At the United Lodge of Theosophists

This week I took a small adventure. In downtown Philadelphia, right next to beautiful Rittenhouse Square, there’s an old wooden door hidden in plain sight. It leads to the United Lodge of Theosophists, as the lettering on the window beside modestly proclaims. Every time I’m in the area, I get a kick out of the name of the organization, and wonder what possibly could go on behind that door, in those presumably arcane halls and massive library.

So I decided to find out.

On Wednesday evening, shortly before 8pm, there was a meeting scheduled to discuss William Q. Judge’s The Ocean of Theosophy. Naturally I knew nothing of this work and intended to do no research beforehand, so as not to ruin whatever surprise awaited me. Surprised I was, and surprisingly frustrated that I hadn’t taken the time to find the book and read it before attending the meeting.

Here’s an excerpt from the portion of the text under discussion at the meeting I attended.

This is the state of Devachan, a Sanskrit word meaning literally “the place of the gods,” where the soul enjoys felicity; but as the gods have no such bodies as ours, the Self in devachan is devoid of a mortal body. In the ancient books it is said that this state lasts “for years of infinite number,” or “for a period proportionate to the merit of the being”; and when the mental forces peculiar to the state are exhausted, “the being is drawn down again to be reborn in the world of mortals.” Devachan is therefore an interlude between births in the world.

So that’s the kind of stuff we’re dealing with here.

My initial take on the philosophical outlook expounded by the text—and consequently, by theosophy in general—was that it was a snobbish mishmash of cultures foreign to the white man, ostentatiously veiled in the raiment of calculated sophistication. One of those books that seeks to make the reader feel utterly gauche. Almost as unbearable as the Generation Xers pruning their bonsai trees.

But this soon changed. Those in attendance were oftentimes quite critical of the material, and asked questions whose profundity made the excerpt above look like Simple English Wikipedia. There was a wonderful unspoken linguistic practice of forbidding the word “I”; attendees and chairperson alike would always use the first person plural, e.g. “Actually, the question we asked was…” or “As we understand it, it seems that….”

The meeting was such an intense rush of intellectual nourishment that I didn’t say a word the whole way through. I was at times struggling to follow the discussion of the room, so lost was I in weird cerebral meanderings certain comments had led me to.

I was recently asked about my personal religious beliefs, about my spirituality, if any. I said that I’ve taken to explaining the matter so: “I believe equally in the truth of all religions, up to and including the point at which each might exclude others.” To some people, it’s a cop-out answer. To others, it’s honest and maybe even deep.

The declaration of the United Lodge of Theosophists closes with a similar sentiment, known as the Eclectic Maxim of H. P. Blavatsky:

The true Theosophist belongs to no cult or sect, yet belongs to each and all.

Now that’s something I can believe in.