Tim Boyd – India, USA
Lily and Tim Boyd while visiting the house of Ulysses Riedel in Brasilia some years ago
There are a couple of questions we need to ask ourselves: if spirit is an omnipresent reality; and if our deepest nature is like a fragment of spirit, then why are we so resistant to truth? Why is it that even though throughout human history great people have come, lived their lives trying to communicate to us about what is truth and how we can experience it; why is it that as a human family we can remain unmoved by their message? In one of his poems the Nobel laureate poet, T. S. Eliot makes the point that we are “distracted from distraction by distraction”. We cannot hear the “still small voice” of the inner self because of the powerful voices of our many outer selves. The body is hot, cold, hungry. The job needs our time, effort, thought. The family needs emotional and financial support, quality time, food, shelter, and so on. Our hobbies, the church, temple, nation, are also shouting their demands.
J. Krishnamurti spent 60 years of his life trying to point out the cause of our tendency toward distraction. He used expressions such as, the conditioned mind — that we are continually being conditioned by the thoughts of others and our own. We are so insulated from reality by these layers and layers of conditioning which we live through, that we become immune to the experience of truth.
In this process we make an effort to awaken, to connect with spirit so that in some way this practical world within which we live can be influenced. Krishnamurti talked about truth being a pathless land. But on our way to truth we do follow a path. According to Blavatsky the path that leads to truth is steep and thorny. It takes place in three distinct phases.
I would put it this way: We have all been asleep, but a time comes when we wake up. The Bible story about the prodigal son is an example. A son who leaves the house of his father, who has everything, who gives everything to him, the house of universal consciousness, and goes out on his own, travels to a distant land — the land of matter and life in a material body. In the “far land” he finds himself completely cut off — oblivious to his divine heritage. But the point comes when he awakens. He remembers his previous exalted state and determines to return. In terms of the spiritual life this is the all-important moment for us — the point where we wake up and remember that there are possibilities much greater than the ones we currently embrace. With this awakening the journey home begins. Ultimately the son reaches home and reunites with the father.
The outgoing journey is a period of ever increasing involvement in a world of attractive sensations, thoughts, desires, and activities. But the homeward journey is of a different nature. Outgoing we are involved in a process of continually adding more — more thoughts, wants, desires, roles, or identities — all of which demand our attention and engagement. At the deepest point of our involvement if we were asked “Who are you?” we would point to one, or many of the identities we have taken on, as a parent, teacher, worker, citizen, religious practitioner, and so forth. The return journey involves a process of purification in which we drop our identification with the many things that obscure the vision of our essential, most inner self.
In this process of purification, clear self-assessment is important. A great American wit came up with a principle he called The First Law of Holes, which stated: “If you ever find yourself in a hole, the first thing you must do is stop digging.” Near the end of his life the Buddha stated the same thing differently. He encapsulated his lifelong teaching in eight words which expressed three spiritual principles: (1) Do no harm (in essence, “stop digging”). (2) “Do good”, which begins the process of climbing out of the self-created hole. (3) “Purify your mind”, which restores our sense of wholeness. These are the principles that are involved in the purification process that lead to the “realization of Oneness” that Annie Besant spoke about.
The culmination of the long, purifying journey can be called Realization — in the example of the prodigal son, it is that moment when he once again arrives at his father’s house, is welcomed and given all good things. This is the moment when we realize that the grace and goodness of this universe within which we live, move, and have our being is always present. Again, in the words of T. S. Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
It is the first time we know it because this time our eyes are opened; we can see.
All of these ideas are familiar to us as principles we try to apply to our individual unfoldment. We try to be aware of the obstacles that we have created and try to do something to alleviate them. But we are part of something more than our individual selves. We also play a part in the collective unfoldment of humanity, but what can we do that has real meaning?
It seems that wherever we find ourselves, whatever we do in life, the way we approach our living can significantly contribute to the collective need. Because for more than a decade I have been working at Adyar, I see it as an example of one approach to working locally for the grand cause of humanity. Annie Besant described the Adyar TS headquarters as “the Masters’ Home”. Anybody who has been here has at some time felt something more exalted than just beautiful Nature and camaraderie. During her time here, and that of Olcott and HPB, the presence of the Masters of the Wisdom was not infrequent.
If the experience of living and working here does not change you, then it is because you are not paying attention. Connecting here in a deep way has a transformative effect. I see it as a virtuous cycle. We are familiar with the term “vicious cycle”. An example is given of the man who comes home angry from work, kicks the cat, the cat runs through the house, knocks over the fire lantern, the house burns down, which causes him to become angrier. But there is the opposite cycle that can be described as virtuous, where one’s compassionate or positive action feeds the growth and the expansion, the magnification, of another. That is what is happening here.
Although I am speaking from my personal experience, the virtuous cycle of collective action has been evident, as has the awakening-purification-realization model. For me, being here at Adyar was an awakening, almost like when one wakes up in the morning. Shortly before we open our eyes, we are in some sort of dream, but we open our eyes and we realize we are in our physical body. It is time to get out of bed and start doing whatever we do. I found myself here and the physical body of this place was in decline.
All of us recognize that with any physical thing, as time passes there is a process of decay and decline, which if you do not do something to interrupt that process, takes over. In our own bodies one of the main signals is the slowing down of our energies. Initially, for me it was like awakening, looking around, and then trying to figure out the next step. The most obvious thing that we could actually do something about was the structures.
We have more than a hundred buildings on this campus and every one of them was in need. Those were obvious things that we had to address. As we were able to get that moving, along with it came certain inner changes, we could say inner effects, one of which was a recognition of a beauty that had been hidden. Our goal in this purification activity is not to give life, or to bring life, but to reveal it, to remove that which obscures it from view. The life is already there.
Much like the art conservation process which has recently begun here at Adyar, there is the meticulous removal of that which hides the beauty. Then when it is fully seen, the effect on those of us who have had the privilege of working here at Adyar has been a sense of appreciation, recognition of beauty, and empowerment that if we can do this, we can do other things as well.
Out of that we started to “discover” people who could further this process. Mostly these people were right here all the time, but the conditions had to be created in order to make it possible for them to give what was within them. Oftentimes they did not even know how much they had within them. Out of these new opportunities that became open to them, their own sense of vision led to an expansion of their potentials, previously unknown to them — for seeing a bigger picture, for management, for efficiency, and for the collaborative work which has been the emphasis of all of this. With a place like Adyar no one person can do anything by themselves. The whole point has been to develop a collaborative point of view bit by bit. That continues to grow as wider avenues of service reveal themselves.
There is the expression in The Idyll of the White Lotus: “The soul of man [and woman] is immortal, and its future is the future of a thing whose growth and splendour has no limit.” Our role is to remove obstacles that limit. As we engage, we also find that there is a rising sense of guidance in all that we do. It is something that we become aware of, to the point that we expect it. How and when it appears we do not know, but we know it will. Experience shows that time after time when crises have arisen, always there was the appearance of something or someone to address them.
A lot of talk goes on in theosophical circles about the Masters. There was a time in the TS’s history when the fanciful nature of that talk got to be just too much. One of the Mahatma Letters was written to Annie Besant saying that this whole outcry about the Masters had to be stopped, because it was distracting, and it was inaccurate, and people were tending toward glamour. In the letter it was expressed as, “The cant [the insincere use of pious words] about “Masters” must be silently but firmly put down.” Members’ personal desire to contact the Masters to aid them, to uplift them, and to initiate them was the basis of the “cant”. For the longest time that kind of conversation was suppressed — not that the Masters were suppressed.
From time to time, as I travel, I am asked about the Masters. One of those questions is “Where are they? How long has it been since anyone got a letter?” In the United States there was a member, who in addition to being a prominent theosophist was also a standup comic. Every year during the convention he would do a standup comedy routine. One of the lines that would recur in his routine was “I didn’t get a letter. I did all these good things, but I didn’t get a letter!”
I have even been asked if, as International President of the TS, I have ever received a letter from the Mahatmas. Probably I should not answer it in this way, because in today’s online, social media world it will be certain to be taken out of context, but here we go. If I were to be asked, “Have you ever received a letter from the Masters?” my truthful answer would be, “Many . . . but none of them were written on paper.” These letters will not be able to go into our archives, but in my experience here at Adyar letters from the Masters have been many.
But these letters have been written in the hearts and in the character of many of the people who have come here to help this work that we are attempting to grow. They are the letters from the Masters, received thankfully. Quite honestly we find ourselves walking around and sharing this campus with many of those letters. I know them, they have names. This is something that becomes in many ways the norm. We want to call on the Masters, we want their help, we want their assistance in our personal issues, but in order to use their energies effectively they need to have groups, bodies that have the potential to reach people more widely with their service. That was the intent for the TS from the beginning, and that intent is unchanged.
By nature, I think I would not be wrong in describing myself as an optimist. I believe in bright things, and my experience tells me that I am not wrong. Actually you could make the argument that the optimist is always right — maybe not in the short term. There is an expression that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. It also bends toward harmony, peace, enlightenment, compassion. Where we find ourselves in that arc at any given moment provides the conditions we have to contend with, but optimistically speaking that is the future that awaits us.
The fact is that all of us are here for a very brief time. We get numerous chances at it, but this life’s moment is brief. It would make sense for us to try as early as possible to think in terms of the most effective ways to utilize this time. We find ourselves in the fortunate situation of receiving the wisdom of the ages that others lived and died for, to make available to us.
I have no doubt that given the patterns of human behavior which seem so intractable at the moment, that there will be dark times, there always have been. But all of us have the capacity to go through those and to bring others through, whole, unfragmented, once we learn to work together, not just in isolation. The idea of collective responsibility for a group such as the TS that adheres to certain principles, requires that, especially when things get a little bit rocky, those principles need to come to the fore.
The poet William Blake made the statement: “What is now proved was once only imagined.” Everything that is real now is the product of some group or individual’s imagination. It arises from our capacity to imagine and to act on behalf of that vision. I believe in that, and what I would ask is that we lend ourselves to that kind of dreaming, that we call upon our capacity to dream a world together, and to call that world into being. It is waiting just on the other side of this imagining process.
When I look at what is happening here now, we have all of these things that seemed to come out of nowhere, the Arts Conservation Project, the Adyar Eco Development, the growth of the Library, the Archives, the outreach and involvement of our members and others that it is. It is one thing after another that was not here earlier, that is here now, that is flourishing, and that is paving the way for other possibilities.
In closing this Convention I want to thank you, not just for your attention, but for the energies that you have brought to bear over these five days. It has been a good time, as it always is. I always notice when the Convention starts there is a sense of things not yet coming together. Then it comes, it forms, and as it ends, at least for me, I find myself with a sense of renewed hope, a renewed sense of wholeness, because of what we have done together.
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This article was also published in The Theosophist, VOL. 146 NO. 6 MARCH 2025
The Theosophist is the official organ of the International President, founded by H. P. Blavatsky on 1 Oct. 1879.
To read the MARCH 2025 issue click HERE