Theosophy - The Mysteries Today - and other essays by Laurence J.Bendit
THE
MYSTERIES TODAY
and other essays
by Laurence J. Bendit
First printed 1973
The Theosophical Publishing House Ltd, London. England
Part
1 of 2 Click here for Part 2
INTRODUCTION
[Page
7] THEOSOPHY, the wisdom of the enlightened mind, is unchanging
for ever. It existed before history began — for man was already an inhabitant
of the earth — and it will endure long after history has ended as a record of
events in time: when it will, in some form, remain as part of the heritage of
the universe. It is the Pearl of Great Price of the Gnostic Christian, it is the
Jewel in the Lotus, the Clear Light of the Buddhist, the Tao of the mind; it is
known by many names, yet it is always the same Wisdom.
What changes, however, is the setting of the Pearl; the Lotus may fade and
have to be renewed in a new bud; the one who has found Bodhi or
Enlightenment may, if he has not attained liberation, have to reincarnate,
bringing his Theosophy with him. Through the ages its doctrines have been
passed from mouth to ear, from teacher to pupil, in such a way that the
pupil became active of mind and so found his own Wisdom. Fragments
have been written on papyrus, on palm-leaf, on parchment and hidden
when persecution drove wisdom underground. Then, too, symbols such as
those of the alchemists, the songs of poets and troubadours, the language
of stonemasons became the vehicles of the hidden lore.
Then, some hundred years ago, more was set down than ever before, on
western style paper, on western printing presses, and for the first time in
history laid before a public which had become sufficiently educated to
appreciate it if they wished; though they might not realize, even if their
interest was caught, that the true Secret Doctrine would still remain secret
until they found the inner key to it. These teachings, it may be surmised,
were like seed waiting in the ground of the intellect for the fertilizing rain of
a higher, intuitive, form of mind, to make them live and grow and acquire
real meaning.
At every stage, therefore, the eternal Wisdom has been there for the one
who sought arduously enough. The words, or the forms of genuine art
which sometimes replaced words, were suited to their time. And the same
applies today when, in the [Page 8] circles of the Society calling itself
Theosophical, valiant students have told us, by way of sharing, not of
dogma, what they discovered. They too did so in the language, and in tune
with the times. But in the past few decades, mankind has undergone the
sudden, or at least rapid change known as a Gestalt. Humanity has taken a
rapid step forward in its mode of thinking, and this has served to 'date', not
the principles expressed by older students, but the way in which they
presented them. Science, art, philosophy, psychology, today are very
different from what they were in the 'thirties. So it is scarcely surprising that
the books we can label 'classics', implying that they have permanent value
though their language is archaic, lend themselves to further comment in
terms of modern culture; though it seems that the earliest writer in the
modern movement, H. P. Blavatsky, despite her endless parentheses and
out-dated polemic, and her exasperation with the limits imposed on her by
the mentality of the time, stands out as the most modern of the group of
herself and her successors. Indeed, one may say that one cannot really go
back to Blavatsky for the simple reason that one's mind has to run 'like
mad' if it wants to catch up with her!
In
any case, one has to remember that H. P. Blavatsky was humble: she never, any
more than others coming after her, claimed infallibility; and,
indeed, she says outright that there are many errors and inconsistencies in
her writings. This is obvious to anyone who tries to construct out of her
writings a picture of the universe which is entirely logical. It is still more
apparent in some of her more emotionally inspired sayings, as when she
speaks of 'a courageous endurance of personal injustice', when, obviously,
if the karmic law is true, there can be no such thing as personal injustice.
Yet her work is monumental and will probably endure as scientific
knowledge develops, when one finds that within the fetters of the older
language she often seems to have anticipated things which the modern
scientist is just beginning to discover once more. (One has to be careful, of
course, here. It is so easy to pick on some ancient text and to say, 'Look:
this was known long since', when more objective examination shows that
the text meant nothing of the sort. I was once told that 'one can find
everything in the Bible, even electricity': but I was not convinced.) [Page 9]
I
feel that it is in no way to down-grade the older writers to reconsider some
of their ideas. On the contrary, the aim of these essays has been to try and
bring out the validity which one usually finds underlying some of the more
conditioned and 'Victorian' expressions of what seem to be basic
theosophical ideas.
If
I have a fault to find, it is not with Theosophy in the last hundred years
or so, but with the fact that what is popularly known as 'Theosophy' or
'Theosophical Teaching' has restricted itself largely to one strand of
Theosophy in its original sense. My Oxford Dictionary defines this word
as denoting 'Any of various ancient and modern philosophies professing
to
attain to a knowledge of God by spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition
or special
individual relations: which
is good. But the Society seems to have concentrated mostly on one aspect
of the theosophical
fabric, i.e.,
occultism: facts, or supposed facts about the universe and man. True,
it has brought in elements of other philosophies, but H. P. Blavatsky's
books are much more 'occult' than anything else, and the other main contributor,
after her, was the very personal work of C. W. Leadbeater. I am not
criticizing these, so much as wanting to point to what seems to have
been a restriction of 'theosophical' thought, so labeled,
to smaller boundaries than the ancient and widest sense of the word. In
particular, it has paid scant attention to modern depth psychology, whose
best bases are directly in line with Theosophy. Indeed, it supplies an
esoteric element, as regards individuals, which it would be difficult to
find in 'occult' literature, in such a way as can be applied to our personal
problems. Only too often does
one hear that somebody is 'having trouble with Kundalini' — an
occult force — which, translated into common language, boils down
to him or her having a problem about sex, which could more or less easily
be solved by taking a psychological look at oneself.
I should perhaps add that the commonly made distinction between
occultism and mysticism scarcely holds good in Theosophy as defined in
Oxford: it is an artificial division which becomes all the more blurred as one
goes on.
Over the years, as the impulse came to me, I have written the articles
assembled in this volume. Inevitably, since they were not written
consecutively, they do not form a coherent [Page 10] whole, a text-book or
primer. But their background is the same: what I have learned from older
Theosophists, including the wise people who are not in the Society or even
the movement labeled theosophical: many of them, though they might even
repudiate the suggestion, are in the real sense Theosophists, people of
insight and wisdom greater than the most brilliant intellect alone can give,
greater also than any accumulation of book knowledge.
It is my hope that the thought embodied in these articles may serve for a
while, but not for very long, as a stimulus to other students. For if we go on
progressing as of late the world has progressed, it is to be hoped that in a
few years what I have written may be healthily buried and dusted over with
the past.
There
is, however, another reason for reprinting these ephemeral articles
which is that they may help to make a bridge between the Theosophy of
the past century and that of time to come. Just as the methodology of
science has, in the past century, given man the mental power of objectivity,
it has served, and still serves, where method cannot be applied — i.e.,
in the realm of feeling values, and of what is aptly termed 'inner space',
the realms inside the mind, and inside the dense physical world. So can
we see a transition between the mental climate of the hundred-year old
modern Theosophical Movement and what it is becoming today.
To
go back to Colonel Olcott's Old Diary Leaves,
and particularly its first two volumes, makes interesting reading. For the
modern Theosophical
Movement germinated in an atmosphere which would probably alienate
many people today. The things recorded in the Diaries give us what cannot
but be an authentic picture of it, as well as of the founders of the Society
themselves. Olcott, an eminent New York lawyer was no fool, though he
was a beginner in occultism; and, devoted as he was to H. P. Blavatsky, he
shows us a picture of an amazing person who, however, was no saint. It is
moreover, curious that her critics usually accuse her of sexual
immorality — yet she was virgo intacta all through her life! It is worth noting
also that not one of those who, in the past decades, have written about her
whether to deify or vilify her ever knew her during her lifetime. They see the
H. P. Blavatsky they want to see, not her as she was. Olcott lived very
close to her, and what he tells us [Page 11] coincides with what others of her
contemporaries say, and clearly shows his description to be authentic in
very large degree. But physical phenomena of a kind rarely if ever found
today, were rife, and seemed to serve as window-dressing for the more
serious intent behind the movement. Olcott himself realized that the ability
to perform psychic tricks had nothing to do with spirituality; but he curiously
enough seems to class all the human or superhuman entities which played
a part in producing phenomena, and those who conveyed through H. P.
Blavatsky the material for her books, as Masters, Mahatmas or Adepts: yet
it seems evident that there were very different grades among them.
Moreover, what they taught was largely factual or symbolically factual
about the universe and its contents.
Today what we ask (though there are still mental coelacanths among
students of the occult) brings into play knowledge derived from worldly
sources which was simply not available a hundred years ago. One is
inclined to think how much Colonel Olcott would have benefited from our
present-day knowledge about psychology and parapsychology, embryonic
as these twin sciences still are: he would have escaped certain naïvetés
apparent in his writings today. 'Inner space' is much more the concern of
the student of the occult, in whatever form, today than remote facts about
cosmic construction. Yet to ignore the latter would be to lose material which
can, at some times and in some form, play into our own inner explorations.
Science, including that dubious branch, psychology, has thrown a bridge
across the division between two levels of mind, and Blavatskian Theosophy
has tried to add its quota on the level of science. It has had some success
in keeping matters from deteriorating into a materialistic era. But we are
now nearing the further end of that bridge, and need to be ready to explore
the realms beyond it. A modern view of the older presentations may narrow
the gap still extant between the end of the scientific era and whatever the
future has in store for us. Hence these essays, as a very small share in the
large contribution to this end which can today be found in many spheres of
life.
In conclusion, I want to give my sincere thanks to Margaret Macdonald for
collating and sorting a spate of papers, and for getting some coherence
into them: a task of which I myself am [Page 12] incapable, partly because
one can never truly evaluate one's own work, but partly also because this
work had to be done in London while I myself am now living in North
America.
I must also thank the editors of The Theosophist, The Theosophical
Journal, The American Theosophist and Theosophia for permission to
reprint various articles.
1972 L.J.B.
THE MYSTERIES TODAY
[Page 13] EVER
since man became man, there has at all times been a direct road between him,
at whatever stage of consciousness he was, and the
deepest spiritual levels of his being. He has always, in theory, been
capable of treading that road as a result of his unaided efforts, but he
has also had the help of a more or less explicit philosophy of the facts
concerning the universe, himself and the relation between the two. This is
often referred to as the Mystery Tradition of Teaching and is a permanent
heritage of mankind. Passed on in writing or by word of mouth, this
perennial philosophy remains basically unchanged by time, but its
expression has varied very markedly. Moreover, there seems always to
have been a dual line of approach to the innermost. One of these was
through meditation and contemplation and was subjective. The other,
outward turned, gave rise to observances, rites, ceremonies carried out in
action. The two were complementary and supplementary to each other.
In the West, Egypt and Greece stand out as two main civilizations in which
the Tradition was organized into Mystery Schools, each with its own rituals,
each with its own symbolism and pomp. Some of the ceremonies were
public, as were the great processions in Egypt and those between Eleusis
and Athens. They still exist in the West in such things as the rites of the
Roman and other churches which have public displays and festivals.
Behind the outer shows, however, there lay esoteric ceremonies open only
to initiates of the proper grade. Freemasonry, in our time, is a survival of
these, adapted and modernized.
There
are, however, a number of enthusiasts today who are anxious to revive the
ancient Mysteries of Greece and Egypt in their old form. But,
apart from the decadence which led to their being eventually outlawed in
Rome, there is an important question as to whether this recall of the past
is healthy and suitable. Would any success be a forward or a retrograde [Page
14] step in the search for deeper understanding and greater awareness
of the meaning of life ? This is the problem which prompts the reflections
which — without claiming any authority other than my own thoughts — I
want now to consider.
Greece, the most recent of the places where the Mysteries flourished on a
great scale, lies over two thousand years behind us. Egypt goes much
farther still. In the interval, man in general has made vast strides, none
more rapid and extensive than in the past two centuries. The manasic
(pure mental) principle has developed, hardened, become more positive
than it ever was before in historical times. (If the myth of Atlantis is actually
a fact, then it belongs not to history but to prehistory). Modern man is,
therefore, very different from his forbears. Hence, what will be useful to him
in furthering his evolution is something very different from what was of use
in the days when man was not so manasic.
Ancient
man (taking this to mean not the primitive but the civilized man of historic
times) was collectively not intellectual and critical. He responded to
feeling and intuition, he was much more 'psychic' and sensitive, if only
in a passive way, than his modern counterpart. But this was counterbalanced
by a much closer and more direct link with people who were much in
advance of the ordinary, and whose function it was to guide, direct and rule
from a standpoint of true spiritual eminence. We see today traces of this
tradition in the place we, sometimes rather unwillingly, allow even today
to crowned kings, to popes and bishops, as well as in the high-sounding
titles — which once meant something — used for instance in Masonic bodies.
It seems as if, in old days, there was a hierarchy in the Mysteries, which
made an open and unbroken link between the deepest, innermost and
most spiritual levels of life and the most mundane public festivals and
religious rites open to hoi polloi. The highway between extremes was
barred by gates of an initiatory nature which opened only to those who
were ready to pass them, but nevertheless, it was well known that the
Mystery path existed for all to follow if they would. The esoteric teaching
and symbolism was the same from first to last. What changed was its
interpretation, values, and the understanding of the disciple.
Things are not the same today. If there are genuine Mystery [Page 15]
Schools, they are hidden and arcane. There are, it is true, many bodies
which claim to be Rosicrucian or to belong to some esoteric tradition, but
all of those which make their claims public are spurious. Even if they use
genuine old rituals derived from papyri or manuscripts, it is most
questionable whether they are in any way linked with the Temples to which
the rituals belonged. Their position is as if, in the Catholic Christian
churches, the Apostolic Succession which links the modern priest with the
furthest origins of the Church were broken and not to be retrieved.
Freemasonry seems to be the only genuinely descended semi-public
organization, however emasculated its present-day forms. In any case, the
average man today ignores, when he does not scorn, these bodies. And
even the more studious usually fails to grasp the inwardness of what is
presented to him in church, lodge or chapter.
In other words, it seems at first sight as if, with the disappearance of the
true Mystery Schools, the Mysteries themselves had also died. But if we
reconsider the matter, a different picture seems to emerge.
Manas,
in every sphere of life, functions both as a link and a barrier between
inner, spiritual consciousness and that of the personality. It is the
focus of selfhood and of the field of self-conscious awareness. It acts as
a barrier when it ousts intuition and confines consciousness below, or outside
itself, in the form of material, pragmatic, detailed knowledge. It is a link
when, the intellect being given its proper place, it opens the way to non-intellectual,
more-than-rational experience such as that which transforms intellectualism
into intelligence — a quality often lacking in the so-called
intellectual.
The duality of manas also shows in action when, at different times in
human history, it swings between introversion and extroversion. We are
now surfeited with the latter and its perilous technical achievements, and
there is a marked tendency to turn inward and to seek out the meaning of
things, no less scientifically, but in the subjective and not the objective field.
The result is a tendency for the deepest intuitive thinkers to withdraw from
ceremonies and rituals towards a more meditative, quietistic way of life.
Otherwise said, it looks as if the modern Mysteries took place, not in outer
ceremonies and rites, but in the rich inner world of the mind where myths
and [Page 16] visions lead to intuitive insights, satori, Gestalts which are in
effect initiatory and transformative to the one who has them. True, some
will still take part in rituals and outer forms. But the emphasis nowadays
lies more on the mythological, spiritual meaning embodied in them than on
the forms themselves; for true and valid rituals are no more than the
dramatic expression of myth and, when properly performed, bring with
them from the archetypal, spiritual world, the powers which flow through
that myth. The principal part of any rite, therefore, is now that which takes
place within the mind, not outside it.
If
this is so, it appears to contradict, or at least modify, some of the
things which have been said about the 'Seventh Ray', often describing it as that
of
ceremonial. If this is indeed the 'Ray' which is coming into prominence
today, when the tendency is to do away with outer ritual, it seems as if
its quality were really that of the mental orderliness of what we call Culture
(including science) in its true sense. The 'ceremonial' takes place as the
mind becomes organized and ordered as a temple in which myth is played
out and, as it is understood, enriches and enhances the spiritual
understanding of the individual. This takes place in each one in an
individual and unique way despite the common significance of any myth for
all mankind. Conscious self-understanding is the dynamic quality which
enables each person to tread the mythological ladder between heaven and
earth. Man today, in contradistinction to man in ages past, is able to do
things for himself and by himself which, in the past, required at least some
help from wiser and senior spiritual teachers and gurus.
It looks as if the older ceremonial initiations at the hands of high-priests and
hierophants helped the weakly developed manasic aspect of the disciple to
overcome a gap in his make-up. His mind was not yet strong enough to do
this for himself; and some wisely applied occult and magical lore was able
to help him on his way. Yet even then it seems worth considering whether
in the ultimate stages, when the disciple became in the full sense a
member of what is known as the Great White Lodge, he did not have to
take that step and initiate himself by his own unaided efforts. One can
conceive of his progress as requiring less and less help from his teachers,
as he comes closer and closer to the true and final event, when he stands
on [Page 17] his own feet entirely and steps through the portal alone. The
Initiation, when it comes, is the greatest of all Gestalts, a break-through in
consciousness into a sphere hitherto only seen through some degree of
veiling but now entered in full conscious perception and awareness.
Such a view calls into question the exact nature of the ceremonial
initiations described in certain books. It suggests that they refer, not to the
full Initiation, but to something less, however near it may approach to the
Reality. For this Reality is something intimate, completely secret so far as
any outer showing is concerned, an opening of consciousness from within.
And it is something which none can confer on another, however exalted the
giver may be. Nor can it be denied to the one who is ready, since it is
something he does for himself. It says in the Book of Amos: 'Unto him that
overcometh will I give a white stone; and in that stone a new name written,
which none knoweth saving him that receiveth it.' The Giver, in this case, is
God: the human spirit, the Atman. The 'new name' is the keynote, the
mantram which expresses the man as reborn. The part italicized contains
two significant matters: that the individual feels the expansion in himself,
the other, that nobody in the outer world is held to be aware of what has
taken place, and hence cannot tell him that he has reached this or the
other stage on the occult path. It should be added here that sudden minor
expansions of consciousness are frequent occurrences in daily life.
Sometimes, moreover, they are part of a destructive process in the mind, a
step towards unbalance and insanity, which is why so many would-be
occultists claim to have become high initiates when they have in reality lost
some of their balance and stability and, above all, humility. For, as it has
been said, the true Initiate 'is as nothing in the eyes of men,' and only the
quality of his life and personality gives any key to his stature.
One
of the difficulties in making a real assessment of things today is that we are
in a stage of transition between two human eras; and rapid
movement inevitably leads to confusion. In the matter under discussion, the
confusion has found expression in many of the descriptions of psycho-spiritual
life, given as a [Page 18] result of psychic investigation. This is in no
way to decry the value of these investigations. They were, after personal
bias, often very strong, is discounted, a magnificent piece of pioneer work.
Indeed, one may see them as laying a foundation for future research, using
extrasensory perception as the means of discovery. But when most of this
work was done, we had only a vague idea of the dynamic importance of
myth — and its external expression in rituals. Annie Besant tells us that myth
is truer and deeper than historical accounts whether about the universe or
about man. She did not, however, realize as we do today, the power of
myth itself as a channel of redemptive forces within the human mind. It took
the genius of C. G. Jung to bring out this aspect of the matter and to show
us both how it operates and how to make constructive use of what it brings.
In
the psychic investigations even of some very competent people it seems
as if actual events, physical or psychic, and myth, had not been fully
differentiated. Objective ceremonies and events may well take place in the
psychic realm, but that realm is also the one where dreams and visions and
the expression of myth originate. If we study some of the descriptions of
such matters — and the Wesak, as described by C. W. Leadbeater is an
example — it is quite clear that it contains a reference to symbols which
belong to the mythological level and which are to be found not only in the
occult tradition, but also present themselves in the important dreams of
the individual student of life. The question thus arises as to whether the
ceremony described is one which actually occurs physically, or near-physically,
or whether in fact Leadbeater did not, in the account of the Wesak, and elsewhere
embody something very real but which took place
only in the form of a symbolic dream.
As
to this it would be foolish to dogmatize, and each one has to make his
own judgement both about this and a great deal else. It is, however, a part
of the whole question of the Mysteries today. Hence it is one which is
important to the theosophical student who is not content to let others do
his thinking for him. The latter may have been in order in olden days, before
man had learned to think. It is today out of place — as much out of place as
any revival of the Ancient Mysteries as such. Man has always needed the
Mystery Tradition. He [Page 19] needs it today and he will need it tomorrow.
It still exists; but unless we allow ourselves to be misled, it has to be sought
in the right place and in the right form. Manas, pure mind, is the key today
and Truth has to be sought through but not in it. By learning to use this
mind properly we are led into the new world of intuition and direct
apprehension of Reality which lives on the further side of it, and this is the
realm of enlightened, personal intuitive knowledge.
This,
it appears to me, are the Mysteries of Today.[Page 20]
THE NEED FOR SCEPTICISM
RECENTLY published material has brought into the open several
questions which many of the more critical older Theosophists have long
been considering. Newer members may wonder whether there is any point
in reviving ancient history; but it has happened, and from it we may learn
something which is today of as much importance as it should have been
yesterday and as it will be tomorrow. That is, the need for very clear
objectivity and discrimination, particularly where revelation of occult matters
is concerned.
It
is useful, taking the material under discussion, to see how major mistakes
can arise, however sincere and honest people may be. We have
it forced on us once again that what those we used to call 'our Leaders'
repeatedly told us (but we did not listen) is true: they were not infallible.
They were, like ourselves, human, therefore imperfect. But, rather than
consider what would be required for infallibility, it is perhaps more practical
and useful if we look at the causes of the errors they — and we, in common
with them — may make. For if we watch for the cause and understand its
working, we are in a better position to judge both what we ourselves
perceive, and what we hear from others.
Briefly, the source of error can be summed up in two headings: wishful
thinking and the misuse of precedent in forecasting the future.
I. WISHFUL THINKING. We may, if we care to, use the term 'unconscious
kriyashakti' for the creation of mental images. The energy known as
kriyashakti can work from any level, through the feeling aspect of the mind.
It can be in the octave known as Buddhi, when true creation takes place
and true intuition enlightens us. It can also emerge at the Kamic or desire
level, when the result is the creation of images based on what we would
like to be told. Normally, the thought images remain within the field of the
individual mind. But they can also, if powerful enough, become eidetic: that
is, they become seemingly [Page 21] detached, figures existing in their own
right, 'idols' (the word eidetic stems from the same root) and hence appear
to be entities, superhuman, human or subhuman, 'elemental' or devilish,
which come before the conscious mind as if from outside and perhaps talk
or act as if they were 'real'. In all cases, however, they are in fact created
by the one they come to: they are yourself, speaking to yourself, about
yourself or about something which deeply concerns yourself.
This is the safe way of looking at all such things, whether they are
perceived directly by oneself or whether they 'report back' indirectly through
mediums, entities from outer space, or in any other way.
The cure ? Deep self-knowledge which, if it docs not eliminate the
possibility of self-deception, at least shows us how it works, and hence
enables us to discount it. But self-knowledge also helps us to realize that
such seemingly eidetic and self-produced images may be in reality what
they purport to be: a Master, a Teacher (other than the supreme teacher,
our own inner selves), the soul of a dead person, an angel or an
'elemental'. But if we know ourselves we can apply to them certain tests,
chief of which perhaps is that no spiritual being flatters our vanity any more
than he talks down to us; while no 'devil' or 'black magician' can ever
torment us unless we have something in us of the same evil quality he
represents.
2. PRECEDENT. Historical time moves on, and human consciousness
changes. Hence, to expect history to repeat itself exactly is fatal, especially
when it comes to such a thing as the Coming of a World Teacher or Avatar.
The whole purpose of such an Event is not to carry on an old tradition in its
old form, but, on the contrary, in a sense to shock mankind into a new
outlook. This inevitably makes the Teacher into a reformer and an
iconoclast.
What little we know about Gautama and Jesus proves this. Gautama, the
prince, threw up his royal future and became a wandering sannyasi. Jesus,
seemingly born at the other end of the social scale, upset the Jewish
pundits, who had a ready-made scheme of behavior for their Messiah. He
refused to conform to it.
Why
then expect any Coming today — if such was ever really intended — to
follow a traditional line ? And when we hear that [Page 22] it was said that
'things went wrong', is his not repeating the same argument as the
Pharisees and Sadducees used over Jesus? Certainly, the recent forecast
was not fulfilled. But might it not be the forecast which was wrong ? That is
a matter which cannot be judged today. In some centuries to come we may
be in a better position to look back on present day events, perhaps to pick
out an individual or individuals who originated a new step forward in human
consciousness. Indeed, it might well prove that the plural, 'individuals' is the
more applicable, for we are said to be entering the Aquarian era, one of
whose features is team or group work rather than separate individual
achievement. It seems possible therefore that, however outstanding one or
two people may be, the actual 'Coming' is taking place, or will do so, in the
form of a wide movement of intuitive thought occurring in many forms all
over the world, in more or less pure and pristine form, but all with a
common background. Thinkers, true scientists, philosophers who are not
glamoured by words, artists — real ones — poets, musicians, theologians,
psychologists may all be vessels of the new 'Coming' : there are some
whom one feels one can pick out as having an outlook which is new and
belongs to the future rather than the past, while others, perhaps more
famous in their sphere, clearly belong to the past and the present only.
(Though this choosing may be as much a matter of wishful thinking on my
part as the expectancy of a repetition of past events by others.)
There is also another difficulty in using the past as a pattern for the
present. It always happens that the Teacher becomes the nucleus of myth.
We know practically nothing of the actual historical events in the physical
life of Jesus, and perhaps the Gautama story may be just as unhistorical as
his Successor's. In any case, the history has minimum importance
compared to the myth, for (as Dr. Besant said and modern psychologists
realize) myth contains far deeper reality than history. It represents the
timeless truth and the spiritual heritage of man, whereas history is of the
earth and of events in the physical world. What makes the teachings of
Gautama or Jesus live is that they belong to this high spiritual level, cast
into a form suited to the state of mind of mankind at the time the Teacher
lived. It was this more than anything else which differentiated them from the
thousands of prophets and yogis who lived at the [Page 23] same time. They
started a chain reaction which established a new religion, taking man a
step further in evolution. It seems that this was not sufficiently thought of
when certain prophesies were made, myth being taken as history, at the
expense of the deeper truth.
How then can we be sure of anything ? We cannot. We are in no position
to be sure of anything except perhaps an inner sense of something which
can never be expressed or named, even to ourselves. As to the things we
read or hear or see, we can only try to judge as impersonally and as truly
as we can, realizing always that we may, however hard we try, be
deceiving ourselves. And if the great people who 'led' us were liable to be
carried away by their own wishful thinking, how much more likely is that to
be the case with us ?
This may seem to some to be a kind of nihilistic philosophy, which they are
afraid to embrace because, they say, they would have nothing left. True
enough! But if one once has the courage to question, to doubt, to shed
one's preconceptions, there comes after a while a beautiful sense of relief,
of lightness, of freedom, which no fixed creed can give. In the words of one
of the happy songs in Dubose Heyward's Porgy and Bess, one finds then
that
'I have plenty of nothin'
And nothin' is plenty for me.'
And
this is a state of bliss where there is room for ever increasing vision and of
certainty acquired by and for oneself, where personalities come in
only as co-workers, co-students, not as god-like beings who turn out to
have, if not feet of clay, at least the human weakness of an Achilles' heel. [Page 24]
THE PERILS OF SPIRITUAL ASPIRATION
'THE path of occultism is strewn with wrecks,' says H. P. Blavatsky
and, in her translation of The Voice of the Silence, she warns against
becoming ensnared in the psychic world, where Mara, the personalized
arch-deceiver, reigns, and where there is a serpent hidden under every
flower.
The
first quotation is one with which it is easy to agree, for it is
evident that the study of what we call 'occultism', without the urge to become
spiritualized, is most dangerous. The student who wants to develop
psychic powers, perceptive (psychism) or active (psychokinetic), is playing with
fire and, sooner or later, is likely to be burned. This applies to such
things
as
specific meditations involving concentration on breathing exercises,
on
certain chakras, especially in attempting to activate Kundalini, the
Serpent Power; to the use of drugs; to dervish exercises and Hatha Yoga and
so on; to trying to develop clairvoyance. These things may produce results
of a sort. But unless they are firmly rooted in a quest for true enlightenment
the student may find himself in the position of the traditional sorcerer's
apprentice, who found himself trying to control forces he in his ignorance
had unleashed but could do nothing about. It is not difficult simply
to
avoid
these methods. It is less simple when we consider the one who, at the
start of trying to find real enlightenment, adopts the path called
'occult'
in a rather dubious distinction from that we call 'mystical'. The mystic
is
safe
enough, except that he may wreck himself in an emotional cushion of
sentimentality which he mistakes for true devotion. But the one who
uses intellect rather than emotion may come up against hard obstacles
which
can do more serious damage than the soft devotional way and may,
indeed, prevent him from making any further progress.
The first main difficulty he encounters, though it will remain with him until
the end, is ignorance: false valuation of systems, rules and disciplines,
delusions, illusions. The second is where that ignorance is of the tricks
which the psychological, personal [Page 25] ego will continue to play on him,
using the first, in this case self-ignorance, to get it way. For if we know and
understand these tricks, we shall then find ourselves in control of the
situation and able to take steps to add to the field where there is no place
for ignorance of the facts of the world we feel to be outside us, and whence
the deluding factors come.
'Mara' may be equated with what we nowadays call the ego: with a small
initial letter, the psychological, personal center of our identity. It will be
useful if we consider once again the nature and origin of this aspect of Self.
First,
let us realize that the psychological ego is brought into existence
by the true Self, the Atman, working through the other principle called
Manas, or pure, unconditioned Mind — at any rate in this, our earth
humanity. But the ego is not the Self. The Self represents something like
the particle of matter which can produce crystallization in a saturated solution
which otherwise remains liquid. The material waiting to be crystallized
consists
of past memories, associations, conditionings and all the rest
of our experience, so that the ego we normally use and call 'I' or 'me' is
a secondary, not a primary product of the evolutionary process:
a thing which seems to be strongly emphasized by Krishnamurti.
'Crystallization' is not actually a very good analogy, for it suggests a static
result. The ego is not static, but behaves like any animate being. It has not
only its past to make use of, it has a faint degree of the numinous quality of
Self, and it has a vigorous animal mental mechanism as its instrument. Its
desire is to survive, to grow great, to acquire prestige and power: all of
them are more or less directly derivations from the instinctive life of the pre-human animal. And the ego is a very wily beast who dwells at the psychic,
not the spiritual levels, and may run riot there.
It does not, however, run riot so long as mankind remains in its first
evolutionary phase, the 'Path of Outgoing', where the job of the ego is to
develop its mental capacities and to dig firm roots into the soil of the mind it
has inherited from its animal past. We need not, in this essay, go into that
at length. But we must remember that a plant's quality is in considerable
measure derived from the food it absorbs from its roots; and its ability to
become fruit and flower is frustrated if it does not make use of [Page 26] its
roots, the personality of body and psyche or mind. I use the word in the
Blavatskian sense of feeling as well as thought and other attributes with
which we need not here concern ourselves.
It is here that we can see the possibility of wrecking when a person, having
turned the corner and entered the Path of Return to his spiritual roots, tries
to mortify that personality rather than work it into its proper place in his
whole economy. A rootless plant dies. To mortify means to kill. We need
our personal qualities and our ego if we want to be there to develop our
spiritual blossom.
But
the fact that we need our 'lower self or ego and its aggregated
appendages puts the aspirant in a dilemma: how far should he pay
attention to personal needs, desires, instinctive demands? That is
a question the answer to which he has to discover for himself. Indeed,
it is basic to all forms of religious disciplines and practices. It is not
easily solved, least of all by trying, as the older formulae had it, to 'kill
out
desire', to 'kill out the personality". The wise man does not kill — others, or himself.
But he tries as it were to domesticate his animal nature, so that it
becomes an asset, not a menace.
So we should try to understand this first peril of the real seeker. But as I
have said, the ego is a wily creature and it finds all kinds of means to delay
its 'domestication' by trying to make itself out to be what it is not: that is, it
tries to make the aspirant believe that it is his true Self which is operating in
his mind, whereas in reality he is under the dominance of nothing more
than the little self. For it fears to be destroyed, like any other animal, and
does not realize that being incorporated into a higher order of evolving life
is not destruction but, in the true sense, alchemical transformation into
something just as much alive but far better in quality.
To
preserve itself, it plays up the ignorance of the individual about
what is going on. The Deceiver makes him think that because he is now
consciously working towards self-fulfilment he is 'not as other men':
he is one better because he has a smattering of 'the Wisdom teaching' — which is
a set of doctrines, not Wisdom itself. This is a fault often to be
found among people who belong to this or that Fraternity or Order which has
stated
aims
of a spiritual nature, perhaps disciplines and methods to hasten the
supposed road to success.[Page 27]
One particular way Mara plays on us is connected with a matter of
much concern to the occultist, and it may be well to digress and study this
a little. That is the talk about initiation, pupilship of a Master and so on. One
hears of people being initiated into this or that mundane rite, into a
monastic or lamaistic order and so on. What does it really mean? Simply
that a person is admitted, in order to begin to make progress. Maybe, in a
Masonic Order, in an ashrama, in Christian or non-Christian monasteries
and convents, certain ceremonies accompany the 'initiation', and these
may be a reflection of something much deeper and greater than the
mundane rite achieves. The latter is often referred to as becoming an
Initiate of the Great White Lodge, entering the Path which leads to
becoming an Arhat or Liberated Man, and eventually to the rank of Asekha
which is the ultimate stage of humanity, whatever lies beyond.
The
intelligent student will easily enough realize the reality-unreality
of these physically performed rites. He will see, for instance, that if
H. P. Blavatsky were — as is said, on rather tenuous grounds — an Initiate into
certain Tibetan Orders, it is not that which gives her the spiritual
stature which many of us believe she had. Even in mysterious and remote Tibet,
there is, as Alexandra David-Neel tells us so shrewdly, a great deal
which
is, if not bogus, at any rate of only a psychic as distinct from a
spiritual nature.
But
we have also to reckon with the experiences of some people in the
sleep state — in the land of Mara par excellence. There can be no question
of brushing aside what some people remember, and saying, 'Only dreams'.
For we know nowadays that a dream is always and invariably significant,
even if its importance is negligible and superficial. These 'dreams' in any
case are significant in that they made a more or less deep impact on the
one who has them. It no more follows that because a person has had such
an experience in the invisible, psychic world, that he is any more spiritually
exalted than a Mason of high degree, or the Dean of a cathedral.
We
can make a rough division in these experiences, because they are related
to the overall personality of the dreamer. Some have deep experiences out
of which they wake with the feeling that they have become promoted in the
spiritual world. By and large these are people with a tendency to paranoia, [Page
28] perhaps even suffering from paranoid
schizophrenia. There is one particular individual who couples his
supposed spiritual greatness with an external growth from being plain 'Mister',
through various intermediate aristocratic titles, to being 'Duke' — maybe
he has now gone further, but he has faded from view. He is an example
of the megalomania of the person who, rather than being promoted,
is suffering
from symptoms which herald breakdown into insanity, however harmless
he may remain on the outside.
The
other kind of person however is sane enough. He is serious in his
search, well-meaning and will not — at first at any rate — become inflated
with a sense of his self-importance.
Such people have undergone a real Gestalt, they have taken a sudden
step in the right direction; it may be that they have become in the full sense
pupils or Initiates of the Greater Mysteries. But it does not seem
necessarily that this is so, and the fact that it has taken place during sleep
does not automatically validate it as such. What then seems to be the case
?
At this point I pause to emphasize that I realize that I am on delicate
ground, and that any explanation I give has to be tentative in the extreme.
It is always a risk to speak of things one does not fully understand, but the
idea of what may happen when one has such a dream experience as I
have in mind may be of use.
There
seems to be a considerable amount of indirect evidence that in the psychic
(astro-mental) world individuals form into clans or groups, or
perhaps even Orders. The Theosophical Society, with its many different
members, is in the psychic world such an entity as I have in mind.
It has a certain coherence at all levels. Another such entity seems to be referred
to
in a novel written by Monica Redlich, where the plot weaves round a
place she called 'the College', which had tutors to teach students, and especially
a Warden of numinous quality. The author 'discovered' this College
while
she was in Denmark during the German occupation, isolated from her
kind, and quite out of touch with anybody of her sort; and she 'dreamed' it.
It
was
only later that she found that some other people also knew the College
both as a 'dream' institution and even in what seemed to be its three-dimensional
special architectural lay-out.[Page 29]
This suggests that the psychic entity has its own various grades,
perhaps its own 'initiations' which, valid enough within their own framework,
fall below those adumbrated by C. W. Leadbeater in his schematized
system in such a book as The Masters and the Path. These steps lead up
to, but are preliminary to the entry of an individual into the Greater
Mysteries of what is often called the White Lodge, that not of the
Himalayas, or of Egypt, or anywhere else, but of the world as a whole.
The
matter becomes further complicated when a person who has had such
an experience is told, a few days later, that he has been given the rank of.
.
. , whatever it is. This information usually came from one of the senior
members of his organization, thereby confirming the belief that what
was felt or dreamed was — as indeed it was — important. It was clear that that
senior (they all belong to the past) was cognizant in his own way of
what had happened to the person concerned.
That the step designated or the new label given to that person was
recognized, by some at least, as being at least one remove from the
greater step, was, moreover, shown when someone whom I knew spoke of
'brevet rank' only. The term 'brevet rank' is one used in the British forces to
designate, for instance, a captain, who, forced by the removal of the
colonel of his regiment to assume command in emergency then serves as
'brevet colonel', but returns to his real rank when relieved of his duties.
It
may seem that I am emphasizing this matter unduly, but it is highly
important as showing how such an event plays straight into the hands of
our friend the Deceiver — Mara, the personal ego. For some people,
becoming proud of being thus singled out into an apparent elite, are
led to behave as if they were 'special' and superior to others. A member
of
a rather exclusive community was once heard to say naively, 'We are
not just
ordinary members, we are a specially dedicated group'. One might ask:
'Dedicated to what?' And, while admitting the best of intentions, the
answer ought to be, 'To my own complacency'. The Pharisee who thanked
God
that he was not as other men said the same thing. And the hubristic
attitude denoted must inevitably divert the victim into a blind alley
where little-I-ness flourishes at the expense of the quest for Truth.[Page 30]
I
need scarcely add that, though I have been writing about events
in circles known to me, the same phenomenon is not unknown in churches
and other groups equally dedicated to the search for Truth. And, as
a
rider to the whole matter we can say that the person, whether or not he receives
any intimation of spiritual rank, who genuinely seeks is humble both
in
his outer behavior and within his own secret mind. It has been said that the
true saint would pass unnoticed in a group — save by those who have 'the
eyes to see'. He would be the least self-important, obtrusive, or ambitious
of men — or women.
Leading
on from this, we find another snare. For the student may be told that his
first task is to try and find his Master. This is a fine opportunity for
Mara to divert the individual from his real task, which is the direct search
for Truth. True, as Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Tulku says, the personal
ego makes a good starting point, since the search has to start
somewhere, and where better than from where one is, and from one whom one
considers as oneself? But the purpose of spiritual aspiration is
to transform this little-self, not to encourage it by dangling before it
the hope of reward or favor from a Master. Rather should we try to develop
insight and vision, confident that if we can be of any help to the Masters
they will find us out. It is simple egoism, despite the fact that devotion
is of help to some, to try to obtrude ourselves before we are ready.
This theme could be vastly expanded. Endless are the ways in which Mara
can wreck us, using nothing but ignorance of ourselves for its own
purposes. If we understand ourselves, even in the murkiest parts of our
personalities, we can avoid shipwreck or entrapment, but to do this
requires that we know and accept ourselves fully. To try and repudiate
even the ugliest side of our natures is equivalent to cutting the growing tip
of a plant from its roots in the manured soil: there can be no hope of flower
or fruit. We have to learn to know and to accept the whole of ourselves
even if we distinguish between the roots, the stem, and the bud. To try to
evade this acceptance is to play straight into the hands of the Deceiver. If I
may be allowed the Irishism, the honest-to-God fraud and liar may be
better than the pious self-deceiver. For the first, acknowledging to himself
his dishonesty, can change at will, while the would-be-good not only has to
undergo the humiliation and shock of [Page 31] seeing himself as he is, but
finds it much more difficult to straighten himself out. We all of us indulge in
the wish to see ourselves as better than we really are, and it is only when
we stop doing so that the way opens before us. Even professions of
humility may conceal ego-pride: we take pride in believing that we are
humble, and so fall into the net which strangles.
In sum, we ourselves, as little egos, individuals at the levels of the
personal, scarce-more than animal mind, are the Deceiver, Mara, the
shadow, the Dark Forces, the black magicians of which some live in fear. It
is we who are the wreckers on the Path of Occultism. Nobody else is to
blame except ourselves; and this blame is due to ignorance, lack of clear
vision both about our own selves and hence of the world in which we live.
Let
us not, however, ever allow ourselves to be self-tricked into thinking that
we have gone beyond that deceit which comes from our own minds. Even the
greatest human beings make mistakes. We are warned that there can be a falling
back, a wrecking, a failure, up to the very end of the human path. We need
constant watchfulness and self-examination to work our way through the realms
of delusion and illusion. Yet we can be certain that it is possible for the
little-self to become the resplendent Self, the Augoeides or Shining Image
which is pure Spirit. All we need to achieve this is to understand ourselves
to the fullest degree.
[Page 32]
MEDITATION IN A VACUUM
MEDITATION has become fashionable in the West. By this I mean
all kinds of meditation other than the old established Christian. Most usually
it refers to something based on Vedanta or Buddhist (Zenist) philosophy,
with many variations from their original source. In the San Francisco area
of the United States the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology recently
listed no less than sixteen 'meditation centers'. Los Angeles could probably
overtop that number, and if we were to lump together all the similar places
in North America and Western Europe, We should probably find a hundred
or more ashrams, viharas, retreats and other more or less organized
institutions where meditational techniques are said to be taught.
Some of these are, certainly, entirely spurious and commercial, some
superficial and inadequate. Some too would be definitely harmful,
advocating the use of drugs, etc. But equally, a good many would be run by
sincere, if not very well equipped, teachers and students who want to
experience transcendental consciousness and are willing to work hard to
attain it.
If,
then, one inquires why people want to indulge in meditation,
one may get a variety of answers. In some cases, it is simply a matter of doing
what others do. More seriously, however, one may be told that it is in order
to experience other states of consciousness, to develop psychic powers,
clairvoyance, etc. Others still come nearer to the true purpose and
will state that they want to find out more about the mysteries of life, to
improve
their
own understanding, to reach Enlightenment. This is a good reason
for embarking on what is at best a strenuous sort of self-discipline, sometimes
involving the sacrifice of things which make life warm and comfortable — though that is not of necessity the case, but may be only a reflection of
ideas of asceticism and mortification, usually of the wrong sort.
Then
one meets people who, for decades perhaps, have [Page 33] already
followed certain routines of meditation. These repay investigation in terms
of how their work has altered them and increased their vision. Only too
often the results are disappointing at least from the outsider's angle. For,
though one does find people who, over the years, have genuinely matured
and deepened their inner quality, there are many who have simply become
older — and perhaps more mellow because of the polishing of time and the
battering of life — but who are just as fixed and set in a limited field of vision
as they were twenty years before. It is with these seeming failures that I am
concerned in this essay. (I say 'seeming' because who can have the
temerity to judge another, especially in terms of spiritual development? Yet
it is obvious that failures there are.) It is as if their disciplines had not
obtained a grip on their characters and thereby proved their effectiveness.
My purpose is to try and see why this happens, and where, in general
terms the fault lies.
Is it in the methods proposed by such teachers of Vedanta as Patanjali or
Shankaracharya, or of the Zen and Taoist masters, of the purer forms of
Buddhism? The answer is negative. There is nothing wrong and much that
is right in what they teach. But when we dissect and analyze such things as
Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, it becomes evident that they can be equated with
the asanas of Hatha Yoga, if we take them alone and out of a context
which I will discuss later. The asanas are, if applied with discrimination,
excellent hygienic exercises. They strengthen and restore physical health.
But the exercises of Patanjali may be taken to represent the same kind of
gymnastics as the physical asanas, moved up to the psychic or mental
level. They limber up the mind as the physical exercises limber up the
body, but they may do nothing more, and may fail to touch the spiritual
level. In that sense, they may act in a vacuum, no matter how many hours
are spent in following them out. The students may indeed find that they see
lights, moving shadows, realize other states of consciousness, float free
from the body (spiritualistic mediums do the same), possibly have
rudimentary extra-sensory experiences; or they become overstrung, have
headaches, sudden accesses of fear, loss of control of their emotions, and
all the rest of the signs that they are doing things wrong. Moreover,
previously latent neurotic and even psychotic symptoms may be brought to
the surface and become [Page 34] exacerbated where previously they were
only in the background of a student's character.
I may add that if anybody takes up the practice of yogic methods 'for kicks',
and the excitement of what he may experience, he will find it much easier,
despite the heavy dangers and permanent damage which may result, to
use drugs: he will at least meet with new vision, however spurious, and
save all the time he would spend on meditation before he reached the
same kind of thing. The yoga practices are much safer; and, moreover, can
be abandoned at any time without bad after-effects, whereas drugs are apt
to leave permanent scars.
If I am right in suggesting that mental or physical yoga out of context is, at
best, useless, at worst, damaging, we need to see what is required for
them to do what they are designed to do: a side of things taken for granted
by teachers from ancient times as much as by those today like
Krishnamurti or the late Aurobindo Ghose, or some of the Tibetan
Rimpoches (who, thanks to Chinese Communism in Tibet, are now known
to the Western world by being exiled from their own land). This background
tells us that the serious student, if he is to become a successful yogi, has
first to be animated by a great love for his fellows and a desire to help them
at whatever the cost. With this as the background to his life, he can go in
for whatever discipline or non-discipline seems to him best, in order to
become really useful, through understanding and illumination.
Put in other words, for meditation to be really fruitful demands of one a total
committal of oneself to the work of finding Truth: not a conditional, partial
committal, setting aside certain aspects of life or of one's character to be
dealt with 'some other time', but a total dedication even of the ugliest and
most murky aspects of oneself to the great work. If one holds anything
back, one may perfect the mental machinery required to refine and
transform one's character, but it is comparable to a polishing wheel which
is not able to touch the object to be polished, and is left spinning in the
void.
It
is here that meditation — and, indeed, all religious practices — fail, whether
they be sitting in meditation, trying to reach what can only be a simulacrum
of samadhi — the kind of trance in which one sees many Sadhus in India.
Spinning a [Page 35] Tibetan prayer-wheel or telling the rosary of Catholic
Christianity with a mechanical mind is just as useful and much easier.
I
have used the phrase 'meditation in a vacuum'. To make it effective,
that vacuum has to be filled, and that which fills it has to be one's
personal self
and the accumulation of mind — thought and feeling — that has gathered
round it. The point of attack of religious practices is none other
than what we usually call ourselves, our little-egos; and the whole purpose is to
transform this little-ego and this little mind so that they become
consciously part of the universal Self and the universal Mind. Many
people earnestly
try; but when they become aware of sides of themselves — and some refuse
to see them, either deliberately or from instinctive reaction of
concealment — they stick fast. This is where yoga disciplines become a
trap, a blind alley, a groove in which a fixed attitude of mind can
run in circles around the very thing which needs to be altered. The
discipline
is
not of necessity wrong, it is the use we make of it.
How
many of us dare even contemplate such a total committal ? Only
to think of it needs courage. To do it requires much more — endless
endurance, disappointment and self-humiliation, in addition to the
virtues spoken of in connection with the great Quest: to work with the same
enthusiasm without hope of reward or 'gaining merit', yet as if one's
goal were spiritual or material riches; to become non-reactive to personal
slights, and all the rest of the qualities of the genuine seeker.
This is no light thing to go into. It is better to draw back than to deceive
oneself that
any external discipline can get us to the goal of Enlightenment without
paying the price of suffering, doubt and, often, of realizing our
mistakes
and stupidities face to face. Only so can meditation and other religious
practices be anything else but waste of time and energy: a will-o'-the-wisp
and a glamour leading us away from rather than towards ultimate Truth.[Page 36]
SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE MASTERS
NOBODY
can belong in the Theosophical Society or any of the splinter groups which
have broken away from the parent body, or in the wider Theosophical movement
which includes many people, without sooner or later hearing about those
commonly called the Masters. We are told that they were the prime movers
in the origins of the Society, that they were the authors who at least
inspired the writing of the Mahatma Letters, that they have on occasion
sent messages to the Society. There are several books of a highly personal
nature which tell us how they are envisaged by the writers. And, most pertinent
of all, that if we are true seekers after truth, we shall become their
own direct pupils or disciples.
The
idea is an inspiring one. Logically it seems probable that
there are indeed human beings who have reached the far end of human evolution,
who are very much wiser than we are, people to whom the deeper
secrets
of the universe are, if not an entirely open book, at least one
with many open pages. Even if we have no direct and personal experience of them,
the feeling that they exist, that they were once like us, and that
we can become like them, can be a great incentive to our aspirations, But
unless
this idea is constantly examined, re-valued, scrutinized in the
light of
our own personalities, it can also become a serious bar to further
progress and insight into the mysteries of life. It is for this reason that I
shall
now raise questions and make comments, not with the idea of denying anything
which has been said, but in order to encourage my fellow students
to ask themselves questions which need to be asked and frankly answered. I
may add that for my part, whatever doubts I may have about the details of what
others, probably wiser than myself, have said, I have none whatever
that the basic principle that there is an 'occult hierarchy' made
up of various
grades of highly developed people, is an ineluctable fact.
We can begin our questioning at the roots. How do we know that such
exalted beings had anything to do with the foundation [Page 37] of our Society
and Movement? How, moreover, do we know that they inspired, if they did
not write, many of the 'Letters', some of which seem extremely trivial or
verbose?
To the first proposition there is no answer save to point to the effect which
resulted from bringing to the Western world many ideas which it tended to
deride or ignore in favor of either materialism or the emotionalism of
Spiritualism in certain of its aspects. There seems little doubt that it has
been considerable. One can nowadays mention such ideas as
Reincarnation and Karma, the sense of the spiritual base of man's being,
and other ideas of the same kind, in conversation without being thought
quite mad. It does not follow that our interlocutor will accept the ideas, but
his mind is sufficiently used to them for him to listen even if he smiles at us
in a superior way if we become dogmatic and try to convert him: always a
great mistake, and a give-away of our own uncertainties about what we
think we firmly believe.
I have asked various people the question whether, as is sometimes said,
the Theosophical Movement has had any influence on modern thought.
And even people who were neutral or perhaps highly critical of
developments since the early days, usually agree that it has. Which does
not prove that there were spiritualized Beings behind the movement. Other
movements, Mormonism, Christian Science and so on, make similar
claims. They too have spread in the last decades, and made many
disciples. We today have to keep our minds open on that particular
question.
As
to the Letters: there are certainly gems of wisdom among them. But, as one
finds diamonds mixed in with clay, so it seems, we need to study them
carefully and try to see what 'feels' right, without referring to the authority
of others, but to that point in ourselves which it should be our task to develop
as the focus from which to orient ourselves and our lives. This focus is
most important from any points of view. For as we learn — often the hard
way — to refer to it, it serves to develop our knowledge of ourselves, seeing
the kinks and quirks, the roughnesses and evasions in our characters.
Thus, eventually we become our own authority, the judges of what is our
own truth. We no longer depend upon others, and then find ourselves let
down because what they tell us shows up as a [Page 38] distortion of a great
fundamental principle. It is important, moreover, because of what it
becomes in our lives and in our ideas of what we call a Master. But before
we go on to that, it will be useful if we consider what we mean when we
use that term.
It is not one I myself like: it suggests the old-fashioned school atmosphere,
where there were two camps, masters (or mistresses) and pupils, with a
gap between them. Yet if we consider other words, these too present
difficulties. If we speak of a 'Mahatma', we find that this term simply means
a 'great spirit'. And one who knows India well tells me that it can be applied
to a master-cook as much as to a Rishi or spiritually developed Being.
'Rishi' means 'seer' and does not of necessity indicate more than a person
with some degree of true vision. 'Saint', thanks to the Roman Church
perhaps more than any other Christian sect, has lost any meaning, while
'Elder Brothers' verges on the sentimental. So perhaps the common term
'Masters' is the simplest and presents the least difficult and I shall continue
to use it.
If I am asked to define what I mean when I apply that term to a person, I
have to fall back on certain principles derived from depth psychology of the
spiritually oriented type. To talk in terms of Initiations and the like, and of a
Master as having taken the Fifth Initiation, means very little to most of us,
especially as this word 'Initiation' has been so badly misused, and, like
'saint', has lost its deep meaning.
It
is widely accepted that the man (including woman, of course) who is
really seeking for truth must perforce grow in vision, in wisdom, in insight
into the mysteries of 'being' and of its extension into the
realm of 'existence' or 'standing out' from pure 'being' into the more material
worlds where
maya or 'conditioned reality' holds sway. As he
progresses, his awareness becomes more and more perfused
with a level deeper than that where the personal mind
lives in maya. This level, which has characteristics
of its own, is known to the mystic, the seer, the true
saint. It is that of the Real, the Spirit, of God — it
has endless names. As this goes on, the individual changes,
his personality becoming increasingly a reflection of
this inner Reality. Putting this in other words, he begins
to show in
his personal
life a reflection of the greater Archetypes or divine Ideas
on which the manifested universe is founded.[Page
39]
This progress is apt to take place in steps, small or great, when a
'breakthrough' takes place suddenly and quickly into a new level of insight
into deeper reality than before. Each of these Gestalt, to give them their
technical name, is indeed an initiation: the beginning of a new phase of life.
It is to the greater steps no doubt that occultists refer when they talk of
initiations, but it is essential that we should realize what the term implies.
We can reasonably, even when our own experience falls far short of it,
assume that there comes a time when the consciousness of a person
makes a final break-through which carries him over the frontier between
mankind-on-earth, as we know him, and a kingdom which lies beyond. As
evolution undergoes a major transformation when the vegetable becomes
animal, the animal man, so would man pass over into a further stage of
what has been called, by Nietzsche 'Beyond-Man' or 'Superman'. A Master,
by definition, is one who, if he has not altogether passed beyond mankind,
is at the very far end of the range of evolution of man.
This is looking at the matter in terms of evolution, of biology, and, since
man's development is less biological than psychological today, of mental
unfoldment. Another way of looking at the matter is that shown us by
modern psychological knowledge.
This
knowledge shows us that when a person reaches a certain stage, the ancient wisdom
stored in traditional myth now begins to flow into his
consciousness, not through tradition and religious forms on the outside,
but from within himself. Myth becomes personalized without, however, losing
its universality in symbol of meaning. His wisdom develops henceforth
as he dedicates himself, as it were, to living his own myth dynamically and
consciously. If he is a Christian, he enters the stage in which he himself
is the infant Jesus and starts on the path which leads from the birth of a new
level of spiritual consciousness in the stable, to the culmination of
the
Resurrection and the Ascension into Nirvana. I put it this way to indicate
how universal myth becomes that of the individual personality, keeping its
general symbolism while having separate meaning and presenting itself
in
different forms to each one of us.[Page 40]
At the same time, certain generalizations can be made about the
kind of symbols one is going to encounter at various stages of the journey.
I will not go into these, since they can be studied at length in many books
belonging to the general Jungian school of psychology, especially perhaps
in P. W. Martin's Experiment in Depth, Ira Progoff's writings, as well as
those of others like-minded. In this paper I want to pick out one image only:
that of the Sage.
This
Sage is sometimes called the Wise Old Man, the Wizard, the
Sibylline, oracular Woman, seen in dream or vision, expressed sometimes in poems
or other art forms. In all cases the impact on the one who 'meets'
this image is profound. If one sees the connection between one dream and
the
next, one realizes that the same Archetype seems to manifest in
different guises. I myself — and I am bound here to bring my own experience into the
picture — know the Sage as a hermit in the hills, a ragged, dirty beggar in a
street, a Chinese merchant selling me certain symbolic cloth which
I could only have if I agreed to accept certain traditions, as
a majestic, royal
figure, and in other less well defined ways, including simply a
voice which seemed
to speak from within myself. All of them usually said something
which showed me some blind spot in myself. One of the characteristics
of
the
Sage was always that he never flattered me, but never made me feel
a fool or a knave: he met me 'man to man', his greatness being
felt all
the more
for the sense of equality he conveyed.
In this context, what is the Sage ? The Master X ? If I wanted to flatter
myself, I would say 'Yes': my little personal, psychological ego would then
feel important, having received the immediate attention of a great spiritual
Being. But in fact, what I was meeting seems to me to be simply my-Self:
that inner Ego, to use the theosophical nomenclature, more or less
disguised.
The point of telling this is to state my own idea of a Master: that he is a
man (or a woman ?). We never hear of a Master in a feminine body, but
unless there is some profound reason behind this, I cannot see why, if they
have bodies, this should not be female as well as male. This would keep a
balance in the higher ranks of mankind between the two polar forces
whose personality embodies without hindrance some aspect of the [Page 41]
Archetypal, divine Mind. He would, in psychological terms, be fully
conscious at the personal, existential level; there would be no automatic
unconscious to cloud his clear vision: he would be the incarnation of a
divine principle, an avatar, even if we use this word in a limited sense.
If
this picture is anywhere near correct — and I realize on what dangerous
ground I am treading: my own prejudices come into the picture just
as much as those of others who have spoken about Masters — then a Master
is something far greater and more magnificent than the insipid
pictures we have been given of them: Victorian clergymen, old-fashioned
aristocrats,
military commanders, recluse hermits and the like, uttering what
on analysis are not usually much more than pious platitudes.
Granted that
the
burning devotion of those who have painted these pictures, whether
in words or on paper and canvas, shows through, the result
belittles what
I believe we should look for when we think of the topmost ranks
of our humanity.
This brings me to the main point of this essay: the relation between such a
person as a Master and ourselves, little, struggling, human entities. We are
told that they will accept pupils into a personal relationship with
themselves. I do not deny this, though I cannot easily accept the scheme
found in such books as The Masters and the Path as more than an
imperfect outline: it may be absolutely correct, but equally it may err in
detail even if it rests on a basic reality.
If we understand the truth of what we know today about mythical archetypal
images, it shows us how easy it is to confuse such an image as the Sage
as our deeper Selves, and the actual objectively existent person we call a
Master. It would take very great insight to become clear as to how much, if
at all, a certain Master played into the symbolic Sage: he may very well do
so. But what matters is not the exact mechanics by which the image of the
Wise Man is produced as what we do with what we are given by that
image. Do we learn the lesson, or do we preen ourselves that we are
among the chosen few? And this is the most serious form of self-deception
which can take place, since it strengthens the hold of the personal ego on
our minds, whereas the whole process of spiritual development is to
weaken that hold in favor of the deeper Self of which the personal ego [Page
42] is a dim and shadowy reflection, nourished from 'below' by the instinctive
or kamic aspects of our personalities.
That
personal ego, the center of self-identity in our ordinary minds, is a tricky
factor for the would-be occultist seeking real spiritual awareness. It is
only as we learn to see its game, self-preservation and self-aggrandizement,
with open eyes, that we can gradually cope with it. We have, as it were, to beat
it at its own game: that game being, not like poker
where bluff and deceit are the main weapons, but chess, where every
move is open and can be studied in clear consciousness. If we do
not see what trick the personal ego is up to, we are inclined to believe that
we have
removed him out of our way, only to discover that he has sneaked
back center-stage without our knowing it. Those misguided people who tell you
they are 'liberated' or 'saved', whether because they are followers
of
Krishnamurti or of Jesus, are an example of egoism run riot in
almost every
case. They do not know themselves as egos, hence they do not know
themselves as Selves.
Unless
we can reach some degree of self-knowledge, it seems unlikely
that, however good our intentions may be, we are likely to enter into a deep
relation — which, I believe, operates through the true Self, not the personal
ego — with any genuine Master. Indeed, we are quite likely to be deceived
by some individual who is not genuine but, for one reason or another,
impresses himself on others by claiming, directly or indirectly,
to be what he is not.
Once
again psychology teaches us something of how this can happen.
We human beings have a great power of projection of our beliefs and emotions
on to others. We invest people and objects with the idea of what
we want them to be — or not to be. Falling in love, when it is said the lovers are blind
to one another, is such an example: they see only what they want
to see, not the objective person. Where a Master is concerned, it is an easy
enough thing when one has read and thought about them, for us to
wish to find the one we feel is 'ours', to meet him in the flesh if possible.
And
there are times when it is difficult to know whether, in refusing
to
accept a certain
person or a certain message, one may not be simply shutting one's
eyes to an opportunity which will not come again.
I
think some principles may help here.[Page 43]
First, let us realize that there are individuals in the world who,
perhaps as a result of misdirected studies of the Occult, have become
powerful 'magnetic' personalities. This power is not necessarily good. Or,
more accurately, the power is neither good nor evil, but it can be used for
evil ends. Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and other dictators were people of
immense personal power. So are some of the fanatical Gospel preachers
who purport to convert people to the true faith. Sensitive individuals, who
do not know themselves, tend to become spellbound by such personalities.
They do not see what they are doing or where they are going: which does
not mean that they are not essentially good and well-meaning idealists.
Some
of the individuals who are neither politicians nor missionaries
turn their attention to the occult. Some are deliberate frauds, who discover
that
they can, as it were, hypnotize others to become their followers
and to keep them in relative luxury without having to do more work than play
on
their credulity. Some are paranoid schizophrenics who believe themselves
to be high initiates and even Masters. They too are often powerful,
but they do not set out to be deliberately dishonest. Let me say now that
I personally have heard of no less than four individuals who claim
to be the Comte de Saint Germain, also known as the Master Rakoczy. One was
a crazy medical doctor; one — the only one I saw directly — a little runt of a
man who radiated some kind of power; one claimed to be a high Mason
and to have a doctor's degree of some sort; another sent mysterious
messages through an intermediary and induced a friend of mine to
travel to Paris to meet him and to return to England as his only
chosen
representative, to cause trouble in theosophical circles.
In all cases, a number of people, some of whom one might think ought to
have known better, 'fell for them', to use the colloquial phrase. And it was
clear that one of the principal reasons for their doing so was flattery, a
suggestion that they were people greatly privileged, and that was because
of their own spiritual stature. Their personal egos were titillated and
inflated, and they lost all sense of proportion.
There
is only one safe course, I believe. That is, so to study oneself — as
both the Delphic Oracle and other sound schools of spiritual study
advised — that one gets to know oneself through [Page 44] and through. This
will help us to realize when our emotions and not our intuitions are involved
either in a school of thought and teaching or with an individual. Moreover, it
will teach us that we have in us a point of reference, by whatever name we
call it, whose mandate or direction we should learn never to ignore. And if
we do ignore it, to be prepared to take the consequences of our mistake. It
is better so than to allow ourselves to become, in our turn, glamoured by
things which flatter our little selves, however subtly.
To conclude, I shall let myself dogmatize and say that the only person likely
to be a true Initiate or in any other way on the Occult path is one who is not
interested in 'where he stands'. He will neither want nor make use of any
label he may be given, realizing that occult advancement, despite what we
have been told, can never be given prematurely nor refused when one is
worthy of it. We advance ourselves by our own efforts only. We should
suspect anybody and everybody who offers us a 'label': it cannot be
genuine.
I believe in a saying attributed to Lao Tse who, whoever he may have been
if he ever existed as a man, said that the right person will achieve his goal
even if he goes at it by wrong methods; but that the wrong person (i.e., the
self-seeker) will never achieve his goal even if he uses the right and best
methods of yoga and self-discipline.
One is perfectly safe, whatever mistakes one may make, provided one is
seeking truth at all costs. The traditional 'wrecks on the Path of Occultism'
are those who, however subtly, are seeking self-aggrandizement rather
than impersonal Reality.
As a final word let me emphasize that 'belief in the Masters' is not the mark
of a Theosophist. Many people believe in them, but a Theosophist is a
seeker after truth, not a believer in any doctrine. There is no harm in
deifying a Master if one wishes to do so, provided one does this on a
pragmatic basis, as a useful means to help us towards our ends. A Master,
however magnificent and exalted, is not God: but, speaking with all
respect, one can use him or the image we build of him as if he were a god,
if not God. To do this we need constantly to remind ourselves that what we
are seeking is Absolute Essential Truth, which cannot be encompassed by
any human or superhuman [Page 45] being. If we know what we are about, I
believe we shall then step by step discover for ourselves the truth about
Masters.
At the same time, there is a tendency, and a healthy one at that, for many
people to avoid personalizing: the Supreme God, Brahman, Tao, cannot be
personalized. And it may suit our temperament better to eschew any formal
idea about Masters and make our aspirations towards Truth, Love, Beauty,
Wisdom directly and in general terms. In any case, we should not, as some
wrong-headed theosophical 'teachers' advocate, make our quest one for a
Master or guru. We should seek beyond even them. And we can leave it to
the one who is our true Master, apart from the one who resides inside
ourselves as our true Self, to seek us out if he wishes. Nobody will be
missed who can be of use to him when he is impersonal and a genuine
Theosophist, in whatever form this may be.[Page 46]
YOGA THROUGH MAYA
IT may seem trite to begin an article by reminding ourselves yet
again that the word 'Yoga' means 'yoking' or joining together things
separated. 'Religion' means the same, with the additional suggestion that
the separate things have already been united and have to be once more
brought together into a unit. As we shall see, that which we call maya is the
conception of things paired and separated; so that if we bring these
together this is an act of Yoga as genuine and deep as anything achieved
by any other form of Yoga.
First,
however, we should try to understand the meaning of this Sanskrit term, maya.
It is often translated merely as 'illusion' or 'unreality', in contradistinction
with 'Reality' or 'the Real', 'the True'. To think in terms of 'illusion'
is, up to a point, valid; but to set this against another conception, that
of 'Truth', is in itself a mayavic way of looking at things. While it may
serve a limited purpose, the duality implied is itself 'illusory'
and hence untrue in any absolute sense. It is only relatively true.
Which tells us what maya is: relative truth; and this, in turn, raises the
question of the nature of relativity. For where things are related there has to
be duality: one thing can only be related to some other thing, it cannot be
'relative', unless it has something to which it is related. In other words, the
field of maya is that of polarity, of 'the pairs of opposites'. And where poles
exist there is, of necessity, a field of force between them. This is the basis
of the manifested universe. Hence, maya and manifestation are
synonymous.
The
Chinese have characterized the situation in the Taoist philosophy, where
the poles are called yin and yang, or, in more specific terms,
the opposites of male and female, good and evil, light and dark, the real
and the unreal, and so on indefinitely. In terms of this essay, the yogic
act is when we integrate these opposites through bringing into play the Tao
which may be said to act upon the field between the poles. Tao-in-action
[Page 47] (Teh)
can probably be equated with the Vedantic idea of tapas, 'the
eternal divine dynamist' as it is called by Sri Aurobindo Ghose. It integrates
them into something else which we call the Real (if we think of rera or
objects, hence of the material world) or Truth (if we think in terms of the
conceptual, non-material). It should again be noted that the very division
in our minds between the material and the conceptual or abstract is itself
a polarized conception: which brings us to what may be the key to the whole
mystery of maya.
For it suggests to us that, if we assume for the moment that there is an
objective world, self-existent, created by an Intelligence which we name
'God', and a subjective world, within our minds, created by ourselves
around our sense of self-identity, our egos, it would appear that maya really
lies in the field between this objective world and the inner, psychic, mental
one. In other words, it clothes our mind much as our physical clothes
surround us and protect us against the elements, as well as hiding our
nakedness.
Thus maya, not surprisingly, since it is dual in its essence, serves a double
purpose: that of protection and that of concealment. But if we think of these
roles in any particular field, we can conceive of them as playing hide-and-seek with one another. Protection becomes concealment when it hides us
from an overdose of Reality, and concealment becomes protection when it
prevents us from knowing everything at once and being overwhelmed by
that knowledge before we are ready for it.
This play on words is deliberate and intended to point to the thing which
concerns us, which is the mind through which we acquire our view of
things. For if we realize certain things about Mind, we find the clue to how
we can find Reality by using 'illusion' itself. First we have to recognize that
the way we perceive the world is a very partial, limited picture of it in its
Real state. Our senses are limited (not only do we not perceive ultra-violet
light or infra-red rays with our eyes, but we think that our hands rest on
solid wood or stone when in fact they rest on what is largely empty space
with tiny particles of 'matter' with vast distances between them; and so on).
In other words, our world-picture is not that of things as they are, but only
of things as we are capable of perceiving them: the picture is a [Page 48]
convenient fiction we carry in our minds; and, fortunately, for normal living,
most people have a very similar fiction in theirs, or at least, one created
('fiction' means 'a thing made') sufficiently like our own for communication
between one person and another to be possible.
This conception that our Welt-Anschauung is a convenient fiction has first
to be, in however small a degree, realized and felt to be more than an
intellectual concept by the would-be maya-Yogi. Many people touch Reality
at 'peak moments' when they find themselves confronted with Something
they know is Real and transcendental; and the experience stays with them
after it is over. As I have already suggested, the contrast between ordinary
living, with a mind functioning at the level of maya and this peak experience
is itself a polarized one, but it gives us the clue we need. For if we cultivate
the sense of what we have seen, giving it value in the mind, it begins to
grow and expand. We become actively Religious. (I use the word in its true
sense, and do not refer in any way to organized religions, with their creeds,
catechism and rituals. The latter may serve a purpose still, but they are not
essential to true Religion.)
It
is now that we can start on a form of Yoga — or Religion — in
which we learn how to make use of maya instead of being enslaved and made use of
by it. This is not done by repudiating the realms of 'illusion and
unreality'. To pass healthily 'from the unreal to the Real' we must
carry the 'unreal'
along with us. If we do not, we lose touch with the earth on which
we should be firmly standing, and become the kind of person who is
'so
spiritual' that he is useless in society, if not actually obnoxious
because of
his inability to live a normal life.
What
changes is the attitude towards the 'unreal' world. For something in us, if it
does not always succeed, begins to make us feel the realm of
unreality as being a playground where our child-minds can grow. Just
as modern education of children makes increasing use of play and enjoyment
in teaching the young, so can we begin to enjoy ('find joy in') the realm of
maya. (Is this why Shiva, the Creator-Destroyer, 'danced'? And why
Krishna played with the Milkmaids, emblems of the Earth-Mother, maya?) If
we can, from the background of the sense of Tao, or Reality which we have [Page 49] experienced, allow ourselves to play the divine game in maya,
life becomes interesting and fruitful; for we gradually withdraw
from self-involvement in many things which previously seemed to be of
vital importance. We may still take part in these things, but we become
less perturbed if they do not go right, or delighted if we get what we want.
Our values change and we begin to learn what is worth while and what
is not. These things will depend on our individual patterns in life, so need
not be listed, but it is clear that the person previously engrossed in
being rich
or prominent in society or in acquiring power is likely to discover
the futility of living for these things. But, if he is sound, he will also
see to it
that he earns
his living in an ethically justifiable way, that he is or remains
socially acceptable and does not offend others without good reason, and so
on. Clearly, a sense of humor and the ability to laugh at one's antics
is a very great asset, if not a necessity. (It should, however, be a sense
of how
funny
oneself and others are, without bitterness or cynicism: one should laugh with and not at oneself or others.)
This attitude of non-involvement in maya is, at its root, the same thing as
discovering Truth or Reality, according to which way one looks, towards the
abstract or the material. When we eventually achieve it, it probably
represents the mokska, liberation or enlightenment which makes one a true
Initiate or Arhat. But even on the way, many things become enjoyable. At
the same time, increased enjoyment, at the mayavic level, also calls for the
balance of increased pain. The way is not all roses. In any case, roses
have cruel thorns but the Yogi will take these thorns as part of the pattern.
The more light he has in one aspect of his mind, the darker the shadows in
those parts which are not illumined.
In
other words, the Yogi as it were invites pain as well as experiencing joy.
In Gurdjieff's school, that word 'invite' is used in a way which can be
misinterpreted as masochistic, courting suffering as something of an end in
itself. This would be to make the same mistake as is made by many
pseudo-Yogis and ascetics of every faith. What should happen is to allow
the suffering resulting from our present ignorance, from our past acts, to
make their full impact on us so that we do not resist that impact. Indeed,
it might be said that the impact of [Page
50] Karma causes pain only because
we resist and try to repress this impact, not because it is painful in itself.
The
whole matter of transcending maya clearly depends on our use of
Mind. Basically, pure, unconditioned Mind, or Manas,
is our instrument, as human beings, for evolving to the point
where we have completely 'de-conditioned' it. Here pure Manas,
unclothed in maya, comes face to face
with Truth and knows itself to be that Truth.
It
is, however, not only Truth but, it creates maya. It lives and evolves
in, by, and through maya. But maya is now its plaything, something
which, since it is self-generated, it can learn to manipulate but not be
ruled by. A scientist 'rules' matter and energy by understanding their laws.
His mind is the instrument he uses as his scepter. Similarly, the maya-Yogi can,
by using his manasic principle, become the ruler of the worlds of illusion
and relativity. But this depends on his mind being, as it ultimately has
to be, uninvolved in the light-and-shadow play of the world perceived as maya.
If we assume that such a true world exists, the principle of seeing it directly
is simple enough: to do away with the veil between us and it. This is the
implication in all true Yogas. Patanjali speaks in terms
of 'stopping the modifications of the thinking principle' (i.e. of conditioned manas],
the Taoist in terms of finding the Tao behind all yin-yang phenomena,
the Tibetan Buddhist of seeing 'the Clear Light'. In all cases, it is not
the world which has to change, but the picture of it within our mind. Hence,
we need to learn how to use this mind in a new way.
We are so used, in the West, to seeing life in terms of causality: a certain
thing becomes the cause producing certain effects. The effect then
becomes the cause of some further effect, and so on in an endless chain
towards the future. But equally valid is it to think of an indefinite regress
into the past, where certain effects are seen from the stand-point that they
are the result of some antecedent cause, leading step by step back in time.
The chain seems to have no beginning and no end: which, indeed, is the
truth of the matter, unless we are willing to think that beginning and end
emerge from and return into timeless Infinity; that is, into something beyond
our comprehension. But if we take each unit of cause-effect as a kind of
quantum similar to the quantum of energy conceived by [Page 51] physicists,
we can learn to think of this quantum as a unit of Reality, the Reality or Tao
including the opposing pair of both cause and effect. Tao as it were stands
between the two, in the 'field' between the opposite poles, bringing them
together into a new synthesis.
Granted that this is a mental exercise, it represents something more than a
piece of clever gymnastics. For as we learn to think of everything in daily
life in these terms, the mind itself changes. It is a very simple exercise; or,
perhaps, an exercise in simplification, whereby three are reduced to one,
yin-yang into Tao. But the very simplicity is what makes things difficult. For,
life after life (if the maya of successive lives has validity) we have trained
the mind in the direction of complexity, of the accumulation of knowledge
and experience, and in finding new ways of making use of them. We now
have to put on the brakes and in fact to reverse this process: we have to be
'converted'. Instead of separating things into contrasting pairs, we need to
bring them, or allow them, to come together, to make enemies into friends
and partners, and that not merely in cases selected according to our
prejudices and feelings, but in every single case.
What
is called for is a complete reorientation of our minds,
and it is little wonder that so often the seeker feels he is being destroyed,
that he 'unknows', that he is passing into dark night. But if he is dedicated
to finding the Truth, he will find himself helped by the very laws
which he has followed in building up the structure he has to change. For
one of these
laws is that of attraction between opposites, not, as at
a certain level, of separating pairs: which is something which his mind has
done but which, below and above the intellectual level, acts in reverse.
We may call this attraction polar — as in the case, say, of electrical charges — but
in a more general sense, love. It may be facetious to speak of the love
of a positive ion for a negative, yet there is a serious undertone
to the
whimsy; while
the polar attraction of a human being inhabiting a male
body for another
human
being in a female one is colloquially called love even
in the absence of more than animal instinctive factors.
If,
then, we can intellectually see the nature of mayavic polarity, and add to this
the willingness to de-polarize our minds in terms of love, we shall be on
the way to finding our goal.[Page 52]
What is de-polarized is maya, the de-polarizing force is love, and
the effect of love is to bring us face to face with the great Tao which is
Truth.
Love,
however, is not intellect but an aspect of intelligence. It is
of intellect, looked at in one (mayavic) way, that it is said that it is 'the
killer
of the Real'.
Properly used, however, it is also the revealer of the Real (I
use this word as equivalent with Truth). The proper way is to use this mind
to doubt
everything, to realize that all intellectual concepts are of
only relative validity, even to the conception of a Master, a Teacher, to Gautama
Buddha and Jesus, however great our reverence for them. Even
they
are only relative, and one must pass beyond even the greatest Teacher;
for,
while he incarnates the Truth, he is not himself Truth. It is
a hard
discipline in that sense. But, as in all mayavic situations, it sets
against itself
faith, belief, devotion, a sense of the validity in all things and
people so that
the two are balanced. And when this balance is found, Mind, at the
center of equipoise, is free and the end of Yoga has been achieved. We know
the inner meaning of the word 'One'. [Page 53]
NO ACCIDENT
IN
the minds of some people the world they live in is a place
of disorder where events take place disconnectedly and fortuitously, without
relation to one another. Life to them is 'a tale told by an idiot'
and there is no pattern or design in it. Others, on the other hand — and they include both
modern scientists and intuitives — have a sense that perfect order reigns,
that the universe is ruled by absolute laws, and that it is only
our ignorance which makes us see it as chaotic, purposeless, a
place where
the word
'accident' denotes the occurrence of an event unpredictable and
meaningless.
These wiser people would use 'accident' in its original etymological sense
as 'something which takes place', even if we do not know why. Moreover,
the term includes both pleasant and unpleasant occurrences, not merely
those which are painful, despite the tendency to think that the pleasant
things of life are those which we deserve, the nasty ones strokes of fate,
divine punishment and the like.
It is only one step further to see that behind the 'accidental', the 'chance
event', the 'indeterminacy', the 'randomness' there is a definite pattern:
cause, followed by effect. These laws, in the West, are thought of as taking
place along the time-track where something from the past produces the
present effect, and what we see happening now will, later in time, result in
something else. It is a perfectly valid point of view and is embodied in the
usual concept we have of the law of Karma. It serves to explain, or to
rationalize, if not explicitly to make clear, the routine of our lives. Maybe, for
most purposes and in practice, this suffices; which is why the philosophy of
what we call rather inaccurately the Aryan culture, both Indian and
Western, had adopted it.
But if one wishes to understand, and to find meaning, it is not enough to
speculate or to see life in these terms alone. We need to add to this causal,
time-track point of view, another one, which, as it were, cuts across the
time-track at right angles, at a [Page 54] point which we call 'now'. That is the
Taoist, ancient Chinese, approach to life. Obviously, if we
concern ourselves only with the immediate moment, we can also
get into
difficulties, such as not thinking of the needs of our larder
for the next meal
or learning from experience so that we may successfully avoid
past errors
and
dangers. A combination of the two philosophies, however, opens
the way to a very practical means of at once dealing with events
and
understanding their significance. It is as if a painter, working
on a flat surface,
brings together both horizontal and vertical lines, and what
emerges is a complete
pattern. And if he is successful, a magical act occurs, in
that his two-dimensional
picture is perceived as if it were three-dimensional. Houses,
painted flat, appear as solid blocks, streets recede into the
distance
which is not on the canvas and so on. The magic takes place
through the
perceiving mind; and, though the three-dimension picture is
illusory in one sense, it becomes very much a real thing when our minds get to work on it.
The picture in the mind may be 'illusory'. But if we learn how to use 'illusion'
or maya properly, once the mind gets to grips with it, it can reverse the
movement and begin to modify the picture itself. This is a provocative
thought, yet it represents the very thing which makes Man different from
the lower animals: he has, however limited it may be, a certain degree of
freewill, of freedom of choice, within a given situation, and the more he
learns about an event, the greater seems to be the room for manoeuver
which this freewill gives. The will, in our case, operating through Manas,
pure Mind, is the operative force.
To
understand this, let us consider the principle known as the Law of Karma — cause and effect, with particular reference to the human race. This
Law is said, in the Vedantic tradition, to be carried out by certain highly
developed Beings known as the Lipika, who may be equated with the idea
of the Recording Angels. But they not only register events in the cosmic
memory, they may also be thought of as in constant action. In line with the
evolution to which they belong — the devic or angelic — their task is to
operate Law, without deviation. In this sense they are the agents of a
seemingly rigid and inflexible set of rules. Mankind, on the other hand, in
this, our system, seems to have as its task the bringing about of seeming
deviations in the [Page 55] Law: its freewill brings into play a new factor which
modifies the overall pattern of any situation in which Man is involved; which
is why Karma seems to be unpredictable and even, at times, erratic. It is
not so in reality, but only seems to be because we do not as yet see a
whole event in depth, but only parts, or superficial aspects of that event.
It
will make matters clearer if we think of the Lipika, supposing
them to be cosmic self-existent entities, as working on the principles
of a computer with constant feed-back — cybernetics in which the computer instantly
balances itself in a perfect pattern belonging to the fleeting instant
of any and every 'now'. In this way the time-track cause of a piece of immediate
pattern is modified by any new force brought into that pattern at
the
moment of the event: notably where human freewill enters into play.
So Karma is not a once-and-for-all determinism, but something which is
constantly being modified. This modification takes place at the instant
in which an event or accident occurs, neither before nor after. And yet, while,
clearly, forces arising from the past play into that moment, they
may
themselves be affected by teleology (things arising from the future),
which also plays into the immediate present. And then we have the important
thing already mentioned, the human faculty of choice or freewill,
arising not from past or future, but from the other dimension of every 'now'.
So we may
say that every instant of time is three-dimensional — in the way we see our
picture, transformed by magic from a flat canvas into a solid
and 'real' object. The three dimensions are past, future and
freewill,
coinciding 'now'.
This brings us to a consideration of the structure of an event or, in the
literal sense, accident. For such an event takes place within the framework
of the Law and, if we allow ourselves to think from a human point of view of
what happens, it is clear that every event is a most complex affair, an
assembly of many items at a place which is 'here' and at a moment in time
which is 'now'. First, as I have said, we have the past of the individual
involved in the event. Then, his dharma or teleology: what he essentially is.
Then we have the mind, and the will working through that mind, at the
exact moment of the accident. But the hard-worked Lipika have also to
bring together at the here now [Page 56] point other individuals, objects,
weather, perhaps cataclysms like earthquakes or tidal waves and so on.
Moreover, these have to make a pattern of absolute perfection in which
every factor is balanced up with every other. It is a staggering picture when
one sits down to think of it. And all the more so when we realize that the
same principles have to operate everywhere, in every 'here' and all the
time throughout the Manvantara or duration of our world system.
Nothing
is left to chance, nothing can happen which is outside
the Law — or
so we think and feel if we have once experienced from within
such a view of the universe, whether as visionaries or as intelligent
scientists.
In other words, we live and move in a perfectly self-balancing
machine where everything is in a sense predetermined: all
but one
thing,
which
is the
individuality of man; and this can change and re-balance the
action of the machine as he uses his mind intelligently within that
machine. (Note that
I
restrict myself to thinking of the human kingdom in relation
to the devic,
and do not attempt to go outside it: some people assert that
Karma applies to animals and even plants. Others, of whom I am one,
use the term Karma
as applying only to the field centered round an individuality or ego.)
Looked
at in this way, Karma is realized as a dynamic, moving,
ever-changing resultant of many forces impinging on that evanescent moment of
time
we call the
present. The pattern for that moment, however, is invalid
for the next infinitesimal 'now', and is related to it only
in terms of a process which is continuous and unfolding from one purely hypothetical
beginning — in modern terms, a 'non-beginning' — to an equally hypothetical
'non-end'. But Law governs the whole, both in its infinitesimal
small divisions, the successive 'nows' and in the overall non-beginning
and non-ending process which we call evolution.
Why
speak of 'non-beginning' and 'non-ending' ? I suggest that this is because what
seems like a start or an end lies in the timeless, spiritual
realm of Tao, Spirit, Essence or Being. From there it emerges in
terms of polarity, of the 'pairs of opposites' which constitute maya, the habitat of our
human minds as at present constituted, and in which we live and can
learn
to live consciously and with intelligence.[Page 57]
This
long introductory section of my essay is likely to appear
very theoretical to the reader. But if he grasps the principles, he will find
that it has a practical application to his own, and indeed, to everybody's
life. Basically it is important to combine the notion of events along
the
time-track
with the fact that it is the immediate moment which counts — the
cross-section on the time-track. This gives significance less
to what happened in the past or will happen in the future
than
to the compound
pattern of this very moment: a pattern which is different immediately after.
C.
G. Jung speaks of this, telling a story of an eminent professor trying to obtain
from a student a definition of Tao. After vain attempts to explain in
words, the young Chinese took the professor to the window and
said: 'What do you see in the street?' The professor enumerated what
he saw: a cat on a wall, a man walking, a car passing. 'That is Tao', said
the student.
A moment later he again asked the professor what he saw. The
pattern had changed, the car had vanished, the cat was moving, new people
had come into sight. 'That too is Tao', he was told. The student should have
added that it was the level of Tao which is capable of being
known and expressed, the trans-section of time which is, to the Taoist, the vital
and
existential moment. It is not the Supreme Tao which is beyond
all expression or definition. But that is beyond the scope of this essay.
The point of view, the state of mind, however, is the key to the
understanding of life and its endless succession of events. Most of the
latter are comparatively unimportant and can be passed over; though it is
well always to hold the idea that, however slight, there is meaning in
everything which happens to one. One does not, however, have to set to
work to try and understand trivialities in depth in the way one should try and
penetrate into the significance of things which make a definite impact on
one. 'When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears.' The 'teacher' can, to
the one who is truly alive, be every moment, every incident in his life.
The impact may come, apparently, from outside oneself, or it may come
from inside the mind. An 'accident' is the result of external forces striking on
one and causing pleasant or unpleasant feeling. A dream, a vision, a
sudden insight or Gestalt [Page 58] is the subjective event corresponding to
what we call accident in the objective world. Both have more or less
meaning to the individual to whom they occur. That meaning can be found,
or at least sought by using certain techniques. These techniques will vary
with the individual, but, basically, they start at the same point: the firm
intuition that nothing is fortuitous or without significance. This needs to be
coupled with the sense that whatever happens at a given moment, in
whatever manner, can serve as a lesson, teaching us something about
ourselves as people still embedded in the maya which is the field of
experience.
It
may be useful at this point to describe some conjectural
event and how it could be thought about by a philosophically minded person.
Let us suppose
that he is walking along a street and a child drops something
from
a balcony which hits and injures him. The Western scientist, if he could
collect sufficient data, would tell him that it was sheer bad
luck, chance, which put him into a certain position at the time the child dropped
the object. He might tell him that the probability of his being there just
then
were so many millions against. But, if our individual takes
the next step, he will perhaps say, 'Karma': the result of past actions in the
present
moment.
This is coming nearer to the heart of the problem. But the
one
who
is
seeking meaning and understanding will still not be satisfied.
For, while accepting the idea of cause and effect, he will want to see why the effect
had to emerge at that particular moment in time." The scientists' diagnosis
of 'chance' he will dismiss as quite false: there is no element
of luck or chance in the juxtaposition of himself in that street
and
the time
when the
child dropped something from on high. It is only seen as 'chance'
because of ignorance of the laws which govern all things. But
he still needs
to understand why the event should take place at the time it
did, perhaps also at the place it happened, because all these
things
make a pattern:
they are
synchronized at a given spot in space as well as time.
Some of the results might show in external events: injured and taken to
hospital, the victim of the accident might meet new people, which in turn
might lead to a new phase of daily life and so on. But this might well not be
everything, in that in his own personal development it was a moment when
things [Page 59] had to change. In other words, there must also be something
in his subjective mind which coincided with the external event; and, to
make the best of it, that is, to understand fully what he should do, he has to
try and become conscious of what is or was happening in that realm of the
mind we call the unconscious: to make conscious things of which he was
previously unaware. Such understanding may not take place immediately,
but when an incident 'stays with one' and cannot be left among the dead,
photographic pictures in the memory-album, but is emotionally tinged when
remembered, the key still has to be found. It may take several years to do
this, at times, and it may then be discovered that the memory of the
incident becomes linked with other aspects of the unconscious mind which
at first seemed to be on a quite different stream of activity.
I
will give an account of an actual case reported to me. It is too involved
to do more than summarize it, but it may illustrate my thesis, which is that
even a minor event, properly and fully understood, may
through its psychological ramifications, teach one something of importance
about oneself. My friend found himself on one occasion precipitated
into a situation where he was entirely innocent, but he received the blame
for certain actions for which others were responsible. The 'guilty'
parties were present, but ignored by the angry people who turned on him.
Outwardly, he
behaved perfectly well, did not try to defend himself,
and even went out of his way to put matters right, doing more than he needed
to have done.
But
the incident penetrated into him and stirred up feelings
which came to the surface at moments when he was relaxed, say, half asleep.
For months on end he forgot the whole thing, but evidently the matter was
not disposed of. Being
of a philosophical turn of mind, he set to work to try and understand what
had happened.
First
he told himself that, obviously, something in himself had, as it were, removed
the anger of those other people from its legitimate target. Something in
himself had, obviously, transferred the anger of the people concerned onto
himself. He had attracted it, it had not just happened by chance. But why
? What was there in himself to have done this ? And when he worked sufficiently
long, rehearsing the event and trying to explore his feelings both immediately
before it and during and [Page
60] after, he
gradually uncovered a pocket of suppressed and unconscious feeling
which had lain latent in him from time immemorial. Moreover, he found that
other kinds of feeling linked up with the basic one which seemed to have
unchained the event, making a complex of primitive emotion of which he
had not previously been aware. At this point, it was as if becoming
conscious of the matter, this awareness served as a surgeon to drain the
abscess in his mind, and the whole matter faded as an emotion-loaded
memory.
This
case, in which some of the techniques of depth psychology
were used, had followed its course to its conclusion in open understanding.
The pattern of unconscious — and in this case the word 'subconscious'
might properly be used, seeing that they belonged to a more primitive level
than normal consciousness — forces which had evoked
the 'accident' became clear, hence, no longer dangerous.
But it is not always so easy, as, for instance, in my own
case where I was delayed for eight
hours on
a journey
for no apparent reason except the whim of a minor official,
then reached my destination precisely as I had intended.
Apart from not feeling resentful
about the official, I still have not found out why this
happened, though I am
sure that it did so for a purpose.
In general, therefore, the one who is seeking wisdom will never accept the
idea that life is meaningless, that things happen which have no purpose. At
worst, this purpose remains obscure; but, often, if the mind is alert and
vigorous, but not tense and inclined either to hold onto or to reject events,
whether subjective or objective, that purpose may be discovered, much to
the benefit of one's character. Everything has meaning, everything is
purposeful to the spiritual aspirant, even the most painful 'accident', even
that which gives pleasure; even the most murky and squalid internal surge
of emotion, passion, desire. All of them are part of life; all of them, if they
are understood, become assets, forces which will add to one's stature as
what the Chinese philosophers describe as 'the superior man', i.e., the
enlightened one, not the conceited one.
I
commend to the reader the little book, Meditation in Action,
by Chögyam
Trungpa Rimpoche, and especially his chapter on 'The Manure of
Experience in the Field of Bodhi' — the latter meaning 'enlightenment': for
here he points out that one [Page 61] cannot grow flower and fruit without
earthy decay and fertilizer. The student who professes to be above the
earth, above instinct, above the compost-heap of personality-desires is
likely to remain sterile and to wither at the growing tip. The wise one will
use his god-given power of understanding to integrate his life as a whole
human being living in his environmental context. This context is himself, the
mirror image of his inner being, brought into existence by maya. One may
even question which, the inner or the outer, is the reality, which the
reflected image, only to discover that both are equally real and equally
unreal; while both together are the Reality of himself as of the world
'outside'.
To see this, however, means that in consciousness of selfhood we have to
be operating from that of the Essential or Higher Self, the Tao which
integrates both higher and lower, inner and outer. For from this level comes
understanding of the immutable yet infinitely flexible Law in which accident
or chance are seen as mere fictions of the human mind.
To learn this we need to assemble ourselves, so to speak, at the crossing-point between the time-track of causality, and the immediacy which sees
this point as the dynamic focus of consciousness and life. Already the
existentialist thinkers have tried to do this; but without the sense of the
spirit or Tao, they fall into a dismal greyness and sickness of mind. But if
one adds to this attitude a clear intuition of purpose and meaning, every
event, however painful or, for that matter, enjoyable, becomes part of a
pattern and a perfection which, however seemingly flawed in its expression
in the world of time, is, in its essence, perfect and complete.
If
we learn to think and feel in this way, if we can gather ourselves up in the
moment, we shall then find that Nirvana is open before us. The only
difficulty is to become simple and clear enough to understand.
Knowledge and erudition will not do what is needed. Only the 'unknowing', the
discarding of mental furniture is, as the mystics have seen, the
key to the
child-like simplicity which opens the gate we aspire to enter. [Page 62]
THOSE 'DARK FORCES'
ONE
cannot for long move in circles where Occultism is studied
without hearing about 'black magic' (the word 'black' having no connection
whatever with the color of anybody's skin), the 'dark forces'
and so on. Indeed, there are some people who live in perpetual terror of being
controlled, obsessed, possessed by these powers. They see a black
magician — or a communist, fascist, Jesuit, capitalist or any other suitable
peg for paranoid ideas — behind every bush and under every stone. And if
some movement starts up which is original and creative, though
they have no idea what it is all about, they denounce it glibly
as 'black'
and
advise or command people to shun it. So fantastic does the matter
sometimes become that it will be well to examine the question
directly and to
try and get it into its proper proportions.
In principle, it is clear that there are powers in the world which we can call
'dark' or 'black'. They are essential to manifestation, since they represent
one pole of the polarized world of the created universe. Without shadow
light is invisible and unintelligible. This is a point accepted in every deep
and truly religious philosophy, and perhaps best expressed in the notion of
the Tao which becomes active and manifest through the polarities of yang
and yin But when we come to calling one good and the other evil we are
concerned with something which has been created by the mind of man. In
subhuman evolution there cannot be said to be good or evil. It is only when
man comes into the field of the created universe that such an idea arises;
and, basically, the 'good' is that which runs concurrently with the
evolutionary trend, the 'evil' is that which tries to retard it. In the case of the
human being, that is good which enlarges him, makes him more aware,
more individually unique, more conscious of himself in relation to his
environment. Evil is what slows, or works counter to this.
With these ideas in mind, we may now look at the 'evil' forces which
surround us: for, just as the good surrounds us, [Page 63] so, out of an
absolute necessity, must its opposite. We need, however, to try to
understand how both of them operate and affect us.
Among
occultists, people easily and somewhat glibly label certain
things 'white' and good or 'black' and evil. And, since Occultism traditionally
thinks much along the lines of energies manipulated by means of ritual
forms, as
well as by the power of the will working through the human
mind, 'black magic' is conceived as consisting in attempts to harm or frustrate
people
or groups of people by the conscious use of subtle, invisible,
forces.
The concept is true enough: it does occasionally happen that an individual
is attacked frontally by psychic means. A study of witchcraft, ancient
or modern, shows us that it does happen that people become bewitched,
victims of a more powerful individual's machinations. But not
only is this rare, it is in reality a very minor danger, even if it should
be that
one
is attacked in this manner; for if one keeps one's head and balance
of mind, any such attack, even if it bruises, cannot do much harm. On the
other hand, fear, panic and things of that sort may result in real damage: the fear
doing much more harm than the actual attack.
How
to defend oneself against any such unlikely possibility? The occultist naturally
thinks first of counter-magic: the use of words of power, of prayer,
amulets, charms, magnetized jewels. And they may be useful but
they have to be looked on simply as first aid in case of emergency. When a
crisis is passed, a real and lasting remedy has to be found and
in this, as in medicine, the weakness which allows the attack has to be discovered.
In
medicine it is well known that certain microbes or viruses can
exist in the body and cause no harm, yet in other cases, or when the state
of mind of
the individual changes, they may cause acute disease. So is it
with the subtler and hidden factors of which we are speaking. The truth that
'no
harm can touch the pure in heart' means exactly what it says:
but which of us is 'pure in heart' and without not only weaknesses of character
of which
we are aware, but also of an unconscious 'shadow' of which we
are not aware.
It
is through this primitive 'shadow' in ourselves that we can be hurt by psychic
attacks of the kind mentioned. The logical conclusion to this
proposition is clear: to get to know oneself, [Page 64] to bring the 'shadow'
into the light of consciousness, and the breach through which we
can succumb is healed. Counter-magic, mantras, exorcisms, then
become entirely unnecessary — if they were ever needed.
The last sentence is important: the need to defend oneself in this manner is
extremely rare, and if one has an alert, fearless, highly aware mind, it is
unlikely that they will be of any value as weapons of defense. There is no
need for people to try and build a psychic fortress round themselves or
their society or group if they are sufficiently alive to themselves. But there is
a further side to the matter, in that in the vast majority of cases, proper
understanding of the situation will show that there has never been any
question of some Satanist doing anything to one, the 'black magician' is a
projection of one's own mind. The qualities unacceptable to us as outer
personalities having become personalized as 'thought-forms' and projected
out of the field we like to consider as ourselves, can then behave as if they
were separate entities.
Psychiatrists are constantly hearing of such cases. Commonest of them
and the most obvious are where a frustrated woman feels herself to be
under attack by 'Mr. X', who may or may not be some man she has met. He
worries her by making sexual suggestions, arousing in her feelings of
which she is ashamed. The obsessing entity is merely her own repressed
instinctive desires, projected onto the image of ' Mr. X'. There are endless
other varieties which show precisely the same process. The student of the
occult readily enough shelves his responsibility for what is happening to
him onto another person. In one case at least, the blame was put onto one
he considered to be his own Teacher!
This
is not the place for deep discussion of psychiatric matters. But the one
who fears 'black magic' would do well to study what depth psychologists
have to say about the extraordinary way in which the human mind can trick
the conscious ego (the personal center) by dramatization and projection.
As one learns to understand this side of things it becomes clear what a
minor factor is in reality involved in all the talk of attack from outside
oneself. Further, it shows the immense harm which well-meaning friends
can do when they encourage people to believe that they are attacked by
elementals, magicians, [Page
65] etc from outside themselves. In exorcising,
in providing charms and the like, they reinforce the notion that the
individual is a victim of others. He is not taught that he is responsible for
himself: that it is he who provides the opening by which such entities — if
they should exist — can enter and take possession of his mind.
This favorite topic of some students of the occult, however, does nothing to
discount the general principle that, just as we see forces we may call 'white'
working to forward the evolution of man, there must, logically, be counter-forces trying to oppose them. There can, logically, not be a saint or Master
without an anti-saint or anti-Master. And if we look objectively at the world,
the principle is seen to refer to fact as well as being theoretical. I myself
think that the present day is one where there is great danger from these
regressive forces: but not in the manner I have just discussed, of external
attack on individuals. This is far too crude a way of doing damage, and on
too small a scale to be worth what must be considerable expenditure of
energy.
If,
then, I imagined myself as an opponent of progress, I would
virtually discard any such ideas as frontal attack. For there are much better
ways
of working, the most effective of which seems to me to be by a subtle
distortion of truth, sufficiently hidden to let the poison
into the minds of people, as it were, unperceived until it is too late. Ninety
per
cent
of truth containing ten per cent of poison serves as an effective 'fifth
column' to
penetrate the collective mind, and that of the individual who
is still — as we
all are — carried by this collective mind; drifting with it without knowing we
are drifting, or, even if we sense the drift and try to swim,
still having to contend with that part of us which is not yet
objective
and free from
the mass. (Again, depth psychology has much to tell us about
this subject, which is too complex to enter into here.)
I can perhaps best exemplify the kind of thing which happens by a personal
example. I was in contact with a group of which I was highly suspicious.
One of its chief speakers, in a talk, put forward a point of view about life
and about one's relation to it of which I could almost entirely approve. My
doubts were aroused when he asserted that every student of occultism
must have an active sex life, and that if he or she did not find it [Page 66]
within marriage, he should find it outside: a common gambit from this kind
of guru. Sex is, indeed, normal, but only in the right context, and it is not a
necessity for spiritual self-realization.
In spite of my doubts I nevertheless persisted, if only out of curiosity, in
going to meetings. Coincidently with that period of my life I became
involved in a personal problem and could not see my way through it. Then,
during one of the lectures, I suddenly thought, 'This room feels as if it were
full of fog,' and I began to think positively. My problem vanished: unknown
to myself I had allowed myself to be influenced, against all my conscious
judgement. I had been trapped by my own lack of mental clarity, my
confusion as to myself.
This
illustrates what is going on all around us today, and
it is far more of a danger than any activity of the kind we usually call
'magic'. It
is magic, and
occasionally it seems probable that it is deliberately
and consciously used, by such monsters as Goebbels, whose technique for inducing
psychosis
in Germany can only be described as the work of genius, however
hideous. On a lesser scale, the Goebbelses are always with us. Their
means are many: advertising is one, the insidious appeal to women to become
sexually 'glamorous' (glamour is a word which connects
with falsehood and unreality), the endless things which suggest false values,
which try to
drag people back from human behavior towards animalism,
and so on. Moreover, the profit motive, though good up to a point, becomes
distorted when it goes too far. (A learned occultist once remarked to
me
that
'Money-making is the black magic of today': and how right
he was, and is! For money
is equivalent to power in the modern world, and the 'black
magician' always seems to be a power-seeker.) One could enlarge on this
theme indefinitely: for most of our values, including those of idealists
are only too often distorted, confused and falsified.
In medicine it is increasingly recognized that disease represents an
exaggeration of a normal process. It is not the process but its exaggeration
which does the harm. In society the same principles hold. For pride in one's
nation, self-regard, the acquisition of the means to live, the cultivation of
the body so that it is not only healthy, but also looks as beautiful as it can
be, are all worthy motives; but only provided they [Page 67] keep within
bounds. In the Buddhist Eightfold Path, for instance, 'right livelihood' is
prescribed: not poverty so that one has to sponge on others, not millionaire
luxury, are held to be consonant with the search for truth. The consumption
of clean food, physical culture to keep the body in trim can all be implied in
the same way, but not cranky exaggeration. But what do we in fact see ?
Invitation to become rich, to learn to dominate others, ambition for public
position, inflated sexuality through constant attention to one's appearance
and clothes and so on. Advertising is surely one of the dubious practices,
as used especially in affluent countries like the United States, where riches
and luxury are held to be equivalent to being a successful human being.
This theme has been discussed over and over again and I need enlarge on
it no further, save to suggest that here we see the corrosive influence of
any 'Black Lodge' on our humanity.
It
is, however, worth touching on a more debatable aspect
of the present scene, which is where 'progressive' movements arise. Prominent
among
these we may take that usually labeled as the rebellion of
the young people, the 'hippie' and so on. The older, more conservative people
reject this and regret the old patterns which are being broken up. The
younger,
feeling only the need to move on, move without quite knowing
what they are aiming at, full of Utopian ideas which cannot possibly work out
in
any 'new society'. Clearly, the war between the old and the new is
playing
straight into the hands of the destructive forces, and all
the
more so because both sides have so much that is good in them. One may say
that 'white' and 'black' forces are working in both camps. The conservatives
suffer from the darker ones when they condemn the rebels wholesale,
yet represent stability which could lead to 'evolution, not revolution';
while the rebels against the Establishment represent the forward movement
of consciousness, but are apt to be misled by the wrong leaders, who
advocate all kinds of undesirable things like drugs, free sex
regardless of love and the rest of the things which confuse and so may
destroy.
(One need not take unduly seriously the 'black masses' and other showy
things which some groups practice: they are, despite all that one may
dislike, more theatrical than anything else, in most cases.)[Page 68]
How then is the individual to try to find his way in this conflict? One
can only lay down some general principles, as each one of us suffers from
his own individual blindness, and each one of us is sure to be touched as it
were by contagion by the general chaos of thought.
First, to condemn wholesale and to try and fight directly is ineffective. This
does not, however, mean that one should not use judgement and
discrimination. On the contrary, the clearer the assessment of things, the
more effective the judgement: provided that it is an intelligent assessment,
and not based on emotional reactions.
Second, the individual who can make a true judgement will, by the very fact
that his mind is clear and objective, be a power in the community which
those living in confusion are not. For we must never forget the power of
thought and feeling, not only on oneself, but on others. We dwell in a world
where telepathy is constant and no rare phenomenon. But it usually
operates behind consciousness and so we are surprised when, in our
waking lives, it may suddenly and momentarily become conscious.
Third,
how do we develop the power of true judgement? Only by
recognizing those things in our minds which stand between us and truth:
that is, not only conscious bias of any kind, but, deeper,
the unconscious 'shadow'. The same principle applies here as it does in Science.
For if a scientist wants to use a certain instrument, he first has to determine
the margin of error it can introduce into its workings. After that, within
certain limits, he need not try to correct the error, but, being
aware
of
it, he
allows for it in his calculations and so gets a true result. In
the same way,
if we
know that we have an inclination — let us say towards being British, or
American, Indian or Negro — we can still discount this bias when we begin
to use the higher reaches of our minds without trying to eliminate
this bias from our personal preferences. Though it would be
ideally best if
we could
do so.
The key, then, is, as always, to know oneself: which has been said so often
and in so many eras, certainly from Greek times to modern times, and
especially in theosophical circles, where it has been very much overlooked
in favor of more exciting pursuits of psychic powers and other things such
as magical [Page 69] practices and rituals. For self-knowledge, in depth, and
not only superficially, becomes not only a safeguard against all forms of
'dark forces' but also makes us effective citizens among our fellows, hence
workers in the cause of true progress. There is no need for fear of the dark
forces except in so far as we have darkness in ourselves and it should be
the main task to lead ourselves 'from darkness into light'. Nobody but
ourselves can do that leading.[Page 70]
THE SPIRIT IN HEALTH AND DISEASE
'I WAS so much hoping I could have spiritual healing and not go to
an osteopath. It would be so much cheaper,' said a patient who had come
for diagnosis by a competent clairvoyant.
I mention this to indicate the confusion of mind in which the whole matter of
'spiritual' healing, and even the idea of 'spirit', exists in the ideas of many
people. One finds what is at best spiritualistic healing taken to be genuine
spiritual healing; and I say 'at best' because so many spiritualistic healers
produce no results, are self-deceived and, without intending to, deceive
others; and because they have not the least idea of the meaning of the
word 'spiritual'. It is not the same as 'psychic', which refers to another and
much more personal level of the human being. It is because of this that I
have chosen this subject so as to try to make things a little clearer.
Basically, every student of what some people call 'the wisdom' must sooner
or later find himself in broad accord with the general principles adumbrated
in such books as those of classical Theosophy, Huxley's Perennial
Philosophy, and Saint Paul, who says that man consists of body (soma),
soul (psyche, which is also called mind), and spirit (pneuma, Essence, or
nous]; and this is the way most people would see things. The esotericist
differs in that when he begins to penetrate into the human being, he is
bound to reverse the order while preserving the triple categories. He
realizes that man is spirit, and that, for evolutionary purposes, he has,
attached to this Essence, a personality, which consists of mind, or psyche,
and body. Body is cogged into the physical world and its rigid space-time
continuum. Spirit exists out of this continuum, hence the extraordinary
difference in consciousness which man has in what the late Abraham
Maslow called moments of 'peak experience', or transcendence. Mind or
psyche lies between the two, so that one experiences space-time in the
flexible, plastic form we [Page 71] know best in dreams, and also in some
extrasensory experiences, where the plasticity is apt to prove very
confusing to both the sporadic experiencer and to the professed and not
properly trained 'psychic'.
It is against this background that we can consider the subject of this essay
on health and disease. At this point I should like to ask the reader to place
a hyphen in his mind in that word 'disease', for it covers not only ill-health
within the body but all forms of unease between oneself and one's
environment, in social relations and everything else that is uncomfortable.
Health, on the other hand, means an integration, a 'wholeness', a
'holiness', in the individual from moment to moment.
It
was C. G. Jung who first put forward directly the principle
that all our problems — all our dis-eases — are the result
of maladjustment to our spiritual being. Each of us, for the most part
as yet only in the spiritual super-consciousness, knows the path we should
tread. If we feel disease, it
is because somewhere we are going astray. This may be between
ourselves and others, or it may be in our bodies. In both
cases, the unease is both a signal to ourselves, a warning light, and
a kind of riddle which
contains its own answer. That answer is how to return to
health, to find 'healing' in so far as we have not already damaged the
physical body beyond repair — for this life-time.
Healing
is basically the result of putting right our wrong relation to our body, to
other people and — I will not go further into this than to mention it — to our
own complicated minds, with their emotions and instincts at war with one
another and not properly understood and accepted by what we call 'I' or
'me'. The process is one of reorganization, reintegration of things which
have come apart. The healthy person finds his environment a happy
one — even if it is not perfect — and, while minding his own business, calling
on him to improve it. But he is healthy also in his organism at the physical
level. As he is not yet perfect, from one moment to the next something may
hit him: some unpleasant adventure, some virus or microbic or metabolic
disease. If he is spiritually aware even to a small degree, he will look for the
cause within himself, not blame fate or others, or accident. The word
'accident' means 'something which happens to one' — whether pleasant or
unpleasant — from outside the field of what one calls 'oneself'. But he may
not [Page 72] be capable of doing anything about it without help from others.
From this he learns, if need be, that no individual exists otherwise than in
the context of his fellows and, beyond them, that of the whole of life.
Retreat into a hermitage, an ashram, into meditation of the kind practiced
so widely today may be useful for a time provided it is not an attempt to
escape from living, but it needs to be followed by a commonsense return to
contact with one's fellows. Moreover, it means also a proper and
commonsense relationship to the physical organism, which has to be fed,
kept clean, and otherwise treated with the love — and, I hope, respect — one
feels for one's animal pets. One cannot be spiritually healthy if he neglects
or suppresses any single part of his total make-up as a human being.
I should add parenthetically that exaggerated attention to health, diet, self-adornment and beautification is in itself a sign of disease. One can be
obsessed by one's body, and this is on a par with the people who make too
much of their dogs or cats, to the detriment of the pets as well as to
themselves.
Passing on from these generalizations, let us consider what healing or
therapy means. For details of methods, as well as an elaboration of
principles, I recommend the book produced by the Medical Group of the
Theosophical Research Center in England, The Mystery of Healing, now
available in Quest Books. Far more important is the principle of healing
itself, in general, that is, the realization that restoration of health is a
permissive, not an active thing. Whatever the external methods used,
whether psychological, chemical (pills or medicine) or manipulative, nobody
and nothing heals a person otherwise than by releasing the things which
have prevented him from healing himself. In other words, if there are vital
energies pent up and causing disease by their being so pent up, the
external factors used or applied result in release of these forces, and health
returns to the extent that physical laws allow damaged tissue to grow
again, to be absorbed or resolved.
This brings us to the question of the place of the healer (and under that title
I include doctors, dentists, vets, and all who have, as it were, made it their
life's work to treat the sick). I do not include those who call themselves
'healer' out of [Page 73] vanity, just as some preen themselves on being
'psychic' and 'so sensitive', but only those who are genuinely trying to do
something for others, not to acquire a reputation or court publicity or raise
money.
At first one might feel inclined to say, 'If a person suffers, it is his Karma,
and one shouldn't interfere'. But a little more insight shows us a principle
long since known to the Taoists, in particular, and which Dr. Carl Jung has
called, in Western language, 'synchronicity'. This tells us that the
immediate situation, the 'now', is the crucial point in all one's actions,
mental or physical. One has to do the right thing, appropriate to every
'now'. Couple that with the idea of the unity of everyone with the whole of
humanity, already expressed, and it follows that at any 'now' there is a
proper action towards those in one's immediate environment.
This
means that if a person is in distress, the one brought
into the picture, or who sees it for himself, has a part to play in the whole
cross-section
of that moment. If a person is ill or hurt, a trained 'healer' — provided he does
not rush in uninvited, or without sufficient knowledge — has his role to play,
and will do what he can for the other person. He is in the
other's momentary world-picture, but so is that other's existence
part
of his own momentary view of things. So it is karmically right
that
the two
world-pictures
should interact at that moment. In short, it is not interfering
with Karma to help a person in difficulties, provided the proper
mutual
consents are given, verbally or tacitly.
The spiritualized healer will never wantonly rush in and mind more than his
business, unless in some way invited to do so. Nor, however, will he stand
back when his services could be of value, whether or not he expects to get
paid for them on however small a scale. Spirituality asks no return.
From
this we can draw a slight picture of true spiritual healers. For there is
no doubt that such exist, and, moreover, that they sometimes
work miracles. But they are humble, unobtrusive people who claim nothing
and may assert that it was Christ, or perhaps some other great Being who
used them; they are more likely to say nothing, lest they give the impression
that they believe themselves to be special people, chosen for the work. One
who fits into this category is a doctor among my [Page
74] friends who has a
true charismatic power which his sensitive patients feel;
but his methods are those of straight orthodox medicine,
applied with a
discrimination which many of his colleagues lack. To meet
him one would scarcely
notice
him
more than anyone else in the room, and it is perhaps only
in private, and with certain people, that he is willing
to talk of such delicate
matters
as his philosophy of spirit. He is and works under the
banner of Christianity, but
he may quietly admit that his skill comes from the far
past and, if pressed further, that he believes himself
to have been trained
in the
Aesculapian
Schools of ancient Greece. Humility is a marked characteristic
of this man — as indeed of all truly spiritualized people.
I have drawn this picture to show a contrast with the self-advertising,
crowd-attracting 'healers', if only because, when one seriously investigates
their work, one finds endless disappointment. True, there may be some
temporary and showy results, largely due to suggestion, but they do not
last. If one should find anything really strange to have happened, it is
probably in the minute proportion of the medically verified miracles at
Lourdes: one in every few millions of the pilgrims who have been going
there over many decades.
If
one is seriously in search of the spiritual outlook, and wishes
for help of the deep and right kind, he needs to develop the right attitude
of mind. The woman whose comment stands at the head of this article evidently
had
no
clue to the truth. She wanted something for herself, as cheaply
in terms of
money as possible. She may be an extreme case, but many are
in some degree like her. This is the reason why the true cure is rare; however
saintly the doctor or healer, he can only evoke the true healing
power
from a patient whose attitude is somewhere oriented in the right
direction.
The Roman Church insists on confession before being able to absolve
a penitent. Crude as the idea has become, it suggests that people
have to mean seriously to change themselves before the absolution can be
effective. The same principle applies to the sick person. Self-seeking
stands in the way of the deep spiritual transformation which
brings about real cure. It is true that a bottle of medicine
may 'cure' [Page 75] certain
symptoms, but others will replace them and need more superficial
treatment. On the other hand, it may be a touch of spiritual
insight which persuades a person to use common sense, take
a simple remedy
or have
an operation or anything else when needed. There is nothing
highfalutin — about spirit. It stands for common sense as well as uncommon
sense.
In conclusion, we may go still deeper, if briefly, into the question of health
and disease. I suggested earlier that there were occasions when one might
consider disease as a problem containing its own answer. Nowadays, a
number of medical philosophers are telling us what we call and feel as
disease may in reality be itself a healing crisis. The word 'healing' here
needs to be taken in very wide and long terms. Not only may a fever or a
skin eruption be a crisis of elimination of some chemical or viral toxin, but
even so dread a state as the schizophrenic breakdown is now seen as at
least potentially therapeutic. As the child with measles develops immunity
to that disease, so the schizophrenic may so change inside that he
emerges from the ordeal not a wreck but a new man, more integrated to his
own deeper nature, more spiritualized.
And
this applies also to death: physical death may result from
the release of the healing forces inside a patient. It is not then a tragedy
but
a
triumph for the healing powers. Everybody must die physically sooner
or later, but few — especially the bereaved — see death in its true colors. Moreover, even
Theosophists who use ideas of reincarnation as a comforting
thought, often fail to learn the lesson of how to prepare themselves to die.
They want their little egos to persist. Even people of great insight sometimes
wish to
let
go of their bodies but feel that somehow they have not learned
the proper knack, the proper mental attitude which will allow them to do
so.
But
the
more we learn the laws of the spiritual life, the easier should
be our progress, not only through a lifetime, but also through the transition
between one incarnation and the (probable) next.
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