The Dag Hammarskjöld interview with biographer Roger Lipsey

June 9, 2013 by

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Dag Hammarskjold's Legacy

Dag Hammarskjöld’s Nobel prize ranks him among the world’s greatest peacemakers. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America urges prayerful reflection on his life in the church’s annual list of saint’s days—calling him a “Renewer of Society.” Retired Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes that Hammarskjöld “almost single-handedly shaped the vision for international co-operation and crisis management that we struggle to realize” to this day.

Henry P. Van Dusen—a former head of Union Theological Seminary in New York who often was called “a Christian statesman” himself—described the publication of Hammarskjöld’s Markings as “the noblest self-disclosure of spiritual struggle and triumph, perhaps the greatest testament of personal faith written in the heat of professional life and amidst the most exacting responsibilities for world peace and order.”

So why don’t more Americans recognize Dag Hammarskjöld’s name today?

Dag Hammarskjöld:
Mystery Behind his Plane Crash Resurfaces

His memory has faded partly because he died more than 50 years ago. However, later this year, the mystery behind his death is likely to resurface. After leading the United Nations as Secretary-General through a series of world crises since 1953, Hammarskjöld was attempting dangerous diplomacy in war-torn Africa in 1961. That’s when his plane crashed and suspicion, even then, fell on U.S.-and-European-backed forces in Africa who wanted his “meddling” to end. Unfortunately, that was the iciest era in the Cold War and the investigation into Hammarskjöld’s death was put on hold by the UN. The evidence seemed to be too remote; the potential issues behind his death too explosive.

However, later this year, a volunteer team of top international jurists is likely to reopen the case. Rowan Williams himself writes in the Cambridge Humanities Review that there “is an overwhelming case for a reopening of the investigation.”

This news alone is a solid reason to purchase a copy of Roger Lipsey’s inspiring new biography: Hammarskjold: A Life. Later this year, his name likely will be in headlines once again. You’ll be able to draw fresh interest in organizing a discussion group around Hammarskjöld’s life and spiritual legacy.

Dag Hammarskjöld: Markings, the Spiritual Classic

What transformed Hammarskjöld from an internationally mourned diplomat into a widely revered saint was the discovery of his private journal in his sparsely decorated, sanctuary-like bedroom. This collection of private jottings—the American title calls this collection Markings—became an instant best-seller in Swedish and then in English translation in 1964.

In Hammarskjöld, we have a world-class peacemaker who proved effective in the most potentially explosive conflicts in the Cold War—and a world-class saint with a spiritual wisdom captured in his own words over many years. ReadTheSpirit highly recommends Roger Lipsey’s biography of Hammarskjöld, and we are not alone in this view. Rowan Williams writes that “Lipsey is brilliant at reading the life in tandem with the meditations, so that we can see something of what was in Hammarskjöld’s mind at points of crisis—not his thoughts about the details of a crisis but what was nourishing him internally.”

INTERVIEW WITH BIOGRAPHER ROGER LIPSEY
ABOUT DAG Hammarskjöld

DAVID: Once upon a time, the world knew two Dag Hammarskjölds. There is the author of Markings, a spiritual classic made up of his short meditations and poems about the meaning of life. Then, there is the diplomat who ran the United Nations from 1953 to 1961 at the height of the Cold War. As you point out in your book, however, he is no longer a household name. So, let’s start by introducing him to readers. He became a world leader almost by accident, you tell us in your biography.

ROGER: The people who selected him did not understand who they were choosing. Hammarskjöld was plucked from obscurity in 1953 by leaders in the United Nations Security Council who considered him a safe bureaucrat who had shown a lot of integrity in international meetings on finance and economics. They thought he would be a good and quiet administrator. They were wrong about that, but it was on that basis that the United States and the Soviet Union, the two main combatants on this choice, agreed to ask him to take office.

Hammarskjöld began to reveal himself in his first public words when he arrived to take office. Anyone with good ears could recognize right away that this was no dull bureaucrat. He was at Idlewild Airport in New York, now known as JFK airport. He was standing there facing reporters and one of them asked if he liked mountain climbing. He explained that his experience in mountaineering was limited to Scandinavia, so he had not climbed any famous heights. Then, he said:

“However, this much I know of the sport, that the qualities it requires are just those which I feel we all need today: perseverance and patience, a firm grip on realities, careful but imaginative planning, a clear awareness of the dangers but also of the fact that fate is what we make it and that the safest climber is he who never questions his ability to overcome all difficulties.”

That wasn’t the voice of a faceless bureaucrat! In one sentence, he pulled together a whole series of values, he showed his intellectual abilities and showed confidence without pride. This was someone with profound abilities for the challenges that lay ahead.

DAVID: World leaders continued to underestimate him for a while. He also started by quietly but firmly building his base. Give us a couple of examples.

LIPSEY: There are still living witnesses who remember that in his first weeks at the UN, he went to every floor and every office to shake hands and say hello to 4,000 employees. That’s still legendary at the UN.

Dag Hammarskjöld: Freeing Prisoners in ‘Red’ China

LIPSEY: I’ll skip over some of the earliest challenges he faced—but after his first year, he hit one of the biggest challenges of his career. The People’s Republic of China was a new regime and the United States, under the flag of the United Nations, had been at war with North Korea as well as thousands of Chinese troops. There was very bad blood between the U.S. and China. But some American pilots had been captured in China and they were facing a miserable future in Chinese prisons. President Eisenhower of course was upset, as were many American leaders, but they had no line of communication open to the Chinese leadership. So, it was handed to the United Nations to try to solve this problem. The General Assembly voted to dispatch Hammarskjöld to solve the problem. The truth is that American leaders did not expect much.

DAVID: You explain in your book that, even as Hammarskjöld started his negotiations, American leaders said particularly damning things about him. He was widely considered a failure—at first. Then, people realized that he had, indeed, been effective, right?

ROGER: Yes, this was Hammarskjöld’s first big international test and it worked out that these pilots were freed some months later. When they finally came home, this was justly considered a major victory for Hammarskjöld personally. He had shown what he was worth. After that, he was regarded as a big figure on the world scene. The major world powers knew that he could face intricate challenges and carry out highly effective diplomatic work. Hammarskjöld clearly was someone to reckon with.

Dag Hammarskjöld: Spiritual Strength in Peacemaking

DAVID: So, as readers enjoy your book, they’ve got these gripping stories of international conflict. And, as you retell them, you also show us what Hammarskjöld was writing in his secret spiritual journal that one day would become Markings. In the most difficult days of the Chinese conflict, he jotted some lines from Psalm 139. He wrote Markings in Swedish, and you’ve rendered that text in English translation. I like the wording you have in your book.

ROGER: On the day of his departure for Beijing, he wrote: “If I take the wings of the morning and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there also shall thy hand lead me.” He wasn’t talking about this publicly, but we now know this is what he was praying as he headed to China. Hammarskjöld was a man with a very strong spiritual life. He was a man on the world stage who—after the success with the Chinese—was highly honored and was being given one difficult challenge after another until the end of his life in 1961. Yet, we now can see that, although he never made a show of this, he was exercising an approach to living that was deeply Christian. This wasn’t in the way most of us may think of Christian practice. He did not attend a church, for example. But Markings shows us the depth of his reflections. He drew on Christian mystics, especially Meister Eckhart. Of course, this was not known during Hammarskjöld’s life.

Dag Hammarskjöld:
Broadcasting Faith with Edward R. Murrow

DAVID: Or, perhaps, people in the 1950s weren’t listening clearly, as you point out in your biography. Hammarskjöld did not exactly hide his spiritual side. He appeared on the popular Edward R. Murrow CBS radio series This I Believe.

ROGER: Yes, and in the 5 minutes provided in those short broadcasts, he provided a considerable credo. The United Nations even issued a press release about the Murrow broadcast, but the public didn’t realize what they were hearing. I have included the entire text of his broadcast in the book so you can read the whole thing.

DAVID: Now, so many years later, this is the broadcast where Hammarskjöld gave the famous description of his family providing two different streams of insight. Readers can get your book to read the whole thing, but he said in part: “From generations of soldiers and government officials on my father’s side I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country—or to humanity. This service required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions concerning what was right and good for the community, whatever were the views in fashion.

“From scholars and clergymen on my mother’s side I inherited a belief that, in the very radical sense of the Gospels, all men were equals as children of God, and should be met and treated by us as our masters in God. Faith is a state of the mind and the soul.” And he went on to quote another mystic: St. John of the Cross. An amazing broadcast!

Dag Hammarskjöld: Creating the Room of Quiet

ROGER: There was another declaration of his spirituality that was noticed by the public—although no one seemed to draw conclusions about Hammarskjöld’s spiritual life. This was the creation of the Room of Quiet, which still exists to this day.

DAVID: You describe this inspiring project in your book and I think this is a good choice to excerpt a bit more of Hammarskjöld’s writing. So, we’re going to publish a second story with this interview about the Room of Quiet.

In relation to the Room of Quiet, let me point out to readers of our interview that Hammarskjöld was both Christian and deeply Asian in his mystical path, as well. I say “Asian” in general, because he clearly was immersed in Hindu, Buddhist and Chinese-Confucian traditions. He was eclectic in his mysticism. Toward the end of your book, you describe the rather startling appearance of his bedroom, after his death. This is where the text of Markings was found. And, I have to say, his sanctuary-like bedroom sounds fascinating. He kept it spare—we might say very Scandinavian—and yet he included a dazzling Buddhist wall hanging, a sketch of a man before a cross and so on.

Dag Hammarskjöld: Drawing from Asia

ROGER: He did read classics of Chinese and Indian spiritual literature. He knew the Gita cold! He also really appreciated Ezra Pound’s translation of Confucian literature, particularly Confucius’ The Unwobbling Pivot as translated by Pound. He especially appreciated Chinese works that synthesized political and community insights with personal spiritual insights. That’s one of the main characteristics of the Confucian literature.

Hammarskjöld read very broadly. He felt a kinship with Asian cultures in general. When he traveled to Laos, Burma, Cambodia and other countries in Asia, he was impressed in many cases by the quality of the culture and the people he met.

DAVID: I see an Asian approach to the subtlety of discernment even in the opening quote in your book from Hammarskjöld. He wrote: “You see, even a very small dent may lead to a rift, and a rift may lead to an opening and you may break in through the wall. The interesting thing is—is this a dent which may lead to a rift?” Is it fair to see an Eastern influence in his comments like this?

ROGER: Yes, I think that is fair to say. What we detect in Hammarskjöld’s expressions—including many that people thought of as diplomatic statements at the time—was an extraordinarily fine awareness of the need to subtly examine the texture of experience to find ways forward in peace. Hammarskjöld was a close student of the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, and you will find in Eckhart writings about a kind of emptiness and a kind of openness to God that is similar to some of the discourses in Buddhism and Vedanta. Really, Hammarskjöld regarded these as paths that led to the same summit.

DAVID: Was he a saint? Because he wasn’t Catholic, he isn’t in the running to be canonized as an official saint at the Vatican. But many American Lutherans regard him as a saint—he’s already on the annual prayer list of saints in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. How do you regard his spiritual legacy overall? I gather from your biography that even his closest friends were hesitant to talk about his spiritual power—other than recommending Markings itself to readers.

ROGER: The best way to answer this is from the beautiful letter toward the end of the book from Hammarskjöld’s friend Greta Belfrage. It’s a long letter and you can read it in the book, but at one point, Greta writes that Markings is “shattering reading of his struggle with himself, of the strong belief he has in himself as having been ‘chosen,’ of his never-faltering will to be led in his life and his work only by this God, who once spoke to him and called him.”

Then, at the very end of her letter, Greta explains that she and others are remaining quiet in public about the way they describe Hammarskjöld. She concludes: “Of course we know—even if we will never say so to anybody else—that he was a saint.”

Care to Read More about Peacemakers?

ReadTheSpirit publishes three books by global peacemaker Daniel Buttry: Interfaith Heroes, Volume 1, with profiles including Gandhi, St. Francis and Rumi; Interfaith Heroes, Volume 2, with profiles including Pope John Paul II, Hans Kung and Thich Nhat Hanh; and Blessed Are the Peacemakers, with profiles including Dorothy Day, Pete Seeger, Diane Nash and Ken Sehested.

And speaking of Ken Sehested: You may also enjoy reading Ken’s remembrance of the late civil-rights activist the Rev. Will D. Campbell.

PLEASE, help us spread the news to friends: Click the blue-“f” icon, either at top or bottom of this story, and share this article with your friends on Facebook.

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion, spirituality, interfaith news and cross-cultural issues.)

Snatam Kaur: Chanting for peace from Oprah’s home—to a neighborhood near you

April 8, 2013 by

By Lynne Meredith Golodner

Snatam Kaur recently got a phone call, asking her to perform at Oprah Winfrey’s Hawaii abode. It just so happened that the sacred chantress from Santa Cruz, California, was around the corner from Oprah’s Hawaii retreat so it was an easy request to grant. She and her band went and hid upstairs in Oprah’s bedroom, then surprised Oprah by walking down the stairs, playing music.

Every night before she goes to sleep, Oprah plays Snatam Kaur’s sacred chants. It speaks to the power of Kaur’s distinctive music, which she is performing nationwide this spring. This week—April 11-14, 2013—she is performing at Joshua Tree, California. Later this month, she will be in Ashville, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. May 10-11, she will be in Chicago. On May 12 and also on May 13, she will be in Birmingham, Michigan. Then, it’s off to Oregon, Washington and California. Her travels continue into summer. You can see her entire schedule at her website by selecting her 2013 concert tour page.

“The world is becoming a much smaller place, especially with Oprah being familiar with all of our chants—that was really quite surreal,” said Snatam Kaur in a recent telephone interview. “It was a beautiful experience to connect with her and see the integrity she holds in her work and her own inner strength as a powerful woman. I walked away from the experience very inspired by being with her and also seeing just how these mantras can really serve a wider population.”

Kaur is a Sikh raised in the Kundalini Yoga tradition under the leadership of Yogi Bhajan. Her music sells widely—more than 70,000 albums a year. She tours the world, bringing her spiritual practice to audiences of people from all walks of life because her universal message praises God and honors the Divine in every being. The daughter of a Grateful Dead manager, Kaur dresses in Sikh attire, wrapping her head in a turban as a sign of modesty. She is married and a mother, and the Gurmukhi mantras she sings in concert are part of a daily practice she herself grew up with.

“I live with these mantras,” she says. “They are very much a part of my life and rhythm and way that I can access the divine every day.”

Children attend her concerts and often doze off in the middle from the soothing sounds of the music swirling around them. During her Michigan visit in early May, Kaur will perform a concert with her band one night and lead a Kundalini Yoga workshop the next night, with her bandmates playing living music alongside.

“Before I started touring, I was teaching,” she says. “It feels like it’s coming full-circle, coming back to the teaching. To empower people to really learn about the power of these chants—I’ve experienced in my own life very profound healing through the chants and so I try to give the concert an experience mode as opposed to a performance mode.”

Kaur is accompanied in concert by Todd Boston on guitar and flute and Ramesh Kannan on percussion.

Snatam Kaur: What Is Mantra?

A mantra is a sound, syllable, word or string of words that people recite in repetitive formation as a way of creating transformation. Mantras originated in the Vedic tradition of India, before the formation of what today is known as Hinduism. Mantra is also prevalent among Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains. However, Snatam Kaur’s concerts are not aimed at specific religious groups. Her goal in touring is peacemaking—performing this type of music to bring a simple, soothing and healing sound to everyone.

For the authors of the Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads, the syllable Om represented Brahman, or the godhead, as well as all of creation. It is a sound that is uttered in many yoga studios across North America today as a calming and unifying chant.

Many people, when first coming to yoga or mantra from a Judeo-Christian tradition, feel uncertain as to whether chanting will in some way praise a foreign deity. However, the practice of yoga and mantra in Western settings usually is a religiously neutral discipline, uniting people around the practice of physical posture and music in a way that accepts participants’ individual beliefs.

Snatam Kaur: ‘I Am a Sikh’ shows solidarity in tragedy

Sikhism began in India in the 15th century with the master Guru Nanak. Sikhs believe in living their lives according to the teaching of the Sikh gurus, devoting time to meditation on God and scripture, chanting and living a life that benefits others. Kaur chants in the sacred tradition of Shabad, a term that refers to the sacred energy in speech and sound—similar to some Western traditions of sacred, meditative hymns. Among world religions, Sikhs have a special reverence for the timeless power of words. The Sikh community around the world refers to a holy book of collected writings, the Guru Granth Sahib, as the final teacher in its long line of gurus.

Recently, Kaur recorded an 11-minute YouTube video called I Am a Sikh, after a shooting incident last summer at the Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Sikh community. (Wikipedia has an overview of the tragedy in which a white supremacist opened fire killing six and injuring four others, before taking his own life.) A petite, Caucasian woman, Kaur’s turbans and all-white clothing mark her as distinctively different as she moves around the country. She produced the video to explain what it means to be a Sikh and to express solidarity with that community in the wake of the shooting. Kaur will be performing a concert there on May 9 at 7 pm to honor the Sikhs in that community. It is open to the public.

The shooting “was just so devastating,” she said. “It felt like it happened right in my own home—that real and personal for me. I had heard about the Sikhs in Oak Creek and how incredible they were, and I was just inspired, and I wanted to do something in service to the Sikh community to get the word out about who the Sikhs are.”

“I see myself as a representative of the Sikh community and because it has such a strong root in healing through sound current and mantra, it’s accessible for people of all walks of life,” she says. “That’s essentially what I represent and share with people.”

“Everyone’s seeking happiness in some way and seeking a way to feel fulfilled. And if they feel just a little sense of healing or happiness, they’re incredibly grateful and don’t really care where it comes from,” she says. While people are often curious about her attire and her devotion, Kaur says she doesn’t run into much stereotyping or judgment. How she lives, what she performs and the message she brings are “gifts for everyone and every walk of life,” Kaur says.

Snatam Kaur in southeast Michigan

Katherine Austin, owner of Karma Yoga in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and a fan of Snatam Kaur and of Kundalini Yoga, is producing the May 12-13 events in metro Detroit. Kaur’s concert and yoga workshop will take place at Seaholm High School in Birmingham.

“Over the years, I’ve had a few tracks of Snatam’s albums but it wasn’t until I was in Rishikesh, India, in 2011 that I fell head over heels in love with her singing through the practice of Kundalini yoga,” says Austin. “I was quickly transformed by the purity and power of the mantras and immediately brought them back to Karma for my classes—whether they were Kundalini or Hatha yoga. I felt the power and healing from these ancient mantras and knew they would instantly affect my students in a positive way.”

Austin plays Kaur’s music in class frequently. Many students in her studio, which attracts 3,500 people each month, say they are excited for the upcoming performances. Austin hopes to pack the 900-seat Seaholm auditorium and have hundreds attend the yoga workshop. The concert takes place on Mother’s Day evening, a perfect synergy for the message and the mantras, she says.

Kaur agrees that her concerts are perfect family events, as the soothing, uplifting music is accessible for all ages. At a recent Mexico City yoga workshop, Kaur says there were two 8-year-old girls in attendance who did every pose and posture with ease. At her concerts, children dance and sing and drift off into sleep when the music gets ultra-soothing.

“Mantras are high vibrational sounds that go beyond the thinking mind to clear, reorganize and create new higher thought patterns and emotions that help us make better choices,” says Austin. That they come in musical form means they are even more accessible. The yoga taught at Austin’s studio “has always included the spirituality of yoga,” she says. That said, students come from all walks of life and all faiths. In March of 2012, Austin attended a retreat with Kaur and her band. After that week of “bliss,” she decided she wanted to share Snatam Kaur’s inspirational performances with her students and community.

“I am beyond thrilled that Snatam is coming! Metro Detroit is in for such a gift,” says Austin. “Her unique delivery of the sacred sound current is profound. Everyone will come away with only love and bliss in their hearts after spending these two days with her.”

The concerts themselves become a sacred setting, Kaur says, as the audience grows toward chanting the words together. “It’s an opportunity for transformation for me and for people that come,” she says. “I feel it in every concert. A very deep personal transformation happens.”

SEE SNATAM KAUR’S ENTIRE SCHEDULE AT HER WEBSITE—by finding and clicking on her 2013 concert tour page.

Lynne Meredith Golodner is  an author with ReadTheSpirit Books. Visit her author page to learn more about her remarkable career and her newest book, The Flavors of Faith: Holy Breads.

(This profile and interview of Snatam Kaur, by Lynne Meredith Golodner, was originally published in https://readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion, values and cross-cultural issues. You can feel free to reproduce this column if you include this credit line and link.)

‘Distilled Spirits’: The untold story of how Alcoholics Anonymous became an all-American spiritual movement

April 7, 2013 by

Don Lattin is one of America’s most important chroniclers of untold stories that are shaping our religious culture. A veteran journalist based in San Francisco, his previous books have thrown open windows into one mysterious spiritual movement after another. Earlier, we highly recommended his book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. That book told the strange story of how four of the most important spiritual voices of the late 20th century passed through a powerful and painful convergence at Harvard.

Don steps back a couple of decades in his new book: Distilled Spirits. In today’s wide-ranging interview with ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm, Don talks about how this new book finally reveals the connections between three major figures: Bill Wilson, Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. The result of their creative collision, among other things, shaped one of the most important grassroots spiritual movements in American history: Alcoholics Anonymous.

THE DON LATTIN INTERVIEW:
ON ‘DISTILLED SPIRITS,’
BILL WILSON, ALDOUS HUXLEY and GERALD HEARD

DAVID: Let’s begin by explaining why your book is a “must read.” When I first saw your new book, I wondered: Why would general readers want to learn about these three fairly obscure guys? Now, having thoroughly enjoyed your book, the answer is obvious to me: You’re telling an untold story about Alcoholics Anonymous and the subsequent host of 12-step groups that touch millions of men and women every day. From its founding in the 1930s, AA really represents a huge change in American religious life, right?

DON: It’s one of the most important spiritual movements of the 20th century and I’m not alone in that assessment. Aldous Huxley called Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson the greatest social architect of the 20th century. That’s high praise, indeed, coming from someone like Huxley! Wilson is important not just because he founded AA and helped millions of people that way. His work also is important because his ideas inspired what sociologists of religion call the small-group movement.

DAVID: A huge number of our ReadTheSpirit readers are involved in small groups. From 12-step groups to Sunday school circles to library book clubs, from men’s breakfasts to women’s groups there are millions of these circles.

DON: That’s right and scholars who study these movements tell us that what came out of the 1930s shaped today’s widespread interest in small groups—some of which meet in people’s homes, some of which meet in churches or synagogues, meditation groups, some affiliated with religion and some not. After all of the research for this new book, I have to agree: Bill Wilson was a genius.

DAVID: There is a long-running debate about whether AA and 12-step programs are “religious” or “spiritual” or “secular.” Your book is fascinating because you look at the interconnections between a huge host of people in the first third of the 20th century. We encounter World War I, Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Woolf, the strange histories of a number of famous drugs, Hindu immigrants and the Vedanta Society. This true story is one strange ride. I’ve been writing in this field for decades—and I discovered lots of things in this book that I never knew! For example, I’ve written about Bill Wilson over the years, but I never new that he read William James. In other words, he was studying one of the founding figures in trying to understand spiritual movements.

DON: Bill Wilson wasn’t just reading William James. He was reading William James the day after he had an important revelation at an asylum for alcoholics in New York. That’s where he had these visions and formative ideas about starting Alcoholics Anonymous. So, Bill Wilson was reading William James, we know, at the exact moment when he was more open to new ideas that at any other time in his life. A friend had given him a copy of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and Bill Wilson read it cover to cover. James is a very important influence on the development of Alcoholics Anonymous.

DAVID: The famous phrase—“Higher Power,” the god of your own understanding—is popularized through AA. It sounds so simple, yet it was a revolutionary idea. For two millennia, Christians liked to beat themselves bloody over fine distinctions about the nature of God. Here was permission to envision your own version of God.

DON: Yes, that’s one reason Wilson and Huxley and Heard are so important. They influenced each other and laid the foundation for this revolutionary idea of what today people like to describe as the spiritual-but-not-religious movement. Today in AA, the Higher Power is defined in many, many different ways. There are even people who take a secular view of this. GOD could be defined as Group Of Drunks, the community itself. But these early thinkers who influenced each other—Huxley, Heard and Wilson—they definitely had a serious interest in studying the mystical and divine.

ALDOUS HUXLEY: THE VAST SCOPE
OF HIS REAL ‘BRAVE NEW WORLD’

DAVID: So let’s turn to Huxley for a moment. If our readers know anything about him, they probably recall the guy who wrote Brave New World, which they were forced to read in high school. But Huxley was so much more! He came from a very famous family. He was a journalist, a poet, a screenwriter, a broadcaster. He was a pacifist and an early proponent of using drugs to alter consciousness. He was British but also lived in the U.S. and helped to bring Asian religious traditions, specifically Hinduism, to America.

So, my question to you is: What conclusion did you reach after all your research into Huxley’s life? Was he a serious scholar—or a restless amateur? Did he know what he was talking about?

DON: Really, we should think of Huxley as one of the last great polymaths. This was a long line of brilliant thinkers who were interested in everything. They studied science. They studied religion. They studied other disciplines. In the modern age of increasing specialization, it’s hard to appreciate that they were interested in studying everything. They were finding connections between different disciplines that, today, people aren’t as well equipped to find.

Huxley was part of the Lost Generation that was so deeply influenced by World War I. In Huxley’s early writings as a young novelist, he focused on satire and had no interest in religion or spirituality or philosophy. It really wasn’t until Huxley met Gerald Heard in 1929 that he developed this interest in religion and spiritual disciplines that would consume him later in life. One reason that Heard is so important to this story is that he got Huxley interested in these realms. In 1945, Huxley published The Perennial Philosophy, a book that was so important in helping people to look for common spiritual truths. In my book about Huston Smith and the Harvard connections—we see that it was Heard’s influence on Huxley that led to Huxley’s strong influence on Smith and later generations.

DAVID: That influence continues to this day. We recently featured a new interview with the very popular Catholic author Richard Rohr, whose writings reach back to The Perennial Philosophy.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS AND HIGHER POWER:
‘THESE PEOPLE ARE DESPERATE TO SAVE THEIR LIVES’

DAVID: Some religious people scoff at the idea of “spiritual but not religious”—and the notion that we can feel free to describe our own version of God, our own Higher Power. Yet, this idea is very serious stuff for millions of men and women, right?

DON: People who come into Alcoholics Anonymous don’t have a lot of time to worry about the fine points of theology. They don’t want doctrinal distinctions. These people are desperate to save their lives. They need something that works—and they need it now. Wilson called it “a faith that works.”

I called this book Distilled Spirits for a number of reasons—one is a reference to a letter from Carl Jung to Bill Wilson in which Jung pointed out that the Latin word for alcohol is spiritus. Jung wrote: “You use the same word for the highest religious experience as for the most depraving poison.”

DAVID: In your book, you call spirits “double-edged swords.”

DON: What’s so interesting to me is that a lot of people who hit bottom with addiction or alcoholism realize that this really is a spiritual thirst in their lives—trying to fill up an emptiness in themselves. Some people call it a “God-sized hole in the heart.” The spiritual aspect of this is very, very important, but you’re right—it’s not about doctrine or dogma. It’s really about your own powerful, personal spiritual experiences. And it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or part of no religious belief system at all.

HOLLYWOOD AS MELTING POT:
NO COINCIDENCE THAT FAITH & FILM OFTEN OVERLAP

DAVID: At ReadTheSpirit, these days, we regularly review important television debuts—and we’re now the publishing house of faith-and-film writer Edward McNulty. Your book makes it clear that Hollywood has been a spiritual melting pot since its origins. Your book includes brief appearances by Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and others. Heard and Huxley were part of that melting pot, right?

DON: Yes. And, actually, I’ve thought of doing a book called Holy Hollywood about the whole history of spirituality in Hollywood. Lawrence Wright’s new book is called Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. He has a chapter in his book about this general theme of religious movements in the movie industry.

The main thing to realize is: These connections go back a very long way. From its earliest history, Hollywood attracted a lot of creative people with lots of money—people who were famous for challenging the prevailing notions of their day. A major Vedanta center was set up in Hollywood in the 1920s. We might think of this as a missionary movement within Hinduism and of course Huxley and Heard were very interested in exploring Vedanta. A lot of the spirituality we think of as “Sixties Spirituality” really dates back to the 1920s. Another way to say it is: The 1920s were a lot like the 1960s in many was.

DAVID: You’re mentioning the Asian connections that certainly were a big part of the inquiries Huxley and Heard were undertaking in California. But this movement also connects with America’s distinctive positive-thinking and self-help movements as well, right?

DON: Yes, there are a lot of similarities and cross overs. One place these lines all connect is William James. In a way, all of these movements we’re talking about are very American approaches to religion—very utilitarian. Give me a religion that works. That’s what I want as an American. Today, many people say: I want personal growth from my spirituality. It’s a very consumerist mentality and it connects with all the ways people market spirituality in America. In my earlier book, Following Our Bliss, I give a lot of examples of the ways that ‘60s notions of therapeutic, utilitarian and consumerist spirituality have come to define a lot of religion today. You see this influence in lots of churches today.

DON LATTIN: ‘DISTILLED SPIRITS’ AS A PERSONAL JOURNEY

DAVID: Finally, we should explain to readers of this interview that Distilled Spirits also is a personal story. Perhaps readers may have sensed, already, from the tone of your comments that you understand all of this from a first-hand perspective. Woven into the fascinating historical stories you give us here, you reveal that you were addicted to drugs and alcohol for many years. This book also is about your own journey into 12-step culture.

So, let me ask: I’ve known you as a colleague in journalism for many years. How did you come to this difficult decision of including yourself in the book? Traditional journalism avoids the word: “I.”

DON: This book actually didn’t start with me in the pages. The idea was really to write a prequel to The Harvard Psychedelic Club. These three guys who readers will meet in the pages of Distilled Spirits are the ones who created a situation that allowed Huston Smith, Timothy Leary, Ram Das and Andrew Weil, much later, to collide in the way they did at Harvard.

Because this new book is published by the University of California Press, there were early readers who provided their reactions. One of the scholars who read my proposal said: “This is interesting but why is Don Lattin interested in these particular people? Why do they matter to this day?”

Well, the answer is: I understand their importance because I’m one of the people helped by what they started so long ago. Of course, I do make it clear to readers: I didn’t know these three guys: Huxley, Heard and Wilson. I didn’t meet these guys. They were really my grandfather’s generation.

But the decision to weave my story into the book really allows readers to see clearly why their lives and ideas are still so important today. Many people’s lives depend on what they started.

ENJOY MORE OF DON LATTIN …

ReadTheSpirit recommends all of Don’s earlier books, which are both compelling to read—and reveal surprising corners of America’s spiritual heritage.

SPIRITUAL STATE OF THE MILLENNIUM: Don and co-author Richard Cimino look at emerging trends—from “mix-and-match” forms of religion to the rise of women’s voices in leadership in Shopping for Faith: American Religion in the New Millennium

THE DARK SIDE: American religious history is full of tragedies, as well as triumphs. Don tells the story of a tragic offshoot from mainline religion in Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge

PRODUCTIVE COLLISION OF FOUR LIVES: In today’s interview, above, we already have recommended The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America

THE POWER OF THAT ‘SIXTIES’ VIBE: From Esalen through New Age to Dharma Kids, Don traces the ties that still bind us in the quest we like to call Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today

DON LATTIN ONLINE …

Don’s Internet hub is his professional website: http://www.DonLattin.com But, you’ll mainly want to seek out his newest online project—a blog for Spirituality & Health that he simply calls Spiritual Search.

(This interview originally was published at https://readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion, values and cross-cultural diversity.)

Meditate in harmony with seasons in ‘The Lunar Tao’

February 17, 2013 by

CLICK THE COVER to visit the book’s Amazon page.Seasons, gods, family and us—
We are tethered on the same cord.
From The Lunar Tao

AMONG THE THOUSANDS of books about the Tao, Deng Ming-Dao’s new book, The Lunar Tao: Meditations in Harmony with the Seasons, invites us to explore the Chinese spiritual world in fresh ways. At first glance, readers can tell this book was designed with great care—from a soft-to-the-touch matte cover to the hundreds of black and white sketches and photographs that draw the eye into the 365 daily meditations.

Why choose this volume over the heaps of other books exploring the Tao? First, consider the author’s stature. Author Deng Ming-Dao has been writing about the Tao for 30 years. His grandfather emigrated from southern China to San Franciso 100 years ago and Deng (that’s his family name) grew up immersed in Chinese culture. His first name, Dao, is the same as the Chinese word we Anglicize as Tao—so he grew up immersed in The Way.

Deng is no latter-day convert—some former Baptist or Catholic who left a career in marketing to start a meditation center and attract seekers. Deng has been in this for the long haul and his work stands up over time. After 20 years, his 365 Tao: Daily Meditations still sells briskly on Amazon. (That 1992 book currently has 87 of its 94 Amazon reviewers ranking it with either 4 or 5 stars!)

What is the Tao? The Way?

The Tao is the more-than-2,000-year-old spiritual system founded by Lao-Tsu (sometimes spelled Laozi, as Deng does in his book). “Taoism is China’s oldest and only indigenous spiritual tradition,” Deng explains to readers. “Buddhism came from India, and Confucianism is a system of morality, philosophy and governance. Taoists believe in following Tao—the Way. They believe that there is a Way that all of nature and all human endeavors follow. Furthermore, they believe that everyone has a personal Way.”

While firmly rooted in the tradition, Deng is gracious in broadening his presentation of the Tao. He touches on Confucian and Zen teachings, as well, and says that the Tao is not limited to Chinese people or Chinese culture. He writes: “Nothing is true just because it’s Chinese. We still need to take the ideas and find the right way to apply them to our own lives, regardless of who we are or where we live. … There is no reason to try to be Chinese if you aren’t.”

What’s inside this massive book? A lot! The Lunar Tao is as big as an old-fashioned telephone book. This certainly isn’t a little volume of meditations to tuck into your bag on a busy day. The trade off is that Deng is able to pack a startling amount of material between these covers. Do you enjoy the New Year’s Lantern Festival? Deng not only explains the festival, he also provides a meditation about lanterns, a tip for experiencing the holiday, an overview of how this holiday relates to other festivals—plus three fascinating legends about the Lantern Festival involving emperors who were surprised at this time of year.

Every day of the year is given at least a full page with at least two different texts to consider. Pick up a copy of this book of wonders, whatever your faith may be, and you’re sure to find something enlightening as the seasons turn this year.

REVIEW BY READTHESPIRIT EDITOR DAVID CRUMM

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Help us launch a landmark series with Indian-Americans

February 11, 2013 by

DIWALI, the Indian Festival of Lights, is celebrated in many American communities, now. Here, family members kindle a carefully arranged array of Diwali lightsWELCOME Joe Grimm, known nationally as a columnist for the Poynter Institute, an author and part of the Journalism School faculty at Michigan State University. Joe’s previous collaboration between MSU and ReadTheSpirit was The New Bullying, the experimental book that made headlines for its production last year in only 101 days.

TODAY, Joe is inviting all of our readers to pitch in and help us with a new landmark series …

Help Us
Create a
New Generation of Cultural Guides

JOE GRIMM writes …

QUESTIONS—like roads—can connect or they can divide. 

Where are you from?
How did you get here?
Why did you come here?

We can ask those questions to draw people closer or to push them away.

Journalism students at Michigan State University are using questions just like these to understand people better. They are asking 100 questions to better understand Indian-Americans. No one in the class is Indian. These are talented young journalists full of questions and they understand that they are asking these questions on behalf of all Americans who are curious about the answers.

Their goal is to publish a guide of 100 questions and answers that will represent a simple step toward greater understanding. They plan to ask some of the big questions about demography and religion and language and some of the little questions that we just don’t know how to ask politely.

The national emblem of India reminds Indians of the beloved ancient ruler Ashoka. The four lions face in four directions with smaller symbolic animals beneath them. Overall, they symbolize power, courage and confidence. The lotus blossoms symbolize creative inspiration and the renewal of life. The motto translates: “Truth alone triumphs.”A LANDMARK SERIES: This guide will be the first in a series of guides on cultural competence, each one focused on a particular nationality, ethnicity, race or religion. The project is a joint undertaking by Read the Spirit and the MSU School of Journalism. And we’d like you to help. More about that soon.

Working across cultures can be awkward. It can be embarrassing. We don’t want to seem stupid and we don’t want to bruise people’s feelings. But many of us wonder:

What does the dot on someone’s forehead mean?
Is it related to religion?
Why are so many Indians in IT and engineering?
Or medicine?
And what do Indian-Americans want the rest of us to know about them?

Finding the right questions, reporting through the answers and then disseminating them is classic, brass-tacks journalism. We think we can use our journalism skills to help close some gaps.

This is what student Hayley Shannon wrote said after completing her first assignment, which was to sit down with someone who is Indian and ask about the biases, misconceptions and questions they encounter: “After speaking with an Indian colleague of mine, it became clear that she faces biases constantly in regard to her race and culture. While it mostly comes from ignorance and is in no way malicious, the extremity of misunderstanding often becomes offensive. This guide will provide an easy, all-in-one resource to gain a broad understanding of Indian culture so that fewer Indian people are offended by outlandish questions and assumptions made by others. I am proud of this project because it provides people with the means to take responsibility in understanding other cultures besides their own, and will hopefully help create a more welcoming community for Indians.”

It’s funny how the words “community” and “communication” are branches from the same root. And here’s how the Read the Spirit community can help …

HERE’S YOUR PART! PLEASE PITCH IN!

YOU CAN HELP: We already have a lot of questions, but we want to have the right questions. We need all the help we can get. If you are Indian-American or Indian or South Asian, send us the questions you wish someone would answer for general readers. If you are not Indian, tell us what you want us to ask. These Michigan State journalism students will get some answers. We will publish the guide by mid-2013. We’ll follow up with you on Read the Spirit, of course.

SEND SUGGESTIONS TO: Email [email protected]

‘China Heavyweight’ shows us rural lives driven by hope

February 9, 2013 by

‘CHINA HEAVYWEIGHT’ Qi Moxiang trains in Huili County, Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan Province. Photo by Sun Shaoguang, courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.THE WEALTH GAP is emerging as one of the biggest political, cultural and moral issues of our era. Not only is America’s wealth gap widening until upward mobility seems impossible for millions of poor Americans—but the global wealth gap threatens to keep world peace a distant hope. That’s the larger drama that keeps us watching China Heavyweight, the latest feature-length documentary from director Yung Chang and Zeitgeist films.

CLICK THE DVD COVER to visit the film’s Amazon page.Dirt-poor, rural Chinese kids are given opportunities at middle-school age to take a shot at wealth and success by competing in boxing camps. In 1959, Mao Tse Tung banned Western boxing for many years—as “too American and too violent,” as we learn in the opening minutes of this new documentary. But boxing is back now in the new China! As you watch this film, you will spot dozens of American icons from framed photos of Muhammad Ali to the Nike Swoosh surrounding these communities. That rising public interest in China frees educators, trainers and sports promoters to lure children toward the growing sport.

That description may make this movie sound like a simple tale of Good vs. Evil, of Western temptation threatening the health and wellbeing of China’s next generation. But filmmaker Yung Chang is a far better documentarian than that. Think of Hoop Dreams, the 1994 American documentary about poor, urban kids trying to make it in professional basketball. That documentary was showered with awards and has been listed, now, in the prestigious National Film Registry as an important depiction of American life.

Think of China Heavyweight as a kind of Asian Ring Dreams—as we watch stoic-looking young people pull on padded sparring helmets and thick gloves to train for their longshot of an Olympic berth. If you dislike sports films and perhaps hate boxing films, you should know that there is, indeed, some real boxing shown on screen. But much of this feature film takes us to the home communities and informal circles of friends and family that surround these boxers.

We are not alone in highly recommending this film for anyone interested in understanding global culture today. Variety magazine calls the movie “an intimate and affecting account of two aspiring boxers from the sticks training under the same hard-working coach. As he did in his Three Gorges Dam documentary Up the Yangtze, Chang examines how a particular strain of Western culture promises opportunity and prosperity for Chinese youth, even as it remains a continual source of intergenerational tension.”

In Film Comment magazine, Meredith Slifkin writes: “China Heavyweight isn’t just a story about boxing or about three individuals and their personal relationships to the sport. It’s about the significance of a traditionally Western sport’s emergence in a changing Eastern culture, the philosophy of chasing a dream—and the way that the trajectory of this trio comes to represent the cultural shifts of a disappearing rural China.”

If you like this film, you will also want to know about a related documentary about the huge annual migration across China for the New Year’s holidays, called Last Train Home, which also shows us the tensions in China between life in the nation’s industrial centers and fragile survival in rural homes.

REVIEW BY READTHESPIRIT EDITOR DAVID CRUMM

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Madame H.P. Blavatsky: Dawn of interfaith exploration

January 13, 2013 by

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.MILLIONS OF AMERICANS are celebrating the lives of visionary anti-slavery activists who dared to cross religious and cultural boundaries to build a nationwide coalition that finally led to freedom. We have published lots of stories about the 150-year milestones this year. See our interview with scholar Stephen Prothero as well as our overview of PBS Abolitionists series running all month. For nearly two centuries, prophetic American activists like Angelina Grimke were crisscrossing the religious landscape in pursuit of human rights. 

FLASH FORWARD A CENTURY and we celebrate interfaith pioneers like Huston Smith (public TV personality and author of major books), Jacob Needleman (scholar-philosopher charting new paths into religious diversity), Bill Moyers (bringing these themes to PBS), Karen Armstrong (historian and peace activist), the Dalai Lama and Pope John Paul II (hosts of global gatherings).

THIS WEEK, thanks to Gary Lachman—a talented author and historian—we invite readers to rediscover a giant from the dawn of interfaith relations: “Madame” H.P. (or Helena) Blavatsky.

TODAY, we recommend that you enjoy Lachman’s newest biography, Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality. If this is your first encounter with this larger-than-life woman, you are in for a treat! What’s more, you are learning about a true pillar in worldwide religious history. At first glance, she can appear to be an outrageously mysterious P.T. Barnum of spirituality! But historians and scholars of religion agree: Blavatsky’s promotion of non-Christian religions in the 1800s led directly to a wider American discovery of these huge religious groups. And, long after her death, the movement she founded played a role in helping Gandhi achieve freedom in India. Intrigued?

ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm interviewed Gary Lachman and here are …

HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR INTERVIEW
WITH GARY LACHMAN ON MADAME H.P. BLAVATSKY

DAVID: At first glance, Madame Blavatsky’s life seems more like an over-the-top novel than a serious matter for readers concerned about international peacemaking today. I’ve often described her as a kind of P.T. Barnum of world religions. She and her movement stacked up some amazing achievements—but she also cultivated this air of international mystery, didn’t she?

GARY: She was this kind of wild child who emerged out of Russia in the mid 19th century. She grew up in an aristocratic Russian family. Her grandmother was a princess, so she had a noble pedigree. Her father was a captain, and later a colonel, in the horse guards in the Russian Army. But, early in her life, she developed this appetite for the unknown. She had this strong sense that truth was out there in the world—answers to religious and metaphysical and spiritual questions. This desire to find those answers came to her at a very early age.

When she was 17 or so, she wed this Mr. Blavatsky who was older. He was in his 40s. The marriage was unconsummated and, after just a few weeks, she ran off and went on her quest into the unknown. Depending on how much you believe of the story she told, she went around the world a few times. Then, she landed in New York in 1873 and that’s when she surfaces on the public record. She goes to Chittenden, Vermont, to a place where a series of spiritual manifestations were reported.

Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott later in their lives. Photo from 1888. Learn more about the online archive of Blavatsky photos at the end of this article.DAVID: We’re talking here about the Eddy Brothers, who were hosting some séances that had received attention from around the world. One person attracted to the town was Colonel Henry Olcott, who had been a longtime journalist and was famous as a Civil War veteran and a member of the team that investigated the assassination of President Lincoln. We’ll be doing a lot of coverage of Lincoln this year. But, back in the 1870s, Olcott moves on to investigate the occult movement sweeping through parts of the American heartland and he winds up in Chittenden. Then, Madame Blavatsky shows up—and there is this historic convergence of these two major figures.

GARY: She had read articles by Col. Olcott, who was considered an American war hero. But, he also was a businessman, an insurance agent and he had a deep interest in spiritualism and what we would call today the paranormal. He was covering the story of the Eddy Brothers, who lived in Chittenden.

Madame Blavatsky sought out Olcott and their lives connected in a way we see happening in other important relationships related to religion and spirituality. A few decades later, the Russian esoteric master Gurdjieff would connect with P.D. Ouspensky, a well-known journalist and writer in their era, and their resulting relationship would become important to both of them in the early 20th century.

In the 1870s, Blavatsky met Olcott in Vermont and that changed both of their lives. In New York, she became this powerful figure in the occult community and the Theosophical Society was founded in 1875. But Blavatsky rarely stayed in one place. She stayed in New York for a while. Then, she had to leave for India by the mid 1880s because of scandal surrounding claims that she was a fraud. She spent the last years of her life, before her death in 1891, as a refugee in Europe.

She moves around so much in such a fascinating era that in my book about her, I try to help readers get a feel for the era and the places she traveled. For example, she was in London at the same era as the Jack the Ripper case and the gas-lit Sherlock Holmes stories were starting to appear in print.

PIONEERS IN TRANSPORTING AND RESHAPING RELIGION

DAVID: It’s easy today to make fun of some of the more bizarre twists and turns in early interfaith history. But, I tend to regard a lot of these early figures as good, intelligent people with a noble desire to expand humanity’s appreciation of religion. We have to remember that the typical junk Americans were reading about other world cultures was served up in pulp novels and penny newspapers and tended to regard other religions as savage and, by default, dangerous if not downright evil.

GARY: One way to describe Madame Blavatsky is: She’s the person who kick started modern spirituality.

DAVID: Yes, from what I know about her, I agree. But let’s talk about her own religious faith. She comes out of Orthodox Christian Russia, at least the aristocratic version of that church. But she left that affiliation far behind. How do you describe her personal faith?

GARY: She called herself Buddhist but she had her own particular meaning for that. This led to a complicated misunderstanding within the movement. She liked A.P. Sinnett’s book Esoteric Buddhism. But the truth is that his version is so esoteric that no Buddhist scholars had heard of it—and haven’t to this day. The author claims that he was writing about a primal teaching that Buddhism came out of. Blavatsky herself says that Buddhism was the kind of teaching that she found on tablets in a monastery. So, a lot of what they were talking and writing about was this esoteric version of Buddhism. However, we also can say that Blavatsky was the one who introduced Mahayana Buddhism to American culture in a popular way. Many of the figures we consider to be early popularizers of Buddhism in the West, like Christmas Humphreys, were part of the Theosophist movement at some point.

DAVID: She was rejecting a lot of aspects of mainstream Christianity in her era, right? She wanted to blow open the potential of spiritual exploration to include other world faiths.

GARY: I think she adopted her particular form of Buddhism militantly against the mainstream Christianity of the time. Think of her as banging her hammer against the citadel of bourgeouis Christianity in her day. She wanted to free people, in her view. She wanted to chip away at the kind of established Judeo-Christian view of the world in the West. There were some negative and even nasty theories that connected with the Theosophist movement, after her death. But, Madame Blavatsky was strongly into progressive movements, what we would call left-wing issues today.

MADAME BLAVATSKY: MYSTERIOUS MATRIARCH

Madame Blavatsky in 1877.DAVID: What was her appeal? Whatever else we may think about her, she had an intense appeal to many people. By the 20th century, a lot of the women who became very popular as evangelists were regarded as beautiful. I’m thinking of Aimee Semple McPherson, who appeared on stage in various costumes and cultivated her exotic beauty. Blavatsky wasn’t a beauty.

GARY: I think her appeal relates to her gravitas. You felt that she was for real—even when she was pulling your leg. Theosophy did have quite a few women in leadership. There was Anna Kingsford, another strong woman who had a less-dominant man attached to her as a colleague—like Blavatsky and Olcott. Another strong woman leader in the movement was Annie Besant. There also were strong men who emerged in Theosophy: Rudolph Steiner and then, of course, Krishnamurti.

Overall, I think we can say it was the strength of their ideas and their chutzpah or charisma that drew people to them. No, Blavatsky did not have any sexual allure. She described herself as having a volcano in her brain but ice in the lower sexual regions in her life. The rumors about her having illegitimate children were untrue. She felt that sex was a beastly trait in humanity and that we should wipe it out. Steiner was another famous celibate. This movement was very different than, for example, the esoteric ideas from someone like an Aleister Crowley who was, I would say, polymorphously perverse and wanted to take spirituality in a completely different direction.

DAVID: OK, so you’ve touched on something we should clarify for readers. When people encounter words like “occult” or “esoteric,” and they begin to scratch the surface of this whole movement—it’s not long before they bump into someone like Crowley with his silly-looking hat that he designed for his so-called Order of the Golden Dawn. In the lives of figures like Crowley there is, indeed, all the kind of wild behavior, including wild sex, that turns out to be the flaw in some of these movements. Crowley consciously tried to use what we would call today dark magic. That’s quite distinct from the Theosophists, as you’ve pointed out. But there were cross-over figures, too, weren’t there? W.B. Yeats for example?

GARY: Yates joined the Theosophist society. He became interested in it when he was living in Dublin and, when he was living in London, we know that he went to the meetings while Blavatsky was living there. Later, though, he wanted to experiment with what we could call practical magic. Blavatsky herself was against things like ceremonial magic. Yates was asked to leave and later he went on to join the Golden Dawn, the most famous occult society of the late 19th century. If you know all of this about Yates and you read his poetry, you can find many references to different ideas from Theosophy. Blavatsky sparked the imagination of many creative people. Wassily Kandinsky, who is considered to be the first painter to create purely abstract paintings, was deep into Theosophy and a lot of his theories about nonrepresentational art come out of ideas he found there.

MADAME BLAVATSKY, THEOSOPHY AND INDIAN INDEPENDENCE

DAVID: There’s a very long and fascinating history involving Gandhi and the movement toward Indian independence just after World War II. Blavatsky herself lived and worked in India. After her death, Theosophist gatherings were one place that Indians of all classes could gather and seriously talk about the importance of their culture—and their hopes for the future.

GARY: Yes, that’s right. In a fundamental sense, Blavatsky and the Theosophists re-introduced people in India to their own native traditions. They took Indian religious traditions seriously and they actually said: This is better than Western traditions. For Indians, it was startling to meet these influential Westerners coming to them and saying that the Hindu tradition was better then their own in the West. All the other Westerners were coming to tell them that they had to learn about Jesus and become Christians. Here were these eloquent Theosophists praising their traditions to the skies! This was an amazing boost to the self esteem of Indians and, yes, eventually this fed into the Indian indepdence movement.

MADAME BLAVATSKY: A VAST STAGE, AN EXPLOSION OF IDEAS

DAVID: Another easy mistake to make, I think, is to read about some of Blavatsky’s own bizarre parlor tricks, we might call them, and to assume she was a fraud for profit. In your book, you describe a few of these things she did to amaze her followers. But, the truth is, she emerges as an amazing feminist pioneer. She was supremely self sufficient even though her thick spiritual books were close to financial flops. She had to work hard her whole life just to keep going.

GARY: This is absolutely true! She didn’t do this to make money! She worked hard her whole life to make a living. She had to fend for herself and, at one point, she developed an ink factory. She developed an artificial-flower factory. She found these trees with a certain kind of fungus that could be cut and sold to help people in starting fires. She was a very practical, resourceful character. And, she wrote an enormous amount—reams and reams and reams. She wrote her big books on spirituality. She wrote journalism. She even wrote some ripping tales about her world travels.

Blavatsky is a catalyst who comes into people’s lives and stirs up things. Olcott probably woundn’t have gone to india on his own, for example, but Blavatsky gets him to go to India and the Theosophist movement goes to India with them. Blavatsky’s message is this very positive forward-looking view of the progression of humanity out of slavery in the past into freedom. Even people like Thomas Edison took some ideas from Theosophy. People like Edison weren’t signed up to the full Theosophist creed, but they were attracted to some of the new ideas.

If you peel away all of the layers in Blavatsky’s life, you discover this real-life character who was influential in building our multifaith sensibility today and who promoted this whole idea of a universal pursuit of truth that should be open to everyone. She really was a liberationist. She’s was on the barricades fighting for what she saw as the best in the modern world.

Many other photographs of Blavatsky and early Theosophist meetings are collected at an online archive. Photos include some scenes of Blavatsky at gatherings in India.

Want more from Gary Lachman & esoteric realms?

Gary Lachman has a talent for combining historical research and an enjoyable narrative so general readers can begin to explore religious figures often considered esoteric or, in many cases, simply too difficult to understand. Lachman’s books are wonderful introductory readers—but these biographies also have substantial research behind each subject and real depth in the chapters. We recommend Lachman’s books as the first choice for exploring figures like Emanuel Swedenborg—we recommended Lachman’s biography of the Swedish scientist and philosopher last year. ALSO AVAILABLE NOW for the first time in a paperback edition is Lachman’s Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung’s Life and Teachings. 

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.