Quest Magazine

Mysticism: Its History and Challenge

by Bruno Borchert
Samuel Weiser, lnc., York Beach, Maine, 1994; paper, 456 pages.

This is a fine new book on mysticism, written by Bruno Borchert, a member of the Carmelite Order and senior researcher on art and mysticism at the Titus Brandsma Instituut in Holland. Borchert discusses the nature and history of mystical experience and considers its relevance in our scientific and rational age.

He states at the outset that the phenomenon of mysticism "seems to occur in all religions and cultures; it is different in external form, but in essence everywhere it is the same: it is the experimental knowledge that, in one way or another, everything is interconnected, that all Things have a single source" (his italics)

That realization is the underlying idea of this journal and of the Theosophical Society from which this journal has sprung.

One may arrive intellectually at the concept, but the mystic experiences the realization. It typically happens in moments of insight and can be quite overwhelming as experience. Often the mystic has a compulsion to try to describe the experience, but encounters great difficulty in doing so. Many mystics find the experience so overwhelming that they thereafter fall into silence, feeling they cannot possibly communicate what they have experienced.

In the first part of the book Borchert describes the phenomenon of mysticism. He writes:

Mysticism involves not only an experience of short duration which always has the same characteristics, but also a person who is trying to assimilate this experience into his or her life. What is more, mystics include both the stolid and the emotional types, both the balanced and the unstable, the physically strong and the frail. Also, a balance between two worlds is involved, especially in Western mysticism: one that is flawless, complete, gladdening, and seen in one lucid moment, and another that has to be coped with daily, full of violence, evil, problems and opposition. Between these two worlds the borders are fairly blurred: the borders between daydream and hard reality, between fantastic imagery and true vision, between spiritual and physical impressions (47-48).

Borchert speaks of the need at times to daydream in a problem-free environment, to muse in quiet surroundings, to read light fiction or the latest gossip column. Drugs, dancing, and music are all ways in which people seek respite from the difficult pressures of life.

The striving for ecstatic experience carries risks, Borchert points out, because the border between the dreamworld and reality may disappeal; there is the risk of madness and indeed history is filled with individuals who seem to have passed over the line from ecstasy to madness.

The second and much longer section of the book provides an overview of the history of mysticism, from its apparent origin in shamanism through India, Iran, Israel, Egypt, and Hellenistic and medieval times.

In the final section of his book, Borchelt considers the modern mysticism he sees growing from the challenges of scientific, rational, and technical Western culture. He refers to the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin, David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, Marilyn Ferguson, and others.

He speaks 011 behalf of a kind of democratization of mysticism for our times. In the final analysis, referring to J. Krishnamurti, he notes that while there are many books and many methods and techniques to offer guidance on the mystical path, nevertheless each of us must choose our own way. "Each case has its own direction, limitations, and possibilities," he declares. "The mystical process has an internal compass, which can be consulted once the way itself is clearly seen, and [which] can help you find your bearings in the maze of life" (364).

Along the way, Borchert's book can serve as a helpful guide to understanding the mystic path and its possibilities and pitfalls.

-WILLIAM METZGER

Spring 1995

The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge

by K. Paul Johnson
State University of New York Press, Albany, 1994; paper, xxii+288 pages.

Fortunately the word myth has come to have a dual meaning, one of which has restored the concept to its rightful place among philosophical ideas, while the other meaning confines it to the popular tradition of "tall stories" or fanciful imaginings. As James Cowan, a contemporary interpreter of the Aboriginal legends of Australia, has put the matter, "Myth is the supreme metaphysical language." Or, as Jocelyn Godwin states in his excellent foreword to the book under review, myth "embodies lost knowledge and higher truths than mere stories."

These statements help us identify the meaning of myth as K. Paul Johnson uses the term in the subtitle of his latest effort to identify the teachers of H. P. Blavatsky; the correspondents of A. P. Sinnett, A. O. Hume, and several other early Theosophists; as well as those spiritually developed individuals referred to in theosophical literature as mahatmas, adepts, or masters. Let us acknowledge at the outset that Johnson is a tireless and careful researcher, that he has opened up, to quote Godwin again, "an entirely new dimension… to the history of Western esotericism at its most complex moment:' and that he has presented to the reader willing to set aside personal bias and prejudgment on the central question of Blavatsky's "teachers" a reasoned and well-documented case for identifying their personae.

Having said that, however, we need to examine the work more closely in order to understand both Johnson's aim and the criteria he used for achieving his purpose. He has not sought to deny the fact that spiritually wise men and women exist, individuals who may be called masters or mahatmas. As Johnson says in his introduction: "To call the occultist view of the Masters a myth is not to deny its value or validity." Rather he proposes that "the Masters were real people whose portrayal has been inflated by myth."

Johnson states unequivocally that he has defined the term "master" on the basis of" objective, measurable factors" and that "because their 'spiritual status' and psychic powers are inaccessible to historical research, these alleged criteria ... arc treated with agnosticism." Fair enough, since the individuals whose biographies he presents were "authorities in one or more spiritual traditions." The question still remains: does being such an authority constitute one a "master”? Perhaps it is that question which haunts the reader throughout this work.

The book itself, following the foreword by Godwin and a very useful introduction by Johnson, is divided into three parts, each consisting of a number of short chapters. Part one, titled "Adepts," consists of biographical sketches of some eighteen individuals, for the most part Westerners by birth, all of whom touched HPB's life in one way or another. Why the term "adept" is used for so widely divergent a group of individuals is not made clear. But here they are, a strange assemblage beginning with Prince Pavel Dolgorukii, HPB’s maternal great-grandfather, whose library, "containing hundreds of books on alchemy, magic and other occult sciences," Johnson proposes "were the most important influence on HPB's conception of the Masters."

Others on Johnson' s list are Albert Rawson. Paolos Metamon, Agardi Metrovitch, Giuseppe Mazzini , Sayyid Jamal ad-Din, Lydia Pashkov, Ooton Liatto, Sir Richard Burton, Dr. James Peebles (questionably entitled to the "Mahatmic status" Johnson suggests for him,) Charles Sotheran (among the original founders of the Theosophical Society,) and Mikhail Katkov ("the dominant figure in Russian journalism when he published HPB's Caves and Jungles of Hindustan in the Moscow Chronicle.”)

Was Rawson indeed the inspirer of HPB' s "confession," in which she wrote, " I loved one man deeply, but still more I loved occult science"? Was Paolos Metamon HPB's "first occult teacher in Egypt" so making him "the most likely original for the Master Serapis"? Was Metrovitch, whose relationship with HPB "is one of the great unsolved mysteries of Theosophical history," H. S. Olcott’s "first initiate teacher"? To what extent did Mazzini's views contribute to HPB’s "vision of the Theosophical movement’s mission?” Was Liatto really the "elusive" master HPB called "Hilarion"? Politics, Masonry, secret societies, Sufism: all figure prominently as interweaving elements in the lives of these "adepts."

Part two of the book is devoted to the biographies of some fourteen additional people whose lives touched Blavatsky's. Johnson calls this section "Mahatmas," although without explanation as to what differentiates them from the "adepts" of the previous section. This group, beginning with the strange story of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati and his Arya Sarna, with which the fledgling Theosophical Society was briefly associated, is composed of Indians, a Sinhalese high priest of Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhist lamas.

Perhaps most relevant for theosophical students are the biographical sketches of Ranbir Singh, Maharaja of Kashmir, whom Johnson proposes as the most likely candidate for the role of "Master Morya"; Sirdar Thakar Singh Sandhanwalla, founder of the Singh Sabha and Johnson's choice for the "Master Koot Hoomi"; Baba Khem Singh Bedi, the hereditary Sikh guru who qualifies as "The Chohan"; and Sirdar Dayal Singh Majithia, a Punjabi Sikh philanthropist who appears as "Master Dju al Kul." With the addition of these individuals to Johnson's list of "adepts," the story becomes complicated indeed, culminating in pan three, which he has titled "Secret Messages."

Johnson's final chapter ('''The Occult Imprisonment") quite rightly refers to the "fragmentary and labyrinthine nature of the evidence." He is clearly an avid historian, out neither to deny the validity of the concept of mahatmas nor to cast doubt on the spiritual motivation and occult prowess of H. P. Blavatsky. His effort has been to prove what the masters themselves repeatedly said in their letters: they are "men not gods." They are "adepts only when acting as such," as they wrote to A. P. Sinnett.

As for HPB, who brought the idea of mahatmas to the Western world, Johnson is generous in praise: "There is no reason to doubt," he writes in the final chapter, "that from first to last she saw the TS primarily as an agent of spiritual values, and allied herself with whatever political and social forces seemed useful to that purpose at the time."

Some Theosophists may not be happy with Johnson' s conclusion that "HPB's adept sponsors were a succession of human mentors rather than a cosmic hierarchy of supermen." But sincere students cannot help but agree with him and with his further statement: "In one sense, these hidden sponsors were indeed her masters. But in another sense, she may have been greater than any of them. While her portrayal of the masters was often historically inaccurate, the spiritual treasures she gathered and transmitted entitle her to recognition as a Great Soul in her own right."

At the end, many questions remain. Did all this varied assemblage of people from East and West really influence HPB' s thought and particularly her concept of adeptship or mahatmahood? In quite another context, James Santucci, in the October 1994 issue of the journal Theosophical History, quotes the Baha'i historian Robert Stockman on the question of historical influences on an individual or a movement. Stockman, responding to another of Johnson's historical researches, states: "Proving the existence of influence of one person or movement on another is a complicated scholarly task unless the influenced part acknowledges it. It is not adequate simply to show that one person met someone else or encountered another movement to prove an influence." As Santucci rightly points out, Stockman's statement "strikes at the heart of historical methodology," adding further, "This cautionary statement is especially true in theosophical and esoteric studies."

And there is the further question: is this all there is to adeptship or being a mahatma? However skeptical or agnostic one may be, is it possible to establish purely "objective" criteria for judging spiritual wisdom, occult know ledge, and esoteric authority? What weight should be given to HPB's own definition of a mahatma (Collected Writings 6: 239-41,"Mahatmas and Chelas"): "A Mahatma is a personage who, by special training and education, has evolved those higher faculties and has attained that spiritual knowledge, which ordinary humanity will acquire after passing through numberless series of reincarnations during the process of cosmic evolution.... The real Mahatma is then not his physical body but that higher Manas which is inseparably linked to the Auna and its vehicle (the 6th principle )." Is that state of consciousness a "measurable factor"?

Therefore, has Johnson really "revealed" the masters? Many will cling to the "myth" of god-like, omniscient beings, but HPB' s "teachers" never claimed to be of that genre, nor did she really claim it for them. Others will rejoice that Johnson has "unmasked" the masters, revealing them for what they themselves, in their correspondence with A. P. Sinnett and others, said they were: mortal men with access to and familiarity with occult knowledge. And a "brotherhood" of such individuals? Why not, when we all recognize our affinity with people of like mind, similar interests and objectives, however geographically separated we may be throughout the world?

So while this reviewer applauds Johnson’s work, for he has done his homework well, many questions still remain to be answered. If he has given us a "parade of heroes and eccentrics who wanted to change the world," not all of whom can be said to qualify as "masters," at least he has, as Godwin puts it in his foreword, presented us with "that most delightful of mysteries-an esoteric whodunit." And we could not agree more with Godwin's admonition: "All Theosophists ... should pluck up the courage to read this book." For whether read as a "whodunit" or as fact, it is a remarkable piece of research in a hitherto unexplored field of study.

-JOY MILLS

Science, Paradox, and the Moebius Principle: The Evolution of a 'Transcultural' Approach to Wholeness

by Steven M. Rosen
State University of New York Press, Albany. N.Y, 1994; softcover, 317pages.

According to Stanislav Grof, the literature on creativity clearly demonstrates that significant breakthroughs in the fields of science, art, religion, and philosophy are characteristically the result of an inspiration mediated by nonordinary states of consciousness. Grof has distinguished at least two primary forms of inspiration.

Sometimes an individual is suddenly presented- in a dream, vision, fever, meditation, or other nonordinary state of consciousness- with the solution to a problem on which he or she has been unsuccessfully working, typically for a long time. An example would be the chemist August von Kekule, who arrived at the final solution to the formula of benzene with his dream of the ouroboros and its ingenious suggest ion of the structure of the ring.

In other cases, however, the relationship between intuitive and discursive thinking is reversed - and the individual is presented, out of the blue, with an unprecedented insight into the nature of reality far in advance of its time. It can take years- even decades or centuries - to unfold the implications of such a visionary seed idea. An example is the idea that organic life originated in the ocean, which was initially formulated by the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, but which had to await modem evolutionary biology for confirmation. Likewise the now familiar idea that reality is characterized by a mutual interpenetration of all things, which is found in ancient Chinese texts, has been developed more recently by the physicist David Bohm and others as an emerging paradigm in science.

Psychologist and philosopher Steven M. Rosen is a key contributor to the "new paradigm," having worked with Bohm himself. Rosen was initially trained in experimental psychology, but has been diligently laboring for twenty-three years in the fields of theoretical physics, mathematics, parapsychology, topology, cosmology, and phenomenology.

While working on his dissertation, he experienced a hypnogogic vision with a powerful and frightening ecstatic component. He subsequently conjectured this was a kundalini awakening. Four years later, in 1972, his Ph.D. in hand, the process suddenly recommenced. Over a two-week period, Rosen experienced what he has described as a series of visionary insights into the nature of consciousness and the cosmos. These insights utterly transformed his sense of self and reality.

Rosen's new book provides a record of the evolution of his ideas, which he describes as a twenty-plus-year process of "unpacking" that two-week transformative experience. In it he traces "the development of the Moebius principle, a new way of approaching the foundations of science and philosophy. The strategy has been to confront crisis and fragmentation in contemporary thought by offering a concrete intuition of thoroughgoing wholeness" (p.269).

Not all holisms are coherent, dynamic, and creative. Some, like Nazism and other totalitarian ideologies, aim for a closed and rigid totality while sacrificing values such as coherence, comprehensiveness, richness, complexity, and openness to change. Rosen is unwilling to make such sacrifices. Rosen is no conservative traditionalist; he sees such views as preserving dualism by exalting a static, orderly realm of supra historical Being over and above a merely chaotic process of historical Becoming.

It may seem perverse to mention totalitarianism, traditionalism, and the new paradigm in the same breath. But in his important 1989 book, Imaginary Landscape; Making Worlds of Myth and Science, philosopher William Irwin Thompson openly broke with the New Age precisely because of what he had come to regard as its unabashedly reactionary character. Thompson argued for a new, non-authoritarian, non-regressive conception of wholeness, for which we need a living, moving geometry, a new topology of the sacred, a "processual morphology."

If Thompson had been acquainted with Rosen's work, he doubtless would have recognized a kindred spirit. "In the Moebius principle," Rosen writes, "wholeness is sought in the embodiment of paradox…The wholeness in quest ion is utterly fluid and dynamic, an unobstructed boundless flow" (p. 269).

By "paradox," Rosen does not mean sheer contradiction-what he calls the negative sense of the word- for that would license every form of irrationality. The positive sense of paradox is to be "understood in the Zen-related sense of a wholeness so uncompromising that it confounds the dichotomies built into ordinary thinking" (p. 120). This refusal to compromise requires a greater, not lesser, degree of logical clarity. For example, the conflation of intellect and emotion represented in the Nazi motto "Think with the blood!" signals a reversion to pre-ration al modes of thought. As Sam Keen has pointed out, the first step of all totalitarian movement s is to encourage us to project our shadow onto the face of "the enemy."

Rosen invites us to bear in mind Ken Wilber's contribution in drawing attention to "the 'pre/ trans fallacy,' a widespread tendency among theorists to confuse pre-personal [i.e., undifferentiated] and transpersonal [i.e., integrated] dimensions'" of consciousness [p. 213). We must also distinguish what is pre-rat ional (merely irrational) from what is trans-rational. Paradox in this positive sense has a definite trajectory: a movement towards a fully coherent wholeness.

By refusing to yield either side of the paradox that we are at once fully alone and yet fully at one with the universe, we are forced to live what cannot easily be explained, that is, what we are. We must resolve to become a veritable mystery to ourselves.

For Rosen there is no easy guide-no guru-friendly formula-for such enlightenment. The question of personal identity is central. But this is not a symptom of a solipsistic or narcissistic self-preoccupation, for the question of identity cannot be addressed in isolation from questions of our collective human identity. And who, and what, is the "other"? Existential self-inquiry, social self-inquiry, and metaphysical inquiry are mutually irreducible, inseparably related aspects of the whole project.

Rosen is still- and necessarily ever shall be-in the process of working out the radical epistemological, existential, and metaphysical implications of this idea. In his perspicacious critiques of Bohm and Jung and their respective approaches to the problem of wholeness, he offers important hints on the direction in which his investigation must go.

In chapter 14, Rosen notes Bohm's distinction between the implicate order and the holomovement. Whereas the implicate (infinite) order is a stratum of energy, information, or meaning subtly enfolded within our explicate (finite} reality, yet knowable in principle, the holomovement is the "unknown" (and unthinkable) totality as it exists in itself, the unmanifest force behind even the implicate order. Rosen follows David Griffin in regarding the idea of the holomovement as symptomatic of Bohm's occasional "Vedantist mood "; he further asks whether this idea only serves to preserve the very fragmentation of consciousness and reality which Bohm originally set out to question.

At times in my personal exchanges with Bohm, I too have gotten the impression of an ultimate denial of form in favor of that which is formless. For example, he has distinguished symbolic knowing from what he believes to be beyond an, form of thought. Bohm has acknowledged that certain forms of symbolizing may usefully call attention to their own limitations and therefore serve as stepping stones, paving the way for transcendence. But in the end, through the acts of inward awareness and deeply reflective attention, which are distinct from mere forms of thought, form is entirely left behind; it dissolves in an" intelligent perception of the infinite totality." As I see it, the non-duality [of subject and object] thus achieved preserves the higher-order dualism of the finite and infinite, the differentiated and undifferentiable, for by granting formless totality such priority over form, form does not merely vanish hut remains to express itself negatively in the now unsolvable enigma of why there is format all. (p. 262)

Rosen's point , I take it , is this: If thought has no essential and internal relationship to intuition or meditation , and language is at best a dispensable means to an end which is entirely apart from language (to know that which is totally unsayable), then we are left with the same scenario rejected by William Irwin Thompson: the purely relative body/mind dropping off in favor of a purely absolute spirit; time, history, individuality, matter, etc. bespeaking a fall into the world; forms (include the forms of thought and imagination ) as symptoms of error or evil. The unbridgeable gulf between the symbol and the symbolized as expressed in the idea that language is thoroughly metaphorical and opaque and that nonlinguistic intuition, totally literal and transparent to reality, is undeniably dualistic; hence there must be continuity as well as discontinuity between thought and intuition, between prose and poetry, between symbolic language and the absolute reality to which it refers. The ultimate, in short, cannot be regarded as utterly ineffable (or the symbol as merely symbolic, or the body as a mere vehicle of absolute spirit) if we seek a truly uncompromising wholeness, a thoroughly coherent holism.

Rosen parts company both with those versions of mysticism which finally dismiss language and embodiment and the "merely phenomenal world ,"as well as with the postmodernist's insistence that language is all, and that objective reality is nothing more than the texts we happen to read (and we can choose to interpret them any way we like). Neither a relativist nor an absolutist, he calls for a transcendence of these polar opposites, and he takes his visionary cue from the Moebius strip and the Klein bottle. For Rosen, these paradoxical forms arc more than mere models; for a mere model, like a mere symbol, is apart from the thing modeled or symbolized. Yet how can this unity of symbol and referent be expressed in words?"

If I am seeking wholeness in the fullest meaning of the word," Rosen writes, "it is not enough for me merely to write about it; wholeness must be embodied in my own way of writing" (p. 269). How does one put one's whole self into the process of inquiry, and what is this "self" thus interjected? These are difficult questions for both Rosen and his readers to grapple with.

This is an exceptionally sophisticated work which requires complete and careful attention. Rosen is a profound thinker who has made an important contribution to contemporary debates.

-JOSEPH M. FELSER

Winter 1996

The Shambhala Guide to Yoga

by Georg Feuerstein
Boston: Shambhala, 1996. Pp. xi + 190.

This survey of yogic philosophy and practice is made with Georg Feuerstein’s customary lucidity, comprehensiveness, detail, and common sense. It is a book about what yoga is, not how to do yoga, thus putting first things properly first. Too many people in the West set out to do yoga without knowing just what it is they are doing. Feuerstein corrects that misordering of priorities by giving an overview of the major aspects of the theory that every practitioner should command before beginning serious work.

This Guide makes it clear that yoga is not just an exotic form of calisthenics, but is rather a spiritual discipline based on certain assumptions about the nature of reality. It also makes clear that the full range of yogic practice includes some activities that are potentially dangerous ones for those who are unprepared for them and are unguided by knowledgeable experts in the field. Its thirteen chapters also give a commendably wide coverage of both Hindu and Buddhist yoga.

The book's first four chapters cover the following subjects: the history and purpose of yoga; the main kinds of yoga (jnana, karma, bhakti, mantra, raja, and hatha); the process of transmitting yoga (the teacher, the disciple, and initiation); and the nature of the bliss to which yoga leads and the moral basis for pursuing it (yama and niyama).

The next four chapters deal with specific techniques typical of yogic practice. These include methods of bodily purification (some of which seem bizarre to contemporary Westerners) and the postures that many Westerners exclusively associate with yoga; the rationale of diet; the theory of breath control; and the mental practices of withdrawing one's attention from the outer world (pratyahara), concentrating it (dharana ), making it continuous in meditation (dhyana), and finally getting it all together (samadhi). The use of imagination, practical techniques, and distractions along the way are also covered.

Chapters nine through eleven treat some more specific matters, including mantras, kundalini (with suitable warnings about the dangers of ignorant and premature experiments), and tantra. Treatment of the last subject includes left -hand and sexual tantras, but it also makes clear that they are not the whole of the "subject, which encompasses "a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices," embracing twelve characteristic features. The last two chapters are conclusions. Chapter twelve examines the nature of the samadhi experience, often translated as "ecstasy," that is, a standing outside one's egoic self, but which might more appropriately be translated as "enstasy," a standing within the conscious ness of the unitive Self. The final chapter, "Yoga in the Modern World," looks at the role yoga can usefully play to fill the gap between con temporary religious fundamentalism and secular fundamentalism (based on scientific materialism) and stresses the need for a qualified teacher to direct the performer in that role.

The final chapter both resonates and contrasts with modern Theosophy. H. P. Blavatsky viewed Theosophy as also filling the gap between the two fundamentalisms of religion and science. Furthermore she viewed Theosophy as a kind of yoga (specifically jnana yoga) leading to the ecstatic experience called samadhi in yogic literature. However, she also recognized that for most Westerners guidance by a guru in the Eastern pattern is not feasible, and so she advanced Theosophy as a form of yoga that can be followed without personal instruction- a form of yoga for the West or, more accurately, a yoga not limited to the cultural patterns of the East, though benefiting from its wisdom.

The Shambhala Guide to Yoga is a vademecum for students and intending practicers of Eastern yoga. It fills the need for a survey of the whole subject in a degree of detail that satisfies without satiating the enquirer. Anyone who wants to know both about yoga and how to do it can usefully begin with Annie Besant's Introduction to Yoga as a primer, follow it with this work surveying the whole field as a thorough introductory overview, and then go on to Wallace Slater's useful guides Raja Yoga and Hatha Yoga for safe, practical suggestions on doing yoga.

-JOHN ALGEO

Winter 1996