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vol. title: vol. period: 1882 pages in vol.: 174 Blue curved marks stand beside the closing lines of the article. Red diagonal strokes cross the Morse appointments notice. The writer has not been identified. |
LIGHT,[1]
November 4, 1882.
< On Some Theosophic Doctrines. (continued from page 14-41) >
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.*
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.
At what point of development precisely does the mortal become immortal? For this is indeed a gigantic stride for a person to make in a second of time! Credat Judæus. This “Conditional Immortality,” whether enounced by the aristocratic arrogance, and Pharisaism of Western theology, Eastern Theosophy, or Academic culture [for Goethe told Eckermann that only well-cultured people were immortal], appears to me equally repulsive and absurd. But I cannot wonder that a religion of self-sufficiency, isolation, and contempt, whose end would seem to be the attainment of abnormal personal power, felicity, or extinction, “varying from the kindly race of men,” and “passing beyond the goal of ordinance” should be so bitter as it shews itself in accredited organs against the universal religion of Jesus Christ, which is one of service, a Gospel for the weak, the oppressed, the despised, for little children, for humble men and women, for the ignorant, suffering, and poor, holding out to such as these a most powerful helping hand of Divine hope and consolation. But this system is quite as devoid of all strength and consolation for man as is the materialism of the West. For it promises one sort of annihilation after long periods of suffering to the majority, and only another sort of annihilation to the favoured few, who by ages of self-torture and self-repression, by mortification of all desire and affection, even the purest and most innocent, shall have succeeded in becoming absorbed into the Spirit, which is “Parabrahm, Unconsciousness,” into “Nîrvana,” which is extinction. (See the editor’s note to the article on Adwaita Philosophy, and the article Nirvana, by the High Priest of Adam’s Peak, Ceylon, in the September number of the Theosophist.) Some may prefer the prospect of that speedier and more painless annihilation promised us by scientific materialism. It would be sooner over. But between such an atheistic system, and even the most mystical, enlightened form of Christianity there can, of course, be no compromise possible.
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.
(To be continued.)
<... continues on page 14-45 >
* A man, I must insist, is not a puddingstone, a conglomerate of qualities juxtaposed, and external to one another. Even chemical combination, and vital union, are far from being this; but a man is more like a mathematical point, wherein the qualities interpenetrate, and whence they radiate. You can more easily sever, and yet keep alive flesh and blood than sever these, and yet retain them in separation. Therefore, there can be no elementaries or shells.
<Untitled> (Mr. J. J. Morse’s Appointments…)
Mr. J. J. Morse’s Appointments.—Cardiff: Sunday, November 5th, Assembly Rooms; morning at 11, evening at 6.30. London: Sunday, November 12th. Cardiff: Sunday, November 19th. London: Sunday, November 26th.—For terms and dates, direct Mr. Morse, at 53, Sigdon-road, Dalston, London, E.
Editor's notes
Sources
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Light, v. 2, No. 96, November 4, 1882, p. 492