Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall

Amy Chua
New York: Doubleday, 2007. xxxiv + 396 pages.

This book is about what makes a great society great and what causes a great society to self-destruct. It is clearly intended by its author, a chaired professor of law at Yale, to be a cautionary tale for the United States. However the book's message can be applied to any organized society, not just to nations, and its message resonates strikingly with Theosophy.

In Chua's use, the term "hyperpower" refers to a nation of vast economic and military might whose influence extends widely over its world and affects multitudes of people. Chua's thesis is that historically every such nation has been marked by extraordinary tolerance and pluralism during its rise, and by intolerance, xenophobia, and racial, religious, or ethnic "purity" during its fall. That thesis is what resonates with Theosophy.

The Theosophical Society from its foundation—in both its formal statement of objects and in its actual practice—has espoused an openness to the unexplained, an encouragement of comparativeness, and a dedication to practical fraternity without distinctions of any kind. Theosophy's attitude to "tolerance" is not just forbearance, but respect, sympathy, and adaptation.

Chua's examples of hyperpowers are the Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great; Rome during its golden age of Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius; China's Tang dynasty; the Mongol empire founded by Genghis Khan; the Dutch commercial empire of the seventeenth century; the British empire after the Glorious Revolution of 1688; and American hegemony after World War II. Her examples of potential hyperpowers that fell before they had properly risen include Spain after the Inquisition, Nazi Germany, and twentieth-century imperial Japan.

"Tolerance," Chua emphasizes, is a relative matter. All of the hyperpowers have been intolerant in certain ways and often, especially the Mongols, calculatedly cruel. But all have practiced "strategic tolerance." That is, they have embraced such diversity as was seen to be helpful in achieving their aims, and that generally included religious and racial inclusiveness. There is another kind of tolerance, however, which Theosophy promotes, namely a tolerance advocated by the eighteenth-century European Age of Enlightenment.

The Age of Enlightenment urged reason rather than prejudice as the basis for action and affirmed that all of us have a natural right to live according to our own lights so long as we do not interfere with the same natural right of others. The founders of the United States were advocates of Enlightenment, as testified by the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The Declaration stated the doctrine of natural rights in traditional religious, but nonsectarian, terms. However, it is not clear exactly where or how the "Creator" stated that endowment. The founders simply took it as a given. What modern Theosophy has done is to make it possible to link Enlightenment tolerance as a natural right with the Indic concept of monism. The latter, found in Hinduism, Buddhism, etc., is that only one ultimate reality exists in the universe and that we and all else are expressions of it. If all of us share the same life, then none of us has a right to force others to conform to our expectations. All of us have a natural right to tolerance as respect, sympathy, and adaptation.

The Theosophical Society has been called both a bridge between East and West and (by the Mahachohan) "the corner-stone, the foundation of the future religions of humanity." It is a bridge because it joins the Eastern concept of the unity of all life with, and as the basis for, the Western Enlightenment concept of natural rights. It is the foundation for the future of humanity because the "Day of Empire" is over. An empire is a political unit dominating and controlling many peoples. Such a political unit is incompatible with either the unity of life or natural rights.

A religion or dharma is that which "ties us again" or "holds us firmly together" (the etymological meanings of those two words). The ideals of the unity of life and of natural rights must be the basis of a future global political unit on this planet. Because those two ideals are at the core of the Theosophical Society, that Society—not as an organization, but as an inspiration—is the foundation of humanity's future. Theosophists need to live up to that ideal.

John Algeo

The reviewer is past president of the Theosophical Society in America.

Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity

Richard Smoley
San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2008. 212 pages.

Conscious Love is an important book, coming at a critical time in human development when old values are dying and new values have not yet been fleshed out. In this book, Richard Smoley takes us through a number of different types of love romance, marriage, family life, friendship —each of which he characterizes as somehow "transactional," involving a certain exchange or quid pro quo, whether that is acknowledged or not. He contrasts these to agape or conscious love, which, he contends, is beyond transactions.

Smoley begins by telling an anecdote about the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He had fallen in love with a young woman when she was fourteen and he twenty-four. Several years later, still in love, he asked her to marry him and she happily agreed. But then he turned cold. Provoked by his attitude, she broke off their engagement and married another man. Kierkegaard remained a bachelor for the rest of his life. But when he died, he left his entire estate to the woman he never married.

Why did Kierkegaard behave in such a strange manner? He had decided that feeling erotic love for the woman was simply selfishness on his part and had nothing to do with true love, which ultimately should be reserved only for God. With respect to this attitude, Smoley has a lovely quote from Russian philosopher of love Vladimir Solovyov saying that "this unfortunate spiritual love reminds one of the little angels in old paintings, which have only a head, then wings and no more."

Though this denial of the flesh runs deep in Christianity, Smoley argues that "conscious love" does not have to be "freedom from drives or passions or self-interest but rather freedom within them." The rest of his book carefully develops and expands on this theme.

If the body cannot be ignored in love, is it all there is? Are we simply following an inborn, embodied need to perpetuate the species, as sociobiologists today argue? So it would seem at first, Smoley argues: "Each of us seeks the fittest possible mate, and satisfied or not, we settle for the best we can find. This is the law of nature, and the law is inexorable." From a biological point of view, each of us is born isolated into a hostile world. We have to find some way to protect ourselves. Ironically, after we have managed to do so, we feel a contrary urge to go past our own barriers of protection. "For humans," he writes, "the means of bridging this gap is often romantic love."

Smoley points to a certain tension here. While romantic love begins out of a need to perpetuate the species, at its best it goes past this urge: "Whenever I read of a truly great love, I am struck by all its uniqueness. Such loves don't fit easily into conventional schemes. Chaste or carnal, blissful or ill-starred, they are in every case the deepest expressions of the individuals themselves."

Why is this so? To answer this question, Smoley presents a position that he develops carefully throughout the book: inside each of us is (1) "something that experiences;" and (2) "that which is experienced" [emphasis in the original]. The first can be called the "I," the second the "world." The "world" is not only what we usually call the outside world; it includes the inner world as well, since that is also part of our experience.

All this takes us into deep water. "If all of what passes for my experience is in itself a sort of other . . . who or what is this mind that is doing the looking? And where is the dividing line between my mind and someone else's?" He goes on to say that the true "I" is more than the ego we normally associate with it; it is potentially our gateway to all that is. The entire path of enlightenment can be summarized simply as the inner need to know yourself. If we go through this process, Smoley claims, we will discover that there is "no real border between this 'I' and the collective 'I' in which we all participate." To realize this truth is to step past transactional love and to touch conscious, unconditional love.

Smoley asks where we can find God in this picture. In order to answer that question, he claims that there is a deeper meaning for "God" than conventional theology often assumes: God is "what theologian Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the 'terrifying and attractive mystery.'" Put in one word, which Otto also coined: God is the numinous! What Smoley calls the true "I" —which is ultimately a collective "I" —is the gateway for access to the divine. "This is the mystical meaning of Christ's saying "I am the door' (John 10:9): The 'I' is the door."Smoley's ultimate point is that this joining with another can take us beyond our personal boundaries, and that joining is ultimately a progressive path toward the joining with the Godhead.

How can this true "I," the witness that can observe everything, still be embodied? In answering this question, Smoley makes one of the most significant points of the book: "This consciousness is not limited to human or even to living beings but subsists in everything, no matter how apparently inanimate." This is God in his most immanent aspect. As we begin to recognize this truth experientially, Smoley argues, the individual mind begins to pass into all that is.

While we are on the way to this high place, somewhere along the line we must each discover our vocation, our "special function," as the author terms it. When one first does discover one's vocation, rather that feeling a union with everyone and everything in cosmic love, instead we tend to initially feel isolated from all those around us. In such an uncomfortable position, we first fall either into arrogance or despondent. Some escape this because their path allows them to find companions; others continue alone. But following that special path, honoring our "special function," leads onward toward the cosmic union.

Smoley has taken us on a long path that led from Kierkegaard, who valued his head over his heart, through recognition of the wisdom of the body and heart, through all the varieties of love. At this point, he says simply that "there is something in us that stands apart from the ceaseless flow of the head's thoughts and the equally ceaseless flow of the heart's feelings and can see them." In the words from an ancient Chinese text: "Consciousness dissolves in vision."

This is an important book, the first I've seen that looks at love from a position rooted not only in esoteric Christianity, but in the deepest spiritual traditions of all times and places. Though the scholarship underlying the book is immense, the author wears it lightly, using both historical quotes and personal anecdotes to get his message across. The book is particularly significant in arguing for an embodied love that can bridge the old and the new. As the author writes, "we, in our physical bodies, are the instruments not only for God's work in this world but for his experience as well. If our own consciousness is elevated..., our pleasure becomes God's pleasure as well."

Robin Robertson

Robin Robertson, Ph.D. is a Jungian-oriented clinical psychologist and the author of sixteen books, including Beginner's Guide to Jungian Psychology. His latest work, Alchemy and Chaos Theory, will be published by Quest Books in 2009.

The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual and Social Harmony

Will Tuttle
New York: Lantern Books, 2005. Paperback, $20, 318 pages.

Will Tuttle's The World Peace Diet is a challenging wake-up call. Many spiritual traditions, including Theosophy, have advocated ethical vegetarianism and care for animals. However, the compelling reasons for such a position have rarely been articulated with as much detail and force as in Tuttle's fine new book. His tone is urgent and uncompromising, yet filled with compassionate understanding. Even if one may not agree with him in every point, he forces the reader to consider matters which too often remain unconscious.
Tuttle writes that his book is:

An exploration of the profound cultural and spiritual ramifications of our food chain and the mentality underlying them. By placing humans at the top of the planet's food chain, our culture has historically perpetuated a particular worldview that requires from its members a reduction of essential feeling and awareness—and it is this process of desensitization that we must understand if we would comprehend the underlying causes of oppression, exploitation, and spiritual disconnectedness.

Graphically reviewing the horrors of factory farming and slaughterhouses, Tuttle reminds us that we reinforce our blindness to these realities with every meal that includes animal products. Some of us may feel more comfortable with dairy and eggs, since animals are not directly killed to produce these foods. However, Tuttle displays the deeply disturbing conditions under which chickens and cows typically live, as well as the character of theft which underlies milk and egg production. He then relates this theft to "our culture's basic repression, confinement, and exploitation of the female and feminine principle".

Tuttle reminds us of the essential solidarity and interconnectedness of all life. We cannot pretend that we can mistreat other sentient beings with impunity, regarding them as commodities instead of fellow creatures. "Dominating others requires us to disconnect from them, and from aspects of ourselves as well" (130). From a theosophical perspective, we can welcome Tuttle's examination of what we might call the karmic consequences of our treatment of animals raised for food, as well as the invisible, energetic realities which we consume in animal food.

Metaphysical toxins—i.e., the concentrated vibration of terror, grief, frustration, and desperation permeating these foods, are invisible and completely unrecognized by conventional science, yet they may be even more disturbing to us than physical toxins, because they work on the level of feelings and consciousness, which are more essential dimensions of ourselves than our physical vehicle.

"In the old herding cultures, animals were gradually transformed from mysterious and fascinating cohabitants of a shared world to mere property objects to be used, sold, traded, confined, and killed" (25). Insofar as we can see through this distortion, and make more conscious and compassionate choices, we will be better able to disentangle ourselves from other ways in which violence, destruction, and the treatment of others as objects have found their way into our lives. After all, "our actions reinforce attitudes, in us and in others, that amplify the ripples of those actions until they become the devastating waves of insensitivity, conflict, injustice, brutality, disease, and exploitation that rock our world today"

John Plummer

The reviewer is a member of the Theosophical Society, a freelance theologian, author of several books and articles on esoteric Christianity, and co-author with John Marby of Who Are the Independent Catholics? (Apocryphile, 2006).

Transforming Fate into Destiny: A New Dialogue with Your Soul

Robert Ohotto
Foreword by Caroline Myss. Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House, 2008. $14.95. 207 pages.

Why am I here? What is my purpose in life? How can I fulfill my destiny? In Transforming Fate into Destiny, his first book, Robert Ohotto treats these questions clearly and succinctly using his own years of personal experience as well as his work as an intuitive and astrologer.

The terms "fate" and "destiny" are often thought of as the same kind of mysterious force. Ohotto contends that fate and destiny are very different, though collaborative, agencies. Fate is the mysterious preincarnate design of our life that is written in the stars. Destiny, by contrast, is what you make of this design. Ohotto calls the negotiation between fate and destiny your "Cosmic Contract." By means of this contract, we can choose what to do within our mortal limits in order to be more successful as well as less anxious and resistant to life. He writes, "We must embrace consciously that a choice was made when our soul met with our body incarnate, and we made a soul 'decision' to be bound to a contract with Fate....The ego often finds this baffling. How many of us have looked at our lives and wondered why didn't I pick the lot of Bill Gates?" Nevertheless, he adds, "if you are in touch with your true passion, a creative obstacle is meant to help you bring it out more effectively in the world." At this point your free will, in contact with Fate, becomes what the Chinese call wu chi — both crisis and opportunity for personal evolution.

Fate can take the form of a loss, an accident, a rejection. It can confront us as a shock, but it can be an opportunity as well. What our consciousness and ego do with these shocks is the point of the book. Ohotto calls this life-enhancing struggle "a dialogue with the soul": Our Cosmic Contract stipulates that we must come to terms with the fate point, the juncture at which we encounter our mortal limits and must realize our personal potential within those limits.

In this book, Ohotto goes chapter by chapter to explain the process of working with these obstacles, employing lessons and practices that establish new ways of attracting "a way to destiny" in order to clarify and in some cases remove psychological burdens and issues. In the latter half of the book, Ohotto moves into some deeply intuitive areas, illuminating new ways to cope with the shadow, the personal unconscious, and synchronicity. In the end, the book helps us genuinely find ways of doing what we must do anyway, and it helps us to do so with consciousness and intention.

Erin Sullivan

Erin Sullivan is a consultant astrologer, author, and lecturer. Her works include Saturn in Transit: Boundaries of Mind, Body and Soul; Astrology of Family Dynamics; and The Astrology of Midlife and Aging.