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 kama rupa.
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
(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,
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
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
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
Question- Even the Fifth Race (our own) of the Fourth Round
began in
Answer - Yes; the Fifth Race - ours - began in
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
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
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
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
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.
-------
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.
-------
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
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
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
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 Himalayas is followed by temporary death (from three to
six months) of the disciple, often of the initiator: but the Buddhists do not
spill blood, for they have a horror of it, knowing that blood attracts evil
powers. At the initiation of the Chinnamasta Tantrikas (chinna, severed,
masta, head) the goddess being represented by a decapitated head, the
Tantrik Shastras say that, as soon as the Adept has reached the highest degree
of perfection, he has to initiate his successor and—die, offering his blood for
the sins of his brothers. He must “cut off his own head with the right hand,
holding it on the left.” Three streams of blood gush out from the headless trunk.
One of these is directed into the mouth of the decapitated head (. . .”my blood
is drink indeed”. . . the injunction in John that so shocked his
disciples). The other is directed towards the earth as an offering of pure,
sinless blood to mother Earth: and the third gushes towards heaven as a witness
for the sacrifice of “self-immolation.” Now, this has a profound occult
significance which is known only to the initiated: nothing like truth is
explained by the Christian dogma: and, imperfectly as they have defined the quasi
inspired authors of “The Perfect Way” reveal the truth far nearer than any
of the Christian commentators.
Searchable Theosophical Texts
Cardiff Theosophical Society
in
Theosophy House
206 Newport Road, Cardiff,
Wales, UK. CF24 -1DL