The Theosophical Society,
The Writings of W Q Judge
W Q Judge 1851 – 96
The
By
William Q. Judge
First published 1893
Español:-
El Oceano de la Teosofía
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1--
THEOSOPHY AND THE MASTERS
Chapter 2--
GENERAL PRINCIPLES
Chapter 3--
THE EARTH CHAIN
Chapter 4--
SEPTENARY CONSTITUTION OF MAN
Chapter 5--
BODY AND ASTRAL BODY
Chapter 6--
KAMA -- DESIRE
Chapter 7--
MANAS
Chapter 8--
OF REINCARNATION
Chapter 9--
REINCARNATION CONTINUED
Chapter
10-ARGUMENTS SUPPORTING REINCARNATION
Chapter
11-KARMA
Chapter
12-KAMA LOKA
Chapter
13-DEVACHAN
Chapter
14-CYCLES
Chapter
15-DIFFERENTIATION OF SPECIES -- MISSING LINKS
Chapter
16-PSYCHIC LAWS, FORCES, AND PHENOMENA
Chapter
17-PSYCHIC PHENOMENA AND SPIRITUALISM
PREFACE
An attempt
is made in the pages of this book to write of theosophy in such a manner as to
be understood by the ordinary reader. Bold statements are made in it upon the knowledge
of the writer, but at the same time it is distinctly to be understood that he
alone is responsible for what is therein written: the Theosophical Society is
not involved in nor bound by anything said in the book, nor are any of its
members any the less good Theosophists because they may not accept what I have
set down. The tone of settled conviction which may be thought to pervade the
chapters is not the result of dogmatism or conceit, but flows from knowledge
based upon evidence and experience.
Members of
the Theosophical Society will notice that certain theories or doctrines have
not been gone into. That is because they could not be treated without unduly
extending the book and arousing needless controversy.
The subject
of the Will has received no treatment, inasmuch as that power or faculty is
hidden, subtle, undiscoverable as to essence, and only visible in effect. As it
is absolutely colourless and varies in moral quality
in accordance with the desire behind it, as also it acts frequently without our
knowledge, and
as it
operates in all the kingdoms below man, there could be nothing gained by
attempting to enquire into it apart from the Spirit and the desire.
I claim no
originality for this book. I invented none of it, discovered none of it, but
have simply written that which I have been taught and which has been proved to
me. It therefore is only a handing on of what has been known before.
WILLIAM Q.
JUDGE
New York,
May, 1893.
CHAPTER 1
Theosophy and the
Masters
Theosophy is that ocean
of knowledge which spreads from shore to shore of the evolution of sentient
beings; unfathomable in its deepest parts, it gives the greatest minds their
fullest scope, yet, shallow enough at its shores, it will not overwhelm the understanding
of a child. It is wisdom about God for those who believe that he is all things
and in all, and wisdom about nature for the man who accepts the statement found
in the Christian Bible that God cannot be measured or discovered, and that
darkness is around his pavilion. Although it contains by derivation the name
God and thus may seem at first sight toembrace
religion alone, it does not neglect science, for it is the science ofsciences and therefore has been called the wisdom
religion. For no science is complete which leaves out any department of nature,
whether visible or invisible, and that religion which, depending solely on an
assumed revelation, turns away from things and the laws which govern them is
nothing but a delusion, a foe to progress, an obstacle in the way of man's
advancement toward happiness. Embracing both the scientific and the religious,
Theosophy is a scientific religion and a religious science.
It is not a belief or
dogma formulated or invented by man, but is a knowledge of the laws which
govern the evolution of the physical, astral, psychical, and intellectual
constituents of nature and of man. The religion of the day is but a series of
dogmas man-made and with no scientific foundation for promulgated
ethics; while our
science as yet ignores the unseen, and failing to admit the existence of a
complete set of inner faculties of perception in man, it is cut off from the
immense and real field of experience which lies within the visible and tangible
worlds.
But Theosophy knows that
the whole is constituted of the
visible and the
invisible, and perceiving outer things and objects to be but transitory it
grasps the facts of nature, both without and within. It is therefore complete
in itself and sees no unsolvable mystery anywhere; it throws the word
coincidence out of its vocabulary and hails the reign of law in everything and
every circumstance.
That man possesses an
immortal soul is the common belief of humanity; to this Theosophy adds that he
is a soul; and further that all nature is sentient, that the vast array of
objects and men are not mere collections of atoms fortuitously thrown together
and thus without law evolving law, but down to the smallest atom all is soul
and spirit ever evolving under the rule of law which is inherent in the whole.
And just as the ancients taught, so does Theosophy; that the course of
evolution is the drama of the soul and that nature exists for no other purpose
than the soul's experience. The Theosophist agrees with Prof. Huxley in the
assertion that there must be beings in the universe whose intelligence is as
much beyond ours as ours exceeds that of the black beetle, and who take an
active part in the government of the natural order of things. Pushing further
on by the light of the confidence had in his teachers, the Theosophist adds
that such intelligences were once human and came like all of us from other and
previous worlds, where as varied experience had been gained as is possible on
this one.
We are therefore not
appearing for the first time when we come upon this planet, but have pursued a
long, an immeasurable course of activity and intelligent perception on other
systems of globes, some of which were destroyed ages before the solar system
condensed. This immense reach of the evolutionary
system means, then, that
this planet on which we now are is the result of the activity and the evolution
of some other one that died long ago, leaving its energy to be used in the
bringing into existence of the earth, and that the inhabitants of the latter in
their turn came from some older world to proceed here with the destined work in
matter. And the brighter planets, such as Venus, are the habitation of still
more progressed entities, once as low as ourselves, but now raised up to a
pitch of glory incomprehensible for our intellects.
The most intelligent
being in the universe, man, has never, then, been without a friend, but has a
line of elder brothers who continually watch over the progress of the less
progressed, preserve the knowledge gained through aeons
of trial and
experience, and
continually seek for opportunities of drawing the developing intelligence of
the race on this or other globes to consider the great truths concerning the
destiny of the soul. These elder brothers also keep theknowledge
they have gained of the laws of nature in all departments, and are ready when
cyclic law permits to use it for the benefit of mankind.
They have always existed
as a body, all knowing each other, no matter in what part of the world they may
be, and all working for the race in many different ways. In some periods they
are well known to the people and move among ordinary men whenever the social
organization, the virtue, and the development of the nations permit it. For if
they were to come out openly and be heard of everywhere, they would be
worshipped as gods by some and hunted as devils by others. In those periods
when they do come out some of their number are rulers of men, some teachers, a
few great philosophers, while others remain still unknown except to the most
advanced of the body.
It would be subversive
of the ends they have in view were they to make themselves public in the
present civilization, which is based almost wholly on money, fame, glory, and
personality. For this age, as one of them has already said, "is an age of
transition," when every system of thought, science, religion, government,
and society is changing, and men's minds are only preparing for an alteration
into that state which will permit the race to advance to the point suitable for
these elder brothers to introduce their actual presence to our sight. They may
be truly called the bearers of the torch of truth across the ages; they
investigate all things and beings; they know what man is in his innermost
nature and what his powers and destiny, his state before birth and the states
into which he goes after the death of his body; they have stood by the cradle
of nations and seen the vast achievements of the ancients, watched sadly the
decay of those who had no power to resist the cyclic law of rise and fall; and
while cataclysms seemed to show a universal destruction of art, architecture,
religion, and philosophy, they have preserved the records of it all in places
secure from the ravages of either men or time; they have made minute observations,
through trained psychics among their own order, into the unseen realms of
nature and of mind, recorded the observations and preserved the record; they
have mastered the mysteries of sound and color through which alone the
elemental beings behind the veil of matter can be communicated with, and thus
can tell why the rain falls and what it falls for, whether the earth is hollow
or not, what makes the wind to blow and light to shine, and greater feat than
all -- one which implies a knowledge of the very foundations of nature -- they
know what the ultimate divisions of time are and what are the meaning and the
times of the cycles.
But, asks the busy man
of the nineteenth century who reads the newspapers and believes in "modern
progress," if these elder brothers are all you claim them to be, why have
they left no mark on history nor gathered men around them? Their
own reply, published
some time ago by Mr. A. P. Sinnett, is better than any I could write.
"We will first discuss,
if you please, the one relating to the presumed failure of the 'Fraternity' to
leave any mark upon the history of the world. They ought, you think, to have
been able, with their extraordinary advantages, to have gathered into their
schools a considerable portion of the more enlightened minds
of every race. How do
you know they have made no such mark? Are you acquainted with their efforts,
successes, and failures? Have you any dock upon which to arraign them? How
could your world collect proofs of the doings of men who have sedulously kept
closed every possible door of approach by which the inquisitive could spy upon
them? The precise condition of their success was that they should never be
surprised or obstructed. What they have done they know; all that those outside
their circle could perceive was the results, the causes of which were masked
from view.
To account for these
results, many have in different ages invented theories of the interposition of
gods, special providences, fates, the benign or hostile influences of the
stars. There never was a time within or before the so-called historical period
when our predecessors were not moulding events and
'making history,' the facts of which were subsequently and invariably distorted
by historians to suit contemporary prejudices. Are you quite sure that the
visible heroic figures in the successive dramas were not often but their
puppets? We never pretended to be able to draw nations in the mass to this or
that crisis in spite of the general drift of the world's cosmic relations.
The cycles must run
their rounds. Periods of mental and moral light and darkness succeed each other
as day does night. The major and minor yugas must be
accomplished according to the established order of things. And we, borne along
the mighty tide, can only modify and direct some of its minor currents."
It is under cyclic law,
during a dark period in the history of mind, that the true philosophy
disappears for a time, but the same law causes it to reappear as surely as the
sun rises and the human mind is present to see it.
But some works can only
be performed by the Master, while other works require the assistance of the
companions. It is the Master's work to preserve the true philosophy, but the
help of the companions is needed to rediscover and promulgate it. Once more the
elder brothers have indicated where the truth -- Theosophy -- could be found,
and the companions all over the world are engaged in bringing it forth for
wider currency and propagation.
The Elder Brothers of
Humanity are men who were perfected in former periods of evolution. These
periods of manifestation are unknown to modern evolutionists so far as their
number are concerned, though long ago understood by not only the older Hindus,
but also by those great minds and men who instituted and carried on the first
pure and undebased form of the Mysteries of Greece.
The periods, when out of the Great Unknown there come forth the visible
universes, are eternal in their coming and going, alternating with equal periods
of silence and rest again in the Unknown. The object of these mighty waves is
the production of perfect man, the evolution of soul, and they always witness
the increase of the number of Elder Brothers; the life of the least of men
pictures them in day and night, waking and sleeping, birth and death, "for
these two, light and dark, day and night, are the world's eternal ways."
In every age and
complete national history these men of power and compassion are given different
designations. They have been called Initiates, Adepts, Magi, Hierophants, Kings
of the East, Wise Men, Brothers, and what not. But in the Sanskrit language
there is a word which, being applied to them, at once thoroughly identifies
them with humanity. It is Mahatma. This is composed of Maha
great, and Atma soul; so it means great soul, and as all men are souls the
distinction of the Mahatma lies in greatness.
The term Mahatma has
come into wide use through the Theosophical Society, as Mme. H. P. Blavatsky
constantly
referred to them as her
Masters who gave her the knowledge she possessed.
They were at first known
only as the Brothers, but afterwards, when many Hindus flocked to the
Theosophical movement, the name Mahatma was brought into use, inasmuch as it
has behind it an immense body of Indian tradition and literature.
At different times
unscrupulous enemies of the Theosophical Society have said that even this name
had been invented and that such beings are not known of among the Indians or in
their literature. But these assertions are made only to discredit if possible a
philosophical movement that threatens to completely
upset prevailing
erroneous theological dogmas. For all through Hindu literature Mahatmas are
often spoken of, and in parts of the north of that country the term is common.
In the very old poem the Bhagavad-Gita, revered by all Hindu sects and admitted
by the western critics to be noble as well as beautiful, there is a verse
reading, "Such a Mahatma is difficult to find."
But irrespective of all
disputes as to specific names, there is sufficient argument and proof to show
that a body of men having the wonderfulknowledge
described above has always existed and probably exists today. The older
mysteries continually refer to them. Ancient
of dogma and priesthood.
The story of Apollonius
of Tyana is about a member of one of the same ancient
orders appearing among men at a descending cycle, and only for the purpose of
keeping a witness upon the scene for future generations.
Abraham and Moses of the
Jews are two other Initiates, Adepts who had their work to do with a certain
people; and in the history of Abraham we meet with Melchizedek, who was so much
beyond Abraham that he had the right to confer upon the latter a dignity, a
privilege, or a blessing. The same chapter of human
history which contains
the names of Moses and Abraham is illuminated also by that of Solomon. And thus
these three make a great Triad of Adepts, the record of whose deeds can not be
brushed aside as folly and devoid of basis.
Moses was educated by
the Egyptians and in Midian, from both of which he
gained much occult knowledge, and any clear-seeing student of the great
Universal Masonry can perceive all through his books the hand, the plan, and
the work of a master. Abraham again knew all the arts and much of the power in
psychical realms that were cultivated in his day, or else he could not have
consorted with kings nor have been "the friend of God"; and the
reference to his conversations with the Almighty in respect to the destruction
of cities alone shows him to have been an Adept who had long ago passed beyond
the need of ceremonial or other adventitious aids. Solomon completes this triad
and stands out in characters of fire. Around him is clustered such a mass of
legend and story about his dealings with the elemental powers and of his magic
possessions that one must condemn the whole ancient world as a collection of
fools who made lies for amusement if a denial is made of his being a great
character, a wonderful example of the incarnation among men of a powerful
Adept. We do not have to accept the name Solomon nor the pretence that he
reigned over the Jews, but we must admit the fact that somewhere in the misty
time to which the Jewish records refer there lived and moved among the people
of the earth one who was an Adept and given that name afterwards. Peripatetic
and microscopic critics may affect to see in the prevalence of universal
tradition naught but evidence of the gullibility of men and their power to
imitate, but the true student of human nature and life knows that the universal
tradition is true and arises from the facts in the history of man.
Turning to
There the people are
fitted by temperament and climate to be the preservers of the philosophical,
ethical, and psychical jewels that would have been forever lost to us had they
been left to the ravages of such Goths and Vandals as western nations were in
the early days of their struggle for education and civilization. If the men who
wantonly burned up vast masses of historical and
ethnological treasures
found by the minions of the Catholic rulers of Spain, in Central and South
America, could have known of and put their hands upon the books and palm-leaf
records of India before the protecting shield of England was raised against
them, they would have destroyed them all as they did for the Americans, and as
their predecessors attempted to do for the Alexandrian library. Fortunately
events worked otherwise.
All along the stream of
Indian literature we can find the names by scores of great adepts who were well
known to the people and who all taught the same story -- the great epic of the
human soul. Their names are unfamiliar to western ears, but the records of
their thoughts, their work and powers remain. Still more, in
the quiet unmoveable East there are today by the hundred persons who
know of their own knowledge that the Great Lodge still exists and has its
Mahatmas, Adepts, Initiates, Brothers.
And yet further, in that
land are such a number of experts in the practical application of minor though
still very astonishing
power over nature and
her forces, that we have an irresistible mass of human evidence to prove the
proposition laid down.
And if Theosophy -- the
teaching of this Great Lodge -- is as said, both scientific and religious, then
from the ethical side we have still more proof. A mighty Triad acting on and
through ethics is that composed of Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus. The first, a
Hindu, founds a religion which today embraces many more people than
Christianity, teaching centuries before Jesus the ethics which he taught and
which had been given out even centuries before Buddha. Jesus coming to reform
his people repeats these ancient ethics, and Confucius does the same thing for
ancient and honorable
The Theosophist says that
all these great names represent members of the one single brotherhood, who all
have a single doctrine. And the extraordinary characters who now and again
appear in western civilization, such as St. Germain,
Jacob Boehme, Cagliostro,
Paracelsus, Mesmer, Count St. Martin, and Madame H.
P. Blavatsky, are agents for the doing of the work of the Great Lodge at the
proper time. It is true they are generally reviled and classed as impostors --
though no one can find out why they are when they generally confer benefits and
lay down propositions or make discoveries of great value to science after they
have died. But Jesus himself would be called an impostor today if he appeared
in some
It will not be unusual
for nearly all occidental readers to wonder how men could possibly know so much
and have such power over the operations of natural law as I have ascribed to
the Initiates, now so commonly spoken of as the Mahatmas. In India, China, and
other Oriental lands no wonder would arise on these heads, because there,
although everything of a material civilization is just now in a backward state,
they have never lost a belief in the inner nature of man and in the power he
may exercise if he will. Consequently living examples of such powers and
capacities have not been absent from those people. But in the West a
materialistic civilization having arisen through a denial of the soul life and
nature consequent upon a reaction from illogical dogmatism, there has not been
any investigation of these subjects and, until lately, the general public has
not believed in the
possibility of anyone save a supposed God having such power.
A Mahatma endowed with
power over space, time, mind, and matter, is a possibility just because he is a
perfected man. Every human being has the germ of all the powers attributed to
these great Initiates, the difference lying solely in the fact that we have in
general not developed what we possess the germ of, while the Mahatma has gone
through the training and experience which
have caused all the
unseen human powers to develop in him, and conferred gifts that look god-like
to his struggling brother below.
Telepathy, mind-reading,
and hypnotism, all long ago known to Theosophy, show the existence in the human
subject of planes of consciousness, functions, and faculties hitherto undreamed
of. Mind-reading and the
influencing of the mind of the hypnotized subject at a distance prove the
existence of a mind which is not wholly dependent upon a brain, and that a
medium exists through which the influencing thought may be sent. It is under
this law that the Initiates can communicate with each other at no matter what
distance. Its rationale, not yet admitted by the schools of the hypnotizers,
is, that if the two minds vibrate or change into the same state they will think
alike, or, in other words, the one who is to hear at a distance receives the
impression sent by the other. In the same way with all other powers, no matter
how extraordinary. They are all natural, although nowunusual,
just as great musical ability is natural though not usual or common.
If an Initiate can make
a solid object move without contact, it is because he understands the two laws
of attraction and repulsion of which "gravitation" is but the name
for one; if he is able to precipitate out of the viewless air the carbon which
we know is in it, forming the carbon into sentences upon the paper, it is
through his knowledge of the occult higher chemistry, and the use of a trained
and powerful image making faculty which every man possesses; if he reads your
thoughts with ease, that results from the use of the inner and only real powers
of sight, which require no retina to see the fine-pictured web which the
vibrating brain of man
weaves about him. All that the Mahatma may do is natural to the perfected man;
but if those powers are not at once revealed to us it is because the race is as
yet selfish altogether and still living for the present and the transitory.
I repeat then, that
though the true doctrine disappears for a time from among men it is bound to
reappear, because first, it is impacted in the imperishable center of man's
nature; and secondly, the Lodge forever preserves it, not only in actual
objective records, but also in the intelligent and fully self-conscious men
who, having successfully overpassed the many periods
of evolution which preceded the one we are now involved in, cannot lose the
precious possessions they have acquired. And because the elder brothers are the
highest product of evolution through whom alone, in co-operation with the whole
human family, the further regular and workmanlike prosecution of the plans of
the Great Architect of the Universe could be carried on, I have thought it well
to advert to them and their Universal Lodge before going to other parts of the
subject.
CHAPTER 2
General Principles
The teachings of
Theosophy deal for the present chiefly with our earth, although its purview
extends to all the worlds, since no part of the manifested universe is outside
the single body of laws which operate upon us. Our globe being one of the solar
system is certainly connected with Venus, Jupiter, and other planets,
but as the great human
family has to remain with its material vehicle -- the earth -- until all the
units of the race which are ready are perfected, the evolution of that family
is of greater importance to the members of it. Some particulars respecting the
other planets may be given later on. First let us take a general view of the
laws governing all.
The universe evolves
from the unknown, into which no man or mind, however high, can inquire, on
seven planes or in seven ways or methods in all worlds, and this sevenfold
differentiation causes all the worlds of the universe and the beings thereon to
have a septenary constitution. As was taught of old,
the little
worlds and the great are
copies of the whole, and the minutest insect as well as the most highly
developed being are replicas in little or in great of the vast inclusive
original. Hence sprang the saying, "as above so below" which the
Hermetic philosophers used.
The divisions of the
sevenfold universe may be laid down roughly as: The Absolute, Spirit, Mind,
Matter, Will, Akasa or Aether, and Life. In place of
"the Absolute" we can use the word Space. For Space is that which
ever is, and in which all manifestation must take place. The term Akasa, taken
from the Sanskrit, is used in place of Aether,
because the English language has not yet evolved a word to properly designate
that tenuous state of matter which is now sometimes called Ether by modern
scientists. As to the Absolute we can do no more than say IT IS. None of the
great teachers of the School ascribe qualities
to the Absolute although
all the qualities exist in It. Our knowledge begins with differentiation, and
all manifested objects, beings, or powers are only differentiations of the
Great Unknown. The most that can be said is that the Absolute periodically
differentiates itself, and periodically withdraws the
differentiated into itself.
The first
differentiation -- speaking metaphysically as to time -- is Spirit, with which
appears Matter and Mind. Akasa is produced from Matter and Spirit, Will is the
force of Spirit in action and Life is a resultant of the action of Akasa, moved
by Spirit, upon Matter.
But the Matter here
spoken of is not that which is vulgarly known as such. It is the real Matter
which is always invisible, and has sometimes been called Primordial Matter. In
the Brahmanical system it is denominated Mulaprakriti. The
ancient teaching always
held, as is now admitted by Science, that we see or perceive only the phenomena
but not the essential nature, body or being of matter.
Mind is the intelligent
part of the Cosmos, and in the collection of seven differentiations above
roughly sketched, Mind is that in which the plan of the Cosmos is fixed or
contained. This plan is brought over from a prior period of manifestation which
added to its ever-increasing perfectness, and no
limit can be set to its evolutionary possibilities in perfectness,
because there was never
any beginning to the
periodical manifestations of the Absolute, there never will be any end, but
forever the going forth and withdrawing into the Unknown will go on.
Wherever a world or
system of worlds is evolving there the plan has been laid down in universal
mind, the original force comes from spirit, the basis is matter -- which is in
fact invisible -- Life sustains all the forms requiring life, and Akasa is the
connecting link between matter on one side and spirit-mind on the other.
When a world or a system
comes to the end of certain great cycles men record a cataclysm in history or
tradition. These traditions abound; among the Jews in their flood; with the
Babylonians in theirs; in Egyptian papyri; in the Hindu
cosmology; and none of
them as merely confirmatory of the little Jewish tradition, but all pointing to
early teaching and dim recollection also of the periodical destructions and
renovations.
The Hebraic story is but
a poor fragment torn from the pavement of the
periodical minor
cataclysms or partial destructions, so, the doctrine holds, there is the
universal evolution and involution. Forever the Great Breath goes forth and
returns again. As it proceeds outwards, objects, worlds and men appear; as it
recedes all disappear into the original source.
This is the waking and
the sleeping of the Great Being; the Day and the Night of Brahma; the prototype
of our waking days and sleeping nights as men, of our disappearance from the
scene at the end of one little human life, and our return again to take up the
unfinished work in another life, in a new day.
The real age of the
world has long been involved in doubt for Western investigators, who up to the
present have shown a singular unwillingness to take instruction from the
records of Oriental people much older than the West. Yet with the Orientals is
the truth about the matter. It is admitted that Egyptian civilization
flourished many centuries ago, and as there are no living Egyptian schools of
ancient learning to offend modern pride, and perhaps because the Jews
"came out of Egypt" to fasten the Mosaic misunderstood tradition upon
modern progress, the inscriptions cut in rocks and written on papyri obtain a
little more credit today than the living thought and record of the Hindus.
For the latter are still
among us, and it would never do to admit that a poor and conquered race
possesses knowledge respecting the age of man and his world which the western
flower of culture, war, and annexation knows nothing of. Ever since the
ignorant monks and theologians of Asia Minor and Europe succeeded in imposing
the Mosaic account of the genesis of earth and man upon the coming western
evolution, the most learned even of our scientific men have stood in fear of
the years that elapsed since Adam, or have been warped in thought and
perception whenever their eyes turned to any chronology different from that of
a few tribes of the sons of Jacob. Even the noble, aged, and silent pyramid of Gizeh, guarded by Sphinx and Memnon
made of stone, has been degraded by Piazzi Smyth and
others into a proof that the British inch must prevail and that a
"Continental Sunday" controverts the law of the Most High. Yet in the
Mosaic account, where one would expect to find a reference to such a proof as
the pyramid, we can discover not a single hint of it and only a record of the
building by King Solomon of a temple of which there never was a trace.
But the Theosophist knows
why the Hebraic tradition came to be thus an apparent drag on the mind of the
West; he knows the connection between Jew and Egyptian; what is and is to be
the resurrection of the old pyramid builders of the Nile valley, and where the
plans of those ancient master masons have been hidden from the profane eyes
until the cycle should roll round again for their bringing forth.
The Jews preserved
merely a part of the learning of
government, theology,
science, and civilization, departed from their old race, that race died out and
the former Egyptians took up their work in the oncoming races of the West,
especially in those which are now repeopling the
American continents. When
They both, in the
opinion of the Theosophist, thought alike, but fate ruled that of the two the
Hindus only should preserve the old ideas among a living people. I will
therefore take from the Brahmanical records of
The doctrine at once
upsets the interpretation so long given to the Mosaic tradition, but fully
accords with the evident account in Genesis of other and former
"creations," with the cabalistic construction of the Old Testament
verse about the kings of Edom, who there represent former periods of evolution
prior
to that started with
Adam, and also coincides with the belief held by some of the early Christian
Fathers who told their brethren about wonderful previous worlds and creations.
The Day of Brahma is
said to last one thousand years, and his night is of equal length. In the
Christian Bible is a verse saying that one day is as a thousand years to the
Lord and a thousand years as one day. This has generally been used to magnify
the power of Jehovah, but it has a suspicious resemblance to the
older doctrine of the
length of Brahma's day and night. It would be of more value if construed to be
a statement of the periodical coming forth for great days and nights of equal
length of the universe of manifested worlds.
A day of mortals is
reckoned by the sun, and is but twelve hours in length. On Mercury it would be
different, and on Saturn or Uranus still more so. But a day of Brahma is made
up of what are called Manvantaras -- or period
between two men -- fourteen in number. These include four billion three hundred
and twenty
million mortal, or
earth, years, which is one day of Brahma.
When this day opens,
cosmic evolution, so far as relates to this solar system, begins and occupies
between one and two billions of years in evolving the very ethereal first
matter before the astral kingdoms of mineral, vegetable, animal and men are
possible. This second step takes some three hundred millions of
years, and then still
more material processes go forward for the production of the tangible kingdoms
of nature, including man.
This covers over one and
one-half billions of years. And the number of solar years included in the
present "human" period is over eighteen millions of years.
This is exactly what
Herbert Spencer designates as the gradual coming forth of the known and
heterogeneous from the unknown and homogeneous. For the ancient Egyptian and
Hindu Theosophists never admitted a creation out of nothing, but ever
strenuously insisted upon evolution, by gradual stages, of the
heterogeneous and
differentiated from the homogeneous and undifferentiated.
No mind can comprehend
the infinite and absolute unknown, which is, has no beginning and shall have no
end; which is both last and first, because, whether differentiated or withdrawn
into itself, it ever is. This is the God spoken of in the Christian Bible as
the one around whose pavilion there is darkness.
This cosmic and human
chronology of the Hindus is laughed at by western Orientalists,
yet they can furnish nothing better and are continually disagreeing with each
other on the same subject. In
But the Free Masons, who
remain inactive hereupon, ought to know better. They could find in the story of
the building of Solomon's temple from the heterogeneous materials brought from
everywhere, and its erection without the noise of a tool being heard, the
agreement with these ideas of their Egyptian
and Hindu brothers. For
Solomon's
But the materials had to
be found, gathered together and fashioned in other and distant places. These
are in the periods above spoken of, very distant and very silent. Man could not
have his bodily temple to live in until all the matter in and about
his world had been found
by the Master, who is the inner man, when found the plans for working it
required to be detailed.
They then had to be
carried out in different detail until all the parts should be perfectly ready
and fit for placing in the final structure. So in the vast stretch of time
which began after
the first almost
intangible matter had been gathered and kneaded, the material and vegetable
kingdoms had sole possession here with the Master -- man -- who was hidden from
sight within carrying forward the plans for the foundations of
the human temple. All of
this requires many, many ages, since we know that nature never leaps. And when
the rough work was completed, when the human temple was erected, many more ages
would be required for all the servants, the priests, and the counsellors to learn their parts properly so that man, the
Master, might be able to use the temple for its best and highest purposes.
The ancient doctrine is
far nobler than the Christian religious one or that of the purely scientific
school. The religious gives a theory which conflicts with reason and fact,
while science can give for the facts which it observes no reason which is in
any way noble or elevating. Theosophy alone, inclusive of all systems and every
experience, gives the key, the plan, the doctrine, the truth.
The real age of the world
is asserted by Theosophy to be almost incalculable, and that of man as he is
now formed is over eighteen millions of years. What has become at last man is
of vastly greater age, for before the present two sexes appeared the human
creature was sometimes of one shape and sometimes of another, until the whole
plan had been fully worked out into our present form, function, and capacity.
This is found to be referred to in the ancient books written for the profane
where man is said to have been at one time globular in shape. This was at a
time when the conditions flavoured such a form and of
course it was longer ago than eighteen millions of years. And when this
globular form was the rule the sexes as we know them had not differentiated and
hence there was but one sex, or if you like, no sex at all.
During all these ages
before our man came into being, evolution was carrying on the work of
perfecting various powers which are now our possession. This was accomplished
by the Ego or real man going through experience in countless conditions of
matter all different one from the other, and the same plan in general was and
is pursued as prevails in respect to the general evolution of the universe to
which I have before adverted. That is, details were first worked out in spheres
of being very ethereal, metaphysical in fact.
Then the next step
brought the same details to be worked out on a plane of matter a little more
dense, until at last it could be done on our present plane of what we miscall
gross matter. In these anterior states the senses existed in germ, as it were,
or in idea, until the astral plane which is next to this one was arrived at,
and then they were concentrated so as to be the actual senses we now use
through the agency of the different outer organs. These outer organs of sight,
touch and hearing, and tasting, are often mistaken by the unlearned or the
thoughtless for the real organs and senses, but he who stops to think must see
that the senses are interior and that their outer organs are but mediators
between the visible universe and the real perceiver within. And all these
various powers and potentialities being well worked out in this slow but sure
process, at last man is put upon the scene a sevenfold being just as the
universe and earth itself are sevenfold. Each of his seven principles is
derived from one of the great first seven divisions, and each relates to a
planet or scene of evolution, and to a race in which that evolution was carried
out. So the first sevenfold differentiation is important to be borne in mind,
since it is the basis of all that follows; just as the universal evolution is septenary so the evolution of humanity, sevenfold in its
constitution, is carried on upon a septenary Earth.
This is spoken of in Theosophical literature as the Sevenfold Planetary Chain,
and is intimately connected with Man's special evolution.
CHAPTER 3
The Earth Chain
Coming now to our Earth
the view put forward by Theosophy regarding its genesis, its evolution and the evolution
of the Human, Animal and other Monads, is quite different from modern ideas,
and in some things contrary to accepted theories.
But the theories of
today are not stable. They change with each century, while the Theosophical one
never alters because, in the opinion of those Elder Brothers who have caused
its repromulgation and pointed to its confirmation in
ancient books, it is but
a statement of facts in nature. The modern theory is, on the contrary, always
speculative, changeable, and continually altered.
Following the general
plan outlined in preceding pages, the Earth is sevenfold. It is an entity and
not a mere lump of gross matter. And being thus an entity of a septenary nature there must be six other globes which roll
with it in space.
This company of seven
globes has been called the "Earth Chain," the "Planetary
Chain." In Esoteric Buddhism this is clearly stated, but there a rather
hard and fast materialistic view of it is given and the reader led to believe
that the doctrine speaks of seven distinct globes, all separated from though
connected with each other. One is forced to conclude that the author meant to
say that the globe Earth is as distinct from the other six as Venus is from
Mars.
This is not the
doctrine. The earth is one of seven globes, in respect to man's consciousness
only, because when he functions on one of the seven he perceives it as a
distinct globe and does not see the other six. This is in perfect
correspondence with man himself who has six other constituents of which only
the gross body is visible to him because he is now functioning on the Earth --
or the fourth globe -- and his body represents the Earth. The whole seven
"globes" constitute one single mass or great globe and they all
interpenetrate each other.
But we have to say
"globe," because the ultimate shape is globular or spherical. If one
relies too closely on the explanation made by Mr. Sinnett it might be supposed
that the globes did not interpenetrate each other but were connected by currents
or lines of magnetic force. And if too close attention is paid to the diagrams
used in the Secret Doctrine to illustrate the scheme,
without paying due
regard to the explanations and cautions given by H. P. Blavatsky, the same
error may be made. But both she and her Adept teachers say, that the seven
globes of our chain are in "coadunition with
each other but not in consubstantiality." (Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p.
166, first edition.)
This is further enforced
by cautions not to rely on statistics or plane surface diagrams, but to look at
the metaphysical and spiritual aspect of the theory as stated in English. Thus
from the very source of Mr. Sinnett's book we have
the statement, that these globes are united in one mass though differing from
each
other in substance, and
that this difference of substance is due to change of center of consciousness.
The Earth Chain of seven
globes as thus defined is the direct reincarnation of a former chain of seven
globes, and that former family of seven was the moon chain, the moon itself
being the visible representative of the fourth globe of the old chain. When
that former vast entity composed of the Moon and six others, all united in one
mass, reached its limit of life it died just as any being dies. Each one of the
seven sent its energies into space and gave similar life or vibration to cosmic
dust -- matter, -- and the total cohesive force of the whole kept the seven
energies together.
This resulted in the
evolving of the present Earth Chain of seven centers of energy or evolution
combined in one mass. As the Moon was the fourth of the old series it is on the
same plane of
perception as the Earth,
and as we are now confined in our consciousness largely to Earth we are able
only to see one of the old seven -- to wit: our Moon.
When we are functioning
on any of the other seven we will perceive in our sky the corresponding old
corpse which will then be a Moon, and we will not see the present Moon. Venus,
Mars, Mercury and other visible planets are all fourth-plane globes of distinct
planetary masses and for that reason are visible
to us, their companion
six centers of energy and consciousness being invisible. All diagrams on plane
surfaces will only becloud the theory because a diagram necessitates linear
divisions.
The stream or mass of
Egos which evolves on the seven globes of our chain is limited in number, yet
the actual quantity is enormous. For though the universe is limitless and
infinite, yet in any particular portion of Cosmos in which manifestation and
evolution have begun there is a limit to the extent of
manifestation and to the
number of Egos engaged therein. And the whole number of Monads now going
through evolution on our Earth Chain came over from the old seven planets or
globes which I have described. Esoteric Buddhism calls this mass of Egos a
"life wave," meaning the stream of Monads. It reached this planetary
mass, represented to our consciousness by the central point our Earth, and
began on Globe A or No. I, coming like an army or river. The first portion
began on Globe A and went through a long evolution there in bodies suited to
such a state of matter, and then passed on to B, and so on through the whole
seven greater states of consciousness which have been called globes.
When the first portion
left A others streamed in and pursued the same course, the whole army
proceeding with regularity round the septenary route.
This journey went on for
four circlings round the whole, and then the whole
stream or army of Egos from the old Moon Chain had arrived, and being complete,
no more entered after the middle of the Fourth Round. The same circling process
of these differently arrived classes goes on for seven complete Rounds of the
whole seven planetary centers of consciousness, and when the seven are ended as
much perfection as is possible in the immense period occupied will have been
attained, and then this chain or mass of "globes" will die in its
turn to give birth to still another series.
Each one of the globes
is used by evolutionary law for the development of seven races, and of senses,
faculties and powers appropriate to that state of matter: the experience of the
whole seven globes being needed to make a perfect development. Hence we have
the Rounds and Races. The Round is a circling of the seven centers of planetary
consciousness; the Race the racial development on one of those seven.
There are seven races
for each globe, but the total of forty-nine races only makes up seven great
races, the special septennate of races on each globe
or planetary center composing in reality one race of seven constituents or
special peculiarities of function and power.
And as no complete race
could be evolved in a moment on any globe, the slow, orderly processes of
nature, which allow no jumps, must proceed by appropriate means. Hence
sub-races have to be evolved one after the other before the perfect root race
is formed, and then the root race sends off its offshoots while it is declining
and preparing for the advent of the next great race.
As illustrating this, it
is distinctly taught that on the Americas is to be evolved the new -- sixth --
race; and here all the races of the earth are now engaged in a great
amalgamation from which will result a very highly developed sub-race, after
which others will be evolved by similar processes until the new one is
completed.
Between the end of any
great race and the beginning of another there is a period of rest, so far as
the globe is concerned, for then the stream of human Egos leaves it for another
one of the chain in order to go on with further evolution of powers and
faculties there. But when the last, the seventh, race has appeared and fully
perfected itself, a great dissolution comes on, similar to that which I briefly
described as preceding the birth of the earth's chain, and then the world
disappears as a tangible thing, and so far as the human ear is concerned there
is silence. This, it is said, is the root of the belief so general that the
world will come to an end, that there will be a judgment-day, or that there
have been universal floods or fires.
Taking up evolution on
the Earth, it is stated that the stream of Monads begins first to work up the
mass of matter in what are called elemental conditions when all is gaseous or
fiery. For the ancient and true theory is that no evolution is possible without
the Monad as vivifying agent. In this first stage there is no
animal or vegetable.
Next comes the mineral when the whole mass hardens, the Monads being all
imprisoned within. Then the first Monads emerge into vegetable forms which they
construct themselves, and no animals yet appear.
Next the first class of
Monads emerges from the vegetable and produces the animal, then the human
astral and shadowy model, and we have minerals, vegetables, animals and future
men, for the second and later classes are still evolving in the lower kingdoms.
When the middle of the Fourth Round is reached no more Monads emerge into the
human stage and will not until a new planetary mass, reincarnated from ours, is
made. This is the whole process roughly given, but with many details left out,
for in one of the rounds man appears before the animals. But this detail need
lead to no confusion.
And to state it in
another way. The plan comes first in the universal mind, after which the astral
model or basis is made, and when that astral model is completed, the whole
process is gone over so as to condense the matter, up to the middle of the
Fourth Round. Subsequent to that, which is our future, the
whole mass is
spiritualized with full consciousness and the entire body of globes raised up
to a higher plane of development. In the process of condensing above referred
to there is an alteration in respect to the time of the appearance of man on
the planet. But as to these details the teachers have only said, "that at
the Second Round the plan varies, but the variation will not be
given to this
generation." Hence it is impossible for me to give it.
But there is no
vagueness on the point that seven great races have to evolve here on this
planet, and that the entire collection of races has to go seven times round the
whole series of seven globes.
Human beings did not
appear here in two sexes first. The first were of no sex, then they altered
into hermaphrodite, and lastly separated into male and female. And this
separation into male and female for human beings was over 18,000,000 years ago.
For that reason is it said, in these ancient schools, that our humanity is
18,000,000 years old and a little over.
CHAPTER 4
Septenary Constitution of Man
Respecting the nature of
man there are two ideas current in the religious circles of Christendom. One is
the teaching and the other the common acceptation of it; the first is not
secret, to be sure, in the Church, but it is so seldom dwelt upon in the hearing
of the laity as to be almost arcane for the ordinary person. Nearly everyone
says he has a soul and a body, and there it ends.
What the soul is, and
whether it is the real person or whether it has any powers of its own, are not
inquired into, the preachers usually confining themselves to its salvation or
damnation. And by thus talking of it as something different from oneself, the
people have acquired an underlying notion that they are not souls because the
soul may be lost by them. From this has come about a tendency to materialism
causing men to pay more attention to the body than to the soul, the latter
being left to the tender mercies of the priest of the Roman Catholics, and
among dissenters the care of it is most frequently put off to the dying day.
But when the true teaching is known it will be seen that the care of the soul,
which is the Self, is a vital matter requiring attention every day, and not to
be deferred without grievous injury resulting to the whole man, both soul and
body.
The Christian teaching,
supported by
orthodox but now
heretical. For when we thus place soul between spirit and body, we come very
close to the necessity for looking into the question of the soul's
responsibility -- since mere body can have no responsibility. And in order to
make the soul responsible for the acts performed, we must assume that it has
powers and functions.
From this it is easy to take the position that the soul may be rational or
irrational, as the Greeks sometimes thought, and then there is but a step to
further Theosophical propositions. This threefold scheme of the
nature of man contains,
in fact, the Theosophical teaching of his sevenfold constitution, because the
four other divisions missing from the category can be found in the powers and
functions of body and soul, as I shall attempt to show later on. This
conviction that man is a septenary and not merely a
duad, was
held long ago and very
plainly taught to every one with accompanying demonstrations, but like other
philosophical tenets it disappeared from sight, because gradually withdrawn at
the time when in the east of
scepticism, its twin. Upon its withdrawal the present dogma of body,
soul, spirit, was left to Christendom.
The reason for that
concealment and its rejuvenescence in this century is
well put by Mme. H. P. Blavatsky in the Secret
Doctrine. In answer to
the statement, "we cannot understand how any danger could arise from the
revelation of such a purely philosophical doctrine as the evolution of the
planetary chain," she says:
The danger was this:
Doctrines such as the Planetary chain or the seven races at once give a clue to
the sevenfold nature of man, for each principle is correlated to a plane, a
planet, and a race; and the human principles are, on every plane, correlated to
the sevenfold occult forces -- those of the higher planes being of tremendous
occult power, the abuse of which would cause
incalculable evil to
humanity.
A clue which is,
perhaps, no clue to the present generation -- especially the Westerns --
protected as they are by their very blindness and ignorant materialistic
disbelief in the occult; but a clue which would, nevertheless, be very real in
the early centuries of the Christian era, to people fully convinced of the
reality of occultism and entering a cycle of degradation which made them ripe
for abuse of occult powers and sorcery of the worst description.
Mr. A. P. Sinnett, at
one time an official in the Government of India, first outlined in this century
the real nature of man in his book Esoteric Buddhism, which was made up from
information conveyed to him by H. P. Blavatsky directly from the Great Lodge of
Initiates to which reference has been made. And in thus placing the old
doctrine before western civilization he conferred a great benefit on his
generation and helped considerably the cause of Theosophy. His classification
was:
1 The Body Rupa.
2 Vitality
Prana-Jiva.
3 Astral
Body Linga- Sarira.
4 Animal
Soul Kama-Rupa
5 Human
SoulManas.
6
Spiritual SoulBuddhi.
7
Spirit Atma
The words in italics
being equivalents in the Sanskrit language adopted by him for the English
terms. This classification stands to this day for all practical purposes, but
it is capable of modification and extension. For instance, a later arrangement
which places Astral body second instead of third in the category
does not substantially
alter it. It at once gives an idea of what man is, very different from the
vague description by the words "body and soul," and also boldly
challenges the materialistic conception that mind is the product of brain, a
portion of the body.
No claim is made that
these principles were hitherto unknown, for they were all understood in various
ways not only by the
Hindus but by many
Europeans. Yet the compact presentation of the sevenfold constitution of man in
intimate connection with the septenary constitution
of a chain of globes through which the being evolves, had not been given out.
The French Abbe, Eliphas Levi, wrote about
the astral realm and the astral body, but evidently had no knowledge of the
remainder of the doctrine, and while the Hindus possessed the other terms in
their language and philosophy, they did not
use a septenary classification, but depended chiefly on a
fourfold one and certainly concealed (if they knew of it) the doctrine of a
chain of seven globes including our earth. Indeed, a learned Hindu, Subba Row,
now deceased, asserted that they knew of a sevenfold classification, but that
it had not been and would not be given out.
Considering these
constituents in another manner, we would say that the lower man is a composite
being, but in his real nature is a unity, or immortal being, comprising a
trinity of Spirit, Discernment, and Mind which requires four lower mortal
instruments or vehicles through which to work in matter and obtain experience
from Nature. This trinity is that called Atma-Buddhi-Manas in Sanskrit,
difficult terms to render in English. Atma is Spirit, Buddhi is the highest
power of intellection, that which discerns and judges, and Manas is Mind. This
threefold collection is the real man; and beyond doubt the doctrine
is the origin of the
theological one of the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The four lower
instruments or vehicles are shown in this table:
1REAL
MANATMA
2BUDDHI
3MANAS
4LOWER
VEHICLESTHE PASSIONS and DESIRES
5LIFE
PRINCIPLE
6ASTRAL
BODY
7PHYSICAL
BODY
These four lower
material constituents are transitory and subject to disintegration in
themselves as well as to separation from each other. When the hour arrives for
their separation to begin, the combination can no longer be kept up, the
physical body dies, the atoms of which each of the four is composed begin to
separate from each other, and the whole collection being disjointed is no
longer fit for one as an instrument for the real man. This is what is called
"death" among us mortals, but it is not death for the real man
because he is deathless, persistent, immortal. He is therefore called the
Triad, or indestructible trinity, while they are known as the Quaternary or
mortal four.
This quaternary or lower
man is a product of cosmic or physical laws and substance. It has been evolved
during a lapse of ages, like any other physical thing, from cosmic substance,
and is therefore subject to physical, physiological, and psychical laws which
govern the race of man as a whole.
Hence its period of
possible continuance can be calculated just as the limit of tensile strain
among the metals used in bridge building can be deduced by the engineer. Any
one collection in the form of man made up of these constituents is therefore
limited in duration by the laws of the evolutionary period in which it exists.
Just now, that is generally seventy to one hundred years, but its possible
duration is longer. Thus there are in history instances where ordinary persons
have lived to be two hundred years of age; and by a knowledge of the occult
laws of nature the possible limit of duration may be extended nearly to
four hundred years.
The visible
physical man is: Brain, Nerves, Blood, Bones, Lymph, Muscles, Organs of
Sensation and Action, and Skin.
The unseen
physical man is: Astral Body, Passions and Desires, Life Principle (called
prana or jiva).
It will be seen that the
physical part of our nature is thus extended to a second department which,
though invisible to the physical eye, is nevertheless material and subject to
decay. Because people in general have been in the habit of admitting to be real
only what they can see with the physical eye, they have at last come to suppose
that the unseen is neither real nor material.
But they forgot that
even on the earth plane noxious gases are invisible though real and powerfully
material, and that water may exist in the air held suspended and invisible
until conditions alter and cause its precipitation.
Let us recapitulate
before going into details. The Real Man is the trinity of Atma-Buddhi-Manas, or
Spirit and Mind, and he uses certain agents and instruments to get in touch with
nature in order to know himself. These instruments and agents are found in the
lower Four -- or the Quaternary -- each principle in which category is of
itself an instrument for the particular experience belonging to its own field,
the body being the lowest, least
important, and most
transitory of the whole series. For when we arrive at the body on the way down
from the Higher Mind, it can be shown that all of its organs are in themselves
senseless and useless when deprived of the man within.
Sight, hearing, touch,
taste, and smelling do not pertain to the body but to the second unseen
physical man, the real organs for the exercise of those powers being in the
Astral Body, and those in the physical body being but the mechanical outer
instruments for making the co-ordination between nature and the real organs
inside.
CHAPTER 5
Body and Astral Body
The body, as a mass of
flesh, bones, muscles, nerves, brain matter, bile, mucous, blood, and skin is
an object of exclusive care for too many people, who make it their god because
they have come to identify themselves with it, meaning it only when they say
"I." Left to itself it is devoid of sense, and acts in
such a case solely by
reflex and automatic action. This we see in sleep, for then the body assumes
attitudes and makes motions which the waking man does not permit. It is like
mother earth in that it is made up of an infinitesimal number of
"lives." Each of these lives is a sensitive point. Not only are there
microbes, bacilli, and bacteria, but these are composed of others, and those
others of still more minute lives. These lives are not the cells of the body,
but make up the cells, keeping ever within the limits assigned by evolution to
the cell.
They are forever
whirling and moving together throughout the whole body, being in certain
apparently void spaces as well as where flesh, membrane, bones, and blood are
seen. They extend, too, beyond the actual outer limits of the body to a
measurable distance.
One of the mysteries of
physical life is hidden among these "lives." Their action, forced
forward by the Life energy -- called Prana or Jiva --
will explain active existence and physical death. They are divided into two
classes, one the destroyers, the other the preservers, and these two war upon
each other from birth until the destroyers win. In this struggle the Life
Energy itself ends the contest because it is life that kills. This may seem
heterodox, but in Theosophical philosophy it is held to be the fact. For, it is
said, the infant lives because the combination of healthy organs is able to
absorb the life all around it in space, and is put to sleep each day by the
overpowering strength of the stream of life, since the preservers among the cells
of the youthful body are not yet mastered by the other class.
These processes of going
to sleep and waking again are simply and solely the restoring of the
equilibrium in sleep and the action produced by disturbing it when awake. It
may be compared with the arc-electric light wherein the brilliant arc of light
at the point of resistance is the symbol of the waking active man. So in sleep
we are again absorbing and not resisting the Life Energy; when we wake we are
throwing it off. But as it exists around us like an ocean in which we swim, our
power to throw it off is necessarily limited. Just when we wake we are in
equilibrium as to our organs and life; when we fall asleep we are yet more full
of life than in the morning; it has exhausted us; it finally kills the body.
Such a contest could not be waged forever, since the whole solar system's
weight of life is pitted against the power to resist focussed
in one small human frame.
The body is considered
by the Masters of Wisdom to be the most transitory, impermanent, and
illusionary of the whole series of constituents in man. Not for a moment is it
the same. Ever changing, in motion in every part, it is in fact never complete
or finished though tangible. The ancients clearly perceived this, for they elaborated
a doctrine called Naimittika [the correct Sanskrit
term is Nitya] Pralaya, or the continual change in
material things, the continual destruction.
This is known now to
science in the doctrine that the body undergoes a complete alteration and
renovation every seven years. At the end of the first seven years it is not the
same body it was in the beginning. At the end of our days it has changed seven
times, perhaps more. And yet it presents the same general appearance from
maturity until death; and it is a human form from birth to maturity. This is a
mystery science explains not; it is a question pertaining to the cell and to
the means whereby the general human shape is preserved.
The "cell" is
an illusion. It is merely a word. It has no existence as a material thing, for
any cell is composed of other cells. What, then, is a cell? It is the ideal
form within which the actual physical atoms -- made up of the "lives"
-- arrange themselves. As it is admitted that the physical molecules are forever
rushing away from the body, they must be leaving the cells each moment.
Hence there is no
physical cell, but the privative limits of one, the ideal walls and general
shape. The molecules assume position within the ideal shape according to the
laws of nature, and leave it again almost at once to give place to other atoms.
And as it is thus with the body, so is it with the earth and with the solar
system. Thus also is it, though in slower measure, with all material objects.
They are all in constant motion and change. This is modern and also ancient
wisdom. This is the physical explanation of clairvoyance, clairaudience,
telepathy, and mind-reading. It helps to show us what a deluding and
unsatisfactory thing our body is.
Although, strictly
speaking, the second constituent of man is the Astral Body -- called in
Sanskrit Linga Sarira -- we
will consider Life Energy -- or Prana and Jiva in
Sanskrit -- together, because to our observation the phenomenon of life is more
plainly exhibited in connection with the body.
Life is not the result
of the operation of the organs, nor is it gone when the body dissolves. It is a
universally pervasive principle. It is the ocean in which the earth floats; it
permeates the globe and every being and object on it. It works unceasingly on
and around us, pulsating against and through us forever.
When we occupy a body we
merely use a more specialized instrument than any other for dealing with both
Prana and Jiva. Strictly speaking, Prana is breath;
and as breath is necessary for continuance of life in the human machine, that
is the better word. Jiva means "life," and
also is applied to the living soul, for the life in general is derived from the
Supreme Life itself. Jiva is therefore capable of
general application, whereas Prana is more particular.
It cannot be said that
one has a definite amount of this Life Energy which will fly back to its source
should the body be burned, but rather that it works with whatever be the mass
of matter in it. We, as it were, secrete or use it as we live. For
whether we are alive or
dead, life-energy is still there; in life among our organs sustaining them, in
death among the innumerable creatures that arise from our destruction.
We can no more do away
with this life than we can erase the air in which the bird floats, and like the
air it fills all the spaces on the planet, so that nowhere can we lose the
benefit of it nor escape its final crushing power. But in working upon the
physical body this life -- Prana -- needs a vehicle, means, or guide, and this
vehicle is the astral body.
There are many names for
the Astral Body. Here are a few: Linga Sarira, Sanskrit, meaning design body, and the best one of
all; ethereal double; phantom; wraith; apparition; doppelganger; personal man; perisprit; irrational soul; animal soul; Bhuta; elementary; spook; devil; demon. Some of these apply
only to the astral body when devoid of the corpus after death. Bhuta, devil, and elementary are nearly synonymous; the
first Sanskrit, the other English.
With the Hindus the Bhuta is the Astral Body when it is by death released from
the body and the mind; and being thus separated from conscience, is a devil in
their estimation. They are not far wrong, if we abolish the old notion that a
devil is an angel fallen from heaven, for this bodily devil is something which
rises from
the earth.
It may be objected that
the term Astral Body is not the right one for this purpose. The objection is
one which arises from the nature and genesis of the English language, for as
that has grown up in a struggle with nature and among a commercial people it
has not as yet coined the words needed for designating the
great range of faculties
and organs of the unseen man. And as its philosophers have not admitted the
existence of these inner organs, the right terms do not exist in the language.
So in looking for words to describe the inner body the only ones found in
English were the "astral body." This term comes near to the
real fact, since the
substance of this form is derived from cosmic matter or star matter, roughly
speaking. But the old Sanskrit word describes it exactly -- Linga
Sarira, the design body -- because it is the design
or model for the physical body. This is better than "ethereal body,"
as the latter might be said to be subsequent to the physical, whereas in fact
the astral body precedes the material one.
The astral body is made
of matter of very fine texture as compared with the visible body, and has a
great tensile strength, so that it changes but little during a lifetime, while
the physical alters every moment. And not only has it this immense strength,
but at the same time possesses an elasticity permitting
its extension to a
considerable distance. It is flexible, plastic, extensible, and strong.
The matter of which it
is composed is electrical and magnetic in its essence, and is just what the
whole world was composed of in the dim past when the processes of evolution had
not yet arrived at the point of producing the material body for man. But it is
not raw or crude matter. Having been through a vast period of evolution and
undergone purifying processes of an incalculable number, its nature has been
refined to a degree far beyond the gross physical elements we see and touch with
the physical eye and hand.
The astral body is the
guiding model for the physical one, and all the other kingdoms have the same
astral model. Vegetables, minerals, and animals have the ethereal double, and
this theory is the only one which will answer the question how it is that the
seed produces its own kind and all sentient beings bring forth their like.
Biologists can only say that the facts are as we know them, but can give no
reason why the acorn will never grow anything but an oak except that no man
ever knew it to be otherwise. But in the old schools of the past the true
doctrine was known, and it has been once again brought out in the West
through the efforts of
H. P. Blavatsky and those who have found inspiration in her works.
This doctrine is, that
in early times of the evolution of this globe the various kingdoms of nature
are outlined in plan or ideal form first, and then the astral matter begins to
work on this plan with the aid of the Life principle, until after long ages the
astral human form is evolved and perfected.
This is, then, the first
form that the human race had, and corresponds in a way with the allegory of
man's state in the garden of Eden. After another long period, during which the
cycle of further descent into matter is rolling forward, the astral
form at last clothes
itself with a "coat of skin," and the present physical form is on the
scene.
This is the explanation
of the verse of the book of Genesis
which describes the
giving of coats of skin to Adam and Eve. It is the final fall into matter, for
from that point on the man within strives to raise the whole mass of physical
substance up to a higher level, and to inform it all with a larger measure of
spiritual influence, so that it may be ready to go still
further on during the
next great period of evolution after the present one is ended. So at the
present time the model for the growing child in the womb is the astral body
already perfect in shape before the child is born.
It is on this the molecules
arrange themselves until the child is complete, and the presence of the
ethereal design-body will explain how the form grows into shape, how the eyes
push themselves out from within to the surface of the face, and many other mysterious
matters in embryology which are passed over by medical men with a description
but with no explanation. This will also explain, as nothing else can, the cases
of marking of the child in the womb sometimes denied by physicians but
well-known by those who care to watch, to be a fact of frequent
occurrence.
The growing physical
form is subject to the astral model; it is connected with the imagination of
the mother by physical and psychical organs; the mother makes a strong picture
from horror, fear, or otherwise, and the astral model is then similarly
affected. In the case of marking by being born legless, the ideas and strong
imagination of the mother act so as to cut off or shrivel up the astral leg,
and the result is that the molecules, having no model of leg to work on, make
no physical leg whatever; and similarly in all such cases. But where we find a
man who still feels the leg which the surgeon has cut off, or perceives the
fingers that were amputated, then the astral member has not been interfered
with, and hence the man feels as if it were still on his person. For knife or
acid will not injure the astral model, but in the first stages of its growth
ideas and imagination have the power of acid and sharpened steel.
In the ordinary man who
has not been trained in practical occultism or who has not the faculty by
birth, the astral body cannot go more than a few feet from the physical one. It
is a part of that physical, it sustains it and is incorporated in it just as
the fibres of the mango are all through that fruit.
But there are those who,
by reason of practices pursued in former lives on the earth, have a power born
with them of unconsciously sending out the astral body.
These are mediums, some
seers, and many hysterical, cataleptic, and scrofulous people. Those who have
trained themselves by a long course of excessively hard discipline which
reaches to the moral and mental nature and quite beyond the power of the
average man of the day, can use the astral form at will, for they
have gotten completely
over the delusion that the physical body is a permanent part of them, and,
besides, they have learned the chemical and electrical laws governing in this
matter. In their case they act with knowledge and consciously; in the other
cases the act is done without power to prevent it, or to bring it
about at will, or to
avoid the risks attendant on such use of potencies in nature of a high
character.
The astral body has in
it the real organs of the outer sense organs. In it are the sight, hearing,
power to smell, and the sense of touch. It has a complete system of nerves and
arteries of its own for the conveyance of the astral fluid which is to that
body as our blood is to the physical. It is the real personal man. There are
located the subconscious perception and the latent memory, which the
hypnotizers of the day are dealing with and being baffled by.
So when the body dies
the astral man is released, and as at death the immortal man -- the Triad --
flies away to another state, the astral becomes a shell of the once living man
and requires time to dissipate. It retains all the memories of the life lived
by the man, and thus reflexly and automatically can
repeat what the
dead man knew, said,
thought, and saw. It remains near the deserted physical body nearly all the
time until that is completely dissipated, for it has to go through its own
process of dying. It may become visible under certain conditions. It is the
spook of the spiritualistic seance-rooms, and is
there made to masquerade as the real spirit of this or that individual.
Attracted by the
thoughts of the medium and the sitters, it vaguely flutters where they are, and
then is galvanized into a factitious life by a whole host of elemental forces
and by the active astral body of the medium who is holding the seance or of any other medium in the audience. From it (as
from a photograph) are then reflected into the medium's brain all the boasted
evidences which spiritualists claim go to prove identity of deceased friend or
relative.
These evidences are
accepted as proof that the spirit of the deceased is present, because neither
mediums nor sitters are acquainted with the laws governing their own nature, nor
with the constitution, power, and function of astral matter and astral man.
The Theosophical
philosophy does not deny the facts proven in spiritualistic seances,
but it gives an explanation of them wholly opposed to that of the spiritualists.
And surely the utter absence of any logical scientific explanation by these
so-called spirits of the phenomena they are said to produce supports the
contention that they have no knowledge to impart. They can merely cause certain
phenomena; the examination of those and deductions therefrom
can only be properly carried on by a trained brain guided by a living trinity
of spirit, soul, and mind. And here another class of spiritualistic phenomena
requires brief notice. That is the appearance of what is called a "materialized
spirit."
Three explanations are
offered: First, that the astral body of the living medium detaches itself from
its corpus and assumes the appearance of the so-called spirit; for one of the
properties of the astral matter is capacity to reflect an image existing unseen
in ether. Second, the actual astral shell of the deceased -- wholly devoid of
his or her spirit and conscience -- becomes visible and
tangible when the
condition of air and ether is such as to so alter the vibration of the molecules
of the astral shell that it may become visible. The phenomena of density and
apparent weight are explained by other laws. Third, an unseen mass of
electrical and magnetic matter is collected, and upon it is reflected out of
the astral light a picture of any desired person either dead or living. This is
taken to be the "spirit" of such persons, but it is not, and has been
justly called by H. P. Blavatsky a "psychological fraud," because it
pretends to be what it is not. And, strange to say, this very explanation of
materializations has been given by a "spirit" at a regular seance, but has never been accepted by the spiritualists
just because it upsets their notion of the return of the spirits of deceased
persons.
Finally, the astral body
will explain nearly all the strange psychical things happening in daily life
and in dealings with genuine mediums; it shows what an apparition may be and
the possibility of such being seen, and thus prevents the scientific doubter
from violating good sense by asserting you did not see what you know you have
seen; it removes superstition by showing the real nature of these phenomena,
and destroys the unreasonable fear of the unknown which makes a man afraid to
see a "ghost." By it also we can explain the apportation
of
objects without physical
contact, for the astral hand may be extruded and made to take hold of an
object, drawing it in toward the body.
When this is shown to be
possible, then travelers will not be laughed at who tell of seeing the Hindu yogi
make coffee cups fly through the air and distant objects approach apparently of
their own accord untouched by him or anyone else.
All the instances of
clairvoyance and clairaudience are to be explained also by the astral body and
astral light. The astral -- which are the real -- organs do the seeing and the
hearing, and as all material objects are constantly in motion among their own
atoms the astral sight and hearing are not impeded, but work at a distance as
great as the extension of the astral light or matter around and about the
earth. Thus it was that the great seer Swedenborg saw houses burning in the
city of
CHAPTER 6
The author of Esoteric
Buddhism -- which book ought to be consulted by all students of Theosophy,
since it was made from suggestions given by some of the Adepts themselves --
gave the name Kama rupa to the fourth principle of man's
constitution. The reason was that the word
I shall call it by the
English equivalent -- passions and desires -- because those terms exactly
express its nature. And I do this also in order to make the sharp issue which
actually exists between the psychology and mental philosophy of the west and
those of the east. The west divides man into intellect, will, and feeling, but
it is not understood whether the passions and desires constitute a
principle in themselves
or are due entirely to the body. Indeed, most people consider them as being the
result of the influence of the flesh, for they are designated often by the
terms "desires of the flesh" and "fleshly appetites."
The ancients, however,
and the Theosophists know them to be a principle in themselves and not merely
the impulses from the body. There is no help to be had in this matter from the
western psychology, now in its infancy and wholly devoid of knowledge about the
inner, which is the psychical, nature of man, and from this point there is the
greatest divergence between it and Theosophy.
The passions and desires
are not produced by the body, but, on the contrary, the body is caused to be by
the former. It is desire and passion which caused us to be born, and will bring
us to birth again and again in this body or in some other.* It is by passion
and desire we are made to evolve through the mansions
of death called lives on
earth. It was by the arising of desire in the unknown first cause, the one
absolute existence, that the whole collection of worlds was manifested, and by
means of the influence of desire in the now manifested world
is the latter kept in
existence.
NOTE
[*W Q Judge, in The
Theosophical Forum, June, 1894, page 12, corrected this to: "in some body
on this earth or another globe."]
This fourth principle is
the balance principle of the whole seven. It stands in the middle, and from it
the ways go up or down. It is the basis of action and the mover of the will. As
the old Hermetists say: "Behind will stands
desire."
For whether we wish to
do well or ill we have to first arouse within us the desire for either course.
The good man who at last becomes even a sage had at one time in his many lives
to arouse the desire for the company of holy men and to keep his desire for
progress alive in order to continue on his way.
Even a Buddha or a Jesus
had first to make a vow, which is a desire, in some life, that he would save
the world or some part of it, and to persevere with the desire alive in his
heart through countless lives. And equally so, on the other hand, the bad man
life after life took unto himself low, selfish, wicked desires, thus
debasing instead of
purifying this principle. On the material and scientific side of occultism, the
use of the inner hidden powers of our nature, if this principle of desire be
not strong the master power of imagination cannot do its work, because though
it makes a mould or matrix the will cannot act unless it is moved, directed,
and kept up to pitch by desire.
The desires and
passions, therefore, have two aspects, the one being low and the other high.
The low is that shown by the constant placing of the consciousness entirely
below in the body and the astral body; the high comes from the influence of and
aspiration to the trinity above, of Mind, Buddhi, and Spirit. This fourth
principle is like the sign Libra in the path of the Sun through the Zodiac;
when the Sun (who is the real man) reaches that sign he trembles in the
balance. Should he go back the worlds would be destroyed; he goes onward, and
the whole human race is lifted up to perfection.
During life the
emplacement of the desires and passions is, as obtains with the astral body,
throughout the entire lower man, and like that ethereal counterpart of our
physical person it may be added to or diminished, made weak or increased in
strength, debased or purified.
At death it informs the
astral body, which then becomes a mere shell; for when a man dies his astral
body and principle of passion and desire leave the physical in company and
coalesce. It is then that the term Kamarupa may be applied, as Kamarupa is
really made of astral body and Kama in conjunction, and this joining of the two
makes a shape or form which though ordinarily invisible is material and may be
brought into
visibility. Although it
is empty of mind and conscience, it has powers of its own that can be exercised
whenever the conditions permit.
These conditions are
furnished by the medium of the
spiritualists, and in
every seance room the astral shells of deceased
persons are always present to delude the sitters, whose powers of
discrimination have been destroyed by wonderment.
It is the
"devil" of the Hindus, and a worse enemy the poor medium could not have.
For the astral spook -- or Kamarupa -- is but the mass of the desires and passions
abandoned by the real person who has fled to "heaven" and has no concern
with the people left behind, least of all with seances
and mediums.
Hence, being devoid of
the nobler soul, these desires and passions work only on the very lowest part
of the medium's nature and stir up no good elements, but always the lower
leanings of the being. Therefore it is that even the
spiritualists themselves
admit that in the ranks of the mediums there is much fraud, and mediums have
often confessed, "the spirits did tempt me and I committed fraud at their
wish."
This Kamarupa spook is
also the enemy of our civilization, which permits us to execute men for crimes
committed and thus throw out into the ether the mass of passion and desire free
from the weight of the body and liable at any moment to be attracted to any
sensitive person. Being thus attracted, the deplorable images of crimes
committed and also the picture of the execution and all the accompanying curses
and wishes for revenge are implanted in living persons, who, not seeing the
evil, are unable to throw it off. Thus crimes and new ideas of crimes are wilfully propagated every day by those countries where
capital
punishment prevails.
The astral shells
together with the still living astral body of the medium, helped by certain
forces of nature which the Theosophists call "elementals," produce
nearly all the phenomena of non-fraudulent spiritualism. The medium's
astral body having the
power of extension and extrusion forms the framework for what are called
"materialized spirits," makes objects move without physical contact,
gives reports from deceased relatives, none of them anything more than
recollections and
pictures from the astral light, and in all this using and being used by the
shells of suicides, executed murderers, and all such spooks as are naturally
near to this plane of life. The number of cases in which any communication
comes from an actual spirit out of the body is so small as to be
countable almost on one
hand. But the spirits of living men sometimes, while their bodies are asleep,
come to seances and take part therein.
But they cannot recollect
it, do not know how they do it, and are not distinguished by mediums from the
mass of astral corpses. The fact that such things can be done by the inner man
and not be recollected proves nothing against these theories, for the
child can see without
knowing how the eye acts, and the savage who has no knowledge of the complex
machinery working in his body still carries on the process of digestion
perfectly. And that the latter is unconscious with him is exactly in line with
the theory, for these acts and doings of the inner man are the unconscious
actions of the subconscious mind.
These words
"conscious" and "subconscious" are of course used
relatively, the unconsciousness being that of the brain only. And hypnotic
experiments have conclusively proved all these theories, as on one day not far
away will be fully admitted. Besides this, the astral shells of suicides and
executed criminals are the most coherent, longest lived, and nearest to us of
all the shades of hades, and hence must, out of the
necessity of the case, be the real "controls" of the seance room.
Passion and desire
together with astral model-body are common to men and animals, as also to the
vegetable kingdom, though in the last but faintly developed. And at one period
in evolution no further material principles had been developed, and all the
three higher, of Mind, Soul, and Spirit, were but latent. Up to this point man
and animal were equal, for the brute in us is made
of the passions and the
astral body. The development of the germs of Mind made man because it
constituted the great differentiation. The God within begins with Manas or
mind, and it is the struggle between this God and the brute below which
Theosophy speaks of and warns about. The lower principle is called bad because
by comparison with the higher it is so, but still it is the basis of action.
We cannot rise unless
self first asserts itself in the desire to do better. In this aspect it is
called rajas or the active and bad quality, as distinguished from tamas, or the quality of darkness and indifference. Rising
is not possible unless rajas is present to give the impulse, and by the use of
this principle of passion all the higher qualities are brought to at last so
refine and elevate our desires that they may be continually placed upon truth
and spirit. By this Theosophy does not teach that the passions are to be
pandered to or satiated, for a more pernicious doctrine was never taught, but
the injunction is to make use of the activity given by the fourth principle so
as to ever rise and not to fall under the dominion of the dark quality that
ends with annihilation, after having begun in selfishness and indifference.
Having thus gone over
the field and shown what are the lower principles, we find Theosophy teaching
that at the present point of man's evolution he is a fully developed quaternary
with the higher principles partly developed. Hence it is taught that today man
shows himself to be moved by passion and desire. This is
proved by a glance at
the civilizations of the earth, for they are all moved by this principle, and
in countries like France, England, and America a glorification of it is
exhibited in the attention to display, to sensuous art, to struggle for power
and place, and in all the habits and modes of living where the gratification of
the senses is sometimes esteemed the highest good.
But as Mind is being
evolved more and more as we proceed in our course along the line of the race
development, there can be perceived underneath in all countries the beginning
of the transition from the animal possessed of the germ of real mind
to the man of mind
complete. This day is therefore known to the Masters, who have given out some
of the old truths, as the "transition period." Proud science and
prouder religion do not admit this, but think we are as we always will be.
But believing in his
teacher, the theosophist sees all around him the evidence that the race mind is
changing by enlargement, that the old days of dogmatism are gone and the
"age of inquiry" has come, that the inquiries will grow louder year
by year and the answers be required to satisfy the mind as it grows more
and more, until at last,
all dogmatism being ended, the race will be ready to face all problems, each
man for himself, all working for the good of the whole, and that the end will
be the perfecting of those who struggle to overcome the brute. For these
reasons the old doctrines are given out again, and Theosophy asks every one to
reflect whether to give way to the animal below or look up to and be governed
by the God within.
A fuller treatment of
the fourth principle of our constitution would compel us to consider all such
questions as those presented by the wonder workers of the east, by
spiritualistic phenomena, hypnotism, apparitions, insanity, and the
like, but they must be
reserved for separate handling.
CHAPTER 7
Manas
In our analysis of man's
nature we have so far considered only the perishable elements which make up the
lower man, and have arrived at the fourth principle or plane -- that of desire
-- without having touched upon the question of Mind.
But even so far as we
have gone it must be evident that there is a wide difference between the
ordinary ideas about Mind and those found in Theosophy.
Ordinarily the Mind is
thought to be immaterial, or to be merely the name for the action of the brain
in evolving thought, a process wholly unknown other than by inference, or that
if there be no brain there can be no mind.
A good deal of attention
has been paid to cataloguing some mental functions and attributes, but the
terms are altogether absent from the language to describe actual metaphysical
and spiritual facts about man. This confusion and poverty of words for these
uses are due almost entirely, first, to dogmatic religion, which has asserted
and enforced for many centuries dogmas and doctrines which reason could not
accept, and secondly to the natural war which grew up between science and religion
just as soon as the fetters placed by religion upon science were
removed and the latter
was permitted to deal with facts in nature.
The reaction against
religion naturally prevented science from taking any but a materialistic view
of man and nature. So from neither of these two have we yet gained the words
needed for describing the fifth, sixth, and seventh principles, those
which make up the
Trinity, the real man, the immortal pilgrim.
The fifth principle is
Manas, in the classification adopted by Mr. Sinnett, and is usually translated
Mind. Other names have been given to it, but it is the knower, the perceiver,
the thinker. The sixth is Buddhi, or spiritual discernment; the seventh is
Atma, or Spirit, the ray from the Absolute Being.
The English language
will suffice to describe in part what Manas is, but not Buddhi, or Atma, and
will leave many things relating to Manas undescribed.
The course of evolution
developed the lower principles and produced at last the form of man with a
brain of better and deeper capacity than that of any other animal. But this man
in form was not man in mind, and needed the fifth principle, the thinking,
perceiving one, to differentiate him from the animal
kingdom and to confer
the power of becoming self-conscious.
The monad was imprisoned
in these forms, and that monad is composed of Atma and Buddhi; for without the
presence of the monad evolution could not go forward. Going back for a moment
to the time when the races were devoid of mind, the question arises, "who
gave the mind, where did it come from, and what is it?" It is the link between
the Spirit of God above and the personal below; it was given to the mindless
monads by others who had gone all through this process ages upon ages before in
other worlds and systems of worlds, and it therefore came from other
evolutionary periods which were carried out and completed long before the solar
system had begun. This is the theory, strange and unacceptable today, but which
must be stated if we are to tell the truth about theosophy; and this is only
handing on what others have said before.
The manner in which this
light of mind was given to the Mindless Men can be understood from the
illustration of one candle lighting many. Given one lighted candle and numerous
unlighted ones, it follows that from one light the others may also be set aflame.
So in the case of Manas. It is the candle of flame. The
mindless men having four
elementary principles of Body, Astral Body, Life and Desire, are the unlighted
candles that cannot light themselves.
The Sons of Wisdom, who
are the Elder Brothers of every family of men on any globe, have the light,
derived by them from others who reach back, and yet farther back, in endless
procession with no beginning or end. They set fire to the combined lower
principles and the Monad, thus lighting up Manas in the new men and preparing
another great race for final initiation.
This lighting up of the
fire of Manas is symbolized in all great religions and Freemasonry. In the east
one priest appears holding a candle lighted at the altar, and thousands of
others light their candles from this one. The Parsees also have their sacred
fire which is lighted from some other sacred flame.
Manas, or the Thinker,
is the reincarnating being, the immortal who carries the results and values of all
the different lives lived on earth or elsewhere. Its nature becomes dual as
soon as it is attached to a body. For the human brain is a superior organism
and Manas uses it to reason from premises to conclusions.
This also differentiates
man from animal, for the animal acts from automatic and so-called instinctual
impulses, whereas the man can use reason. This is the lower aspect of the
Thinker or Manas, and not, as some have supposed, the highest and best gift
belonging to man. Its other, and in theosophy higher, aspect is the
intuitional, which knows, and does not depend on reason. The lower, and purely
intellectual, is nearest to the principle of Desire, and is thus distinguished
from its other side which has affinity for the spiritual principles above. If
the Thinker, then, becomes wholly intellectual, the entire nature begins to
tend downward; for intellect alone is cold, heartless, selfish, because it is
not lighted up by the two other principles of Buddhi and Atma.
In Manas the thoughts of
all lives are stored. That is to say: in any one life, the sum total of
thoughts underlying all the acts of the lifetime will be of one character in
general, but may be placed in one or more classes. That is, the business man of
today is a single type; his entire life thoughts represent but one single
thread of thought. The artist is another. The man who has engaged in business,
but also thought much upon fame and power which he never attained, is still
another.
The great mass of
self-sacrificing, courageous, and strong poor people who have but little time
to think, constitute another distinct class. In all these the total quantity of
life thoughts makes up the stream or thread of a life's meditation --
"that upon which the heart was set" -- and is stored in Manas, to be
brought out again at any time in whatever life the brain and bodily environments
are similar to those used in engendering that class of thoughts.
It is Manas which sees
the objects presented to it by the bodily organs and the actual organs within.
When the open eye receives a picture on the retina, the whole scene is turned
into vibrations in the optic nerves which disappear into the brain, where Manas
is enabled to perceive them as idea. And so with every other organ or sense. If
the connection between Manas and the brain be broken, intelligence will not be
manifested unless Manas has by training found out how to project the astral
body from the physical and thereby keep up communication with fellowmen.
That the organs and
senses do not cognize objects, hypnotism,
mesmerism, and
spiritualism have now proved. For, as we see in mesmeric and hypnotic
experiments, the object seen or felt, and from which all the effects of solid
objects may be sensed, is often only an idea existing in the operator's brain.
In the same way Manas, using the astral body, has only to impress an idea upon
the other person to make the latter see the idea and translate it into a visible
body from which the usual effects of density and weight seem to follow.
And in hypnotism there
are many experiments, all of which go to show that so called matter is not per
se solid or dense; that sight does not always depend on the eye and rays of
light proceeding from an object; that the intangible for one normal brain and
organs may be perfectly tangible for another; and that physical
effects in the body may
be produced from an idea solely.
The well-known
experiments of producing a blister by a simple piece of paper, or preventing a
real blistering plaster from making a blister, by force of the idea conveyed to
a subject, either that there was to be or not to be a blister,
conclusively prove the
power of effecting an impulse on matter by the use of that which is called
Manas. But all these phenomena are the exhibition of the powers of lower Manas
acting in the astral Body and the fourth principle -- Desire, using the
physical body as the field for the exhibition of the forces.
It is this lower Manas
which retains all the impressions of a lifetime and sometimes strangely
exhibits them in trances or dreams, delirium, induced states, here and there in
normal conditions, and very often at the time of physical death. But it is so
occupied with the brain, with memory and with sensation, that it usually
presents but few recollections out of the mass of events that years have
brought before it. It interferes with the action of Higher Manas because just
at the present point of evolution, Desire and all corresponding powers,
faculties, and senses are the most highly developed, thus obscuring, as it
were, the white light of the spiritual side of Manas. It is tinted by each
object presented to it, whether it be a thought-object or a material one. That
is to say, Lower Manas operating through the brain is at once altered into the
shape and other characteristics of any object, mental or otherwise. This causes
it to have four peculiarities.
First, to
naturally fly off from any point, object, or subject;
second, to
fly to some pleasant idea;
third, to
fly to an unpleasant idea;
fourth, to
remain passive and considering naught.
The first is due to
memory and the natural motion of Manas; the second and third are due to memory
alone; the fourth signifies sleep when not abnormal, and when abnormal is going
toward insanity. These mental characteristics all belonging to Lower Manas, are
those which the Higher Manas, aided by Buddhi and Atma, has to fight and
conquer. Higher Manas, if able to act, becomes what we sometimes call Genius;
if completely master, then one may become a god.
But memory continually
presents pictures to Lower Manas, and the result is that the Higher is
obscured. Sometimes, however, along the pathway of life we do see here and
there men who are geniuses or great seers and prophets. In these the Higher
powers of Manas are active and the person illuminated. Such were the great
Sages of the past, men like Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, Zoroaster, andothers. Poets, too, such as Tennyson, Longfellow, and
others, are men in whom Higher Manas now and then sheds a bright ray on the man
below, to be soon obscured, however, by the effect of dogmatic religious
education which has given memory certain pictures that always prevent Manas
from gaining full activity.
In this higher Trinity,
we have the God above each one; this is Atma, and may be called the Higher
Self.
Next is the spiritual
part of the soul called Buddhi; when thoroughly united with Manas this may be
called the Divine Ego.
The inner Ego, who reincarnates,
taking on body after body, storing up the impressions of life after life,
gaining experience and adding it to the divine Ego, suffering and enjoying
through an immense period of years, is the fifth principle -- Manas -- not
united to Buddhi. This is the permanent individuality which gives to every man
the feeling of being himself and not some other; that which through all the
changes of the days and nights from youth to the end of life makes us feel one
identity through all the period; it bridges the gap made by sleep; in like
manner it bridges the gap made by the sleep of death.
It is this, and not our
brain, that lifts us above the animal. The depth and variety of the brain
convolutions in man are caused by the presence of Manas, and are not the cause
of mind. And when we either wholly or now and then become consciously united
with Buddhi, the Spiritual Soul, we behold God, as it were.
This is what the
ancients all desired to see, but what the moderns do not believe in, the latter
preferring rather to throw away their own right to be great in nature, and to
worship an imaginary god made up solely of their own fancies and not very
different from weak human nature.
This permanent
individuality in the present race has therefore been through every sort of
experience, for Theosophy insists on its permanence and in the necessity for
its continuing to take part in evolution. It has a duty to perform, consisting
in raising up to a higher state all the matter concerned in the chain of globes
to which the earth belongs. We have all lived and taken part in civilization
after civilization, race after race, on earth, and will so continue throughout
all the rounds and races until the seventh is complete.
At the same time it
should be remembered that the matter of this globe and that connected with it
has also been through every kind of form, with possibly some exceptions in very
low planes of mineral formation. But in general all the matter visible, or held
in space still unprecipitated, has been moulded at one time or another into forms of all varieties,
many of these being such as we now have no idea of.
The processes of
evolution, therefore, in some departments, now go forward with greater rapidity
than in former ages because both Manas and matter have acquired facility of
action. Especially is this so in regard to man, who is the farthest ahead of
all things or beings in this evolution. He is now incarnated and projected into
life more quickly than in earlier periods when it consumed many years to obtain
a "coat of skin." This coming into life over and over again cannot be
avoided by the ordinary man because Lower Manas is still bound by Desire, which
is the preponderating principle at the present period.
Being so influenced by
Desire Manas is continually deluded while in the body, and being thus deluded
is unable to prevent the action upon it of the forces set up in the life time.
These forces are generated by Manas, that is, by the thinking of the life time.
Each thought makes a physical as well as mental link with the desire in which
it is rooted. All life is filled with such thoughts, and when the period of
rest after death is ended Manas is bound by innumerable electrical magnetic
threads to earth by reason of the thoughts of the last life, and therefore by
desire, for it was desire that caused so many thoughts and ignorance of the
true nature of things. An understanding of this doctrine of man being really a
thinker and made of thought will make clear all the rest in relation to
incarnation and reincarnation. The body of the inner man is made of thought,
and this being so it must follow that if the thoughts have more affinity for
earth-life than for life elsewhere a return to life here is inevitable. At the present
day Manas is not fully active in the race, as Desire still is uppermost. In the
next cycle of the human period Manas will be fully active and developed in the
entire race. Hence the people of the earth have not yet come to the point of
making a conscious choice as to the path they will take; but when in the cycle
referred to, Manas is active, all will then be compelled to consciously make
the choice to right or left, the one leading to complete and conscious union
with Atma, the other to the annihilation of those beings who prefer that path.
CHAPTER 8
Of Reincarnation
How man has come to be
the complex being that he is and why, are questions that neither Science nor
Religion makes conclusive answer to. This immortal thinker having such vast
powers and possibilities, all his because of his intimate connection with every
secret part of Nature from which he has been built up,
stands at the top of an
immense and silent evolution. He asks why Nature exists, what the drama of life
has for its aim, how that aim may be attained. But Science and Religion both
fail to give a reasonable reply. Science does not pretend to be able to give
the solution, saying that the examination of things as they are is enough of a
task; religion offers an explanation both illogical and unmeaning and
acceptable but to the bigot, as it requires us to consider the whole of Nature
as a mystery and to seek for the meaning and purpose of life with all its
sorrow in the pleasure of a God who cannot be found out. The educated and enquiring
mind knows that dogmatic religion can only give an answer invented by man while
it pretends to be from God.
What then is the
universe for, and for what final purpose is man the immortal thinker here in
evolution? It is all for the experience and emancipation of the soul, for the
purpose of raising the entire mass of manifested matter up to the
stature, nature, and
dignity of conscious god-hood. The great aim is to reach self-consciousness;
not through a race or a tribe or some flavoured nation,
but by and through the perfecting, after transformation, of the whole mass of
matter as well as what we now call soul. Nothing is or is to be left out.
The aim for present man
is his initiation into complete knowledge, and for the other kingdoms below him
that they may be raised up gradually from stage to stage to be in time
initiated also. This is evolution carried to its highest power; it is a
magnificent prospect; it makes of man a god, and gives to every part of nature the
possibility of being one day the same; there is strength and nobility in it, for
by this no man is dwarfed and belittled, for no one is so originally sinful that
he cannot rise above all sin. Treated from the materialistic position of
Science, evolution takes
in but half of life; while the religious conception of it is a mixture of
nonsense and fear.
Present religions keep
the element of fear, and at the same time imagine that an Almighty being can
think of no other earth but this and has to govern this one very imperfectly.
But the old
theosophical view makes
the universe a vast, complete, and perfect whole.
Now the moment we
postulate a double evolution, physical and spiritual, we have at the same time to
admit that it can only be carried on by reincarnation. This is, in fact,
demonstrated by science. It is shown that the matter of the earth and of all
things physical upon it was at one time either gaseous or molten;
that it cooled; that it
altered; that from its alterations and evolutions at last were produced all the
great variety of things and beings. This, on the physical plane, is
transformation or change from one form to another.
The total mass of matter
is about the same as in the beginning of this globe, with a very minute
allowance for some star dust. Hence it must have been changed over and over
again, and thus been physically reformed and reimbodied.
Of course, to be strictly accurate, we cannot use the word reincarnation,
because "incarnate" refers to flesh. Let us say "reimbodied," and then we see that both for matter and
for man there has been a constant change of form and this is, broadly speaking,
"reincarnation." As to the whole mass of matter, the doctrine is that
it will all be raised to man's estate when man has gone further on himself.
There is no residuum
left after man's final salvation which in a mysterious way is to be disposed of
or done away with in some remote dust-heap of nature. The true doctrine allows
for nothing like that, and at the same time is not afraid to give the true
disposition of what would seem to be a residuum. It is all worked up into other
states, for as the philosophy declares there is no inorganic matter whatever
but that every atom is alive and has the germ of self-consciousness, it must
follow that one day it will all have been changed.
Thus what is now called
human flesh is so much matter that one day was wholly mineral, later on
vegetable, and now refined into human atoms. At a point of time very far from
now the present vegetable matter will have been raised to the animal stage and
what we now use as our organic or fleshy matter will have
changed by
transformation through evolution into self-conscious thinkers, and so on up the
whole scale until the time shall come when what is now known as mineral matter
will have passed on to the human stage and out into that of thinker.
Then at the coming on of
another great period of evolution the mineral matter of that time will be some
which is now passing through its lower transformations on other planets and in
other systems of worlds. This is perhaps a "fanciful" scheme for the
men of the present day, who are so accustomed to being called bad, sinful,
weak, and utterly foolish from their birth that they fear to believe the truth
about themselves, but for the disciples of the ancient theosophists it is not
impossible or fanciful, but is logical and vast. And no doubt it will one day
be admitted by everyone when the mind of the western race has broken away from
Mosaic chronology and Mosaic ideas of men and nature.
Therefore as to
reincarnation and metempsychosis we say that they are first to be applied to
the whole cosmos and not alone to man. But as man is the most interesting
object to himself, we will consider in detail its application to him.
This is the most ancient
of doctrines and is believed in now by more human minds than the number of
those who do not hold it. The millions in the East almost all accept it; it was
taught by the Greeks; a large number of the Chinese now believe it as their
forefathers did before them; the Jews thought it was true,
and it has not
disappeared from their religion; and Jesus, who is called the founder of
Christianity, also believed and taught it. In the early Christian church it was
known and taught, and the very best of the fathers of the church believed and
promulgated it.
Christians should
remember that Jesus was a Jew who thought his mission was to Jews, for he says
in St. Matthew, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of
this can be seen by
consulting St. Matthew in chapters xvii, xi, and others.
In these it is very
clear that Jesus is shown as approving the doctrine of reincarnation. And
following Jesus we find St. Paul, in Romans ix, speaking of Esau and Jacob
being actually in existence before they were born, and later such great
Christian fathers as Origen, Synesius,
and others believing and teaching
the theory. In Proverbs
viii, 22, we have Solomon saying that when the earth was made he was present,
and that, long before he could have been born as Solomon, his delights were in
the habitable parts of the earth with the sons of men. St. John the Revelator
says in Revs. iii, 12, he was told in a vision which refers to the voice of God
or the voice of one speaking for God, that whosoever should overcome would not
be under the necessity of "going out" any more, that is, would not
need to be reincarnated. For five hundred years after Jesus the
doctrine was taught in
the church until the council of Constantinople.
Then a condemnation was
passed upon a phase of the question which has been regarded by many as against
reincarnation, but if that condemnation goes against the words of Jesus it is
of no effect. It does go against him, and thus the church is in the position of
saying in effect that Jesus did not know enough to curse, as it did, a doctrine
known and taught in his day and which was brought to his notice prominently and
never condemned but in fact approved by him.
Christianity is a Jewish
religion, and this doctrine of reincarnation belongs to it historically by
succession from the Jews, and also by reason of its having been taught by Jesus
and the early fathers of the church. If there be any truthful or logical way
for the Christian church to get out of this position -- excluding, of course,
dogmas of the church -- the theosophist would like to be shown it.
Indeed, the theosophist
holds that whenever a professed Christian denies the theory he thereby sets up
his judgment against that of Jesus, who must have known more about the matter
than those who follow him. It is the anathema hurled by the church council and
the absence of the doctrine from the teaching now that have damaged
Christianity and made of all the Christian nations people who pretend to be
followers of Jesus and the law of love, but who really as nations are followers
of the Mosaic law of retaliation. For alone in reincarnation is the answer to
all the problems of life, and in it and Karma is the force that will make men
pursue in fact the ethics they have in theory. It is the aim of the old
philosophy to restore this doctrine to whatsoever religion has lost it; and
hence we call it the "lost chord of Christianity."
But who or what is it that
reincarnates? It is not the body, for that dies and disintegrates; and but few
of us would like to be chained forever to such bodies as we now have, admitted
to be infected with disease except in the case of the savage. It is not the
astral body, for, as shown, that also has its term and must go to pieces after
the physical has gone. Nor is it the passions and desires. They, to be sure,
have a very long term, because they have the power to reproduce themselves in
each life so long as we do not eradicate them. And reincarnation provides for
that, since we are given by it many opportunities of slowly, one by one,
killing off the desires and passions which mar the heavenly
picture of the spiritual
man.
It has been shown how
the passional part of us coalesces with the astral
after death and makes a seeming being that has a short life to live while it is
disintegrating. When the separation is complete between the body that has died,
the astral body, and the passions and desires -- life having begun to busy itself
with other forms -- the Higher Triad, Manas, Buddhi, and Atma, who are the real
man, immediately go into another state, and when that state, which is called
Devachan, or heaven, is over, they are attracted back to earth for reincarnation.
They are the immortal part of us; they, in fact, and no other are we. This
should be firmly grasped by the mind, for upon its clear understanding
depends the
comprehension of the entire doctrine.
What stands in the way
of the modern western man's seeing this clearly is the long training we have
all had in materialistic science and materializing religion, both of which have
made the mere physical body too prominent. The one has taught of matter alone
and the other has preached the resurrection of the body, a doctrine against
common sense, fact, logic, and testimony. But there is no doubt that the theory
of the bodily resurrection has arisen from the corruption of the older and true
teaching. Resurrection is founded on what Job says about seeing his redeemer in
his flesh, and on St. Paul's remark that the body was raised incorruptible. But
Job was an Egyptian who spoke of seeing his teacher or initiator, who was the
redeemer, and Jesus and Paul referred to the spiritual body only. Although
reincarnation is the law of nature, the complete trinity of
Atma-Buddhi-Manas does
not yet fully incarnate in this race. They use and occupy the body by means of
the entrance of Manas, the lowest of the three, and the other two shine upon it
from above, constituting the God in Heaven. This was symbolized in the old
Jewish teaching about the Heavenly Man who stands with his head in heaven and
his feet in hell. That is, the head Atma and Buddhi are yet in heaven, and the
feet, Manas, walk in hell, which is the body and physical life. For that reason
man is not yet fully conscious, and reincarnations are needed to at last
complete the incarnation of the whole trinity in the body.
When that has been
accomplished the race will have become as gods, and the godlike trinity being
in full possession the entire mass of matter will be perfected and raised up
for the next step. This is the real meaning of "the word made flesh."
It was so grand a thing in the case of any single person, such as Jesus or
Buddha, as to be looked upon as a divine incarnation. And out of this, too,
comes the idea of the crucifixion, for Manas is thus crucified for the purpose
of raising up the thief to paradise.
It is because the
trinity is not yet incarnate in the race that life has so many mysteries, some
of which are showing themselves from day to day in all the various experiments
made on and in man.
The physician knows not
what life is nor why the body moves as it does, because the spiritual portion
is yet enshrouded in the clouds of heaven; the scientist is wandering in the
dark, confounded and confused by all that hypnotism and other strange things
bring before him, because the conscious man is out of sight on the very top of
the divine mountain, thus compelling the learned to speak of the
"subconscious mind," the "latent personality," and the
like; and the priest can give us no light at all because he denies man's
god-like nature, reduces all to the level of original sin, and puts upon our
conception of God the black mark of inability to control or manage the creation
without invention of expedients to cure supposed errors. But this old truth
solves the riddle and paints God and Nature in harmonious colors.
Reincarnation does not
mean that we go into animal forms after death, as is believed by some Eastern
peoples. "Once a man always a man" is the saying in the Great Lodge.
But it would not be too much punishment for some men were it possible to
condemn them to rebirth in brute bodies; however nature does not go by sentiment
but by law, and we, not being able to see all, cannot say that the brutal man
is brute all through his nature. And evolution having brought Manas the Thinker
and Immortal Person on to this plane, cannot send him back to the brute which
has not Manas.
By looking into two
explanations for the literal acceptation by some people in the East of those
laws of Manu which seem to teach the transmigrating into brutes, insects, and
so on, we can see how the true student of this doctrine will not fall into the
same error.
The first is, that the
various verses and books teaching such transmigration have to do with the
actual method of reincarnation, that is, with the explanation of the actual
physical processes which have to be undergone by the Ego in passing from the unembodied to the embodied state, and also with the roads,
ways, or means of descent from the invisible to the visible plane.
This has not yet been
plainly explained in Theosophical books, because on the one hand it is a
delicate matter, and on the other the details would not as yet be received even
by Theosophists with credence, although one day they will be. And as these
details are not of the greatest importance they are not now expounded.
But as we know that no
human body is formed without the union of the sexes, and that the germs for
such production are locked up in the sexes and must come from food which is
taken into the body, it is obvious that foods have something to do with the
reincarnating of the Ego. Now if the road to reincarnation leads through
certain food and none other, it may be possible that if the Ego gets entangled
in food which will not lead to the germ of physical reproduction, a punishment
is indicated where Manu says that such and such practices will lead to
transmigration, which is then a "hindrance." I throw this out so far
for the benefit of certain theosophists who read these and whose theories on
this subject are now rather vague and in some instances based on quite other
hypotheses.
The second explanation is,
that inasmuch as nature intends us to use the matter which comes into our body
and astral body for the purpose, among others, of benefiting the matter by the
impress it gets from association with the human Ego, if we use it so as to give
it only a brutal impression it must fly back to the animal kingdom to be
absorbed there instead of being refined and kept on the human plane. And as all
the matter which the human Ego gathered to it retains the stamp or photographic
impression of the human being, the matter transmigrates to the lower level when
given an animal impress by the Ego. This actual fact in the great chemical
laboratory of nature could easily be misconstrued by the ignorant. But the
present-day students know that once Manas the Thinker has arrived on the scene
he does not return to baser forms; first, because he does not wish to, and
second, because he cannot. For just as the blood in the body is prevented by
valves from rushing back and engorging the heart, so in this greater system of
universal circulation the door is shut behind the Thinker and prevents his
retrocession. Reincarnation as a doctrine applying to the real man does not
teach transmigration into kingdoms of nature below the human.
CHAPTER 9
Reincarnation Continued
In the West, where the
object of life is commercial, financial, social, or scientific success, that
is, personal profit, aggrandizement, and power, the real life of man receives
but little attention, and we, unlike the Orientals, give scant prominence to
the doctrine of pre-existence and reincarnation.
That the church denies
it is enough for many, with whom no argument is of any use.
Relying on the church,
they do not wish to disturb the serenity of their faith in dogmas that may be
illogical; and as they have been taught that the church can bind them in hell,
a blind fear of the anathema hurled at reincarnation in the Constantinople
council about 500 AD would alone debar them from accepting the accursed theory.
And the church in arguing on the doctrine urges the objection that if men are
convinced that they will live many lives, the temptation to accept the present
and do evil without check will be too strong. Absurd as this seems, it is put
forward by learned Jesuits, who say men will rather have the present chance than
wait for others.
If there were no
retribution at all this would be a good objection, but as Nature has also a
Nemesis for every evil doer, and as each, under the law of Karma -- which is
that of cause and effect and perfect justice -- must receive the exact consequences
himself in every life for what good or bad deeds and thoughts he did and had in
other lives, the basis for moral conduct is secure. It is safe under this
system, since no man can by any possibility, or favor, or edict, or belief escape
the consequences, and each one who grasps this doctrine will be moved by
conscience and the whole power of nature to do well in order that he may
receive good and become happy.
It is maintained that
the idea of rebirth is uncongenial and unpleasant because on the one hand it is
cold, allowing no sentiment to interfere, prohibiting us from renouncing at
will a life which we have found to be sorrowful; and on the other, that there
appears to be no chance under it for us to see our loved ones who have passed
away before us. But whether we like it or not Nature's laws go forward
unerringly, and sentiment or feeling can in no way avert the consequence that
must follow a cause. If we eat bad food bad results must come. The glutton
would have Nature permit him to gorge himself without the indigestion which
will come, but Nature's laws are not to be thus put aside.
Now, the objection to
reincarnation that we will not see our loved ones in heaven as promised in
dogmatic religion, presupposes a complete stoppage of the evolution and
development of those who leave earth before ourselves, and also assumes that
recognition is dependent on physical appearance. But as we progress in this
life, so also must we progress upon leaving it, and it would be unfair to compel
the others to await our arrival in order that we may recognize them. And if one
reflects on the natural consequences of arising to heaven where all trammels
are cast off, it must be apparent that those who have been there, say, twenty
of mortal years before us must, in the nature of things mental and spiritual,
have made a progress equal to many hundreds of years here under varied and very
favourable circumstances. How then could we, arriving
later and still imperfect, be able to recognize those who had been perfecting
themselves in heaven with such advantages? And as we know that the body is left
behind to disintegrate, so, it is evident, recognition cannot depend, in the
spiritual and mental life, on physical appearance. For not only is this thus
plain, but since we are aware that an unhandsome or deformed body often
enshrines a glorious mind and pure soul, and that a beautifully formed exterior
-- such as in the case of the Borgias -- may hide an
incarnate devil in character, the physical form gives no guarantee of
recognition in that world where the body is absent. And the mother who has lost
a child who had grown to maturity must know that she loved the child when a
baby as much as afterwards when the great alteration to later life had
completely swept away the form and features of early youth.
The Theosophists see
that this objection can have no existence in the face of the eternal and pure
life of the soul. And Theosophy also teaches that those who are like unto each
other and love each other will be reincarnated together whenever the conditions
permit. Whenever one of us has gone farther on the road to
perfection, he will
always be moved to help and comfort those who belong to the same family. But
when one has become gross and selfish and wicked, no one would want his
companionship in any life. Recognition depends on the inner sight and not on
outward appearance; hence there is no force in this objection. And the other
phase of it relating to loss of parent, child, or relative is based on the erroneous
notion that as the parents give the child its body so also is given its soul.
But soul is immortal and parentless; hence this objection is without a root.
Some urge that Heredity
invalidates Reincarnation. We urge it as proof. Heredity in giving us a body in
any family provides the appropriate environment for the Ego. The Ego only goes
into the family which either completely answers to its whole nature, or which
gives an opportunity for the working out of its evolution, and which is also
connected with it by reason of past
incarnations or causes
mutually set up. Thus the evil child may come to the presently good family
because parents and child are indissolubly connected by past actions. It is a
chance for redemption to the child and the occasion of punishment to the
parents. This points to
bodily heredity as a natural rule governing the bodies we must inhabit, just as
the houses in a city will show the mind of the builders.
And as we as well as our
parents were the makers and influencers of bodies, took part in and are
responsible for states of society in which the development of physical body and
brain was either retarded or helped on, debased or the contrary, so we are in
this life responsible for the civilization in which we now appear. But when we
look at the characters in human bodies, great inherent differences are seen.
This is due to the soul inside, who is suffering or enjoying in the family,
nation, and race his own thoughts and acts in the past lives have made it
inevitable he should incarnate with.
Heredity provides the
tenement and also imposes those limitations of capacity of brain or body which
are often a punishment and sometimes a help, but it does not affect the real
Ego. The transmission of traits is a physical matter, and
nothing more than the
coming out into a nation of the consequences of the prior lives of all Egos who
are to be in that race. The limitations imposed on the Ego by any family
heredity are exact consequences of that Ego's prior lives.
The fact that such
physical traits and mental peculiarities are transmitted does not confute
reincarnation, since we know that the guiding mind and real character of each
are not the result of a body and brain but are peculiar to the Ego in its essential
life. Transmission of trait and tendency by means of parent and body
is exactly the mode
selected by nature for providing the incarnating Ego with the proper tenement
in which to carry on its work. Another mode would be impossible and subversive
of order.
Again, those who dwell
on the objection from heredity forget that they are accentuating similarities
and overlooking divergencies. For while
investigations on the line of heredity have recorded many transmitted traits,
they have not done so in respect to divergencies from
heredity vastly greater in number. Every
mother knows that the
children of a family are as different in character as the fingers on one hand
-- they are all from the same parents, but all vary incharacter
and capacity.
But heredity as the
great rule and as a complete explanation is absolutely overthrown by history,
which shows no constant transmission of learning, power, and capacity. For
instance, in the case of the ancient Egyptians long gone and their line of
transmission shattered, we have no transmission to their
descendants.
If physical heredity
settles the question of character, how has the great Egyptian character been
lost? The same question holds in respect to other ancient and extinct nations.
And taking an individual illustration we have the great musician Bach, whose
direct descendants showed a decrease in musical ability leading to its final
disappearance from the family stock. But Theosophy teaches that in both of
these instances -- as in all like them -- the real capacity and ability have
only disappeared from a family and national body, but are retained in the Egos
who once exhibited them, being now incarnated in some other nation and family
of the present time.
Suffering comes to
nearly all men, and a great many live lives of sorrow from the cradle to the
grave, so it is objected that reincarnation is unjust because we suffer for the
wrong done by some other person in another life. This objection is based on the
false notion that the person in the other life was some one else. But in every
life it is the same person. When we come again we do not take up the body of
some one else, nor another's deeds, but are like an actor who plays many parts,
the same actor inside though the costumes and the lines recited differ in each
new play. Shakespeare was right in saying that life is a play, for the great
life of the soul is a drama, and each new life and rebirth another act in which
we assume another part and put on a new dress, but
all through it we are
the selfsame person. So instead of its being unjust, it is perfect justice, and
in no other manner could justice be preserved.
But, it is said, if we
reincarnate how is it that we do not remember the other life; and further, as
we cannot remember the deeds for which we suffer is it not unjust for that
reason? Those who ask this always ignore the fact that they also have enjoyment
and reward in life and are content to accept them without
question. For if it is
unjust to be punished for deeds we do not remember, then it is also inequitable
to be rewarded for other acts which have been forgotten.
Mere entry into life is
no fit foundation for any reward or punishment. Reward and punishment must be
the just desert for prior conduct. Nature's law of justice is not imperfect,
and it is only the imperfection of human justice that requires the offender to
know and remember in this life a deed to which a penalty is annexed. In the
prior life the doer was then quite aware of what he did, and nature affixes
consequences to his acts, being thus just.
We well know that she
will make the effect follow the cause whatever we wish and whether we remember
or forget what we did. If a baby is hurt in its first years by the nurse so as
to lay the ground for a crippling disease in after life, as is often the case,
the crippling disease will come although the child neither brought on the
present cause nor remembered aught about it. But reincarnation, with its companion
doctrine of Karma, rightly understood, shows how perfectly just the whole
scheme of nature is.
Memory of a prior life
is not needed to prove that we passed through that existence, nor is the fact
of not remembering a good objection. We forget the greater part of the occurrences
of the years and days of this life, but no one would say for that reason we did
not go through these years.
They were lived, and we
retain but little of the details in the brain, but the entire effect of them on
the character is kept and made a part of ourselves. The whole mass of detail of
a life is preserved in the inner man to be one day fully brought back
to the conscious memory
in some other life when we are perfected. And even now, imperfect as we are and
little as we know, the experiments in hypnotism show that all the smallest
details are registered in what is for the present known as the subconscious
mind. The theosophical doctrine is that not a single one of these happenings is
forgotten in fact, and at the end of life when the eyes are closed and those
about say we are dead every thought and circumstance of life flash vividly into
and across the mind.
Many persons do,
however, remember that they have lived before. Poets have sung of this,
children know it well, until the constant living in an atmosphere of unbelief
drives the recollection from their minds for the present, but all are
subject to the
limitations imposed upon the Ego by the new brain in each life.
This is why we are not
able to keep the pictures of the past, whether of this life or the preceding
ones. The brain is the instrument for the memory of the soul, and, being new in
each life with but a certain capacity, the Ego is only able to use it for the
new life up to its capacity. That capacity will be fully
availed of or the
contrary, just according to the Ego's own desire and prior conduct, because
such past living will have increased or diminished its power to overcome the
forces of material existence.
By living according to
the dictates of the soul the brain may at least be made porous to the soul's
recollections; if the contrary sort of a life is led, then more and more will
clouds obscure that reminiscence. But as the brain had no part in the life last
lived, it is in general unable to remember. And this is a wise law, for we
should be very miserable if the deeds and scenes of our former
lives were not hidden
from our view until by discipline we become able to bear a knowledge of them.
Another objection
brought up is that under the doctrine of reincarnation it is not possible to
account for the increase of the world's population. This assumes that we know
surely that its population has increased and are keeping informed of its
fluctuations. But it is not certain that the inhabitants of the globe
have increased, and,
further, vast numbers of people are annually destroyed of whom we know nothing.
In
Statistics of famine
have not been made. We do not know by how many thousands the deaths in
It also assumes that
there are fewer Egos out of incarnation and waiting to come in than the number
of those inhabiting bodies, and this is incorrect. Annie Besant has put this
well in her "Reincarnation" by saying that the inhabited globe
resembles a hall in a town which is filled from the much greater population of
the town outside; the number in the hall may vary, but there is a constant
source of supply from the town. It is true that so far as concerns this globe
the number of Egos belonging to it is definite; but no one knows what that
quantity is nor what is the total capacity of the earth for sustaining them.
The statisticians of the
day are chiefly in the West, and their tables embrace but a small section of
the history of man. They cannot say how many persons were incarnated on the
earth at any prior date when the globe was full in all parts, hence the quantity
of egos willing or waiting to be reborn is unknown to the men of today. The
Masters of theosophical knowledge say that the total number of such egos is
vast, and for that reason the supply of those for the occupation of bodies to
be born over and above the number that die is sufficient. Then too it must be
borne in mind that each ego for itself varies the length of stay in the post-mortem
states. They do not reincarnate at the same interval, but come out of the state
after death at different rates, and whenever there occurs a great number of
deaths by war, pestilence, or famine, there is at once a rush of souls to
incarnation, either in the same place or in some other place or race.
The earth is so small a
globe in the vast assemblage of inhabitable planets there is a sufficient
supply of Egos for incarnation here. But with due respect to those who put this
objection, I do not see that it has the slightest force or any
relation to the truth of
the doctrine of reincarnation.
CHAPTER 10
Arguments Supporting
Reincarnation
Unless we deny the
immortality of man and the existence of soul, there are no sound arguments
against the doctrine of pre-existence and rebirth save such as rest on the
dictum of the church that each soul is a new creation. This dictum can be
supported only by blind dogmatism, for given a soul we must sooner or later
arrive at the theory of rebirth, because even if each soul is new on this earth
it must keep on living somewhere after passing away, and in view of the known
order of nature will have other bodies in other planets or spheres.
Theosophy applies to the
self -- the thinker -- the same laws which are seen everywhere in operation
throughout nature, and those are all varieties of the great law that effects
follow causes and no effect is without a cause.
The soul's immortality
-- believed in by the mass of humanity -- demands embodiment here or elsewhere,
and to be embodied means reincarnation. If we come to this earth for but a few
years and then go to some other, the soul must be reimbodied
there as well as here, and if we have travelled from
some other world we must have had there too our proper vesture. The powers of
mind and the laws governing its motion, its attachment, and its detachment as
given in theosophical philosophy show that its reimbodiment
must be here, where it moved and worked, until such time as the mind is able to
overcome the forces which chain it to this globe. To permit the involved entity
to transfer itself to another scene of action before it had overcome all the
causes drawing it here and without its having worked out its responsibilities
to other entities in the same stream of evolution would be unjust and contrary
to the powerful occult laws and forces which continually operate upon it. The
early Christian Fathers saw this, and taught that the soul had fallen into
matter and was obliged by the law of its nature to toil upward again to the
place from which it came. They used an old
Greek hymn which ran:
Eternal Mind, thy seedling spark,
Through this thin vase of clay,
Athwart the waves of chaos dark
Emits a timorous ray.
This mind enfolding soul is sown,
Incarnate germ in earth:
In pity, blessed Lord, then own
What claims in Thee its birth.
Far forth from Thee, thou central fire,
To earth's sad bondage cast,
Let not the trembling spark expire;
Absorb thine own at
last!
Each human being has a
definite character different from every other human being, and masses of beings
aggregated into nations show as wholes that the national force and
distinguishing peculiarities go to make up a definite and separate national
character. These differences, both individual and national,
are due to essential
character and not to education.
Even the doctrine of the
survival of the fittest should show this, for the fitness can not come from nothing
but must at last show itself from the coming to the surface of the actual inner
character. And as both individuals and nations among those who are ahead in the
struggle with nature exhibit an immense force in their character, we must find
a place and time where the force was evolved.
These, Theosophy says, are this
earth and the whole period during which the human race has been on the planet.
So, then, while heredity
has something to do with the difference in character as to force and morale,
swaying the soul and mind a little and furnishing also the appropriate place
for receiving reward and punishment, it is not the cause for the essential
nature shown by every one.
But all these
differences, such as those shown by babes from birth, by adults as character
comes forth more and more, and by nations in their history, are due to long
experience gained during many lives on earth, are the outcome of the soul's own
evolution.
A survey of one short
human life gives no ground for the
production of his inner
nature. It is needful that each soul should have all possible experience, and
one life cannot give this even under the best conditions.
It would be folly for
the Almighty to put us here for such a short time, only to remove us just when
we had begun to see the object of life and the possibilities in it. The mere
selfish desire of a person to escape the trials and discipline of life is not
enough to set nature's laws aside, so the soul must be reborn until it has
ceased to set in motion the cause of rebirth, after having developed character
up to its possible limit as indicated by all the varieties of human nature,
when every experience has been passed through, and not until all of truth that
can be known has been acquired. The vast disparity among men in respect to
capacity compels us, if we wish to ascribe justice to Nature or to God, to
admit reincarnation and to trace the origin of the disparity back to the past
lives of the Ego. For people are as much hindered and handicapped, abused and
made the victims of seeming injustice because of limited capacity, as they are
by reason of circumstances of birth or education.
We see the uneducated
rising above circumstances of family and training, and often those born in good
families have very small capacity; but the troubles of nations and families
arise from want of capacity more than from any other cause.
And if we consider
savage races only, there the seeming injustice is enormous. For many savages
have good actual brain capacity but still are savage. This is because the Ego
in that body is still savage and undeveloped, for in contrast to the savage
there are many civilized men with small actual brain force who are
not savage in nature
because the indwelling Ego has had long experience in civilization during other
lives, and being a more developed soul has power to use the brain instrument to
its highest limit.
Each man feels and knows
that he has an individuality of his own, a personal identity which bridges over
not only the gaps made by sleep but also those sometimes supervening on
temporary lesions in the brain. This identity never breaks from beginning to
end of life in the normal person, and only the
persistence and eternal
character of the soul will account for it.
So, ever since we began
to remember, we know that our personal identity has not failed us, no matter
how bad may be our memory.
This disposes of the argument
that identity depends on recollection, for the reason that if it did depend
alone on recollection we should each day have to begin over again, as we cannot
remember the events of the past in detail, and some minds remember but little
yet feel their personal identity. And as it is often seen that some who
remember the least insist as strongly as the others on their personal identity,
that persistence of feeling must come from the old and immortal soul.
Viewing life and its probable
object, with all the varied experience possible for man, one must be forced to
the conclusion that a single life is not enough for carrying out all that is
intended by Nature, to say nothing of what man
himself desires to do.
The scale of variety in experience is enormous. There is a vast range of powers
latent in man which we see may be developed if opportunity be given. Knowledge
infinite in scope and diversity lies before us, and especially in these days
when special investigation is the rule. We perceive
that we have high
aspirations with no time to reach up to their measure, while the great troop of
passions and desires, selfish motives and ambitions, war with us and among
themselves, pursuing us even to the door of death.
All these have to be
tried, conquered, used, subdued. One life is not enough for all this. To say
that we have but one life here with such possibilities put before us and impossible
of development is to make the universe and life a huge and cruel joke
perpetrated by a
powerful God who is thus accused, by those who believe in a special creation of
souls, of triumphing and playing with puny man just because that man is small
and the creature of the Almighty.
A human life at most is seventy
years; statistics reduce this to about forty; and out of that little remainder
a large part is spent in sleep and another part in childhood. Thus in one life
it is perfectly impossible to attain to the merest fraction of what
Nature evidently has in
view. We see many truths vaguely which a life gives us no time to grasp, and
especially is this so when men have to make such a struggle to live at all. Our
faculties are small or dwarfed or weak; one life gives no opportunity to alter
this; we perceive other powers latent in us that cannot possibly be brought out
in such a small space of time; and we have much
more than a suspicion
that the extent of the field of truth is vastly greater than the narrow circle
we are confined to.
It is not reasonable to
suppose that either God or nature projects us into a body simply to fill us
with bitterness because we can have no other opportunity here, but rather we
must conclude that a series of incarnations has led to the present condition,
and that the process of coming here again and again must go on for the purpose
of affording us the opportunity needed.
The mere fact of dying
is not of itself enough to bring about development of faculties or the
elimination of wrong tendency and inclination. If we assume that upon entering heaven
we at once acquire all knowledge and purity, then that state after death is
reduced to a dead level and life itself with all its discipline is shorn of
every meaning. Some of the churches teach of a school of discipline after death
where it is impudently stated that the Apostles themselves, well known to be
ignorant men, are to be the teachers. This is absurd and devoid of any basis or
reason in the natural order. Besides, if there is to be such subsequent
discipline, why were we projected into life at all? And why after the suffering
and the error committed are we taken from the place where we did our acts?
The only solution left
is in reincarnation. We come back to earth because on it and with the beings
upon it our deeds were performed; because it is the only proper place where
punishment and reward can be justly meted out; because here is the only natural
spot in which to continue the struggle toward perfection, toward the
development of the faculties we have and the destruction of the wickedness in
us. Justice to ourselves and to all other beings demands it, for we cannot live
for ourselves, and it would be unjust to permit some of us to escape, leaving
those who were participants with us to remain or to be plunged into a hell of
eternal duration.
The persistence of
savagery, the rise and decay of nations and civilizations, the total extinction
of nations, all demand an explanation found nowhere but in reincarnation.
Savagery remains because there are still Egos whose experience is
so limited that they are
still savage; they will come up into higher races when ready.
Races die out because
the Egos have had enough of the experience that sort of race gives. So we find
the red Indian, the Hottentot, the Easter Islanders,
and others as examples of races deserted by high Egos and as they are dying
away other souls who have had no higher life in the past enter into the bodies
of the race to go on using them for the purpose of gaining such experience as
the race body will give. A race could not possibly arise and then suddenly go
out. We see that such is not the case, but science has no explanation; it
simply says that this is the fact, that nations decay. But in this explanation
no account is taken of the inner man nor of the recondite subtle and occult
laws that unite to make a race. Theosophy
shows that the energy drawn together has to expend itself gradually, and
therefore the reproduction of bodies of the character of that race will go on,
though the Egos are not compelled to inhabit bodies of that sort any longer
than while they are of the same development as the race. Hence a time comes
when the whole mass of Egos which built up the race leaves it for another
physical environment more
like themselves. The
economy of Nature will not permit the physical race to suddenly fade away, and
so in the real order of evolution other and less progressed Egos come in and
use the forms provided, keeping up the production of new bodies but less and
less in number each century.
These lower Egos are not
able to keep up to the limit of the capacity of the congeries of energies left
by the other Egos, and so while the new set gains as much experience as is
possible the race in time dies out after passing through its decay. This is the
explanation of what we may call descending savagery, and no other theory will
meet the facts. It has been sometimes thought by ethnologists that the more
civilized races kill off the other, but the fact is that in consequence of the
great difference between the Egos inhabiting the old race body and the energy
of that body itself, the females begin to be sterile, and thus slowly but
surely the number of deaths exceeds the births. China itself is in process of
decay, she being now in the almost stationary stage just before the rush
downward.
Great civilizations like
those of
Of all the old races the
Aryan Indian alone yet remains as the preserver of the old doctrines. It will
one day rise again to its old heights of glory. The appearance of geniuses and
great minds in families destitute of these qualities, as well as the extinction
from a family of the genius shown by some ancestor, can only be met by the law
of rebirth. Napoleon the First came in a family wholly unlike him in power and
force. Nothing in his heredity will
explain his character.
He said himself, as told in the Memoirs of Prince Talleyrand, that he was
Charlemagne. Only by assuming for him a long series of lives giving the right
line of evolution or cause for his mind and nature and force to be brought out,
can we have the slightest idea why he or any other great genius appeared at
all. Mozart when an infant could compose orchestral
score. This was not due
to heredity, for such a score is not natural, but is forced, mechanical, and
wholly conventional, yet he understood it without schooling. How? Because he
was a musician reincarnated, with a musical brain furnished by his family and
thus not impeded in his endeavors to show forth his
musical knowledge.
But stronger yet is the
case of Blind Tom, a Negro whose
family could not by any
possibility have a knowledge of the piano, a modern instrument, so as to
transmit that knowledge to the atoms of his body, yet he had great musical
power and knew the present mechanical musical scale on the piano. There are
hundreds of examples like these among the many prodigies who have appeared to
the world's astonishment. In
It is seen in the child
and the animal, and is no more than the result of previous experience. And
whether we look at the new-born babe flinging out its arms for self-protection,
or the animal with very strong instinctual power, or the bee building a cell on
the rules of geometry, it is all the effect of reincarnation acting either in
the mind or physical cell, for under what was first laid down no atom is devoid
of life, consciousness, and intelligence of its own.
In the case of the
musician Bach we have proof that heredity counts for nothing if the Ego is not
advanced, for his genius was not borne down his family line; it gradually faded
out, finally leaving the family stream entirely. So, too, the coming of idiots
or vicious children to parents who are good, pure, or highly
intellectual is
explained in the same way. They are cases where heredity is set at nought by a wholly bad or deficient Ego.
And lastly, the fact
that certain inherent ideas are common to the whole race is explained by the
sages as due to recollection of such ideas, which were implanted in the human mind
at the very beginning of its evolutionary career on this planet by those
brothers and sages who learned their lessons and were
perfected in former ages
long before the development of this globe began. No explanation for inherent
ideas is offered by science that will do more than say, "they exist."
These were actually taught to the mass of Egos who are engaged in
this earth's evolution;
they were imprinted or burned into their natures, and always recollected; they
follow the Ego through the long pilgrimage.
It has been often
thought that the opposition to reincarnation has been solely based on
prejudice, when not due to a dogma which can only stand when the mind is bound
down and prevented from using its own powers. It is a doctrine the most noble
of all, and with its companion one of Karma, next to be
considered, it alone
gives the basis for ethics. There is no doubt in my mind that the founder of
Christianity took it for granted and that its present absence from that
religion is the reason for the contradiction between the professed ethics of Christian
nations and their actual practises which are so
contrary to the morals given out by Jesus.
CHAPTER 11
Karma
Karma is an unfamiliar
word for Western ears. It is the name adopted by Theosophists of the nineteenth
century for one of the most important of the laws of nature. Ceaseless in its
operation, it bears alike upon planets, systems of planets, races, nations,
families, and individuals. It is the twin doctrine to reincarnation. So inextricably
interlaced are these two laws that it is almost
impossible to properly
consider one apart from the other. No spot or being in the universe is exempt
from the operation of Karma, but all are under its sway, punished for error by
it yet beneficently led on, through discipline, rest, and reward, to the
distant heights of perfection. It is a law so comprehensive in
its sweep, embracing at
once our physical and our moral being, that it is only by paraphrase and copious
explanation one can convey its meaning in English.
For that reason the
Sanskrit term Karma was adopted to designate it. Applied to man's moral life it
is the law of ethical causation, justice, reward and punishment; the cause for
birth and rebirth, yet equally the means for escape from incarnation. Viewed
from another point it is merely effect flowing from cause, action and reaction,
exact result for every thought and act. It is act and the result of act; for
the word's literal meaning is action. Theosophy views the Universe as an
intelligent whole, hence every motion in the Universe is an action of that
whole leading to results, which themselves become causes for further results.
Viewing it thus broadly,
the ancient Hindus said that every being up to Brahma was under the rule of
Karma. It is not a being but a law, the universal law of harmony which
unerringly restores all disturbance to equilibrium. In this the theory
conflicts with the ordinary conception about God, built up from the Jewish system,
which assumes that the Almighty as a thinking entity, extraneous to the Cosmos,
builds up, finds his construction inharmonious, out of proportion, errant, and
disturbed, and then has to pull down, destroy, or punish that which he created.
This has either caused thousands to live in fear of God, in compliance with his
assumed commands, with the selfish object of obtaining reward and securing
escape from his wrath, or has plunged them into darkness which comes from a
denial of all spiritual life. But as there is plainly, indeed painfully,
evident to every human being a constant destruction going on in and around us,
a continual war not only among men but everywhere through the whole solar
system, causing sorrow in all directions, reason requires a solution of the
riddle. The poor, who see no refuge or hope, cry aloud to a God who makes no
reply, and then envy springs up in them when they consider the comforts and
opportunities of the rich. They see the rich profligates, the wealthy fools,
enjoying themselves unpunished.
Turning to the teacher
of religion, they meet the reply to their questioning of the justice which will
permit such misery to those who did nothing requiring them to be born with no
means, no opportunities for education, no capacity to overcome social, racial,
or circumstantial obstacles, "It is the will of God."
Parents produce beloved
offspring who are cut off by death at an untimely hour, just when all promised
well. They too have no answer to the question "Why am I thus
afflicted?" but the same unreasonable reference to an inaccessible God whose
arbitrary will causes their misery. Thus in every walk of life, loss,
injury, persecution,
deprivation of opportunity, nature's own forces working to destroy the
happiness of man, death, reverses, disappointment continually beset good and
evil men alike. But nowhere is there any answer or relief save in the ancient
truths that each man is the maker and fashioner of his own destiny, the
only one who sets in
motion the causes for his own happiness and misery. In one life he sows and in
the next he reaps. Thus on and forever, the law of Karma leads him.
Karma is a beneficent
law wholly merciful, relentlessly just, for true mercy is not favor but
impartial justice.
"My brothers! each man's life
The outcome of his former living is;
The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and
woes,
The bygone right breeds bliss. . . .
This is the doctrine of Karma."
How is the present life affected
by that bygone right and wrong act, and is it always by way of punishment? Is
Karma only fate under another name, an already fixed and formulated destiny
from which no escape is possible, and which therefore might make us careless of
act or thought that cannot affect destiny?
It is not fatalism.
Everything done in a former body has consequences which in the new birth the
Ego must enjoy or suffer, for, as
No act is performed
without a thought at its root either at the time of performance or as leading
to it. These thoughts are lodged in that part of man which we have called Manas
-- the mind, and there remain as subtle but powerful links with magnetic
threads that enmesh the solar system, and through which various effects are
brought out. The theory put forward in earlier pages that the whole system to
which this globe belongs is alive, conscious on every plane, though only in man
showing self-consciousness, comes into play here to explain how the thought
under the act in this life may cause result in this or the next birth. The
marvellous modern experiments in hypnotism show that the slightest impression,
no matter how far back in the history of the person, may be waked up to life,
thus proving it is not lost but only latent. Take for instance the case
of a child born
humpbacked and very short, the head sunk between the shoulders, the arms long
and legs curtailed. Why is this? His karma for thoughts and acts in a prior
life. He reviled, persecuted, or otherwise injured a deformed person so
persistently or violently as to imprint in his own immortal mind the deformed
picture of his victim. For in proportion to the intensity of his thought will
be the intensity and depth of the picture.
It is exactly similar to
the exposure of the sensitive photographic plate, whereby, just as the exposure
is long or short, the impression in the plate is weak or deep. So this thinker
and actor -- the Ego -- coming again to rebirth carries with him this picture,
and if the family to which he is attracted for birth has similar physical
tendencies in its stream, the mental picture causes the newly-forming astral
body to assume a deformed shape by electrical and magnetic osmosis through the
mother of the child. And as all beings on earth are indissolubly joined
together, the misshapen child is the karma of the parents also an exact
consequence for similar acts and thoughts on their part in other lives. Here is
an exactitude of justice which no other theory will furnish.
But as we often see a
deformed human being -- continuing the instance merely for the purpose of
illustration -- having a happy disposition, an excellent intellect, sound
judgment, and every good moral quality, this very instance leads us to the
conclusion that karma must be of several different kinds in every individual
case, and also evidently operates in more than one department
of our being, with the
possibility of being pleasant in effect for one portion of our nature and
unpleasant for another.
Karma is of three sorts:
First --
that which has not begun to produce any effect in our lives owing to the
operation on us of some other karmic causes. This is under a law well known to
physicists, that two opposing forces tend to neutrality, and that one force may
be strong enough to temporarily prevent the operation of another one.
This law
works on the unseen mental and karmic planes or spheres of being just as it
does on the material ones. The force of a certain set of bodily, mental, and
psychical faculties with their tendencies may wholly inhibit the operation on
us of causes with which we are connected, because the whole nature of each
person is used in the carrying out of this law. Hence the weak and mediocre
furnish a weak focus for karma, and in them the general result of a lifetime is
limited, although they may feel it all to be very heavy. But that person who
has a wide and deep-reaching character and much force will feel the operation
of a greater quantity of karma than the weaker person.
Second --
that karma which we are now making or storing up by our thoughts and acts, and
which will operate in the future when the appropriate body, mind, and
environment are taken up by the incarnating Ego in some other life, or whenever
obstructive karma is removed.
This bears
both on the present life and the next one. For one may in this life come to a
point where, all previous causes being worked out, new karma, or that which is
unexpended, must begin to operate.
Under this
are those cases where men have sudden reverses of fortune or changes for the
better either in circumstances or character. A very important bearing of this
is on our present conduct. While old karma must work out and cannot be stopped,
it is wise for the man to so think and act now under present circumstances, no
matter what they are, that he shall produce no bad or prejudicial causes for
the next rebirth or for later years in this life.
Rebellion
is useless, for the law works on whether we weep or rejoice. The great French
engineer, de Lesseps, is a good example of this class
of karma. Raised to a high pitch of glory and achievement for many years of his
life, he suddenly falls covered with shame through the
Third --
that karma which has begun to produce results. It is the operating now in this
life on us of causes set up in previous lives in company with other Egos. And
it is in operation because, being most adapted to the family stock, the
individual body, astral body, and race tendencies of the present incarnation,
it exhibits itself plainly, while other unexpended karma awaits its regular
turn.
These three classes of
karma govern men, animals, worlds, and periods of evolution. Every effect flows
from a cause precedent, and as all beings are constantly being reborn they are
continually experiencing the effects of their thoughts and acts (which are
themselves causes) of a prior incarnation. And thus
each one answers, as St.
Matthew says, for every word and thought; none can escape either by prayer, or
favor, or force, or any other intermediary.
Now as karmic causes are
divisible into three classes, they must have various fields in which to work.
They operate upon man in his mental and intellectual nature, in his psychical
or soul nature, and in his body and circumstances. The spiritual nature of man
is never affected or operated upon by karma.
One species of karma may
act on the three specified planes of our nature at the same time to the same
degree, or there may be a mixture of the causes, some on one plane and some on
another. Take a deformed person who has a fine mind and a deficiency in his
soul nature. Here punitive or unpleasant karma is operating on his body while
in his mental and intellectual nature good karma is being experienced, but
psychically the karma, or cause, being of an indifferent sort the result is
indifferent. In another person other combinations appear. He has a fine body
and favourable circumstances, but the character is
morose, peevish, irritable, revengeful, morbid, and disagreeable to himself and
others.
Here good physical karma
is at work with very bad mental, intellectual, and psychical karma. Cases will
occur to readers of persons born in high station having every opportunity and
power, yet being imbecile or suddenly becoming insane.
And just as all these
phases of the law of karma have sway over the individual man, so they similarly
operate upon races, nations, and families. Each race has its karma as a whole.
If it be good that race goes forward. If bad it goes out -- annihilated as a
race -- though the souls concerned take up their karma in
other races and bodies.
Nations cannot escape their national karma, and any nation that has acted in a
wicked manner must suffer some day, be it soon or late. The karma of the
nineteenth century in the West is the karma of
the European and
American nations.
The old Aztec and other
ancient American peoples died out because their own karma -- the result of
their own life as
nations in the far past
-- fell upon and destroyed them. With nations this heavy operation of karma is
always through famine, war, convulsion of nature, and the sterility of the
women of the nation. The latter cause comes near the end and sweeps the whole
remnant away. And the individual in race or nation is warned by this great
doctrine that if he falls into indifference of thought and act, thus moulding himself into the general average karma of his race
or nation, that national and race karma will at last carry him off in the
general destiny. This is why teachers of old cried, "Come ye out and be ye
separate."
With reincarnation the
doctrine of karma explains the misery and suffering of the world, and no room
is left to accuse Nature of injustice.
The misery of any nation
or race is the direct result of the thoughts and acts of the Egos who make up
the race or nation. In the dim past they did wickedly and now suffer. They
violated the laws of harmony. The immutable rule is that harmony must be
restored if violated. So these Egos suffer in making
compensation and
establishing the equilibrium of the occult cosmos.
The whole mass of Egos
must go on incarnating and reincarnating in the nation or race until they have
all worked out to the end the causes set up. Though the nation may for a time
disappear as a physical thing, the Egos that made it do not leave
the world, but come out
as the makers of some new nation in which they must go on with the task and
take either punishment or reward as accords with their karma. Of this law the
old Egyptians are an illustration. They certainly rose to
a high point of
development, and as certainly they were extinguished as a nation. But the souls
-- the old Egos -- live on and are now fulfilling their self-made destiny as
some other nation now in our period.
They may be the new American
nation, or the Jews fated to wander up and down in the world and suffer much at
the hands of others. This process is perfectly just. Take, for instance, the
Individual unhappiness
in any life is thus explained:
(a) It is punishment for
evil done in past lives; or
(b) it is discipline
taken up by the Ego for the purpose of eliminating defects or acquiring
fortitude and sympathy. When defects are eliminated it is like removing the
obstruction in an irrigating canal which then lets the water flow on. Happiness
is explained in the same way: the result of prior lives of goodness.
The scientific and
self-compelling basis for right ethics is found in these and in no other
doctrines. For if right ethics are to be practised
merely for themselves, men will not see why, and have never been able to see
why, for that reason they should do right. If ethics are to be followed from
fear, man is degraded and will surely evade; if the favor of the Almighty, not
based on law or justice, be the reason, then we will have just what prevails
today -- a code given by Jesus to the west professed by nations and not practised save by the few who would in any case be
virtuous.
On this subject the
Adepts have written the following to be found in the Secret Doctrine:
"Nor would the ways
of karma be inscrutable were men to work in union and harmony instead of
disunion and strife. For our ignorance of those ways -- which one portion of
mankind calls the ways of Providence dark and intricate, while another sees in
them the action of blind fatalism, and a third simple chance
with neither gods nor
devils to guide them -- would surely disappear if we would but attribute all
these to their correct cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a
confident conviction that our neighbours will no more
work harm to
us than we would think
of harming them, two-thirds of the world's evil would vanish into thin air.
Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work
for nor weapons to act through. . . .
We cut these numerous
windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we
are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and
then complain of those ways beings so intricate and so dark. We stand
bewildered before the
mystery of our own making and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and
then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. But verily there is not an
accident in our lives, not a misshapen day or a misfortune, that could not be
traced back to our own doings in this or another life. . . .
Knowledge of Karma gives
the conviction that if --
'virtue in distress and vice in triumph Make
atheists of Mankind',
it is only because that
mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that man is himself his own saviour as his own destroyer; that he need not accuse heaven
and the gods, fates and providence, of the apparent injustice that reigns in
the midst of humanity. But let him rather remember and repeat this bit of
Grecian wisdom which
warns man to forbear accusing That which
'Just though mysterious, leads us on unerring
Through ways unmarked from guilt to
punishment'
-- which are now the
ways and the high road on which move onward the great European nations. The
western Aryans had every nation and tribe like their eastern brethren of the fifth
race, their Golden and their Iron ages, their period of comparative
irresponsibility, or the Satya age of purity, while
now several of them have reached their Iron age, the Kali Yuga, an age black
with horrors. This state will last . . . until we begin acting from within
instead of ever following impulses from without . . . Until then the only
palliative is union and harmony -- a Brotherhood in actu
and altruism not simply in name."
CHAPTER 12
Kama Loka
Let us now consider the states
of man after the death of the body and before birth, having looked over the
whole field of the evolution of things and beings in a general way. This brings
up at once the questions: Is there any heaven or hell, and what are they? Are
they states or places? Is there a spot in space
where they may be found
and to which we go or from where we come? We must also go back to the subject
of the fourth principle of the constitution of man, that called
After dealing with
The natural separation
of the principles brought about by death divides the total man into three
parts:
First, the
visible body with all its elements left to further disintegration on the earth
plane, where all that it is composed of is in time resolved into the different
physical departments of nature.
Second, the
Third, the
real man, the upper triad of Atma-Buddhi-Manas, deathless but now out of earth
conditions, devoid of body, begins in devachan to
function solely as mind clothed in a very ethereal vesture which it will shake
off when the time comes for it to return to earth.
It is an astral sphere
intermediate between earthly and heavenly life. Beyond any doubt it is the
origin of the Christian theory of purgatory, where the soul undergoes penance
for evil done and from which it can be released by prayer and other ceremonies
or offerings.
The fact underlying this
superstition is that the soul may be detained in kama
loka by the enormous force of some unsatisfied
desire, and cannot get rid of the astral and kamic
clothing until that desire is satisfied by some one on earth or by the soul
itself. But if the person was pure minded and of high aspirations,
the separation of the
principles on that plane is soon completed, permitting the higher triad to go
into Devachan. Being the purely astral sphere, it partakes of the nature of the
astral matter which is essentially earthly and devilish, and in it all the
forces work undirected by soul or conscience. It is the slag-pit, as it were,
of the great furnace of life, where nature provides for the sloughing off of
elements which have no place in Devachan, and for that reason it must have many
degrees, every one of which was noted by the ancients.
These degrees are known
in Sanskrit as lokas or places in a metaphysical
sense. Human life is very varied as to character and other potentialities, and
for each of these the appropriate place after death is provided, thus making kama loka an
infinitely varied
sphere. In life some of the differences among men are modified and some
inhibited by a similarity of body and heredity, but in kama
loka all the hidden desires and passions are let
loose in consequence of the absence of body, and for that reason the state is
vastly more diversified than the life plane. Not only is it necessary to
provide for the natural varieties and
differences, but also
for those caused by the manner of death, about which something shall be said.
And all these various divisions are but the natural result of the life thoughts
and last thoughts of the persons who die on earth. It is beyond the scope of
this work to go into a description of all these degrees, inasmuch as volumes
would be needed to describe them, and then but few would understand.
To deal with
During mortal life the
desires and passions are guided by the mind and soul; after death they work without
guidance from the former master; while we live we are responsible for them and
their effects, and when we have left this life we are still responsible,
although they go on working and making effects on others while they last as the
sort of entity I have described, and without our direct guidance. In this is
seen the continuance of responsibility.
They are a portion of
the skandhas -- well known in eastern philosophy --
which are the aggregates that make up the man. The body includes one set of the
skandhas, the astral man another, the
They are being made from
day to day under the law that every thought combines instantly with one of the
elemental forces of nature, becoming to that extent an entity which will endure
in accordance with the strength of the thought as it leaves the brain, and all
of these are inseparably connected with the being who evolved them. There is no
way of escaping; all we can do is
to have thoughts of good
quality, for the highest of the Masters themselves are not exempt from this
law, but they "people their current in space" with entities powerful
for good alone.
Now in
Hence they are said to
remain until the being comes out of devachan, and
then at once by the law of attraction they are drawn to the being, who from
them as germ or basis builds up a new set of skandhas
for the new life. Kama loka therefore is
distinguished from the earth plane by reason of the existence therein, uncontrolled
and unguided, of the mass of passions and desires; but at the same time
earth-life is also a kama loka,
since it is largely governed by the principle kama,
and will be so until at a far distant time in the course of evolution the races
of men shall have developed the fifth and sixth principle, thus throwing kama into its own sphere and freeing earth-life from its
influence.
The astral man in
down in another chapter,
every atom going to make up the man has a memory of its own which is capable of
lasting a length of time in proportion to the force given it. In the case of a
very material and gross or selfish person the force lasts longer than in any
other, and hence in that case the automatic consciousness will be more definite
and bewildering to one who without knowledge dabbles with necromancy. Its
purely astral portion contains and carries the record of all that ever passed
before the person when living, for one of the qualities of the astral substance
is to absorb all scenes and pictures and the impressions of all thoughts, to
keep them, and to throw them forth by reflection when the conditions permit.
This astral shell, cast
off by every man at death, would be a menace to all men were it not in every
case, except one which shall be mentioned, devoid of all the higher principles
which are the directors. But those guiding constituents being disjoined from
the shell, it wavers and floats about from place to place without any will of
its own, but governed wholly by attractions in the astral and magnetic fields.
It is possible for the
real man -- called the spirit by some -- to communicate with us immediately
after death for a few brief moments, but, those passed, the soul has no more to
do with earth until reincarnated. What can and do influence the sensitive and
the medium from out of this sphere are the shells I have described. Soulless
and conscienceless, these in no sense are the spirits of our deceased ones.
They are the clothing thrown off by the inner man, the brutal earthly portion
discarded in the flight to devachan, and so have
always been considered by the ancients as devils -- our personal devils --
because essentially astral, earthly, and passional.
It would be strange indeed if this shell, after being for so long the vehicle
of the real man on earth, did not retain an automatic memory and consciousness.
We see the decapitated body of the frog or the cock moving and acting for a
time with a seeming intelligence, and why is it not possible for the finer and
more subtle astral form to act and move with a far greater amount of seeming
mental direction?
Existing in the sphere
of
As fire burns and as
water runs down and not up under their general law, so the elementals act under
law, but being higher in the scale than gross fire or water their action seems
guided by mind. Some of them have a special relation to mental operations and
to the action of the astral organs, whether these be joined to a body or not.
When a medium forms the channel, and also from other natural co-ordination,
these elementals make an artificial connection with the shell of a deceased
person, aided by the nervous fluid of the medium and others near, and then the
shell is galvanized into an artificial life. Through the medium connection is
made with the physical and psychical forces of all present.
The old impressions on
the astral body give up their images to the mind of the medium, the old
passions are set on fire. Various messages and reports are then obtained from
it, but not one of them is original, not one is from the spirit.
By their strangeness,
and in consequence of the ignorance of those who dabble in it, this is mistaken
for the work of spirit, but it is all from the living when it is not the mere
picking out from the astral light of the images of what has been in the past.
In certain cases to be noted there is an intelligence at work
that is wholly and
intensely bad, to which every medium is subject, and which will explain why so
many of them have succumbed to evil, as they have confessed.
A rough classification
of these shells that visit mediums would be as follows:
(1) Those
of the recently deceased whose place of burial is not far away. This class will
be quite coherent in accordance with the life and thought of the former owner.
An unmaterial, good, and spiritualized person leaves
a shell that will soon disintegrate. A gross, mean, selfish, material person's
shell will be heavy, consistent, and long lived: and so on with all varieties.
(2) Those
of persons who had died far away from the place where the medium is. Lapse of
time permits such to escape from the vicinity of their old bodies, and at the
same time brings on a greater degree of disintegration which corresponds on the
astral plane to putrefaction on the physical.
These are
vague, shadowy, incoherent; respond but briefly to the psychic stimulus, and
are whirled off by any magnetic current. They are galvanized for a moment by
the astral currents of the medium and of those persons present who were related
to the deceased.
(3) Purely
shadowy remains which can hardly be given a place. There is no English to
describe them, though they are facts in this sphere. They might be said to be
the mere mould or impress left in the astral substance by the once coherent
shell long since disintegrated. They are therefore so near being fictitious as
to almost deserve the designation. As such
shadowy
photographs they are enlarged, decorated, and given an imaginary life by the
thoughts, desires, hopes, and imaginings of medium and sitters at the seance.
(4)
Definite, coherent entities, human souls bereft of the spiritual tie, now tending
down to the worst state of all, avitchi, where
annihilation of the personality is the end. They are known as black magicians.
Having centered the consciousness in the principle of
They may
and do last for many centuries, gratifying their lusts through any sensitive
they can lay hold of where bad thought gives them an opening. They preside at
nearly all seances, assuming high names and taking
the direction so as to keep the control and continue the delusion of the
medium, thus enabling themselves to have a convenient channel for their own
evil purposes. Indeed, with the shells of suicides, of those poor wretches who
die at the hand of the law, of drunkards and gluttons, these black magicians
living in the astral world hold the field of physical mediumship
and are liable to invade the sphere of any medium no matter how good.
The door
once open, it is open to all. This class of shell has lost higher manas, but in the struggle not only after death but as well
in life the lower portion of manas which should have
been raised up to godlike excellence was torn away from its lord and now gives
this entity intelligence which is devoid of spirit but power to suffer as it
will when its final day shall come.
In the state of Kama
Loka suicides and those who are suddenly shot out of life by accident or
murder, legal or illegal, pass a term almost equal to the length life would
have been but for the sudden termination. These are not really dead.
To bring on a normal death,
a factor not recognized by medical science must be present. That is, the
principles of the being as described in other chapters have their own term of
cohesion, at the natural end of which they separate from each other under their
own laws. This involves the great subject of the cohesive
forces of the human
subject, requiring a book in itself. I must be content therefore with the
assertion that this law of cohesion obtains among the human principles. Before
that natural end the principles are unable to separate.
Obviously the normal
destruction of the cohesive force cannot be brought about by mechanical
processes except in respect to the physical body. Hence a suicide, or person
killed by accident or murdered by man or by order of human law, has not come to
the natural termination of the cohesion among the other
constituents, and is
hurled into the
But the degrees of
Theosophy full well know.
We have now approached devachan. After a certain time in
CHAPTER 13
Devachan
Having shown that just
beyond the threshold of human life there is a place of separation wherein the
better part of man is divided from his lower and brute elements, we come to consider
what is the state after death of the real being, the immortal who travels from
life to life. Struggling out of the body the entire man goes into
loosens himself from the
lower skandhas; this period of birth over, the higher
principles, Atma-Buddhi-Manas, begin to think in a manner different from that which
the body and brain permitted in life. This is the state of Devachan, a Sanskrit
word meaning literally "the place of the gods," where the soul enjoys
felicity; but as the
gods have no such bodies as ours, the Self in devachan
is devoid of a mortal body. In the ancient books it is said that this state
lasts "for years of infinite number," or "for a period
proportionate to the merit of the being"; and when the mental forces
peculiar to the state are exhausted, "the being is drawn down again to be
reborn in the world of mortals."
Devachan is therefore an
interlude between births in the world. The law of karma which forces us all to
enter the world, being ceaseless in its operation and also universal in scope,
acts also on the being in devachan, for only by the
force or operation of Karma are we taken out of devachan.
It is something like the
pressure of atmosphere
which, being continuous and uniform, will push out or crush that which is
subjected to it unless there be a compensating quantity of atmosphere to
counteract the pressure. In the present case the karma of the being is the
atmosphere always pressing the being on or out from state to state; the
counteracting quantity of atmosphere is the force of the being's own life-thoughts
and aspirations which prevent his coming out of devachan
until that force is exhausted, but which being spent has no more power to hold
back the decree of our self-made mortal destiny.
The necessity for this
state after death is one of the necessities of evolution growing out of the
nature of mind and soul. The very nature of manas
requires a devachanic state as soon as the body is
lost, and it is simply the effect of loosening the bonds placed upon the mind
by its physical and astral encasement.
In life we can but to a
fractional extent act out the thoughts we have each moment; and still less can
we exhaust the psychic energies engendered by each day's aspirations and
dreams. The energy thus engendered is not lost or annihilated, but is stored in
Manas, but the body, brain, and astral body permit no full development of the
force. Hence, held latent until death, it bursts then from the weakened bonds
and plunges Manas, the thinker, into the expansion, use, and development of the
thought-force set up in life.
The impossibility of escaping
this necessary state lies in man's ignorance of his own powers and faculties.
From this ignorance delusion arises, and Manas not being wholly free is carried
by its own force into the thinking of devachan. But
while ignorance
is the cause for going
into this state the whole process is remedial, restful, and beneficial. For if
the average man returned at once to another body in the same civilization he
had just quitted, his soul would be completely tired out and deprived of the
needed opportunity for the development of the higher part of his nature.
Now the Ego being minus
mortal body and kama, clothes itself in devachan with a vesture which cannot be called body but may
be styled means or vehicle, and in that it functions in the devachanic
state entirely on the plane of mind and soul. Everything is as real then to the
being as this world seems to be to us.
It simply now has gotten
the opportunity to make its own world for itself unhampered by the clogs of
physical life. Its state may be compared to that of the poet or artist who,
rapt in ecstacy of composition or arrangement of
color, cares not for and knows not of either time or objects of the world.
We are making causes
every moment, and but two fields exist for the manifestation in effect of those
causes. These are, the objective as this world is called, and the subjective
which is both here and after we have left this life. The objective field
relates to earth life and the grosser part of man, to his bodily acts and his
brain thoughts, as also sometimes to his astral body.
The subjective has to do
with his higher and spiritual parts. In the objective field the psychic
impulses cannot work out, nor can the high leanings and aspirations of his
soul; hence these must be the basis, cause, substratum, and support for the
state of devachan. What then is the time, measured by
mortal
years, that one will
stay in devachan?
This question while
dealing with what earth-men call time does not, of course, touch the real
meaning of time itself, that is, of what may be in fact for this solar system
the ultimate order, precedence, succession, and length of moments.
It is a question which
may be answered in respect to our time, but not certainly in respect to the
time on the planet Mercury, for instance, where time is not the same as ours,
nor, indeed, in respect to time as conceived by the soul. As to the latter any
man can see that after many years have slipped away he has no
direct perception of the
time just passed, but is able only to pick out some of the incidents which
marked its passage, and as to some poignant or happy instants or hours he seems
to feel them as but of yesterday. And thus it is for the being in devachan. No time is there. The soul has all the benefit of
what goes on within itself in that state, but it indulges in no speculations as
to the lapse of moments; all is made up of events, while all the time the solar
orb is marking off the years for us on the earth plane.
This cannot be regarded
as an impossibility if we will remember how, as is well known in life, events,
pictures, thoughts, argument, introspective feeling will all sweep over us in
perfect detail in an instant, or, as is known of those who have been drowning,
the events of a whole life time pass in a flash before the eye of the mind. But
the Ego remains as said in devachan for a time
exactly proportioned to the psychic impulses generated during life. Now this
being a matter which deals with the mathematics of the soul, no one but a
Master can tell what the time would be for the average man of this century in
every land. Hence we have to depend on the Masters of wisdom for that average,
as it must be based upon a calculation.
They have said, as is
well put by Mr. A. P. Sinnett in his Esoteric Buddhism, that the period is
fifteen hundred years in general. From a reading of his book, which was made up
from letters from the Masters, it is to be inferred he desires it to be
understood that the devachanic period is in each and
every case fifteen centuries; but to do away with that misapprehension his
informants wrote at a later date that that is the average period and not a
fixed one.
Such must be the truth,
for as we see that men differ in respect to the periods of time they remain in
any state of mind in life due to the varying intensities of their thoughts, so
it must be in
devachan
where thought has a greater force though always due to the being who had the
thoughts.
What the Master did say
on this is as follows: "The 'dream of devachan'
lasts until karma is satisfied in that direction. In devachan
there is a gradual exhaustion of force. The stay in devachan
is proportionate to the unexhausted psychic impulses originated in earth life.
Those whose actions were
preponderatingly material will be sooner brought back into rebirth by the
force of Tanha." Tanha
is the thirst for life. He therefore who has not in life originated many
psychic impulses will have but little basis or force in his essential nature to
keep his higher principles in devachan.
About all he will have
are those originated in childhood before he began to fix his thoughts on materialistic
thinking. The thirst for life expressed by the word Tanha
is the pulling or magnetic force lodged in the skandhas
inherent in all beings. In such
a case as this the
average rule does not apply, since the whole effect either way is due to a
balancing of forces and is the outcome of action and reaction.
And this sort of
materialistic thinker may emerge out of devachan
into another body here in a month, allowing for the unexpended psychic forces
originated in early life. But as every one of such persons varies as to class,
intensity and quantity of thought and psychic impulse, each may vary in respect
to the time of stay in devachan. Desperately materialistic thinkers will
remain in the devachanic condition stupefied or
asleep, as it were, as they have no forces in them appropriate to that state
save in a very vague fashion, and for them it can be very truly said that there
is no state after death so far as mind is
concerned; they are
torpid for a while, and then they live again on earth. This general average of
the stay in devachan gives us the length of a very
important human cycle, the Cycle of Reincarnation. For under that law national
development will be found to repeat itself, and the times that are past will be
found to come again.
The last series of
powerful and deeply imprinted thoughts are those which give color and trend to
the whole life in devachan. The last moment will
color each subsequent moment. On those the soul and mind fix themselves and
weave of them a whole set of events and experiences, expanding them to their
highest limit, carrying out all that was not possible in life. Thus expanding
and weaving these thoughts the entity has its youth and growth and growing old,
that is, the uprush of the force, its expansion, and
its dying down to final exhaustion.
If the person has led a colourless life the devachan will
be colourless; if a rich life, then it will be rich
in variety and effect. Existence there is not a dream save in a conventional
sense, for it is a stage of the life of man, and when we are there this present
life is a dream. It is not in any sense monotonous. We are too prone to measure
all possible states of life and places for experience by our present earthly
one and to imagine it to be reality.
But the life of the soul
is endless and not to be stopped for one instant. Leaving our physical body is
but a transition to another place or plane for living in. But as the ethereal garments
of devachan are more lasting than those we wear here,
the spiritual,
moral, and psychic
causes use more time in expanding and exhausting in that state than they do on
earth. If the molecules that form the physical body were not subject to the
general chemical laws that govern physical earth, then we should live as long
in these bodies as we do in the devachanic state. But
such a
life of endless strain
and suffering would be enough to blast the soul compelled to undergo it.
Pleasure would then be pain, and surfeit would end but in an immortal insanity.
Nature, always kind, leads us soon again into heaven for a rest, for the
flowering of the best and highest in our natures.
Devachan is then neither
meaningless nor useless. "In it we are rested; that part of us which could
not bloom under the chilling skies of earth-life bursts forth into flower and
goes back with us to earth-life stronger and more a part of our nature than
before. Why should we repine that Nature kindly aids us in the interminable
struggle, why keep the mind revolving about the present petty personality and
its good and evil fortunes? " (Letter from Mahatma K. H. See Path p. 191,
Vol. 5.)
But it is sometimes
asked, what of those we have left behind: do we see them there? We do not see
them there in fact, but we make to ourselves their images as full, complete,
and objective as in life, and devoid of all that we then thought was a blemish.
We live with them and see them grow great and good instead of mean or bad. The
mother who has left a drunken son behind finds him before her in devachan a sober, good man, and likewise through all
possible cases, parent, child, husband, and wife have their loved ones there
perfect and full of knowledge. This is for the benefit of the soul. You may
call it a delusion if you will, but the illusion is necessary to happiness just
as it often is in life. And as it is the mind that makes the illusion, it is no
cheat.
Certainly the idea of a
heaven built over the verge of hell where you must know, if any brains or
memory are left to you under the modern orthodox scheme, that your erring
friends and relatives are suffering eternal torture, will bear no comparison
with the doctrine of devachan. But entities in devachan are not
wholly devoid of power
to help those left on earth. Love, the master of life, if real, pure, and deep,
will sometimes cause the happy Ego in devachan to
affect those left on earth for their good, not only in the moral field but also
in that of material circumstance. This is possible under a law of the occult
universe
which cannot be
explained now with profit, but the fact may be stated. It has been given out
before this by H. P. Blavatsky, without, however, much attention being drawn to
it.
The last question to
consider is whether we here can reach those in devachan
or do they come here. We cannot reach them nor affect them unless we are
Adepts.
The claim of mediums to
hold communion with the spirits of the dead is baseless, and still less valid
is the claim of ability to help those who have gone to devachan.
The Mahatma, a being who has developed all his powers and is free from
illusion, can go into the devachanic state and then
communicate with the Egos there.
Such is one of their
functions, and that is the only school of the Apostles after death. They deal
with certain entities in devachan for the purpose of
getting them out of the state so as to return to earth for the benefit of the
race. The Egos they thus deal with are those whose nature is great and deep but
who are not wise enough to be able to overcome the natural illusions of devachan.
Sometimes also the
hypersensitive and pure medium goes
into this state and then
holds communication with the Egos there, but it is rare, and certainly will not
take place with the general run of mediums who trade for money. But the soul
never descends here to the medium. And the gulf between the consciousness of devachan
and that of earth is so deep and wide that it is but seldom the medium can
remember upon returning to recollection here what or whom it met or saw or
heard in devachan. This gulf is similar to that which
separates devachan from rebirth; it is one in which
all memory of what preceded it is blotted out.
The whole period
allotted by the soul's forces being ended in devachan,
the magnetic threads which bind it to earth begin to assert their power. The
Self wakes from the dream, it is borne swiftly off to a new body, and then,
just before birth, it sees for a moment all the causes that led it to devachan and back to the life it is about to begin, and
knowing it to be all just, to be the
result of its own past
life, it repines not but takes up the cross again -- and another soul has come
back to earth.
CHAPTER 14
Cycles
The doctrine of Cycles
is one of the most important in the whole theosophical system, though the least
known and of all the one most infrequently referred to.
Western investigators have
for some centuries suspected that events move in cycles, and a few of the
writers in the field of European literature have dealt with the subject, but
all in a very incomplete fashion. This incompleteness and want of accurate
knowledge have been due to the lack of belief in spiritual
things and the desire to
square everything with materialistic science. Nor do I pretend to give the
cyclic law in full, for it is one that is not given out in detail by the
Masters of Wisdom. But enough has been divulged, and enough was for a long time
known to the Ancients to add considerably to our knowledge.
A cycle is a ring or
turning, as the derivation of the word indicates. The corresponding words in
the Sanskrit are Yuga, Kalpa, Manvantara, but of these yuga
comes nearest to cycle, as it is lesser in duration than the others. The beginning
of a cycle must be a moment, that added to other moments makes a day, and those
added together constitute months, years, decades, and centuries.
Beyond this the West
hardly goes. It recognizes the moon cycle and the great sidereal one, but looks
at both and upon the others merely as periods of time. If we are to consider
them as but lengths of time there is no profit except to the dry student or to
the astronomer. And in this way today they are regarded by
European and American
thinkers, who say cycles exist but have no very great bearing on human life and
certainly no bearing on the actual recurrence of events or the reappearance on the
stage of life of persons who once lived in the world.
The theosophical theory
is distinctly otherwise, as it must be if it carries out the doctrine of
reincarnation to which in preceding pages a good deal of attention has been
given. Not only are the cycles named actual physical facts in respect to time,
but they and other periods have a very great effect on human life and the
evolution of the globe with all the forms of life thereon.
Starting with the moment
and proceeding through a day, this theory erects the cycle into a comprehensive
ring which includes all in its limits. The moment being the basis, the question
to be settled in respect to the great cycles is,
When did the first
moment come? This cannot be answered, but it can be said that the truth is held
by the ancient theosophists to be that at the first moments of the
solidification of this globe the mass of matter involved attained a certain and
definite rate of vibration which will hold through all variations in any part
of it until its hour for dissolution comes. These rates of vibration are
what determine the
different cycles, and, contrary to the ideas of western science, the doctrine
is that the solar system and the globe we are now on will come to an end when
the force behind the whole mass of seen and unseen matter has reached its limit
of duration under cyclic law. Here our doctrine is again different from both
the religious and scientific one.
We do not admit that the
ending of the force is the withdrawal by a God of his protection, nor the
sudden propulsion by him of another force against the globe, but that the force
at work and determining the great cycle is that of man himself considered as a
spiritual being; when he is done using the globe he leaves it, and then with
him goes out the force holding all together; the consequence is dissolution by
fire or water or what not, these phenomena being simply effects and not causes.
The ordinary scientific
speculations on this head are that the earth may fall into the sun, or that a
comet of density may destroy the globe, or that we may collide with a greater
planet known or unknown. These dreams are idle for the present.
Reincarnation being the
great law of life and progress, it is interwoven with that of the cycles and
karma. These three work together, and in practice it is almost impossible to
disentangle reincarnation from cyclic law. Individuals and nations in definite
streams return in regularly recurring periods to the earth,
and thus bring back to
the globe the arts, the civilization, the very persons who once were on it at
work. And as the units in nation and race are connected together by invisible
strong threads, large bodies of such units moving slowly but surely all
together reunite at different times and emerge again and again
together into new race
and new civilization as the cycles roll their appointed rounds.
Therefore the souls who
made the most ancient civilizations will come back and bring the old
civilization with them in idea and essence, which being added to what others
have done for the development of the human race in its character and knowledge
will produce a new and higher state of civilization.
This newer and better
development will not be due to books, to records, to arts or mechanics, because
all those are periodically destroyed so far as physical evidence goes, but the
soul ever retaining in Manas the knowledge it once gained and always pushing to
completer development the higher principles and powers, the essence of progress
remains and will as surely come out as the sun shines.
And along this road are
the points when the small and large cycles of Avatars bring out for man's
benefit the great characters who mould the race from time to time.
The Cycle of Avatars
includes several smaller ones. The greater are those marked by the appearance
of Rama and
At the intersection of the
great cycles dynamic effects follow and alter the surface of the planet by
reason of the shifting of the poles of the globe or other convulsion. This is
not a theory generally acceptable, but we hold it to be true. Man is a great
dynamo, making, storing, and throwing out energy, and when masses of men
composing a race thus make and distribute energy, there is a resulting dynamic
effect on the material of the globe which will be powerful enough to be
distinct and cataclysmic. That there have been vast and awful disturbances in
the strata of the world is admitted on every hand and now needs
no proof; these have
been due to earthquakes and ice formation so far as concerns geology; but in
respect to animal forms the cyclic law is that certain animal forms now extinct
and also certain human ones not known but sometimes suspected will return again
in their own cycle; and certain human languages now known as dead will be in
use once more at their appointed cyclic hour.
"The Metonic cycle is that of the Moon. It is a period of about
nineteen years, which being completed the new and the full moons return on the
same days of the month."
"The cycle of the
Sun is a period of twenty eight years, which having elapsed the Dominical or
Sunday letters return to their former place and proceed in the former order
according to the Julian calendar."
The great Sidereal year
is the period taken by the equinoctial points to make in their precession a
complete revolution of the heavens. It is composed of 25,868 solar years
almost. It is said that the last sidereal year ended about 9,868 years ago, at
which time there must have been on this earth a violent convulsion
or series of such, as
well as distributions of nations. The completion of this grand period brings
the earth into newer spaces of the cosmos, not in respect to its own orbit, but
by reason of the actual progress of the sun in an orbit of its own that cannot
be measured by any observer of the present day, but which is guessed at by some
and located in one of the constellations.
Affecting man especially
are the spiritual, psychic, and moral cycles, and out of these grow the
national, racial, and individual cycles. Race and national cycles are both historical.
The individual cycles are of reincarnation, of sensation, and of impression.
The length of the individual reincarnation cycle
for the general mass of
men is fifteen hundred years, and this in its turn gives us a large historical
cycle related closely to the progress of civilization.
For as the masses of
persons return from devachan, it must follow that the
Roman, the Greek, the old Aryan, and other Ages will be seen again and can to a
very great extent be plainly traced. But man is also affected by astronomical
cycles
because he is an
integral part of the whole, and these cycles mark the periods when mankind as a
whole will undergo a change.
In the sacred books of
all nations these are often mentioned, and are in the Bible of the Christians,
as, for instance, in the story of Jonah in the belly of the whale. This is an
absurdity when read as history, but not so as an astronomical cycle.
"Jonah" is in the constellations, and when that astronomical point
which represents man reaches a point in the Zodiac which is directly opposite
the belly of Cetus or the whale on the other side of
the circle, by what is known as the process of opposition, then Jonah is said
to be in the center of the fish and is "thrown out" at the expiration
of the period when that man-point has passed so far along in the Zodiac as to
be out of opposition to the whale. Similarly as the same point moves thus
through the Zodiac it is brought by opposition into the different
constellations that are exactly opposite from century to century while it moves
along.
During these progresses
changes take place among men and on
earth exactly signified
by the constellations when those are read according to the right rules of
symbology. It is not claimed that the conjunction causes the effect, but that
ages ago the Masters of Wisdom worked out all the problems in respect to man
and found in the heavens the means for knowing the exact dates
when events are sure to
recur, and then by imprinting in the minds of older nations the symbology of
the Zodiac were able to preserve the record and the prophecy.
Thus in the same way
that a watchmaker can tell the hour by the
arrival of the hands or
the works of the watch at certain fixed points, the Sages can tell the hour for
events by the Zodiacal clock. This is not of course believed today, but it will
be well understood in future centuries, and as the nations of the earth have
all similar symbols in general for the Zodiac, and as
also the records of
races long dead have the same, it is not likely that the vandal-spirit of the
western nineteenth century will be able to efface this valuable heritage of our
evolution. In Egypt the Denderah Zodiac tells the
same tale as that one left to us by the old civilization of the American
continent, and all of these are from the same source, they are the work of the
Sages who
come at the beginning of
the great human cycle and give to man when he begins his toilsome ascent up the
road of development those great symbols and ideas of an astronomical character
which will last through all the cycles.
In regard to great
cataclysms occurring at the beginning and ending of the great cycles, the main
laws governing the effects are those of Karma and Reimbodiment,
or Reincarnation, proceeding under cyclic rule. Not only is man ruled by these
laws, but every atom of matter as well, and the mass of matter is constantly
undergoing a change at the same time with man. It must therefore exhibit
alterations corresponding to those through which the thinker is going.
On the physical plane
effects are brought out through the electrical and other fluids acting with the
gases on the solids of the globe. At the change of a great cycle they reach
what may be termed the exploding point and cause violent convulsions of the
following classes:
(a)
Earthquakes
(b) Floods
(c) Fire
(d) Ice
Earthquakes may be
brought on according to this philosophy by two general causes; first,
subsidence or elevation under the earth-crust due to heat and steam, second,
electrical and magnetic changes which affect water and earth at the same time.
These last have the power to instantaneously make the earth
fluidic without melting
it, thus causing immense and violent displacements in large or small waves. And
this effect is sometimes seen now in earthquake districts when similar
electrical causes are at work in a smaller measure.
Floods of general extent
are caused by displacement of water from the subsidence or elevation of land,
and by those combined with electrical change which induces a copious discharge
of moisture. The latter is not a mere emptying of a cloud, but a sudden turning
of vast bodies of fluids and solids into water.
Universal fires come on
from electrical and magnetic changes in the atmosphere by which the moisture is
withdrawn from the air and the latter turned into a fiery mass; and, secondly,
by the sudden expansion of the solar magnetic center into seven such centers,
thus burning the globe.
Ice cataclysms come on
not only from the sudden alteration of the poles but also from lowered
temperature due to the alteration of the warm fluid currents in the sea and the
hot magnetic currents in the earth, the first being known to science, the
latter not. The lower stratum of moisture is suddenly frozen, and vast tracts
of land covered in a night with many feet of ice. This can easily happen to the
Both Egyptians and Greeks
had their cycles, but in our opinion derived them from the Indian Sages. The
Chinese always were a nation of astronomers, and have recorded observations
reaching far back of the Christian era, but as they belong to an old race which
is doomed to extinction -- strange as the assertion may appear -- their
conclusions will not be correct for the Aryan races.
On the coming of the
Christian era a heavy pall of darkness fell on the minds of men in the West,
and
deliberately as a
necessary precaution taken by that great Lodge to which I adverted in Chapter
I, because its Adepts, knowing the cyclic laws perfectly, wished to preserve
philosophy for future generations. As it would be mere pedantry and
speculation to discuss
the unknown Saros and Naros
and other cycles of the Egyptians, I will give the Brahmanical
ones, since they tally almost exactly with the correct periods.
A period or exhibition
of universal manifestation is called a Brahmanda,
that is a complete life of Brahma, and Brahma's life is made of his days and
years, which, being cosmical are each of immense
duration. His day is as man's 24 odd hours long, his year 360 odd days, the
number of his years is 100.
Taking now this globe --
since we are concerned with no other -- its government and evolution proceed
under Manu or man and from this is the term Manvantara or "between two
Manus." The course of evolution is divided into four Yugas for every race
in its own time and way. These Yugas do not affect all mankind at one and the
same time, as some races are in one of the Yugas while others are in a
different cycle.
The Red Indian, for
instance, is in the end of his stone age, while the Aryans are in quite a
different state. These four Yugas are: Krita, or Satya, the golden; Treta; Dvapara; and Kali or the black. The present age for the
West and
present -- Kali -- is
very rapid, its motion being accelerated precisely like certain astronomical
periods known today in regard to the Moon, but not fully worked out.
TABLEMORTAL YEARS
360 (odd)
mortal days make1
Krita Yuga has 1,728,000
Treta Yuga has1,296,000
Dvapara Yuga has864,000
Kali Yuga
has 432,000
Maha Yuga, or the
four preceding, has4,320,000
71 Maha Yugas form the reign of one Manu, or 306,720,000
14 Manus
are4,294,080,000
Add the
dawns or twilights between each Manu 25,920,000
These
reigns and dawns make 1000 Maha Yugas, a Kalpa, or
Day of Brahma 4,320,000,000
Brahma's
Night equals his Day and Night together make 8,640,000,000
360 of
these Days make Brahma's Year3,110,400,000,000
100 of
these Years make Brahma's Life311,040,000,000,000
The first 5000 years of
Kali Yuga will end between the years 1897 and 1898.
This Yuga began about
3102 years before the Christian era, at the time of
As 1897-98 are not far
off, the scientific men of today will have an opportunity of seeing whether the
close of the five thousand year cycle will be preceded or followed by any
convulsions or great changes political, scientific, or physical, or all of
these combined. Cyclic changes are now proceeding as year after year the souls
from prior civilizations are being incarnated in this period when liberty of
thought and action are not so restricted in the West as they have been in the
past by dogmatic religious prejudice and bigotry. And at the present time we
are in a cycle of transition, when, as a transition period should indicate,
everything in philosophy, religion, and society is changing. In a transition
period the full and complete figures and rules respecting cycles are not given
out to a generation which elevates money above all thoughts and scoffs at the
spiritual view of man and nature.
CHAPTER 15
Differentiation of
Species -- Missing Links
Between Science and
Theosophy there is a wide gulf, for the present unbridged,
on the question of the origin of man and the differentiation of species. The teachers
of religion in the West offer on this subject a theory, dogmatically buttressed
by an assumed revelation, as impossible as the one put forward by
scientific men. And yet
the religious expounders are nearer than science to the truth. Under the
religious superstition about Adam and Eve is hidden the truth, and in the tales
of Cain, Seth, and Noah is vaguely shadowed the real story of the other races
of men, Adam being but the representative of one single race.
The people who received
Cain and gave him a wife were some of those human races which had appeared
simultaneously with the one headed by Adam.
The ultimate origin or
beginning of man is not to be discovered, although we may know when and from
where the men of this globe came. Man never was not. If not on this globe, then
on some others, he ever was, and will ever be in existence somewhere in the
Cosmos. Ever perfecting and reaching up to the image of the Heavenly Man, he is
always becoming. But as the human mind cannot go back to any beginning, we
shall start with this globe. Upon this earth and upon the whole chain of globes
of which it is a part seven races of men appeared simultaneously, coming over
to it from other globes of an older chain. And in respect to this earth -- the
fourth of this chain -- these seven races came simultaneously from another
globe of this chain.
This appearance of seven
races together happens in the first and in part of the second round of the
globes. In the second round the seven masses of beings are amalgamated, and
their destiny after that is to slowly differentiate during the succeeding
rounds until at the seventh round the seven first great races will be once more
distinct, as perfect types of the human race as this period of evolution will
allow.
At the present time the
seven races are mixed together, and representatives of all are in the many
so-called races of men as classified by our present science. The object of this
amalgamation and subsequent differentiation is to give to every race the
benefit of the progress and power of the whole derived from prior progress in
other planets and systems. For Nature never does her work in a hasty or undue
fashion, but, by the sure method of mixture, precipitation, and separation,
brings about the greatest perfection. And this method was one known to the
Alchemists, though not fully understood in all its bearings even by them.
Hence man did not spring
from a single pair. Neither did he come from any tribe or family of monkey. It
is hopeless to look to either religion or science for a solution of the question,
for science is confused on her own admission, and religion is tangled with a
revelation that in its books controverts the theory
put forward by the
priest. Adam is called the first man, but the record in which the story is
found shows that other races of men must have existed on the earth before Cain
could have founded a city. The Bible, then, does not support the single pair
theory. If we take up one of the hypotheses of Science and admit for
the moment that man and
monkey differentiated from one ancestor, we have then to decide where the first
ancestor came from. The first postulate of the Lodge on this subject is that
seven races of men appeared simultaneously on the earth,
and the first negative
assumption is that man did not spring from a single pair or from the animal
kingdom.
The varieties of
character and capacity which subsequently appear in man's history are the
forthcoming of the variations which were induced in the Egos in other and long
anterior periods of evolution upon other chains of globes. These
variations were so
deeply impacted as to be equivalent to inherent characteristics. For the races
of this globe the prior period of evolution was passed on the chain of globes
of which our moon is the visible representative.
The burning question of
the anthropoid apes as related to man is settled by the Masters of Wisdom, who
say that instead of those being our progenitors they were produced by man
himself. In one of the early periods of the globe the men of that time begot from
large females of the animal kingdom the anthropoids, and in anthropoid bodies
were caught a certain number of Egos destined one day to be men. The remainder
of the descendants of the true anthropoid are the descendants of those
illegitimate children of men, and will die away gradually, their Egos entering
human bodies. Those half-ape and half-man bodies could not be ensouled by strictly animal Egos, and for that reason they
are known to the Secret Doctrine as the "Delayed Race," the only one
not included in the fiat of Nature that no more Egos from the lower kingdoms
will come into the human kingdom until the next Manvantara.
But to all kingdoms
below man except the anthropoids, the door is now closed for entry into the
human stage, and the Egos in the subordinate forms must all wait their turn in
the succeeding great Cycle. And as the delayed Egos of the Anthropoid family
will emerge into the man stage later on, they will thus be rewarded for the
long wait in that degraded race. All the other monkeys are products in the
ordinary manner of the evolutionary processes.
On this subject I cannot
do better than quote the words of one of those Masters of Wisdom, giving the
esoteric anthropology from the secret volumes, thus:
The anatomical
resemblance between Man and the higher Ape, so frequently cited by the
Darwinists as pointing to some former ancestor common to both, presents an
interesting problem the proper solution of which is to be sought for in the
esoteric explanation of the genesis of the pithecoid
stocks. We have given it so far as was useful by stating that the bestiality of
the primeval mindless races resulted in the production of huge manlike monsters
-- the offspring of human and animal parents.
As time rolled on and
the still semi-astral forms consolidated into the physical, the descendants of
these creatures were modified by external conditions until the breed, dwindling
in size, culminated in the lower Apes of the Miocene period. With these the
later Atlanteans renewed the sin of the "Mindless" -- this time with
full responsibility. The resultants of their crime were the species now known
as the Anthropoid. . . .
Let us remember the
esoteric teaching which tells us of Man having had in the Third Round a
gigantic Ape-like form on the astral plane. And similarly at the close of the
Third Race in this Round. Thus it accounts for the human features of the Apes,
especially of the later Anthropoids, -- apart from the fact that
these latter preserved
by heredity a resemblance to their Atlanto-Lemurian
sires.
The same teachers
furthermore assert that the mammalian types were produced in the fourth round,
subsequent to the appearance of the human types. For this reason there was no
barrier against fertility, because the root-types of those
mammals were not far
enough removed to raise the natural barrier. The unnatural union in the third
race, when man had not yet had the light of Manas given to him, was not a crime
against Nature, since, no mind being present save in the
merest germ, no
responsibility could attach. But in the fourth round, the light of Manas being
present, the renewal of the act by the new race was a crime, because it was
done with a full knowledge of the consequences and against the warning of conscience.
The karmic effect of this, including as it does all
races, has yet to be
fully felt and understood -- at a much later day than now.
As man came to this
globe from another planet, though of course then a being of very great power
before being completely enmeshed in matter, so the lower kingdoms came likewise
in germ and type from other planets, and carry on their evolution step by step
upward by the aid of man, who is, in all periods of
manifestation, at the
front of the wave of life. The Egos in these lower kingdoms could not finish
their evolution in the preceding globe-chain before its dissolution, and coming
to this they go forward age after age, gradually approaching nearer the man
stage. One day they too will become men and act as the advance guard and guide
for other lower kingdoms of this or other globes.
And in the coming from
the former planet there are always brought with the first and highest class of
beings some forms of animal life, some fruits and other products, as models or
types for use here.
It will not be
profitable to go into this here with particularity, for being too far ahead of
the time it would evoke only ridicule from some and stupidity from others. But the
general forms of the various kingdoms being so brought over, we have next to
consider how the differentiation of animal and other lower species began and
was carried on.
This is the point where
intelligent aid and interference from a mind or mass of minds is absolutely
necessary. Such aid and interference was and is the fact, for Nature unaided
cannot do the work right. But I do not mean that God or angel interferes and
aids. It is Man who does this. Not the man of the day, weak and ignorant as he
is, but great souls, high and holy men of immense power, knowledge, and wisdom.
Just such as every man would now know he could become, if it were not that
religion on one hand and science on the other have painted such a picture of
our weakness, inherent evil and purely material origin that nearly all men
think they are puppets of God or cruel fate without hope, or remain with a
degrading and selfish aim in view both here and after. Various names have been
given to these beings now removed from our plane. They are the Dhyanis, the
Creators, the Guides, the Great Spirits, and so on by many titles. In
theosophical literature they are called the Dhyanis.
By methods known to
themselves and to the Great Lodge they work on the forms so brought over, and
by adding here, taking away there, and often altering, they gradually transform
by such alteration and addition the kingdoms of nature as well as the gradually
forming gross body of man.
This process is carried
on chiefly in the purely astral period preceding the gross physical stage, as
the impulses thus given will surely carry themselves forward through the
succeeding times. When the midway point of evolution is reached the species
emerge on to the present stage and not showing the connection to the eye of man
nor to our instruments. The investigations of the day have traced certain
species down to a point where, as is confessed, it is not known to what root
they go back. Taking oxen on one side and horses on the other, we see that both
are hoofed, but one has a split hoof and the other but one toe. These bring us
back, when we reach the oldest ancestor of each, to the midway point, and there
science has to stop.
At this spot the wisdom
of the Masters comes in to show that back of this is the astral region of ancient
evolution, where were the root-types in which the Dhyanis began the evolution
by alteration and addition which resulted in the differentiation afterwards on
this gross plane into the various families,
species, and genera.
A vast period of time,
about 300,000,000 years, was passed by earth and man and all the kingdoms of
nature in an astral stage. Then there was no gross matter such as we now know.
This was in the early rounds when Nature was proceeding slowly with the work of
perfecting the types on the astral plane, which is matter, though very fine in
its texture. At the end of that stretch of years the process of hardening
began, the form of man being the first to become solid, and then some of the
astral prototypes of the preceding rounds were involved in the solidification,
though really belonging to a former period when everything was astral. When
those fossils are discovered it is argued that they must be those of creatures
which coexisted with the gross physical body of man.
While that argument is
proper enough under the other theories of Science, it becomes only an
assumption if the existence of the astral period be admitted. It would be
beyond the scope of this work to go further into particulars. But it may
incidentally be said that neither the bee nor the wheat could have had their
original differentiation
in this chain of globes, but must have been produced and finished in some other
from which they were brought over into this. Why this should be so I am willing
to leave for the present to conjecture.
To the whole theory it
may be objected that Science has not been able to find the missing links
between the root-types of the astral period and the present fossils or living
species. In the year 1893 at Moscow Professor Virchow
said in a lecture that the missing link was as far off as ever, as much of a
dream as ever, and that no real evidence was at hand to show man as coming from
the
animals. This is quite
true, and neither class of missing link will be discovered by Science under her
present methods. For all of them exist in the astral plane and therefore are
invisible to the physical eye. They can only be seen by the inner astral
senses, which must first be trained to do their work properly, and until
Science admits the existence of the astral and inner senses
she will never try to
develop them. Always, then, Science will be without the instruments for
discovering the astral links left on the astral plane in the long course of
differentiation. The fossils spoken of above, which were, so to say, solidified
out of date, form an exception to the impossibility of finding any missing
links, but they are blind alleys to Science because she admits none of the
necessary facts.
The object of all this
differentiation, amalgamation, and separation is well stated by another of the
Masters, thus:
Nature consciously
prefers that matter should be indestructible in organic rather than inorganic
forms, and works slowly but incessantly towards the realization of this object --
the evolution of conscious life out of inert material.
CHAPTER 16
Psychic Laws, Forces,
and Phenomena
The field of psychic
forces, phenomena, and dynamics is a vast one. Such phenomena are seen and the
forces exhibited every day in all lands, but until a few years ago very little
attention was given to them by scientific persons, while a great deal of
ridicule was heaped upon those who related the occurrences or averred belief in
the psychic nature. A cult sprang up in the United States some forty years ago
calling itself quite wrongly "spiritualism," but having a great
opportunity it neglected it and fell into mere wonder-seeking without the
slightest shadow of a philosophy. It has accomplished but little in the way of
progress except a record of many undigested facts which for four decades failed
to attract the serious attention of people in general.
While it has had its
uses, and includes in its ranks many good minds, the great dangers and damages coming
to the human instruments involved and to those who sought them more than offset
the good done in the opinion of those disciples of the Lodge who would have man
progress evenly and without ruin along his path of evolution. But other Western
investigators of the accepted schools have not done much better, and the result
is that there is no Western Psychology worthy of the name.
This lack of an adequate
system of Psychology is a natural consequence of the materialistic bias of
science and the paralyzing influence of dogmatic religion; the one ridiculing
effort and blocking the way, the other forbidding investigation. The Roman
Catholic branch of the Christian Church is in some respects an exception,
however. It has always admitted the existence of the psychic world -- for it
the realm of devils and angels, but as angels manifest when they choose and
devils are to be shunned, no one is permitted by that Church to meddle in such
matters except an authorized priest. So far as that Church's prohibiting the
pernicious practice of necromancy indulged in by "spiritualists" it
was right, but not in its other prohibitions and restrictions. Real psychology
is an Oriental product today.
Very true the system was
known in the West when a very ancient civilization flourished in America, and
in certain parts of Europe anterior to the Christian era, but for the present
day psychology in its true phase belongs to the Orient.
Are there psychic
forces, laws, and powers? If there are, then there must be the phenomena. And
if all that has been outlined in preceding chapters is true, then in man are
the same powers and forces which are to be found anywhere in Nature. He is held
by the Masters of Wisdom to be the highest product of the whole system of
evolution, and mirrors in himself every power, however wonderful or terrible,
of Nature; by the very fact of being such a mirror he is man.
This has long been
recognized in the East, where the writer has seen exhibitions of such powers
which would upset the theories of many a Western man of science. And in the
West the same phenomena have been repeated for the writer, so that he knows of
his own knowledge that every man of every race has the same powers potentially.
The genuine psychic --
or, as they are often called, magical -- phenomena done by the Eastern fakir or
yogi are all performed by the use of natural forces and processes not even
dreamed of as yet by the West. Levitation of the body in apparent defiance of
gravitation is a thing to be done with ease when the process is completely
mastered. It contravenes no law. Gravitation is only half of a law. The
Oriental sage admits gravity, if one wishes to adopt the term; but the real
term is attraction, the other half of the law being expressed by the word
repulsion, and both being governed by the great laws of electrical force.
Weight and stability depend on polarity, and when the polarity of an object is
altered in respect to the earth immediately underneath it, then the object may
rise. But as mere objects are devoid of the consciousness found in man, they
cannot rise without certain other aids. The human body, however, will rise in
the air unsupported, like a bird, when its polarity is thus changed.
This change is brought
about consciously by a certain system of breathing known to the Oriental; it
may be induced also by aid from certain natural forces spoken of later, in the
cases of those who without knowing the law perform the phenomena, as with the
saints of the Roman Catholic Church.
A third great law which enters
into many of the phenomena of the East and West is that of Cohesion. The power
of Cohesion is a distinct power of itself, and not a result as is supposed.
This law and its action must be known if certain phenomena are to be brought
about, as, for instance, what the writer has seen, the passing of one solid
iron ring through another, or a stone through a solid wall. Hence another force
is used which can only be called dispersion. Cohesion is the determinating force, for, the moment the dispersing force
is withdrawn, the cohesive force restores the particles to their original
position.
Following this out the
Adept in such great dynamics is able to disperse the atoms of an object --
excluding always the human body -- to such a distance from each other as to
render the object invisible, and then can send them along a current formed in
the ether to any distance on the earth. At the desired point
the dispersing force is
withdrawn, when immediately cohesion reasserts itself and the object reappears
intact. This may sound like fiction, but being known to the Lodge and its
disciples as an actual fact, it is equally certain that Science will sooner or
later admit the proposition.
But the lay mind
infested by the materialism of the day wonders how all these manipulations are
possible, seeing that no instruments are spoken of. The instruments are in the
body and brain of man. In the view of the Lodge "the human brain is an
exhaustless generator of force," and a complete knowledge of
the inner chemical and
dynamic laws of Nature, together with a trained mind, give the possessor the
power to operate the laws to which I have referred. This will be man's
possession in the future, and would be his today were it not for blind
dogmatism, selfishness, and materialistic unbelief. Not even the Christian lives
up to his Master's very true statement that if one had faith he could remove a
mountain. A knowledge of the law when added to faith gives power over matter,
mind, space, and time.
Using the same powers,
the trained Adept can produce before the eye, objective to the touch, material
which was not visible before, and in any desired shape. This would be called
creation by the vulgar, but it is simply evolution in your very presence.
Matter is held suspended in the air about us. Every particle of matter, visible
or still unprecipitated, has been through all
possible forms, and what the Adept does is to select any desired form,
existing, as they all do, in the Astral Light and then by effort of the Will
and Imagination to clothe the form with the matter by precipitation. The object
so made will fade away unless certain other processes are resorted to which
need not be here described, but if these processes are used the object will
remain permanently.
And if it is desired to
make visible a message on paper or other surface, the same laws and powers are
used. The distinct -- photographically and sharply definite -- image of every
line of every letter or picture is formed in the mind, and then out of
the air is drawn the
pigment to fall within the limits laid down by the brain, "the exhaustless
generator of force and form." All these things the writer has seen done in
the way described, and not by any hired or irresponsible medium, and he knows
whereof he speaks.
This, then, naturally
leads to the proposition that the human Will is all powerful and the
Imagination is a most useful faculty with a dynamic force. The Imagination is
the picture-making power of the human mind. In the ordinary average human
person it has not enough training or force to be more than a sort
of dream, but it may be
trained. When trained it is the Constructor in the Human Workshop. Arrived at
that stage it makes a matrix in the Astral substance through which effects
objectively will flow. It is the greatest power, after Will, in the human
assemblage of complicated instruments. The modern Western definition of
Imagination is incomplete and wide of the mark.
It is chiefly used to
designate fancy or misconception and at all times stands for unreality. It is impossible
to get another term as good because one of the powers of the trained Imagination
is that of making an image. The word is derived from those signifying the
formation or reflection of an image. This faculty used, or rather suffered to
act, in an unregulated mode has given the West no other idea than that covered
by "fancy." So far as that goes it is right but it may be pushed to a
greater limit, which, when reached causes the Imagination to evolve in the Astral
substance an actual image or form which may be then used in the same way as an
iron moulder uses a mould of sand for the molten
iron. It is therefore the King faculty, inasmuch as the Will cannot do its work
if the Imagination be at all weak or untrained. For instance, if the person
desiring to precipitate from the air wavers in the least with the image made in
the Astral substance, the pigment will fall upon the paper in a correspondingly
wavering and diffused manner.
To communicate with
another mind at any distance the Adept attunes all the molecules of the brain
and all the thoughts of the mind so as to vibrate in unison with the mind to be
affected, and that other mind and brain have also to be either voluntarily
thrown into the same unison or fall into it voluntarily.
So though the Adept be
at
And when it is desired
to look into the mind and catch the thoughts of another and the pictures all
around him of all he has thought and looked at, the Adept's inner sight and
hearing are directed to the mind to be seen, when at once all is visible. But,
as said before, only a rogue would do this, and the Adepts do not
do it except in strictly
authorized cases. The modern man sees no misdemeanour
in looking into the secrets of another by means of this power, but the Adepts say
it is an invasion of the rights of the other person.
No man has the right, even
when he has the power in his hand, to enter into the mind of another and pick
out its secrets. This is the law of the Lodge to all who seek, and if one sees
that he is about to discover the secrets of another he must at once withdraw
and proceed no further. If he proceeds his power is taken from him in the case
of a disciple; in the case of any other person he must take the consequence of
this sort of burglary. For Nature has her laws and her policemen, and if we
commit felonies in the Astral world the great Law and the guardians of it, for
which no bribery is possible, will execute the penalty, no matter how long we
wait, even if it be for ten thousand years. Here is another safeguard for
ethics and morals. But until men admit the system of philosophy put forward in
this book, they will not deem it wrong to commit felonies in fields where their
weak human law has no effect, but at the same time by thus refusing the
philosophy they will put off the day when all may have these great powers for
the use of all.
Among phenomena useful
to notice are those consisting of the moving of objects without physical
contact. This may be done, and in more than one way. The first is to extrude
from the physical body the Astral hand and arm, and with those grasp the object
to be moved. This may be accomplished at a distance of as much as ten feet from
the person. I do not go into argument on this, only referring to the properties
of the Astral substance and members. This will serve to some extent to explain
several of the phenomena of mediums. In nearly all cases of such apportation the feat is accomplished by thus using the
unseen but material Astral hand. The second method is to use the elementals of
which I have spoken.
They have the power when
directed by the inner man to carry objects by changing the polarity, and then
we see, as with the fakirs of
Clairvoyance, clairaudience,
and second-sight are all related very closely. Every exercise of any one of
them draws in at the same time both of the others. They are but variations of
one power. Sound is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Astral
sphere, and as light goes with sound, sight obtains simultaneously with
hearing. To see an image with the Astral senses means that at the same time
there is a sound, and to hear the latter infers the presence of a related image
in Astral substance. It is perfectly well known to the true student of
occultism that every sound produces instantaneously an image, and this, so long
known in the Orient, has lately been demonstrated in the West in the production
to the eye of sound pictures on a stretched tympanum.
This part of the subject
can be gone into very much further with the aid of occultism, but as it is a
dangerous one in the present state of society I refrain at this point. In the
Astral Light are pictures of all things whatsoever that happened to any person,
and as well also pictures of those events to come the causes for which are
sufficiently well marked and made. If the causes are yet indefinite, so will be
the images of the future. But for the mass of events for several years to come
all the producing and efficient causes are always laid down with enough
definiteness to permit the seer to see them in advance as if present. By means
of these pictures, seen with the inner senses, all clairvoyants exercise their
strange faculty. Yet it is a faculty common to all men, though in the majority
but slightly developed; but occultism asserts that were it not for the germ of
this power slightly active in every one no man could convey to another any idea
whatsoever.
In clairvoyance the
pictures in the Astral Light pass before the inner vision and are reflected
into the physical eye from within. They then appear objectively to the seer. If
they are of past events or those to come, the picture only is seen; if of
events actually then occurring, the scene is perceived through the Astral Light
by the inner sense. The distinguishing difference between ordinary and
clairvoyant vision is, then, that in clairvoyance with waking sight the
vibration is communicated to the brain first, from which it is transmitted to
the physical eye, where it sets up an image upon the retina, just as the
revolving cylinder of the phonograph causes the mouthpiece to vibrate exactly
as the voice had vibrated when thrown into the receiver. In ordinary eye vision
the vibrations are given to the eye first and then transmitted to the brain.
Images and sounds are both caused by vibrations, and hence any sound once made
is preserved in the Astral Light from whence the inner sense can take it and
from within transmit it to the brain, from which it reaches the physical ear.
So in clairaudience at a distance the hearer does not hear with the ear, but
with the center of hearing in the Astral body.
Second-sight is a
combination of clairaudience and clairvoyance or not, just as the particular
case is, and the frequency with which future events are seen by the
second-sight seer adds an element of prophecy.
The highest order of
clairvoyance -- that of spiritual vision -- is very rare. The usual clairvoyant
deals only with the ordinary aspects and strata of the Astral matter. Spiritual
sight comes only to those who are pure, devoted, and firm. It may be attained
by special development of the particular organ in the body through which alone
such sight is possible, and only after discipline, long training, and the
highest altruism.
All other clairvoyance
is transitory, inadequate, and fragmentary, dealing, as it does, only with
matter and illusion. Its fragmentary and inadequate character results from the
fact that hardly any clairvoyant has the power to see into more than one of the
lower grades of Astral substance at any one time.
The pure-minded and the
brave can deal with the future and the present far better than any clairvoyant.
But as the existence of these two powers proves the presence in us of the inner
senses and of the necessary medium -- the Astral Light, they have, as such
human faculties, an important bearing upon the claims made by the so-called
"spirits" of the seance room.
Dreams are sometimes the
result of brain action automatically proceeding, and are also produced by the
transmission into the brain by the real inner person of those scenes or ideas
high or low which that real person has seen while the body slept. They are then
strained into the brain as if floating on the soul as it
sinks into the body.
These dreams may be of use, but generally the resumption of bodily activity
destroys the meaning, perverts the image, and reduces all to confusion. But the
great fact of all dreaming is that some one perceives and feels therein, and
this is one of the arguments for the inner person's existence.
In sleep the inner man
communes with higher intelligences, and
sometimes succeeds in
impressing the brain with what is gained, either a high idea or a prophetic
vision, or else fails in consequence of the resistance of brain fibre. The karma of the person also determines the meaning
of a dream, for a king may dream that which relates to his kingdom, while the
same thingdreamed by a citizen relates to nothing of
temporal consequence. But, as said by Job:
"In dreams and
visions of the night man is instructed."
Apparitions and doubles
are of two general classes. The one, astral shells or images from the astral
world, either actually visible to the eye or the result of vibration within
thrown out to the eye and thus making the person think he sees an objective
form without. The other, the astral body of living persons and
carrying full
consciousness or only partially so endowed.
Laborious attempts by Psychical
Research Societies to prove apparitions without knowing these laws really prove
nothing, for out of twenty admitted cases nineteen may be the objectivization of the image impressed on the brain. But
that apparitions have
been seen there is no
doubt. Apparitions of those just dead may be either pictures made objective as
described, or the Astral Body -- called Kama Rupa at this stage -- of the
deceased. And as the dying thoughts and forces released from the body are very
strong, we have more accounts of such apparitions than of any other class.
The Adept may send out
his apparition, which, however, is called by another name, as it consists of
his conscious and trained astral body endowed with all his intelligence and not
wholly detached from his physical frame.
Theosophy does not deny
nor ignore the physical laws discovered by science. It admits all such as are
proven, but it asserts the existence of others which modify the action of those
we ordinarily know. Behind all the visible phenomena is the occult cosmos with
its ideal machinery; that occult cosmos can only be fully understood by means
of the inner senses which pertain to it; those senses will not be easily
developed if their existence is denied. Brain and mind acting together have the
power to evolve forms, first as astral ones in astral substance, and later as
visible ones by accretions of the matter on this plane.
Objectivity depends
largely on perception, and perception may be affected by inner stimuli. Hence a
witness may either see an object which actually exists as such without, or may
be made to see one by internal stimulus.
This gives us three
modes of sight:
(a) with the eye by
means of light from an object
(b) with the inner
senses by means of the Astral Light
(c) by stimulus from within
which causes the eye to report to the brain, thus throwing the inner image
without.
The phenomena of the
other senses may be tabulated in the same
manner.
The Astral substance being
the register of all thoughts, sounds, pictures, and other vibrations, and the
inner man being a complete person able to act with or without co-ordination
with the physical, all the phenomena of hypnotism, clairvoyance, clairaudience,
mediumship, and the rest of those which are not
consciously performed
may be explained. In the Astral substance are all sounds and pictures, and in
the Astral man remain impressions of every event, however remote or
insignificant; these acting together produce the phenomena which seem so
strange to those who deny or are unaware of the postulates of occultism.
But to explain the
phenomena performed by Adepts, Fakirs, Yogis, and all trained occultists, one
has to understand the occult laws of chemistry, of mind, of force, and of
matter. These it is obviously not the province of such a work as
this to treat in detail.
CHAPTER 17
Psychic Phenomena and
Spiritualism
In the history of
psychical phenomena the records of so-called "spiritualism" in
The doctrines given in
preceding chapters are those of true spiritualism; the misnamed practises of modern mediums and so-called spiritists constitute the Worship of the Dead,
old-fashioned necromancy, in fact, which was always prohibited by spiritual
teachers. They are a gross materializing of the spiritual idea, and deal with
matter more than with its opposite. This cult is supposed by some to have
originated about forty years ago in America at Rochester, N. Y., under the mediumship of the Fox sisters, but it was known in Salem
during the witchcraft excitement, and in Europe one hundred years ago the same practises were pursued, similar phenomena seen, mediums
developed, and seances held.
For centuries it has
been well known in
and communicated with.
But the facts of the long record of forty years in
give the true
explanation, point out defects, reveal dangers, and suggest remedies.
As it is plain that
clairvoyance, clairaudience, thought-transference, prophecy, dream and vision,
levitation, apparitional appearance, are all powers that have been known for
ages, the questions most pressing in respect to spiritualism are those relating
to communication with the souls of those who have left this earth and are now
disembodied, and with unclassified spirits who have not been embodied here but
belong to other spheres. Perhaps also the question of materialization of forms
at seances deserves some attention.
Communication includes
trance-speaking, slate and other writing, independent voices in the air,
speaking through the physical vocal organs of the medium, and precipitation
of written messages out
of the air. Do the mediums communicate with the spirits of the dead? Do our departed
friends perceive the state of life they have left, and do they sometimes return
to speak to and with us?
The answers are
intimated in foregoing chapters. Our departed do not see us here. They are
relieved from the terrible pang such a sight would inflict. Once in a while a
pure-minded, unpaid medium may ascend in trance to the state in which a
deceased soul is, and may remember some bits of what was there heard;
but this is rare. Now
and then in the course of decades some high human spirit may for a moment
return and by unmistakable means communicate with mortals.
At the moment of death
the soul may speak to some friend on earth before the door is finally shut. But
the mass of communications alleged as made day after day through mediums are
from the astral unintelligent remains of men, or in many
cases entirely the
production of, invention, compilation, discovery, and collocation by the
loosely attached Astral body of the living medium. Certain objections arise to
the theory that the spirits of the dead communicate.
Some are:
I. At no time have these spirits given the laws governing
any of the phenomena, except in a few instances, not accepted by the cult,
where the theosophical theory was advanced. As it would destroy such structures
as those erected by A. J. Davis, these particular spirits fell into discredit.
II. The
spirits disagree among themselves, one stating the after-life to be very
different from the description by another. These disagreements vary with the
medium and the supposed theories of the deceased during life. One spirit admits
reincarnation and others deny it.
III. The
spirits have discovered nothing in respect to history, anthropology, or other
important matters, seeming to have less ability in that line than living men;
and although they often claim to be men who lived in older civilizations, they
show ignorance thereupon or merely repeat recently published discoveries.
IV. In
these forty years no rationale of phenomena nor of development of mediumship has been obtained from the spirits. Great
philosophers are reported as speaking through mediums, but utter only drivel
and merest commonplaces.
V. The
mediums come to physical and moral grief, are accused of fraud, are shown
guilty of trickery, but the spirit guides and controls do not interfere to
either prevent or save.
VI. It is
admitted that the guides and controls deceive and incite to fraud.
VII. It is
plainly to be seen through all that is reported of the spirits that their assertions
and philosophy, if any, vary with the medium and the most advanced thought of
living spiritualists.
From all this and much
more that could be adduced, the man of materialistic science is fortified in
his ridicule, but the theosophist has to conclude that the entities, if there
be any communicating, are not human spirits, and that the
explanations are to be
found in some other theories.
Materialization of a
form out of the air, independent of the medium's physical body, is a fact. But
it is not a spirit. As was very well said by one of the "spirits" not
flavoured by spiritualism, one way to produce this
phenomenon is by the accretion of electrical and magnetic particles into one
mass upon which matter is aggregated and an image reflected out of the Astral
sphere.
This is the whole of it;
as much a fraud as a collection of muslin and masks. How this is accomplished
is another matter. The spirits are not able to tell, but an attempt has been
made to indicate the methods and instruments in former chapters. The second
method is by the use of the Astral body of the living
medium. In this case the
Astral form exudes from the side of the medium, gradually collects upon itself
particles extracted from the air and the bodies of the sitters present, until
at last it becomes visible.
Sometimes it will resemble
the medium; at others it bears a different appearance. In almost every instance
dimness of light is requisite because a high light would disturb the Astral
substance in a violent manner and render the projection difficult. Some
so-called
materializations are hollow mockeries, as they are but flat plates of electrical
and magnetic substance on which pictures from the Astral Light are reflected.
These seem to be the faces of the dead, but they are simply pictured illusions.
If one is to understand
the psychic phenomena found in the history of "spiritualism" it is
necessary to know and admit the following:
I. The
complete heredity of man astrally, spiritually, and
psychically, as a being who knows, reasons, feels, and acts through the body,
the Astral body, and the soul.
II. The
nature of the mind, its operation, its powers; the nature and power of
imagination; the duration and effect of impressions. Most important in this is
the persistence of the slightest impression as well as the deepest; that every
impression produces a picture in the individual aura; and that by means of this
a connection is established between the auras of friends and relatives old,
new, near, distant, and remote in degree: this would give a wide range of
possible sight to a clairvoyant.
III. The
nature, extent, function, and power of man's inner Astral organs and faculties
included in the terms Astral body and Kama. That these are not hindered from
action by trance or sleep, but are increased in the medium when entranced; at
the same time their action is not free, but governed by the mass chord of
thought among the sitters, or by a predominating will, or by the presiding
devil behind the scenes; if a sceptical scientific
investigator be present, his mental attitude may totally inhibit the action of
the medium's powers by what we might call a freezing process which no English
terms will adequately describe.
IV. The fate
of the real man after death, his state, power, activity there, and his
relation, if any, to those left behind him here.
V. That the
intermediary between mind and body -- the Astral body -- is thrown off at death
and left in the Astral light to fade away; and that the real man goes to Devachan.
VI. The
existence, nature, power, and function of the Astral light and its place as a
register in Nature. That it contains, retains, and reflects pictures of each
and every thing that happened to anyone, and also every thought; that it
permeates the globe and the atmosphere around it; that the transmission of
vibration through it is practically instantaneous, since the rate is much
quicker than that of electricity as now known.
VII. The
existence in the Astral light of beings not using bodies like ours, but not
human in their nature, having powers, faculties, and a sort of consciousness of
their own; these include the elemental forces or nature sprites divided into
many degrees, and which have to do with every operation of Nature and every
motion of the mind of man. That these elementals act at seances
automatically in their various departments, one class presenting pictures,
another producing sounds, and others depolarizing objects for the purposes of apportation. Acting with them in this Astral sphere are the
soulless men who live in it. To these are to be ascribed the phenomenon, among
others, of the "independent voice," always sounding like a voice in a
barrel just because it is made in a vacuum which is absolutely necessary for an
entity so far removed from spirit. The peculiar timbre of this sort of voice
has not been noticed by the spiritualists as important, but it is extremely
significant in the view of occultism.
VIII. The
existence and operation of occult laws and forces in nature which may be used
to produce phenomenal results on this plane; that these laws and forces may be
put into operation by the subconscious man and by the elementals either
consciously or unconsciously, and that many of these occult operations are
automatic in the same way as is the freezing of water under intense cold or the
melting of ice under heat.
IX. That the
Astral body of the medium, partaking of the nature of the Astral substance, may
be extended from the physical body, may act outside of the latter, and may also
extrude at times any portion of itself such as hand, arm, or leg and thereby
move objects, indite letters, produce touches on the
body, and so on ad infinitum. And that the Astral body of any person may be
made to feel sensation, which, being transmitted to the brain, causes the
person to think he is touched on the outside or has heard a sound.
Mediumship is full of dangers because the Astral part of the man is
now only normal in action when joined to the body; in distant years it will
normally act without a body as it has in the far past. To become a medium means
that you have to become disorganized physiologically and in the nervous system,
because through the latter is the connection between the two worlds.
The moment the door is
opened all the unknown forces rush in, and as the grosser part of nature is
nearest to us it is that part which affects us most; the lower nature is also
first affected and inflamed because the forces used are from that part of us.
We are then at the mercy
of the vile thoughts of all men, and subject to the influence of the shells in
Kama Loka. If to this be added the taking of money for the practice of mediumship, an additional danger is at hand, for the things
of the spirit and those relating to the Astral world must not be sold. This is
the great disease of
American spiritualism which has debased and degraded its whole history; until
it is eliminated no good will come from the practice; those who wish to hear
truth from the other world must devote themselves to truth and leave all
considerations of money out of sight.
To attempt to acquire
the use of the psychic powers for mere curiosity or for selfish ends is also
dangerous for the same reasons as in the case of mediumship.
As the civilization of the present day is selfish to the last degree and built
on the personal element, the rules for the development of these powers
in the right way have
not been given out, but the Masters of Wisdom have said that philosophy and
ethics must first be learned and practised before any
development of the other department is to be indulged in; and their
condemnation of the wholesale development of mediums is supported by the
history of spiritualism, which is one long story of the ruin of mediums in
every direction.
Equally improper is the
manner of the scientific schools which without a thought for the true nature of
man indulge in experiments in hypnotism in which the subjects are injured for
life, put into disgraceful attitudes, and made to do things for the
satisfaction of the investigators which would never be done by
men and women in their
normal state. The Lodge of the Masters does not care for Science unless it aims
to better man's state morally as well as physically, and no aid will be given
to Science until she looks at man and life from the moral and spiritual side.
For this reason those who know all about the psychical world, its denizens and
laws, are proceeding with a reform in morals and
philosophy before any
great attention will be accorded to the strange and seductive phenomena
possible for the inner powers of man.
And at the present time
the cycle has almost run its course for this century. Now, as a century ago,
the forces are slackening; for that reason the phenomena of spiritualism are
lessening in number and volume; the Lodge hopes by the time the next tide
begins to rise that the West will have gained some right knowledge of the true
philosophy of Man and Nature, and be then ready to bear the lifting of the veil
a little more. To help on the progress of the race in this direction is the
object of this book, and with that it is submitted to its readers in every part
of the world.
Cardiff Theosophical Archive
The Theosophical Society,
Cardiff Lodge, 206 Newport Road, Cardiff CF24 – 1DL