HPB-SB-14-42: Difference between revisions

It is alleged that the Divine essence has for ever departed from these elementaries or shells. If so, ''what essence'' is it that now underlies and supports their intelligence, will, and appreciation of virtue? Are there then two essences in the universe, the Divine and some other? This would be Manicheeism, yet the philosophy in question is not, I believe, Manichean. I agree, on the contrary, with Spinoza and Augustine, that the intelligence, will, life, and muscular power with which Nero slew his mother were necessarily Divine—only the abuse of these faculties through defective being was creaturely. But if the Divine essence has ''not'' departed from these shells, then they have ''not'' lost their immortality as alleged, any more than God has lost His. God is the Divine Substance of all conscious being, and all conscious being is necessarily personal, one with itself, and different from others, though also one with all by virtue of this Divine Substance, which is universal as well as particular—particular and universal. You cannot divorce the two ideas any more than you can the one and the many, the identical and the different. It is a false philosophy that proposes to plant them out separately, and herein, in the clear perception of this, lies principally the advance made by Behmen and Hegel upon the often profound, yet also fanciful and undeveloped conceptions of Indian, Kabalistic, Eleatic, Neo-Platonic, and Spinozistic philosophy. Do I not then believe in the “three Principles” or Kingdoms, of Behmen, in the “Body, Soul, and Spirit” of St. Paul? Certainly, but I also believe that “these three are one.” They are three degrees of the same being, not three beings. They are all rooted in One, exist by Influx on the one hand and by Defect, Limitation, Illusion on the other. It is one, Inverted Cone, with Infinity for Base, containing three regions. I do not say that the body and soul will not be transfigured in the spirit, but I do say that the body and soul cannot be without the spirit to underlie and support them. The lower depends on the higher; it is by limitation of the higher; but so far as it is at all, the higher is in it. It is true that th{{Style S-HPB SB. Restored|e}}<ref name="editor-restoration-42">The letter obscured by a fold in “the” is restored from Light, 28 October 1882, p. 480.</ref> lower does not manifest the higher, as the higher is at its own fullest and highest; yet, regarded by a spiritually-purged vision, it does manifest the higher in symbol, in image, veiled. But, assuredly, a bad man may seem to lose all sense of right and wrong, and in some races these do not appear to be developed. What a bad man has, however, he derives from the Divine essence, though he be deprived of some excellencies that pertain to the Divine essence. But often we come to perceive that these were only latent—as they are latent in the infant or untutored savage. And if the essence of a conscious being be Divine, what capacity of rising in the scale of being shall we presume to deny him?

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