Theosophy - What is God- the view of a Master of the Wisdom
WHAT
IS GOD - THE VIEW OF A MASTER OF THE WISDOM
Letter
No. 10- (Transcribed from a copy in Mr. Sinnett's handwriting. Editor
) and which appeared in
The Mahatma Letters to A.P.Sinnett
[Hume's article appeared in the November "The Theosophist".]
NOTES
BY MAHATMA K.H.
ON A "PRELIMINARY
CHAPTER" HEADED "GOD"
BY HUME,
INTENDED TO PREFACE AN EXPOSITION OF OCCULT PHILOSOPHY (ABRIDGED).
Received at Simla, 1881-? '82.
Neither our philosophy
nor ourselves believe in a God, least of all in one whose pronoun necessitates
a capital G. Our philosophy falls under the definition of Hobbes. It is preeminently
the science of effects by their causes and of causes by their effects, and since
it is also the science of things deduced from first principle, as Bacon defines
it, before we admit any such principle we must know it, and have no right to
admit even its possibility. Your whole explanation is based upon one solitary
admission made simply for argument's sake in October last. You were told that
our knowledge was limited to this our solar system: ergo as philosophers who
desired to remain worthy of the name we could not either deny or affirm the
existence of what you termed a supreme, omnipotent, intelligent being of some
sort beyond the limits of that solar system. But if such an existence is not
absolutely impossible, yet unless the uniformity of nature's law breaks at those
limits we maintain that it is highly improbable.
Nevertheless we deny
most emphatically the position of agnosticism in this direction, and as regards
the solar system. Our doctrine knows no compromises. It either affirms or denies,
for it never teaches but that which it knows to be the truth. Therefore, we
deny God both as philosophers and as Buddhists. We know there are planetary
and other spiritual lives, and we know there is in our system no such thing
as God, either personal or impersonal. Parabrahm is not a God, but absolute
immutable law, and Iswar is the effect of Avidya and Maya, ignorance based upon
the great delusion. The word "God" was invented to designate the unknown
cause of those effects which man has either admired or dreaded without understanding
them, and since we claim and that we are able to prove what we claim -- i.e.
the knowledge of that cause and causes we are in a position to maintain there
is no God or Gods behind them.
The idea of God is
not an innate but an acquired notion, and we have but one thing in common with
theologies -- we reveal the infinite. But while we assign to all the phenomena
that proceed from the infinite and limitless space, duration and motion, material,
natural, sensible and known (to us at least) cause, the theists assign them
spiritual, super-natural and unintelligible an un-known causes. The God of the
Theologians is simply and imaginary power, un loup garou as d'Holbach
expressed it -- a power which has never yet manifested itself. Our chief aim
is to deliver humanity of this nightmare, to teach man virtue for its own sake,
and to walk in life relying on himself instead of leaning on a theological crutch,
that for countless ages was the direct cause of nearly all human misery. Pantheistic
we may be called -- agnostic NEVER. If people are willing to accept and to regard
as God our ONE LIFE immutable and unconscious in its eternity they may do so
and thus keep to one more gigantic misnomer. But then they will have to say
with Spinoza that there is not and that we cannot conceive any other substance
than God; or as that famous and unfortunate philosopher says in his fourteenth
proposition, "practer Deum neque dari neque concepi potest substantia"
-- and thus become Pantheists . . . . who but a Theologian nursed on mystery
and the most absurd super-naturalism can imagine a self existent being of necessity
infinite and omnipresent outside the manifested boundless universe.
The word infinite
is but a negative which excludes the idea of bounds. It is evident that a being
independent and omnipresent cannot be limited by anything which is outside of
himself; that there can be nothing exterior to himself -- not even vacuum, then
where is there room for matter? for that manifested universe even though the
latter limited. If we ask the theist is your God vacuum, space or matter, they
will reply no. And yet they hold that their God penetrates matter though he
is not himself matter. When we speak of our One Life we also say that it penetrates,
nay is the essence of every atom of matter; and that therefore it not only has
correspondence with matter but has all its properties likewise, etc. -- hence
is material, is matter itself. How can intelligence proceed or emanate from
non-intelligence -- you kept asking last year. How could a highly intelligent
humanity, man the crown of reason, be evolved out of blind unintelligent law
or force! But once we reason on that line, I may ask in my turn, how could congenital
idiots, non-reasoning animals, and the rest of "creation" have been
created by or evoluted from, absolute Wisdom, if the latter is a thinking intelligent
being, the author and ruler of the Universe? How? says Dr. Clarke in his examination
of the proof of the existence of the Divinity. "God who hath made the eye,
shall he not see? God who hath made the ear shall he not hear?" But according
to this mode of reasoning they would have to admit that in creating an idiot
God is an idiot; that he who made so many irrational beings, so many physical
and moral monsters, must be an irrational being. . . .
. . . We are not
Adwaitees, but our teaching respecting the one life is identical with that of
the Adwaitee with regard to Parabrahm. And no true philosophically brained Adwaitee
will ever call himself an agnostic, for he knows that he is Parabrahm and identical
in every respect with the universal life and soul -- the macrocosm is the microcosm
and he knows that there is no God apart from himself, no creator as no being.
Having found Gnosis we cannot turn our backs on it and become agnostics.
. . . . Were we to
admit that even the highest Dyan Chohans are liable to err under a delusion,
then there would be no reality for us indeed and the occult sciences would be
as great a chimera as that God. If there is an absurdity in denying that which
we do not know it is still more extravagant to assign to it unknown laws.
According to logic
"nothing" is that of which everything can truly be denied and nothing
can truly be affirmed. The idea therefore either of a finite or infinite nothing
is a contradiction in terms. And yet according to theologians "God, the
self existent being is a most simple, unchangeable, incorruptible being; without
parts, figure, motion, divisibility, or any other such properties as we find
in matter. For all such things so plainly and necessarily imply finiteness in
their very notion and are utterly inconsistent with complete infinity."
Therefore the God here offered to the adoration of the XIXth century lacks every
quality upon which man's mind is capable of fixing any judgment. What is this
in fact but a being of whom they can affirm nothing that is not instantly contradicted.
Their own Bible their Revelation destroys all the moral perceptions they heap
upon him, unless indeed they call those qualities perfections that every other
man's reason and common sense call imperfections, odious vices and brutal wickedness.
Nay more he who reads our Buddhist scriptures written for the superstitious
masses will fail to find in them a demon so vindictive, unjust, so cruel and
so stupid as the celestial tyrant upon whom the Christians prodigally lavish
their servile worship and on whom their theologians heap those perfections that
are contradicted on every page of their Bible. Truly and veritably your theology
has created her God but to destroy him piecemeal. Your church is the fabulous
Saturn, who begets children but to devour them.
(The Universal Mind)
-- A few reflections and arguments ought to support every new idea -- for instance
we are sure to be taken to task for the following apparent contradictions. (1)
We deny the existence of a thinking conscious God, on the grounds that such
a God must either be conditioned, limited and subject to change, therefore not
infinite, or (2) if he is represented to us as an eternal unchangeable and independent
being, with not a particle of matter in him, then we answer that it is no being
but an immutable blind principle, a law. And yet, they will say, we believe
in Dyans, or Planetaries ("spirits" also), and endow them with a universal
mind, and this must be explained.
Our reasons may be
briefly summed up thus:
(1) We deny the absurd
proposition that there can be, even in a boundless and eternal universe -- two
infinite eternal and omni-present existences.
(2) Matter we know
to be eternal, i.e., having had no beginning (a) because matter is Nature herself
(b) because that which cannot annihilate itself and is indestructible exists
necessarily -- and therefore it could not begin to be, nor can it cease to be
(c) because the accumulated experience of countless ages, and that of exact
science show to us matter (or nature) acting by her own peculiar energy, of
which not an atom is ever in an absolute state of rest, and therefore it must
have always existed, i.e., its materials ever changing form, combinations and
properties, but its principles or elements being absolutely indestructible.
(3) As to God --
since no one has ever or at any time seen him or it -- unless he or it is the
very essence and nature of this boundless eternal matter, its energy and motion
, we cannot regard him as either eternal or infinite or yet self existing. We
refuse to admit a being or an existence of which we know absolutely nothing;
because (a) there is no room for him in the presence of that matter whose undeniable
properties and qualities we know thoroughly well (b) because if he or it is
but a part of that matter it is ridiculous to maintain that he is the mover
and ruler of that of which he is but a dependent part and (c) because if they
tell us that God is a self existent pure spirit independent of matter -- an
extra-cosmic deity, we answer that admitting even the possibility of such an
impossibility, i.e., his existence, we yet hold that a purely immaterial spirit
cannot be an intelligent conscious ruler nor can he have any of the attributes
bestowed upon him by theology and thus such a God becomes again but a blind
force. Intelligence as found in our Dyan Chohans, is a faculty that can appertain
but to organized or animated being -- however imponderable or rather invisible
the materials of their organizations. Intelligence requires the necessity of
thinking; to think one must have ideas; ideas suppose senses which are physical
material, and how can anything material belong to pure spirit? If it be objected
that thought cannot be a property of matter, we will ask the reason why? We
must have an unanswerable proof of this assumption, before we can accept it.
Of the theologian we would enquire what was there to prevent his God, since
he is the alleged creator of all -- to endow matter with the faculty of thought;
and when answered that evidently it has not pleased Him to do so, that it is
a mystery as well as an impossibility, we would insist upon being told why it
is more impossible that matter should produce spirit and thought, than spirit
or the thought of God should produce and create matter.
We do not bow our
heads in the dust before the mystery of mind -- for we have solved it ages
ago. Rejecting with contempt the theistic theory we reject as much the automaton
theory, teaching that states of consciousness are produced by the marshalling
of the molecules of the brain; and we feel as little respect for that other
hypothesis -- the production of molecular motion by consciousness. Then
what do we believe in? Well, we believe in the much laughed at phlogiston
(see article
"What is force and what is matter?" Theosophist, September), and
in what some natural philosophers would call nisus the incessant though perfectly
imperceptible (to the ordinary senses) motion or efforts one body is making
on another -- the pulsations of inert matter - its life. The bodies of the
Planetary spirits are formed of that which Priestley and others called Phlogiston
and for which we have another name - this essence in its highest seventh
state forming that matter of which the organisms of the highest and purest
Dyans are composed, and in its lowest or densest form (so impalpable yet that
science calls it energy and force) serving as a cover to the Planetaries of
the 1st or lowest degree. In other words we believe in MATTER alone, in matter
as visible nature and matter in its invisibility as the invisible omnipresent
omnipotent Proteus with its unceasing motion which is its life, and which
nature draws from herself since she is the great whole outside of which nothing
can exist. For as Bellinger truly asserts "motion is a manner of existence
that flows necessarily out of the essence of matter; that matter moves by
its own peculiar energies; that its motion is due to the force which is inherent
in itself; that the variety of motion and the phenomena that result proceed
from the diversity of the properties of the qualities and of the combinations
which are originally found in the primitive matter" of which nature is
the assemblage and of which your science knows less than one of our Tibetan
Yak-drivers of Kant's metaphysics.
The existence of
matter then is a fact; the existence of motion is another fact, their self
existence and eternity or indestructibility is a third fact. And the idea
of pure spirit as a Being or an Existence -- give it whatever name you will
- is a chimera, a gigantic absurdity.
Our ideas on Evil.
Evil has no existence per se and is but the absence of good and exists but
for him who is made its victim. It proceeds from two causes, and no more
than good is it an independent cause in nature. Nature is destitute of goodness
or malice; she follows only immutable laws when she either gives life and
joy, or sends suffering [and] death, and destroys what she has created.
Nature has an antidote for every poison and her laws a reward for every
suffering. The butterfly devoured by a bird becomes that bird, and the little
bird killed by an animal goes into a higher form. It is the blind law of
necessity and the eternal fitness of things, and hence cannot be called
Evil in Nature. The real evil proceeds from human intelligence and its origin
rests entirely with reasoning man who dissociates himself from Nature. Humanity
then alone is the true source of evil. Evil is the exaggeration of good,
the progeny of human selfishness and greediness. Think profoundly and you
will find that save death - which is no evil but a necessary law, and accidents
which will always find their reward in a future life - the origin of every
evil whether small or great is in human action, in man whose intelligence
makes him the one free agent in Nature. It is not nature that creates diseases,
but man. The latter's mission and destiny in the economy of nature is to
die his natural death brought by old age; save accident, neither a savage
nor a wild (free) animal die of disease. Food, sexual relations, drink,
are all natural necessities of life; yet excess in them brings on disease,
misery, suffering, mental and physical, and the latter are transmitted as
the greatest evils to future generations, the progeny of the culprits.
Ambition, the desire
of securing happiness and comfort for those we love, by obtaining honours
and riches, are praiseworthy natural feelings but when they transform man
into an ambitious cruel tyrant, a miser, a selfish egotist they bring untold
misery on those around him; on nations as well as on individuals. All this
then - food, wealth, ambition, and a thousand other things we have to leave
unmentioned, becomes the source and cause of evil whether in its abundance
or through its absence. Become a glutton, a debauchee, a tyrant, and you
become the originator of diseases, of human suffering and misery. Lack all
this and you starve, you are despised as a nobody and the majority of the
herd, your fellow men, make of you a sufferer your whole life. Therefore
it is neither nature nor an imaginary Deity that has to be blamed, but human
nature made vile by selfishness. Think well over these few words; work out
every cause of evil you can think of and trace it to its origin and you
will have solved one-third of the problem of evil. And now, after making
due allowance for evils that are natural and cannot be avoided, -- and so
few are they that I challenge the whole host of Western metaphysicians to
call them evils or to trace them directly to an independent cause -- I will
point out the greatest, the chief cause of nearly two thirds of the evils
that pursue humanity ever since that cause became a power. It is religion
under whatever form and in whatsoever nation. It is the sacerdotal caste,
the priesthood and the churches; it is in those illusions that man looks
upon as sacred, that he has to search out the source of that multitude of
evils which is the great curse of humanity and that almost overwhelms mankind.
Ignorance created
Gods and cunning took advantage of the opportunity. Look at India and look at
Christendom and Islam, at Judaism and Fetichism. It is priestly imposture that
rendered these Gods so terrible to man; it is religion that makes of him the
selfish bigot, the fanatic that hates all mankind out of his own sect without
rendering him any better or more moral for it. It is belief in God and Gods
that makes two-thirds of humanity the slaves of a handful of those who deceive
them under the false pretence of saving them. Is not man ever ready to commit
any kind of evil if told that his God or Gods demand the crime?; voluntary victim
of an illusionary God, the abject slave of his crafty ministers. The Irish,
Italian and Slavonian peasant will starve himself and see his family starving
and naked to feed and clothe his padre and pope. For two thousand years India
groaned under the weight of caste, Brahmins alone feeding on the fat of the
land, and to-day the followers of Christ and those of Mahomet are cutting each
other's throats in the names of and for the greater glory of their respective
myths. Remember the sum of human misery will never be diminished unto that day
when the better portion of humanity destroys in the name of Truth, morality,
and universal charity, the altars of their false gods.
If it is objected
that we too have temples, we too have priests and that our lamas also live
on charity . . . let them know that the objects above named have in common
with their Western equivalents, but the name. Thus in our temples there
is neither a god nor gods worshipped, only the thrice sacred memory of the
greatest as the holiest man that ever lived. If our lamas to honour the
fraternity of the Bhikkhus established by our blessed master himself, go
out to be fed by the laity, the latter often to the number of 5 to 25,000
is fed and taken care of by the Samgha (the fraternity of lamaic monks)
the lamassery providing for the wants of the poor, the sick, the afflicted.
Our lamas accept food, never money, and it is in those temples that the
origin of evil is preached and impressed upon the people. There they are
taught the four noble truths - ariya sakka, and the chain of causation,
(the 12 nid[ci]anas) gives them a solution of the problem of the origin
and destruction of suffering.
Read the Mahavagga
and try to understand not with the prejudiced Western mind but the spirit of
intuition and truth what the Fully Enlightened one says in the 1st Khandhaka.
Allow me to translate it for you.
"At the time the blessed Buddha was at Uruvella on the shores of the river
Nerovigara as he rested under the Boddhi tree of wisdom after he had become
Sambuddha, at the end of the seventh day having his mind fixed on the chain
of causation he spake thus: 'from Ignorance spring the samkharas of threefold
nature -- productions of body, of speech, of thought. From the samkharas springs
consciousness, from consciousness springs name and form, from this spring the
six regions (of the six senses the seventh being the property of but the enlightened);
from these springs contact from this sensation; from this springs thirst (or
desire, Kama, tanha) from thirst attachment, existence, birth, old age and death,
grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection and despair. Again by the destruction
of ignorance, the Sankharas are destroyed, and their consciousness name and
form, the six regions, contact, sensation, thirst, attachment (selfishness),
existence, birth, old age, death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection,
and despair are destroyed. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering."
Knowing this the
blessed one uttered this solemn utterance. "When the real nature of things
becomes clear to the meditating Bikshu, then all his doubts fade away since
he has learned what is that nature and what its cause. From ignorance spring
all the evils. From knowledge comes the cessation of this mass of misery, and
then the meditating Brahmana stands dispelling the hosts of Mara like the sun
that illuminates the sky."
Meditation here means
the superhuman (not supernatural) qualities, or arhatship in its highest of
spiritual powers.
Copied out Simla, Sept. 28, 1882.
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