Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the March - April 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: MacKay, Carol Hanbery. "Confounding or Amazing? The Multiple Deconversions of Annie Besant." Quest  90.2 (MARCH - APRIL 2002):50-56.

By Carol Hanbery MacKay

ANNIE WOOD BESANT (1847 -1933) engaged tumultuously with problems of personal belief throughout her early life. As a young woman, she was a problematic figure in Victorian England, openly questioning and then breaking from the Anglican Church to become an atheist, a freethinker, a neo-Malthusian, and then a Fabian Socialist—all the while exasperating the general public with her writings and legal and political battles. Her inner peace came only in 1889, when she embraced the worldwide social and mystical movement known as Theosophy.

After the death of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1891, Besant headed the Theosophical movement in her typically controversial style for more than forty years, writing prolifically on the subject. She was the elected President of the Theosophical Society from 1907 until her death. She also participated actively in the stormy politics of India, where she influenced as much as she provoked Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, while that land of ancient tradition struggled to free itself from British colonialism.

Some of the apparent paradoxes in Besant's life story and her complex intellectual journey can be understood by a theory of "deconversion"—the loss of confidence in one system of belief that impels the individual to adopt a new one. Because they understand the spiritual quest resulting from deconversion better than most Westerners, Indian biographers have played an important role in redressing our often imbalanced perspective on Besant's life, even if some of them have engaged in open hagiography. Too many of her Western biographers have failed to understand the process of deconversion, so they unfortunately deride her apparent lack of commitment. For example, Arthur C. Nethercot's two-volume biography (1960 and 1963), in treating Besant's life in nine stages, implies a satiric analogy to a cat's nine lives. Anne Taylor's 1992 biography is a disappointment largely because of its lack of empathy for its subject. A more balanced account is Geoffrey West's earlier (1929) text, The Life of Annie Besant. West proffers an interlude chapter on conversion, opening with the words, "With regard to Mrs. Besant's conversion to Theosophy nothing needs more to be stressed than that it was, absolutely, a logical conclusion to all that had gone before. It might almost have been prophesied, had anyone possessed intimate knowledge and subtle perception" (143).

Reading the literature about Besant leads to the conclusion that she has not been well served by most of her Western biographers, who appear not to have read her autobiographical texts carefully. Unbiased accounts are in articles like Mark Bevir's "Annie Besant's Quest for Truth: Christianity, Secularism and New Age Thought" in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1999), which studies her life stages "in the context of the Victorian crisis of faith and the social concerns it helped raise" (62). Ultimately, however, she may be best understood by spiritual feminism.

Studies like Catherine Wessinger's Annie Besant and Progressive Messianism, 1847-1933 point the way to understanding Besant; and the title of her dissertation, "Millenarianism in the Thought of Annie Besant" (University of Iowa, 1985), more overtly asserts Besant's progressive model in contrast to catastrophic millennialism. Of Wessinger's articles, two are especially apropos: "Democracy vs. Hierarchy: The Evolution of Authority in the Theosophical Society," and "Annie Besant and Issues in Contemporary Feminist Spirituality." Diana Burfield's "Theosophy and Feminism: Some Explorations in Nineteenth Century Biography" and Joy Dixon's "Sexology and the Occult: Sexuality and Subjectivity in Theosophy's New Age" are other feminist studies of Besant.

To read Besant's texts closely is to run the risk of being radicalized, maybe even converted to a succession of her belief systems, culminating with her grand vision for the future of the human race. The line of resistance to her siren song seems to have taken the form of personal attack and disparagement, chiefly through the charge or innuendo that she was easily swayed by others and always "needed a man in her life." These assaults uncannily resemble the jeering she had experienced on the platform and the derision of the mainstream press during her life, so it is perhaps not surprising that Besant anticipated them in her own writings. She answered such criticisms in advance for those who were willing to listen—who could discern her sincerity, consistency, and integrity.

The self-questioning that consumed her prior to joining the Theosophical Society sums up her position succinctly, for it shows her unclouded recognition of the losses entailed by her choice:

For I saw, distinct and clear—with painful distinctness, indeed—what that joining would mean. . . . Was I to plunge into a new vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule—worse than hatred—and fight for an unpopular truth? . . . Must I leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true? And [Charles Bradlaugh], the strongest and truest friend of all, whose confidence I had shaken by my Socialism—must he suffer the pang of seeing his co-worker, his co-fighter, of whom he had been so proud, to whom he had been so generous, go over to the opposing hosts, and leave the ranks of Materialism? [Autobiography 342 -3]

Bradlaugh, president of the National Secular Society, had been her co-worker and co-leader of the free-thought movement since their first meeting at the Hall of Science in 1874. He did not, however, share the interest in socialism that Besant later developed. The growing division in their views played out in the pages of her journal Our Corner. Besant published her exchange of views on Socialism with Bradlaugh on a monthly basis in 1887, starting in April and ending in June. He began with "Socialism: Its Fallacies and Dangers"; she responded with "Its Truths and Its Hopes." He then tried a "Rejoinder," to which she provided in the same issue "A Final Reply"—thereby getting the last word.

The passage from Besant's Autobiography cited above does not mark Besant as she is often depicted by her biographers: the antagonist who loves a good fight and always needs another cause—with its male leadership—to champion. It instead exposes a tired, compassionate "soldier," one who took the next necessary step in her evolution even if it meant hurting those she loved, such as Charles Bradlaugh, because she could not deny a greater truth.

All along, in both her Autobiographical Sketches (1885) and An Autobiography (1893), Besant had been noting and underscoring, with increasing self-insight and audience awareness, the underlying logic of her social and spiritual evolution. Yet she still realized that she needed to address directly the criticisms that continued to be leveled at her, criticisms that would haunt her life story as rendered by biographers in the many decades to come. It was in this knowing spirit that she openly asserted, "I have been told that I plunged headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away. I think the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but it had been long led up to, and realized the dreams of childhood on the higher planes of intellectual womanhood" (Autobiography 345).

What more could she say on this point? To say more would have been to incur the critique of her detractors that she was being repetitious and even defensive, yet history has borne out her prescience in recognizing the necessity of risking overstatement to the resistant reader. To the reader or listener willing to trace her steps, Besant was more than generous in her explanations and explications, as witnessed in her two full-length autobiographical accounts, two lectures that she delivered and then subsequently reprinted entitled "Why I Became a Theosophist," and the entire body of her writings on Theosophy, which followed during the remaining four decades of her fully-lived lifetime.

In the context of her spiritual evolution by deconversion, it is fascinating to note the tension between Besant and George Bernard Shaw, a tension that transcended Besant's death and continued to resurface in Shaw's repeated jibes at her seriousness of purpose and her ultimate success. Nine years his senior, Besant was in fact responsible for the young Shaw finding a periodical audience and financial security. In her journal Our Corner, she serialized two of his unpublished novels, The Irrational Knot (about the marriage tie) and Love among the Artists, as well as signing him on as a regular contributor to the column entitled "Art Corner."

Appearing in Our Corner over a twenty-three month period in 1885 and 1886, The Irrational Knot was not published in book form until 1905, when Shaw referred to it as "The Second Novel of His Nonage." Alluding to Henrik Ibsen's play on the subject, the preface of the book says, "It may be regarded as an early attempt on the part of the Life Force to write a Doll's House in English by the instrumentality of a very immature writer aged twenty-four." Shaw's "immature" work on marriage can be compared with Besant's 1879 pamphlet on the subject, Marriage: Its Past, Present and Future.

Shaw's note to the reader of Love among the Artists, as serialized in fourteen monthly installments in 1887-1888 and published in book form in 1900, offers a back-handed acknowledgement of Besant: "If you find yourself displeased with my story, remember that it is not I, but the generous and appreciative editor of this magazine, who puts it forward as worth reading" (Our Corner 10:265). An account of the stormy relationship between Besant and Shaw, albeit slanted in Shaw's favor, is given by Michael Holroyd in Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love; and a more even-handed one, by Sally Peters in Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman.

The early friendship between Besant and Shaw deepened, although he remained jealous of the influence of the "other men" in her life—co-workers and collaborators like freethinker and radical Bradlaugh, editorial assistant John Mackinnon Robertson (later a Member of Parliament of considerable stature), scientist Edward Aveling, editor and co-seeker William Thomas Stead, and reformer-turned-Theosophist Herbert Burrows. But collaboration was not really a concept that Shaw could fathom. He was too much of an individualist and an egotist to work in equal partnership with anyone, least of all a strong woman, in actuality a superwoman who could outperform his superman. Even in a movement that espoused cooperation, namely the Fabianism to which Shaw nominated Besant in membership, he remained competitive, and when Besant moved beyond the more moderate Fabians to embrace what Socialism fully entailed, he expressed exasperation and a sense of betrayal.

After Besant's deconversion to Theosophy, Shaw found an outlet for his contradictory feelings about her in his portrayal of the character Raina Petkoff in his play Arms and the Man (1894). Besant's idealism gets transformed into a mixture of Romanticism and realistic self-knowledge in this heroine, whose "noble attitude" and "thrilling voice" provoke both mockery and admiration from the practical but equally Romantic Swiss mercenary, Captain Bluntschli, a role that very much reflects Shaw's own position.

Shaw's shorthand notes to Arms and the Man summed up the play: "The comedy begins in the conflict between [Raina's] romantic ideas of heroic soldiering and the reality before her in the person of this extremely matter-of-fact Swiss homme de metier." In his undated instructions to the producer of a film version of the play, he wrote, "Raina must be pretty enough to be readily forgiven her affectations and little lies; and she must have some comic talent." This last comment is especially intriguing given his views on Besant's lack of humor.

Shaw's confirmation that "Mrs. Besant" was the model for Raina came in the postscript of a letter (21 April 1898, Collected Letters 2:341) sent to fellow drama critic William Archer. It is interesting to note that Shaw wrote the part of Raina for the actress Florence Farr, with whom he had one of his many theatrical dalliances; Farr subsequently became involved with W. B. Yeats, who continued to be influenced by Theosophy long after his official break with it in 1889. Incidentally, Shaw has also acknowledged that the character of Mrs. Clandon, "a leader of the sex emancipation movement" in You Never Can Tell (1898), another "pleasant play," is modeled on Besant. Torn between seeing Besant as a genuine reformer and a quixotic dreamer, he fought to resist her charisma even as he was compelled to appreciate it.

We can gain some insight into his understanding of this melodrama of male-female relations (and perhaps Shaw's personal feelings about Besant) by reading his correspondence with the actress Lillah McCarthy, who played the part of Raina in the play's 1907 revival. Ranting about McCarthy's failure on opening night to carry "dramatic indignation to the point of totally forgetting your clothes"—because she still did not "sweep with a sufficiently majestic unconsciousness of them"—Shaw launched into an even more vitriolic attack a month later, when he declaimed that "Raina has gone to bits" because she was no longer on her "high horse." "What Raina wants," he went on to explain, "is the extremity of style—style—Comedie Francaise, Queen of Spain style. Do you hear, worthless wretch that you are?—STYLE." This letter ends with the exasperated exclamation "Demon—demon—demon!" (Collected Letters 2:755 –7). Hands-on about the productions of his plays, Shaw nonetheless seemed even more carried away here than usual, as if he indeed had a living model he was trying to approximate, someone with whom he had a longstanding love-hate relationship.

In 1947, four decades after the 1907 revival of Arms and the Man—fourteen years after Annie Besant's death, only four before his own, and the centenary year of her birth—the perennially pugnacious George Bernard Shaw felt constrained to challenge an article in the Freethinker and to assert his own active role in Besant's deconversion to Theosophy. Entitled "Annie Besant and the 'Secret Doctrine,'" Shaw's response tried to rewrite the history of Besant's reviewing of H. P. Blavatsky's major work, The Secret Doctrine, at the request of the editor William T. Stead. Ignoring (or perhaps unaware of) the accounts published by all three participants, he insisted on attacking Stead as "a complete Philistine" and casting himself in the rescuing role that Besant had earlier played for him.

Yet Shaw's assessment was privately countered and Stead's sensitivity confirmed in a letter Stead wrote to Blavatsky (December 8, 1888), in which he also acknowledged that "you have a genius quite transcendent, and an extraordinary aptitude for both literature and propagandism, which the rest of your fellow-creatures may well envy." Meanwhile, Besant went on to report in An Autobiography (308 -10) that she reviewed the Blavatsky text for the Pall Mall Gazette (April 25, 1889) explicitly at Stead's behest, requesting from him as well "an introduction to the writer" so that she might send a note "asking to be allowed to call." Some first-hand accounts by Stead and Besant of their relationship with Blavatsky and Besant's review of The Secret Doctrine are reprinted in Daniel Caldwell's anthology The Esoteric World of Madame Blavatsky (365 -70).

According to his rewritten scenario, however, Shaw declared that it was he who turned the review assignment over to Besant out of concern for her "serious want of money" and the fact that it was "a huge tome which I contemplated with dismay." Given Shaw's gratitude to William Archer for doing the same for him by planting him on the reviewer roster of the Pall Mall Gazette, it is not hard to see in this account a false memory induced by his desire to repay a long-held debt to Besant for boosting his career in journalism. It was not the first time Shaw had misremembered his earlier history.

Continuing with his revisionist history about Besant's conversion to Theosophy, Shaw went on to report that he had been "utterly confounded" by reading Besant's 1889 article in the Star, entitled "How I Became a Theosophist." "I had done a trick I never intended," he confessed, though not without some pride in his apparent influence despite his face-to-face accusation that "she was quite mad." He was, however, disturbed by her jocular response, all the more so because he found it uncharacteristic: "She said she supposed that since she had, as a Theosophist, become a vegetarian, her mind may have been affected." (Shaw was himself notoriously vegetarian.) Then, after declaring that this occasion marked "the end of our collaboration" and that their "separation was entirely of her doing," Shaw launched into the oft quoted tirade that has fueled the negative rhetoric of many of Besant's detractors:

Like all great public speakers she was a born actress. She was successively a Puseyite Evangelical, an Atheist Bible-smasher, a Darwinian Secularist, a Fabian Socialist, a Strike Leader, and finally a Theosophist, exactly as Mrs. Siddons was a Lady Macbeth, Lady Randolph, Beatrice, Rosalind, and Volumnia. She "saw herself" as a priestess above all: That was how Theosophy held her to the end. There was a different leading man every time: Bradlaugh, Robertson, Aveling, Shaw, and Herbert Burrows. That did not matter. Whoever does not understand this as I, a playwright, do, will never understand the career of Annie Besant. ["Annie Besant and the 'Secret Doctrine'" 450]

In spite of himself, Shaw here paid tribute to Besant's great powers of oratory, but his "actress" label missed the point that she had been repeatedly making about the nature of her deconversion process. Not giving credence to her own accounts (again, possibly because he had never read them), he provided his own rationale in the language of the theater, his false analogy suggesting that she took on a jumbled assortment of roles, not the successive ones that she so carefully researched and agonized over.

As for Shaw's intimations regarding her "leading men," Besant apparently had a precise rebuttal in mind over half a century prior to his attempt to impugn her character:

I may add that such shafts are specially pointless against myself. A woman who thought her way out of Christianity and Whiggism into Freethought and Radicalism absolutely alone; who gave up every old friend, male and female, rather than resign the beliefs she had struggled to in solitude; who, again in embracing active Socialism, has run counter of the views of her nearest "male friends"; such a woman may very likely go wrong, but I think she may venture, without conceit, to at least claim independence of judgment. [Autobiography 316]

The integrity and independence that Shaw denied to Besant are manifest in her lifetime struggles and her own writing. That so many of her contemporaries, as well as most biographers, should fail to see these qualities speaks more about their own efforts to resist the strength of her argument and the potency of her rhetoric than anything else.

On a more constructive note, it is worthwhile to observe how Besant's spiritual journey resembles one of popular culture's most widely loved female quests, namely L. Frank Baum's story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Apart from the actual connections between Baum and Theosophy, plot elements of the story—Dorothy's multiple challenges in the land of Oz, the interplay between reality and illusion, and her spirited desire to return home—all find parallels in the experiences of Besant's complex life story. Moreover, at least one literary critic reads Baum's tale as a Theosophical allegory. Specifically citing Besant's and Blavatsky's metaphorical description of the quest to find Truth, John Algeo makes the connection fairly explicit: "There is a Road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every kind, but yet a Road, and it leads to the very heart of the universe." Algeo goes on to summarize, "Dorothy's quest is for salvation, liberation, enlightenment, freedom from birth and death" (295), adding, "If there is a 'moral' to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this is it: we must rely on ourselves, for we alone have the power to save ourselves" (297). Besant's real strength lay in precisely that ability to combine self-reliance with a relentless pursuit of the truth synonymous with ultimate liberation.

Controversial in life and death, Besant continues to vex would-be biographers with her rich complexities. The best accounts—because fairest and closest to the experience of their subject—reproduce at length her own words. At the same time, they also support the position that no account can be definitive, that we as would-be readers of such a complex life story need to track it down from multiple sources, putting together a narrative of our own making even as we recognize that it will need to be reformulated again and again.

In trying to tell the story of the multiple deconversions of Annie Wood Besant, I have followed a winding trail of resources. Bibliographies of Besant's writings can be found in various biographies about her, notably those of Aiyar, Bennett, Besterman, Cousins, Dinnage, Kumar, Nethercot, Prakasa, Taylor, and West. There have even been Internet exchanges providing information to readers who have not had ready access to her history or writings. One such posting at http://www.indiana. edu/~libref/victoria (21 April 1997) from Teresa Malafaia at the University of Lisbon reported that she had recently supervised an M.A. thesis on the Besant autobiographies. Excerpts from An Autobiography appear in at least one anthology, namely Janet Horowitz Murray's Strong-Minded Women and Other Lost Voices from Nineteenth-Century England; they are reproduced under the following headings: "Decision to Marry" (1866), "Her Daughter's Illness" (1871), "Her First Lecture" (1873), and "The 'White Slavery' of London Match Workers" (1888). Ruth Brandon's recent study, The New Woman and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question, provides an example of yet another body of research to be taken into account.

In addition, works contemporary with Besant to be considered for their influence, reflection of the cultural ambience, or attempt to write character from Besant's example include especially Edith Lees Ellis's Attainment (1909), whose heroine Rachel is clearly modeled on Besant and her journey. Rachel moves from philanthropy to Theosophy, wherein the sun and the moon blend the light of their mysteries to create a union "beyond motion and beyond speech" (316). Another is the children's book The Story of the Amulet (1906), written by Besant's good friend Edith Nesbit. In this text, the Queen of Babylon travels forward in time to Edwardian England, only to wreck havoc at the British Museum when she tries to reclaim her possessions on display. As she sweeps down the Museum steps, a passing journalist inquires, "Theosophy, I suppose. Is she Mrs. Besant?" Given a "reckless" affirmation, the journalist rushes off to Fleet Street to publish his article, "Impertinent Miracle at the British Museum" (128).

Much has been written about Besant because she had such a broadly based public career, but by the same token there have been more veils thrown over her activities and the assessments of them. Serving so many different agendas, Annie Wood Besant has appeared in multiple guises, which have in turn obscured her all-too-singular multiplicity. Without engaging in hagiography ourselves, I think we can join with my colleague Desley Deacon, who speaks with quiet amazement of lives so lived: "You just gaze in wonder."

References

Carol Hanbery MacKay is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches courses on Victorian fiction, Women's Studies, and autobiography. Educated at Stanford University and UCLA, she is the author of Soliloquy in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1987) and editor of The Two Thackerays (1988) and Dramatic Dickens (1989). She is preparing a critical edition of Annie Besant's Autobiographical Sketches (1885) for Broadview Press. This article is an excerpt from her recently published book, Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest (Stanford University Press, 2001). The book advances an original theory of creative negativity to help explain the rhetorical and artistic strategies of four Victorian women who were "velvet revolutionaries" in their own time: poet-photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 -1879), novelist-essayist Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837 -1919), actress-playwright-novelist Elizabeth Robins (1862 -1952), and activist-spiritual leader Annie Wood Besant.

Originally printed in the March - April 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Mills, Joy. "The Becoming Self." Quest  90.2 (MARCH - APRIL 2002):58-63.

By Joy Mills

NASRUDIN, THE SUFI WISE FOOL, is the subject of many stories. Here are two.

Once on a journey, Nasrudin stopped for the night in a town where he did not know anyone. He found an inn and slept comfortably, but the next morning on waking, he discovered to his dismay that he did not know who he was. He thought about this for a time and finally decided to go out into the market to see if anyone recognized him. Of course since it was a town in which he knew no one, obviously no one knew him. After wandering around for a while, he decided to go into a clothing store, where he tried on several suits and jackets, but none of them seemed quite satisfactory. Finally, he asked the shopkeeper, "Did you see me come into your store?" The shopkeeper, mystified by such a question, replied rather sharply, "Of course, my good man, I saw you come in." "Well, tell me then," said Nasrudin, "how did you know it was me?"

It may well have been in the same town that Nasrudin went into a bank to cash a check. The bankteller asked him if he could identify himself. Nasrudin took a mirror from his backpack, looked into it for some time, and finally declared, "Yes, that's me!"

We may chuckle at such stories, but consider, do we really know who we are? Are we certain of our own identity? When we look in the mirror each morning, who is it that looks back at us? Is the "I" who looks the same "I" who looked yesterday? Is that "I" the self, the me, the singular one who feels sad or happy, who thinks and ponders and wonders? Is there a self at all?

When we say "I" it is obvious that we do not always refer to the same entity within ourselves.There may be, indeed there is more than one "I" within us, and yet the sense of being an "I" is a very precious possession. How often we guard that identity which we feel at any particular moment to be the essential "I," the self that is the me-ness of me, that defines me and identifies me.

The questions seem to be endless. Just who am I? Who is the self to which "I" refers? Am I the contents of my skin, this strange assemblage of organs, tubes, and fluids? Or am I the contents of my inner world, my thoughts and feelings, the totality of all I am aware of? Does this "I" expand and contract, come and go, with the fluctuations of my consciousness, moment by moment? Or am I everything I have ever been aware of, everything that I have experienced, thought, and desired, even those things I have forgotten? The really big question is this: Even when my body disappears, as it will, is there some other structure—some other "I"—that will support my inner world, that will go on experiencing, thinking, being? Allied to that question is another big one: If I am convinced of the concept of reincarnation, who is the "I" that reincarnates? Will I—whoever that "I" may be—even recognize myself?

Questions often wake us up to the realization that perhaps even the simplest ones have no easy answers. While none of us is likely to stand before a bank teller who has asked us for identification and pull out a mirror in order to confirm our identity, we do produce some kind of image—usually the photo on a driver's license—as proof of who we are. And in the everyday world of physical reality, that kind of identification suffices since it proves that I am who I say I am. Then we go our way, perhaps to a Theosophical talk, to find out who we really are!

Theosophy does not so much answer the questions raised above, as provide a perspective from which to view the "self." Ultimately it is we ourselves, however we conceive of ourselves, who will answer the questions. There is a certain trap, of course. With whatever self you answer the question today, you may well discover that, like Nasrudin, you wake up tomorrow not knowing that self and therefore having to find a new self who will reanswer the question. Questions have a way of popping up again and again, of never staying answered very long, at least questions of the kind posed here. And selves also have a way of changing, of never staying the same for very long. Consider whether you are the same "I" you were ten years ago, or even yesterday!

In The Key to Theosophy (33-4), the questioner asks about the distinction between the"true individuality" and the "I"of which we are all conscious. HPB responds in part:

We distinguish between the simple fact of self-consciousness, the simple feeling that "I am I," and the complex thought that "I am Mr. Smith" or "Mrs. Brown." . . . You see "Mr. Smith" really means a long series of daily experiences strung together by the thread of memory, and forming what Mr. Smith calls "himself." But none of these "experiences" are really the "I" . . . nor do they give Mr. Smith the feeling that he is himself, for he forgets the greater part of his daily experiences, and they produce the feeling of Egoity in him only while they last. We Theosophists, therefore, distinguish between this bundle of "experiences," which we call the false (because so finite and evanescent) personality, and that element . . . to which the feeling of "I am I" is due. It is this "I am I" which we call the true individuality.

Elsewhere HPB refers to that basic duality as a "lower" and a "higher" self. Yet these distinctions do not fully answer the simple question, "Who am I?" As observed above, questions have a way of reappearing, and the self who identifies itself has an uncomfortable way of metamorphosing into another self.

The reality of a continually changing self is illustrated in a statement made by an adept teacher. The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett consists of correspondence between two Englishmen who were early members of the Theosophical Society in India and those individuals whom H. P. Blavatsky designated as her "teachers." Early in the correspondence, one of those teachers suspended writing to Sinnett because, he said, he was to go on a retreat and would be incommunicado for some time. When he did take up the correspondence again, he informed Sinnett, "I have been on a long journey after supreme knowledge . . . . I am 'Self' once more. But what is Self? Only a passing guest, whose concerns are all like a mirage of the great desert."

Reading those words, one could well ask: was the teacher the same person after his long journey,after the retreat during which the correspondence had ceased, as he had been before undertaking that search for "supreme knowledge"? A close examination of the letters written to Sinnett and his colleague, A. O. Hume, both before and after the event termed a "retreat," reveals some interesting differences. No one could possibly undertake such an inner journey, in the quest for spiritual knowledge, without experiencing some internal change. And out of such a change in consciousness, there could well arise a new sense of self.

So far, the term "self" as used here suggests a separate entity, a static thing, whether identified as personality or as individuality, a thing higher or lower on some scale of reality. But what if the self is not a thing, however many guises it may wear or transformations it may undergo? What if the self—whether higher or lower, whether spiritual or bounded by the temporal and spatial dimensions of existence in this world—is not a thing? What if the self is a process? What if that process is not only "a becoming"—an evolving, developing, unfolding movement—but is, at every stage along the way, "most becoming"—beautiful, harmonious, fitting, meaningful?

Take the example of a rose, which evolves from a bud to a fully open flower. The movement from bud to flower is the developmental process of the rose. At the same time, each stage is in itself beautiful: the bud is as "becoming," as beautiful, to the essential roseness, as is the fully open flower.

The psychologist, Robert Kegan, writing of the stages in human development in his book, The Evolving Self, has pointed out that the word "person" refers as much to a process as to an entity. He states, "Western grammars separate entities and processes as if the distinction were absolute." Further, he adds, while we may accept the thesis that "what is most fundamental about life is that it is motion rather than something that moves," our language constrains us to experience our own I-ness, our own personhood, along with everything about us in the world as things that move. Students of The Secret Doctrine will recognize in Kegan's thesis the fundamental principle enunciated by HPB that motion—the "Great Breath" as she termed it—is primary. That motion is intelligence, consciousness, and space itself.

Kegan then suggests that our notion of "human being" has been colored by two major ideas which, as he has put it, "have had an influence on nearly every aspect of intellectual life in the last hundred years." The first of these ideas, again one to be found in The Secret Doctrine and given increasing attention today by many leading thinkers particularly in the field of physics, is that "persons or systems constitute or construct reality." That is, we create the world; what we see is always a function of what we are; we live in a participatory world. The second great idea, according to Kegan, is again a very familiar one: there has been a shift from an "entity-oriented perception of the phenomena of investigation to a developmental, process-oriented perception," from a static view of ourselves and the world to a dynamic view. According to contemporary chaos theory, we may say that the world is a flow!

The self, then, may be seen as a process, which we generally call a becoming, with never-ending possibilities of transformation, metamorphosis, or transmutation. From such a point of view, the "self" is—as Carl Jung pointed out—both a symbol of our wholeness and an expression of the "numinosity of a God-image." Or we might say that the "self" is an inner image of the One Reality. And when the expression in the world of that inner image is harmonious and whole, the self we reveal is truly becoming.

M. Esther Harding in her book The 'I' and the 'Not-I' has elaborated on Jung's proposal that"each individual life is based on a particular myth," stating further that we ought each to discover what our own basic myth is, so that we may live it consciously and intelligently, cooperating with the trend of this life pattern, instead of being dragged along unwillingly. . . . certain people's lives illustrate and demonstrate the myth of the "hero" or the "leader," others that of the "savior," others again that of the "mother"; in others we can observe the story of Ulysses, or of Isis and Osiris . . . . patterns can be seen recurring in the lives of certain people, who remain totally unconscious of what they are living. But if the individual becomes conscious in relation to the archetypal trend that underlies his life—his fate—he can begin to adapt himself to it consciously. The outer fate is then transmuted into the inner experience, and the true individuality . . . begins to emerge.

The comments by Blavatsky, Kegan, and Harding reveal the pattern of the "becoming self." One self is a process that HPB depicted as "a long series of daily experiences strung together by the thread of memory" and producing in us "the feeling of Egoity"or I-ness. It is the self of karma, so it is a process that tends to be repetitive. It is an illusory entity, built by those aggregates or attributes which, though ever changing, characterize the personality and which the Buddhist tradition calls the "skandhas." These skandhas are the agents of karma that constitute the identity we assume so often to be ourselves.

But another self, which HPB called the element within us "to which the feeling of 'I'am 'I' is due," may be called the self of dharma, the archetypal pattern to which Jung referred, which carries us beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries of the personal, karmic self, to the realization of true individuality. It is the dharmic self, the "becoming" or beautifully appropriate self, which reveals both our individual uniqueness and our unique universality. Such a self is singular but not single, both one only and only one, knowing no divide between ourselves, our own humanity, and everything else. As Christopher Bache put it in Dark Night, Early Dawn, it is "not an atom independent of other life forms but . . . a node in a web of relationships that reaches out into and includes everything."

Since we live to such a large extent in and through our karmic selves, or what might be called the "unbecoming" self, we should be well acquainted with it. In terms of process, it is the reactive self, composed as HPB says in The Key to Theosophy (130) of the "material Skandhas . . . which generate the most marked Karmic effects," a self which is, as she states, "as evanescent as a flash of lightning." Commenting on these attributes of material form, sensation, and tendencies of mind, including memory, she says: "Of these we are formed; by them we are conscious of existence; and through them communicate with the world about us" (129n).

We often identify ourselves with our passing desires, our transient thoughts, even with the ever-changing form in which we appear as separate persons in the world. Consider the emotion of anger, as an example. When we are angry, we are completely, totally anger; we reflect only later, "I was angry," but at the moment our whole being is simply anger. It is the same with love or any other emotion or desire. We are identified with that feeling. When we perceive the karmic self as a distinct and independent entity and identify ourselves with its reactions, hopes, fears, ambitions, and disappointments, we forget its evanescent and illusory nature. Yet its innate tendency is to be the very process that awakens us to an ever wider, deeper, more comprehensive self, a growing self, a becoming self, a dharmic self.

The concept of dharma may be less well known to us and certainly is less often discussed than karma.Although the word has many meanings, dharma as a principle or ideal may be called the law of our being,our truenature or best being. Reginald Ray, the author of Indestructible Truth, an excellent compendium describing the schools of Tibetan Buddhism, has proposed that dharma "includes and integrates several levels of experience, from our first moment on the path to the achievement of full realization." Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, one of the great Indian philosophers of the twentieth century, has stated that, next to the category of reality, dharma is the most important concept in Indian thought, since it is a necessary consequence of the basic postulate of one Ultimate Reality, which is both immanent and transcendent. While central in both Hindu and Buddhist thought, it is also a Christian concept. St. Paul wrote to the Galatians: "Stand fast in the liberty where with Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage," a statement which, from an esoteric point of view, may be interpreted to mean that we are to become one—"stand fast"—with our dharma or the "Christ principle" within us, no longer "entangled" in the karmic, reactive, bondage-creating illusory self.

"Dharma" has been translated as duty, righteousness, religion in its truest sense, or the moral law of our being. From the Sanskrit root dhr, meaning "to hold together, nourish, support or sustain," dharma may be described as the rightness that is inherent in all things, what N. Sri Ram called both the "instinct of beauty" and the "instinct of rightness," which are at the base of our being. It is the imperative necessity of the mundane order to reflect the cosmic order while at the same time representing the potential for growth and transformation in all beings since the cosmos itself is a dynamic process. Dharma is both the universal "rightness" of all that is and also the rightness of our ordinary existence. It is both the eternal lawfulness that sustains and nourishes the essential rightness of the cosmos and the lawfulness that sustains and nourishes our essential being. The eternal dharma may break through and transform every moment of our lives.

To fulfill the rightness of the moment, to act naturally and spontaneously with whatever the occasion may require—whether it be with a word, a gesture, a smile, a thought, or a touch—this is to be one's own dharma, one's becoming self, wholly present in the here and now. In such a state, there is purposive action without self-centeredness, individuality without egoism, an awareness of oneness with all without loss of uniqueness.

Embedded in the everyday, quite ordinary, experiencing, reactive karmic self is the dharmic or "becoming" self. Our task in the journey of life is to rediscover that becoming self; this is the great adventure, the process that is the self. As HPB stated succinctly in The Voice of the Silence, "The way to final freedom is within thy SELF. That way begins and ends outside of Self." Within the here and now of existence, yet outside or beyond the karmic self, lies our true identity, the "becoming" self, the dharmic self. For as the Voice also tells us, "Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search." Who then am I? Who is the self that asks the question? "And now thy Self is lost in SELF, thyself unto THYSELF, merged in that SELF from which thou first didst radiate." Enjoy the search. . . . And become your most becoming Self!

Joy Mills is an international lecturer, frequent director of the School of the Wisdom at Adyar, past National President in both America and Australia, and past international Vice President of the Theosophical Society.

Originally printed in the March - April 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Zaney, Isaac K. "Watching the World Pass By." Quest  90.2 (MARCH - APRIL 2002):64-65.

By Isaac K. Zaney

HIGH UP IN NEW YORK HARBOR there stands the statue of a lady with a radiating crown of light, bearing a torch. The statue, originally named "Liberty Enlightening the World," is now called simply the Statue of Liberty, and the torch she carries is the torch of liberty. The statue represents the ideal and the aspiration that the nation born more than two and a quarter centuries ago in 1776 stands for. In days when ships were the means for crossing the ocean, New York Harbor was the principal gateway into what was in fact an ancient world but had become to its new settlers the "new world." In 1956, the statue's site on a torch Island was renamed Liberty Island, and in July 1986, the Statue of Liberty was refurbished.

HPB'S Figure of Lucifer

The figure of the Statue of Liberty recalls that other figure which H. P. Blavatsky used on the cover of her magazine, Lucifer. It is the figure of a youth holding aloft a torch that sheds light in a surrounding gloom. That figure was meant to represent Lucifer, whose name means "the Light-Bearer." That was HPB's symbol of the Theosophical Society, holding aloft the light of the Ancient Wisdom, newly reborn into the modern world, which had been bereft or at any rate unaware of that Wisdom. HPB was herself an embodiment of that allegorical figure of Lucifer.

The association of the Theosophical Light-Bearer with America's Light-Bearer of Liberty is not without some significance. The Theosophical Society was born, doubtless not by accident, in New York, under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Theosophy could in fact only be born and thrive in an atmosphere of freedom—freedom to think and to be what one truly is. It was only after its birth, appropriately in the "new world," that the Theosophical Society was headquartered in India, the ancient seat of the Ancient Wisdom. From that moment, the Ancient Wisdom has flowed from its ancient Custodians in the heart of Asia, across the bridge of the Society into the young world—a world vibrant with youthful energy, which, however, needs to be guided by the wisdom of the ancients.

Fraternity and Equality

There is another association also. The Statue of Liberty, under the shadow of which the Theosophical Society was born, was a gift, a little more than a century and a quarter ago, from the people of France to the New World—from France, which holds dear the triple ideals of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. These also are the fundamental principles of the Theosophical Society, which proclaims the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color, and declares freedom of thought as a necessary environment for the growth of the human spirit.

Today this ideal—the oneness of humanity and the essential equality of its individual members—has generally been accepted in principle by the world's great leaders as the only bridge over which the present world can pass from its present crisis into a new age, characterized by that global peace which is enshrined in the charter of the United Nations as the fervent hope and aspiration of mankind—which organization is also headquartered in New York.

Realizing Brotherhood in Action

Today, the hope for brotherhood and peace seems incapable of attainment in the midst of the increased conflict all over the world. But this phenomenon of conflict is surely the desperate fight of the Dark Powers, and there is no uncertainty as to the victory soon of the Powers of the Light. Conflict and war are the signs of a dying age, unwilling to die. In this situation the work that the Theosophical Society sets itself as its first object is a most urgent one. While the world is burning around us we should not sit Nero-like playing on harps. Many organizations and individuals are carrying out various schemes and programs that have the effect of bringing about, in practical terms, the realization of the oneness of humanity, while we talk so much about Brotherhood as an ideal.

The Brotherhood of Humanity, which is our first object, can be brought into realization in the face of human tragedy by individual practical acts that demonstrate an awareness of our unity and awaken it in the hearts of other human beings. There is hunger around us, devastating tragedies occur daily around us, millions of victims of war and ethnic conflict flee from their homes and become refugees in other countries. Sensitive and compassionate hearts, awake to the oneness of humanity and to the call of brotherhood, answer by giving aid in various forms. HPB said in The Key to Theosophy: "The Theosophical ideas of charity mean personal exertion for others; personal mercy and kindness; personal interest in the welfare of others who suffer, personal sympathy, forethought and assistance in their troubles and needs."

Isaac K. Zaney of Ghana is a longtime member of the Theosophical Society who served for ten years(1973—1983) as Organizing Secretary of the Theosophical Society in West Africa. He is now Regionary Bishop for the Liberal Catholic Church in Ghana and teaches courses in Yoga and mysticism.

The Yellow Brick Road and the Field of Poppies
The Society's Third Object

By John Algeo

Originally printed in the March - April 2004 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Algeo, John. "The Blossom and the Serpent." Quest  92.2 (MARCH-APRIL 2004):60-65.

In their journey on the Yellow Brick Road across the Land of Oz to the Emerald City, Dorothy and her companions came to a field of poppies, whose stupefying fragrance put the flesh-and-blood travelers Dorothy, Toto, and the Cowardly Lion into a deep trance, thus preventing their further progress. It was only the intelligence of the Scarecrow and the devotion of the Tin Woodman that found a way to invoke higher powers to get them out of the field and back on the path to the center of Oz.

It is likely that Frank Baum, the Theosophist author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, knew Madame Blavatsky's spiritual guidebook, The Voice of the Silence, which had been published just eleven years before his well-known children's book. Like The Wizard of Oz, The Voice of the Silence describes a quest-journey, one during which the pilgrim must pass through three Halls—of Ignorance, Learning, and Wisdom. In the second of those Halls, the pilgrim soul finds "the blossoms of life, but under every flower a serpent coiled." In a note on that passage, HPB identifies the second Hall as "the astral region, the psychic world of supersensuous perceptions and of deceptive sights . . . No blossom plucked in those regions has ever yet been brought down on earth without its serpent coiled around the stem. It is the world of the Great Illusion." (p. 75)

The Voice of the Silence was written "for those ignorant of the dangers of the lower iddhi," or psychic powers. Those powers are symbolized by the blossom with a serpent coiled around its stem or by a field of poppies, whose fragrance overpowers our minds and submerges us in narcotic sleep. The danger of the lower iddhis is that their attractiveness can entice us from our journey and preoccupy us with spiritually irrelevant phenomena and with ego-gratifying distractions.

We have been warned against the lower iddhi or psychic powers from the days of the ancients until our own time. The fifth-century Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus said of these lower powers, "The Gods admonish us not to look upon them before we are fenced around with the [higher] powers brought to birth by the Mystery rites." And the Chaldean Oracles likewise advise, "Thou should'st not look on them before the body is perfected; for ever do they fascinate men's souls and draw them from the Mysteries." G. R. S. Mead, a Theosophical authority on these ancient writers, adds, "The lower visions were to be turned from in order that the higher theophanies, or manifestations of the Gods, might be seen" (Chaldean Oracles 2:66).

Closer to our own time, the instructions given to a fourteen-year-old Krishnamurti and published as At the Feet of the Master also warn about this danger:

Have no desire for psychic powers; they will come when . . . it is best for you to have them. To force them too soon often brings in its train much trouble; often their possessor is misled . . . or becomes conceited and thinks he cannot make a mistake; and in any case the time and strength that it takes to gain them might be spent in work for others. They will come in the course of development. . . . Until then, you are better without them. (p.31)

The third Object of the Theosophical Society is "to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity." Some people think of those latent powers as exclusively or mainly the "lower iddhis," which include clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, and so on. Those things are indeed one kind of latent power, but to investigate them, impartially and in a scientific spirit, is not the same as to attempt to develop them in oneself. Indeed, attempting to activate such latent powers in oneself or in another may interfere with a proper—that is, a competent, reliable, and impartial—investigation of them.

Moreover, there are different and higher kinds of iddhis, which are spiritual powers—such as insight, wisdom, compassion, harmony, and so on—which require the most rigorous self-development to bring them from latency into activity. The lower iddhis are real, and they are normal (though not at our stage of evolution), but they are also dangerous. Everything which is, is good and holy, when rightly used at the right time. As Ecclesiastes says, "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven." There will be a time for developing the lower iddhis, but this is the season for cultivating Wisdom and Love, Creativity and Peace. Those are unexplained laws of nature and latent powers truly worthy of our investigation here and now.

*******

The investigation of unexplained natural laws and latent human powers has been a purpose, though not the central one, of the Theosophical Society from its earliest days. The impetus to found the Society came from a lecture given at one of H. P. Blavatsky's soirées by an engineer-architect, George H. Felt, on "The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians." His lecture dealt with the geometrical symbolism on the wall of an Egyptian temple, but Felt also claimed to have discovered how Egyptian priests invoked and commanded spirits of the elements. That claim, and Felt's promise to demonstrate it, elicited interest in others at the meeting and led to a proposal to found a society to pursue such matters, as well as more generally the investigation of science and religion.

Although the impetus for the Society's founding was an interest in phenomena, its objects, as set forth in its 1875 bylaws, were more general: "to collect and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which govern the universe." By 1878, those objects were further diversified to include other purposes, such as to "study to develop his [man's] latent powers" and ending "finally and chiefly, aid in the institution of a Brotherhood of Humanity . . . of every race." From that time onward, it was clear that brotherhood was the central and primary purpose of the Society. By 1886, the emphasis on phenomena had been de-emphasized by restricting their pursuit from all members of the Society to only some: "The third object, pursued by a portion of the members of the Society, is to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the psychical powers of man." By 1888, the third object was associated with "a distinct private pision of the Society under the direction of the Corresponding Secretary [HPB]." And by 1896, the third Object had taken the form it still has in the Society worldwide: "To investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man," with the omission of the term "psychic."

The inner founders of the Society were always clear on this issue. In one of his earliest letters to A. P. Sinnett (no. 5), the teacher known as KH wrote: "The term 'Universal Brotherhood' is no idle phrase. Humanity in the mass has a paramount claim upon us. . . . It is the only secure foundation for universal morality . . . and it is the aspiration of the true adept." And again (letter no. 12) he wrote, "The Chiefs want a 'Brotherhood of Humanity,' a real Universal Fraternity started; an institution which would make itself known throughout the world and arrest the attention of the highest minds." They emphatically did not want a "School of Magick" (letter no. 11) and in general dismissed the importance and value of all psychic phenomena.

Why then, it is sometimes asked, was the attention of the Society shifted from a focus on the paranormal to one on brotherhood and cultural understanding? But that is the wrong way to put it. In view of KH's early and strong emphasis on brotherhood and cross-cultural understanding as the Society's purposes, we might ask instead why, at the Society's founding, phenomenal matters were emphasized at all. The answer to that question is fairly clear.

The inner founders wanted a society to be formed for the purposes KH set forth in his letter to A. P. Sinnett. But KH and his colleagues were not the ones forming the Society; ordinary people, who had their own priorities, were the first members, and they came together to satisfy their personal interests. The late nineteenth century was a time of intense conflict between religion and science. In 1873, only two years before the foundation of the Society, a New York University professor, John William Draper, had published History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, which is still read today.

Nineteenth-century science was aggressively materialistic in opposition to an intellectually stultified Christianity that refused to accept facts about the history and nature of the world. The conflict thus presented Westerners with a choice between godless materialism and pious ignorance. Consequently many people were looking for something different, a third way that would affirm spiritual and nonmaterial values yet be reasonable and scientifically based. HPB reflected on that yearning in a letter she wrote to her sister Vera about the time of the founding of the Theosophical Society (Letters of H. P. Blavatsky, p. XXX)"Humanity has lost its faith and its higher ideals; materialism and pseudo-science have slain them. The children of this age no longer have faith; they demand proof, proof founded on a scientific basis—and they shall have it. Theosophy, the source of all human religions, will give it to them."

At the time of the Society's founding, Spiritualism and an interest in psychic matters were expressions of the search many people were making for a logical explanation of the world in nonmaterialistic terms. It was such an explanation—of both the normal and the apparently paranormal—that HPB proposed Theosophy would supply. Accordingly, the Society attracted persons eager for such an explanation and also those who were interested in witnessing, at first hand, phenomena that science could not explain and that conventional religion found threatening. Thus the Society included among its objects the investigation of such matters, and HPB performed some striking phenomena to demonstrate the possibility of things in heaven and earth that were not dreamt of in philosophy or science.

*******

The investigation of unexplained laws and latent human powers has thus always been a part of the Society's calling, albeit not the basic reason for its foundation. Such investigation is more a means to demonstrate certain truths than an ultimate purpose for the Society's existence. A number of prominent members of the Society did, however, activate some of those powers that are latent in all of us, particularly that of clairvoyance, which is the ability to see certain aspects of reality that are invisible to most people.

There is more to reality than any of us can perceive. There are colors outside the range of light visible to our eyes—infrared and ultraviolet. There are sounds outside the range of vibrations our ears can hear—low-pitched rumbles that precede an earthquake, which animals hear and which cause them to flee, or high-pitched whistles that a dog can hear and will respond to. Similarly, there are tastes, odors, and sensations that our senses cannot pick up. But more than that, there are kinds of potential stimuli that we have no senses to perceive at all: X-rays, radio waves, beta waves, and so on. We have invented machines that are affected by such stimuli and can translate them into signals we are able to perceive, but we do not experience those stimuli directly. So also, many Theosophists believe in the existence of superphysical stimuli that physical machines cannot respond to, but that a few persons are able to detect by means of the faculty we call clairvoyance.

Relatively dependable clairvoyance is a rare phenomenon, and fully reliable clairvoyance does not exist. The Society has never had many who were gifted with or developed this faculty. HPB had it, as she herself describes in some of her letters to her relatives, as well as the ability to materialize objects and perform a variety of other phenomena. She got into trouble, however, by using that ability to satisfy the curiosity of people. Her motive was a good one—to attract people to the philosophical truths behind the phenomena, but most who witnessed it wanted only more marvels, not philosophy.

C. W. Leadbeater was clairvoyant too, as attested perhaps most notably by his recognition that a young teenage boy—dirty and unkempt, whom his tutor had judged to be retarded—was destined to be a great teacher and speaker: J. Krishnamurti. And yet Leadbeater made mistakes, for example in his clairvoyant observations of the past, as his secretary C. Jinarajadasa pointed out to him.

Dora Kunz, a president of the American Section, was clairvoyant, particularly in certain ways. She had a remarkable ability to look at the health aura of a person and identify physical illnesses from abnormalities in that aura, as confirmed by medical examination. And from that ability, she developed a supplementary diagnostic and healing technique called Therapeutic Touch, now widely used by nurses. Many can bear personal testimony to its effectiveness. But she also made other kinds of decisions based on inadequate grounds, despite her gifts.

Geoffrey Hodson had clairvoyant ability; most notably he described his perception of angelic or deva forms, as well as the forms produced by music on the inner dimensions of reality. Hodson was also tested at one time for his ability to perceive between two alternative paths of electrons that were fired randomly along one or the other of the two paths. Not only was his perception of the paths being followed by the electrons correct at a higher than chance level, but he was able to tell when the machine emitting the electrons had malfunctioned and was not producing any, even though the machine's operator was unaware of the fact at the time. Yet he was not always reliable and was taken in by the fraudulent Cottingsley Fairy photographs, as was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

No clairvoyant ability is always accurate and reliable, not even that of genuine clairvoyants. Why should that be? It is an obvious fact that several people witnessing the same event will see it differently. The sworn court testimony given by eyewitnesses is sometimes conflicting, and a demonstration of the unreliability of our physical observations is sometimes made in psychology classes. The instructor will arrange to have the class interrupted by someone who comes into the room, does something quite bizarre, and then immediately leaves. The instructor then asks the class to write an account of what they have just seen: what did the person look like, what was done, what was the apparent purpose of the action? The resulting accounts will vary significantly in the most basic information. People do not see the same event in the same way.

If our physical observations are unreliable, being influenced by many factors, including our expectations, how much more so must be observations on superphysical dimensions. Physicists now tell us that the act of observation changes the thing observed, an effect we hardly notice on the level in which we live but one that is notable in the subatomic world. In subtler dimensions of reality—such as the emotional and mental—the observer and the observed are one in a way that is far truer than in the physical dimension. Consequently, in those subtler dimensions, what the observer experiences must be affected by the observer's own background, expectations, and assumptions, just as they are in the physical world, but to a much greater extent in those subtler realms. Moreover, if skilled and practiced clairvoyants can make mistakes, what about less skilled and more amateur ones?

It is also noteworthy that the famous clairvoyants talked little about how they developed their own talents along those lines or the process by which they used them. There may be good reason for their reticence. What is appropriate for one person, who is exceptional in many ways, may not be advisable for the rest of us. Human beings at our stage of evolution should not be forcing psychic development. There are doubtless reasons why a few had the ability naturally or were able to develop it, but it is not advisable for most people to play around with psychic matters. HPB, we are told (Mahatma Letters 491), had to be separated from some aspect of her nature (whatever that may mean) to develop her latent powers along those lines. C. W. Leadbeater had specific instructions, he tells us, from his Master, clearly for specific purposes. Dora Kunz seems to have been born with psychic abilities, which in itself is not unusual as many young children have some trace of it, though it normally fades out. Geoffrey Hodson's abilities, like Leadbeater's, seem also to have been developed under tuition.

There are, of course, many people who claim clairvoyance of one sort or another, but very few, if any, have demonstrated the results that the four mentioned above did. Some self-proclaimed clairvoyants are frauds, pure and simple. Some are perhaps self-deluded. Some doubtless have a degree of clairvoyant ability, that is not well developed or under control. Assessing clairvoyance is no easy matter. The great problem is the one of consistent replicability. Clairvoyants are affected by their environment, so reliable scientific tests are hard to apply to them—probably impossible in a strict sense. And what cannot be reliably tested cannot be depended upon.

*******

Some scholar-scientists have sought to investigate extraordinary perception and other psychic abilities. Two who have done the most rigorous work along those lines are Ian Stevenson, who has investigated memories of past incarnations, and Rupert Sheldrake, who has investigated cognition outside the limits of known physical channels. But the scientific community as a whole unfortunately tends to ignore their work, doubtless because their findings conflict with the dominant paradigm of scientific thought.

The third Object, insofar as it applies to things like clairvoyance, was never intended to be for all members of the Society. But the powers latent within us are not limited to clairvoyance and other psychic abilities. Meditation, which the Society teaches and many members practice, taps into latent powers of a different sort. Indeed we all have latent spiritual powers whose development and application will do more to improve the life of the individual and of society than any possible psychic expansion.

It is not timidity that restricts us from investigating the paranormal in a concerted and scientific way. It is a judgment of what is possible, advisable, and profitable in ways that matter. The appropriate investigation of psychic powers requires the training, experience, and dedication of scientists like Ian Stevenson and Rupert Sheldrake. However, the rest of us can investigate such matters in an anecdotal way. We can collect accounts of events that cannot be easily explained by a materialist view of the world, and we can consider them in the light of the Theosophical tradition. The intense and focused investigation of such accounts requires someone with the proper training and the determination to apply it (like Stevenson and Sheldrake), and such people cannot be just materialized. They are a rare breed. What all of us can do is to be aware of possibilities that surpass the normal at our stage and to record them for those who have the special competence needed for their rigorous investigation.

But another sort of investigation of unexplained laws and latent powers requires no competence other than that which all of us can develop in ourselves. And that is an awareness of who we are, where we are, and why we are here. The technique for such investigation is also no mystery. It consists of study, meditation, and service. Study of what the great sages of the past thought and of how our contemporaries responded to those wise thoughts will provide us with a map or blueprint for our own self-development. Meditation on the great truths from the past and on our own inner reality will internalize our study and make us, not just intellectually informed, but inwardly wise. Service is the inevitable result of inward wisdom; those who are wise express their wisdom by being helpful to other beings. And paradoxically, serving others is the only way to a full realization of what we have studied and what we have meditated upon.

The most important of all unexplained laws is that which relates us to all other living creatures. The greatest of all latent powers is the ability to apply the law of relationship in everyday life. That ability is wisdom, compassion, peace, and spiritual power. It is what the third Object is really about.

References

Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Chicago: G. M. Hill Co., 1900.

Blavatsky, H. P. The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky. Vol. 1. Ed. John Algeo. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 2003.

———. The Voice of the Silence. 1889. Adyar Centenary Edition. Adyar, Chennai, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1982.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. Fairies Photographed. New York, George H. Doran, 1921.

Draper, John William. History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. New York: Appleton, 1873.

Krishnamurti, J. ("Alcyone"). At the Feet of the Master. 1910. Reprint Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 2001.

The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett from the Mahatmas M. & K.H. in Chronological Sequence. Ed. Vicente Hao Chin. Adyar, Chennai, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1998.

Sheldrake, Rupert. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1995.

———. The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind. New York: Crown, 2003.

Stevenson, Ian. Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation. Rev. ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.

———. European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.