Applied Theosophy
I think the essential vision and message of theosophy was not to fill our heads with information about spirituality, but to effect a change in awareness on a global and individual level.
It is time to stop gathering information, stop working on our self improvement package, and step out of our habitual routine conditioned mode of thinking. I’m not interested in how many Theosophical quotes and theories someone can muster up.
I’d like to speak to someone who has a calm clear mind, who listens with all his/her faculties on an energetic level and someone who can speak truthfully and to the point.
A theosophist recently said to me that there are few theosophists today who are willing to do the hard soul searching, ego wrenching work on oneself that is required to advance spiritually.
I argue that somehow there has been something missing in the way it is being presented. Theosophy needs to be more immediate, hands on and easily applied. We need to write in a twenty first century voice. We need to keep the essence of the original teachings but restate it with a focus on what is relevant today.
For example; I had read about meditation and changes in awareness, but all the reading and information gathering had not effected any change in my consciousness until how to apply it was described to me.
Several years ago during an intense period of spiritual training, my teacher suggested meditation for two hours every day at the same time, without fail, for forty days.
It was the beginning of many changes in my awareness, one of which was the ability to observe the Lower self (as it is called in Theosophy) or Separate self (as described in Spiritual Realism). But to speak today to the average person about the Lower or Higher Self, by the very nature of those words implies something less than and something more than.
People today know that they are here now in whatever Self it is and they want to be whole and functioning on every level of their being . I think we need to clarify that there are no lower or higher, better than or less less than ways of being.
We are multifaceted beings with our awareness focused differently. We have the ability to refocus or change our awareness states.
I think that we will have to develop a new way of describing this applied theosophy.
I think we have to start writing about it in a clear experiential way rather than continuing our endless theoretical discussions. The challenges involved in “living the life” need to be shared so that new theosophists can receive some practical spiritual guidance.
I have been in theosophical lodges all over the world, and spoken to many many theosophical students and ‘authorities’, it is a truly bizarre experience to listen to people “talking theosophy” who have no living inner spiritual connection to what they are expounding with such arrogance.
When you say:
“I’d like to speak to someone who has a calm clear mind, who listens with all his/her faculties on an energetic level and someone who can speak truthfully and to the point.”
I find myself in full agreement.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you for your insightful comment. I’m sure many others have had the same feelings about the state of their lodges and groups, but haven’t confronted the situation.
It’s really not difficult in this day and age to accumulate knowledge on any subject, and somehow, because this is supposed to be knowledge about the spiritual, I guess it’s treated like another “cred” to their personality “looking spiritual”. It becomes a self improvement project, but unfortunately the self that is being improved is not the essential self.
I think that people today can pick out “pretense” pretty fast. If we want to present the Theosophical tradition to modern folks, we had better be sincere, clear and authentic.
We will “keep up the good work”, it was good to hear from you.
My family are theosophists and I know a bit about it. I just found it hard to read, lots of theories and no coherent order of study and application. This site is actually interesting and clear to read. I’ve learned more in the last few weeks than in all my years talking to theosophists. I am inspired enough to actually apply some of this stuff.
Thank you Star; your frankness really cut through a lot of the muck you find at theosophical meetings. I think you’re right that meditation is the key to applying the great theosophical truths and to getting them off the page and into your life. I’m delighted to see HPB’s meditation diagram here in print. It is not easy to find in theosophical books but it’s the key to moving from the intellectual to devotion and practice and ‘compassion’ as they say in Buddhism these days.