Pecha Kucha

Last week I attended Vol. 4 of Chicago Pecha Kucha (pronounced PEH-CHUH ku-CHUH). Essentially, it is an evening of presentations where each presenter gets to share 20 slides and has 20 seconds per slide. Someone gets up, has six minutes and 40 seconds to do their thing and then it is on to the next. Read more about it here.

I’ve long been fascinated with the relationship between form and content. The way material is presented is another layer of the material itself. That Michelangelo made frescoes, Van Gogh painted on canvas and Bill Viola uses video speaks equal volumes as their widely varying subjects.

Theosophy likewise comes in different forms. Palm leaves, oral teachings, precipitated letters, books, videos, podcasts (well, the last one has yet to happen, but it will soon, I promise!). Outside of the written word, the most common dispensation is the lecture, where a purported authority stands in front of and higher than an audience of individuals all seated in rows faced forward. The lecturer speaks for about an hour, maybe answers a few questions, and then everyone leaves. It is a classic model for information sharing: a single active authority giving, and a mass, passive audience receiving.

I have to confess I actually have a soft spot for this model. I love listening to John Algeo, Joy Mills, Tim Boyd, Ravi Ravindra, Huston Smith, etc. And these people are all far more informed than me, they have information and perspectives I want, and I’ll happily sit for an hour taking it all in. When I was studying at Oxford, the high point of my week was having the opportunity to listen to Stephen Mulhall ruminate aloud for an hour about Heidegger’s Being & Time.

That being said, I think the model is increasingly irrelevant and reflects out of date political and social models. Most people don’t want to sit passively, hell, most people can’t sit for that long. I have no desire to moralize on this point; it is simply a reality to be recognized. People have less time and attention; they want to be engaged. Lectures simply won’t cut it.

So, I attended Pecha Kucha with this thought in mind: can this provide an alternative model for how we present theosophy? The short answer is an enthusiastic ‘yes’. The event I attended was sold out. Over 300 people crammed in a bar on a Tuesday night to hear presentations by artists, designers and writers, and they were excited to be there. When a presentation worked, it left you wanting more, scribbling down names and websites to explore later; when one didn’t, well, it was over pretty quickly.

Now, theosophy deals with some rather complex and frequently abstract ideas, and 20 images at 20 seconds apiece isn’t much opportunity for depth. However, it is exactly limitations like this that inspire creativity and innovation.

My idea is this. Pick a theme. Invite four to six people (or teams) to give presentations, within the Pecha Kucha parameters, leave room for dialogue between each presentation, and then end with a panel discussion.

I think we would pack the house, inspire incredible discussions, encourage tremendous creativity and leave people wanting more. The presentations could then be housed online along with forums for further discussion and sustained treatments. If particularly appealing, they could even be packaged and distributed.

So, my fellow theosophists, especially those in Chicago, what do you say we pick a theme and commit to doing this next Fall at Olcott? If it works, we could then invite others from all around and do another event during the Annual Conference.

I’m in.

Youth and wisdom

Chogyam Trungpa wrote:

We have the idea that an enlightened person is supposed to be more or less an old-wise-man type: not quite like an old professor, but perhaps an old father who can supply sound advice on how to handle all of life’s problems or an old grandmother who knows all the recipes and all the cures. That seems to be the current fantasy that exists in our culture concerning enlightened beings. They are old and wise, grown-up and solid. Tantra has a different notion of enlightenment, which is connected with youth and innocence. We can see this pattern in Padmasambhava’s life, the life of the great teacher who brought the tantric teachings of Buddhism to Tibet. Here the awakened state of mind is portrayed not as old and adult but as young and free. Youth and freedom in this case are connected with the birth of the awakened state of mind. The awakened state of mind has the quality of morning, of dawn — fresh and sparkling, completely awake.

From “Primordial Innocence,” in CRAZY WISDOM, pages 26 to 27.

Not only does tantra have this notion, so did Jiddu Krishnamurti:

To live fully and completely, there must be freedom, not an acceptance of authority; and there can be freedom only when there is virtue. Virtue is not imitation; virtue is creative living. That is, creativeness comes through the freedom which virtue brings; and virtue is not to be cultivated, it does not come through practice or at the end of your life. Either you are virtuous and free now, or you are not.

In Tibetan Buddhism in general, Chogyam Trungpa’s path, some young people are sought out and trained to be spiritual teachers. The Dalai Lama was raised that way, and that’s given the world a remarkable public figure. That’s what happened to Jiddu Krishnamurti as well.

Obviously not all young people are wise, or on the path to wisdom - but I do wonder: why does the Theosophical Society (which I love BTW) put an age minimum on membership of it’s Esoteric Section (E.S.)?

Disclosure: I was myself too young when I applied and therefor not  allowed into the E.S.

I’ve spoken to many people about this - and most seem to agree: it’s because wisdom comes with age. I agree. People in their teens, even their late teens, are awful. I was very ignorant and foolish at 19. I made some of my worst mistakes back then. But I have to wonder: would I have made those same mistakes if some wise people had taken me on? I will never know, because they didn’t. Instead, a few years later, I got taken on by a scholarly theosophist, Henk Spierenburg, who gave me the Blavatsky Collected Writings among other things, but no practical life advice. Maybe I wasn’t meant to get that. Anyhow, I’m getting off track here.

The main issue with people getting spiritual teachings ought to be their motivation. Young people are often at their most idealistic in their teenage years. Moral issues are seen in black and white at that age. I’ve known quite a few people who were vegetarians in high school but turned back to eating meat in college. In college social realities catch up with them and the issue of animal welfare is suddenly no longer that big a deal. Does that mean they should not be allowed to be vegetarians in high school? Of course not. It just means that life isn’t through testing them yet. But is life ever through testing any of us?

[And no, this isn't an application to get into the E.S. now. I probably could get in if I wanted to, but that ship has sailed, as far as I'm concerned.]

Religion or Spirituality

Religion has a bad name in alternative circles. It’s associated with the Christian church and all it’s crimes (real and perceived). Religion is associated with dogma, stifling rules that don’t fit our day to day lives and worse of all: authority. A preacher to tell me what to do in my personal life? Never!

In my religion classes at Leiden University very different definitions of religion are taught. I’ll use a famous one by Clifford Geertz to sum up the point:

“Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”

[Geertz wrote in 1966, just before political correct formulations would have replaced 'men' by 'people'.]

The basic point here is that religion is that which gives direction to our lives, helps us establish priorities (consciously or unconsciously) and helps us understand our lives - in such a way that our worldview and priorities seem uniquely realistic.

That definition actually includes spirituality. We have symbols: Ying & Yang, the Buddha and the Tibetan flag (1). We have ideas about the universe we live in which often include: holism, karma, alternative health, aura’s etc. (3). These ideas about life and the universe seem real to us (4) and therefore the lifestyle that comes with them does too (2, 5).

The obsession with the difference between religion and spirituality comes, I think, from the bad reputation the Christian churches has with many of us. Religion has often been defined as ‘organised religion’.

Spirituality - taking place in yoga classrooms, alternative bookstores and retreats - is not organized in the same clear way. One can be spiritual within any religious system. The main thing is that one hasn’t settled for dogma’s, thinks for oneself and keeps ones own spiritual and ethical growth as a top priority (2).

Letting Go and Visualizing where you’re going

I’ve been struggling with understanding The Secret for a while now  - in fact before the hype started. Part of my struggle is that I hear people say to (to me) opposite things. On the one hand there’s the idea that we are responsible for our own life. If we truly clean up our act, we will be happy, because we’ve let go of guilt and only let positive energy into our lives. If we want something, we should visualize it and create it from within. I’ll leave the contrast between actual action and visualizing change for the moment.
We are told to ‘let go’, to ‘not be ambitious’, to surrender to the universe. People are saying that we should let coincidences into our lives. We should be open to what presents itself - because the universe knows best.

Am I missing something here? Isn’t it part of life to make choices, take responsibility for where we are and where we want to go? How does waiting for fate going to change my life?

The type of thinking I’m trying to understand here seems to have two aspects:

• You are in this life to learn life’s lessons, the lessons you chose to learn. You are responsible for both the lessons and the way you respond to them.
• Your most interesting life is going to be lived not by controlling everything, but by letting the universe tell you where you need to be. Let coincidence and fate decide things for you.

While I have my reservations about the first idea - I’m not responsible for the mistakes people make while learning their lessons (to name one - I have more reservations about the second: If I let coincidences rule my life, I am not making choices - I’m just being a passive feather on the sea of life. I know some people who live like that - and I feel they are doing even worse than not making choices: they’re not taking responsibility for their lives.

The most important lessons I’ve learned in my life were while taking actual responsibility. I chose something, threw myself into that, and ended up failing miserably. No coincidences there. No universe telling me something: just me trying to find my way in a very complicated world.

Interfaith Presentation

In November of last year I was invited to represent the Theosophical Society at the 17th Annual Interfaith Thanksgiving Service at St. Procopius Abby in Lisle, Illinois.

This is a lovely event hosted by the Benedictine monks of St. Procopius Abbey. Representatives from nine different faiths came to this sublime hall to talk about their tradition and offer prayers and blessings to a lovely audience of open minded spiritually oriented pilgrims.

There were Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians; the choir from the Second Baptist of Church rocked the house. The Baha’i House of Worship Choir reminded why music has always served the sacred, their singers had me wanting to leap out of my seat and praise . . . everything.

 

It occurred to me at some point in all this rapture and glow of gratitude that I should figure out what I was going to say. I am a legendary procrastinator, a terrible habit enabled by an almost perverse ability to think quickly on my feet. Undoubtedly this habit is essentially simple immaturity, but there is a strange kind of alchemical intensity provoked by desperation, the proximity to performance acting as a crucible, quickening my connection to whatever strange source my words spring from (credit to Socrates for providing further philosophical justification).

As it drew close to my time, I noted that of all the groups represented, I was alone in being alone. I was preceded by entire choirs for Christ’s sake. My heart began to race, but then, quite suddenly the ideas began forming in my mind, whole phrases and paths of thought lit up as clear as a Broadway marquee. I am forever grateful for the reliability of this strange magic.

This is what came to me (not quite verbatim as I didn’t get around to recollecting what I said until several weeks later). And please know that unlike my usual speaking, this was very slow and deliberate, a prayer:

 

“As the representative of a truly syncretic tradition, I feel as if I should just wait until the very end, stand up and say, ‘Ditto’.

Of course, theosophists do more than that. When we attend events such as this, we listen to the many prayers and perspectives and ask, “What is it that unites them? What are their differences, and what can we learn from such unity and difference?”

I think it fair to say that all the traditions represented here today share certain commonalities, at least one of which is the recognition of a transcendent reality, a divine source, a holy Other. Further, that we can relate to this ultimate ground, that the very substance, nature and character of this relationship is love, and that in this relationship lies our greatest, and perhaps only hope for salvation.

Theosophists are interested in this original source, how it comes into being, and our various relationships to it in different times and places. As such, we seek to form a nucleus of the universal family, we encourage a comparative study of religion, philosophy, science and art, and we endorse an exploration of the undiscovered laws of nature and the unrealized potentials of humanity.

All of which can become terribly abstract were it not for the one simple, fundamental premise upon which all of Theosophy is predicated: the unity of all life. To that end, we have an invocation that I would like to share with you.

I’ll say it once so you can hear it, and then I will say it a second time and I invite you to repeat it after me.

O Hidden Life, vibrant in every atom.

O Hidden Light, shining in every creature.

O Hidden Love, embracing all in oneness.

May all who feel themselves as one with thee, know they are therefore one with every other.

Thank you very much, and blessings to you all.”

I met many wonderful people that evening, and I am very grateful for having had the opportunity to share Theosophy with them.

If you are able to attend this event next year, I encourage you to do so.

dropping labels

There is an Intelligentsia cafe near my work. They have the best coffee in the city. I frequently go there for lunch, to read, write, to take a break from the chaos of my office. They have a consistent staff of really interesting young people. They look like the cast of some hip, undiscovered indie movie, and talk like it too. It’s beautiful.

It is also very small and customers frequently have to share tables with strangers. More often than not everyone sits quietly in their own little world, but I’ve also met some delightful people through encounters of this sort.

Today, as the women in this picture was sitting down at the table next to me something fell out or off of her coat. She was a bit harried and didn’t notice. I picked it up off the floor and awaited for her to get herself together. It was the brand label from inside her coat. The threading had become bare and the whole label fell off.

I handed it to her. “I doubt you need this, but it dropped from your coat.”

She replied, “Ugh, a metaphor for my life.” As in, ‘everything is falling apart’.

I looked at her and said, “If dropping labels is a metaphor for your life, you might be well along the road to enlightenment.”

She may have heard me, but she certainly didn’t hear me. I turned back to my coffee and Huston Smith’s ‘Forgotten Truth’, and she busied herself with her coat and bag while awaiting her order.

We have so many opportunities to touch each other, however briefly. We are guerilla bodhisattvas.

What is a spiritual experience? Part I

This question has been on my mind lately.

That we even talk about certain experiences being spiritual reveals a mark of otherness. For most of us, only rare moments earn the denomination. Yet one of the most consistent claims proceeding from examinations of such experiences is the fundamentally spiritual nature of total reality, the oneness of all that is.

I’d like to better understand what leads me, you, he or she, to designate an experience spiritual. What are the qualities of that experience that separate it from non-spiritual experiences?

Further, within the class of spiritual experiences, are there differences? Are some experiences more spiritual than others? Are there different types of spiritual experience?

When first confronted with this line of inquiry, many understandably balk. They anticipate a dystopia of ranked ineffables and the inevitable hierarchies that would proceed. “I’ve had fourteen documented level 6 spiritual experiences, you’ve barely had three level fives, so I think we’ll go with my idea.” Imagine a militaristic organization with the Dalai Lamas as a five star general overseeing an army of average materialists who occasionally experience bliss during a close football game.

Such anxieties, and the lack of faith they reveal, shouldn’t dissuade us. If spiritual experiences are real, they will resist colonization by such thinking. Indeed, they may offer us the very qualities and criteria needed to relegate this type of thinking to its proper place (a reverse colonization, like Greek gods in Rome).

A proper examination of what constitutes spiritual experiences, if the consistencies of the reports are any indication, may reveal a reality that palimpsests the typical flatland of contemporary western ontology.

But that’s jumping ahead.

First, the question remains: what constitutes a spiritual experience?

first entry - a clearing

Welcome to the Theosophist blog.

A common and useful trope in spiritual literature is the idea of an opening, a sacred space into which you can invite . . . whatever.

Heidegger, in his later works, talks about the clearing required for Being to disclose itself. There is also the story of the professor who goes to visit a Zen master.

This blog will be a kind of clearing, a space in which theosophical voices can share their stories.

Too often our spiritual lives are abstracted into something ‘other’. This blog will be a shared conversation about living theosophically, the struggle to wake up, to find our way along the path.