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(June 1892 — ?)
Publications:
- The Path, vol. VII, no. 3, June 1892, pp. 87-89 (to be continued)
Read:
CTD entry in Russian: Кейтли, Джулия - "Она, умерши, говорит"
DATA
Title for references: Keightley J - She Being Dead Yet Speaketh
Short description: In her will H. P. Blavatsky asked that her friends assemble each year on the anniversary of her deat...
In the will of the late H. P. Blavatsky was made the request that her friends should assemble on the anniversary of her death and read passages from the Bhagavad-Gita and the Light of Asia. This was accordingly done on May 8th, in Adyar, London, New York, and other places. In New York, among other interesting items reported at the time, Mrs. J. Campbell Keightley read, after a few introductory remarks, extracts from the private letters of H. P. B. In response to many requests we print these as follows. The remarks, being extemporaneous, are quoted from memory.
87 Mr. President, Friends:
This being the first occasion upon which I have ever spoken in public, I will ask you to condone my inexperience while I make a few remarks upon the extracts chosen from the letters of Madame Blavatsky to a few friends.
In regard to Mme. Blavatsky, the world, to use a phrase of Charles Lamb, was "the victim of imperfect sympathies." It failed to know her; that failure was its own great loss. Among the many accusations flung at her was one which, at the last ditch, it never failed to make; it said that Mme. Blavatsky had no Moral Ideal. This was false.
She had this ideal; she had also the Eastern reverence for an ideal — a reverence to the Western world unknown. We might hence expect to find her teaching that Ideal to a great extent under the privacy of a pledge, and there are indications of this in all that has been published concerning the Esoteric School. That her ideal was ever present to her mind and heart these extracts from private letters to her friends will show.
Her main teachings can be reduced to the following propositions:
That Morals have a basis in Law and in fact.
That Moral Law is Natural Law.
That Evolution makes for Righteousness.
That the "fundamental identity of all souls with the Oversoul" renders moral contagion possible through the subtle psychic medium.
That the Spiritual Identity of all Being renders Universal Brotherhood the only possible path for truth-seeking men.
She distrusted the appeal to sentiment. She saw that existing religions fail in it; that modern civilization frustrates it; that emotionalism is no basis for the Will which annuls all temptations of the flesh, and the Faith which shall make mountains move.
Hence she taught the scientific aspect and bearing of sin.88Taught that Universal Law, in every department, rigidly opposes and avenges the commission of sin, showing the free will of man counterbalanced by the declaration "Vengeance is mine, saith the Law; I will repay". She taught that the awful responsibility of the occultist, extending down to the least atom of substance, forever forbade our asking that question of Cain which we do ask daily — "Am I my Brother's keeper?" She taught that the deep reply reverberated down the ages, as we may read it in our bibles: "What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the ground".
Justice she taught, and the true discrimination of it; Mercy, too, and Love. She wrote of one: "He has developed an extraordinary hatred to me, but I have loved him too much to hate him". Above all she taught that "the pure in heart see God"; taught it as a scientific fact; showed it to be, so to say, materially as well as spiritually possible through the spiritual laws working in the one Substance, and, in the showing, lifted our courage higher than the visible stars.
The first of these extracts from H. P. B.'s letters is dated Nov. 29, 1878, and is interesting from the fact that it speaks of the original institution of three degrees of the T. S., a fact often disputed in these later days.
You will find the aims and purposes of the Theosophical Society in the two inclosed circulars. It is a brotherhood of humanity, established to make away with all and every dogmatic religion founded on dead-letter interpretation, and to teach people and every member to believe but in one impersonal God; to rely upon his (man's) own powers; to consider himself his only saviour; to learn the infinitude of the occult psychological powers hidden within his own physical man; to develop these powers; and to give him the assurance of the immortality of his divine spirit and the survival of his soul; to make him regard every man of whatever race, color, or creed, and to prove to him that the only truths revealed to man by superior men (not a god) are contained in the Vedas of the ancient Aryas of India. Finally, to demonstrate to him that there never were, will be, nor are, any miracles; that there can be nothing "supernatural" in this universe, and that on earth, at least, the only god is man himself.
It lies within his powers to become and to continue a god after the death of his physical body. Our society receives nothing the possibility of which it cannot demonstrate at will. We believe in the phenomena, but we disbelieve in the constant intervention of 'spirits' to produce such phenomena. We maintain that the embodied spirit has more powers to produce them than a disembodied one. We believe in the existence of spirits, but of many classes, the human spirits being but one class of the many.89
The Society requires of its members but the time they can give it without encroaching upon that due to their private affairs. There are three degrees of membership. It is but in the highest or third that members have to devote themselves quasi entirely to the work of the T. S. . . .
Every one is eligible, provided he is an honest, pure man or woman, no free lover, and especially no bigoted Christian. We go dead against idolatry, and as much against materialism.
Of the two unpardonable sins, the first is Hypocrisy — Pecksniffianism. Better one hundred mistakes through unwise, injudicious sincerity and indiscretion than Tartuffe-like saintship as the whitened sepulchre, and rottenness and decay within. . . . This is not unpardonable, but very dangerous, . . . doubt, eternal wavering — it leads one to wreck. . . . One little period passed without doubt, murmuring, and despair; what a gain it would be; a period a mere tithe of what every one of us has had to pass through. But every one forges his own destiny.
Those who fall off from our living human Mahatmas to fall into the Saptarishi — the Star Rishis, are no Theosophists.
Allow me to quote from a very esoterically wise and exoterically foolish book, the work and production of some ancient friends and foes: 'There is more joy in the Kingdom of Heaven for one repentant sinner than for ninety-nine saints.' . . . Let us be just and give to Cæsar what is Cæsar's, however imperfect, even vicious, Cæsar may be. 'Blessed be the peacemakers,' said another old adept of 107 years B. C., and the saying is alive and kicks to the present day amongst the Masters.
Footnotes