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HPB-SB-14-44: Difference between revisions
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{{Style P-No indent|ideas; there is no potential self-identification possible between them; but out of potential self-identification in thought there is no true identity conceivable.}} | {{Style P-No indent|ideas; there is no potential self-identification possible between them; but out of potential self-identification in thought there is no true identity conceivable.}} | ||
Moreover, who shall distinguish so absolutely between the evil and the good, the fool and the wise? Must we not be evil in order to be good, and fools in order to be wise? Is the worst man without any spark of goodness? Is the fool without any gleam of wisdom? Is the good man without any shade of defilement, or the wise man without any lapses into folly? Such a Primitive, or occultist Calvinism does not commend itself to me as having more to say for itself than the Calvinism of Christian theology. Here is a man with a great deal that is good and clever about him; yet we are assured the Spirit does not even “overshadow” him, and he is destined to perish utterly. ''How he ever got to be, and how he manages to hang together now'', we are not told! But an additional difficulty is that he has so much in him, which in a second man is ascribed by these teachers to an overshadowing by, or union with the Spirit; the second man has only rather a higher (or, if you will, a much higher) degree of the same qualities. If his qualities be totally different in kind, then he is not human at all; we have mistaken his genus; we have nothing to do with him; and then he is not the being at all who was developed out of a lower stage of life. So what was he improved for? except we are all mere shadows in a shadow-pantomime, one a little bigger for the ''Karma'' of the other, and the biggest dropping off into the Nothing at last. The man may be improved; he may even have certain faculties and abilities added to him; but if it is still ''himself'' we are speaking about, then the essence of him is not completely altered, only developed, only in the flower instead of in the seed. However different, the seed and flower are one. Without intuition not the simplest act of thought can occur. And without the faculties and experience supposed by Occultism left behind in the case of the most highly illuminated, such illumination is impossible. For universal consciousness there must be particular consciousness—however transformed; there must be, if not memory, then the sublimation of memory—self-identification with our own past, and with all. But if our past be left out, we are, so far, imperfect and truncated. There is perfecting, enlarging and intensifying personality, not extinguishing it. In this life, if a man remembers, and thinks, and desires with his astral body, and “intues,” or exercises some undefined spiritual functions with his spirit, he must be most uncomfortably mixed up indeed!—two Egos, or selves, have to lend each other’s functions to one another! Transubstantiation is simplicity itself to such an amorphous conception! And then, when they part company, these two? Occultists evidently conceive of many distinct entities, which give each other a ''rendezvous'' to form what they funnily call “a human combination,” some of which entities are perishable, and some eternal. Thus the Spirit, though totally distinct from a person, can be added to him, or not, as the case may be, and his immortality is secured if such an addition be made, not otherwise. But really! how could you make a perishable article imperishable by glueing, or cementing on to it an imperishable foreign body? And how incorporate one with the other? Put such very new wine into such very old bottles! Or again, how hocus-pocus the mortal into the immortal? The self-identifying ''unity'' of the Ego or self, amid diverse successive experiences, seems a conception absolutely unknown to Occultism, though it be the very ''pons asinorum'' of Western philosophy. Nay, Occultism tells us, just as Spiritualists tell us, of an inner or astral ''body'', an ''aura'', a ''perisprit'', that thinks and remembers, is stored with impressions and memories. But this materialistic conception, as I have shewn in my “Philosophy of Immortality,” is really quite as crass and absurd as the attribution of such functions to the outer body and brain by the more ordinary kind of physiological materialist. It is I who remember, I who desire, I who reason, I who love, I who work miracles, have visions, intuitions, trances. It is not one of me who does some of those things, and another of me who does the others. For many of these acts that I do involve and imply that the same I is doing others of them at the same moment. | Moreover, who shall distinguish so absolutely between the evil and the good, the fool and the wise? Must we not be evil in order to be good, and fools in order to be wise? Is the worst man without any spark of goodness? Is the fool without any gleam of wisdom? Is the good man without any shade of defilement, or the wise man without any lapses into folly? Such a Primitive, or occultist Calvinism does not commend itself to me as having more to say for itself than the Calvinism of Christian theology. Here is a man with a great deal that is good and clever about him; yet we are assured the Spirit does not even “overshadow” him, and he is destined to perish utterly. ''How he ever got to be, and how he manages to hang together now'', we are not told! But an additional difficulty is that he has so much in him, which in a second man is ascribed by these teachers to an overshadowing by, or union with the Spirit; the second man has only rather a higher (or, if you will, a much higher) degree of the same qualities. If his qualities be totally different in kind, then he is not human at all; we have mistaken his genus; we have nothing to do with him; and then he is not the being at all who was developed out of a lower stage of life. So what was he improved for? except we are all mere shadows in a shadow-pantomime, one a little bigger for the ''Karma'' of the other, and the biggest dropping off into the Nothing at last. The man may be improved; he may even have certain faculties and abilities added to him; but if it is still ''himself'' we are speaking about, then the essence of him is not completely altered, only developed, only in the flower instead of in the seed. However different, the seed and flower are one. Without intuition not the simplest act of thought can occur. And without the faculties and experience supposed by Occultism left behind in the case of the most highly illuminated, such illumination is impossible. For universal consciousness there must be particular consciousness—however transformed; there must be, if not memory, then the sublimation of memory—self-identification with our own past, and with all. But if our past be left out, we are, so far, imperfect and truncated. There is perfecting, enlarging and intensifying personality, not extinguishing it. In this life, if a man remembers, and thinks, and desires with his astral body, and “intues,” or exercises some undefined spiritual functions with his spirit, he must be most uncomfortably mixed up indeed!—two Egos, or selves, have to lend each other’s functions to one another! Transubstantiation is simplicity itself to such an amorphous conception! And then, when they part company, these two? Occultists evidently conceive of many distinct entities, which give each other a ''rendezvous'' to form what they funnily call “a human combination,” some of which entities are perishable, and some eternal. Thus the Spirit, though totally distinct from a person, can be added to him, or not, as the case may be, and his immortality is secured if such an addition be made, not otherwise. But really! how could you make a perishable article imperishable by glueing, or cementing on to it an imperishable foreign body? And how incorporate one with the other? Put such very new wine into such very old bottles! Or again, how hocus-pocus the mortal into the immortal? The self-identifying ''unity'' of the Ego or self, amid diverse successive experiences, seems a conception absolutely unknown to Occultism, though it be the very ''pons asinorum'' of Western philosophy. Nay, Occultism tells us, just as Spiritualists tell us, of an inner or astral ''body'', an ''aura'', a ''perisprit'', that thinks and remembers, is stored with impressions and memories. But this materialistic conception, as I have shewn in my “Philosophy of Immortality,” is really quite as crass and absurd as the attribution of such functions to the outer body and brain by the more ordinary kind of physiological materialist. It is I who remember, I who desire, I who reason, I who love, I who work miracles, have visions, intuitions, trances. It is not one of me who does some of those things, and another of me who does the others. For many of these acts that I do involve and imply that the same I is doing others of them at the same moment.* | ||
The astral, or any possible ''body'' can only be a conception of some one, or many self-identical and self-identifying Egos, or persons, that is, conscious, perceiving, remembering, comparing, judging, classifying, reasoning selves, or foci of self-identifying continuous experience. The “astral body” is ''a complex conception of ours, or yours, or someone’s'', quite as much as the physical external body is. And, therefore, Occultism must be totally wrong in attributing thought and memory ''to it'', still more in maintaining that ''on it depends'' the sense of self, or personality, the Ego—because, on the contrary, ''it'' would be impossible ''without'' an Ego or conscious self to ''constitute'' it in thought. One strong argument for our immortality (which applies to the “''bad''” as well as to the “''good''”) is that this body, every possible body, and every external object of perception or thought, are ''phenomena'', that is, ''appearances'' to us; and therefore ''their'' dissolution, or ''passing away into a different form of phenomenon'', cannot be supposed to affect ''us'', the part-originators, by the constitution of our thinking faculty, of such phenomena; we are what is termed in Western philosophy ''noumena'', the ''reals'', while these are but ''phenomena'', or ''appearances'' to us. I do not deny that these phenomena have other bases also, but these, as I have proved elsewhere, must also be of the same spiritual nature as ourselves, personalities. | The astral, or any possible ''body'' can only be a conception of some one, or many self-identical and self-identifying Egos, or persons, that is, conscious, perceiving, remembering, comparing, judging, classifying, reasoning selves, or foci of self-identifying continuous experience. The “astral body” is ''a complex conception of ours, or yours, or someone’s'', quite as much as the physical external body is. And, therefore, Occultism must be totally wrong in attributing thought and memory ''to it'', still more in maintaining that ''on it depends'' the sense of self, or personality, the Ego—because, on the contrary, ''it'' would be impossible ''without'' an Ego or conscious self to ''constitute'' it in thought. One strong argument for our immortality (which applies to the “''bad''” as well as to the “''good''”) is that this body, every possible body, and every external object of perception or thought, are ''phenomena'', that is, ''appearances'' to us; and therefore ''their'' dissolution, or ''passing away into a different form of phenomenon'', cannot be supposed to affect ''us'', the part-originators, by the constitution of our thinking faculty, of such phenomena; we are what is termed in Western philosophy ''noumena'', the ''reals'', while these are but ''phenomena'', or ''appearances'' to us. I do not deny that these phenomena have other bases also, but these, as I have proved elsewhere, must also be of the same spiritual nature as ourselves, personalities. | ||
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The Spirit, we are told in “Isis Unveiled” and elsewhere, does not “overshadow” the child under seven years of age. One can but reply, though it may scarcely sound civil (yet remember the babies cannot take up the cudgels for themselves), in the words of Laertes to another mystagogue, who was speaking lightly of Ophelia, “''I tell thee, churlish priest! a ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling!''” And, again, with Wordsworth, I answer, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy”; or, appealing to a greater Authority than either of these, I say, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” The fact is that about the age of seven a child too often begins to ''lose'' his more manifest divinity. But we Christians, believing God to be the Omnipotent Love, hold also that He can desert neither the very lowliest, nor the very wickedest of His creatures, and that “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth more than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance”—hold that the Good Shepherd came, and is ever coming to seek and to save the lost sheep. | The Spirit, we are told in “Isis Unveiled” and elsewhere, does not “overshadow” the child under seven years of age. One can but reply, though it may scarcely sound civil (yet remember the babies cannot take up the cudgels for themselves), in the words of Laertes to another mystagogue, who was speaking lightly of Ophelia, “''I tell thee, churlish priest! a ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling!''” And, again, with Wordsworth, I answer, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy”; or, appealing to a greater Authority than either of these, I say, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” The fact is that about the age of seven a child too often begins to ''lose'' his more manifest divinity. But we Christians, believing God to be the Omnipotent Love, hold also that He can desert neither the very lowliest, nor the very wickedest of His creatures, and that “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth more than over ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance”—hold that the Good Shepherd came, and is ever coming to seek and to save the lost sheep. | ||
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