HPB-SB-10-346

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

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vol. 10, p. 346	volume 10, page 346 vol. title: vol. period: 1879-1880 pages in vol.: 577
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< A Theosophist's View of Man's Position and Prospects (continued from page 10-345) >

incomplete. We can afford, however, to look on calmly, for it is not our mission to destroy, but to build up, and the Rationalistic plough only prepares the soil for the good seed of future progress.

Next came Geology, extending our view backwards and forwards, far beyond the 6,000 years of the popular theology. Then came the discovery of the antiquity of man, and of principles of evolution, sweeping away the materialistic interpretation of Genesis. Finally, the discovery of spectrum analysis has established the unity of the physical universe, and the rise of Spiritualism has opened before us the vast horizons of the spiritual universe.

Nationally, we have everything to encourage us. We are not a race that has retrograded, and although the earlier civilisations may have risen to a higher level than our own, yet we are a new people, risen within a very few centuries from utter barbarism to the station which we occupy at present.

But we cannot get rid so easily of the contracted ideas which prevailed until, as it were, yesterday, respecting space and time. Just as our Christian brethren, without exception, look forward to earn “Heaven” by one well-spent life, so are we too liable to look to Nirvana as attainable by the single sustained effort of a single life. We do not consider that we inhabit a very small and very inferior world, and that our arm is still too short to reach the sun, but like blind men restored to sight, we think we can touch anything we can see. Even as regards the material universe, I think I am much within the mark in saying that a pea placed in the middle of one of our largest parks would not more than represent the proportion borne by our earth to the solar system alone. Beyond the system it would take 200,000 years to count the number of miles to the nearest fixed star.

You will ask me, what of the accomplished union with God, of which the mystics speak? This, I think I can explain by referring to Swedenborg, who says that in some of the inferior planets, the inhabitants are permitted to worship the angel, (or the society of angels) appointed to rule over them. In another passage, he says that the higher the society, the more it appears to the angels that they act of themselves, but the more certainly they know that they speak and act from the Lord alone; that is, as I take it, from the society next above them, through which the divine influx descends to them. Again, there is understood to be perfect communion of thought and feeling within the higher societies, so that the thought or act of any member is felt as the thought or act of all. Hence it would seem to any man who succeeded in placing himself temporarily en rapport with such a society, that he had become one with God; and his feelings would be practically incommunicable to anyone who had had no similar experience. If this view is correct, it will go far to explain such ideas as absorption of individuality, which are often used without any very clear and definite sense being attached to them.

Again, very few generations separate the savage from the sage. The links have existed, but on looking back through history they shade away. Shall one material existence, even on earth, be sufficient for our development, if it requires material existence at all?* Infinite are the phases of human life, even here, nor could any two existences be other than widely different. Hence a new earthly existence would be to all intents and purposes as new a life as the transfer from one spiritual society to another. And there must be a still greater difference between planet and planet. Let us look rather to slow and sure steps for advancement, than attempt to scale the Heavens at a bound, and thus repeat the error of the Christians. The earth is, (as the Arabs say, speaking of the habitable portion of the earth, compared with their idea of what is uninhabited) as a tent in a desert; and within the vast limits of the solar system, there must be, around and beyond the material worlds, worlds within worlds of spiritual universes, all which lie before us, as we pass to and for, first between the earth and its dependent spheres (for I greatly doubt if we are really in communication with any spiritual spheres at all, except those immediately dependent on the earth), and then from planet to planet, our residence in each planet, including residence in its dependent spheres, till we reach the suns, and thus:

“From star to star, From world to luminous world, as far As the universe stretches its flaming wall.”

But beyond the earths, beyond the spheres, beyond the sun, beyond Sirius, beyond Alcyone, lies Nirvana, the state of the pure spirits, far above any material or even fluidic world, and we are told that when a Buddha is about to attain it, <... continues on page 10-347 >

* Dr. Temple has shown us that the development of the race is as the development of the individual, aud must not the converse be true, and the development of the individual be as that of the race?