Quest Magazine

By John White

Astrology as commonly understood is ego-oriented pop-culture nonsense. It is used as either entertainment or an effort to manipulate future circumstances for personal gain and protection. Some consult the stars to predict the stock market or determine propitious days and times to undertake actions, though there is no credible evidence that such predictions are valid. Newspaper horoscopes and books on finding your soul mate through sun signs belong in the realm of entertainment. Sometimes the stars are invoked as a New Age version of the "victim excuse": I'm having a bad day because my moon is in Pisces with Venus rising. There's nothing sacred, spiritual, or growth-oriented about such uses of the art.

That's not to say astrology is useless. There is an astrology which goes to the spiritual depths of humanity. It was pioneered by Dane Rudhyar, a dear and respected friend who died on September 13, 1985, at the age of 90. He attempted to restore the sacred nature and high purpose of astrology: enlightenment or God-realization. Of perhaps a dozen astrologers who've cast my horoscope over the years, only one--Rudhyar, as he preferred to be called--was able to tell me anything significant about myself. The rest of the horoscopes were either irrelevant, superficial, or nonsensical. Rudhyar dedicated one of his books to me (Beyond Individualism). I want to direct readers to his work--not just the transpersonal astrology which he pioneered but also his esoteric psychology, philosophy, music, art, and fiction.

Rudhyar was a visionary, a true Renaissance man of multiple talents and a social critic of the highest order. His prodigious output includes nearly three dozen books and innumerable articles; his music has been honored by a special presentation of his works at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and by various recordings. Luminaries such as Henry Miller and Leopold Stokowski praised Rudhyar's work in their fields. However, he is best known as the father of modern astrology.

In the 1930s, it was Rudhyar's articles in the then-new magazine American Astrology which caught the public mood and made astrology respectable. Those articles, lucid and profound, dealt with the basic relationship between humanity and the universe. They were soon collected in Rudhyar's most popular book, The Astrology of Personality. His synthesis of Jung's depth psychology with astrology made the book one of the perennial sellers in the field and a classic for serious students of the esoteric art.

But Rudhyar did not stop there. Ever growing, ever deepening his insight into human nature, he went beyond himself and the superficial pop culture spinoffs of his own work to develop in the 1950s what he called humanistic astrology. It linked astrology with the human potential movement and emphasized free will and personal development rather than some nebulous "fate written in the stars." He saw through the ego-fantasies of popular astrology, and in the 1960s, when psychologists Abraham Maslow and Antony Sutich developed transpersonal psychology, Rudhyar developed transpersonal astrology as a true spiritual discipline in parallel with their work.

His first statement on transpersonal astrology was published in 1975 by the Seed Center in Palo Alto, California. (Rudhyar lived in nearby Los Altos then.) It was entitled From Humanistic to Transpersonal Astrology. He expanded that booklet into his 1980 work, The Astrology of Transformation. It is his definitive statement on the subject.

Rudhyar's position is that the horoscope is to be used like a mandala for the unfolding of one's spiritual potential, rather than for predictive purposes. He distinguishes between what he calls an "astrology of information"--conventional astrology--and an "astrology of understanding and meaning." The astrology of information, he says, is inferior to, and cannot perform as, the astrology of understanding and meaning. He also describes a multilevel astrology--one which includes the biological and sociocultural levels of human existence, which condition and control people, and the levels beyond those, in which a person becomes authentically individual and, finally, transpersonal. (Incidentally, Rudhyar first used the term "transpersonal" in 1930, long before it became popular.)

From that perspective, the evolution of the soul can be understood and guided so that one evolves to a mature form of one's sun sign. "Mature" means, for example, Taurus's childish stubbornness is transformed into persistence and dedication to spiritual objectives, Leo's vanity and arrogance becomes humble pride in worthwhile accomplishments, and so forth. Optimizing the qualities of one's character means becoming God-realized. That is, in the highest ranges of human development, one is transformed beyond the entire horoscopic system. At that point, it is the same thing as attaining enlightenment or--to use the circular image of a horoscope--stepping off the wheel of death and rebirth.

Dane Rudhyar, born in France in 1895, was a musical composer, an actor in silent films, a poet and fiction writer, and a painter, as well as an astrologer. His connection with the Theosophical Society spanned his entire adult life. In his early twenties, he was associated with the Krotona Institute in Hollywood, California, then the headquarters of the American Section of the Theosophical Society, where he collaborated with Christine Wetherill Stevenson, founder of the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Little Theatre Movement. She was producing a play on the life of the Buddha at Krotona and invited Rudhyar to compose the music for a similar play about the life of Christ, which was performed in 1920 at the future Hollywood Bowl. Rudhyar's experience at Krotona increased his interest in Eastern thought and contributed to his thinking about the cyclical nature of life and cultures.

Known as the "grand old man of American astrology," Rudhyar was a prolific author, with books from Doubleday, Dutton, Harper & Row, David McKay, Penguin, Philosophical Library, Random House, and others. A number of his books were published by the Theosophical Publishing House, beginning with Rebirth of Hindu Music (1928) and extending through six Quest Books: Occult Preparations for a New Age (1975), Culture, Crisis, and Creativity (1977), Beyond Individualism: The Psychology of Transformation (1979), The Astrology of Transformation: A Multilevel Approach (1980), Rhythm of Wholeness: A Total Affirmation of Being (1983), and The Fullness of Human Experience (1986), his last work, published posthumously.

John White is an author in the fields of consciousness research and higher human development. He has published fifteen books, including The Meeting of Science and Spirit, What Is Enlightenment? and A Practical Guide to Death and Dying, as well as a children's story, The Christmas Mice. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Saturday Review, Reader's Digest, Esquire, Omni, and Woman's Day, as well as in four earlier issues of the Quest. He lives in Cheshire, Connecticut. This article is drawn from his forthcoming book "Toward Homo Noeticus: Reflections on God-Realization and Higher Human Development."

This is the task that is set before us. Personal transformation is the pathway of Theosophy and all quests for Truth. With sustained effort we can regulate our attitudes and actions, and little by little we can change our keynote to one of compassion and concern for all. Then the vibration of our being will be able to permeate the atmosphere, not with the distress of a siren, but with the call to responsible living and the music of altruism.

Hast thou attuned thy heart and mind to the great mind and heart of all mankind? For as the sacred River's roaring voice whereby all Nature-sounds are echoed back, so must the heart of him "who in the stream would enter," thrill in response to every sigh and thought of all that lives and breathes.

By Daryl S. Paulson

Ken Wilber--a household name in transpersonal studies--is looked upon by some as the major light-bearer in this field; but, for others, he is overly critical. Some say his theories will unify science, religion, and philosophy; others say his theories do not fit the data. All agree, however, that he has made an indelible impact on transpersonal studies.

Four Wilbers and Four Quadrants

Ken Wilber began writing about transpersonal psychology in 1974 in the publication Main Currents in Modern Thought (founded and edited by the Theosophists Fritz Kunz and Emily Sellon). Shortly after, he wrote his first book, Spectrum of Consciousness (Theosophical Publishing House, 1977). About that time, he also founded the journal Revision with his friend and fellow intellectual, Jack Crittenden. Over the course of the last twenty years, Wilber has written more than a dozen books and many essays, mainly in transpersonal studies.

Wilber says that his theoretical view has evolved through four stages, which he terms Wilber I, Wilber II, Wilber III, and Wilber IV. Wilber I he considers his romantic period, when he first began writing, as exemplified in both Spectrum of Consciousness and No Boundary. At that time, Wilber viewed the ego as emerging from the unconscious, an act which is subsequently repressed and forgotten and split a number of times into dualistic oppositions. The first split is between God and self, the second between organism and environment, the third between ego and body, and the fourth between persona and shadow. The goal in psychospiritual development is to reunite each duality and reclaim the unity underlying each split until finally one realizes one's nonseparateness from the Absolute. A model of this kind is also used by Jungian and Freudian theorists, by transpersonal theorist Michael Washburn, and by Hameed Ali in his Diamond approach, with the major dualistic repressive split being between the ego and the unconscious. The psychospiritual goal is to reunite the ego and the unconscious. This model and its applications have provided valuable contributions to psychospiritual integration.

Wilber II evolved with the Atman Project and Up from Eden. At this time, Wilber began to incorporate a developmental perspective into psychospiritual growth, particularly as presented by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine and Integral Yoga. Instead of the ego lifting its repression of the unconscious, Wilber now viewed the ego-mind complex as developing consciously into higher transegoic levels, reached by stages rather than states of consciousness.

Wilber III was presented in the essay, "Ontogenetic Development," published by the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and in his three chapters in Transformations of Consciousness. At this stage, Wilber further refined his model, integrating it with western developmental models (Piaget, in particular) and expanded his view to include Howard Gardner's research concerning multiple lines of development. In this view, a person does not develop from preconventional to conventional to postconventional in one thrust. Instead, one develops at differing rates along multiple lines--physical, cognitive, emotional, moral, psychosexual, interpersonal, spatio-temporal, as well as lines of self-identity, self-needs, world views, intimacy, creativity, specific talents (music, sports), and so forth.

Wilber IV incorporates Wilber III but adds to it the concept of quadrant development. From Wilber's point of view, human experience occurs in multiple dimensions, consisting of elements that are simultaneously wholes and parts (figure 1). For example, an atom is a whole atom but part of a molecule; a molecule is a whole molecule but part of a cell; a cell is a whole cell but part of an organ system; and so on. Similarly, a person is also both a whole person and a part of a culture or society.

Wilber views reality as having both interior and exterior dimensions, as well as simultaneous parts and wholes. Take, for example, a person--you or me. I, as an individual, am composed of both interior domains (thoughts, feelings, values, meaning, etc.) and exterior ones (cells, organs, behavior, etc.). I am also part of a whole culture of shared values, meaning, and beliefs, and part of the social structure (rules, roles, behaviors) of this society.

For Wilber, you and I interact in at least three distinct, but not separate, existential domains--the objective world (both right quadrants), our personal subjective world (upper left quadrant), and our shared intersubjective world of culture (lower left quadrant). None of these domains can be explained exclusively in terms of the others. For example, my subjective feelings of love for my wife cannot be solely explained through biochemical reactions, since my feelings are real, in and of themselves. But my feelings of love have both physical and intersubjective correlates. All three domains must be recognized and integrated.

Through this model, Wilber has deconstructed the compartmentalized, disconnected worldview of science (objective), religion (subjective), and ethics (intersubjective) and replaced it with a connected, integrated one. So as an empirical scientist, instead of viewing the world solely from my customary objective viewpoint, I now must also include both subjective and intersubjective viewpoints.

A Visionary Model and Technical Details

I and other empirical scientists have years invested in our professional objective endeavors. In order to expand my life boundaries and worldview, however, I must relinquish being an expert in a small world (some subspecialty of empirical science) and adopt the perspective of a mere student of life in the vastly larger, multidimensional Wilber IV world. To be safe, I tell myself, perhaps I should ignore his quadrant model and pick him apart in microbiology. True, he specifically includes microorganisms in his four-quadrant model, but he does not discuss them in great detail, so obviously his model is wrong. But then I realize that when we choose to give up our known world in order to gain another that is larger, but less known, we face this dilemma.

In the archaic period, instead of expanding their world to include objective truth, humans relied on magic to protect them from the unknown. Perhaps we also unconsciously rely on subfield specializations and their insular properties as a kind of magic to protect us from what lies beyond our knowledge. Much criticism of Wilber's integral model is limited to specific and very technical points within some level of specialization. Granted, those technical points are important and should be recognized. But we must remember that Wilber's model is fundamentally based on "orienting generalizations." That is, to construct his model he tends to use only the level of abstraction and those basic concepts that are generally accepted by workers in a field--generalizations we can use to orient ourselves to specific facts.

For example, not everyone agrees that human psychological development is composed of five, ten, or fifteen stages. However, virtually everyone agrees that it has at least three--preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Wilber uses these three common stages for general, broad statements, but arranges the orienting generalizations into chains or networks of interlocking conclusions that provide a systematic vision. This practice, however, often comes back to haunt him, because subfield specialists become offended that he does not mention specific instances and detail what their research has uncovered. As a result, they conclude his model is wrong.

But can a general visionary model--a skeletal model--rooted in orienting generalizations really be different from the type Wilber has devised? To provide a model with any accuracy or precision, he is forced to "smooth" the data by the omission of many specifics. This does not make his skeletal model wrong, but rather it allows subfield specialists to complete the model, fleshing it out with their own valuable and necessary contributions. This is what Wilber himself explicitly suggests.

In addition, most critics point to specific instances in which Wilber's model appears not to fit their data exactly. And this is where most of the trouble lies. An example from my own area of biostatistics will illustrate. Like all models, statistical models, by nature, lose the specific detail of the individual or event, in order to achieve general, broad-scope knowledge, the "central tendency." The "central tendency" of a basic American family may be described as a white, middle-class family, with 2.5 children, $47,000 annual income, and a $120,000 home. This model does not describe any individual--only the average central tendency. That is the function of a model. This is true whether the model describes an ecological system, a human physiological system, weather conditions, shared "cultural" values, beliefs, or cognitive processes.

Rarely do statisticians or empirical scientists rely exclusively on central tendencies to describe data. They include "confidence intervals" that contain data not exactly the value of the central tendency (or average), but within a preset range, usually 95 percent. The 95 percent confidence interval contains individual observation values differing from the central tendency and clearly shows how far the individual measurements vary from one another. If the 95 percent range is narrow, the central tendency by itself describes the data well. If the 95 percent confidence range is wide, the central tendency by itself does not describe the data well. Thus the "confidence intervals" of the basic American family may include 1 to 3 children, an income of $37,000 to $57,000, and a house costing $110,000 to $130,000. These figures are considered to be the normal or expected deviation values from the central tendency.

Critics of Wilber's model have often simply pointed out normal observation variations from the central tendency, which are to be expected in the central tendency model. The differences, then, are not significant from Wilber's model. This has occurred, for example, in the book Ken Wilber in Dialogue (Quest 1998), except for the essays by Walsh, Murphy, and perhaps Puhakka. I suggest researchers take into consideration "normal variability" within the data and construct a "confidence interval" around their models to describe the actual phenomena more accurately and precisely than is possible using only the central tendency, and I suggest the same thing to Wilber.

Doing this will require a type of statistical analysis. Instead of using a parametric statistical model (a model using quantitative or numerical data: 119.5, 76.0, 59.0, and so on), as in the empirical sciences, human science researchers would be better served with nonparametric methods (models using qualitative data: yes/no, big/small, good/bad), particularly meta-analysis procedures. Meta-analysis is a nonparametric statistical approach used to evaluate multiple groups of data collected by different researchers, who evaluated the same or very nearly the same phenomena. This would help eliminate the problem of relying on a central tendency model by fleshing out the average with individual difference ranges, both above and below the central tendency.

For example, let us look at the work of Carol Gilligan, describing female moral development. If female development is focused primarily at the central tendency, as in Gilligan's work, women tend to negotiate the pre-conventional–conventional–post-conventional stages of moral development based on judgments of care and concern, instead of control and agency, as males do. But just what range of care and concern constitute a 95 percent confidence interval? Surely, some women described by Gilligan's model are more agency-focused than some men. And some women are more caring and concern-focused than other women. What degree of difference bounds a 95 percent confidence interval? Without including this information, even though there is a central tendency for care and concern in female moral development, we never really can decide how "well" Gilligan's model describes the data.

Since Wilber has a comprehensive model, we can start with it, adding to it, correcting it, or even restructuring it, based on the confidence interval range of the data, not just a central tendency data point. This is standard practice in both the hard and natural sciences, which provide the ranges of the data collected. Ranges are customarily not reported in qualitative human science studies, thereby suggesting there is only a single valid value or phenomenon which all observations should equal. This has been a downside of human science's rejection of many of the techniques and methods of empirical science and substituting for them phenomenology and other qualitative methods. But because confidence intervals are not constructed for these qualitative models, one can never determine how well the model fits the data. Thus our current situation leads to the deconstruction of everyone's models, and the net effect is that everyone loses.

From another perspective, as in quantum physics, where an electron can appear to be both a wave and a particle, psychospiritual studies may, in fact, require multiple models. For example, Wilber views growth as a continual ascent to higher, more inclusive stages of development. That is, for Wilber, one moves from pre-egoic to egoic to trans-egoic stages in multiple lines of development, but on an ascending path, commonly referred to as the "ladder model." However, Michael Washburn, a very gifted, articulate, and thorough transpersonal researcher, views growth as beginning at the pre-egoic level and then moving to the egoic level just as Wilber does, but then, unlike Wilber, Washburn views an individual returning to the pre-egoic level (which also contains the trans-egoic level) in order to develop into the trans-egoic stage. Washburn's view is referred to as the "U-turn model." Now, if Wilber's ladder model and Washburn's U-turn model cannot be integrated, then perhaps both are true, relative to one's vantage point, and neither can be explained in terms of the other.

Finally, there is much valuable work already collected by other researchers which would help flesh out Wilber's model. For example, areas such as mythology, psychospiritual growth in the clinical setting, ecological issues, gender issues, indigenous people's wisdom, near death experiences, various nonordinary states of consciousness, systems psychology, sociology, natural science, religion, somatic studies, and thanatology have much to offer. Moreover, with this sort of encompassing intent, the field could open up to include aspects of esotericism--for example, many of the works of the Theosophical Society, as well as those presented in, say, the Journal of Esoteric Psychology.

I suggest that we apply Wilber's broad and vast concepts as a starting point, which is what Wilber himself suggests, fleshing out his model with the specifics of other valuable contributors. In addition, we should focus not only on the central tendency, but also on a percent confidence interval (such as the 95 percent level), to provide a range of behavior, observations, and developments that fall within these confidence limits, describing the central tendency. In this way, multiple models, seemingly incompatible, can be integrated to produce a much more powerful insight into psychospiritual development and a truly comprehensive model.

Daryl S. Paulson, PhD, is president and CEO of BioScience Laboratories, Inc., an international research firm focusing on the evaluation of medical and pharmaceutical antimicrobial products. He has doctorates in both psychology and human science.

This is the task that is set before us. Personal transformation is the pathway of Theosophy and all quests for Truth. With sustained effort we can regulate our attitudes and actions, and little by little we can change our keynote to one of compassion and concern for all. Then the vibration of our being will be able to permeate the atmosphere, not with the distress of a siren, but with the call to responsible living and the music of altruism.

Hast thou attuned thy heart and mind to the great mind and heart of all mankind? For as the sacred River's roaring voice whereby all Nature-sounds are echoed back, so must the heart of him "who in the stream would enter," thrill in response to every sigh and thought of all that lives and breathes.

By Robert Ellwood

The three objects of the Theosophical Society are currently written as follows:

• To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color;

• To encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science;

• To investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.

Universal Brotherhood

Taking the objects in order, let's begin by looking at the key words in the first, "To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity." A nucleus, like the nucleus in a cell or the kernel of a grain of wheat or corn, is the catalyst, paradigm, or template of the whole, a bearer of the genetic molecules or DNA. It is not the whole show, but something that helps the whole be what it is meant to be. We must also note that this object says that the Society is to be "a" nucleus of the universal brotherhood---not "the" nucleus, as though the Theosophical Society presumed to be the one and only means of bringing about universal brotherhood. We have a part to play, but are not the whole show.

The word "brotherhood" is a bit more tricky. Apart from the lingering sexism in the term, there is the awkward fact that brothers do not in fact always get along. Consider Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, or the Biblical Cain and Abel, or Jacob and Esau. Anyone who has had a brother, or sister for that matter, knows about brotherly relations in a deep, visceral way. The worst hatreds, the greatest cruelties, can often be found at home. When we say "brotherhood," we are not talking about utopia.

There is, however, a difference between homefolks and outsiders. Except in the most pathological families, brothers and sisters will put aside their quarrels and stand together against outsiders in order to uphold the family name.

Moreover, brothers and sisters know things about each other. They know how the other will react on a deeper level than almost anyone else. Finally, if in the end they come to forgive each other the pain, the teasing and taunting and quarreling, even fighting, of childhood and the shame of ignoring each other in adolescence, brotherhood can be a truly beautiful and deep thing. I have seen it in my own family, among brothers and sisters who quarreled and teased as children but now as adults are the best of friends.

So in talking of brotherhood we are not really expounding easy platitudes about universal harmony and feeling good about everyone and everything. We are talking about a hard, deeply human, and deeply flawed, yet wonderful kind of relationship that can lead to no less wonderful transformations. It is a change that, like Jacob's reconciliation with his brother Esau only after he had wrestled all night with an angel and faced profound angers and anxieties, comes only with excruciatingly painful growth and maturation. It comes only after working through all sorts of stubborn feelings and problems, anger and guilt. All this must be faced and exorcised like demons---but the struggle makes the final victory into grown-up brotherhood all the more worthwhile.

Our internal relations with our brothers and sisters in the Society have not always been perfect either. But, as in any family, if our working through our differences brings us to acceptance, support, and love in spite of those differences---if it brings us in the end to rejoice in the different gifts that different people bring---that could truly be an example and catalyst for the world.

And what is the world situation in regard to brotherhood? In this day, just after the end of the cold war and to a large extent of other ideologies, the world unfortunately often seems only to be getting back to certain basics of human relations, as gritty as they sometimes are. While no vast overarching conflict of great ideologies and great powers seems to obtain today, as it did in the two world wars or in the cold war, there are plenty of people who just don't like each other, or who have such contempt of others that they are willing to commit serious crimes against them. One thinks of Ireland, Africa, the Near East, the former Yugoslavia. I don't mean to single out any one place, because it's everywhere, including in our own country. As headway seems to be made in one place, the situation becomes discouraging in another.

For the Theosophist, the situation is not easy, no more than for anyone else. We have no simple answers, only a lot of hard thinking and hard work ahead of us if we wish to contribute to the brotherhood of humanity and make our Society one nucleus of it. Yet we do have resources that can help.

Perhaps I'm an eternal optimist, but I think the situation is getting better for brotherhood overall, despite countless setbacks. It does seem better than twenty-five or fifty years ago, when we lived with the nuclear threat, with a cold war that sometimes got hot, and under the shadow of world war past and perhaps future. Although there will be numerous local conflicts in the years to come, as there are today, it is arguable there will never again be a world war like those in the first half of this century. The world is unified in numerous new subtle, almost secret, ways. One thinks of the World Wide Web, complex trade networks, quasi-governmental agencies, the United Nations, and the European Community. These may all bear their own tensions, but overall they enhance communications, cooperation, and interdependencies that militate against war on a global scale.

There may be less overt racial prejudice at home and abroad than a half century ago, and signs are emerging that humanity is making slow, almost invisible, but real progress toward global community: rising rates of intercultural friendship and marriage, pluralism everywhere of religion and culture, gradually arising common languages and norms. These are the sorts of things that will take another millennium to be fulfilled. They may be barely perceptible even in one lifetime. However, having just turned 65, I have lived long enough to remember Hitler and World War II, and the blatant racial slurs and segregation at home of another age, and I think I can say that the brotherhood picture is a bit more encouraging now than then.

A sense of slow progress like this is the picture we need if we are not to get totally discouraged. Theosophy can help us to keep faith in a gradual world advance toward brotherhood because of the Theosophical idea of spiritual evolution. According to that Theosophical concept, evolutionary progress is always being made, but very slowly, sometimes perhaps imperceptibly, and always subject to human freedom.

Let us think for a moment about what this Theosophical model of spiritual evolution means. First, we must note that not everyone is evolving at the same rate; at best we can talk only of statistical averages. This certainly is true of the world we see around us. Second, the program can be set back a long time by entities like certain early Elohim described in The Secret Doctrine who decide not to evolve. We are told, for example, in stanza 6 of the Stanzas of Dzyan that "The Sons are told to create their image. One third refuses---two obey. The curse is pronounced: They will be born in the Fourth, suffer and cause suffering. This is the First War" (1: 33).

The ancient commentary relates that "The holy youths (the gods) refused to multiply and create species after their likeness, after their kind. They are not fit forms [rupas] for us. They have to grow. They refuse to enter the chhayas [shadows or images] of their inferiors." And thus "they had to suffer for it in later births" (1: 192).

In short, it is clear that evolution is not deterministic, but entails the conscious cooperation of intelligent beings, who can always develop a bad attitude and refuse the opportunity for ultimate growth--though sometimes, as here, taking the evolutionary challenge involves apparent humiliation at the moment. Those "Sons" no doubt considered themselves too pure and too good for the realm of matter, but actually their stubbornness was a far more devastating failing than any that matter could impose. The proximate cause of our own stubbornness toward spiritual growth is often unfinished karmic business clattering after us like the chains on Marley's ghost in A Christmas Carol. It includes the addictions, angers, festering memories, and unresolved processes with other people that seem to us more pressing than the opportunity for growth to another level of being that could be ours if we could but let go of them entirely and once for all.

This letting go can be done. All the great spiritual traditions tell us that sufficient faith, as in Pure Land Buddhism or Protestant Christianity, or sufficiently fervent devotion, as in Bhakti Hinduism or Catholic Christianity, can at once burn away all sin or bad karma and enable us to start over fresh and clean without that burden. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow," in the words of the Prophet Isaiah. But we are inwardly too attached to our chains, we don't really want to give them up, whatever we say, for they are at the core of our identity. Without this addiction, without this anger at this person, without this shame or guilt or psychic sore I keep gnawing at inwardly, who would I be? Would I really be I? It is not easy to give up the self I have known myself to be for so many years, however bright the alternative.

We could make the world a paradise tomorrow---we could move on to the sixth root race---if we all simultaneously willed to do so. But the unfinished business of the individual karma of many will make this unlikely. Though a few may be ready to advance in tremendous and courageous strides, as they always are, for the world as a whole to change would require that the preponderance of people make this transition all at once. That is statistically unlikely. So the world continues moving very slowly, though all we can do individually to advance ourselves also adds to the whole and speeds up the whole process by so much.

What then can we do?

First, we can strive to understand all our brothers and sisters in the intimate way members of a family can, even when we don't like the other. For family members have lived so closely together for so long, and through so many early stages of life, that they can often intuit where the other is coming from. While such intimate knowledge may at first lead to tensions, in the end it can assist the working through of difficult tensions that leads to victorious brotherhood.

Second, we can stand with others, like a family: not against others but with those who need support.

Third, we can talk in such a way as to help the world work its way back through the painful angers and memories to forgiveness and mature living together, as in a mature family. We will not expect perfection. Here as so often the "best," in the sense of a hopeless ideal, can be the enemy of the good. But we have the right to expect decent respect by everyone for all other brothers and sisters, even when it's hard.

Robert Ellwood, Professor Emeritus of the University of Southern California, is a well-known Theosophical author and speaker, currently visiting Professor at Auburn University. This article is based on a talk given at the 1998 convention of the Theosophical Society in America.