Tim Boyd – India, USA
The author
The author, Victor Hugo, expressed a thought with which most of us have become familiar: “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” Then he added: “Not all the armies in the world are more powerful.” Whenever such far-reaching, strong thoughts are shared, we need to examine them to see if they are true, whether our own experience supports it.
In India’s recent history it was under the domination of England, at that time the most powerful nation in the world. However, based on an idea that began with non-violent resistance to the practices of the British Raj, the mightiest military and strongest economy in the world was forced to release its hold and acknowledge India’s independence.
Various ideas have come into the world and formed social systems which previously had not existed. Socialism and communism are ideas that had their beginnings in the 19th century. Democracy traces back to ancient Greece. It was an unpractised ideal, but at a certain time it took root and has become the current standard for governmental behavior around the world. So, Victor Hugo’s expression seems to be correct, that when the time has ripened for a p particular idea to take root, it will grow.
There are ideas that relate strongly to societal change, but, for the purposes of the Theosophical Society (TS), spiritual self-transformation as a process and possibility is central. This is a powerful idea, which in the form of Theosophy is of a fairly recent vintage. It was in 1875 when this expression of the Ageless Wisdom tradition took form. There are stages through which any idea passes. In order for something to grow, the ground has to be prepared. The ideas are always in existence. Everything that comes into being pre-exists its appearance, but seeds don’t grow in winter. Timing is everything.
The driest place on Earth is the Atacama Desert in Chile, South America. It gets one inch of rainfall every couple of years. There are even places in that desert where no rainfall has been recorded. But there comes a time, maybe once every three or four years, when it does rain, and literally overnight this barren space bursts into bloom. Everywhere one looks is covered with flowers. The seeds were there, unseen, but waiting for the proper conditions. A great deal of the preparatory transformative work in our spiritual lives takes place in the world of ideas.
H. P. Blavatsky (HPB) made a statement to her inner group. She felt the need to define what she meant when she talked about “the world”. She described the world as “Man living in his personal nature”. Although the comment applies to “man” as an individual, she was talking about something beyond individuals. Man is a collective entity composed of its billions of individuals, much like our body is one thing composed of trillions of lives. The collective behavior of Man(kind) has a tendency to express itself through the personal nature — its feelings, thoughts, and sensations. It is this pattern of behavior that creates the “world” with its politics, economics, preferences, prejudices, and constant wants.
The TS has been involved in the attempt to serve the world by, at the minimum, elevating it to the higher regions of the personal nature. Change at these deeper levels tends to be gradual. It has been noted that any idea that puts forth some new theory, or vision of truth, passes through three distinct phases on its way to acceptance. First the new truth is ridiculed. In the face of long-standing accepted truths, the new idea is dismissed out of hand as unworthy of serious consideration. One can just look to the early history of the TS for examples.
The other day I had a lady in my office who is writing a book about Annie Besant. She had a lot of good questions about Besant’s history. But when it came to the subject of the Mahatma Letters, an unbridgeable sticking point for her was the history of the letters being “precipitated”, which from the author’s point of of view was “supernatural” in a way that was difficult for her to accept. She wanted me to comment on whether or not this precipitation aspect, and, what were to her, the questionable circumstances surrounding it, interfered with the value of the Letters.
For me, precipitation is far from one of the strangest things in human history. Levitation and clairvoyance are also quite well known. However, whether the letters were precipitated or delivered by the mailman is not a standard by which to judge their value. A tree is not judged by its leaves, or bark, or roots, but by its fruit. We read the letters, precipitated or not, and ask: In what way do they elevate my understanding? If they do not, we need not concern ourselves with them. But the fact is that, for many, the letters profoundly affect their understanding. The content must be allowed to stand on its own.
The first attempts to introduce a new truth are ridiculed, but it always happens that a small group of people who can see the value are drawn to it. With a growing credibility, the next phase is that, it is violently attacked — not just the idea, but the people who embrace it.
The fact that HPB lived at Adyar for only three years was the result of this violent attack that focused on her. The thinking, which turned out to be incorrect, was that if she could be defamed and removed from the picture, the whole theosophical movement would crumble. So, violent opposition is the second phase in the introduction of a new truth, before we reach the third phase, where what was once ridiculed and violently opposed is regarded as self-evident and obvious.
There is a long list of people in history who were killed or tortured because they had a vision of what was true which was out of step with their time. Today no rational person would argue that the Earth is the center of the universe, but many people were persecuted and killed for contradicting this belief.
We have a World Congress coming up next year. Part of its title is “Our Role in Shaping the Future”. It is an idea that many people in the world are trying to come to grips with. From the point of view of someone who is spiritually inclined, “Our Role” takes on a different meaning. One of the values of engaging with Theosophy is that it provokes insight. It raises questions which must then be explored such as: “Who am I? How did I get here? What has put me in this body, in this world, in this condition at this time?” One of the beauties of Theosophy is that it presents glimpses from an Ageless Wisdom tradition. At the outset of HPB’s The Secret Doctrine the idea is stated that our composition as human beings is complex. Three completely different streams of evolution, with their own laws and directions, compose the human being: the monadic or spiritual, the intellectual, and the physical. That they are “interwoven and interblended at every point” is what makes us such complex beings.
In the Yoga tradition Patanjali condenses the idea. He refers to the coming together of Purusha [Spirit] and Prakriti [Matter]. He says: “The purpose of the coming together of the Purusha and Prakriti is the gaining by the purusha of the awareness of his true nature and the unfoldment of powers inherent in him and Prakriti.” The image is given of a blind man carrying a lame man. Spirit cannot walk in this world on its own. Matter is blind and needs to be informed. But where is mind in this example?
A common phrase used by many is “spiritualizing matter”. Matter’s level of functioning can be elevated by its interaction with spirit. But the medium for this elevation is the mind, the point of contact, or bridge between Purusha and Prakriti. The linking mind is where they inform each other and draw out their latent potentials. Matter does not become spiritual, but its range of functioning expands. Spirit does not become “materialized”, but it becomes able to function through the previously impervious agency of matter.
One of the roles that the Masters are said to play in their attempts to serve and help humanity is that they are generating a stream of energy at the highest levels of thought. Their constant advice is that if we really want to pursue the depths of the spiritual life we have to step out of our world and into theirs. There are people, even us on occasion, who find themselves elevated, approaching the high level of the Masters’ thought. They might not fully enter into this stream, but they come near enough to be affected. An example I sometimes use is, if we put a bar of iron next to a fire, the iron may be cold at first, but if we leave it there, it warms. It takes on the qualities of the fire.
Our proximity to this stream, causes a certain quickening to take place within us. Inevitably, we come back to the world as we know it, but we come back slightly changed, and our “warmth” warms the people and things around us. There are also those people who enter fully into that stream. Often the contact with this higher level, stimulates ideas for new inventions, vastly broadened perceptions, and seed ideas that form the basis for movements of thought. People sometimes ask: “If the Masters are real, why can’t we see them, why are they not communicating and working on behalf of humanity?” The fact is that they are; their work is unceasing. It is humanity that is not working on behalf of itself.
There is a fairly long quote from a book by Dane Rudhyar, Occult Preparations for a New Age:
We must ever be ready to accept the totally unexpected, the miraculous. We never have to feel totally defeated. A new dawn can always occur, in some way unlike any previous dawn; but we must have faith. Faith is the intuitive, unchallengeable, even if intellectually unexplainable, feelingrealization that the Ocean of Infinite Potentiality surrounds us; we live, move, and have our being in it, but most of us refuse to feel, refuse to see, so wrapt are we in our frantic agitation, our fear, our masochistic concentration on how much we suffer. Such a suffering is in vain and calls for endless repetition. He then gives the advice:
We must become still, and “feel” the soundless sound of the vast tides of spirit lapping at the shores of our consciousness, or perhaps beating at the jagged rocks of our pride and our greed. We must turn our consciousness toward this inner sea and try to sense the end of a cycle of experience peacefully moving into the yet imprecise and unfocused beginning of a new cycle. We must dare to summon the potentiality of an essentially new and, for us, unprecedented beginning.
In this quote he is speaking to the idea of what many feel, that we are on the cusp of some new level of understanding, and that the way in which we access this idea is by becoming still. We reach out toward that which is beyond our current grasp. We make the attempt, to expose ourselves, regularly, in order to be informed by this “ocean of infinite potentiality.” These are not just nice words; it is the basis for a practice. It also speaks to our role in shaping the future. What ideas will come? Many are already here. More are flooding in. The capacity to be open to that Greater Life in which we live, move, and have our being is the basis of spiritual selftransformation. It is part of the role that we try to play in shaping the future.
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This article was also published in The Theosophist, VOL. 146 NO. 3 DECEMBER 2024
The Theosophist is the official organ of the International President, founded by H. P. Blavatsky on 1 Oct. 1879.
To read the Dewcember 2024 issue click HERE