Explorations: Isis and Osiris-Death and Resurrection

Explorations: Isis and Osiris-Death and Resurrection

By Normandi Ellis

Religious rites and traditions often center upon a culture's story of its dead and resurrected god. Egyptian religion is no different. The myth of Isis and Osiris is the pillar of Egyptian religion. As Judas betrayed Jesus during the Passover feast, so did Seth betray his brother Osiris in the midst of a grand feast held in Osiris's honor. Here's how it happened:

The good king Osiris was in his twenty-eighth year. He and his sister-wife Isis had been given the rich, fertile black land of the Nile valley and delta, whereas brother Seth and his sister-wife Nephthys were bequeathed the barren, red desert lands. Seth felt cheated. In their land, the royal couple Osiris and Isis were much beloved, having taught their people the ways of agriculture and a nonviolent life. Seth's tribe, on the other hand, were still a ragtag group of warriors and hunters who had to scratch subsistence from the desert mountains and valleys. They wanted what Osiris had.

While the goddess Isis was away, Osiris generously invited his brother Seth and Seth's whole entourage to join him and his people in a harvest festival, with abundant food and copious amounts of wine and beer. The palace was all in festivity of music and dancing and merriment.

Seth appeared, bearing a gift—a box richly adorned with jewels and gold. As a party game, he announced he would give the box to any man or woman who might lie down in it and fit exactly. Of course, the trick was that it had been built precisely to the proportions of Osiris. Like Cinderella's glass slipper, it would fit none except its rightful owner. When Osiris lay within it, Seth and his seventy-two rabble-rousing companions closed him up inside and sealed the coffin with lead.

Amid the ensuing confusion and under the cover of darkness, Seth's gang hurried the box down to the river's edge and threw it into the Nile, drowning Osiris in the jeweled coffin. The river carried his body inside the box downstream, until it finally came to rest in a foreign land, moored against a tamarisk tree that grew around the coffin, completely trapping the body of Osiris within.

When Isis finally heard the news, she was beside herself with grief. She came home to find that Osiris was dead, his body had vanished, and her younger brother was her husband's murderer. In the manner of widows of her nation, she cut off all her beautiful long hair and walked barefoot along the banks of the river, searching for the body of her husband. She no longer resembled the beautiful queen of Egypt, but appeared in the grim visage of a hag; thus her own people rejected and scorned her. At last, following the river, she discovered that the chest had sailed down the Nile, clear out of Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea, and had been cast onto the shores of Byblos and lodged in the branches of the tamarisk tree. Even though Osiris was hidden, the good wife Isis recognized that the tree contained the body of her husband and so would not leave it.

In the meantime, stories abounded in Byblos of an amazing tree that apparently had sprung up overnight beside the shore of the sea. The king of Byblos was so astounded by the beautiful tree, by its sturdiness, and by its miraculous growth that he had it hewn down and brought to his capital city to make it into the central pillar for his palace.

Dutiful Isis followed the fallen tree all the way to the palace gates. There she sat outside the community well, weeping and wondering what to do now that her husband's body had been taken from her yet again. Common as she seemed on the outside, Isis attracted the interest of the palace servants and the princesses. Who was this strange, ravaged yet beautiful woman sitting beside their well, and why was she crying? As the handmaidens of the queen came closer, they realized this mysterious woman exuded a fragrant perfume from the pores of her skin. Divine beings were said to have a fragrance that was the mark of their divinity, so the servants and princesses reasoned that this woman must be a goddess in hiding.

Because of the delicious odor of sanctity about the woman, the queen decided to give Isis the royal babe to nurse. Thus Isis was taken into the palace as nursemaid and given an infant to suckle and proximity to her husband again. Isis soon became an indispensable part of the palace household and was the much-loved nurse to the king and queen's children. Having lost a husband, Isis knew there is no worse grief than the death of a loved one, so she decided to give the child of this queen a rare gift indeed for mortals—the gift of immortality.

At night, while the palace slept, Isis made magic. She performed a divine alchemy by thrusting the babe into the fire to burn away his mortality. While the magical fire performed its task on the hearth, the goddess transformed herself into a kite. She flapped her wings, fluttering about the column in which Osiris resided, keening and lamenting his death with strange, shrill, mournful songs.

This alchemical magic went on for some days, but on the last night of the transforming ritual for the babe, the strange singing of the hawk goddess awakened the queen, who went to investigate. Seeing her child in flames, the queen shrieked and dragged the babe from the fire, thus breaking the spell and depriving him of immortality. Seeing that her gift had been rejected, Isis swooped down before the terrified queen and reassumed her true form as a goddess.

Terrified of having a woman of such power in her kingdom, the queen quickly asked, "What do you want?" She was willing to give anything to get rid of this witch in her house.

"I want the pillar that contains Osiris," Isis said.

Immediately granting her request, the queen had the pillar cut down and sent home with Isis in one of the king's boats.

The Lamentations of Isis was a sorrowing festival held on October 3 to bemoan the loss of light in the northern hemisphere. Six months later, on April 3, came another festival celebrating the return of the light, when Isis found Osiris. On the third night of the festival, the priests went to the river's edge, removed from a box a casket of gold into which they poured holy water, and cried "Osiris is found!" Then fertile soil, spices, and incense were mixed to form a crest of mud, representing the union of Isis and Osiris.

Among the Greek initiates of Isis, this feast day was linked to the Thesmophoria, a festival devoted to Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and marriage. Like Isis, Demeter had also lost a loved one, her daughter Persephone, to the power of the underworld. As Osiris arose to bring renewed life in Egypt, so did Persephone return to initiate the spring growing season in Greece.

The Greek historian Herodotus reported that two women of noble birth from Egypt, called the Danaids, brought these sacred rites to Peloponesia and taught the women there how to celebrate the feast day. In Athens two noble women were chosen to preside over the festival as Isis and Nephthys. They alone performed the temple duties and prepared the festal meal. The Thesmophoria was strictly a women's festival, and a part of the mysteries included mixing seed corn with menstrual blood and planting it to initiate a bountiful agricultural year. After the planting, the women cloistered themselves within the temple to commune with the goddess during the night.

The mystery rites of Isis and Osiris were held in Egypt year after year. Participants returned annually to the temples to be reinitiated and to celebrate the festival of renewal. Performing the Osirian rites was a sacred act of remembering. To forget one's name and one's relationship to the Divine was to die while still living. It was the worst of all possible sins. Therefore, the rites were celebrated yearly. Each year, Osiris was mourned; each spring, his body and spirit were reunited; each spring, he was remembered and reborn.


Normandi Ellis, who has taught English at the University of Colorado and writing at the University of Kentucky, is an award-winning author of books on Egyptian religion, including the Quest Book Dreams of Isis (1995). This selection is adapted from her new Quest Book, Feasts of Light: Celebrations for the Seasons of Life Based on the Egyptian Goddess Mysteries.


The Next Stages in Human Spiritual Evolution, Part One

Originally printed in the March - April  2001 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Elwood, Robert. "The Next Stages in Human Spiritual Evolution, Part One." Quest  89.2 (MARCH - APRIL  2001): 56-61.

By Robert Ellwood

Theosophical Society - Robert Ellwood is emeritus professor of religion at the University of Southern California and a former vice-president of the Theosophical Society in America. He currently resides at the Krotona School of Theosophy.We are now entering the twenty-first century and the third millennium. A perceptible feeling hangs in the air that the world is rapidly approaching one of history's decisive seismic shifts. Changes are looming ahead of us that will tremendously affect the total context of human life from here on out. They will profoundly change our political, economic, social, cultural, religious, and spiritual lives.

We sense that things somehow cannot and will not go on much longer just as they are—not with what is just over the horizon in cosmology, physics, the technology of the computer age, biological engineering, and above all shifts in our inner spiritual attitudes toward ourselves and the universe. We don't know just what those changes will be, so we look at them with a combination of hopefulness and dread. But we sense they will not be just another turning in human history; what is coming now may change not only human history but the nature of human history.

What waits just over the horizon will be something more than just the fall of one empire and the rise of another. The impending hinge in time may well swing far more widely than even such turnings as the French and American revolutions or the Protestant Reformation, for though they deeply affected the shape of politics and religion in their spheres, and indeed in the world, the basic structures, the nation state and the organized church, went on though with internal modification.

Even the European discovery of the New World, the Industrial Revolution, and European imperialism, at first and almost up to the present, simply continued the old order of nations, money, and work in new forms, in new expansion franchises, one might say. What is approaching, what is now just beginning to light the sky, may change even such basic institutions as these beyond recognition. They may go so far as to modify beyond recognition the ways we think, communicate, and live in our bodies.

What will come in the course of the next millennium, and probably starting very early in it, is of an order that can be compared only to the emergence of humanity as we now know it from proto-human primates. The third millennium will recall humanity's rather sudden evolution to its present brain size and upright stance, complete with tool-making and sophisticated communications capability in the form of speech and symbol. That breakthrough is now dated to about two million years ago; the new era will bring changes in mind and communication of comparable scale.

As far as religious, political, and cultural shifts are concerned, the coming change could also be compared to the discovery of agriculture about 12,000 years ago and to what has been called the axial age, the time around the fifth century BCE of the great religious and intellectual leap reflected in the work of the Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tzu, Zoroaster, the great Hebrew prophets, and the early Greek philosophers. (The axial-age transition to a more individual-centered religion and in some places to a more systematic, protoscientific view of the universe was only the beginning of a process later continued in the labors of Jesus and Muhammad and the universal faiths of which they were founders, between 2000 and 1500 years ago.)

Three Human Eras

According to commonly accepted norms of anthropology and the history of religion, these three eras—humanity before agriculture, humanity after agriculture but before the axial age, and post-axial humanity—are the most fundamental stages of human material and spiritual development thus far, since the evolutionary breakthrough two million years ago. As always, material and spiritual development interacted with each other.

The first stage was the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age culture, based on hunting and gathering, tribal in nature. After the discovery of agriculture, it was followed by the Neolithic or New Stone Age, comprised of archaic farmers in sedentary communities and all that implies: rapid population growth, towns, division of labor, commerce, political organization and kingship, some surplus wealth to support professional artists, priests, and even philosophers. The ancient agricultural empires, like those of ancient Egypt, Babylon, or China, though post-Neolithic were really but the last phase of the archaic agricultural world. That world had ended not only in empires on the banks of rivers like the Nile, but also with writing, and a sophisticated awareness of history and literature.

That ending in empires and writing produced the conditions that gave rise to the axial age of the great individual religious founders and their religions, with their written scriptures and their institutions. How could we have modern religion without writing, temple or cathedral cities, and priestly bureaucracies? It was essentially out of the womb of those ancient empires, in India, China, the Middle East and the Mediterranean that the axial age was born, and the great religions of today emerged.

According to a revisionist view of the Theosophical concept of "root races" proposed by one of the students at the School of the Wisdom I recently taught at Adyar, which many of us felt made sense, the anthropological stages can fit very neatly into the Theosophical. The Paleolithics would then be the Lemurians, who according to The Secret Doctrine were quite primitive, yet were ruled by kings and able to build vast but crude cities, and who religiously combined a simple primal monotheism with remarkable psychic powers, later largely repressed.

Of particular interest is a very recent analysis by scientists at the University of Massachusetts which produced the date of two million years ago for the emergence of humanity. These researchers propose that, somewhere in Africa, a small group of individuals became separated from other Australopithecines. This population bottleneck led to a series of sudden, interrelated changes in brain size, skeletal proportions, and behavior that jump-started the evolution of our species, setting it directly on the course to Homo sapiens. The study pinpoints this breakthrough just before the first tool-making by Homo habilis, suggesting relatively sudden new patterns of hunting and social organization. Based on a full spectrum of paleontological and genetic evidence, the report powerfully brings to mind the assertion of The Secret Doctrine that in the middle of the Lemurian era, the Lords of the Flame arrived on earth to serve as a catalyst for the evolutionary jump between proto-human animals and true humans.

"Nature unaided fails," The Secret Doctrine avers. Biological evolution alone can prepare the vessels for humanity, but the awakening of the full capability of the human manas, as well as the first dim awareness of the higher spiritual self, requires an outside push. Perhaps it was actually in Africa, to a small isolated population able to become prototypes of the new humanity, that the push came, and from this incentive came ultimately Homo erectus, the Neanderthal, Homo sapiens, and finally air-conditioning and spaceships.

In Theosophical technical terms, it seems that the "push" was the joining of physical bodies prepared by biological evolution to etheric bodies from the "lunar stream" of evolution, and the awakening of their higher nature, atma-buddhi-manas. No doubt is was then that these Paleolithic or Lemurian peoples began to conceptualize the characteristics of Old Stone Age religion: the Sky God, initiation, shamanism, and the Sacred in the animal so well epitomized in the famous cave paintings.

The next great stage, Neolithic or archaic agriculture, compares well to the fourth or Atlantean root race, with its emphasis on sorcery and a profoundly cosmic view of the human situation, essentially what Mircea Eliade meant by cosmic religion, in contrast to the later religions of historical consciousness. The Atlanteans, we are told by Theosophical sources, achieved some remarkable technological advances, but above all embraced a magical worldview, though they were divided into light and dark factions, peaceful and violent. (This matches with what anthropology tells us of archaic agricultural societies, which can and do go to marked extremes of both tendencies.)

Archaic agriculture is, moreover, the world of what Mircea Eliade has called the myth of the eternal return, a world without much sense of history but in which every New Year is a recapitulation of the creation, and every year therefore a chance to start over. This is also the world of the labyrinth, the megalith, the way to the gods in sacred caves and mountains, and in the turn of the seasons. Holidays such as May Day and Halloween, and even Christmas and Easter as seasonal festivals of midwinter and spring, are remnants in our culture of those times. The Theosophical classics especially identify Atlanteans with the Chinese. Certainly traditional Chinese spiritual cosmology, with its five elements and their cycles of dominance, and the eternal interplay of yin and yang, suggests a highly sophisticated, civilized version of cosmic religion.

Then enters the next great stage, the axial age with its great religious and cultural changes. This epoch, in whose aftermath we are still living, sounds like the fifth root race. Its deepest vocation is to explore physical, material nature fully, hence the emphasis on science and technology and its concomitant: the rational, scientific model of reality and how it is known. The centuries around the axial age and following it have therefore been a time of material as well as spiritual invention.

Perhaps the most decisive of all inventions in the ancient world was writing, which came before the axial age and clearly was a prime stimulus for it. The pen and the scroll, or the stylus and the clay tablet, facilitated not only commerce and the exchange of ideas, but also new kinds of religion with scriptures and abstract philosophies. Above all, writing made possible the keeping of historical records that showed we live not in eternal-return time, but in irreversible linear or one-thing-after-another time. In it, things change and do not change back. In due course writing made possible scientific and mathematical thinking as well.

The new axial-age religions dealt with what Eliade called "the terror of history," and so they talked of God or the gods acting in history. The religious narratives of the Hebrew scriptures depict a moment of creation followed by wars and other events in which God intervenes and look forward to a culminating event at the end of history. All axial-age and post-axial-age religions posit a decisive moment within history—the time of Moses, the Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, Jesus, or Muhammad—when the deep structures of history shifted, and time with all its terrors was ultimately redeemed. In the words of the Christmas hymn of such a historical moment, "The hopes and fears of all the years / are met in thee tonight."

The new religions—Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, as well as new updated forms of Judaism, Hinduism, and Chinese religion—saw themselves as having a world destiny in history, one spelled out in sacred written texts and personal identities. They had their bibles, and they emphasized individual sin, karma, faith, and salvation, more than that of the family or the tribe. Above all, the new kind of religion led to a religious consciousness in which rational, propositional models of truth were important.

Doctrines about spiritual things were defined as true or false, as though they were heavenly parallels to the "laws of nature" of emergent science from Aristotle to Newton, and were structured with as much logical detail. God's existence was as rigorously proved as atoms, and karma or grace was like a spiritual version of gravitation. All this is what we would label, in an expression Theosophists have used, a "very fifth-root-race way of thinking."

What I am proposing is that now we are about to move beyond the fifth root race and the axial-age way of religion and thought, and that is why I say what is coming is comparable to the origins of Paleolithic humanity, the discovery of agriculture, or the invention of writing and axial-age religion. It is really a new step in human spiritual evolution, which Theosophists have particularly useful tools for understanding.

The Future of Communication

First, what future changes are likely in the world of communications? As we have seen, the last great change, the one that prompted the vast axial-age, fifth-root-race shift in religion, was writing—a fundamental change in the nature of communication that in turn led to awesomely immense changes in ways of thought and in religion. And the beginning of humanity itself some two million years ago was as much as anything a change in the nature of communication: nothing about the primal human experience was more important than the emergence of human words and language. If we were now to move on to a stage beyond writing—or even beyond words and language—that would be something. At the least it would mean a new root race; at the most . . . what?

To start where we are on a dizzying voyage into the future, it is widely predicted that we will move to electronic instead of paper books as the main vehicle of reading within two or three decades. But that may only presage more significant changes that could mean profound shifts in consciousness: the replacement of words in linear order—the basis of writing, of formal speech, and even of human thought as we now know it—with wordless moving images as the fundamental visual medium of communication. They would allow communication to present itself the way the world presents itself to us before we sort it out in word order, as images on the screen, or in holographs, that can be layered and put in synchronicity with other moving images.

All this is possible now on the computer monitor. To change from words and letters to moving images and symbols does not require any major change in technology, but only in the psychology of what we mean by reading. It would mean using other "triggers" than words in the process of visually absorbing programmed knowledge or ideas, or vicariously entertaining emotional experiences, or indulging suggested poetic fancies.

In fact, television has already begun this change in thinking, together of course with cinema, videos, and the Internet screen. As an example, consider how television has midwifed a transition from baseball to football as our most popular national game. Baseball is supremely a linear sport, in which only one thing happens at a time, and so it lends itself very well to narrative description and radio broadcasting. But football is a game in which many things can happen at once, like multiple synchronous moving images—the quarterback setting up the pass, the running receiver going deep, the line trying to do interference—and so the game is ideally suited to television, with instant replay in case you didn't get it all the first time.

These new media are more and more making the reading of linear words not the sovereign vehicle of communication among people and down the ages, but only one among several options, and for some not the most inviting. Recent generations are abandoning the idea that the only way to read seriously is to read hardcopy paper-based books. When I was in college in the 1950s, movies and even television were available, but they were just entertainment—the great books were still the great tradition, the serious vehicles of knowledge. It was universally assumed that if you really wanted to learn a field, you read the best books about it. Now books are still there, and professors still talk, and rightly so, about the importance of the great books of Western and Eastern civilization, but students wanting to know about something—even about those books—are as likely as not to check out a video or get up a website. And the fact that the website is still mainly linear words is no doubt only transitional—before long they will more and more embrace wholly new ways of communication truly suitable to the medium, moving images and wordless symbols.

The present transitional state is leading up to a critical point at which, to reverse the gospel image, the new wineskins of technology will no longer contain the old wine of words. The novel potentials of the emerging communication technologies will take over, and we will behold new languages with new minds to go with them. A change of consciousness may be on the way in which words in linear order, even words themselves, come to seem inadequate compared to the knowledge and experience transmitted by moving synchronous images and symbols—though that experience is of a nature almost unimaginable to us. The transition might require practice of the order of a blind person learning to read Braille or of a deaf person learning to read lips.

When we make a change that drastic in the way we communicate, we will find ourselves not only reading in new ways but thinking in new ways. Consider that a function of language, equally as important as communicating with others, is serving as a tool for silent thinking. Try thinking through some halfway complicated idea or problem in your mind without silently using words. But when we "read" wordless moving images and symbols rather than words, we will begin to think more and more without words. Who knows what trans-human species we shall then become?

Consider the implications of changing from linear word-based communication to synchronous moving-imaging thinking, like going from a storybook to a movie, or from an abstract book of economics or philosophy to a video with moving charts and symbols. At least that is the best I can conceptualize it, though I am sure it will become more than that. .Communicating with wordless moving images and symbols—is this a reversion to animal or preverbal infantile modes of thought, and so a regression? I don't think so, although it will certainly be different. The human need and capacity for language will still exist, but it will be for languages of unimaginable new kinds.

Of course spoken language, and the need to transcribe spoken communications, will still persist even as book-equivalent "writing" assumes new and different shapes. Possibly on some (not all) levels it will be like a reversion to the shaman bard reciting epics before the invention of writing, as she or he acted it out and created an atmosphere to go with the story, very different from the mood of analyzing words that are black and white on the page and create emotion and atmosphere only in one's imagination.

The new media might do the work of imagination for us in holographic 3-D. They might even lead to a postmodern realization there is something illusory about the ideas of history and chronological progress that have been so much a part of the modern way of thinking. Our sense of history is based on narrative word-records and on a linear model of how things happen rather than on a synchronous one. And "moving-image writing" is only one phase of the future, the sixth-root-race stage. Ultimately, as we shall see in the second part of this article, words and speech may be altogether transcended in other, more direct modes of communication appropriate to the seventh root race.

What about Theosophy? Theosophy as we know it is very much dependent, indeed over-dependent, on books. That's about all Theosophists do, it sometimes seems, at least in formal meetings—read books and talk about them. But can Theosophy make the transition? It seems to me that The Secret Doctrine would lend itself incredibly well to the new moving-image and symbol-based communication, almost as though that massive text was itself actually a verbal portent of the coming trans-book age.

Indeed, I wonder if The Secret Doctrine will not even begin to be fully understood until it is translated into the wordless language of the future. I see its cosmogenesis unfolding silently on a screen, telling its story in its own symbolic rather than verbal way, as silently and wordlessly as space itself gave birth to energy and mass and to pure preverbal consciousness. And then I see images of all the ancient races and civilization and their symbols, moving synchronously.

It may take those who know how to read in this new way to start understanding aright what Blavatsky gave the world, though I suspect we will never more than start understanding that book. Perhaps The Secret Doctrine is not just a musty tome from the past, as we may sometimes fear, but a book for the future, which only the far future will truly know how to translate and read.

This transition in communication could mark the end of the axial age, fifth-root-race religions as we now know them, because they are based on historical time, sacred texts, individual sin and salvation—all those things associated with fifth-root-race ways of thinking and reading. Following the great law of evolution, they must change or die.

And even more dramatic and radical changes, with their challenges to Theosophical understandings of humanity, are on the way in the new worlds, new races, and new minds that will be made by genetic engineering, neurotechnology, and radiotelepathy. To those astounding evolutions we will turn next.

(To be concluded)


 Robert Ellwood, Professor Emeritus from the University of Southern California, was Bashford Professor of Oriental Studies in the School of Religion until his retirement. He is an internationally noted and widely published scholar in the history of religions. His textbook Many Peoples, Many Faiths: An Introduction to the Religious Life of Humankind was published in its fifth edition in 1996, and his scholarly writings are numerous.


Quantum Yoga: A View Through the Visionary Window

Originally printed in the March - April  2001 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Goswami, Amit. "Quantum Yoga: A View Through the Visionary Window." Quest  89.2 (MARCH - APRIL  2001): 52-55.

By Amit Goswami

Theosophical Society - Amit Goswami was born in India, where he earned a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics at Calcutta University. He has been a professor of quantum physics at the University of Oregon since 1968 and is a senior scholar in residence at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Author of The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World and many other books and articles, he has lectured internationally, including at the international center of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, India, and at the national center at Wheaton, Illinois, where he will present his second Elderhostel program with his wife Uma Krishnamurthy, May 13 -19, 2001. This article is a slightly adapted extract from the opening chapter of his most recent book, The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment (foreword by Deepak Chopra, Quest Books, 2000).I once participated in a panel discussion in Berkeley, California, on the question "Can scientific and spiritual traditions carry on a dialog?" The first speaker, an American Buddhist, expressed uneasiness. The two traditions have diverged so much, he said, that both may need to return to basics and start over; maybe then they can have a dialog. I spoke next. I think I surprised him and probably many in the audience by saying that not only can there be dialog, there can and will be complete reconciliation between the two traditions. In fact, I asserted, the reconciliation has already begun. How is this so?

When my Buddhist friend was talking about science, he meant science based on classical physics, the physics that Isaac Newton founded in the seventeenth century and Albert Einstein completed in the first decades of the twentieth century. And his uneasiness was justifiable. Most biology and psychology and virtually all of our social sciences are carried out day-to-day on a Newtonian basis.

Newtonian science has given us some strong prejudices--such as determinism, strong objectivity, and materialism--that are appropriate when we investigate the order of the outer world. But the purpose of spirituality and religion is to investigate our inner reality, to establish order in our inner life, where ordinarily disorder, conflict, and unease reign. The spiritual quest is to find happiness beyond the discord; it is an investigation of consciousness. Since spirituality requires that consciousness plays a causal role, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make room within objective, materialist science for spirituality.

I too was right because science is no longer exclusively Newtonian. Classical physics was replaced in the 1920s by a new physics called quantum mechanics. And now, after seven decades, this new physics is causing a major revision in how we think of living systems and how we do biology and psychology and thus all social sciences. In the new paradigm there is a window of opportunity, a visionary window, through which to recognize that consciousness plays a major role in shaping reality. Then spirituality can be reconciled with science.

The word quantum comes from a Latin word meaning "quantity" and signifies a discontinuously discrete amount. In classical physics all things vary in a continuous manner, but in quantum physics, things change in both continuous and discontinuous ways. Continuous change is materially caused, even in quantum mechanics. But what brings about discontinuous change? If we posit that consciousness causes the change, we have the proposition that prompts the shift from a divisive paradigm to one that integrates science and spirituality. But there is more to consider here.

We have made enormous progress in science. Why have we not made similar progress in religion in spite of the efforts for millennia by spiritual traditions? In science, once a few scientists discover the laws of universal order, the job is done; the rest can read those scientists' work, and that is enough for them to be able to appreciate the harmony of the outer world.

In the realm of spirituality, however, great strides have been made by figures such as Buddha, Plato, Lao Tsu, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. But their discoveries have not brought harmony and happiness to everyone. We remain by and large, even today, a violent and unhappy bunch. Why is this so? The objective of spirituality takes much longer to accomplish because one person's spiritual realization and happiness does not proliferate to others. Finding happiness and establishing inner harmony are fundamentally individual processes.

The Sanskrit word yoga means "union, integration." I have coined the phrase quantum yoga to signify the integration of the quantum message into a comprehensive new worldview that unites science and spirituality in a personally meaningful way. My book The Visionary Window is not only an introduction to the window that quantum physics opens for us, but also a guide to the practice of quantum yoga leading toward personal enlightenment.

The word dialog originated from two Greek words: dia, meaning "through," and logos, meaning "word"; thus, dialog generally means "communication through words." The physicist David Bohm defined dialog more significantly as "a free flow of meaning between people in communication." Can there be dialog between science and religion in this Bohmian sense?

Initially, a dialog between science and religion seems rather unlikely. Both science and religion are endeavors in the search for truth. Both are based on the intuition that truth is unique, not pluralistic. The problem is that, even when we haven't gone far enough in our search, we try to impose our limited truth upon others. This is what many exoteric religions have done traditionally; now science is doing the same thing. And so science and religion have become polarized.

The Integration of Cosmologies

In the Middle Ages, influenced by Aristotelian thinking, Christian belief maintained that the universe was anthropocentric. The earth was regarded as the center of the universe. Humans were regarded as superior to animals. These cosmological components of Western religion were demolished by science. Copernicus demonstrated that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system. Later work took the demolition of Christian cosmology even further: the sun is only an average-sized star on the edge of one galaxy among a hundred billion other galaxies. We are insignificant on the cosmic scale.

Scientists now make a good case for a big-bang creation of the universe some fifteen billion years ago. From that initial creation, the evolution of galaxies, star systems, planets, and life are all seen as the play of chance statistical fluctuation. Darwin's argument that humans have evolved from animals and his further contention that all evolution is a mere play of blind chance and the necessity of survival further diminish the importance of being human and suggest that human pursuits such as religion are meaningless.

What is the exoteric Christian answer to the big bang? Since the big bang is a singularity in some theories of cosmology, and since a singularity is a breakdown of physics, the Christian scientist may see in the big bang the signature of the divine. But there are also ways in physics to avoid the singularity. The most vocal Christian answer to Darwinism is still creationism, which, in view of the fossil data, does not make sense to the modern mind.

Within esotericism (whether it is called Vedanta, mysticism, perennial philosophy, or monistic idealism) is the resolution of the ontological debate between science and religion. Does the esoteric ontology--consciousness as the ground of all being--offer a resolution of cosmologies as well?

A number of coincidences in cosmology suggest that the universe evolves toward the manifestation of life and sentience--an idea that is called the anthropic principle. When we do science-within-consciousness, we see that the anthropic principle makes perfect sense: the universe is a play of consciousness. It evolves towards sentience because its meaning is us.

The gaps in the fossil record suggest to quite a few biologists that Darwinism is not the complete story of evolution. Creationism also does not make complete sense; though the Christian contention that God intervenes in the affairs of the world, even in biological evolution, to align the world with purposiveness, is credible in a science-within-consciousness. Note, however, that in this science purpose does not mean final cause--an idea that conflicts with what we know about initial causes from materialist physics. But in science-within-consciousness, we can look at the fossil gaps as the signature of creative conscious intervention--so purpose enters evolution creatively.

The materialist cosmology is not wrong, but it's not the complete story. In the completion of the story, the cosmological struggles of both science and religion are found to converge, and integration becomes possible.

 The Integration of Spiritual Traditions

It is the absence of a good cosmology that has engendered divisiveness among religions. The world's great religions, united at their esoteric cores, differ greatly in their exoteric expression because they present cosmology differently. Furthermore, in the absence of a science, they mythologize their cosmologies. My hope is that as a cosmological science-within-consciousness gains strength, these myths will give way to a reillumination of the underlying unity of all religions.

Take the mythologized storyline of the Christian cosmology. Because Eve ate the apple of worldly knowledge and persuaded Adam to do the same, humanity knew separation and fell from the perfection of Eden. Then God sent his beloved and only son, Jesus, to return fallen humanity to Eden, to perfection. Thus Jesus is the only door back to Eden.

But the story of the fall from Eden comes from the Jewish tradition, which has a different take on how the story ends. Yes, declare the Jewish spiritual authorities, there will be a messiah at the "end of time" who will redeem humanity (or at least the chosen ones) to perfection, but Jesus is not he.

So battle lines are drawn. Jews feel that Christians are "less" because they have settled for a false messiah. Christians feel that Jews are "less" because they are "Christ killers." Moslems are repulsed by the whole "son of God" idea: God sends messengers only to remind humanity that God is their Lord. Moses and Jesus were both such messengers, but the last and the best messenger was Muhammad.

The Hindus seem to agree with the Christians that God can and does appear in human forms as "sons of God." Whenever the forces of evil seem to subdue the good, God incarnates as an avatara to elevate good over evil, however temporarily. Krishna was such an avatara; so was Buddha and so was Jesus.

Buddhists maintain, in still another twist on the same theme, that ordinary human beings can regain perfection through their own efforts. These perfected beings, instead of returning to "Eden," remain at its threshold as bodhisattvas until all humanity has so redeemed itself.

Postmodernism, the most recent development in Western thinking, has given us deconstructionism ("God is dead" and all metaphysics is false) and an ecological worldview in which God is fully immanent in the world itself. Eden is here, and there is no need to posit transcendence, the fall, and the spiritual journey of return.

So which is the correct storyline? We can never settle this question by debate, as past millennia have proven. However, I submit that as we gain an understanding of the cosmology of the human condition and the nature of the spiritual path, these disparate storylines will all be seen as expressions of one grand story. In other words, I believe that the integration of science and spirituality will enable the different spiritual traditions to acknowledge their underlying unity, a unity that the poet Rabindranath Tagore called "the religion of man." In Hinduism it is sometimes referred to as sanatana dharma, the eternal religion. Diversity of religions will of course remain, but superimposed on an underlying unity.


Amit Goswami was born in India, where he earned a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics at Calcutta University. He has been a professor of quantum physics at the University of Oregon since 1968 and is a senior scholar in residence at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Author of The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World and many other books and articles, he has lectured internationally, including at the international center of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, India, and at the national center at Wheaton, Illinois, where he will present his second Elderhostel program with his wife Uma Krishnamurthy, May 13 -19, 2001. This article is a slightly adapted extract from the opening chapter of his most recent book, The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment (foreword by Deepak Chopra, Quest Books, 2000).


Christian Exclusiveness Theosophical Truth

Originally printed in the March - April  2001 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Williams, Jay G. "Christian Exclusiveness Theosophical Truth." Quest  89.2 (MARCH - APRIL  2001):

By Jay G. Williams

I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life.
No one comes to the Father except through me. --John 14.6

Few sentences in any scripture have led to as much diabolical mischief as these words from the Gospel of John. They have been the basis for Christian claims to absolute truth and hence have been the inspiration for crusades and pogroms, for inquisitions and tyrannical oppression. They have led to the view that all outside the Christian Church are of darkened mind, pitiable heathens who can only be saved through conversion to the truth. And, of course, since some Christians believe that many other Christians do not understand Jesus, the words have bred bewildering sectarianism and all those bloody struggles which, in the past, have wracked Christendom. It is no wonder that H. P. Blavatsky turned in sheer disgust from the Christianity around her.

How, we must ask, could a Gospel that purports to teach the supremacy of love have led to such terrible results. Did the Gospel writer really claim for the Christian religion such an exclusive grip upon truth, or is there some other, more theosophical way to understand these words? Clearly there is. Indeed, a careful reading of John reveals that Christian claims to absolute, exclusive truth are based upon a very bad misreading of these words.

The Gospel of John begins with a very dramatic and well-known prolog, which must be kept in mind throughout the whole Gospel, for it explains what John (and Jesus) are talking about. From God, says the Gospel, flows creative power which has produced and produces everything that is. This power John calls the Logos. It is the source of all reality, the manifestation of God in the world. In one sense, God the Father, is totally hidden and unknown, what the Kabbalah calls En-Sof. But this Logos, which proceeds from God, is God with us. It is the way through which humans can know the divine.

People in every culture and clime have had spiritual inclinations because this power is the light and life of every human being. We live in the light, and the light lives in us. It is the Way to God. Wherever people have found God, therefore, they have glimpsed the light. It is the root of all spirituality. The Logos, which is the life and light of all humanity, is the source of humanity. It is what we, in the center of our being, are. Transcending all boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and religion, the light is the power that binds us all together.

The problem is that, although the light is the very core of our being, we humans regularly forget who we are. We see the diversity and enmity, not can only. We become enamored of worldly position and pleasure and are drawn away from our own true and eternal nature. As John says, we walk in darkness.Therefore, Jesus comes, not as an alien from outer space, but as a manifestation of the light to reveal to us what we all really are. He comes, transparent to the light, to wake us up to our common humanity.

When he proclaims, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," he speaks, not as a historical character, but as the divine light, the light presumably known to all the wise sages of every age. From these sages have come many traditions. Thus, in God's house there are many mansions. What John teaches, however, is that no one can find the Ultimate through human organizations or scriptures or philosophies alone. Every tradition is, by itself, a dry stream bed, now lacking the water that formed it. To know the Truth one must find that living water, that ineffable light within and among us. All the rest--the stories, the doctrines, the rituals--are but fingers pointing to the source, to the esoteric, unspeakable Reality. That, it seems to me, is a very theosophical idea.


 

 Jay G. Williams, PhD Columbia University, is Walcott-Bartlett Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He is the author of two Quest Books, Judaism and Yeshua Buddha. This paper is the second in a series of reflections on matters considered by the November 2000 Christianity-Theosophy Conference.


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