Quest Magazine

Printed in the Fall 2016 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor’s Desk" Quest 104.4 (Fall 2016): pg. 90

National secretary David Bruce reminds me that this year is the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare. Which raises a question: what exactly was Shakespeare’s worldview?

Technically, Shakespeare was a Christian. But Christianity is far in the background in Shakespeare’s work. Often he seems more comfortable setting his plays in pagan contexts—as with Julius Caesar or King Lear—than in Christian ones. If you search for Jesus or Jesu in his plays, you will see that they mostly occur as interjections.

Some argue that Shakespeare was an atheist. But he does not seem to be an atheist. His plays are full of spirits of all kinds — nature spirits, the dead, even the occasional pagan god. And these details all point to one thing as the source of his worldview: the occult philosophy of the Renaissance, which was the version of the Ancient Wisdom known and practiced at that time. It was essentially a mix of Hermeticism, a Christianized version of the Kabbalah, and Neoplatonic ideas that persisted in Western thought after the end of classical antiquity.

Scholar Frances Yates has written, “Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the occult, with ghosts, witches, fairies, is understood as deriving less from popular tradition than with deep-rooted affinity with the learned occult philosophy and its religious implications.” This quotation is taken from Yates’s book The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, which is a good place to go if you want to know more about this subject. Many educated men of the time understood this philosophy, and Yates points out numerous allusions to it in Shakespeare.

One example is the famous speech about the “seven ages of man” in As You Like It, act 2, scene 7: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances, /And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.”

I don’t have the space here to reproduce the entire passage. It has been quoted very often.

But the structure behind it is not widely understood.

These seven ages are correlated to the seven planets as they were known in Shakespeare’s time. These planets surround the earth (it was believed) in concentric spheres. Shakespeare’s stages of life correspond to them. The “mewling, puking” infant corresponds to the moon, which governs growth. The “whining schoolboy with his satchel” correlates with Mercury, which has to do with study and learning. The stage of the “lover” is of course the stage of Venus, while the “soldier” is that of Mars. The justice, “full of wise saws,” relates to Jupiter, the planet of counsel. And “the lean and slippered pantaloon” corresponds to Saturn, the slowest of all the planets then known, associated with old age and melancholy. The seventh stage, “second childishness and mere oblivion,” corresponds to the primordial space to which we all return. The seventh “planet,” the sun, does not appear here, because esoterically the sun correlates to the Self and thus encompasses all levels. (For more on this subject, see Priscilla Costello’s recent book Shakespeare and the Stars.)

It’s hard, even for those drawn to esotericism today, to grasp how much this occult philosophy informed people’s lives in those days. Remember that this seven-planet system, centered on the earth (the Copernican theory had not yet been fully accepted), was believed to be the way the universe was physically composed. That it had correspondences in the life of man, even in terms of the ages, meant that the human being was seen as much more integrally connected to the cosmos than today.

Theosophical literature often speaks of the astral body, but the reason for its name is sometimes forgotten. The original idea was that this astral body was made up of subtle starry stuff—what H.P. Blavatsky, following Éliphas Lévi, called the astral light. We can think of it as the medium by which the planets affect our moods and feelings, just as the forces of the earth affect our physical bodies.

Clearly these are subtle forces—so subtle that one might be forgiven for believing that they don’t exist at all. But there are many energies that science has not discovered, or has just barely discovered. I’m thinking of a recent news item saying that astronomers have discovered a “magnetic rope” that extends between Saturn and the sun. Although they had known such magnetic links existed between the sun and the inner planets, including the earth, they had never found one for an outlying planet such as Saturn. It is possible, even likely, that other such forces govern our existence in ways that are still undreamt of.

It may be useful to imagine our astral, and perhaps mental, bodies as coextensive with the solar system, whose planets govern their currents and impulses, just as the astrologers claim. If so, then possibly the higher bodies still—the causal body and those above it—are governed not by the planets but by larger and still more comprehensive entities. We might imagine that the causal body, say, is coextensive with the galaxy and is influenced by its movements—although these are, of course, on a scale that goes past the bounds of a single lifetime. But then so does the causal body.

I find these speculations both comforting and plausible. It may be the case that, as the old occult philosophy taught, the stages of human life are attuned to the planets. It may also be the case that the stages of life far outstrip, not only the life of the body on earth, but the life of the solar system, of the galaxy, and of the universe itself.

Richard Smoley

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Printed in the Fall 2016  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Wehr, Janet, "Peaceful Passages:Glimpses into the Life of a Hospice Nurse" Quest 104.4 (Fall 2016): pg. 118-119

By Janet Wehr

The First One

The call came at 2:15 a.m. It was my first on-call summons since I had become a hospice nurse a month earlier. I dressed quickly, running a comb through my sleep-flattened hair, feeling more than a little as firemen do as they jump into their boots and slide down the pole when the alarm sounds. I reviewed the patient’s name and address and the message the triage nurse had given me on the phone: “Madeline D. is close to dying. Her family is expecting you as soon as you can get there.” On the way, I carefully remembered what I had been taught to do when I arrived. My heart would tell me what to say.

Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the door of the small but cozy apartment. Madeline’s granddaughter, Christine, answered, and it was obvious that she had been crying. Christine’s husband, Jack, was there to support her. I took a moment to comfort them, then went into the bedroom. Madeline lay in a hospital bed under a pink comforter. She was very old and frail, shrunken to just a wisp of a person. Her knees were drawn up to her chest as if she were going back into the womb. Her fingernails and toenails were a pale shade of blue, the color of the inside of a seashell, showing that her weakened heart could no longer perfuse even this child-sized body. Her breathing was raspy with the death rattle, and there were long gaps between breaths. I knew that she was only a few hours, maybe minutes, from dying.

I began gently to discuss with Christine and Jack the physiology of what they were witnessing in Madeline’s condition—the signs and symptoms of dying. They listened carefully, relaxed in knowing that what was happening was the normal process of a body letting go of life. Christine related to me that, only two days earlier, Madeline had shared that she was tired, she was old, she had had a rich life, and now she wanted to rest. She had said this calmly, quietly, and with complete satisfaction and conviction in her voice.

Unexpectedly a man then burst through the door into the apartment. It was apparent that he was angry and wanted to take charge. He was introduced as Christine’s brother, Robert, who was a prominent surgeon at our hospital. Robert stormed past us and went into the room where Madeline lay so close to dying. He visually assessed her for no more than a few seconds, then moved briskly to the phone and dialed 911. When he had ordered an ambulance, he turned to me and yelled, “What do you think you’re doing? My grandmother is dying! She needs emergency treatment NOW!”

I’m a good “diffuser” in most situations, and I calmly began to explain why this was not an emergency. “Your grandmother is ninety-nine years old,” I said. “Her doctor explained to your family that there was no treatment for her age-related illness and decline. She can’t see, she can’t hear, and now she can’t swallow. Perhaps she doesn’t want to stay any longer.”

Robert simply glared at me, tapping his foot with impatience, waiting for the paramedics to arrive.

And they did. When Robert opened the door to let them in and introduced himself in a loud, authoritative tone as “Doctor,” all the king’s men jumped into action and whisked Madeline out of the house and into the waiting ambulance, leaving Christine, Jack, and me with our mouths hanging open.

What had just happened here? None of the training I had received as a hospice nurse had prepared me for this. I felt that I had let Madeline down and prayed that she would not die in a speeding vehicle or in the emergency room among strangers. I prayed that the emergency room personnel would not intubate her or perform CPR. I wanted what Jack and Christine wanted, which was for her to be in her own bed, in her own home, with people who loved her and understood her desire to leave. I packed up my nursing bag and left Madeline’s home, feeling as if I had failed her.

I was called back to Madeline’s home the very next day, to hear from Christine what I already knew: the emergency room staff had taken one look at Madeline the night before and told the “Doctor” that his grandmother wasn’t sick, she was dying, and that they felt they should send her back home. Madeline held on until she was back under her fluffy down comforter, in her little pink bedroom, and quietly slipped away.

Hospice on Call

When the pager goes off, it’s 2:00 a.m., and I reluctantly leave my dreams and my soft bed and jump into action. I go to where my clothes had been laid out the night before to save time if a call came. I dress quickly, barely bothering with my hair, because I am needed somewhere.

Someone has died.

I leave home in the dark, following directions from the hospice information sheet. Even though I’ve been to this home many times in the daylight, I surely don’t want to get lost at this hour.

I pull up in front of the house. I center myself for a minute so that I can be the calm in the storm that is probably waiting inside.

A man with a tear-stained face greets me wordlessly at the door and walks me to the back bedroom. Then he disappears around a corner, not wanting me to see him cry.

There, in the hospital bed, is the person who has died. A tiny attractive grandmother. No heartbeat, no breaths. Pupils fixed and eyes at half-mast. I wonder about who she was, what things she had done during her life, who she loved, and who loved her.

I tell a young woman, who introduces herself as the patient’s daughter, that her mother has died. Two teenaged granddaughters standing at the door burst into tears as they hear the word they expect but have been dreading.

I turn off the oxygen and remove the oxygen tubing from the grandmother’s nose. I whisper condolences and tell the family to take as much time as they need. I explain that there are official phone calls that need to be made to the coroner, the doctor, and the funeral home, and I excuse myself to make the calls while they grieve. I call the doctor and to report that his patient has died. The physician has cared for this patient a long time, and I can sense sadness as he asks me to give his condolences.

I call the coroner and the funeral director, both of whom I know now on a first-name basis—these people who work during the wee hours of the morning, just as I do. I tell them the official time of death I pronounced: 2:00 a.m.

I offer to bathe the patient and dress her before the funeral director arrives to take her away. The daughter leaves to gather the necessary items, and I sense her relief at being able to perform one last, loving task for her mother. I bathe the body, tenderly and respectfully, while the rest of the family waits in the next room. This woman has been sick a long time. She is withered and wasted away. She still has blue ink marks on her chest and abdomen where the radiologists aimed the radiation treatments that were meant to help her. I dress her in the clothes provided by her daughter: clean undergarments; a soft blue sweater; black velour pants; cozy socks. I comb through her hair and take a moment to spread lotion on her face so that she will smell good when they kiss her goodbye.

The doorbell rings, and there is a white van in the driveway: the funeral director is here. I encourage the family to say their goodbyes and explain that it might be easier if they wait in the other room while we transfer the body. They decide to stay.

I help the director transfer the woman’s body to a gurney and watch as the bag is zipped up over her face. This is always difficult—the finality of it—although I’ve witnessed it hundreds of times.

I pack up stray medical supplies, strip the bed, and tidy the room. I dispose of medications in the bag of kitty litter that I keep in my nursing bag just for this purpose. I turn off the light and close the door behind me.

The family is grateful for my guidance and support during this difficult time. After my numerous visits over the past several weeks, they say they will never forget me. Despite the fact that I will repeat this scenario over and over again, little do they realize that they, and their loved one, are likewise etched in my heart forever. My watch says 4:00 a.m. I leave the home, get into my car, and turn the key. The pager goes off.

' Someone has died.

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Janet Wehr, R.N., has devoted most of her nursing career to hospice care. A Qualified Therapeutic Touch Practitioner, she is a member of the Therapeutic Touch International Association and the American Holistic Nurses Association. She is also on the board of directors for the Saret Charitable Fund of DuPage County, Illinois. These stories are excerpted from her book Peaceful Passages: A Hospice Nurse’s Stories of Dying Well, published in 2015 by Quest Books. Reprinted with permission.

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Printed in the Fall 2016issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Bull, James L., "Levels of Awakening" Quest 104.4 (Fall 2016): pg. 112-113

By James L. Bull

For many years I believed that retirement was only a sad commentary on the unpleasantness of most work. After all, if work is an unpleasant necessity and to be avoided, as it is for many, then why not seek relief at every opportunity? Weekends are to the work week as vacation is to the year, as retirement is to a life’s work. The assumption is that leisure is what’s enjoyable and work is the price one pays to get it. The solution, of course, is to have not just a job but a satisfying life’s work, thereby blurring the distinction between work and nonwork.

Now in my early eighties, I’m no longer working, but I’ve found that being active as a volunteer satisfies needs that were there all along. Energy and output may not decline much, but there may be a qualitative shift that comes with age. On a deep level a shift may occur which sends reverberations to the surface that influence the course of my life. Parallel to the natural physical changes and declines, there may be a spiritual shift which is its own developmental stage, a period of reflection and deepening.

Of this the commercial world has no clue. From that point of view, aging is some sort of malady. A recent magazine cover announces that there is a “cure for aging.” Is aging a disease? Another magazine reports on an “anti-aging’’ medication. Is aging an adversary, to be fought? Of course, it is fought in countless ways, from face lifts to sexual potency enhancers. This oppositional attitude parallels other struggles against natural phenomena to be conquered or overcome, such as the wilderness. But aging, if engaged consciously and without a disabling fear of death, may open the door to a deepening of appreciation and an enhanced capacity for reflection, made possible by having more of life to remember.

To enjoy these benefits, we first need to loosen our grip on some of the skills that served us so well earlier, including rationality, linear thinking, necessity, and precision—all those left-brain qualities. Intuitive skills may now be more important, and with this softening process, we may discover vulnerability within us. The strength required to be vulnerable is more appropriate to age, just as the strength to be tough serves the young and ambitious. The deeper, more appreciative qualities that may now emerge are not as well expressed with words; when words are used, poetry probably works best.

None of this means that we leave the world of necessity and responsibility. We still pay the bills and keep the car running. But we may be able to choose more consciously between the world of adoration and the world of necessity. I was reminded of this distinction on a recent camping trip. While fixing dinner, I paused to appreciate—and to praise and pray in thanksgiving for—the setting sun and the clouds illuminated by it. But soon I was pulled back to the ‘‘necessities”—checking a pot, adding more wood to the fire.

I’m not suggesting that the perspective of necessity is any less important than that of appreciation; they are complementary. They are the two modes of attention that we carry through this life. They are the content and context of life. Because we are normally only aware of the content of our daily lives, we may naturally overlook the context in which it all takes place. Earlier in life, it may not have been useful to spend as much time in reflection. Now we can allow ourselves to drop down, away from the necessary and toward the essential, closer to the soul. There, there may be moments of nonduality, of recognition: not everything is content; there is a surrounding meaning, or context, in which all takes place. Life has meaning; we are not here by accident; there are no accidents.

In order to give ourselves to the surrender of awe and wonder, we need to be well-grounded in the first place. To be insufficiently grounded in this life, and in our bodies, is unhealthy. I have often had the impression that some mentally ill persons are not well-grounded in their bodies—not fully located here. But once we are fully grounded —and reasonably secure —we may allow ourselves a reverential pause. How absolutely natural that we should become completely absorbed in the details of this life! We are provided with the combination of extraordinary sensory equipment and equally rich experiential potential—and a world to match. We are placed in a world of such richness, how could we not been enraptured by it all—longing, sadness, taste, laughter, beauty! It can be thought of as a sort of divine joke: we are dropped into a life so inviting that we become caught up entirely, Spirit chuckling all the while. Perhaps it is useful for us not to see this life in its full context while we are living it. This way, we are allowed to focus on our present situation without distraction.

Nevertheless, as I grow older I get more of a sense of hidden meanings. Our inner task is to stay aware, to sense the context, to be in touch with who we really are and who we were all along.

Otherwise, we might be swept away and lose the self.

Kierkegaard understood the tragedy of those who live their lives “outside of themselves.” In Either/Or he writes:

And this is the pitiful thing to one who contemplates human life, that so many live on in a quiet state of perdition; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that the content of life is successively unfolding and now is possessed in this expanded state, but they live their lives, as it were, outside of themselves, they vanish like shadows, their immortal soul is blown away.

The context of this life may be far more subtle than the immediate content; it is usually sensed intuitively; it may seem elusive and more a matter of revelation than verification. It is everything we sense that surrounds this life and makes it possible, the aura of meaning and mystery which encloses all we know. Although there are effective methods for tapping into this realm, such as meditation and prayer, the maxim seems to apply that “this thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.”

In a recent workshop, poet Robert Bly referred to a poem by Kabir that reads in part:

We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves
       birds and animals and the ants—
perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you
       n your mother’ s womb.
Is it logical you would be walking around entirely 
       orphaned now?

In this workshop, Bly used the poem as a point of departure to ask the question, “What did you know before you were born?” I wrote: ·

What we knew before we were born is like one of Rilke’s sealed letters, an epistle we carry through life in our bodies. Perhaps we dare to peek, tearing back the envelope at one comer, seeing a word or two. Rarely would we read the whole thing. Perhaps when we are old, the paper yellowed and brittle, we may find the courage to open, to read, to weep.

What could it be that I carried with me always, but never knew? What I knew before I was born might literally be whatever I learned in my mother’s womb, plus whatever I brought to this life before that. But in a larger, more metaphorical sense, this question asks that I pause to consider the context of this life. As I grow older, my birth and death (the two most important events of my life) may begin to come together. (As Shakespeare wrote, “This little life is rounded with a sleep.’’) If there is a part of me that transcends my birth and death—call it the soul—I can stay in touch with it along the way.

The idea that we brought something with us to this life is not a new one. It is described excellently by James Hillman, who asserts, “Each person enters the world called.” He continues,

The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we were born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe that we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern. And therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.

Clearly Hillman believes we were loved before we were born:

Despite this invisible caring, we prefer to imagine ourselves thrown naked into the world, utterly vulnerable and fundamentally alone. It is easier to accept the story of heroic self-made development than the story that you may well be loved by this guiding providence, that you are needed for what you bring, and that you are sometimes fortuitously helped by it in situations of distress.

We are born into situations and families that give us opportunities to work out issues that require our attention. This may not be easy: the son of the macho father goes on to become a ballet dancer; the maternally overprotected child finds assertiveness and learns to be bold. So there may be a great deal, on a deep level, that we knew before we were born. Our lives take place on the surface of a very deep sea. As I grow older, I sense that all is not forgotten. The accidents of my life dissolve into purposes; the purposes become harder to explain, and explanation matters less and less.

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James L. Bull, Ph.D., first learned about Theosophy from his mother, Evelyn Bull, who had a number of articles and poems published in The American Theosophist. Now a retired psychologist, he remains active as a hospice volunteer.

 

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Printed in the Fall 2016  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "Levels of Awakening" Quest 104.4 (Fall 2016): pg. 107-111

By Richard Smoley

It is a more or less universal teaching that there are levels of awakening. And there are countless ways of characterizing these levels. One relatively fresh way of doing so may be through the lens of identification. With whom, or what, do we identify? What relation do we have to a larger whole, and how do we experience it?

We can begin by assuming that the wider the perspective an individual has, the more mature, and therefore the more awake, she is. Consider the accompanying diagram, which roughly depicts the stages of human cognitive growth. The child begins by becoming aware of self, then of family, community, nation, the whole of humanity, and possibly even all sentient life.

The schema here is crude and somewhat arbitrary. There are countless other collectivities that someone may identify with: for many children, the first community they are aware of is school. Nor are these categories universal; other cultures may break them down in different ways. In some primitive tribes, members are classed by an animal totem: an individual is of the deer people, the turtle people, and so on. Among the Chippewa Indians of the American Midwest and Canada, for example:

 

 

All members with the same totem regarded themselves as related even though of different villages or different tribes . . . When two strangers met and found themselves to be of the same totem they immediately began to trace their genealogy . . . and the one became the cousin, the uncle, or the grandfather of the two, although the grandfather might often be the younger of the two. (Lévi-Strauss, 167)

The bond of the totem is so strong that if a man witnesses a quarrel, he will immediately side with the individual with his own totem, even if the other person is a close relative of his.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss says that this identification with a totem animal “sometimes goes beyond the limits of humanity in a biological, and no longer a merely sociological, sense” (ibid.). Certain Australian aborigines with a dog totem, for example, will describe dogs as “sons” and “brothers”—meaning that members may consider them as more a part of their family than other humans.

In more developed cultures, a common religion can create a sense of unity beyond national or ethnic borders. One famous case was that of civil rights leader Malcolm X. Although he had been a prominent leader of the Black Muslim movement—which teaches that the white man is evil—he experienced a change of heart in 1964 on the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca. He described his experience at the Frankfurt airport, waiting for a plane with other pilgrims: “Throngs of people, obviously Muslims from everywhere, bound for the pilgrimage, were hugging and embracing. They were of all complexions, the whole atmosphere was of warmth and friendliness. The feeling hit me that there really wasn’t any color problem here. The effect was as though I had just stepped out of a prison.”

On the other hand, such perceived bonds sometimes generate confusion. When I was traveling in Egypt with my then-girlfriend in 1979, we hired a guide named Mr. Hanna to show us around the sites of Luxor. Mr. Hanna was a Coptic Christian and was much friendlier toward us than were the Muslim Egyptians. He assumed that, being from the West, we were Christians too. But my girlfriend, whose parents were atheists, was not a Christian and had never been baptized. Mr. Hanna could not understand this at all.

We might assume that this journey outward from the circle of self to the circle of universality will proceed normally and naturally. Such is not always the case. The progression can be arrested at any point.

The problem is easiest to see from extreme examples, such as sociopaths. There are not many sociopaths, but there are certainly some. Figures from the Web put them at between 1 and 3 percent of the population. Sociopaths never proceed beyond the inmost circle of the self. They are often defined as people without a conscience. They are incapable of sympathy or empathy. Nor do they feel affection.

The sociopath has no sense of connection with other people. Emotionally, he is completely isolated from everyone else. He lives for himself alone. And he does not mind. Other people are only things to be used instrumentally.

It is grim to consider that a large number of the most powerful people in the world are very likely sociopaths.

We generally see the sociopath as an individual, an isolated case, the victim of some early trauma or damage. But this progression outward can be arrested at other stages as well, and the process may go beyond the individual to the collective.

Consider the family in Italian society. Author Luigi Barzini writes in his insightful book The Italians:

The Italian family is a stronghold in a hostile land: within its walls and among its members, the individual finds consolation, help, advice, provisions, loans, weapons, allies and accomplices to aid him in his pursuits . . . Scholars have always recognized the Italian family as the only fundamental institution in the country . . . In fact, the law, the State, and society function only if they do not directly interfere with the family’s supreme interests . . .

There were times in [Italy’s] past, and even in recent, almost contemporary history, when the State was at its lowest and weakest, impoverished and defeated, and yet the inhabitants were feverishly active, happy, and prosperous. (Barzini, 190)

Barzini goes on to say that in Italy, the family has been a “private lifeboat in the stormy seas of anarchy.”

All well and good, but there is a flip side to this situation. The family has been reinforced to the detriment of a larger social order:

Anarchy in Italy is not simply a way of life, a spontaneous condition of society, a natural development: it is also the deliberate product of man’s will, the fruit of his own choice; it has been assiduously cultivated and strengthened down the centuries. The strength of the family, therefore, is not only the bulwark against disorder, but, at the same time, one of its principal causes. (Barzini, 191)

Italy, fragmented for 1400 years into many little states, ruled variously by Vikings, Arabs, Spaniards, the French, the Austrians, and the Holy See, was often the plaything of larger powers. Small wonder, then, that the Italians took refuge behind the walls of their families. But at the same time the family kept them from going beyond the bounds of this refuge. In terms of the diagram, Italians collectively did not go past the second circle. Barzini is asking whether they did so because of the political storms that were always outside these walls, or whether the storms were partly caused by this isolation.

The United States presents the opposite case. The rule of law is strong here, public institutions are accountable and responsible (if imperfectly so), and there is a great sense of national identity and pride, as we see from the countless flags that are displayed at every conceivable location. The family, by contrast, is weak. To some extent this has been a self-selecting process. The vast majority of Americans either came here to get away from someplace else or are descended from people who did. Thus the population is naturally going to be skewed toward the mobile, the restless, the drifters. Americans are always on the move, and they have always been. In a nation like this, the family is comparatively insignificant, extolled between the last Thursday of November and the first day of January, but otherwise very much in the background.

Consequently, loneliness and isolation are central issues in our culture. Practically every major work of American literature is about this theme, whether you’re talking about crazy Ahab on the Pequod, Huck Finn on his raft down the Mississippi, or Jay Gatsby, friendless in his ostentatious mansion. Even when the family is in the foreground—as with the tormented Compsons in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury—it seems only to reinforce its members’ sense of isolation.

So some cast about almost arbitrarily for something greater to be part of. You live in a certain city, and that city has a sports team, so you feel part of the community by being a fan of the team.

Sports fandom is mostly innocent. People get pleasure out of watching sports, and the thrill of having your team win usually balances out the disappointment of having it lose. Even when the team doesn’t win very often, fans can commiserate about how bad it is.

Of course there is nothing wrong with being a sports fan. But it often seems as if being a fan requires not only loving your own team, but hating the rival team. Often the second part is more fun than the first.

Sometimes it can get out of hand. In the Byzantine Empire—the eastern half of the Roman Empire that lasted for a thousand years after the fall of Rome itself—chariot racing was popular. There were two teams, the blues and the greens. The fans of these teams started to band together, and they started to fight. There were riots. There were even points at which the factions nearly brought the empire down.

So you can see how this sense of belonging to something greater than yourself can turn destructive. The Byzantine chariot factions are a comparatively rare example of this happening with sports fans. (Although as I write this in June 2016, the headlines are full of tales of brawls between English and Russian soccer fans in the European championship matches.) You can find many other examples with political parties, sects, religions, nations, and so on. Human history is largely the history of such conflicts.

In these instances the sense of these widening concentric circles—family, society, humanity—comes to a halt. And it can be halted at any point. Some people consider the whole world outside their own families as enemies to be feared and fought. Others feel that way about their villages, nations, religions.

In these cases the need for connection to a larger whole is dysfunctional. It stops before it’s supposed to. It leads to hatred, violence, atrocity.

Finally, there is the universal level. This can’t possibly be dysfunctional, can it?

It can. The problem is best expressed by the line from Charles Schultz’s Peanuts: “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand.” In my experience, there are many people dedicated to noble and high-minded causes who thereby feel justified in treating those immediately around them casually and even despicably. It is a hazard that is in fact likely to confront someone with such high ideals. It has by no means been absent from the Theosophical Society.

To take an example from literature, there is Mrs. Jellyby in chapter 4 of Dickens’s Bleak House: a middle-aged woman “with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . they could see nothing nearer than Africa!” And in fact Mrs. Jellyby is so preoccupied with educating “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the west bank of the Niger” that her house is in a state of squalor and her children miserable. She ignores her son when he falls down the stairs. The narrator says about the boy, “I did not know which to pity most—the bruises or the dirt.” Mrs. Jellyby explains, “The African project at present employs my whole time.”

There is something to be said for Christ’s command to “love thy neighbor.” “Neighbor” implies proximity, and those who are closest to us, not only by blood but also geographically, have claims upon us that more remote people do not have. In fact the more remote the problem, the less likely we are to do any good, despite our intentions. Reporter Claire Bennett wrote about relief efforts in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake in 2015:

Ragtag brigades of well-intentioned do-gooders flooded the country: students, church congregations, individuals who had previously vacationed in the area, all clambering over one another looking for a way to make their mark and do good, but lacking either the skills or coordination to have an impact. Indeed, many ended up slowing down the aid efforts.

There were even reports of teams of doctors who arrived to help but were unable to feed themselves. This wave of unsolicited and poorly planned shipments of untrained people and donated goods was dubbed by some humanitarians “the second disaster”.

Advising would-be relief workers, Bennett added, “Remember that it is not about you. It is not about your love for the country and its people. Your feelings of guilt and helplessness may be difficult to deal with, but you may not be what is needed right now” (emphasis hers).

From another angle, it is important to be humane to animals. But many of the people I have known who are obsessed with animal welfare show a strong streak of misanthropy.

Thus any level of identification can be misguided or pathological. This suggests a need for some balance among all these levels. Self-interest is legitimate, but it is not absolute. So are family, society, nation, religion, humanity—even beyond. You may feel compassion for all sentient beings, but if your house is overrun with vermin, you need to deal with the problem.

This kind of ethical balance has been more heavily underscored in the Eastern traditions than in the West. Hinduism has its concept of dharma—which is not only duty in our familiar sense but an understanding of one’s proper role in the universe and a willingness to take responsibility for that role. The Chinese tradition speaks of the chen jen, “true man,” who similarly exists in right relationship not only with his fellow humans, but with the cosmos.

It is a point that Christianity has rarely gotten right. Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels, does not have a wife or children, and if he did, one suspects that, like the Buddha, he would not have paid much attention to them. (In fact this is how he acts toward his mother and his siblings.) He also says, “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). Contrary to what some claim, Jesus cared little for family values.

At the beginning of this article, I said that diagram 1 was crude and arbitrary. Diagrams are always treacherous. They oversimplify and distort; they conceal as much as they illumine. Thus we may learn something by turning it inside out (diagram 2).

At first glance this schema looks completely counterintuitive. The collective, the unitive, as the inmost part of the self? That sounds absurd. But there may be more truth to it than one might suspect.

In the first place, it points up an extremely important but neglected fact: there are collective layers to the psyche. It’s easy to forget this in the present-day U.S., with its nearly pathological insistence on individualism. But in past times these levels were probably far more dominant than they are today. The Turkish Sufi master Refik Algan comments: “In the medieval ages, we had the type rather than the individual. In a village or a group of villages, people were almost the same as others. They felt almost the same things; they had the same songs, the same food; individual difference meant little” (Kinney and Smoley, 35). Today someone dresses to express herself as an individual. In those days people did not think of such things: they wore the clothing of their region, their village, to express themselves as part of a collective.

In a more developed stage of civilization, there was (and is) the nation. The nation is one of those concepts that evaporate the more closely you examine them. What exactly constitutes a nation? An ethnicity? A language? A history? A government? You don’t have to think very hard to realize that a nation is none of those things. As Hugh Seton-Watson, author of a highly respected text on nationalism, concedes, “I am driven to the conclusion that no ‘scientific definition’ of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists” (quoted in Anderson, 3; emphasis Seton-Watson’s). Nevertheless, as poorly understood as it is, there is a stratum of the individual psyche that is attuned to the psyche of this nation.

Note also that these collective levels run deeper than the merely personal. That helps explain why people rush so madly to sacrifice themselves for their nations, their faiths, and their allegiances. They feel these as part of themselves more deeply than they do the personal ego. Theosophist Arthur E. Powell portrays this collective as the crowd: “Crowds are in the main formed, nourished on, and dominated by feeling or emotion—not by thought” (Powell, Astral Body, 216).

I am not so sure. Certainly emotion plays an enormous part in the crowd mentality. But there are certain ideas that can take hold of a population with as much or more intensity than feelings per se. In the twentieth century such ideas as the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Master Race had this power. The same may be the case for the concept of jihad among certain radical elements of Islam today.

As a remedy, the Theosophical literature focuses on the conscious work of certain more or less awakened people. C.W. Leadbeater writes: “The power of the united thought of a number of people is always far greater than the sum of their separate thoughts . . . Hence it is exceedingly beneficial for any city or community that there should be constantly meeting in its midst a number of people who are capable of generating thoughts at a high level” (quoted in Powell, Mental Body, 48).

Finally we reach the center. There is something in you that is conscious, that is aware. It is not your body, nor is it even your thoughts and feelings, because you can step back inwardly and observe all these things as if from a distance (this is the point of many meditative practices). Here are some names for it: the Atman, the Self, Buddha nature, the kingdom of God, the Tiferet of the Kabbalists, “I am that I am.” It is there, and it can never go away—in fact, it is said, this is the only part of you that is truly immortal. As these examples suggest, this truth is known to practically all religions. Of course it is—because if it is true, it must be universally true, and many people will have discovered it in their own ways. Here is a description from the Hungarian spiritual teacher Georg Kühlewind:

This experience we call the “I-am experience.” It is the universal healing medicine. It is a feeling of identity with an ever-deepening being that wills itself. It provides certainty, creativity, and solidity, and dissolves what comes from egotism. From it, the knowledge arises that nothing can happen to me (the one who is experiencing this): I am safe, completely independent of circumstances, opinions, successes, or failures. I have found my spiritual roots. (Kühlewind, 39; emphasis Kühlewind’s)

There is a point at which one awakens to the true “I” within. But what relation does this transcendent “I” have to others? Many times you hear it said that “we are all one.” What could this possibly mean? In day-to-day life we are most assuredly not one. The advantage of one person is the disadvantage of the other. You get the girl, I don’t; I get the job, you don’t. We are linked only by our mutual interests and advantages. And yet the world’s traditions all teach us to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

All of this only makes sense if we realize one thing: if you follow the “I” far enough into oneself —past all the levels of personal and collective identification—you reach “a feeling of identity with an ever-deepening being,” as Kühlewind says. This is the “I” that is “we.” At the core, the “I” that is in you is the same “I” that is in me, and indeed in all creation. (This may be one meaning of the Hindu axiom “Atman is Brahman.”) That is, ultimately your self-interest and mine are identical. You are to love your neighbor as yourself because at the core, your neighbor is yourself. In the words of the German mystic Meister Eckhart, “It is when one does not belong anymore to oneself that one is most oneself” (quoted in Aubry, 47).

If you understand these facts to some degree, consciously or not, you are healthy. If you don’t, you’re not.

This health expresses itself in such things as love, compassion, and empathy. I would go further. I would say it is the source of all true love, compassion, and empathy. All other forms of human relations are merely transactions.

If I’m right about these things, it explains something else. We now know why—for a normal person at any rate—it feels good to do kind things and to help others. It feels good for the same reason that sex feels good or sleep feels good. These are all the satisfactions of real organic needs.

Now it’s a bit more clear why being a kind person is, in a very deep sense, healthy for you.

If people could function normally in this sense, with a proper orientation toward the larger Self that is the human race and indeed the universe, most of the problems of the present would vanish. They would be seen simply as technical problems. And humanity has gotten very good at solving technical problems. It’s often said that there is enough money, resources, and know-how to end the environmental crisis and provide everyone on earth with a decent standard of living. But the will is not there. The will is not there because not enough people are connected to “the I that is we.”

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SOURCES

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1983.

Aubry, Gwenaëlle. “Plato, Plotinus, and Mysticism.” In Glenn Alexander Magee, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Barzini, Luigi. The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring Their Manners and Morals. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964.

Bennett, Claire. “Don’t Rush to Nepal to Help. Read This First.” The Guardian, April 27, 2015; http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/27/earthquake-nepal-dont-rush-help-volunteers-aid; accessed June 16, 2016.

Dash, Mike. “Blue Versus Green: Rocking the Byzantine Empire,” Smithsonian.com, Mar. 2, 2012; www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blue-versus-green-rocking-the-byzantine-empire-113325928/?no-ist; accessed Nov. 3, 2015.

Kinney, Jay, and Richard Smoley. “The Goal of Oneness: The Gnosis Interview with Refik Algan.” Gnosis 41 (winter 1994), 34–39.

Kühlewind, Georg. The Light of the “I”: Guidelines for Meditation. Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 2008.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Moss, Richard. The I That Is We: Awakening to Higher Energies through Unconditional Love. Berkeley, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1981.

Powell, Arthur E. The Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1996 [1927].

———. The Mental Body. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 2000.

Tristan, Pierre. “Malcolm X in Mecca,” About.com, Dec. 26, 2015; http://middleeast.about.com/od/religionsectarianism/a/me080220b.htm; accessed June 14, 2016.

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Richard Smoley’s latest book, How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, was reviewed in Quest, summer 2016, and is available now.

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