Tim Boyd – India, USA
Tim Boyd
One of the foundational ideas within the Theosophical Society (TS) is that “There is no religion higher than Truth”. It is an idea that points us in a certain direction — beyond the forms that try to engage us and determine our path, it points toward Truth itself. The difficulties that we then encounter result from the fact that we are ill-prepared to embrace an all-encompassing truth. We have to find our way toward it, using the tools that are at hand to us, the main instrument being the laboratory of our own consciousness, with all of its powers and all of its limitations. In every spiritual tradition there is a strong emphasis on cultivating the tools of consciousness. Generally the term that is used for this process is “practice”. Practice refers to the variety of ways where, beginning with our personality, we refine habits of mind and emotion in order for them to cease being obstacles and become aids to deeper, hidden aspects of our being.
We are familiar with the threefold description of a holistic practice as study, meditation, and service. Study tends to be the initial focus for most of us. Along with the recognition of the need for some form of practice comes the clear awareness that we lack a necessary level of knowledge. Basically, in our initial stages, while we may have a sense of the general direction we need to go, we need more specifics. At some level of awareness, we know that Truth cannot be grasped by the mind or its intellect, but early in our unfoldment, concepts, ideas, and information about inner things serves a purpose. It quickens the mind and helps us uncover a different way of experiencing this tool. Like a fisherman, we cast a net of thought into the sea in what we think is the direction of Truth, hoping to have caught something when we draw it out of the water. And we do, but because it is the Ocean itself we are searching for, ultimately the intellect must be abandoned as the primary aid in this process. No system of thought is up to the task.
I have seen videos of tiger hunts in which a large ring of people encircle the area in the forest where the tiger resides. All of them have pans or drums that they beat, making a loud noise. Slowly they all walk toward the center of the circle, driving the, as yet, unseen tiger toward the place where it will be caught. This is not so different from our studied approach to Truth. We believe ourselves to have surrounded it with our knowledge, and that our thought and study have closed off any avenue of escape, permitting us to capture the wild and illusive beast of truth. It may work with tigers, but Truth is a different animal.
Meditation is different in that it involves stripping away the thoughts and concepts that delight our minds, but obscure our vision. This takes place at ever deepening levels. Anyone who has spent sufficient time experimenting with meditation can recognize that what began as “meditation” for them has changed over time. The same should be true for study. There is a hierarchical progression that can take place within us.
Many people begin their meditation practice by sitting in the postures that others have prescribed — legs crossed, eyes closed, breath flowing unforced, hands folded or in specific mudras — and find it relaxing to the body. With the body’s relaxation the mind may seem less turbulent. Engaged in properly, continuing experimentation gradually leads to new levels of quiet, and an unanticipated new quality of thought. Outwardly one is sitting and breathing in the same way as before, but it is not the same.
As the various ways we practice become more and more refined, our access to deepening levels of inner experience changes. Genuine spiritual guides and teachers attempt to point us in this direction. As novices, or people whose inner eye is freshly opening we have no idea where this path may lead, but the guides and teachers do. As much as we try to get them to explain, or communicate to us in the ways we prefer, always they try to move us to a level of actual experience, beyond the ideas, words, and superficial experiences we crave.
Although clairvoyance should not be seen as an indication of spiritual growth, in the right hands it can be useful, like a drill or a screwdriver for a carpenter. C. W. Leadbeater was not born clairvoyant. He became interested in the theosophical movement because of spiritualism, which in his time was a movement of great popular interest. His deep involvement in the TS began in England and continued when he came to Adyar with H. P. Blavatsky (HPB) to work in the fledgling society. While living at Adyar, in the River Bungalow adjacent to the TS headquarters building, over a 42-day period he made a profound breakthrough that led to the clairvoyance that characterized the rest of his life. The way he tells it, his master assisted him during this period to tip the scale and move into a different level of vision.
Annie Besant is famous for many things, her social activism, oratory, and writing, her deep knowledge of spiritual matters, but also for her clairvoyance. Her contributions to Thought Forms and Occult Chemistry are still influencing artists and thought leaders today. But at the time of her meeting HPB this level of vision was completely inactive in her. In a letter HPB wrote to W. Q. Judge she says about Annie Besant that she is “not psychic nor spiritual in the least — all intellect . . .”. But she goes on to say: “. . . and yet she hears the Master’s voice when alone, sees his Light, and recognizes his Voice”. Her deep devotion and courage, combined with her refined intellect paved the way for her rapid unfoldment.
The example of these two prominent figures in TS history is not merely related to clairvoyance. It points out how certain developed aspects of consciousness when combined with other processes and qualities can lead to new horizons of vision and experience. Although it may seem strange, let us take the example of rice. Rice is the staple food for more than half the world’s population. But when it is harvested rice is inedible. The human digestive system cannot break it down to provide usable nutrition. In fact, eating it will make you sick. Combine the rice with water, with heat, and with the proper amount of time, and it becomes the sustaining food for the world’s population. A transformation takes place, but it requires a specific process. Whether it is rice or human consciousness the process begins with the readiness of the substance to be transformed. If it is not yet ripe, nothing of value emerges.
In many of the world’s spiritual traditions these processes are highly codified and ritualized. In Tibetan Buddhism all of the four major schools incorporate Tantra, Vajrayana, as a core approach to hastening the enlightenment process. An essential framework for the teachings is Lamrim, or Stages of the Path, which is intended to address practitioners at their specific stage of development. It begins with a focus on purification. The view is more comprehensive than mere physical or bodily purity, but is directed to the trinity of “body, speech, and mind”. The four Tantras are hierarchical, beginning with Purification or Action (kriya), and progressing through Method or Performance (charya), to Union (yoga), and finally to the Highest Yoga Tantra (anuttarayoga). The stages move from external to ever increasing internal practice and awareness.
Tibetan Buddhist cosmology encompasses a number of “Buddha Families”, groupings of interrelated enlightened beings. Unlike the other tantras in which the practitioner is introduced to the deity and its related practices, in the practice of the Highest Tantra the practitioner actually “arises” as the enlightened being. Of course, in its initial stages it is an act of imagination, in which one envisions oneself as possessing all of the enlightened being’s power, compassionate energies, limitless capacity to heal and to bless. Much like HPB’s “Diagram of Meditation” where “the normal state of our consciousness must be molded by” meditative attention to lofty conditions in consciousness — the “Acquisitions” — that lead to the stable awareness that “I am all space and time”, this Highest Tantra arrives at the same mountain peak of awareness along a different path.
One of the essential understandings of many spiritual traditions is based on the simple observation that all beings want happiness. Everyone wants it and behaves in those ways that are calculated to achieve it. Even though, unknowingly, our attempts at happiness often result in an increase in misery and distress, it is not because we are not trying. The challenge is that happiness is not sustainable — for a reason. It is a condition that results from something else. One way of putting it is that, happiness is a symptom of the cessation of desire. Because our desires are unceasing and changeable, happiness is momentary. We have a desire for ice cream, a new car, a date with someone we like, and so on; we get it; with the cessation of the pressure of that desire an underlying happiness is revealed. We are no longer pushed to run after the next thing. It is like waves on a wind-blown lake becoming still — until the next wind blows. These moments of Desirelessness point toward a deeper, self-initiated experience, beyond will power, control, and suppression.
There is something which exceeds happiness — something which many equate with it, but which is qualitatively different — Joy. Although happiness sometimes accompanies joy, sometimes it doesn’t. Recently I attended the memorial service of a friend who passed away unexpectedly. She was one of those “bright light” kind of people, whose activity, commitment, humor, love of beauty, and way of living brought a sense of lightness when you were around her. During the service commemorating her life, I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of joy for the connection with the life she had lived and the energy she brought into the world. But there was no happiness. In fact, there was an intense sadness for the connection that was now severed. Certainly, the Ageless Wisdom assures that no bond is lost, and that it all remains at deeper levels, but at the personal level there is a sense of finality. We won’t be sitting down for dinner, laughing, talking. So, joy, but no happiness. The two share similarities, but are not the same.
The example often given about the nature of joy is of a man lost in the desert, dying of thirst. In the distance he sees an oasis with trees and pure flowing water. It is a mirage, but in spite of the vision’s unreality, in spite of the fact that he has yet to drink even one drop of water, the state of being he experiences is joy. Joy is not extreme happiness and is unaffected by the presence or absence of desire. It is a state of being that is independent of external factors, continuously available to those who can “see” it. It is a gateway to the soul’s vision and qualities. To the unobstructed view of the soul, joy pervades everything.
Any experience of joy is soul-evoking. In Hindu spirituality the highest joy, Ananda, is liberating. It removes one from the constant preoccupation with self and bondage to its demands for satisfaction. It merges one with the universal consciousness — Sat-Chit-Ananda, Reality-Consciousness-Joy. Even less dramatic encounters with joy change things. The delight that opens us to the experience of wholeness, of unconfined, expansive consciousness alters the way we see the world. The experience of joy is spiritual in the sense that it links us with a “greater whole” and opens us to the soul’s participation in our lives. Because it is rooted in wholeness it has a globalizing effect on our way of seeing. It moves one from the personal approach of “May I attain enlightenment” to the universal, “May I attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings”.
J. Krishnamurti refused to speak in hierarchical terms. He spoke from the mountaintop of unitive vision and would not dilute it with a graded approach. For him there was a “pathless” Truth, and then there was our “beastly little mind” that barred access to that Truth. In his many conversations with scientists and representatives of spiritual/religious traditions he pointed out the dangers of becoming trapped in tradition; the limitations of adherence to ritual, technique, method, “isms”, and “how to . . .” approaches to truth. Practice, as normally conceived, was not something he advocated, not because it was ineffective, but because of its capacity to distract from what he saw as the real need of clearly seeing the workings of the conditioned mind. Although his life of teaching affected many people around the world, toward the end he stated that no one fully got what he was trying to share.
Spiritual practice, like any activity operating through a conditioned mind, is often derailed by a too-strict adherence to ancient traditions that, with the passage of time, have incrementally added ceremonial, ritual, and beliefs that mask its essentials. Though intended to uncover ever deepening levels of consciousness and inner experience, one’s practice is subject to many factors. The paradox is that practice does not guarantee the depths of spiritual experience, it guarantees the possibility. Much like a seed or an egg, without the complete combination of a number of factors, every seed does not come to life and bear fruit, every little bird does not emerge from the shell. With an egg, if the humidity is too low or too high in the final days before hatching, if the temperature is too low or high, if ventilation is inadequate, if the chick inside the egg is not properly positioned, if it becomes exhausted or too weak to peck its way through the shell, it perishes. Some have said that the rare experience of enlightenment is an accident, but practice makes us more accident prone.
Enlightenment could be described as the pinnacle of human experience, and even though many point themselves in the direction, few, in any generation, achieve it. Short of the loftiest experience of enlightenment, practice brings about unfoldment of the poise, equanimity, self-discipline, perseverance, quiet, and a host of other qualities that move us ever closer to deep experience. One of the practices associated with joy derives from the Sanskrit or Pali word for joy as a “sublime, immeasurable state” — Muditâ — which means “Sympathetic or Vicarious Joy”. As a practice it involves attuning to joy through recognizing it in others and celebrating it. We acknowledge the good, the successes, the happiness, the kindness, generosity, illumination of friends, family, and others, and rejoice in it. It is a selftraining in a refined sensitivity that could be described as a deepening approach to gratitude, involving not only recognition and appreciation, but the stimulation in ourselves of a corresponding joy. It also empowers us to form a potent, radiant wish that all people, all beings, may have that same joy, and sets a virtuous cycle in motion.
We are familiar with the process. Although the practice of Sympathetic Joy is opposite in nature and outcome, the method is the same as that employed in gossip. Gossip involves a self-training in seeing and identifying the shortcomings of others. In this opposite practice the failings and inadequacies of those around us are noted, examined, magnified, and celebrated with others in ritualized sessions of gossip that invite others to add more ingredients to the stew cooking in this cauldron of mental misuse. With practice one’s sensitivity to the inadequacies and failings of others becomes so acute and imbedded that it is almost instinctual, which is to say that it operates beneath the level of awareness and conscious control. What we give our attention to, we become. And what is it that gossip contributes to the world? Certainly it spawns distrust; also isolation and separation; a low and extremely temporary form of happiness requiring a constant refueling with new, or newly exaggerated inputs.
It is exactly the same process and equally successful when focused on joy. The critical difference, of course, is the shaping effect on ourselves and our environment. Joy is attractive, magnetic, really. It draws those with a joyful nature to us, and moves us into the orbit of those whose depth of joy exceeds our own. It is transformative in the sense that those who live in its atmosphere are changed in deep and lasting ways. It is clarifying and wholistic; empowering; it opens us to hear, see, and participate in the hidden patterns of life, to effortlessly join in its flow, its dance.
The great scientist, scholar, and priest, Teilhard de Chardin, made the statement: “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” I think he was right.
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This article was also published in The Theosophist, VOL. 147 NO. 6 MARCH 2026
The Theosophist is the official organ of the International President, founded by H. P. Blavatsky on 1 Oct. 1879.
To read the MARCH 2026 issue click HERE