Quest Magazine

Printed in the Fall 2019 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Grasse, Ray ,"Urban Mystic: Reminiscences of Goswami Kriyananda" Quest 107:4, pg 27-31

By Ray Grasse

Your everyday life is your spiritual life.
—Goswami Kriyananda

In the months leading up to my twentieth birthday, I wrestled mightily with the notion of linking up with a spiritual teacher. It became somewhat fashionable in those days to seek out a guru after the Beatles, Donovan, and the Beach Boys traveled to India and had done just that. More than a few writers at the time went so far as to assert that if you entertained any hope of finding “enlightenment,” you’d better align yourself with a spiritual teacher—or you might as well just forget about it.

But the thought of putting myself at the feet of a guru troubled me, for any number of reasons. One of those involved a certain fear of commitment, since I thought that discipleship meant aligning yourself with a teacher for eternity. What if you picked the wrong one? But I also worried about sacrificing my individuality, since I (mistakenly) feared that was part and parcel of the process. Besides, didn’t the Buddha attain enlightenment on his own?

Formal discipleship or not, I knew I wanted to acquire some of the knowledge offered by these teachers should the chance ever arise.

As it turned out, that chance did arise. During sophomore year in college, a fellow student told me about an American-born swami in the area who was supposedly knowledgeable in the ways of mysticism and meditation. He called his center the Temple of Kriya Yoga, and it was located then on the fifth floor of an office building on State Street in downtown Chicago. Despite my nervousness about entering this new environment—I was fairly agoraphobic at the time, so social gatherings were a source of anxiety for me—I finally attended one of his lectures to see for myself what this man had to offer.

I was nineteen at the time, and felt very out of place sitting there amongst those strangers, some of whose behaviors and appearances were very different from mine. I had no problem with the long hair or the flowing dresses, but I was a bit wary of the bearded men with beads around their necks who brandished inscrutable smiles. Did that look imply peace of mind, or rather a cultlike mindlessness?

Kriyananda—or as the others referred to him, Goswami Kriyananda—certainly looked the part of a guru, with his long beard and flowing hair.* He spoke that first night for a little over an hour, and his knowledge of mystical subjects was impressive. So impressive, in fact, that before I knew it, I’d attended his classes and lectures for nearly fifteen years in all.

Over the course of those years I became marginally involved with the temple itself, volunteering my time to help design logos or advertisements, joining one or another committee to help plan events, and on a handful of occasions teaching classes. Yet unlike most of the others, I was never compelled to take the final plunge and become a formal disciple. That proved to be a double-edged sword, for reasons that should become clearer as my story moves along.

It wasn’t long before I learned his original name was Melvin Higgins. He was born in 1928, and up to then had lived most of his life in Chicagoland. (As for why he never relocated elsewhere, he once remarked, “I believe one should bloom where one is planted.”) He graduated from college, worked in the business world for a while, and acquired a following of students that expanded in size as his center changed locations around the city. He first taught out of his home in Hyde Park, on Chicago’s south side, after which he moved to several locations in the downtown Chicago area, finally relocating the temple in 1979 to the Logan Square neighborhood on the city’s north side.

Kriyananda was notably unpretentious, and drove an old car at a time when some other better-known teachers were flaunting their conspicuous wealth in the form of multiple Rolls-Royces and phalanxes of fawning attendants. He also made himself surprisingly accessible to students after lectures, which wasn’t a common practice among teachers of his caliber. It was relatively easy to walk into his office and approach him with pressing concerns; in fact, there was almost always a line of students outside his office, looking for answers to their questions or for emotional support.

Despite that ease of access, it took me almost a full year to build up the nerve to go in and speak with him one-on-one, because I was initially intimidated by his presence. When I finally did approach him, however, he couldn’t have been friendlier. Over those next few years we wound up carrying our conversations outside the temple, enjoying talks over lunch or dinner while running errands in the city together, or talking on the phone.

Indeed, the fact that I wasn’t a disciple seemed to make it easier for him to be relatively open with me, since he wasn’t as obliged to play the formal role of teacher with me and maintain the disciplinary posture that often entails. He was always down-to-earth in our exchanges, never pious or ethereal, and it wasn’t unusual for him to spruce up our conversations with a well-chosen expletive now and then. He was definitely a Chicago-born teacher, no doubt about it—and that was all for the better, as far as I was concerned.

Every chance I had to speak with him over the years, I soaked up as much information as I could about subjects like karma, mythology, ancient history, astrology, meditation, comparative religion, or even politics. And he never held back, no matter how persistent or annoying I could be (and I could be pretty persistent and annoying). I was especially impressed by his openness about his own imperfections. It was obvious he didn’t want to appear better than anyone else. Like his own guru, Shelly Trimmer, he didn’t wear his spirituality on his sleeve. 

But I also suspect that low-key style may have affected his popularity and fame as a teacher. That’s because some of the more well-known spiritual teachers making the rounds at the time projected a carefully cultivated air of “holiness” and solemn unapproachability that many interpreted as signs of spiritual merit—whether they actually possessed any or not. This wasn’t Kriyananda’s style at all. He could be self-effacing, often humorous, and very human. Yet underlying that humanness was a spiritual depth and core integrity that was obvious to me. On countless occasions, for example, I watched as he went out of his way to help others, sometimes at considerable expense or inconvenience to himself. At bottom, he struck me as a profoundly sensitive soul with a deep compassion for others.

I suspect some of that sensitivity may have come from experiencing a hard life while he was growing up. Before he was five, his father died, and his mother remarried a man who ushered several more children into an already large household, with young Melvin now having to shoulder much of the responsibility of helping to raise those younger siblings. He openly admitted to being so shy when younger that he could hardly speak in social settings, something which undoubtedly pained him greatly. I had the sense that his way of coping back then was escaping into books and learning as much as he could about spirituality, science, and history.

Over the years I interacted with him, Kriyananda displayed a work ethic that confounded me with its sheer energy. He gave formal lectures at least twice a week, on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evenings, in addition to continually offering courses which extended anywhere from six weeks to twelve months, along with rigorous programs specifically designed for disciples and aspiring swamis. All of that was on top of an astrological practice that had him seeing clients five or six days a week, while he also churned out a series of books and pamphlets. I never quite figured out how he managed to do it all, and suspected he must have gotten by on just a few hours of sleep every night.

What kept him going? Though I knew he was passionate about teaching, I also knew the entire process wasn’t always a stroll in the park. In particular, keeping the temple afloat was an expensive endeavor and generated a mountain of bills—and he was the one mainly responsible for paying them. He once told how exciting it was when he first opened the temple, but then how challenging it became after a few years, not just financially but in overseeing the parade of personalities that streamed through it. When he mentioned this to his own guru, the elder teacher responded, “Kriyananda, it’s very easy to create something, whether that be a marriage, a business, or a temple. But it’s much harder to sustain that creation.” But sustain it he did, in the process affecting the lives of many thousands of men and women, both directly and indirectly.

The Teachings

Kriyananda lectured on a wide range of esoteric and spiritual topics, but had a particular genius when it came to astrology. He was a virtual encyclopedia of information on both Eastern and Western astrological systems, and often discussed interpretive techniques I’d never heard of before, and to this day I’m still unsure where he learned them. Just as impressive was his hands-on talent for reading horoscopes. Much of the time Kriyananda seemed to have nearly X-ray vision for deciphering birth charts and what they revealed about their owners. I know of instances where he said things to individuals that were accurate in detailed ways that continue to baffle me, since I could find nothing in those horoscopes which prompted those insights.

Yet the central core of his teachings revolved principally around Kriya Yoga, a holistic tradition known for consciousness-raising techniques and a comparatively “householder” approach toward spiritual practice. With the notable exception of Paramahansa Yogananda, famed author of Autobiography of a Yogi, most of the teachers in this branch of the Kriya lineage were married and held regular jobs while teaching students. That was a definite plus as far as I was concerned, since I certainly wasn’t interested in celibacy.

Kriyananda—or Melvin, as he was known early in life—first encountered the teachings of Kriya Yoga up close and personal through a mysterious teacher in Minnesota named Shelly Trimmer, whom I’d eventually encounter myself (and whom I wrote about in my book An Infinity of Gods, excerpted in Quest, fall 2017).

With both his sun and moon in Taurus, there was a notable practicality to Kriyananda’s teachings that was somewhat less pronounced in Shelly’s sometimes more “cosmic” perspective. Kriyananda had a talent for distilling complex spiritual doctrines into simple terms, such as this gem: “Everyone is trying to find God when they haven’t even found their humanness yet.” In that respect he shared a close affinity with the here-and-now emphasis of Zen Buddhism (he once even remarked that Paul Reps’ book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones was “one of the greatest books ever written”).

That subtle difference between his spiritual perspective and Shelly’s was apparent in a comment he once made about something the older guru said to him. On one occasion Shelly remarked how he never felt entirely comfortable in his physical body. “Other people are trying to get out of their physical body, but I have trouble staying in mine,” Shelly said laughingly. In contrast with that perspective, Kriyananda took a more Zenlike approach when he said, “That’s one of the few areas where I respectfully disagree with my guru. I believe that we should be comfortable wherever we find ourselves, whether that be in a twenty-room mansion or a tiny shack.”

There were a few other ways in which Kriyananda and Shelly differed in their approach toward teaching. For instance, Shelly had a pronounced trickster streak and was known to pull the wool over students’ eyes—a teaching tactic of which Kriyananda found himself on the receiving end more than once. Directly as a result of those sometimes frustrating lessons, he consciously chose to go in a different direction with students, once saying to me, “Ask me a question, and I’ll shoot straight from the hip; I’ll give you a direct answer.”

Another key difference between them concerned the matter of legacy. Shelly’s modesty about his own contribution to the world was such that he felt no pressing desire to write books or preserve his ideas for posterity, other than teaching in that distinctly low-key, one-on-one fashion of his. Shelly genuinely seemed to believe that in the greater scheme of things, his words ultimately meant very little. “If I don’t do it or say it, someone else undoubtedly will,” he once remarked.

In contrast with that proverbial view from 30,000 feet, Kriyananda had a more practical, boots-on-the-ground attitude. Early on, he set about working to preserve his ideas not only in books but through creating a library of audiotapes and videos that could be accessed online and would survive long after he had passed.

Which of those two perspectives is the right one, Kriyananda’s or Shelly’s? To my mind, both are. They were simply different approaches, each with its own validity and value. Kriyananda and Shelly viewed the world through different lenses, set to very different magnifying powers, and I drew enormous value from both of them. 

Kriyananda the Mystic

Of the varied insights I gathered from Kriyananda over the years, I especially valued those of a more personal nature, when he related experiences he had as an early student or later on as a teacher. Indeed, of all the teachings I’ve heard delivered by various teachers over the years, the ones that stand out most vividly in my memory are those of a more personal nature, even more than their philosophical ruminations. That was true with Kriyananda too. As just one example, I recall a series of lectures Kriyananda delivered on Taoist philosophy sometime during the late 1970s, yet to this day the only thing I remember from that six-week course was a personal anecdote he shared in passing about a conversation he had with his own teacher, and which remains as vivid to me now as the day I heard it.

Most of these personal anecdotes were of a spiritual nature, describing some struggle or lesson he learned while growing up, or during some encounter with his guru. But a few of the more intriguing tales involved anecdotes of a psychic or paranormal nature. Why did those interest me? Because they suggested there was more going on with the man than meets the eye.

Kriyananda strongly discouraged students from becoming overly concerned with psychic abilities or magical powers. Indeed it was one reason he never recommended Yogananda’s famed Autobiography of a Yogi to new students: he felt its emphasis on exotic powers and experiences misrepresented the spiritual path in certain respects. Yet he never denied that those abilities existed, and on rare occasions spoke about his own paranormal experiences. While it’s impossible for me to judge the ultimate validity of these accounts, I never sensed the slightest hint of ego or dishonesty in their telling—and as I’ll explain shortly, I had reasons of my own to believe they were more than just fabrications.

Many of those stories were brief and simple, and casually mentioned in the course of longer lectures or conversations. One simple example was the time he spoke about driving along the city’s outer drive that morning and seeing a dead dog lying alongside the road. He described perceiving the spirit of the dog wandering around the accident scene, looking dazed and confused about what had happened to it. Feeling compassionate for the dog, he stopped his car along the shoulder of the busy road to tend to it, blessing it and sending it on its way.

Or the time he was drafted into the army during the Korean War, where he served as a medic and found himself situated near the battlefront. While huddling in the trench during one conflict, he described seeing a fellow soldier rise up and march towards enemy lines, only to be shot and instantly killed. But while the soldier’s body dropped to the ground, Kriyananda said he saw the man’s astral double keep marching forward, as though he hadn’t realized he’d been shot.

Once he spoke of attending a Catholic service that was being conducted by a priest with whom he’d been friends. Normally, he explained, he would sit in the back of a church and see the energies of the parishioners during the service; whenever the priest would lift the chalice upwards at that point of communion, he’d see the spinal currents of everyone rise upwards as well, as if in sympathetic resonance with the ritual up on the altar.

But on this particular Sunday morning, the priest lifted the chalice upwards—and nothing happened in the spines of the parishioners; no subtle energies were stirred. After the service, he spoke to his priest friend and inquired whether there was anything different about the ceremony this particular Sunday. It turned out the church had run out of wine, so the priest substituted grape juice instead that day. Kriyananda used this story to illustrate the importance of symbolic “purity” in rituals and the need to use the appropriate ingredients to embody one’s intentions.

Then there was this. One afternoon in 1978 Kriyananda emerged from his office to deliver his usual Sunday afternoon talk, but he was looking noticeably disturbed about something. Sitting down before the podium, he shook his head back and forth gently a few times and muttered softly, “They’re doing some crazy things down there”—with no further explanation. He continued on with his talk, leaving myself and the others in attendance perplexed about that opening comment. What did he mean by “down there”? Or by “crazy things”? I continued wondering about it, so after his talk I headed downstairs to the lower floors of the hotel lobby to see if he might have been referring to something taking place there, or even outside the building. But I found nothing unusual at all.

Later that evening, I turned on the TV to hear reporters talk about news trickling in from South America about a mass suicide down in Guyana. Over the next few days, reports revealed that over 900 residents of Jonestown had taken their lives under the direction of cult leader Jim Jones—and it had all started unfolding around the time of Kriyananda’s talk. Was he psychically sensing the mass tragedy happening far away? There’s no way to know for sure, but that was the only time I ever heard him make a public comment like that.

There were even some possible instances of prophecy. One of them involved a young woman named Karen Phillips, a disciple of his and a good friend of mine from the suburban town I was living in, Oak Park. While lecturing privately to his disciples one day (as related to me later that week by his disciple Bill Hunt), Kriyananda made this sobering remark: “In six weeks one of you will no longer be with us.” Was he implying someone was going to move out of state? Or something more serious? Most of those in attendance that afternoon had no idea what to make of the statement, and probably just forgot about it after a few days. But I was intrigued enough on hearing about it that I carefully kept an eye on the calendar to see if any of his disciples might be departing the temple in six weeks.

Exactly six weeks later, I walked into the temple to attend a class when a phone call came in to the front desk. The receptionist picked it up, and on the other end of the line was someone saying that Karen Phillips had been brutally murdered the night before. As the receptionist broke the news to Kriyananda, he looked concerned but not surprised. Eventually, the case received worldwide media coverage because of one singularly odd element: the culprit was identified as a young Bible student living several doors down from Karen, who went to the police shortly afterwards to describe a dream in which he witnessed precise details of the murder. Because of how closely the dream matched the actual crime, he was arrested and convicted of the murder, spending several years in jail before his conviction was finally overturned on appeal.

It was the only time I heard Kriyananda ever make a prediction that dramatic, and I naturally wondered how he arrived at it. Years later, Kriyananda may have provided a clue when a local magazine interviewed him and asked how anyone could verify whether an astral projection experience was valid or just a fantasy. He answered by describing his own early experiences with astral projection, and what he learned from them:

I (eventually) encountered disembodied souls who told me about their children and what was going to happen to them. Years later, these events manifested exactly the way the parents said they would. This evidence absolutely confirmed the afterlife’s existence and its link to human earth life and earth life to the afterlife. It was those experiences that removed any remaining doubt that humans were able to see into the afterlife.

Interesting stories all, no doubt. But how could I be sure they weren’t anything more than just coincidence, or fabrications? The answer is, I can’t—not positively anyway. But in some instances the unusual phenomena I witnessed did involve me directly, in which case they took on an entirely different weight. Here are a couple of examples.

Consider the time I had a conversation with Kriyananda and posed a series of questions to him on a variety of subjects while I recorded his comments on the battery-powered tape recorder I’d placed on his desk, where it remained near to me and never within his reach. One of those questions I asked him concerned the existence of God, and he may well have given me a fascinating answer; but unfortunately I was so busy checking the next question on my sheet that I barely noticed what he was saying. When I finally looked up from my paper, there was a look on his face of mild exasperation, as though he could tell I wasn’t really paying attention and was too caught up figuring out my next query. On top of that, he shook his head slightly and muttered something to the effect that, “I really shouldn’t have said quite so much.” I wasn’t too worried, though, since I’d been recording the conversation and knew I could always listen to his answers once I’d returned home—right?

But before I left the building that day, Kriyananda did something odd. He came up to me and said, “Wait a second, Ray, can I see that tape?” “Sure,” I said, as I pulled out the cassette and handed it over. Grasping it with one hand, he proceeded to quickly rub the cassette tape two or three times with his index and middle fingers, then handed it back to me with an almost mischievous look on his face. As he turned and walked away from me, I could only wonder what that was all about.

That night at home, I excitedly sat down to listen to the tape, and was especially interested to hear that one section of the conversation where I asked him about God. But lo and behold, when I got to that part of the tape, it was blank. Exactly when I expected to hear him answer my question, there was no sound on the tape at all, only silence. Then, right at the point where I launched into my next question, the sound on the tape mysteriously started up again. That silent spot was the only blank patch on the entire recording.

I was baffled, and started to mentally retrace my steps from earlier in the day to see if there was any conceivable way he could have done something to the tape or the recorder to make that glitch occur. But the recorder was in my possession the entire time, and was running on batteries rather than via any power cord. He never once touched it. Still skeptical about what happened, the next time I walked into the Temple and saw him, I asked right off, “OK, now, how did you do that?” From the look on his face, it was obvious he knew exactly what I was referring to, but he just laughed and walked away.

Then there was this. Throughout much of that period I struggled with meditation, often feeling as though I was simply spinning my wheels in the backwaters of conventional mind. I saw others sitting quietly and motionless during their meditations, yet I usually felt frustrated by my own restlessness and inability to go very deep in my meditations. But for one short but unusually fruitful stretch of time, I seemed to strike gold with one Kriya technique known as the Hong Sau mantra. This is a silent, strictly internal mantra that is coupled with one’s breathing pattern. For that relatively brief span of time, things came together for me in a powerful way, to where I felt as though I had finally gotten what the technique was about—or at least one aspect of it (since a given technique doesn’t necessarily have a single intended outcome). Each time I engaged this technique, I experienced a heightening of awareness along with a welling up of blissful energy that was dramatic and deeply pleasurable.

During one of Kriyananda’s talks, I was sitting in the back of the dimly lit room and began practicing the Hong Sau technique. My eyes were closed, and I was completely silent, with nothing externally to indicate what I was doing internally. Then, shortly after I began feeling that surge of blissful energy in me, I heard Kriyananda stop lecturing in midsentence and go completely silent for about fifteen seconds. That wasn’t at all normal for him during a talk, so I opened my eyes to see what was going on—only to see him peering through the darkness directly at me, as everyone else in the room turned to see what he was looking at. Embarrassed by the sudden attention, with all eyes now directed at me, I stopped the technique, and Kriyananda resumed his lecture as if nothing had happened.

Exactly one week later, a friend of mine (who didn’t know I was using that technique) happened to walk into Kriyananda’s office to ask if he would teach him the Hong Sau mantra. Kriyananda replied, “Why don’t you ask Ray to teach it to you? He seems to be having some pretty good luck with it.” When my friend told me of that exchange, I was floored, not only because it indicated Kriyananda knew I was having a powerful meditation that afternoon, but even pinpointed the exact technique I was using. That was impressive, I thought.

Instances like those led me to accept the possibility he did possess unusual psychic abilities. During one conversation with him about my own inability to intuit people’s intentions, I lightheartedly said, “We can’t all be as psychic as you, Kriyananda!” To which he claimed he wasn’t born that way, and that while young, he was about as “unpsychic as anyone could be.” Being an earthy double Taurus, he added, he originally believed if one couldn’t touch, taste, or measure something, it just wasn’t real. He seemed to be implying that it was a result of extensive meditations over the years that his intuitive powers developed as far as they had.

Yet I also suspect those unusual potentials may well have been latent from birth, just waiting to be triggered. I say that for this reason. I took a course in palmistry from him at one point in the 1970s, and in one class he used his hand to make a point about the length and shape of the lines in the palm, and what these meant from a symbolic standpoint. It was then that I happened to notice something very unusual about the little finger on his right hand—the finger associated by astrologers and palmists with the mind and the planet Mercury. Instead of the usual three joints, his little finger had four. That was surprising, so I asked him whether that indicated unusual mental capacities. He laughed and humbly played it down, saying, “Yes, but remember, I’m left-handed, so the usual view that the left hand shows inborn potentials and the right hand shows what you’ve done with them is reversed in my case!” I frankly didn’t quite buy his humble revision of traditional palmistry theory, but revision or not, it was an anomalous anatomical feature I’d never seen on anyone’s hand before or since. 

The Final Years

Unfortunately, despite a few peak moments here and there, my own attempts at meditation were unfolding at a snail’s pace, and more often than not I struggled with simply sitting still. The longer I studied at the temple, the more I realized how much work I still needed to do in that respect—which is when I began entertaining the possibility of taking part in a longer-term meditation retreat somewhere else. Thus in late 1986 I went off to live for several months at Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York, where I managed to learn a few more helpful things about meditation.

But I kept in touch with Kriyananda over the coming years, calling him on occasion or traveling into the city to meet him in his office. For me, one of the main values of having access to a spiritual teacher is the chance to get honest feedback about one’s own spiritual or psychological progress—however painful that can be at times. Had he been my actual guru, I suspect he would have taken an even stricter stance with me and offered more explicit suggestions about how to enhance my practice; and had that happened, I have no doubt I would have grown much faster and farther than I did, spiritually. But simply being able to get any of his feedback on my life and mind from time to time was immensely valuable. So just as I had always done during the years I attended talks at the temple, I would ask, “Where do you think I most need to work on myself now?” Generally, he would calmly but compassionately respond with comments like, “You lack self-discipline” (which was true); or “You’re too much in your head, Ray” (also true), or “You need to meditate more” (very true, too)—and other pointed observations.

But on some occasions, he’d extend a touching compliment out of the blue, and those were meaningful in a different way. For instance, I came to know a student of his named Rebecca Romanoff, with whom I spent much time over the years as friends. We would get together for lunch or dinner sometimes, sit along the lakefront, or go to see a movie. Eventually, many years later, some time after his first wife died from cancer, Kriyananda and Rebecca got married, and they lived together until her death in 2013.

But in 1983, a couple of years prior to their marriage, she invited Kriyananda and me over to her apartment for dinner, where we spent the evening talking about a wide variety of subjects. At one point, I began reminiscing with Rebecca about some of the activities we enjoyed doing back in the old days, at which point she interjected, very self-critically, “Oh, you must have thought I was such a basket case back then.”

I was genuinely surprised to hear how hard she was on herself—especially considering I always regarded her as the one who had it together, and that I had been the neurotic one, not her. So I quickly responded, “Oh, Becky! I’ve never judged you like that!” At which point Kriyananda chimed in unexpectedly, “You know, that’s something you and Shelly have in common; you’re the two individuals I know who aren’t at all judgmental towards others.” To be compared like that with his teacher—even in such a modest way—was deeply moving, especially coming at a time when I was dealing with a string of personal disappointments in my life.

In the summer of 2013 I received the sad news that Rebecca had passed away. Around that time I decided to preserve what I could of the teachings I’d gathered from both Kriyananda and Shelly, as I began sorting through the records of my years studying with them. In Kriyananda’s case, that involved searching through several dozen notebooks I’d compiled from which I selected key passages and quotes which I felt distilled his teachings in more digestible form. As it so happened, on April 21, 2015, virtually the same day I finished that selection and posted those quotes online, I received word that Kriyananda himself passed away, having lived out his last days in France. I’d sent him a message just two weeks earlier to get his approval on what I had compiled, just to make sure I wasn’t misrepresenting his thoughts in any way. When I didn’t hear back from him, I was perplexed, since he normally responded fairly quickly. When I received word of his passing, though, I realized he probably hadn’t been in any condition to communicate with me at that point.

* There are several teachers in the yogic tradition named Kriyananda (notably the late Swami Kriyananda of California, aka J. Donald Walters, with whom the Chicago-born Kriyananda is sometimes confused). A simple way to distinguish the two teachers is through their titles: the Kriyananda I’m profiling in this article was known by the honorific Goswami, rather than Swami. 

Ray Grasse worked on the staff of Quest magazine during the 1990s. He is the author of several books, including The Waking Dream, Under a Sacred Sky, and An Infinity of Gods: Conversations with an Unconventional Mystic—The Teachings of Shelly Trimmer. This article is excerpted from his book Urban Mystic: Recollections of Goswami Kriyananda. Ray’s website is www.raygrasse.com.

Printed in the Fall 2019 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bruce, David ,"Serving a Higher Purpose: Letters to the National Lodge" Quest 107:4, pg 27-31

By David Bruce

The National Lodge of the Theosophical Society in America is a community formed in 1996 to provide study courses for members who are not near a lodge or study center. Since 2003, TSA national secretary David Bruce has been in charge of managing the National Lodge. Part of his task has been to write cover letters for the material that is sent.

“By the end of 2005,” David writes, “I had tired of producing letters that were too frothy to be of any consequence . . . Moreover, I realized that breezy salutations, padded with pastoral sketches of squirrels frolicking on the campus grounds, did very little to promote the cause of Theosophy. So I began using the letters as a vehicle to discuss and promote Theosophical ideas.”

This year Quest Books has published a collection of David’s essays from these letters, entitled Serving a Higher Purpose: Theosophy for a Meaningful Life. The letters are short because, as David points out, “originally they were printed on a single page of TSA letterhead, thus limiting the number of words that could be employed.” Nonetheless, they cover a wide range of topics, from the Ring-Pass-Not to “Why Johnny Can’t Meditate.” Other subjects include patience, the need for secrecy, and the limited utility of language. The letters reprinted below are David’s own handpicked selection, highlighting some of his most important themes, including the literary power of H.P. Blavatsky’s writings and her work The Voice of the Silence.

Untimely Departures

Why is it that some great souls die so young, their all-too-brief appearance on the world stage resembling shooting stars, flashing momentarily against the dark abyss? John Keats died in his twenty-fifth year, but not before leaving behind a legacy that later established him as one of the leading poets of the English Romantic era; his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” remains popular to this day. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a contemporary of Keats, died at the age of twenty-nine; he authored Prometheus Unbound and is said to be one of the finest lyric poets of his time. Emily Brontë had time for only one novel before she died at age thirty, but her Wuthering Heights has had numerous film adaptations, from as early as 1920 to as recently as 2011. The Austrian composer Franz Schubert managed to write ten symphonies, eleven string quartets, and assorted chamber music before he died at thirty-one. And if anybody ever deserved the label of genius, it was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose musical oeuvre was astonishing, covering virtually every genre of his day. He never saw his thirty-sixth birthday. The Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer passed away at forty-three, his output consisting of mostly domestic scenes; more than three hundred years after his death, one of Vermeer’s oil paintings inspired the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring, starring Colin Firth.

That the sojourn in this world of these extraordinary people ended much too soon is apparent to the aesthetic sensibility. A thoughtful person cannot help but wonder if their early demise was due to chance or to design. If the capricious hand of fate was at work, these early deaths may be considered to be nothing more than items on the list of life’s tragedies. But what if these truncated lives were preordained, so to speak? What if they were meant to be?

Mahatma Letter 68 obliquely refers to the idea that the soul comes into an incarnation “destined to live” a certain span of time, an idea that seems compatible with the thought that each incarnation has a purpose (Chin and Barker, 200). Could it be that the life of a Mozart or a Keats was intended to grace the stage of life not for more than a few years but just enough for them to bestow their sublime gifts to humanity? We can only speculate. If the early departure of such souls was one of chance, we see tragedy. But if a hidden purpose was at work, the meaning of which we are unable to divine, we behold a mystery. Fortunately, the fruit of their creativity remains, enriching our lives and uplifting our spirits.

Diversity, Not Orthodoxy

For students of Theosophy, familiarity with its doctrines is desirable—a doctrinaire approach to their study is not. These doctrines, or principles, have been enunciated differently by various commentators, each of whom may have some unique insight or perspective. The timeless truths of Theosophy are such that no one writer or person can claim to have the final word. As Michel de Montaigne said, “Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later” (Montaigne, 170).

In Theosophical circles it is often noted that none of us are experts, that we are all students. That seems to be a very healthy point of view, for it helps prevent our intellectual inquiry from devolving from one that is fresh and open minded to one that is rigid and predictable. Cicero once observed: “The authority of those who want to teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn” (Cicero, 188). Nevertheless, it is generally recognized that some students have been at it longer than others and therefore possess a considerable storehouse of knowledge and wisdom. That is a very different thing from posing as an authority. And while it is quite legitimate to acknowledge authorities in the fields of medicine, engineering, jurisprudence, and other areas of secular knowledge, it is improper—even absurd—to assume the mantle of authority in the field of Theosophical inquiry.

Those who are widely read are likely to have a broader perspective than those who are not. These words from T.S. Eliot, though made in a different context, are relevant:

Wide reading is not valuable as a kind of hoarding, an accumulation of knowledge, or what sometimes is meant by the term “a well-stocked mind.” It is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by any one, or by any small number. (Eliot, 102) 

I think Eliot is making a very valuable statement. When we expose ourselves to different points of view, we are not as likely to allow our opinions to crystalize into a rigid certainty, which may occur when we become overly enamored with the thoughts of a single but influential writer. And consider these words of H.P. Blavatsky:

Orthodoxy in Theosophy is a thing neither possible nor desirable. It is diversity of opinion, within certain limits, that keeps the Theosophical Society a living and healthy body . . . Were it not . . . such healthy divergences would be impossible, and the Society would degenerate into a sect, in which a narrow and stereotyped creed would take the place of the living and breathing spirit of Truth and an ever growing Knowledge. (Blavatsky, Collected Writings, 9:243–44)

As a farmer’s soil is enriched when crops are rotated yearly, so too will our understanding of Theosophy be enriched if we expose our minds to diverse and varied thought.

The Poignant Poetry of H.P. Blavatsky

It has been said that the poetry in The Voice of the Silence is as exquisite as its paradoxes are startling. By poetry is meant the artful use of language to create poetic imagery. Such images are formed when two unlike objects sharing like attributes are compared, as in the case of a person who is said to be in the twilight of his career. What connects twilight and career are endings; twilight comes at the end of the day, and all careers inevitably come to an end. One example of poetic imagery found in The Voice of the Silence: “thy dark garments of illusion” (Voice of the Silence, 33), compares ignorance to a piece of dark (and possibly heavy) clothing; one serves to cover the body, the other to veil the mind.

In the preface to this work, Mme. Blavatsky says: “I have done my best to preserve the poetical beauty of language and imagery which characterize the original” (Voice of the Silence, 9, referring to The Book of the Golden Precepts, of which The Voice of the Silence is a translation).We should not overlook or discount the power of poetry in this work. To underscore this point, let us state a simple fact: The mind is subject to illusion—a statement that is as unremarkable and forgettable as it is undeniably true. But under HPB’s skillful pen, this trite maxim becomes something else:

For the mind is like a mirror; it gathers dust while it reflects. It needs the gentle breezes of Soul-Wisdom to brush away the dust of our illusions. (Voice of the Silence, 44–45)

Here the prejudices and biases of the human mind are compared to dust settling on a mirror, one that becomes less and less able to reflect the light, just as a conditioned mind is less able to perceive and express the truth without bias and distortion. The simple beauty of the language serves to elevate a pedestrian truth to a memorable statement of enduring inspiration. However, HPB takes the same truth—the mind is subject to illusion—and articulates it very differently in the following passage:

The moth attracted to the dazzling flame of thy night-lamp is doomed to perish in the viscid oil. The unwary soul that fails to grapple with the mocking demon of illusion, will return to earth the slave of Mara. (Voice of the Silence, 19) 

The change of tone is as unmistakable as a melody that is played first in a major, and then in a minor, key. The mood shifts from one of quiet reflection to one of stern admonishment; and HPB does this solely through her choice of imagery. From the contemplation of dust gathering quietly on a mirror, we now envision the stark image of dying moths entrapped in hot, viscid oil. The underlying truth is the same in both verses, but the dramatic effect created by poetic imagery could not be more dissimilar. Careful readers will take time to savor the powerful wordplay found in the Voice, thus enhancing their delight and enjoyment of this little masterpiece.

Paprika, Oregano, and Literary Condiments

Spiritual books from the East often employ a literary device in which the teachings are put forth ostensibly as a dialogue between a wise guru and an aspiring devotee. We find this to some extent in Shankaracharya’s Crest Jewel of Wisdom, but much more so in the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna and Krishna engage in an ongoing conversation. Similarly, The Voice of the Silence makes limited use of this convention by framing its teachings as a discussion between a humble but worthy disciple (lanoo) and an enlightened preceptor. An intriguing aspect of this stylistic practice is the use of nicknames to designate the pupil. Arjuna, for example, is referred to as “Pandava,” “Bharata,” “son of Kunti,” “slayer of demons,” “conqueror of sleep,” and many other appellations. Although the use of sobriquets may at first create confusion in the mind of the reader, their real purpose is to add clarity and depth by revealing something significant about the disciple or the transformative process.

The first fragment of the Voice is essentially a monologue in which the guru is speaking to the lanoo, whose presence is implied, not stated. I found this to be an interesting parallel to the practice of the ancient Pythagorean school, which required the student to listen in silence during the probationary period of training. But the tacit presence of the pupil does not prevent his guru from addressing him by various monikers, some of which are quite colorful, a habit that he continues throughout the second and third fragments.

All told, my audit of the Voice identified at least three dozen such monikers. Some paint him as a rank novice (beginner, ignorant disciple), while those used in the third fragment foretell higher levels of spiritual attainment (Arhan, Bodhisattva, Master of Samadhi). Some point to requisite qualities that the disciple must develop (fearless warrior, thou of patient heart), while others intimate the nature of trials that lie ahead (pursuer of truth, slayer of thy thoughts, perceiver of external shadows). The first-time reader may glide over these subtleties without notice, but they are there all the same. Some may be tempted to dismiss them as nothing more than ornamentation, as in the use of melodic trills in Baroque music. But I would prefer a different metaphor, likening them to the paprika on a macaroni and cheese casserole, the bay leaves in soup, or the oregano in spaghetti sauce―all of which augment the main course by adding subtle but deeply satisfying flavors. As ideas are said to be food for the mind, the analogy is hopefully not too far-fetched.

The Nuances of Light and Darkness

“This earth . . . is but the dismal entrance leading to the twilight that precedes the valley of true light” (Voice of the Silence, 15).

Blavatsky’s metaphoric use of light in The Voice of the Silence is delightfully unconventional. In verse 140, the aspirant is told to “step out from sunlight into shade” (Voice of the Silence, 53), but in verse 18 (cited above) the implication is that he should be moving out of darkness and into light. It is the same metaphor used to very different effect, a literary distinction that serves to enrich the aesthetic enjoyment of the reader. Also surprising is the metaphorical pairing of the words light with valley. Symbolically, valleys are often used to represent pain and suffering (the valley of the shadow of death), whereas mountains suggest triumph, illumination, or a wider perspective. Again, in verse 37 Blavatsky refers to the “Vale of Bliss” (Voice of the Silence, 20), rather than associating a transcendent state of consciousness with a mountain peak. But this is not without precedent. Consider this passage from the Tao Te Ching: “The Valley Spirit never dies . . . [It] is the base from which Heaven and Earth sprang. It is there within us all the while.” Authors have on occasion used valleys to symbolize safety, growth, warmth, fertility, and abundance.

Shifting from style to substance, let us note that some readers may recoil at the depiction of earthly life as being dismal. Yet one cannot deny the existence of suffering. Human existence involves an oscillation of peaks and valleys, pleasure and pain, weal and woe. While the suffering often cuts deeply, the moments of felicity and mirth are all too ephemeral. Having observed this sad state of affairs, Fyodor Dostoevsky allegedly confessed, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings” (quoted in Frankl, 86).

We do not always listen to our better angels. We see through a glass darkly. Aspiring to higher things, we quickly tire and succumb to the gravitational pull of personal desires. Yet if we struggle, it is because we are human. I am reminded of a quote attributed to Somerset Maugham: “Only a mediocre person is always at his best.” We will fall, but we get up again. To err is human, but to get up in the face of adversity is heroic. The journey from darkness through twilight to the true light is the one true journey, a journey of many lifetimes. Patience and devotion are our companions. If fears and doubts arise, we have the testimony of countless shamans and saints and sages affirming that it can be done. Faith and fortitude, too, are our companions. Follow the true light, dimly perceived at first, like the partial sunlight seen from the bottom of a well; but as we continue to put one step in front of the other its growing intensity and brilliance will erase these pervasive shadows that we now take for light.

St. Augustine’s Dilemma

The opening stanza of The Secret Doctrine stops the rational mind dead in its tracks: “Time was not, for it lay asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.” The rational mind wants to ask, “How can there not be time?” But what is time? We generally understand it as past, present, and future—this threefold division corresponding to the way we experience the world. Upon closer examination, however, the concept of time proves to be one of the most illusory aspects of phenomenal existence.

Mme. Blavatsky was not the first to point this out. Consider this passage of Augustine’s in his Confessions:

For what is time? Who can even comprehend it in thought or put the answer into words? . . . How is it that there are the two times, past and future, when even the past is now no longer and the future is now not yet? But if the present were always present, and did not pass into past time, it obviously would not be time but eternity. (Augustine, 264)

The Secret Doctrine describes the present as “a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that part which we call the past” (Secret Doctrine, 1:37). A true mathematical line has no existence in this three-dimensional world. What you see on the draftsman’s schematic is only a reasonable representation of it, for a mathematical line exists only in the realm of ideas, not in the world of form. Let us return to the Confessions of Augustine:

If any fraction of time be conceived that cannot now be divided even into the most minute momentary point, this alone is what we may call time present. But this flies so rapidly from future to past that it cannot be extended by any delay. For if it is extended, it is then divided into past and future. But the present has no extension whatsoever. (Augustine, 266) 

The rational mind reels in bewilderment before all this. Perhaps it was Marcus Aurelius who put it best: “Every instant of time [is] a pinprick of eternity” (Aurelius, 40).

Celestial Scribes

The cast of actors entering and exiting the pages of The Secret Doctrine includes some of the most elusive and mysterious characters you could imagine. Take, for instance, the Lipikas. Who are they? And what do they do? The reader is provided with precious little information—just enough to arouse curiosity. Scholars explain that the word Lipika comes from the Sanskrit verbal root lip, meaning to write, to inscribe, to engrave, which is why the Lipikas are sometimes called Recorders, Scribes, or Annalists—names meant to be taken not literally but metaphorically. Theosophists commonly refer to them as the Lords of Karma.

According to the author of The Secret Doctrine, “These Divine Beings are connected with Karma . . . [They keep] a faithful record of every act, and even thought, of man, of all that was, is, or ever will be, in the phenomenal Universe. As said in Isis Unveiled (I, 343), this divine and unseen canvas is the Book of Life” (Secret Doctrine, 1:104).

Commentators provide additional insights. According to Annie Besant, “They hold the threads of destiny which each man has woven, and guide the reincarnating man to the environment determined by his past” (Besant, 225).Theosophist Gottfried de Purucker says, “They are infinitely more impersonal and more automatic in their action than are the recorders in a court of law, setting down word by word, act by act, whatever takes place in the cosmic courtroom; and their record is infinitely accurate and just. There is no personal equation at all” (de Purucker, 2:400−01). Another Theosophical writer, Geoffrey Barborka, has this to say: “Each one may add to his own ‘Book of Life.’ In fact, everyone is doing so, whether a person is aware of it or not” (Barborka, 420).

One more thing bears mention. No human word or deed goes unnoticed by these Cosmic Scribes. In human affairs, people sometimes manage to evade accountability for their actions in the court of public opinion, or in the realm of jurisprudence, but not so with karma. For the Lipikas never take a vacation; they are on the job, so to speak, day and night. At the dawn of a new manvantara, they are the first to appear; and as Universal Day yields to Universal Night, they are the last ones there to turn off the lights.

The Cosmic Ladder of Life

One of the more fascinating themes in The Secret Doctrine is that of hierarchy. The English language confines the word hierarchy mainly to ecclesiastical matters, and so the general public remains unaware of its occult denotations. Because it is associated in the public mind with priestly matters, the term carries certain negative connotations—rigidity, dominance, and exploitation, for instance. But the esoteric meaning of hierarchy as presented in The Secret Doctrine inspires awe and wonder, revealing a hidden natural order involving various planes, or levels, of existence as well as a vast multitude of beings. Geoffrey Barborka describes this panoramic view as the cosmic ladder of life (Barborka, 57).

The strange-sounding names of the hierarchical beings appearing on the pages of Mme. Blavatsky’s magnum opus read like the cast of a Federico Fellini film: Architects, Builders, and Silent Watchers; Kumaras and Pitris and Agnishvattas; Elementals, Asuras, and Dhyan-Chohans; Lipikas and Lahs and Manasaputras. All this is likely to leave the first-time reader feeling as bewildered as a Norwegian cook who stumbles into an Indian spice shop. But with continued study, the names grow familiar, and their respective roles come into focus. It gradually becomes clear that each planetary or celestial being has its special role to play in the greater economy of the divine plan.

Some may find the idea of a cosmic hierarchy to be fanciful, if not preposterous. But is it really? Consider, for example, a large corporation employing tens of thousands of people. It is structured so that its manifold operations—finance and accounting, advertising and marketing, engineering and production, research and development—are all set up as separate departments run by competent managers, whose business it is to see that each unit carries out its part smoothly and efficiently. We live in an intelligent and purposeful universe. “As above, so below,” says the Hermetic axiom. If a mere human enterprise recognizes the value of organization, should we expect any less of the universe?

Sources

Saint Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Albert C. Outler. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson, 1999.

Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated by A.S.L. Farquharson. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Barborka, Geoffrey. The Divine Plan. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1961.

Besant, Annie. The Ancient Wisdom. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1986.

Blavatsky, H.P. Collected Writings. 15 vols. Edited by Boris de Zirkoff. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1960–91.

———. The Secret Doctrine. 2 vols. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.

———. The Voice of the Silence. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1982.

Chin, Vicente Hao, and A.T. Barker, eds. The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett in Chronological Sequence. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1998.

Cicero. Cicero on the Good Life. Translated by Michael Grant. London: Folio Society, 2003.

Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975.

Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon, 2006.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by Donald M. Frame. London: Penguin, 1993.

Purucker, Gottfried de. Dialogues of Gottfried de Purucker. Edited by Arthur L. Conger. 3 vols. Covina, Calif.: Theosophical University Press, 1948.

David Bruce is national secretary of the Theosophical Society in America.

Printed in the Fall 2019 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Sender, Pablo ,"The Dawn of Civilization: An Esoteric Account of the First Three Root Races" Quest 107:4, pg 12-13

By Pablo Sender

The model for the evolution of humanity presented by the esoteric philosophy is far more complex than the modern scientific views on the subject. In The Secret Doctrine, H.P. Blavatsky states that humanity develops through seven great evolutionary cycles, called “Root Races,” which give rise to seven consecutive human civilizations.

Each of these humanities developed on different continents. At the end of each Root Race, there was a global geological upheaval that changed the face of the earth. Because of these continental changes, the vast majority of the remains from previous Root Races are currently under the oceans.

According to The Secret Doctrine, the First Root Race, nonphysical beings lacking in consciousness, began to develop over 1.5 billion years ago. The first self-conscious humanity resembling what we know today was the Third Root Race, which started over 18 million years ago. The anthropological records, historic and even prehistoric, belong to our current Root Race, which is the fifth (out of seven).

The esoteric story of human civilization is too vast to be covered in one article. Here we will limit ourselves to exploring the genesis of humanity and the beginning of civilization, according to The Secret Doctrine.

Assisted Evolution

Modern science explains the emergence of humankind as a result of chance chemical events and random mutations. The odds of this occurrence are so slim that scientists regard the evolution of humanity as nothing short of a miracle. Theosophical teachings, by contrast, say that this “miracle” is really the orderly work of natural forces with the assistance of intelligent beings. These intelligences guiding the process of evolution have been recognized in all religious traditions of the past. They were conceived of as gods, angels, devas, and so forth.

Unfortunately, these celestial beings have frequently been anthropomorphized in such a way that makes them appear as fanciful inventions. Perhaps this is inevitable, because we cannot really understand the nature of nonhuman intelligences. Even the Stanzas of The Secret Doctrine use mythological imagery and allegorical language to explain the origins and evolution of human beings.

Although accepting the participation of celestial beings, esoteric philosophy does not support a creationist view. It agrees with the evolutionary theory, extending it beyond the physical world into the intellectual and spiritual realms. This evolution, however, is not blind, random, or purposeless. It has clear aims, and the intelligent beings who guide it are not perfect, but are themselves evolving.

The First Root Race

According to The Secret Doctrine, once the earth was ready to hold human life, two groups of celestial beings were called upon to assist in the “creation” of man—the Lords of the Moon and the Lords of the Flame: “Bring forth men of your nature. Give their spirits a subtle form. Mother Earth will build a material covering” (Secret Doctrine, 2.75).

Their task was to provide the “spirits” (human monads) with an astral body that nature could use as a model to slowly start building a physical human form. The seven Lords of the Moon (seven hierarchies or groups, not seven individual celestial beings) responded to the call, but the Lords of the Flame remained behind, refusing to engage in the work of creation. They claimed that they were too spiritual and pure and furthermore did not have creative powers to build material forms. The Lords of the Moon, devas of a less spiritual nature, went to their allotted lands on seven different portions of the earth, ready to create the seven primordial groups of human beings. They emanated astral forms out of their own nonphysical bodies, which became the First Root Race of humanity—ethereal and gigantic. The rudimentary form (not yet a body proper) of the early humans was a mere shadow, and these beings were regarded as a “phantom race.” The astral forms were sexless—they were not born from parents but reproduced themselves by fission. For this reason, the First Root Race was called “the self-born.” The Lords of the Moon were capable of producing astral forms, but they were not able to give minds to the members of this race. The protohumanity of this Root Race was essentially an embryonic stage, devoid of understanding.

Being nonphysical, the forms could not be affected by fire, water, or other natural elements. This rendered them impervious to the harsh conditions of the planet at the time. In fact, the phantom race could not die—they lasted for the whole duration of their evolutionary cycle, being finally assimilated to the bodies of the next Root Race.

The First Root Race developed on the “primordial land,” which is said to be a region destined to last from the beginning to the end of the evolution on this Earth, surviving all cataclysms and continental changes that will take place in this evolutionary Round. The first continent is called the “Imperishable Sacred Land.” Blavatsky wrote:

Of this mysterious and sacred land very little can be said, except, perhaps, according to a poetical expression in one of the Commentaries, that the “pole-star has its watchful eye upon it, from the dawn to the close of the twilight of “a day” of the great breath. (Secret Doctrine, 2.6)

This primordial land was located at what was the North Pole of 1.5 billion years ago. This was not our current North Pole, under which there is no land. As The Secret Doctrine explains, the inclination of the earth’s axis has shifted since then, so this imperishable sacred land would be today somewhere in the northern hemisphere.

The Second Root Race

As the astral forms of the First Root Race floated around, the “spirit of the Earth” (referring to the elemental and nature spirits) was busy at work developing the bodies of the next Root Race. Using the astral forms as a template, nature built a denser, though still ethereal, covering around them. The original astral forms became now a subtler counterpart of the newly developed ethereal bodies of the Second Root Race. This humanity was called “the boneless,” indicating that it was not yet a physical race. They were “the most heterogeneous gigantic semi-human monsters—the first attempts of material nature at building human bodies” (Secret Doctrine, 2.138). These “semi-humans” showed an instinctive intelligence, but they were still devoid of mind and self-consciousness. They too reproduced asexually, using a method of “budding and expansion.” (Today there are some simple animals, such as flatworms, which reproduce by budding, although this process is mostly associated with bacteria and yeast.)

The egg-shaped aura surrounding the ethereal body extruded a small germ from itself, which would feed from its parent and expand until it gradually detached itself from its originator. In the later part of this Root Race, the “buds” began to look like drops of sweat—“a kind of exudation of moisture or vital fluid.” (Secret Doctrine, 2.132). For this reason, the late second Race was called “the sweat-born.”

The land on which this Root Race developed was called by Blavatsky “Hyperborea,” in reference to the mythical perfect land of the Greeks:

The “Hyperborean” will be the name chosen for the Second Continent, the land which stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole to receive the Second Race, and comprised the whole of what is now known as Northern Asia. . . . It was a real Continent, a bona fide land which knew no winter in those early days. (Secret Doctrine, 2.7)

During this Root Race, the Earth too became more “solid,” producing more dry lands. This caused a great displacement of the waters of oceans, which changed their beds. The ethereal bodies of this Root Race were still impervious to the weather, although not completely to the physical elements. In fact, the majority of this race was eventually destroyed by the water displaced in this first universal flood (of which there were several).

The Third Root Race

At the beginning of the next Root Race, the small “sweat drops” started to change. They grew, becoming hard and round, eventually turning into eggs, out of which individuals hatched. The Third Root Race, now known as the “egg-born,” was approaching a fully physical form—a race “with bones.” During the transition from the sweat-born to the egg-born, the asexual progeny became hermaphroditic, each body able to produce eggs on its own. By the middle of the Third Root Race, the eggs “began to give birth, gradually and almost imperceptibly in their evolutionary development, first, to Beings in which one sex predominated over the other, and, finally, to distinct men and women” (Secret Doctrine, 2.132). At this stage, reproduction began to take sexual form. This change, of course, took millions of years, but by the end, human beings were fully physical, born from the wombs of their mothers as male or female. They were again gigantic, adapted to the general conditions and surroundings of the earth at the time. Legends of giant races are present in most ancient mythologies. Still, this middle Third Root Race was the first one that resembled what we call “human,” and was now ready for the crucial step.

The Advent of Self-Consciousness

About 18 million years ago, after humanity developed a physical body, the time came for the “completion” of the human being—the awakening of mind and self-consciousness. According to the esoteric philosophy, this milestone could not be reached by the efforts of nature alone. It required the assistance of those celestial beings who had previously refused to involve themselves in the creation of the early human forms—the Lords of the Flame. While these celestial beings could not help with physical evolution, they were able to do what the Lords of the Moon could not—stimulate the intellectual evolution of humanity by ensouling the bodies.

The terminology about these celestial beings in The Secret Doctrine is confusing. For the purpose of this article, we will simplify and state that there were two groups of beings under the “Lords of the Flame.” One is the “Lords of Wisdom”—celestial beings that had finished their human evolution in previous cycles and could now be regarded as “gods.” The other group, the “Sons of Wisdom,” are celestial beings of various degrees of evolution who are in the process of going through the human experience. These Sons of Wisdom are our souls.

The Secret Doctrine says that some among the Sons of Wisdom—those who had attained a higher level of evolution in previous cycles—incarnated in the human forms and became spiritual sages (Arhats) after a few rebirths. In Blavatsky’s words:

The Sons of Wisdom, or the spiritual Dhyanis, had become “intellectual” through their contact with matter, because they had already reached, during previous cycles of incarnation, that degree of intellect which enabled them to become independent and self-conscious entities, on this plane of matter. They were reborn only by reason of Karmic effects. They entered those who were “ready,” and [eventually] became the Arhats, or sages, alluded to above. (Secret Doctrine, 2.167)

Most Sons of Wisdom, however, were only able to send sparks of themselves into the bodies. Although this was enough to awaken the mind of the early humans, they remained destitute of the higher, enlightened knowledge already attained by the group mentioned above. These individuals constitute the average humanity of today, which is in the process of acquiring wisdom by passing through the different Root Races.

Lastly, a prideful group of Sons of Wisdom, on seeing the primitive and mindless bodies they had to incarnate into, delayed their action. “We can choose . . . we have wisdom,” they said (Secret Doctrine, 2.161), and decided to wait for the bodies to evolve further before getting involved with them. But this was a mistake—the forms left unawakened turned into a mindless, semianimal race, called the “narrow-brained.”

This third group of Sons of Wisdom, who decided to wait, had hoped that the bodies would keep on evolving in the meantime. However, physical evolution had done the best it could under the guidance of the Lords of the Moon, after which they retired, passing on the responsibility of evolution to the Sons of Wisdom. These deserted bodies, instead of evolving, began to degenerate. The narrow-brained beings started to reproduce with animals and gave birth to a monstrous “race of crooked, red-hair-covered monsters, going on all fours” (Secret Doctrine, 2.184). Seeing this, the Sons of Wisdom decided to incarnate before the situation got worse, but they had to do so in forms that had been desecrated, thus becoming a backward race. The karmic effects of the “sin of the mindless” fell upon those Sons of Wisdom “who failed to do by them their Karmic duty” (Secret Doctrine, 2.185).

Meanwhile, quite apart from this, a hierarchy of “gods”—the Lords of Wisdom—had created their own human forms by means of kriya-shakti (thought power) and incarnated among the Third Root Race. As we will see later, they would become the rulers and teachers of the early humanity.

In summary, esoteric philosophy postulates that there were seven groups of souls of varying degrees of evolution incarnating in early humanity—from those who had almost completed their human journey in previous cycles to those who were newly developed souls on this evolutionary Round. This is an important concept. If all souls inhabiting human bodies were created equal just before incarnating, it is difficult to explain the mysteries of evil and inequalities in social, moral, intellectual, and spiritual capacities among human beings. According to Blavatsky, the fact that there was a difference in the maturity or “age” of the human souls from the very beginning “solves the secret of the subsequent inequalities of intellectual capacity, and gives a logical explanation to the incomprehensible Karmic course” (Secret Doctrine, 2.161).

The mind of the late Third Root Race was young and innocent, and humans were more spiritual than intellectual. They developed a kind of nature-sound language to communicate with each other, but the essence of the communication between individuals was from mind to mind, by means of the spiritual “third eye” of which they were endowed. Because of this, the Third Root Race could perceive intuitively their connection with nature and the divine. In Blavatsky’s words:

No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present as the ever to be unknown and invisible all, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his inner God, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature, though an animal in his physical Self. (Secret Doctrine, 2.272)

Early Civilization

The continent of the Third Root Race was located in the area of the Pacific Ocean. Blavatsky wrote:

The third Continent, we propose to call “Lemuria” . . . extended from Madagascar to Ceylon and Sumatra. It included some portions of what is now Africa; but otherwise this gigantic Continent, which stretched from the Indian ocean to Australia, has now wholly disappeared beneath the waters of the Pacific, leaving here and there only some of its highland tops which are now islands. (Secret Doctrine, 2.7).

Before the awakening of the mind, weather had not been an issue, since “an eternal spring reigned over the whole globe” (Secret Doctrine, 2.135). Toward the end of this Root Race, however, there was a shift in the earth’s axis, and the world began to experience a change of seasons. Humanity found itself expelled from “paradise” and had to learn to survive in the new and hostile conditions. However, according to Theosophical teachings, this child humanity did not have to learn how to survive by the slow method of trial and error, as modern science proposes.

After (the separation [of sexes]) . . . the eternal spring became constant change and seasons succeeded. Cold forced men to build shelters and devise clothing. Then man appealed to the superior Fathers (the higher gods or angels) . . . Divine Kings descended and taught men sciences and arts, for man could live no longer in the first land (Adi-Varsha, the Eden of the first Races), which had turned into a white frozen corpse. (Secret Doctrine, 2.201)

At this juncture, the Lords of Wisdom stepped in and became the leaders and teachers of humankind. They are remembered in many traditions as the gods who were the “Divine Rulers” during the golden age of humanity. As mentioned before, the Third Root Race did not have a formal religion; but they had a natural childlike devotion for their Divine Kings, who guided and taught them:

At the dawn of consciousness, the man of the Third Root-Race had no beliefs that could be called religion. . . . But if the term is to be defined as the binding together of the masses in one form of reverence paid to those we feel higher than ourselves, of piety—as a feeling expressed by a child toward a loved parent—then even the earliest Lemurians had a religion—and a most beautiful one. (Secret Doctrine, 2.272)

It was the Golden Age, when

the gods walked the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals . . .

These gods incarnate taught humanity the rudiments of sciences and arts, and helped them build their first cities:

Under the guidance of their divine Rulers [they] built large cities, cultivated arts and sciences, and knew astronomy, architecture and mathematics to perfection. (Secret Doctrine, 2.273, 317)

But all this happened gradually. Many hundreds of thousands of years after the separation of sexes elapsed before the primeval civilization started. The Lemurians built their first cities out of stone and lava. Eventually, they were able to build huge cities using rare earths, metals, lava, marble, and black stones. According to Blavatsky, the first large cities appeared on that region of the Lemurian continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar (Secret Doctrine, 2.317). 

Conclusion

How are we to take this narrative? Is it supposed to describe real facts, or is it allegorical? Blavatsky admitted that, “to some extent . . . even the esoteric teaching is allegorical,” because the endeavor to present processes taking place on nonphysical planes “requires the use of symbols cast in an intelligible form” (Secret Doctrine, 2.81). That being said, Blavatsky claims that the story offered in The Secret Doctrine describes what actually happened.

If so, how far does this account agree with the findings of modern science? No remains could be found of the first two Root Races, which were nonphysical. But when we come to statements about the physical races (third and fourth), one of the difficulties in judging their veracity is that these races inhabited areas that are not easily accessible to modern anthropological research. Blavatsky and her teachers pointed out that the lack of remains belonging to the giant races can be explained by the fact that the greater part of the continents of Lemuria and Atlantis are now under the oceans. In the words of Mahatma Koot Hoomi:

No doubt your geologists are very learned; but why not bear in mind that . . . there may be, hidden deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other, and far older continents whose stratums have never been geologically explored; and that they may some day upset entirely their present theories. (Chin and Barker, 310)

Anthropological studies do not yet present a reliable picture of human evolution. We learn every year of new findings that modify previously held theories, a number of them pointing in the direction of claims made in The Secret Doctrine. The time may come when clear evidence surfaces but until then, the esoteric and scientific views walk on different paths.

Sources

Emphasis in quotes is from the original.

Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. Two volumes. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.

Chin, Vicente Hao, Jr., and A.T. Barker. The Mahatma Letters in Chronological Sequence. Adyar, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1998.

Pablo Sender PhD, has been a member of the Theosophical Society since 1996 and has presented Theosophical lectures, seminars, and classes around the world. He lives at the Krotona Institute of Theosophy in Ojai, California. He is the author of Evolution of the Higher Consciousness, and his articles have been published in Theosophical journals in several languages. Learn more at his website: www.pablosender.com.

VOLUME 107, NUMBER 4

CONTENTS

The Dawn of Civilization: An Esoteric Account of the First Three Root Races
Pablo Sender

Mind over Matter: Magic from Egypt
Normandi Ellis

Atlantis Then and Now
Richard Smoley

Serving a Higher Purpose: Letters to the National Lodge
David Bruce

Urban Mystic: Reminiscences of Goswami Kriyananda
Ray Grasse

From the Editor's Desk
Richad Smoley

Members' Forum: Nurturing New Students of Theosophy
Carol Craig

Viewpoint: Learning From the Past
Barbara Hebert