< Kabbalistic Views on "Spirits" As Propagated by the Theosophical Society (continued from page 4-149) >
became contaminated with the world of darkness, or the world of Satan (evil), of which it must be purified, before it could ascend again to celestial happiness. Suppose a drop of water enclosed within a capsule of gelatine and thrown in the ocean; so long as the capsule remains whole, the drop of water remains isolated: break the envelope, and the drop becomes a part of the ocean, its individual existence has ceased. So it is with the spirit, so long as its ray is enclosed in its plastic mediator or soul, it has an individual existence. Destroy this capsule (the astral man, who then becomes an elementary), which destruction may occur from the consequences of sin, in the most depraved and vicious, and the spirit returns back to its original abode—the individualization of man has ceased.” “This militates,” he adds, “with the idea of progression, that Spiritualists generally entertain. If they understood the law of harmony, they would see their error. It is only by this law that individual life can be sustained; and the farther we deviate from harmony the more difficult it is to regain it.” To return to Lévi, he remarks (La Haute Magie, Vol. I, p. 319), “When we die, our interior light (the soul) ascends, agreeably to the attraction of its star (the spirit), but it must first of all get rid of the coils of the serpent (earthly evil—sin); that is to say, of the unpurified astral light, which surrounds and holds it captive, unless, by the force of will, it frees and elevates itself. This immersion of the living soul in the dead light (the emanations of everything that is evil, which pollute the earth’s magnetic atmosphere, as the exhalation of a swamp does the air) is a dreadful torture; the soul freezes and burns therein, at the same time.”
The kabalists represent Adam as the Tree of Life, of which the trunk is humanity; the various races, the branches; and individual men, the leaves. Every leaf has its individual life, and is fed by the one sap; but it can live through the branch, as the branch itself draws its life through the trunk. “The wicked,” says the Kabala, “are the dead leaves and the dead bark of the tree. They fall, die, are corrupted, and changed into manure, which returns to the tree through the root.”
My friend, Miss Emily Kislingbury, of London, Secretary of the British National Association of Spiritualists, who is honored, trusted and beloved by all who know her, sends me a spirit-communication obtained, in April, 1877, through a young lady, who is one of the purest and most truthful of her sex. The following extracts are singularly à propos to the subject under discussion: “Friend, you are right. Keep our Spiritualism pure and high, for there are those who would abase its uses. But it is because they know not the power of Spiritualism. It is true, in a sense, that the spirit can overcome the flesh, but there are those to whom the fleshly life is dearer than the life of the spirit; they tread on dangerous ground. For the flesh may so outgrow the spirit, as to withdraw from it all spirituality, and man become as a beast of the field, with no saving power left. These are they whom the Church has termed “reprobate,” eternally lost, but they suffer not, as the Church has taught—in conscious hells. They merely die, and are not; their light goes out, and has no conscious being.” (Question): “But is this not annihilation?” (Answer): “It amounts to annihilation; they lose their individual entities, and return to the great reservoir of spirit—unconscious spirit.”
Finally, I am asked: “Who are the trained seers?” They are those, I answer, who have been trained from their childhood in the pagodas, to use their spiritual sight; those whose accumulated testimony has not varied for thousands of years as to the fundamental facts of Eastern philosophy; the testimony of each generation corroborating that of each preceding one. Are these to be trusted more, or less, than the “communications of “bands,” each of whom contradicts the other as completely as the various religious sects, which are ready to cut each other’s throats, and of mediums, even the best of whom are ignorant of their own nature, and unsubjected to the wise direction and restraint of an adept in psychological science?
No comprehensive idea of nature can be obtained except by applying the law of harmony and analogy in the spiritual as well as in the physical world. “As above, so below,” is the old Hermetic axiom. If Spiritualists would apply this to the subject of their own researches, they would see the philosophical necessity of there being in the world of spirit as well as in the world of matter, a law of the survival of the fittest.
Respectfully,
Buddhism in Ceylon
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Editor's notes
- ↑ Buddhism in Ceylon by Peebles J.M., Spiritualist, The, Jan. 18, 1878