The Twisted History of the Swastika

Printed in the Winter 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "The Twisted History of the Swastika" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 22-23

By Richard Smoley 

Theosophical Society - Richard Smoley is editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America and a frequent lecturer for the Theosophical SocietyIf you were asked to come up with a symbol for evil, very likely you would think of the swastika. The quintessential emblem of the Third Reich, it still evokes hatred and fear seventy years after the collapse of the Nazi regime.

And yet not so long ago it was a symbol of blessings and good fortune. Even its name is derived from Sanskrit roots meaning “it is good.” (Other names given to it include the cross patteé, the gammadion, the hakenkreuz or hooked cross, and the fylfot.) Today, in a somewhat truncated form, it still occupies a place in the official symbol of the Theosophical Society.

The peculiar fate of the swastika has a great deal to teach about the nature and meaning of symbols — and about the uses to which they can be put.

The swastika occurs almost universally. The most ancient version known is on a carved tusk from the Ukraine, dated to around 10,000 BC. Other early instances were found at Hissarlik in western Asia Minor, where Heinrich Schliemann, often called the father of archaeology, unearthed the ruins of Troy in 1873. The swastika begins to appear in the city’s third stratum, dated to 2250–2100 BC. It is on spindle-whorls, a sphere, and a statue made of lead thought to be an image of the goddess Artemis. The vulva (or perhaps the mons veneris) of this figure has a swastika in the middle. One scholar interpreted it as representing “the generative power of man” (Wilson, 811–13, 829).

Schliemann himself, following orientalist scholars of his time, said that the swastika was “of the very greatest importance among the early progenitors of the Aryan races in Bactria and in the villages of the Oxus, at a time when Germans, Indians, Pelasgians, Celts, Persians, Slavonians and Iranians still formed one nation and spoke one language” (Schliemann, 102).

But the swastika is found far beyond the traditional provenance of the “Aryan races.” Thomas Wilson, who wrote a study on it for the Smithsonian Institution in the late nineteenth century, lists examples from ancient sites ranging from Japan to Europe to North and South America. It’s quite apparent that the swastika belongs to everybody and to nobody.

Before we go into the swastika’s history, it might be best to clear up one source of confusion: its orientation. You will often hear it said that the “clockwise” direction of the swastika is the “good” direction, while the “counterclockwise” direction is the “bad” one.

To begin with, consider these two images: 

   Theosophical Society - Left-Facing, or "Clock-Wise" Swastika
   Figure 1. Left-facing or
"clockwise" swastika.
 

 Theosophical Society - Right-Facing, or "Counterclock-Wise" Swastika

 

   Figure 2. Right-facing or
"counterclockwise" swastika.

Which of these looks clockwise to you? To me, either one could be seen as clockwise, or counterclockwise, so I will avoid these terms. Instead I will speak of “left-facing” (for diagram 1) and “right-facing” (for diagram 2) swastikas. (If you’re curious, the left-facing one is most often described as clockwise.)

You can also forget about which direction is the good one or the bad one. Traditionally there seems to be no difference, and often both types appear in the same location — for example, on the curtain of a Tibetan temple devoted to the Bönpa, the nation’s pre-Buddhist shamanistic religion (Baumer, 21). Similarly Thomas Wilson, introduced to a member of a Chinese delegation visiting Washington, found him wearing robes of state emblazoned with both versions of the swastika. “The name given to the sign was . . . wan, and the signification was ‘longevity,’ ‘long life,’ ‘many years,’” Wilson writes. “Thus was shown that in far as well as near countries, in modern as well as ancient times, this sign stood for blessing, good wishes, and, by a slight extension, for good luck” (Wilson, 800).

So how did it come to stand for the complete opposite: hatred, violence, and cruelty?

Some historical background is needed. In 1871 Germany, which for centuries had been fragmented into dozens of tiny and often overrun states, was unified into a single empire, or Reich, by the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Naturally Germans began to feel a thirst for a shared national identity. This began to form under a range of influences, from the treatise on Germany by the Roman historian Tacitus to the operas of Richard Wagner.

An identity is created out of many things, including the things you are against. Thus anti-Semitism soon became part of this German identity. Anti-Semitism had deep roots in Germany, going back at least as far back as Martin Luther, who in 1543 published a vituperative book entitled On the Jews and Their Lies. Wagner too was an anti-Semite.

Opposed to the Jews were, so the theory went, the Aryans. The word comes from the Sanskrit arya, meaning “noble,” and originally referred to the Indo-European peoples who conquered the Indian subcontinent in the second millennium BC. But soon it came to mean, above all else, the pure, white European race, which had reached the summit of perfection in the Germans.

What could serve as a symbol for this race? The cross was tainted by Christianity, which after all was founded by Jews. The fact that Schliemann had found the swastika in the ruins of Troy and Mycenae, the homes of an ancient, noble, and presumably Aryan race, spoke in its favor. It was (and is) found universally in India too, which had given the Aryans their name. And there was the verdict of the French symbologist the Count Goblet d’Alviella, who asserted that the swastika “is not met with in Egypt, Chaldea, or Assyria” — the last two being Semitic nations (Goblet d’Alviella, 40).

By the twentieth century, occult and pseudo-occult groups invoking the Aryan legacy were displaying the swastika. Hitler’s connection with these groups is suppositional at best, but it is fairly certain that he read and collected issues of the journal Ostara, founded in 1905 by the occultist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. The magazine’s subtitle — “Newsletter of the Blonds and Male Supremacists” — gives a good idea of its orientation. Its emblem was a knight in a hooded robe covered with swastikas.

Other extreme groups made use of the symbol as well, such as the Germanenorden, an occult lodge focused on ancient Germanic lore and of course anti-Semitism. Its founder was a self-styled aristocrat named Rudolf von Sebottendorff. As the German Reich collapsed in the fall of 1918, the order recast itself as the Thule Society (after Thule, a mythical polar land). Its symbol was a long dagger superimposed on a swastika sun wheel.

On November 9, 1918 — two days before Germany’s surrender in World War I — Sebottendorff delivered an impassioned speech to the Thule Society. Because of the imminent defeat, he declaimed, “in the place of our princes of Germanic blood rules our deadly enemy: Judah.” He urged his audience to fight “until the swastika rises victoriously out of the icy darkness” (Goodrick-Clarke, 144–45).

Direct connections between the Thule Society and the nascent Nazi movement are somewhat hard to trace, but there was at the very least an overlap of membership. In May 1919 a Thule member named Friedrich Krohn proposed the left-facing swastika as a symbol for the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (“German Workers’ Party,” or DAP), the precursor of the Nazi party. 

Krohn evidently preferred this direction because he considered it auspicious, whereas, he said, the right-facing version portended disaster and death. But as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes in his Occult Roots of Nazism, “there was no standard usage regarding the swastika” in this movement (or, as far as I can tell, anywhere else). The Germanenorden itself had used the right-facing version. Finally Hitler, who joined the party in November 1919 and soon rose to its leadership, chose the right-facing version, for reasons that are not clear (Goodrick-Clarke, 151).

But the meaning was clear. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, Hitler writes: “The swastika signified the mission allotted to us — the struggle for the victory of Aryan mankind and at the same time the triumph of the ideal of creative work which is in itself and always will be anti-Semitic.” He credits himself with the design: 

After innumerable trials I decided upon a final form — a flag of red material with a white disc bearing in its centre a black swastika. After many trials I obtained the correct proportions between the dimensions of the flag and of the white central disc, as well as that of the swastika . . . The new flag appeared in public in the midsummer of 1920. It suited our movement admirably, both being new and young. Not a soul had seen this flag before; its effect at that time was something akin to that of a blazing torch. (Hitler, chapter 7) 

     This, by the way, is the standard Nazi swastika:

Theosophical Society - Nazi Swastika
Figure 3. Nazi swastika.

Notice one thing about this version. As figures 1 and 2 indicate, the traditional forms of the swastika appear in full vertical and horizontal orientation. But the Nazi swastika is decussated: it is cocked to a tilt of 45 degrees. This gives a greater impression of movement, possibly of a destructive kind. In this position it looks like a whirling blade. Hitler may have adopted it for this reason.

Nevertheless, the swastika did not have these meanings elsewhere in the world. In the U.S. it remained a good-luck sign, as evidenced by its use in the house organ of the Girls’ Club, called The Swastika. Up to the 1930s, the symbol appeared — with perfectly innocent intentions — on American goods ranging from poker chips and playing cards to the labels of fruit boxes. It was even the emblem of a lovable cartoon monkey named Bing-o. To this day in Asia it is still used, with auspicious connotations, on commercial signs and in religious ritual (Heller, 37, 90–101, 149).

But after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Western world came to link the swastika with hatred and violence. A synagogue in Hartford, Connecticut, had swastika patterns in its flooring, which the horrified congregation had to have paved over. When swastika flags were hoisted over three ocean liners docked in New York in 1935, a mob of 2000 people tore them down, provoking diplomatic protests from the Nazis. The swastika became so firmly equated with evil that it remains an emblem of fear for many — and for many others, it is still used for that purpose. The incarcerated cult murderer Charles Manson carved it into his forehead in 1970 (Heller, 13). It continues to surface among anti-Semites and fascists of various stripes. The present-day German republic forbids its public display.

 

All this gives a brief history of the use and abuse of the swastika in modern times. But what does the symbol really mean? This question is, I believe, not only difficult but unanswerable. But before I say why, let’s explore some of the meanings that have been ascribed to it.

     One interpretation is given by Schliemann, citing a scholar named Émile Bournouf: 

The swastika represents the two pieces of wood which were laid cross-wise upon one another before the sacrificial altars in order to produce the holy fire (Agni), and whose ends were bent round at right angles and fastened by means of four nails, so that this wooden scaffolding might not be moved. At the point where the two pieces of wood were joined, there was a small hole, in which a third piece of wood, in the form of a lance (called Pramantha) was rotated by means of a cord made of cow’s hair and hemp, till the fire was generated by friction. (Schliemann, 103–04; cf. Blavatsky, Collected Writings, 2:143–44) 

The swastika is thus associated with fire — particularly the sacred fire known as agni, which is not to be confused with the physical manifestation per se. Because this fire is caused by friction, the swastika is also associated with motion. And from its shape, it is connected with the cross. Thus the swastika can represent a cross in motion. George S. Arundale, late president of the Theosophical Society, writes: 

All that you feel in the sea you can feel infinitely more in the whirling of the Svastika [sic], for you yourselves are part and parcel of the whirling. The Svastika whirls because a God has set in motion the Wheel of the Law, and it is as if to its myriad spokes clung innumerable drops — the Men who are to become Gods. (Arundale, 225) 

This passage is taken from Arundale’s Lotus Fire, a profound work that explores a sequence of symbols (the point, the web, the line, the circle, the cross, the swastika, and the lotus) that was, he claimed, “disclosed to me by a Lord of Yoga” (Arundale, 22). Arundale also observes: 

 I see . . . a very special appearance of relentlessness to the movement of the Svastika and to its effect upon the Men of the Sea [i.e., unindividuated beings] whom it frictions into ever-increasing Self-consciousness. The well-known phrase “broken on the wheel” — that horrible physical torture of earlier periods of history, perpetuated in modern days in terms of the mind, so that the inquisition of today is breaking its victims on the wheel of the mind, a terrible desecration of the Wheel of the Law . . . — occurs to me, for indeed is it ignorance which is broken upon the Wheel of the Love of God, the Wheel of His Salvation, the Svastika. (Arundale, 267–68; emphasis added) 

H.P. Blavatsky, identifying the swastika with “Thor’s hammer” or “the hammer of creation,” says: 

In the Macrocosmic work, the “Hammer of Creation,” with its four arms bent at right angles, refers to the continual motion and revolution of the invisible Kosmos of Forces. In that of the manifested Kosmos and our Earth, it points to the rotation in the circles of time of the world’s axes and their equatorial belts; the two lines forming the Svastika swastika meaning Spirit and Matter, the four hooks suggesting the motion in the revolving cycles. (Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 2:99; emphasis Blavatsky’s) 

Other authorities have also linked the swastika to cosmic cycles. The French esotericist René Guénon writes: 

The bent part of the arms of the swastika is considered . . . as representing the Great Bear seen in four different positions in the course of its revolution around the Pole Star, to which the centre of the four gammas are united naturally corresponds, and that these four positions are related to the cardinal symbol points and the four seasons. (Guénon, 85) 

Theosophical Society - The Swastika Seen as Four Greek Gammas
Figure 4. The swastika seen as an
arrangement of four Greek gammas.

Guénon is talking about the fact that the four arms of the swastika resemble four gammas (the Greek capital gamma looks like this: Γ) positioned around a center point. He connects this fact with the symbolism of the letter G — the roman equivalent of the gamma — in Masonry. Hence also the name gammadion.

Furthermore, this center point would be the pole. (The point of view would be of someone looking down at the earth from above the North Pole.) For this reason, Guénon associates the swastika with Hyperborea, a prehistoric circumpolar civilization that was said to precede Atlantis. (Note: this is not to be confused with Blavatsky’s concept of the Hyperborean Root Race.)

So, then, the swastika is, or may be, connected with the four principal directions, portrayed symbolically as a cross. If so, then the decussated Nazi swastika would symbolize directions that are askew, and hence a world out of joint, possibly evil.

Incidentally one could say the same thing about the Soviet hammer and sickle. In essence it is nothing other than the cross (in this case, a T-cross) combined with the crescent — two of the most ancient and universal sacred symbols. But again its orientation is not rectilinear. Like the Nazi swastika, it is decussated — again suggesting something that is aberrant, out of joint, or evil.  

Earlier I said that none of these associations, singly or as a whole, exhausts the meaning of the swastika. That’s because the swastika, like all other primordial symbols, has no ultimate meaning. It means itself. It speaks to a level of the mind that lies beyond the realm of meaning as we normally understand it. The same is true of other basic geometric shapes such as the six-pointed star and the crescent, the defining symbols of Judaism and Islam. These symbols will keep their living force for as long as the human mind is as it is. Meanings and movements will attach themselves to them and will try to draw power from them, often with success. Yet meanings come and go, while the symbol remains.

Theosophical Society - The Soviet hammer and  sickle. Conventionally it refers to  the combined power of the workers (represented by the hammer) and  the peasants (represented by  the sickle.
Figure 5. The Soviet hammer and 
sickle. Conventionally it refers to 
the combined power of the workers
(represented by the hammer) and 
the peasants (represented by 
the sickle.

As theologian Paul Tillich writes, religious symbols open “the depth dimension of reality itself, the dimension of reality which is the ground of every other dimension and every depth . . . the fundamental level, the level below all other levels, the level of being itself . . . If a religious symbol has ceased to have this function, then it dies. And if new symbols are born, they are born out of a changed relationship to the ultimate ground of Being, i.e., to the Holy” (Tillich, 47, 49).

I believe that Tillich is right up to a point, but it is not so obvious to me that symbols — the primordial symbols, at any rate, of which the swastika is one — die. Or if they die, they are born again. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that they are recycled.

In recent years some have tried to cleanse the swastika of its evil connotations. In 1988–92 a Jewish artist named Edith Altman created an installation entitled Reclaiming the Symbol: The Art of Memory. In one scene, she has a gold swastika painted on a wall above a black Nazi swastika painted on the floor — a visual attempt to expunge evil from the symbol. In 2008, in a ham-handed effort to make the swastika humorous, cartoonist Sam Gross published We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons. (Sample: a Nazi dropping garbage into a swastika-shaped bin labeled “White Trash Only.”)

But as graphic artist Steven Heller comments, “For every naïve rock-and-roller who thinks the swastika can be used with irony, there is a fervent neo-Nazi who uses it with malice. For every well-meaning artist who thinks the swastika can be tamed, there is a devout racist who embraces it” (Heller, 157).

In the long run, it’s likely that the swastika will be rehabilitated. Theosophist Arthur M. Coon observes:

The memory of the use of the swastika, as an emblem of Nazism will in future ages have faded to oblivion; while its true meaning as a symbol of the hidden “fire” or “spirit” within all manifestation, from the atom to a solar universe, will become increasingly revealed to humanity. (Coon, 120)

But I suspect that these future ages will not, at least in the West, come in the lifetime of anyone who is breathing on this planet now.


 

Sources 

Arundale, George S. The Lotus Fire: A Study in Symbolic Yoga. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1939.

Baumer, Christoph. Tibet’s Ancient Religion: Bön. Translated by Michael Kohn. Trumbull, Conn.: Weatherhill, 2002.

Blavatsky, H.P. Collected Writings. 15 vols. Edited by Boris de Zirkoff. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1966–91.

————. The Secret Doctrine. 2 vols. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.

Coon, Arthur M. The Theosophical Seal: A Study for the Student and the Non-Student. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1958.

“Edith Altman.” Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies; http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/exhibitions/witnessLeg/survivorsRefs/altman/index.html; accessed Sept. 1, 2015.

Goblet d’Alviella, Count. The Migration of Symbols. London: Archibald Constable, 1894.

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

—–—–. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. New York University Press, 1985.

Gross, Sam. We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Guénon, René. Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science. Translated by Alvin Moore, Jr. Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995.

Heller, Steven. The Swastika: Symbol beyond Redemption? New York: Allworth, 2000.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Translated by James Murphy. http://www.greatwar.nl/books/meinkampf/meinkampf.pdf; accessed Aug. 27, 2015.

Jeffrey, Jason. “Hyperborea and the Quest for Mystical Enlightenment.” New Dawn (Jan.-Feb. 2000); http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/hyperborea-the-quest-for-mystical-enlightenment; accessed Sept. 1, 2015.

Schliemann, Henry [Heinrich]. Troy and Its Remains: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries Made on the Site of Ilium, and in the Trojan Plain. Edited by Philip Smith. London: John Murray, 1875.

“The Seal of the Theosophical Society.” The Seal of the Theosophical Society; accessed Aug. 28, 2015.

Tillich, Paul. The Essential Tillich. Edited by F. Forrester Church. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Wilson, Thomas. The Swastika: The Earliest Known Symbol and Its Migrations, with Observations on the Migrations of Certain Industries in Prehistoric Times. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896.

  

Richard Smoley’s latest book, The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness is available now. His next book, How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, is due to be published by Tarcher/Penguin in June 2016.

 

 


President's Diary

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Boyd, Tim. "President’s Diary" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 34-35

By Tim Boyd

This issue’s Diary will be like one of those super-size sandwiches — with Adyar in the beginning, Adyar at the end, and a host of other places, events, and people in the middle. In July my wife, Lily, and I returned from Adyar. Twice a year at Olcott, in July and in February, we have the TSA board of directors’ meeting. The meetings extend over three and a half days and involve not only the directors from around the Section, but TSA staff; John Kern, who has served as advisor to the bank for The Kern Foundation Trust since its founding in 1966; TSA treasurer Floyd Kettering; chief financial officer Augie Hirt; and national secretary David Bruce. Quite honestly, our meeting room can feel a little claustrophobic at times.

The purpose of the board meetings is multilayered. Primarily it is an opportunity for everyone to be brought up to speed on the overall functioning of the TSA. The directors share updates and ideas on what is happening in their areas; the TSA staff pass on information and impressions about the work at Olcott; John Kern and others speak about funding and possible directions; and together we engage in a process of building a vision for the work and function of the overall organization. Over the course of the three-plus days it can be tiring at times, but it is always the case that working together so intensely for the good of the TS is inspiring. We have some very good people on our board.

Immediately following the TSA board meetings, after lunch on the last day, the board meeting of the Theosophical Order of Service USA begins. It lasts for a day. Under the leadership of TOS-USA president and TOS international secretary Nancy Secrest, it is a full, informative, and work-packed day.

The very next day the 129th Summer National Convention (SNC) of the TSA began with the theme “Psychology: Science of the Soul.” Each year for me it seems that the quality of the programs and feeling within the group surely must have peaked. Last year I felt it was the best; the year before, it could not possibly get better; the year before that, the same; and so on. Well, this year was the same. Our luminary presenters included both members and friends whose work in the world magnifies the Theosophical message. Dr. Cassandra Vieten, CEO of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), with whom we have developed a close collaborative relationship over the past few years, and Dr. Fred Luskin, founder and director of Stanford University’s long-running Forgiveness Project, were two of our featured speakers. (See the interview with Cassandra.) TSA members Fernando de Torrijos, director of psychiatric mindfulness training programs at the University of Massachusetts Medical School; Quest Books author and practicing clairvoyant Kurt Leland; Peggy Heubel; and Quest author Dr. Albert Amao filled out the program.

In keeping with what has become a minitradition over the past four years, my wife, Lily, again held a tea. Each year, members from around the country pitch in to make it a thoroughly enjoyable and elegant affair. Everything from setup to cleanup, food preparation to dishwashing, takes place seamlessly. The Nicholson Dining Hall was elegantly decorated with flowers and soft lights; all manner of delicacies were served; and again this year the necessary tea was prepared by Greenville, South Carolina’s finest (by way of Gujarat, India), Kishore Patel. His recipe for spiced chai has become a necessity for the occasion.

Two days after our SNC ended, IONS’ sixteenth international conference began in Oak Brook, Illinois, just a few miles away. IONS began in 1973 after astronaut Edgar Mitchell had a transformative experience during his return from walking on the moon. The organization has done major work to improve the scientific community’s understanding and appreciation of subtle energies and consciousness. Earlier in the year Cassandra Vieten had asked me to speak at their conference. So on their opening night, after hearing from Cassandra and Edgar Mitchell, I had a chance to close the evening addressing the 600-plus people attending. (To see the video of the talk: click here..)

At this point you may be getting the impression that this was a busy time. Two days after the IONS event, it was off to the airport for an August-long swing through Europe. The trip began in London, where we came for the English Section’s summer school. Briefly we visited at the TS England’s Gloucester Street national headquarters before joining with about twenty others on a charter bus to Birmingham, where the summer school was to be held. Over the course of the six-day event I spoke on a number of occasions, participated in a number of meetings of various types, and most importantly had conversations with the members about everything from fine points of Theosophy to service activity to family concerns. As has been the case since the TSE’s founding, its members are an independent-minded crew, unafraid to express themselves.

Next was Finland. Our trip began at Kreivila, the lovely summer home for the TS Finland. Kreivila is a beautiful retreat in the countryside, two hours north of Helsinki. There is a large main building with a number of bedrooms, kitchen, and dining area. They have built a first-rate meeting hall that easily accommodated the fifty or so people gathered. There are woods, a lake, and a sauna right next to the lake. Before I left the U.S. Joy Mills wrote to me about my upcoming trip. In the letter she talked about the various places I would be going and her memories of the many years and many times she had visited. She had some particularly fond memories of Kreivila. One of the things she told me was that while I was there I must be sure to “take a sauna.” I have never been one to disobey Joy.

From Kreivila it was on to Helsinki for programs that included a public talk at the Rudolf Steiner School. While we were there, a contingent of members from neighboring Sweden came, and we had a chance to meet together.

 

Theosophical Society - Tim and Lily Boyd with Members of  the Helsinki Lodge
Tim and Lily Boyd with Members of  the Helsinki Lodge

 

From Helsinki it was a boat ride across the Baltic Sea to Tallinn, Estonia, for a one-day visit which included a public talk and a separate meeting with members. The historic Old Town of this beautiful medieval city has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site for good reason.

Then came Paris where we stayed at the TS France’s national headquarters in the seventh arrondissement, just a five-minute walk from the Eiffel Tower. The French portion of the trip was much more laid-back. Kim Dieu, former general secretary of the TS France, says that if another country ever wanted to invade France all they would have to do is come in August, because even the army would be at the beach on vacation. We did have a day of sightseeing at Monet’s Giverny garden with about twenty members. The afternoon culminated in a picnic and formal meeting with a lively give-and-take of questions and responses. All TS meetings could profit from this “très français” approach.

The final stop on our European tour was at the International Theosophical Centre in Naarden, the Netherlands. One revelation that came with being elected to the position of president of TS international was that I was ex officio head of this wonderful center. Last year, when I came for the first time, the ITC in conjunction with the Dutch Section organized “Dutch Day.” This year we had another Dutch Day. I had thought that “Double Dutch Day” might work, but little did I know that for the Dutch it does not have the same meaning as it does in the U.S. For me it refers to a game of jump rope using two ropes. In Holland it carries a meaning that derives from a time when the British and Dutch were in conflict. The Brits used the term to describe someone who talks in a tricky or unclear way. It was a minor lesson in navigating the global cultural minefield. Maybe next time we’ll do Triple Dutch. In any case the meeting was well-attended and had a quality of open conversation and a sense of ease in discussing difficult issues internationally and at our Adyar center. Already we have three members of the Dutch Section doing a variety of important volunteer work at Adyar, and more are on the way. I like this Section.

In both the Netherlands and in Finland I had separate meetings with two groups of vibrant younger members. During the general council meeting at Adyar last December, I told the various Section heads that when I visited a Section I wanted to have such meetings. So far we have done it in Italy, Finland, and the Netherlands. In February the Brazilian Section is hosting an International Young Theosophists gathering at their center outside of Brasilia. I will be attending.

Finally at the end of August my wife, daughter, and I returned to Olcott just in time for our biggest annual event, TheosoFest. Every year for fifteen years, on the first Saturday following Labor Day, we have held our open house event. We open the campus to the community. Vendors of all types are invited — healing arts, vegetarian food, jewelry, massage therapists, tai chi, alternative educational institutions, and more. During the day more than forty talks are presented on Theosophical and related subjects. It’s a day that people around the area look forward to. For a number of years I have been saying that I wanted to break the mythical number of 2000 attendees. Except for 1993, when our TheosoFest was linked to the hundred-year anniversary of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, we had never been able to reach that number. Something felt different this year. We had a record number of vendors — 115 — and ended up turning some away for the first time. More than 1000 cars were parked on the campus throughout the day. The bookstore had its highest-selling day ever, actually selling more books than crystals and jewelry! And yes, 2100 people came. Next year, 10,000. Just kidding.

As I write, I am once again back at Adyar. What a summer!

Tim Boyd

 


The Dangers of Staying in One Place

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Goldsberry, Clare. "The Dangers of Staying in One Place" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 29-31

By Clare Goldsberry

Google is a great place to find philosophical tidbits. While this saying didn’t have an attribution, I copied it into a book I keep of great quotes:

Sometimes walking away has nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with strength. We walk away not because we want others to realize our worth and value, but because we finally realize our own.

Theosophical Society - Clare Goldsberry is a professional freelance writer and volunteer teacher with RISE, a continuing education program for older adults, on Eastern philosophies, the Ageless Wisdom, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah.It struck a chord with me because many times I’ve walked away from people, from situations, from relationships, and even from religions because they no longer fit or seemed right any longer. At these times I finally realize that the need to fulfill my own destiny (whatever that is), or to follow my path, steers me in another direction, because the direction I’ve been moving in no longer feels right. I have never been able to stay in one place very long — or with one person — and especially not with one religion. My Higher Self begins to stir something within me; my consciousness begins to shift, and I can feel myself beginning to pull away. It’s an odd feeling, even though I’ve felt it many times during my life. It is as if I am moving further from a particular situation or place in my life to make room for something else.

I seem to feel more comfortable in places and with people who offer me freedom from the constraints of rigid thinking or acting. I feel drawn to places in which “flow” can happen naturally and spontaneously. I love the natural world, and my connection to it grew out of the place where I grew up. As a child I was reared on a small farm that was primarily one big playground for my two brothers and me. Our father worked in the city, but our mother had been raised on a farm, so she did the gardening and the canning. We always had a couple of cows that were raised for meat, and some ponies for us to ride.

My world was one of the smell of green grass and fresh-cut clover hay, the tantalizing excitement of summer rains that came often and kept the air washed clean and invited the cry of the rain crows — which I later learned were mourning doves. My favorite spot was in my Thinking Tree — a great, noble sycamore with smooth, white-barked limbs mottled with flaking brown bits of overbark — lying out prone on a huge limb that had grown horizontally out over the creek that ran through our farm. I’d lie there for hours, listening to the music of the water flowing beneath me while I daydreamed of my life to come, even though it was always difficult to imagine being anyplace but on the farm.

It was there, in my Thinking Tree, at age ten, that I first heard my inner voice. I’d asked what I would be when I grew up. “You’re going to be a writer, Clare,” it said. It was plain and clear — a sound, yet not a sound that one would hear with one’s physical ears. Whose was that voice? I finally satisfied myself with the idea that it was God talking to me. After all, God knew me and knew my name. Surely it must have been God!

As much as I loved our little farm in Kentucky, I was always filled with a restless sense that I wanted to — needed to — move on. Being called away was the first step. Finding the path by which I could go forward was often the more difficult step.

For me, a lifelong spiritual seeker, the pursuit of religion and the spiritual path was my passion. I was always questioning everything. I’d question my Sunday School teachers until they were exasperated with me. “Just believe!” they would tell me, which certainly sounded easy enough but never really satisfied my longing to know.

When I became a teenager in high school, a new minister came to Bullittsville Christian Church who was very different from most of the ministers we’d had. He was an Old Testament scholar. He did not seem rigid in his religious thinking, but was open and seemed to enjoy my questions, which he was not at all reluctant to discuss with me. We’d spend hours in his office in the church talking about religion, the history of religion, and why people were (or weren’t) religious. When I married a Mormon man at age twenty-one, Rev. O’Neal told me that I would join the Mormon church. “No, I won’t,” I protested. “I like the Disciples of Christ church. I won’t change.”

“Oh yes, you will, Clare,” he replied. “Because you have too many questions and Mormons have all the answers.”

Not that those answers would be the truth or my truth — but they did have answers. After nearly ten years, however, their answers were no longer satisfying. I’d never really stopped searching for or pursuing the truth, and few answers the Mormons provided held any real satisfaction to my constant questioning.

And so my pursuit continued beyond Mormonism, back to the Disciples, out of the Disciples, and into the Eastern philosophies — first Buddhism, then its forerunner, Hinduism. I have often asked myself if the pursuit for knowledge, truth, and realization should ever end. Do we at some point settle into a single spiritual tradition and become content with what we find there? Or are questions an intrinsic part of our human search for the divine? And if the questions are an intrinsic part of our search, then are they more important than the answers?

There is something certain, reassuring, and comfortable in being dedicated to a strict dogma or to absolute doctrine. I’ve often thought that people like the Mormons, who believe absolutely and undoubtedly that their church is the only true church, that their belief system is the only true belief system and provides the one way to get to heaven, are perhaps more content and satisfied in their absolutes than we who are seekers. From time to time, I’ve felt envious of people who could find perfect contentment in one place for their entire life. But that wasn’t me. That’s not who I am, and so I must always continue on, listening to the call that it is time to leave.

There are dangers in staying in one place. One can get stuck in that place, and stuck in a way that becomes an obstacle. Belief systems can become our greatest obstacle to our spiritual growth because we begin to invest everything into the belief system, which can be rigid, unyielding, and unbending and fail to invest in the fluid and dynamic experiences which life can give us.

I’ve discovered over the years that I do not take being called away lightly. My first response is to resist that call, to tell myself that it’s just my own feelings of restlessness arising again and that if I just stick it out the feeling will go away. That tends to work for a while. But that nagging feeling of being called away stays with me, no matter how forcefully I try to tamp it down or push it to the back of my mind.

At these times I have a feeling that my work or my learning in this place is complete, and there is nothing more I can do here. The purpose for which I was called to this particular job or spiritual calling has been fulfilled, and it’s time for me to walk away from it and await my next calling.

Often I’ve received the call to move on at times when I believed very much that I had found my place and was doing exactly what I needed to be doing in my spiritual life. This shift in consciousness, which seems to come as my experiences change, leaves me feeling that I no longer need to hold on to past ideas. Although they seemed to fit perfectly then, they no longer feel like a part of my path. It’s not an abandonment of past ideas — I’ve stayed rooted primarily in Eastern philosophies — but it is more of a moving beyond what was “true” for me yesterday to a deeper understanding of what it means to be on path that is being created one step at a time as I experience it.

Buddhism was that path for me — and remains so. After many years of study, contemplation, and meditation on my own, I found (quite by accident — or maybe not!), and joined, Sangha, community. Nonetheless, with groups— particularly religious groups — it doesn’t take long for groupthink to set in. Even in Buddhism there are those who create a rigid, dogmatic system out of this tradition that, if one adheres to the Buddha’s teachings, is as open, spacious, and expansive as the mind. I once read this comment online: “There have been too many worthy attempts at pursuing the Dharma that have become bogged down in dogma, so the vitality is lost. We can’t live life without structure. But being bound by it is not living nor can it truly be practice.”

Of course seeking is a good thing as long as one does not get addicted to the search. I read an essay recently by Charles McAlpine, owner of Storm Wisdom, a center for intentional living in Phoenix that offers healing services and practices, crystals, and other tools for one’s path. He noted that at one time he’d become “addicted to the pursuit” shortly after he’d started “participating in retreats, workshops, classes and experiences that were designed to connect us with the deeper relationship with Self.” He said that it finally got to the point that all he could think of was “wanting more! Being someone who loves to learn, the pursuit was intoxicating.” He acknowledged how “the focus of pursuit would or could take over.”

Those words really touched me, not only because I’d often wondered about that for my own search, but because of a few friends who also seemed to be addicted to the pursuit. For myself, my search narrowed into the Eastern philosophies, but even those teachings can be found to various degrees in many other ancient and esoteric traditions, as if the ideas knew no human bounds, but everyone, everywhere at some point could meet up with them amidst their own search. I began to understand that in a way, the Eastern philosophies were the end of my pursuit. The more I saw those ideas embedded in the ideas and thoughts of other spiritually attuned persons, the more I realized that I could stay with Eastern traditions as the basis for the development of my personal truth.

But even that requires a winnowing and sifting.

Stephen Sohettni, in an article in Tricycle magazine, writes, “I began to see the path as a state of mind, an attitude that, when maintained, is itself Buddhahood — not an achievement but a process. Far from being a concrete, predictable, and infallible road map, the path is empty . . . Like everything, it’s uniquely related to one’s own mental formations. We find our path, I thought, by probing our own creativity.

“I prefer words of common sense and humor to the flowery epithets of wisdom and compassion,” he goes on to say. “I think less about awakening than simply staying awake to the enlightening moments that are everywhere for anyone who pays attention. Staying awake means continually reevaluating the ground on which we walk. It’s not about belonging at all, but letting go.”

Perhaps the search takes us along a path of knowing and ultimately to that which is beyond knowing to not-knowing, and that is where letting go is of importance. The idea of going beyond has a rich tradition in Buddhism. This beyond knowing is called “excellent wisdom” or “highest wisdom” in ancient Buddhist traditions; it is going beyond the wisdom of the world. “O wisdom which has gone beyond, gone beyond the beyond, to Thee homage.” (Om gate, gate, paramgate, parasamgate bodhi swaha.)

The apostle Paul too taught the idea of going beyond worldly wisdom to the enlightened state of spiritual wisdom. When we think we know everything we need to know and the search seems to be at an end, we must then move beyond knowing to not-knowing. It is in this space of not-knowing that we reach the enlightened mind, where the illusory phenomenal world falls away and the wisdom of ultimate reality becomes our true home.


Clare Goldsberry is a professional freelance writer and volunteer teacher with RISE, a continuing education program for older adults, on Eastern philosophies, the Ageless Wisdom, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah. Her latest book, The Teacher Within: Finding and Living Your Personal Truth, can be found on Amazon. She is a member of the Theosophical Society’s Phoenix study group.


Alexander Scriabin: Music of Ecstasy and Light

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Wadlow, René . "Alexander Scriabin: Music of Ecstasy and Light" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 22-23

By René Wadlow

The compoTheosophical Society - René Wadlow is president of the Association of World Citizens and is a representative to the United Nations, Geneva, on its behalf.ser Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) was a key figure in what is commonly called the Silver Age in Russian history (from the 1890s to the outbreak of World War I in 1914). This era saw a surge of interest in mysticism and in the occult and philosophical teachings of India and China, along with influences from Germany, including the thought of Nietzsche and the Christianized version of Theosophy developed by the Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner’s second wife, Marie von Sivers, was a Baltic Russian. She helped spread Steiner’s views in Helsinki and Warsaw, cities in close contact with Russian intellectual circles.

One element of Theosophical thought, especially in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, which Scriabin read closely, was the idea of esotericism — hidden or secret knowledge which passes from age to age and from country to country. This hidden knowledge is taught in small inner circles or can be discovered through a careful study of the literature and the development of the individual’s higher consciousness by meditation. For Scriabin, music of certain sorts had the power to open the door to this hidden and transformative knowledge. (For a Theosophical assessment of Scriabin’s music, see Cyril Scott’s book, cited below.)

Scriabin came from an aristocratic Russian family. His father was a diplomat who was usually posted abroad and had little contact with his son. Scriabin’s mother was a well-known concert pianist but died when Scriabin was only one year old. He was raised by his father’s sister and mother, both of whom were musicians. As Scriabin showed an interest and talent for music, he started to learn the piano at an early age with a teacher who was also teaching the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. The two students became lifelong friends, and Rachmaninoff did much to promote Scriabin’s piano works after the latter’s early death at the age of forty-three.

Scriabin followed the classic Russian path for musicians, going to the Moscow conservatory, and at an early age he married another young pianist, Vera Ivanova Isakovich. Like many Russians of that time and class, they decided to travel abroad, and so from 1904 to 1909, they lived in Paris and spent time in London, Brussels, and the U.S. In 1907 in Paris, Scriabin collaborated with the producer Sergei Diaghilev to introduce Russian music, dance, and art to the French artistic milieu.

Scriabin found time to produce four children with his wife, as well as taking a second “wife,” Tatyana Schloezer. Finally Vera agreed to a divorce, and Tatyana became his legal wife. They had three children. In addition to music, Scriabin believed that sex was an avenue to secret knowledge. At the time in Theosophical circles there was a good deal of interest in the awakened kundalini, the serpent fire, said to be coiled at the base of the spine. With proper breathing exercises and meditation, the serpent can rise up to the Third Eye between the brows and then to the crown of the head, producing enlightenment and liberation from matter. Scriabin used yogic breathing exercises to work with the kundalini. One problem — which did not occur with Scriabin alone — is that the fire often rises from the base of the spine but only reaches as far as the sex organs and stays there. Later, in the period between 1930 and 1940, when Scriabin’s music was considered to be out of line with officially favored school of Socialist Realism, it was attacked for “its unhealthy eroticism.” Scriabin’s life was given as proof that his music stimulated sex and took the workers’ minds off production goals. Today, with Russia’s fast-declining birth rate, there seems to be a strong revival of interest in Scriabin’s music.

Theosophical Society - The composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) was a key figure in what is commonly called the Silver Age in Russian history (from the 1890s to the outbreak of World War I in 1914). This era saw a surge of interest in mysticism and in the occult and philosophical teachings of India and China, along with influences from Germany, including the thought of Nietzsche and the Christianized version of Theosophy developed by the Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner’s second wife, Marie von Sivers, was a Baltic Russian. She helped spread Steiner’s views in Helsinki and Warsaw, cities in close contact with Russian intellectual circles.
Alexander Scriabin

One of Scriabin’s most explicitly Theosophical-spiritual compositions, following concepts put forward in The Secret Doctrine, is Prometheus: Poem of Fire. In the usual account of the myth, Zeus has the titan Prometheus make humans out of mud. Prometheus, taking pity on the condition of the creatures he created, steals fire from heaven and gives it to them. Zeus punishes Prometheus by having him bound to a rock, although he is eventually freed by Hercules.

In Scriabin’s Theosophical retelling, Prometheus does not steal the fire but is given it consciously by Zeus in order to produce “the ray of light” in humans. Thus Prometheus is like Lucifer, the “light bringer” who imparts the mind with the capacity to understand the causes of progress and regression. In this version Zeus does not punish Prometheus. Instead, being bound to a rock is a symbol of the difficulties on the spiritual path, the progression of spirit through matter, to return liberated as spirit, but at a higher degree of evolution at the end of the cycle than at the beginning.

In the Soviet Union and even in today’s Russia, Scriabin’s music has been treated as music largely separate from his philosophical ideas. In 1922, after the end of the Russian Civil War, when the Soviet government could start thinking about culture, Scriabin’s Moscow apartment was made into a state museum and kept in the condition it was in when he was alive, with his esoteric books visible in the library. Except for the 1930–40 period — the harshest time of Stalin’s repression — Scriabin’s music has been played continuously in Russia. When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was orbiting in his craft in 1961, Russian radio sent up the music of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, which became a kind of theme song for the flight after Gagarin landed.

The spiritual foundation of Scriabin’s music is no longer unknown in Russia, but it is not stressed either. As is often the case, esoteric knowledge remains esoteric. With a knowledge of the spiritual quest, one can hear his music with different ears.


 

René Wadlow is president of the Association of World Citizens and is a representative to the United Nations, Geneva, on its behalf.

Suggested Reading

Carlson, Maria. No Religion Higher than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Rosenthal, Bernice G., ed. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Scott, Cyril. Music: Its Secret Influence throughout the Ages. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1958.


Till We Dead Awaken: The Quest for Higher Consciousness in Film, Fiction, and Theater

Printed in the Winter 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: HorowitzMitch. "Till We Dead Awaken: The Quest for Higher Consciousness in Film, Fiction, and Theater" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 18-21.

By John Shirley

Because it flashed upon me with a sudden horror that you were dead already — long ago.

                                                                     —Henrik Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken

Theosophical Society - John Shirley is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of many books including Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. His novel Doyle after Death was reviewed in Quest, fall 2014. His article “The Apocalypse of Consciousness” appeared in the same issue.I was walking through “the yard” at San Quentin State Prison. The prisoners sunning themselves at tables near the worn baseball field would have pleased any casting director with their do-rags and the homemade prison tattoos on muscular bare arms. The man walking with me, though, was smallish, balding, middle-aged, and pale, making me think of an accountant. He might once have been an accountant, I don’t know; I do know he was a convicted murderer.

I was a volunteer, teaching writing to inmates. My companion had written a script, which was about a man driven by his origins to do bad things, but with something higher struggling to emerge in him. I asked, “You have sports, television, work, time to walk freely within the walls — and you’ve been here since 1978. Do you stay so busy you forget, for a while, that you’re incarcerated, and just feel like this is normal life?”

He told me that if he kept busy, he could “sort of” forget. But he added that he could never really forget he was in prison. “You try not to think about it too much, but . . .” He looked at the armed guard strolling by. “There are constant reminders. It’s always there. You feel it.” Even at the best times, the defining negativity of his situation loomed in the background, casting barbed-wire shadows.

Unsurprisingly, the group of inmates composing screenplays often wrote, indirectly, about people who were trapped in some way. And it’s not surprising when screenwriters and authors, moving “freely” in the outside world, write about their own existential conditions, and spiritual conditions, even when they might suppose themselves to be writing about something else entirely.

When I saw the film The Invasion (2007), I remembered that day volunteering in prison. Starring Nicole Kidman, The Invasion is the second remake of the classic science-fiction horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Based on a novel by Jack Finney, the Body Snatcher movies portray an isolated town in the grip of an invisible alien invasion. The invaders take over the bodies of locals, making them, one by one, into cold-hearted players in an extraterrestrial conspiracy. Your wife and your father still look like your wife and father, and talk like them. But it’s not them anymore; they’ve become numb biological robots. Key to The Invasion — it’s even in the trailer — is the admonition “Don’t fall asleep!” Because, the film warns, it’s when you’re asleep that your body is snatched. In his essay for Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute, Parabola editor Jeff Zaleski observes:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers poses a terror that is fundamentally spiritual: the loss of that special something that makes us human . . . Yet the story also offers a metaphor for a less obvious but more insidious threat . . . It’s well known but rarely discussed that the world’s five major religions teach another fundamental truth about the human condition . . . that we spend our lives mostly in a dreamlike state — lost in our thoughts, so lost in our thoughts that we are cut off from the sensation of our bodies and full awareness of the real world. This teaching can be found in the esoteric branches of each major religion.

Both Finney’s novel and the Body Snatcher movies may have been intended more as political than spiritual metaphor. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out in 1956, an era charged with a fear of communists supposedly bent on turning our world into a godless dictatorship of the proletariat. But political themes may mask deeper insights. A look at The Invasion and other films suggests that many popular films are actually unconscious (or only partly conscious) expressions of esoteric truths. Metaphors for spiritual conditions are found in unlikely places — but they are found persistently because, like the man who “kept busy” in San Quentin, we all know, on some level, that we’re in prison. We know, too, that there’s a possibility of freedom just on the other side of a certain wall.

Despite our straitjacketed condition, something in us senses that we’re asleep and struggles, at times, to wake up. Even when we haven’t encountered esoteric teachings, we know something’s wrong: that we are living in a twilight world, where the light is too dim; that we are driven by drivers we cannot see. This unconscious, uneasy half-comprehension of our condition finds expression in popular art — especially in theater, film, and fiction.

Consider the plays of Samuel Beckett. In his unnerving, austere productions, characters walk about in purgatorial loops, repeating nightmarish scenarios, seeming caught up in entrapping states of mind. They battle for dignity, for some eking out of individuality. In Beckett’s short play Catastrophe, two ruthlessly officious, controlling individuals, a “director” and his secretary, set about arranging, as if toying with a wire framework, a miserable-looking, ragged old man frozen on a stage. At the end, the old man, against directions, lifts his head, and looks up at the audience — a tiny act of defiance. It’s all he can manage, so controlled is he by outside forces. Beckett spoke of his plays as “objects,” and probably wasn’t consciously making a spiritual statement. But again and again he poignantly expressed man’s condition: trapped, mechanical, struggling to emerge from a puppet’s purgatory.

Television has its moments of inadvertent insight into our trapped, sleeping condition: going back a ways, one of the most popular television antagonists was the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Borg is all one being, made up of lesser beings, a cyborgian fusion of man and machine that assimilates individuals, overriding their free will and turning them into mindless components of an artificial Archon. Besides dramatizing mindless subjection to automaticity, the Borg may be a parable of our fear of becoming disastrously dependent on the electronic and digital superstructure of our smartphone-dominated culture.

Popular film resounds with themes that speak of our tendency to lapse into sleep when we think we’re awake. One of the most striking examples is The Matrix (1999). Starring Keanu Reeves, The Matrix is about a man who discovers that the entire human world is asleep and dreaming, kept that way by enslaving artificial intelligences. Human beings are so controlled by computers they become seamlessly blended into the digital world. A rebel leader has liberated a cadre of revolutionaries, one of whom makes a secret deal with the artificial intelligences: he will betray the rebels if he can be allowed a fabricated dream life of his own choosing. The traitor may represent the inner resistance a seeker feels when presented with the possibility of awakening.

Numerous films point to the same truths with a timeliness and convergence of intent that somehow make them part of an inadvertent “movement” in cinema. I’m thinking particularly of American Beauty, Fight Club, Dark City, eXistenZ, Mulholland Drive, The Truman Show, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life, S1m0ne, The Island, The Invasion, and Inception.

Sam Mendes’s 1999 film American Beauty, written by Alan Ball, is the story of a dysfunctional family lost in the centerless maze of modern life. Kevin Spacey’s character can’t touch his wife in any way that matters; he can’t reach his daughter, though she’s right in the same house with him. He has an encounter with a pot-dealing young bohemian who moves in next door — whose obsession with the innate visual beauty of the ordinary world seems an adventure in perception — and is inspired to wrestle his way free of his middle-class funk. The overall impression is of a man recognizing that he’s been asleep, dreaming his way through an air-conditioned, wall-to-wall-carpeted misery — who had forgotten the choices, the almost infinite ways out, that life offers to the wakeful in every single second of existence. As a side note, Ball’s television series Six Feet Under (2001–05) — about a family of morticians, each episode’s prologue dramatizing the death of a client — might be regarded as an oblique reminder of the importance of living consciously in the moment, with death always in the offing.

In David Fincher’s visceral Fight Club (1999), characters desperate for connection to something real go to Twelve-Step groups for problems they don’t have, just to feel emotions by proxy. They are so desperate to rid themselves of existential numbness that they start a fight club, where ordinary people meet in secret to beat each other bloody. It isn’t the violence they want — it’s the return to realness in the moment, brought about by powerful, unavoidable living contact. They allude to a society caught up in consumerism and corporate striving, dumbfounded by masks and celebrity worship and empty recreation, and they recognize that it’s all a kind of sleepwalking, a hypnotic state that must be struggled with, even battered with bare fists.

Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998) is a stylish noir fantasy, a Gnostic fable about a man who finds himself on a search for truth and identity in a shape-shifting city that turns out to be a living urban stage designed for sinister, arcane purposes by malignant entities. All may be a dream — or may not.

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) involves a virtual-reality videogame that — like so many Philip Dick–influenced tales — makes us wonder where reality ends and the game begins. Fantasy and reality inevitably overlap in this film. There are anti-game revolutionaries in the background, and the game’s player wonders what’s real, and if the game could be a game within a game . . .

In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a young actress seems to have her soul, or identity, stolen by evil forces embedded in the city of Los Angeles (no one who’s worked in The Business there needs much convincing) as she goes through an enigmatic quest to find her real nature — in what turns out to be, apparently, a dream.

In Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carrey’s character discovers he’s in a false reality, literally staged by people who are using him as entertainment and have done so for a generation. He must find the confines of the staging area and break out into the real world, to find actual love, an unscripted destiny.

Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001) was inspired by a 1997 Spanish film called Open Your Eyes. This Tom Cruise vehicle once again gives us a hero who by degrees realizes that his nightmarish reality is fabricated, intricately computer-animated, and transmitted into his brain, which is in modified cryogenic freeze. He chooses to wake up and face the real world of a dark future rather than accepting the comforting dreams the cryogenics company offers him.

Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) — an intriguing innovation fusing conventional movie photography and animation — gives us a hero who keeps waking up from a complex dream that seems to push him into profound social and philosophical dialogues with the sundry intellectual outlaws he encounters. But each time he’s sure he’s awakened, he finds, once more, he’s only dreaming.

Andrew Niccol’s S1m0ne (2002) is a comedy about a movie director who’s so disgusted with actors that he computer-generates Simone, a beautiful actress programmed with the best aspects of all the great female movie stars. The audience falls in love with her, and people refuse to accept she’s not real, even when he tries to tell them so. S1m0ne sends up the public’s willingness to collaborate with illusion on a global scale.

In Michael Bay’s The Island (2005), the hero discovers that his world, which seems to be the only refuge in a world supposedly ravaged by catastrophe, is actually a factory for creating clones used by the rich for spare parts, and the free, living world is hidden but intact and waiting for him beyond the walls of social illusion.

While The Invasion, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, is less effective than the Don Siegel original, the film nevertheless dramatizes (probably unconsciously) the central dark fact of the human condition: when we allow consciousness to lapse, we surrender our ability to make choices, deferring to lower subselves and their mindless agenda.

Then there’s the Christopher Nolan film Inception (2010). Ostensibly a tale of corporate espionage — stealing some ideas and planting others in human minds through entry into their dreams — the movie can also be seen as a surreal take on the subjectivity of our normal reality. The filmmaker said he was seeking to make a coherent adventure in the world of dreams. But what if a hidden, deeper part of him was saying something more? As G.I. Gurdjieff tells us, “Life is real, only then, when ‘I am’.” Eventually the hero of Inception must find his way out of a subjective dream world, effectively learning what it is to actually be — what it is to be able to genuinely say, I am.

Whether these are great works of art is not important. What matters is the emergence of a remarkable number of films questioning reality itself — each suggesting a sinister puppeteer, pointing to a kind of dreamy disorientation prevailing in the median consciousness of the industrialized world — seems a defined cultural current, however unplanned, emerging from a consensus about our condition. What is it we’re trying to tell ourselves, with The Matrix, and all these other films on the same theme?

These filmmakers are not deliberately referring to esoteric ideas, but on some level they seem to confirm insights basic to vipassana Buddhism, certain forms of Sufism, esoteric Christianity, and Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way. Artists express their perception, however murky, of the human condition. And a perceptual consensus is beginning to emerge: mankind is asleep, mechanical, strictured, fragmentary.

Most everyone has had a dark dream that they struggled to wake from. A few nights ago I had a chance encounter on the street with an unbalanced stranger who claimed to have a concealed pistol. He threatened to shoot me if I got too close to his new truck. I doubted he had a gun at all, and took it in stride, shrugging it off, but deep down the encounter disturbed me. That night I dreamt I was in a crowded public square, where a belligerent man argued with me, then ran and got a large automatic pistol from his friends. The crowd watched in vague amusement as I ducked behind a car to avoid getting shot. On some level (this often happens when I have nightmares) I knew I was asleep. It took a few moments, but I somehow deliberately wrested myself out of sleep so that I wouldn’t have to dream of being shot.

My anxiety about the threatening man on the street was not unfounded in our gun-burdened society, and my dream was a way to process that anxiety. Films are like dreams; they extol the social subconscious. The films in our incomplete list are roughly along the same lines. They are cinematic dreams mulling over real dilemmas our so-called “conscious” minds are only dimly aware of. These films are external representations of inner processes: the higher part of us struggling to awaken, to warn us we’re in danger of losing our birthright.

Some of us drift through our lives like pollen; others bounce energetically from one interaction to another like the reflective silver sphere in a pinball machine. Sometimes, spurred by inner compulsions and external conditions, we imagine that we are doing great things in the world; we become reformers, or master criminals. We run for president.

But on some level, no matter what we seem to accomplish, we know that the whole time, we have been asleep. Like the people in comas who are often seen to struggle to awaken, we make feeble, indirect efforts to protest our numbness, to acknowledge that transcendence is tantalizingly near. We go to amusement parks for rocket-fast rides that thrill us into momentary contact with our bodies and the present moment; we try skydiving, bungee jumping, extreme sports. Some people go in for drugs and speak portentously of their fitful, veering experiences with altered consciousness. And filmmakers protest their sleep through movies like The Matrix, an adrenaline-pumping action movie that combines thrill seeking with the notion of our subjectivity to mechanicality and the possibility of awakening to real freedom.

These films rarely offer straightforward solutions to the dilemmas they pose. Although fight clubs do exist, the novel (by Chuck Palahniuk) and film Fight Club are actually presenting only satirical solutions — questioning the status quo — and a willingness to use desperate means for escape.

Still, The Matrix seems to symbolically suggest something like the process of self-observation found in Buddhism and the Fourth Way: the hero takes steps to wake up, only to find he’s connected to machinery that has kept him drugged, fed, and subjected to a false digital “reality.” Waking enough to see this machinery, he’s able to unplug himself from it and escape to liberation. That is, when a man really looks, really observes for himself that he is mechanical, he has the possibility of freedom from the machine.

The Invasion offers us only an alert willingness to question the apparent, and a feverish determination to find a way out of the trap at all costs. The Island’s implicit advice is essentially the same. Vanilla Sky’s hero chooses to face a harsh reality as it is — to look it square in the eye, acknowledging the painfulness of seeing what is, and intimating that in the end the discomfort is freeing.

The young actress in Mulholland Drive seems to be on a search for some lasting, essential self — something beyond the ephemeral — and Lynch hints that there’s an essence to be found, eventually. In Waking Life and eXistenZ we’re directed to question the status quo and our own assumed reality; we’re called to interrogate existence with an active mind.

In The Truman Show, Peter Weir goes farther. Question the status quo, then go on a journey, regardless of the difficulties and your own resistance, to the other side of the façade, where you’d better be willing to see not only the falseness of the staging, but your own.

There are, of course, films, like the heavy-handed but charming Tyrone Powers classic The Razor’s Edge (1946), Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (1993), and Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991), that address spiritual themes more directly. There’s also Peter Brook’s Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), a film version of Gurdjieff’s memoir of his spiritual search. In what seems a play on ideas of recurrence from Nietzsche and P.D. Ouspensky, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day is condemned to live the same life over and over again till he sees himself, finally, as he truly is — and sees the consequences of real choices. In The Fisher King, Jeff Bridges plays a vain talk-radio host who inadvertently causes a tragedy. Tormented by guilt, he has to risk all, in an act of selfish love, to escape the suffering brought on by identification. In telling the story, the scripter uses Hermetic symbols like the Grail to symbolize the path to redemption through renunciation of the ego.

But films that express the human dilemma unconsciously, like a poignant cry from a child with night terrors, somehow strike more honestly to the heart of our condition. The sudden outpouring of films that show their heroes struggling to escape confinement by the walls of sleep makes us wonder. 

In my own work as a novelist, I try to walk a middle way. In my theosophical novel Doyle after Death and in my novel of “alternative apocalypse,” The Other End, I do use symbols on purpose, but I embed the symbol in story in a way that not only dramatizes, but, I hope, entertains.

But writing fiction to that end is fraught with the risk of coming off too precious, of seeming self-important and pompous. In short, it could easily become bad writing.

For me, the best approach is to engage a sense of real experience, both for myself and the reader. I try to immerse myself — and the reader — into the world of my story, without much, if any, authorial interpolation. But along the way I allow my own spiritual leanings, and important symbols, to emerge naturally from the story and its setting.

Whether it’s prose or pictures, that’s how it works best: the symbol and the story are one and the same. The symbol should emerge seamlessly from the script or the story. And what is usually symbolized, when we look around at the sense of the spiritual emerging from entertainment media, is our awareness, just hatching, that we’re not as conscious as we could be. And that realization is a call from the cosmos itself to emerge into the world of real consciousness.

When I write fiction, I feel a responsibility to call people to wake up to the human condition, to suggest our profound need to reach for higher consciousness, for true mindfulness. And when I’m calling out in that way, I’m calling to myself too. By constantly facing the subject, I’m reminded of my own tendency to give in to my resistance. I’m reminded of my proneness to fall back into seductive numbness and the dull, default level of consciousness — into pseudoconsciousness.

Like everyone else, I struggle to awaken. Writing about awakening, even through metaphor, encourages me to reach for it myself.


John Shirley is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of many books including Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. His novel Doyle after Death was reviewed in Quest, fall 2014. His article “The Apocalypse of Consciousness” appeared in the same issue.


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