Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the September-October 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: McMain, Deanna Goodrich. "Annie Besant Speaks." Quest  88.5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2000): pg 184-189.

By Deanna Goodrich McMain

The following is an imaginary interview with Annie Besant, the second international President of the Theosophical Society and, with Helena Blavatsky, the best known of all Theosophists. As the interview begins, the interviewer notes that Annie Besant is only five feet tall, although most people are unaware of her height because her powerful speech and ideas magnify her diminutive size.

DM: So, Mrs. Besant—"BEZZ-ant" is how you pronounce your name, isn't it?

AB: Yes, it is. Some members of my husband's family, such as his brother, Sir Walter Besant, a well-known man of letters, pronounce the name "bi-ZANT," but when my husband and I separated, I adopted the pronunciation "BEZZ-ant." Of course I was born "Annie Wood."

DM: Yes, I see. Well, Mrs. Besant, could we take just a moment here to learn a little about your early years? Apparently you were English?

AB: Well, I was born in England, regrettably, in 1847, and I was raised there, but I'm proud to say I'm actually three-quarters Irish. My mother was Irish, and my father half Irish and half English. I've always considered myself an Irishwoman.

DM: And your childhood—what was that like?

AB: Oh, it was idyllic. I was called "Sunshine" when I was a girl because I was always happy.

DM: But didn't your father die when you were five?

AB: Yes, and then my mother moved our family to Harrow, where she operated a boarding house for schoolboys. So my brother got a sound education, and when I was eight I was taken in by a wealthy maiden lady and home-schooled until I was 16.

DM: And you obviously got a good education, too. You were lucky to have had this arranged for you as a girl at that time in history, weren't you?

AB: Yes, I was very fortunate there, too. I had a tutor by the name of Ellen Marryat. She taught me literature and languages, and I learned how to study independently, which was quite unusual for a girl at that time.

DM: And you were very religious as a young girl, as I understand it. Could you talk a little about that?

AB: Certainly. I was raised in the Church of England, but I was quite drawn to Catholicism. I felt very much attuned to the religious figures and the ceremony of the Catholic Church. I wanted to have been born at an earlier time. I fasted and even flagellated myself to see if I could bear pain. My tutor, Miss Marryat, was a devout Christian, and I probably developed much of my passion for the Church through her influence.

DM: Can we talk a bit about your marriage now? I know you married a minister, and yet that marriage didn't seem to have been "made in heaven," as they say. How old were you when you married?

AB: I was twenty when I married the Rev. Mr. Frank Besant, by whom I had two children, Digby in 1869 and Mabel in 1870.

DM: Somehow I don't see you as the kind of woman who would marry and raise a family. That takes a lot of time, and you had many causes to work for in your life.

AB: Yes, well, in those days English girls rather idealized clergymen. In addition, I had reconciled myself to the thought of marriage in place of the ascetic religious life which I had envisioned because I would be the wife of a priest, working in the Church and among the poor and doing good for the world. I had hoped my marriage would be a wonderful collaboration, but of course my husband was a product of his time, and I rebelled against the strictures of a Christian marriage of that time.

DM: How so?

AB: Well, my husband believed in male power and female subservience—that wasn't uncommon then—and I had political interests, too, which just added fuel to the fire. Another event that shocked me deeply was earning 30 shillings in payment for some short stories I had written and learning the money wasn't mine, but belonged to Frank! Also society didn't approve of women speaking in public before audiences containing men—meetings with both men and women in the audience were called "promiscuous assemblies," and a woman speaking in one of them was considered immoral. But let me tell you how I discovered my ability to give speeches, as I recorded that discovery in my Autobiographical Sketches (72):

In that spring of 1873 [when 26 years old], I delivered my first lecture. It was delivered to no one, queer as that may sound. And indeed, it was queer altogether. I was learning to play the organ, and was in the habit of practicing in the church by myself. One day, being securely locked in, I thought I would like to try how "it felt" to speak from the pulpit. Some vague fancies were stirring in me, that I could speak if I had the chance; very vague they were, for the notion that I might ever speak on the platform had never dawned on me; only the longing to find outlet in words was in me; the feeling that I had something to say, and the yearning to say it. So, queer as it may seem, I ascended the pulpit in the big, empty, lonely church, and there and then I delivered my first lecture! I shall never forget the feeling of power and of delight which came upon me as my voice rolled down the aisles, and the passion in me broke into balanced sentences, and never paused for rhythmical expression, while I felt that all I wanted was to see the church full of upturned faces, instead of the emptiness of the silent pews. And as though in a dream the solitude became peopled, and I saw the listening faces and the eager eyes, and as the sentences came unbidden from my lips, and my own tones echoed back to me from the pillars of the ancient church, I knew of a verity that the gift of speech was mine, that if ever--and it seemed then so impossible--if ever the chance came to me of public work, that at least this power of melodious utterance should win hearing for any message I had to bring.

DM: You are quite an orator indeed! I now have a little understanding of how you might have had a difficult time staying in the kind of marriage you describe. What would you say was the driving factor that led to your separation?

AB: When Mabel was a baby, she suffered a long and painful illness, and I began to doubt the goodness of a God who could inflict such a fate on an innocent child. I read all manner of religious literature, including teachings from the East, and I learned that Jesus was not the only incarnation of the Deity. Then I felt I could no longer take communion. Well, Mr. Besant and I had been increasingly estranged, but the climax came when he commanded me to take communion or leave his home.

DM: So you left home?

AB: Oh, yes, I certainly did. I obtained a legal separation in 1873 and was granted legal custody of Mabel. I became a freethinker and continued to study religious subjects. The next year I met Moncure Conway—a former Methodist minister who had become a Unitarian, then a rationalist—and Charles Bradlaugh, who was an atheist. Charles Bradlaugh and I became friends. I joined his organization and later became co-editor of his atheistic journal, National Reformer. I supported his campaign for election to Parliament and his right to take his seat, which was contested because of his atheism. My friendship with him coupled with my having become an atheist made me the object of attacks. Then in 1877 Mr. Bradlaugh and I published a pamphlet on contraception, and we were tried in a court of law for obscenity! Mind you, this was medical information to protect women's health and to give poor couples the means to limit the size of their families, and it was deemed pornography! I think this course of events brought to national attention the issues of contraception and poverty.

DM: That was a courageous stand for a woman to take in that era.

AB: It was quite a time. The lives of the poor were absolutely wretched, and I felt it was my duty to help them. I had so much compared to them.

DM: Well, you certainly made a difference!

AB: I paid a price! Frank Besant won custody of Mabel—she was wrested right out of my arms, screaming terribly at what was happening to her. I had been declared unfit as a parent. I became very lonely and thought of death. The good news is that when Digby and Mabel came of age they both left their father and returned to me. Many years later, Digby wrote an article saying I was in every way his ideal of a mother.

DM: What an ordeal! What came next in your life?

AB: I became a friend of George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, and through his influence became a Fabian socialist. The Fabians, you know, were a group of socialists who believed in slow, not revolutionary, change in government.

DM: What did you accomplish during your time with the Fabian Society?

AB: For one thing, I studied at London University and received advanced certificates in eight sciences. Then I was elected to the London School Board and served 3 years before I decided not to run for reelection. Meanwhile I was working, speaking, and writing for reform in taxation, Irish home rule, repeal of capital punishment, fair labor laws, national education, and many other issues.

DM: I've read about the match girl strike of 1888, for which you were responsible, in large part.

AB: Yes, that's true. In a London match factory, on the East Side, the workers were mostly girls, including children as young as six years old! They worked from 6:30 in the morning until 6:00 at night. One-eighth of the work force suffered caries of the jaw from constant exposure to the phosphorus fumes. First there was loss of the teeth, then of the jawbone itself. I wrote an article called "White Slavery in London," published in a socialist newspaper so that these conditions would become public knowledge. I sent a copy to the owner of the factory; he replied by threatening legal action. But I also received letters from many of the match girls in support of my work, and finally the fines and deductions levied on the workers were abolished.

DM: And you founded large unions of unskilled workers that eventually corrected many unjust practices.

AB: Yes, I'm glad to say the unions were successful.

DM: I understand you came across The Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky while you were doing this work. How did that occur?

AB: I was beginning to become dissatisfied with the negative aspects of free thought, and so I began researches into spiritualism, hypnotism, and the nature of truth. One day I heard again the same voice I had heard earlier when I was nearly suicidal. It asked, "Are you willing to give up everything for the sake of learning the Truth?" I immediately said, "Yes, Lord." A few days later the publisher of a journal handed me Madame Blavatsky's book The Secret Doctrine to review. I was so impressed with it that I asked for an introduction to Madame Blavatsky. On our second meeting, I applied for membership in the Theosophical Society. Not that it was a particularly easy decision. Part of me fought against it. You see, my work on the London School Board had largely undone public prejudice against me, so I had a smoother road ahead of me. Did I really want to plunge into a new vortex of strife and once again make myself a mark for ridicule by fighting for an unpopular truth? Did I really want to turn against materialism and face the shame of publicly confessing that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the soul? It was not a clear-cut decision. But I did join and was happy to be in the company of Madame Blavatsky.

DM: What an inspiration that must have been for you to continue your work and your search for truth!

AB: Ah, that it was! That was in 1889. I found in HPB (as she liked to be called) the mother and female guide who did not urge me to curtail my self-development or constrict my truest self to conform to the restricted female role of that time. I brought her into my home to live until she died two years later in 1891.

DM: You plunged right into Theosophy rather quickly, didn't you?

AB: Many people thought I moved too swiftly, but I believe the decision had been long approached and brought into realization the dreams of my childhood. I have gained a certainty of knowledge about life.

DM: How did Madame Blavatsky's death affect your life?

AB: I made my first trip to India in 1894 and began to learn about Indian culture and then began work to revive the people's self-respect and reverence for their own culture, which had been weakened by Western influence. When Col. Olcott, the President-Founder of the Theosophical Society, died in 1907, I was elected as his successor.

DM: What are some of the important events during your tenure as President?

AB: There are many, but the story wouldn't be complete without mention of Jiddu Krishnamurti. My colleague Charles Leadbeater met him on the beach at Adyar when the boy was in his early teen years and recognized in him some very unusual and wonderful qualities. He had an aura about him that led Leadbeater to believe Krishnamurti could become the embodiment of a great teaching. I assumed responsibility for the boy and his brother as their guardian because their mother was dead and their father worked for the Society. I remained personally close to Krishnamurti ever after, although we had several substantial differences of philosophy.

DM: I understand you had major differences with Mohandas Gandhi, too. Could you also say a word about him?

AB: Yes, well, although I was the first to refer to him as "Mahatma," which means Great Soul, he and I did not agree about how to achieve our goals. He was no politician and disliked what some have referred to as my "rampant propaganda." I, on the other hand, disapproved of his form of bringing about social change, which was deliberately to break laws and create confrontations. I thought that policy could lead the ordinary person into a disregard of the law. A great deal more could be said about our differences, but that's enough for the present.

DM: What were some of your accomplishments in India?

AB: I founded the Central Hindu College in Benares, the Theosophical Educational Trust, the Sons and Daughters of India, and the Indian Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements. I also established and edited the New India newspaper in support of home rule for India. I funded the India Home Rule League and was elected President of the Indian National Congress for the year 1917. I drew up the Commonwealth of India Bill and spoke to both houses of Parliament at its presentation.

DM: You wrote quite a lot, too.

AB: Yes, I wrote a great many books, pamphlets, and articles, edited twelve periodicals, and traveled around the world, giving hundreds of lectures in my lifetime.

DM: What were some of the main ideas you wanted to communicate through your writings and speeches? Obviously you were a feminist long before the word existed. You worked tirelessly for women's rights, including their right to know about contraception. And you certainly demonstrated your commitment to serve your fellow humans.

AB: I saw service as the supreme object in life. It is one of the three limbs of the Theosophical movement, along with study and meditation. My book In the Outer Court says that the shorter pathway in our evolution is "service to humanity." I also wrote in Principles of Education that every subject of instruction, whether it be in the area of mental, moral, physical, or religious education, is not only a means toward self-development, but an avenue through which service may be rendered to others. We can cooperate consciously with the divine will in the evolutionary process and at the same time attain a sense of deep peace and great joy.

DM: Another area in which I think you exerted a lot of influence is thought. You wrote a book called Thought Power.

AB: When you consider that our thoughts inevitably determine our actions, you see the great importance of how we think. Right thinking has to be based on right memory, and right memory means that a wrong done to a person is immediately forgotten by that person, but a kindness is treasured and remembered for all time. Right thought and right action are considered in a poem I wrote in 1919:

If a comrade be faithless; let us be faithful to him;If an enemy injure, let us forgive him;If a friend betray, let us stand by him;Then shall the Hidden God in us shine forth.

DM: Yes, you seem to believe in the importance of fostering peace and harmony between individuals. Could you say just a bit more about that?

AB: I talked about that in The Doctrine of the Heart. We need to recognize that the Self in all people is one, so that in each person with whom we come into contact, we ignore all that is unlovely in the outer casing, and recognize the Self seated in the heart. Now I'm speaking of Self with a capital "S." The next thing is to realize—in practice, not only in theory—that the Self is trying to express itself through the casings that obstruct it, and that the inner nature is altogether lovely but is distorted in our awareness by the envelopes that surround us. We should identify ourselves with that Self, which is indeed ourselves in its essence, and cooperate with it in its efforts to rise above the elements that stifle its expression.

DM: What can you say about how we might develop our power to think and to use our thought for good?

AB: We might begin by comparing the mind to a mirror. A mirror appears to have objects within it, yet it does not. What we see in the mirror are only images, illusions, reflections. In the same way, the mind knows only the illusive images of the universe, not things themselves. The first requirement for competent thinking is attentive, accurate observation. If you are not accurate, you will compound your errors so that nothing can correct them except going back to the very beginning. And you can develop your powers of accuracy just by observing and testing yourself. How can we develop our power to think? One way is by learning to concentrate. That is a key to thought power. Reading by itself does not build the mind; thought alone can build it. Reading only furnishes material for thought; therefore you should read for five minutes and think for ten.

DM: What if I'm a worrier? How can I stop that?

AB: Worry is the process of repeating the same train of thought over and over with only small alterations, and not only coming to no end result but not even aiming at the reaching of a result. Probably the best way to get rid of the "worry-channel" is to dig another of exactly opposite character. You do this by giving three or four minutes in the morning, when you first get up, to an encouraging or positive thought, such as "The Self is peace; that Self am I. The Self is strength; that Self am I." During this time you also consider that you are one with God and mistakenly regard your pain and your anxiety as yourself. Nothing can injure us that is not brought to us by our own previous willing and acting. The great law of karma works to free us by forcing us to face the debts that keep us in prison tied to the whirling wheel of births and deaths.

DM: Thank you so much, Mrs. Besant, for being here with us. Is there anything else you would like to leave us?

AB: Perhaps I will end with a little piece I wrote about my loyalty to Truth:

She may lead me into the wilderness,Yet I must follow her; She may strip me of all I love,Yet I must pursue her;Though she slay me, Yet will I trust in her; And I ask no other epitaph on my tomb but "She tried to follow Truth."

Deanna Goodrich McMain, PhD, is a writer, photographer, and student of classical guitar. A former computer programmer, audiologist, and clinical counselor, she lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her husband, hiking the mountains of the southwest and staying close to Nature. She served as Silver City Study Center secretary for two years.

Originally printed in the September-October 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Phillips, Jan. "God Is At Eye Level." Quest  88.5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2000): pg 172-174.

By Jan Phillips

I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the color and fragrance of a flower--the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence. --Helen Keller

I sometimes awaken from a dream hearing a faint whisper of words coming from a place that feels very far away. Dream telegrams, a friend calls them. Not long ago, I heard the voice again, this time whispering the words, "God is at eye level." I smiled myself awake, wishing I could talk back to this voice or visit the place where it was coming from.

The words lingered throughout the day, the weeks, and even now, when I'm out photographing, they are always there in the spaciousness of my mind. Through the woods, along the beach, in the streets of downtown, wherever I am with my camera around my neck, I hear that hushed voice--"God is at eye level," repeating over and over like a mantra.

At an early age, I learned that God was a particular Being who dwelled in a place far from where I ever stood. My perception of God has changed dramatically over the years. I am guided now not so much by teachings that have come down to me, but by learnings that have risen up from within--a shift that began thirty years ago when I was a young postulant in a religious community taking my first theology class.

The Jesuit priest stood in front of the room and asked each of us what we believed about God. One by one we recited our beliefs, recalling sentences from the Baltimore Catechism about who God was, why He made us, what He wanted from us. The priest challenged those beliefs one by one, tore them apart, belittled them as nothing more than memorized statements, versions of someone else's opinion.

He took a hammer to our naive image of God and shattered it. I started to cry, hating him, wondering how he could do this, how could he stand there and destroy God when we'd just given our whole lives over to God, left behind everything to be with God. It was a moment of devastating loss, incomprehensible sadness. I felt as if everything I believed in, everything on which I had based my life, was no longer true. The silence in the room was deafening; the void I felt, terrifying. We sat there, thirty of us, for what seemed an eternity, reckoning with the obliteration of God as we had known Him.

Finally the priest broke the silence. "You must come to know what is true about God from your own experience," he said. "Arrive at a faith that is deeper than your learning, one that is rooted in your ultimate concern and rises up from the nature of who you are." He said that we needed to let go of beliefs and conjure up a faith of commitment, one that rises up from within ourselves, from a deep awareness of our own godliness. The biblical paradox that says you must lose your life in order to find your life was beginning to make sense.

Self-realization is the actualization of our own divinity. It is a recognition of ourselves in all things and all things in ourselves, found through the simple contemplation of things as they are. The opposite of selfishness, it is a manifestation of ourselves as gift to and mirror to others. The deeper one's self-awareness, the clearer reflection one can offer.

Self-realization is an exploration into the complexities and contradictions of life, an attempt to plumb the opposites until we arrive finally at the Oneness that contains them. It is a painstaking process of observation, an astute and relentless probing into reality, past our learned illusions of separateness into the profound experience of connectedness.

When we observe something deeply, we enter into it, become one with it. Something of its essence enters into us, and we are changed in the process. When we read a novel, see a play, or listen to a story, we enter into its world, place ourselves in the scene and experience the drama and conflicts as if they were ours. We often come away from someone else's creation with a deeper understanding of our own story.

The Italian poet and Nobel Prize winner Salvatore Quasimodo wrote that "poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own." All things reveal us to ourselves. If we look deeply enough into an oak tree or mountain stream, into a photograph or other work of art, we will find ourselves there. And if we linger, listening intently, it will speak to us in a language divine, a language of light, symbol, metaphor.

In the process of observing, of being wholly attentive, we are liberated momentarily from our sense of separateness, rapt in a oneness with the subject of our gaze--a connection as real as that of lovers who have felt their spiritual beings merge in another dimension as their earthly bodies join together. We all crave this oneness, this holy and mystical union, and are willing to travel to the ends of the earth to find it. Yet it is ours to experience in every moment, wherever we are. This oneness is the Tao, the ever-flowing reality--all in each of us and each in all. The accurate perception of our relationship to every living thing leads to awakening, to self-realization, to the experience and expression of God in the world through our artistic creations and through our compassion for one another.

Diarmuid O'Murchu, a priest and social psychologist, writes in Quantum Theology: "Observation gives way to relationship, a complex mode of interacting, fluctuating between giving and receiving, until a sense of resonance emerges, whereby the individual parts lose their dualistic, independent identities, but rediscover a sense of the 'quantum self' in the interdependent relationship of the new whole, which might be anything from the marriage of two people to a newly felt bond with the universe itself."

Observation gives way to relationship, and relationship heals and sustains us. Whether with one other or with many, with children, with animals, with nature, it is our sense of relatedness that keeps us whole and balanced. In contemplating things as they are, we experience the life force in living things, awaken to the consciousness throbbing in every being, every molecule and atom. On some profound and mysterious level, we fully understand our relation to the Whole. Only our thinking keeps us separate; only our beliefs keep us from finding the Divine in the substance of our daily lives.

In my quest for the Infinite, I have come to believe that God, Truth, Beauty, Love--all those concepts I associate with the Divine--are not things that are "found" at the end of the path, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but are rather what I experience on the journey as I travel through life--or perhaps, more explicitly, they are the journey itself.

God, to me, is the universe unfolding, the power and potential within all life, the oak within our acorn selves. Not one bit separate, but fused with us like salt and the sea, ever-present in the faces, the scenes, the feelings that pass through our lives day to day.

When I pause long enough to really look--as one must in the act of photographing--I am seized by this awareness, that everywhere I look, there God is. In the smooth gray bark of the eucalyptus, the immense bulk of the polar bear, the eyes of that hungry child, that angry customer, that tattooed teenager. I forget, when I'm not really looking, that something deep and beautiful is below the surface. But when I'm photographing, that is all I remember, all I seek to capture--that essence within things.

Photography heals because it reveals this essence. In the process of looking, finding, framing, and shooting, all one's energies are focused purely. In the attempt to capture a piece of life in a fraction of a second, one waits mindfully, perfectly attentive, for the right alignment of shape and light, tone and texture, color and contrast. One waits for the cloud to come or go, for the child to forget there is anyone looking, for the fawn to rise up from its cozy bed of green. In these moments of waiting, a oneness occurs between the seer and the seen, and they become, knowingly or not, cocreators of an image that will endure beyond the present and have an effect, a healing power of its own.

As I think back on the inner voices that informed my looking before I knew I was seeking God at eye level, I'm conscious of a variety of them. When I first started photographing, the voice spoke a simple, "Don't forget this." I'd photograph people, places, or events that had meaning and joy I didn't want to lose sight of. Photographing meant I could keep an image to savor later, reflect on, and find myself in when I was lost.

Eventually, as I improved in the craft, another voice came along, whispering, "Share this." Then my looking was informed by a desire to pass along what I was seeing that another might miss. I photographed beautiful landscapes and flowers, put them into a slide show with music, and for the first time ventured out, sharing my images in the hope that they would lift up others as they'd lifted me.

In time, that voice gave way to another that said, "Your images can make a difference in the world--let them." As an activist for peace, I photographed disarmament rallies around the nation and traveled the world showing these images in an effort to reflect a consciousness of compassion and peace.

And as I traveled, among Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Communist, Arab, Israeli, Catholic, Protestant people--all of whom housed, fed, and nourished me in profound ways--the voice behind my looking changed to "You are one with each of these," and my photography grew in intimacy, in power, in conviction, colored forever by this new awareness of union, of non-separateness, of family.

Though I can't know for certain if it's the same with all photographers, my guess is that all of our looking is informed by a deeper voice, a compelling passion that takes us to the edge from which we look and directs our gaze toward that which we seek.

Each of us listens to a different voice within, but if we are true to the voice that is speaking in our hearts, the images we make will heal our wounds, mend our brokenness. If we think clearly and carefully about the power of our images and, in our looking, see past the barriers, the walls that have been constructed between one person and another, we may one day stumble upon the Divine we've been trying all along to find.

Whenever I'm tempted to speak of God, the words of Lao Tzu come to mind: "He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know." I think that God, like love, is more aptly defined by what it isn't than by what it is. I think of Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic, who says that the ultimate leave-taking is the leaving of God for God--the final letting go of the limited concept for an experience of the real thing.

When I was young, I prayed to be a martyr. I wanted to show God and everyone else that I loved Him enough to die for him. I wanted to go into battle for Him, be another Joan of Arc, a hero for God's sake.

Now all that's changed. I wouldn't think of dying for God, but am doing my best to live for God--with God, in God, with God in me. There are no more lines of separation, only strands of connectedness. My eyes find God everywhere, in every living thing, creature, person, in every act of kindness, act of nature, act of grace.

Everywhere I look, there God is, looking back, looking straight back.

Jan Phillips has authored the Quest Books God Is at Eye Level: Photography as a Healing Art (from which this article is taken) and Marry Your Muse: Making a Lasting Commitment to Your Creativity (a 1998 Ben Franklin Award book). She has published in the New York Times, Ms Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, Christian Science Monitor, and Utne Reader. She has presented workshops to more than 10,000 people in 23 countries. Her Web site is www.janphillips.com .

Originally printed in the September-October 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Welwood, John. "The Play of the Mind: Form, Emptiness, and Beyond." Quest  88.5 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2000): pg 190-195.

By John Welwood

Form is emptiness, emptiness itself is form; emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness.

—Heart Sutra

In every crescendo of sensation, in every effort to recall, in every progress towards the satisfaction of desire, this succession of an emptiness and fullness that have reference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of the phenomenon.

—William James

In the gap between thoughts nonconceptual wisdom shines continuously.

—Milarepa

Western philosophy has studied the mind mainly through conceptual thought and rational analysis; as a result, it has granted thinking, even "thinking about thinking," the highest status. Modern depth psychology has gone beyond this traditional understanding by giving greater importance to what eludes thought--subconscious feelings, wishes, impulses, images. Yet modern psychology's view of mind remains limited because, in characteristic Western fashion, it focuses on the contents of mind, while neglecting mind as an experiential process.

William James  was an early critic of psychology's tendency to overemphasize the contents of the mind, while ignoring the flowing stream of consciousness itself--which for him was like saying that a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other molded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow.

In directing attention toward the flow of consciousness, the free water that cannot be confined to its molded forms, James comes close to the Buddhist understanding of everyday mind as a mindstream, a continuous flow of moment-to-moment experiencing.

Buddhist psychology goes one step further, however. Beyond the static Western focus on contents of mind and the more dynamic view of the mindstream as a flow of experiencing, it recognizes a still larger dimension of mind--the presence of nonconceptual awareness, or "nonthought," as it is sometimes called. In contrast to the forms that consciousness takes--thought, feeling, perception--the larger nature of consciousness has no shape or form. Therefore, it is often described as "emptiness." If the contents of mind are like pails and buckets floating in a stream, and the mindstream is like the dynamic flowing of the water, pure awareness is like the water itself in its essential wetness. Sometimes the water is still, sometimes it is turbulent; yet it always remains as it is—wet, fluid, watery. In the same way, pure awareness is never confined or disrupted by any mind-state. Therefore, it is the source of liberation and true equanimity.

When we start to observe the play of the mind, what we most readily notice are the contents of consciousness--the ongoing, overlapping sequence of perceptions, thoughts, feelings. As we develop a subtler, finer, more sustained kind of witnessing, through a discipline like meditation, we discover in addition to these differentiated mind-moments another aspect of the mindstream that usually remains hidden: inarticulate gaps or spaces appearing between our discrete thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. These spaces between the pailsful and bucketsful of water floating in the stream are hard to see at first and impossible to remember because they have no definite form or shape we can grasp. Yet if we do not try to grasp them, these undifferentiated mind-moments can provide a glimpse of the larger reality that lies beyond the mindstream: the pure ground of nonconceptual awareness that encompasses and also surpasses all the activities of mind.

Thus the play of the mind includes three elements: differentiated and undifferentiated mind-moments, and the larger background awareness in which the interplay between these two takes place. In the Tibetan Mahamudra tradition, these three elements are known as movement, stillness, and awareness. The alternation between movement and stillness--differentiated and undifferentiated mind-moments--makes up the flowing stream of consciousness that is the foreground level of mind. And through the relative stillness of the silent spaces between thoughts we find a doorway into the essence of mind itself, the larger background awareness that is present in both movement and stillness, without bias toward either. This larger awareness is self-existing: it cannot be fabricated or manufactured because it is always present, whether we notice it or not.

In terms of the Buddhist teaching of the three kayas, we could say that the contents of consciousness belong to the nirmanakaya, the realm of manifest form. The pulsation of the mindstream, with its alternation between movement and stillness, belongs to the sambhogakaya, the realm of energetic flow. And the larger open ground of awareness, first discovered in moments of stillness, is the dharmakaya, the realm of pure being itself, eternally present, spontaneous, and free of entrapment in any form whatsoever.

Form and Emptiness in the Stream of Consciousness

Our most common experience of nonthought or emptiness is the appearance of little gaps between our thoughts--which are continually occurring, though normally overlooked. For instance, after speaking a sentence, there is a natural pause, marked by a punctuation mark when written out, which allows a split-second return to undifferentiated awareness. Or between the words of the sentence itself, there may be halts and gaps (often covered verbally by "hm" or "ah") that allow split-second attention to a preverbal sense of what we wish to say.

As one of the first Western explorers of consciousness, William James was particularly interested in these undifferentiated moments in the mindstream--which he called the "transitive parts," in contrast to the more substantial moments of formal thought and perception. James (1890, 243-4) also understood the impossibility of using focal attention to try to observe these diffuse transitional spaces that occur between more substantive mind-moments:

Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. . . . The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.

The difficulty of apprehending these undifferentiated moments through focal attention has led Western psychology to disregard or deny them as having any importance in the stream of consciousness, an error that James  called the "psychologist's fallacy":

If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thought's stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the stream.

The mind's tendency to hold onto solid forms is like a bird in flight always looking for the next branch to land on. And this narrow focus prevents us from appreciating what it is like to sail through space, to experience what one Hasidic master called the "between-stage"--a primal state of potentiality that gives birth to new possibilities. Continually looking for a belief, attitude, identity, or emotional reaction to hold onto for dear life, we fail to recognize the interplay of form and emptiness in the mindstream--out of which all creativity arises.

Beauty itself is a function of this interplay. Things stand out as beautiful only in relation to the space surrounding them. The loveliest antiques mean nothing in a cluttered room. A sudden clap of thunder is awesome not just because of the sound, but because of the silence it has interrupted, as James (1890, 240) points out:

Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. . . . The feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone.

Similarly in music, the contour, meaning, and beauty of a melody derive from the intervals between the notes. Recognizing this, the great pianist Artur Schnabel once wrote, "The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes--ah, that is where the art resides." A single tone by itself has little meaning, and as soon as two tones are sounded they are instantly related by the shape of the space or interval between them. The interval of a third conveys a totally different feeling-quality than does a fifth. Since any pair of tones the same interval apart will sound rather similar, the sequences of intervals are what give a melody its particular quality, rather than the particular tones themselves.

Thus music provides an interesting analogy for the interplay between form and emptiness within the larger ecology of mind. Form is emptiness: the melody is actually a pattern of intervals between the tones. Although a melody is usually thought of as a sequence of notes, it is equally, if not more so, a sequence of spaces that the tones simply serve to mark off. Emptiness is form: nonetheless, this pattern of intervals does make up a definite, unique melodic progression that can be sung and remembered. And the ground of both the tones and the intervals is the larger silence that encompasses the melody and allows it to stand out and be heard.

Our usual addiction to the grasping tendency of mind causes us to overlook the spaces around thoughts, the felt penumbra that gives our experience its subtle beauty and meaning. Neglecting these fluid spaces within the mindstream contributes to a general tendency to over-identify with the contents of our mind and to assume that we are the originator and custodian of them. The troublesome equation "I = my thoughts about reality" creates a narrowed self-sense, along with an anxiety about our thoughts as territory we have to defend.

Absolute Emptiness: The Larger Ground of Awareness

So far we have focused on gaps in the mindstream--spaces between thoughts, moments of quiet--that represent a relative kind of emptiness. These gaps are relatively formless in comparison to the more graspable forms of thought, perception, or emotion. And the stillness in these gaps is only relative because it is easily disrupted or displaced by the next moment of activity that occurs in the mindstream. This type of stillness is simply an experience among experiences--what the Tibetans call nyam (temporary experience).

Beyond the relative emptiness we discover in these gaps in the mindstream there lies the much larger, absolute emptiness of nonconceptual awareness, which Buddhism regards as the very essence of mind. This nonconceptual awareness is an absolute stillness or emptiness because its space and silence actually pervade, and thus cannot be displaced by, whatever goes on in the mind. Meditation practice can help us find this larger stillness in movement, this larger silence within sound, this nonthought within the very activity of thinking.

Without sustained and disciplined inner attention, it is almost impossible to discover, enter, or abide in this absolute ground of steady awareness. For as long as we skim along the surface of consciousness, our moments of stillness are quickly disrupted by the activity of thought, feeling, and perception. Meditation practice provides a direct way to tune into this larger dimension of nonconceptual awareness. As one Tibetan text  describes this discovery:

Sometimes in meditation there is a gap in normal consciousness, a sudden complete openness. . . . It is a glimpse of reality, a sudden flash which occurs at first infrequently, and then gradually more and more often. It may not be a particularly shattering or explosive experience at all, just a moment of great simplicity.

Meditation is designed to help us move beyond the surface contents of the mind. Underneath the mind's surface activity, the ocean of awareness remains perfectly at rest, regardless of what is happening on its surface. As long as we are caught up in the waves of thought and feeling, they appear solid and overwhelming. But if we can find the presence of awareness within our thoughts and feelings, they lose their formal solidity and release their fixations. In the words of Tibetan teacher Tarthang Tulku (1974, 9-10):

Stay in the the thoughts. Just be there. . . . You become the center of the thought. But there is not really any center. . . . Yet at the same time, there is . . . complete openness. . . . If we can do this, any thought becomes meditation.

In this way, meditation reveals the absolute stillness within both the mind's turbulence and its relative calm.

Here then is the deeper sense in which form is emptiness: The essence of all thought and all experience is complete openness and clarity. In this sense, Buddhist psychology provides an understanding of mind that resembles the quantum physics view of matter. In quantum field theories, "the classical contrast between the solid particles and the space surrounding them is completely overcome" (Capra 1975, 210). Just as subatomic particles are intense condensations of a larger energy field, so thoughts are momentary condensations of awareness. Just as matter and space are but two aspects of a single unified field, so thought and the spaces between thoughts are two aspects of the larger field of awareness, which Zen master Suzuki  described as "big mind." If small mind is the ongoing grasping and fixating activity of focal attention, big mind is the background of this whole play--pure presence and nonconceptual awareness.

The following diagram illustrates the relationship between the three aspects of mind discussed here:

In this figure, the dots are like differentiated mind-moments, which stand out as separate events because of the spaces between them. Although these spaces appear to be nothing in comparison to the dots, they nonetheless provide the context that allows the dots to stand out as what they are and that joins them together. The spaces between the dots also provide entry points into the background, the white space of the page, which represents the larger ground of pure awareness in which the interplay of form and emptiness takes place.

Big Mind

The big mind of pure awareness is a no-man's-land--a free, open reality without reference points, property boundaries, or trail markers. Although it cannot be grasped as an object by focal attention, it is not an article of faith. Quite the contrary, in the words of a Tibetan text, "The nothingness in question is actually experienceable" (Guenther 1959, 54). Unfortunately, when the untutored mind regards it as a mere blankness or nothingness, the jewel-like radiance of this pure awareness becomes obscured. As Dzogchen teacher Tenzin Wangyal (1997, 29) points out:

The essence of meditation could be described quite simply, in Tenzin Wangyal's words, as "presence in the gap"--as an act of nondual, unitive knowing that reveals the ground of being in what at first appears to be nothing at all. As another Tibetan text (Guenther 1956, 269) explains, "The foundation of sentient beings is without roots. . . . And this rootlessness is the root of enlightenment." Only in the groundless ground of being can the dance of reality unfold in all its luminous clarity.

References

Capra, Fritjof. 1975. The Tao of Physics. Berkeley, CA: Shambhala.

Guenther, Herbert V. 1956. "Tibetan Buddhism in Western Perspective: The Concept of Mind in Buddhist Tantrism." Journal of Oriental Studies 3:261-77.

Guenther, Herbert V. 1959. "The Philosophical Background of Buddhist Tantrism." Journal of Oriental Studies 5:45-64.

James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt.

Suzuki, Daisetz T. 1970. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. New York: Walker, Weatherhill.

Tarthang Tulku. 1974. "On Thoughts." Crystal Mirror 3:7-20.

Trungpa, Chogyam, and M. Hookham, trans. 1974. "Maha Ati." Vajra 1:6-8.

Wangyal, Tenzin. 1997. A-Khrid Teachings. Vol. 2. Berkeley, CA: privately published.

John Welwood, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and the associate editor of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. He has been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for thirty years and is the author of many articles and seven books. This article is excerpted from his latest book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Psychotherapy, and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation (Shambhala, 2000). Copyright © John Welwood, 2000.