Tim Boyd – India, USA
Tim Boyd, International President of the TS, and his wife Lily on a visit to the National Headquarters of the Australian Section in Surry Hills, Sydney
Before talking about “Spirituality and the Practical World”, it would be good to establish a common vocabulary. Often, we use words assuming they mean the same thing to all of us. Spirituality and the world are not unknown words to us, but it does not hurt if we give them finer definitions.
“Spirituality” necessarily applies to the spirit. Yet what is spirit? We use the word frequently with certain meanings in our minds, but can we say what it really is? When we look to the theosophical teachings, one of the things that comes across is that “spirit” is a very big word. When we turn our thoughts to the Absolute, often we tie our concept of spirit to it. But the absolute, from H. P. Blavatsky’s (HPB) point of view, has no possible description; it has no words that can contain it or define it; it is nameless, it is not active, nor is it inactive; it has no qualities, yet lacks none; it is not being, but is expressed more as be-ness — the potential for all states of being which arise from it. When we speak about spirit, the absolute is not, technically, what we are talking about.
Spirit and matter both are linked aspects of the Absolute, but if we really go into it, there is not a lot we know about either one of them. Let us start with matter. It has been approximately 400 years since the type of science that has become predominant in the world today had its beginnings. During this period, the material world, and only the material world, has been its focus. Every process and phenomenon that could be pointed to and named has been meticulously examined, studied, tested, and experimented with. Theories, explanations, and descriptions abound, so much so that faced with the authoritative voice of science, everyone tends to quiet down. For science, as we have come to know it, matter and the energies of the material world are its singular focus. It is a world which we feel we know better than all others, and which, for the scientific community, comprises all there is; in a word, the material realm is “reality”.
But science today has some issues that it is facing, resulting from its own continually expanding knowledge base. Simply stated, the problem is that the totality of the scientifically known matter and energy comprising the material universe falls short of what must exist in order for the universe to behave as it does. There is not sufficient matter in the universe known to science to justify the manner in which galaxies are bound together by the force of gravity. Also, the accelerating expansion of the universe cannot be justified by the energies known to science. The terms used to describe these missing components of matter and energy are creatively named “dark matter” and “dark energy”. Because it cannot be seen, tested, or examined by any known means, except that mathematically it must exist, it is called dark. Others may correctly use the term “unknown”.
If the missing matter and energy were a small amount, the problem might be solved with simple adjustments to formulae. But it is not small. The agreed upon difference between what is known and what is not, is 96%. In other words, only 4% of all that makes up the universe is known to science. So, what do you do when you realize that the bulk of what is described as the “real” world is completely invisible and unknown? That is just on the side of matter.
For spirit the same thing applies. The extent of it is not something that is in any way knowable at our stage of unfoldment. So, just as with contemporary science, what we end up doing is dealing with what we do know and trying to use that as a platform for our growing understanding. Thus, we may not be able to put our finger on what spirit is, but spirituality is another thing.
Annie Besant gave a very concise definition of spirituality. She said it is “the realization of Unity; the seeing of Oneness in all things”. We can work with that definition. Basically, spirituality is an approach to spirit that presents us with a sense of unity, of Oneness, and it works in a couple of different ways. All of us hope and strive towards, and from time to time realize this sort of seeing. It unfolds in two ways: it can unfold unconsciously, due to what HPB describes as natural impulse; or it can unfold consciously.
In the unconscious approach we are pushed by Nature, we are impelled, blown here and there, and ultimately if we bounce around enough, we open our eyes and learn. In the United States there is a term for this way of learning — “The school of hard knocks”. You could call it cultivation of consciousness through crisis. One idea that does seem to have some merit is that we as a human family often unconsciously create crises for ourselves through which we grow by having to respond to challenges.
There is a story in the Buddhist tradition about two children in a house that is on fire, burning down around them. They are playing a game, but they are so fixated on it that they are totally unaware of the raging fire. In order to save them from being engulfed by the flames, an enlightened being coaxes them out by showing some playthings that attract their attention. To me the story speaks of the conditions that we are facing in the world now. When our Governor [Mr T. N. Ravi, Hon’ble Governor of Tamil Nadu] was here with us speaking, he made it a point to enumerate many of the challenges that are facing us as a human family, the fires that are burning the house. As members of the TS, as people of consciousness, we may look at it in a different way. In the world today we have all of these things, like climate change, fires burning uncontrollably, deserts growing — you know the list. Yet the response of humanity as a whole might be described as pouring more fuel on the flame while looking for technological solutions to the fires we are feeding. That is an example of the unconscious route to becoming aware of spirit — learning from the production of more challenges.
Of course, unconscious karma creation is not the only avenue to awareness. We can become aware of the presence and power of spirit by consciously creating the conditions that move us toward the recognition of Oneness. Commitment to a path, a practice, has its effects. In the world of theosophical thinking there are some things that we tend to take for granted. One of the things that we accept as an irrefutable given is consciousness and the primacy of consciousness. This, however, is not true for the scientific community.
In the community of scientists there is what is described as “the hard problem”. That is what to do about consciousness. What makes it a problem is that it is not explainable in scientific terms. They can point to the synapses in the brain that register pain and pleasure; they can track the related chemical and electrical responses in the body. But the idea that we feel those material impulses as pain, joy, happiness, peace, or anger; that it is possible to connect with others in ways that are not biological or chemical, cannot be explained within existing scientific paradigms. That consciousness is involved is undeniable, obviously it takes consciousness to even analyze the problem. But it cannot be measured and quantified, and that is what is spoken of as “the hard problem”.
In many ways spirit is similar. Like dark matter and energy for material science, for the spiritual scientist/practitioner spirit is not measurable. Yet we are aware of it, we experience it, and we know the reality of its existence. All of the world’s spiritual traditions invite us to pursue a scientific approach to our own unfoldment. The idea is that we are here to experiment, not simply agree and comply, and that the religions and great teachers of the world have provided us with formulas, with experiments, and theories, about the inner life that are, as with anything scientific, testable and repeatable.
Take for example the short book by HPB, The Voice of the Silence. In it there is this little phrase: “Self-Knowledge is of loving deeds the child.” It is beautiful, poetic, but it is also something that lends itself to experimentation. These great truths are spoken not just for us to sit and nod our head and say “yes”, but for our own experimentation by which we either find it is true or not. So how do we approach an experiment related to “Self-Knowledge”? The experiment might go like this, in the laboratory of my own consciousness, I can identify what are “loving deeds”, then incorporate them in my behavior, and persist in performing them over a period of time. This should result in some answer to the question: Do loving deeds lead to self-knowledge? This is what all of the different aphorisms, slokas, and phrases that we quote from the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavadgitâ, and the Dhammapada ask us to test.
In the Dhammapada Buddha says that “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” Is that true, is it testable? He says that if you think an evil thought then you experience pain and that pain follows you like the wheel follows the ox that pulls the cart. It is a poetic, scientific formula: If you act with a pure thought then happiness follows you like a never-departing Shadow. It is beautiful but it is intended for us to determine from our own experience whether or not these things are true. So when it comes to spirit, even though we cannot put our finger on it, even though we are unable to grab it, we do experience it.
Many years ago I was in France and was invited to have lunch at a person’s house that was situated right in the middle of acres and acres of sunflowers, which they grew commercially for the seeds and the oil. It was in the afternoon on a lovely sunny day. A typically French thing is that meals go on for a long time. When you are sitting for lunch the conversation at some point turns to what is the plan for dinner because the two mealtimes tend to run together — good conversation, course after course of different foods, it’s wonderful! As nice as the meal and conversation were, the thing that really impressed me was not happening inside the house. As I sat there, periodically I would look out the window. I had known that sunflowers track the sun as it moves across the sky. But to see fields of sunflowers, as far as one can see, with every one of them following the pathway of the Sun, impressed me very deeply! To me it is a model of our experience and our approach to spirit. We know it is there and we lean toward it wherever we find it.
Some time ago I was fortunate to be with the Dalai Lama as he was talking to a group of people. It was shortly after the Tiananmen Square incident in China. He was saying that China was a country where for more than two generations any expression of spirituality or religion had been suppressed. The assumption was that having been denied an opportunity to express, it would wither and die. With the Tiananmen Square uprising what he witnessed was the outflowing of innate compassionate activity from the protestors toward their nation and its people. They were willing to stand in front of tanks to acquire a freedom for themselves and for others.
As human beings, it seems that compassion is hardwired in all of us. Wherever we look — family structures, societal structures — all evolve with the intent that the weakest among them are served and protected. In a family everything is sacrificed for the child. Nothing is held back. In any family that is deemed to be healthy and appropriately attentive to parenthood, the weakest among them is the one that attracts our deepest attention and effort. The weak, the elderly, the sick, the poor, the hungry, these are the ones for whom, in healthy societies, structures are created in order to serve them. When we find that we are in a situation, either in a nation or in a family or in a world, where that is ignored or neglected, we feel unease. Throughout history the denial of this irrepressible compassionate response has been the cause of uprisings and revolutions. In many ways in today’s world there is a sense of unease. There is an urge for correction and the re-establishment of our inner, natural values and practices that are spiritually oriented.
Compassion is described in several ways. In Buddhist practice compassion is defined as the desire to relieve the suffering of other beings, but I think it is more than that. We can examine what is happening internally when we find ourselves engaged in some compassionate activity. The normal feeling for everyone is a sense of the importance of “me” — a Buddhist term would be “self-cherishing”.
But let someone become a parent, a spouse, or the adult child of an aging parent and that circle of concern extends to include another. Where you have patriots, great people, willing to sacrifice their own lives for their country, that sphere of inclusion extends to embrace a nation. Then there are the ones that we point to as the truly Great Ones, the messiahs, the avatars whose compassion is absolutely without limits — nationhood, gender, religion, none of these distinctions are real to that consciousness.
This process of expanding compassion echoes Besant’s words: Spirituality is “the seeing of the Oneness of all things”. When compassion reaches its extremes, it is the expansion from long accepted limits to an embrace of all people, no longer distinguishing between self and others. The experience of compassionate activity reveals itself most keenly from what we might describe as the symptoms of spirituality — peace, joy, happiness, healing. These are the things that to us are signs of something much deeper toward which we lean.
A question we might ask is: if any of this is true, if it has merit, then why do we tend to remain so unaware of the presence and activity of spirit? This is a question that throughout the ages has been a motivation for all of the avatars, messiahs, prophets, saints, seers, and messengers who have come to try to heal us from our ongoing blindness.
It would not be unfair to ask the question that if these great ones came to open our eyes what was the effect of their coming? For example: What was the condition of humanity before and after Buddha came, gave his messages, and lived his life? What changed? Certainly, there were many people who experienced enlightenment and the descent of this deep sense of compassion.
But did wars stop, was starvation ended, was the imbalance of wealth and poverty altered, did loneliness and sadness disappear? The fact that all of the negative conditions afflicting humanity continue in spite of the numerous great messengers who have come and gone would cause some people to regard their lives and mission as a failure. I would not agree with that.
I would go more with the idea that is expressed in the Mahachohan’s letter, that no prophet, saint, or seer has ever achieved full success during their lifetime. They planted seeds, started movements that would add to the possibility for enlightenment and unfoldment; but ultimate success is a very long-range project. One of the things that does occur is that they attract the attention of people like us, normal people, but people to whom this idea that there is such a thing as spirit has some reality, people who have some experience, even if momentary, of being elevated, of having spiritual moments that speak to the possibility for those to be the inheritance of humanity. For many people that is something worth dedicating a life to, even though we know, as was the case for people greater than us, that by the time we are gone, little will have changed . . . but much will have changed.
The other day someone I was talking with made the point that, just like others that have come before us, we are not going to be able to do much in a lifetime. The example I gave is: If I need to reach a point at the back of this auditorium, if before taking my first step I change my course by an inch, by the time I arrived at the back of the hall I would be a few feet away from the chosen destination. If this course correction continues for hours, the distance from the original destination grows. Imagine the difference a lifetime can make. We cannot ever forget that our capacity to influence ourselves and others is significant and that we are part of a long-range plan.
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This article was also published in The Theosophist, VOL. 146 NO. 5 FEBRUARY 2025
The Theosophist is the official organ of the International President, founded by H. P. Blavatsky on 1 Oct. 1879.
To read the FEBRUARY 2025 issue click HERE