< Madame Blavatsky on the Vews of the Theosophists (continued from page 4-198) >
pure spirits, any less than we do in communication between bad men and bad spirits, or even of good men with bad spirits under bad conditions. Occultism is the essence of Spiritualism, while modern or popular Spiritualism I cannot better characterize than as adulterated, unconscious magic. We go so far as to say that all the great and noble characters, all the grand geniuses—the poets, painters, sculptors, musicians—all who have worked at any time for the realization of their highest ideal, irrespective of selfish ends—have been Spiritually inspired; not mediums, as many Spiritualists call them—passive tools in the hands of controlling guides—but incarnate, illuminated souls, working consciously in collaboration with the pure disembodied human and newly-embodied high planetary spirits, for the elevation and spiritualization of mankind. We believe that everything in material life is most intimately associated with Spiritual agencies. As regards psychical phenomena and mediumship, we believe that it is only when the passive medium has given place, or rather grown into, the conscious mediator, that he can discern between spirits good and bad. And we do believe, and know also, that while the incarnate man (though the highest adept) cannot vie in potency with the pure disembodied spirits, who, freed of all their skandhas, have become subjective to the physical senses, yet he can perfectly equal, and can far surpass in the way of phenomena, mental or physical, the average “spirit” of modern mediumship. Believing this, you will perceive that we are better Spiritualists, in the true acceptation of the word, than so-called Spiritualists, who, instead of showing the reverence we do to true spirits—gods—debase the name of spirit, by applying it to the impure, or, at best, imperfect beings who produce the majority of the phenomena.
The two objections urged by Mr. Croucher against the claim of the Theosophists, that a child is but a duality at birth, “and perhaps until the sixth or seventh year,” and that some depraved persons are annihilated at some time after death, are (1) that mediums have described to him his three children, “who passed away at the respective ages of two, four, and six years”; and (2) that he has known persons who were “very depraved” on earth come back. He says: These statements have been afterwards confirmed by glorious beings who come after, and who have proved by their mastery of the laws which are governing the universe, that they are worthy of being believed.
I am really happy to learn that Mr. Croucher is competent to sit in judgment upon these “glorious beings,” and give them the palm over Kapila, Manu, Plato, and even Paul. It is worth something, after all, to be an “inspirational medium.” We have no such “glorious beings” in the Theosophical Society to learn from; but it is evident that while Mr. Croucher sees and judges things through his emotional nature, the philosophers whom we study took nothing from any glorious being that did not perfectly accord with the universal harmony, justice, and equilibrium of the manifest plan of the universe. The Hermetic axiom, “as below, so above,” is the only rule of evidence accepted by the Theosophists. Believing in a spiritual and invisible universe, we cannot conceive of it in any other way than as completely dovetailing and corresponding with the material, objective universe; for logic and observation alike teach us that the latter is the outcome and visible manifestation of the former, and that the laws governing both are immutable.
In his letter of December 7th,* Colonel Olcott very appropriately illustrates his subject of potential immortality by citing the admitted physical law of the survival of the fittest. The rule applies to the greatest as to the smallest things—to the planet equally with the plant. It applies to man. And the imperfectly developed man-child can no more exist under the conditions prepared for the perfected types of its species, than can an imperfect plant or animal. In infantile life, the higher faculties are not developed, but, as everyone knows, are only in the germ, or rudimentary. The babe is an animal, however “angelic” he may, and naturally enough, ought to appear to his parents. Be it ever so beautifully molded, the infant body is but the jewel-casket preparing for the jewel. It is bestial, selfish, and, as a babe, nothing more. Little of even the soul, Psychê, can be perceived except as vitality is concerned; hunger, terror, pain, and pleasure appear to be the principal of its conceptions. A kitten is its superior in everything but possibilities. The grey neurine of the brain is equally unformed. After a time mental qualities begin to appear, but they relate chiefly to external matters. The cultivation of the mind of the child by teachers can only affect this part of the nature—what Paul calls natural or psychical, and James and Jude sensual or psychical. Hence the words of Jude [verse 19], “psychical, having not the spirit,” and of Paul:
The psychical man receiveth not the things of the spirit, for to him they are foolishness; the spiritual man discerneth [1 Cor., ii, 14].
It is only the man of full age, with his faculties disciplined to discern good and evil, whom we can denominate spiritual, noetic, intuitive. Children developed in such respects would be precocious, abnormal—abortives.
Why, then, should a child who has never lived other than an animal life; who never discerned right from wrong; who never cared whether he lived or died—since he could not understand either of life or death—become individually immortal? Man’s cycle is not complete until he has passed through the earthlife. No one stage of probation and experience can be skipped over. He must be a man before he can become a spirit. A dead child is a failure of nature—he must live again; and the same psychê re-enters the physical plane through another birth. Such cases, together with those of congenital idiots, are, as stated in Isis Unveiled, the only instances of human reincarnation. If every child-duality were to be immortal, why deny a like individual immortality to the duality of the animal? Those who believe in the trinity of man know the babe to be but a duality—body and soul; and the individuality which resides only in the psychical is, as we have seen proved by the philosophers, perishable. The completed trinity only survives. Trinity, I say, for at death the astral form becomes the outward body, and inside a still finer one evolves, which takes the place of the psychê on earth, and the whole is more or less overshadowed by the nous. Space prevented Colonel Olcott from developing the doctrine more fully, or he would have added that not even all of the elementaries (human) are annihilated. There is still a chance for some. By a supreme struggle these may retain their third and higher principle, and so, though slowly and painfully, yet ascend sphere after sphere, casting off at each transition the previous heavier garment, and clothing themselves in more radiant spiritual envelopes, until, rid of every finite particle, the trinity merges into the final Nirvana, and becomes a unity—a God.
A volume would scarce suffice to enumerate all the varieties of elementaries and elementals; the former being so called by some Kabalists (Henry Khunrath, for instance) to indicate their entanglement in the terrestrial elements which hold them captive, and the latter designated by that name to avoid confusion, and equally applying to those which go to form the astral body of the infant, and to the stationary nature-spirits proper. Éliphas Lévi, however, indifferently calls them all “Elementary,” and “souls.” I repeat again, it is but the wholly psychical, disembodied astral man, which ultimately disappears as an individual entity. As to the component parts of his psychê. they are as indestructible as the atoms of any other body composed of matter.
That man must indeed be a true animal who has not after death, a spark of the divine ruach or nous left in him to allow him a chance of self-salvation. Yet there are such lamentable exceptions; not alone among the depraved, but also among those who, during life, by stifling every idea of an after-existence, have killed in themselves the last desire to achieve immortality. It is the will of man, his all-potent will, that weaves his destiny, and if a man is determined in the notion that death means annihilation, he will find it so. It is among our commonest experiences that the determination of physical life or death depends upon the will. Some people snatch themselves by force of determination from the very jaws of death; while others succumb to insignificant maladies. What man does with his body he can do with his disembodied psychê.
Nothing in this militates against the images of Mr. Croucher’s children being seen in the Astral Light by the medium, either as actually left by the children themselves, or as imagined by the father to look when grown. The impression in the latter case would be but a phasma, while in the former it is a phantasma, or the apparition of the indestructible impress of what once really was.
In days of old the “mediators” of humanity were men like Krishna, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Apollonius of Tyana, Plotinus, Porphyry, and the like of them. They were adepts, philosophers—men who, by struggling their whole lives in purity, study, and self-sacrifice, through trials, privations, and self-discipline, attained divine illumination and seemingly superhuman powers. They could not only produce all the phenomena seen in our times, but regarded it as a sacred duty to cast out “evil spirits” or demons, from the unfortunate who were obsessed. In other words, to rid the medium of their days of the “elementaries.” But in our time of improved psychology every hysterical sensitive blooms into a seer, and behold! there are mediums by the thousand! Without any previous study, self-denial, or the least limitation of their physical nature, they assume, in the capacity of mouthpieces of unidentified and unidentifiable intelligences, to outrival Socrates in wisdom, Paul in eloquence, and Tertullian himself in fiery and authoritative dogmatism. The Theosophists are the last to assume infallibility for themselves, or recognize it in others; as they judge others, so they are willing to be judged. In the name, then, of logic and common sense, before bandying epithets, let us submit our differences to the arbitrament of reason. Let us compare all things, and, putting aside emotionalism and prejudice as unworthy of the logician and the experimentalist, hold fast only to that which passes the ordeal of ultimate analysis.
New York, January 14th, 1878.
* See this book p. 66e
Space and Time
Sir,— I am glad to "see that my anticipations, expressed years ago, that we should be indebted to a new generation of thinking men and women for a fair and candid examination of the claims of Spiritualism, is now being realised in your columns, and it is not, I assure you, an empty compliment when I say that the journal which you conduct is in my opinion a credit to the movement which it advocates. I do not, however, take up my pen to enter the lists as a controversialist, for I find my thoughts are far better expressed by others, but I should like to say in passing that the theories of my friend Dr. Wyld, and his followers, do not disturb my settled convictions that the intelligences—good, bad, and indifferent—which come to us from the invisible world, proceed from departed human beings of like habits and character, and this is confirmed in my mind by the actions I have witnessed, and the nature of the messages I have invariably received. On this point, by the way, it would be interesting to know what proof the occultists give of any intelligence such as we have been accustomed to call spiritual, being derived from beings of another race, whom they assert are of a very low order in creation, but who, to play the part assigned to them, must be intimately acquainted with the ways and usages of modern society, and with the languages of all nations.
My immediate object in writing this letter, is to take exception to a passage in Mr. Charles Massey’s paper, “Space and Time.” He says, “I, for instance—I do not accept the story of Mrs. Guppy’s miscalled flight from Holloway to Lamb’s-Conduit-street; it is not because I see anything at all incredible in it, but because the evidence has failed in this particular instance to satisfy me of the fact as proven, though I think it very probably is true. No Spiritualist, of course, is absurd enough to suppose that there was an actual flight through space of Mrs. Guppy’s phenomenal body.”
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Editor's notes
- ↑ Space and Time by Coleman, Benjn., London Spiritualist, No. 285, February 8, 1878, p. 69
London Spiritualist, No. 285, February 8, 1878, p. 69