Quest Magazine

Printed in the Summer 2013 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard  "Letters to the Editor" Quest  101. 3 (Summer 2013): pg. 82. 

My good friend, the British Kabbalist Warren Kenton, who writes under the name Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi, recently sent me a copy of his latest book. It's entitled A Kabbalistic View of History. It portrays the ups and downs of history, as well as the rise and fall of civilizations, in light of the evolution of humanity.

While there are many fascinating themes in War­ren's book, one in particular stands out. It has to do with the role played at crucial moments in history by small groups of people who were working from a higher plane of consciousness. Groups of this kind included the Pythagorean school in ancient Greece; the school of Chartres in medieval times, which built the great cathedral; the Brethren of the Common Life, who revi­talized Christian devotion in the late Middle Ages; and the Rosicrucian brotherhood, whose famous manifes­toes, published around 1615, proclaimed a coming age of political liberty and scientific inquiry. And of course there is Theosophy, which began in the nineteenth cen­tury by setting forth esotericism as a third way between a rigid Christian dogmatism and an equally rigid scien­tific materialism.

While there are many lessons we could learn from each of these cases, there are a couple that stand out for me. The first has to do with timing. While a small and subtle impetus can push human history and civi­lization in a given direction, this impetus has to wait for the right moment. It is as if a rock is teetering over a precipice; one small push could make it go in either direction. But one might have to wait a long time before the rock comes into that position. Furthermore—since we are not dealing with rocks but with large currents in human life—it requires a great deal of discernment to see when that moment is at hand.

I would suggest that it is only from a higher perspec­tive that one can accurately see the moment at hand. It does not require the power of prophecy—indeed the record of prophets through the ages, from the Bible to Nostradamus to the tangle of pronouncements sur­rounding the year 2012, suggests that we have no rea­son whatsoever to believe in prophecies of any kind. But it does require a transcendent capacity to see the potentialities in the present—and to know how to make use of them. We could call this kind of knowledge and power an "esoteric impulse." 

The second thing that strikes me is that these eso­teric impulses run down after a time. The school of Pythagoras died out not long after his lifetime in the sixth century B.C. The schools that built the great cathe­drals left buildings as monuments to their legacy; they did not perpetuate themselves as schools. The Brethren of the Common Life vanished from history around the time of the Reformation.

What happens when an esoteric impulse withers away? Or, to put it in familiar language: "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?" (Matt. 5:13). 

To begin with, the founding figures pass from the scene, replaced by followers in whose minds the origi­nal  ideas take up a comfortable slumber. Practices become rote and mechanical, and the purpose behind them is forgotten. There is a curious story about a spiritual teacher who had a cat that misbehaved. To keep it from causing trouble, the teacher told one of his students to catch the cat before meetings and tie it up. The years passed; the cat died; the master died. But the school went on. Hundreds of years later, before each meeting, the followers still had to find a cat to tie up.

In the end, the energy fueling organizations of this kind is provided mostly by inertia. Sooner or later even this runs out, and the movement dwindles away. This does not always happen overnight. Much has been made of the Christians closing down the pagan temples in late antiquity, but people often forget that the energy of paganism had been dying for centuries. Around A.D. 100 the Greek author Plutarch wrote a treatise called On the Failure of the Oracles, lamenting that of the great oracles that had once been so admired in the classical world, "silence has come upon some and utter desola­tion upon others." Plutarch was in a position to know, since he served for many years as a priest at the cel­ebrated oracle of Delphi. The job apparently left him plenty of time for writing. 

What happens after the temples have closed? Some­times the impulse survives in a new and unrecogniz­able form, as Christianity in many ways carried on the traditions of the old mystery religions. Sometimes it goes underground for centuries, passed on only in tiny groups or even in one-on-one transmissions, as seems to have been the case with much of the "old religion" of pre-Christian Europe. In still other cases it may vanish entirely. Then, when the oracles are most silent and the rituals most mechanical, a new impulse arises—per­haps from the esoteric orders on the inner planes that are said to watch over human evolution—and the cycle starts all over again.

Richard Smoley

Printed in the Summer 2013 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Todd, Larry  "A Touch of BODHICITTA" Quest  101. 3 (Summer 2013): pg. 110-113. 

By Larry Todd

With career and home responsibilities, social obligations, and a host of other details, it's easy to become discon­nected from the unseen realms of exis­tence we Theosophists like to contemplate. Becoming too engrossed in mundane activities (no matter how virtuous our intention) can inadvertently produce an entire host of karmic consequences. In fact, it's so easy to do that many times we don't even realize we've done it until there is a consequence that involves our own suffering.

That's exactly the situation I found myself in as a young man. In my youth, I enjoyed thinking of myself as a good person. Yet over time my life increasingly became filled with things centered around myself. Underneath my persona was a steady undercurrent of dissatisfaction. This, combined with the lack of a proper mentor, left me searching for an exit.

What appeared to be a convenient escape at that time was an active social life. As social obligations began to mount and take precedence over my goals for the future, I found myself engaging in certain risky activi­ties—namely substance abuse. Gradually, my lifestyle led me into some very dark places, and I found myself isolated. Even my own family ostracized me. Things got so bad for me that many times I found myself hungry, broke, or occasionally even homeless. I had to rely on others for basic provisions, and I would get into alter­cations as a consequence of my choices. I often ended up hurt or hurting someone else. I eventually resorted to a life of crime and spent short stints in and out of jails and prisons.

Fortunately, I was able to find moral refuge in a friend I'd made named Cinda, who worked nights at a local pizzeria. She didn't have a lot, and she worked very hard for little money to help her mother, who struggled with bills. But she loved to engage in intense dialogue when it came to matters of the heart.

Cinda was always glad to see me when I visited her at work. It became a nightly ritual for us. She was intuitive and intelligent. Often she could tell that I was hungry without even asking me. More often than not, she would cook something for me to eat and pay for it out of her own pocket or her tips. She would hand me a fistful of quarters and ask me to go select some songs on the jukebox. As soon as the music began, she wasted no time making inquiries into my latest activities. She was a conversationalist, and much of the time she could be very candid or even cynical. If you didn't know her, you might even find yourself offended by he direct approach.

We would talk for hours on end, exchanging ideas and building on them. We compared experiences and interjected snippets of humor wherever we could. She would scold me for using drugs and for other risky behaviors. Her words, no matter how harsh, were satu­rated with truth and burned deep into my conscience She would burst into laughter after administering a heavy dose of hard truth, relishing my facial expression when suddenly I realized I was wrong.

Healthy debate was just part of who we were, and many of our "build sessions" ended up centered around her attempt to convince me that my views were dis­torted and unrealistic. Yet she backed her arguments with logic. She also seemed to have an endless supply of forgiveness and selfless energy. Cinda was highly sensitive to the needs of others and often took in sick or injured animals (or people). There were a few nights when even I found myself sleeping on her couch. She was giving to a fault and was herself a victim many times because of this quality.

She was a bit of a mythology buff and prided herself on knowing every detail about a multifaceted range of pantheons. She was a huge believer in magic and a student of occult schools of thought. Our conversations wandered off into topics of occult science, such as divi­nation, astrology, psychometry, and psychism.

On a certain occasion, I got involved in an alter­cation with an intoxicated man outside of a motel room. I was alone at the time, and this individual beat me until I lost consciousness. When things came back into focus, someone was holding my head in her arms and calling my name. I still do not know how Cinda found me, but she never left until I was able to get up on my own.

There were times when she clothed me or wrote me when I was in jail. Time and circumstances altered our paths, however, and as a result our lives took different courses. Eventually I landed myself into one too many criminal cases and was sent to prison for sixteen man­datory years. After ten years, all of my immediate rela­tives had died, and I found myself struggling to survive prison life without outside help or support.

After an unintended run-in with an old acquain­tance, I received word that Cinda had returned home and was once again living with her mother. The acquain­tance told me that she knew where I was and wanted me to write her. It had been years since I'd even talked to anyone from home and at least twenty years since I'd talked to Cinda. So naturally I was excited and wasted no time in reestablishing contact with my old friend. Soon I received a response from her, but with some unexpected and disturbing news. Cinda had developed stage four metastasized breast cancer and had only a short while to live.

I was instantly heartbroken. Shortly before rees­tablishing contact with Cinda, I had decided to initi­ate some much-needed changes in my own life. I'd befriended a Jew in prison who was a Buddhist con­vert. It was through the patience of this individual that I was able to question my own views on the purpose of life. I began to study Tibetan Buddhism and through my friend got into contact with certain charitable monas­tic teachers. I underwent Mahayana thought training techniques.

This really helped me put my behavior under the microscope and make some critical adjustments. I began practicing Tantric yoga meditation and was able to modify my behavior using these time-tested formu­las. I began to intensify my study and set new goals. I got back in school and began working towards my Gen­eral Educational Development (GED) credential. As I began learning about impermanence and the dangers of attachment, my friend was suffering and dying. She was able to recognize this change, and for the first time in a very long time I was back in control. She turned to me for moral support.

I passed my GED and was stunned to learn that my scores were among the highest in the country. I even received a letter from the White House signed by Presi­dent Barack Obama congratulating me on my achieve­ment and encouraging me to use what I learned to help others do the same thing. I was granted a Georgia HOPE scholarship and was offered a job as a teach­er's aide by the education director, which I accepted. I immediately signed up for vocational and college courses being offered at the time.

When I'd first received word of Cinda's situation, I loathed thinking of the inevitable. After learning her prognosis was only giving her perhaps a year or two left to live, she asked me to help her study treatment options. Cinda had been a lifelong sufferer from manic depression and bipolar disorder. Usually medication would help treat this, but when she started chemother­apy her insurance would not cover both cancer treat­ment drugs and mental health medication.

After reading Deepak Chopra's book Quantum Healing, I became convinced that sickness in the human body actually starts in the mind and subtle body. I wrote my teachers at Sravasti Abbey in Spokane, Washington. I explained Cinda's situation and asked for assistance from a monastic named Karma Zopa. We found a Bud­dhist retreat at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado. They had a yearly program to help women suffering from the effects of cancer learn how to cope with the disease and research alternative treatment options such as ayurvedic healing and holistic medicine.

I was convinced that Cinda's cancer was a direct result of her depression. My teachers also believed this, and counseled Cinda along the way. I sent her Medicine Buddha and White Tara meditations. With the help of Karma Zopa, I was able to secure Cinda a scholarship into the retreat, and I found a donor for her round-trip airfare.

Cinda's cancer had spread to her liver, lungs, and skeleton. She was in a lot of pain most of the time. She'd just had a mastectomy, and this did nothing to boost her confidence. Yet she endured with a positive attitude, still giving to and helping others. Over the next year, she wrote and sent keepsakes, and, if only for a moment, we were back to our deep build sessions again. The only difference being that this time my mind was in a better place than ever before, and instead of Cinda doing most of the giving in our relationship, I was able to find ways to help her cope.

Eventually, Cinda became addicted to the pain­killers she was prescribed, and this obstructed her abil­ity to combat her illness using ayurvedic techniques. The month she was scheduled to go to the retreat, she succumbed to her illness and died. I, of course, was devastated. I sought refuge in the sangha at Sravasti Abbey and began my own three-month Vajrasattva purification retreat. My teachers sent cards to console and encourage me, and Karma Zopa suggested that I  think of Cinda with buddha now and myself with Buddha as well.

I must admit that when practicing single-pointed concentration during my meditations, it was difficult not to dwell on my hurt until the strangest thing hap­pened to me. One night, while practicing my mantra recitations, I began to hear a faint echo. It became louder and more distinctive only when my concentra­tion on the Buddha was strongest. I recognized it as a female voice chanting in perfect concert with my own. It was at that point that I realized that everything I'd endured and accomplished was worthwhile. Karma Zopa's words became surreally true. The lesson was love.

I am so happy to have a chance to share this story with Quest readers. I only hope it will serve to pro­vide you with an inspirational lift. The Sanskrit word for compassion Buddhists use is bodhicitta. I am for­tunate to have shared in this up close and personal bodhicitta experience with Cinda and the sangha. I feel I am a better person for knowing Cinda. Even at the very end, she was more worried about how I would take her death than she was about death itself. She was concerned that people would not remember her for her personality but for her suffering. I assured her that this would not be the case.

I feel saddened, not for Cinda, but for the people who lost all benefit of knowing her and experiencing the bodhicitta energy she radiated. Her smile alone had a way of changing the entire atmosphere of a room. It's funny what just offering a smile can do to change the heart of another. I have since been fortunate enough to start participating in hospice volunteer work in prison with sick and dying prisoners. It's rewarding in its own way.

The Sanskrit word namaste describes the intercon­nectedness or universal consciousness we all share with one another in the divine scheme of things. We can learn a lot from suffering. We can help alleviate much of our own suffering just by being attentive to the needs of others less fortunate than ourselves. It's just that some­times we need to slow down in our lives to both rec­ognize and share in the suffering of others. It's easy to take life for granted. There is a lot to which we are not paying attention. What more can we give of ourselves? Cinda once told me that love is something you give and not something you get. Love, bodhicitta, simply put, is perhaps best described as the gift of oneself.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is quoted as saying:

Because we all share an identical need for love, it is pos­sible to feel that anyone we meet, in whatever circum­stances, is a brother or sister. No matter how different the dress and behavior, there is no significant division between us and others ... our basic natures are the same.

If you're bogged down and find yourself seeking a remedy for microcosmic and macrocosmic disharmony, then slow down and exude bodhicitta energy. Taking time out to understand the suffering of another and becoming a source of refuge for that suffering individ­ual is the same as reaching out to our own suffering selves. Just a touch of bodhicitta will do.

LARRY TODD, a native of Savannah, Georgia, is serving a sixteen-year prison sentence. He is due for release in 2016. He is currently taking a study course in raja yoga with the Theosophical Society.

Printed in the Summer 2013 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Young, George M. "Navigating Spaceship Earth: Four Russian Cosmists" Quest  101. 3 (Summer 2013): pg. 105-108, 120.

By George M. Young

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,  a tendency emerged in Russian thought that went beyond socioeconomic, political, and geographic considerations to examine our cosmic dimensions, and to suggest that our field of awareness, activity, and influence extends even beyond planetary boundaries to include the entire universe.

The Russian Cosmists, as these thinkers are called today, did not consider themselves part of a coher­ent school, and only in retrospect can they be seen to have shared a common core of themes and convic­tions. Some, like Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky, were primarily religious thinkers. Others, like Vladimir Vernadsky, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Alexander Chizhevsky, were scientists. What they shared was a conviction that we are very much more than earthly beings, that we are active agents of our own evolution, and that we should direct all spiritual, scientific, and even esoteric knowledge and effort to realize the long and widely held dream of universal human immortality. We are, as one of these thinkers put it, not earthlings, but "heaven dwellers."

Of the ten or so major Cosmists I would like to focus here on four: Nikolai Fyodorov (1829-1903; his surname is sometimes transliterated as "Fedorov"), the eccentric librarian and futuristic religious thinker from whom— or sometimes against whom—all the later Cos-mists develop their positions; Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), who as a teenager considered Fyodorov his "university" and went on to become the grandfather of the Russian space program; Alexander Chizhevsky (1897-1964), who as a young man was mentored by Tsiolkovsky and went on to investigate (among other things) periodicity in nature and the influence of cos­mic energy on cycles of human behavior; and Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), an eminent scientist proficient in many disciplines, who developed the idea of the "noosphere," a sheath of mental energy surrounding the planet.

Fyodorov, the founder of the Cosmist tendency, was born in the south of Russia, an illegitimate son of Prince Pavel Gagarin, who was a scion of one of Rus­sia's oldest and most distinguished families. The roots of the Gagarins extend back to Riurik, the legendary founder of Russia, and extend forward to include Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. Prince Pavel himself was a black sheep; he left the Gagarin estates to lead a bohemian life as impresario of a theater and bur­lesque house in Odessa. Almost nothing is known about Fyodorov's mother, and his surname came from the godfather at the christening. Fyodorov grew up as both a Gagarin and not a Gagarin, and in his mature writings always takes the point of view of the outsider looking in, a voice from the uneducated masses speak­ing to a learned elite. A major theme in all his writ­ings is the need to overcome divisions: between classes, generations, and academic disciplines, between theory and practice, ideal and reality. All now divided must be brought back together, especially sons and fathers, the living and the dead. Duty and responsibility were cardinal virtues for Fyodorov, absent in the world as it is, dominant in the world as it ought to be.

In his lifetime Fyodorov was best known for his twenty-five years of service in the great Rumiantsev Museum, which now forms a wing of the enormous Russian National Library. Occupying a minor position and refusing all offers of promotion, he became a legend of erudition, said to know not only the title but a sum­mary of the contents of every item in the vast library, and a reader ordering materials would often receive extra items he had not even heard of that turned out to be relevant, even essential, to his research. A lifelong ascetic bachelor, Fyodorov lived alone, changing resi­dences every year or so, usually a single closet-sized rented room or corner of someone's apartment. He slept on a humpback trunk, sometimes bare, sometimes covered with newspapers, placing under his head not a pillow but some hard object, usually a book. The only coat he wore every day, summer or winter, was more rag than coat, and strangers easily mistook him for a beggar on the streets. He had no furniture, and each time he moved to new quarters he gave away whatever objects the room had accumulated. He spent nothing on entertainment, diversion, or any conveniences, and he refused to take cabs even in the coldest winter months. He drank only tea, ate hard rolls, sometimes accom­panied by a piece of old cheese or salt fish, and lived for months without a hot meal. He considered wealth poisonous and vile, rejected all offers of raises, gave away most of his meager salary, and cursed himself if he came home at night with a few kopecks left in his pocket that he had not managed to give away.

Every researcher at the library knew Fyodorov as an ideal, if eccentric, librarian. But only a very few knew that he was also a thinker—in Berdyaev's opinion the most original and "most Russian" in Russian his­tory. Leo Tolstoy, who looked down on tsars, generals, popes, and emperors, considered himself fortunate to have lived in the same century as Fyodorov. Solovyov, usually considered Russia's greatest philosopher, con­sidered Fyodorov his master and spiritual father and Fyodorov's idea the first forward movement of the human spirit since the time of Christ. So what was so important about Fyodorov?

The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin has drawn a famous dichotomy between foxes, who know many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. Fyodorov was a supreme hedgehog, a thinker with one huge idea. And though it is a very complex idea with any number of parts, in its simplest statement his idea is that we all should stop everything that we are now diversely doing and devote all our time, energy, effort, and knowledge to what he called "the common task" of resurrecting all the dead. And he meant this literally. In his view everything in the physical, social, moral uni­verse is now disintegrating and pointed toward death, and it is humanity's task to overcome death and redirect everything toward eternal life. Nature is the force of disintegration, and God gave us human reason to regu­late nature. We should be mindless nature's mind, blind nature's eyes. For Fyodorov, an Orthodox believer, true Christianity can only be the practice of actively resur­recting the dead. All science must become the science of resurrection. 

As early as the 1860s Fyodorov was proposing things like what we now call cloning, genetic engineer­ing, artificial organs, space travel, and colonization. For Fyodorov, all matter contains particles of our disinte­grated ancestors. Advanced science must find a way to restore whole persons from individual particles, and since some of these have dispersed beyond earth, we must go into space to gather in the dispersed particles of our ancestors. Combining knowledge and action, sci­ence, religion, and art, everyone will join the project. Everyone living will become a resurrector, Christian in practice, regardless of belief or unbelief. Sons and daughters will resurrect their parents, who in turn will resurrect their parents, and so all the way back to Adam and Eve.

To those who worried about overpopulation and wondered where on earth we would put all those resurrected, Fyodorov answered: that's why we must colonize space. The resurrected ancestors would have new bodies engineered to live in places throughout the universe currently unable to support life. Going even further, Fyodorov proposed that as part of regulating nature we learn to overcome gravity and time; eventu­ally we should be able to guide our planet out of its nat­ural orbit and sail it like a boat in directions of our own rational choice. A hundred years before R. Buckminster Fuller, Fyodorov proposed that we become "captain and crew of spaceship earth." In today's terminology, Fyodorov wanted to turn the exploding cosmos into an eternal steady state, shaped not as constellations of figures from pagan Greek myths, but as a human-regu­lated sidereal icon of the Holy Trinity.

The few contemporaries who learned of Fyodorov's idea and incorporated at least parts of it—the moral and religious, not scientific or technological parts—into their own works included three of the greatest: Tolstoy, Solovyov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Another younger contemporary who did incorporate Fyodorov's scien­tific ideas into his own was Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky, a nearly deaf raw youth who came to Mos­cow penniless but in hopes of somehow obtaining in the great library an education beyond his minimal school­ing back home in Kaluga. Fyodorov immediately rec­ognized the young man's potential. He took him under Ms wing, brought him stacks of guided readings, set problems for him, taught him to take notes and use a conspectus, provided money for necessities whenever possible, and, as Tsiolkovsky later gratefully wrote, took the place of the university professors he was unable to study under. 

After a few years in Moscow, Tsiolkovsky returned to his village near Kaluga to become an elementary science teacher while dreaming of interplanetary travel. He began to make notebook sketches for rocket boats rocket wagons, and rocket-powered spaceships and to write fictional accounts of space voyages. What distin­guished Tsiolkovsky's imagination from that of any of his contemporaries is that after writing fantasy narra­tives and drawing rough pencil sketches, he developed the mathematical formulas that would make the realiza­tion of some of his fantasies possible. Over the years, while still teaching school and working after hours in a homemade attic laboratory, he built a series of large wooden model rockets, dirigibles, aerostats, wind tun­nels, centrifuges, and primitive space vehicles, and wrote the papers that would eventually lay the founda­tion for the 1957 launching of Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite.

Tsiolkovsky's great accomplishment as a scientist was not only to quantify the dream of space travel through mathematical equations, but to actively pro­mote and popularize the idea of flight beyond earth, to inspire an enthusiasm for rocket science among young people and even schoolchildren throughout the Soviet Union. He provided a kindly, grandfatherly, down-to-earth image for an otherwise daunting field of study.

Among the young readers who grew up to be out­standing scientists were the cosmonaut and first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the Cosmist heliobiologist Alexander Chezhevsky, whose ideas we shall discuss below. 

But it is not only rocket scientists who are interested in Tsiolkovsky. From early in his career through late in life, he speculated about man's relationship to the cos­mos. Some of these speculations found their way into his science fiction narratives, others were published in tiny editions as discursive pamphlets or tracts, but most remained unpublished during his lifetime, and have only begun to emerge since the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of these speculations, many of them probably derived from H.P. Blavatsky, in whose writ­ings he was deeply interested, Tsiolkovsky has become something of a New Age cult figure in Russia, and his home and museum in Kaluga (which was also the home of Elena Pisareva, a leading early Theosophist and pub­lisher of Theosophical works), have become a destina­tion for esoteric as well as scientific pilgrims.

One of Tsiolkovsky's central ideas has to do with the presence of life and spirit in all matter. He writes: "I am not only a materialist, but also a panpsychist, recog­nizing the sensitivity of the entire universe. I consider this characteristic inseparable from matter. Everything is alive, but with the condition that we consider living only that which possesses a sufficiently strong sense of feeling. Since everything that is matter can, under favorable circumstances, convert to an organic state, then we can conditionally say that inorganic matter is in embryo (potentially) living." 

An idea at the heart of most of Tsiolkovsky's non­technical writings is that of the "atom-spirit" (atorn­dukh) inherent in every particle of matter in the cosmos, recalling Fyodomv's idea of all matter as the dust of ancestors. But where Fyodorov believed that we must redirect and reshape the cosmos, Tsiolkovsky's view of the cosmos is that it is already teleological, rationally organized, and hierarchical. Lower life forms, consist­ing mainly of matter in which spirit is dormant, naturally evolve into higher ones, in which the spirit is awakened and more dominant. Eventually as we approach perfec­tion, we will outgrow our material envelopes and join the rays of cosmic energy that constitute something like the pleroma of the Gnostics. In Tsiolkovsky's view, our earth probably represents an early, primitive stage of planetary evolution, and elsewhere in the cosmos life forms have advanced much further. These advanced "atom-spirits" are already in communication with us, but only geniuses —artists, scientists, mahatmas, and the like—are attuned to their messages.

As in the 1870s Fyodorov was mentor to the six­teen-year-old Tsiolkovsky, in 1914 Tsiolkovsky became mentor to seventeen-year-old Alexander Chizhevsky, a sensitive but fragile wunderkind from a privileged background, who began his intellectual life as a poet and painter, talents he continued to exercise through life. As a child, Chizhevsky was taken to Italy every winter, where, as he writes in his autobiography, he began his lifelong fascination with, even worship of, the sun. When his father was appointed commander of a regiment in Kaluga, the family moved there, and the boy genius Chizhevsky soon came under the wing of the eccentric rocket genius Tsiolkovsky. Though they worked in different fields, their close association continued for the rest of Tsiolkovsky's life, and today in Kaluga the Tsiolkovsky Museum of Cosmonautics houses a Chizhevsky Museum as a wing. It was under Tsiolkovsky's influence that Chizhevsky's intellectual interests, always broad, ranging from ancient lan­guages to neoimpressionist painting, gradually began to expand further to include the sciences.

The works that would earn Chizhevsky an inter­national reputation as a "Da Vinci of the twentieth century;' and a nomination (though unsuccessful) for a Nobel Prize, were his discoveries in aero-ionization, which included the invention of an air purification device called the "Chizhevsky Chandelier," and studies in hemodynarnics, which shed new light on the cycling of blood through living bodies. These studies, some first published in French, others in Russian, fell within the limits of acceptable Soviet science and brought Chizhevsky high national and international honors. 

But his most important work, in heliobiology, dem­onstrating the effects of solar pulsations on human life, provoked accusations of mysticism, occultism, and irra­tionality. Eventually, during the Stalinist terror, these accusations led to his arrest as an "enemy under the mask of a scientist," resulting in sixteen years in prison camps and exile, from 1942 until his rehabilitation in 1958. During this period of imprisonment and exile, despite special punishment for refusing to wear a large prison number on his back and for objecting to being addressed in the familiar second person singular, he still painted, wrote poetry, and, with whatever means he could find, continued to conduct scientific research. At one point, realizing that they had an internation­ally famous biologist in their hands, prison authorities dragged Chizhevsky barely alive from a punishment cell to see if he could stop a cholera epidemic that was sweeping the camp—which, with bleaching powder and other crude remedies at hand, he managed to do. As a reward, he was allowed to set up a minimal labo­ratory in the prison clinic. Here, using only a borrowed microscope and glass capillaries, he conducted ground­breaking investigations into the movement of blood.

In one of his most controversial works, published in 1922, Chizhevsky provides a number of charts in which he correlates the fluctuations of sunspots with the up-and-down periods of violence in human history. In these charts, covering two thousand years, the cor­relation is almost too perfect to be credible, with peri­ods of what he calls maximum universal excitability coinciding with maximum solar activity, and stretches of relative international calm coinciding with minimal solar activity.

During his career, Chizhevsky, like the other Cosmists, was frequently accused of trying to take science back to a prescientific state, for  attempting to replace chemistry with alchemy, astronomy with astrology. Chizhevsky, like the other Cosmists, strongly denied these allegations, but added that he did respect and did wish to restore to modern science not the actual prac­tices of alchemy and astrology, but the intuition under­lying those prescientific efforts. He argued that in some very profound and mysterious but eventually definable way we and all matter in the cosmos are one, and that through exchanges of energies and matter, via particles and rays, elemental transformations, cosmic and local, physical and psychological, can result. 

Vladimir Vernadsky was another scientist hon­ored for his writings on the biosphere but derided for speculations about what he called the transition of the biosphere into a "noosphere" (from the Greek nous, "mind"), a sheath of life increasingly infused with and directed by the human mind. In the West, the concept of the noosphere is best known through the writings of Vernadsky's French colleague, Pierre Teilhard de Char-din, who attended a course of lectures Vernadsky deliv­ered at the Sorbonne and probably developed his own concepts under the influence of and in collaboration with Vernadsky. But it is through Vernadsky's deeper and broader extensions of the idea that the noosphere has become such an important concept in Russian Cos-mist speculation. Vernadsky contended that although it cannot be measured or detected by standard instru­ments, the noosphere is as real and important as the stratosphere or ionosphere. He believed that our plan­et's transition from the biosphere, the sheath of living matter, to the noosphere, the sheath of thinking matter, will be as crucial a stage in geology as earlier transitions from a lifeless orbiting rock to a teeming biosphere. In Vernadsky's view, we share the biosphere with all liv­ing matter—vegetables, animals, other humans. We are related to all, and, as the rational component of living matter, we bear responsibility for all.

Although not religious in any traditional sense, Ver­nadsky was a deeply spiritual thinker, and his idea of the noosphere as a nonmaterial sheath of intellectual matter and recorded mental activity enveloping the biosphere in some ways resembles the Theosophical concept of akasha. Vernadsky's spiritual and scientific vision was of a wholly interconnected cosmos. Man in Vernadsky is both a result of and an active partici­pant in the ongoing natural evolution of the cosmos, which nonmaterial as well as material realities operate. Like the other Cosmist thinkers, Vernadsky assumed that knowledge was whole, that scientific, spiritual moral, theoretical, and practical approaches would not lead toward different directions and goals, but would in the end unite in ultimate truth. As a political, cultural, and intellectual moderate living and working among radicals of all stripes and tendencies, as a profound traditionalist in revolutionary times, Vernadsky suffered official slights, threats, and harassment throughout his career. But even through the worst conditions, he remained loyally, thoroughly Russian, refused to adapt science to politics, refused all opportunities to emigrate, and as conditions have improved has emerge as a model of scientific genius and intellectual integrity.

None of the Russian Cosmists was a pure Theo­sophist, but all were at one time or another familiar with, attracted to, and influenced by HPB's writings. They were not afraid to go against current intellectual tendencies, nor hesitant to undertake unconventional researches. They found new scientific worth in long ignored or rejected bodies of knowledge and directions of enquiry. Though not intended as such, their works as a whole can be read as reasonable responses to the Third Object of Theosophy: to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.

George M. Young is a Fellow at the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England. He is the author of The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Further Reading

Bales, Kendell E. Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolution: V.I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863?1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Holquist, Michael. "Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: Science Fiction and Philosophy in the History of Soviet Space Exploration." In Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. George E Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 74-86.

Masing-Delic, Irene. Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Printed in the Summer 2013 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Sender, Pablo. "The Esoteric School of Theosophy" Quest  101. 3 (Summer 2013): pg. 100-104.

By Pablo Sender

Every person that joins the Theosophical Society receives a welcoming letter from the current international president, Radha Burnier. At the end there is a somewhat mysterious postscript:

There is an Esoteric School connected with the Theosophical Society, which those who have been members of the Society for a certain time and who fulfill the required conditions may enter if they wish. The Esoteric School is meant for all those who wish to live truly Theosophical lives, and not merely study Theosophy. Wisdom comes to those whose minds are capable of receiving it. Mem­bers of the Esoteric School prepare themselves by a life of purity and self-discipline to become worthy to receive [the wisdom].

What is the Esoteric School? What do their mem­bers do that cannot be done in the Society as a whole? And what are the "required conditions" to enter?

The Esoteric School (ES) developed in the first decades of the life of the Theosophical Society. Before we can better understand its nature and purpose, we need to examine briefly the history of its formation.

A New Experiment

Most spiritual and religious organizations throughout recorded history were designed to promote a specific set of teachings given by their founders. These teach­ings brought light to many around the world but unfor­tunately also led to quarrels among the different beliefs. Thus religions have frequently acted as means of divi­sion rather than of union.

The founding of the Theosophical Society in 1875 was described as an "experiment" in a new approach (Chin, 125). It too was inspired by some enlightened beings (known as the Mahatmas or Masters of Wisdom), and its founders and leaders also gave some specific teachings we call "modern Theosophy". But the TS was not meant to become one more sect among many, promoting its own teachings exclusively. Rather, the goal was to form a nucleus of universal brotherhood without distinctions—a brotherhood that is not based on the profession of a common faith, but one where people with different beliefs and views can come, share, learn, and work together, united in the common aspiration to find truth by whatever path each person chooses. While some members may feel attracted to Theosophical teachings, those who feel differently are free to follow their own paths, without being compelled to adopt any particular approach.

This open platform, which offers the freedom nec­essary to bring people together from different tradi­tions or none, also has certain limitations, which soon became evident. As the Theosophical teachings spread, a number of people were inspired by them and joined the TS. Naturally enough, these members longed to have a space entirely dedicated to a spiritual discipline based on these principles. But they could not do this in their lodges without limiting the freedom of those who wanted to study different teachings. Should the TS give up its attempt to be a universal brotherhood and promote one particular way of life? Or should it merely become an organization to spread teachings from dif­ferent traditions, leaving those who longed to live a Theosophical life alone in their efforts?

Early attempts to address this problem were made by forming "inner groups" within some TS lodges. However, none of these loosely organized efforts were successful. Finally, in 1888, after repeated requests, H.P. Blavatsky agreed to create a special section within the TS called the "Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society" The ES provided a way to encourage among its members the practice of the spiritual life based on Theosophical teachings, while at the same time protect­ing the nonsectarian quality of the TS as a whole.

This section, headed by Mme. Blavatsky, was to be independent and to be connected to the general Soci­ety only through the Society's president and founder, Henry Steel Olcott. But sometime before her death in 1891, HPB decided that "all official connection between the two should end" so that "the perfect freedom and public character of the Society" could not be interfered with (Blavatsky, 12:485). The name of the ES was then changed to "Eastern School of Theosophy," and later to its current one: "Esoteric School of Theosophy." Today the two organizations are independent and have no offi­cial connection, save in the fact that only members of the TS can be admitted into the ES.

Beyond the Great Range

In order to understand the character of the ES we need to examine one more element that played an important role in its formation.

One of Mme. Blavatsky's goals was to oppose the growing scientism of her era, which portrayed the uni­verse as a clockwork mechanism with no room or need for anything religious or spiritual. To this end she per­formed occult phenomena that could not be explained by the laws known to the scientists of the time, showing there were realities beyond their ken. (For more infor­mation about this, see my article "Psychic Phenomena and the Early Theosophical Society," Quest, Summer 2012.) These phenomena, HPB claimed, were not "miracles" of any kind. They followed certain "occult laws" well known to the Masters of Wisdom, of whom she was a disciple and with whom she and some other members were in direct communication.

In the early 1880s, two disgruntled employees at the international headquarters of the TS in India accused HPB of faking the phenomena and forging the com­munications coming from the Masters. Richard Hodg­son, a young and inexperienced member of the newly formed Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in Britain, went to India to investigate the charges. In a report published in 1885, he pronounced her a fraud. This, of course, became worldwide news, making Hodgson and the SPR famous.

As was shown in later studies, Hodgson systemati­cally disregarded the evidence in favor of HPB. In 1986, over a hundred years later, Vernon Harrison, a long­standing member of the SPR and an expert on forgery, published a study of the Hodgson report in the SPR Journal. Harrison concluded that HPB was unjustly condemned. (For an online version of Harrison's study, visit www.theosociety.org/pasadena/hpb-spr/hpbspr-h.htm.) Nevertheless, when it first appeared, the Hodgson report was almost a deathblow to the TS, and even HPB feared that this would destroy it. In an attempt to save the Society, Olcott proposed to redi­rect its activity and publications, dropping all mention of phenomena, the occult, and the Masters, to work on the less controversial field of comparative religion, phi­losophy, and science.

One of the Masters, Koot Hoomi, said that although this move was well-calculated to save the physical integrity of the Society, it would kill its soul.

The Society has liberated itself from our grasp and influ­ence and we have let it go—we make no unwilling slaves. He [Olcott] says he has saved it? He saved its body, but he allowed through sheer fear, to its soul to escape, and it is now a soulless corpse, a machine run so far well enough, but which will fall to pieces when he is gone. Out of the three objects the second alone is attended to, but it is no longer either a brotherhood, nor a body over the face of which broods the Spirit from beyond the Great Range. (Jinarajadasa, 125-26)

By denying its "occult" dimension the TS had become an exoteric organization with lofty aims, but empty of its occult life, and the influence of the Masters was seriously restricted. But even if the TS could suc­cessfully limit itself to the exoteric field, it would still be doomed to fail. Why? Probably because the foundation stones of the TS were not laid with the exoteric work in view. No organization that deals with subjects such as the Lemurian and Atlantean civilizations, psychic phenomena, unseen Masters and their disciples, and occult initiations is fit to be a "respectable" member of the academic world.

Mme. Blavatsky, aware of this situation, was seeking a way of retaining the link between the TS and its occult source of inspiration. The formation of the ES afforded this opportunity, as the existence of the Masters was naturally and openly accepted by those members eager to lead a spiritual life based on Theosophical teachings.

The Purpose of the ES

Although a feeling of devotion to the Masters and their work for humanity is an important element for many of its members, the ES is not a temple where the Mas­ters are worshipped, nor is it intended to fulfill the role of a religion. The meetings revolve around a medita­tive study and inquiry on Theosophical spirituality, and the members agree to follow a daily discipline based on purity of life, meditation, study, service, and self-awareness.

Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that the ES is not primarily meant to promote the members' personal development. The ES aims at preparing peo­ple to be helpers of humanity.

The ideal aspirant is one who sees the depth of the ignorance and suffering in which he (or she) and the world are buried. Being sensitive to this state of affairs, he wonders how things could be changed. He may help to palliate the suffering through charitable orga­nizations, education, and movements for social reform, but he sees that, although external changes are useful and even necessary, they do not address the root of the problem. The real cause of sorrow is in the hearts and minds of people. What is needed is to help humanity move from a selfish to an unselfish state of conscious­ness. But he realizes that only those who are beyond the need of help can really help others, and that he can participate in this work to the extent that he frees him­self from his own spiritual ignorance. Individual spiri­tual growth is necessary, not as an end in itself, but as a means to a wider, collective goal. Thus the ES offers a path for transcending the personal ego so that the aspi­rant can assist the Masters in their altruistic work.

The ES is an occult organization, but only in the sense in which the word "occult" was used at the time of its formation. (The word "occultism" was made pop­ular by the TS in the late nineteenth century. At the time, it was used to refer to the spiritual path that leads one from the personal ego to the higher Self. Later the word was applied by other movements and authors to a variety of things that Mme. Blavatsky used to call the "occult arts.") The ES was never meant to be a school of magic. In fact, both HPB and the Masters were opposed to the creation of such a thing, even though a number of members were asking for it. The ES does not teach how to develop psychic powers, to activate chakras, to awaken kundalini, or anything related to the manipulation of occult forces.

This degree of the Esoteric Section is probationary, and its general purpose is to prepare and fit the student for the study of practical occultism or Raj yoga. Therefore, in this degree, the student —save in exceptional cases—will not be taught how to produce physical phenomena, nor will any magical powers be allowed to develop in him; nor, if possessing such powers naturally, will he be permitted to exercise them before he has thoroughly mastered the knowledge of SELF, of the psycho-physiological processes (taking place on the occult plane) in the human body gen­erally, and until he has in abeyance all his lower passions and his PERSONAL SELF.

Disappointment is sure to come to those who have joined this Section for the purpose of learning "magic arts" or acquiring "occult training" for themselves, quite regardless of the good of other people less determined. (Blavatsky, 12:488)

HPB said that the study (let alone the practice) of occult teachings sets in motion forces that can harm students if they are not prepared (Blavatsky, 12:678­). Practical occultism should only be attempted by a person who has attained a certain degree of purity and transcended the illusion of the personal self. The purpose of the ES is to provide the tools for the ear­nest student to undergo this process of transformation. Once the student has accomplished it (which may take several lives of earnest work) a Master of Wisdom will accept him as a disciple. Only then he can safely start treading the path of practical occultism under the guid­ance of his Master.

While HPB was alive, the ES served as a place where she could impart some esoteric instructions related to this preparation for the occult path, to be worked out among the ES members before making them public. (In her view, whenever a person studies a subject he "magnetically" attracts the thought-forms produced by people who have previously studied the topic. These thought-forms may either help or hinder the understanding, depending on their accuracy. It was probably expected that the study by ES members would produce the right thought-forms before the gen­eral public had access to the teachings). Those teach­ings were later published partially by Annie Besant in her third volume of The Secret Doctrine and eventually made available in their entirety in volume twelve of Blavatsky's Collected Writings.

The ES is not esoteric because it has a body of teach­ings that are kept secret from the rest of the TS mem­bers. Although there is material produced specifically for the ES, these teachings can be found throughout the Theosophical literature. Rather the ES material focuses on the teachings that have to do with the practice of the spiritual life according to Theosophical principles. Thus the occult aspect of the school is not based on the exis­tence of special information or secret ceremonies, but on the inner processes to which members are subjected.

A second purpose of this organization has to do with the collective. Every homogeneous group of peo­ple becomes, consciously or unconsciously, a channel for different kinds of energies, whether spiritual, intel­lectual, or emotional, whether uplifting or debasing. The ES attempts to gather together a group of people with a common goal and lifestyle so that a certain influ­ence can be conveyed through them. (This, of course, does not mean that every person who joins the ES is inwardly in tune with its aim, or that there are no peo­ple outside the ES who are in harmony with its aim and work.) It is the duty of each ES member to do his best to attune himself to the aims of the ES and to be in harmony with other members, so that he becomes a vehicle instead of an obstruction for the energy that is intended to be spread.

Joining the ES

As was said before, the TS offers an open platform for everybody without asking its members to adopt any particular belief or practice. Those ready to fulfill the necessary requirements are free to join the ES, if they feel drawn to this particular spiritual path. But those TS members who are not particularly attracted to it are free to follow their own practice, if any, and this will in no way be a hindrance to their TS life and activities.

Any person, after having been an active member of the Theosophical Society for a couple of years, can apply to join the ES. However, because this school is meant as a place to tread a certain spiritual path and not merely to study about it, there are some conditions the aspirant has to fulfill. Some people dislike the fact  that they cannot be freely admitted, but this attitude does not seem reasonable. The ES is an organization that proposes a particular lifestyle. If somebody is not willing to adopt it, why would he want to join the ES? It is like wanting to join a tennis club while being unwill­ing to hit a ball with a racquet.

The requirements to join the ES should not be felt as an imposition from outside, but simply as part of a lifestyle the aspirant is ready to embrace willingly. Bla­vatsky wrote that although the discipline will not affect family duties, "every member of the Esoteric Section will have to give up more than one personal habit, such as practised in social life, and to adopt some few ascetic rules" (Blavatsky, 12:488).

For the ES to have any transformative effect, the aspirant has to be willing to work on any physical and psychological habits that may hinder his spiritual life. If a member is not willing to do this to the best of his capacity, joining the ES will not have a positive effect on him; moreover he will become an inharmonious ele­ment within the organization.

Let us now explore briefly the conditions of mem­bership. One of them is vegetarianism. (In the nine­teenth century it was difficult to be vegetarian in the West, so this rule was not compulsory. But today it is, since there are many options for a vegetarian diet.) According to Theosophical teachings, the consumption of meat stimulates the animal nature the aspirant is try­ing to fight against. Also, the influence of the Masters is hindered by an atmosphere saturated by the emana­tions from the slaughtered animals (Chin, 138). Finally, Theosophical teachings point out that the presence of a nervous system in an organism is the result of an active awareness on the emotional plane. This means that the capacity to feel pain is well developed in the animal kingdom (in vertebrates more than in invertebrates). Eating meat therefore goes against the development of compassion.

Another prerequisite is to avoid the consumption of drugs and alcohol, even if the aspirant wants to use them as alleged "spiritual" means. In the Theosophi­cal view, no artificially altered state of consciousness is regarded as valuable. Besides other harmful effects, these habits attract undesirable elementals and damage the pineal and pituitary glands, which are the organs for the reception of spiritual perception in the brain.

Finally, the sexual life of the aspirant has to be ordered and healthy. It is essential that it take place in the atmosphere of higher emotions, with a person he or she loves and feels responsible for, rather than as an act of gratification of the animal nature.

It is clear that these rules are not in themselves indicators of spirituality. A person may be able to ful­fill them quite easily and yet be thoroughly selfish and unfit for the spiritual path. Similarly, another person can be very spiritual and compassionate even if he does not follow them. These rules do not entail any moral judgment, but those willing to tread this particular path need to follow them, both for individual and collective reasons.  

Once the aspirant joins the ES, he agrees to follow a daily discipline based on the Theosophical principles of study, meditation, service, and self-awareness. How­ever, in the ES there are no gurus that take responsibil­ity for a member, or control what he does or does not do. The "control" comes from the law of karma: those who are serious receive help and guidance through what happens in their lives, while those who are not miss the opportunity and gradually stagnate. 

Effects of Joining  

Joining an occult organization such as the ES has some important effects on the neophyte. HPB explained it as follows:

As soon as anyone pledges himself as a "Probationer," cer­tain occult effects ensue. Of these the first is the throwing outward of everything latent in the nature of the man: his faults, habits, qualities, or subdued desires, whether good, bad, or indifferent ..

[The vices] will come to the front irrepressibly, and he will have to fight a hundred times harder than before, until he kills all such tendencies in himself.

On the other hand, if he ... has any virtue hitherto latent and concealed in him, it will work its way out as irrepressibly as the rest.

THIS IS AN IMMUTABLE LAW IN THE DOMAIN OF THE OCCULT.

Its action is the more marked the more earnest and sincere the desire of the candidate, and the more deeply he has felt the reality and importance of his pledge. (Bla­vatsky, 12:515)

We have to remember that the motive for joining the ES is not to make life more enjoyable, but to free oneself from the sources of ignorance as rapidly as possible, so that one becomes able to help others. The effects of the occult energies are similar to those of the sun when it begins to shine upon a hitherto obscured piece of land. Everything in it is vitalized, weeds as well as beauti­ful plants. As in an alchemical process, the neophyte's weaknesses and shortcomings will become more active, so that he has the opportunity to work on them for their purification and transmutation. But he will also have added strength to do this work.

However, there are those who, after experiencing this effect, fall into a tendency of self-delusion, not fac­ing honestly whatever is being brought up. The result of this attitude is that they fall prey to the negative side of this occult process (the stimulation of weaknesses) without taking advantage of the positive one (the addi­tional strength to deal with them).

An additional effect of a sincere intent in this direc­tion is that the neophyte's karma is "reorganized." Life becomes less random and acquires a specific direction that is clear to the observant aspirant. External situa­tions will be shaped in a way so as to afford the nec­essary challenges and opportunities for the work of inner alchemy. The earnest aspirant has nothing to fear. Nobody has to face more than he is capable of. And even though at times this is hard work, the bright side is that as a result of his efforts, he gradually attains more freedom, wisdom, and strength.

This inner work helps the aspirant progressively awaken to a deeper existence, and his life becomes more meaningful from a spiritual point of view. But maybe the most inspiring aspect of this path is the sense that he becomes a humble part of a mighty power that is toiling to ultimately ensure the happiness of humanity, and that every time he faces and defeats the "evil" inside himself, he is helping defeat it in the whole world.   

Sources

Blavatsky, H.P. Collected Writings. Edited by Boris de Zirkoff. 15 vols. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977-91.

Chin, Vicente Hao, Jr., ed. The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett in Chronological Sequence. Manila: Theosophical Publishing House, 1998.

Jinarajadasa, C., ed. Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom, First Series. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1919.