Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity

Richard Smoley
San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2008. 212 pages.

Conscious Love is an important book, coming at a critical time in human development when old values are dying and new values have not yet been fleshed out. In this book, Richard Smoley takes us through a number of different types of love romance, marriage, family life, friendship —each of which he characterizes as somehow "transactional," involving a certain exchange or quid pro quo, whether that is acknowledged or not. He contrasts these to agape or conscious love, which, he contends, is beyond transactions.

Smoley begins by telling an anecdote about the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He had fallen in love with a young woman when she was fourteen and he twenty-four. Several years later, still in love, he asked her to marry him and she happily agreed. But then he turned cold. Provoked by his attitude, she broke off their engagement and married another man. Kierkegaard remained a bachelor for the rest of his life. But when he died, he left his entire estate to the woman he never married.

Why did Kierkegaard behave in such a strange manner? He had decided that feeling erotic love for the woman was simply selfishness on his part and had nothing to do with true love, which ultimately should be reserved only for God. With respect to this attitude, Smoley has a lovely quote from Russian philosopher of love Vladimir Solovyov saying that "this unfortunate spiritual love reminds one of the little angels in old paintings, which have only a head, then wings and no more."

Though this denial of the flesh runs deep in Christianity, Smoley argues that "conscious love" does not have to be "freedom from drives or passions or self-interest but rather freedom within them." The rest of his book carefully develops and expands on this theme.

If the body cannot be ignored in love, is it all there is? Are we simply following an inborn, embodied need to perpetuate the species, as sociobiologists today argue? So it would seem at first, Smoley argues: "Each of us seeks the fittest possible mate, and satisfied or not, we settle for the best we can find. This is the law of nature, and the law is inexorable." From a biological point of view, each of us is born isolated into a hostile world. We have to find some way to protect ourselves. Ironically, after we have managed to do so, we feel a contrary urge to go past our own barriers of protection. "For humans," he writes, "the means of bridging this gap is often romantic love."

Smoley points to a certain tension here. While romantic love begins out of a need to perpetuate the species, at its best it goes past this urge: "Whenever I read of a truly great love, I am struck by all its uniqueness. Such loves don't fit easily into conventional schemes. Chaste or carnal, blissful or ill-starred, they are in every case the deepest expressions of the individuals themselves."

Why is this so? To answer this question, Smoley presents a position that he develops carefully throughout the book: inside each of us is (1) "something that experiences;" and (2) "that which is experienced" [emphasis in the original]. The first can be called the "I," the second the "world." The "world" is not only what we usually call the outside world; it includes the inner world as well, since that is also part of our experience.

All this takes us into deep water. "If all of what passes for my experience is in itself a sort of other . . . who or what is this mind that is doing the looking? And where is the dividing line between my mind and someone else's?" He goes on to say that the true "I" is more than the ego we normally associate with it; it is potentially our gateway to all that is. The entire path of enlightenment can be summarized simply as the inner need to know yourself. If we go through this process, Smoley claims, we will discover that there is "no real border between this 'I' and the collective 'I' in which we all participate." To realize this truth is to step past transactional love and to touch conscious, unconditional love.

Smoley asks where we can find God in this picture. In order to answer that question, he claims that there is a deeper meaning for "God" than conventional theology often assumes: God is "what theologian Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the 'terrifying and attractive mystery.'" Put in one word, which Otto also coined: God is the numinous! What Smoley calls the true "I" —which is ultimately a collective "I" —is the gateway for access to the divine. "This is the mystical meaning of Christ's saying "I am the door' (John 10:9): The 'I' is the door."Smoley's ultimate point is that this joining with another can take us beyond our personal boundaries, and that joining is ultimately a progressive path toward the joining with the Godhead.

How can this true "I," the witness that can observe everything, still be embodied? In answering this question, Smoley makes one of the most significant points of the book: "This consciousness is not limited to human or even to living beings but subsists in everything, no matter how apparently inanimate." This is God in his most immanent aspect. As we begin to recognize this truth experientially, Smoley argues, the individual mind begins to pass into all that is.

While we are on the way to this high place, somewhere along the line we must each discover our vocation, our "special function," as the author terms it. When one first does discover one's vocation, rather that feeling a union with everyone and everything in cosmic love, instead we tend to initially feel isolated from all those around us. In such an uncomfortable position, we first fall either into arrogance or despondent. Some escape this because their path allows them to find companions; others continue alone. But following that special path, honoring our "special function," leads onward toward the cosmic union.

Smoley has taken us on a long path that led from Kierkegaard, who valued his head over his heart, through recognition of the wisdom of the body and heart, through all the varieties of love. At this point, he says simply that "there is something in us that stands apart from the ceaseless flow of the head's thoughts and the equally ceaseless flow of the heart's feelings and can see them." In the words from an ancient Chinese text: "Consciousness dissolves in vision."

This is an important book, the first I've seen that looks at love from a position rooted not only in esoteric Christianity, but in the deepest spiritual traditions of all times and places. Though the scholarship underlying the book is immense, the author wears it lightly, using both historical quotes and personal anecdotes to get his message across. The book is particularly significant in arguing for an embodied love that can bridge the old and the new. As the author writes, "we, in our physical bodies, are the instruments not only for God's work in this world but for his experience as well. If our own consciousness is elevated..., our pleasure becomes God's pleasure as well."

Robin Robertson

Robin Robertson, Ph.D. is a Jungian-oriented clinical psychologist and the author of sixteen books, including Beginner's Guide to Jungian Psychology. His latest work, Alchemy and Chaos Theory, will be published by Quest Books in 2009.

The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual and Social Harmony

Will Tuttle
New York: Lantern Books, 2005. Paperback, $20, 318 pages.

Will Tuttle's The World Peace Diet is a challenging wake-up call. Many spiritual traditions, including Theosophy, have advocated ethical vegetarianism and care for animals. However, the compelling reasons for such a position have rarely been articulated with as much detail and force as in Tuttle's fine new book. His tone is urgent and uncompromising, yet filled with compassionate understanding. Even if one may not agree with him in every point, he forces the reader to consider matters which too often remain unconscious.
Tuttle writes that his book is:

An exploration of the profound cultural and spiritual ramifications of our food chain and the mentality underlying them. By placing humans at the top of the planet's food chain, our culture has historically perpetuated a particular worldview that requires from its members a reduction of essential feeling and awareness—and it is this process of desensitization that we must understand if we would comprehend the underlying causes of oppression, exploitation, and spiritual disconnectedness.

Graphically reviewing the horrors of factory farming and slaughterhouses, Tuttle reminds us that we reinforce our blindness to these realities with every meal that includes animal products. Some of us may feel more comfortable with dairy and eggs, since animals are not directly killed to produce these foods. However, Tuttle displays the deeply disturbing conditions under which chickens and cows typically live, as well as the character of theft which underlies milk and egg production. He then relates this theft to "our culture's basic repression, confinement, and exploitation of the female and feminine principle".

Tuttle reminds us of the essential solidarity and interconnectedness of all life. We cannot pretend that we can mistreat other sentient beings with impunity, regarding them as commodities instead of fellow creatures. "Dominating others requires us to disconnect from them, and from aspects of ourselves as well" (130). From a theosophical perspective, we can welcome Tuttle's examination of what we might call the karmic consequences of our treatment of animals raised for food, as well as the invisible, energetic realities which we consume in animal food.

Metaphysical toxins—i.e., the concentrated vibration of terror, grief, frustration, and desperation permeating these foods, are invisible and completely unrecognized by conventional science, yet they may be even more disturbing to us than physical toxins, because they work on the level of feelings and consciousness, which are more essential dimensions of ourselves than our physical vehicle.

"In the old herding cultures, animals were gradually transformed from mysterious and fascinating cohabitants of a shared world to mere property objects to be used, sold, traded, confined, and killed" (25). Insofar as we can see through this distortion, and make more conscious and compassionate choices, we will be better able to disentangle ourselves from other ways in which violence, destruction, and the treatment of others as objects have found their way into our lives. After all, "our actions reinforce attitudes, in us and in others, that amplify the ripples of those actions until they become the devastating waves of insensitivity, conflict, injustice, brutality, disease, and exploitation that rock our world today"

John Plummer

The reviewer is a member of the Theosophical Society, a freelance theologian, author of several books and articles on esoteric Christianity, and co-author with John Marby of Who Are the Independent Catholics? (Apocryphile, 2006).

Transforming Fate into Destiny: A New Dialogue with Your Soul

Robert Ohotto
Foreword by Caroline Myss. Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House, 2008. $14.95. 207 pages.

Why am I here? What is my purpose in life? How can I fulfill my destiny? In Transforming Fate into Destiny, his first book, Robert Ohotto treats these questions clearly and succinctly using his own years of personal experience as well as his work as an intuitive and astrologer.

The terms "fate" and "destiny" are often thought of as the same kind of mysterious force. Ohotto contends that fate and destiny are very different, though collaborative, agencies. Fate is the mysterious preincarnate design of our life that is written in the stars. Destiny, by contrast, is what you make of this design. Ohotto calls the negotiation between fate and destiny your "Cosmic Contract." By means of this contract, we can choose what to do within our mortal limits in order to be more successful as well as less anxious and resistant to life. He writes, "We must embrace consciously that a choice was made when our soul met with our body incarnate, and we made a soul 'decision' to be bound to a contract with Fate....The ego often finds this baffling. How many of us have looked at our lives and wondered why didn't I pick the lot of Bill Gates?" Nevertheless, he adds, "if you are in touch with your true passion, a creative obstacle is meant to help you bring it out more effectively in the world." At this point your free will, in contact with Fate, becomes what the Chinese call wu chi — both crisis and opportunity for personal evolution.

Fate can take the form of a loss, an accident, a rejection. It can confront us as a shock, but it can be an opportunity as well. What our consciousness and ego do with these shocks is the point of the book. Ohotto calls this life-enhancing struggle "a dialogue with the soul": Our Cosmic Contract stipulates that we must come to terms with the fate point, the juncture at which we encounter our mortal limits and must realize our personal potential within those limits.

In this book, Ohotto goes chapter by chapter to explain the process of working with these obstacles, employing lessons and practices that establish new ways of attracting "a way to destiny" in order to clarify and in some cases remove psychological burdens and issues. In the latter half of the book, Ohotto moves into some deeply intuitive areas, illuminating new ways to cope with the shadow, the personal unconscious, and synchronicity. In the end, the book helps us genuinely find ways of doing what we must do anyway, and it helps us to do so with consciousness and intention.

Erin Sullivan

Erin Sullivan is a consultant astrologer, author, and lecturer. Her works include Saturn in Transit: Boundaries of Mind, Body and Soul; Astrology of Family Dynamics; and The Astrology of Midlife and Aging.

Marty Bax
Amsterdam: SUN, 2006. — 42.90 607, pages.

A genuine work of art encompasses an artist's whole being in the inspiration, ideas, and feelings that it expresses. What prevails of the greatest value in art is the spiritual dimension. Paul Klee said it succinctly: "Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible."

The major exhibition by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986-87 titled The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890—1985, proved that, even in modern times, the spiritual is very much a part of art. Both the exhibition and its catalogue showed that while much of modern art has become so abstract that it appears to be lost in pure form rather than (as we commonly expect) representing our ideas of the physical world, this abstraction reveals a search for the spiritual. The exhibition pointed to Theosophy (and other strains of esoteric wisdom) as a leading impulse for this search, particularly for artists such as Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky, who are considered the fathers of abstract art. The essential idea was that if the search in art was to express the spiritual, which is formless, only abstract forms could serve that purpose by avoiding the distractions and limitations of concrete objects. This kind of art tried to make visible what cannot be seen, although it can be experienced. Since the time of Mondrian and Kandinsky in the early twentieth century, the Theosophical influence has become more dispersed in a variety of currents from New Age to Zen.

With notable exceptions such as the Los Angeles exhibition, the absence of spiritual study is the norm in milieus where art is usually taught and practiced. (I can testify to this, having taught in such environments for over forty years and found that the subject is virtually taboo.) A sense of the spiritual is absent from the social establishment of collectors, critics, and museums that is responsible for formulating the public perception of "good art." The establishment's valuation mostly reflects a materialistic view of artists and artifacts, focused on their market value. Academic art history, on the other hand, generally examines its subject through visual analysis of form and style rather than through the ideas that lie behind them. Since they tend to overlook the spiritual interests of artists, scholars and historians who have discussed this relationship generally prove to have only a superficial knowledge of Theosophy and similar currents. Therefore they can offer no insight into the phenomenon, nor can they understand the values and controversies that surround this material.

At last we have a book that looks into the fusion of Theosophy and art from an author who has substantial knowledge of both. Marty Bax's work is presently available only in Dutch [redundant, as already included at the beginning]. This scholarly 600-page work examines the complex web of factors in the relationship between art and spirituality. Bax saw a real need to study the ideas that generated this interest, the social context in which it took place, and the various effects it had on individuals and groups in Theosophy, art, and culture. Her methodology underscores the need for other art historians to use a similar approach if they are to offer any genuine understanding of the subject.

Rather than limiting her discussion to "fine art" (painting and sculpture), Bax also includes architecture and design on the premise that these disciplines not only have equal value but influence one another, especially from an esoteric perspective. The unfortunate intellectual tendency to separate design from fine art represents a gross misunderstanding that ignores the intention behind the artifact. Instead it imposes value based on function in society, implying that "fine art" is the "highest" way to practice art, while architecture or "applied" or "decorative" art (metal and ceramic work, furniture and product design, book and graphic design, etc.) is "lower" because of its commercial or functional intent. But spirituality does not limit its perspective to a single mode of expression. From a Theosophical perspective, both the creative artifact and the artist himself are vahanas ("vehicle" for the spiritual in Sanskrit)—an idea that comes to light in this book and which was a major theme for some of the figures discussed here.

Although this book focuses on Dutch artists and their culture in the first half of the twentieth century, one can draw further inferences from it about how esotericism has affected art in general. Because I am of Dutch origin, I felt that I could relate more easily than the non-Dutch to the social, geographic, and historical issues described here, and was at first somewhat critical of portions in the study that appeared too detailed for a non-Dutch audience. However, the more I read, the more I valued such details, which enable even non-Dutch readers to understand the larger context of the ideas and insights discussed. In any event, the picture goes far past Dutch art as such, if only because Dutch artists played such a preeminent international role in this period, especially in design.

The author has tried not only to understand Theosophy but to grasp how Theosophists think and live, as well as how this has influenced the practice of art and its social environment. The book presents the underpinnings of ideas that led up to the interest in Theosophy: the social and ideological context; connections to freethinkers such as Baruch Spinoza; the Freemasons; and parallel trends in art in other countries (especially French Symbolism).

Bax goes on to show how artists shared Theosophical ideas among themselves and how these ideas manifested through individuals and groups. A main example of the latter is the Vahana Lodge of the Dutch TS, created specifically (though not exclusively) for those interested in art, design, and architecture. Mathieu Lauweriks, a principal advocate of both Theosophy and Theosophical theory in art, taught ideas ranging from cell and geometric systems (especially sacred geometry) to asymmetry and organics as vitalizing principles (Fohat, kundalini) for creation and unity. These esoteric elements influenced design styles, including the famous Amsterdam School of architecture and its creator, H. P. Berlage, who is generally considered the father of Dutch modern architecture, but whose Theosophical influence is usually overlooked.

Bax goes into some detail about three painters and their Theosophical interests: Herman Heijenbroek saw the blue-collar worker as a Promethean transformer of raw matter and sought to inspire this social group through his paintings; Janus de Winter saw his work as a visionary vehicle derived from the astral perspective; and Piet Mondrian, utilizing the underlying principles of cosmo/anthropogenisis, offered a glimpse of this ultimately invisible cosmic web. Bax does not, however, limit her study to those recognized by the art establishment but includes lesser-known artists, whose influences were nonetheless considerable, and describes how their work was accepted or rejected socially. She does the same for architecture and design, and how these affected each other.

Ultimately, this study reveals how a Theosophical orientation, based on freethinking and diversity, produced many different forms of expression, making it difficult to speak of "Theosophical art," since no iconography, form, or style entirely fits such categorization. Frequently artists were active in multiple disciplines (one reason Bax was compelled to cover the full panorama of art). This diversity becomes apparent through her case studies—an approach that also makes it easier to understand the influence of Theosophy on specific artists.

I found this to be an absorbing and insightful book that should be of value to all who want to understand the interface between Theosophy and art, and how this phenomenon helped shape the social environment and affected the future of modern art. The book's clarity, thoroughness, and cohesion are exemplary. They make me hope that this work, which deserves the attention of Theosophists, artists, and art experts alike, will become available in English soon.

Thomas Ockerse

This reviewer is professor of graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design, a third generation Theosophist, and Life Member of the Theosophical Society. He served as Eastern Regional Director and on the Pumpkin Hollow board, and lectured at various centers here and abroad on the relationship of Theosophy and art.