Tim Boyd - India, USA
Tim Boyd
There is a habit, suggested by H. P. Blavatsky (HPB), which I have adopted. Whenever she would hear or read something that she felt was meaningful, she would write it down. She also would cut out newspaper articles, paste them in her scrapbooks, and comment in writing, even going so far as to add drawings elaborating her opinions. In the Adyar Archives there are 39 large, fascinating volumes of these collected scraps of thought. In 1890, a year before she died, HPB published a small book containing some of the quotes she had culled from a variety of sources. It was titled Gems from the East: A Birthday Book of Precepts and Axioms. It contained a brief quote for every day of the year, drawn chiefly from “Oriental” sources. Some examples of the pithy gems in the book are “A little hill in a low place thinks itself a great mountain”, “One proof is better than ten arguments”, and “The soul ripens in tears”. It is a mix of profound and humorous instruction for living.
Over the years my own volume of collected quotes has grown. There is a short poem that I ran across many years ago, which was striking to me, mostly for its last line. It is from a poem called “Healing” by the English author, D. H. Lawrence.
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds deep to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance, long difficult repentance,
realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake that mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
Lawrence was not a member of the Theosophical Society (TS), so some of the terms that he used might have slightly different meanings than those accepted in theosophical parlance. For example, when he talks about the soul, he describes it as “the deep emotional self”. For the theosophist “soul” has a different meaning, describing an entity which exceeds the emotions. However, it does not exclude the involvement of the “emotional self”. Wounding experienced in the emotional self is communicated to the soul and shapes its unfoldment — “The soul ripens in tears”. As with all great poetry it clothes an intuitive perception in language and images.
At the end of the book, Light on the Path, there is a short essay titled “Karma”. We are told it was written by one of the Masters (the Venetian). It begins with the request to exercise our imagination: “Consider with me that the individual existence is a rope which stretches from the infinite to the infinite . . .” The rope is composed of “innumerable fine threads . . . perfect in their qualities of straightness, strength and levelness.” Because this rope passes “through all places” it suffers “strange accidents”. The illustration is intended to impress the idea of individual existence as an unbroken continuum. It is not merely one life or a series of unrelated lives. The incident in a particular life that causes one of the threads to be caught, even though it may be violently pulled from the rope, it does not break, but for a great time the thread and the rope are disordered. The same is true if the rope gets stained. The stain carries on for some time, discoloring the rope beyond the initial point of contact. What comes across from the analogy is that the “future is in unbroken continuity with the past”. As in the poem “wounds to the soul take a long, long time”.
The poem is also specific about other things, in particular the nature of the healing process. Time and patience are required to carry on, knowing that with patience, and given sufficient time, healing is possible. It is an expression of the familiar admonition that “This too shall pass.” No matter how severe the wound, ultimately, we move on.
Lawrence then speaks about a “certain difficult repentance” required in the healing process. It is a curious expression. Repentance is one of those words that is normally confined to religious discussion. Most often it refers to the conscious process of moving away from “sin”. Sin as a concept relates to behaviors, even states of mind that are in opposition to clarity, purity, understanding, or any of the necessary qualities that connect us to our truer nature. As a religious idea it involves behaving in ways that contradict religious laws attributed to God though often these behaviors are engaged in, out of ignorance. We fight, steal, kill, lie, take intoxicating substances because we do not know any better. With time and sufficient repetition of our ignorance we come to see the separating effects.
Until that point any genuine repentance is impossible. We could say prayers, make apologies, ask for forgiveness, but without true recognition it would just be words. Only once the nature of our behavior is recognized does this difficult repentance becomes a possibility. The difficulty results from our long engagement in the “sinful” behavior. Like so many things we do, we become accustomed. We come to regard it as an aspect of “who I am”. So, this entire process of the recognition of our error, the acknowledgement, the determination to turn in another direction, and the will to persist, makes this repentance long and difficult.
Although there is a brilliance and profundity to the entire poem, the reason that I first included it in my little book of quotes was for the last three lines:
. . . the freeing oneself from the endless
repetition of the mistake that mankind
at large has chosen to sanctify.
The all-important point of the poet’s vision of healing depends on our understanding of the mistake, a mistake so profound that it is not only endlessly repeated, but made holy — sanctified — by humanity. Like repentance, it is only when we see it that we can correct it. So, what is the mistake?
In Buddhism there is the idea that all of our “mistakes” are rooted in a fundamental condition of ignorance — avidya. Our normal way of thinking about ignorance is as a condition of “not knowing” — that we are somehow lacking information or knowledge. From the Buddhist, Vedanta, or Ageless Wisdom perspective our ignorance is something completely different. This fundamental ignorance is that we do know, but everything that we know, we know wrongly.
The classic example is of the person walking in the forest at evening who sees a snake on the road and becomes frightened. He prepares himself to fight or run. But then walking closer he sees that what he thought was a snake was really a root or a rope coiled on the road. What we see, correctly or wrongly, shapes our behaviors, our view of ourselves, and our view of the world. This is the fundamental ignorance that we fall prey to. Other traditions use the word maya to describe our misperception. There is this fundamental wrong seeing of ourselves and the world that makes us act in certain ways.
The main effect of our ignorance is the sense of ourselves as separate, independent beings, operating unconnected to the greater whole of humanity or the planet. In spiritual traditions this is the central mistake. H. P. Blavatsky puts her finger on it in The Voice of the Silence, where she names it “the heresy of separateness”. Our heresy is the relationship between what we believe is real and what is real. In our heretical view we see ourselves as existing within a universe of isolated individual things — a universe of stars, galaxies, trees, plants, people, animals, cells, bacteria, all of them separate, somehow revolving around ourselves as the central focus.
There is a visual teaching device that was evolved to help in coming to grips with this cycle of expanding ignorance. It is called the bhavachakra. It is a circle containing three, sometimes four, concentric wheels. It is intended to depict the nature and causes of samsâra. At the circle’s center are the “Three Poisons”, identified as delusion, greed, and hatred; or stated differently, as ignorance, attachment and aversion. The next ring of images depicts the “Six Realms” of Buddhist cosmology — hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, humans, lower gods, and higher gods — through which the samsâra-bound consciousness cycles.
To some these realms are viewed literally, as actual forms through which the consciousness migrates in life after life. For others the Six Realms and behavior consign us. Around the perimeter of the wheel the “twelve interdependent links” are graphically depicted. These are the nidâna-s, the psychological states that condition our consciousness and tie us to the “endless repetition”, beginning with ignorance and ending in old age, sickness, and death.
A sense of separateness is inherent in the dual nature of the universe. Always there will be here and there, inner and outer, creation and destruction, myself and others. The structure of things gives an ongoing confirmation of the correctness of separation. It is only at the level of consciousness that the certainty of our separateness can dissolve. This is why there is such emphasis in some of the schools of Tibetan Buddhism on both Compassion and Wisdom. It is the nature of compassion at any level that the isolating walls of self-centered consciousness extend to include another.
In the case of the great compassion of a Buddha, Christ, or enlightened being, the boundaries and distinctions of self and other dissolve completely. Wisdom, simply stated, is the realization of a state of utter interdependence, not merely as a personal experience, but as the inherent nature of being. “Me” or “I” loses its meaning as an independent, separate entity in the same way that a drop of water falling into the ocean loses any separate identity.
The healing process addressed in the poem involves the same stages of unfoldment as the spiritual life — a movement from bondage, or wounding, to awareness; from awareness to intelligent effort; from effort to realization or freedom. For the person engaged in the process of revealing a long-hidden life and splendor first there is a necessary awakening. Until we awaken from the sleep of not knowing or wanting to know about our condition there can be no healing. “The disease that is hidden cannot be cured”.
Opening our eyes requires us to take stock of ourselves, our potentials and limitations. Based on that seeing the “wounds” inflicted on the soul become apparent. The cause and the cure demand a deeper perception. Who or what has done this to me? becomes a vital question. In normal life when we encounter difficulties, we tend to look for someone to blame, or, failing that, something to blame. “It’s his fault”, or “It’s the system”. The last place we tend to look is inside, “It’s me”. In a sense the cause of our wounding is both outer and inner.
In our embrace of the universally accepted mistake, we harm ourselves. There can be no blame for our self-inflicted wounds. The fact is that until we can open our eyes and see more clearly, we live in the same world and share the same beliefs as everyone else — the world of our families, teachers, friends, and societies, all formed by their unshakeable conviction of separateness. The seeing of this state of affairs leads to the “long difficult repentance” and the possibility to heal.
Genuine healing is much more than easing pain or removing wounds. Healing by definition is the restoration of wholeness. In spiritual traditions the idea is expressed as being in the world, but not of it. As human beings we live through a body in a world of people just like us, struggling to make their way. We do not have a choice. In this world we are continually navigating, responding as best we can to the challenges, setbacks, and obstacles of daily life. It is only in consciousness that we gain access to a “higher” view, a perspective whose wholeness does not separate us from others or from the world in which we live and labor. It is the seeing that allows for the freeing — freedom from our repetitive engagement in the wounding process.
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This article was also published in The Theosophist, VOL. 146 NO. 9. JUNE 2025
The Theosophist is the official organ of the International President, founded by H. P. Blavatsky on 1 Oct. 1879.
To read the JUNE 2025 issue click HERE