HPB-SB-14-43: Difference between revisions

{{Style P-Align center|1='''By the Hon. Roden Noel.'''}}

{{Style P-Align center|1=''(Continued from page 480.)''}}

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I will conclude by noticing an interpretation of this doctrine of shells, or “elementaries,” which I have heard from an able Western exponent of Occultism, and which seems to me far more plausible than that of {{Style S-HPB SB. Restored|t}}he<ref name="editor-restoration-43">The damaged letters in “the”, “be” and “admitted” are restored from Light, 4 November 1882, p. 491.</ref> writer of the “Fragments,” though I shall give reasons for rejecting it. The occult philosophy, as expounded in these papers and elsewhere, appears to assume the real existence of matter—unless, indeed, our vulgar conception of it is merely substituted provisionally in argument for the conception of it as Maya, Illusion, the Hyle, Not-being of Plato and Aristotle.* Thus we are told that these elementaries pick up notions with which to deceive us in their impersonations out of the astral light. Now I do not believe a candid person can read Eliphas Levi or Madame Blavatsky without the irresistible impression that they regard the astral light, ''Akasa'', or ether, as ''out there'', together with grosser matter, apart from any personal centre of consciousness whatsoever. But I, as good idealist, believe that there can be no pictures either in gross or subtle matter apart from our, or some other personal spirit’s perception of them; that such pictures can only be in some personal consciousness. And nearly all competent Western thinkers would agree with me. The Theosophist in question agrees with me also on this head; but he contends that the pictures in the astral light may be memories in the world-soul, and that the elementaries are a temporary aggregate of the cell-souls, whose cell-bodies made up our organism on earth, still saturated with our influence for awhile, but tending to disintegrate.

Now there is no possibility to my mind that such an aggregate of souls could display the unity, and identity, and humanity of consciousness which, with whatever limitations, they admittedly do display, however all might be influenced by us. These innumerable, diverse, and lowly-organised cell-souls, whatever they may be, must be incapable, even now with us, and much more hereafter without us, of displaying any such self-identical unity of human consciousness as may simulate a deceased man. Either, moreover, they must separate after our departure, or they must remain in organic relation with us, or they must be dominated by some other greater Spirit as they were before. But, then, as to these astral pictures in which all events are supposed to be represented—so as to furnish information for the supposed elementaries; are they memories in the world-soul? Now, in such occultist books as I have read, by the world-soul appears to be meant a kind of unconscious principle of life—(see Cudworth, for instance)—and this I hold that a sound idealist philosophy must decidedly reject. But, if by world-soul be meant a superior world-spirit, in whom we and other creatures of the earth are, then I, too, believe in him. Well, a memory in him involves two factors, (1) the self-identical Spirit remembering, and (2) the self-identical person or object remembered acting upon him, consciously or otherwise, to produce such remembrance. That this holds good in all memory I have done my best to prove in my “Philosophy of Immortality.” And because, however clear what a man believes to be the truth may seem to himself, he cannot help feeling some diffidence in holding and declaring it, if he has neither received it from any external human source, nor has succeeded in producing the same conviction in other minds, I have welcomed warmly a clear statement of the same view, which I have just read in the translation of an admirable work by Professor Fechner, entitled “Life after Death,” reviewed in “{{Style S-Small capitals|Light}}” by “C. C. M.,” who points out the identity of my own and Fechner’s belief in this respect.* But if we are right, then the memory of the world-soul, into which these pictures in astral light resolve themselves, involves the continued existence of the person, who, according to this theory of elementaries, has really perished. And at any rate it involves the personal identity of the Spirit, or Spirits who remember. The vibrations in ether connected with our thought-life, being phenomena, involve other thought-lives; in so far as they do not belong to our own Spirits, they belong to other Spirits; they always must belong to ''some'' personal identity, or they would be nothing at all. So that we must have ''some'' Ego behind these memories of the world-soul, which is exactly what this theory of “''Shells''” denies. No “memory” without a rememberer.