Quest Magazine

From an interpretation of the Tao Te Ching

by S.J. "Peaceman" McGuire

Originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: McGuire,S.J.. "The Tao of It." Quest  98. 4 (Fall 2010): 147-150.

1. it is

how can i explain it?

it goes beyond saying

it just is

it has been here all along

it is now

this is it

here is it

it is all around us

it is everywhere

it is everything

it is all there is

it is all it

it cannot be named

it is the name

consider it

it is even that which is not

it was even that which was not

it makes you wonder

that's about it

 

2. it is both

it is more than that

it is this and that

it is now and then

it is here and after

it is more or less

it is all or nothing

it is off and on

it is neither and both

it is either or

it rises and sets

it becomes what it is not

it knows what it needs to do

it is doing it

it comes and goes

it follows itself

it is one to the other

it is over when it's over

now you see it now you don't

it is not for us to say

it is as it does

it keeps on doing it

here it comes again

 

3. it's self

it's proof

it is self-evident

it is self-actuating

it happens all the time

there it is 'cause here it is

now it is this

keep it in perspective

think it over

let it go

it is not of us

it is us

we are not it

we are of it

let it be

it will come

it knows itself

it works itself out

 

4. it's all it ever was

same as it ever was

all it could ever be

as much as it needs

it's even where it's not

it's endless

it's beginningless

it's timeless

it doesn't matter where it comes from

don't dwell on it

it dwells in you

count on it

 

8. let it

it flows

it settles

it's self-leveling

it's happy where it is

it knows where to go

keep it connected

keep close with it

be fair about it

be generous with it

don't try to possess it

don't try to control it

don't try to own it

it's not for you to decide

it's for you to see

enjoy it

be good with it

be happy with it

it is working out for you

revel in it

it rests at your feet

 

10. as it may

can you do it?

will you do it?

how will it be for you?

will you allow it?

remember to remember it

let it happen

it's happening

go along with it

lift yourself up by it

take care of it

take care with it

watch and see how it goes

do it just because

don't take credit for it

 

18. it's like it knows what it's doing

is it any wonder?

it takes itself

it takes what it needs

it provides for itself

it has a way about it

it was so that it can be

it is so that it will be

it prepares for itself

it's self perpetuating

it's on purpose

it's self fulfilling

it pauses so it may resume

 

22. let it come to you

go through it

make way for it

have room for it

give in to it

be still for it

do it

save space for it

it's not for display

it's nothing to brag about

it shines

it speaks

it reveals itsself

how does it work?

it works its way

it validates itself

give it and it's yours

live it and you've got it

be it and it's you

 

25. it's the force behind the force

Jesus talked about it

Mohammad referred to it

in the beginning there was it

it was here before

it always was forever

it's calm and quiet

it's not

it begat it

it has been referred to as tao

it's not its real name

it flows throughout itself

it penetrates us

it binds us together

we are about it

it's great

its song is great

its word is great

it comes around to it

it is the gravity

it follows that it leads

it comes to this

it's before us

we ride upon it

 

26. rest in its might

it is where it comes from

we are from it

it's always the way

you must put it down to pick it up

you must step over it to get to it

why look for it beyond it

admire it from here

you have to let go of it to reach for it

don't you get it?

it's instinctual

you know it right now

 

33. it's all there within you

it's not about who or what

it's how

know it yourself

you master it as it masters you

having it is everything

with it there is you everlasting

it is to be embraced

it's enough is enough

it's to your heart's desire

it's what you've always wanted

it's from now on

 

37. all by itself

i didn't start it

it just got that way

it was already like that

if only we would do it

we could do it

it happens

it's all because of it

who feels it knows it

it is what's happening

it's how things get done

if we could just get it through our thick skulls

it's nothing to worry about

just like it is

 

46. there's no fear in it

take it to the limit

it's that we are safe

it's only scary without it

it's got your back

it's great when you've got it

it's a shame when we forget

danger has a way with it

it is nothing to be afraid of

try not to freak out over it

it's like being some kind of super hero

it's full on

live it

see through to it

it's the real deal

 

47. it doesn't take much

it's where it's at

to see it you need only to look at it

it's what you need for now

it's all you need to do it

it's effortless

it's where you find it

its less is more

it's where you put it

it's more already

it's there with you

it's a done deal

it's whether or not

it is anyway

as well it should be

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by Betty Bland

Originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Band, Betty. "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize." Quest 98. 4 (Fall 2010): 126.

Can you remember learning how to ride a bike? After one has learned, it seems so natural that the actual learning is quickly forgotten—except by the traumatized parents who were trying to help the process. "It is all about balance," they would say encouragingly. So it proceeded through trial and error, until pretty soon the catastrophic wobble transformed into a tentatively directed ride before bursting into an exhilarating junket at full speed ahead. The balance was not something to be told about, but to do. Once mastered, the skill is always accessible; it may become rusty with disuse, but can quickly be recaptured.

Yet, balance has other, more subtle components. Focused attention is required to avoid the ordinary small obstacles such as a stone or bump in the road or a change in pavement, but attention must also be directed toward a wider outlook. If one kept eyes down on each little obstacle a tumble would surely result, or one might suddenly find oneself wrapped around a telephone pole.

Quite obviously this applies to our lives in general and particularly to the life of an aspirant. There are many levels of balanced functioning to be achieved, each building on the former and each requiring practice and attention. At every point in our growth, what we have already learned seems simple and what still lies ahead seems daunting.  However the three principles of balance, focus, and a constant eye to the horizon are essential elements of our practice. I recently ran across several little aphorisms by George S. Arundale (GSA), president of the international TS from 1934 to 1945, written in 1919 in a little book titled The Way of Service. I will use them to highlight the three principles mentioned above.

Balance: "Do not allow the force of your affection for another to disturb either your balance or his" GSA writes. "Your service must strengthen and not weaken." Isn’t it interesting that at the very outset we have to learn to balance what we generally call love? A multitude of sins can parade under the guise of love, such as an attachment to our way of defining a person and how they must act. In our desire to be helpful we need to keep balanced within boundaries so that each has the space to unfurl his or her own unique potential.

Balance in human relationships requires a great deal of self-awareness. We see through the filters of self-interest and protection of the group we belong to—whatever that may be. Each layer of learning about ourselves reveals one more way in which we might fool ourselves into thinking that our motives are purely altruistic when they actually may be quite self serving. And moving beyond self-interest to protecting our cultural bias with which we identify, we can become quite irrational in the way we react to and value our brothers and sisters. This has manifested in many ways including women’s issues, homophobia, race relations, and religious intolerance. All these throw us totally off balance in our view of reality.

Focus: "Do not be jealous of another's greater power of service," urges GSA, "rather be glad that a greater power exists to help those whom your own weaker force may be unable to reach." In other words, recognize the ideal of benefiting humankind as the goal rather than wondering whether you might shine or be recognized for any great talent. There are very few truly great people in the world and it is a certain bet that a part of their repertoire is humility. Even so, humanity has such a wide array of talents that excelling in one area is usually balanced by some other weakness. Comparing ourselves to others is like concentrating on the little pebbles in the road, assuring a certain crash.

We have been told by many religious teachings not to worry about the glamour of admiration or praise. Jesus told his disciples to pray in private rather than in public where everyone would recognize one for their righteousness. Jiddu Krishnamurti penned in the little book At the Feet of the Master that your mind "wishes itself to feel proudly separate" and calculates on behalf of self instead of helping others. Beware: anything that feeds the ravenous wolf of self is sure to result in the inevitable crash. As the saying goes, "Pride goes before the fall and mighty pride goes before a mighty fall."

A constant eye: "The less a person thinks about himself, says GSA, "the more he is really paying attention to his growth. Each little act of service returns to the doer in the shape of an added power to serve." To keep "a constant eye toward the ideal of human progression and perfection which the secret science depicts" as HPB stated in the Golden Stairs, our goal is to lift our eyes beyond our personal self to the good of the whole. This kind of habitual view is developed only through the practice of returning our gaze to the horizon again and again, whenever we begin feeling a bit off-balance. With the eyes of our soul uplifted toward this wide view, we gain a powerful tool for holding steady in our travels through life. Our great prize, if we keep our balance, focus, and vision, is the "reward past all telling—the power to bless and save humanity."

There is a road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every kind, but yet a road, and it leads to the very heart of the Universe: I can tell you how to find those who will show you the secret gateway that opens inward only, and closes fast behind the neophyte for evermore. There is no danger that dauntless courage cannot conquer; there is no trial that spotless purity cannot pass through; there is no difficulty that strong intellect cannot surmount. For those who win onwards there is reward past all telling—the power to bless and save humanity; for those who fail, there are other lives in which success may come. (H. P. Blavatsky, Collected Works, 13:219)

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Originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation:Smoley, Richard."From the Editor's Desk Fall 2010." Quest 98. 4 (Fall 2010): 122.

If there is an American religion, surely this lies at its core"”what William James called "the religion of healthy-mindedness," the belief that positive thoughts will not only triumph but can bend reality to their own shape.

The father of the religion of positive thinking was an obscure New Englander named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802—66). Quimby started out practicing mesmerism, which attempted to heal by stimulating the flow of "animal magnetism" (something more or less like what we today would call chi or prana). But he soon found that the passes that mesmerists used to stimulate this flow were irrelevant to healing. He concluded that "all disease is in the mind or belief"; what really worked was healing patients' minds, which would automatically heal their bodies.

Quimby was remarkably successful, attracting many out-of-state patients to his Maine-based practice. After his death, his ideas"”which he came to call Christian Science"”lived on in the teachings of his most famous pupil, Mary Baker Eddy, who popularized the name and created a religion around it, as well as in subsequent movements such as New Thought, Unity, and Religious Science.

The twentieth century saw the gospel extended to financial success in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and Robert Collier's Secret of the Ages and in the writings of Florence Scovel Shinn. It reached mass audiences with Dale Carnegie's Power of Positive Thinking and the works of Norman Vincent Peale. Over the past decade we have seen another crop, including Esther and Jerry Hicks, whose books, such as Ask and It Is Given and The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent, channeling the words of an entity called Abraham, sat on the best-seller lists for months. Rhonda Byrne's 2006 book and DVD The Secret, based on the Abraham materials, were stupendous best-sellers in their own right.

Thus the American appetite for positive thinking is enormous. But how much truth is there in this idea? Certainly it would be hard to deny its fundamental insight"”that thought is creative and can shape reality around itself, often in ways that can seem bizarre or even paranormal. And yet there seems to be something missing in the positive-thinking gospel. Sometimes it manifests in a lack of compassion, of which New Thought groups are often"”and rightly"”accused. (After all, if your thoughts are the only things that are affecting you, and you get cancer or have to file for bankruptcy, it's really your own fault, isn't it?) We see the same tendency in mass culture, with its eerie habit of pasting smiley faces over everything while tens of millions are suffocating in anxiety and depression.

Taken in a certain way, accentuating the positive can make you oblivious. Many esoteric teachings say that the ordinary state of human consciousness is a form of delusion. Much of this is due to a deeply ingrained tendency to see the present in the light of past preconceptions. Most of us, it's true, have a bias toward negative preconceptions based on fear and anxiety. Replacing these with positive preconceptions is no doubt a step forward, but even so a positive preconception is no more likely to be accurate than a negative one. Either way you are filtering the present through the mesh of some foreordained conclusion that your mind (usually unconsciously) has drawn.

To me, then, it seems mistaken to extol positivity as an absolute. It may be better understood in light of Aristotle's concept of virtue, which, he said, consisted of a mean between two extremes. Courage is a mean between cowardice and recklessness, and someone who is financially prudent stands somewhere between the miser and the spendthrift. So it is with positivity. As an unthinking, automatic response, it will lead us no further on the path to consciousness than will any other form of automatic behavior. There is a balance to be struck between a monochromatic pessimism on the one hand and a dazed cheeriness on the other.

Many spiritual teachings express this truth in one way or another. The Chinese tradition offers the yang and the yin, which form the theme of this issue. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life has three pillars"”Mercy and Severity on the right and left, with the Pillar of Mildness mediating between them. Knowledge in the true sense means seeing where and when it is appropriate to use mercy or severity.

I grant you that the world often seems to be a terrible place, where negativity threatens to overwhelm everything. But I would add that the answer to this apparent onslaught of negativity is not a blind or unthinking positivity. It is the insight to see the truth in a situation and, as the Buddhists say, employing the "skillful means" needed to set it right.

Richard Smoley

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by Alice O. Howell

Originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Howell, Alice O.."Dadaji." Quest  98. 4 (Fall 2010): 153, 159.

Dadaji was the most exceptional Hindu I ever met, and you will just have to take my word for the incredible feats I am about to relate. His real name was Roy Chauderi. He lived the life of a simple householder. He was married, and in India he ran a small toy store. But once a year there would be a special ceremony where, in the presence of hundreds, he would transform milk into an edible solid substance.

            Though I  went to India twice, I never made it to Calcutta, where he lived. We met him in Ventura, California, in 1982. There was a meeting of Indians in a private home. There were only four Caucasians present. We sat in a ring and he gave a lecture. He didn't sound very special, just a dark wavy headed man, but as we bid him good night, he drew me down and whispered, "Come back tomorrow morning early." So, I did. He drew me into a private room and we had a spiritual conversation. Although we'd never met before, it was as if we were continuing where we left off the last time. Then he asked me if I would like to know the name of God? I was to move to another room. 

            This room turned out to be the host's baby's nursery. Besides the crib, Dadaji had a small altar with flowers, fruit, a small oil lamp and a few small ornamental bronze deities. I sat in a chair; he chanted a prayer, then took a small piece of paper and wrote a name on it in red ink. When he handed it to me and I unfolded it, it was totally blank! He smiled. Hypnosis?

            Then he instructed me to return that evening with my husband, Walter. Each of us was to bring a simple sealed jar of water. The trip was about 30 miles, each way, but I agreed. Accordingly, I filled two empty mayonnaise jars and another and we returned.

           The same group was gathered and we were summoned in one at a time. The rest of us meditated silently. When Walter returned, he looked amazed, but I was immediately next. This time, he was seated in a dark room lit by a few candles. Another low altar with flowers and fruit was in front of him. He smiled radiantly and asked for my jar. I handed it to him, determined to watch closely, which I did. To my astonishment, he took the jar, and prayed over it, it started to sweat water on the outside as he rubbed it! Then with a beatific smile he handed it to me, blessed me, and indicated I was to leave.

            When I returned to the group, we sat again quietly. The Indian next to Walter whispered "Open it!" When Walter opened his jar a beautiful fragrance wafted out. When I opened mine another fragrance but different from Walter's! When we came home and opened them again, the fragrances were still there and we had been told, it was safe to sip. I could not help but think of Jesus and his changing the water to wine at the wedding in Cana. This was still possible!

            We soon became good friends, and Walter and  I attended informal gatherings only to discover how loving and humorous he was. He showered us with his books, which I still have. Also a printed portrait framed. He was reluctant on one occasion to have his photo taken. At last, he relented, but when the film was developed it turned out to be that of a holy man with a beard! 

            Dadaji occasionally came to Connecticut, not to far from where we were living in Massachusetts, and we were invited to visit several times. There he would have an audience, one on one. A good friend of mine, who was both a Jungian analyst and Episcopal priest, came to see Dadaji. My friend had been through hell. He had lost forty pounds, and was at the lowest point in his life. He had been kicked out of his professional position having been publicly accused by his angry significant other of sleeping with one of his patients. Not quite true, as she had quit before this happened, but true enough. So he arrived a broken man and went in to see Dadaji. When he came out, his blue denim shirt was soaked in front and the fragrance was overwhelming! Apparently, Dadaji had stroked the front of it and the fragrance came out of his hands like oil. In India, this is called padmagandi,  and other gifted gurus have the same gift.

            As I had had known my friends his angry partner as well, I urged her to visit Dadaji. When she walked down his corridor, he waved and ordered her to stop. He told her, she might return in a couple of years but he could not see her that day. I had said nothing to Dadaji about the situation with either one of them.

            Walter, who was a Reiki practitioner had compassion for Dadaji who was clearly exhausted, so Dadaji agreed to let Walter treat him. It helped enormously and so the two men became dear friends. We were invited several times to visit and had the pleasure of meeting his wife.

            Needless to say, this encounter forced me to rearrange much of my mental furniture! I am by nature a skeptical Scorpio but I now have a true saying by fictional friend Gezeebius: Always keep an open mind and a good crap-detector! This has served me well over the years. 

Dadaji was an extraordinary human being and his teachings were wise and loving. I still hear his laughter and feel the warmth of his hugs. Though he is no longer in the flesh, his spirit, love and teachings continue. He is the one who called himself an anti-guru guru! He told me that everyone has the same access to the Truth. The only problem is that we are unconscious of it, so time is kind by coming in minutes, hours, and days as we live to say "Aha!" In that way, C. G. Jung is saying exactly same thing: the Self knows but it dwells in the unconscious!   I think of this as a candle. Everyone has an individual wick but the flame on every wick is the same flame!

 

           Imprisoned Splendor   

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things, whate'er you may believe.

There is an inmost center in us all,

Where truth abides in fullness; and around,

Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,

This perfect, clear perception which is truth

A baffling and perverting carnal mesh

Binds it, and makes all error: and to KNOW,

Rather consists in opening out a way

Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,

Than in effecting an entry for a light

Supposed to be without.

— Robert Browning (1812—1889), from Paracelsus

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Alice O. Howell is an author and astrologer based in western Massachusetts. Her works include The Web in the Sea; The Dove in the Stone; and The Heavens Declare: Astrological Ages and the Evolution of Consciousness, all published by Quest Books.

 

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