Buddhism and Theosophy: A Comparison

By Richard Grossinger

The Historical Perspective

There are profound similarities and differences between the Seven Planes system and the visualization practices of Vajrayana/Tantric Buddhism as well as between theosophy (with and without a capital “T”) and Vajrayana, Zen, and Dzogchen, and other lineages of Buddhism in general.  These systems address the Ultimate Supreme Reality from diverging cultural perspectives, at different energetic tones, and from unique ontological and eschatological perspectives.

Historically theosophy and Buddhism arrive from opposite poles of West and East and reflect European and Asian views in their spiritual strategies, meditation techniques, lifestyles, degrees of asceticism, and relative optimism or pessimism regarding our immediate and ultimate fate.  A zendo with zafus for sitting meditation, chanting paramitas, and bowing before an altar of Buddhas is not a lodge hall with Gnostic imagery, magic-monolith circles, altars of wax lights, and attunements to flows of cosmic maganetism, sidereal force, mesmer and vibrational ranges of the Seven Planes.  (See nomenclature note, p. 440.)

As the Zen initiate sits for hours, days, weeks, years on a cushion, trying to tame his monkey mind and regain his fundamental dignity, a psychic student tries to separate Astral and Etheric vibrations and travel in the Astral and other higher realms.  Yet each is running subtle energy and cultivating objective, pranic, Astral, Buddhic, and Auric levels of consciousness.

Across a gap in cultural context rooted in the Stone Age, different operational civilizations arose.  While internal meditation and alchemy in Taoist and Buddhist cultures gave rise to energetic breathing, gathering of interior chi, and nonattachment to form, the West's externalized and projective alchemy produced forges, locomotives, and laboratories.

Of course, if taken at face value, this is a ludicrous oversimplification: the West has internal arts, and Asia originated exterior technologies too. It is more a clue to divergent ethics and existential strategies.

Both traditions are Deep Earth.  Each shares the other's shamans, sybils, and psychics.  Each believes in a cosmic chain of universes and the gradual progression of every world and atom in them toward liberation. Each honors karmic evolution through nature.  Each is self-secret such that even if a person were directly given its teachings, he would not have the context in which to understand or use them; each requires transmission of secret doctrines and their techniques from teacher to student, priest to initiate. 

Each also has tenebrous tendrils in the other’s sources, as the systems are correlative and reciprocal: one's surface tends to function as the other's depth, and vice versa.  Buddhism has enlightenment as its explicit and apparent goal.  Western theosophy, divination, and psychic practices seek personal reality and spiritual freedom. But those are cover stories. Spiritual freedom lies also at the core of Buddhism, and enlightenment is the alternate reality of the Western occult.  A lama is as psychic as a tarot reader, and an Astral voyager is as concerned as a Zen monk about the precision of his or her meditation.

Buddhabrot (wikipedia commons)

The Crisis of the World Illusion

Riding a sublime current out of Hinduism, Buddhism has as its sine qua non: breaking the cycle of samsara (birth, life, death, and rebirth; incarnation and reincarnation): " Lead me from the unreal to the real.   Lead me from darkness to light.  Lead me from death to immortality.  Lead me from the temporary to the eternal." (1)  Theosophy's corresponding plan is to participate fully in the world. But Buddhists party and carouse as part of the dharma, while theosophists aspire to get off the Eternal Return Roller-Coaster.

Buddhism is rooted in a Vedic view of life (existence) as illusion and ceaseless change with inevitable loss and grief.  Theosophy, which is at least partly grounded in Vedic cosmology too, does not refute or evade this gloomy verdict, but it does not prioritize it or cast an existential gaze in its direction.  Instead, it follows higher vibrations, as it leads the horse celebratorily around the corral (the corral being Life As It Is) and cultivates a resilient capacity for pleasure and sorrow and the ceaseless permutations connecting them. At the same time, Buddhists participate in creative expression of Life As It Is and ride the Great Wave.

From a monastic Buddhist perspective, the world is a lair of temptations, of traps that keep us from self-realization and immortality, luring us into one false state of being after another.  But why?  In either instance—pleasure-seeking or strategic abstinence—why?  Or is "why" a feeble bleat against the vastness and mysteriousness of our manifestation?  Both Buddhist monks and clairvoyant trainees disavow that our situation is an unfortunate exile from satori: instead, they understand that this is exactly how things should be despite "heartaches by the number and troubles by the score."  We are here for a act that is as bare and simple as it is complex and intractable: to participate in creation: "to be able to embrace everything with the mindfulness of awareness-wisdom, without losing the continuity of that awareness." (2)
Easier said than done.  But that is the way to become either a magician or master in either system, to escape the cycle of rebirth or whatever.

Of course the difference between these systems can sometimes be a matter of whether one is temperamentally inclined to accept that the gods and source energies of the universe are fundamentally benign and ecstatic or whether they are indifferent, even cruel.  But that is a superficial reading too.  Both systems accept a beneficent creation and ultimate redemption.  Buddhism doesn't project the universe as ruthless or punitive in a dualistic sense or because that is its core diabolic nature; it is our mindedness and minds that have ensnared us in a vicious cul de sac whereby we see mainly mirages and holographs of illusions.  Because of the deviousness of the kink rather than the innate sinister nature of creation, this is a mess.  So mature Buddhist teachers tend toward abstemious strategies while keeping their main attention on the source of mind and the symptomology of our attachment to fleeting pleasures and securities.  For them joyful and loving practice provides the most stable basis for transcendence of core deceptions. Compassion and kindness are not only virtues, but they cut through the apparition to its core.

It is sometimes hard to tell in instances of real practitioners and lives which belief system is in fact in play, which practitioner is cheery and hopeful; which is dour and severe—and what brand of spiritual epistemology either is practicing.   It can often be a matter of personality rather than philosophy—an ecstatic magician can be depressed and alienated despite a productive repertoire, while a rigorously ascetic Zen monk can be as happy as a child on Christmas every morning.  The treacherous nature of consciousness itself rather the literal objects of consciousness usually determines the orientation.

For some who practice rigid Buddhism, enlightenment can be turned into a grim march up an unscalable mountain of infinite height—a sentence of untold trillion of kalpas that has to be lived out despite piety and yoga (recalling the legendary Buddhist measurement of a kalpa as the time it takes for a mountain be worn down by a dove's wing brushing it—in other words, a very long time). By contrast, the theosophical perspective has tended to be goofy, affirming, even reassuring.  

Yet both warn that change is inevitable, profound, and our destiny—and you know what that means. Authoritarian theosophy can be as doctrinaire and grim as any Buddhist precept.  Finally the world is the world, and we are where we are. Aleister Crowley once remarked, upon the death of a child—and I quote approximately here from memory a quote I read a long time ago, "Yes it's an illusion, but this one is a super-illusion."

Who is to judge or grade among run-of-the-mill illusions and super ones which get to be the determinative ones?  Buddhism makes the contest simple: they are all illusions, perhaps different scales and grades of phantasm, but smoke and mirrors all the same.  Shamanic and hermetic magic meanwhile is a game for moving clouds and mists, either way.

The Buddhist gaze rests upon its act of sitting zazen and encountering limitless interior space, allowing thoughts to arise and fade away of their own source energy without beguilement or attachment to a goal.  It is like looking dispassionately at an inner night sky.  To make ourselves transparent and receptive enough to glimpse our ground luminosity is to awaken somewhat within a dream to something not quite the dream. In fact, it is our only chance, the one solace we have in the face of inevitable depletion, grief, and anguish.

 Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki-roshi put it this way:

“Suppose your children are suffering from a hopeless disease. You do not know what to do; you cannot lie in bed.  Normally the most comfortable place for you would be a warm comfortable bed, but now because of your mental agony you cannot rest.  You may walk up and down, in and out, but this does not help. Actually the best way to relieve your mental suffering is to sit in zazen, even in such a confused state of mind and bad posture.  If you have no experience of sitting in this kind of difficult situation you are not a Zen student.  No other activity will appease your suffering.  In other restless positions you have no power to accept your difficulties, but in the zazen posture which you have acquired by long, hard practice, your mind and body have great power to accept things as they are, whether they are agreeable or disagreeable.

“When you feel disagreeable it is better for you to sit.  There is no other way to accept your problem and work on it….

“The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact. That is the point you will realize by zazen practice.” (3)

"Right here, right now" is the heart of Buddhist practice, reflected in popularized maxims like "be here now" and "the power of now."  "Right here, right now" means refining a pinpoint awareness of the moment of consciousness and its effects—the exact subjective awareness that behaviorists consider an epiphenomenon or illusion.  

As a damp fog gradually drenches one’s clothing and body, humbly practicing zazen while yielding to the nature of the universe as it is soaks one’s mind and being with a stable joy.

Using quite different tools, the various versions of theosophy also tap the energy of "life as it is," fostering our natural receptivity to internal spaciousness and joyful awareness but in a more vernacular, county-fair kind of way.  While the magic of psychic attunement has its existential moments and groks the grave cosmic view, its policies for dealing with the universe barely avert spiritually immaturity.  Buddhism's advanced practices for attaining joy and neutrality are discriminating and discrete, so I wouldn’t recommend dropping Buddhist meditation for psychic tools in hopes of having more fun or getting off scot-free. 

Drubwang Tsoknyi Rinpoche warns in particular against getting trapped in idealized shortcuts or conceptual frameworks (Buddhist or other). Even the goal of clarity and “being empty,” he says, is a mirage unless one holds to the source emptiness out of which all thoughts are proceeding—meaning not nothingness or a void but the fullness and fecundity of empty, transparent space; the silence that carries more meaning than eloquence.  

As the act of meditation focuses the meditator on present time, he may also find himself counterproductively working with the goal of the “now” as a separate, dual concept, copied from a counterfeit observation of what insight or compassion should look like and how it should behave.  There are plenty of spiritual rulebooks and formal instructions.  Instead one must let things be as they are, constantly recognizing the fact of the self-arising nature and source of mind, and reawakening oneself to it and its constantly shifting appearances moment to moment (not unlike the relaxation of effort described for psychic work in the previous chapter).  Then compassion will be real compassion, and “now” will really be now:
 “The real bodhichitta, which is awakened mind, is of course already present within us as our basic nature, but somehow it is covered up by our normal way of thinking, encased within the shell of deluded perceptions.  It’s not so easy to have it become visible immediately in a full-fledged way.  It’s as if we need to plagiarize awakened mind a little bit, by forming a thought as an imitation.  There is really no way around this other than to make a facsimile of the awakened attitude….  [W]e need to copy bodhichitta by forming the thought of compassion for all beings.  There is nothing wrong with that.  Bodhichitta is not copyrighted; no company manufactures it, so it’s not as if we’ll be sued. We simply want to imitate what we have heard so much about, the awakened state realized by the buddhas and masters of the past.” (4)

We can't forge clear mind or compassion in Buddhism; we have to find their self-arising in us, and in this we are on our own.  Yet ritual imitation—copying energy, plagiarizing visualizations—is not only permissible but de rigueur in theosophy.  Of course, real psychic meditation does not get stuck in forgeries either; it blows them up and moves on as directed by present energy. 

To oversimplify, Dzogchen prefers clear mind; theosophy clear energy. But in the end these are the same. Different paths, different terminology: same payoff. 

Crazy Wisdom

Kagyu-lineage tulku Chögyam Trungpa’s legendary “crazy wisdom” offers engagement with life as well as permission to participate in extreme forms of pleasure and experience as teaching modes.  The rationale is that, insofar as all states are real in themselves and arise from natural mindedness, no act or encounter should be avoided indefinitely.  Obdurate abstention merely creates agitated states of mind and habitual trance behavior, and these lead to inauthentic piety with no spiritual depth or resilience.  On the other hand, following one's innate desires to their root and source energies, if done with commitment to witnessing, reduces their seeming allure to mere streams of existential static and leads ultimately to their transcendence.  
"Crazy wisdom" in a sense turns the innate quality of pleasure-seeking into its own deconstruction.  If one goes consciously on his or her own trajectory of mindful hedonism with an awareness of its inner luminosity and the innate brilliance of its own presence within natural being, then every act is allowed and every experience becomes part of the training—but only as long it is directed toward clarity and renunciation rather than pleasure for its own sake or for carnal self-aggrandizement.  
Trungpa is exhorting people to recognize their own desires—in terms of their origination and intrinsic nature—and this is different from merely total permission to have fun.  When he urged his disciples to follow their own crazy wisdom, he meant not their extrinsic desires but the roots behind those impulses down to their basic emptiness.  Practitioners could cultivate emptiness by exploration of desire’s components rather than by monastic avoidance.  This practice was recognition of desire, not the satiation of its sybatitic expressions.

“Crazy wisdom” teachers may seem to be encouraging followers to indulge in self-gratification where they are drawn or attracted, but the actual path entials identifying and ending attachment to desire and the cyclical nature of attachment.  Under the lens of clear mind, hedonism turns out to be only symptomatic and superficially solace-producing rather pleasurable or substantial in itself.  It gains little spiritually or emotionally from its seeming gratifications. Trungpa so blatantly fulfilled the trope of the sexually exploitative guru with his pliant disciples that one has to assume that the blatant drinking fests, orgies, and playboy motifs disguise something more austere and profound. Despite the lama’s notorious sign-up sheets in which female followers wrote down their names to get in queue for sex with the master, he apparently used these trysts as teachings venues of the most generous and exquisite sort.  At least so his followers claim.  It is not for us, or anyone not directly involved, to judge otherwise.  

Nonetheless, these philosophies and practices are far too easy to misunderstand and misapply because, after all, who doesn't want to have fun and ass in the context of high-end spiritual permission?  For some “crazy wisdom” becomes a license to engage in promiscuous sex, sundry intoxications, and profound slackerdom as per each treasured morsel of desire.  The dark side was provided in spades by many of Trungpa’s followers and those of other “crazy” teachers.  In the decades following the exuberant sixties, many apologists performed a charade of spiritual practices under what they took as carte blanche: ordinary ethics don’t apply to this here pilgrim and seeker! 

What they rationalized from their gurus, unfortunately, was that, if you are a sincere Buddhist, you can have all the wine, women, drugs, and hiphop you desire and, as a bonus, you can become enlightened in the process.  If that sounds too good to be true….   The universe is an open road, gracious and magnificent to a fault, but it is not facile.  Nobel-level abuses and betrayals within Trungpa's own Naropa community speak for themselves—but the same brief could be laid at the feet of many other contemporary gurus, yogis, and dharma tactiticians (Da Free John/Adi Da, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and Swami Muktananda among them).

Trungpa was trying to persuade his students to break their links with their self-absorptions, self-deceptions, smugly high self-opinions, and other placations and adornments of ego.  He decried attachments to pseudo-miracles and façades of soul depth.  Too many devotees fritter their lives and hopes away, he warned, for a god they never meet, an essence they cannot find.

Egoic mind, Trungpa averred, does not really want to achieve clarity, basic sanity, its own true nature, or the cessation of its neurotic patterns because that would be “planning its own funeral”—so it enacts pseudo-versions of spiritual accomplishment and then tries to sell itself and others on their legitimacy.  He identified these as delusions on the path to clarity.  Eventually we will be disappointed in such practices when they do not lead to enlightenment or happiness or even real pleasure. Devotion to them only make one more neurotic.  I'm afraid he would consign Astral bodies, golden suns, and grounding cords, to the same nemesis.

However, the neurotic abuse of any sacred practice—erotic, spiritual, or philanthropic—is there for the taking. In consumer society, self-righteous spiritual heavyweights as well as wannabes among the masses fall for gaudy attractions and grotesque trophies.  It's our Burger King reality.  We wolf down more calories and sweeteners than we need or want.  We cultivate being more sexually obsessed than called for by our desires.  We invent a metaphysics more decorous and inflated than anything we can use psychospiritually or integrate emotionally.  We cut ourselves off from our own souls and course of individuation, as we creatively psychopathologize ourselves beyond our pathologies and spiritualize ourselves in fictive and superficial realms where our soul doesn’t even exist. We invent past lives, bogus energies, and ersatz initiations in the name of nonexistent gods, imaginary dimensions, and palliative soul healing.  Even more debilitating, we declare ourselves guilty and inadequate for the wrong reasons, far guiltier in our self-blame than any sins we have committed would entail.  We get about as stuck as conscious animals can.

As failed practices sour into boredom, boredom seeks new toys, new chimeras and self-seductions, cleverer ones with which to entertain and extend itself.  Even as these arrive in spiritual disguises, they lead to frustration and boredom again; them boredom turns into anger and then rejection of spiritual practice altogether—a pendulum from ascetic rigidity to neurotic joy-rides. 

Trungpa insists that there is no hidden entertainment in the dharma—so boredom is a useful tool to expose the hollowness and compulsions spiritual materialism and facilitate the goal of egolessness.

Excerpted from Dark Pool Of Light.

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