< Correspondence (continued from page 7-44) >
material bodies) are shown—the captive, the wandering, and the free spirits. If Scrutator were acquainted with the literature of Kabalism, he would know that the term elementary applies not only to one principle, or constituent part, to an elementary primary substance, but also embodies the idea which we express by the term elemental—that which pertains to the four elements of the material world, the first principles or primary ingredients. The word “elemental,” as defined by Webster, was not current at the time of Kunrath, but the idea was perfectly understood. The distinction has been made, and the term adopted by Theosophists for the sake of avoiding confusion. The thanks we get are that we are charged with propounding, in 1878, a different theory of the “elementaries” from that of 18761
Does anything herein stated, either as from ourselves, or Kunrath, or Levi, contradict the statement of the “learned occultist” that “each atom, no matter where found, is imbued with that vital principle called spirit:” or that each grain of sand, equally with eachminutest atom of the human body, has its inherent latent spark of the divine light”? Not in the least. “M.A., Cantab.,” asks, “How, then, can a man lose this divine light, in part or in whole, as a rule, before death, if each minutest atom of the human body has its inherent latent spark of the divine light?” Italicising some words, as above, but omitting to emphasize the one important word of the sentence, i,e., “latent,” which contains the key to the whole mystery. In the grain of sand, and each atom of the human material body, the spirit is latent, not active; hence, being but a correlation of the highest light, something concrete as compared with the purely abstract, the atom is vitalised and energised by spirit, without being endowed with distinct consciousness. A grain of sand, as every minutest atom, is certainly “imbued with that vital principle called spirit.” So is every atom of the human body, whether physical or astral, and thus every atom of both, following the law of evolution, whether of objective or semi-concrete astral matter, will have to remain eternal throughout the endless cycles, indestructible in their primary, elementary constituents. But will “M.A., Cantab.,” for all that, call a grain of sand, or a human nail-paring, consciously immortal? Does he mean us to understand him as believing that a fractional part, as a fraction, has the same attributes, capabilities, and limitations as the whole? Does he say that because the atoms in a nail-paring are indestructible as atoms, therefore the body, of which the nail formed a part, is of necessity, as a conscious whole, indestructible and immortal?
Our opponents repeat the words Trinity, Body, Soul, Spirit, as they might say the cat, the house, and the Irishman inhabiting it—three perfectly dissimilar things. They do not see that, dissimilar as the three parts of the human trinity may seem, they are in truth but correlations of the one eternal essence—which is no essence, but unfortunately the English language is barren of adequate expression—and, though they do not see it, the house, the physical Irishman, and the cat are, in their last analysis, one. I verily begin to suspect that they imagine that spirit and matter are two, instead of one! Truly, says Vishnu Barva Brahmachari, in one of his essays in Marathi (1869), that “the opinion of the Europeans that matter is ‘Padartha’—(an equivalent for the ‘pada,’ or word ‘Abhava,’ l.e., Ahey, composed of two letters, ‘Ahe,’ meaning is, and ‘nahin,’ not)—whereas ‘Abhava’ is no “Padartha,” is foolishly erroneous! Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann seem to have written to little effect, and Kapila will be soon pronounced an antiquated ignoramus. Without at all ranging myself under Schopenhauer’s banner, who maintains that in reality there is neither spirit nor matter, yet I must say that if ever he were studied, Theosophy would be better understood.
But can one really discuss metaphysical ideas in an European language? I doubt it. We say “spirit,” and behold, what confusion it leads to? Europeans give the name spirit to that something which they conceive as apart from physical organisation, independent of corporeal, objective existence; and they call spirit also the airy, vaporous essence, alcohol. Therefore, the New York reporter who defined a materialised spirit as “frozen whisky,” was right, in his way. A copious vocabulary, indeed, that has but one term for God and for alcohol! With all their libraries of metaphysics, European nations have not even 'gone to the trouble of inventing appropriate words to elucidate metaphysical ideas. If they had, perhaps one book in every thousand would have sufficed to really instruct the public, instead of there being the present confusion of words, obscuring intelligence, and utterly hampering the orientalist, who would expound his philosophy in English. Whereas, in the latter language, I find but one word to express, perhaps, twenty different ideas; in the Eastern tongues, especially Sanskrit, there are twenty words or more to render one idea in its various shades of meaning.
We are accused of propagating ideas that would surprise the “average” Buddhist. Granted, and I. will liberally add that the average Brahminist might be equally astonished. We never said that we were either Buddhists or Brahminists in the sense of their popular exoteric theologies. Buddha, sitting on his lotus, or Brahma, with any number of teratological arms, appeal to us as little as the Catholic Madonna, or the Christian personal God, which stare at us from cathedral walls and ceilings. But neither Buddha nor Brahma represent to their respective worshippers the same ideas as these Catholic icons, which we regard as blasphemous. In this particular, who dares say that Christendom, with its boasted civilisation, has outgrown the fetichism of the Fijians? When we see Christians and Spiritualists speaking so flippantly and confidently about God and the materialization of “spirit,” we wish they might be made to share a little in the reverential ideas of the old Aryas.
We do not write for “average” Buddhists, or average people of any sort. But I am quite willing to match any tolerably educated Buddhist or Brahmin against the best metaphysicians of Europe, to compare views on God and on man’s immortality.
The ultimate abstract definition of this—call it God, force, principle, as you will—will ever remain a mystery to humanity, though it attain to its highest intellectual development. The anthropomorphic ideas of Spiritualists concerning spirit are a direct consequence of the anthropomorphic conceptions of Christians as to the Deity. So directly is the one the outflow of the other, that “Scrutator’s” handiest argument against the duality of a child and potential immortality, is to cite “Jesus who increased in wisdom as his brain increased.” Christians call God an Infinite Being, and then endow Him with every finite attribute, such as love, anger, benevolence, mercy! They call Him All-Merciful, and preach eternal damnation for three-fourths of humanity, in every church; All-Just, and the sins of this brief span of life may not be expiated by even an eternity of conscious agony. Now, by some miracle of oversight among thousands of mistranslations in the “Holy” Writ, the word “destruction,” the synonym of annihilation, was rendered correctly in the King James’s version, and no dictionary can make it read either damnation, or eternal torment. Though the Church consistently put down the “destructionists,” yet the impartial will scarcely deny that they come nearer than their persecutors to believing what Jesus taught and what is consistent with justice, in teaching the final annihilation of the wicked.
To conclude, then, we believe that there is but one undefinable principle in the whole universe, which, being utterly incomprehensible by our finite intellects, we prefer rather to leave undebated, than to blaspheme its majesty with our anthropomorphic speculations. We believe that all else which has being, whether material or spiritual, and all that may have existence, actually or potentially in our idealism, emanates from this principle. That everything is a correlation in one shape or another, of this Will and Force; and hence, judging of the unseen by the visible, we base our speculations upon the teachings of the generations of sages who preceded Christianity, fortified by our own reason.
I have already illustrated the incapacity of some of our critics to separate abstract ideas from complex objects, by instancing the grain of sand and the nail-paring. They refuse to comprehend that a philosophical doctrine can teach that an atom imbued with divine light, or a portion of the great Spirit, in its latent stage of correlation, may, notwithstanding its reciprocal or corresponding similarity and relations to the one indivisible whole, be yet utterly deficient in self-consciousness. That it is only when this atom, magnetically drawn to its fellow-atoms, which had served in a previous state to form with it some lower complex object, is transformed at last, after endless cycles of evolution, into Man—the apex of perfected being, intellectually and physically, on our planet—in conjunction with them becomes as a whole a living soul, and reaches the state of intellectual self-consciousness. “A stone becomes a plant, a plant an animal, an animal a man, and man a spirit,” say the Kabalists. And here,"again, is the wretched necessity of translating by the word “spirit” an expression which means a celestial, or rather ethereal, transparent man—something diametrically opposite to the man of matter, yet a man. But if man is the crown of evolution on earth, what is he in the initiatory stages of the next existences—that man who, at his best, even when he is pretended to have served as a habitation for the Christian God, Jesus is said by Paul to have been “made a little lower than the angels”? But now we have every astral spook transformed into an “angel”! I cannot believe that the scholars who write for your paper—and there are some of great intelligence and erudition who think for themselves; and whom exact science has taught that ex nihilo nihil fit; who know that every atom of man’s body has been evolving by imperceptible gradations, from lower into higher forms, through the cycles—accept the unscientific and illogical doctrine that the simple unshelling of an astral man transforms him into a celestial spirit and “angel” guide.
In Theosophical opinion a spirit is a ray, a fraction of the whole; and the Whole being Omniscient and Infinite, its fraction must partake, in degree, of the same abstract attributes. Man’s “spirit” must become the drop of the ocean, called “Ishwara-Bhava”—the “I am one body, together with the universe itself” (I am in my Father, and my Father is in me), instead of remaining but the “Jiva-Bhava,” the body only. He must feel himself not only a part of the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer, but of the soul of the three, the Parabrahma, who is above these, and is the vitalising, energising, and ever-presiding Spirit. He must fully realise the sense of the word “Sahajanund,” that state of perfect bliss in Nirvana, which can only exist for the It, which has become co-existent with the “formless and actionless present time.” This is the state called “artamana,” or the “Ever Still Present,” in which there is neither past nor future, but one infinite eternity of present. Which of the controlling “spirits,” materialised or invisible, have shown any signs that they belong to the kind of real spirits known as the “Sons of Eternity”? Has the highest of them been able to tell even as much as our own Divine Nous can whisper to us in moments when there comes the flash of sudden pre-vision? Honest communicating “intelligences” often answer to many questions, “We do not know; this has not been revealed to us.” This very admission proves that, while in many cases on their way to knowledge and perfection, yet they are but embryonic, undeveloped “spirits;” they are inferior even to some living Yogis, who, through abstract meditation, have united themselves with their personal individual Brahma, their Atman, and hence have overcome the “Adnayana,’’ or lack of that knowledge as to the intrinsic value of one’s “self,” the Ego, or self-being, so recommended by Socrates and the Delphic commandment.
London has been often visited by highly intellectual, educated Hindus, I have not heard of any one professing a belief in “materialized spirits”—as spirits. When not tainted with Materialism, through demoralising association with Europeans, and when free from superstitious sectarianism, how would one of them, versed in the Vedanta, regard these apparitions of the circle? The chances are that, after going the rounds of the mediums, he would say: “Some of these may be survivals of disembodied men’s intelligences, but they are no more spiritual than the average man. They lack the knowledge of “Dryananta,” and evidently find themselves in a chronic state of “Maya,” i.e., possessed of the idea that “they are that which they are not.” The “Vartamana” has no significance for them, as they are cognizant but of the “Vishama” (that which, like the concrete numbers in mixed mathematics, applies to that which can be numbered). Like simple, ignorant mortals, they regard the shadow of things as the reality, and vice versa, mixing up the true light of the “Vyatireka” with the false light or deceitful appearance—the “Anvaya.” ... In what respect, then, are they higher than the average mortal? No, they are not spirits, not “Devas,” . . . they are astral “Dasyoos” . . .
Of course, all this will appear to “Scrutator” “unfathomable absurdities,” for, unfortunately, few metaphysicians shower down from Western skies. Therefore, so long as our English opponents will remain in their semi-Christian ideas, and not only ignore the old philosophy, but the very terms it employs to render abstract ideas; so <... continues on page 7-46 >
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