Searchable Theosophical Texts
Theosophy House
of The Masters
1881-1883
Edited by
C Jinarajadasa
The Secret Doctrine by H P Blavatsky
Contents
Section
1 The Planetary
Chain
2 Conditions After
Death
3 Races and Sub-Races
4 Cosmic Origins
5 Science
6 Ethics and Philosophy
7 The Universal
Mind
8 Avalokitesvara
9 Our Ideas on
Evil
10 Planetary
Spirits
11 The Principle of Life
APPENDIX
A Death
B Devachan and Avitchi
C
The Harmonics of Smell
D Some secrets
Publishers’ Preface
A new school of thought is arising
to challenge long-accepted views of life. Its keynote may be said to be
“evolutionary creation.” It is an exposition of the phenomena that surrounds us
in terms that are both scientific and idealistic. It offers an explanation of
life, of the origin of our fragment of the universe, of hidden and mysterious
natural laws, of the nature and destiny of man, that appeals with moving force
to the logical mind. This school of thought is at the same time both iconoclastic
and constructive, for it is sweeping away old dogmas that are no longer tenable
in the light of rapidly developing modern science, while it is building a
substantial structure of facts beneath the age-long dream of immortality.
The literature that is growing out
of ideas which are so revolutionary in the intellectual realm and yet are so
welcome to a world groping through the fogs of materialism, is receiving a warm
welcome in other lands and it should be better known here.
The Theosophical Press, Chicago.
1923
Introduction
During the year 1881, two very
able Englishmen, who were resident in
The instruction given by certain
of the Masters of the Wisdom to A.P. Sinnett and A.O. Hume came in the form of
answers to questions which they propounded. The inquirers wrote their
questions, which were then given or sent to H.P.B., who was in Allahabad, Simla
or Bombay, as the case might be, either residing with them or at a distance.
The procedure adopted by the Masters seems to have been roughly as follows:
Sometimes the Masters, by occult means, brought the letter to Their residences
in
In answer, letters were sent,
mostly phenomenally, in a handwriting which was either in blue or red pencil,
or black or red ink. In one case, a letter is in green ink. These letters were
not written by hand, but precipitated, that is, not written by hand, but
the writing materialised on the paper by a process used by the Adepts which
involves the use of fourth dimensional space. In precipitated letters, there is
no difference found which distinguishes them from a letter written by hand.
There is no difference whatsoever in the handwriting. Each Master has His
characteristic handwriting, like any of us.
But the remarkable fact is that,
while this handwriting is personal to a Master, it is also like an office
handwriting, from a particular office with a particular chief. Thus, certain
pupils of the Masters M and K.H. were given the right to precipitate [
The right given is to precipitate by occult means, not to write with the hand.]
in Their official handwriting. This is perfectly understandable, if only we
realise that the Masters are not ascetics living aloof on the slopes of the
snow-clad Himalayas, having nothing to do but to live in the bliss of higher
realms, but rather heads of great World Departments of activity, directing many
workers, and having very little time to spare. Therefore, just as in a big
business organisation there may be a particular typewriter which is used by the
head of the organisation, but which it is perfectly allowable for the Private
Secretary to use, when once permission is granted, so it is with regard to the
handwriting of the two Masters. Sometimes They personally wrote, and this was
especially the case with letters which gave directions to aspirants or Chelas
whom They were not able to impress by any other occult means. But often
instructions were given to an advanced Chela outlining what he was to say in
reply to a question. Of course, the Master, like any head of a business office,
took the responsibility for the statements of His private secretaries; but this
need not mean that the actual words used by a secretary represent the full or
even accurate thought of the Master.
It is to a large extent possible
to sort out the letters which emanate direct from the Master from those which
are written through intermediaries. The answers of the Master M. are short,
direct and imperious, being less the exposition of an instructor and more like
marginal notes of a sovereign on a state paper. Not infrequently, His answers
convey a challenge of the whole basis upon which the inquirer rests with
confidence. The style of the Master K.H. is literary, showing a general, and
sometimes a very particular, knowledge of Western literature and science. He
uses a gentle raillery to make His point, and can at times be extremely witty.
Since most of the teachings were given under His direction, all that is in this
work, except the teachings of the Master M., bear His impress, whether written
directly by Him or only under His supervision.
Needless to say, where a Chela is
highly advanced and most closely en rapport with His Master, very few
mistakes would be made in transmission, and even the Master’s idiosyncrasies of
phrasing might be reproduced in the answer. But we have to clearly understand
that, because a letter happens to be in the well-known handwriting of a Master,
it is not necessarily always written by that Master himself. In this regard,
the following statement of H.P.B. is most illuminating:
Statement By H.P.B
[ The statement is preceded by these words in
Mrs. Gebhard’s handwriting: “Extracts from a letter from H.P.Blavatsky dated
This morning before the receipt of
your letter at 6 o’clock, I was permitted and told by Master to make you
understand at last, you and all the sincere, truly devoted Theosophists, “as
you sow, so you will reap”, the personal and private questions and prayers,
answers framed in the mind of those whom such matters can yet interest, whose
minds are not yet entirely blank to such worldly terrestrial questions, answers
by chelas and novices, often something reflected from my own mind, for
the Masters would not stoop for one moment to give a thought to individual,
private matters relating but to one or even ten persons, their welfare, woes
and blisses in this world of Maya, to nothing except questions of really
universal importance. It is all you Theosophists who have dragged down
in your minds the ideals of our Masters; you who have unconsciously and
with the best of intentions and full sincerity of good purpose, desecrated
Them, by thinking for one moment, and believing that They would trouble
Themselves with your business matters, sons to be born, daughters to be
married, houses to be built, etc. etc. And yet, all those of you who have
received such communications, being nearly all sincere (those who were not
have been dealt with according to other special laws) you had a right, knowing
of the existence of Beings Who you thought could easily help you, to seek help
from Them, to address Them once that a monotheist addresses his personal God,
desecrating the Great Unknown a million of times above the Masters,
by asking Him (or It) to help him with a good crop, to slay his enemy
and send him a son or a daughter; and having such a right in the abstract
sense, They could not spurn you off, and refuse answering you if not
Themselves, then by ordering a chela to satisfy the addresses to the best of
his or her’s (the chela’s) ability.
How many a time was I (no Mahatma)
shocked and startled, burning with shame when shown notes written in Their
(two) handwritings (a form of writing adopted for the T.S. And used by chelas,
only never without Their special permission or order to that effect)
exhibiting mistakes in science, grammar and thoughts, expressed in such
language that it perverted entirely the meaning originally intended, and
sometimes expressions that in Tibetan Sanskrit or any other Asiatic language
had quite a different sense, as in one instance I will give. In answer to Mr.
Sinnett’s letter referring to some apparent contradictions in
Two or three times, perhaps more,
letters were precipitated in my presence, by chelas who could not speak
English, and who took ideas and expressions out of my head. The phenomena in truth
and solemn reality were greater at those times than ever! Yet they often
appeared the most suspicious, and I had to hold my tongue, to see suspicion
creeping into the minds of those I loved best and respected, unable to justify
myself or to say one word. What I suffered Master only knew! Think only (a case
with Solovioff at Elberfeld) I sick in my bed; a letter of his, an old letter of
his received in London and torn by me, rematerialised in my own sight, I
looking at the thing; five or six times in the Russian language, in Mahatma
K.H.’s handwriting in blue, the words taken from my head, the letter
old and crumpled travelling slowly alone (even I could not see the
astral hand of the chela performing the operation) across the bedroom, then
slipping into and among Solovioff’s papers who was writing in the little
drawing-room, correcting my manuscripts; Olcott standing closely by him and
having just handled the papers looking over them with Solovioff. The latter
finding it, and like a flash I see in his head in Russian the thought: “The old
impostor (meaning Olcott) must have put it there!”, and such things by
hundreds.
Well, this will do. I have told
you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so far as I am
allowed to give it. Many are the things I have no right to explain, if I had to
be hung for it.
When these letters were received
by Messrs. Sinnett and Hume, copies were sent by order of the Master K.H. To
H.P.B. And Damodar Mavlankar. Often extracts from them were sent to C.C. Massey
in
In arranging all these letters in
the form of a book, I have thought it wise to group, as far as possible, the
many topics under six Sections. The grouping in the book tentative, and on
further study may be changed in a future edition. I have made no attempt to
systematise the transliteration of Sanskrit words. We must not forget that, in
1881, when Sanskrit studies were at an early age, transliteration and the
meaning of technical terms had not crystallised into their present shape. In a
future edition, which I hope to bring out at greater leisure than has been
possible to give to the publication of this edition, the transliteration of
Sanskrit words will be systematised.
The effect of these early
teachings on the two recipients, Messrs. Sinnett and Hume, was different. We
all know how Mr. Sinnett eagerly responded and gained an inner vision of occult
realities. The writing of Esoteric Buddhism from the heterogeneous
material of the teachings given to him is indeed a most brilliant feat, and a
high tribute to Mr. Sinnett’s synthetic ability. His work will always stand out
as a brilliant summary of the Ancient Wisdom. Since the beginning, he has stood
unwavering in his loyalty to his Master, and has made for himself a name in the
annals of the Theosophical Society, and earned the gratitude of thousands.
The effect on Mr. Hume was rather
different. Mr. Hume, who was brilliant in intellect and greatly philosophical,
found that very sharpness of intellect a handicap, for the simple reason that
he was not sufficiently impersonal. He was not so much inquirer as
critic. “Your own ego, which has already seized the essentials of every truth,”
was the way that the Master K.H., in attempting to draw attention to this vice
of intellectual pride, described Mr. Hume’s great weakness. One continuous
grievance of his was that he was not told everything fully which he desired to
know. And furthermore, he could not adapt himself to credit the existence of
another philosophical way of looking at things, which was Eastern, which might
have any kind of superiority over the Western scientific standpoint. The result
was a continual lack of accommodation on his part to the needs of the work
which the Masters wanted done. He could not realise that the Masters were not
specially bent on instructing the Western world in occult teachings, but were
far more intent on building a great Theosophical Movement, which should break
down barriers of race, creed, sex, caste and colour everywhere throughout the
world. Mr. Sinnett also partly shared Mr. Hume’s attitude, but finally he
adapted himself to some extent to the needs of the T.S. as a Movement,
while Mr. Hume, to put it briefly, cared a great deal for occult knowledge, but
nothing whatsoever for the T.S.., which to him was but proclaiming the
threadbare gospel of Brotherhood.
Slowly within a couple of years,
the divergencies between him and the occult Teachers widened, till finally he
lost interest in the whole movement. Nevertheless, the influence from beyond
the
I would mention in passing that
all the modern political revival in
Those who are in touch with the
work today of Theosophists will be struck very greatly by one phase of
Theosophical interests which is not at all represented in this book. Today
questions of Brotherhood and Social Reconstruction are so vital in the minds of
Theosophists that they will be surprised to see that no question specifically
dealing with Reconstruction was propounded to the Masters, The Teachers did not
go out of Their way to expound all that They had to give, but merely answered
the questions propounded to Them. But we must not forget that even while teachings
were being given to Mr. Sinnett and Mr. Hume, the work of the Masters
was being done by H.P.B. and Colonel Olcott. The two Founders were all the time
proclaiming and applying the gospel of Brotherhood, though both Mr. Sinnett and
Mr. Hume were, to put it briefly, very sceptical as to any real usefulness
accruing in spiritualising the world by proclaiming the ideas of Brotherhood.
They held that, if the Western world was to be affected and weaned from
Materialism, it was only by giving it occult knowledge, and that any attempt to
“mix up Brotherhood with Occultism” would inevitably mean the collapse in the
long run of the T.S. Again and again, wherever any suggestions were thrown out
by the Masters as to practical work to be done in order to narrow the gap which
existed in India between the Indians and the English, Their hints were rarely
taken, and continually the two Englishmen harped on the fact that they knew the
Western mind and the ways to affect Western thought better than did the Adepts.
Finally, so insistent were Messrs.
Sinnett and Hume in their attitude, that matters early came almost to an
impasse. Then it was that the great Master Who is known as the “Mahachohan”,
laid down the general principles which underlie the Theosophical Movement which
originated from Them. The remarks of the Mahachohan, as reported by the Master
K.H. to Mr. Sinnett, appears as “Letter No.1" in the little work Letters
from the Masters of the Wisdom, First Series.
An earnest student, who wants to
gain a comprehensive idea of what was the teaching and directions given by the
Masters at this time, should read in connection with this present work the
little work mentioned above, Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom.
Since the publication of that work, many more letters of the Masters have come
into my custody, and a second volume will, I hope, appear soon. Quite apart
from these publications, a book yet remains to be compiled of the somewhat
personal letters to Mr. Sinnett from the Masters M. and K.H. The original
letters has always been with Mr. Sinnett, but copies made of them with his
permission are at Adyar. When all these volumes, which record the guidance and
teaching of the Masters in these early years of the T.S. are read and pondered
over together, then it will be possible for us more fully than now to enter
into that “Our World”, into which They invited us when They shared with us some
of Their priceless knowledge.
C. Jinarajadasa
-------
SECTION 1
Questions. 1-
2. We understand that the man-bearing cycle of necessity of our solar system
consists of thirteen objective globes, of which ours is the lowest, six above
it in the ascending and six in the descending cycle, with a fourteenth world
lower than ours. Is this correct?
Answer - 1.
The number is not quite correct.
There are seven objective
and seven subjective globes (I have been just permitted for the first time to
give you the right figure), the worlds of causes and effects. The former have
our earth occupying the lower turning point where spirit and matter equilibrate.
But do not trouble yourself to go into calculations even on this correct basis,
for it will only puzzle you, since the infinite ramifications of the number
seven (which is one of our greatest mysteries) being so closely allied and
interdependent with the seven principles of Nature and Man, this figure is the
only one I am permitted (so far) to give you. What I can reveal I do so in a
letter I am just finishing.
Answer- 2.
Below man there are three in the objective and three in the subjective region,
with man as a septenary. Two of the three former none but an Initiate can
conceive of; the third is the inner kingdom below the crust of the earth, which
we could name, but would feel embarrassed to describe. These seven kingdoms are
preceded by other and numerous septenary stages and combinations.
Question- 3.
We understand that the monad starting in the highest world of the ascending
series appears there in a mineral encasement, and there goes through a series
of seven encasements representing the seven classes into which the mineral
kingdom is divided, and that this done, it passes to the next planet and does
likewise. (I purposely say nothing of the worlds of results, where it takes on
the development, the result of what it has gone through in the last world and
the necessary preparation for the next, and so on through the thirteen spheres
making altogether ninety-one mineral existences.) (a) Is this correct? (b) If
so, what are the classes we are to reckon in the mineral kingdom? Also (c) in
the case of inherbations and incarnations, the plant and animal die, but so far
as we know the mineral does not die; so how does the monad in the first Round
get out of one immetalisation into another? (d) And has every separate molecule
of mineral a monad, or only those groups of molecules where definite structure
is observable such as crystals?
Answer -
Yes; in our string of worlds it starts at globe A of the descending series, and
passing through all the preliminary evolution and combinations of the first
three kingdoms, it finds itself encased, in its first mineral form (in what I
shall call race when speaking of man, and what we may call class
in general) of Class 1. Then only it passes through seven instead of
“through the thirteen spheres,” even omitting the intermediate “worlds of
results”.
Having passed through its
seven great classes of immetalisation (a good word this) with their septenary
ramifications, the monad gives birth to the vegetable kingdom, and moves on to
the next planet. B. (a) As you now see, except as to the numbers. (b) Your
geologist divide, I believe, stones into three great groups of sandstone,
granite and chalk, or the sedimentary, organic and igneous, following their
physical characteristics, just as the psychologist and spiritualists divide man
into the trinity of body, soul and spirit. Our method is totally different. We
divide minerals (also the kingdoms) according to their occult properties, i.e.,
according to the relative proportion of the seven mineral principles which they
contain. I am sorry to refuse you, but I am not permitted to answer your
question. To facilitate for you a question of simple nomenclature, however, I
would advise you to study perfectly the seven principles [The “seven
principles in man” were classified as follows in 1881, when these Teachings
were first given, (Article “Fragments of Occult Truth,” by A.O. Hume,
Theosophist, October 1881):
1. The physical body,
composed wholly of matter in its grossest and most tangible form.
2. The Vital principle (or
Jiv-atma), a form of force, indestructible and when disconnected with one set
of atoms, becoming attracted immediately by others.
3. The Astral body (Linga
Sharira) composed of highly etherealised matter; in its habitual passive state;
the perfect but very shadowy duplicate of the body; its activity, consolidation
and form depending entirely on the
4- The Astral shape (Kama
Rupa) or the body of desire, a principle defining the configuration of -
5. The animal or physical
intelligence or consciousness of Ego, analogous to, though proportionally
higher in degree than, the reason, instinct, memory, imagination, etc.,
existing in higher animals.
6. The Higher or Spiritual
intelligence or consciousness, or Spiritual Ego, in which mainly resides the
sense of consciousness in the perfect man, though the lower dimmer animal
consciousness coexists in No. 5.
7. The Spirit - an
emanation from the ABSOLUTE; uncreated; eternal; a State rather than a being.
This classification was
modified in Esoteric Buddhism (1883) as follows;
1. The Body - Rupa;
2. Vitality - Prana or Jiva;
3. Astral Body - Linga Sharira;
4. Animal Soul - Kama Rupa;
5. Human Soul - Manas;
6. Spiritual Soul - Buddhi;
7. Spirit - Atma.]
in man, and then to divide the seven great classes of the minerals
correspondentially; for instance, the group of the sedimentary would answer to
the compound (chemically speaking) body of man, or his first principle, the
organic to the second (some call it third) principle, or Jiva, etc. You must
exercise your own intuitions in that. Thus you might also intuit certain truths
even as to their properties. I am more than willing to help you, but things
have to be divulged gradually. (c) By occult osmosis. The plant and animal
leave their carcasses behind when life is extinct; so does the mineral, only at
longer intervals, as its rocky body is more lasting. It dies at the end of
every Manvantaric cycle, or at the close of one “Round,” as you would
call it. It is explained in the letter I am preparing for you. (d) Every molecule
is part of the Universal life. Man’s soul (his fourth and fifth principles) is
but a compound of the progressive entities of the lower kingdoms. The
superabundance or preponderance of one over another compound will often
determine the instincts or passions of a man, unless these are checked by the
soothing and spiritualising influence of his sixth principle.
Question-4.
Please note, we call the grand cycle that the monad has performed in the
mineral kingdom, a “Round,” which we understand to contain thirteen stations,
or objective, more or less material worlds; at each of these stations it
performs a “world-ring” [ Now termed a
‘world-period’.] which includes seven immetalisations, one in each of
the seven classes of that kingdom. Is this accepted for nomenclature and
correct?
Answer- I
believe it will lead to further confusion. A Round we are agreed to call
the passage of the monad from globe A to globe Z (or G) through the encasement
in all and each of the four kingdoms, viz., as a mineral, a vegetable,
an animal and a man or the Deva kingdom. The “world-ring” [ Now termed a
‘world-period’.] is correct, - advised Mr. Sinnett strongly to agree
upon a nomenclature before going any further. A few stray facts were given to
you par contrebande and on the smuggling principle hitherto. But now
since you are really and seriously determined to study and utilise our
philosophy, it is time we should begin to work seriously. Because we are
constrained to deny to our friends an insight into the higher Mathematics, it
is no reason why we should refuse to teach them Arithmetic. The monad performs
not only “world rings,” or seven major immetalisations, inherbations,
zoonations (?) and incarnations, but an infinitude of sub-rings, or subordinate
whirls, all in series of sevens. As the geologist divides the crust of the
earth into great divisions, subdivisions, minor compartments and zones, and the
botanist his plants into orders, classes and species, and the zoologist his
subjects into classes, orders and families; so we have our arbitrary
classifications and our nomenclature. But besides all this being
incomprehensible to you, volumes upon volumes out of the books of Kiu-te[
See Secret Doctrine, III, 405, for reference to this archaic work.] and
others would have to be written. Their commentaries are worse still. They are
filled with the most abstruse mathematical calculations, the keys to most of
which are in the hands of our highest adepts only; showing as they do the
infinitude of the phenomenal manifestations in the side projections of the one
force, they are again secret, therefore I doubt whether I will be allowed to
give you for the present anything beyond the mere unitary or root idea; anyhow
I will do my best.
Question- 5.
We understand that in each of your other kingdoms, a monad similarly performs a
complete Round, in each Round stopping in each of the thirteen stations and
there performing in each a world ring of seven lives, one in each of the seven
classes into which each of the six said kingdoms are divided. Is this correct,
and if so will you give us the seven classes of these six kingdoms?
Answer - If by
kingdoms the seven kingdoms or reigns of the earth are meant - and I do not see
how it can mean anything else - then the query is answered in my reply to your
Question-2. And if so, then the five out of the seven are already enumerated.
The first two are related, as well as the third, to the evolution of the
elementals and of the inner kingdom.
Question- 6.
If we are right, then the total existences prior to the man period is 637. Is
this correct? Or are there seven existences in each class of each kingdom,
4,459? Or what the total numbers and how divided? One point more; in these
lower kingdoms, is the number of lives, so to speak, invariable or does it
vary, and if so how, why and within what limits?
Answer - Not
being permitted to give you the whole truth or divulge the number of isolated
fractions, I am unable to satisfy you, by giving the total number. Rest
assured, my dear Brother, that to one who does not seek to become a practical
occultist these numbers are immaterial. Even our high chelas are refused these
particulars till the moment of initiation into Adeptship. These figures as I
have already said are so interwoven with the profoundest psychological
mysteries, that to divulge the key to such figures would be to put the rod of
power within the reach of all the clever men who would read your book. All that
I can tell you is that within the Solar Manvantara the number of existences or
vital activities of the monad is fixed, but there are local variations in
number, in minor systems and individual world rounds and world rings according
to circumstances. And in this connection remember also that human personalities
are often blotted out, while the entities, whether single or compound,
complete all the minor and major cycles of necessity under whatsoever form.
Question- 7.
So far we hope we are tolerably correct but when we come to man we
have got muddled.
Answer - And
no wonder, since you were not given the correct information.
(a) Does the monad as
man (ape-man and upwards) make one or seven Rounds as above defined? We gather
the latter.
(a) As a man-ape he
performs just as many Rounds and rings as every other race or class, i.e.,
he performs one Round, and in every planet from A to Z has to go through seven
chief races of ape-like man, as many sub-races, etc. (See Supplemental Notes)
as the above described race.
(b) In each Round
does this world circle consist of seven lives in seven races (49) or only seven
lives in one race? We are not certain how you use the word race, whether there
is only one race in each station of each Round, i.e. one race to each world
circle, or whether there are seven races (with their seven branchlets and a
life in each), in either case in each world circle. Nay, from your use of the
words, “and through each of these man has to evolve before he passes on
to the next higher race and that seven times,” we are not sure that
there are not seen lives in each branchlet as you call it, sub-race we
will, if you like, say. So now there may be seven Rounds, each with seven
races, each with seven sub-races, each with seven incarnations
13x7x7x7x7=31,313 lines, or one Round with seven races and seven sub-races and
a life in each = 13x7x7 = 637 lives or 4,459 lives. Please set us right here,
stating the normal number of lives (the exact numbers will vary owing to idiots
and children as not counting) and how divided.
(b) As the above described
race, i.e., at each planet - our earth included - he has to perform
seven rings through seven races (one in each) and 7x7 offshoots. There are
seven root-races and seven sub-races or offshoots. Our doctrine treats
anthropology as an absurd empty dream of the religionists, and confines itself
to ethnology. It is possible that my nomenclature is faulty; you are at liberty
in such a case to change it. What I call race you will perhaps term “stock,”
though sub-race expresses better what we mean than the word family or division
of the genus homo. However, to set you right so far I will say: one life
in each of the seven root-races, seven lives in each of the 49 sub-races, or
7x7x7=343, and add seven more. And then a series of lives in offshoot and
branchlet races, making the total incarnations of man in each station or planet
777. The principle of acceleration and retardation applies itself in such a way
as to eliminate all the inferior stocks and leave but a single superior one to make
the last ring - not much to divide over some millions of years that man passes
on one planet. Let us take but one million of years - suspected and now
accepted by your science - to represent man’s entire term upon earth in this
Round, and allowing an average of a century for each life, we find that whereas
he has passed in all his lives upon our planet (in this Round) but 77,700
years, he has been in the subjective spheres 922,300 years - not much
encouragement for the extreme modern reincarnationists who remember their
several previous existences! [ French Spiritualists of the Allan Kardec
school were at this time taught reincarnation by their “guides” and devotees of
Spiritualism began to “remember” their past lives as various historical
characters, such as Mary Queen of Scots, etc. All the past personalities were
considered, by some of these reincarnationists, as still hovering round the
personality of this life, and at times manifesting.] Should you indulge
in any calculations, do not forget that we have computed above only full
average lives of consciousness and responsibility. Nothing has been said as to
failures of nature in abortions, congenital idiots, deaths of children in their
first septenary cycle, nor of the exceptions of which I cannot speak. No
less have you to remember that average human life varies greatly according to
the Round. If you work out any of the problems by yourself it will be my duty
to tell you so. Try to solve the problem of 777 incarnations. [ July 9, 1882
]
The Fifth Round has not
commenced on our earth, and the races and sub-races of one Round must not be
confounded with those of another. The Fifth Round of mankind may be said to
have commenced when there shall not be left on the planet which preceded ours a
single man of that Round, and on our earth not one of the Fourth Round. You
should know also that the usual Fifth Round men (very few and scarce they are)
who come in upon us as avant-couriers, do not beget on earth Fifth Round
progeny. Plato and Confucius were Fifth Round men and our Lord [ The
Lord Buddha ] a Sixth Round man (though his avatar is a mystery) and not
even his son [ Prince Rahula ] was anything but a Fourth Round
man. Our mystic terms in their clumsy re-translation from the Sanskrit into
English are as confusing to us as to you; unless in writing to you one of us takes
his pen as an Adept and uses it from the first word to the last in this
capacity, he is quite as liable to slips as any other man. We are not in the
Fifth Round, but Fifth Round men have been coming in for the last few thousand
years. But what is such a petty stretch of time in comparison with even one
million of the several millions of years embraces in man’s occupancy of earth!
Question- Is
the sun (a) as Allen Kardec [ The leader of a school of
Spiritualists in France who taught reincarnation. Allan Kardec was a nom de
plume, his real name being L.H.D. Rivail ] says a habitation of
highly spiritualised beings; (b) is it the vertex of our Manvantaric chain, and
of all the other chains in this solar system also?
Answer - (a)
Most decidedly not. Not even a Dhyan Chohan of the lower orders could approach
it without having his body consumed or rather annihilated. Only the
highest Planetary can scan it. (b) Not unless we call it the vertex of an
angle. But it is the vertex of all the chains collectively. All of us, dwellers
of the chains, we will have to evolve, live and run up and down the scales in
that highest and last of the septenary chains (on the scale of perfection)
before the solar pralaya snuffs out our little system.
Question-
Obscurations are a subject at present wrapped in obscurity. They take place
after the last man of any given Round has passed on to the next planet. But I
want to make out how the next superior Round forms are evolved. When the fifth
Round spiritual monads arrive, what fleshly habitations are ready for them?
Going back to the only former letter in which you have dealt with obscurations,
I find (a) we have traced man out of a Round into the Nirvanic state between Z
and A. A was left in the last Round dead. As the new Round begins, it catches
the new influx of life, reawakens to vitality, and begets all its kingdoms of a
superior order to the last.
Answer - Take
into consideration the following facts and put them together if you can: - (1)
The individual units of mankind remain a hundred times longer in the transitory
spheres of effects than on the globes; (2) the few men of the fifth
Round do not beget children of the fifth, but of your fourth Round; (3) that
the obscurations are not pralayas, and that they last in a proportion of
one to ten, i.e., if a ring or whatever we call it - the period during
which the seven Root-races have to develop and reach their last appearance upon
a globe during that Round - lasts, say ten millions of years (of course
it last far longer) then the obscuration will last no longer than one
million. When our globe, having got rid of its last fourth Round men and a few,
very few, of the fifth, goes to sleep, during the periods of rest the fifth
Round men will be resting in their Devachanic and spiritual lokas - far longer
at any rate than the fourth Round “angels” in theirs, since they are far more
perfect.
Question- I
want to make out how the next superior Round forms are evolved.
Answer - My
friend, try to understand that you are putting me questions pertaining to the
highest Initiations; that I can give you a general view, but that I dare not
nor will I enter upon details, though I would if I could satisfy you. Do not
feel that it is one of the highest mysteries, than which there is no
higher one?
Question-
But has it to begin at the beginning again between each Round and evolve human
forms from animal, these last from vegetable, etc.? If so to what Round do the
first imperfectly evolved man belong? Ex hypothesi to the
fifth, but the fifth Round should be a more perfect race in all respects.
Answer - Of
course not, since it is not destroyed, but remains crystallised - so to
say, in statu quo. At each Round there are fewer and fewer animals - the
latter themselves evoluting into higher forms. During the first Round it is
they that were the “Kings of Creation”. During the seventh Round, men will have
become gods, and animals intelligent beings. Draw your inferences.
Beginning with the second Round, already evolution proceeds on quite a
different plan. Everything is evolved and has but to proceed on its cyclic
journey. It is only the first Round that man becomes from a human being on
Globe B, a mineral, a plant, an animal on globe C. The method changes entirely
from the second Round. But I have learned prudence with you and will say
nothing before the time for saying it has come.
Question- 1.
Some fifth Round men have already begun to appear on earth. In what way are
they distinguishable from fourth Round men of the seventh earthly incarnation?
Answer - The
natural born seers and clairvoyants of Mrs. A. Kingsford’s and Mr. Maitland’s
[ Mrs Anna Bonus Kingsford and Mr. Edward Maitland, authors of The Perfect
Way or The Finding of Christ, 1881.] types; the great Adepts of
whatsoever country; the geniuses, whether in arts, politics or religious
reform. No great physical distinction yet; too early - will come later on.
Question- 2. I
suppose they are in the first incarnation of the fifth Round and that a tremendous
advance will be achieved when the fifth Round people get to their seventh
incarnation?
Answer - Quite
so; if you turn to Appendix I, you will find it explained.
Question- 3.
But if a first fifth Round man devoted himself to occultism and became an
Adept, would he escape further earthly incarnations?
Answer - No;
if we except Buddha, a sixth Round being, as he had run so successfully the
race in his previous incarnations as to outrun even his predecessors. But then
such a man is to be found one in a billion of human creatures. He
differed from other men as much in his physical appearance [ i.e., in
the nature of the constituents which compose the vehicles of the Lord Buddha,
including the physical body, for Buddhist tradition says nothing about any
difference of outward appearance. See Secret
Doctrine, Vol. III., “The
Mystery of Buddha”.] as in spirituality and knowledge. Yet even he
escaped further reincarnations but on this earth; and when the last of the
sixth Round men of the third ring is gone out of this earth, the great Teacher
will have to get reincarnated on the next planet. Only and since he sacrificed
Nirvanic bliss and rest for the salvation of his fellow creatures, he will be
reborn in the highest, the seventh ring of the upper planet. Till then he will overshadow
every decimillennium (let us rather say and add, has overshadowed already) a
chosen individual who generally overturned the destinies of nations (See Isis,
Vol. I, pp, 34 and 35, last and first paragraphs on the pages.)
Question- 4.
Is there any essential spiritual difference between a man and a woman, or is
sex a mere accident of each birth, the ultimate future of the individual
furnishing the same opportunities?
Answer - A
mere accident, as you say. Generally a chance work, yet guided by individual
Karma - moral aptitudes, characteristics and deeds of the previous birth.
Question- 5.
The majority of the superior classes of civilised countries on earth now, I understand
to be seventh ring people (i.e., of the seventh earthly incarnation) of the
fourth Round. The Australian aborigines I understand to be of a low ring? and
are the lower and inferior classes of civilised countries, of various rings or
the rings just below the seventh? And are all seventh ring people born in the
superior classes or may not some be found among the poor?
Answer - Not
necessarily. Refinement, polishedness, and brilliant education, in your
sense of these words have very little to do with the course of nature’s higher
Law. Take a seventh ring African or a fifth ring Mongolian, and you can educate
him - if taken from the cradle - and transform him (save his physical
appearance) into the most brilliant and accomplished English lord. Yet, he will
still remain but an outwardly intellectual parrot. (See Appendix No.II.)
Question- 6.
The old lady [ Madame Blavatsky was
often thus affectionately described by her friends.] told me that the
bulk of the inhabitants of this country are in some respects less advanced than
Europeans through more spiritual. Are they on a lower ring of the same Round,
or does the difference refer to some principle of national cycles which have
nothing to do with individual progress?
Answer - Most
of the peoples of India belong to the oldest or the earliest branchlet of the
fifth human Race. I have desired M [ The Master M., to whom as the Manu
of the next Root Race, the Master K.H. often refers questions on races.]
to end his letter to you with a short summary of the last scientific theory of
your learned ethnographers and naturalists, to save myself work. Read what he
writes and then turn to number Appendix III.
Appendix I
Every spiritual
Individuality has a gigantic evolutionary journey to perform, a tremendous gyrating
progress to accomplish. First, at the very beginning of the great Manvantaric
rotation, from first to last of the man-bearing planets, as on each of them,
the monad has to pass through seven successive races of man. From the dumb
offshoot of the ape (the latter strongly differentiating from the now known
specimens) up to the present fifth Race, or rather variety, and through
two more races before he has done with this Earth only; and then on to the next
higher and higher still. But we will confine our attention but to this one.
Each of the seven races send seven ramifying branchlets from the Parent Branch:
and through each of these in turn man has to evolve before he passes on
to the next higher race; and that seven times. Well may you open wide
your eyes, good friend and feel puzzled it is so.
The branchlets typify
varying specimens of humanity - physically and spiritually - and no one of us
can miss one single rung of the ladder. Please bear in mind, that when I say “man,”
I mean a human being of our type. There are other and innumerable Manvantaric
chains of globes bearing intelligent beings - both in and out of our solar
system - the crowns or apexes of evolutionary and intellectually lower, others
immeasurably higher than the man of our chain. But beyond mentioning them we
will not speak of them at present. Through every race then, man has to pass
making seven successive entrances and exits and developing intellect to degrees
from the lowest to the highest in succession.
In short, his earth cycle
with its rings and sub-rings is the exact counterpart of the great cycle - only
in miniature. Bear in mind again that the intervals even between these special
“race-reincarnations” are enormous, as even the dullest of the African Bushmen
has to reap the reward of his Karma, equally with his brother Bushmen who may
be six times more intelligent.
Your ethnographers and the
anthropologists would do well to ever keep in their minds this unvarying
septenary law which runs throughout the works of nature. From Cuvier - the late
Grand Master of Bible theology - whose Bible-stuffed brain made him divide
mankind into but three distinct varieties of races, down to Blumenbach who
divided them into five, they were all wrong. Alone Pritchard who prophetically
suggested seven comes near the right mark. I read in the Pioneer of June
12, forwarded to me by H.P.B., a letter on the Ape Theory by A. P. W.
which contains a most excellent exposition of the Darwinian hypothesis. The
last paragraph, p.6, Col 1. would be regarded - barring a few errors - as a revelation
in a millennium or so, were it to be preserved. Reading the nine lines from
line 21 (counting from the bottom) you have a fact of which few
naturalists are yet prepared to accept the proof [ The following is the
extract from the Pioneer of June 12, 1882, I have put the nine lines referred
to in boldface: Darwin never maintained man’s descent from the ape. He held
that man was descended “from an ape-like animal.” ; of which the ape, too, is a
branch. In other words, man and ape have a common origin. But it does not
follow that the ape will ever develop into man. The differentiation commenced
at some remote period; and as time rolls on the gulf between them will widen
indefinitely. Darwin illustrated the doctrine of evolution by a genealogical
tree, in which the trunk or base represents a common and collective origin; its
branches and branchlets, developments and differentiations. The trunk
constantly ascending and sending out branches in every direction, and these in
turn ramifying branchlets, typifies varying forms of life widely removed from
each other in character and time, such that, if contrasted without reference to
the base of origin, would be pronounced distinct and specific creations,
instead of mere evolutions. Man, as occupying the Kingship of creation,
is as a branchlet forming the pinnacle of the tree. But he must ultimately
prove only a side branch, and be superseded and topped in turn by superior
races of beings developed from him, and as much and more unlike him than he is
unlike the ape-like animal from which he is undoubtedly descended - for the
tree continues its growth and the end is not yet. The branches and
branchlets that have ceased to grow are the arrested forms of life doomed to
eventual decay in the “struggle for existence”. Those that show decay, indicate
forms that cannot exist under “altered conditions of life,” while those that
have perished point to the extinction of many forms whose fossils are entombed
in the earth’s strata. “The survival of the fittest” under prevailing
conditions, whatever they may be, is the universal law.] The fifth,
sixth and seventh races of the fifth Round - each succeeding race evolving with
and keeping pace, so to say, with the “great cycle” Rounds - and the fifth Race
of the fifth Round, having to exhibit a perceptible physical and intellectual
as well as moral differentiation towards its fourth Race or “earthly
incarnation,” you are right in saying that “a tremendous advance will be achieved
when the fifth Round people get to their seventh incarnation”.
Appendix II
Nor has wealth nor
poverty, high nor low birth, any influence upon it, for this is all a result of
their Karma. Neither has what you call civilization much to do with the
progress. It is the inner man, the spirituality, the illumination of the
physical brain by the light of the spiritual or divine intelligence that is the
test. The Australian, the Esquimaux, the Bushmen, the Veddahs, etc., are all
side-shooting branchlets of that Branch which you call “cavemen,” the third
Race (according to your science, the second) that evolved on the globe. They
are the remnants of the seventh ring cavemen, remnants “that have ceased to
grow and are the arrested forms of life doomed to eventual decay in the
struggle of existence,” in the words of your correspondent. See Isis,
Chap. 1. - The Divine Essence (Purusha), “like a luminous arc,” proceeds to
form a circle - the maha-manvantaric chain: and having attained the highest (or
its first starting-point) bends back again and returns to earth (the first
globe) bringing a higher type of humanity in its vortex - thus seven times.
Approaching our earth, it grows “more and more shadowy, until upon touching the
ground it is as black as night,” i.e., it is matter outwardly,
the Spirit or Purusha being concealed under a quintuple armour of the first
five principles. Now see underlined three lines on p.5. [ “They divided
the interminable periods of human existence on this planet into cycles, during
each of which mankind gradually reached the culminating point of highest
civilization and gradually relapsed into abject barbarism.” Isis, 1, p.5.].
For the word “mankind” read human race, and for “civilization” read spiritual
evolution of that particular race, and you have the truth which had to be
concealed at that incipient stage of the T.S. See again page 13, last
paragraph, and p. 14, first paragraph, [“For lack of comprehension of
this great philosophical principle, the methods of modern science, however
exact, must end in nullity. In no one branch can it demonstrate the origin and
ultimate of things. Instead of tracing the effect from its primal source, its
progress is the reverse. Its higher types, at it teaches, are all evolved from
antecedent lower ones. It starts from the bottom of the cycle, led on step by
step in the great labyrinth of nature by a thread of matter. As soon as this
breaks and the clue is lost, it recoils in affright from the Incomprehensible,
and confesses itself powerless. Not so did Plato and his disciples. With him
the lower types were but the concrete images of the higher abstract ones.
The soul, which is immortal, has an arithmetical, as the body has a geometrical
beginning. This beginning, as the reflection of the great universal ARCHAEUS,
is self-moving, and from the centre diffuses itself over the whole body of the
microcosm.” Isis, 1, pp. 13-14. ] and note the underlined lines about
Plato. Then see P.32, remembering the difference between the Manvantaras
as therein calculated and the Mahamanvantara (complete seven Rounds
between two Pralayas, the four Yugas returning seven times, one for each
race). Having done so far, take your pen and calculate. This will
make you swear - but this will not hurt your Karma much. Lip-profanity finds
it deaf. Read attentively in this connection (not with the swearing process,
but with that of evolution) p.301, last line, “And now comes a mystery,” and
continue on till page 304. Isis was not unveiled but rents [
Isis Unveiled was originally intended to be called The Veil of Isis, and it was
only after Vol. 1. had been printed that the name was changed to Isis Unveiled.]
sufficiently large were made to afford fitting glances to be completed by
the student’s own intuition. In this curry of quotations from various
philosophies and esoteric truths purposely veiled, behold our doctrine which is
now partially taught to Europeans for the first time.
Appendix III
As I said in my answer on
your notes, most of the people of India, with the exception of the Semitic
Moguls, belong to the oldest branchlet of the present Fifth human Race, which
was evolved in Central Asia more than one million of years ago. Western science
finding good reasons for the theory of human beings having inhabited Europe
4000,000 years before your era, this cannot so shock you as to prevent you
drinking wine tonight at your dinner. [ Mr. Sinnett was not a total
abstainer, and even to the end took light wine like claret at dinner.] Yet
Asia has, as well as Australia, Africa, America, and the most northward
regions, its remnants of the fourth - even of the third Race (cavemen and
Therns). At the same time, we have more of the seventh ring men of the fourth
Race than Europe, and more of the first Ring of the Fifth Round, as older than
the European branchlets, our men have naturally come in earlier. Their being
“less advanced” in civilization and refinement troubles their spirituality but
very little, Karma being an animal which remains indifferent to pumps and white
gloves. [ Men’s dancing shoes of black patent leather. Men “in Society”
when dancing wear white kid gloves.] Neither your knives nor forks,
operas and drawing rooms, will any more follow you in your onward progress than
will the dead leaf colored robes of the British aesthetics [ Alluding to
the “aesthetic” wave which affected one set in London Society, and which was
satirised in 1881 by W.S. Gilbert’s comic opera Patience ] prevent the
proprietors thereof and wearers from having been born among the ranks of those
who will be regarded - do what they may - by the forthcoming sixth and seventh
Round men as flesh-eating and liquor-drinking savages “of the Royal Society
Period”.
Question- 7. What
other planets of those known to ordinary science besides Mercury belong to our
system of worlds?
Answer - Mars,
and four other planets of which astronomy yet knows nothing. Neither A, B, nor
Y, Z are known, nor can they be seen through physical means, however perfected.
The figure [ The
figure is found in neither of the MSS.] roughly represents the
development of humanity on a planet - say our earth. Man evolves in seven major
or Root Races, forty-nine minor races, and in subordinate races or offshoots;
the branchlet races coming from the latter are not shown. The arrows indicate
the direction taken by the evolutionary impulse. I, II, etc., are the major or
Root Races; 1, 2, 3, etc., are the seven minor races; a-a-a, etc., are the
subordinate or offshoot races; N, the initial and terminal point of evolution
on the planet; S, the axial point where the development equilibrates or adjusts
itself in each race evolution; E, the equatorial points where in the descending
arc intellect overcomes spirituality, and in the ascending arc spirituality
outstrips intellect.
D.K.
P.S. In his hurry D.K. has
made his figure inclined somewhat out of the perpendicular, but it serves as a
rough memo; he drew it to represent development on a single planet, but I have
added a word or two to make it apply as well (which it does) to a whole
Manvantaric chain of worlds.
Whenever any question of
evolution or development in any kingdom presents itself to you, bear constantly
in mind that everything comes under the septenary rule of series in these
correspondences and mutual relations throughout nature. In the evolution of man
there is a topmost point, a bottom point, a descending arc and an ascending
arc.
Section II
Answer - 1. [ The questions for this and the other
numbered answers which follow are not recorded in the MS.] Why should it be
supposed that Devachan is a monotonous condition, only because some one moment
of earthly sensation is indefinitely perpetuated - stretched, so to say,
throughout aeons? It is not, it cannot be, so; this would be contrary to
all analogies and antagonistic to the Law of Effects, under which results are
proportionate to antecedent energies. To make it clear, you must keep in mind
that there are two fields of causal manifestations, to wit, the objective and
subjective. So the grosser energies, those which operate in the heavier and
denser conditions of matter, manifest respectively in physical life, their
outcome being the new personality of each birth included within the grand cycle
of the evolving individuality.
The moral and spiritual activities find their sphere of effects in
Devachan. For example, the vices, physical attractions, etc., of a philosopher,
may result in the birth of a new philosopher, a king, a merchant, a rich
Epicurean or any other personality, whose make-up was inevitable from the
preponderating proclivities of the being in the next preceding birth. Bacon,
for instance, whom a poet called “the greatest, wisest, meanest of
mankind,” might reappear in his next incarnation as a greedy money-getter with
extraordinary intellectual capacities. But the moral and spiritual qualities of
the previous Bacon would also have to find a field in which their energies
could expand themselves. Devachan is such a field, hence all the great plans of
moral reform, of intellectual and spiritual research into abstract principles
of nature, all the divine aspirations, would in Devachan come to fruition, and
the abstract entity, previously known as the great Chancellor, would occupy
itself in this inner world of its own preparation, living, if not quite what
one would call a conscious existence, at least a dream of such realistic
vividness that none of the life-realities could ever match it. And this dream
lasts until Karma is satisfied in that direction, till the ripple of force
reaches the edge of its cyclic basin, and the being moves into the next area of
causes. This it may find in the same world as before, or another, according to
his or her stage of progression through the necessary rings and Rounds of human
development.
Then how can you think that but one moment of earthly sensation is
selected for preparation? Very true, that moment lasts from first to last, but
then it lasts but as the keynote of the whole harmony, a definite tone of
appreciable pitch, around which cluster and develop in progressive variations
of melody, and as endless variations on a theme, all the aspirations, desires,
hopes, dreams, which in connection with that particular moment had ever crossed
the dreamer’s brain during his life time, without having ever found their
realisation on earth, and which he now finds fully realised in all their
vividness in Devachan, without ever suspecting that all that blissful reality
is but the progeny begotten by his own fancy, the effects of the mental causes
produced by himself. That particular one moment which will be most
intense and uppermost in the thoughts of his dying brain, at the time of
dissolution will of course regulate all the other “moments,” still, the latter,
minor and less vivid though they be, will be there also having their appointed
place in this phantasmagoric marshalling of past dreams, and must give variety
to the whole.
No man on earth but has
some predilection, if not a domineering passion, no person however humble and
poor, and often because all that, but indulges in dreams and desires,
unsatisfied through though these be. Is this monotony? Would you call such
variations ad infinitum on the one theme, and that theme modelling
itself on, and taking colour and its definite shape from that group of desires
which was the most intense during life, “a blank destitution of all knowledge
in the devachanic mind,” seeming in a measure ignoble? Then verily you must
have failed, as you say, to take in my meaning, or it is I who am to blame. I
must have surely failed to convey the right meaning, and have to confess my
inability to describe the indescribable. The latter is a difficult task, good
friend, unless the intuitive perceptions of a trained Chela come to the rescue.
No amount of description however graphic will help; indeed no words are
adequate to express the difference between a state of mind on earth and one
outside of its sphere of action; no English terms in existence equivalent to
ours; nothing but unavoidable (due to early Western education) preconceptions:-
hence lines of thought in a wrong direction in the learner’s mind - to help us
in this inoculation of entirely new thoughts! You are right; not only “ordinary
people” - your readers - but even idealists and highly intellectual minds will
fail, I am afraid, to seize the true idea, will never fathom it to its
very depths. Perhaps you may some day realise better than you do now one of the
chief reasons for our unwillingness to impart our knowledge to European
candidates.
A man in the way to learn
something of the mysteries of nature “seems in a higher state of existence to
begin with on earth than that which nature apparently provides for him as a reward
for his best deeds”; perhaps “apparently,” not so in reality, when the modus
operandi of nature is correctly understood. Then that other misconception -
the more merit the longer period of Devachan. “But then in Devachan all sense
of the lapse of time is lost: a minute is as a thousand years. A quoi bon
then,” etc. . . .
This remark and such way
of looking at things might as well apply to the whole Eternity, to Nirvana,
Pralaya, and what not. Say at once that the whole system of being, of
existence, separate and collective, of nature objective and subjective, are but
idiotic aimless facts, a gigantic fraud of that nature which, meeting with but
little sympathy with Western philosophy, has moreover the cruel disapprobation
of its best representatives. A quoi bon in such a case this preaching of
our doctrines, all this uphill work and swimming in adverso flumine? Why
should the West be so anxious to learn anything from the East, since it is
evidently unable to digest that which can never meet the requirements of the
special tastes of its aesthetics? A sorry outlook for us, since even you
fail to take in the whole magnitude of our philosophy, or to even embrace at
one scope a small corner - the Devachan of those sublime horizons of “after
life”. I do not want to discourage you, I would only draw your attention to the
formidable difficulties encountered by us in every attempt we make to explain
our metaphysics to Western minds even among the most intelligent. No, there are
no clocks, not timepieces in Devachan, though the whole Cosmos is a gigantic
chronometer in one sense. Nor do we mortals - ici bas même - take much,
if any, cognisance of time during periods of happiness and bliss, and find them
ever too short; a fact that does not in the least prevent us from enjoying that
happiness all the same when it does come. Have you given a thought to this
possibility, that perhaps it is because their cup of bliss is full to the brim
that the “Devanchanee” loses all sense of the lapse of time, and that it is
something that those who land in Avitchi do not, though, as much as the
“Devachanee,” the “Avitchee” has no cognisance of time - i.e. of our
earthly calculations of periods of time?
I may also remind you in
this connection that time is something created by ourselves; that, while
one short second of intense agony may appear, even on earth, as an Eternity to
one man, to another more fortunate, hours, days and sometimes whole years may
seem to flit like one short moment; and that finally, of all the sentient and
conscious beings on earth, man is the only animal that takes any cognisance of
time, although it makes him neither happier nor wiser. How then can I explain
to you that which you cannot feel, since you seem unable to comprehend
it? Finite similes are unfit to express the abstract and the infinite, nor can
the objective ever mirror the subjective. To realise the bliss in Devachan or
the woes in Avitchi, you have to assimilate them as we do. Western critical
idealism has still to learn the difference which exists between the real being
of supersensible objects and the shadowy subjectivity it has reduced them to.
Time is not a predicate conception, and can therefore neither be proved nor
analysed according to the methods of superficial philosophy; and unless we learn
to counteract the negative results of that method of drawing our conclusions as
agreeably to the so-called system of pure reason, and to distinguish between
the matter and the form of our knowledge of sensible objects, we can never
arrive at correct definite conclusions. The case in hand as defended by me
against your (very natural) conception is a good proof of the shallowness and
even fallacy of that system of pure (materialistic) reason. Space and Time may
be, as Kant has it, not the product, but the regulators of the sensations, but
only so far as our sensations on earth are concerned, not those in
Devachan. There we do not find a priori ideas of Space and Time
controlling the perceptions of the denizen of Devachan in respect to the
objects of his sense, but on the contrary we discover that it is the Devachanee
himself who absolutely creates both and annihilates them at the same time. Thus
the “after states” so called can never be correctly judged by practical reason,
since the latter can have active being only in the sphere of final causes or
ends, and can hardly be regarded with Kant - with whom the term means on one
page “reason,” and on the next “will” - as the highest spiritual power in man
having for its sphere that Will.
The above is not dragged
in, as you may think, for the sake of a (too far stretched perhaps) argument,
but with an eye to a future discussion “at home,” as you express it, with
students and admirers of Kant and Plato, that you will have to encounter. In
plainer language, I will not tell you the following, and it will be no fault of
mine if you still fail to comprehend its full meaning. As physical existence
has its cumulative intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy
henceforward to dotage and death, so the dream life of Devachan is lived
correspondentially. Hence you are right in saying that the “soul” can never
awake to its mistake and find itself “cheated by nature” - the more so since
strictly speaking the whole of human life and its boasted realities are no
better than such “cheating”. But you are wrong in pandering to the prejudices
and preconceptions of Western readers. No Asiatic will ever agree with you upon
this point. When you add that “there is a sense of unreality about the
whole affair which is painful to the mind,” you are the first one to feel that;
it is no doubt due much more to an imperfect grasp of the nature of existence
in Devachan, than to any defect in our system. Hence my orders to a Chela to
reproduce, in an appendix to your article, extracts from this letter, and
explanations calculated to disabuse the reader, and to obliterate as far as
possible the painful impression this statement of yours is sure to produce upon
him.
Believe me, nature cheats
no more the Devachanee than she does the living physical man. Nature provides
for him far more real bliss and happiness there than she does here,
where all the conditions of evil and chance are against him; and his inherent
helplessness, that of a straw violently blown hither and thither by every
remorseless wind, has made happiness on this earth an utter impossibility for
the human being, whatever his chances and condition may be. Rather call this
life an ugly horrid nightmare and you will be right. To call the Devachan
existence “a dream,” in any other sense but that of a conventional term, well
suited to your languages, all full of misnomers, is to renounce for ever the
knowledge of the esoteric doctrine, the sole custodian of truth
Let me try once more to
explain to you a few of the many states in Devachan and Avitchi. As in actual
earth life, so there is for the ego in Devachan the first flutter of psychic
life, the attainment of prime, the gradual exhaustion of force passing into
semi-consciousness, gradual oblivion and lethargy and - not death - but birth,
birth into another personality and the resumption of action, which daily begets
new congeries of causes that must be worked out in another term of Devachan,
and still another physical rebirth as a new personality. What the lives in Devachan
and upon earth shall be respectively in each instance is determined by Karma,
and this weary round of birth must be ever and ever run through, until the
being reaches the end of the seventh Round, or attains in the interim the
wisdom of an Arhat, then that of a Buddha, and thus gets relieved for a Round
or two, having learned how to burst through the vicious circles, and to pass
into Pari-Nirvana.
But suppose that it is not
the case of a Bacon, Goethe, Shelley, or a Howard, but of some humdrum person, some
colourless, flavourless personality who never impinged upon the world enough to
make himself felt. What then? Simply that his Devachan state is as colourless
and feeble as was his personality. How could it be otherwise, since cause and
effect are equal? But suppose a cause of a monster of wickedness, sensuality,
ambition, avarice, pride, deceit, etc., but who nevertheless has a germ or
germs of something better, flashes of more divine nature - where is he to go
to? The said spark smouldering under a heap of dirt will counteract
nevertheless the attraction of the Eighth Sphere, whither fall but absolute nonentities,
failures of nature, to be remodelled entirely, whose divine monad separated
itself from the fifth principle during their lifetime (whether in the next
preceding birth, since such cases are also on our records) and who have lived
as soulless human beings. (See Isis, Vol. II, p.369, the word soul
standing there for spiritual soul, of course, which, whenever it leaves a
person soulless, becomes the cause of the fifth principle - animal soul -
sliding down into the eighth sphere.) Of these persons whose sixth principle
has left them, while the seventh, having lost its vehicle, can exist
independently no longer, their fifth or animal soul of course goes down into
the bottomless pit. This will perhaps make Eliphas Levi’s hints still more
clear to you, if you read over what he says, and my remarks on the margin
thereon (see Theosophist, October, 1881, “Death,”) and reflect upon the
words used, “useless drones,” etc. [ See Appendix A.] Well, the
first named entity then cannot with all its wickedness go to the Eighth Sphere,
since his wickedness is of a too spiritual, refined nature. He is a
monster, not a mere soulless brute. He will not be simply annihilated,
but punished, for annihilation, i.e., total oblivion, and the
fact of being snuffed out of conscious existence, constitutes, per se,
no punishment, and as Voltaire expressed it “ le néant ne laisse pas
d’avoir du bon”. Here is no taper glimmer to be puffed out by a zephyr, but a
strong, positive, maleficent energy, fed and developed by circumstances, some
of which may have actually been beyond his control. There must be for such a
nature a state corresponding to Devachan, and this is found in Avitchi, the
perfect antithesis of Devachan, vulgarised by the Western nations into Hell and
Heaven, and which you have entirely lost sight of in your Fragments. [
See Appendix B.] Remember, to be immortal in good, one must identify oneself
with good (or God); to be immortal in evil, with evil (or Satan).
Misconceptions of such terms as “Spirit,” “Soul,” “Individuality,”
“Personality” and (especially “Immortality” provoke wordy wars between a great
number of idealistic debaters, and to complete your Fragment, I found it
necessary to add Avitchi to Devachan as its complement, and apply to it the
same laws as to the former. This is done with your permission in the appendix. [The
“appendix” referred to appears on p. 137, Theosophist, March 1883. It will be
found at the end of this work as Appendix B.]
Having explained the
situation sufficiently, I may now answer your query No.1 directly. Yes,
certainly, there is a change of occupation, a continual change in Devachan,
just as much, and far more, as there is in the life of any man or woman who
happens to follow, his or her whole life, one sole occupation whatever it may
be - with this difference, that to the Devachanee this special occupation is
always pleasant and fills his life with rapture. Change, then, there must be,
for that dream life is but the fruition, the harvest time, of those psychic
seed-germs dropped from the tree of physical existence in our moments of
dreams, hopes and fancy, glimpses of bliss and happiness stifled in an ungrateful
social soil, blooming in the rosy dawn of Devachan and ripening under its
ever-fructifying sky. No failures there, no disappointments. If man had
but one single moment of ideal happiness and experience during his life,
as you think, even then, if Devachan exists, it could not be, as you
erroneously suppose, the indefinite prolongation of that “single moment,” but
the indefinite developments of the various incidents and events based upon, and
outflowing from, that one single moment or moments, as the case may be - all,
in short, that would suggest itself to the dreamer’s fancy. That one note, as I
said, struck from the lyre of life, could form but the keynote of the being’s
subjective state, and work out its numberless harmonic tones and semitones of
psychic phantasmagoria.
There, all unrealised
hopes, aspirations and dreams become fully realised, and the dreams of
the objective become the realities of the subjective existence. And
there, behind the curtain of Maya, its vaporous and deceptive appearances are
perceived by the Adept who has learnt the great secret how to penetrate thus
deeply into the Arcana of being. Doubtless my question, whether you had
experienced monotony during what you consider the happiest moment of your life,
has entirely misled you. This letter is thus the just penance for my laziness
to amplify the explanation.
Answer - 2. What
cycle is meant? The “minor cycle” meant is of course the completion of the
seventh Round, as decided upon and explained. Besides that, at the end of each
of the seven Rounds, comes a less full remembrance, only of the Devachanic
experiences taking place between the numerous births at the end of each
personal life. But the complete recollection of all the lives (earthly and
Devachanic - omniscience, in short) comes but at the great end of the full
seven Rounds (unless one had become in the interim a Bodhisattva, an Arhat),
the threshold of Nirvana meaning an indefinite period. Naturally a man, a
seventh Rounder (who completes his earthly migrations at the beginning of
the last race and ring), will have to wait longer at that threshold, than one
of the very last of those Rounds. That life of the Elect between the minor
Pralaya and Nirvana - or rather before the Pralaya - is the great
reward, the grandest in fact, since it makes of the ego (though he may never
have been an Adept, but simply a virtuous worthy man in most of his existences)
virtually a God, an omniscient conscious being, a candidate for eternities of
aeons as a Dhyan Chohan. Enough, I am betraying the mysteries of Initiation.
But what has “Nirvana” to
do with the recollections of objective existences? That is a state still
higher, and in which all things objective are forgotten. It is a state of
absolute rest and assimilation with Parabrahm, it is Parabrahm itself.
Oh for the sad ignorance
of our philosophic truths in the West, and for the inability of your
greatest intellects to seize the true spirit of those teachings! What shall we
do, what can we do.?
Question- 3. [The
answer to this is not in the MS.] You postulate an intercourse of
entities in Devachan which applies only to the mutual relationship of physical
existence. Two sympathetic souls will each work out its own Devachanic
sensations making the other a sharer in its subjective bliss, but yet each is
dissociated from the other as regards actual mutual intercourse. For what
companionship could there be between two subjective entities which are not even
as material as that ethereal body, the Mayavi-rupa?
Answer - 4
Devachan is a state, not a locality. Rupa Loka, Arupa Loka, and Kama Loka are
three spheres of ascending spirituality, in which the several groups of
subjective entities find their attractions. In the Kama Loka (semi-physical
sphere, dwell the shells, the victims and suicides, and the sphere is divided
into innumerable regions and sub-regions, corresponding to the mental states of
the comers at their hour of death. This is the glorious Summerland of the
Spiritualists, to whose horizons is limited the vision of their best seers -
vision imperfect and defective because untrained and non-guided by Alaya
(hidden knowledge). Who in the West knows anything of true Sahalokadhatu, the
mysterious Chiliocosm, [ Mentioned in Beal’s Catena of Buddhism. pp.
101. 116.] out of the many regions of which but three can be given to
the outside world, the Tribhuvana (three worlds), namely Kama, Rupa and Arupa
Lokas? Yet see the sad mess produced in Western minds by the mention of even
these three. From Kama Loka there is the great Chiliocosm. Once awakened from
their post mortem torpor, the newly translated “souls” go ( all but the
shells) according to their attractions either to Devachan or Avitchi. And these
two states are again differentiated ad infinitum, their ascending
degrees of spirituality drawing their names from the Lokas in which they are
induced. For instance, the sensations, perceptions and ideation of a Devachanee
in Rupa Loka will of course be of a less subjective character, than they would
be in Arupa Loka, in both of which the Devachanic experiences will vary in
their presentation to the subject entity, not only as regards form, colour and
substance, but also in their formative potentialities. But not even the highest
Devachanic state in Arupa Loka (the last of seven states) is comparable to that
perfectly subjective condition of pure spirituality, from which the monad
emerged to descend into matter, and to which at the completion of the grand
cycle it must return, nor is Nirvana itself comparable to Pari-Nirvana.
Answer - 5. Reviving
consciousness begins after the struggle in Kama Loka at the door of Devachan,
and only after the “gestation period”. Please turn to my responses on the
subject in your “Famous Contradictions”.
Answer - 6. Your
deductions, as to the indefinite prolongation in Devachan of some one moment of
earthly bliss, having been unwarranted, your question in the last paragraph of
this need not be considered. The stay in Devachan is proportioned to the
unfinished psychic impulses originating in earth-life. Those whose attractions
were preponderatingly material will sooner be drawn back into rebirth by the
force of Tanha. [ The “thirst” or craving for existence.] As one
London opponent truly remarks, these subjects (metaphysical) are only partly
for understanding. A higher faculty belonging to the higher life must see; and
it is truly impossible to force it upon one’s understanding merely in words.
One must see with his spiritual eye, hear with his Dharma-kayic ear, feel with
the sensations of his Astitya Vijnana (spiritual “I”, before one can comprehend
this doctrine fully, otherwise it may but increase one’s discomfort and add to
his knowledge very little.
Answer - 7. The
“reward” provided by nature for men who are benevolent in a large systematic
way, and who have not focussed their affections upon an individual or
speciality is that, if pure, they pass the quicker for that through the Kama
and Rupa Lokas into the higher sphere of Tribhuvana, since it is one where the
formation of the abstract ideas and the consideration of general principles
fill the thought of its occupants. Personality is the synonym for limitation;
and the more contracted the person’s ideas, the closer will he cling to the
lower spheres of being, the longer loiter on the plane of selfish social
intercourse. The social status of a being is, of course, a result of Karma, the
law being that like attracts like. The renascent being is drawn into the
gestative current with which preponderating attractions coming over from the
last birth make him assimilate. Thus one who died a great ryot [ A
cultivator.] may be reborn a king; so a dead sovereign may see the light
in a coolie’s hut. This law of attraction asserts itself in a thousand
“accidents of birth,” than which there could not be a greater misnomer. When
you realise at last the following, that the Skandhas [ The components of
a being, according to Buddhism.] are the elements of limited existence,
then you will have realised also one of the conditions of Devachan which has
such a profoundly unsatisfactory outlook for you. Nor are your inferences ( as
regards the well-being and enjoyment of the upper classes being due to a better
Karma) quite correct in their general application. They have had a ring about
them which is hardly reconcilable with Karmic law, since those “well-being and
enjoyments” are oftener the causes of a new and overloaded Karma, than
the production or effects of the latter, even, as a broad rule, poverty and
humble condition in life are less a cause of sorrow than wealth or high birth.
But of that later on. My answers are once more assuming rather the shape of a
volume than the decent aspect of a letter.
Question- 1.
The remarks appended to a letter in the last “Theosophist.” [ June
1882.] page 226, col 1, strike me as very important and as qualifying
( I do not say contradicting) a good deal of what we have hitherto been told in
re Spiritualism. We have heard of a spiritual condition of life in which the
redeveloped ego enjoyed a conscious existence for a time before reincarnation
in another world, but that branch of the subject has hitherto been slurred
over. Now some explicit statements are made about it and these suggest further
enquiries. In the Devachan the new ego retains complete recollection of his
life on earth, apparently. Is that so, or is there any misunderstanding on that
point on my part?
Answer - The
Devachan, or land of “Sukhavati” is allegorically described by our Lord
Buddha himself. What he said may be found in the Shan-mun-yihtung. Says
Tathagata: “Many thousand myriads of systems of worlds beyond this [ours]
there is a region of bliss called Sukhavati. This region is
encircled within seven rows of railings, seven rows of vast curtains,
seven rows of waving trees; this holy abode of Arhats is governed by the Tathagatas
[Dhyan Chohans] and is possessed by the Bodhisattvas. It hath seven
precious lakes in the midst of which flow crystalline waters having seven
and one properties or distinctive qualities [ the seven principles
emanating from the One]. This, O Sariputra, is the Devachan. The
divine Udambara flower casts a root in the shadow of every earth, and
blossoms for all those who reach it. Those born in the blessed region are truly
felicitous, there are no more griefs or sorrows in that cycle for them.
Myriads of spirits resort there for rest and then return to their own
regions [ those who have not ended their earth rings.] Again,
O Sariputra, in that land of joy many who are born in it are Avaivartyas,” etc.
[ literally, those who will never return, the seventh Round men, etc.] [
For the full discourse in the Chinese version, see Beal’s Catena of Buddhist
Scriptures. pp.378.382 ]
Question- 2.
Now except in the fact that the duration of existence in the Devachan is
limited, there is a very close resemblance between the condition and the Heaven
of ordinary religion (omitting anthropomorphic ideas of God).
Answer -
Certainly the new ego, once that it is reborn, retains for a certain time,
proportionate to its earth life, a “complete recollection of his life on earth”
(see your preceding query). But it can never return on earth from the
Devachan, nor has the latter, even omitting all “anthropomorphic ideas of God,”
any resemblance to Paradise, or Heaven of any religion, and it is H.P.B’s
literary fancy that suggested to her the wonderful comparison.
Question- 3.
Now the question of importance is, who goes to Heaven, or Devachan? Is this
condition only attained by the few who are very good, or by the many who are
not very bad, after the lapse in their case of a longer unconsciousness,
incubation, or gestation?
Answer - “Who
goes to Devachan?” The personal ego, of course, but beatified, purified, holy.
Every ego - the combination of the sixth and seventh principles which after the
period of unconscious gestation is reborn into the Devachan - is of necessity
as innocent and pure as a new born babe. The fact of his being reborn at all
shows the preponderance of good over evil in his old personality. And while the
Karma (of evil) steps aside for the time being to follow him in his future
earth-reincarnation, he brings along with him but the Karma of his good deeds,
words and thoughts into this Devachan. “Bad” is a relative term for us - as you
were told more than once before - and the law of Retribution is the only law
that never errs. Hence all those who have not slipped down into the mire of
unredeemable sin and bestiality go to the Devachan. They will have to pay for
their sins, voluntary and involuntary, later on. Meanwhile they are rewarded;
they receive the effects of the causes produced by them.
Of course it is a state,
one, so to say of intense selfishness, during which an ego reaps the
reward of his unselfishness on earth. He is completely engrossed in the
bliss of all his personal earthly affections, preferences and thoughts, and
gathers in the fruit of his meritorious actions. No pain, no grief, nor even
the shadow of a sorrow comes to darken the bright horizon of his unalloyed
happiness, for it is a state of perpetual “Maya”. Since the conscious
perception of one’s personality on earth is but an evanescent dream,
that sense will be equally that of a dream in the Devachan, only a hundredfold
intensified. So much so indeed, that the happy ego is unable to see through the
veil of evils, sorrows and woes to which those it loves on earth may be
subjected. It lives in that sweet dream with its loved ones, whether gone
before or yet remaining on earth; it has them near itself, as happy, as
blissful and as innocent as the disembodied dreamer himself; and yet, apart
from rare visions, the denizens of our gross planet feel it not. It is in this,
during such a condition of complete Maya, that the souls or astral egos of
pure, loving sensitives, labouring under the same illusion, think their loved
ones come down to them on earth, while it is their own spirits that are raised
towards those in the Devachan. Many of the subjective spiritual
communications - most of them when the sensitives are pure indeed - are real;
but it is most difficult for the uninitiated medium to fix in his mind
the true and correct picture of what he sees and hears. Some of the phenomena
called psychography (though more rarely) are also real. The spirit of the
sensitive getting odylised, so to say, by the aura of the spirit in Devachan,
becomes for a few minutes that departed personality, and writes in the
handwriting of the latter, in his language and in his thoughts as they were
during his life time. The two spirits become blended in one; and the
preponderance of one over the other during such phenomena determines the
preponderance of personality in the characteristics exhibited in such
writings and trance speaking. What you call the “rapport” is in plain fact an
identity of molecular vibration between the astral part of the incarnate medium
and the astral part of the disincarnate personality.
I have just noticed an
article on Smell by some English professor (which I will cause to be reviewed
in Theosophist [ Referring to an article of Professor William
Ramsay in Nature, June 22, 1882; a review appears in Theosophist, August, 1882,
under the title, “The Harmonies of Smell”. See Appendix C.] and say a
few words) and find in it something that applies to our case. As in music two
different sounds may be in accord and separately distinguishable - this harmony
or discord depending upon the synchronous vibrations and complementary periods
- so there is rapport between medium and control when their astral molecules
move in accord. And the question whether the communication shall reflect more of
the one personal idiosyncrasy or the other is determined by the relative
intensity of the two sets of vibrations in the compound wave in the Akasa.
The less identical the vibratory impulses the more mediumistic and less
spiritual will be the message. So then, measure your medium’s moral state by
that of the alleged controlling intelligence, and your tests of genuineness
leave nothing to be desired.
Question- 4.
Are there great varieties of condition within the limits so to speak of
Devachan, so that an appropriate state is dreamed into by all, from which they
will be born into lower or higher conditions in the next world of causes? It is
of no use to multiply hypotheses: we want some information to go upon.
Answer - Yes,
there are great varieties in the Devachan states, and it is all as you say - as
many varieties of bliss as on earth there are shades of perception and
capability to appreciate such reward. It is an ideated paradise of the ego’s
own making, and by him filled with the scenery, crowded with the incidents and
thronged with the people he would expect to find in such a state of
compensative bliss. And it is that variety which guides the temporary personal
ego into the current which will lead him to be reborn in a higher or lower
condition in the next world of causes. Everything is so harmoniously adjusted
in nature, especially in the subjective world, that no mistake can ever be
committed by the Tathagatas, or Dhyan Chohans who guide the impulses.
Question- 5. On
the face of the idea, a purely spiritual state would only be enjoyable to the
entities highly spiritualised in this life. But where are the myriads of very
good people (morally) who are not spiritualised at all? How can they be fitted
to pass, with their recollections of this life, from a material to a spiritual
condition of existence?
Answer - It is
a “spiritual condition” only as contrasted with our own grossly material
condition, and, as already stated, it is such degrees of spirituality that
constitute and determine the great varieties of conditions within the limits of
Devachan. A mother from a savage tribe is not less happy than a mother from a
regal palace, with her lost child in her arms; and, although as actual egos,
children prematurely dying before the perfection of their septenary entity do
not find their way to Devachan, yet all the same the mother’s loving fancy
finds her children there, without one missing that her heart yearns for. Say it
is but a dream; but after all what is objective life itself but a panorama of
vivid unrealities? The pleasure realized by a red Indian in his happy hunting
grounds in that land of dreams is not less intense than the ecstasy felt by a
connoisseur who passes aeons in the rapt delight of listening to divine
symphonies by imaginary angelic choirs. As it is no fault of the former if born
a savage with an instinct to kill, though it caused the death of many an
innocent animal, why - if with it all he was a loving father, son, husband, -
why should not he also enjoy his share of reward? The case would be quite
different if the same cruel acts had been done by an educated and civilised
person from a mere love of sport. The savage in being reborn would simply take
a low place in the scale by reason of his imperfect moral development, while
the Karma of the other would be tainted with moral delinquency. Everyone but
that ego which, attracted by its gross magnetism, falls into the current that
will draw it into “the Planet of Death” - the mental as well as the physical
satellite of our earth - is fitted to pass into a relative spiritual condition
adjusted by his previous condition in life and mode of thought.
To my knowledge and
recollection, H.P.B. explained to Mr. Hume that man’s sixth principle, as
something purely spiritual, could not exist or have conscious being in
the Devachan, unless it assimilated some of the more abstract and pure of the
mental attributes of the fifth principle or the animal soul - its Manas (mind)
and memory. When man dies, his second and third principles die with him; the lower
triad disappears, and the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh principles form
the surviving Quaternary (read again p. 6, in Fragments of O. T.) [
Fragments of Occult Truth. Eight articles with this title appeared in Theosophist,
from October, 1881, to May, 1883. The articles are unsigned, but references in
these letters, and in letters of Mr. Sinnett, show that they were practically
the joint production, in the beginning at least, of Mr. Sinnett and Mr. Hume.
No.1 however seems to have been Mr. Hume’s. Seven “Fragments “ appeared as two
pamphlets, the first bearing the imprint “Issued by the Parent Theosophical
Society,” and the second, “Printed by the Parent Theosophical Society”.]
Thenceforth it is a “death” struggle between the upper and lower dualities. If
the upper wins, the sixth, having attracted to itself the quintessence of good
from the fifth - its nobler affections, its saintly (though they be earthly)
aspirations and the most spiritualised portions of its mind - follows its
divine Elder of the seventh into the “gestation state”; and the fifth
and fourth remain in association as an empty shell (the expression is quite
correct) to roam in the earth’s atmosphere with half the personal memory gone,
and the more brutal instincts fully alive for a certain period - an
“Elementary” in short. This is the “Angel guide” of the average medium. If, on
the other hand, it is the upper duality which is defeated, then, it is
the fifth principle that assimilates all that there may be left of personal
recollection and perception of its personal individuality in the sixth. But
with all this additional stock it will not remain in Kama Loka, the world of
desire, or our earth’s atmosphere; in a very short time, like a straw floating within
the attraction of the vortices and pits of the maelstrom, it is caught up and
drawn into the great whirlpool of human egos, while the sixth and seventh, now
a purely spiritual individual monad, with nothing left in it of the late
personality, having no regular “gestation” period to pass through (since there
is no purified personal ego to be reborn), after a more or less
prolonged period of unconscious rest in the boundless space will find itself
reborn in another personality on the next planet. When arrives the period of
full individual consciousness which preceded that of absolute
consciousness in Pari-Nirvana, this lost personal life becomes as a torn-out
page in the great Book of Lives, without even a disconnected word left to mark
its absence. The purified monad will neither perceive nor remember it in the
series of its past rebirths, which it would had it gone to the “world of forms”
(Rupa Loka), and its retrospective glance will not perceive even the slightest
sign to indicate that it has been. The light of Samma-Sambuddha,
That
light which shines beyond our mortal ken,
The
light of all the lives in all the worlds.
throws no ray upon that personal
life in the series of lives forgone. To the credit of mankind I must say that
such an utter obliteration of an existence from the tablets of universal Being
does not occur often enough to make a great percentage. In fact, like the much
mentioned congenital idiot, such a thing is lusus naturae - an exception,
not the rule.
Question- 6.
And now is a spiritual existence, in which everything is merged into the sixth
principle, compatible with that consciousness of individual and personal
material life which must be attributed to the ego in Devachan, if he retains
his earthly consciousness, as stated in “Theosophist” note?
Answer - The
question is now sufficiently explained, I believe. The sixth and seventh
principles apart from the rest, constitute the eternal, imperishable, but also unconscious
“monad.” To awaken it to life, the latent consciousness, especially that of personal
individuality, requires the monad plus the highest attributes of the
fifth (the animal soul), and it is that which makes the eternal ego, that lives
and enjoys bliss in Devachan. Spirit, or the unalloyed emanation of the One -
the latter forming with the seventh and sixth principles the highest triad -
neither of the two emanations are capable of assimilating, but that which is
good, pure and holy; hence no sensual material or unholy recollection can
follow the purified memory of the ego to the region of bliss. The Karma for
these recollections of evil deeds and thoughts will reach the ego when it changes
personality in the following world of causes. The monad, or the
“spiritual individuality,” remains untainted in all cases. No sorrow or pain
for those born there (in the Rupa Loka of Devachan) for this is the pure land.
All the regions in space posses such lands (Sakwala), but this land of bliss is
the most pure. “By personal purity and earnest meditation we overleap the
limits of the world of desire, and enter into the world of forms.” (Djnana-prasthana
Shastra.)
Question- 7.
The period of gestation between death and Devachan has hitherto been conceived,
by me at all events, as very long. Now it is said to be in some cases only a
few days, in no case (it is implied) more than a few years. This seems plainly
stated, but I ask if it can be explicitly confirmed, because it is a point on
which so much turns.
Answer -
Another fine sample of the habitual disorder in which Mrs. H.P.B’s mental
furniture is kept. She talks of “Bardo,” [ In article referred to in
Question-1.] and does not even say to her readers what it means; as in
her writing room confusion is ten times confounded, so in her mind are crowded
ideas piled in such a chaos that when she wants to express them the tail peeps
out before the head. “Bardo” has nothing to do with the duration of time in the
case you are referring to. “Bardo” is the period between death and rebirth, and
may last from a few years to a kalpa. It is divided into three sub-periods: -I-
. When the ego, delivered of its mortal coil, enters into Kama Loka (Tibetan tuli-kai),
the abode of the elementaries. -II-. When it enters into its “gestation state”.
-III-. When it is reborn in the Rupa Loka of Devachan, Sub-period -I-. may last
from a few minutes to a number of years (the phrase a “few years” becoming
puzzling and utterly worthless without a more complete explanation); sub-period
-II-, is very long, as you say, longer sometimes than you may even imagine, yet
proportionate to the ego’s spiritual stamina; sub-period -III-, lasts in
proportion to the good Karma, after which the monad is again reincarnated. The
Agama Sutra saying, “In all these Rupa-Lokas the devas [spirits]
are equally subjected to birth decay, old age and death” means only that an ego
is borne thither, then begins fading out and finally dies,” i.e., falls
into that unconscious condition which precedes rebirth; and ends the sloka with
these words, “As the devas emerge from these heavens, they enter the lower
world again,” i.e., they leave a world of bliss to be reborn in the
world of causes.
Question- 8. In
that case, and assuming that Devachan is not solely the heritage of Adepts and
persons almost as elevated, there is a condition of existence tantamount to
Heaven actually going on, from which the life of earth may be watched by an
immense number of those who have gone before.
Answer - Most
emphatically the Devachan is not solely the heritage of the Adepts, and
most decidedly there is a “heaven,” if you must use this
astro-geographical Christian term, for “an immense number of those who have
gone before.” But “the life of earth” can be watched by none of these, for
reasons of the law of Bliss and Maya already given.
Question- 9. And
for how long? Does this state of spiritual beatitude endure for years, for
decades, for centuries?
Answer - For
years, decades, centuries and millenniums, oftentimes X by something more. It
all depends upon the duration of Karma. Fill with oil Denny’s [ Denny
Sinnett, Mr. Sinnett’s little boy.] cup and a city reservoir of water,
and lighting both, see which burns the longer. The ego is the wick and Karma
the oil, the difference in the quantity of the latter (in the cup and in the
reservoir) suggesting to you the great difference in the duration of various
Karmas. Every effect must be proportionate to the cause. And as man’s term of
incarnate existence bears but a small proportion to his periods of internatal
existence in the Manvantaric cycle, so the good thoughts, words and deeds of
any of these “lives” on a globe are causation of effects, the working out of
which requires far more time than the evolution of the causes occupied.
Therefore, when you read in the Jatakas and other “fabulous” stories of the
Buddhist Scriptures that this or the other good action was rewarded by Kalpas
of several figures of bliss, do not smile at the absurd exaggeration, but bear
in mind what I have said. From a small seed sprung a tree whose life endures
for twenty-two centuries - the Anuradhapura Bo-tree.[ This tree, now in
Ceylon, was a cutting from the original tree under which Lord Buddha attained
to Buddahood. It was brought by Sanghamitta, the daughter of the Buddhist
Emperor Asoka, and planted at Anuradhapura in the third century B.C. It is
still flourishing.]
Nor must you laugh if ever
you come across Pindadana or any other Buddhist Sutra and read: “Between
the Kama Loka and the Rupa Loka there is a locality, the dwelling of Mara [death].
This Mara, filled with passion and lust, destroys all virtuous principles as a
stone grinds corn. [This Mara, as you may well think, is the allegorical
image of the sphere called ‘the Planet of Death’ - the whirlpool whither
disappear the lives doomed to destruction. It is between Kama and Rupa Lokas
that the struggle takes place] His palace is 7,000 yojanas square
and is surrounded by a seven fold wall.” For you will feel now more
prepared to understand the allegory. Also, when Beal, or Burnouf, or Rhys
Davids in the innocence of their Christian and materialistic souls indulge in
such translations as they generally do, we do not bear them malice for their
commentaries, since they cannot know any better. But what can the following
mean: “the names of the heavens [ a mistranslation - Lokas are not
heavens but localities or abodes] of desire, Kama Loka, so called
because the beings who occupy them are subject to desires of eating, drinking,
sleeping and love. They are otherwise called the abodes of the five (?) orders
of sentient creatures - Devas, men, asuras, beasts, demons.” (Lautan Sutra,
translated by S. Beal.) They mean simply that, had the reverend translator been
acquainted with the true doctrine a little better, he would have first divided
the Devas into two classes - and called them the “Rupa Devas” and the “Arupa
Devas” (the “form” or objective, and the “formless” or subjective Dhyan
Chohans); and second, would have done the same for his class of “men,” since
there are shells and “Mara rupas,” i.e.., bodies doomed to annihilation.
All these are: (1) Rupa-devas - Dhyan Chohans having forms (Ex-men). [The
Planetary Spirits of our Earth are not of the highest as you may well imagine,
since, as Subba Row says in his criticism upon Oxley’s work, no Eastern Adept
would like to be compared with an angel or Deva - see May Theosophist. [
“Philosophy of Spirit, with a new version of the Bhagavad-Gita by William
Oxley,” was reviewed in Theosophist, December 1881. In May 1882, T. Subba Row
writes on the same work, “Examined from the Esoteric and Brahmanical
Stand-Point”.] (2) Arupa-devas - Dhyan Chohans having no forms (ex-men).
(3) Pisachas (two-principled) ghosts or shells. (4) Mararupas
(three-principled) bodies doomed to annihilation. (5) Asuras - elementals
having no human form. (6) Beasts - second class animal elementals (these two
classes, (5) and (6), are future men). (7) Rakshasas (demons) - souls or astral
forms of sorcerers, men who have reached the apex of knowledge in the forbidden
art; dead or alive, they have, so to say, cheated nature, but it is only
temporary, until our planet goes into obscuration, after which they will have nolens
volens to be annihilated. [ In Abidharma Shastra
(Metaphysics) we read “Buddha taught that on the outskirts of all Sakwalas,
there is a black interval, without sun or moonlight for him who falls into it.
There is no rebirth from it. It is the cold Hell, the great Naraka”.
This is Avitchi. ] It is these seven groups that form the principal
divisions of the dwellers of the subjective worlds around us. It is in stock
No.-I- that are the intelligent Rulers of this world of matter, and who, with
all their intelligence, are but the blindly obedient instruments of the ONE,
the active agents of a Passive Principle.
And thus are
misinterpreted and mistranslated nearly all our Sutras; yet even under that
confused jumble of doctrines and words, for one who knows even superficially
the true doctrine, there is firm ground to stand upon. Thus, for instance, in
enumerating the seven Lokas of Kama Loka, the Avatamsaka Sutra gives as
the seventh “the Territory of Doubt”. I will ask you to remember the
name, as we shall have to speak of it hereafter. Every such world, within the
sphere of effects has a Tathagata or Dhyan Chohan to protect and watch over,
not to interfere with, it. Of course, of all men, Spiritualists will be the
first to reject and throw off our doctrines to the “limbo of exploded
superstitions”. Were we to assure them that every one of their “Summerlands”
had seven boarding houses in it, with the same number of “Spirit Guides” to
“boss” in them, and call these “angels” St. Peters, St. Johns and St. Ernests,
they would welcome us with open arms. But whoever heard of Tathagatas and Dhyan
Chohans, Asuras, and elementals? Preposterous! Still we are happily allowed by
our friends (Mr. Eglington at least) to be possessed “of a certain knowledge of
occult sciences” (vide Light), and thus, even this mite of “knowledge”
is at your service, and is now helping me to answer your following question:
Question- 10. Is
there any intermediate condition between the spiritual beatitude of Devachan,
and the forlorn shadow life of the only half-conscious elementary reliquiae of
human beings who had lost their sixth principle? Because if so, that might give
a locus standi in imagination to the
Ernests and Joeys of the spiritual mediums, the better sort of controlling
spirits. If so, surely that must be a very popular world from which any amount
of spiritual communications might come.
Answer - Alas,
no my friend; not that I know of. From Sukhavati down to the “territory of
doubt,” there is a variety of spiritual states; but I am not aware of any such
“intermediate condition”. I have told you of the Sakwalas (though I cannot be
enumerating them since it would be useless); and even of Avitchi, the “Hell”
from which there is no return, and I have no more to tell about it. “The
forlorn shadow” has to do the best it can. As soon as it has stepped outside
the Kama Loka and crossed the “Golden Bridge” leading to the “Seven Golden
Mountains,” the ego can confabulate no more with the easygoing mediums. No
Ernest or Joey has ever returned from the Rupa Loka, let alone the Arupa Loka,
to hold sweet intercourse with mortals.
Of course, there is a
better sort of reliquiae, and the “shells,” or the “earth walkers” as they are
here called, are not necessarily all bad. But even those who are good
are made bad for the time being by mediums. The shells may well not care, since
they have nothing to lose anyhow. But there is another kind of “spirits” we
have lost sight of: the suicides and those killed by accident. Both
kinds can communicate and both have to pay dearly for such visits. And now I
have to explain what I mean. Well, this class is the one that the French
Spiritualists call les esprits souffrants. They are an exception to the
rule, as they have to remain within the earth’s attraction and in its
atmosphere, Kama Loka, till the very last moment of what would have been the
natural duration of their lives. In other words, that particular wave of
life-evolution must run on to its shore. But it is a sin and cruelty to revive
their memory and intensify their suffering by giving them a chance of living an
artificial life - a chance to overload their Karma, by tempting them into
opened doors, viz., mediums and sensitives, for they will have to pay
roundly for every such pleasure. I will explain the suicides, who, foolishly
hoping to escape life, find themselves still alive, have suffering enough in
store for them from that very life. Their punishment is in the intensity of the
latter. Having lost by the rash act of their seventh and sixth principles,
though not for ever, as they can regain both, instead of accepting their
punishment and taking their chances of redemption, they are often made to regret
life and tempted to regain a hold upon it by sinful means. In the Kama Loka,
the land of intense desires, they can gratify their earthly yearnings but
through a living proxy, and by so doing, at the expiration of the
natural term, they generally lose their monad forever. As to the victims of
accident, these fare still worse. Unless they were so good and pure as to be
drawn immediately within the akashic samadhi, - i.e., to fall
into a state of quiet slumber, a sleep full of rosy dreams during which they
have no recollection of the accident, but move and live among their familiar
friends and scenes, until their natural life-term is finished, when they find
themselves born in the Devachan - a gloomy fate is theirs. Unhappy shades, if
sinful and sensual, they wander about (not shells, for their connection with
their two higher principles is not quite broken) until their death hour
comes. Cut off in the full flush of earthly passions which bind them to familiar
scenes, they are enticed by the opportunities which mediums afford, to gratify
them vicariously. They are the Pisachas, the Incubi and Succubi of mediaeval
times; the demons of thirst, gluttony, lust and avarice; Elementaries of
intensified craft, wickedness, and cruelty; provoking their victims to horrid
crimes and revelling in their commission. They not only ruin their victims, but
these psychic vampires, borne along by the torrent of their hellish impulses,
at last, at the fixed close of their natural period of life, are carried out of
the earth’s aura into regions where for ages they endure exquisite suffering
and end with entire destruction.
But if the victim of
accident and violence be neither very good nor very bad - an average person -
then this may happen to him: a medium who attracts him will create for him the
most undesirable of things - a new combination of skandhas and a new and
evil Karma.
But let me give you a
clearer idea of what I mean by Karma in this case. In connection with this, let
me tell you before, that since you seem so interested with the subject, you can
do nothing better than to study the two doctrines of Karma and Nirvana as
profoundly as you can. Unless you are thoroughly well acquainted with the two
tenets - the double key to the metaphysics of Abhidharma - you will always find
yourself at sea in trying to comprehend the rest. We have several sorts of
Karma and Nirvana in their various applications to the universe, the world,
Devas, Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, men and animals - the second including its seven
kingdoms. Karma and Nirvana are but two of the seven great mysteries of
Buddhist metaphysics, and but four of the seven are known at all to Western
Orientalists, and even those but imperfectly. If you ask a learned Buddhist
priest, what is Karma, he will tell you that Karma is what a Christian might
call Providence (in a certain sense only) and a Mahommedan Kismet, fate or
destiny (again in one sense). That is that cardinal tenet that teaches that, as
soon as any conscious or sentient being, whether man, Deva or animal, dies, a
new being is produced, and he or it reappears in another birth on the same or
another planet, under conditions of his or its own antecedent making. Or, in
other words, that Karma is the guiding power, and Trishna (in Pali Tanha),
the thirst or desire to sentiently live, the proximate force or energy; the
resultant of human (or animal) action - which out of the old Skandhas [
I remark that in the second as well as in the first edition of your Occult World the same misprint appears, in that the word
Skandha is spelt Shandba; [This wrong spelling “Shandba” of the word
Skandha is still persisted in, even in the last reprint of 1921. For forty-one
years the misprint continues, in spite of the Master's correction! The on-line
version is fine ] on page 130 as it now stands I am made to express
myself in a very original way for a supposed Adept ] produces the
new group that form the new being and control the nature of the birth itself.
Or, to make it still clearer, the new being is rewarded and punished for the
meritorious acts and misdeeds of the old one, Karma representing an entry book,
in which all the acts of man good, bad or indifferent are carefully recorded to
his debit and credit, by himself, so to say, or rather by these very actions of
his. There, where Christian poetical fiction created and sees a “recording”
guardian angel, stern and realistic Buddhist logic, perceiving the necessity
that every cause should have its effect, shows its real presence. The opponents
of Buddhism have laid great stress upon the alleged injustice that the doer
should escape, and an innocent victim be made to suffer, since the doer and the
sufferer are different beings. The fact is, that while in one sense they may be
so considered, yet in another they are identical. The “old being” is the
sole parent, the father and mother at once, of the “new being.” It is the
former who is the creator and fashioner of the latter in reality; and far more
so in plain truth, than any father in flesh. And once that you have well
mastered the meaning of the Skandhas you will see what I mean. It is the group
of Skandhas that form and constitute the physical and mental individuality we
call man (or any being). This group consists (in the exoteric teaching) of five
Skandhas, namely Rupa, the material properties or attributes; Vedana,
sensations; Sanna, abstract ideas; Sankhara, tendencies both
physical and mental; and Vinnana, mental powers, an amplification of the
fourth, meaning mental, physical and moral predispositions. We add to them two
more, the nature and names of which you may learn hereafter. Suffice it for the
present to let you know that they are connected with, and productive of, Sakkaya
ditthi, “the heresy or delusion of individuality,” and of Attavada,
“ the doctrine of self,” both of which, in the case of the fifth principle, the
soul, lead to the Maya of heresy and belief in the efficacy of vain rites and
ceremonies, in prayers and intercessions. [ Of the ten “Fetters” on the
Path to liberation, the first three are: (1) Sakkayaditthi, the delusion of
self, (2) Vichikicheha, doubt, (3) Silabbataparamsa, belief in the efficacy of
rites and cermonies.]
Now, returning to the
question of identity between the old and the new “ego,” I may remind you once
more than even your science has accepted the old, very old, fact distinctly
taught by our Lord, [ see the Abhidharma Kosha Vyakhya, the Sutta
Pitaka or any Northern Buddhist book, all of which show Gautama Buddha
saying that even if these Skandhas are the soul, since the body is constantly
changing, and that neither man, animal nor plant is ever the same for two consecutive
days or even minutes, “Mendicants! Remember that there is within man no
abiding principle whatever, and that only the learned disciple who
acquires wisdom in saying ‘ I am’ knows what he is saying”] viz.,
that a man of any given age, while sentiently the same, is yet physically not
the same as he was a few years earlier (we say seven years and are
prepared to maintain and prove it); Buddhistically speaking, his Skandhas have
changed; at the same time they are ever and ceaselessly at work in preparing
the abstract mould, the “privation” of the future new being. Well, then,
if it is just that a man of forty should enjoy or suffer for the actions of the
man of twenty, so it is equally just that the being of the new birth - who is
essentially identical with the previous being, since he is its outcome and
creation - should feel the consequences of that begetting self or personality.
Your Western law which punishes the innocent son of a guilty father by
depriving him of his parent, rights and property; your civilised society which
brands with infamy the guiltless daughter of an immoral criminal mother; your
Christian Church and Scriptures which teach that the Lord God visits the sins
of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation; are not
all these far more unjust and cruel than anything done by Karma? Instead of
punishing the innocent together with the culprit, the Karma avenges and rewards
the former, which neither of your three Western Potentates above mentioned ever
thought of doing. But perhaps to our physiological remark the objectors may
reply that it is only the body that changes, there is only a molecular
transformation which has nothing to do with the mental evolution; and that the
Skandhas represent not only a material but also a set of mental and moral
qualities. But is there, I ask, either a sensation, an abstract idea, a
tendency of mind, or a mental power that one could call an absolutely
non-molecular phenomenon? Can even a sensation or the most abstract of
thoughts, which is something, come out of nothing, or be nothing?
Now the causes producing
the “new being” and determining the nature of Karma are, as already said, Trishna
(or Tanha) - thirst, desire for sentient existence, and Upadana,
which is the realisation or consummation of Trishna or that desire. And both of
these the medium helps to awaken and develop ne plus ultra in an
elementary, be he a suicide or a victim (alone the shells and the elementals
are left unhurt, though the morality of the sensitives can, by no means, be
improved by the intercourse). The rule is that a person who dies a natural
death will remain from “a few hours to several short years” within the earth’s
attraction, i.e., the Kama Loka. But exceptions are the cases of
suicides and those who die a violent death in general. Hence one of such egos,
for instance, who was destined to live, say eighty or ninety years, but who
either killed himself or was killed by some accident, let us suppose at the age
of twenty, would have to pass in the Kama Loka not “a few years” but in his
case sixty or seventy years as an elementary, or rather as an “earth walker,”
since he is not, unfortunately for him, even a shell. Happy, thrice happy, in
comparison, are those disembodied entities, who sleep their long slumber, and
live in dream, in the bosom of space! And woe to those whose Trishna will
attract them to mediums, and woe to the latter, who tempt them with such an
easy Upadana. For in grasping them and satisfying their thirst for life, the
medium helps to develop in them - is in fact the cause of - a new set of
Skandhas, a new body with far worse tendencies and passions than was the one
they lost. All the future of this new body will be determined thus, not only by
the Karma of demerit of the previous set or group, but also by that of a new
set of the future being. Were the mediums and Spiritualists but to know, as I
said, that with every new “angel guide” they welcome with rapture, they entice
the latter into an Upadana which will be productive of a series of untold evils
for the new ego that will be reborn under its nefarious shadow, and that with
every seance, especially for materialisation, they multiply the causes for
misery - causes that will make the unfortunate ego fail in his spiritual birth
or to be reborn into a worse existence than ever - they would, perhaps, be less
lavish in their hospitality.
And now you may understand
why we oppose so strongly Spiritualism and mediumship. And you will also see
why, to satisfy Mr. Hume at least in one direction, I got myself into a scrape
with the Chohan,[ See below] and - mirabile dictu - with
both the Sahibs, “the young man of the name of “[ Alluding to the “young
man of the name of Guppy,” well-known to readers of Dickens ‘Bleak House’.]
- Scott and Banon. [ Ross Scott, of the Bengal Civil Service, who
married Mr. Hume’s daughter, and Captain A Banon of the 39th Bengal
Native Infantry.] To amuse you I will ask H.P.B. to send you with this a
page of the “Banon papyrus,” an article of his that he winds up with a severe
literary thrashing of my humble self. Shadows of the Asuras, in what a passion
she flew upon reading this rather disrespectful criticism! I am sorry she does
not print it, upon considerations of “family honour,” as the “Disinherited”
[ Damodar K. Mavlankar was thus nicknamed, as he renounced all his
patrimony to attach himself to H.P.B and follow the call of the Masters.]
expressed it. As to the Chohan, the matter is more serious; and he was far from
satisfied that I should have allowed Eglington to believe it was myself.
He had permitted this proof of the power in living man to be given to
the Spiritualists through a medium of theirs, [ This incident is
narrated in The Occult World, “Conclusion,”] but had left the
programme and its details to ourselves: hence his displeasure at some trifling
consequences.
I tell you, my dear
friend, that I am far less free to do as I like than you are in the matter of
the Pioneer. [ Mr. Sinnett was the editor of the Pioneer.]
None of us but the highest Chutuktus are their full masters. But I digress. And
now that you have been told much and have had explained a good deal, you may as
well read this letter to our irrepressible friend, Mrs. Gordon. [ Mrs
Alice Gordon, wife of Colonel Gordon, who testifies in The Occult World to the
phenomena of H.P.B.] The reasons given may throw some cold water
on her spiritualistic zeal, though I have my reasons to doubt it; anyhow it may
show her that it is not against true Spiritualism that we set ourselves,
but only against indiscriminate mediumship and physical manifestations,
materialisations and trance possessions especially. Could the Spiritualists be
only made to understand the differences between individual and personal immortality
and some other truths, they would be more easily persuaded that Occultists may
be fully convinced of the monad’s immortality, and yet deny that of the soul
- the vehicle of the personal ego; that they can firmly believe in and
themselves practise spiritual communication and intercourse with disembodied
egos of the Rupa Loka, and yet laugh at the insane idea of “shaking hands”
with a spirit; and that finally, as the matter stands, it is the Occultists and
Theosophists who are Spiritualists, while the modern sect of that name is
composed simply of materialistic phenomenalists.
And now that we are
discussing “individuality” and “personality,” it is curious that H.P.B., when
subjecting poor Mr. Hume’s brain to torture with her muddled explanations, never
thought, until receiving the explanation from himself, of the difference that
exists between individuality and personality, that it was the very same
doctrine she had been taught - that of Pachcheka-yana, and Amita-yana.
The two terms as above given by him are the correct and literal translation of
the Pali, Sanskrit, and even of the Chino-Tibetan technical names for the many personal
entities blended in one individuality - the long string of lives
emanating from the same immortal monad. You will have to remember then (1) the pachcheka
yana (in Sanskrit pratyeka) means literally the “personal vehicle”
or personal ego - a combination of the five lower principles; while (2) the amita
yana (in Sanskrit amrita) is translated “the immortal vehicle” or individuality
- the spiritual soul, or the immortal monad, a combination of the fifth, sixth
and seventh principles.
[From
A.P. Sinnett to H.P. Blavatsky
Simla, July 25 -1882]
My Dear Old Lady,
I began to try to answer
N.D.K’s [ N.D. Khandalawala, still a member of the T.S., and Member of
the General Council. This letter appears in Theosophist, Nov. 1882, evidently
many months after Mr. Sinnett had read it.] letter at once, so that if
K.H. really meant the note to appear in this immediately next appearing Theosophist
for August it might just be in time. But I soon got into a tangle. Of course we
have received no information that distinctly covers the question now raised,
though I suppose we ought to be able to combine bits into an answer. The
difficulty turns on giving the real explanation of Eliphas Levi’s enigma in
your note in the October Theosophist. 8 [Article, “Death”. See
Appendix A.]
If he refers to the fate
of this, at present existing, race of mankind, his statement that the
intermediate majority of egos are ejected from nature or annihilated, would be
in direct conflict with K.H.’s teaching. They do not die without remembrance,
if they retain remembrance in Devachan and again recover remembrance (even of
past personalities as of a book’s pages) at the period of full individual
consciousness preceding that of absolute consciousness in Pari-Nirvana.
But it occurred to me that
E.L. may have been dealing with humanity as a whole, not merely with the fourth
Round men. Great numbers of fifth Round personalities are destined to perish, I
understand, and these might be his intermediate useless portion of mankind. But
then the individual spiritual monads, as I understand the matter, do not perish
whatever happens, and if a monad reaches the fifth Round with all his previous
personalities preserved in the pages of his book awaiting future perusal, he
would not be ejected and annihilated because some of his fifth Round pages were
“unfit for publication”; so again there is a difficulty in reconciling the two
statements. But again is it conceivable that a spiritual monad, though
surviving the rejection of the third and fourth Round pages -cannot survive the
rejection of fifth and sixth Round pages - that failure to lead good lives in these
Rounds means the annihilation of the whole individual, who will never then get
to the seventh Round at all? But on the other hand if that were so, the Eliphas
Levi’s case would not be met by such hypothesis, for long before then the
individuals who had become co-workers with Nature for evil would have been
themselves annihilated by the obscuration of the planet between the fifth and
sixth Rounds, if not by the obscuration between the fourth and fifth, for to
every Round there is an obscuration we are told. There is another difficulty
here, because some fifth Rounders being here already, it is not clear when the
obscuration comes on. Will it be behind the avant couriers of the fifth
Round, who will not count as commencing the fifth, that epoch only beginning
after the existing race has totally decayed out - but this would not work.
A.
P. S.
[From
A.O. Hume to the Master K.H.]
My Dear Master,
In speaking of Fragments
No. III, of which you will receive proof soon, I said it was far from
satisfactory though I had done my best. It was necessary to advance the
doctrine of the Society another stage, so as gradually to open the eyes of the
Spiritualists, so I introduced as the most pressing matter the suicide, etc.,
view given in your last letter to S. Well, it is this that seems to me most
unsatisfactory, and it will lead to a number of questions that I shall feel
puzzled to reply to. Our first doctrine is that the majority of objective
phenomena were due to shells, 1½- and 2½- principled shells, i.e.,
principles entirely separated from their sixth and seventh principles. But as a
further development, we admit that there are some spirits, i.e., fifth
and fourth principles not wholly dissevered from their sixth and seventh, which
also may be potent in the seance room. These are the spirits of suicides and
victims of accident or violence. Here the doctrine is that each particular wave
of life must run on to its appointed shore, and with the exception of the very
good, that all spirits prematurely divorced from the three lower principles
must remain on earth, until the fore-destined hour, of what would have been the
natural death, strikes. Now this is all very well, but this being so, it is
clear that in opposition to our former doctrine, shells will be few and spirits
many.
For what difference can
there be, to take the case of suicides, whether these be conscious or
unconscious, whether the man blows his brains out or only drinks himself to
death or kills himself by overstudy? In each case, equally the normal natural
hour of death is anticipated and a spirit and not a shell the result. Or again
what difference does it make whether a man is hung for murder, killed in
battle, in a railway train or a powder explosion, drowned or burnt to death, or
knocked over by cholera, or plague, or jungle fever or any of the other
thousand and one epidemic diseases of which the seeds were not ab initio
in his constitution, but were introduced therein in consequence of his
happening to visit a particular locality or undergo a given experience to that
which he might have avoided? Equally in all cases the nominal normal death hour
is anticipated, and a spirit instead of a shell the result. In England it is
calculated that not 15 per cent of the population reach their normal
death-period, and what with fevers and famines and their sequeloe I fear
the percentage is not much larger than here even, where the people are mostly
vegetarians and, as a rule, live under less unfavourable sanitary conditions.
So then the great bulk of
all the physical phenomena of Spiritualists ought apparently to be due to these
spirits and not shells. I should be glad to have further information on this
point. There is a second point. Very often as I understand, the spirits of very
fair average good people dying natural deaths, remain some time in the
earth’s atmosphere, from a few days to a few years; why cannot such as these
communicate? And if they can, this is a most important point that should not
have been overlooked. And thirdly, it is a fact that thousands of spirits do
appear in pure circles and teach the highest morality, and moreover tell very
closely the truth as to the unseen world (witness X.Y.Z.’s [ I omit the
true name and substitute X.Y.Z. See later the reference to this Spiritualist.]
books, pages on pages of which are identical with what you yourself teach) and
it is unreasonable to suppose that such are either shells or bad spirits. But
you have not given us any opening for any large number of pure high spirits;
and until the whole theory is perfectly set forth, and due place made for
these, which seem to me a thoroughly well-established fact, you will never win
over the Spiritualists. I dare say it is the old story - only part of
the truth being told to us and the rest reserved - if so it is merely cutting
the Society’s throat. Better to tell the outside world nothing
than to tell them half truths, the incompleteness of which they detect at once,
the result being a contemptuous rejection of what is truth - though they
cannot accept it in this fragmentary state.
Yours affectionately,
A.O. Hume.
[Answer]
Except in so far that he
constantly uses the terms “God” and “Christ,” which taken in their esoteric
sense mean good in its dual aspect of the abstract and the concrete -
nothing more dogmatic - Eliphas Levi is not in any direct conflict with
our teachings. It is again a straw blown out of a haystack and accused by the
wind to belong to a hay-rick. Most of those whom you call “candidates” for
Devachan die and are reborn in the Kama-Loka, “without remembrance,” though
(and just because) they do get some of it back in the Devachan. Nor can we call
it a full, but only a partial remembrance. You would hardly call a
“remembrance,” a “dream” of yours, some particular scene or scenes within those
narrow limits you would find enclosed a few persons, those whom you loved best
with an undying love, that holy feeling alone surviving, and not the slightest recollection
of any other events or scenes? Love and hatred are the only immortal
feelings, the only survivors from the wreck of te-damina [ So in
MS., presumably wrongly copied from the original letter.] or the
phenomenal world.
Imagine yourself then, in Devachan
with those you may have loved with such immortal love, with the familiar
shadowy scenes connected with them for a back ground, and - a perfect blank for
everything else relating to your interiors, social, political and literary
life; and then, in the face of that spiritual purely cogitative existence, of
that unalloyed felicity which, in proportion to the intensity of the feeling
that created it, lasts from a few to several thousand years, call it the
“personal remembrance of A.P. Sinnett,” if you can. Dreadfully monotonous, you
may think; not in the least I answer. Have you experienced monotony during,
say, that moment which you considered then and now so consider
it, as the moment of the highest bliss you have ever felt? Of course not; well,
no more will you experience it there, in that passage through the Eternity in
which a million of years is no longer than a second. There, where there is no
consciousness of an external world, there can be no discernment to mark
differences; hence, no perception of contrasts, of monotony or variety;
nothing, in short, outside the immortal feeling, of love and sympathetic
attraction whose seeds are planted in the fifth, whose plants blossom
luxuriantly in and around the fourth, but whose roots have to penetrate deep
into the sixth principle if it would survive the lower groups. (And now I
propose to kill two birds with one stone - to answer your letter and Mr. Hume’s
questions at the same time.)
Remember, both, that we
create ourselves our Devachan, as our Avitchi, while yet on earth, and
mostly during the latter days and even moments of our intellectual sentient
lives. That feeling which is strongest in us at that supreme hour, when, as in
a dream, the events of a long life to their minutest details, are marshalled in
the greatest order in a few seconds in our vision (that vision takes place when
a person is already proclaimed dead; the brain is the last organ that dies),
that feeling will become the fashioner of our bliss or woe, the life
principle of our future existence. In the latter we have no substantial
being, but only a present and momentary existence, whose duration has no
bearing upon, has no effect nor relation to, its being, which as every other
effect or a transitory cause will be as fleeting, and in its turn will vanish
and cease to be. The real full remembrance of our lives will come but at the
end of the minor cycle, not before. In Kama Loka those who retain their
remembrance will not enjoy it at the supreme hour of recollection, and these
two are the exceptions to the general rule. Those who know they are dead
in their physical body can only be either Adepts or sorcerers. Both having been
“co-workers with nature,” the former for good, the latter for evil, in her work
of creation and that of destruction, they are the only ones who may be called immortal
- in the Kabalistic and the esoteric sense, of course. Complete or true
immortality, which means an unlimited sentient existence, can have no
breaks or stoppages, no arrest of self-consciousness. And even the
shells of those good men whose pages will not be found missing in the great
Book of Lives at the threshold of the great Nirvana, even they will regain
their remembrance of self-consciousness only after the sixth and seventh
principles, with the essence of the fifth (the latter having to furnish the
material for even that partial recollection of personality which is necessary
for the object in Devachan), have gone to their gestation period, not before.
Even in the case of suicides and those who have perished by violent death, even
in their case consciousness requires a certain time to establish its new centre
of gravity and evolve, as Sir W. Hamilton would have it, its “perception
proper,” henceforth to remain distinct from “sensation proper”. Thus, when man
dies, his “soul” (fifth principle) becomes unconscious and loses all
remembrance of things internal as well as external.
Whether his stay in Kama
Loka has to last but a few moments, hours, days, weeks, months, or years;
whether he died a natural or a violent death; whether it occurred in his youth
or old age; and whether the ego was good, bad, or indifferent; his
consciousness leaves him as suddenly as the flame leaves the wick when blown
out. When life has retired from the last particle in the brain matter, his
perceptive faculties become extinct for ever, his spiritual powers of
cogitation and volition (all those faculties, in short, which are neither
inherent in, nor acquirable by organic matter) for the time being. [ So
in MS. But surely some word like “suspended” omitted!] His Mayavirupa
may be often thrown into objectivity, as in the cases of apparitions after
death; but, unless it is projected with the knowledge of (whether latent or
potential) or, owing to intensity of the desire to see or appear to some one,
shooting through the dying brain, the apparition will be simply automatical; it
will not be due to any sympathetic attraction, or to any act of volition, and
no more than the reflection of a person passing unconsciously near a mirror is
due to the desire of the latter.[ The meaning is clear, though some
words seem somewhere omitted in MS.]
Having thus explained the position, I will sum up and ask you again why it
should be maintained that what is given by Eliphas Levi and expounded by
H.P.B., is “in direct conflict” with my teaching? E.L. is an occultist and
Kabalist, and writing for those who are supposed to know the rudiments of the
Kabalistic tenets, uses the peculiar phraseology of his doctrine, and H.P.B.,
follows suit. The only omission she was guilty of was not to add the word
“Western” between the last two words, “Occult” and “Doctrine”. (See 3rd
line of Editor’s Note.) (See Appendix A ] She is a fanatic in her way
and is unable to write with anything like system and calmness to remember that
the general public needs all the lucid explanations that, to her, may seem
superfluous. And, as you are sure to remark, “but this is also our case and you
too seem to forget it”, I will give you a few more explanations. As remarked on
the margin of The Theosophist for October, the word immortality
has for the Initiates and occultists quite a different meaning.
We call “immortal” but the
one Life in its universal collectivity and entire or absolute abstraction -
that which has neither beginning nor end, nor any break in its continuity .
Does the term apply to anything else? Certainly it does not. Therefore the
earliest Chaldeans had several prefixes to the word immortality, one of which
is the Greek, rarely-used term panoeonic immortality, i.e.,
beginning with the Manvantara and ending with the Pralaya of our Solar
universe. It lasts the aeon (αιωυ), or “period” of all our Pan,
or all “nature”. Immortal then is he, in the panaeonic immortality, whose
distinct consciousness and perception of self, under whatever form,
undergoes no disjunction at any time, not for one second, during the period of
his ego-ship. These periods are several in number, each having its distinct
name in the secret doctrines of the Chaldeans, Greeks, Egyptians and Aryans,
and were they but amenable to translation - which they are not, at least so
long as the idea involved remains inconceivable to the Western mind - I could
give them to you. Suffice for you for the present to know, that a man, an ego
like yours or mine, may be immortal from one to the other Round. Let us say I
begin my immortality at the present fourth Round, i.e., having become a
full Adept (which unfortunately I am not) [ The Master K.H. had been for
long a “full Adept,” but not “D.K.” who I think writes this part of the letter.
It was soon after this, I believe next year, that “D.K.” passed on to his Fifth
Initiation of Asekha and became a “full Adept”.] I arrest the hand of
death at will, and when finally obliged to submit to it, my knowledge of the secrets
of nature puts me in a position to retain my consciousness and distinct
perception of self as an object to my own reflective consciousness and
cognition; and thus avoiding all such dismemberments of principles, that as a
rule take place after the death of average humanity, I remain as K.H. in my
ego, throughout the whole series of births and lives across the seven worlds
and Arupa Lokas, until finally I land again on this earth among the fifth race
men of the full fifth Round beings. I would have been in such a case “immortal”
for a period to you inconceivably long, embracing many milliards of years. And
yet, am I truly immortal for all that? Unless I make the same efforts as
I do now to secure for myself another such furlough from nature’s laws, K.H.
will vanish, and may become a Mr. Smith or an innocent Babu, when his leave
expires. There are men among us who may become immortal during the remainder of
the Rounds, and then take their appointed place among the highest Chohans, the
Planetary conscious “ego-spirits”. Of course, the monad “never perishes
whatever happens,” but Eliphas Levi speaks of the personal, not of the
spiritual ego.
You misconceived the
teaching, because you were not aware of what you are now told: (a) who are the
true co-workers with nature, and (b) that it is by no means all
the evil “co-workers with nature” who drop into the Eighth Sphere and are
annihilated (annihilated suddenly as human egos, personalities lasting in that
world of pure matter, under various material forms, for an inconceivable time
before they are returned to primeval matter). The potency for evil is as great
in man, aye greater, than the potentiality for good. An exception to the rule
of nature that exception, which in the case of Adepts and sorcerers becomes in
its turn a rule, has again its own exceptions. Read carefully the passage that
C.C.M. [ C. C. Massey, President of the London Lodge T.S.. one of the
original founders of the T.S. in 1875.] left unquoted on pp. 352-3, Isis,
Vol. I, paragraph 3. Again she omits to state distinctly that the case
mentioned relates only to those powerful sorcerers, whose co-partnership with
nature for evil affords to them the means of forcing her hand, and thus accords
them panaeonic immortality. But oh, what kind of immortality, and how
preferable is annihilation to such lives! Don’t you see that everything you
find in Isis is delineated, hardly sketched, nothing completed or
revealed? Well, the time has come, but where are the workers for such a tremendous
task?
Says Mr. Hume (see affixed
letter, marked passages) . . . . And now when you have read the objections to
that most unsatisfactory doctrine, as Mr. Hume calls it, - a doctrine
which you have to learn first as a whole, before proceeding to study it in
parts - at the risk of satisfying you no better I will proceed to explain the
latter.
Although not wholly
dissevered from their sixth and seventh principles and quite potent in the
séance-room, nevertheless to the day when they would have died a natural death,
they are separated from the higher principles by a gulf. The sixth and seventh
remain passive and negative, whereas, in cases of accidental death, the higher
and the lower groups actually attract each other. In cases of good and innocent
egos, moreover, the latter gravitate irresistibly towards the sixth and
seventh, and thus either slumber surrounded by happy dreams, or sleep a
dreamless profound sleep until the hour strikes. With a little reflection and
an eye to the eternal justice and fitness of things, you will see why. The
victim, whether good or bad, is irresponsible for his death; even if his death
were due to some action in a previous life, was an act, in short, of the law of
Retribution, still it was not the direct result of an act deliberately
committed by the personal ego of that life during which he happened to
be killed. Had he been allowed to live longer he might have atoned for his
previous sins still more effectually; and even now the ego, having been made to
pay off the debt of his maker (the previous ego), is free from the blows of
retributive justice. The Dyan Chohans, who have no hand in the guidance of the
living human ego, protect the helpless victim when it is violently thrust out
of its element into a new one, before it is matured and made fit and ready for
it. We tell you what we know, for we are made to learn it through personal
experience. You know what I mean, and I can say no more. Yes, the
victims, whether good or bad, sleep to awake but at the hour of the last judgement,
which is that hour of supreme struggle between the sixth and the seventh and
the fourth and the fifth at the threshold of the gestation state. And even
after that, when the sixth and seventh, carrying off a portion of the fifth,
have gone into their Akashic Samadhi, even then it may happen that the
spiritual spoil from the fifth may prove too weak to be reborn in Devachan, in
which case it will there and then re-clothe itself in a new body, the
subjective “being” created from the Karma of the victim (or no victim as the
case may be), and enter upon a new earth-existence, whether upon this or any
other planet. In no case then, with the exception of suicides and shells, is
there any possibility for any other to be attracted to a séance-room. And it is
“clear” that this teaching is not “in opposition to our former doctrine,” and
that while shells will be many, spirits very few.
2. There is a great
difference in our humble opinion. We, who look at it from a standpoint which
would prove very unacceptable to a Life Insurance Company, say that there are
very few, if any, of the men who indulge in the above enumerated vices who feel
perfectly sure that such a course of action will lead them eventually to
premature death. Such is the penalty of Maya. The vices will not escape their
punishment, but it is the cause, not the effect, that will be punished,
especially an unforeseen though probable effect. As well call a suicide
a man who meets his death in a storm at sea, as one who kills himself with
“overstudy”. Water is liable to drown a man, and too much brain work to produce
a softening of the brain which may carry him away. In such a case no one ought
to cross the Kalapani [“Blackwater” - a Hindu designation for the
ocean.] nor ever to take a bath for fear of getting faint in it and
drowned (for we all know of such cases), nor should a man do his duty, least of
all sacrifice himself for even a laudable and highly beneficent cause as many
of us (H.P.B. for one) do. Would Mr. Hume call her a suicide were she to
drop down dead over her present work? Motive is everything, and man is punished
in a case of direct responsibility, never otherwise. In the victim’s case, the
natural hour of death was anticipated accidentally, while in that of the
suicide, death is brought on voluntarily, and with a full and deliberate
knowledge of its immediate consequences. Thus a man who causes his death in a
fit of temporary insanity is not a felo-de-se, to the great grief and
often trouble of the Life Insurance Companies. Nor is he left a prey to the
temptations of the Kama Loka, but falls asleep like any other victim. A Guiteau
[ Guiteau on July 2, 1881, shot President Garfield of U.S.A. Garfield
died in September from the injuries received. ] will not remain in the
earth’s atmosphere with his higher principles over him, inactive and paralysed
but still there. Guiteau is gone into a state during the period of which he
will be ever firing at his President, and thereby tossing into confusion and
shuffling the destinies of millions of persons, where he will be ever tried and
ever hung, bathing in the reflection of his deeds and thoughts, especially
those he indulged in on the scaffold. As for those who were “knocked over by
cholera or plague or jungle fever,” they could not have succumbed had they not
had the germs for the development of such diseases in them from birth. “So then
the great bulk of all the physical phenomena of Spiritualists,” my dear
brother, are not “due to these spirits”, but indeed to “shells”.
3. “The spirits of very
fair average good people dying natural deaths, remain some time in the earth’s
atmosphere, from a few days to a few years,” the period depending upon their
readiness to meet their creature, not their Creator, a very abstruse
subject you will learn later on when you too are more prepared. But why should
they “communicate”? Do those you love communicate with you objectively during
their sleep? Your spirits, in hours of danger, or intense sympathy, vibrating
on the same current of thought, which in such cases creates a kind of
telegraphic spiritual wires between your two bodies, may meet and mutually
impress your memories; but then you are living not dead bodies. But how
can such an unconscious fifth principle impress or communicate with a living
organism unless it has already become a shell? If for certain reasons they
remain in such a state of lethargy for several years, the spirits of the living
may ascend to them, as you were already told; and then communication may take
place still easier than in Devachan, where the spirit is too much engrossed in
his personal bliss to pay much attention to an intruding element. I say they cannot.
4. I am sorry to
contradict your statement. I know of thousands of spirits who “do appear” in
circles, and “teach the highest morality,” but I do not know of one perfectly pure
circle; I hope I may not be classed with slanderers, in addition to other names
lately bestowed upon me, but truth compels me to declare that X. Y. Z. was not
quite immaculate during his lifetime, nor has he become a very pure spirit
since. As to teaching the “highest morality,” we have Dugpa Shaman not far from
where I am residing, quite a remarkable man, not very powerful as a sorcerer
but excessively so as a drunkard, a thief, a liar - and an orator. In this latter
role he could give points to and beat Messrs. Gladstone, Bradlaugh, and even
the Rev. H. Ward Beecher, than whom there is no more eloquent preacher of
morality and no greater breaker of his Lord’s commandments in the USA. This
Shapatung Lama, when thirsty, can make an enormous audience of “yellow cap”
laymen weep all their yearly supply of tears with the narrative of his
repentance and suffering in the morning, and then get drunk in the evening and
rob the whole village by mesmerising them into a dead sleep. Preaching and
teaching morality with an end in the view proves very little. Read J.P.T’s
article in Light and what I say will be corroborated.
(To A.P.S.) The
obscuration comes on only when the last man of whatever Round has passed into
the sphere of effects. Nature is too well, too mathematically, adjusted to
cause mistakes to happen in the exercise of its functions. The obscuration of
the planet on which we are now evolving the races of the fifth Round man, will
of course be behind the few avant couriers who are now here. But before
that time comes, we will have to part to meet no more, as the editor of the Pioneer
and his humble correspondent.
And now having shown that
the October number of The Theosophist was not utterly wrong, nor
was it at variance with the “later teaching,” may K.H. set you “to reconcile
the two”? To reconcile you still more with Eliphas, I will send you a number of
his manuscripts that have never been published, in a large, clear, beautiful
hand writing, with my comments all through. Nothing better than that can give
you a key to Kabalistic puzzles. [ All these were duly published in
Theosophist as “Unpublished Writings of Eliphas Levi”. One of them, “The
Paradoxes of the Highest Science,” has lately been reprinted by the Theosophical
Publishing House, Adyar, Madras.]
I have to write to Mr.
Hume this week, to give him consolation, and to show that unless he has a
strong desire to live he need not trouble himself about Devachan. Unless a man loves
well or hates well, he will be neither in Devachan nor Avitchi. “Nature
spues the lukewarm out of her mouth,” means only that she annihilates their personal
egos (not the shells, nor yet the sixth principle) in the Kama Loka and the
Devachan. This does not prevent them from being immediately reborn, and if
their lives were not very, very bad, there is no reason why the eternal monad
should not find the page of that life intact in the Book of Life.
Question- You
say, “Remember that we create ourselves our Devachan,
as our Avitchi, while yet on earth, and mostly during the latter days and even
moments of our intellectual sentient lives.” It is a widely spread belief among
all the Hindus that a person’s future pre-natal state and birth are moulded by
the last desire he may have at the time of death. But this last desire, they
say, necessarily hinges on to the shape which the person may have given to his
desires, passions, etc., during his past life. It is for this very reason,
viz., that our last desire may not be unfavourable to our future progress, that
we have to watch our actions and control our passions and desires throughout
our whole earthly career. But do the thoughts on which the mind may be engaged
at the last moment necessarily hinge on to the predominant character of its past
life? Otherwise it would seem as if the character of a person’s Devachan or
Avitchi might be capriciously and unjustly determined by the chance which
brought some special thought uppermost at last.
Answer - It
cannot be otherwise. The experience of dying men (by drowning and other
accidents) brought back to life has corroborated our doctrine in almost every
case. Such thoughts are involuntary, and we have no more control over
them than we should have over the retina of the eye to prevent it perceiving that
colour which affects it most. At the last moment the whole life is reflected in
our memory and emerges from all the forgotten nooks and corners, picture after
picture, one event after the other. The dying brain dislodges memory with a
strong supreme impulse, and memory restores faithfully every impression that
has been entrusted to it during the period of the brain’s activity. That
impression and thought which was the strongest naturally becomes the most vivid
and survives, so to say, all the rest, which now vanish and disappear forever,
to reappear but in Devachan. No man dies insane or unconscious, as some
physiologists assert. Even a madman or one in a fit of delirium tremens
will have his instant of perfect lucidity at the moment of death, though unable
to say so to those present. The man may often appear dead; yet from the last
pulsation, from and between the last throbbing of his heart, and the moment
when the last spark of animal heat leaves the body, the brain thinks,
and the ego lives in these few brief seconds his whole life over again. Speak
in whispers, ye who assist at a deathbed, and find yourselves in the solemn
presence of Death. Especially have ye to keep quiet just after Death has laid
his clammy hand upon the body. Speak in whispers, I say, lest ye disturb the
quiet ripple of thought, and hinder the busy work of the Past casting its
reflection upon the veil of the Future.
Question- “The
real full remembrance of our lives will come but at the end of the minor
cycle.” Does the “minor cycle” here mean one Round, or the whole Manvantara of
our planetary chain? That is, do we remember our past lives in the Devachan of
world Z at the end of each Round, or only at the end of the seventh Round?
Answer - Yes;
the full remembrance of our collective lives will return at the end of all the
seven Rounds, at the threshold of the long, long Nirvana that awaits us after
we leave globe Z. At the end of isolated Rounds, we remember but the sum-total
of our last impressions, those we had selected, or rather those that had forced
themselves upon us, and followed us in Devachan. Those are all “probationary”
lives with large “indulgences” and new trials afforded us with every new life.
But at the close of the minor cycle, after the completion of all the seven
Rounds, there awaits us no other mercy but the cup of good deeds of
merit outweighing that of evil deeds and demerit in the scales of Retributive
Justice. Bad, irretrievably bad, must be that ego that yields no mite from its
fifth principle, and has to be annihilated, to disappear in the Eighth
Sphere. A mite, as I say, collected from the personal ego suffices to save him
from this dreary fate. Not so after the completion of the great cycle; either a
long Nirvana of bliss (unconscious though it be in his and according to your
crude conceptions), after which life as a Dhyan Chohan for a whole Manvantara;
or else Avitchi-Nirvana, and a Manvantara of horror and misery as a
.............. you must not hear the word, nor I pronounce or write it.
But “those” have naught to do with the mortals that pass through the seven
spheres. The collective Karma of a future Planetary is as lovely as the
collective Karma of a ............ is terrible! Enough! I have said too much
already.
Question-
And you say, “ And even the shells of those good men whose pages will not be
found missing in the great book of lives . . . even they will regain their
remembrance of self consciousness only after the sixth and seventh principles
with the essence of the fifth have gone to their gestation period.”
Answer -
Verily so; until the struggle between the higher and middle duad begins (with
the exception of suicides, who are not dead, but have only killed their
physical triad, and whose elemental parasites therefore are not naturally
separated from the ego, as in real death) until that struggle, I say, has not
begun and ended, no shell can realise its position. When the sixth and seventh
principles are gone, carrying off with them the finer spiritual portions of
that which was once the personal consciousness of the fifth, then only
does the shell gradually develop a kind of hazy consciousness of its own from
what remains in the shadow of personality. No contradiction here, my dear friend,
only haziness in your own perception ( a physical brain, once dead, of course
cannot retain its perceptive faculties).
Question- A
little later on: “ Whether the ego was good, bad, or indifferent, his
consciousness leaves him as suddenly as the flame leaves the wick . . . his
perceptive faculties become extinct for ever.” Well, can a physical brain once
dead retain its perceptive faculties? That which will perceive in the shell is
something that perceives with a borrowed or reflected light (see note) Then
what is the nature of the remembrance and self consciousness of the shell? This
touches on a matter I have often thought about - wishing for further
explanation - the extent of personal identity in elementaries.
Answer - All
that which pertains to the materio-psychological attributes and sensations of
the five lower skandhas, all that which will be thrown off as refuse by
the newly-born ego in the Devachan, as unworthy of and not sufficiently related
to the purely spiritual perceptions, emotions and feelings of the sixth,
strengthened and, so to say, cemented by a portion of the fifth, (that portion
which is necessary in the Devachan for the retention of a divine spiritualised
notion of the “I” in the monad, which would otherwise have no consciousness in
relation to subject and object at all) - all this “becomes extinct for ever,”
namely at the moment of physical death, to return once more, marshalling before
the eyes of the new ego at the threshold of Devachan, and to be rejected by it.
It will return for the third time fully at the end of the minor
cycle, after the completion of the seven Rounds, when the sum-total of
collective existences is weighed, merit in one cup and demerit in the other cup
of the scales. But in that individual, in the ego - good, bad or indifferent -
in the isolated personality, “consciousness leaves as suddenly as the flame
leaves the wick.” Blow out your candle, good friend; the flame has left that
candle “for ever,” but are the particles that moved, their motion producing the
objective flame, annihilated or dispersed for all that? Never, Relight
the candle, and the same particles, drawn by a mutual affinity, will return
to the wick. Place a long row of candles on your table. Light one and blow it
out; then light the other and do the same, then the third and fourth, and so
on. The same matter, the same gaseous particles - representing in our case the
Karma of the personality - will be called forth by the conditions given them by
your match to produce a new luminosity; but can we say that candle No 1 has not
had its flame extinguished for ever? Not even in the case of the “failures of
nature,” of the immediate reincarnation of children and congenital idiots and
so forth, can we call them the identical ex-personalities, though the whole of
the same life-principle and identically the same Manas, (fifth principle)
re-enters a new body, and may truly be called a “reincarnation of the
personality”; whereas in the rebirths of the ego from Devachan and Avitchi into
Karmic life, it is only the spiritual attributes of the monad and its Buddhi
that are reborn. All we can say of the reincarnated “failures” is that they are
the reincarnated Manas, the fifth principle, of Mr. Smith or Miss Grey; but not
certainly that these are the reincarnations of Mr. S or Miss. G. “But what is
then the nature of the remembrance and self consciousness of the shell?” you
ask. As I said in your note, no better than a reflected or borrowed light.
Memory is one thing and perceptive faculties quite another. A madman may
remember very clearly some portions of his past life; yet he is unable to
perceive anything in its true light, for the higher portion of his Manas and
his Buddhi are paralysed in him, have left him. Could an animal, a dog for
instance, speak, he would prove to you that his memory in direct relation to
his canine personality is as fresh as yours; nevertheless his memory and
instinct cannot be called “perceptive faculties”. A dog remembers that his
master thrashed him when the latter gets hold of a stick; at all other times he
has no remembrance of it. Thus a shell; once in the aura of a medium, all he
perceives through the borrowed organs of the medium, and of those in magnetic
sympathy with the latter, he will perceive very clearly; but not further than
what the shell can find in the perceptive faculties and memories of circle
and medium; hence often the rational and highly intelligent answers; hence also
a complete oblivion of things known to all but that medium and circle. The
shell of a highly intelligent but utterly unspiritual man who died a natural
death will last longer, and the shadow of his own memory helping (that
shadow which is the refuse of the sixth principle left in the fifth), he may
deliver discourses through trance-speakers, and repeat parrot-like that which
he knew and thought much over in his lifetime.
But find one single
instance in the annals of Spiritualism where a returning shell of a Faraday, or
a Brewster (were they to fall into the trap of a mediumistic attraction) said
one word more that it knew during its lifetime. Where is that scientific shell
that ever gave evidence of that which is claimed on behalf of disembodied
spirits; namely, that a free soul, the spirit disembodied from its body’s
fetters, perceives and sees that which is concealed from living mortal eyes?
Let the “spirit” of Zollner, now that he is in the fourth dimension of space
and has already put in an appearance with several mediums, tell the last word
of his discovery, complete his astrophysical philosophy. No; Zollner when
lecturing through an intelligent medium surrounded with persons who read his
works and are interested in them, will repeat in various tones that which is
known to others (not even that which he alone knew, most probably) the
credulous ignorant public confounding the post hoc with the proper
hoc, and firmly convinced of the spirit’s identity. Indeed, it will be
worth your while to stimulate investigation in this direction. Yes; personal
consciousness does leave everyone at death; and whenever the centre of memory
is established in the shell, it will remember and speak out its recollections
through the brain of some living human being.
Question- Is
a shell conscious of losing anything that feels like life as it gradually
disintegrates?
Answer - No,
it is not conscious of this loss of cohesion. Besides such a feeling in a shell
being quite useless for nature’s purposes, it could hardly realize something
which could never be dreamt by a medium or its affinities. It is dimly
conscious of its own physical death - after a prolonged period of time, though
- that is all. The few exceptions to this rule - cases of half-successful
sorcerers, of very wicked persons passionately attached to self - offer a real
danger to the living. These very material shells, whose last dying thought was
self, self, self and to live! to live!, will often feel it instinctively. So do
some suicides - though not all. What happens then is terrible, for it becomes a
case of post mortem lycanthropy. The shell will cling so tenaciously to
its semblance of life that it will seek refuge in a new organism - any beast, a
dog, a hyaena, a bird - when no human organism is close at hand, rather than
submit to annihilation.
Question- What
is the explanation of “Ernest” and Eglinton’s [
William Eglintgon, a spiritualistic medium of great probity, to whom the Master
K.H. appeared on board S.S. Vega. See Occult World, “Conclusion”, and also
p.75. “Ernest” was one of Eglinton’s spirit “guides,” who offered to C. W.
Leadbeater to take a letter to the Master K.H., and failed (see Letters from
The Masters of Wisdom, Letter VII, note 10).] other guides? Are they
elementaries drawing their conscious vitality from him, or elementals
masquerading? When “Ernest” took that sheet of Pioneer note paper, how did he
contrive to get it without mediumship at this end? [ In Theosophist,
January 1882, appears a letter from J.G. Meugens, the host of Eglinton, that
“Ernest has stated that he will try and take a sheet of paper, privately marked
by me for identification, to my friend in London, and bring it back to me with
a message in my friend’s handwriting. If this is successfully done I will
inform you of it”. No further correspondence appears in Theosophist stating
that Ernest had done what he promised. Possibly “that sheet of Pioneer
notepaper” in the question refers to a similar phenomenon where Ernest was
successful.]
Answer - I can
assure you it is not worth your while to study the true natures of the
“Ernests” and “Joeys” [ Another “guide” of Eglinton was Joey.]
and other “guides” as unless you become acquainted with the evolution of the
corruptions of elemental dross, and those of the seven principles in man, you
would ever find yourself at a loss to understand what they really are. There
are no written statutes for them, and they can hardly be expected to pay their
friends and admirers the compliment of truth, silence or forbearing. If you are
related to them as some soulless physical mediums are, you shall meet.
If not, better leave them alone. They gravitate but to their likes - the
mediums; and their relation is not made but forced by foolish and sinful
phenomena-mongers. They are both elementaries and elementals - at best a low,
mischievous, degrading jungle.
Question- You
say, it may happen “that the spiritual spoil from the fifth will prove too weak
to be reborn in Devachan, in which case it (sixth) will there
and then reclothe itself in a new body, and enter upon a new earth
existence, whether upon this or any other planet”.
Answer - The
“it” relates to the sixth and seventh principles not to the fifth, for the manas
will have to remain a shell in each case, only in the one hand it has no time
to visit mediums, for it begins sinking down to the Eighth Sphere almost immediately.
“Then and there” in the eternity may be a mighty long period; it means only
that the monad, having no Karmic body to guide its rebirth, falls into non-being
for a certain period, and then reincarnates - certainly not earlier than one or
two thousand years. No, it is not an “exceptional case”; save a few exceptional
cases in the cases of the initiated, such as our Teshu Lamas, the Bodhisattvas,
and a few others, no monad ever got reincarnated before its appointed cycle.
Section III
Question- There is a very interesting allusion in
your last, when speaking of Hume you speak of certain characteristics he
brought back with him from his last incarnation.
Answer - All of us, we bring some characteristics
from our previous incarnations. It is unavoidable.
Question- Have you the power of looking back to
the former lives of persons now living, and identifying them?
Answer - Unfortunately some of us have. I for one
do not like to exercise it.
Question- In that case would it be improper,
personal curiosity to ask for any particulars of my own?
Answer - “Man know thyself,” saith the Delphinian
oracle. There is nothing “improper” certainly in such a curiosity. Only would
it not be still more proper to study our own present personality before
attempting to learn anything of its creator-predecessor and fashioner - the man
that was? Well, some day I may treat you to a little story - no time now - only
I promise no details; a simple sketch and a hint or two to test your intuitional
powers.
Question- Is there any way of accounting for what
seems the curious rush of human progress within the last two thousand years, as
compared with the relatively stagnant condition of the Fourth Round people up
to the beginning of modern progress?
Answer - The latter end of a very important cycle.
Each Round, each ring, as every race, has its great and its smaller cycles on
every planet that mankind passes through. Our Fourth Round humanity has its one
great cycle and so have her races and sub-races. The “curious rush” is due to
the double effect of the former - the beginning of its downward course - and of
the latter (the small cycle of our sub-race) running on to its apex. Remember
you belong to the Fifth Race. Yet you are but a Western sub-race.
Notwithstanding your efforts, what you call civilisation is confined only to
the latter and its offshoots in America. Radiating around, its deceptive light
may seem to throw its rays on a greater distance than it does in reality. There
is no “rush” in China, and of Japan you make but a caricature.
A student of Occultism ought not to speak of the “stagnant
condition” of the Fourth Round people, since history knows next to nothing of
that condition “up to the beginning of modern progress” of other nations but
the Western. What do you know of America, for instance, before the invasion of
that country by the Spaniards? Less than two centuries prior to the arrival of
Cortez, there was as great a “rush” toward progress among the sub-races
of Peru and Mexico as there is now in Europe and the U.S.A. Their sub-races
ended in nearly total annihilation through causes generated by itself; so will
yours at the end of its cycle. We may speak only of the stagnant conditions
into which, following the law of development, growth, maturity and decline,
every race and sub-race falls during its transition periods. It is the latter
condition your Universal History is acquainted with, while it remains superbly
ignorant of the condition even in India was in, some ten centuries back. Your
sub-races are now running towards the apex of their respective cycles, and that
history goes no further back than the periods of decline of a few other
sub-races belonging most of them to the preceding Fourth Race. And what is the
area and the period of time embraced by its universal eye? At the utmost
stretch, a few miserable dozens of centuries - a mighty horizon indeed. Beyond
all is darkness for it, nothing but hypothesis.
Question- Or has there been any former period during
the habitation of the earth by Fourth Round men, civilisations as great as our
own in regard to intellectual development that have utterly passed away?
Answer - No doubt there was. Egyptian and Aryan
records and especially our Zodiacal tables furnish us with every proof of it,
besides our inner knowledge. Civilisation is an inheritance and
patrimony that passes from race to race along the ascending and descending
paths of cycles. During the minority of a sub-race, it is preserved for it by
its predecessor which disappears, dies out gradually, when the former comes of
age. At first most of them squander and mismanage their property, or leave it
untouched in the ancestral coffers. They reject contemptuously the advice of
their elders, and prefer, boy-like, playing in the streets to studying and
making the most of the untouched wealth stored up for them in the records of
the past. Thus during your transition-period - the Middle Ages - Europe
rejected the testimony of antiquity, calling such sages as Herodotus and other
learned Greeks “the father of lies,” until she knew better and changed the
appellation into that of “father of history”. Instead of neglecting, you now
accumulate and add to your wealth; as every other race, you had your ups and
downs, your periods of honour and dishonour, your dark midnight, and you are
now approaching your brilliant noon. The youngest of the Fifth Race family, you
were for long ages the unloved and the uncared-for, the Cendrillon [
Cinderella.] in your home. And now when so many of your sisters have
died, and others are still dying while a few of the old survivors, now in their
second infancy, wait but their Messiah - the Sixth Race - to rise to a new life
and start anew with the arriving stranger along the path of a new cycle, now
that the Western Cendrillon has suddenly developed into a proud and wealthy
Princess, the beauty we all see and admire, how does she act? Less
kind-hearted than the Princess in the tale, instead of offering to her elder
and less-favoured sister - the oldest now, in fact, since she is nearly a
million years old, and the only one who has never treated her unkindly, though
she may have ignored her - instead of offering her, I say, the kiss of peace
she applies to her the lex talionis with a vengeance that does not
enhance her natural beauty. This, my good friend and brother, is not
far-stretched allegory, but history.
Question- Even the Fifth Race (our own) of the
Fourth Round began in Asia a million years ago. What was it about for the
998.000 years preceding the last 2.000? During that period have greater
civilisations than our own risen and decayed?
Answer - Yes; the Fifth Race - ours - began in Asia
a million years ago. “What was it about for the 998,000 years preceding the
last 2,000?” A pertinent question, offered moreover in quite a Christian spirit
that refuses to believe that any good could ever have come out from anywhere before
and save Nazareth. What was it about? Well, it was occupying itself
pretty well in the same way as it does now - craving Mr. Grant Allen’s pardon,
who would place our primitive ancestor, the “hedge-hoggy” man, in the early
part of the Eocene Age! Forsooth, your scientific writers bestride their
hypothesis most fearlessly, I see. It will really be a pity to find their fiery
steed kicking and breaking their heads some day; something that is unavoidably
in store for them. In the Eocene Age - even in its “very first part” - the
great cycle of the Fourth Race men , the Atlanteans, had already reached its
highest point, and the great continent, the father of nearly all the present
continents, showed the first symptoms of sinking, a process that occupied it
down to 11,446 [ i.e. 9564 B.C., since the answer was given in A.D.
1882. years ago, when its last island, that, translating its vernacular name, we
may call with propriety Poseidonis, went down with a crash. By the bye,
whoever wrote the review of Donnelly’s Atlantis is right. Lemuria can no
more be confounded with the Atlantic continent than Europe with America. Both
sank and were crowned with their high civilisations and “Gods”; yet between the
two catastrophes a short period of about 700,000 years elapsed, Lemuria
flourishing and ending her career just at about that trifling lapse of time,
before the early part of the Eocene Age, since its race was the Third. Behold
the relics of that once great nation in some of the flat-headed aborigines of
your Australia! No less right is the review in rejecting the kind attempt of
the author to people India and Egypt with the refuse of Atlantis. No doubt your
geologists are very learned; but why not bear in mind that, under the
continents explored and fathomed by them, in the bowels of which they have
found the “Eocene Age” and forced it to deliver them its secret, there may be,
hidden deep in the fathomless or rather unfathomed ocean beds, other and
far older continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and
that they may some day upset entirely their present theories, thus illustrating
the simplicity and sublimity of truth connected with inductive “generalisation”
in opposition to their visionary conjectures. Why not admit - true no one of
them has ever thought of it - that our present continents have, like Lemuria
and Atlantis, been several times already submerged, and had the time to
reappear again and bear their new groups of mankind and civilisation; and that
at the first great geological upheaval at the next cataclysm, in the series of
periodical cataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round,
our already autopsized [ This is the word in MSS., but evidently copied
wrongly from original Letter.] continents will go down and the Lemurias
and Atlantises come up again. Think of the future geologists of the Sixth and
Seventh Races. Imagine them digging deep in the bowels of what was Ceylon and
Simla, and finding implements of the Veddahs, or of the remote ancestor of the
civilised Pahari - every object of the civilised portions of humanity that
inhabited these regions having been pulverised to dust by the great masses of
travelling glaciers during the next glacial period - imagine him finding only
such rude implements as now found among those savage tribes, and forthwith
declaring that during that period, primitive man climbed and slept on the
trees, and sucked the marrow out of animal bones after breaking them (as
civilised Europeans no less than the Veddahs will often do), hence jumping to
the conclusion that in the year A.D. 1882 mankind was composed of “manlike
animals” black-faced, and whiskered “with prominent prognathous and large,
pointed, canine teeth”. True, a Grant Allen of the Sixth Race may not be so far
from fact and truth in his conjecture that during the Simla period “these teeth
were used in the combats of the males” - for grass widows - but then
metaphor has very little to do with anthropology and geology. Such is your
Science.
To return to your questions. Of course the Fourth Race had its
period of the highest civilisation. Greek and Roman and even Egyptian
civilisations are nothing compared to the civilisations that began with the
Third Race. Those of the Second were not savages, but they could not be
called civilised. And now reading once of my first letters on the races (a
question first touched by M.) pray do not accuse either him or myself of some
new contradiction. Read it over and see that it leaves out the question of
civilisations altogether, and mentions but the degenerate remnants of the
Fourth and Third Races, and gives you as a corroboration the latest conclusions
of your own science. Do not regard an unavoidable incompleteness as
inconsistency. You now ask me a direct question and I answer it. Greeks and
Romans were small sub-races, and Egyptians part and parcel of our own
“Caucasian” stock. Look at the latter and at India. Having reached the highest
civilisation and, what is more, learning, both went down, Egypt as a distinct
sub-race disappearing entirely (her Copts are a hybrid remnant), India as one
of the first and most powerful offshoots of the Mother Race, and composed of a
number of sub-races lasting to these times, and struggling to take once more
her place in history some day. That history catches but a few stray, hazy
glimpses of Egypt, some 12,000 years back; when having already reached the apex
of its cycle thousands of years before, the latter had begun going down. What
does or can it know of India 5,000 years ago, or of the Chaldees, whom
it confounds most charmingly with the Assyrians, making of them one day
“Akkadians,” at another Turanians and what not? We say then that your
history is entirely at sea. We are refused by the Journal of Science any
claim whatever for “higher knowledge”. Says the reviewer, “Suppose the Brothers
were to say ‘Point your telescopes to such and such a spot in the heavens, and
you will find a planet yet unknown to you, or dig into the earth . . . etc.,
and you will find a mineral,’ etc.” Very fine indeed, and suppose that was
done, what would be the result? Why a charge of plagiarism, since every thing
of that kind, every plant and mineral that exists in space or inside the earth,
was known and recorded in our books thousands of years ago; more, many a true
hypothesis was timidly brought forward by their own scientific men and as
constantly rejected by the majority with whose preconceptions it interfered. Your
intention is laudable, but nothing that I may give you in answer will ever
be accepted from us. Whenever discovered that “it is verily so,” the discovery
will be attributed to him who corroborated the evidence, as in the case of
Copernicus and Galileo, the latter having availed himself but of the
Pythagorean manuscripts.
But to return to civilisations. Do you know that the Chaldees were
at the apex of their occult fame before what you term as the Bronze Age, that
the “sons of Ad” or “ the children of the Fire Mist” preceded by hundreds of
centuries the Age of Iron, which was an old age already when what you now call
the Historical Period - probably because what is known of it is generally no
history but fiction - had hardly begun?
But then what warrant can we give the world that we are right, that
far “greater civilisations than our own have risen and been destroyed”? It is
not enough to say, as some of your modern writers do, than an extinct
civilisation existed before Roma and Athens was founded. We affirm that a series
of civilisations existed before as well as after the Glacial Period,
that they existed upon various points of the Globe, reached the apex of glory
and - died. Every trace and memory of the Assyrian and Phoenician civilisations
had been lost until discoveries began to be made a few years ago. And now they
open a new, though not by far one of the earliest, page in the history of
mankind. And yet how far back do those civilisations go in comparison with the
oldest? And even them history is shy to accept.
Archaeology has sufficiently demonstrated that the memory of man
runs vastly further back than history has been willing to accept, and the
sacred records of once mighty nations preserved by their heirs are still more
worthy of trust. We speak of civilisations of the ante-glacial period, and (not
only in the minds of the vulgar and the profane, but even in the opinion of the
highly learned geologist) the claim sounds preposterous. What could you say
then to our affirmation that the Chinese - I now speak of the inland, the true
Chinaman, not of the hybrid mixture between the Fourth and Fifth Races now
occupying the throne - the aborigines who belong in their unalloyed nationality
wholly to the highest and last branch of the Fourth Race, reached their highest
civilisation when the Fifth had hardly appeared in Asia, and its first offshoot
was yet a thing of the future? When was it? Calculate. You cannot think that
we, who have a tremendous odds against the acceptance of our doctrine, would
deliberately go on inventing races and sub-races (in the opinion of Mr. Hume)
were they not a matter of undeniable fact. The group of islands off the
Siberian coast discovered by the Nordenskiol of the “Vega” was found
strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., among gigantic bones of
elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses and other monsters belonging to periods when
man - says your science - had not yet made his appearance on earth. How came
horses and sheep to be found in company with the huge “antediluvians”? The
horse, we are taught in schools, is quite a modern invention of nature and no
man ever saw its pentadactyle ancestor. The group of Siberian islands may
give the lie to the comfortable theory The region now locked in the fetters of
eternal winter uninhabited by man - that most fragile of animals - will be very
soon proved to have had not only a tropical climate - something your science
knows, and does not dispute - but as having been likewise the seat of one of
the most ancient civilisations of that Fourth Race, whose highest relics now we
find in the degenerated Chinaman, and whose lowest are hopelessly (for the
profane scientist) intermingled with the remnants of the Third.
I told you before now, that the highest people now on earth
(spiritually) belong to the first sub-race of the Fifth Root race; and those
are the Aryan Asiatics; the highest race (in physical intellectuality) is the
last sub-race of the Fifth - yourselves, the white conquerors. The majority of
mankind belongs to the seventh sub-race of the Fourth Root race - the above
mentioned Chinamen and their offshoots and branchlets (Malayan, Mongolians,
Tibetans, Javanese, etc., etc.), and to remnants of other sub-races of the
Fourth and the seventh sub-race of the Third Race. All these fallen, degraded
semblances of humanity are the direct lineal descendants of highly civilised
nations, neither the name nor memory of which have survived except in such
books as Populvuh and a few others unknown to science.
Question- To what epoch did the existence of the
continent of Atlantis belong, and did cataclysmal change which produced its
extinction come into any appointed place in the evolution of Round
corresponding to the place occupied in the whole Manvantaric evolution by
obscurations?
Answer - To the Miocene times. Everything comes in
its appointed time and place in the evolution of Rounds; otherwise it would be
impossible for the best seer to calculate the exact hour and year when such
cataclysms great and small have to occur. All an Adept could do would be to
predict an approximate time; whereas now, events that result in great
geological changes may be predicted with as mathematical a certainty as
eclipses and other revolutions in space. The sinking of Atlantis (the group of
continents and isles) began during the Miocene period as certain of your
continents are now observed to be gradually sinking; and it culminated first,
in the final disappearance of the largest continent, an event coincident with
the elevation of the Alps; and second, with that of the last of the fair
islands mentioned by Plato. The Egyptian priest of Sais told his ancestor Solon
that Atlantis (i.e., the only remaining large island) had perished 9,000
years before their time. This was not a fancy date, since they had for
millenniums preserved most carefully their records. But then, as I say, they
speak but of the “Poseidonis,” and would not reveal even to the great Greek
legislator their secret chronology. As there are no geological reasons for
doubting, but on the contrary a mass of evidence for accepting, the tradition,
science has finally accepted the existence of the great continent and
archipelago, and thus vindicates the truth of one more “fable”. It now teaches,
as you know, that Atlantis or the remnants of it lingered down to post-tertiary
times, its final submergence occurring within the Palaeozoic ages of American
history! Well, truth and fact ought to feel thankful even for such small
favours, in the previous absence of any for so many centuries. The deep sea
explorations, especially those of the Challenger, have fully confirmed
the reports of geology and palaeontology. The great event, the triumph of our
“Sons of the Fire Mist,” the inhabitants of Shamballa when yet an island in the
Central Asian Sea, over the selfish if not entirely wicked magians of
Poseidonis occurred just 11.446 years ago. Read in this connection the
incomplete and partially veiled tradition in Isis, Vol. 1, pp. 588 - 94,
and something may become still plainer to you. The corroboration of tradition
and history brought forward by Donnelly I find in the main correct, but you
will find all this and much more in Isis.
Question- I find that the most common question asked
about occult philosophy by fairly intelligent people who begin to enquire about
it is, “Does it give any explanation of the origin of evil?” That is a point on
which you have formally promised to touch and which it might be worth while to
take up before long.
Answer - It certainly does, and I have “touched
upon” the subject long ago. Strangely enough, I found a European author, the
greatest materialist of his time, Baron d’ Holbach, whose views coincide
entirely with the views of our philosophy. When reading his Essais sur la
nature, I might have imagined I had our book of Kiu-ti before me. In
the forthcoming Theosophist you will find a note or two appended to
Hume’s translation of Eliphas Levi’s Preface[ Theosophist,
November 1882. See Appendix D.] in connection with the lost continent.
And now, since I am determined to make of the present answers a volume, bear
your cross with Christian fortitude, and then, perhaps, after reading the
whole, you will ask for no more for some time to come. But what can I add to
that already told? I am unable to give you purely scientific information since
we can never agree entirely with Western conclusions, and ours will be rejected
as unscientific. Yet both geology and palaeontology bear witness to much we
have to say. Of course your science is right in many of her generalities, but
her premises are wrong or at any rate very faulty. For instance, she is right
in saying that, while the new America was forming, the ancient Atlantis was
sinking and gradually wasting away; but she is neither right in her given
epochs nor in the calculations of the duration of that sinking. The latter is
the future fate of your British Islands, the first on the list of victims that
have to be destroyed by fire (submarine volcanoes) and water. France and other
lands will follow suit. When they reappear again, the last seventh sub-race of
the Sixth Root-race of present mankind will be flourishing on Lemuria and
Atlantis, both of which will have reappeared also (their reappearance following
immediately the disappearance of the present isles and continents), and very
few seas and great waters will be found then on our globe, waters as
well as land appearing and disappearing and shifting periodically and each in
turn.
Trembling at the prospect of fresh charges of “contradictions” at
some future incomplete statement, I rather explain what I mean by this. The
approach of every new “obscuration” is always signalled by cataclysms of either
fire or water. But apart from this, every “ring” or Root Race has to be cut in
two, so to say, by either one or the other. Thus having reached the apex of its
development and glory, the Fourth Race, the Atlantean, was destroyed by
water; you find now but their degenerated fallen remnants, whose sub-races
nevertheless - aye, each of them - had its palmy days of glory and relative greatness.
What they are now, you will be some day, the law of cycles being one and
immutable.
When your race, the Fifth, will have reached is zenith of physical
intellectuality and developed the highest civilisation (remember the difference
we make between material and spiritual civilisations), unable to
go any higher in its own cycle, its progress towards absolute evil will
be arrested (as its predecessors the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, the men of
the Third and Fourth Races, were arrested in their progress towards the same)
by one of such “cataclysmic changes,” its great civilisation destroyed, and all
the sub-races of that race will be found going down their respective cycles
after a short period of glory and learning. See the remnants of the Atlanteans,
the old Greeks and Romans [The “autochthonous” Greeks and Etruscan
Romans.] (the modern belong to all the Fifth Race). See how great and
how short, how evanescent were their days of fame and glory! For, they were but
sub-races of the seven offshoots of the Root race.
No Mother Race, any more than her sub-races and offshoots, is
allowed by the one reigning Law to trespass upon the prerogatives of the Race
or sub-race that will follow it; least of all to encroach upon the knowledge
and powers for its successor.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
SECTION IV
On the Hypothetical Absolute and Infinite Final Cause
Note - The following notes down to the end of the page are much
abbreviated. So far as the original essay or memorandum of Hume is concerned,
M’s notes are just made intelligible by a few lines of the original essay. I am
not now abbreviating anything, but am giving you all I thought it necessary to
preserve at this time. [A.P.S.] [ I put in italics the
parts from Mr. Hume’s essay.]
The Absolute and Infinite is composed of the conditioned and
finite. Causes are conditioned in their modes of existence, as attributes and
as individual aggregates - unconditioned and eternal in their sum, or as a
collective aggregate.
If the Absolute is a blind law how can it give birth to
intelligence?
But passive latent intelligence or that principle diffused
throughout the universe, which in its pure immateriality is non-intelligence
and non-consciousness, and which, as soon as it becomes imprisoned in matter is
transformed into both, can . . .[
Sentence not finished in MS.] The Absolute, if intelligent, must be
omnipotent, omniscient and all good.
Please give your reasons why.
In the last the Absolute, itself non-conscious, is linked to
intelligence by emanations supposed to be conditioned. How far this satisfies
the mind as to the possibility of intelligence evolving out of non-intelligence
depends on the mind addressed.
What do you know of the gradual development of brain since the
Silurian period?
It is useless . . . [Sentence
not finished in MS.] Show me the philosopher, who would prove it
useless . . . to say that evil is as necessary to make good apparent, as
darkness to make light cognizable. To the unconditioned it may be, to the
omnipotent nothing is necessary.
Prove him first.
But clearly a conditioned agency is not the final cause. Above it
is the law or principle that conditions it.
How’s this? Where? Not unless you create something outside the
Absolute and limitless.
Problems lying behind the veil that separates the non-manifested
final cause from the manifested universe are beyond the grasp of minds
conditioned in that universe.
Indeed they are not.
. . .the Absolute infinite is unthinkable and we can neither
comprehend it nor justify its ways to man.
Then why lose time over it? Who commissioned you to do so?
Your all pervading supreme power exists but it is exactly matter,
whose life is motion, will, and nerve power electricity. Purusha can think but
through Prakriti.
-------------------------------------------
[Following this I have an essay by Hume
summing up the previous conclusions, as follows, A.P.S.]:
What you would say would be: “Whether this be so or not (as regards
the hypothesis of an absolute beyond the conditioned) it is and must ever
remain a pure hypothesis. The highest intelligences in the universe know
nothing about it. So far as they can explore, the manifested universe is
boundless and infinite. Our philosophy admits only of what is known and
knowable. This is admittedly unknowable even to Planetaries, and it is ex
hypothesi non-existent. Why then consider it?
“Even were this conception correct how does it concern us? For
thousands of years the highest Planetaries have explored the universe; they
have found no limits to it, nothing in it is guided or governed by any external
impulse, everything on the contrary proceeding from internal impulses which
they understand and which suffice to explain everything they have ever had
cognizance of. A quoi bon then to introduce the
unnecessary conception of a something (which as non-existent for us is a
nothing) outside and beyond what for us is limitless and eternal, when whether
it exists or not it plays no discoverable part in anything that concerns us?
“The fact is, your western philosophical conceptions are
monarchical, ours democratic. You are only able to think of the Universe as
governed by a King, while we know it to be a republic in which the aggregate,
indwelling intelligence rules.”
We might say more: never better. That is just what we would say.
Who are the artificers of the world?
Dhyan Chohans, Planetaries.
Essay by Hume, with Notes as before from M.
The universe may primarily be conceived as space pervaded by an
infinite and eternal and homogeneous congeries of molecules, in which motion,
their latent unconscious life, is inherent. In this, its passive, unmanifested state,
may it be regarded as chaos?
Yes, if only people were capable of conceiving what real chaos is,
which they are not.
Though truly a unity, it may be conceived in its various aspects,
as space in regard to its boundless extension, co-existing with eternity in
regard to its endless duration, cosmic matter in regard to its molecules, and
cosmic force in regard to its all pervading motion. But these four conceptions
must be held to indicate not four elements composing a compound, but rather
four properties or attributes of one single thing, just as on earth one thing
may be hot, luminous, heavy and in motion. This universe, one and indivisible
in its passive, unmanifested form, this chaos, is for us non-existent.
For you, but why speak for others?
But throughout it are scattered centers of activity or evolution,
and wherever and whenever activity prevails, there portions of the whole
differentiate, and where this occurs, homogeneity ceases. This differentiation
is due (1) to the greater or less proximity of the molecules, (2) to their
greater or less attenuation.
What does (2) mean? How can the primal molecules grow thinner or
fatter - ex nihilo, etc.
I was not aware that atoms were considered by you as something nihil.
Are not the molecules considered by science as compound atoms? Your science
knows only of such compound molecules, and a primal atom is and will remain for
ever as a hypothetical abstraction for it. Science can know nothing of the
nature of atoms outside the region of effects on her globe, and even that atom
she calls indivisible, which we do not, for we know of the existence and
properties of the universal solvent, the essence of the Panchamahabhutam, the
five elements. Even the existence of the atoms which compose the unseen medium,
through which the power which magnetises instantly a short, iron rod placed
across the centre of a hoop two yards in diameter, around which a wire thickly
covered with India rubber is coiled, even the existence of such atoms, I say,
remains an open question, and science remains puzzled and embarrassed to decide
whether it is an action at a distance, without or with some mysterious medium,
or what?
(3) To changes in their polarity. This differentiation in activity
is manifestation, and every thing so differentiated comes into existence or
becomes conceivable for us. Each centre of activity (and these centres are
countless) marks a solar system, but these are still rari
nantes in gurgite vasto, hanging in the all pervading ocean of the
unmanifested universe, out of which new manifestations are perpetually
evolving, and into the oblivion of which others whose cycle has been completed
are ever returning.
Alternations of activity and passivity constitute the cyclic law of
the universe. As the microcosm, man, has his days and nights, his waking and
his sleeping hours, so has the earth, which, a macrocosm to him, is a microcosm
to the solar system, and so has this latter, which, a macrocosm to a single
globe, is itself a microcosm to the universe.
That the universe itself must similarly have its days and nights of
activity and passivity is probable by analogy, but if so, these cover periods
unthinkable, and the fact remains unknowable by the highest intelligences
conditioned in the universe.
The night of the solar system, the Pralaya of the Hindoos, the
Maha-Bardo or great night of mind of the Tibetans, involves the disintegration
of all form, and the return of that portion of the universe occupied by that
system to its passive, unmanifested condition, space pervaded by atoms in
motion. Everything else passes away for the time but matter, which these
ultimate atoms represent (though at times objective, at times potential or
subjective, now organised, now unorganised, is eternal and indestructible), and
motion is the imperishable life (conscious or unconscious as the case may be)
of matter. Even, therefore, during the night of mind, when all other forces are
paralysed, when omniscience and ignorance both sleep, and everything else
rests, this latent unconscious life unceasingly maintains the molecules in
which it is inherent, in blind resultless and purposeless motion inter
se.
Why should it be more purposeless and resultless than the
unconscious blind motion of the atoms in any foetus preparing for rebirth?
The solar system has disappeared even to the highest intelligences
in other solar systems. Is this correct? Can the Planetaries in any way cognize
the passive, non-being portions of the universe?
They can.
Adepts can at will, I know, create forms out of cosmic matter, but
probably this cosmic matter is many degrees from matter as it exists in the
passive latent universe, which perhaps should rather be called potential than
cosmic matter.
Potentiality is a possibility, not an actuality. Find a better
word.
But nothing has been annihilated any more than anything has been
ever created, only this recently active, organised, manifested and existing
portion of the universe, losing all differentiation of its parts, has passed
into its primordial, passive, homogeneous, unmanifested, and, quoad
all intelligences, non-existent or unconceivable state. It has resettled into
chaos. If it is asked, whence these alternations of activity and passivity, the
reply is that they are the law inherent in the universe. (Here as a footnote
would come the purport of the argument approved by you against the unnecessary
creation of an intelligence outside the self-governed universe.)
If you can show me one being or object in the universe which does
not originate and develop through and in accordance with blind law, then only
will your argument hold good and footnote be necessary. The doctrine of
evolution is an eternal protest. Evolution means unfolding of the evolute from
the involute, a process of gradual growth. The only thing that could have
possibly been spontaneously created is cosmic matter, and primordium with us
means not only primogenitureship but eternalism, for matter is eternal and one
of the Hlun dhub, not a Kyen, - a cause, itself the result of
some primary cause. Were it so at the end of every Mahapralaya, when the whole
cosmos moves into collective perfection, and every atom (that you call
primordial, and we, eternal) emanates from itself a still finer atom - every
individual atom containing in itself the actual potentiality of evolving
milliards of worlds each more perfect and more ethereal - how is it that there
is no sign of such an intelligence outside the self-governed universe? You take
a last hypothesis - a portion of your God sits in every atom. He is divided ad
infinitum, he remains concealed, in abscondito, and the logical
conclusion we arrive at is that, as the infinite mind of the Dhyan Chohans
knows, the newly emanated atoms are incapable of any conscious or unconscious
action, unless they receive the intellectual impulses from them. Ergo,
your God is no better than blind matter ever propelled by as blind eternal
force, or law, which is that matter’s God, perchance. Well, well, we shall not
lose time over such talk.
The period of passivity ends, the night of mind ceases, the solar
system awakes and re-emerges into manifestation and existence, and everything
throughout it is once more as it was when the night set in. Though a period
inconceivable to human minds has passed, it has passed but as a sound and
dreamless sleep. The law of activity comes again into operation, the centre of
evolution resumes its work, the fount of being commences to flow again. I
conclude this must be so, or otherwise the matter ejected from the vortex or
central point, would find none in a differentiated state from which to acquire
its own impulses of differentiation.
When the hour strikes, the cosmic atoms already in a differentiated
state remain in statu quo, as well as globes and everything else in the
process of formation. Therefore you have seized the idea. [ I
interpolate a warning here that Hume and I got a good deal off the rails at
this point. It was not till long afterwards that the impressions suggested by
this note, erroneous themselves though the note was afterwards justified, were
cleared up. A.P.S.] in the still passive portion of the universe, in
which, and interpenetrated by which, hangs the re-manifested solar system in
the non-being where subsists the eternal mechanical motion, its uncreated cause
or vortex is formed, which in its ceaseless rotation perpetually ejects the
polarised active manifested conscious universe, the unpolarised passive
unmanifested and unconscious universal element.
Call it motion. cosmic matter, duration, or space, for it is all
these and yet one, this is the universe manifested and unmanifested, and there
is nothing else in the universe. But the moment it passes out of passivity or
non-being into activity or being, it begins to change its state, and
differentiate from contact with what had formerly changed; and so the eternal
wheel rolls on, the effect of today becoming the cause of tomorrow for ever and
ever. But it must ever be remembered that the non-being, the passive, is the
eternal, the real; the being, the active, the transitory and the unreal. For
longer or shorter as its career may be according to the impulses it receives,
sooner or later the manifested disintegrates into the unmanifested, and being
fades into non-being.
But how about the highest Planetaries? They surely do not return
into non-being, but pass on to higher or at any rate different solar systems?
The highest state of Nirvana is the highest state of non-being.
There comes a time when the whole infinitude sleeps or rests, when all is
re-immersed in the one eternal and uncreated sum of all, the sum of the latent
unconscious potentiality.
It has been stated that a differentiation of the primordial element
is the basis of the manifested universe and we must now consider the seven
different principles that constitute and govern that universe, or in other
words the seven different states or conditions in which this element exists in
it.
There is no finite or primordial design but in conjunction with
organised matter. Design is Kyen, a cause arising from a primary one. The
latent design exists from the eternity in the one unborn eternal atom, or the
central point which is everywhere and nowhere, called - (our most secret
incommunicable name given at Initiation to the highest Adepts.) So I can give
you the six names of the principles of our solar system but have to withhold
the rest, and even the name of the seventh. Call it the unknown and explain
why. A dam ye (a Brahman) will not give you the name of even the crown
of the Akasa, but will speak of the six primary forces in nature represented by
the solar light.
I’ll give you the principles by and bye. Study this well first.
Question- I conceive that at the close of a Pralaya
the impulse given by the Dhyan Chohans does not develop from chaos a succession
of worlds simultaneously, but seriatim. The comprehension of the
manner in which each in succession ensues from its predecessor, as the impact
of the original impulse, might perhaps be better postponed till after I am
enabled to realise the working of the whole machine - the cycle of worlds -
after all its parts have come into existence.
Answer - Correctly conceived, nothing in Nature
springs into existence suddenly, all being subjected to the same laws of
gradual evolution. Realise but once the process of the Maha-cycle of one
sphere, and you have realised them all. One man is born like another man. One
race evolves, develops and declines like another and all other races. Nature
follows the same groove from the “creation” of a universe, down to that of a
mosquito. In studying esoteric cosmogony, keep a spiritual eye upon the
physiological process of human birth, proceed from cause to effect,
establishing as you go along analogies between the birth of a man and that of a
world. In our doctrine you will find necessary the synthetic method; you will
have to embrace the whole, that is to say, to blend the macrocosm and microcosm
together, before you are enabled to study the parts separately, or analyse
them, with profit to your understanding. Cosmology is the physiology of the
universe spiritualised, for there is but one law.
Question- Taking the middle of a period of activity
between two Pralayas, i.e., of a Manvantara, what I understand to happen is
this. Atoms are polarised in the . . . [
Question not continued in MS.]
Answer - Polarising themselves during the process
of motion, and propelled by the irresistible force at work in cosmogony and the
work of Nature, the positive and negative or the active and passive forces
correspond to the male and female principles. Your spiritual efflux comes out
from behind the veil, but is the male seed falling into the veil of cosmic
matter. The active is attracted by the passive principle, and the great Nag,
the serpent-emblem of eternity, attracts its tail to its mouth, forming thereby
a circle (cycles of the eternity) in that incessant pursuit of the negative by
the positive. Hence the emblem of the lingam, the phallus and the
eteis. [ So in MS.] The one and chief attribute of the universal
spiritual principle, the unconscious but ever active life-giver, is to expand
and shed; that of the universal material principle, to gather in and fecundate.
Unconscious and non-existing when separated, they become consciousness and life
when brought together. Hence again Brahman from the root brih, the
Sanskrit for “to expand, grow, or to fructify,” Brahman being but the vivifying
expansive force of Nature in its eternal evolution . . . .highest [
First part of sentence omitted in MS.] region of spiritual efflux from
behind the veil of primitive cosmic matter. The magnetic impulse which has
accomplished this result flits from one universal form to another within the
first sphere, till having run the round of existence in that kingdom of the
first sphere, it succeeds in a current of attraction to the second sphere.
Question- Do worlds of effects intervene between the
worlds of activity in the series of descent?
Answer - The worlds of effects are not Lokas or
localities, they are the shadow of the world of causes - their souls - worlds
having like men their seven principles which develop and grow simultaneously
with the body. Thus the body of man is wedded to and remains for ever within
the body of his planet. His individual Jivatma, life principle, returns after
death to its source, so that his Linga Sharira will be drawn into Akasa; his
Kama Rupa will recommingle with the universal Shakti, the will force or
universal energy; his animal soul, borrowed from the breath of universal mind,
will return to the Dhyan Chohans; his sixth principle, whether drawn into or
ejected from the matrix of the great passive principle, must remain in its own
sphere, either as part of the crude material, or as an individualised unity to
be reborn in a higher world of causes. The seventh will carry it from the
Devachan and follow the new ego to its place of rebirth.
Question- The magnetic impulse, which cannot yet be
conceived of as an individuality, enters the second sphere in the same, the
mineral kingdom, as that to which it belonged in the first sphere, and runs the
round of mineral incarnations, there passing on to the third sphere. Our earth
is still a sphere of necessity for it. Hence it passes into the upward series
and from the highest of these passes into the vegetable kingdom of the first
sphere. Without any new impulse of creative force from above, its career round
the cycle of worlds as a universal principle has developed some new attractions
or polarisations, which cause it to assume the lowest vegetable form. In
vegetable forms, it passes successively through the cycle of worlds, the whole
being still a circle of necessity (as no responsibility can yet have accrued to
an unconscious individuality and therefore it cannot at any stage of its
progress do anything to select one or other of divergent paths); or is there
something in the life even of a vegetable which, though not responsibility, may
lead it up, or down, at this critical stage of its progress? Having completed
the whole cycle as a vegetable, the growing individuality expands on its next
circuit into an animal form.
Answer - The evolution of the worlds cannot be
considered apart from the evolution of everything created or having being on
these worlds. Your accepted conceptions of cosmogony, whether from the
theological or scientific standpoints, do not enable you to solve a single
anthropological or even ethnical problem, and they stand in your way whenever
you attempt to solve the problem of the races on this planet.
When a man begins to talk about creation and the origin of man, he
is butting against the facts incessantly. Go on saying, “our planet and man
were created,” and you will be fighting against hard facts, for ever analysing
and losing time over trifling details, unable to ever grasp the whole. But once
admit that our planet and ourselves are no more creations than the iceberg now
before me (in our K.H.’s home) but that both planet and man are states for a
given time; that their present appearance - geological and anthropological - is
transitory, and but a condition concomitant of that state of evolution at which
they have arrived in the descending cycle; and all will become plain. You will
easily understand what is meant by the “one and only” element or principle in
the universe and that androgynous - the seven headed serpent or Manda of
Vishnu, the Nag around Buddha, the great dragon of eternity from the emanations
of which spring worlds, beings and things; you will comprehend the reason why
the first philosopher proclaimed all Maya, but that one principle which
rests during the Mahapralayas or the nights of Brahma.
Now think the Nag awakes. He heaves a heavy breath, and the latter
is sent like an electric shock all along the wire encircling space. Go to your
piano and execute upon the lower register of keys the seven notes of the
lower octave, up and down. Begin pianissimo, crescendo from the first
key, and having struck fortissimo on the last note, go back diminuendo,
getting out of your last note a hardly perceptible sound. The first and last
notes will represent to you the first and last spheres in the cycle of
evolution. The one you struck once is our planet. The seven vowels chanted by
the Egyptian priests to the seven rays of the rising sun to which Memnon
responded meant but that. The one life principle when in action runs in
circuits, even as known in physical science. It runs the round in the human
body where the head represents and is to the microcosmos, (the physical world
of matter) what the summit of the cycle is to the macrocosmos (world of
universal spiritual forces); so with the formation of worlds and the great
descending and ascending circle of necessity. All is one law. Man has his seven
principles, the germs of which he brings with him at his birth. So has a plant
or a world. From first to last every sphere has its world of effects, the
passing through which will afford a place of final rest to each of the human
principles, the seventh principle excepted. The world A is born, and with it,
clinging like barnacles to the bottom of a ship in motion, evolve from its
first breath of life the living beings of its atmosphere, from the germs
hitherto inert, now awakening to life with the first motion of the sphere. With
sphere A begins the universal kingdom, and runs the round of universal
evolution. By the time it is completed, sphere B comes into objectivity and
draws to itself the life which has completed its round on sphere A, and
has become a surplus (the fount of life being inexhaustible, for it is the true
Archnea doomed to spin out its web eternally, save during the period of
Pralaya). Then comes vegetable life on sphere A, and the same process takes
place. On its downward course life becomes with every state coarser, more
material; on its upward, more shadowy.
No; there is not, nor can there be, any responsibility until the
time when matter and spirit are properly equilibrized. Up to man, life has no
responsibility in whatever form, no more than has a foetus who in his mother’s
womb passes through all the forms of life - a mineral, a vegetable, an animal -
to become finally man.
Question- Where does it get the animal soul, its
fifth principle from? Has the potentiality of this resided from the first in the
original magnetic impulse which constituted the mineral, or at every transition
from the last world on the ascending side to the first sphere, does it so to
speak pass through and ocean of spirit and assimilate some new principle?
Answer - Thus you see his fifth principle is
evolved from within himself, man having, as you will say, the “potentiality” of
all the seven principles as a germ, from the very instant he appears on the
first world of causes as a shadowy breath, which coagulates with, and is hardened
together with, its parent sphere. Spirit as life is indivisible, and when we
speak of the seventh principle, it is neither quality nor quantity nor yet form
that are meant, but rather the space occupied in that ocean of spirit by the
results of effects, beneficent as are all those of a co-worker with Nature
impressed thereon.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
SECTION V
Question- Can you (i.e.,
is it permitted) ever answer any questions relating to matter of physical science?
If so, here are some points that I should greatly like dealt with.
Answer - Most undoubtedly I am so permitted. But
then comes the most important point, how far satisfactory will my answers
appear even to you? That not every law brought to light is regarded as adding a
link to the chain of human knowledge, is shown by the ill grace with which
every fact unwelcome, for some reasons, to science is received by its
professors. Nevertheless whenever I can answer you I will try to do so,
only hoping that you will not send it as a contribution from my pen to the Journal
of Science.
Question- Have magnetic conditions anything to do
with the precipitation of rain, or is that due entirely to atmospheric currents
at different temperatures encountering other currents of different humidities,
the whole set of motions being established by pressures, expansions etc., due
in the first instance to solar energy? If magnetic conditions are engaged, how
do they operate and how could they be tested?
Answer - Most assuredly they have. Rain can be
brought on in a small area of space, artificially and without any claim to
miracle or superhuman powers, though its secret is no property of mine that I
should divulge it. I am now trying to obtain permission to do so. We know of no
phenomenon in nature entirely unconnected with either magnetism or electricity
- since where there are motion, heat, friction, light, there magnetism and its
alter ego (according to our humble opinion) electricity, will always
appear either as cause or effect, or rather both, if we but fathom the
manifestation to its origin. All the phenomena of earth-currents, terrestrial
magnetism and atmospheric electricity are due to the face that the earth is an
electrified conductor, whose potential is ever changing owing to its rotation
and its annual orbital motion, the successive cooling and heating of the air,
the formation of clouds and rainstorms and winds, etc. This you may perhaps
find in some text book. But then science would be unwilling to admit that all
those changes are due to akasic magnetism, incessantly generating
electric currents which tend to restore the disturbed equilibrium. By directing
the most powerful of electric batteries - the human frame electrified by a
certain process - you can stop rain on some given point by making “a
hole in the rain-clouds,” as the occultists term it. By using other strongly
magnetic implements within, so to say, an insulated area, rain can be produced
artificially. I regret my inability to explain to you the process more clearly.
You know the effects produced by trees and plants on rainclouds, and how their
strong magnetic nature attracts and even feeds those clouds over the tops of
the trees. Science explains it otherwise, may be. Well, I cannot help it, for
such is our knowledge and the fruits of millenniums of observation and
experience.
Were the present to fall into the hands of Hume, he would be sure
to remark that I am vindicating the charge publicly brought by him against us:
“Whenever unable to answer your arguments (?) they (we) calmly reply that their
(our) rules do not admit of this or that”. I am compelled to answer that, since
the secret is not mine, I cannot make of it a marketable commodity. Let some
physicist calculate the amount of heat required to vaporise a certain quantity
of water; let them compute the quantity of rain needed to cover an area - say
one square mile to a depth of one inch. For this amount of vaporisation
they will require of course an amount of heat that would be equal to at least
five million tons of coal. Now the amount of energy, of which this consumption
of heat would be the equivalent, corresponds (as any mathematician could tell
you) to that which would be required to raise a weight of upwards of ten
million tons one mile high. How can one man generate such an amount of heat and
energy? Preposterous, absurd! We are all lunatics and you who listen to us will
be placed in the same category if you ever venture to repeat this proposition.
Yet I say that one man alone can do it and very easily, if he is but
acquainted with a certain “physico-spiritual” lever in himself, far more
powerful than that of Archimedes. Even simple muscular contraction is always
accompanied by electric and magnetic phenomena, and there is the strongest
connection between the magnetism of the earth, the changes of weather, and man,
who is the best barometer living, if he but know how to decipher it properly.
Again, the state of the sky can always be ascertained by the
variations shewn by magnetic instruments. It is now several years since I had
an opportunity of reading the deductions of science upon this subject;
therefore, unless I go to the trouble of catching up what I may have remained
ignorant of, I do not know the latest conclusions of science. But with us it is
an established fact that it is the earth’s magnetism that produces wind, storm,
and rain. What science seems to know of it is but secondary symptoms always
induced by that magnetism, and she may very soon find out her present errors.
The earth’s magnetic attraction of meteoric dust and the direct
influence of the latter upon the sudden changes of temperature, especially in
the matter of heat and cold, are not settled questions to the present day. I
believe Dr. Plimpson in 1867 and Cowper Ranyard in 1879 both urged the theory,
but it was rejected. It was doubted whether the fact of our earth’s passing
through a region of space, in which there are more or less of meteoric masses,
has any bearing upon the height of our atmosphere’s being increased or
decreased, or even upon the state of the weather. But we think we could easily
prove it; and since they accept the fact that the relative proportion and
distribution of land and water on our globe may be due to the great
accumulation upon it of meteoric dust, (snow, especially in our northern
regions, being full of meteoric iron and magnetic particles), and deposits of
the latter being found even at the bottom of seas and oceans, I wonder how
science has not hitherto understood that every atmospheric change and
disturbance was due to the combined magnetism of the two great masses between
which our atmosphere is compressed. I call this meteoric dust a “mass,” for it
is really one. High above our earth’s surface the air is impregnated and space filled
with magnetic-meteoric dust which does not even belong to our solar system.
Science, having luckily discovered that as our earth with all the other planets
is carried along through space, it receives a greater proportion of that dust
matter on its northern than on its southern hemisphere, knows that to this are
due the preponderating number of the continents in the former hemisphere and
the greater abundance of snow and moisture. Millions of such meteors and even
of the finest particles reach us every year and every day and all our temple
knives are made of this “heavenly” iron, which reaches us without having
undergone any change - the magnetism of the earth keeping them in cohesion.
Gaseous matter is continually added to our atmosphere from the never ceasing
fall of meteoric, strongly magnetic matter, and yet it seems with them still an
open question whether the magnetic conditions have anything to do with
the precipitation of rain or not. I do not know of any “set of motions
established by pressure, expansion, etc., due in the first instance to solar
energy”. Science makes too much and too little at the same time of “solar
energy” and even of the sun itself; and the sun has nothing whatsoever to do
with the rain and very little with heat. I was under the impression that
science was aware that the glacial periods, as well as those periods when the
temperature was “like that of the carboniferous age,” are due to the decrease
and increase, or rather to the expansion, of our atmosphere, which expansion is
itself due to the same meteoric presence. At any rate we all know that the heat
that the earth receives by radiation from the sun is at the utmost one third,
if not less, of the amount received by her directly from the meteors.
Question- Is the Sun's corona an atmosphere of any
known gases? and why does it assume the rayed shape always observed in
eclipses?
Answer - Call it a chromosphere or atmosphere? It
can be called neither; for it is simply the magnetic and ever-present aura of
the sun seen by astronomers for a few brief moments only during the eclipses,
and by some of our Chelas whenever they like - of course while in a certain
induced state. A counterpoint of what the astronomers call the red flames in
the corona may be seen in Reichenbach’s crystals, or in any other strongly
magnetic body. The head of a man in a strongly ecstatic condition, when all the
electricity of his system is centred around the brain, will represent
(especially in darkness) a perfect simile of the sun during such periods. The first
artist who drew the aureole about the heads of his gods and saints was not
inspired, but represented it on the authority of temple pictures and traditions
of the sanctuary and the chambers of Initiation where such phenomena took
place. The closer to the head or to the aura-emitting body, the stronger and
the more effulgent the emanation (due to hydrogen, science tells us, in the
case of the flames) hence the irregular red flames around the Sun or the “inner
corona”. The fact that these are not always present in equal quantity shows
only the constant fluctuation of the magnetic matter and its energy, upon which
also depend the number and variety of the spots. During periods of magnetic
inertia the spots disappear, or rather remain invisible. The farther the
emanation shoots out, the more it loses in intensity, until, gradually
subsiding, it fades out; hence the outer corona; its rayed shape being due
entirely to the latter phenomenon, whose effulgence proceeds from the magnetic
nature of the matter and the electric energy, and not at all from intensely hot
particles, as asserted by some astronomers.
All this is terribly unscientific, nevertheless a fact, to
which I may add another by reminding you that the Sun we see is not at all the
central planet of our little universe, but only its veil or its reflection.
Science has tremendous disadvantages against studying that planet, which
luckily for us we have not, foremost of all being the constant tremors of our
atmosphere, which prevent them from judging correctly the little they do see.
This impediment was never in the way of the ancient Chaldee and Egyptian
astronomers, nor is it an obstacle to us, for we have the means of arresting or
counteracting such tremors, acquainted as we are with all the akasic
conditions. No more than the rain secret would this secret, supposing we do
divulge it, be of any practical use to your men of science unless they become
occultists, and sacrifice long years to the acquirement of powers. Only, fancy
a Huxley or a Tyndall studying Yog-Vidya! Hence the many mistakes into
which they fall and the conflicting hypotheses of your best authorities. For
instance, the Sun is full of iron vapours - a fact that was demonstrated by the
spectroscope, showing that the light of the corona considered largely of a line
in the green part of the spectrum, very nearly coinciding with an iron line.
Yet Professors Young and Lockyer rejected that under the witty pretext, if I
remember, that, if the corona were composed of minute particles like a dust cloud
(and it is this that we call magnetic matter) these particles would (1) fall
upon the Sun’s body; (2) comets were known to pass through this vapour without
any visible effect on them; (3) Prof. Young’s spectroscope showed that the
coronal line was not identical with the iron one, etc. Why they should call
those objections scientific is more than we can tell.
Firstly, the reason why the particles - since they call them so -
do not fall upon the Sun’s body is self-evident; there are forces
co-existent with gravitation of which they know nothing - besides that other
fact that there is no gravitation properly speaking only attraction and
repulsion. Secondly, how could comets be affected by the said passage since
their “passing through” is simply an optical illusion? They could not pass
within the area of attraction without being immediately annihilated by that
force of which no vril can give an adequate idea, since there can be
nothing on earth that could be compared with it. Passing as the comets do
through a “reflection,” no wonder that the said vapour has “no visible
effect upon these light bodies”.
Thirdly, the coronal line may not seem identical through the
best “grating spectroscopes”; nevertheless the corona contains iron as
well as other vapours. To tell you of what it does consist is idle, since I am
unable to translate the words we use for it, and that no such matter exists
except in the Sun - not in our planetary system, at any rate. The fact is that
what you call the Sun is simply the reflection of the huge “storehouse” of our
system wherein all its forces are generated and preserved - the Sun
being the heart and brain of our pigmy universe. We might compare its faculae -
those millions of small intensely brilliant bodies of which the Sun’s surface
away from the spots is made up - with the blood corpuscles of that luminary,
though some of them, as correctly conjectured by science, are as large as
Europe. Those blood corpuscles are the electric and magnetic matter in its
sixth and seventh state. What are those long white filaments twisted like so
many ropes of which the penumbra of the Sun is made up? What the central part
that is seen like a huge flame ending in fiery (threads) spires, and the
transparent clouds, or rather vapours formed of delicate threads of silvery
light that hang over those flames? What but the magneto-electric aura - the phlogiston
of the Sun? Science may go on speculating forever, yet so long as she does not
renounce two or three of her cardinal errors she will find herself forever
groping in the dark. Some of her greatest misconceptions are to be found in her
limited notions of the law of gravitation - her denial that matter may be imponderable,
her newly invented term “force,” and the absurd and tacitly accepted idea that
force is capable of existing per se, or of acting (any more than life)
outside, independent of, or in any way otherwise than through matter; in
other words, that force is anything but matter in one of her highest states,
the three last on the ascending scale being denied, only because science knows
nothing of them - and in her utter ignorance of the universal Proteus, its
functions and importance in the economy of nature - magnetism and electricity.
Tell science that even in those days of the decline of the Roman Empire, when
the tattooed Britisher used to offer to the Emperor Claudius his nazzur [Tributary
offering.] of “electron” in the shape of a string of amber beads, that
even then there were yet men remaining aloof from the universal masses, who
knew more of electricity and magnetism than they, the men of science, do now,
and science will laugh at you as bitterly as she now does over your kind
dedication to me. [ Mr Sinnett dedicated his Occult World to the Master
K.H.]
Verily, when your astronomers, speaking of Sun-matter, term those
lights and flames “clouds of vapour” and “gases unknown to science,” chased by
mighty whirl-winds and cyclones (whereas we know it to be simply magnetic
matter in its usual state of activity), we feel inclined to smile at the expressions.
Can one imagine the “Sun’s fires fed with purely mineral matter - with
meteorites highly charged with hydrogen giving the Sun a far-reaching
atmosphere of ignited gas’? We know that the invisible sun is
composed of that which neither has name nor can be compared to anything known
by your science on earth; and that its “reflection” contains still less of
anything like “gases,” mineral matter, or fire, though even we, when
treating of it in your civilized tongue, are compelled to use such expressions
as “vapour” and “magnetic matter”. To close the subject, the coronal changes
have no effect upon the earth’s climate though the spots have, and Prof.
Lockyer is mostly wrong in his deductions. The sun is neither a solid, a
liquid, nor yet a gaseous globe, but a gigantic ball of electro-magnetic forces
- the storehouse of universal life and motion, from which the
latter pulsate in all directions, feeding the smallest atom as the greatest
genius with the same material unto the end of the Maha-yuga.
Question- Is the photometric value of light emitted
by stars a safe guide to their distance, considered of course in connection
with distance as guessed by parallax, and is it true, as astronomy assumes faute
de mieux in the way of a theory, that per square mile the Sun’s surface
emits as much light as can be emitted from any body?
Answer - I believe not. The stars are distant from
us, at least 500,000 times as far as the Sun and some as many times more. The
strong accumulation of the meteoric matter and the atmospheric tremors are
always in the way. If your astronomers could climb on the height of that
meteoric dust, with their telescopes and havannas, they might trust more
than they can now in their photometers. How can they? Neither can the real
degree of intensity of that light be known on earth. Hence no trustworthy basis
for calculating magnitudes and distances can be had, nor have they hitherto
made sure in a single instance, except in the matter of one star, which stars
shine by reflected and which by their own light. The working of the best double
star photometers is deceptive. Of this I have made sure, so far back as in the
spring of 1878, while watching the observations made through a Pickering
photometer. The discrepancy in the observations upon a star (near Gamma Ceti)
amounted at times to half a magnitude. No planets but one have hitherto been
discovered outside of the solar system, with all their photometers, while we
know with the sole half of our spiritual naked eye a number of them,
every completely matured Sun-star having, as in our own system, several
companion planets in fact. The famous “polarisation of light” test is about as
trustworthy as all others. Of course, the mere fact of their starting from a
false premise cannot vitiate either their conclusions or astronomical
prophesies, since both are mathematically correct in their mutual relations,
and that it answers the given object. Neither the Chaldees nor yet our old
Rishis had either your telescopes or photometers, and yet their astronomical
productions were faultless - the mistakes, very slight ones in truth, fathered
upon them by their modern rivals, proceeding from the mistakes of the latter.
You must not complain of
my too long answers to your very short questions, since I answer you for your
instruction as a student of occultism, my “Lay” Chela, [ Mr. Sinnett
called himself a Lay Chela, as he felt he could not observe the strict
disciplines of a true Chela.] and not at all with a view of answering
the Journal of Science. I am no man of Science with regard to or in
connection with modern learning. My knowledge of your Western sciences is very
limited in fact; and you will please bear in mind that all my answers are based
upon, and derived from, our Eastern Occult doctrines, regardless of their
agreement or disagreement with those of exact science. Hence I say, “the sun’s
surface emits per square mile, as much light (in proportion) as can be emitted
from any body.” But what can you mean in this case by “light’? The latter is
not an independent principle; and I rejoiced at the introduction, with a view
to facilitate means of observation, of the “diffraction spectrum”; since by
abolishing all these imaginary independent existences, such as heat, actinism,
light, etc., it rendered to occult science the greatest service, by vindicating
in the eyes of her modern sister our very ancient theory that every phenomenon,
being but the effect of the diversified motion of what we call Akasa (not your
ether), there was in fact but one element, the causative principle of all. But
since your question is asked with a view to settling a disputed point in modern
science, I will try to answer it in the clearest way I can. I say then no,
and will give you my reasons why.
They cannot know it, for
the simple reason that heretofore they have in reality found no sure means of
measuring the velocity of light. The experiments made by Fizeau and Corum,
known as the two best investigators of light in the world of science, notwithstanding
the general satisfaction at the results obtained, are not trustworthy data,
neither in respect to the velocity with which sunlight travels nor to its
quantity. The methods adopted by both these Frenchmen are yielding correct
results (at any rate approximately correct, since there is variation of
227 miles per second between the result of the observation of both
experimenters albeit made with the same apparatus) only as regards the velocity
of light between our earth and the upper regions of its atmosphere. Their
toothed wheel, revolving at a known velocity, records, of course, the
strong ray of light which passes through one of the niches of the wheel and
then has its points of light observed whenever a tooth passes accurately
enough. The instrument is very ingenious and can hardly fail to give splendid
results on a journey of a few thousand meters there and back, there being
between the Paris observatory and its fortifications no atmosphere, no meteoric
masses to impede the ray’s progress, and that ray finding quite a different
quality of a medium to travel upon the ether of space, the ether between the
Sun and the meteoric continent above our heads, the velocity of light
will of course show some 185,000 and odd miles per second, and your physicists
shout “Eureka”, nor do any of the other devices contrived by science to measure
that velocity since 1887 answer any better. All they can say is that their
calculations are so far correct. Could they measure light above
our atmosphere they would soon find they were wrong.
Question- Is
Jupiter a hot and still partially luminous body, and to what cause, as solar
energy has probably nothing to do with matter, are the violent disturbances of
Jupiter’s atmosphere due?
Answer - It
is, so far; but is fast changing. Your science has a theory, I believe, that if
the earth were suddenly placed in extremely cold regions - for instance, were
it to exchange places with Jupiter - all our seas and rivers would be suddenly
transformed into solid mountains; the air (or rather a portion of the aeriform
substances which compose it) would be metamorphosed from their state of
invisible fluid, owing to the absence of heat, into liquids (which now exist on
Jupiter, but of which men have no idea on earth). Realize or try to imagine the
reverse condition and it will be that of Jupiter at the present moment. The
whole of our system is imperceptibly shifting its position in space, the
relative distance between the planets remaining ever the same, and being in no
wise affected by the displacement of the whole system; and the distance between
the latter and the stars and other suns being so incommensurable as to produce
but little, if any, perceptible change for centuries and millennia to come, no
astronomer will perceive it telescopically, until Jupiter and some other
planets whose little luminous points hide now from sight millions upon millions
of stars (all but some 5,000 or 6,000), will suddenly let us have a peep at a
few of the Raja Suns they are now hiding. There is such a King Star
right behind Jupiter that no mortal physical eye has every seen during this our
Round. Could it be so perceived, it would appear, through the best telescope
with a power of multiplying its diameter 10,000 times, still a small dimension
less point thrown into the shadow by the brightness of any planet;
nevertheless, this world is thousands of times larger than Jupiter. The violent
disturbances of its atmosphere and even its red spot that so interest science
lately are due (1) to that shifting, (2) to the influence of that Raja Star. In
its present position in space, imperceptibly small though it be, the metallic
substances of which it is mainly composed are expanding and gradually
transforming themselves into aeriform fluids - the state of our own earth and
its six sister globes before the first Round - and becoming part of its
atmosphere. Draw our own inferences and deductions from this, my dear “Lay
Chela,” but beware lest in doing so you sacrifice your humble instructor and
the occult doctrine itself, on the alter of your wrathful goddess, modern
Science.
Question- Is
there any truth in the new Siemens’ theory of solar combination, i.e.,
that the Sun in its passage through space gathers in at its poles combustible
gas (which is diffused through all space in a highly attenuated condition), and
throws it off again at the equator, after the intense heat of that region has
again dispersed the elements, which combustion temporarily united?
Answer - I am
afraid not much, since our Sun is but a reflection. The only great truth
uttered by Siemens is that interstellar space is filled with highly attenuated
matter, such as may be put in air vacuum tubes, and which stretches from planet
to planet and from star to star. But this truth has no bearing upon his main
facts. The Sun gives all and takes back nothing from its system.
The Sun gathers nothing “at the poles,” which are always free even from the
famous “red flames” at all times - not only during eclipses. How is it that
with their powerful telescopes they have failed to perceive any such
“gathering,” since their glasses show them even “the superlatively fleecy
clouds” on the photo-sphere? Nothing can reach the Sun from without the
boundaries of its own system in the shape of such gross matter as
attenuated gases. Every bit of matter in all its seven states is
necessary to the vitality of the various and numberless systems - worlds in
formation, suns awakening anew to life, etc, - and they have none to spare even
for their best neighbours and next of kin. They are mothers, not step-mothers,
and would not take away one crumb from the nutrition of their children. The
latest theory of radiant energy which shows that there is no such thing is
nature, properly speaking, as chemical, light or heat ray, is the only
approximately correct one. For, indeed, there is but one thing - radiant energy
which is inexhaustible, and knows neither increase nor decrease, and
will go on with its self-generating work to the end of the Solar Manvantara.
The absorption of the solar forces by the earth is tremendous, yet it is or may
be demonstrated that the latter receives hardly 25 per cent of the chemical
power of its rays, for these are despoiled of 75 per cent during their vertical
passage through the atmosphere, at the moment they reach the outer boundary of
the “aerial ocean,” and even these rays lose about 20 per cent in illuminating
and caloric power, we are told. What with such a waste must then be the
recuperative power of our Father-Mother Sun? Yes, call it radiant energy, if
you will; we call it life, all-pervading omnipresent life, ever at work in its
great laboratory - the Sun.
Question- Could
any clue be given to the causes of magnetic variations - the daily changes at
given places, and the apparently capricious curvature of the isogonic lines
which show equal declination? For example, why is there a region in Eastern
Asia where the needle shows no variation from the true north, though variations
are recorded all round that space? Have your Lordships anything to do with this
peculiar condition of things?
Answer - None
can ever be given by your men of science, whose “bumptiousness” makes them
declare that only to those for whom the word magnetism is a mysterious agent
can the supposition that the Sun is a huge magnet account for the production by
that body of light, heat and the causes of magnetic variations perceived on our
earth. They are determined to ignore and thus reject the theory suggested to
them by Jenkins of the R.A.S. of the existence of strong magnetic poles above
the surface of the earth; but the theory is the correct one nevertheless, and
one of these poles revolves round the North Pole is a periodical cycle of
several hundred years. Halley and Handstein, besides Jenkins, were the only
scientific men who ever suspected it. Your question is again answered by
reminding you of another exploded suggestion. Jenkins did his best some
three years ago to prove that it is the north end of the compass needle
that is the true north pole and not the reverse, as the current scientific
theory maintains. He was informed that the locality in Boothia, where Sir James
Ross located the earth’s north magnetic pole, was purely imaginary; it is
not there. If he (and we) are wrong, then the magnetic theory that like
poles repel and unlike attract must also be declared a fallacy; since if the
north end of a dipping needle is a south pole, then its pointing to the
ground in Boothia, as you call it, must be due to attraction, and if
there is anything there to attract it, why is it that the needle in London is
attracted neither to the ground in Boothia nor to the earth’s centre? As very
correctly argued, if the north pole of the needle pointed almost
perpendicularly to the ground in Boothia, it is simply because repelled by the
true north magnetic pole, when Sir James Ross was there about half a century
ago.
No; our “Lordships” have
nothing to do with the inertia of the needle. It is due to the presence of
certain metals in fusion in that locality. Increase of temperature diminishes
magnetic attraction, and a sufficiently high temperature destroys it
altogether. The temperature I am speaking of is, in the present case, rather an
aura, an emanation, than anything that science knows of. Of course this
explanation will never hold water with the present knowledge of science.
But we can wait and see. Study magnetism with the help of occult doctrines, and
then that which now will appear incomprehensible, or absurd in the light
of physical science will become all clear.
Question- Could
any other planets besides those known to modern astronomy (I do not mean mere
planetoids) be discovered by physical instruments if properly directed?
Answer - They
must be. Not all of the intra-Mercurial planets, nor yet those in the orbit of
Neptune are yet discovered, though they are strongly suspected. We know that
such exist and where they exist, and that there are innumerable planets
“burnt out,” they say - in obscuration, we say - planets in formation
and not yet luminous, and so forth. But then the “we know” is of little use to
science when the spiritualists will not admit our knowledge. Edison’s
tasimeter, adjusted to its unmost degree of sensitiveness and attached to a
large telescope, may be of great use when perfected. When so attached, the “tasimeter”
will afford the possibility, not only to measure the heat of the remotest
visible stars, but to detect by their invisible radiations stars that are
unseen and otherwise undetectable, hence planets also. The discoverer [
Edison became an honorary member of the T.S., and a letter of his exists in the
Adyar records acknowledging his diploma of membership, which he promised to put
in his “honour box” where he kept his really valued diplomas.] (an F.T.S.,
a good deal protected by M.) thinks that if at any point in a blank space of
heaven - a space that appears blank even through a telescope of the highest
power - the tasimeter indicates an accession of temperature and does so
invariably, this will be a regular proof that the instrument is in range with a
stellar body, either non-luminous or so distant as to be beyond the range of
telescopic vision. This tasimeter, he says, “is affected by a wider range of
etheric undulations than the eye can take cognizance of”. Science will hear
sounds from certain planets before she sees them. This is a
prophecy. Unfortunately I am not a planet - not even a “Planetary,” otherwise I
would advise you to get a tasimeter from him, and thus avoid me the
trouble of writing to you. I would manage then to find myself “in range” with
you.
Simple prudence misgives
me at the thought of entering upon my new role as instructor. If M. satisfied
you but little, I am afraid of giving you still less satisfaction, for there
are a thousand things I will have to leave unrevealed by my vow of silence; I
have far less time at my disposal than he has. However I will try my best. Let
it not be said that I failed to recognize your present sincere desire to become
useful to the Society, hence to humanity, for I am deeply alive to the fact
that none better than yourself in India is calculated to disperse the mists of
superstition and popular error, by throwing light on the darkest problems. But
before I answer your questions and explain our doctrine any further, I shall
have to preface my replies with a long introduction.
First of all and again I
will draw your attention to the tremendous difficulty of finding appropriate
terms in English, which would convey to the educated European mind even an
approximately correct notion about the various subjects we will have to treat
upon. To illustrate my meaning, I will underline in red the technical words
adopted and used by your men of science, and which withal are absolutely
misleading, not only when applied to such transcendental subjects as on hand,
but even when used by themselves in their own system of thought. To comprehend
my answers you will have first of all to view the eternal Essence, the
Svabhavat, not as a compound element you will call spirit-matter, but as this
one element for which the English has no name. It is both passive and active,
pure spirit Essence in its absoluteness and repose, pure matter in its
finite and conditioned state, even as an imponderable gas, or that great
unknown which science has pleased to call force. When poets talk of the
shoreless ocean of immutability, we must regard the term as but a jocular
paradox, since we maintain that there is no such thing as immutability, in our
solar system as least.
Immutability, say the
theists and Christians, is an attribute of God, and forthwith they endow that
God with every mutable and variable quality and attribute knowable as
unknowable, and believe they have solved the unsolvable and squared the circle.
To this we reply, if that which the theists call God, and science “Force
and Potential energy,” were to become immutable but for an instant, even during
the Maha Pralaya - a period when even Brahm the architect of the world is said
to have emerged into non being - then there could be no Manvantara, and space
alone would reign unconscious and supreme in the eternity of Time.
Nevertheless, theism when speaking of mutable immutability is no more absurd
than materialistic science talking of “latent potential energy” and the
“indestructibility of matter and force”. What are we to believe is
indestructible? Is it the invisible something that moves matter, or the energy
of moving bodies? What does modern science know of force proper, or say
forces, the cause of causes of motion? How can there be such a thing as “potential
energy,” i.e., an energy having latent inactive power, since
it is energy only while it is moving matter, and that if it ever ceased
to move matter it would cease to be, and with it matter itself would disappear?
Is force any happier term? Some thirty-five years back a Dr. Mayer offered the
hypothesis, now accepted as an axiom, that force, in the sense given it by
modern science, like matter, is indestructible, namely, when it ceases
to be manifested in one form it still exists, and has only passed into some
other form. As yet your men of science have not found a single instance,
where one form is translated into another, and Mr. Tyndall tells his opponents
that in no case is the force producing the motion annihilated or changed into
anything else.
Moreover we are indebted
to modern science for the novel of discovery that there exists a quantitative
relation between the dynamic energy producing something and the something
produced. Undoubtedly there exists a quantitative relation between cause and
effect, between the amount of energy used in breaking one’s neighbour’s nose,
and the damage done to that nose, but this does not solve one bit more the
mystery of what they are pleased to call correlations, since it can be easily
proved, and that on the authority of that same science, that neither motion nor
energy is indestructible, and that the physical forces are in no way or manner
convertible one into another. I will cross-examine them in their own
phraseology, and we will see whether their theories are calculated to serve as
a barrier to our “astounding doctrines”.
Preparing as I do to
propound a teaching diametrically opposed to their own, it is but just that I
should clear the ground of scientific rubbish, lest what I have to say should
fall on too encumbered soil and only bring forth weeds. “This potential and
imaginary materia prima cannot exist without form,” says Raleigh, and he
is right, in so far that the materia prima of science exists but in
their imagination. Can they say that the same quantity of energy has always
been moving the matter of the universe? Certainly not, so long as they teach
that when the elements of the material cosmos, elements which had first to
manifest themselves in their uncombined gaseous state, were uniting, the
quantity of matter-moving energy was a million times greater than it is now when
our globe is cooling off. For where did the heat that was generated by this
tremendous process of building up a universe go to? To the unoccupied chambers
of space, they say. Very well, but if it is gone for ever from the material
universe, and the energy operative on earth has never and at no time been
the same, then how can they try to maintain the unchangeable quality of energy,
“that potential energy which a body may sometimes exert, the force which
passes from one body to another producing motion, and which is not yet annihilated
or changed into anything else”. “Aye,” we are answered, “but we still hold to
its indestructibility; while it remains connected with matter, it can
never cease to be, or less or more.” Let me see whether it is so. I throw a
brick up to a mason, who is busy building the roof of a temple. He catches it
and cements it in the roof. Gravity overcame the propelling energy which
started the upward motion of the brick, and the dynamic energy of the ascending
brick, until it ceased to ascend. At that moment it was caught and
fastened to the roof. No natural force can now move it, therefore it possesses
no longer potential energy. The motion and dynamite energy of the ascending
brick are absolutely annihilated.
Another example from their
own text book: you fire a gun upwards from the foot of a hill, and the ball
lodges in a crevice of the rock on that hill. No natural force can, for
an indefinite period, move it, so the ball as much as the brick has lost its
potential energy. “All the motion and energy which was taken from the ascending
ball by gravity is absolutely annihilated, no other motion or energy succeeds,
and gravity has received no increase of energy.” It is not true then that
energy is indestructible. How then is it that your great authority teaches the
world that “in no case is the force producing the motion annihilated or changed
into anything else”.
I am perfectly aware of
your answer and give you this illustration but to show how misleading are the
terms used by scientists, how vacillating and uncertain their theories, and
finally how incomplete all their teachings. One more objection and I have done.
They teach that all the physical forces, rejocning in specific names, such as
gravity, inertia, cohesion, light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical
affinity are convertible one into another. If so, the force producing must
cease to be as the force produced becomes manifest. A flying cannon ball moves
only from its own inherited force of inertia. When it strikes, it produces heat
and other effects, but its force of inertia is not the least diminished. It
will require as much energy to start it again at the same velocity as it did at
first. We may repeat the process a thousand times, and as long as the quantity
of matter remains the same, its force of inertia will remain the same in
quantity. The same in the case of gravity. A meteor falls and produces heat.
Gravity is to be held to account for this, but the force of gravity upon the
fallen body is not diminished.
Chemical attraction draws
and holds the particles of matter together, their cohesion producing heat. Has
the former passed into the latter? Not in the least, since the drawing the
particles again together, whenever these are separated, proves that it, the
chemical affinity, is not decreased, for it will hold them as strongly
as ever together. Heat, they say, generates and produces electricity, yet they
find no decrease in the heat in the process.. Electricity produces heat, we are
told. Electrometers show that the electrical current passes through some poor
conductor, a platinum wire say, and heats the latter. Precisely the same
quantity of electricity, no decrease; what then has been converted into
heat?
Again electricity is said
to produce magnetism. I have on the table before me primitive electrometers, in
whose vicinity Chelas come the whole day to recuperate their nascent powers. I
do not find the slightest decrease in the electricity stored. The Chelas are
magnetized, but their magnetism, or rather that of their rods, is not that
electricity under a new mask? No more than a flame of a thousand tapers lit at
the flame of the one lamp is the flame of the latter. Therefore, if by the
uncertain twilight of modern science it is an axiomatic truth that during vital
processes the conversion only, and never the creation of matter or
force, occurs, (Dr. J. R. Mayer’s organic motion in its connection with
nutrition) it is for us but half a truth. It is neither conversion nor
creation, but something for which science has yet no name.
Perhaps now you will be
prepared to better understand the difficulties with which we have to contend.
Modern science is our best ally, yet it is generally that same science which is
made the weapon to break our heads with. However, you will have to bear in
mind:
(a) That we recognize but
one element in nature (whether spiritual or physical) outside which there can
be no nature, since it is nature itself (not in the sense of natus,
“born,” but Nature as the sum total of every thing visible and invisible, of
forms and minds, the aggregate of the known and unknown causes and effects, the
universe in short, infinite and uncreated and endless as it is without a
beginning), and which as the Akasa pervades our Solar System, every atom being
part of itself, pervades throughout space and is space in fact,
which pulsates as in profound sleep during the Pralayas, and is the universal
Proteus, the ever active nature during the Manvantara;
(b) That consequently
spirit and matter are one, being but a differentiation of states, not essences,
and that the Greek philosopher who maintained that the universe was a large
animal, penetrated the symbolical significance of the Pythagorean monad (which
becomes two, then three ,Δ, and finally having become the Tetraktys or the
perfect square, thus evolving out of itself four and involving three Δ
forms the sacred seven [ the triangle Δ within a box ], and thus was far
in advance of all the scientific men of the present time;
(c) That our notions of
cosmic matter are diametrically opposed to those of Western science. Perchance
if you remember all this, we will succeed in imparting to you at least the
elementary axioms of our esoteric philosophy more correctly than heretofore.
Fear not, my kind brother,
your life is not ebbing away and it will not be extinct before you have
completed your mission. I can say no more, except that the Chohan has
permitted me to devote my spare time to instruct those who are willing to
learn, and you will have work enough “to drop” your Fragments at
intervals of two or three months.
My time is very limited,
yet I will do what I can. But I can promise nothing beyond this. I will have to
remain silent as to the Dhyan-Chohans, nor can I impart to you the secrets
concerning the men of the seventh Round. The recognition of the higher phases
of man’s being on this planet is not to be attained by the mere acquirement of
knowledge. Volumes of the most perfectly constructed information cannot reveal
to man life in the higher regions. One has to get a knowledge of spiritual facts
by personal experience and from actual observation, for as Tyndall puts it,
“facts looked directly at are vital, when they pass into words half their sap
is taken out of them”. And because you recognise this great principle of
personal observation, and are not slow to put into practice what you have
acquired in the way of useful information, is perhaps the reason why the
hitherto implacable Chohan, my Master, has finally permitted me to devote to a
certain extent a portion of my time to the progress of the Eclectic. [
The Simla Eclectic Theosophical Society, the local branch of the T.S. at Simla.
Mr. Hume was its first President.] But I am but one and you are many,
and none of my fellow brothers with the exception of M. will help me in this
work, not even our semi-European Greek Brother [The Master Hilarion.]
who but a few days back remarked that when “every one of the Eclectics on the
hill [i.e., Simla.] will have become a heretic then he will see what
he can do for them”. And as you are aware there is very little hope for this.
Men seek often knowledge
until they weary themselves to death, but even they do not feel very impatient
to help their neighbour with their knowledge; hence there arises a coldness, a
mutual indifference, which renders him who knows inconsistent with
himself and inharmonious with his surroundings. Viewed from our standpoint, the
evil is far greater on the spiritual than on the material side of man; hence my
sincere thanks to you and desire to urge your attention to such a course as
shall aid a true progression and achieve wider results by turning your
knowledge into a permanent teaching in the form of articles and pamphlets.
But for the attainment of
your proposed object, viz., for a clearer comprehension of the extremely
abstruse and at first incomprehensible theories of our occult doctrine, never
allow the serenity of your mind to be disturbed during you hours of literary
labour, nor before you set to work. It is upon the serene and placid surface of
the unruffled mind that the visions gathered from the invisible find a
representation in the visible world; otherwise you would vainly seek those
visions, those flashes of sudden light which already helped to solve so many of
the minor problems, and which alone can bring the truth before the eye of the
soul. It is with jealous care we have to guard our mind-plane from all the
adverse influences which daily arise in our passage through earth life. Many
are the questions you asked me in you several letters, I can answer but few.
SECTION Vl
“Thou shalt not eat of the
fruit of knowledge of good and evil of the tree that is growing for thy heirs,”
we may say with more right than would be willingly conceded us by the Humes of
your sub-race. This “tree” is in our safekeeping, entrusted to us by the Dhyan
Chohans, the protectors of our race, and the trustees for those that are
coming. Try to understand the allegory, and never lose sight of the hint given
you in my letter upon the Planetaries. At the beginning of each Round, when
humanity reappears under quite different conditions than those afforded for the
birth of each new race and its sub-races, a “Planetary” has to mix with these
primitive men, and to refresh their memories and to reveal to them the truths
they knew during the preceding Round. Hence the confused traditions about
Jehovah, Ormuzd, Osiris, Brahm and tutti quanti. But that happens only
for the benefit of the first Race. It is the duty of the latter to
choose the fit recipients among its sons, who are “set apart” to use a Biblical
phrase, as the vessel to contain the whole stock of knowledge to be divided
among the future races and generations until the close of that Round. Why
should I say more, since you must understand my whole meaning, and that
I dare not reveal it in full. Every race has its Adepts; so with every
new race we are allowed to give them out as much of our knowledge as the men of
that race deserve. The seventh Race, the last, will have its Buddha as every
one of its predecessors had; but its Adepts will be far higher than any of the
present race, for among them will abide the future Planetary, the Dhyan Chohan
whose duty it will be to instruct or refresh the memory of the first race of
the fifth Round men, after this planet’s future obscuration. Closely allied to
this question would be another often put: “What is the good of the whole cyclic
process, if spirit only emerges at the end of all things pure and impersonal,
as it was at first before its descent into matter?” My answer is that I am not
at present engaged in excusing, but in investigating the operations of Nature,
and that perhaps there may be a better answer available.
What emerges at the end of
all things is not only pure and impersonal spirit, but the collective
“personal” remembrances skimmed off every new fifth principle in the long
series of being. And if “at the end of all things’ - say in some millions of
years hence - spirit will have to rest in its pure impersonal
non-existence as the One or the Absolute, still there must be some good in the
cyclic process, since every purified ego has the chance, in the long interims
between objective being upon the planets, to exist as a Dhyan Chohan - from the
lowest Devachanee to the highest Planetary - enjoying the fruits of its
collective lives.
But what is “spirit pure
and impersonal,” per se? Is it possible that you should not have
realised yet our meaning? Why, such a spirit is a nonentity, a pure
abstraction, an absolute blank to our senses - even to the most spiritual. It
becomes something only in union with matter; hence it is always
something, since matter is infinite and indestructible and non-existent
without spirit, which in matter is life. Separated from matter, it
becomes the absolute negation of life and being, whereas matter is inseparable
from it. Ask those who offer the objection whether they know anything of “life
and consciousness” beyond what they now feel on earth. What conception can they
have - unless natural born seers - of the state and consciousness of one’s
individuality after it has separated itself from the gross earthly body? What
is the good of the whole process of life upon earth, you may ask them in your turn,
if we are as good, as “pure” unconscious entities before birth, during sleep,
and at the end of our career? Is not death, according to the teachings of
science, followed by the same state of unconsciousness as the one before birth?
Does not life when it quits our body become as impersonal as it was
before it animated the foetus?
Life after all - the
greatest problem within the ken of human conception - is a mystery that the
greatest of your men of science will never solve. In order to be correctly comprehended,
it has to be studied in the entire series of its manifestations - otherwise it
cannot be fathomed nor even comprehended in its easiest form, life as a state
of being upon this earth. It can never be grasped so long as it is studied
separately, apart from the universal life. To solve the great problem one has
to become an occultist, to analyse and experiment with it personally in all its
phases, as life on earth, life beyond the limit of physical death - mineral,
vegetable, animal, spiritual life; life in conjunction with concrete matter, as
well as life present in the imponderable atom. Let them try to examine and
analyse life apart from organism, and what remains of it? Simply a mode of
motion; which unless our doctrine of the all-pervading, infinite, and
omnipresent life is accepted - though it be accepted on no better terms than a
hypothesis only a little more reasonable than their scientific ones, which are
all absurd - has to remain unsolved. Shall they object? Well, we will answer
them by using their own weapons. We will say that it is and will forever remain
demonstrated, that, since motion is all-pervading and absolute rest
inconceivable - under whatever form or mask motion may appear, whether as
light, heat, magnetism, chemical affinity or electricity - all these must be
but phases of one and the same universal omnipotent Force, the Proteus they bow
to as the great Unknown (see Herbert Spencer), and which we simply call the One
Life, the One Law and the One Element.
The greatest and most
scientific minds on earth have been keenly pressing forward towards the
solution of the mystery, leaving no by-path unexplored, no thread loose or weak
in this darkest of labyrinths for them; and all have come to the same
conclusion - that of the occultists when given only partially - viz.,
that life in its concrete manifestation is the legitimate result and
consequence of chemical affinity. As to life in its abstract sense - life pure
and simple - well, they know no more of it today than they knew in the incipient
stage of the Royal Society. They knew that organisms in certain solutions
previously free from life will spring spontaneously (Pasteur and his Biblical
piety notwithstanding) owing to certain chemical compositions of such
substances.
If, as I hope, I am in a
few years entirely my own Master, I may have the pleasure of demonstrating to
you on your own writing-table that life, as life, is not only
transferable into other aspects or phases of the all-pervading Force, but that
it can be transferred actually into an artificial man. A Frankenstein in nature
is a possibility, and the physicists and physicians of the last sub-race of the
Sixth Race will innoculate life and revive corpses as they now innoculate
smallpox and often less comely diseases. Spirit, Life and Matter are not
natural principles existing independently of each other, but the effects of
combinations produced by eternal motion in space, and they had better learn it.
LETTER No. 1
[Notes
from the Book of Kiu-te, the great repository of occult lore in the
keeping of the Adepts in Tibet. I believe there are thirty or forty volumes, a
great deal shown only to Initiates. What follows is merely some elementary
catechism in the very beginning. We began to get these notes through Madame Blavatsky
when Mr. Hume and I first set to work together. But we soon got off on to other
lines of rail.
The very first thing I
ever had in the way of philosophical teaching I sent you a copy of last year;
it was a sketch of the chain of worlds which I suppose you have somewhere
still. Then we got in a fragmentary way the materials on which Hume wrote the
first of the “Occult Fragments” - that relating to the seven principles in man.
It is necessary to have an absolute comprehension of that division at starting.
It runs through all nature in various shapes and ways. I now copy out of my MS
book. A.P.S.]
Question- What
are the different kinds of knowledge?
Answer - The
real (Dgyu) and the unreal (Dgyu-mi). Dgyu becomes Fohat
when in its activity - active agent of will, electricity, no other name.
Question- What
is the difference between the two kinds of knowledge?
Answer - Real
knowledge deals with eternal verities and primal causes, the unreal only with
illusory effects, Dgyu stands independent of the belief or unbelief of
man. Dgyu-mi requires faith, rests on authority.
Question- Who
possesses the real knowledge?
Answer - The Lhas
or Adept alone possesses the real knowledge, his mind being en rapport
with the Universal Mind in its fullness, which makes him a divine being
existing in the region of absolute intelligence, knowledge of natural laws or Dgyu.
The profane cannot become a dang-ma (a purified soul), for he lacks
means of perceiving Chhag, genesis, or the beginning of things [
As I go on copying, I see I shall have to interpolate remarks of an explanatory
nature now and then. These I shall identify by leaving a broader margin than
the copied out parts. [ I put these remarks of Mr. Sinnett in square
brackets.] I wanted now to remark that you must not be giving yourself
excessive trouble to commit these Tibetan words to memory. We soon got out of
the way of using them. A.P.S.]
Question- Is
there any difference between what produces primal causes and their ultimate
results?
Answer -
None. Everything in the occult universe, which embraces all the primal causes,
is based upon two principles - Kosmic Energy (Fohat or breath of wisdom)
and Kosmic Ideation. [Thyan Kam =the knowledge of bringing about
or giving the impulse to cosmic energy in the right direction. In Fohat
all that exist on earth as ultimates exist as primates.]
Question- What
is the one eternal thing in the universe independent of every other thing?
Answer -
Space.
Question- What
things are coexistent with space?
Answer.
1. Duration.
2. Matter.
3. Motion, for this is the
imperishable life (conscious or unconscious as the case may be). Even during
the Pralaya, or night of mind ( when Chyang, omniscience, and Chiyang-mi-shi-khon
both sleep), this latent unconscious life still maintains the matter it
animates in sleepless unceasing motion.
4. The Akasa (Bar-nang)
or Kosmic atmosphere (Astral Light or celestial ether), whether in latent or
active condition, surrounds and interpenetrates all matter in motion of which
it is at once a result and the medium by which the cosmic energy acts on its
source.
5. Purusha or the seventh
principle of the universe, [ Linga Sharira is composed of the
etheral elements of the body’s organism and never leaves the body but at death
and remains near. This note, which is disconnected from the immediate subject
of the paper was probably added by M. in reply to some current question asked
at that time.]
Question- Are
we to understand Purusha as another name for space or as a different thing
occupying every part of space?
Answer - The
same. Svayambhu occupies every part of space, which itself is boundless
and eternal, hence must be space in one sense. Svayambhu becomes Purusha
when coming in contact with matter.
Question- The
universal mind is the aggregate of all the minds of the Dhyan Chohans or
Planetaries, the result of the action of Purusha on matter, just as the
spiritual soul in Man is the action of spirit on matter.
Answer - Yes.
Question-
Are we to look upon the seven principles as all matter or all spirit - one
thing, with spirit as it were at one pole and matter at the other ?
Answer - Yes,
just so.
Question- If
so, are we to view them as different states of matter or spirit or how?
Answer -
States, conditions, call it whatever you please. I call it Kyen, i.e.,
cause, itself a result of previous or some primary cause.
Question-
All matter consists of ultimate molecules. How may we conceive the different
states of matter?
Answer - As
the molecules go on rarefying, so in proportion they become attenuated; and the
greater the distance between our globe and them (I do not mean here the region
within the reach of your science), the greater the change in their polarity,
the negative pole acquiring a stronger property of repulsion, and the positive
losing gradually its power of attraction. (And now the time for your men of Dgyu
to set me down as a Tibetan ass, and for me to return the compliment.)
[ We
were anxious to make out the correspondences between the seven principles of
Man and of the Universe. M. wrote out the following table.]
|
MAN |
|||
|
|
Tibetan |
Sanskrit |
English |
|
1 |
A-ku |
Rupa |
Body |
|
2 |
Zer |
Jivatma |
Life-principle |
|
3 |
Chhin-Lung |
Linga Sarira |
Astral body |
|
4 |
Nga-Zhi |
Kama-Rupa |
Will-form |
|
5 |
Ngi |
Linga deha |
Animal soul |
|
6 |
Lana |
Atman or Mayavi-Rupa |
Spiritual soul |
|
7 |
Hlun Dhub |
Mahatma |
Spirit |
|
UNIVERSE
|
|||
|
|
Tibetan |
Sanskrit |
English |
|
1 |
Sien-chan (animated universe) |
Brahm (Prakriti-matter lyam, earth |
Organised matter |
|
2 |
Zhihna |
Purusha |
Vivifying universal spirit |
|
3 |
Yor-wa |
Maya, Akasa |
Astral kosmic atmosphere |
|
4 |
Od, light (the shining active astral
light) |
Vach |
Kosmic Will |
|
5 |
Nam Kha |
Yajna |
Universal Illusion |
|
6 |
Kon chhog |
Narayana (Spirit brooding over the waters
and reflected in the universe) |
Universal Mind |
|
7 |
Nyng |
Svayambbuva |
Latent Spirit |
[This
may help to throw light on some Eastern metaphysical writings, but it seems to
me an effort to put into words some correspondences that are too subtle for
such classification. A.P.S.]
Question-
Sien chan=animated universe. SSa=earth as an element. Where then does cosmic or
unorganized matter class?
Answer - Zhi
gyn (cosmic matter), Thog (span), Nyng (duration, Khon-wa (motion),
are all one. Fire, as everything else, has seven principles. Od,
one, but not the most material sixth.
Question-
All matter cosmic or organised has inherent motion. What then does Zhihna,
vital soul or vivifying soul do to it?
Answer - There
you see! As well ask “does for human body” when it comes in conjunction with
the other five. A dead body is composed of molecules full of life, is it? Yet
when the vital soul has deserted the whole, what is it but a dead body? Give up
your pansophy and come down to our Dgyu. We believe in spontaneous
generation and you do not. We say that Zhihna being positive and Zhi
gyn negative, it is only when the two come in contact or the former
brought to act on the latter that organised, living, self-acting matter is
produced. Every thing invisible, imponderable - the spirit of a thing - is
positive, for it belongs to the world of reality, as everything solid and
visible is negative. Primate and ultimate, positive and negative. So much in
our manifested world. As the forces move on, and the distance between organised
and unorganised matter becomes greater, a tendency towards the reverse begins
to take place. The powers of attraction and repulsion become gradually weaker.
Then a complete exchange of properties takes place, and for a time equilibrium
is restored in an opposite order at every grade further onwards, or away
towards their primary state; shifts no more mutually its property, but
gradually weakens until it reaches the world of non-being, where exists the
eternal mechanical motion, the uncreated cause from whence proceed, in a kind
of incessant downward and upward rotation, the founts of being from non-being -
the latter, the reality, the former, Maya - the temporary from the everlasting,
the effect from its cause - the effect becoming in its turn cause ad
infinitum. During the Pralaya, that downward and upward motion ceases,
inherent unconscious life alone remaining - all creative forces paralysed, and
everything resting in the night of mind.
Question-
Are we to consider any of the principles as non-molecular?
Answer - There
comes a time when polarity ceases to exist or act, as everything else. In the
night of mind, all is equilibrised in the boundless cosmos in a state of
non-action or non-being.
Question- And
is cosmic matter non-molecular?
Answer -
Cosmic matter can no more be non-molecular than organised matter. The seventh
principle is molecular as well as the first one, but the former differentiates
from the latter, not only by its molecules getting wider apart and becoming
more attenuated, but also by losing as gradually, its polarity. Try to
understand and realise this idea and the rest will become easy. The panspermic
and theospermic conceptions will both be in our way as taught by your schools.
You will never be able to realise the latter as an absurdity, so long as you
comprehend but imperfectly the incessant work of what is called by occult
science the central point in both its active and passive states. As I
said, we believe in spontaneous generation, in the independent origin of matter
whether living or dead, and we prove it, which is more than your Pasteurs and
Wyman and Huxleys can say. Did they know that Zhihn cannot be pumped out or
shut out a glass vessel like air, and that hence wherever there is Purusha
there can be no thermal limit of organic life, they would have bak-baked [
Hindustani for purposeless chatter. A.P.S.] and told the world less
absurdities than they have. In short, motion, cosmic matter, duration, space
are everywhere, and for perspicuity’s sake, let us place or fancy this
multiplicity in or at the top of a circle boundless. They are passive,
negative, unconscious, yet ever propelled by their inherent latent life or
force. During the day of activity, that cyclic force is ejecting from the
causative latent principle cosmic matter, as the wheel of a water-mill ejects
showers of water-dust round its rotating circle; put it in contact with the
same principles (but whose condition owing to their finding themselves outside
the state of primitive passivity of the eternal immutability has already
changed). Thus the same principles begin to acquire, so to speak, the germs of
polarity, Then coming within the Universal mind Dyan-Kam develops these
germs, conceives, and giving the impulse communicates it to Fohat, who,
vibrating along Akasa, Od (a state of cosmic matter, motion, force,
etc.) runs along the lines of cosmic manifestations and frames all and
everything blindly agreed, yet as faithfully in accordance with the prototypes
as conceived in the eternal mind as a good mirror reflects your face.
Extract from a Letter by
the Master K.H. to A.O. Hume, 1881
Did it ever strike you - and now from the standpoint of your
Western science, and the suggestion of your own ego, which has already seized
the essentials of every truth, prepare to deride the erroneous idea - did you
ever suspect that universal, like finite human, mind might have two attributes
or a dual power, one the voluntary and conscious, the other the involuntary and
unconscious or mechanical power? To reconcile the difficulties of many theistic
and anti-theistic propositions, both these powers are a philosophical
necessity. The possibility of the first, or voluntary and conscious attribute
in reference to the Infinite Mind, notwithstanding the assertions of all the
egos throughout the living world, will remain for ever a mere hypotheses,
whereas in the finite mind it is a scientific and demonstrated fact. The
highest Planetary Spirit is as ignorant of the first as we are, and the
hypothesis will remain one even in Nirvana, as it is a mere inferential
possibility whether there or here.
Take the human mind in connection with the body; man has two
distinct physical brains—the cerebrum with its two hemispheres at the frontal
part of the head (the source of the voluntary nerves), and the cerebellum
situated at the back part of the skull, the fountain of the involuntary nerves
which are the agents for the unconscious or mechanical powers of the mind to
act through. And, weak and uncertain as may be the control of man over his
involuntary actions, such as the blood circulation, the throbbing of the heart
and respiration, especially during sleep, yet how far more powerful, how much
more potential, appears man as the master and ruler over the blind molecular
motion, the laws which govern his body (proof of this being afforded in the
phenomenal powers of the Adept and even of the common Yogi) than that which you
call God shows over the immutable laws of nature. Contrary in that to the
finite, the “Infinite Mind”—which we name so but for argument’s sake, for we
call it the infinite force—exhibits but the functions of its cerebellum,
the existence of the supposed cerebrum being admitted, as above stated, but on
the inferential hypothesis deduced from the Kabalistic theory (correct in every
other relation) of the Macrocosm being the prototype of the microcosm.
So far as we know, the corroboration of it by modern Science
receiving but little consideration—so far as the highest Planetary Spirits have
ascertained, who, remember, have the same relations with the trans-cosmical
world, penetrating behind the veil of cosmic matter, as we have behind the veil
of this our gross physical world—the Infinite Mind displays to them, as to us,
no more than the regular unconscious throbbings of the eternal and universal
pulse of nature throughout the myriads of worlds, within as without the
primitive veil of our Solar System. So far as we know within and to the
utmost limit, to the very edge of the cosmic veil, we know the fact to be
correct owing to personal experience; for the information gathered as to what
takes place beyond we are indebted to the Planetary Spirits, and to our blessed
Lord Buddha.
This of course may be regarded as second-hand information. There
are those who, rather than yield to the evidence of facts, will prefer
regarding even the Planetary Spirits as “erring,” disembodied philosophers, if
not actually liars. Be it so. “Every one is master of his own wisdom,” says a
Tibetan proverb, and he is at liberty either to honour or degrade his slave.
However, I will go on for the benefit of those who may yet seize my explanation
of the problem and understand the value of the solution.
It is the peculiar faculty of the involuntary power of the Infinite
Mind (whom no one would ever think of calling God) to be eternally evolving
subjective matter into objective atoms (you will please remember the two
adjectives are used but in a relative sense) or cosmic matter, to be later on
developed into form, and it is likewise that same involuntary mechanical power
that we see so intensely active in all the fixed laws of nature, which governs
and controls what is called the universe or the cosmos. There are some modern
philosophers who will prove the existence of a Creator from motion; we say and
affirm that that motion—the universal perpetual motion which never ceases,
never slackens nor increases its speed, not even during the interludes between
the Pralayas or nights of Brahm, but goes on like a mill in motion whether it
has anything to grind or not (for the Pralaya means the temporary loss of every
form, but by no means the destruction of cosmic matter, which is eternal)—we
say then this perpetual motion is the only eternal uncreated deity that we are
able to recognise. To regard God as an intelligent spirit, and accept at the
same time this absolute un-materiality, is to conceive of a non-entity, of a
blank void; to regard God as a Being, an Ego, and to place this intelligence
under a bushel for some mysterious reasons, is most consummate nonsense; to
endow him with intelligence in the face of blind brutal evil, is to make of him
a fiend, a most rascally God. A being, however gigantic, occupying space and
having length, breadth and thickness, is most certainly the Mosaic Deity. No-being
and a mere principle lands you directly in the Buddhistic Atheism or the
Vedantic primitive Acosmism.
What lies beyond and outside the worlds of form and being, in
worlds and spheres in their most spiritualised state (and you will perhaps
oblige us by telling us where that “beyond” can be, since the universe is
limitless and infinite) is useless for anyone to search after, since even
Planetary Spirits have no knowledge or perception of it. If our greatest Adepts
and Bodhisattvas have never themselves penetrated beyond our Solar System—and
the idea seems to suit your preconceived theistic theory wonderfully, my
respected brother, they still know of the existence of other such solar systems
with as mathematical a certainty as any western astronomer knows of the
existence of invisible stars which he can never approach or explore. But of
that which lies within the worlds of systems, not in the “trans-infinitude,” (a
queer expression to use), but in the cis-infinitude, rather, in the state of
the purest and most inconceivable immateriality, no one ever knew or ever will
know all; hence it is something non-existent for the universe.
You are at liberty to place in this eternal vacuum the intellectual
or voluntary powers of your Deity, if you can conceive of such a thing.
Meanwhile we say that it is motion which governs the laws of nature, and that
it governs them as the mechanical impulse given to running water, which will
profit them either in a direct line or along hundreds of side furrows they may
happen to meet on their way, whether those furrows are natural grooves or
channels prepared artificially by the hand of man; and we maintain that
wherever there is life and being however much spiritualised a form, there is no
room for moral government, much less for a moral governor, a Being who at the
same time has no form nor occupies space! If verily the light shineth in
darkness and the darkness comprehends it not, it is because such is the natural
law; but how much more suggestive and pregnant with meaning for one who
knows to say that light can still less comprehend darkness or ever know it,
since it kills it wherever it penetrates, and annihilates it instantly. A pure,
yet volitional, spirit is an absurdity for volitional mind. The result of
organism cannot exist independent of an organized brain, and an organized brain
made out of mind is a still greater fallacy. If you ask me, whence then the
immutable laws since laws cannot make themselves, then in my turn I will ask:
and whence their supposed Creator? A creator cannot create or make himself if
the brain did not make itself; for this would be affirming that brain acted
before it existed; how could intelligence—the result of an organized brain—act
before its Creator was made?
All this reminds me of wrangling for seniorship. [ This
refers to the “Senior Wrangler,” the first on the list in the mathematical
examination of Cambridge University. In the old days, each scholar proceeding
to a degree was a “wrangler,” that is, one ready to defend his thesis by
disputation against all comers.] If our doctrines clash too much with
your theories, then we can easily give up the subject and talk of something
else.
Study the laws and doctrines of the Nepaulese Svabhavikas, the
principal Buddhist philosophical school in India, and you will find them the
most learned, as the most scientifically logical, wranglers in the world. Their
plastic, invisible, eternal, omnipresent and unconscious Svabhavat is force or
motion ever generating electricity, which is life. Yes, there is a force as
limitless as thought, as potent, as boundless as will, as subtle as the essence
of life, so inconceivably awful in its rending force as to convulse the
universe to its centre could it but be used as a lever; but this force is not
God, since there are men who have learned the secret of subjecting it to their
will when necessary. Look around you and see the myriad manifestations of life,
so infinitely multiform, of life, of motion, of change. What caused them? From
what inexhaustible source come they, by what agency out of the invisible and
subjective have they entered our little area of the visible and objective?
Children of Akasa, concrete evolution from the ether, it was force which
brought them into perceptibility, and force will in time remove them from the
sight of man. Why should this plant in your garden, to the right, have been
produced with such a shape, and that other one to the left, with one totally
dissimilar? Are these not the result of varying action of force—unlike
correlations? Given a perfect monotony of activities throughout the world, we
should have a complete identity of forms, colours, shapes and properties
throughout all the kingdoms of nature.
It is motion with its resulting conflict, neutralization,
equilibration, correlation, to which is due the infinite variety which
prevails. You speak of an intelligent and good—the attribute is rather
unfortunately chosen—Father, a mortal guide and governor of the universe and
man . A certain condition of things around us we call normal; under this
nothing can occur which transcends our every day experience (“God’s immutable
laws”). But suppose we change this condition and have the best of him, without
whom even a hair of your head will not fall, as they tell you in the West. A
current of air brings cold to me from the lake, near which with my fingers half
frozen I now write to you this letter. I change, by a certain combination of
electrical magnetic, odyllic or other influences, the current of air which
benumbs my fingers into a warm breeze, I have thwarted the intention of the
Almighty and dethroned him at my will. I can do that or, when I do not want
nature to produce strange and too visible phenomena, I force my nature (seeing
nature influencing Self within me) to suddenly awake to new perceptions and
feelings, and thus am my own creator and ruler.
But do you think you are right when saying “the laws arise”?
Immutable laws cannot arise since they are eternal and uncreated, propelled in
the eternity, and God himself, if such a thing existed, could never have the
power of stopping them. And when did I say that these laws were fortuitous per
se? I meant their blind correlations, never the laws or rather the law,
since we recognize but one law in the universe, the law of harmony, of perfect
equilibrium.
Then for a man endowed with so subtle a logic, and such a fine
comprehension of the value of ideas in general and that of words especially,
for a man so accurate as you generally are to make tirades upon an “all-wise,
powerful and loveful God” seems to me, to say the least, strange. I do not,
protest at all, as you seem to think, against your theism or a belief in an
abstract idea of some kind; but I cannot help asking you, “How do you or how
can you know that your God is all-wise, omnipotent and loveful, when everything
in nature, physical and moral, proves such a being, if he does exist, to be
quite the reverse of all you say of him? Strange delusion, and one which seems
to overpower your very intellect.
The difficulty of explaining the fact that unintelligent forces can
give rise to highly intelligent beings like ourselves is covered by the eternal
progression of cycles and the process of evolution ever perfecting the world as
it goes on. Not believing in cycles, it is unnecessary for you to learn that
which will create but a few pretext for you, my dear brother, to combat the
theory and argue upon it ad infinitum. Nor did I ever become guilty of
heresy I am accused of in reference to spirit and matter. The conception of
spirit and matter as entirely distinct and both eternal could certainly never
have entered my head, however little I may know of them. For it is one of the
elementary and fundamental doctrines of Occultism that matter and spirit are
one, and are distinct but in their respective manifestations and only in the
limited perception of the world of our senses. Far from lacking philosophical
breadth then, our doctrines show but one principle in nature, spirit-matter or
matter-spirit, the third, the ultimate absolute, and quintessence of the two,
if I may be allowed to use an erroneous term in the present application, losing
itself beyond the view and spiritual perceptions of even the Gods or Planetary
Spirits. The third principle, say the Vedantic philosophers, is the only
reality, everything else being Maya, as none of the Protean manifestations of
spirit-matter, or Purusha and Prakriti, have ever been regarded in any other
light than that of temporary delusions of the senses. Even in the hardly
outlined philosophy of Isis, this idea is clearly carried out. In the
book of Kiu-te spirit is called the ultimate sublimation of matter and
matter the crystallization of spirit; and no better illustration could be
afforded than the very simple phenomenon of ice-water-vapour, and the final
dispersion of the latter, the phenomenon being reversed in its consecutive
manifestations, and called the spirit falling into generation or matter, this
trinity resolving itself into unity. A doctrine as old as the world of thought
was seized upon by some early Christians, who had it in the schools of
Alexandria and made it up into the Father or generative Spirit, the Son, or
matter-man, and the Holy Ghost, the immaterial essence or the apex of the
equilateral Δan idea found to this day in the pyramids of Egypt.
Thus once more it is proved that you misunderstand my meaning
entirely whenever, for the sake of brevity, I use a phraseology habitual with
western people. But in my turn I have to remark that your idea that matter is
but the temporary allotropic form of spirit, differing from it as charcoal does
from diamond, is as unphilosophical as it is unscientific from both the eastern
and western point of view; charcoal being but a form of residue of matter,
while matter per se is indestructible and, as I maintain, can conceive
of. Bereaved of Prakriti, Purusha (spirit) is unable to manifest itself, hence
ceases to exist, becomes nihil, without spirit or force; even that which
science styles as not living matter, the so-called mineral ingredients which
feed plants, could never have been called into form.
There is a moment in the existence of every atom and molecule of
matter when, for one cause or another, the last spark of spirit or motion or
life, call it by whatever name you please, is withdrawn; and in the same instant,
with a swiftness that surpasses that of the lightning glance of thought, the
atom or molecule or the aggregation of molecules is annihilated to return to
its pristine purity of intra-cosmic matter; it is drawn to the mother fount
with the velocity of a globule of quicksilver to the central mass. Matter,
force and motion are the trinity of physical objective nature, as the
trinitarian unity of spirit and matter is that of spiritual subjective nature;
motion is eternal because spirit is eternal, but no modes of motion can ever be
conceived unless they be in connection with matter.
And now to your extraordinary hypothesis that evil, with its
attendant train of sin and suffering is not the result of matter, but may be
perchance the wise scheme of the moral Governor of the Universe. Conceivable as
the idea may seem to you, trained in the pernicious fallacy of the Christian,
that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, it is utterly inconceivable for me;
must I repeat again that the best Adepts have searched the universe during
millenniums and found nowhere the slightest trace of such a Machiavellian
schemer, but throughout the same immutable inexorable law. You must excuse me
therefore if I positively decline to lose my time over such childish
speculations. It is not the ways of the Lord but rather those of some extremely
intelligent men, in everything but some particular hobby, that are to me
incomprehensible.
As you say, this need make no difference between us personally; but
it does make a world of difference if you propose to learn and offer me to
teach; for the life of me I cannot make out how I could ever impart to you that
which I know, since the very A.B.C of what I know to be the rock upon which the
secrets of the occult universe, whether upon this or that side of the veil, are
encrusted, is contradicted by you invariably and a priori. My dear
Brother, either we know something or we do not know anything. In the first
case, what is the use of your learning since you think you know better; in the
second case, why should you lose your time? You say it matters nothing whether
these laws are the expression of the will of an intelligent conscious God, as
you think, or constitute the inevitable attributes of an unintelligent
unconscious God, as I hold. I say it matters everything, since you earnestly
believe that these fundamental questions of spirit and matter, of God and no
God, are admittedly beyond both of us, in other words that neither I nor yet
our greatest Adepts can know any more than you do.
Then what is there on earth that I could teach you? You know that,
in order to enable you to read, you must learn your letters; yet you want to
know the course of events before and after the Pralayas, of every event here on
this globe on the opening of a new cycle, namely, a mystery imparted at one of
the last Initiations, as Mr. Sinnett was told; for my letter to him upon the
Planetary Spirits was simply accidental, brought out by a question of his. And
now you would say I am evading the direct issue, that I have discoursed upon
collateral points but have not explained to you all you want to know, and that
you ask me to tell you. You say, “I dodge as I always do”. Pardon me for
contradicting you, but it is nothing of the kind; there are a thousand
questions I shall never be permitted to answer, and it would be dodging were I
to answer to you other than I do. I tell you plainly you are unfit to learn,
for your mind is too full, and there is not a corner vacant from whence a
previous occupant would not arise to struggle with and drive away a new comer.
Therefore I do not evade. I only give you time to reflect and deduce, and first
learn well what was already given you, before you seize on something else. The
world of force is the world of occultism and the only one whither the highest
Initiate goes to probe the secret of being; hence no one but such an Initiate
can know anything of these secrets. Guided by his Guru, the Chela first
discovers this world and its laws, then their centrifugal evolutions into the
world of matter. To become a perfect Adept takes him long years but at last he
becomes a Master; the hidden things have become patent and mystery and miracle
have fled from his sight for ever; he sees how to guide force in this direction
or that, to produce desirable effects; the secret chemical, electric or odic
properties of plants, herbs, roots, minerals, and animal tissue are as familiar
as the feathers of your birds are to you. [ Mr. Hume was an
ornithologist and had a valuable collection of stuffed birds.] No change
in the etheric vibrations can escape him; he applies his knowledge, and behold
a miracle! and he who started with the repudiation of the very idea that
miracle is possible is straightway classed as a miracle worker and either
worshipped by the fools as a demi-god or repudiated by still greater fools as a
charlatan.
And, to show you how exact a science is Occultism, let me tell you
that the means we avail ourselves of are all laid down for us in a code as old
as humanity to the minutest details, but every one of us has to begin from the
beginning, not from the end. Our laws are as immutable as those of nature, and
were known to man an eternity before this strutting gamecock, modern science,
was hatched. If I have not given you the modus operandi or begun at the
wrong end, I have at least shown you that we build our philosophy upon
experiment and deduction, unless you choose to question and dispute this fact
equally with all others. Learn first our laws and educate your perceptions,
dear brother; control your involuntary powers and develop in the right
direction your will, and you will become a teacher instead of a learner. I
would not refuse what I have a right to teach, only I had to study for fifteen
years before I came to the doctrine of cycles and had to learn simpler things
at first. But, do what we may and whatever happens, I trust we shall have no
more arguing, which is as profitless as it is painful.
Notes by the Master K.H.
on a Preliminary Chapter headed “God”,
by A.O. Hume, intended to preface an Exposition of Occult Philosophy
Neither our philosophy nor ourselves believe in a God, least of all
in one whose pronoun necessitates a capital H. Our philosophy falls under the
definition of Hobbes; it is pre-eminently the science of effects by their
causes, and of causes by their effects. And since it is also the science of
things deduced from first principles, as Bacon defines it, before we admit any
new principle, we must know it, and have no right to admit even its
probability. Your whole explanation is based upon one solitary admission, made
simply for argument’s sake in October last. You were told that our knowledge
was limited to this our Solar System: ergo, as philosophers who desired
to remain worthy of the name, we could not either deny or affirm the existence
of what you termed a supreme omnipotent intelligent being of some sort beyond
the limits of that Solar System. But if such an existence is not absolutely
impossible, yet, unless the uniformity of Nature’s laws breaks at those limits,
we maintain that it is highly improbable. Nevertheless we deny most
emphatically the position of Agnosticism in this direction, and as regards the
Solar System our doctrine knows no compromise. It either affirms or denies, for
it never teaches but that which it knows to be the truth. Therefore we
deny God, both as philosophers and Buddhists. We know that there are Planetary
and other spiritual lives, and we know that there is in our system no such
thing as God, either personal or impersonal. Parabrahm is not a God, but
absolute immutable law, and Isvara is the effect of Avidya and Maya, a
ignorance based upon the great delusion.
The word “God” was invented to designate the unknown cause of those
effects which man has either admired or dreaded without understanding them, and
since we claim and are able to prove what we claim, i.e., the knowledge
of that cause or those causes, we are in a position to maintain that there is
no God or gods behind them. The idea of God is not an innate but an acquired
notion, and we have but one thing in common with theologists—we reveal the
infinite. But while we assign to all the phenomena that proceed from the
infinite and boundless space, duration and motion, material, natural, sensible
and known (to us at least) causes; the theists assign them spiritual,
supernatural, unintelligible and unknown causes. The God of the theologians is
simply an imaginary power, “un loup-garou” as Dolback expresses it, a power
which has never yet manifested itself. Our chief aim is to deliver humanity
from this nightmare, and to teach man virtue for its own sake, and to walk in
life relying on himself instead of leaning on a theological crutch that for
countless ages was the direct cause of nearly all human misery. Pantheistic we
may be called, agnostic never.
If people are willing to accept and regard as God our “One Life,”
immutable and unconscious in its eternity, they may do so, and thus keep to one
more gigantic misnomer; but then they will have to say with Spinoza, that there
is not, and that we cannot conceive, any other substance than God, or as that
famous and unfortunate philosopher says in his fourteenth proposition—Praeter
Deum neque dari, neque concipi potest substantia—and thus become
Pantheists. Who but a theologian nursed on the most absurd supernaturalism can
imagine self-existent being, of necessity infinite and omnipresent, outside the
manifested, boundless universe? The word infinite is but a negation with
excludes the idea of bounds. It is evident that a being independent and
omnipresent cannot be limited by any thing which is outside of himself, that
there can be nothing exterior to himself—not even vacuum; then where is there
room for matter? for that manifested even though the later limited.[So
in MS.] If we ask the theists, “Is your God vacuum space or matter?”
they will reply, ‘no.” And yet they hold that their God penetrates matter
though he is not himself matter.
When we speak of our “One Life,” we also say that it penetrates,
nay, is the essence of every atom of matter, and that therefore it not only has
correspondence with matter, but has all its properties likewise, etc., hence is
material, is matter itself. “How can intelligence proceed or emanate
from non-intelligence? you kept asking last year. “How could a highly
intelligent humanity, man the crown of reason, be evolved out of blind
unintelligent law or force?” But once we reason on that line I may ask in my
turn: “How could congenital idiots, non-reasoning animals, and the rest of the
creation have been created by, or evolved from, absolute wisdom, if the latter
is a thinking intelligent being, the author and ruler of the universe?” How
says Dr. Clarke in his examination of the proof of the existence of the
Divinity: “God Who hath made the eye shall He not see, God Who hath made the
ear shall He not hear?” But according to this mode of reasoning, they would
have to admit that in creating an idiot, God is an idiot, that he who made so
many irrational beings, so many physical and moral monsters, must be an
irrational being. We are not Adwaitis, but our teaching respecting the One Life
is identical with that of the Adwaitis with regard to Parabrahm, and identical
in every respect with the universal life and soul, the macrocosm with the
microcosm, and he knows that there is no God apart from himself, no Creator as
no being. Having found Gnosis we cannot turn our backs on it and become
agnostic. Were we to admit that even the highest Dhyan Chohans are liable to
err under a delusion, there would be no reality for us indeed, and the occult
science would be as great a chimera as that God. If there is an absurdity in
denying that which we do not know, it is still more extravagant to assign to it
unknown laws. According to logic, nothing is that of which everything can truly
be denied, and nothing can be truly affirmed. The idea, therefore, either of a
finite or infinite nothing is a contradiction in terms. And yet according to theologians,
“God the self-existent Being, is a most simple, unchangeable, incorruptible
being, without parts, figure, motion, divisibility or any other such properties
as we find in matter; for all such things do plainly and necessarily imply
finiteness in their very notion, and are utterly inconsistent with complete
infinity.” Therefore the God here offered to the adoration of the nineteenth
century lacks every quality upon which man’s mind is capable of fixing any
judgement. What is this in fact but a being of whom they can affirm nothing
that is not instantly contradicted? Their own Bible, their revelation destroys
all the moral perceptions they heap upon him, unless indeed they call those
qualities perfections, that every other man’s reason and common sense call
imperfections, odious vices and brutal wickedness.
Nay more, those who read our Buddhist scriptures, written for the
superstitious masses, will fail to find in them a demon so vindictive, unjust,
so cruel and so stupid, as the celestial tyrant upon whom the Christians
prodigally lavish their servile worship, and upon whom their theologians heap
those perfections that are contradicted on every page of their Bible. Truly and
veritably, your theology has created her God but to destroy him piecemeal; your
church is a fabulous Saturn who begets children but to destroy them.
A few reflections and arguments ought to support every new idea.
For instance, we are sure to be taken to task for the following apparent
contradiction. We deny the existence of a thinking conscious God, on the ground
that such a God must either be conditioned, limited and subject to change,
therefore not infinite, or, if he be represented to us as an eternal, unchangeable
and independent being, with not a particle of matter in him; then we answer
that it is no-being, but an immutable blind principle, a law. And yet, they
will say, we believe in Dhyans or Planetaries (Spirits also) and endow them
with a universal mind—and this must be explained. Our reasons must be
briefly summed up thus:—
(1) We deny the absurd proposition that there can be, even in a
boundless and eternal universe, two infinite, eternal, and omnipresent
existences; (2) matter we know to be eternal, i.e., having had no
beginning; (a) because matter is nature herself; (b) because that which cannot
annihilate itself and is indestructible exists necessarily, and therefore it
cannot begin to be, nor cannot it cease to be; (c) because the accumulated
experiences of countless ages and that of exact science show to us matter (or
nature) acting by her own peculiar energy, of which not one atom is ever in a
state of absolute rest, and therefore it must have always existed, i.e.,
its materials ever changing form, combinations and properties, but its
principles or elements being absolutely indestructible; (3) as to God, since no
one has ever or at any time seen Him or It, unless He or It
is the very essence and nature of this boundless, eternal matter,
its energy and motion, we cannot regard him as either eternal or
infinite or yet self-existing.
We refuse to admit a being or an existence of which we know
absolutely nothing because (a) there is no room for him in the presence of that
matter whose undeniable properties and qualities we know thoroughly well (b)
because if he or it is but a part of that matter, it is
ridiculous to maintain that he is the mover of that of which he is but a
dependent part, and (c) because if they tell us that God is a self-existent,
pure spirit, independent of matter, an extra cosmic Deity, we answer that,
admitting even the possibility of such an impossibility, i.e., his
existence, we yet hold that a purely immaterial spirit cannot be an
intelligent, conscious ruler, nor can he have any of the attributes bestowed
upon him by theology, and thus such a God becomes again but a blind force.
Intelligence as found in our Dhyan Chohans is a faculty that can appertain but
to organised or animated beings, however imponderable, or rather invisible,
the material of their organisations.
Intelligence requires the necessity of thinking; to think one must
have ideas; ideas suppose senses, which are physical and material; and how can
anything material belong to pure spirit? If it be objected that thought cannot
be a property of matter, we will ask, “Why not”? We must have an unanswerable
proof of this assumption before we can accept it. Of the theologian we would
enquire what was there to prevent his God, since he is the alleged Creator of
all, from endowing matter with the faculty of thought, and when answered that
evidently it has not pleased him to do so, that it is a mystery as well as an
impossibility, we would insist upon being told why is it more improbable
that matter should produce spirit and thought, than that the spirit or the
thought of God should produce or create matter.
We do not bow our heads in the dust before the mystery of the mind,
for we have solved it ages ago. Rejecting with contempt the theistic
theory, we reject as much the automaton theory, teaching that states of
consciousness are produced by the marshalling of the molecules of the brain;
and we feel as little respect for that other hypothesis—the production of
molecular motion by consciousness. Then in what do we believe? Well, we
believe in the much laughed-at phlogiston (see article “What is Force
and What is Matter?” “Theosophist”, September) and in what some natural
philosophers would call nisus—the incessant though perfectly imperceptible
(to the ordinary senses) motions or efforts one body is making on another—the
pulsations of inert matter—its life.
The bodies of the Planetary Spirits are formed of that which
Priestly and others called phlogiston, and for which we have another name—this
essence in its highest (seventh) state forming that matter of which the
organisms of the highest and purest Dhyans are composed, and in its
lowest or densest form (so impalpable yet that science calls it energy and
force) serving as a cover to the Planetaries of the first or lowest degree.
In other words, we believe in matter alone, in matter as visible
nature and matter in its invisibility as the invisible, omnipresent, omnipotent
Proteus with its unceasing motion which is its life, and which nature draws
from herself, since she is the great whole, outside of which nothing can exist.
For as Belfinger asserts: “Motion is a manner of existence that flows
necessarily out of the essence of matter, that matter moves by its own peculiar
energies, that its motion is due to the force which is inherent in itself, that
the variety of motion and the phenomena that result proceed from the diversity
of the properties, of the qualities and of the combinations which are
originally found in the primitive matter, of which nature is the assemblage”;
and of which your science knows less than one of our Tibetan Yak-drivers of
Kant’s metaphysics. The existence of matter, then, is a fact; the existence of
motion is another fact; then self-existence and eternity or indestructibility
is a third fact; and the idea of pure spirit as a Being or an existence—give it
whatever name you will—is a chimera, a gigantic absurdity.
Now that you are at the centre of modern Buddhistic exegesis, in
personal relations with some of the clever commentators (from whom the holy
Devas deliver us), I shall draw your attention to a few things which are really
as discreditable to the perceptions of even non-initiates as they are misleading
to the general public. The more one reads such speculations as those of
Rhys-Davids and Lillie, the less can one bring oneself to believe that the
unregenerate western mind can ever get at the core of our abstruse doctrines.
Yet hopeless as their cases may be, it would appear well worth the trouble to
test the intuition of some of your members by half expounding one or two
mysteries, and leaving them to complete the chain themselves. Shall we take Mr.
Rhys-Davids as our first subject, and show that, indirectly as he has done it,
yet it is himself who strengthened the absurd ideas of Mr. Lillie, who fancies
he has proved belief in a personal God in ancient Buddhism. Rhys-Davids’
“Buddhism” is full of the sparkle of our most important esotericism, but
always, as it would seem, beyond not only his reach but apparently even his
powers of intellectual perception. To avoid “absurd metaphysics” and its
“inventions,” he creates unnecessary difficulties and falls headlong into
inextricable confusion. He is like the Cape settlers, who lived over diamond
fields without suspecting it.
I shall only instance the definition of Avalokitesvara on pp.202-3.
There we find the author saying what to any Occultist seems a palpable
absurdity: “The name Avalokitesvara, which means ‘ The Lord who looks down from
on high,’ is a purely metaphysical invention. The curious use of the past
participle avalokita in an active sense is clearly evident from the
translation into Tibetan and Chinese.” Now saying that it means “the Lord who
looks down from on high,” or as he kindly explains further, “the spirit of the
Buddhas present in the Church,” is a complete reversal of the sense. In short,
Avalokitesvara literally interpreted means “the Lord that is seen,” “Isvara”
implying moreover rather the adjective than the noun,—lordly,
self-existent, lordliness—not Lord. It is, when correctly interpreted,
in one sense “the divine self perceived or seen by self,” the Atman or seventh
principle ridded of its Mayavic distinction from its universal source, which
becomes the object of perception, for and by the individuality centred in
Buddhi, the sixth principle, something that happens only in the highest state
of Samadhi. This is applying it to the microcosm. In the other sense,
Avalokitesvara implies the seventh universal principle as the object
perceived by the universal Buddhi or “Mind” or Intelligence, which is the
synthetic aggregation of all the Dhyan Chohans, as of all other intelligencies,
whether great or small, that ever were, are or will be. Nor is it the “spirit
of the Buddhas present in the Church,” but the omnipresent universal spirit in
the temple of nature in one case, and the seventh principle, the Atman, in the
temple of man in the other. Mr. Rhys-Davids might at least have remembered the
(to him) familiar simile made by the Christian adept, the Kabalistic Paul:
“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwelleth
in you?” and thus avoided making a mess of the name. Though as a grammarian he
detected the use of the “past participle passive,” yet he shows himself far
from an inspired Paul in overlooking the true cause, and saving his grammar by
raising the hue and cry against metaphysics. And yet he quotes Beale’s Catena
as his authority for the invention, when in truth this work is perhaps the only
one in English that gives an approximately correct explanation of the
word, at any rate, on page 374.
“Self-Manifested”—how? It is asked. “Speech or Vach was regarded as
the Son of Manifestation of the Eternal Self, and was adored under the
name of Avalokitesvara, the manifested God.” This shows as clearly as can be
that Avalokitesvara is both the manifested Father and the manifested Son,
the latter proceeded from and identified with the other; namely the Parabrahm and
Jivatma, the universal and the individualised seventh principle, the Passive
and the Active, the latter the Word, Logos, the “Verb,” call it by
whatever name you will; only let these unfortunate deluded Christians know that
the real Christ of every Christian is the Vach, the “mystical voice,”
while the man Jeshu was but a mortal like any of us, an Adept more by
his inherent purity and ignorance of real evil, than by what he had learned
from his initiated Rabbis and the already (at that period) fast degenerating
Egyptian hierophants and priests. A great mistake is also made by Beal, who
says: “This name (Avalokitesvara) in Chinese took the form of Kwan-shai-yin,
and the divinity worshipped under that name (was) generally regarded as a
female.” Kwan-shai-yin, or the universally manifested voice, is active male,
and must not be confounded with Kwan-yin, or Buddhi, the spiritual Soul (the
sixth principle) and the vehicle of its “Lord”. It is Kwan-yin that is the
female principle or the manifested passive, manifesting itself “to every
creature in the universe, in order to deliver all men from the consequences of
sin”—as rendered by Beal, this once, quite correctly (p.383)—while
Kwan-shai-yin, the Son identical with his Father, is the absolute activity,
hence having no direct relation to objects of sense as Passivity.
What a common ruse it is of your Aristotelians! With sleuth-hound
persistence they track an idea to the very verge of the impassable chasm; and
then, brought to bay, leave the metaphysicians to take up the trail if they
can, or let it be lost. It is but natural that a Christian theologian, a
missionary, should act upon this line, since, as easily perceived even in the
little I gave out just now, a too correct rendering of our Avalokitesvara and
Kwan-shai-yin might have very disastrous effects. It would simply amount to
showing Christendom the true and undeniable origin of the “awful and
incomprehensible mysteries” of its Trinity, Trans-substantiation, Immaculate
Conception, as also whence their ideas of the Father, Son, Spiritus—and mother.
It is less easy to shuffle at pleasure the cards of Buddhistic
chronology than those of Krishna and Christ. They cannot place—however much
they would—the birth of our Lord Sangyas Buddha A.D., as they have contrived to
place that of Krishna. But why an atheist and a materialist like Mr.
Rhys-Davids should so avoid the correct rendering of our dogmas even when he
happens to understand them—which does not happen every day—is something
surpassingly curious. In this instance the blind and guilty Rhys-Davids leads
the blind and innocent Mr. Lillie into the ditch, when the latter catching at
the proffered straw rejoices in the idea that Buddhism teaches in reality a
personal God.
Does your B. T. S. [ British Theosophical Society]
know the meaning of the white and black interlaced triangles of the Parent
Society’s seal that it has also adopted? Shall I explain? The double triangle,
viewed by the Jewish Kabalists as Solomon’s seal, is, as many of you doubtless
know, the Sri-an-tara of the archaic Aryan Temple, the “mystery of
mysteries,” a geometrical synthesis of the whole occult doctrine. The two
interlaced triangles are the Buddhanymus of creation. They contain the
“squaring of the circle,” the “philosopher’s stone,” the great problems of Life
and Death—and the mystery of Evil. The Chela who can explain this from every
one of its aspects is virtually an Adept. How is it then that the only one
among you who has come so near to unravelling the mystery is also the only one
who got none of her ideas from books? Unconsciously she gives out to him who
has the key, the first syllable of the Ineffable Name! Of course you know that
the double triangle, the Salkir Chakram of Vishnu, or the six-pointed 
star, is the perfect seven. In all the old Sanskrit works, Vedic
and Tantric, you find the number six mentioned more often than seven, this last
figure, the central point, being implied, for it is the germ of the six and
their matrix. It is then thus: the central point standing for seventh and the
circle, the Maha-akasha, endless space for the seventh universal
principle. In one sense both are viewed as Avalokitesvara, for they are
triangles; the upward pointing one is wisdom concealed, and the downward
pointing one wisdom revealed (in the phenomenal world). The circle indicates
the bounding, circumscribing quality of the All, the universal
Principle, which from any given point expands so as to embrace all things,
while embodying the potentiality of every action in the cosmos. At the point
there is the centre round which the circle is traced, they are identical and one,
though from the standpoint of Maya and Avidya (illusion and
ignorance) one is separated from the other by the manifested triangle, the
three sides of which represent the three gunas, finite attributes. In
symbology the central point is Jivatma, (the seventh principle) whence
Avalokitesvara, the Kwan-Shai-yin, the manifested “voice” (or Logos), the germ
point of manifested activity; hence, in the phraseology of the Christian
Kabalists, “the son of the Father and mother,” and agreeably to ours, “the self
manifested in self”, Jih-Sui, the “one form of existence,” the child of
Dharmakaya (the universally diffused essence), both male and female, Parabrahm
or “Adi Buddha” while acting through that germ point outwardly as an active
force, reacts from the circumference inwardly as the supreme but latent
Potency. The double triangles symbolize the Great Passive and the Great Active,
the male and female, Purusha and Prakriti. Each triangle is a trinity because
presenting a triple aspect. The white represents in its straight lines: Jnanam
(knowledge), Jnata (the knower), Jneyam (that which is
known). The black: form, colour and substance; also creative, preservative and
destructive forces, and are mutually correlating, etc.
Well may you admire and more should you wonder at the marvellous
lucidity of that remarkable seeress, who, ignorant of Sanskrit or Pali and thus
shut out from their metaphysical treasures, has yet seen a great light shining
from behind the dark hills of exoteric religions. How, think you, did the
writers of “The Perfect Way” come to know that Adonai was the Son and not the
Father, or that the third person of the Christian Trinity is female? Verily they
lay in that work several times their hands upon the keystone of Occultism. Only
does the lady who persists in using without an explanation the misleading term
“God” in her writings know how nearly she comes up to our doctrine when saying:
“Having for Father, Spirit which is Life (the endless circle or
Parabrahm) and for mother, the Great Deep, which is substance, (Prakriti in its
indifferentiated condition) Adonai possesses the potency of both and wields the
dual powers of all things.” We would say triple, but in the sense as
given this will do. Pythagoras had a reason for never using the finite useless
figure 2, and for altogether discarding it. The one can when manifesting
become only three. The unmanifested when a simple duality remains passive and concealed.
The dual monad (the seventh and sixth principles) has, in order to manifest
itself as a Logos, the Kwan-shai-yin, first to become a triad (seventh, sixth
and one-half of fifth); then, on the bosom of the “Great Deep,” attracting
within itself the one circle, form out of it the perfect square, thus
“squaring the circle”—the greatest of all the mysteries, friend—and inscribing
within the latter the word (the Ineffable Name)—otherwise the duality
could never tarry as such, and would have to be reabsorbed into the one.
The “Deep” is space, both male and female, “Purusha (as Brahma) breathes in the
eternity; when “He” inbreathes, Prakriti (as manifested substance)
disappears in his bosom; when “He” outbreathes she reappears as Maya,”
says the sloka. The one reality is Mulaprakriti (indifferentiated substance),
the “rootless root,” the . . . But we have to stop lest there should remain but
little to tell for your own intuitions.
Well may the geometer of the R. S. [ Royal Society.]
not know that the apparent absurdity of attempting to square the circle covers
a mystery ineffable. It would hardly be found among the foundation stones of
Mr. Roden Noel’s speculations upon the Pneumatical Body . . . of our Lord,” nor
among the debris of Mr. Farmer’s “A New Basis of Belief in Immortality,” and to
many such metaphysical minds it would be more than useless to divulge the fact,
that the unmanifested circle, the Father or Absolute Life, is non-existent
outside the Triangle and Perfect Square, and is only manifested in the Son, and
that it is when reversing the action and returning to its absolute state of
unity and the square expands once more into the circle, that the “Son returns
to the bosom of the Father”. There it remains till called back by his mother,
“the Great Deep,” to remanifest as a triad, the Son partaking at once of
the essence of the Father and that of the mother, the active Substance,
Prakriti in its differentiated condition. “My mother (Sophia, the manifested
wisdom) took me,” says Jesus in a gnostic treatise, and he asks his disciple to
tarry till he comes. . . . The true word may only be found by tracing
the mystery of the passage inward and outward, of the Eternal Life through the
states typified in these three geometric figures.
The criticism of “A Student of Occultism” (whose wits are sharpened
by the mountain air of his home) and the answers by S.T. K. Chany (June Theosophist)
upon a part of your annular and circular expositions need not annoy or disturb
in any way your philosophic calm. As our Pondicherry Chela significantly says,
neither you nor any other man across the threshold has had, or ever will have,
the “complete theory” of evolution taught him or get it unless he guesses it
for himself. If anyone can unravel it from such tangled threads as are given
him, very well, and a fine proof it would indeed be of his or her spiritual
insight. Some have come very near it. But yet there is
always with the best of them just enough error, colouring and misconception—the
shadow of manas projecting across the field of Buddhi—to prove the eternal law
that only the unshackled spirit shall see the things of the spirit without a
veil. No untaught amateur could ever rival the proficient in this branch of
research; yet the world’s real Revelators have been few, and its
pseudo-Saviours legion; and fortunate it is if their half glimpses of the light
are not like Islam enforced at the sword’s point, or like Christian theology
amid blazing fagots and in torture chambers. Your Fragments contain
some—still very few—errors, due solely to your two preceptors of Adyar, one of
whom would not, and the other could not tell you at all. The rest
could not be called mistakes—rather, incomplete explanations. Those are due,
partly to your own imperfect education in your last theme—I mean the ever
threatening obscurations—partly to the poor vehicles of language at our
disposal, and in part again to the reserve imposed upon us by rule. Yet, all
things considered, they are few, and trivial, while as to those noticed by “A
Student,” etc. (the Marcus Aurelius of Simla) in your No.VII, it will be
pleasant for you to know that every one of them, however now seeming to you
contradictory, can (and if it should seem necessary shall) be easily
reconciled with facts.
The trouble is that (a) you cannot be given the real figures and
different age in the Rounds, and (b) that you do not open doors enough for
explorers. The bright luminary of the B.T.S [ British Theosophical
Society.] and the intelligences that surround her (embodied, I mean) may
help you to see the plans; at all events, try. “Nothing was ever lost by
trying.” You share with all beginners the tendency to draw too absolutely
strong inferences from partly caught hints and to dogmatize thereupon as though
the last word had been spoken. You will correct this in good time. You may
misunderstand us, are more than likely to do so, for our language must always
be more or less that of parable and suggestion, when treading upon forbidden
ground; we have our own peculiar modes of expression and what lies behind the
fence of words is even more important than what you read, but still, Try!
Perhaps if Mr. S. Moses [ W. Stainton Moses, the spiritualist, who wrote
under the pseudonym “M. A. (Oxon)” could know just what was meant by what was
said to him and about his Intelligences, he would find all strictly true.
As he is a man of interior growth, his day may come and his reconciliation with
“the occultists” be complete. Who knows?
(Copied out at Simla, September 28th, 1882)
Evil has no existence per se, and is but the absence of good
and exists but for him who is made its victim; it proceeds from two causes, and
no more than good is it an independent cause in nature. Nature is destitute of
goodness or malice; she follows only immutable laws when she either gives life
and joy, or sends suffering and death, and destroys what she has created.
Nature has an antidote for every poison, and her laws have a reward for every
suffering. The butterfly devoured by a bird becomes that bird, and the little
bird devoured by an animal goes into a higher form. It is the blind law of
necessity and the eternal fitness of things, and hence cannot be called evil in
nature. The real evil proceeds from human intelligence, and its origin
rests entirely with reasoning man, who dissociates himself from Nature.
Humanity alone, then, is the true source of evil. Evil is the
exaggeration of good, the progeny of human selfishness and greediness. Think
profoundly and you will find that, save death (which is no evil, but a
necessary law) and accidents, which will always find their reward in a future
life, the origin of every evil, whether small or great, is in human
action—in man, whose intelligence makes him the one free agent in nature.
It is not nature that creates diseases, but man. The latter’s
mission and destiny in the economy of nature is to die his natural death
brought by age. Save by accident, neither a savage nor a wild (free) animal
dies of disease. Food, drink, sexual relations, all are necessities of life,
yet excess in them brings on disease, misery, suffering, mental and physical,
and the latter are transmitted as the greatest evils to future generations, the
progeny of the culprits. Ambition, the desire of securing happiness and comfort
for those we love by obtaining honour and riches, are praiseworthy natural
feelings; but when they transform man into an ambitious, cruel tyrant, a miser
or a selfish egoist, they bring untold misery on those around him—on nations as
well as on individuals. All this, then, (food, wealth, ambition and the
thousand other things we have to leave unmentioned) becomes the source and
cause of evil, whether in its abundance or through its absence. Become a
glutton, a debauchee, a tyrant, and you become the originator of diseases, of
human suffering and misery. Lack all this and you starve, you are despised as a
nobody, and the majority of the herd of your fellow-men make you a sufferer for
your whole life. Therefore it is neither nature nor an imaginary deity that has
to be blamed, but human nature made vile by selfishness. Think well over these
few words; work out every cause of evil you can think of and trace it to its
origin, and you will have solved one-third of the problems of evil.
And now, after making due allowances for evils that are natural and
cannot be avoided—and so few are they that I challenge the whole host of
Western metaphysicians to call them evils or trace them to an independent
cause—I will point out the greatest, the chief cause of nearly two-thirds of
the evils that pursue humanity ever since that cause became a power. It is
religion, under whatever form or in whatever nation; it is the sacerdotal
caste, the priesthood and the churches. It is in those illusions that man looks
upon as sacred, that he has to search out the source of that multitude of evils
which is the great curse of humanity and that almost overwhelms mankind;
ignorance created gods, and cunning took advantage of the opportunity. Look at
India, look at Christendom and Islam, at Judaism and Fetichism. It is priestly
imposture that rendered these gods so terrible to man; it is religion that
makes of him the selfish bigot, the fanatic, that hates all mankind out of his
own sect, without rendering him any better or more moral for it. It is belief
in God or gods that makes of two-thirds of humanity the slaves of those who
deceive them under the false pretence of saving them. Is not man ever ready to
commit any kind of evil, if told that his God or gods demand the crime? Voluntary
victim of an illusory god, the abject slave of his crafty ministers, the Irish,
Italian or Sclavonian peasant will starve himself, and see his family starving
and naked, to feed and clothe his padre or pope.
For 2.000 years India groaned under the weight of caste, Brahmins
alone feeding on the fat of the land, and today the followers of Christ and
Mahomet are cutting each other’s throats in the name for the greater glory of
their respective myths. Remember, the sum of human misery will never be diminished
until that day when the better portion of humanity destroy, in the name of
truth, morality and universal charity, the alters of their false gods.
If it is objected that we too have temples, we too have priests,
and that our Lamas also live on charity, let them know that the objects above
named have in communion with their Western equivalents but the name. Thus in
our temples there is neither a god nor gods worshipped, only the three sacred
memories of the greatest as the holiest man that ever lived. If our Lamas, to
honour that fraternity of the Bhikkus established by our Blessed Master
himself, go out to be fed by the laity, the latter, often to the number of 5 to
25,000 is fed and taken care of by the Sangha (the fraternity of Lamaic
monks) the Lamasery providing for the wants of the poor, the sick and the
afflicted. Our Lamas accept food, never money, and it is in these temples that
the origin of evil is preached and impressed upon the people. There they are
taught the Four Noble Truths (Arya sachchani), and the chain of
causation (the twelve Nidanas) gives them a solution of the problem of the
origin and destruction of suffering.
Read the Maha-vagga: (Vin. Pit.I.i.1), and try to
understand, not with the prejudiced western mind but with the spirit of intuition
and truth, what the fully Enlightened One says in the 1st Khandhaka.
Allow me to translate it for you. “At the time when the blessed Buddha was at
Uruvela on the shores of the river Neranjara, as he rested under the Bodhi-tree
of wisdom after he had become Sambuddha; at the end of the seventh day, having
his mind fixed on the chain of causation, he spake thus: ‘From ignorance spring
the Sankharas of three-fold nature—productions of body, of speech, of thought;
from Sankharas spring consciousness; from consciousness springs name and form;
and from these spring the six natures (of the six senses, the seventh being the
property of but the enlightened); from these spring contact; from this
sensation; from this thirst (or desire Kama-tanha); from thirst—attachment,
existence, birth, old age and death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection
and despair. Again by the destruction of ignorance, the Sankharas are
destroyed, and their consciousness, name and form, the six regions, contact,
sensation, thirst, attachment (selfishness), existence, birth, old age, death,
grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection and despair are destroyed. Such is the
cessation of the whole mass of human suffering.’ Knowing this the Blessed One
uttered this solemn utterance. When the real nature of things becomes clear to
the meditating Bhikkhu, then all his doubts fade away since he has learned what
is that nature and what its cause; from ignorance spring all the evils, from
knowledge comes the cessation of this mass of misery; then the meditating
Brahmin stands dispelling the hosts of Maya like the sun when it illumines the
sky.” Meditation here means the superhuman, not supernatural, qualities of
Arhatship in its highest or spiritual power.
Planetary Spirits
Alone the Adepts, i.e., the
embodied spirits, are forbidden by our wise and intransgressible laws to
completely subject to themselves another and a weaker will, that of free-born
man. The latter mode of proceeding is the favourite one resorted to by the
Brothers of the Shadow, the Sorcerers, the Elementary Spooks and, as an
isolated exception, the highest Planetary Spirits, those who can no longer err.
But these appear on earth but at the origin of every new human kind at the
junction or close of the two ends of the great cycle; and they remain with man
no longer than the time required for the eternal truths they teach to impress
themselves so forcibly upon the plastic minds of the new races as to warrant
them from being entirely lost or forgotten in ages hereafter by the
forth-coming generations.
The mission of the Planetary
Spirit is but to strike the Key-note of Truth. Once he has directed the
vibration of the latter to run its course uninterruptedly along the catenation
of the race, and the end of the cycle, the denizen of the highest inhabited
sphere disappears from the surface of our planet until the following
resurrection of flesh. The vibrations of the primitive truth are what your
philosophers term innate ideas. To your question: “May a Planetary spirit have
been humanely incarnated?” I will first say that . . . there can be no
Planetary Spirit that was not once material, or what you call human. When our
great Buddha, the patron of all the Adepts, the reformer and codifier of the
Occult System, reached first Nirvana on earth, he became a Planetary Spirit, i.e.,
his soul could at one and the same time rove the interstellar spaces in full
consciousness and continue at will on earth in his original and individual
body. For the divine self had so completely enfranchised itself from matter
that it could create at will an inner substitute for itself, and leaving it in
the human form for days and weeks, sometimes years, affect in no wise by the
change either the vital principle or the physical mind of its body. By the way,
that is the highest form of Adeptship man can hope for on our planet; but it is
as rare as the Buddhas themselves, the last Hobelgan who reached it being
Tsong-ka-pa of Rokowr (XIVth century), the reformer of esoteric as well as
vulgar Lamaism.
Many are those who break through
the egg-shell, few who once out are able to exercise their nirupa namaphen [
So in MS., but evidently wrongly transcribed.] fully, when completely
out of the body. Conscious life in spirit is as difficult for some natures as
swimming is for some bodies. Though the human frame is lighter in its bulk than
water, and though every person is born with the faculty, so few develop in themselves
the art of treading water that death by drowning is the most frequent of
accidents. The Planetary Spirit of that kind, the Buddha-like, can pass at will
into other bodies, of more or less materialized matter, inhabiting other
regions of the universe. There are many other grades and orders, but there is
no separate and eternally constituted order of Planetary Spirits. I may answer
with what I said to G.H. Fechner one day when he wanted to know the Hindu view
on what he had written: “You are right; every diamond, every planet and star
has its own individual soul besides man and animal . . . and there is a
hierarchy of souls from the lowest forms of matter up to the world-soul; but
you are mistaken when adding to that the assurance that the spirits of the departed
hold sweet communion with souls that are still connected with a human body, for
they do not.” The relative position of the inhabited worlds in our solar system
would alone preclude such a possibility; for I trust you have given up the
queer idea (a natural result of early Christian training) that there can
possibly be human intelligences inhabiting purely spiritual regions. You
will then as readily understand the fallacy of Christians who would burn
immaterial souls in a material physical hell, as the mistake of the more
educated spiritualists who lull themselves with the thought that any other than
the denizens of the two worlds immediately interlinked with our own can
possibly communicate with them. However ethereal and purified of gross matter they
may be, the pure spirits are still subject to the physical and universal laws
of nature. They cannot, even if they would, span the abyss that
separates their world from ours. They can be visited in spirit; their
spirit cannot descend and reach us. The attract, they cannot be
attracted—their spiritual polarity being an insuperable difficulty in the way.
Once fairly started upon that
subject I will endeavour to explain to you still more clearly where lies the
impossibility. You will thus be answered in regard to Planetary Spirits and
seance room spirits.
The cycle of intelligent
existences commences at the highest worlds or planets, the term “highest”
meaning here the most spiritually perfect. Evolving from Kosmic matter, which
is Akasa, the primeval, not secondary, plastic medium or ether of science,
instinctively suspected, improves with the rest. Man first evolves from this
matter in its most sublimated state, appearing at the threshold of Eternity, as
a perfectly ethereal, not spiritual, entity, says a Planetary Spirit. He is but
one removed from the universal and spiritual world-essence—the “Anima Mundi” of
the Greeks or that which humanity in its spiritual decadence has degraded into
a mythical personal God. Hence at that state the spirit-man is at best an
active power—an immutable, therefore, an unthinking principle (the term
immutable being again used here but to denote that state for the time being),
the immutability applying here but to the inner principle which will vanish and
disappear as soon as the spark of the material in him will start on its cyclic
work of evolution and transformation. In his subsequent descent, and in
proportion to the increase of matter, he will assert more and more his
activity.
Now the congeries of the
star-worlds (including our own planet) inhabited by intelligent beings may be
likened to an orb, or rather an epicycloid, formed of rings like a chain,
worlds interlinked together—the totality representing an imaginary endless ring
or circle. The progress of man throughout the whole, from its starting to its
closing points, meeting on the highest point of the circumference, is what we
call Maha-Yuga, or great cycle—the Kyklos whose head is lost in a crown
of spirit and its lowest circumference in absolute matter, viz., the point
of cessation of action of the active principle. If, using a more familiar term,
we call the great cycle the macrocosm and its compound parts or
interlinked star-worlds the microcosm, the occultist’s meaning in
representing each of the latter as perfect copies of the former will become
evident. The great is the prototype of the smaller cycles; and as such, each
star-world has in its turn its own cycle of evolution, which starts with a
purer and ends with a grosser or more material nature. As they descend, each
world presents itself naturally more and more shadowy, becoming at the
antipodes absolute matter. Propelled by the irresistible cyclic impulse, the
Planetary Spirit has to descend before he can reascend. On his way he has to
pass through the whole ladder of evolution, missing no rung, to halt at every
star-world as he would at a station, and, besides the unavoidable cycle of that
particular and every respective star-world, to perform in it his own
life-cycle, viz., returning and reincarnating as many times as he fails
to complete his round of life in it, as he dies on it before reaching the age
of reason, as correctly stated in Isis.
That is what happens. After
circling, so to say, along the arc of the cycle, circling along and within it
(the daily and yearly rotation of the Earth is as good an illustration as any)
when the spirit-man reaches our own planet, which is one of the lowest, having
lost at every station some of the ethereal, and acquired an increase of
material nature, both spirit and matter have become pretty much equilibrated in
him. But then he has the earth’s cycle to perform, and, as in the process of
involution and evolution downwards, matter is ever trying to stifle spirit,
when, arrived at the lowest point of his pilgrimage, the once pure Planetary
Spirit will be found dwindled to what science agrees to call a primitive or
primordial man amidst a nature as primordial, speaking geologically; for
physical nature keeps pace with the physiological as well as the spiritual man
in her cyclic career. At that point the great law begins its work of selection.
Matter found entirely divorced from spirit is thrown over into the still lower
worlds, into the sixth “gati” or “way of rebirth” of the vegetable and mineral
worlds, and of primitive animal forms. From thence, matter, ground over in the
workshop of nature, proceeds soul-less back to its Mother-Fount, while the egos
purified of their dross are enabled to resume their progress once more onward.
It is here that the laggard egos
perish by the millions. It is the solemn moment of the survival of the
fittest—the annihilation of those unfit. It is but matter (or material man)
which is compelled by its own weight to descend to the very bottom of the
“circle of necessity” to then assume an animal form; as to the winner of that
race throughout the worlds, the spiritual ego, he will ascend from star to
star, from one world to another, circling onward to re-become the once pure
Planetary Spirit, then higher still, to finally reach its first starting point,
and from thence to merge into Mystery. No Adept has ever penetrated
beyond the veil of primitive cosmic matter. The highest, the most perfect
vision, is limited to the Universe of Form and Matter.
But my explanation does not end
here. You want to know why it is deemed supremely difficult if not utterly
impossible for pure disembodied spirits to communicate with men through mediums
of Phantomosophy. I say because (1) on account of the antagonistic atmospheres
respectively surrounding these worlds; (2) of the entire dissimilarity of the
physiological and spiritual conditions; and (3) because that chain of worlds I
have just been telling you about is not only an epicycloid but an elliptical
orbit of existences, having, as every eclipse, not one but two points—two foci
which can never approach each other, man being at one focus of it and pure
spirit at the other. To this you might object. I can neither help it nor change
the fact. But there is still another and far mightier impediment. Like a rosary
composed of white and black beads alternating with each other, so that
concatenation of worlds is made up of worlds of causes and worlds of effects—the
latter the direct result produced by the former. Thus it becomes evident that
every sphere of causes (and our Earth is one) is not only interlinked with, and
surrounded by, but actually separated from, its nearest neighbour, the higher
sphere of causality, by an impenetrable atmosphere (in its spiritual sense) of
effects, bordering on and even interlinking , never mixing with the next
sphere; for one is active, the other passive—the world of causes positive, that
of effects negative. This passive resistance can be overcome, but under
conditions of which you most learned spiritualists have not the faintest idea.
All movement is, so to say, polar.
It is very difficult to convey my meaning to you at this point, but I will go
on to the end. I am aware of my failure to bring before you these, to us,
axiomatical truths, in any other form but that of a simple logical postulate,
if so much, they being capable of absolute and unequivocal demonstration but to
the highest Seers. But I will give you food for thought if nothing else. The
intermediary spheres, being but the projected shadows of the world of causes,
are regulated by the last. They are the great halting-places, the stations in
which the new self-conscious egos, to be the self-begotten progeny of the old
and disembodied egos of our planet, are gestated. Before the new Phoenix,
reborn of the ashes of its parent, can soar higher to a better, more
spiritually perfect world—still a world of matter—it has to pass through the
process of a new birth, so to say, and as on our Earth where two-thirds of
infants are either still-born or die in infancy, so in our “world of effects”.
On Earth it is the physiological and mental defects, the sins of the
progenitors, that are visited upon the issue; in that land of shadows, the new
and yet unconscious ego-foetus becomes the just victim of the transgressions of
its old self, whose Karma, merit and demerit, will alone weave out its future
destiny. In that world we find but unconscious, self-acting, ex-human machines,
souls in their transition state, whose dormant faculties and individuality lie
as a butterfly in its chrysalis; and spiritualists would yet have them talk
sense! Caught at times into the vortex of the abnormal mediumistic current,
they become the unconscious echoes of thoughts and ideas crystallized around
those present. Every positive, well-directed mind is capable of neutralising
such secondary effects in a seance room.
The world below ours is worse yet.
The former is harmless at least; it is more sinned against by being disturbed,
than sinning; the latter, allowing the retention of full consciousness (as
being a hundredfold more material) is positively dangerous. The notions of hell
and purgatory, of paradise and resurrection are all caricatured, distorted
echoes of the primeval one truth taught humanity in the infancy of its races by
every first Messenger—the Planetary Spirit whose remembrance lingered in the
memory of man as Elu of the Chaldees, Osiris of the Egyptian, Vishnu, the first
Bhuddhas, and so on. The lower world of effects is the sphere of such distorted
thoughts, of the most sensual conceptions and pictures, of anthropomorphic
deities, the out-creations of their creators, the sensual human minds of people
who have never grown out of their brute-hood on Earth. Remembering that
thoughts are things—have tenacity, coherence, and life, that they are real
entities—the rest will become plain. Disembodied, the creator is attracted
naturally to its creation, and creatures sucked in by the maelstrom dug out by
their own hands. But I must pause, for volumes would hardly suffice to explain
all that is said by me in this letter.
One [ In the MS of C.W.L.,
these two paragraphs exist in a condensed form. In the MS of F.A. they do not
appear at all. The paragraphs as I print them are from a copy of a letter of
the Master K.H. which I obtained in Paris in 1916. In this copy the Greek words
are wrongly copied. I have tentatively restored autokrates, apeiron, noumena
and oiakonomos on the recommendation of a Greek scholar.] of your
letters with a quotation from one of my own: “Remember that there is within man
no abiding principle”—which sentence I find followed by a remark of yours, “How
about the sixth and seventh principles?” To this I answer: Neither Atma nor
Buddhi were ever within man— a little metaphysical axiom that you can
study with advantage in Plutarch and Anaxagoras; the latter made his nous
autokrates—the spirit of self-potent—the apeiron that alone
recognized noumena, while the former taught on the authority of Plato and
Pythagoras that the Oiakonomos or the nous always remained
without the body, that is, floated and overshadowed, so to say, the extreme
part of the man’s head. It is only the vulgar who think it is within them, says
Buddha; you have to get rid entirely of all the subjects of impermanence
composing the body, that your body will become permanent.
The permanent never merges within
the impermanent, although the two are one. But it is only when all outward
appearances are gone that there is left that one principle of life which exists
independently of all external phenomena. It is the fire that burns in the
eternal light, when the fuel is expended and the flame extinguished, for that
fire is neither in the flame nor in the fuel, nor yet inside either of the two,
but above, beneath, and everywhere.
Death
By the late Eliphas Levi
(Theosophist, October 1881)
DEATH is the
necessary dissolution of imperfect combinations. It is the reabsorption of the
rough outline of individual life into the great work of universal life; only
the perfect is immortal.
It is a bath of oblivion. It is
the fountain of youth where on one side plunges old age, and whence on the
other issues infancy.[ Rebirth of the Ego after death. The Eastern and
especially Buddhistic doctrine of the evolution of the new, out of the old Ego.]
Death is the transfiguration of
the living; corpses are but the dead leaves of the Tree of Life which will
still have all its leaves in the spring. The resurrection of men resembles
eternally these leaves.
Perishable forms are conditioned
by immortal types.
All who have lived upon earth live
there still in new exemplars of their types, but the souls which have surpassed
their type receive elsewhere a new form based upon a more perfect type, as they
mount ever on the ladder of worlds; [ From one loka to the other; from a
positive world of causes and activity, to a negative world of effects and
passivity.] the bad exemplars are broken and their matter returned into
the general mass.[ Into Cosmic matter, when they necessarily lose their
self-consciousness or individuality, or are annihilated, as the Eastern
Kabalists say.]
Our souls are as it were a music,
of which our bodies are the instruments. The music exists without the
instruments, but it cannot make itself heard without a material intermediary;
the immaterial can neither be conceived nor grasped.
Man in his present existence only
retains certain predispositions from his past existences.
Evocations of the dead are but
condensations of memory, the imaginary coloration of the shades. To evoke those
who are no longer there, is but to cause their types to reissue from the
imagination of nature. [To ardently desire to see a dead person is to
evoke the image of that person, to call it forth from the astral light or ether
wherein rest photographed the images of the Past. That is what is being
partially done in the seance rooms. The spiritualists are unconscious
Necromancers.]
To be in direct communication with
the imagination of nature, one must be either asleep intoxicated, in an
ecstasy, cataleptic, or mad.
The eternal memory preserves only
the imperishable; all that passes in Time belongs of right to oblivion.
The preservation of corpses is a
violation of the laws of nature; it is an outrage on the modesty of death,
which hides the works of destruction, as we should hide those of reproduction.
Preserving corpses is to create phantoms in the imagination of the earth [To
intensify these images in the astral or sidereal light.] the spectres of
the nightmare, of hallucination, and fear, are but the wandering photographs of
preserved corpses. It is these preserved or imperfectly destroyed corpses,
which spread, amid the living, plague, cholera, contagious diseases, sadness,
scepticism and disgust of life. [ People being intuitionally to realize
the great truth, and societies for burning bodies and crematories are now
started in many places in Europe.] Death is exhaled by death. The
cemeteries poison the atmosphere of towns, and the miasma of corpses blight the
children even in the bosoms of their mothers.
Near Jerusalem in the Valley of
Gehenna a perpetual fire was maintained for the combustion of filth and the
carcasses of animals, and it is to this eternal fire that Jesus alluded when he
says that the wicked shall be cast into Gehenna; signifying that dead
souls will be treated as corpses. The Talmud says that the souls of those who
have not believed in immortality will not become immortal. It is faith only
which gives personal immortality; [ Faith and will-power. Immortality is
conditional, as we have ever stated. It is the reward of the pure and good. The
wicked man, the material sensualist only survives. He who appreciates but
physical pleasures will not and cannot live in the hereafter as a
self-conscious Entity.] science and reason can only affirm the general
immortality.
The mortal sin is the suicide of
the soul. This suicide would occur if the man devoted himself to evil with the
full strength of his mind, with a perfect knowledge of good and evil, and an
entire liberty of action which seems impossible in practice, but which is
possible in theory, because the essence of an independent personality is an
unconditioned liberty. The divinity imposes nothing upon man, not even
existence. Man has a right to withdraw himself even from the divine goodness,
and the dogma of eternal hell is only the assertion of eternal free-will.
God precipitates no one into hell.
It is men who can go there freely, definitely and by their own choice.
Those who are in hell, that is to
say, amid the gloom of evil [ That is to say, they are reborn in a
“lower world” which is neither “Hell” nor any theological purgatory, but a
world of nearly absolute matter and one preceding the last one in the “circle
of necessity” from which “there is no redemption, for there reigns absolute
spiritual darkness”. (Book of Kiu-te).] and the sufferings of the
necessary punishment, without having absolutely so willed it, are called to
emerge from it. This hell is for them only a purgatory. The dammed completely,
absolutely and without respite, is Satan who is not a rational existence, but a
necessary hypothesis.
Satan is the last word of
creation. He is the end infinitely emancipated. He willed to be like God of
which he is the opposite. God is the hypothesis necessary to reason, Satan the
hypothesis necessary to unreason asserting itself as free-will.
To be immortal in good, one must
identify oneself with God; to be immortal in evil, with Satan. These are two
poles of the world of souls; between these two poles vegetate and die without
remembrance the useless portion of mankind.
Editor’s Note: This may seem incomprehensible to the
average reader, for it is one of the most abstruse of the tenets of Occult
doctrine. Nature is dual: there is a physical and material side, as there is a
spiritual and moral side to it; and, there is both good and evil in it, the
latter the necessary shadow to its light. To force oneself upon the current of
immortality, or rather to secure for oneself an endless series of rebirths as
conscious individualities—says the Book of Kiu-te, Vol. XXXI—one must become a
co-worker with nature, either for good or bad, in her work of
creation and reproduction, or in that of destruction. It is but the useless
drones, which she gets rid of, violently ejecting and making them perish by the
millions as self-conscious entities. Thus, while the good and pure strive to
reach Nipang (nirvana or the state of absolute existence
and absolute consciousness—which, in the world of finite perceptions, is
non-existence and non-consciousness)—the wicked will seek, on the
contrary, a series of lives as conscious, definite existences or beings,
preferring to be ever suffering under the law of retributive justice rather
than give up their lives as portions of the integral, universal whole. Being
well aware that they can never hope to reach the final rest in pure spirit, or
nirvana, they cling to life in any form, rather than give up that “desire
for life” or Tanha which causes a new aggregation of Skandhas or
the individuality to be reborn. Nature is as good a mother to the cruel bird of
prey as she is to the harmless dove. Mother nature will punish her child, but
since he has become her co-worker for destruction she cannot eject him. There
are thoroughly wicked and depraved men, yet as highly intellectual acutely spiritual
for evil, as those who are spiritual for good. The Egos of these may
escape the law of final destruction or annihilation for ages to come. That is
what Eliphas Levi means by becoming “immortal in evil,” through identification
with Satan. “I would thou wert cold or hot,” says the vision of
the Revelation to St. John (III, 15-16). “So then because thou art lukewarm
and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. The Revelation
is an absolutely Kabalistic book. Heat and cold are the two “poles,” i.e.,
good and evil, spirit and matter. Nature spues the “luke-warm” or
“the useless portion of mankind” out of her mouth, i.e., annihilates
them. This conception, that a considerable portion of mankind may after all not
have immortal souls, will not be new even to European readers. Coleridge
himself likened the case to that of an oak tree bearing, indeed, millions of
acorns, but acorns of which under nominal conditions not one in a thousand ever
developed into a tree, and suggested that, as the majority of acorns failed to
develop into a new living tree, so possibly the majority of men fail to develop
into a new living entity after this earthly death.
(Theosophist, March 1883)
“DEVACHAN” is of
course a state not a locality, as much as “Avitchi”—its antithesis
(which please not to confound with Hell). Esoteric Buddhist philosophy
has three principal lokas so-called namely (1) Kama Loka, (2) Rupa-loka;
and (3) Arupa-loka; or in their literal translation and meaning—(1)
world of desires or passions, of unsatisfied earthly cravings—the abode of
“Shells” and Victims, of Elementaries and suicides; (2) the world of Forms, i.e.,
of shadows more spiritual, having form and objectivity but no substance;
and (3) the formless world, or rather the world of no-Form, the
incorporeal, since its denizens can have neither body, shape, nor colour for us
mortals, and in the sense that we give to these terms. These are the three
spheres of ascending spirituality in which the several groups of subjective
semi-subjective entities find their attractions. The time having not yet come
to speak of the latter two, we will merely notice the first, namely the Kama-loka.
Thence it is, that all but the remaining shells, the suicides and the victims
of premature violent deaths, go according to their attractions and powers
either into the Devachanic or Avitchi state, which two states form the
numberless sub-divisions of “Rupa” and “Arupa” lokas; that is to say,
that such states not only vary in degree, or in their presentation to the
subject entity as regards form, colour, etc.,—but that there is an infinite
scale of such states, in their progressive spirituality and intensity of
feeling; from the lowest in the Rupa, up to the highest and the most
exalted in the Arupa-loka. The student must bear in mind that personality
is the synonym for limitation; and that the more selfish, the more contracted
the person’s ideas, the closer will he cling to the lower spheres of being, the
longer loiter on the plane of selfish social intercourse.
II
To use an antiphrasis, “Avitchi”
is a state of the most ideal spiritual wickedness, something akin to the
state of Lucifer, so superbly described by Milton. Not many, though are there
who can reach it, as the thoughtful reader will perceive. And if it is urged
that, since there is Devachan for nearly all, for the good, and the bad,
and the indifferent, the ends of harmony and equilibrium are frustrated, and
the law of Retribution and of impartial, implacable Justice hardly met and
satisfied by such a comparative scarcity if not absence of its antithesis, then
the answer will show that it is not so. “Evil is the dark son of Earth
(matter) and Good the fair daughter of Heaven” (or spirit) says the Chinese
philosopher; hence the place of punishment for most of our sins is the
Earth—its birth place and playground. There is more apparent and relative than
actual evil even on earth, and it is not given to the hoi polloi to
reach the fatal grandeur and eminence of a “Satan” every day. See foot-notes in
art. “Death” by Eliphas Levi (October Theosophist, Vol. III), the
editorial answer to the art: “Death and Immortality” (November Theosophist,
p.28); and the words used by the author, when speaking of those who are
immortal in good by identification with God (or good), and immortal in evil by
identification with Satan (Evil). Although the general rule applies but to
“Sorcerers,” i.e., adepts in black Magic, real Initiates and sons of
Evil, generally known as “the Brothers of the Shadow,” yet there are exceptions
to that rule as to every other. Occasionally men reaching the apex of evil
become “unconscious” sorcerers; they identify themselves with “Satan,” and then
Avitchi becomes their Fate. Happy they are when thereby they avoid a worse
punishment—a loka from which indeed, no traveller—either returns or, once
within its dark precincts—pursues his journey!
(Theosophist, August 1882)
The old proverb, that “Truth is
stranger than fiction,” is again exemplified. An English scientist—Professor
William Ramsay, of University College, Bristol—has just communicated to Nature
(see number of June 22), a theory to account for the sense of smell which is
likely to attract much attention. As the result of observation and experiment
he propounds the idea that smell is due to vibrations similar to, but of a
lower period than those which give rise to the sense of light and heat. The
sensation of smell, he explains, is provoked by the contact of substances with
the terminal organs of the olfactory nerves, which are spread as a network over
a mucous membrane lining the upper part of the nasal cavity. The proximate
cause of smell is the minute hairlets of the nasal membrane which connect with
the nerves through spindle-shaped cells. The sensation is not excited by
contact with a liquid or a solid, but always with a gas. Even in the case of
smelling metals, such as brass, copper, tin, etc., there is a subtle gas or
pungent vapour given off by them at ordinary atmospheric temperatures. The
varying intensities of smells depend upon their relative molecular weight. As
the smell growing stronger as the gases rises in molecular weight, to the quality
of smell; that he thinks may depend upon the harmonics of the vibration. “Thus,
the quality of tone in a violin differs from that of a flute by the
different harmonics or overtones, peculiar to each instrument. I would ascribe
to harmonies the quantity of smell possessed by different substances. . . .
Smell, then, may resemble sound in having its quality influenced by harmonics.
And just as a piccolo has the same quality as a flute, although some of its
harmonics are so high as to be beyond the range of the ear, so smells owe their
quality to harmonics, which, if occurring alone, would be beyond sense.” Two
sounds heard simultaneously, he remarks, give a discord or a concord, yet the
ear may distinguish them separately. Two colours, on the other hand, produce a
single impression on the eye, and it is doubtful whether we can analyse them.
“But smell resembles sound and not light in this particular. For in a mixture
of smells, it is possible, by practice, to distinguish each ingredient,” and—in
a laboratory experiment—to match the sensation by a mixture of different
ingredients. Apparently astonished at his own audacity, he brings forward “the
theory adduced with great diffidence.” Poor discoverer, the elephantine foot of
the Royal Society may crush his toes! The problem, he says, is to be solved “by
a careful measurement of the ‘lines’ in the spectrum of heat rays, and the
calculation of the fundamentals, which this theory supposes to be the cause of
smell.
It may be a comfort for Professor
Ramsay to know that he is not the first to travel the path he suddenly has
found winding from his laboratory-door up the hill of fame. Twenty or more
years ago, a novel, entitled Kaloolah, was published in America by one
Dr. Mayo, a well-known writer. It pretended, among other things, to describe a
strange city, situated in the heart of Africa, where, in many respects, the
people were more civilized and perfected than contemporary Europeans. As regards
smell, for instance, the prince of that country, for the entertainment of his
visitors—the hero of the story and his party—seats himself at a large
instrument like an organ, with tubes, stops, pedals and keys, and plays an
intricate composition, of which the harmonics are in odours, instead of in
sounds as with a musical instrument. And he explains that his people have
brought their olfactory sense, by practice, to such an exquisite point of
sensitiveness as to afford them, by combinations and contrasts of smells, as
high enjoyment as the European derives from a “concourse of sweet sounds.” It
is but too plain, therefore, that Mr. Mayo had, if not a scientific, yet at
least an intuitive cognition of this vibratory theory of odours, and that his smell
harmonicum was not so much the baseless image of a romancer’s fancy as the
novel-readers took it for when they laughed so heartily at the conceit. The
fact is—as has been so often observed—the dream of one generation becomes the
experience of the next. If our poor voice might without profanation invade so
sacred a place as the laboratory of University College, Bristol, we would ask
Mr. Ramsay to take a glance—just one furtive peep, with closed doors, and when
he finds himself alone—at (it requires courage to say the word!) at..at..at Occult
Science. (We scarcely dared speak the dreadful word, but it is out at last,
and the Professor must hear it.) He will then find his vibratory theory is
older than even Dr. Mayo, since it was known to the Aryans and is included in
their philosophy of the harmonics of nature. They taught that there is a
perfect correspondence, or mutual compensation between all the vibrations of
Nature, and a most intimate relation between the set of vibrations which give
us the impression of sound, and that other set of vibrations which give us the
impression of colour. This subject is treated at some length in Isis
Unveiled. The Oriental adept applies this very knowledge practically when
he transforms any disagreeable odour into any delicious perfume he may think
of. And thus modern science, after so long enjoying its joke over the
puerile credulity of the Asiatics in believing such fairy stories about the
powers of their Sadhoos, is now ending by being forced to demonstrate
the scientific possibility of those very powers by actual laboratory
experimentation. “He laughs best who laughs last”—an adage that the graduates
of India would do well to remember.
(Notes to Theosophist, Vol. 4,
p.37)
A. See Plato’s History of
Atlantis, as given by the priests of Sais to his great ancestor Solon, the
Athenian law-giver.
Atlantis, the
submerged continent and the land of the “Knowledge of Good and Evil”
(especially the latter) par excellence, was inhabited by the fourth race
of men (we are the fifth), who are credited in the Popol-Vuh (the book
of the Guatemalans) with sight unlimited, and “who knew all things at once.”
Eliphas Levi refers to the secret tradition, among occultists, about the great
struggle that took place in those far-away prehistoric days of Atlantis,
between the “sons of God,” the initiated Adepts of Sham-bha-la (once as
fair a land, an oasis surrounded by barren deserts and salt lakes)—and the
Atlanteans, the wicked magicians of Thevetat, (see Isis, Vol. I, pp.
589-94).
It is a well-established belief
among the Eastern and especially the Mongolian and Tibetan occultists, that,
towards the end of every race, when mankind reaches its apex of knowledge in
that cycle, dividing into two distinct classes, it branches off, one as the
“Sons of Light” and the other as “the Sons of Darkness,” or initiated Adepts
and natural-born magicians or—mediums. Towards the very close of the race, as
their mixed progeny furnishes the first pioneers of a new and higher race,
there comes the last and supreme struggle, during which the “Sons of Darkness”
are usually exterminated by some great cataclysm of nature, either by fire or
by water. Atlantis was submerged: hence the inference that that portion of the
mankind of the fifth race which will be composed of “natural-born magicians”
will be exterminated in the future great cataclysm—by fire.
B. (37). What was in reality that
much maligned and still more dreaded goat, that Baphomet, regarded even now by
the Roman Catholics as Satan, the Grand Master of the “Witches Sabbath,” the
central figure of their nocturnal orgies? Why, simply Pan or Nature.
C. By “the dogma of elementary
forces” Eliphas Levi means “spirit” and “matter,” allegorised by Zoroaster for
the common herd into Ormazd and Ahriman, the prototype of the Christian “God”
and “Devil”: and epitomised and summed up by the philosophy of Occult Science
in the “Human Triad” (body, soul, spirit—the two poles and the “middle nature”
of man), the perfect microcosm of the One Universal Macrocosm or Universe. In
the Khodah-Avesta the Zoroastrian dualism is contradicted: “Who art
thou, O fair being?” inquiries the disembodied soul of one who stands at the
gates of its Paradise. “I am, O soul, thy good and pure actions . . . thy law,
thy angel, and thy God.”
D. P.38. The seventh state of
matter-life. The Fire and Light of the “Astral Virgin” may be studied by the
Hindus in the Fire and Light of Akasha.
E. . . .” to avoid seeing what God
is,” i.e., seeing that God is but man and vice versa, when he is
not the lining of God, the Devil. We know of many who prefer voluntary
life-long blindness to plain, sober truth and fact.
F. (38), Cupid, the God, is the
seventh principle of the Brahm of the Vedantin and Psyche is its vehicle, the
sixth or spiritual soul. As soon as she feels herself distinct from her
“consort,” and sees him, she loses him. Study the “Heresy of Individuality” and
you will understand.
G. In the Christian legend the
Redeemer is the Initiator, who offers his life in sacrifice for the privilege
of teaching his disciples some great truths. He who unriddles the Christian
Sphinx “becomes the Master of the Absolute,” for the simple reason that the
greatest mystery of all the ancient initiations, past, present, and future, is
made plain and divulged to him. Those who accept the allegory literally, will
remain blind all their life, and those who divulge it to the ignorant masses
deserve punishment for their want of discretion in seeking to “feed pigs with
pearls.”
The Theosophist, read by the intelligent, who, when they
understand it, prove that they deserve as much of the secret knowledge as can
be given them, is permitted to throw out a hint. Let him who would fathom the
mystery of the allegory of both Sphinx and Cross, study the modes of initiation
of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, ancient Jews, Hindus, etc. And then he will find
what the word “Atonement,” far older than Christianity, meant as also “the
Baptism of Blood.” At the last moment of the supreme initiation, when the
Initiator had divulged the last mysterious word, either the hierophant or the
“newly-born,” the worthier of the two, had to die, since two Adepts of equal
power must not live, and “he who is perfect” has no room on earth. Eliphas Levi
hints at the mystery in his volumes without explaining it. Yet he speaks of
Moses who dies, mysteriously disappears from the top of Mount Pisgah, after he
had laid hands on the initiated Aaron: of Jesus, who dies for the disciple
“whom he loved,” John, the author of the Apocalypse: and of John the Baptist,
the last of the real Nazars of the Old Testament (see Isis, Vol.
II, p.132), who, in the incomplete, contradictory and tortured Gospel accounts,
is made to die later through Herodias’ whim, and, in the secret Kabalistic
documents of the Nabatheans, to offer himself as an expiatory victim after
baptizing (i.e., initiating) his chosen successor in the mystic Jordan.
In these documents, after the
initiation, Aba, the Father, becomes the Son, and the Son succeeds the Father
and becomes Father and Son at the same time, inspired by Sophia Achamoth
(secret wisdom), transformed later on into the Holy Ghost. But this successor
of John the Baptist was not Jesus, the Nazarenes say. But of this anon. To this
day, the initiation beyond the
Searchable Theosophical Texts
Theosophy House