Quest Magazine

Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump

Gary Lachman
New York: TarcherPerigree, 2018. xxii + 234 pp., paper, $17.

It is always a pleasure to read a new book by Gary Lachman, as there are few writers in the field of esoteric and occult studies who write as clearly and engagingly while also maintaining a mind-boggling level of output. Like his mentor and literary hero Colin Wilson, Lachman (a longtime Quest contributor) has the gift of digesting an array of ideas, theories, historical details, and mostly obscure thinkers, and rendering up highly readable books that avoid both scholarly nitpicking and pop sensationalism.

Dark Star Rising is no exception and, for bonus points, it may be Lachman’s most timely book, given its relevance to the Age of Trump, which continues to unfold on a daily basis.

To briefly summarize, Lachman starts out pondering the possible causes behind Donald Trump’s unexpected and, for millions, perplexing election victory. Rather than focusing on theories about Russian meddling, Lachman notes several factors that may have eluded most people’s attention.

One is Trump’s decades of practicing Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking (most famously described in his best-selling book of that title). Trump’s father introduced his son to Peale’s perspective in the 1950s and initiated his lifelong attendance at Peale’s Manhattan church. Lachman explores the history of New Thought, the hugely influential spiritual movement that blossomed in the late nineteenth century and counted Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science and Ernest Holmes’s Science of Mind among its propagators. Peale was perhaps the most famous of its exponents.

In a nutshell, New Thought teaches that we create our own reality through the thoughts we cultivate; that our individual minds are a manifestation of the universal mind or intelligence; and that if we wish to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, we can attract those states through prayer, creative visualization, a positive attitude, and maintaining a faith that the bounty of life can be ours.

Lachman suggests that Trump’s insistence on his own positively defined reality, which strikes so many as delusional or sociopathic, is rather an ingrained case of positive thinking, which for the most part has served him well throughout his life (taking him to the White House, for example).

Lachman also notes the pervasive influence of postmodernist theories that have saturated academia and oozed into Western culture at large. Rejecting the grand narratives of historical and cultural explanation that have characterized modernity, postmodernism has championed the rise of a subjective fracturing of the notion of truth. This feeds into the present space, where consensus reality has broken down. Accusations of “fake news” arise from both left and right, exacerbating the sense that everything is just a matter of interpretation. “You create your own reality,” indeed.

 Lachman also examines the Internet-based phenomenon of meme propagation, which amounts to the rapid spread in social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and 4Chan) of catchphrases, images, and clusters of ideas that have widespread social influence. According to Lachman, these resemble the practices of Chaos Magick and the sigil-based magick of Austin Osman Spare. (This spelling of magick originated with occultist Aleister Crowley, who used it to distinguish occult magic from the sleight-of-hand variety. Chaos Magick uses unorthodox, often ad hoc, ritual forms and stresses the subjective nature of belief.) In other words, the “anything goes” meme propagators of the alt-right, who spread the cartoon image of Pepe the Frog in mockery of progressives, may have been unknowingly (or not) using an esoteric practice that harnesses the power of intention, will, and mental energy to produce real-world results. As unlikely as this may seem, Lachman makes a plausible case for it.

 The most extended section of Dark Star Rising ponders the influence of Traditionalism on current political trends. This includes both the Traditionalism of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon on the one hand and the more politicized version of Julius Evola on the other. Most curious among the defenders of Tradition in this sense is Alexander Dugin, a Russian intellectual who has bounced between supporting National Bolshevism, a Russian “red-brown” mixture of Stalinism and fascism, and Eurasianism, a geopolitical strategy that tries to cast Russia and its surrounding countries as an allied bloc. Given that Dugin identifies with the Traditionalist philosophy of Evola and savors the “positive” aspects of Stalinism and Nazism (whatever those may be), he is a controversial figure, to say the least. Lachman sees Dugin’s Eurasianism as a significant influence on Vladimir Putin’s attempts to restore Russia as a geopolitical force.

 But here too postmodernism may have the last laugh. If truth is up for grabs, and powerful rulers see fit to create their own realities, we may need to harness our own mental capacities and visualize a future that trumps those of both Putin and Trump.

In any event, Dark Star Rising is a stimulating read, and a provocative meditation on the hidden forces at work in our present juncture. Its timeliness, which is its greatest strength, may prove its greatest weakness a few years down the line. But for the time being, it serves as one of the most acute studies of the present moment.

 Jay Kinney

Jay Kinney was founder and publisher of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions and is a frequent contributor to Quest.

The Collected Letters of Alan Watts

Edited by Joan Watts and Anne Watts
Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2017. xv + 599 pp., hardcover, $32.50.

Collections of literary letters still emerge, but tragically there are ever fewer, because email has all but destroyed the art of letter writing. Yet when we find a collection of a great man’s or woman’s letters, doors open for us. We see into their minds and emotions, the weft and weave of their lives becomes an almost tactile texture. Sometimes we’re startled.

Author and lecturer Alan Watts (1915–73) is best known for introducing Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies to the generation that came of age in the 1950s and ’60s. Watts’s importance as a both a commentator on spirituality—indeed a bona fide revelator—and an agent of interfaith communication is never in doubt. He did more to sow the seeds of Zen in the West than any other single writer. His insights into the human and cosmic condition are on par with those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Swami Vivekananda, J. Krishnamurti, and Aldous Huxley.

This collection of his letters, edited by his two eldest daughters, Joan and Anne, occasionally renders up intimacy; certainly there’s insight, and plenty of intellectual shine. Of startlement there is little in the letters themselves. But the narrative presented in this collection of letters is agreeably goosed by intervals of commentary from Watts’s daughters. They tell us baldly what his letters only hint at: that he could be a womanizer and a kind of romance addict, often marrying and divorcing in search of a new fix. He struggled with alcoholism, and despite his good intentions he could be an aloof father.

The Collected Letters follows the arc of his life. They start with a number of precocious—and a little too precious—boyhood letters written from English boarding schools. This is followed by a good many somewhat stodgy college letters. Thereafter Watts moved to New York, became a citizen of the U.S. and, confronted with practicality, studied for the Episcopal priesthood. The constraints of this profession soon chafed, and he resigned after about six years, in 1950. Thereupon his letters—always well-written—become by turns academically austere, playful, and occasionally giddy during the balance of his life. This period was marked by an increasingly bohemian lifestyle, experimentation with psychedelics, deeper forays into meditation, and philosophical exchanges (only glimpsed in this collection) with the likes of Huxley, Henry Miller, Joseph Campbell, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The Collected Letters offers a selection of photos that illustrate the same arc, showing us a self-serious teen wearing a school tie, then an uncomfortable, mustachioed adult in suits, followed by the glowering priest in collar; on to long hair, trim beard, casual dress, Japanese kimonos, and loops of wooden beads.

Watts’s boyhood precocity and flair for independent thinking flowered in the 1930s, when he was captivated by a book on Buddhism. He officially became a Buddhist at the first opportunity. He wrote articles for a Buddhist magazine so well that he was asked to lecture, as his daughters tell us here, and when he arrived, the group was astonished to discover that he was a teenager. When he was merely twenty-one, he wrote to Carl Jung, taking him to task: “I was rather surprised to hear you say in your lecture . . . that you had never found any mandalas with six divisions.” He then gives Jung a longish epistolary lecture on the parts of mandalas.

 Watts was even younger, in his early teens, when he wrote An Outline of Zen Buddhism, a thirty-two page pamphlet. Just four years later, in 1935, E.P. Dutton published The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East.

Even as a priest Watts engaged in a quiet but persistent return to esotericism, Eastern and Western. In a letter to a friend in 1944, he said “Prayer in its essence is, of course, the contemplation of God as the living void or . . . the ‘luminous darkness.’ That is to say the aim is to reach the point where you abandon all images and concept of God whatever, as well as all specific technique of prayer.” This kind of casual, heretical discourse would have shocked his superiors in the church. In a letter of 1947 he suggests that the vitality of any religion issues from its esoteric nucleus and without it “there is a general decline of the entire religious and social order.”

In a letter of 1948 to a Yale scholar it becomes evident that Watts has already crystallized one of his key ideas—that the central consciousness of the universe experiences itself through us; that our job is to be God’s means of experiencing itself. “The concept of the infinite giving itself to the finite . . . is the central meaning of most Zen anecdotes.”

As trippy as that idea is, he hadn’t yet taken LSD. That came in the late 1950s. Certainly psychedelic experiences informed his later lectures, his speculation, his aesthetics, and quite possibly his erotic life. There are a few letters here to women self-effacingly, yet cunningly professing love. In his 1959 letter to a woman who was later to become his third wife, he says he has “an awful blast from my former girlfriend in LA . . . pointing out the dreadful defects in my character and intimating I will exploit you just as I exploited her. Oh Jano, aren’t you simply scared to death of getting so involved with me? . . . Perhaps I can console myself with the fact that only for you have I dropped the desire for all other relations.”

Watts never did completely find his way out of a morass of vodka and romance, but he accomplished much, he opened eyes, and he grew spiritually. The Collected Letters is a bit ponderous, at around 600 pages of fairly small print. His true devotees will want to read every word of it; others may choose to dip in. If that’s what you do, don’t neglect the parts written by Joan Watts and Anne Watts: they are nicely composed and entertaining. And the book is a worthy contribution to the literature of letters.

John Shirley

John Shirley is the author of Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (Tarcher/Penguin), and such novels as The Other End (Open Road), Demons (Del Rey), and a novel of Arthur Conan Doyle in the afterlife, Doyle after Death (HarperCollins).

An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation

MARTIN LAIRD
New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 232 pp., paper, $18.95.

There is a wonderful dialogue quoted in the preface to this book. It is from the children’s classic The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. When the Boy in the story starts loving any of his stuffed animals, they start to become real. The Rabbit, confused, asks the wise Skin Horse, “What is Real?” The Skin Horse tells him, “When a child REALLY loves you, then you become Real. . . . Sometimes pain is involved but then when you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt. . . . and it takes a long time.” Each of us can find a different meaning in this story, but the underlying truth is that love makes us real. Being real requires patience and endurance of hardship and struggles, but it can also smooth the jagged edges of life.

How do we find love that makes us real or, even more, makes those around us real? It is the faculty of loving that we reach through contemplation, which means that we stop clinging to thoughts (even though they may cling to us). Martin Laird’s book leads us through a journey within with a deep understanding of contemplative practice. It is our own unique conversation with the Skin Horse. Our predicaments are many—principally an inability to be aware of our thoughts. Such an awareness, if we develop it, allows us to choose what we give our attention to. The practice of contemplation is not only beneficial for us as individuals but also for the whole world. The fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing says that contemplation “is the work of the soul that pleases God most.”

Laird’s book is a companion volume to two preceding it: Into the Silent Land and A Sunlit Absence. The first addressed a need in the literature on contemplation for the “intermediates”—those who had a well-established practice. The second one focused more on the challenges in our practice and the nature of awareness: it is not what we are aware of but the process of being aware that needs our attention.

Laird’s current volume explores the themes from previous volumes from a different angle. It is composed of three parts. Part 1 goes into the illusion of being separate from God. We allow the voice of contemplation in our life so we understand the intimate presence of God. God does not know how to be absent. Why do we not see it? It is simply that our “vision is heavily lumbered” and our minds are cluttered.

Part 2 uses this metaphor of cluttering and decluttering as a pathway into the practice of contemplation. Laird stresses that the mind is not something static; it is impermanent. Laird highlights three aspects of mind: the reactive, receptive, and luminous, and he goes into each one with the same four questions: What is practice like? What is ego like? What contemplative skills are developing? What are special challenges?

We all know what practice is like for the reactive mind. It is constantly distracted by events. Our attention is stolen by thoughts and feelings. The ego comes in only one size: extra-large. It desperately tries to cling to what it wants and discards what it does not. The challenge is to bring awareness into the picture.

It is awareness that turns the reactive mind into the receptive mind. The receptive mind is less cluttered. Like the sun breaking through clouds, it has always been there. Sitting in silence is more natural to the receptive mind, and practice becomes a way of life for it.

Is the luminous mind any different from the reactive and receptive mind? Not really. It is indeed the underlying foundation of clarity, devoid of all clutter. The “I” present in the reactive and receptive phases has disappeared. It is radiant, present, pure and simple. It is true contemplative living.

Part 3 of Laird’s book deals with the immensely important topic of depression. Laird uses the term to include anxiety, dark thoughts, and other ailments. He says that the key to coping with depression is understanding that one may never get relief from it; for some, it is there to stay. What do contemplatives do then? They accept depression as a companion: this “frequent pattern of inner weather” needs to be allowed to be present. Through contemplation, we discover an inner stillness that remains even in the presence of depression. Understanding this darkness brings about light! It is a wonderful paradox of contemplative life.

Laird’s book introduces us to many voices of saints and authors and resources that are too many to mention. Some are old friends, some we meet for the first time. It is time worth spending.

Is Laird telling us something new? Jesus said, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3). I remember my mother teaching me the same thing through a Marathi proverb. The underlying truth is profound and deep, no matter the language or religion or philosophy. A new expression always helps!

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. He is a regular reviewer for Quest and volunteers in the archives department of the TSA.

Evolution of the Higher Consciousness: An In-Depth Study into H.P. Blavatsky’s Teachings

by PABLO SENDER
Ojai, Calif.: Fohat Productions, 2018. xxvi + 201 pp., hardcover $34.95; paperback $24.95.

Theosophists are often reproached for failing to put their somewhat abstruse teachings into practice. Many people believe that the principles of Theosophy are so abstract and lofty that they are of no practical use in the real world. In the present book, Theosophical teacher Pablo Sender rises above such criticism by presenting Theosophical theory as it was put forth by its original teachers (H.P. Blavatsky and the Mahatmas) and showing how it can be put to work on a practical, everyday level.

Following a brief preface and an introduction setting out the purpose, the book is divided into two parts appropriately labeled “Theory” and “Practice.” This is followed by a short but very complete glossary of Sanskrit and other technical terms commonly used in Theosophical texts.

The theoretical analysis is largely based on the unique Theosophical system of seven “principles” into which the human constitution and that of the universe can be divided. This system is grounded in the simple threefold division (spirit, soul, and body) presented in Isis Unveiled (1877), which evolved over the next few decades into a much more elaborate and complicated sevenfold division. This system, which is characteristic of modern Theosophy, is easily recognizable, even when it is presented by other writers using variant terminology.

The system was originally presented orally by H.P. Blavatsky to two English students, A.O. Hume and A.P. Sinnett, and was further elaborated by her trans-Himalayan collaborators. It was explained from many angles in later writings, including The Secret Doctrine. During the last years of her life, HPB added details and offered refinements. This early material, including some private teachings only recently made available to the public, forms the basis for the present book.

The first chapter explains the human constitution and the three “streams” of evolution explained in The Secret Doctrine: the spiritual stream, the physical stream, and the intellectual stream, which brings together the other two. The spiritual stream traces the journey of the Monad (atma-buddhi) through the kingdoms of life with the ultimate goal of establishing “spiritual self-consciousness.” We see the fruits of the physical stream in the human body and the other living organisms around us. The third or intellectual stream brings about the development of manas or mind, which becomes the “human soul” or “reincarnating Ego.” The goal of this Ego is, as Sender writes, “to become the master of the lower Principles and to merge with the spiritual monad.”

After this introduction, the author moves on to a detailed discussion in chapters entitled “Atman: The Higher Self”; “The Monad”; “Manas: The Ego”; and “Kama: The Animal Soul.” In these chapters, he describes the universal spirit and the three aspects of “soul”—spiritual, human, and animal. The explanations are clear and well-written, and they are supplemented with helpful quotations from the original literature of Theosophy. Useful tables and charts are sprinkled throughout the text to illustrate the points. For the most part, these are original with the author and offer new perspectives on several issues. The theoretical part of the book is completed by the chapters “Communication with the Higher Consciousness” and “Evolution of the Higher Ego.” These tell us what is to be accomplished in order to complete the course of human evolution and bring all three streams to fruition.

The second part of the book, “Practice,” was written in the stated hope that “the more these ‘abstractions’ become a reality to us, the more they will have a bearing on our actions.” The guiding principle in this discussion is the concept of manas taijasa, a Sanskrit term that can be translated as illumined mind. This term was introduced by Mme. Blavatsky, who explained it as “the human soul illuminated by the radiance of the divine soul, the human reason lit by the light of the spirit.” To achieve this state, it is necessary to abandon negative qualities or attitudes while cultivating positive ones. The exercises and meditative practices that follow are meant to enable the reader to carry out these goals.

The chapters “States of Consciousness” and “The ‘Thought-Producer’” are well worth studying, and the time invested in trying the exercises and thought experiments will be amply rewarded. This is not easy material, however, and the exercises require a serious commitment. The book closes with a chapter on “The Sense of Space,” which expands and elaborates upon HPB’s instructions in her diagram of meditation. Once again, the goal is practical realization, and serious effort is required.

Despite the author’s effort to make these teachings accessible and practical, some readers may still find this book to be abstract and hard to follow in places. This is inherent in the nature of the teachings themselves, which, as HPB explained, are not for the lazy or mentally obtuse.

All in all, this is an excellent book. It brings together a wealth of authentic Theosophical material from its original sources. Students familiar with this literature will find it stimulating, and those who have not been exposed to the early Theosophical writings will find it to be an excellent introduction.

Doss McDavid