David M. Grossman – USA
The author, David Grossman, is a professional photographer and lives in Brooklyn NY. He is a life-long student of Theosophy, a regular contributor to Theosophy Forward and his articles have also appeared in The Theosophist. The Sunflower is his favorite flower.
Thomas Paine
“These are the times that try men's souls,” is the first sentence of the first pamphlet in the series of essays named “The American Crisis” by Thomas Paine published in December 1776. These acted as a kind of spark and ongoing inspiration that rekindled not only the morale but the vision of George Washington and his troops to continue the fight against the British to achieve American Independence in what were then the American Colonies.
This eventually lead to the expansion and unfoldment of what is now the United States of America which incidentally will have its two hundred fiftieth anniversary next year.
What is it that “tries men’s souls?” In the case of the colonists it was living up to the ideal of freedom for all people and the opportunity to carve out their own future.
Soul is a word we use to refer to our core nature, who and what we essentially are as thinking, choosing, self-directing beings; the real person, the “I am I” we know ourselves to be throughout our lives. Our bodies grow and change, our thoughts and feelings fluctuate; our circumstances alter, yet we hold onto our sense of being.
According to Theosophy it is those circumstances and events of life, objective and subjective, individual and collective and our reactions to them that “try” us. To a great degree it is this process that forms our character. We begin to identify with our so called “successes and failures” as if they define who and what we are. It is this mis-identification that blocks our true nature and limits our evolutionary trajectory, by obscuring our essential purpose in life. We get attached to our part in the play and loose our sense of real identity as the actor capable of playing many parts.
One of the main lessons presented in that gem of spiritual literature, the Bhagavad Gita has to do with the concept of non-attachment. For it is attachment to that which is temporary or transitory that causes much of the pain and suffering that we experience in life for the obvious reason that it will eventually, sooner or later, be taken from us, or to put it another way we will see its transitory nature. This is not to say we should not act and participate in life and do things fully in fact, but at the same time not identify our value or sense of identity with those things. This is a difficult and sometimes painful task when we have invested thought, emotion, time and commitment to various things or feel strong bonds with family and friends. As far as bonds of love and connection with others are concerned, these are in their purer expressions an echo of the “One Life,” transcending the particular and temporary forms and circumstances.
Mabel Collins
In the teachings from Light On The Path by Mabel Collins, the relationship between our “permanent Self” vs our impermanent instrument, sometimes referred to as the personality is revealed:
Pressure on the divine part of man re-acts upon the animal part. As the silent soul awakes it makes the ordinary life of the man more purposeful, more vital, more real and responsible.
(Comments, part II)
It is the Theosophical view that life does have a purpose which is the unfoldment and expanding expression of our true essence, spiritually, mentally, and physically by refining our instruments, reflecting the oneness and unity of the spiritual realm here on the material plane of duality in brotherly cooperation with all peoples. To use the Hermetic expression, “As above so below.” This is accomplished through a long series of reincarnations during the life of a universe as it passes through the stages of creation, preservation, and dissolution.
The trials of our lives come about through the process of the higher mind taming, refining and transforming the undirected tendencies of the senses and the “me oriented” desires of the kamic nature. Another way to put it is, we are Manasic (self conscious) beings in animal bodies and must take control of our lives, rather than be controlled by the physical and irrational tendencies.
If we more clearly perceived our interconnection and interdependence with all living beings we would treat the earth, our sustainer, with the care and respect that is necessary for our continuance here.
The Hopi people teach their children, ‘we are the custodians of the earth.’ If we felt the responsibility of that custodianship individually and collectively and applied that awareness in science, technology, industry and political vision the earth and many social ills would be healed in short order. In truth “we are our brother’s keeper.”
This vision has been continuously cultivated within the original Theosophical Society as well as all subsequent Theosophical organizations, reflected in its first original object; “To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color.”
In order to achieve this we must first see past the surface of things and realize that every color of the rainbow is an expression of the same bright light, the living expression of the ONE LIFE.
Ideally our bodies are “temples of the soul” that is the vehicles that we incarnate into periodically over a vast period of time. These bodies become better instruments for the growth and fuller expression of our active spiritual natures. Theosophy proposes that essentially we have two parallel bodies if you will, the physical and then what is termed the astral or electro magnetic design body for the physical. Every physical form has its astral counterpart. It is not only the pattern but also the real seat of the senses.
Drawing once again on Light On The Path a treatise on treading the conscious spiritual path, Mabel Collins points out
Everyone who is not a dullard, or a man stupefied by some predominant vice, has guessed, or even perhaps discovered with some certainty, that there are subtle senses lying within the physical senses; ………that everything which is perceptible to the ordinary sight, has something even more important than itself hidden within it;
The whole world is animated and lit, down to its most material shapes, by a world within it. This inner world is called Astral by some people, and it is as good a word as any other, though it merely means starry; but the stars, as Locke pointed out, are luminous bodies which give light of themselves.
(Comments 1)
We too have a self-illuminating inner nature directed through what we sometimes call the Buddhic principle. When the mind, (Manas) is illuminated by Buddhi it is termed the higher mind, which in turn becomes the lens to focus the primal ray of the unknown, (Atman) what people call God, or The Absolute, the indefinable; and so it is Atma-Buddhi-Manas that we call the Higher Triad or spiritual Ego, the real man. If we combine this with what is referred to as the lower quaternary, the physical man, made of (1) the physical body, (2) prana, the life force, (3) the design or astral body and (4)Kama the desire nature; together with the higher triad, we have the sevenfold man. The Lower four disperse at death. HPB points out in The Key to Theosophy, chapter VI, “There is but one real man, enduring through the cycle of life and immortal in essence , if not in form, and this is Manas, the Mind-man or embodied Consciousness.”
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According to Theosophy we are in what Indian philosophy refers to as the Kali Yuga (Dark Cycle) in which the trials of life are most difficult in general, in this densest (heaviest) period of our evolution where the polarization between spirit and matter is most apparent and intense.
Although spirit and matter are what we might call the primal ingredients of intelligent life and are coeval in essence; still there is a battle going on in human consciousness between the opposites rather than a reciprocity that supports the whole. This is the real living metaphor of our lives expressed in the battle of the Bhagavad Gita, the struggle within our own natures.
While we live in a time of great intellectual prowess with all sorts of scientific and technological breakthroughs we seem to be eclipsed spiritually if the inhumanity within our species is to be any kind of measurement.
Through past action over lifetimes we are enmeshed in a kind of karmic matrix of causation that places each of us in a maze that we must navigate through and free ourselves from, and see clearly (become) our true selves. Then the collective ideals of humanity can unfold and be achieved such as brotherhood and selfless action.
Looking once again into the writings of Thomas Paine; he expresses in Rights Of Man a wholistic view of life when he says, “The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”
This vision can be a guiding light that helps navigate us in this fast moving Kali Yuga age.
It does not matter how slowly you go
as long as you do not stop. —
Confucius