Kenneth Small – USA
Ke
Kenneth Small
Insights from Helena Blavatsky, William James, D.T. Suzuki, Erich Fromm, Meister Eckhart
The Path of Compassion: Poetry and ‘Points’ of Awakening
In this introductory overview of Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence (VOS), we will touch on its history and religious and literary influence since it was first published, its core elements of poetry and rhythm, paradox and simile. Then in this series, also in its content: the path of compassion, the paramitas and ethics of transformation, and non-dualism, as well as its Tibetan Buddhist, Mahayana and Raja Yoga elements.
In Blavatsky’s own copy of The Voice of the Silence, she writes, with a kind of secret irony and humor about her own inner psychology: “from H.P.B. to H.P. Blavatsky, with NO kind regards”. This allusion is clearly her own way of talking about something within herself that is more essential (HPB) and something more ephemeral (Helena Blavatsky). Elsewhere, Blavatsky uses rather unique language and what is later usually and almost casually referred to as ones “Higher Self”, she refers to with the more nuanced ‘second-less Self’. Again, to reflect on what is ‘second-less’ and therefore incomparable gives a sober pause to our usual analytic and easy answers to both mundane and even metaphysical speculation. Perhaps this is familiar to many, yet one must ask ‘What does this really mean?’ and how in each of our own small worlds does this relationship between our essential or ‘second-less Self’ and our more ephemeral self, manifest and develop. This is one of the core themes that pervades HPB’s Voice of the Silence where she attempts in the clumsiness in English for deep meta-psychological states, the nuances of self, Self and SELF … so we will explore and follow this thread as we journey through the ‘fragments’ 1,2 and 3 that she gathered together as “The Voice of the Silence”[i].
Background
In the summer of 1889, Helena Blavatsky, having already written and published her deeply metaphysical The Secret Doctrine (1888) and had just published her practical discourse in question-and-answer form, The Key to Theosophy (1889) We can wonder and speculate that perhaps she felt a need for something deeper in the ‘inner life’, for a more balanced and complete overview of her Theosophic Perennialism. So, in July of 1889, she packed up and set out from England across the channel, toward the somewhat north and central area of France at Fontainebleau. Here in its tranquil setting, she clearly sought a place suited both for rest and recuperation from her recent illness, and a natural environment of solitude for writing her poetic mystical book of paradox and compassion. In a short few weeks, she finished her writing and returned to England, stopping for a few days at St. Heliers, on Jersey Island on her return, in late July 1889. The deep significance of The Voice of the Silence, a guidebook for inner practice and awakening, cannot be understated. She expressed that the few pages of this book were essential to understanding the all-encompassing and complex metaphysics of her Secret Doctrine and advised that one need study the SD through the essentials in the VOS.[ii] So, we may ask what is it in The Voice of the Silence that is so crucial to understanding Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine? One may well ask: ‘In what way is the approach and view that this small book holds, essential to our spiritual life-practice?’
William James
The Soundless Sound
Philosopher and psychologist William James in his famous and breakthrough lectures and book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) cites Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence, with a rather unique focus. He uses it as an example of a mystical writing that brings to the reader its spiritual impact not only from its content but also by way of its intonation and rhythmic sound value.
James quotes Blavatsky’s VOS:
He who would hear the voice of Nada, ‘the Soundless Sound’, and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana … when to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams; when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE – the inner sound which kills the outer … For then the soul will hear and remember. And then to the inner ear will speak The Voice of the Silence … and now thy Self is lost in SELF, thyself unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate … Behold ! thou hast become the Light, thou hast become the Sound, thou are thy Master and thy God. Thou are THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE. Om Tat Sat.
William James then comments:
These words, if they do not awaken laughter as you receive them, probably stir chords within you which music and language have in common. Music gives us ontological message which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict …[iii]
Let’s explore a little William James idea of sound, music, and ‘ontological messages’. He most importantly invites us to see how music, language and ‘ontological messages’ intersect in mystical poetry and within the way in which Blavatsky composed the VOS.
‘Ontological messages’ relate to qualities of being, reflecting the deeper inner and more experiential aspect of mystical and esoteric expressions. The recitation with both its sounds and content converging simultaneously carries the reader to a more direct experience of its meaning. These ‘ontological messages’ give us an antidote to avoid falling into merely entifying or reifying abstractions and replicating metaphysical ideas however exalted. They provide a way to navigate between the extremes of ‘spiritual materialism’ and of objectifying psychic perceptions as ‘truth’ or falling into mistaking the finger pointing for the moon for the moon itself.
Points and the ‘Diamond Soul’: Satori
The seeds of wisdom cannot grow in airless space. To live and reap experience the mind needs breadth and depth and points to draw it towards the Diamond Soul.[iv]
D. T. Suzuki
For quite some years I wondered about Blavatsky’s use of the word ‘points’ and what it might mean. “Breadth” and “depth” have more usual contexts of meaning, but what about “points”? Here, Blavatsky is parallel in her view and use of language to the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart who D.T. Suzuki quotes:
… God has left a little point wherein the soul turns back upon itself and knows itself to be a creature.
And Suzuki comments:
A little point’ left by God corresponds to what Zen Buddhists would call satori. When we strike this point, we have a satori. To have a satori means to be standing at Eckhart’s ‘point’ where we can look in two directions: God-way and creature-way. Expressed in another form, the finite is infinite and the infinite is finite.[v]
Action and Non-action on the Path
Is the solution to these impediments one of action or non-action?
Regarding the seeming dichotomy between action and non-action, we can ask ourselves the question: ‘Is the solution to our inner or outer obstacles or impediments one of action or non-action?
Blavatsky in the VOS states:
Shalt thou abstain from action? Not so shall gain thy soul her freedom. To reach Nirvana one must reach Self-knowledge, and Self-knowledge is of loving deeds the child.
The key here is ‘loving deeds’. This could be restated as compassionate activity engaged in ‘actions for their own sake’ … a quality of ‘being’ versus the pervasive work ethic of doing ‘A’ to achieve ‘B’, chasing the ever elusive ‘goal’ …however exalted … which we are then never ‘PRESENT’ with. In the VOS she states:
The more thou dost become one with it [Alaya’s SELF], thy being melted in its BEING, the more thy Soul unites with that which IS, the more thou wilt become COMPASSION ABSOLUTE.
In the VOS footnote [31, p. 94] HPB notes:
this ‘compassion’ must not be regarded in the same light as “God, the divine love” of the Theists. Compassion stands here as an abstract, impersonal law whose nature, being absolute Harmony, is thrown into confusion by discord, suffering and sin.
Erich Fromm
There is much food for inner practice and contemplation here. De Purucker shares in his first volume of instructions to pledged esoteric students: “Chelaship is a matter of being, not of talking about being.”[vi] What does this mean in our life practice? The psychologist Erich Fromm in one of his most essential writings, “To Have or To Be” (1976), offers great depth and wisdom for this pervasive malaise of our time.
Fromm writes:
The mode of being only exists in the here and now. The mode of having only in time: past, present and future. In the having mode we are bound to what we have amassed in the past: money, land, fame, social status, knowledge, children, memories. Etc.
Being is not necessarily outside of time, but time is not the dimension that governs being. The painter has to wrestle with color, canvas, and brushes, the sculptor with stone and chisel. Yet the creative act, their “vision” of what they are going to create, transcends time. … … The experience of loving, of joy, of grasping truth does not occur in time, but in the here and now. The here and now is eternity, i.e., timelessness. But eternity is not, as popularly misunderstood, indefinitely prolonged time.
Fromm’s insights give support to the psychology of inner development and the easy floundering into the pitfalls of power, mere acquisition, or replication and the difference between emulating qualities of compassion and superficial imitation. All of this is based on the fulcrum of ‘being and having’. As Blavatsky poetically expresses it:
thou hast to learn to live and breathe in all, as all that thou perceives breathes in thee; to feel thyself abiding in all things, all things in SELF. Thou shalt not let thy sense make a playground of thy mind. [Mindfulness practice] Thou shalt not separate thy being from BEING, and the rest, but merge the Ocean in the drop, the drop within the Ocean. So shalt thou be in accord with all that lives; bear love to men as though they were thy brother-pupils, disciples of one Teacher, the sons of one sweet mother.[vii]
Meister Eckhart
Meister Eckhart’s insight from his deep Christian mystical experience expresses this same view:
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.[viii]
HPB is giving poetic and mystical expression to qualities of being and non-dualism, where one may find that inner freedom where ‘self’ and ‘other’ converge for an instant of awakening. Blavatsky, like Meister Eckhart, is guiding us out of our ego centric conditioning in an internal process. Fromm complements this where he quotes the great 12th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart:
People should not consider so much what they are to do as what they are …thus take care that your emphasis is on being good and not on the number of kind things to be done. Emphasize the fundamentals upon which your work rests.” Fromm adds: “Our being is the reality, the spirit that moves us, the character that impels our behavior; in contrast, the deeds or opinions that are separated from our dynamic core have no reality.[ix]
To conclude another Fromm quotation
…being is life, activity, birth, renewal, outpouring, flowing out, productivity. In this sense, being is the opposite of having, of ego boundness and egotism. Being, to Eckhart, means to be active in the classic sense of the productive expression of one’s human powers, not in the modern sense of being busy.
FOOTNOTES
[i] The Voice of the Silence – London 1889
[ii] Herbert Coryn, secretary of HPB’s ‘Inner Group’ shared this with Geoffrey Barborka at the Lomaland theosophical community c1920 - ref: The Divine Plan by Geoffrey Barborka.
[iii][iii] The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902) pp.442-443
[iv] VOS pp. 25 -26 Peking ed.
[v] D.T. Suzuki quotes from Dean Inge in Mysticism Christian and Buddhist p. 67
[vi] Esoteric Teachings vol. 1 – p.
[vii] VOS 49
[viii] Meister Eckhart – Sermons
[ix] To Have or To Be by Eric Fromm p. 60