Theosophy - Esoteric Buddhism by A.P.Sinnett
Esoteric
Buddhism ΔΔ
by
A. P. Sinnett
Author
also of The Occult World
President
of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society
Fifth
edition, annotated and enlarged by the author
London,
Chapman and Hall Ltd 1885
CONTENTS
Preface
to the Annotated Edition
Preface
to the Original Edition
CHAPTER
I - Esoteric Teachers
Nature
of the Present Exposition - Seclusion of Eastern Knowledge - The Arhats and
their Attributes - The Mahatmas - Occultists generally - Isolated Mystics -
Inferior Yogis - Occult Training - The Great Purpose -Its Incidental Consequences
- Present Concessions
Esoteric Cosmogony - Where to Begin - Working
back from Man to Universe - Analysis of Man - The Seven Principles
Esoteric Views of Evolution - The
Chain of Globes - Progress of Man round them - The Spiral Advance
- Original Evolution of the Globes - The Lower Kingdoms
Uniformity of Nature- Rounds and Races - The
Septenary Law - Objective and Subjective Lives - Total Incarnations - Former
Races on Earth - Periodic Cataclysms - Atlantis - Lemuria - The Cyclic Law
Spiritual Destinies of the Ego -
Karma - Division of the Principles of Death - Progress of the Higher
Duad - Existence in Devachan - Subjective Progress - Avitchi - Earthly
Connection with Devachan - Devachanic Periods
The Astral Shell - Its Habitat - Its Nature
- Surviving Impulses - Elementals - Mediums and Shells - Accidents and Suicides
- Lost Personalities
Progress of the Main Wave - Obscurations -
Twilight and Dawn of Evolution - Our Neighbouring Planets - Gradations of Spirituality
- Prematurely Developed Egos - Intervals of Re-Incarnation
The Choice of Good or Evil - The
Second Half of Evolution - The Decisive Turning-point - Spirituality
and Intellect - The Survival of the Fittest - The Sixth Sense - Development
of the Principles in their Order - The Subsidence of the Unfit - Provision
for All - The Exceptional Cases - Their Scientific Explanation - Justice
Satisfied - The Destiny of Failures - Human Evolution Reviewed
The Esoteric Buddha - Re-Incarnations of Adepts
- Buddha’s Incarnation - The Seven Buddhas of the Great Races - Avalokiteshwara
- Addi Buddha - Adeptship in Buddha’s Time - Sankaracharya - Vedantin
Doctrines - Tsong-ka-pa - Occult Reforms in Tibet
Its Remoteness - Preceding Gradations - Partial
Nirvana - The Threshold of Nirvana - Nirvana - Para Nirvana - Buddha and Nirvana
- Nirvana attained by Adepts - General Progress towards Nirvana - Conditions
of its Attainment - Spirituality and Religion - The Pursuit of Truth
The Days and Night of Brahma - The Various
Manvantaras and Pralayas - The Solar System - The Universal Pralaya - Recommencement
of Evolution - “Creation” - The Great First Cause - The Eternal
Cyclic Process
CHAPTER
XII - The Doctrine Reviewed
Correspondences of the Esoteric Doctrine
with Visible Nature - Free Will and Predestination - The Origin of Evil -
Geology, Biology, and the Esoteric Teaching - Buddhism and Scholarship - The
Origins of all Things - The Doctrine as Distorted - The Ultimate Dissolutions
of Consciousness - Transmigration - The Soul and the Spirit - Personality
and Individuality - Karma
Preface to the Annotated Edition
SINCE this book was first published in
the beginning of 1883, I have come into possession of much additional
information bearing on many of the problems dealt with. But I am glad
to say that such later teaching only reveals incompleteness in my
original conception of the esoteric doctrine, - no material error
so far. Indeed I have received from the great Adept himself, from
whom I obtained my instruction in the first instance, the assurance
that the book as it now stands is a sound and trustworthy statement
of the scheme of Nature as understood by the initiates of occult science,
which may have to be a good deal developed in the future, if the interest
it excites is keen enough to constitute an efficient demand for further
teaching of this kind on the part of the world at large, but will
never have to be remodelled or apologized for. In view of this assurance
it seems best that I should now put forward my later conclusions and
additional information in the form of annotations on each branch of
the subject, rather than infuse them into the original text, which,
under the circumstances, I am reluctant in any way to alter. I have
therefore adopted that plan in the present edition.
As conveying an indirect acknowledgement
of the general harmony to be traced between these teachings and the
recognized philosophical tenets of certain other great schools of
Indian thought, I may here refer to criticisms on this book, which
were published in the Indian magazine the Theosophist in June,
1883, by “a Brahman Hindoo.” The writer complains that
in interpreting the esoteric doctrine, I have departed unnecessarily
from accepted Sanskrit nomenclature; but his objection merely is that
I have given unfamiliar names in some cases to ideas already embodied
in Hindoo sacred writings, and that I have done too much honour to
the religious system commonly known as Buddhism, by representing that
as more closely allied with the esoteric doctrine than any other.
“The popular wisdom of the majority of Hindûs to this day,”
says my Brahman critic, “is more or less tinged with the esoteric
doctrine taught in Mr Sinnett’s book misnamed ‘Esoteric
Buddhism,” while there is not a single village or hamlet in
the whole of India in which people are not more or less acquainted
with the sublime tenets of the Vedânta philosophy . . . . The
effects of Karma in the next birth, the enjoyment of its fruits, good
or evil, in a subjective or spiritual state of existence prior to
the reincarnation of the spiritual monad in this or any other world,
the loitering of the unsatisfied souls or human shells in the earth
(Kâma loca), the pralayic and manvantaric periods . . . . are
not only intelligible, but are even familiar to a great many Hindûs,
under names different from those made use by the author of ‘Esoteric
Buddhism.’ “ So much the better, -I take leave to rejoin,
- from the point of view of Western readers, to whom it must be a
matter of indifference whether the esoteric Hindoo or Buddhist religion
is nearest to absolutely true spiritual science, which should certainly
bear no name that appears to wed it to any one faith in the external
world more than to another. All that we in Europe can be anxious for,
is to arrive at a clear understanding as to the essential principles
of that science, and if we find the principles defined in this book
claimed by the cultured representatives of more than one great Oriental
creed as equally the underlying truths of their different systems,
we shall be all the better inclined to believe the present exposition
of doctrine worth our attention.
In regard to the complaint itself, that
the teachings here reduced to an intelligible shape are incorrectly
described by the name this book bears, I cannot do better than quote
the note by which the editor of the Theosophist replies to
his Brahman contributor. This note says: -“We print the above
letter as it expresses in courteous language, and in an able manner,
the views of a large number of our Hindoo brothers. At the same time
it must be stated that the name of ‘Esoteric Buddhism’
was given to Mr Sinnett’s latest publication, not because the
doctrine propounded therein is meant to be specially identified with
any particular form of faith, but because Buddhism means the
doctrine of the Buddhas, the Wise i.e. the Wisdom Religion.”
For my own part I need only add that I fully accept and adopt that
explanation of the matter. It would indeed be a misconception of the
design which this book is intended to sub-serve, to suppose it concerned
with the recommendation, to a dilettante modern taste, of Old
World fashions in religious thought. The external forms and fancies
of religion in one age may be a little purer, in another a little
more corrupt, but they inevitably adapt themselves to their period,
and it would be extravagant to imagine them interchangeable. The present
statement is not put forward in the hope of making Buddhists from
among the adherents of any other system, but with the view of conveying
to thoughtful readers, as well in the East as in the West, a series
of leading ideas relating to the actual verities of Nature, and the
real facts of man’s progress through evolution, which have been
communicated to the present writer by Eastern philosophers, and thus
fall most readily into an Oriental mould. For the value of these teachings
will perhaps be most fully realized when we clearly perceive that
they are scientific in their character rather than controversial.
Spiritual truths, if they are truths, may evidently be dealt with
in a no less scientific spirit than chemical reactions. And no religious
feeling, of whatever colour it may be, need be disturbed by the importation
into the general stock of knowledge of new discoveries about the constitution
and nature of man on the plane of his higher activities. True religion
will eventually find a way to assimilate much fresh knowledge, in
the same way that it always finally acquiesces in a general enlargement
of Knowledge on the physical plane. This, in the first instance, may
sometimes disconcert notions associated with religious belief, - as
geological science at first embarrassed biblical chronology. But in
time men came to see that the essence of the biblical statement does
not reside in the literal sense of the cosmological passages in the
Old Testament, and religious conceptions grew all the purer for the
relief thus afforded. In just the same way when positive scientific
knowledge begins to embrace a comprehension of the laws relating to
the spiritual development of man, -some misconceptions of Nature,
long blended with religion, may have to give way, but still it will
be found that the central ideas of true religion have been cleared
up and strengthened all the better for the process. Especially as
such processes continue, will the internal dissensions of the religious
world be inevitably subdued. The warfare of sects can only be due
to a failure on the part of rival sectarians to grasp fundamental
facts. Could a time come when the basic ideas on which religion rests,
should be comprehended with the same certainty with which we comprehend
some primary physical laws, and disagreement about them be recognized
by all educated people as ridiculous, then there would not be room
for very acrimonious divergences of religious sentiment. Externals
of religious thought would still differ in different climates and
among different races, - as dress and dietaries differ, - but such
differences would not give rise to intellectual antagonism.
Basic facts of the nature indicated are developed,
it appears to me, in the exposition of spiritual science we have now obtained
from our Eastern friends. It is quite unnecessary for religious thinkers to
turn aside from them under the impression that they are arguments in favour
of some Eastern, in preference to the more general Western creed. If medical
science were to discover a new fact about man’s body, were to unveil some
hitherto concealed principle on which the growth of skin and flesh and bone
is carried on, that discovery would not be regarded as trenching at all on the
domain of religion. Would the domain of religion be invaded, for example, by
a discovery that should go one step behind the action of the nerves, and disclose
a finer set of activities manipulating these as they manipulate the muscles?
At all events, even if such a discovery might begin to reconcile science and
religion, no man who allows any of his higher faculties to enter into his religious
thinking would put aside a positive fact of Nature, plainly shown to be such,
as hostile to religion. Being a fact it would inevitably fit in with all other
facts, and with religious truth among the number. So with the great mass of
information in reference to the spiritual evolution of man embodied in the present
statement. Our best plan evidently is to ask, before we look into the report
I bring forward, not whether it will square in all respects with preconceived
views, but whether it really does introduce us to a series of natural facts
connected with the growth and development of man’s higher faculties. If
it does this we may wisely examine the facts first in the scientific spirit,
and leave them to exercise whatever effect on collateral belief may be reasonable
and legitimate later on.
Ramifying, as the explanation proceeds, into a
great many side paths, it will be seen that the central statement now put forward
constitutes a theory of anthropology which completes and spiritualises the ordinary
notions of physical evolution. The theory which traces man’s development
by successive and very gradual improvements of animal forms from generation
to generation, is a very barren and miserable theory regarded as an all-embracing
account of creation; but properly understood it paves the way for a comprehension
of the higher concurrent process which is all the while evolving the soul of
man in the spiritual realm of existence. The present view of the matter reconciles
the evolutionary method with the deeply seated craving of every self-conscious
entity for perpetuity of individual life. The disjointed series of improving
forms on this earth have no individuality, and the life of each in turn
is a separate transaction which finds in the next similar transaction, no compensation
for suffering involved, no justice, no fruit of its efforts. It is just possible
to argue on the assumption of a new independent creation of a human soul every
time a new human form is produced by physiological growth, that in the after
spiritual states of such soul, justice may be awarded; but then this conception
is itself at variance with the fundamental idea of evolution, which traces,
or believes that it traces the origin of each soul to the workings of highly
developed matter in each case. Nor is it less at variance with the analogies
of Nature; but without going into that, it is enough for the moment to perceive
that the theory of spiritual evolution, as set forth in the teaching of esoteric
science, is at any rate in harmony with these analogies, while at the same time
it satisfactorily meets the requirements of justice, and of the instinctive
demand for continuity of individual life.
This theory recognizes the evolution
of the soul as a process that is quite continuous in itself, though
carried out partly through the instrumentality of a great series of
dissociated forms. Putting aside for the moment of profound metaphysics
of the theory which trace the principle of life from the original
first cause of the cosmos, we find the soul as an entity emerging
from the animal kingdom, and passing into the earliest human forms,
without being at that time ripe for the higher intellectual life with
which the present state of humanity renders us familiar. But through
successive incarnations in forms whose physical improvement, under
the Darwinian law, is constantly fitting them to be its habitation
at each return to objective life, it gradually gathers that enormous
range of experience which is summed up in its higher development.
In the intervals between its physical incarnations it prolongs and
works out, and finally exhausts or transmutes into so much abstract
development, the personal experiences of each life. This is the clue
to the true explanation of that apparent difficulty which besets the
cruder form of the theory of reincarnation which independent speculation
has sometimes thrown out. Each man is unconscious of having led previous
lives, therefore he contends that subsequent lives can afford him
no compensation for this one. He overlooks the enormous importance
of the intervening spiritual condition, in which he by no means forgets
the personal adventures and emotions he has just passed through, and
in the course of which he distills these into so much cosmic progress.
In the following pages the elucidation of this profoundly interesting
mystery is attempted, and it will be seen that the view of events
now afforded us is not only a solution of the problems of life and
death, but of many very perplexing experiences on the borderland between
those conditions - or rather between physical and spiritual life -
which have engaged attention and speculation so widely of recent years
in most civilized countries.
Preface
to the Original Edition
THE teachings embodied in the present
volume let in a flood of light on questions connected with Buddhist
doctrine which have deeply perplexed previous writers on the religion,
and offer the world for the first time a practical clue to the meaning
of almost all ancient religious symbolism. More than this, the esoteric
doctrine, when properly understood, will be found to advance an overpowering
claim on the attention of earnest thinkers. Its tenets are not presented
to us as the invention of any founder or prophet. Its testimony is
based on no written scriptures. Its views of Nature have been evolved
by the researches of an immense succession of investigators, qualified
for their task by the possession of spiritual faculties and perceptions
of a higher order than those belonging to ordinary humanity. In the
course of ages the block of knowledge thus accumulated, concerning
the origin of the world and of man and the ultimate destinies of our
race - concerning also the nature of other worlds and states of existence
differing from those of our present life - checked and examined at
every point, verified in all directions, and constantly under examination
throughout, has come to be looked on by its custodians as constituting
the absolute truth concerning spiritual things, the actual state of
the facts regarding vast regions of vital activity lying beyond this
earthly existence.
European philosophy, whether concerned with religion
or pure metaphysics, has so long been used to a sense of insecurity in speculations
outrunning the limits of physical experiment, that absolute truth about spiritual
things is hardly recognized any longer by prudent thinkers as a reasonable object
of pursuit; but different habits of thought have been acquired in Asia. The
secret doctrine which, to a considerable extent, I am now enabled to expound,
is regarded not only by all its adherents, but by vast numbers who have never
expected to know more of it than that such a doctrine exists, as a mine of entirely
trustworthy knowledge from which all religions and philosophies have derived
whatever they possess of truth, and with which every religion must coincide
if it claims to be a mode of expression for truth.
This is a bold claim indeed, but I venture to announce
the following exposition as one of immense importance to the world, because
I believe that claim can be substantiated.
I do not say that within the compass of this volume
the authenticity of the esoteric doctrine can be proved. Such proof cannot be
given by any process of argument; only through the development in each inquirer
for himself of the faculties required for the direct observation of Nature along
the lines indicated. But his prima facie conclusion may be determined
by the extent to which the views of Nature about to be unfolded, may recommend
themselves to his mind, and by the reasons which exist for trusting the powers
of observation of those by whom they are communicated.
Will it be supposed that the very magnitude
of the claim now made on behalf of the esoteric doctrine, lifts the
present statement out of the region of inquiry to which its title
refers - inquiry as to the real inner meaning of the definite and
specific religion called Buddhism? The fact is, however, that esoteric
Buddhism, though by no means divorced from the associations of exoteric
Buddhism, must not be conceived to constitute a mere imperium
in imperio - a central school of culture in the vortex of the
Buddhist world. In proportion as Buddhism retreats into the inner
penetralia of its faith, these are found to merge into the inner penetralia
of other faiths. The cosmic conceptions, and the knowledge of Nature
on which Buddhism not merely rests, but which constitute esoteric
Buddhism, equally constitute esoteric Brahmanism. And the esoteric
doctrine is thus regarded by those of all creeds who are “enlightened”
(in the Buddhist sense) as the absolute truth concerning Nature, Man,
the origin of the Universe, and the destinies toward which its inhabitants
are tending. At the same time, exoteric Buddhism has remained in closer
union with the esoteric doctrine than any other popular religion.
An exposition of the inner knowledge, addressed to English readers
in the present day, will thus associate itself irresistibly with familiar
outlines of Buddhist teaching. It will certainly impart to these a
living meaning they generally seem to be without, but all the more
on this account may the esoteric doctrine be most conveniently studied
in its Buddhist aspect: one, moreover, which has been so strongly
impressed upon it since the time of Gautama Buddha that though the
essence of the doctrine dates back to a far more remote antiquity,
the Buddhist colouring has now permeated its whole substance. That
which I am about to put before the reader is esoteric Buddhism,
and for European students approaching it for the first time, any other
designation would be a misnomer.
The statement I have to make must be
considered in its entirety before the reader will be able to comprehend
why initiates in the esoteric doctrine regard the concession involved
in the present disclosures of the general outlines of this doctrine
as one of startling magnitude. One explanation of this feeling, however,
may be readily seen to spring from the extreme sacredness that has
always been attached by their ancient guardians to the inner vital
truths of Nature. Hitherto this sacredness has always prescribed their
absolute concealment from the profane herd. And so far as that policy
of concealment, - the tradition of countless ages, - is now being
given up, the new departure which the appearance of this volume signalizes
will be contemplated with surprise and regret by a great many initiated
disciples. The surrender to criticism which may sometimes perhaps
be clumsy and irreverent, of doctrines which have hitherto been regarded
by such persons as too majestic in their import to be talked of at
all except under circumstances of befitting solemnity, will seem to
them a terrible profanation of the great mysteries. From the European
point of view it would be unreasonable to expect that such a book
as this can be exempt from the usual rough-and-tumble treatment of
new ideas. And special convictions or common-place bigotry may sometimes
render such treatment in the present case peculiarly inimical. But
all that, though a matter of course to European exponents of the doctrine
like myself, will seem very grievous and disgusting to its earlier
and more regular representatives. They will appeal sadly to the wisdom
of the time-honoured rule which, in the old symbolical way, forbade
the initiates from casting pearls before swine.
Happily, as I think, the rule has not been allowed
to operate any longer to the prejudice of those who, while still far from being
initiated, in the occult sense of the term, will probably have become, by sheer
force of modern culture, qualified to appreciate the concession.
Part of the information contained in the following
pages was first thrown out in a fragmentary form in the Theosophist,
a monthly magazine, published at Madras, by the leaders of the Theosophical
Society. As almost all the articles referred to have been my own writing, I
have not hesitated to weld parts of them, when this course has been convenient,
into the present volume. A certain advantage is gained by thus showing how the
separate pieces of the mosaic as first presented to public notice, drop naturally
into their places in the (comparatively) finished pavement.
The doctrine or system now disclosed in its broad
outlines has been so jealously guarded hitherto, that no mere literary researches,
though they might have curry-combed all India, could have brought to light any
morsel of the information thus revealed. It is given out to the world at last
by the free grace of those in whose keeping it has hitherto lain. Nothing could
ever have extorted from them its very first letter. It is only after a perusal
of the present explanations that their position generally, as regards their
present disclosures or their previous reticence can be criticized or even comprehended.
The views of Nature now put forward are altogether unfamiliar to European thinkers;
the policy of the graduates in esoteric knowledge, which has grown out of their
long intimacy with these views must be considered in connection with the peculiar
bearings of the doctrine itself.
As for the circumstances under which these revelations
were first foreshadowed in the Theosophist, and are now rounded off and
expanded as my readers will perceive, it is enough for the moment to say, that
the Theosophical Society, through my connection with which the materials dealt
with in this volume have come into my hands, owes its establishment to certain
persons who are among the custodians of esoteric science. The information poured
out at last for the benefit of all who are ripe to receive it, has been destined
for communication to the world through the Theosophical Society since the foundation
of that body, and later circumstances only have indicated myself as the agent
through whom the communication could be conveniently made.
Let me add, that I do not regard myself
as the sole exponent for the outer world, at this crisis, of esoteric
truth. These teachings are the outcome, as regards philosophical knowledge,
of the relations with the outer world which have been established
by the custodians of esoteric truth through me. And it is only
regarding the acts and intentions of those esoteric teachers who have
chosen to work through me, that I can have any certain knowledge.
But, in different ways, some other writers seem to be engaged in expounding
for the benefit of the world - and, as I believe, in accordance with
a great plan, of which this volume is a part - the same truths, in
different aspects, that I am commissioned to unfold. Probably the
great activity at present of literary speculation dealing with problems
that overstep the range of physical knowledge, may also be in some
way provoked by that policy, on the part of the great custodians of
esoteric truth, of which my own book is certainly one manifestation.
Again, the ardour now shown in “Psychical Research,” by
the very distinguished, highly gifted, and cultivated men, who lead
the society in London devoted to that object, is, to my inner convictions
- knowing as I do something of the way the spiritual aspirations of
the world are silently influenced by those whose work lies in that
department of Nature - the obvious fruit of efforts, parallel to those
with which I am more immediately concerned.
It only remains for me to disclaim, on
behalf of the treatise which ensues, any pretension to high finish
as regards the language in which it is cast. Longer familiarity with
the vast and complicated scheme of cosmogony disclosed, will no doubt
suggest improvements in the phraseology employed to expound it. Two
years ago, neither I, nor any other European living, knew the alphabet
of the science here for the first time put into a scientific shape
- or subject at all events to an attempt in that direction - the science
of Spiritual Causes and their Effects, of Super-physical Consciousness,
of Cosmical Evolution. Though ideas had begun to offer themselves
to the world in more or less embarrassing disguise of mystic symbology,
no attempt had ever been made by any esoteric teacher, two years back,
to put the doctrine forward in its plain abstract purity. As my own
instruction progressed on those lines, I have had to coin phrases
and suggest English words as equivalents for the ideas which were
presented to my mind. I am by no means convinced that in all cases
I have coined the best possible phrases and hit on the most neatly
expressive words. For example, at the threshold of the subject we
come upon the necessity of giving some name to the various elements
or attributes of which the complete human creature is made up. “Element”
would be an impossible word to use, on account of the confusion that
would arise from its use in other significations; and the least objectionable
on the whole seemed to me “principle,” though to an ear
trained in the niceties of metaphysical expression this word will
have a very unsatisfactory sound in some of its present applications.
Quite possibly, therefore, in process of time the Western nomenclature
of the esoteric doctrine may be greatly developed in advance of that
I have provisionally constructed. The Oriental nomenclature is far
more elaborate, but metaphysical Sanskrit seems to be painfully embarrassing
to a translator - the fault, my Indian friends assure me, not of Sanskrit,
but of the language in which they are now required to express the
Sanskrit ideal. Eventually we may find that, with the help of a little
borrowing from familiar Greek quarries, English may prove more receptive
of the new doctrine - or rather, of the primeval doctrine as newly
disclosed - than has been supposed in the East.
CHAPTER
1
Esoteric
Teachers
THE information contained in the following
pages is no collection of inferences deduced from study. I am bringing
to my readers knowledge which I have obtained by favour rather than
by effort. It will not be found the less valuable on that account;
I venture, on the contrary, to declare that it will be found of incalculably
greater value, easily as I have obtained it, than any results in a
similar direction which I could possibly have procured by ordinary
methods of research, even had I possessed, in the highest degree,
that which I make no claim to possess at all - Oriental scholarship.
Every one who has been concerned with
Indian literature, and still more, any one who in India has taken
interest in talking with cultivated Natives on philosophical subjects
will be aware of a general conviction existing in the East that there
are men living who know a great deal more about philosophy in the
highest acceptation of the word - the science, the true knowledge
of spiritual things, - than can be found recorded in any books. In
Europe the notion of secrecy as applied to science is so repulsive
to the prevailing instinct, that the first inclination of European
thinkers is to deny the existence of that which they so much dislike.
But circumstances have fully assured me during my residence in India
that the conviction just referred to is perfectly well founded, and
I have been privileged at last to receive a very considerable mass
of instruction in the hitherto secret knowledge over which Oriental
philosophers have brooded silently till now; instruction which has
hitherto been only imparted to sympathetic students, prepared themselves
to migrate into the camp of secrecy. Their teachers have been more
than content that all other inquirers should be left in doubt as to
whether there was anything of importance to learn at their hands.
With quite as much antipathy at starting as any
one could have entertained to the old Oriental policy in regard to knowledge,
I came, nevertheless, to perceive that the old Oriental knowledge itself was
a very real and important possession. It may be excusable to regard the high
grapes as sour so long as they are quite out of reach, but it would be foolish
to persist in that opinion if a tall friend hands down a bunch and one finds
them sweet.
For reasons that will appear as the present explanations
proceed, the very considerable block of hitherto secret teaching this volume
contains, has been conveyed to me, not only without conditions of the usual
kind, but to the express end that I might convey it in my turn to the world
at large.
Without the light of hitherto secret
Oriental knowledge, it is impossible by any study of its published
literature - English or Sanskrit - for students of even the most scholarly
qualifications, to reach a comprehension of the inner doctrines and
real meaning of any Oriental religion. This assertion conveys no reproach
to the sympathetic, learned, and industrious writers of great ability
who have studied Oriental religions generally, and Buddhism especially,
in their external aspects. Buddhism, above all, is a religion which
has enjoyed a dual existence from the very beginning of its introduction
to the world. The real inner meaning of its doctrines has been kept
back from uninitiated students, while the outer teachings have merely
presented the multitude with a code of moral lessons and a veiled,
symbolical literature, hinting at the existence of knowledge in the
background.
This secret knowledge, in reality, long
antedated the passage through earth-life of Gautama Buddha. Brahmin
philosophy, in ages before Buddha, embodied the identical doctrine
which may now be described as Esoteric Buddhism. Its outlines had
indeed been blurred; its scientific form partially confused; but the
general body of knowledge was already in possession of a select few
before Buddha came to deal with it. Buddha, however, undertook the
task of revising and refreshing the esoteric science of the inner
circle of initiates, as well as the morality of the outer world. The
circumstances under which this work was done, have been wholly misunderstood,
nor would a straightforward explanation thereof be intelligible without
explanations, which must first be furnished by a survey of the esoteric
science itself.
From Buddha’s time till now the
esoteric science referred to has been jealously guarded as a precious
heritage belonging exclusively to regularly initiated members of mysteriously
organized associations. These, so far as Buddhism is concerned, are
the Arahats, or more properly Arhats, referred to in Buddhist literature.
They are the initiates who tread the “fourth path of holiness,”
spoken of in esoteric Buddhist writings. Mr Rhys Davids, referring
to a multiplicity of original texts and Sanskrit authorities, says
- “One might fill pages with the awe-struck and ecstatic praise
which is lavished in Buddhist writings on this condition of mind,
the fruit of the fourth path, the state of an Arahat, of a man made
perfect according to the Buddhist faith.” And then making a
series of running quotations from Sanskrit authorities, he says -
“To him who has finished the path and passed beyond sorrow,
who has freed himself on all sides, thrown away every fetter, there
is no more fever or grief....For such there are no more births....they
are in the enjoyment of Nirvana. Their old karma is exhausted, no
new karma is being produced; their hearts are free from the longing
after future life, and no new yearnings springing up within them,
they, the wise are extinguished like a lamp.” These passages,
and all like them, convey to European readers, at all events, an entirely
false idea as to what sort of person an Arhat really is, as to the
life he leads while on earth, and what he anticipates later on. But
the elucidation of such points may be postponed for the moment. Some
further passages from exoteric treatises may first be selected to
show what an Arhat is generally supposed to be.
Mr Rhys Davids, speaking of Jhana
and Samadhi - the belief that it was possible by intense self-absorption
to attain supernatural faculties and powers - goes on to say - “So
far as I am aware, no instance is recorded of any one, not either
a member of the order, or a Brahmin ascetic, acquiring these powers.
A Buddha always possessed them; whether Arahats as such, could
work the particular miracles in question, and whether of mendicants,
only Arahats or only Asekhas could do so, is at present not clear.”
Very little in the sources of information on the subject that have
hitherto been explored will be found clear. But I am now merely endeavouring
to show that Buddhist literature teems with allusions to the greatness
and powers of the Arhats. For more intimate knowledge concerning them,
special circumstances must furnish us with the required explanations.
Mr Arthur Lillie, in “Buddha and
Early Buddhism,” tells us - “Six supernatural faculties
were expected of the ascetic before he could claim the grade of Arhat.
They are constantly alluded to in the Sutras as the six supernatural
faculties, usually without further specification . . . .Man has a
body composed of the four elements . . . . in this transitory body
his intelligence is enchained, the ascetic finding himself thus confused,
directs his mind to the creation of the Manas. He represents
to himself, in thought, another body created from this material body
- a body with a form, members, and organs. This body, in relation
to the material body, is like the sword and the scabbard; or a serpent
issuing from a basket in which it is confined. The ascetic then, purified
and perfected, begins to practise supernatural faculties. He finds
himself able to pass through material obstacles, walls, ramparts &c;
he is able to throw his phantasmal appearance into many places at
once . . . . he can leave this world and even reach the heaven of
Brahma himself . . . . He acquires the power of hearing the sounds
of the unseen world as distinctly as those of the phenomenal world
- more distinctly in point of fact. Also by the power of Manas
he is able to read the most secret thoughts of others, and to tell
their characters.” And so on with illustrations. Mr Lillie has
not quite accurately divined the nature of the truth lying behind
this popular version of the facts; but it is hardly necessary to quote
more to show that the powers of the Arhats and their insight into
spiritual things are respected by the world of Buddhism most profoundly,
even though the Arhats themselves have been singularly indisposed
to favour the world with autobiographies or scientific accounts of
“the six supernatural powers.”
A few sentences from Mr. Hoey’s
recent translation of Dr Oldenberg’s “Budda: his Life,
his Doctrine, his Order,” may fall conveniently into this place,
and then we may pass on. We read: - “Buddhist proverbial philosophy
attributes in innumerable passages the possession of Nirvana to the
saint who still treads the earth: ‘The disciple who has
put off lust and desire, rich in wisdom, has here on earth attained
deliverance from death, the rest, the Nirvana, the eternal state.
He who has escaped from the trackless hard mazes of the Sansara, who
has crossed over and reached the shore, self-absorbed, without stumbling
and without doubt, who has delivered himself from the earthly and
attained Nirvana, him I call a true Brahmin.’ If the saint will
even now put an end to his state of being he can do so, but the majority
stand fast until Nature has reached her goal; of such may those words
be said which are put in the mouth of the most prominent of Buddha’s
disciples, ‘I long not for death; I long not for life; I wait
till mine hour come, like a servant who awaiteth his reward.’
“
A multiplication of such quotations would
merely involve the repetition in various forms of exoteric conceptions
concerning the Arhats. Like every fact or thought in Buddhism, the
Arhat has two aspects, that in which he is presented to the world
at large, and that in which he lives, moves, and has his being. In
the popular estimation he is a saint waiting for a spiritual reward
of the kind the populace can understand - a wonder-worker meanwhile
by favour of supernatural agencies. In reality he is the long-tried
and proved-worthy custodian of the deepest and innermost philosophy
of the one fundamental religion which Buddha refreshed and restored,
and a student of natural science standing in the very foremost front
of human knowledge, in regard not merely to the mysteries of spirit,
but to the material constitution of the world as well.
Arhat is a Buddhist designation. That which is
more familiar in India, where the attributes of Arhatship are not necessarily
associated with professions of Buddhism, is Mahatma. With stories about the
Mahatmas, India is saturated. The older Mahatmas are generally spoken of as
Rishis; but the terms are interchangeable, and I have heard the title Rishi
applied to men now living. All the attributes of the Arhats mentioned in Buddhist
writings are described with no less reverence in Indian literature, as those
of the Mahatmas, and this volume might be readily filled with translations of
vernacular books, giving accounts of miraculous achievements by such of them
as are known to history and tradition by name.
In reality, the Arhats and the Mahatmas are the
same men. At that level of spiritual exaltation, supreme knowledge of the esoteric
doctrine blends all original sectarian distinctions. By whatever name such illuminati
may be called, they are the adepts of occult knowledge, sometimes spoken of
in India now as the Brothers, and the custodians of the spiritual science which
has been handed down to them by their predecessors.
We may search both ancient and modern literature
in vain, however, for any systematic explanation of their doctrine or science.
A good deal of this is dimly set forth in occult writing; but very little of
this is of the least use to readers who take up the subject without previous
knowledge acquired independently of books. It is under favour of direct instruction
from one of their number that I am now enabled to attempt an outline of the
Mahatmas’ teaching, and it is in the same way that I have picked up what
I know concerning the organization to which most of them, and the greatest,
in the present day belong.
All over the world there are occultists
of various degrees of eminence, and occult fraternities even, which
have a great deal in common with the leading fraternity now established
in Tibet. But all my inquiries into the subject have convinced me
that the Tibetan Brotherhood is incomparably the highest of such associations,
and regarded as such by all other associations - worthy of being looked
upon themselves as really “enlightened” in the occult
sense of the term. There are, it is true, many isolated mystics in
India who are altogether self-taught and unconnected with occult bodies.
Many of these will explain that they themselves attain to higher pinnacles
of spiritual enlightenment than the Brothers of Tibet, or any other
people on earth. But the examination of such claims in all cases I
have encountered, would, I think, lead any impartial outsider, however
little qualified himself by personal development to be a judge of
occult enlightenment, to the conclusion that they are altogether unfounded.
I know one native of India, for example, a man of European education,
holding a high appointment under Government, of good station in society,
most elevated character, and enjoying unusual respect with such Europeans
as are concerned with him in official life, who will only accord to
the Brothers of Tibet a second place in the world of spiritual enlightenment.
The first place he regards as occupied by one person, now in this
world no longer - his own occult master in life - whom he resolutely
asserts to have been in incarnation of the Supreme Being. His own
(my friend’s) inner senses were so awakened by this Master,
that the visions of his entranced state, into which he can still throw
himself at will, are to him the only spiritual region in which he
can feel interested. Convinced that the Supreme Being was his personal
instructor from the beginning, and continues so still in the subjective
state, he is naturally inaccessible to suggestions that his impressions
may be distorted by reason of his own misdirected psychological development.
Again, the highly cultivated devotees, to be met with occasionally
in India, who build up a conception of Nature, the universe, and God,
entirely on a metaphysical basis, and who have evolved their systems
by sheer force of transcendental thinking, will take some established
system of philosophy as its groundwork, and amplify on this to an
extent which only an Oriental metaphysician could dream of. They win
disciples who put implicit faith in them, and found their little school
which flourishes for a time within its own limits; but speculative
philosophy of such a kind is rather occupation for the mind than knowledge.
Such “Masters,” by comparison with the organized adepts
of the highest brotherhood, are like rowing-boats compared with ocean
steamships - helpful conveyances on their own native lake or river,
but not craft to whose protection you can trust yourself on a world-wide
voyage of exploration over the sea.
Descending lower again in the scale, we find India
dotted all over with Yogis and Fakirs, in all stages of self-development, from
that of dirty savages, but little elevated above the gipsy fortune-tellers of
an English racecourse, to men whose seclusion a stranger will find it very difficult
to penetrate, and whose abnormal faculties and powers need only be seen or experienced
to shatter the incredulity of the most contented representative of modern Western
scepticism. Careless inquirers are very apt to confound such persons with the
great adepts of whom they may vaguely hear.
Concerning the real adepts, meanwhile, I cannot
at present venture on any account of what the Tibetan organization is like,
as regards its highest ruling authorities. Those Mahatmas themselves, of whom
some more or less adequate conception may, perhaps, be formed by readers who
will follow me patiently to the end, are subordinate by several degrees to the
chief of all. Let us deal rather with the earlier conditions of occult training,
which can more easily be grasped.
The level of elevation which constitutes
a man - what the outer world calls a Mahatma or “Brother”
- is only attained after prolonged and weary probation, and anxious
ordeals of really terrible severity. One may find people who have
spent twenty or thirty years or more, in blameless and arduous devotion
to the life-task on which they have entered, and are still in the
earlier degrees of chelaship, still looking up to the heights of adeptship
as far above their heads. And at whatever age a boy or man dedicates
himself to the occult career, he dedicates himself to it, be it remembered,
without any reservations and for life. The task he undertakes is the
development in himself of a great many faculties and attributes which
are so utterly dormant in ordinary mankind, that their very existence
is unsuspected - the possibility of their development denied. And
these faculties and attributes must be developed by the chela himself,
with very little, if any, help, beyond guidance and direction from
his master. “The adept.” says an occult aphorism, “becomes:
he is not made.” One may illustrate this point by reference
to a very common-place physical exercise. Every man living, having
the ordinary use of his limbs, is qualified to swim. But put those
who, as the common phrase goes, cannot swim, into deep water, and
they will struggle and be drowned. The mere way to move the limbs
is no mystery; but unless the swimmer in moving them has a full belief
that such movement will produce the required result, the required
result is not produced. In this case, we are dealing with mechanical
forces merely, but the same principle runs up into dealings with subtler
forces. Very much further than people generally imagine will mere
“confidence” carry the occult neophyte. How many European
readers, who would be quite incredulous if told of some results which
occult chelas in the most incipient stages of their training have
to accomplish by sheer force of confidence, hear constantly in church
nevertheless, the familiar Biblical assurances of the power which
resides in faith, and let the words pass by like the wind, leaving
no impression.
The great end and purpose of adeptship is the achievement
of spiritual development, the nature of which is only veiled and disguised by
the common phrases of exoteric language. That the adept seeks to unite his soul
with God, that he may thereby pass into Nirvana, is a statement that conveys
no definite meaning to the ordinary reader, and the more he examines it with
the help of ordinary books and methods, the less likely will he be to realize
the nature of the process contemplated, or of the condition desired. It will
be necessary to deal first with the esoteric conception of Nature, and the origin
and destinies of Man, which differ widely from theological conceptions, before
an explanation of the aim which the adept pursues can become intelligible. Meanwhile,
however, it is desirable, at the very outset, to disabuse the reader of one
misconception in regard to the objects of adeptship that he may very likely
have framed.
The development of those spiritual faculties, whose
culture has to do with the highest objects of the occult life, gives rise, as
it progresses, to a great deal of incidental knowledge, having to do with the
physical laws of Nature not yet generally understood. This knowledge, and the
practical art of manipulating certain obscure forces of Nature, which it brings
in its train, invest an adept, and even an adept’s pupils, at a comparatively
early stage of their education, with very extraordinary powers, the application
of which to matters of daily life will sometimes produce results that seem altogether
miraculous; and, from the ordinary point of view, the acquisition of apparently
miraculous power is such a stupendous achievement, that people are sometimes
apt to fancy that the adept’s object in seeking the knowledge he attains
has been to invest himself with these coveted powers. It would be as reasonable
to say of any great patriot of military history that his object in becoming
a soldier had been to wear a gay uniform and impress the imagination of the
nursemaids.
The Oriental method of cultivating knowledge
has always differed diametrically from that pursued in the West during
the growth of modern science. Whilst Europe has investigated Nature
as publicly as possible, every step being discussed with the utmost
freedom, and every fresh fact acquired, circulated at once for the
benefit of all, Asiatic science has been studied secretly and its
conquests jealously guarded. I need not as yet attempt either criticism
or defence of its methods. But at all events these methods have been
relaxed to some extent in my own case, and, as already stated, it
is with the full consent of my teachers that I now follow the bent
of my own inclinations as a European, and communicate what I have
learned to all who may be willing to receive it. Later on it will
be seen how the departure from the ordinary rules of occult study
embodied in the concessions now made, falls naturally into its place
in the whole scheme of occult philosophy. The approaches to that philosophy
have always been open, in one sense, to all. Vaguely throughout the
world in various ways has been diffused the idea that some
process of study which men here and there did actually follow, might
lead to the acquisition of a higher kind of knowledge than that taught
to mankind at large in books or by public religious preachers. The
East, as pointed out, has always been more than vaguely impressed
with this belief, but even in the West the whole block of symbolical
literature relating to astrology, alchemy, and mysticism generally
has fermented in European society, carrying to some few peculiarly
receptive and qualified minds the conviction that behind all this
superficially meaningless nonsense great truths lay concealed. For
such persons eccentric study has sometimes revealed hidden passages
leading to the grandest imaginable realms of enlightenment. But till
now, in all such cases, in accordance with the law of those schools,
the neophyte no sooner forced his way into the region of mystery than
he was bound over to the most inviolable secrecy as to everything
connected with his entrance and further progress there. In Asia in
the same way, the “chela,” or pupil of occultism, no sooner
became a chela than he ceased to be a witness on behalf of the reality
of occult knowledge. I have been astonished to find, since my own
connection with the subject, how numerous such chelas are. But it
is impossible to imagine any human act more improbable than the unauthorized
revelation by any such chela, to persons in the outer world, that
he is one, and so the great esoteric school of philosophy successfully
guards its seclusion.
In a former book, “The
Occult World,” I have given a full and straightforward narrative
of the circumstances under which I came in contact with the gifted
and deeply instructed men from whom I have since obtained the teaching
this volume contains. I need not repeat the story. I now come forward
prepared to deal with the subject in a new way. The existence of occult
adepts, and the importance of their acquirements, may be established
along two different lines of argument: firstly, by means of external
evidence, - the testimony of qualified witnesses, the manifestation
by or through persons connected with adepts, of abnormal faculties
affording more than a presumption of abnormally enlarged knowledge;
secondly, by the presentation of such a considerable portion of this
knowledge as may convey intrinsic assurances of its own value. My
first book proceeded by the former method; I now approach the more
formidable task of working on the latter.
Annotations
The further we advance in occult study,
the more exalted in many ways become our conceptions of the Mahatmas.
The complete comprehension of the manner in which these persons become
differentiated from human kind at large, is not to be achieved by
the help of mere intellectual effort. These are aspects of the adept
nature which have to do with the extraordinary development of the
higher principles in man, which cannot be realized by the application
of the lower. But while crude conceptions in the beginning thus fall
very short of reaching the real level of the facts, a curious complication
of the problem arises in this way. Our first idea of an adept who
has achieved the power of penetrating the tremendous secrets of spiritual
nature, is modelled on our conception of a very highly gifted man
of science on our own plane. We are apt to think of him as once an
adept always an adept, - as a very exalted human being, who must necessarily
bring into play in all the relations of his life the attributes that
attach to him as a Mahatma. In this way while - as above pointed out
- we shall certainly fail, do all we can, to do justice in our thoughts
to his attributes as a Mahatma, we may very easily run to the opposite
extreme in our thinking about him in his ordinary human aspect, and
thus land ourselves in many perplexities, as we acquire a partial
familiarity with the characteristics of the occult world. It is just
because the highest attributes of adeptship have to do with principles
in human nature which quite transcend the limits of physical existence,
that the adept or Mahatma can only be such in the highest acceptation
of the word, when he is, as the phrase goes, “out of the body,”
or at all events thrown by special efforts of his will into an abnormal
condition. When he is not called upon to make such efforts or to pass
entirely beyond the limitations of this fleshly prison, he is much
more like an ordinary man than experience of him in some of his aspects
would lead his disciples to believe.
A correct appreciation of this state
of things explains the apparent contradiction involved in the position
of the occult pupil towards his masters, as compared with some of
the declarations that the master himself will frequently put forward.
For example, the Mahatmas are persistent in asserting that they are
not infallible, that they are men, like the rest of us, perhaps with
a somewhat more enlarged comprehension of nature than the generality
of mankind, but still liable to err both in the direction of practical
business with which they may be concerned, and in their estimate of
the characters of other men, or the capacity of candidates for occult
development. But how are we to reconcile statements of this nature
with the fundamental principle at the bottom of all occult research
which enjoins the neophyte to put his trust in the teaching and guidance
of his master absolutely and without reserve? The solution of the
difficulty is found in the state of things above referred to. While
the adept may be a man quite surprisingly liable to err sometimes
in the manipulation of worldly business, just as with ourselves some
of the greatest men of genius are liable to make mistakes in their
daily life that matter-of-fact people would never commit, on the other
hand, directly a Mahatma comes to deal with the higher mysteries of
spiritual science, he does so by virtue of the exercise of his Mahatma-attributes,
and in dealing with these can hardly be recognized as liable to err.
This consideration enables us to feel that the
trustworthiness of the teachings derived from such a source as those which have
inspired the present volume, is altogether above the reach of small incidents
which in the progress of our experience may seem to claim a revision of that
enthusiastic confidence in the supreme wisdom of the adepts which the first
approaches to occult study will generally evoke.
Not that such enthusiasm or reverence will really
be diminished on the part of any occult chela as his comprehension of
the world he is entering expands. The man who in one of his aspects is a Mahatma,
may rather be brought within the limits of affectionate human regard, than deprived
of his claims to reverence, by the consideration that in his ordinary life he
is not so utterly lifted above the common-place run of human feeling as some
of his Nirvanic experiences might lead us to believe that he would be.
If we keep constantly in mind that an adept is
only truly an adept when exercising adept functions but that when exercising
adept functions, but that when exercising these he may soar into spiritual rapport
with that which is, in regard at all events to the limitations of our solar
system, all that we practically mean by omniscience, we shall then be guarded
from many of the mistakes that the embarrassments of the subject might create.
Intricacies concerning the nature of the adept
may be noticed here, which will hardly be quite intelligible without reference
to some later chapters of this book, but which have so important a bearing on
all attempts to understand what adeptship is really like that it may be convenient
to deal with them at once. The dual nature of the Mahatma is so complete that
some of his influence or wisdom on the higher planes of nature may actually
be drawn upon by those in peculiar psychic relations with him, without the Mahatma-man
being at the moment even conscious that such an appeal has been made to him.
In this way it becomes open to us to speculate on the possibility that the relation
between the spiritual Mahatma and the Mahatma-man may sometimes be rather in
the nature of what is sometimes spoken of in esoteric writing as an overshadowing
than as an incarnation in the complete sense of the word.
Furthermore as another independent complication
of the matter we reach this fact, that each Mahatma is not merely a human ego
in a very exalted state, but belongs, so to speak, to some specific department
in the great economy of nature. Every adept must belong to one or other of seven
great types of adeptship, but although we may almost certainly infer that correspondences
might be traced between these various types and the seven principles of man,
I should shrink myself from attempting a complete elucidation of this hypothesis.
It will be enough to apply the idea to what we know vaguely of the occult organization
in its higher regions. For some time past it has been affirmed in esoteric writing
that there are five great Chohans or superior Mahatmas presiding over the whole
body of the adept fraternity. When the foregoing chapter of this book was written,
I was under the impression that one supreme chief on a different level again
exercised authority over these five Chohans, but it now appears to me that this
personage may rather be regarded as a sixth Chohan, himself the head of the
sixth type of Mahatmas, and this conjecture leads at once to the further inference
that there must be a seventh Chohan to complete the correspondences which we
thus discern. But just as the seventh principle in nature or in man is a conception
of the most intangible order eluding the grasp of any intellectual thinking,
and only describable in shadowy phrases of metaphysical non-significance, so
we may be quite sure that the seventh Chohan is very unapproachable by untrained
imaginations. But even he no doubt plays a part in what may be called the higher
economy of spiritual nature, and that there is such a personage visible occasionally
to some of the other Mahatmas I take to be the case. But speculation concerning
him is valuable chiefly as helping to give consistency to the idea above thrown
out, according to which the Mahatmas may be comprehended in their true aspect
as necessary phenomena of nature without whom the evolution of humanity could
hardly be imagined as advancing, not as merely the exceptional men who have
attained great spiritual exaltation.
CHAPTER
II
The Constitution of Man
A SURVEY of Cosmogony, as comprehended by occult
science, must precede any attempt to explain the means by which a knowledge
of that cosmogony itself has been acquired. The methods of esoteric research
have grown out of natural facts, with which exoteric science is wholly unacquainted.
These natural facts are concerned with the premature development in occult adepts
of faculties, which mankind at large has not yet evolved; and these faculties,
in turn, enable their possessors to explore the mysteries of Nature, and verify
the esoteric doctrines, setting forth its grand design. The practical student
of occultism may develop the faculties first and apply them to the observation
of Nature afterwards, but the exhibition of the theory of Nature for Western
readers merely seeking its intellectual comprehension, must precede consideration
of the inner senses, which occult research employs. On the other hand, a survey
of cosmogony, as comprehended by occult science, could only be scientifically
arranged at the expense of intelligibility for European readers. To begin at
the beginning, we should endeavour to realize the state of the universe before
evolution sets in. This subject is by no means shirked by esoteric students,
and later on, in the course of this sketch, some hints will be given concerning
the views occultism entertains of the earlier processes through which cosmic
matter passes on its way to evolution. But an orderly statement of the earliest
processes of Nature would embody references to man’s spiritual constitution,
which would not be understood without some preliminary explanation.
Seven distinct principles are recognized
by esoteric science, as entering into the constitution of man. The
classification differs so widely from any with which European readers
will be familiar that I shall naturally be asked for the grounds on
which occultism reaches so far-fetched a conclusion. But I must, on
account of inherent peculiarities in the subject, which will be comprehended
later on, beg for this Oriental knowledge I am bringing home, a hearing
(in the first instance at all events) of the Oriental kind. The Oriental
and the European systems of conveying knowledge are as unlike as any
two methods can be. The West pricks and piques the learner’s
controversial instinct at every step. He is encouraged to dispute
and resist conviction. He is forbidden to take any scientific statement
on authority. Pari Passu, as he acquires knowledge, he must
learn how that knowledge has been acquired, and he is made to feel
that no fact is worth knowing, unless he knows, with it, the way to
prove it a fact. The East manages its pupils on a wholly different
plan. It no more disregards the necessity of proving its teaching
than the West, but it provides proof of a wholly different sort. It
enables the student to search Nature for himself, and verify its teachings,
in those regions which Western philosophy can only invade by speculation
and argument. It never takes the trouble to argue about anything.
It says: - “So and so is fact; here is the key of knowledge;
now go and see for yourself.” In this way it comes to pass that
teaching per se is never anything else but teaching on authority.
Teaching and proof do not go hand in hand; they follow one another
in due order. A further consequence of this method is that Eastern
philosophy employs the method which we in the West have discarded
for good reasons as incompatible with our own line of intellectual
development - the system of reasoning from generals to particulars.
The purposes which European science usually has in view would certainly
not be answered by that plan, but I think that any one who goes far
in the present inquiry will feel that the system of reasoning up from
the details of knowledge to general inferences is inapplicable to
the work in hand. One cannot understand details in this department
of knowledge till we get a general understanding of the whole scheme
of things. Even to convey this general comprehension by mere language,
is a large and by no means an easy task. To pause at every moment
of the exposition in order to collect what separate evidence may be
available for the proof of each separate statement, would be practically
impossible. Such a method would break down the patience of the reader,
and prevent him from deriving, as he may from a more condensed treatise,
that definite conception as to what the esoteric doctrine means to
teach, which it is my business to evoke.
This reflection may suggest, in passing, a new
view, having an intimate connection with our present subject, of the Platonic
and Aristotelian systems of reasoning. Plato’s system, roughly described
as reasoning from universals to particulars, is condemned by modern habits in
favour of the later and exactly inverse system. But Plato was in fetters in
attempting to defend his system. There is every reason to believe that his familiarity
with esoteric science prompted his method, and that the usual restrictions under
which he laboured as an initiated occultist, forbade him from saying as much
as would really justify it. No one can study even as much occult science as
this volume contains, and then turn to Plato or even to any intelligent epitome
of Plato’s system of thought, without finding correspondences cropping
out at every turn.
The higher principles of the series which
go to constitute Man are not fully developed in the mankind with which
we are as yet familiar, but a complete or perfect man would be resolvable
into the following elements. To facilitate the application of these
explanations to ordinary exoteric Buddhist writings the Sanskrit names
of these principles are given as well as suitable terms in English.
[The nomenclature here adopted differs slightly from that hit upon
when some of the present teachings were first given out in a fragmentary
form in the Theosophist. Later on it will be seen that the
names now preferred embody a fuller conception of the whole system,
and avoid some difficulties to which the earlier names give rise.
If the earlier presentations of esoteric science were thus imperfect,
one can hardly be surprised at so natural a consequence of the difficulties
under which its English exponents laboured. But no substantial errors
have to be confessed or deplored. The connotations of the present
names are more accurate than those of the phrases first selected,
but the explanations originally given, as far as they went, were quite
in harmony with those now developed.].
1 |
The Body |
Rûpa |
2 |
Vitality |
Prana, or Jîva |
3 |
Astral Body |
Linga Sharira |
4 |
Animal Soul |
Kâma Rûpa |
5 |
Human Soul |
Manas |
6 |
Spiritual Soul |
Buddhi |
7 |
Spirit |
Âtma
|
Directly conceptions, so transcendental as some
of those included in this analysis, are set forth in a tabular statement, they
seem to incur certain degradation, against which, in endeavouring to realize
clearly what is meant, we must be ever on our guard. Certainly it would be impossible
for even the most skilful professor of occult science to exhibit each of these
principles separate and distinct from the others, as the physical elements of
a compound body can be separated by analysis and preserved independently of
each other. The elements of a physical body are all on the same plane of materiality,
but the elements of man are on very different planes. The finest gases of which
the body may to some extent be chemically composed, are still, on one scale
at all events, on nearly the lowest level of materiality. The second principle
which, by its union with gross matter, changes if from what we generally call
inorganic, or what might more properly be called inert, into living matter,
is at once a something different from the finest example of matter in its lower
state. Is the second principle then anything that we can truly call matter at
all? The question lands us, thus, at the very outset of this inquiry, in the
middle of the subtle metaphysical discussion as to whether force and matter
are different or identical. Enough for the moment to state that occult science
regards them as identical, and that it contemplates no principle in Nature as
wholly immaterial. In this way, though no conceptions of the universe, of man’s
destiny, or of Nature generally, are more spiritual than those of occult science,
that science is wholly free from the logical error of attributing material results
to immaterial causes. The esoteric doctrine is thus really the missing link
between materialism and spirituality.
The clue to the mystery involved, lies of course
in the fact, directly cognizable by occult experts, that matter exists in other
states besides those which are cognizable by the five senses.
The second principle of Man, Vitality, thus consists
of matter in its aspect as force, and its affinity for the grosser state of
matter is so great that it cannot be separated from any given particle or mass
of this, except by instantaneous translation to some other particle or mass.
When a man’s body dies, by desertion of the higher principles which have
rendered it a living reality, the second, or life principle, no longer a unity
itself, is nevertheless inherent still in the particles of the body as this
decomposes, attaching itself to other organisms to which that very process of
decomposition gives rise. Bury the body in the earth and its jîva will
attach itself to the vegetation which springs above, or the lower animal forms
which evolve from its substance. Burn the body, and indestructible jîva
flies back none the less instantaneously to the body of the planet itself from
which it was originally borrowed, entering into some new combination as its
affinities may determine.
The third principle, the Astral Body or Linga Sharira,
is an ethereal duplicate of the physical body, its original design. It guides
jîva in its work on the physical particles, and causes it to build up
the shape which these assume. Vitalized itself by the higher principles, its
unity is only preserved by the union of the whole group. At death it is disembodied
for a brief period, and, under some abnormal conditions, may even be temporarily
visible to the external sight of still living persons. Under such conditions
it is taken of course for the ghost of the departed person. Spectral apparitions
may sometimes be occasioned in other ways, but the third principle, when that
results in a visible phenomenon, is a mere aggregation of molecules in a peculiar
state, having no life or consciousness of any kind whatever. It is no more a
Being, than any cloud wreath in the sky which happens to settle into the semblance
of some animal form. Broadly speaking, the linga sharira never leaves the body
except at death, nor migrates far from the body even in that case. When seen
at all, and this can but rarely occur, it can only be seen near where the physical
body still lies. In some very peculiar cases of spiritualistic mediumship, it
may for a short time exude from the physical body and be visible near it, but
the medium in such cases stands the while in considerable danger of his life.
Disturb unwillingly the conditions under which the linga sharira was set free,
and its return might be impeded. The second principle would then soon cease
to animate the physical body as a unity, and death would ensue.
During the last year or two, while hints
and scraps of occult science have been finding their way out into
the world, the expression, “Astral Body,” has been applied
to a certain semblance of the human form, fully inhabited by its higher
principles, which can migrate to any distance from the physical body
- projected consciously and with exact intention by a living adept,
or unintentionally, by the accidental application of certain mental
forces to his loosened principles, by any person at the moment of
death. For ordinary purposes there is no practical inconvenience in
using the expression “Astral Body” for the appearance
to projected - indeed, any more strictly accurate expression, as will
be seen directly, would be cumbersome, and we must go on using the
phrase in both meanings. No confusion need arise; but, strictly speaking,
the linga sharira, or third principle, is the astral body, and that
cannot be sent about as the vehicle of the higher principles.
The three lower principles, it will be seen, are
altogether of the earth, perishable in their nature as a single entity, though
indestructible as regards their molecules, and absolutely done with by man at
his death.
The fourth principle is the first of
those which belong to man’s higher nature. The Sanskrit designation,
kâma rûpa, is often translated “Body of Desire,”
which seems rather a clumsy and inaccurate form of words. A closer
translation, having regard to meanings rather than words, would, perhaps,
be “Vehicle of Will,” but the name already adopted above,
Animal Soul, may be more accurately suggestive still.
In the Theosophist for October,
1881, when the first hints about the septenary constitution of man
were given out, the fifth principle was called the animal soul, as
contra-distinguished from the sixth or “spiritual soul;”
but though this nomenclature sufficed to mark the required distinction,
it degraded the fifth principle, which is essentially the human principle.
Though humanity is animal in its nature as compared with spirit, it
is elevated above the correctly defined animal creation in every other
aspect. By introducing a new name for the fifth principle, we are
enabled to throw back the designation “animal soul” to
its proper place. This arrangement need not interfere, meanwhile,
with an appreciation of the way in which the fourth principle is the
seat of that will or desire to which the Sanskrit name refers. And,
withal, the kâma rûpa is the animal soul, the highest
developed principle of the brute creation, susceptible of evolution
into something far higher by its union with the growing fifth principle
in man, but still the animal soul which man is by no means yet without,
the seat of all animal desires, and a potent force in the human body
as well, pressing upwards, so to speak, as well as downwards, and
capable of influencing the fifth, for practical purposes, as well
as of being influenced by the fifth for its own control and improvement.
The fifth principle, human soul, or Manas
(as described in Sanskrit in one of its aspects), is the seat of reason
and memory. It is a portion of this principle, animated by
the fourth, which is really projected to distant places by an adept,
when he makes an appearance in what is commonly called his astral
body.
Now the fifth principle, or human soul,
in the majority of mankind is not even yet fully developed. This fact
about the imperfect development as yet of the higher principles is
very important. We cannot get a correct conception of the present
place of man in Nature if we make the mistake of regarding him as
a fully perfected being already. And that mistake would be fatal to
any reasonable anticipations concerning the future that awaits him
- fatal also to any appreciation of the appropriateness of the future
which the esoteric doctrine explains to us as actually awaiting him.
Since the fifth principle is not yet
fully developed, it goes without saying that the sixth principle is
still in embryo. This idea has been variously indicated in recent
forecasts of the great doctrine. Sometimes it has been said, we do
not truly possess any sixth principle, we merely have germs of a sixth
principle. It has also been said, the sixth principle is not in
us; it hovers over us; it is a something that the highest aspirations
of our nature must work up towards. But it is also said: - All things,
not man alone, but every animal, plant, and mineral have their seven
principles, and the highest principles of all - the seventh itself
- vitalizes that continuous thread of life which runs all through
evolution, uniting into a definite succession, the almost innumerable
incarnations of that one life which constitute a complete series.
We must imbibe all these various conceptions and weld them together,
or extract their essence, to learn the doctrine of the sixth principle.
Following the order of ideas which just now suggested the application
of the term animal soul to the fourth principle, and human soul to
the fifth, the sixth may be called the spiritual soul of man, and
the seventh, therefore, spirit itself.
In another aspect of the idea the sixth principle
may be called the vehicle of the seventh, and the fourth the vehicle of the
fifth; but yet another mode of dealing with the problem teaches us to regard
each of the higher principles from the fourth upwards, as a vehicle of what,
in Buddhist philosophy, is called the One Life or Spirit. According to this
view of the matter of one life is that which perfects, by inhabiting the various
vehicles. In the animal the one life is concentrated in the kâma rûpa.
In man it begins to penetrate the fifth principle as well. In perfected
man it penetrates the sixth, and when it penetrates the seventh, man ceases
to be man, and attains a wholly superior condition of existence.
This latter view of the position is especially
valuable as guarding against the notion that the four higher principles are
like a bundle of sticks tied together, but each having individualities of their
own if untied. Neither the animal soul alone, nor the spiritual soul alone,
has any individuality at all; but, on the other hand, the fifth principle would
be incapable of separation from the others in such a way, that its individuality
would be preserved while both the deserted principles would be left unconscious.
It has been said that the finer principles themselves even, are material and
molecular in their constitution, though composed of a higher order of matter
than the physical senses can take note of. So they are separable, and the sixth
principle itself can be imagined as divorcing itself from its lower neighbour.
But in that state of separation, and at this stage of mankind’s development,
it could simply reincarnate itself in such an emergency, and grow a new fifth
principle by contact with a human organism; in such a case, the fifth principle
would lean upon and become one with the fourth, and be proportionately degraded.
And yet this fifth principle, which cannot stand alone, is the personality of
the man; and its cream, in union with the sixth, his continuous individuality
through successive lives.
The circumstances and attractions under the influence
of which the principles do divide up, and the manner in which the consciousness
of man is dealt with then, will be discussed later on. Meanwhile, a better understanding
of the whole position than could ensue from a continued prosecution of the inquiry
on these lines now, will be obtained by turning first to the processes of evolution
by means of which the principles of man have been developed.
ANNOTATIONS
Some objection has been raised to the method in
which the Esoteric Doctrine is presented to the reader in this book, on the
ground that it is materialistic. I doubt if in any other way the ideas to be
dealt with could so well be brought within the grasp of the mind, but it is
easy, when they once are grasped, to translate them into terms of idealism.
The higher principles will be the better susceptible of treatment as so many
different states of the Ego, when the attributes of these states have been separately
considered as principles undergoing evolution. But it may be useful to dwell
for awhile on the view of the human constitution according to which the consciousness
of the entity migrates successively through the stages of development, which
the different principles represent.
In the highest evolution we need concern
ourselves with at present - that of the perfected Mahatma - it is
sometimes asserted in occult teaching that the consciousness of the
Ego has acquired the power of residing altogether in the sixth principle.
But it would be a gross view of the subject, and erroneous, to suppose
that the Mahatma has on that account shaken off altogether, like a
discarded sheath or sheaths, the fourth and fifth principles, in which
his consciousness may have been seated during an earlier stage of
his evolution. The entity, which was the fourth or fifth principle
before, has come now to be different in its attributes, and to be
entirely divorced from certain tendencies or dispositions, and is
therefore a sixth principle. The change can be spoken of in more general
terms as an emancipation of the adept’s nature from the enthralments
of his lower self, from desires of the ordinary earth-life - even
from the limitations of the affections; for the Ego, which is entirely
conscious in his sixth principle, has realized the unity of the true
Egos of all mankind on the higher plane, and can no longer be drawn
by bonds of sympathy to any one more than to any other. He has attained
that love of humanity as a whole which transcends the love of the
Maya or illusion which constitutes the separate human creature
for the limited being on the lower levels of evolution. He has
not lost his fourth and fifth principles, - these have themselves
attained Mahatmaship; just as the animal soul of the lower kingdom,
in reaching humanity, has blossomed into the fifth state. That consideration
helps us to realize more accurately the passage of ordinary human
beings through the long series of incarnations of the human plane.
Once fairly on that plane of existence the consciousness of the primitive
man gradually envelopes the attributes of the fifth principle. But
the Ego at first remains a centre of thought activity working chiefly
with impulses and desires of the fourth stage of evolution. Flashes
of the higher human reason illumine it fitfully at first, but by degrees
the more intellectual man grows into the fuller possession of this.
The impulses of human reason assert themselves more and more strongly.
The invigorated mind becomes the predominant force in the life. Consciousness
is transferred to the fifth principle, oscillating, however, between
the tendencies of the lower and higher nature for a long while - that
is to say, over vast periods of evolution and many hundred lives,
- and thus gradually purifying and exalting the Ego. All this while
the Ego is thus a unity in one aspect of the matter, and its sixth
principle but a potentiality of ultimate development. As regards the
seventh principle, that is the true Unknowable, the supreme controlling
cause of all things, which is the same for one man as for every man,
the same for humanity as for the animal kingdom, the same for the
physical as for the astral or devachanic or nirvanic planes of existence.
No one man has got a seventh principle, in the higher conception
of the subject: we are all in the same unfathomable way overshadowed
by the seventh principle of the cosmos.
How does this view of the subject harmonize with
the statement in the foregoing chapter, that in a certain sense the principles
are separable, and that the sixth even can be imagined as divorcing itself from
its next lower neighbour, and, by reincarnation, as growing a new fifth principle
by contact with a human organism? There is no incompatibility in the spirit
of the two views. The seventh principle is one and indivisible in all Nature,
but there is a mysterious persistence through it of certain life impulses, which
thus constitute threads on which successive existences may be strung. Such a
life impulse does not expire even in the extraordinary case supposed, in which
an Ego, projected upon it and developed along it to a certain point, falls away
from it altogether and as a complete whole. I am not in a position to dogmatize
with precision as to what happens in such a case, but the subsequent incarnations
of the spirit along that line of impulse are clearly of the original sequence;
and thus, in the materialistic treatment of the idea, it may be said, with as
much approach to accuracy as language will allow in either mode, that the sixth
principle of the fallen entity in such a case separates itself from the original
fifth, and reincarnates on its own account.
But with these abnormal processes it
is unnecessary to occupy ourselves to any great extent. The normal
evolution is the problem we have first to solve; and while the consideration
of the seven principles as such is, to my own mind, the most instructive
method by which the problem can be dealt with, it is well to remember
always that the Ego is a unity progressing through various spheres
or states of being, undergoing change and growth and purification
all through the course of its evolution, - that it is a consciousness
seated in this, or that, or the other, of the potential attributes
of a human entity.
CHAPTER
III
The
Planetary Chain
ESOTERIC science, though the most spiritual
system imaginable, exhibits as running throughout Nature, the most
exhaustive system of evolution that the human mind can conceive. The
Darwinian theory of evolution is simply an independent discovery of
a portion - unhappily but a small portion - of the vast natural truth.
But occultists know how to explain evolution without degrading the
highest principles of man. The esoteric doctrine finds itself under
no obligation to keep its science and religion in separate water-tight
compartments. Its theory of physics and its theory of spirituality
are not only reconcilable with each other, they are intimately blended
together and interdependent. And the first great fact which occult
science presents to our notice in reference to the origin of man on
this globe, will be seen to help the imagination over some serious
embarrassments of the familiar scientific idea of evolution. The evolution
of man is not a process carried out on this planet alone. It is a
result to which many worlds in different conditions of material and
spiritual development have contributed. If this statement were merely
put forward as a conjecture, it would surely recommend itself forcibly
to rational minds. For there is a manifest irrationality in the commonplace
notion that man’s existence is divided into a material beginning,
lasting sixty or seventy years, and a spiritual remainder lasting
for ever. The irrationality amounts to absurdity when it is alleged
that the acts of the sixty or seventy years - the blundering, helpless
acts of ignorant human life - are permitted by the perfect justice
of an all-wise Providence to define the conditions of that later life
of infinite duration. Nor is it less extravagant to imagine that,
apart from the question of justice, the life beyond the grave should
be exempt from the law of change, progress, and improvement, which
every analogy of Nature points to as probably running through all
the varied existences of the universe. But once abandon the idea of
a uniform, unvarying, unprogressive life beyond the grave - once admit
the conception of change and progress in that life - and we admit
the idea of a variety hardly compatible with any other hypothesis
than that of progress through successive worlds. As we have said before,
this is not a hypothesis at all for occult science, but a fact, ascertained
and verified beyond the reach (for occultists) of doubt or contradiction.
The life and evolutionary processes of
this planet - in fact, all which constitutes it something more than
a dead lump of chaotic matter - are linked with the life and evolutionary
processes of several other planets. But let it not be supposed that
there is no finality as regards the scheme of this planetary union
to which we belong. The human imagination once set free is apt sometimes
to bound too far. Once let this notion, that the earth is merely one
link in a mighty chain of worlds, be fully accepted as probable, or
true, and it may suggest the whole starry heavens as the heritage
of the human family. That idea would involve a serious misconception.
One globe does not afford Nature scope for the processes by which
mankind has been evoked from chaos, but these processes do not require
more than a limited and definite number of globes. Separated as these
are, in regard to the gross mechanical matter of which they consist,
they are closely and intimately bound together by subtle currents
and forces, whose existence reason need not be much troubled to concede,
since the existence of some connection - of force or ethereal
media - uniting all visible celestial bodies, is proved by the mere
fact that they are visible. It is along these subtle currents
that the life elements pass from world to world.
The fact, however, will at once be liable
to distortion, to suit preconceived habits of mind. Some readers may
imagine our meaning to be that after death the surviving soul will
be drawn into the currents of that world with which its affinities
connect it. The real process is more methodical. The system of worlds
is a circuit round which all individual spiritual entities
have alike to pass; and that passage constitutes the Evolution of
Man. For it must be realized that the evolution of man is a process
still going on, and by no means yet complete. Darwinian writings have
taught the modern world to regard the ape as an ancestor, but the
simple conceit of Western speculation has rarely permitted European
evolutionists to look in the other direction, and recognize the probability,
that to our remote descendants we may be, as that unwelcome progenitor
to us. Yet the two facts just declared hinge together. The higher
evolution will be accomplished by our progress through the successive
worlds of the system; and in higher forms we shall return to this
earth again and again. But the avenues of thought through which we
look forward to this prospect, are of almost inconceivable length.
It will readily be supposed that the
chain of worlds to which this earth belongs are not all prepared for
a material existence exactly, or even approximately resembling our
own. There would be no meaning in an organized chain of worlds which
were all alike, and might as well all have been amalgamated into one.
In reality the worlds with which we are connected are very unlike
each other, not merely in outward conditions, but in that supreme
characteristic, the proportion in which spirit and matter are mingled
in their constitution. Our own world presents us with conditions in
which spirit and matter are on the whole evenly balanced in equilibrium.
Let it not be supposed on that account that it is very highly elevated
in the scale of perfection. On the contrary, it occupies a very low
place in that scale. The worlds that are higher in the scale are those
in which spirit largely predominates. There is another world attached
to the chain, rather than forming a part of it, in which matter asserts
itself even more decisively than on earth, but this may be spoken
of later.
That the superior worlds which man may
come to inhabit in his onward progress should gradually become more
and more spiritual in their constitution - life there being more and
more successfully divorced from gross material needs - will seem reasonable
enough at the first glance. But the first glance in imagination at
those which might conversely be called the inferior, but may with
less inaccuracy be spoken of as the preceding worlds, would perhaps
suggest that they ought to be conversely less spiritual, more material,
than this earth. The fact is quite the other way, and must be so,
it will be seen on reflection, in a chain of worlds which is an endless
chain - i.e. round and round which the evolutionary process travels.
If that process had merely one journey to travel along a path which
never returned into itself, one could think of it, at any rate, as
working from almost absolute matter up to almost absolute spirit;
but Nature works always in complete curves, and travels always in
paths which return into themselves. The earliest, as also the latest,
developed worlds - for the chain itself has grown by degrees - the
furthest back, as also the furthest forward, are the most immaterial,
the most ethereal of the whole series; and that this is in all ways
in accordance with the fitness of things will appear from the reflection
that the furthest forward of the worlds is not a region of finality,
but the stepping-stone to the furthest back, as the month of December
leads us back again to January. But it is not a climax of development
from which the individual monad falls, as by a catastrophe, into the
state from which he slowly began to ascend millions of years previously.
From that which, for reasons which will soon appear, must be considered
the highest world on the ascending arc of the circle, to that which
must be regarded as the first on the descending arc, in one sense
the lowest - i.e. in the order of development- there is no descent
at all, but still ascent and progress. For the spiritual monad or
entity, which has worked its way all round the cycle of evolution,
at any one of the many stages of development into which the various
existences around us may be grouped, begins its next cycle at the
next higher stage, and is thus still accomplishing progress as it
passes from world Z back again to world A. Many times does it circle,
in this way, right round the system, but its passage round must not
be thought of merely as a circular revolution in an orbit. In the
scale of spiritual perfection it is constantly ascending. Thus, if
we compare the system of worlds to a system of towers standing on
a plain - towers each of many stories and symbolizing the scale of
perfection - the spiritual monad performs a spiral progress round
and round the series, passing through each tower, every time it comes
round to it, at a higher level than before.
It is for want of realizing this idea
that speculation, concerned with physical evolution, is so constantly
finding itself stopped by dead walls. It is searching for its missing
links in a world where it can never find them now, for they were but
required for a temporary purpose, and have passed away. Man, says
the Darwinian, was once an ape. Quite true; but the ape known to the
Darwinian will never become a man - i.e. the form will not
change from generation to generation till the tail disappears and
the hands turn into feet, and so on. Ordinary science avows that,
though changes of form can be detected in progress within the limits
of species, the changes from species to species can only be inferred;
and to account for these, it is content to assume great intervals
of time and the extinction of the intermediate forms. There has been
no doubt an extinction of the intermediate or earlier forms of all
species (in the larger acceptation of the word) - i.e. of all kingdoms,
mineral, vegetable, animal, man, &c. - but ordinary science can
merely guess that to have been the fact without realizing the conditions
which rendered it inevitable, and which forbid the renewed generation
of the intermediate forms.
It is the spiral character of the progress
accomplished by the life impulses that develop the various kingdoms
of Nature, which accounts for the gaps now observed in the animated
forms which people the earth. The thread of a screw, which is a uniform
inclined plane in reality, looks like a succession of steps when examined
only along one line parallel to its axis. The spiritual monads which
are coming round the system on the animal level, pass on to other
worlds when they have performed their turn of animal incarnation here.
By the time they come again, they are ready for human incarnation,
and there is no necessity now for the upward development of animal
forms into human forms - these are already waiting for their spiritual
tenants. But, if we go back far enough, we come to a period at which
there were no human forms ready developed on the earth. When spiritual
monads, traveling on the earliest or lowest human level, were thus
beginning to come round, their onward pressure in a world at that
time containing none but animal forms, provoked the improvement of
the highest of these into the required form - the much-talked-of missing
link.
In one way of looking at the matter,
it may be contended that this explanation is identical with the inference
of the Darwinian evolutionist in regard to the development and extinction
of missing links. After all, it may be argued by a materialist, “we
are not concerned to express an opinion as to the origin of the tendency
in species to develop higher forms. We say that they do develop these
higher forms by intermediate links, and that the intermediate links
die out; and you say just the same thing.” But there is a distinction
between the two ideas for any one who can follow subtle distinctions.
The natural process of evolution from the influence of local circumstances
and sexual selection, must not be credited with producing intermediate
forms, and this is why it is inevitable that the intermediate forms
should be of a temporary nature and should die out. Otherwise, we
should find the world stocked with missing links of all kinds, animal
life creeping by plainly apparent degrees up to manhood, human forms
mingling in indistinguishable confusion with those of animals. The
impulse to the new evolution of higher forms is really given, as we
have shown by rushes of spiritual monads coming round the cycle in
a state fit for the inhabitation of new forms. These superior life
impulses burst the chrysalis of the older form on the planet they
invade, and throw off an efflorescence of something higher. The forms
which have gone on merely repeating themselves for millenniums, start
afresh into growth; with relative rapidity they rise through the intermediate
into the higher forms, and then, as these in turn are multiplied with
the vigour and rapidity of all new growths, they supply tenements
of flesh for the spiritual entities coming round on that state or
plane of existence, and for the intermediate forms there are no longer
any tenants offering. Inevitably they become extinct.
Thus is evolution accomplished, as regards
its essential impulse, by a spiral progress through the worlds.
In the course of explaining this idea we have partly anticipated the
declaration of another fact of first-rate importance as an aid to
correct views of the world-system to which we belong. That is, that
the tide of life, - the wave of existence, the spiritual impulse,
call it by what name we please - passes on from planet to planet by
rushes, or gushes, not by an even continuous flow. For the momentary
purpose of illustrating the idea in hand, the process may be compared
to the filling of a series of holes or tubs sunk in the ground, such
as may sometimes be seen at the mouths of feeble springs, and connected
with each other by little surface channels. The stream from the spring,
as it flows, is gathered up entirely in the beginning by the first
hole, or tub A, and it is only when this is quite full that the continued
in-pouring of water from the spring causes that which it already contains
to overflow into tub B. This in turn fills and overflows along the
channel which leads to tub C, and so on. Now, though, of course, a
clumsy analogy of this kind will not carry us very far, it precisely
illustrates the evolution of life on a chain of worlds like that we
are attached to, and, indeed the evolution of the worlds themselves.
For the process which goes on does not involve the pre-existence of
a chain of globes which Nature proceeds to stock with life; but it
is one in which the evolution of each globe is the result of previous
evolutions, and the consequence of certain impulses thrown off from
its predecessor in the superabundance of their development. Now, it
is necessary to deal with this characteristic of the process to be
described, but directly we begin to deal with it we have to go back
in imagination to a period in the development of our system very far
antecedent to that which is specially our subject at present - the
evolution of man. And manifestly, as soon as we begin talking of the
beginnings of worlds, we are dealing with phenomena which can have
had very little to do with life, as we understand the matter,
and, therefore, it may be supposed, nothing to do with life impulses.
But let us go back by degrees. Behind the human harvest of the life
impulse, there lay the harvest of mere animal forms, as every one
realizes; behind that, the harvest or growths of mere vegetable forms
- for some of these undoubtedly preceded the appearance of the earliest
animal life on the planet. Then, before the vegetable organizations,
there were mineral organizations, - for even a mineral is a product
of Nature, an evolution from something behind it, as every imaginable
manifestation of Nature must be, until in the vast series of manifestations,
the mind travels back to the unmanifested beginning of all things.
On pure metaphysics of that sort we are not now engaged. It is enough
to show that we may as reasonably - and that we must if we would talk
about these matters at all - conceive a life impulse giving birth
to mineral forms, as of the same sort of impulse concerned to raise
a race of apes into a race of rudimentary men. Indeed, occult science
travels back even further in its exhaustive analysis of evolution
than the period at which minerals began to assume existence. In the
process of developing worlds from fiery nebulae, Nature begins with
something earlier than minerals - with the elemental forces that underlie
the phenomena of Nature as visible now and perceptible to the senses
of man. But that branch of the subject may be left alone for the present.
Let us take up the process at the period when the first world of the
series, - globe A let us call it, - is merely a congeries of mineral
forms. Now it must be remembered that globe A has already been described
as very much more ethereal, more predominated by spirit, as distinguished
from matter, than the globe of what we at present are having personal
experience, so that a large allowance must be made for that state
of things when we ask the reader to think of it, at starting, as a
mere congeries of mineral forms. Mineral forms may be mineral in the
sense of not belonging to the higher forms of vegetable organism,
and may yet be very immaterial as we think of matter, very ethereal,
consisting of a very fine or subtle quality of matter, in which the
other pole or characteristic of Nature, spirit, largely predominates.
The minerals we are trying to portray are, as it were, the ghosts
of minerals; by no means the highly-finished and beautiful, hard crystals
which the mineralogical cabinets of this world supply. In these lower
spirals of evolution with which we are now dealing, as with the higher
ones, there is progress from world to world, and that is the great
point at which we have been aiming. There is progress downwards, so
to speak, in finish and materiality and consistency; and then, again,
progress upward in spirituality as coupled with the finish which matter
or materiality rendered possible in the first instance. It will be
found that the process of evolution in its higher stages as regards
man is carried on in exactly the same way. All through these studies,
indeed, it will be found that one process of Nature typifies another,
that the big is the repetition of the little on a larger scale.
It is manifest from what we have already
said, and in order that the progress of organisms on globe A shall
be accounted for, that the mineral kingdom will no more develop the
vegetable kingdom on globe A until it receives an impulse from without,
than the Earth was able to develop Man from the ape till it received
an impulse from without. But it will be inconvenient at present to
go back to a consideration of the impulses which operate on globe
A in the beginning of the system’s construction.
We have already, in order to be able
to advance more comfortably from a far later period than that to which
we have now receded, gone back so far that further recession would
change the whole character of this explanation. We must stop somewhere,
and for the present it will be best to take the life impulses behind
globe A for granted. And having stopped there we may now treat the
enormous period intervening between the mineral epoch on globe A and
the man epoch, in a very cursory way, and so get back to the main
problem before us. What has been already said facilitates a cursory
treatment of the intervening evolution. The full development of the
mineral epoch on globe A prepares the way for the vegetable development,
as soon as this begins, the mineral life impulse overflows into globe
B. Then when the vegetable development on globe A is complete and
the animal development begins, the vegetable life impulse overflows
to globe B, and the mineral impulse passes on to globe C. Then, finally,
comes the human life impulse on globe A.
Now, it is necessary at this point to
guard against one misconception that might arise. As just roughly
described, the process might convey the idea that by the time the
human impulse began on globe A, the mineral impulse was then beginning
on globe D, and that beyond lay chaos. This is very far from being
the case, for two reasons. Firstly, as already stated, there are processes
of evolution which precede the mineral evolution, and thus a wave
of evolution, indeed several waves of evolution, precede the mineral
wave in its progress round the spheres. But over and above this, there
is a fact to be stated which has such an influence on the course of
events, that, when it is realized, it will be seen that the life impulse
has passed several times completely round the whole chain of worlds
before the commencement of the human impulse on globe A. This fact
is as follows: Each kingdom of evolution, vegetable, animal, and so
on, is divided into several spiral layers. The spiritual monads -
the individual atoms of that immense life impulse of which so much
as been said - do not fully complete their mineral existence on globe
A, then complete it on globe B, and so on. They pass several times
round the whole circle as minerals, and then again several times round
as vegetables, and several times as animals. We purposely refrain
for the present from going into figures, because it is more convenient
to state the outline of the scheme in general terms first, but figures
in reference to these processes of Nature have now been given to the
world by the occult adepts (for the first time, we believe), and they
shall be brought out in the course of this explanation very shortly,
but, as we say, the outline is enough for any one to think of at first.
And now we have rudimentary man beginning
his existence on globe A, in that world where all things are as the
ghosts of the corresponding things in this world. He is beginning
his long descent into matter. And the life impulse of each “round”
overflows, and the races of man are established in different degrees
of perfection on all the planets, on each in turn. But the rounds
are more complicated in their design than this explanation would show,
if it stopped short here. The process for each spiritual monad is
not merely a passage from planet to planet. Within the limits of each
planet, each time it arrives there, it has a complicated process of
evolution to perform. It is many times incarnated in successive races
of men before it passes onward, and it even has many incarnations
in each great race. It will be found, when we get on further, that
this fact throws a flood of light upon the actual condition of mankind,
as we know it, accounting for those immense differences of intellect
and morality, and even of welfare in its highest sense, which generally
appear so painfully mysterious.
That which has a definite beginning generally
has an end also. As we have shown that the evolutionary process under
description began when certain impulses first commenced their operation,
so it may be inferred that they are tending towards a final consummation,
towards a goal and a conclusion. That is so, though the goal is still
far off. Man, as we know him on this earth, is but half-way through
the evolutionary process to which he owes his present development.
He will be as much greater, before the destiny of our system is accomplished,
than he is now, as he is now greater than the missing link. And that
improvement will even be accomplished on this earth, while, in the
other worlds of the ascending series, there are still loftier peaks
of perfection to be scaled. It is utterly beyond the range of faculties
untutored in the discernment of occult mysteries, to imagine the kind
of life which man will thus ultimately lead before the zenith of the
great cycle is attained. But there is enough to be done in filling
up the details of the outline now presented to the reader, without
attempting to forecast those which have to do with existences towards
which evolution is reaching across the enormous abysses of the future.
ANNOTATIONS
An expression occurs in the foregoing
chapter which does not recommend itself to the somewhat fuller conceptions
I have been able to form of the subject since this book was written.
It is stated that “the spiritual monads - the individual atoms
of that immense life impulse of which so much has been said - do not
fully complete their mineral existence on globe A, then complete it
on globe B, and so on. They pass several times round the whole
circle as minerals, and then again several times round as vegetables,
&c.” Now it is intelligible to me that I was permitted to
use this form of expression in the first instance because the main
purpose in view was to elucidate the way in which the human entity
was gradually evolved from processes of Nature going on in the first
instance in lower kingdoms. But in truth at a later stage of the inquiry
it becomes manifest that the vast process of which the evolution of
humanity and all which that leads up to is the crowning act, the descent
of spirit into matter, does not bring about a differentiation of individualities
until a much later stage than is contemplated in the passage just
quoted. In the mineral worlds on which the higher forms of plant and
animal life have not yet been established, there is no such thing,
as yet, as an individual spiritual monad, unless indeed by virtue
of some inconceivable unity - inconceivable, but subject to treatment
as a theory none the less - in the life impulses which are destined
to give rise to the later chains of highly organized existence. Just
as in a preceding note we assumed the unity of such a life impulse
in the case of a perverted human Ego falling away as a whole from
the current of evolution on which it was launched, so we may assume
the same unity backwards to the earliest beginnings of the planetary
chain. But this can be no more than a protective hypothesis, reserving
us the right to investigate some mysteries later on that we need not
go into at present. For a general appreciation of the subject it is
better to regard the first infusion, as it were, of spirit into matter
as provoking a homogeneous manifestations. The specific forms of the
mineral kingdom, the crystals and differentiated rocks are but bubbles
in the seething mass assuming partially individualized forms for a
time, and rushing again into the general substance of the growing
cosmos, not yet true individualities. Nor even in the vegetable kingdom
does individuality set in. The vegetable establishes organic matter
in physical manifestation, and prepares the way for the higher evolution
of the animal kingdom. In this, for the first time, but only in the
higher regions of this, is true individuality evoked. Therefore it
is not till we begin in imagination to contemplate the passage of
the great life impulse round the planetary chain on the level of animal
incarnation, that it would be strictly justifiable to speak of the
spiritual monads as traveling round the circle as a plurality, to
which the word “they” would properly apply.
It is evidently not with the intention
of encouraging any close study of evolution on the very grand scale
with which we are dealing here, that the adept authors of the doctrine
set forth in this volume, have opened the subject of the planetary
chain. As far as humanity is concerned, the period during which this
earth will be occupied by our race is more than long enough to absorb
all our speculative energy. The magnitude of the evolutionary process
to be accomplished during that period is more than enough to tax to
the utmost the capacities of an ordinary imagination. But it is extremely
advantageous for students of the occult doctrine to realize the plurality
of worlds in our system once for all - their intimate relations with,
their interdependence on each other - before concentrating attention
on the evolution of this single planet. For in many respects the evolution
of a single planet follows a routine, as it will be found directly,
that bears an analogical resemblance to the routine affecting the
entire series of planets to which it belongs. The older writings on
occult science, of the obscurely worded order, sometimes refer to
successive states of one world, as if successive worlds were meant,
and vice versa. Confusion thus arises in the reader’s
mind, and according to the bent of his own inclination he clings to
various interpretations of the misty language. The obscurity disappears
when we realize that in the actual facts of Nature we have to recognize
both courses of change. Each planet while inhabited by humanity,
goes through metamorphoses of a highly important and impressive character,
the effect of which may in each case be almost regarded as equivalent
to the reconstitution of the world. But none the less, if the whole
group of such changes is treated as a unity, does it form one of a
higher series of changes. The several worlds of the chain are objective
realities, and not symbols of change in one single, variable world.
Further remarks on this head will fall into their place more naturally
at the close of a later chapter.
CHAPTER
IV
The
World Periods
A STRIKING illustration of the uniformities
of Nature is brought out by the first glance at the occult doctrine
in reference to the development of man on the earth. The outline of
the design is the same as the outline of the more comprehensive design
covering the whole chain of worlds. The inner details of this world,
as regards its units of construction, are the same as the inner details
of the larger organism of which this world itself is a unit. That
is to say, the development of humanity on this earth is accomplished
by means of successive waves of development which correspond to the
successive worlds in the great planetary chain. The great tide of
human life, be it remembered - for that has been already set forth
- sweeps round the whole circle of worlds in successive waves. These
primary growths of humanity may be conveniently spoken of as rounds.
We must not forget that the individual units, constituting each round
in turn, are identically the same as regards their higher principles,
that is, that the individualities on the earth during round one come
back again after completing their travels round the whole series of
worlds and constitute round two, and so on. But the point to which
special attention should be drawn here is that the individual unit,
having arrived at any given planet of the series in the course of
any given round, does not merely touch that planet and pass on to
the next. Before passing on, he has to live through a series of races
on that planet. And this fact suggests the outline of the fabric which
will presently develop itself in the reader’s mind, and exhibit
that similarity of design on the part of one world as compared with
the whole series, to which attention has already been drawn. As the
complete scheme of Nature that we belong to is worked out by means
of a series of rounds sweeping through all the worlds, so the development
of humanity on each world is worked out by a series of races developed
within the limits of each world in turn.
It is time now to make the working of
this law clearer by coming to the actual figures which have to do
with the evolution of our doctrine. It would have been premature to
begin with them, but as soon as the idea of a system of worlds in
a chain, and of life evolution on each through a series of rebirths,
is satisfactorily grasped, the further examination of the laws at
work will be greatly facilitated by precise reference to the actual
number of worlds and the actual number of rounds and races required
to accomplish the whole purpose of the system. For the whole duration
of the system is as certainly limited in time, be it remembered, as
the life of a single man. Probably not limited to any definite
number of years set irrevocably from the commencement, but that which
has a beginning progresses onward towards an end. The life of a man,
leaving accidents quite out of the account, is a terminable period,
and the life of a world system leads up to a final consummation. The
vast periods of time, concerned in the life of a world system, dazzle
the imagination as a rule, but still they are measurable; they are
divisible into sub-periods of various kinds, and these have a definite
number.
By what prophetic instinct Shakespeare
pitched upon seven as the number which suited his fantastic classification
of the ages of man, is a question with which we need not be much concerned;
but certain it is that he could not have made a more felicitous choice.
In periods of sevens the evolution of the races of man may be traced,
and the actual number of the objective worlds which constitute our
system, and of which the earth is one, is seven also. Remember, the
occult scientists know this as a fact, just as the physical scientists
know for a fact that the spectrum consists of seven colours, and the
musical scale of seven tones. There are seven kingdoms of Nature,
not three, as modern science has imperfectly classified them. Man
belongs to a kingdom distinctly separate from that of the animals,
including beings in a higher state of organization than that which
manhood has familiarized us with as yet; and below the mineral kingdom
there are three others, which science in the West knows nothing about;
but this branch of the subject may be set aside for the present. It
is mentioned merely to show the regular operation of the septenary
law in Nature.
Man - returning to the kingdom we are
most interested in - is evolved in a series of rounds (progressions
round the series of worlds), and seven of these rounds have to be
accomplished before the destinies of our system are worked out. The
round which is at present going on is the fourth. There are considerations
of the utmost possible interest connected with precise knowledge on
these points, because each round is, as it were, specially allotted
to the predominance of one of the seven principles in man, and in
the regular order of their upward gradation.
An individual unit, arriving on a planet
for the first time in the course of a round, has to work through seven
races on that planet before he passes on to the next, and each of
those races occupies the earth for a long time. Our old-fashioned
speculations about time and eternity, suggested by the misty religious
systems of the West, have brought on a curious habit of mind in connection
with problems bearing on the actual duration of such periods. We can
talk glibly of eternity, and, going to the other end of the scale,
we are not shocked by a few thousand years, but directly years are
numbered with precision in groups which lie in intervening regions
of thought, illogical Western theologians are apt to regard such numbering
as nonsense. Now, we at present living on this earth - the great bulk
of humanity, that is to say, for there are exceptional cases to be
considered later - are now going through the fifth race of our present
fourth round. And yet the evolution of that fifth race began about
a million of years ago. Will the reader, in consideration of the fact
that the present cosmogony does not profess to work with eternity,
nerve himself to deal with estimates that do concern themselves with
millions of years, and even count such millions by considerable numbers?
Each race of the seven which go to make
up a round - i.e. which are evolved on the earth in succession during
its occupation by the great wave of humanity passing round the planetary
chain - is itself subject to subdivision. Were this not the case,
the active existences of each human unit would be indeed few and far
between. Within the limits of each race there are seven subdivisional
races, and again within the limits of each subdivision there are seven
branch races. Through all these races, roughly speaking, each individual
human unit must pass during his stay on earth, each time he arrives
there, on a round of progress through the planetary system. On reflection,
this necessity should not appal the mind so much as a hypothesis which
would provide for fewer incarnations. For, however many lives each
individual unit may pass through whole on earth during a round, be
their numbers few or many, he cannot pass on until the time comes
for the round wave to sweep forward. Even by the calculation already
foreshadowed, it will be seen that the time spent by each individual
unit in physical life can only be a small fraction of the whole time
he has to get through between his arrival on earth and his departure
for the next planet. The larger part of the time - as we reckon duration
of time - is obviously, therefore, spent in those subjective conditions
of existence which belong to the “World of Effects,” or
spiritual earth attached to the physical earth, on which our objective
existence is passed.
The nature of existence on the spiritual
earth must be considered pari passu with the nature of that
passed on the physical earth, and dealt with in the above enumeration
of race incarnations. We must never forget that between each physical
existence the individual unit passes through a period of existence
in the corresponding spiritual world. And it is because the conditions
of that existence are defined by the use that has been made of the
opportunities in the next, preceding physical existence, that the
spiritual earth is often spoken of in occult writing as the world
of effects. The earth itself is its corresponding world of causes.
That which passes naturally into the
world of effects after an incarnation in the world of causes is the
individual unit or spiritual monad; but the personality just dissolved
passes there with it, to an extent dependent on the qualifications
of such personality - on the use, that is to say, which the person
in question has made of his opportunities in life. The period to be
spent in the world of effects - enormously longer in each case than
the life which has paved the way for existence there - corresponds
to the “hereafter” or heaven of ordinary theology. The
narrow purview of ordinary religious conceptions deals merely with
one spiritual life and its consequences in the life to come. Theology
conceives that the entity concerned had its beginning in this physical
life, and that the ensuing spiritual life will never stop. And this
pair of existences which is shown by the elements of occult science,
that we are now unfolding, to constitute a part only of the entity’s
experience during its connection with a branch race which is one of
seven belonging to a subdivisional race, itself one of seven belonging
to a main race, itself one of seven belonging to the occupation of
earth by one of the seven round-waves of humanity which have each
to occupy it in turn before its functions in Nature are concluded
- this microscopic molecule of the whole structure is what common
theology treats as more than the whole, for it is supposed
to cover eternity.
The reader must here be warned against
one conclusion to which the above explanations - perfectly accurate
as far as they go, but not yet covering the whole ground - might lead
him. He will not get at the exact number of lives an individual
entity has to lead on the earth in the course of its occupation by
one round, if he merely raises seven to its third power. If one existence
only were passed in each branch race the total number would obviously
be 343, but each life descends at least twice into objectivity in
the same branch - each monad, in other words, incarnates twice in
each branch race. Again, there is a curious cyclic law which operates
to augment the total number of incarnations beyond 686. Each subdivisional
race has a certain extra vitality at its climax, which leads it to
throw off an additional offshoot race at that point in its progress,
and again another offshoot race is developed at the end of the subdivisional
race by its dying momentum, so to speak. Through these races the whole
tide of human life passes, and the result is that the actual normal
number of incarnations for each monad is not far short of 800. Within
relatively narrow limits it is a variable number, but the bearings
of that fact may be considered later on.
The methodical law which carries each
and every individual human entity through the vast evolutionary process
thus sketched out, is in no way incompatible with that liability to
fall away into abnormal destinies or ultimate annihilation which menaces
the personal entities of people who cultivate very ignoble
affinities. The distribution of the seven principles at death shows
that clearly enough, but viewed in the light of these further explanations
about evolution, the situation may be better realized. The permanent
entity is that which lives through the whole series of lives not only
through the races belonging to the present round-wave on earth, but
also through those of other round-waves and other worlds. Broadly
speaking, it may, in due time, though at some inconceivably distant
future, as measured in years, recover a recollection of all those
lives, which will seem as days in the past to us. But the astral dross,
cast off at each passage into the world of effects, has a more or
less independent existence of its own, quite separate from that of
the spiritual entity from which it has just been disunited.
The natural history of this astral remnant
is a problem of much interest and importance; but a methodical continuation
of the whole subject will require us in the first instance to endeavour
to realize the destiny of the higher and more durable spiritual Ego,
and before going into that inquiry there is a good deal more to be
said about the development of the objective races.
Esoteric science, though interesting
itself mainly with matters generally regarded as appertaining to religion,
would not be the complete comprehensive and trustworthy system that
it is, if it failed to bring all the facts of earth life into harmony
with its doctrines. It would have been little able to search out and
ascertain the manner in which the human race has evolved through eons
of time and series of planets, if it had not been in a position to
ascertain also as the smaller inquiry is included in the greater,
the manner in which the wave of humanity with which we are now concerned
has been developed on this earth. The faculties, in short, which enable
adepts to read the mysteries of other worlds, and of other states
of existence, are in no way unequal to the task of travelling back
along the life-current of this globe. It follows that while the brief
record of a few thousand years is all that our so-called universal
history can deal with, the earth history, which forms a department
of esoteric knowledge, goes back to the incidents of the fourth race,
which preceded ours, and to those of the third race, which preceded
that. It goes back still further indeed, but the second and first
races did not develop anything that could be called civilization,
and of them therefore there is less to be said than of their successors.
The third and fourth did - strange as it may seem to some modern readers
to contemplate the notion of civilisation on the earth several millions
of years ago.
Where are its traces? they will ask.
How could the civilization with which Europe has now endowed mankind,
pass away so completely that any future inhabitants of the earth could
ever be ignorant that it once existed? How then can we conceive the
idea that any similar civilisation can have vanished, leaving no records
for us?
The answer lies in the regular routine
of planetary life, which goes on pari passu with the life of
its inhabitants. The periods of the great root races are divided from
each other by great convulsions of Nature, and by great geological
changes. Europe was not in existence as a continent at the time the
fourth race flourished. The continent on which the fourth race lived
was not in existence at the time the third race flourished. and neither
of the continents which were the great vortices of the civilizations
of these two races are in existence now. Seven great continental cataclysms
occur during the occupation of the earth by the human life-wave for
one round-period. Each race is cut off in this way at its appointed
time, some survivors remaining in parts of the world, not the proper
home of their race; but these, invariably in such cases, exhibiting
a tendency to decay, and relapsing into barbarism with more or less
rapidity.
The proper home of the fourth race, which
directly preceded our own, was that continent of which some memory
has been preserved even in exoteric literature - the lost Atlantis.
But the great island, the destruction of which is spoken of by Plato,
was really but the last remnant of the continent. “In the Eocene
age,” I am told, “even in its very first part, the great
cycle of the fourth race men, the Atlanteans, had already reached
its highest point, and the great continent, the father of nearly all
the present continents, showed the first symptoms of sinking - a process
that occupied it down to 11,446 years ago, when its last island, that,
translating its vernacular name, we may call with propriety Poseidonis,
went down with a crash.
“Lemuria” (a former continent
stretching southwards from India across what is now the Indian Ocean,
but connected with Atlantis, for Africa was not then in existence)
“should no more be confounded with the Atlantis continent than
Europe with America. Both sank and were drowned, with their high civilizations
and ‘gods;’ yet between the two catastrophes a period
of about 700,000 years elapsed, Lemuria flourishing and ending her
career just about that lapse of time before the early part of the
Eocene age, since its race was the third. Behold the relics of that
once great nation in some of the flat-headed aborigines of your Australia.”
It is a mistake on the part of a recent
writer on Atlantis to people India and Egypt with the colonies of
that continent, but of that more anon.
“Why should not your geologists,”
asks my revered Mahatma teacher, “bear in mind that under the
continents explored and fathomed by them, in the bowels of which they
have found the Eocene age, and forced it to deliver them its secrets,
there may be hidden deep in the fathomless, or rather unfathomed ocean
beds, other and far older continents whose strata have never been
geologically explored; and that they may some day upset entirely their
present theories? Why not admit that our present continents have,
like Lemuria and Atlantis, been several times already submerged, and
had the time to reappear again, and bear their new groups of mankind
and civilization; and that at the first great geological upheaval
at the next cataclysm, in the series of periodical cataclysms that
occur from the beginning to the end of every round, our already autopsized
continents will go down, and the Lemurias and Atlantises come up again?
“Of course the fourth race had
its periods of the highest civilization.” (The letter from which
I am now quoting was written in answer to a series of questions I
put.) “Greek, and Roman, and even Egyptian civilizations are
nothing compared to the civilizations that began with the third race.
Those of the second race were not savages, but they could not be called
civilized.
“Greeks and Romans were small sub-races,
and Egyptians part and parcel of our own Caucasian stock. Look at
the latter, and at India. Having reached the highest civilization,
and, what is more, learning, both went down; Egypt, as a distinct
sub-race, disappearing entirely (her Copts are but a hybrid remnant);
India, as one of the first and most powerful offshoots of the mother
race, and composed of a number of sub-races, lasting to these times,
and struggling to take once more her place in history some day. That
history catches but a few stray, hazy glimpses of Egypt some 12,000
years back, when, having already reached the apex of its cycle thousands
of years before, the latter had begun to go down.
“The Chaldees were at the apex
of their occult fame before what you term the Bronze Age. We hold
- but then what warrant can you give the world that we are right?
- that far greater civilizations than our own have risen and decayed.
It is not enough to say, as some of your modern writers do, that an
extinct civilization existed before Rome and Athens were founded.
We affirm that a series of civilizations existed before as well as
after the glacial period, that they existed upon various points of
the globe, reached the apex of glory, and died. Every trace and memory
had been lost of the Assyrian and Phoenician civilizations, until
discoveries began to be made a few years ago. And now they open a
new, though not by far one of the earliest pages in the history of
mankind. And yet how far back to those civilizations go in comparison
with the oldest, and even then history is slow to accept. Archaeology
has sufficiently demonstrated that the memory of man runs back vastly
further than history has been willing to accept, and the sacred records
of once mighty nations, preserved by their heirs, are still more worthy
of trust. We speak of civilizations of the ante-glacial period, and
not only in the minds of the vulgar and the profane, but even in the
opinion of the highly-learned geologist, the claim sounds preposterous.
What would you say then to our affirmation that the Chinese - I now
speak of the inland, the true Chinamen, not of the hybrid mixture
between the fourth and fifth races now occupying the throne - the
aborigines who belong in their unallied nationality wholly to the
highest and last branch of the fourth race, reached their highest
civilization when the fifth had hardly appeared in Asia. When was
it? Calculate. The group of islands discovered by Nordenskiöld
of the Vega was found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep,
oxen, &c., among gigantic bones of elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses,
and other monsters belonging to periods when man, says your science,
had not yet made his appearance on earth. How came horses and sheep
to be found in company with the huge antediluvians?
“The region now locked in the fetters
of eternal winter, uninhabited by man - that most fragile of animals
- will very soon be proved to have had not only a tropical climate,
something your science knows and does not dispute, but having been
likewise the seat of one of the most ancient civilizations of the
fourth race, whose highest relics we now find in the degenerate Chinaman,
and whose lowest are hopelessly (for the profane scientist) intermixed
with the remnants of the third. I told you before that the highest
people now on earth (spiritually) belong to the first sub-race of
the fifth root race, and those are the Aryan Asiatics the highest
race (physical intellectuality) is the last sub-race of the fifth
- yourselves, the white conquerors. The majority of mankind belongs
to the seventh sub-race of the fourth root race - the above-mentioned
Chinamen and their offshoots and branchlets (Malayans, Mongolians,
Tibetans, Javanese, &c., &c.) - with remnants of other sub-races
of the fourth and the seventh sub-race of the third race. All these
fallen, degraded semblances of humanity are the direct lineal descendants
of highly civilized nations, neither the names nor memory of which
have survived, except in such books as ‘Populvuh,’ the
sacred book of the Guatemalans, and a few others unknown to science.”
I had inquired was there
any way of accounting for what seems the curious rush of human progress
within the last two thousand years as compared with the relatively
stagnant condition of the fourth-round people up to the beginning
of modern progress. This question it was that elicited the explanations
quoted above, and also the following remarks in regard to the recent
“rush of human progress.”
“The latter end of a very important
cycle. Each round, each race, as every sub-race, has its great and
its smaller cycles on every planet that mankind passes through. Our
fourth-round humanity has its one great cycle, and so have its races
and sub-races. ‘The curious rush’ is due to the double
effect of the former - the beginning of its downward course - and
of the latter (the small cycle of your sub-race) running on to its
apex. Remember, you belong to the fifth race, yet you are but a western
sub-race. Notwithstanding your efforts, what you call civilization
is confined only to the latter and its offshoots in America. Radiating
around, its deceptive light may seem to throw its rays on a greater
distance than it does in reality. There is no rush in China, and of
Japan you make but a caricature.
“A student of occultism ought not
to speak of the stagnant condition of the fourth-round people, since
history knows next to nothing of that condition, ‘up to the
beginning of modern progress,’ of other nations but the Western.
What do you know of America, for instance, before the invasion of
that country by the Spaniards? Less than two centuries prior to the
arrival of Cortez there was great a rush towards progress among the
sub-races of Peru and Mexico as there is now in Europe and the United
States. Their sub-race ended in nearly total annihilation through
causes generated by itself. We may speak only of the ‘stagnant’
condition into which, following the law of development, growth, maturity
and decline every race and sub-race falls during the transition periods.
It is that latter condition your universal history is acquainted with,
while it remains superbly ignorant of the condition even, India was
in some ten centuries back. Your sub-races are now running toward
the apex of their respective cycles, and that history goes no further
back that the periods of decline of a few other sub-races belonging
most of them to the preceding fourth race.”
I had asked to what epoch Atlantis belonged,
and whether the cataclysm by which it was destroyed came in an appointed
place in the progress of evolution, corresponding for the development
of races to the obscuration of planets. The answer was: -
“To the Miocene times. Everything
comes in its appointed time and place in the evolution of rounds,
otherwise it would be impossible for the best seer to calculate the
exact hour and year when such cataclysms great and small have to occur.
All an adept could do would be to predict an approximate time, whereas
now events that result in great geological changes may be predicted
with as mathematical a certainty as eclipses and other revolutions
in space. The sinking of Atlantis (the group of continents and isles)
began during the Miocene period - as certain of your continents are
now observed to be gradually sinking - and it culminated first in
the final disappearance of the largest continent, an event coincident
with the elevation of the Alps, and second, with that of the last
of the fair islands mentioned by Plato. The Egyptian priests of Saïs
told his ancestor, Solon that Atlantis (i.e. the only remaining large
island) had perished 9000 years before their time. This was not a
fancy date, since they had for millenniums preserved most carefully
their records. But then, as I say, they spoke but of the Poseidonis,
and would not reveal even to the great Greek legislator their secret
chronology. As there are no geological reasons for doubting, but,
on the contrary, a mass of evidence for accepting the tradition, science
has finally accepted the existence of the great continent and archipelago,
and thus vindicated the truth of one more ‘fable.’
“The approach of every new obscuration
is always signalled by cataclysms of either fire or water. But, apart
from this, every root race has to be cut in two, so to say, by either
one or the other. Thus, having reached the apex of its development
and glory, the fourth race - the Atlanteans - were destroyed by water;
you find now but their degenerate fallen remnants, whose sub-races,
nevertheless, each of them, has its palmy days of glory and relative
greatness. What they are now, you will be some day, the law of cycles
being one and immutable. When your race, the fifth, will have reached
its zenith of physical intellectuality, and developed its highest
civilization (remember the difference we make between material and
spiritual civilizations), unable to go any higher in its own cycle,
its progress towards absolute evil will be arrested (as its predecessors,
the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, the men of the third and fourth
races, were arrested in their progress towards the same) by one of
such cataclysmic changes, its great civilization destroyed, and all
the sub-races of that race will be found going down their respective
cycles, after a short period of glory and learning. See the remnants
of the Atlanteans, the old Greeks and Romans (the modern belong to
the fifth race). See how great and how short, how evanescent were
their days of fame and glory. For they were but sub-races of the seven
offshoots of the root race. [Branches of the subdivisions, according
to the nomenclature I have adopted previously.] No mother race, any
more than her sub-races and offshoots, is allowed by the one reigning
law to trespass upon the prerogatives of the race or sub-race that
will follow it; least of all to encroach upon the knowledge and powers
in store for its successor.”
The “progress towards absolute
evil.” arrested by the cataclysms of each race in turn, sets
in with the acquisition, by means of ordinary intellectual research
and scientific advancement, of those powers over Nature which accrue
even now in adeptship from the premature development of higher faculties
than those we ordinarily employ. I have spoken slightly of these powers
in a preceding chapter, when endeavouring to describe our esoteric
teachers; to describe them minutely would lead me into a long digression
on occult phenomena. It is enough to say that they are such as cannot
but be dangerous to society generally, and provocative of all manner
of crimes which would utterly defy detection, if possessed by persons
capable of regarding them as anything else but a profoundly sacred
trust. Now some of these powers are simply the practical application
of obscure forces of Nature, susceptible of discovery in the course
of ordinary scientific progress. Such progress had been accomplished
by the Atlanteans. The worldly men of science in that race had learned
the secrets of the disintegration and reintegration of matter, which
few but practical spiritualists as yet know to be possible, and of
control over the elementals, by means of which that and other even
more portentous phenomena can be produced. Such powers in the hands
of persons willing to use them for merely selfish and unscrupulous
ends must not only be productive of social disaster, but also for
the persons who hold them, of progress in the direction of that evilly
spiritual exaltation which is a far more terrible result than suffering
and inconvenience in this world. Thus it is, when physical intellect,
unguarded by elevated morality, runs over into the proper region of
spiritual advancement, that the natural law provides for its violent
repression. The contingency will be better understood when we come
to deal with the general destinies towards which humanity is tending.
The principle under which the various
races of man as they develop are controlled collectively by the cyclic
law, however they may individually exercise the free will they unquestionably
possess, is thus very plainly asserted. For people who have never
regarded human affairs as covering more than the very short period
with which history deals, the course of events will perhaps, as a
rule, exhibit no cyclic character, but rather a chequered progress,
hastened sometimes by great men and fortunate circumstances, sometimes
retarded by war, bigotry, or intervals of intellectual sterility,
but moving continually onwards in the long account, at one rate of
speed or another. As the esoteric view of the matter, fortified by
the wide range of observation which occult science is enabled to take,
has an altogether opposite tendency, it seems worth while to conclude
these explanations with an extract from a distinguished author, quite
unconnected with the occult world, who nevertheless, from a close
observation of the mere historical record, pronounces himself decisively
in favour of the theory of cycles. In his “History of the Intellectual
Development of Europe” Dr J W. Draper writes as follows: -
“We are, as we often say, the creatures
of circumstances. In that expression there is a higher philosophy
than might at first sight appear . . . .From this more accurate point
of view we should therefore consider the course of these events, recognizing
the principle that the affairs of men pass forward in a determinate
way, expanding and unfolding themselves. And hence we see that the
things of which we have spoken as though they were matters of choice,
were in reality force upon their apparent authors by the necessity
of the times. But in truth they should be considered as the presentation
of a certain phase of life which nations in their onward course sooner
or later assume. To the individual, how well we know that a sober
moderation of action, an appropriate gravity of demeanour, belong
to the mature period of life, change from the wanton wilfulness of
youth, which may be ushered in, or its beginning marked by, many accidental
incidents; in one perhaps by domestic bereavements, in another by
the loss of fortune, in a third by ill-health. We are correct enough
in imputing to such trials the change of character; but we never deceive
ourselves by supposing that it would have failed to take place had
those incidents not occurred. There runs an irresistible destiny in
the midst of all these vicissitudes . . . There are analogies between
the life of a nation and that of an individual, who, though he may
be in one respect the maker of his own fortunes, for happiness or
for misery, for good or for evil, though he remains here or goes there,
as his inclinations prompt, though he does this or abstains from that,
as he chooses, is nevertheless held fast by an inexorable fate - a
fate which brought him into the world involuntarily, as far as he
was concerned, which presses him forward through a definite career,
the stages of which are absolutely invariable - infancy, childhood,
youth, maturity, old age, with all their characteristic actions and
passions - and which removes him from the scene at the appointed time,
in most cases against his will. So also it is with nations; the voluntary
is only the outward semblance, covering, but hardly hiding, the predetermined.
Over the events of life we may have control, but none whatsoever over
the law of its progress. There is a geometry that applies to nations
an equation of their curve of advance. That no mortal man can touch.”
CHAPTER
V
Devachan
IT was not possible to approach a consideration
of the states into which the higher human principles pass at death,
without first indicating the general framework of the whole design
worked out in the course of the evolution of man. That much of my
task, however, having now been accomplished, we may pass on to consider
the natural destinies of each human Ego in the interval which elapses
between the close of one objective life and the commencement of another.
At the commencement of another, the Karma of the previous objective
life determines the state of life into which the individual shall
be born. This doctrine of Karma is one of the most interesting features
of Buddhist philosophy. There has been no secret about it at any time,
though for want of a proper comprehension of elements in the philosophy,
which have been strictly esoteric, it may sometimes have been misunderstood.
Karma is a collective expression applied
to that complicated group of affinities for good and evil generated
by a human being during life, and the character of which inheres in
his fifth principle all through the interval which elapses between
his death out of one objective life and his birth into the next. As
stated sometimes, the doctrine seems to be one which exacts the notion
of a superior spiritual authority summing up the acts of a man’s
life at its close, taking into consideration his good deeds and his
bad, and giving judgment about him on the whole aspect of the case.
But a comprehension of the way in which the human principles divide
up at death, will afford a clue to the comprehension of the way in
which Karma operates, and also of the great subject we may better
take up first - the immediate spiritual condition of man after death.
At death the three lower principles -
the body, its mere physical vitality, and its astral counterpart -
are finally abandoned by that which really is the Man himself, and
the four higher principles escape into that world immediately above
our own; above our own, that is, in the order of spirituality - not
above it at all, but in it and of it, as regards real locality - the
astral plane or kâma loca, according to a very familiar Sanskrit
expression. Here a division takes place between the two duads, which
the four higher principles include. The explanation already given
concerning the imperfect extent to which the upper principles of man
are as yet developed, will show that this estimation of the process,
as in the nature of a mechanical separation of the principles, is
a rough way of dealing with the matter. It must be modified in the
reader’s mind by the light of what has been already said. It
may be otherwise described as a trial of the extent to which the fifth
principle has been developed. Regarded in the light of the former
idea, however, we must conceive the sixth and seventh principles,
on the one hand, drawing the fifth, the human soul, in one direction,
while the fourth draws it back earthwards in the other. Now, the fifth
principle is a very complex entity, separable itself into superior
and inferior elements. In the struggle which takes place between its
late companion principles, its best, purest, most elevated and spiritual
portions cling to the sixth, its lower instincts, impulses and recollections
adhere to the fourth, and it is in a measure torn asunder. The lower
remnant, associating itself with the fourth, floats off in the earth’s
atmosphere, while the best elements, those, be it understood, which
really constitute the Ego of the late earthly personality, the individuality,
the consciousness thereof, follow the sixth and seventh into a spiritual
condition, the nature of which we are about to examine.
Rejecting the popular English name for
this spiritual condition, as encrusted with too many misconceptions
to be convenient, let us keep to the Oriental designation of that
region or state into which the higher principles of human creatures
pass at death. This is additionally desirable because, although the
Devachan of Buddhist philosophy corresponds in some respects to the
modern European idea of heaven, it differs from heaven in others which
are even more important.
Firstly, however, in Devachan, that which
survives is not merely the individual monad, which survives through
all the changes of the whole evolutionary scheme, and flits from body
to body, from planet to planet, and so forth - that which survives
in Devachan is the man’s own self-conscious personality, under
some restrictions indeed, which we will come to directly, but still
it is the same personality as regards its higher feelings, aspirations,
affections, and even tastes, as it was on earth. Perhaps it would
be better to say the essence of the late self-conscious personality.
It may be worth the reader’s while
to learn what Colonel H S. Olcott has to say in his “Buddhist
Catechism” (14th thousand) of the intrinsic difference
between “individuality” and “personality.”
Since he wrote not only under the approval of the High Priest of the
Sripada and Galle, Sumangala, but also under the direct instruction
of his Adept Guru, his words will have weight for the student of occultism.
This is what he says in his appendix: -
“Upon reflection I have submitted
‘personality’ for ‘individuality,’ as written
in the first edition. The successive appearances upon one or many
earths, or ‘descents into generation’ of the tanhaically
coherent parts (Skandas) of a certain being, are a succession
of personalities. In each birth the personality differs from
that of the previous or next succeeding birth. Karma, the deus
ex machinâ, masks (or shall we say, reflects?) itself now
in the personality of a sage, again as an artisan, and so on throughout
the string of births. But though personalities ever shift, the one
line of life along which they are strung like beads runs unbroken.
“It is
ever that particular
line, never any other. It is therefore individual, an individual
vital undulation which began in Nirvana or the subjective side of
Nature, as the light or heat undulation through æther began
at its dynamic source; is careering through the objective side of
Nature, under the impulse of Karma and the creative direction of Tanha;
and tends through many cyclic changes back to Nirvana. Mr Rhys Davids
calls that which passes from personality to personality along the
individual chain ‘character’ or ‘doing.’ Since
‘character’ is not a mere metaphysical abstraction, but
the sum of one’s mental qualities and moral propensities, would
it not help to dispel what Mr Rhys Davids calls ‘the desperate
expedient of a mystery,’ if we regarded the life undulation
as individuality, and each of its series of natal manifestations as
a separate personality?
“The denial of ‘soul’
by Buddha (see ‘Sanyutto Nikaya,’ the Sutta Pitaka) points
to the prevalent delusive belief in an independent transmissible personality;
and entity that could move from birth to birth unchanged, or go to
a place or state where, as such perfect entity, it could eternally
enjoy or suffer. And what he shows is that the ‘I am I’
consciousness is, as regards permanency, logically impossible, since
its elementary constituents constantly change, and the ‘I’
of one birth differs from the ‘I’ of every other birth.
But everything that I have found in Buddhism accords with the theory
of a gradual evolution of the perfect man - viz. A Buddha through
numberless natal experiences. And in the consciousness of that person
who at the end of a given chain of beings attains Buddha-hood, or
who succeeds in attaining the fourth stage of Dhyâna, or mystic
self-development, in any one of his births anterior to the final one,
the scenes of all these serial births are perceptible. In the ‘Jatakattahavannana,’
so well translated by Mr Rhys Davids, an expression continually recurs
which I think rather supports such an idea - viz. ‘Then the
blessed one made manifest an occurrence hidden by change of birth,’
or ‘that which had been hidden by, &c.’ Early Buddhism,
then, clearly held to a permanency of records in the Akâsa,
and the potential capacity of man to read the same when he has evoluted
to the stage of true individual enlightenment.”
The purely sensual feelings and tastes
of the late personality will drop off from it in Devachan, but it
does not follow that nothing is preservable in that state, except
feelings and thoughts having a direct reference to religion or spiritual
philosophy. On the contrary, all the superior phases, even of sensuous
emotion, find their appropriate sphere of development in Devachan.
To suggest a whole range of ideas by means of one illustration, a
soul in Devachan, if the soul of a man who was passionately devoted
to music, would be continuously enraptured by the sensations music
produces. The person whose happiness of the higher sort on earth had
been entirely centered in the exercise of the affections will miss
none in Devachan of those whom he or she loved. But, at once it will
be asked, if some of these are not themselves fit for Devachan, how
then? The answer is, that does not matter. For the person who loved
them they will be there. It is not necessary to say much more
to give a clue to the position. Devachan is a subjective state. It
will seem, as real as the chairs and tables round us; and remember
that, above all things, to the profound philosophy of occultism are
the chairs and tables, and the whole objective scenery of the world,
unreal and merely transitory delusions of sense. As real as the realities
of this world to us, and even more so, will be the realities of Devachan
to those who go into that state.
From this it ensues that the subjective
isolation of Devachan, as it will perhaps be conceived at first,
is not real isolation at all, as the word is understood on the physical
plane of existence; it is companionship with all that the true soul
craves for, whether persons, things, or knowledge. An a patient consideration
of the place in Nature which Devachan occupies will show that this
subjective isolation of each human unit is the only condition which
renders possible anything which can be described as a felicitous spiritual
existence after death for mankind at large, and Devachan is as much
a purely and absolutely felicitous condition for all who attain it,
as Avitchi is the reverse of it. There is no inequality or injustice
in the system; Devachan is by no means the same thing for the good
and the indifferent alike, but it is not a life of responsibility,
and therefore there is no logical place for it for suffering, any
more than in Avitchi there is any room for enjoyment or repentance.
It is a life of effects, not of causes; a life of being
paid your earnings, not of labouring for them. Therefore it is impossible
to be during that life cognizant of what is going on on earth. Under
the operation of such cognition there would be no true happiness possible
in the state after death. A heaven which constituted a watch-tower,
from which the occupants could still survey the miseries of the earth,
would really be a place of acute mental suffering for its most sympathetic,
unselfish, and meritorious inhabitants. If we invest them in imagination
with such a very limited range of sympathy that they could be imagined
as not caring about the spectacle of suffering after the few persons
to whom they were immediately attached had died and joined them, still
they would have a very unhappy period of waiting to go through before
survivors reached the end of an often long and toilsome existence
below. And even this hypothesis would be further vitiated by making
heaven most painful for occupants who were most unselfish and sympathetic,
whose reflected distress would thus continue on behalf of the afflicted
race of mankind generally, even after their personal kindred had been
rescued by the lapse of time. The only escape from this dilemma lies
in the supposition that heaven is not yet opened for business, so
to speak, and that all people who have ever lived from Adam downwards
are still lying in a death-like trance, waiting for the resurrection
at the end of the world. This hypothesis also has its embarrassments,
but we are concerned at present with the scientific harmony of esoteric
Buddhism, not with the theories of other creeds.
Readers, however, who may grant that
a purview of earthly life from heaven would render happiness in heaven
impossible, may still doubt whether true happiness is possible in
the state, as it may be objected, of monotonous isolation now described.
The objection is merely raised from the point of view of an imagination
that cannot escape from its present surroundings. To begin with, about
monotony. No one will complain of having experienced monotony during
the minute, or moment, or half-hour, as it may have been of the greatest
happiness he may have enjoyed in life. Most people have had some happy
moments, at all events, to look back to for the purpose of this comparison;
and let us take even one such minute or moment, too short to be open
to the least suspicion of monotony, and imagine its sensations immensely
prolonged without any external events in progress to mark the lapse
of time. There is no room, in such a condition of things, for the
conception of weariness. The unalloyed, unchangeable sensation of
intense happiness goes on and on, not for ever, because the causes
which have produced it are not infinite themselves, but for very long
periods of time, until the efficient impulse has exhausted itself.
Nor must it be supposed that there is,
so to speak, no change of occupation for souls in Devachan - that
any one moment of earthly sensation is selected for exclusive perpetuation.
As a teacher of the highest authority on this subject writes: -
“There are two fields of causal
manifestations - the objective and subjective. The grosser energies
- those which operate in the denser condition of matter - manifest
objectively in the next physical life, their outcome being the new
personality of each birth marshaling within the grand cycle of the
evolving individuality. It is but the moral and spiritual activities
that find their sphere of effects in Devachan. And, thought and fancy
being limitless, how can it be argued for one moment that there is
anything like monotony in the state of Devachan? Few are the men whose
lives were so utterly destitute of feeling, love, or of a more or
less intense predilection for some one line of thought as to be made
unfit for a proportionate period of Devachanic experience beyond their
earthly life. So, for instance, while the vices, physical and sensual
attractions, say, of a great philosopher, but a bad friend and a selfish
man, may result in the birth of a new and still greater intellect,
but at the same time a most miserable man, reaping the Karmic effects
of all the causes produced by the ‘old’ being, and whose
make-up was inevitable from the pre-ponderating proclivities of that
being in the preceding birth, the intermedial period between the two
physical births cannot be, in Nature’s exquisitely well-adjusted
laws, but a hiatus of unconsciousness. There can be no such
dreary blank as kindly promised, or rather implied, by Christian Protestant
theology, to the ‘departed souls,’ which, between death
and ‘resurrection,’ have to hang on in space, in mental
catalepsy, awaiting the ‘Day of Judgment.’ Causes produced
by mental and spiritual energy being far greater and more important
than those that are created by physical impulses, their effects have
to be, for weal or woe, proportionately as great. Lives on this earth,
or other earths, affording no proper field for such effects, and every
labourer being entitled to his own harvest, they have to expand in
either Devachan or Avitchi. [The lowest states of Devachan interchain
with those of Avitchi.] Bacon for instance, whom a poet called
‘The brightest, wisest, meanest
of mankind,’might reappear in his next incarnation
as a greedy money-getter, with extraordinary intellectual capacities.
But, however great the latter, they would find no proper field in
which that particular line of thought, pursued during his previous
lifetime by the founder of modern philosophy, could reap all its dues.
It would be but the astute lawyer, the corrupt Attorney-General, the
ungrateful friend, and the dishonest Lord Chancellor, who might find,
led on by his Karma, a congenial new soil in the body of the
money-lender, and reappear as a new Shylock. But where would Bacon,
the incomparable thinker, with whom philosophical inquiry upon the
most profound problems of Nature was his ‘first and last and
only love,’ where would this ‘intellectual giant of his
race,’ once disrobed of his lower nature, go to? Have all the
effects of that magnificent intellect to vanish and disappear? Certainly
not. Thus his moral and spiritual qualities would also have to find
a field in which their energies could expand themselves. Devachan
is such a field. Hence all the great plans of moral reform, of intellectual
research into abstract principles of Nature - all the divine, spiritual
aspirations that had so filled the brightest part of his life would,
in Devachan, come to fruition; and the abstract entity, known in the
preceding birth as Francis Bacon, and that maybe known in its
subsequent re-incarnation as a despised usurer - that Bacon’s
own creation, his Frankenstein, the son of his Karma - shall in the
meanwhile occupy itself in this inner world, also of its own preparation,
in enjoying the effects of the grand beneficial spiritual causes sown
in life. It would live a purely and spiritually conscious existence
- a dream of realistic vividness - until Karma, being satisfied in
that direction, and the ripple of force reaching the edge of its sub-cycle
basin, the being should move into its next area of causes, either
in this same world or another, according to his stage of progression
. . . . Therefore, there is’ a change of occupation,’
a continual change, in Devachan. For that dreamlife is but the fruition,
the harvest-time, of those psychic seed-germs dropped from the tree
of physical existence in our moments of dream and hope - fancy-glimpses
of bliss and happiness, stifled in an ungrateful social soil, blooming
in the rosy dawn of Devachan, and ripening under its ever-fructifying
sky. If man had but one single moment of ideal experience, not even
then could it be, as erroneously supposed, the indefinite prolongation
of that ‘single moment.’ That one note, struck from the
lyre of life, would form the key-note of the being’s subjective
state, and work out into numberless harmonic tones and semitones of
psychic phantasmagoria. There, all unrealized hopes, aspirations,
dreams, become fully realized, and the dreams of the objective become
the realities of the subjective existence. And there, behind the curtain
of Maya, its vaporous and deceptive appearances are perceived by the
Initiate, who has learned the great secret how to penetrate thus deep
into the Arcana of Being . . . .”
As physical existence has its cumulative
intensity from infancy to prime, and its diminishing energy thenceforward
to dotage and death, so the dream-life of Devachan is lived correspondentially.
There is the first flutter of psychic life, the attainment of prime,
the gradual exhaustion of force passing into conscious lethargy, semi-unconsciousness,
oblivion and - not death, but birth! - birth into another personality
and the resumption of action which daily begets new congeries of causes
that must be worked out in another term of Devachan.
“It is not a reality then, it is
a mere dream,” objectors will urge; “the soul so bathed
in a delusive sensation of enjoyment, which has no reality all the
while, is being cheated by Nature, and must encounter a terrible shock
when it wakes to its mistake.” But, in the nature of things,
it never does or can wake. The waking from Devachan is its next birth
into objective life, and the draught of Lethe has then been taken.
Nor as regards the isolation of each soul is there any consciousness
of isolation whatever; nor is there ever possibly a parting from its
chosen associates. Those associates are not in the nature of companions
who may wish to go away, of friends who may tire of the friend that
loves them, even if he or she does not tire of them. Love, the creating
force, has placed their living image before the personal soul which
craves for their presence, and that image will never fly away.
On this aspect of the subject I may again
avail myself of the language of my teacher:-
“Objectors of that kind will be
simply postulating an incongruity, an intercourse of entities in Devachan,
which applies only to the mutual relationship of physical existence!
Two sympathetic souls, both disembodied, will each work out its own
Devachanic sensations, making the other a sharer in its subjective
bliss. This will be as real to them, naturally, as though both were
yet on this earth. Nevertheless, each is dissociated from the other
as regards personal or corporeal association. While the latter is
the only one of its kind that is recognized by our earth experience
as an actual intercourse, for the Devachanee it would be not
only something unreal, but could have no existence for it in
any sense, not even as a delusion: a physical body or even a Mâyâvi-rûpa
remaining to its spiritual senses as invisible as it is itself
to the physical senses of those who loved it best on earth. Thus even
though one of the ‘sharers’ were alive and utterly unconscious
of that intercourse in his waking state, still every dealing with
him would be to the Devachanee an absolute reality, And what
actual companionship could there ever be other than the purely
idealistic one, as above described, between two subjective
entities which are not even as material as that ethereal body-shadow
- the Mâyâvi-rûpa? To object to this on the ground
that one is thus ‘cheated by Nature,’ and to call it ‘
a delusive sensation of enjoyment which has no reality,’ is
to show oneself utterly unfit to comprehend the conditions of life
and being outside of our material existence. For how can the same
distinction be made in Devachan - i.e. outside of the conditions of
earth-life - between what we call a reality and a factitious or an
artificial counterfeit of the same, in this, our world? The same principle
cannot apply to the two sets of conditions. It is conceivable that
what we call a reality in our embodied physical state will exist under
the same conditions as an actuality for a disembodied entity? On earth,
man is dual - in the sense of being a thing of matter and a thing
of spirit; hence the natural distinction made by his mind - the analyst
of his physical sensations and spiritual perceptions - between an
actuality and a fiction; though, even in this life, the two groups
of faculties are constantly equilibrating each other, each group when
dominant seeing as fiction or delusion what the other believes to
be most real. But in Devachan our Ego has ceased to be dualistic,
in the above sense, and becomes a spiritual, mental entity. That which
was a fiction, a dream in life, and which had its being but in the
region of ‘fancy,’ becomes, under the new conditions of
existence, the only possible reality. Thus, for us to postulate
the possibility of any other reality for a Devachanee is to maintain
an absurdity, a monstrous fallacy, an idea unphilosophical to the
last degree. The actual is that which is acted or performed de
facto: ‘the reality of a thing is proved by its actuality.’
And the suppositions and artificial having no possible existence in
that Devachanic state, the logical sequence is that everything in
it is actual and real. For, again, whether overshadowing the five
principles during the life of the personality, or entirely separated
from the grosser principles by the dissolution of the body - the sixth
principle, or our ‘Spiritual Soul,’ has no substance -
it is ever Arupa; nor is it confined to one place with a limited horizon
of perceptions around it. Therefore, whether in or out
of its mortal body it is ever distinct, and free from its limitations;
and if we call its Devachanic experiences ‘a cheating of Nature,’
then we should never be allowed to call ‘reality’ any
of those purely abstract feelings that belong entirely to, and are
reflected and assimilated by, our higher soul - such, for instance,
as an ideal perception of the beautiful, profound philanthropy, love,
&c., as well as every other purely spiritual sensation that during
life fills our inner being with either immense joy or pain.”
We must remember that by the very nature
of the system described there are infinite varieties of well-being
in Devachan, suited to the infinite varieties of merit in mankind.
If “the next world” really were the objective heaven which
ordinary theology preaches, there would be endless injustice and inaccuracy
in its operation. People, to begin with, would be either admitted
or excluded, and the differences of favour shown to different guests
within the all-favoured region would not sufficiently provide for
differences of merit in this life. But the real heaven of our earth
adjusts itself to the needs and merits of each new arrival with unfailing
certainty. Not merely as regards the duration of the blissful state,
which is determined by the causes engendered during objective life,
but as regards the intensity and amplitude of the emotions which constitute
that blissful state, the heaven of each person who attains the really
existent heaven is precisely fitted to his capacity for enjoying it.
It is the creation of his own aspirations and faculties. More than
this it may be impossible for the uninitiated comprehension to realize.
But this indication of its character is enough to show how perfectly
it falls into its appointed place in the whole scheme of evolution.
“Devachan,” to resume my
direct quotations, “is, of course, a state, not a locality,
as much as Avitchi, its antithesis (which please not to confound with
hell). Esoteric Buddhist philosophy has three principal lokas
so-called - namely, 1. Kâma loka; 2. Rûpa loka;
and 3. Arûpa loka; or in their literal translation and
meaning - 1. world of desires or passions, of unsatisfied earthly
cravings - the abode of ‘Shells’ and Victims, of Elementaries
and Suicides; 2. the world of forms - i.e., of shadows more spiritual,
having form and objectivity, but no substance; and 3. the formless
world, or rather the world of no form, the incorporeal, since its
denizens can have neither body, shape, nor colour for us mortals,
and in the sense that we give to these terms. These are the three
spheres of ascending spirituality in which the several groups of subjective
and semi-subjective entities find their attractions. All but the suicides
and the victims of premature violent deaths go, according to their
attractions and powers, either into the Devachanic or the Avitchi
state, which two states form the numberless subdivisions of Rûpa
and Arûpa lokas - that is to say, that such states not only
vary in degree, or in their presentation to the subject entity as
regards form, colour, &c., but that there is an infinite scale
of such states, in their progressive spirituality and intensity of
feeling, from the lowest in the Rûpa, up to the highest and
the most exalted in the Arûpa-loka. The student must bear in
mind that personality is the synonym for limitation; and that
the more selfish, the more contracted the person’s ideas, the
closer will he cling to the lower spheres of being, the longer loiter
on the plane of selfish social intercourse.”
Devachan being a condition of mere subjective
enjoyment, the duration and intensity of which is determined by the
merit and spirituality of the earth-life last past, there is no opportunity,
while the soul inhabits it, for the punctual requital of evil deeds.
But Nature does not content herself with either forgiving sins in
a free and easy way, or damning sinners outright, like a lazy master
too indolent, rather than too good-natured, to govern his household
justly. The Karma of evil, be it great or small, is at certainly operative
at the appointed time as the Karma of good. But the place of its operation
is not Devachan, but either a new rebirth, or Avitchi - a state to
be reached only in exceptional cases and by exceptional natures. In
other words, while the common-place sinner will reap the fruits of
his evil deeds in a following re-incarnation, the exceptional criminal,
the aristocrat of sin, has Avitchi in prospect - that is to say, the
condition of subjective spiritual misery which is the reverse side
of Devachan.
“Avitchi is a state of the most
ideal spiritual wickedness, something akin to the state of
Lucifer, so superbly described by Milton. Not many, though, are there
who can reach it, as the thoughtful reader will perceive. And if it
is urged that since there is Devachan for nearly all, for the good,
the bad, and the indifferent, the ends of harmony and equilibrium
are frustrated, and the law of retribution and of impartial, implacable
justice, hardly met and satisfied by such a comparative scarcity,
if not absence of its antithesis, then the answer will show that
it is not so. ‘Evil is the dark son of Earth
(matter), and Good - the fair daughter of Heaven’ (or
Spirit), says the Chinese philosopher; hence the place of punishment
for most of our sins is the earth - its birth-place and play-ground.
There is more apparent and relative than actual evil even on earth,
and it is not given to the hoi polloi to reach the fatal grandeur
and eminence of a ‘Satan’ every day.”
Generally the re-birth into objective
existence is the event for which the Karma of evil patiently waits;
and then it irresistibly asserts itself, not that the Karma of good
exhausts itself in Devachan, leaving the unhappy monad to develop
a new consciousness with no material beyond the evil deeds of its
last personality. The re-birth will be qualified by the merit as well
as the demerit of the previous life, but the Devachan existence is
a rosy sleep - a peaceful night, with dreams more vivid than day,
and imperishable for many centuries.
It will be seen that the Devachan state
is only one of the conditions of existence which go to make up the
whole spiritual or relatively spiritual complement of our earth life.
Observers of spiritualistic phenomena would never have been perplexed,
as they have been, if there were no other but the Devachan state to
be dealt with. For once in Devachan there is very little opportunity
for communication between a spirit, then wholly absorbed in its own
sensations and practically oblivious of the earth left behind, and
its former friends still living. Whether gone before or yet remaining
on earth, those friends, if the bond of affection has been sufficiently
strong, will be with the happy spirit still, to all intents and purposes
for him, and as happy, blissful, innocent, as the disembodied dreamer
himself. It is possible, however, for yet living persons to
have visions of Devachan, though such visions are rare, and only one-sided,
the entities in Devachan, sighted by the earthly clairvoyant, being
quite unconscious themselves of undergoing such observation. The spirit
of the clairvoyant ascends into the condition of Devachan in such
rare visions, and thus becomes subject to the vivid delusions of that
existence. It is under the impression that the spirits, with which
it is in Devachanic bonds of sympathy, have come down to visit earth
and itself, while the converse operation has really taken place. The
clairvoyant’s spirit has been raised towards those in Devachan.
Thus many of the subjective spiritual communications - most of them
when the sensitives are pure-minded - are real, though it is most
difficult for the uninitiated medium to fix in his mind the true and
correct pictures of what he sees and hears. In the same way some of
the phenomena called psychography (though more rarely) are also real.
The spirit of the sensitive, getting odylized, so to say, by the aura
of the spirit in the Devachan, becomes for a few minutes that
departed personality, and writes in the handwriting of the latter,
in his language and in his thoughts, as they were during his lifetime.
The two spirits become blended in one, and the preponderance of one
over the other during such phenomena determines the preponderance
of personality in the characteristic exhibited. Thus it may incidentally
be observed, what is called rapport, is, in plain fact, an
identity of molecular vibration between the astral part of the incarnate
medium and the astral part of the disincarnate personality.
As already indicated, and as the common
sense of the mater would show, there are great varieties of states
in Devachan, and each personality drops into its befitting place there.
Thence, consequently he emerges in his befitting place in the world
of causes, this earth or another, as the case may be, when his time
for re-birth comes. Coupled with survival of the affinities, comprehensively
described as Karma, the affinities both for good and evil engendered
by the previous life, this process will be seen to accomplish nothing
less than an explanation of the problem which has always been regarded
as so incomprehensible - the inequalities of life. The conditions
on which we enter life are the consequences of the use we have made
of our last set of conditions. They do not impede the development
of fresh Karma, whatever they may be, for this will be generated by
the use we make of them in turn. Nor is it to be supposed that
every event of a current life which bestows joy or sorrow is old Karma
bearing fruit. Many may be the immediate consequences of acts in the
life to which they belong - ready-money transactions with Nature,
so to speak, of which it may be hardly necessary to make any entry
in her books. But the great inequalities of life, as regards the start
in it which different human beings make, is a manifest consequence
of old Karma, the infinite varieties of which always keep up a constant
supply of recruits for all the manifold varieties of human condition.
It must not be supposed that the real
Ego slips instantaneously at death from the earth life and its entanglements,
into the Devachanic condition. When the division of, or purification
of the fifth principle has been accomplished in Kâma loca by
the contending attractions of the fourth and sixth principles, the
real Ego passes into a period of unconscious gestation. I have spoken
already of the way in which the Devachanic life is in itself a process
of growth, maturity, and decline; but the analogies of earth are even
more closely preserved. There is a spiritual ante-natal state at the
entrance to spiritual life, as there is a similar and equally unconscious
physical state at the entrance to objective life. And this period,
in different cases, may be of very different duration - from a few
moments to immense periods of years. When a man dies, his soul or
fifth principle becomes unconscious and loses all remembrance of things
internal as wall as external. Whether his stay in Kâma loca
has to last but a few moments, hours, days, weeks, months or years,
whether he dies a natural or a violent death, whether this occurs
in youth or age, and whether the Ego has been good, bad, or indifferent,
his consciousness leaves him as suddenly as the flame leaves a wick
when it is blown out. When life has retired from the last particle
of the brain matter, his perceptive faculties become extinct for ever,
and his spiritual powers of cognition and volition become for the
time being as extinct as the others. His Mâyâvi-rûpa
may be thrown into objectivity, as in the case of apparitions after
death, but unless it is projected by a conscious or intense desire
to see or appear to some one shooting through the dying brain, the
apparition will be simply automatic. The revival of consciousness
in Kâma loca is obviously, from what has been said, a phenomenon
that depends on the characteristic of the principles passing, unconsciously
at the moment, out of the dying body. It may become tolerably complete
under circumstances by no means to be desired, or it may be obliterated
by a rapid passage into the gestation state leading to Devachan. This
gestation state may be of very long duration in proportion to the
Ego’s spiritual stamina, and Devachan accounts for the remainder
of the period between death and the next physical re-birth. The whole
period is, of course, of very varying length in the case of different
persons, but re-birth in less than fifteen hundred years is spoken
of as almost impossible, while the stay in Devachan, which rewards
a very rich Karma is sometimes said to extend to enormous periods.
ANNOTATIONS
The comments I have to make on the doctrine
embodied in the foregoing chapter will be postponed most conveniently
to the end of the next, and offered in connection with those applying
to the conditions of Kâma loca.
CHAPTER VI
Kâma Loca
THE
statements already made in reference to the destiny of the higher human principles
at death will pave the way for a comprehension of the circumstances in which
the inferior remnant of these principles finds itself, after the real Ego
has passed either into the Devachanic state, or that unconscious intervening
period of preparation therefore, which corresponds to physical gestation.
The sphere in which such remnants remain for a time is known to occult science
as Kâma loca, the region of desire, not the region in which desire is developed to
any abnormal degree of intensity, as compared with desire as it attaches
to earth life, but the sphere in which that sensation of desire, which is
a part of the earth life, is capable of surviving.
It
will be obvious, from what has been said about Devachan, that a large part
of the recollections which accumulate round the human Ego during life are
incompatible in their nature with the pure subjective existence to which
the real, durable, spiritual Ego passes; but they are not necessarily on
that account extinguished or annihilated out of existence. They inhere in
certain molecules of those finer (but not finest) principles, which escape
from the body at death; and just as dissolution separates what is loosely
called the soul from the body, so also it provokes a further separation between
the constituent elements of the soul. So much of the fifth principle, or
human soul, which is in its nature assimilable with, or has gravitated upward
towards, the sixth principle, the spiritual soul, passes with the germ of
that divine soul into the superior region, or state of Devachan, in which
it separates itself almost completely from the attractions of the earth; quite completely, as far as its own spiritual course
is concerned, though it still has certain affinities with the spiritual aspirations
emanating from the earth, and may sometimes draw these towards itself. But
the animal soul, or fourth, principle (the element of will and desire, as
associated with objective existence), has no upward attraction, and no more
passes away from the earth than the particles of the body consigned to the
grave. It is not in the grave, however, that this fourth principle can be
put away. It is not spiritual in its nature or affinities, but it is not
physical in its nature. In its affinities it is physical, and hence the result.
It remains within the actual physical local attraction of the earth - in
the earth’s atmosphere - or, since it is not the gases of the atmosphere that are specially
to be considered in connection with the problem in hand, let us say, in Kâma loca.
And
with the fourth principle a large part (as regards most of mankind unfortunately,
though a part very variable in its relative magnitude) inevitably remains.
There are plenty of attributes which the ordinary composite human being exhibits,
many ardent feelings, desires, and acts, floods of recollections, which,
even if not concerned with a life as ardent perhaps as those which have to
do with the higher aspirations, are nevertheless essentially belonging to
the physical life, which take time to die. They remain behind in association
with the fourth principle, which is altogether of the earthly perishable
nature, and disperse or fade out, or are absorbed into the respective universal
principles to which they belong just as the body is absorbed into the earth,
in progress of time, and rapidly or slowly, in proportion to the tenacity
of their substance. And where meanwhile is the consciousness of the individual
who has died or dissolved? Assuredly in Devachan; but a difficulty presents itself to the mind untrained
in occult science, from the fact that a semblance of consciousness inheres
in the astral portion - the fourth principle, with a portion of the fifth
- which remains behind in Kâma loca. The individual consciousness, it is argued, cannot be in two places
at once. But first of all, to a certain extent, it can. As may be perceived
presently, it is a mistake to speak of consciousness, as we understand the
feeling of life, attaching to the astral shell or remnant; but nevertheless
a certain spurious manifestation of consciousness may be reawakened in the
shell, without having any connection with the real consciousness all the
while growing in strength and vitality in the spiritual sphere. There is
no power on the part of the shell of taking in and assimilating new ideas
and initiating courses of action on the basis of those new ideas. But there
is in the shell a survival of volitional impulses imparted to it during life.
The fourth principle is the instrument of volition, though not volition itself,
and impulses imparted to it during life by the higher principles may run
their course and produce results almost indistinguishable for careless observers from those which would ensue were the four
higher principles really all united, as in life.
The
fourth principle, is the vehicle during life of that essentially mortal consciousness
which cannot suit itself to conditions of permanent existence; but the consciousness
even of the lower principles during life is a very different thing from the vaporous, fleeting and uncertain consciousness
which continues to inhere in them when that which really is the life, the over-shadowing of them, or their vitalization by the infusion
of the spirit, has ceased, as far as they are concerned. Language cannot
render all the facets of a many-sided idea intelligible at once, any more
than a plain drawing can show all sides of a solid object. And at the first
glance different drawings of the same object from different points of view
may seem so unlike as to be unrecognizable as the same, but none the less,
by the time they are put together in the mind, will their diversities be
seen to harmonize. So with these subtle attributes of the invisible principles
of man - no treatise can do more than discuss their different aspects separately.
The various views suggested must mingle in the reader’s mind before the complete conception corresponds to the realities of Nature.
In
life the fourth principle is the seat of will and desire, but it is not will
itself. It must be alive, in union with the overshadowing spirit, or “one life,” to be thus the agent of that very elevated function of life - will, in its sublime
potency. As already mentioned, the Sanscrit names of the higher principles
connote the idea that they are vehicles of the one life. Not that the one
life is a separable molecular principle itself; it is the union of all -
the influence of the spirit; but in truth the idea is too subtle for language,
perhaps for intellect itself. Its manifestation in the present case, however,
is apparent enough. Whatever the willing fourth principle may be when alive,
it is no longer capable of active will when dead. But then, under certain
abnormal conditions, it may partially recover life for a time; and this fact
it is which explains many, though by no means all, of the phenomena of spiritualistic
mediumship. The “elementary,” be it remembered - as the astral shell has generally been called in former occult
writings - is liable to be galvanized for a time in the mediumistic current
into a state of consciousness and life, which may be suggested by the first
condition of a person who, carried into a strange room in a state of insensibility
during illness, wakes up feeble, confused in mind; gazing about with a blank
feeling of bewilderment, taking in impressions, hearing words addressed to
him, and answering vaguely. Such a state of consciousness is unassociated
with the notions of past or future. It is an automatic consciousness, derived
from the medium. A medium, be it remembered, is a person whose principles
are loosely united and susceptible of being borrowed by other beings, or
by floating principles, having an attraction for some of them or some part
of them. Now what happens in the case of a shell drawn into the neighbourhood
of a person so constituted? Suppose the person from whom the shell has been cast, died with some strong unsatisfied
desire, not necessarily of an unholy sort, but connected entirely with the
earth life, a desire, for example, to communicate some fact to a still living
person. Certainly the shell does not go about in Kâma loca with a persistent intelligent conscious purpose of communicating that
fact; but, amongst others, the volitional impulse to do this has been infused
into the fourth principle, and while the molecules of that principle remain
in association, (and that may be for many years,) they only need a partial
galvanization into life again, to become operative in the direction of the
original impulse. Such a shell comes into contact with a medium (not so dissimilar
in nature from the person who had died as to render a rapport impossible), and something from the fifth principle of the medium associates
itself with the wandering fourth principle, and sets the original impulse
to work. So much consciousness and so much intelligence as may be required
to guide the fourth principle in the use of the immediate means of communication
at hand - a slate and pencil, or a table to rap upon - is borrowed from the
medium, and then the message given may be the message which the dead person
originally ordered his fourth principle to give, so to speak, but which the
shell has never till then had an opportunity of giving. It may be argued
that the production of writing on a closed slate, or of raps on a table without
the use of a knuckle or a stick, is itself a feat of a marvellous nature,
bespeaking a knowledge on the part of the communicating intelligence of powers
in Nature we in physical life know nothing about. But the shell is itself
in the astral world; in the realm of such powers. A phenomenal manifestation is its natural mode of dealing. It is
no more conscious of producing a wonderful result by the use of new powers
acquired in a higher sphere of existence, than we are conscious of the forces
by which in life the volitional impulse is communicable to nerves and muscles.
But,
it may be objected, the “communicating intelligence” at a spiritual séance will constantly perform remarkable feats for no other than their own sake, to
exhibit the power over natural forces which it possesses. The reader will
please remember, however, that occult science is very far from saying that
all the phenomena of spiritualism are traceable to one class of agents. Hitherto
in this treatise little has been said of the “elementals,” those semi-intelligent creatures of the astral light, who belong to a wholly
different kingdom of Nature from ourselves. Nor is it possible at present
to enlarge upon their attributes, for the simple and obvious reason that
knowledge concerning the elementals, detailed knowledge on that subject,
and in regard to the way they work, is scrupulously withheld by the adepts
of occultism. To possess such knowledge is to wield power, and the whole
motive of the great secrecy in which occult science is shrouded turns upon
the danger of conferring powers upon people who have not, first of all, by
undergoing the training of initiates, given moral guarantees of their trustworthiness.
It is by command over the elementals that some of the greatest physical feats
of adeptship are accomplished; and it is by the spontaneous playful acts
of the elementals that the greatest physical phenomena of the séance room are brought about. So also with almost all Indian Fakirs and Yogis of the
lower class who have power of producing phenomenal results. By some means,
by a scrap of inherited occult teaching, most likely, they have come into
possession of a morsel of occult science. They may not necessarily understand
the action of the forces they employ, any more than an Indian servant in
a telegraph office, taught how to mix the ingredients of the liquid used
in a galvanic battery, understands the theory of electric science. He can
perform the one trick he has been taught; and so with the inferior Yogi.
He has got influence over certain elementals, and can work certain wonders.
Returning
to a consideration of the ex-human shells in Kâma loca, it may be argued that their behaviour in spiritual séances is not covered by the theory that they have had some message to deliver from
their late master, and have availed themselves of the mediumship present,
to deliver it. Apart altogether from phenomena that may be put aside as elemental
pranks, we sometimes encounter a continuity of intelligence on the part of
the elementary or shell that bespeaks much more than the survival of impulses
from the former life. Quite so; but with portions of the medium’s fifth principle conveyed into it, the fourth principle is once more an instrument
in the hands of a master. With a medium entranced so that the energies of
the fifth principle are conveyed into the wandering shell to a very large
extent, the result is that there is a very tolerable revival of consciousness
in the shell for the time being, as regards the given moment. But what is
the nature of such consciousness, after all? Nothing more, really, than a
reflected light. Memory is one thing, and perceptive faculties quite another.
A madman may remember very clearly some portions of his past life; yet he
is unable to perceive anything in its true light, for the higher portion
of his Manas, fifth, and Buddhi, sixth, principles, are paralysed in him
and have left him. Could an animal - a dog, for instance - explain himself,
he could prove that his memory, in direct relation to his canine personality,
is as fresh as his master’s; nevertheless, his memory and instinct cannot be called perceptive faculties.
Once
that a shell is in the aura of a medium, he will perceive, clearly enough,
whatever he can perceive through the borrowed principles of the medium, and
through organs in magnetic sympathy therewith; but this will not carry him
beyond the range of the perceptive faculties of the medium, or of some one
else present in the circle. Hence the often rational and sometimes highly
intelligent answers he may give, and hence, also, his invariably complete
oblivion of all things unknown to that medium or circle, or not found in
the lower recollections of his late personality, galvanized afresh by the
influences under which he is placed. The shell of a highly intelligent, learned,
but utterly unspiritual man, who died a natural death, will last longer than
those of weaker temperament, and (the shadow of his own memory helping) he
may deliver, through trance-speakers, orations of no contemptible kind. But
these will never be found to relate to anything beyond the subjects he thought much and earnestly of during life,
nor will any word ever fall from him indicating a real advance of knowledge.
It
will easily be seen that a shell, drawn into the mediumistic current, and
getting into rapport with the medium’s fifth principle, is not by any means sure to be animated with a consciousness
(even for what such consciousness are worth) identical with the personality
of the dead person from whose higher principles it was shed. It is just as
likely to reflect some quite different personality, caught from the suggestions
of the medium’s mind. In this personality it will perhaps remain and answer for a time; then
some new current of thought thrown into the minds of the people present,
will find its echo in the fleeting impressions of the elementary, and his
sense of identity will begin to waver; for a little while it flickers over
two or three conjectures, and ends by going out altogether for a time. The
shell is once more sleeping in the astral light, and may be unconsciously
wafted in a few moments to the other ends of the earth.
Besides
the ordinary elementary or shell of the kind just described, Kâma loca is the abode of another class of astral entities, which must be taken
into account if we desire to comprehend the various conditions under which
human creatures may pass from this life to others. So far we have been examining
the normal course of events, when people die in a natural manner. But an
abnormal death will lead to abnormal consequences. Thus, in the case of persons
committing suicide, and in that of persons killed by sudden accident, results
ensue which differ widely from those following natural deaths. A thoughtful
consideration of such cases must show, indeed, that in a world governed by
rule and law, by affinities working out their regular effects in that deliberate
way which Nature favours, the case of a person dying a sudden death at a
time when all his principles are firmly united, and ready to hold together
for twenty, forty, or sixty years, whatever the natural remainder of his
life would be, must surely be something different from that of a person who, by natural processes of decay, finds
himself, when the vital machine stops, readily separable into his various
principles, each prepared to travel their separate ways. Nature, always fertile
in analogies, at once illustrates the idea by showing us a ripe and an unripe
fruit. From out of the first the inner stone will come away as cleanly and
easily as a hand from a glove, while from the unripe fruit the stone can
only be torn with difficulty, half the pulp clinging to its surface. Now,
in the case of the sudden accidental death or of the suicide, the stone has
to be torn from the unripe fruit. There is no question here about the moral
blame which may attach to the act of suicide. Probably, in the majority’ of cases, such moral blame does attach to it, but that is a question of Karma
which will follow the person concerned into the next re-birth, like any other
Karma, and has nothing to do with the immediate difficulty such person may
find in getting himself thoroughly and wholesomely dead. This difficulty
is manifestly just the same, whether a person kills himself, or is killed
in the heroic discharge of duty, or dies the victim of an accident over which
he has no control whatsoever.
As
an ordinary rule, when a person dies, the long account of Karma naturally
closes itself - that is to say, the complicated set of affinities which have
been set up during life in the first durable principle, the fifth, is no
longer susceptible of extension. The balance-sheet, so to speak, is made
out afterwards, when the time comes for the next objective birth; or, in
other words, the affinities long dormant in Devachan, by reason of the absence
there of any scope for their action, assert themselves as soon as they come
in contact once more with physical existence. But the fifth principle, in
which these affinities are grown, cannot be separated, in the case of the
person dying prematurely, from the earthly principle - the fourth. The elementary,
therefore, which finds itself in Kâma loca, on its violent expulsion from the body is not a mere shell - it is the
person himself, who was lately alive, minus nothing but the body. In the true sense of the word, he is not dead at all.
Certainly
elementaries of this kind may communicate very effectually at spiritual séances at their own heavy cost; for they are unfortunately able, by reason of the completeness
of their astral constitution, to go on generating Karma, to assuage their
thirst for life at the unwholesome spring of mediumship. If they were of
a very material sensual type in life, the enjoyments they will seek will
be of a kind the indulgence of which in their disembodied state may readily
be conceived even more prejudicial to their Karma than similar indulgences
would have been in life. In such cases facilis est descensus. Cut off in the full flush of earthly passions which bind them to familiar scenes,
they are enticed by the opportunity which mediums afford for the gratification
of these vicariously. They become the incubi and succubi of mediaeval writing,
demons of thirst and gluttony, provoking their victims to crime. A brief
essay on this subject, which I wrote last year, and from which I have reproduced
some of the sentences just given, appeared in the Theosophist, with a note, the authenticity of which I have reason to trust, and the tenor
of which was as follows: -
“The
variety of states after death is greater if possible than the variety of
human lives upon this earth. The victims of accident do not generally become
earth walkers, only those falling into the current of attraction who die
full of some engrossing earthly passion, the selfish, who have never given a thought to the welfare of others. Overtaken by death
in the consummation, whether real or imaginary, of some master passion of
their lives, the desire remaining unsatisfied, even after a full realization,
and they still craving for more, such personalities can never pass beyond
the earth attraction to wait for the hour of deliverance in happy ignorance
and full oblivion. Among the suicides, those to whom the above statement
about provoking their victims to crime, &c., applies, are that class who commit the act, in consequence of a crime, to
escape the penalty of human law or their own remorse. Natural law cannot
be broken with impunity; the inexorable causal relation between action and
result has its full sway only in the world of effects, the Kâma loca, and every case is met there by an adequate punishment, and in a thousand
ways, that would require volumes even to describe them superficially.”
Those
who “wait for the hour of deliverance in happy ignorance and full oblivion” are of course such victims of accident as have already on earth engendered pure
and elevated affinities, and after death are as much beyond the reach of
temptation in the shape of mediumistic currents as they would have been inaccessible
in life to common incitements to crime.
Entities
of another kind occasionally to be found in Kâma loca have yet to be considered. We have followed the higher principles of
persons recently dead, observing the separation of the astral dross from
the spirituality durable portion; that spirituality durable portion being
either holy or Satanic in its nature, and provided for in Devachan or Avitchi
accordingly. We have examined the nature of the elementary shell cast off
and preserving for a time a deceptive resemblance to a true entity; we have
paid attention also to the exceptional cases of real four-principled beings
in Kâma loca who are the victims of accident or suicide. But what happens to a personality
which has absolutely no atom of spirituality, no trace of spiritual affinity
in its fifth principle, either of the good or bad sort? Clearly in such a
case there is nothing for the sixth principle to attract to itself. Or, in
other words, such a personality has already lost its sixth principle by the
time death comes. But Kâma loca is no more a sphere of existence for such a personality than the subjective
world; Kâma loca may be permanently inhabited by astral beings, by elementals, but can
only be an antechamber to some other state for human beings. In the case
imagined, the surviving personality is promptly drawn into the current of
its future destinies, and these have nothing to do with this earth’s atmosphere or with Devachan, but with that “eighth sphere” of which occasional mention will be found in older occult writings. It will
have been unintelligible to ordinary readers hitherto why it was called the “eighth” sphere, but since the explanation, now given out for the first time, of the
sevenfold constitution of our planetary system, the meaning will be clear
enough. The spheres of the cyclic process of evolution are seven in number,
but there is an eighth in connection with our earth, our earth being, it
will be remembered, the turning-point in the cyclic chain, and this eighth
sphere is out of circuit, a cul de sac, and the bourne from which it may be truly said no traveller returns.
It
will readily be guessed that the only sphere connected with our planetary
chain, which is lower than our own in the scale, having spirit at the top
and matter at the bottom, must itself be no less visible to the eye and to
optical instruments than the earth itself, and as the duties which this sphere
has to perform in our planetary system are immediately associated with this
earth, there is not much mystery left now in the riddle of the eighth sphere,
nor as to the place in the sky where it may be sought. The conditions of
existence there, however, are topics on which the adepts are very reserved
in their communications to uninitiated pupils, and concerning these I have
for the present no further information to give.
One
statement though is definitely made-viz., that such a total degradation of
a personality as may suffice to draw it, after death, into the attraction
of the eighth sphere, is of very rare occurrence. From the vast majority
of lives there is something which the higher principles may draw to themselves,
something to redeem the page of existence just passed from total destruction,
and here it must be remembered that the recollections of life in Devachan,
very vivid as they are, as far as they go, touch only those episodes in life
that are productive of the elevated sort of happiness of which alone Devachan
is qualified to take cognizance, whereas the life from which, for the time
being, the cream is thus skimmed, may come to be remembered eventually in
all its details quite fully. That complete remembrance is only achieved by
the individual at the threshold of a far more exalted spiritual state than
that which we are now concerned with; one which is attained far later on in the progress of vast cycles of evolution.
Each one of the long series of lives that will have been passed through will
then be, as it were, a page in a book to which the possessor can turn back
at pleasure, even though many such pages will then seem to him most likely,
very dull reading, and will not be frequently referred to. It is this revival
eventually of recollection concerning all the long-forgotten personalities
that is really meant by the doctrine of the Resurrection. But we have no
time at present to stop and unravel the enigmas of symbolism as bearing upon
the teachings at present under conveyance to the reader. It may be worth
while to do this as a separate undertaking at a later period; but meanwhile,
to revert to the narrative of how the facts stand, it may be explained that
in the whole book of pages, when at last the “resurrection” has been accomplished, there will be no entirely infamous pages; for even if
any given spiritual individuality has occasionally, during its passage through
this world, been linked with personalities so deplorably and desperately
degraded that they have passed completely into the attraction of the lower
vortex, that spiritual individuality in such cases will have retained, in
its own affinities, no trace or taint of them. Those pages will, as it were,
have been cleanly torn out from the book. And, as at the end of the struggle,
after crossing Kâma loca, the spiritual individuality will have passed into the unconscious gestation
state from which, skipping the Devachan state, it will be directly (though
not immediately in time) reborn into its next life of objective activity,
all the self-consciousness connected with that existence will have passed
into the lower world, there eventually to “perish everlastingly;” an expression of which, as of so many more, modern theology has proved a faithless
custodian, making pure nonsense out of psycho-scientific facts.
ANNOTATIONS
There
is no part of the present volume which I now regard as in so much urgent
need of amplification as the two chapters which have just been passed. The
Kâma loca stage of existence, and that higher region or state of Devachan, to which
it is but the antechamber, were, designedly I take it, left by our teachers
in the first instance in partial obscurity, in order that the whole scheme
of evolution might be the better understood. The spiritual state which immediately
follows our present physical life, is a department of Nature, the study of
which is almost unhealthily attractive for every one who once realizes that
some contact with it - some processes of experiment with its conditions -
are possible even during this life. Already we can to a certain extent discern
the phenomena of that state of existence into which a human creature passes
at the death of the body. The experience of spiritualism has supplied us
with facts concerning it in very great abundance. These facts are but too
highly suggestive of theories and inferences which seem to reach the ultimate
limits of speculation, and nothing but the bracing mental discipline of esoteric study in its broadest aspect
will protect any mind addressed to the consideration of these facts from
conclusions which that study shows to be necessarily erroneous. For this
reason, theosophical inquirers have nothing to regret as far as their own
progress in spiritual science is at stake, in the circumstances which have
hitherto induced them to be rather neglectful of the problems that have to
do with the state of existence next following our own. It is impossible to
exaggerate the intellectual advantages to be derived from studying the broad
design of Nature throughout those vast realms of the future which only the
perfect clairvoyance of the adepts can penetrate, before going into details
regarding that spiritual foreground, which is partially accessible to less
powerful vision, but liable, on a first acquaintance, to be mistaken for
the whole expanse of the future.
The
earlier processes, however, through which the soul passes at death, may be
described at this date somewhat more fully than they are defined in the foregoing
chapter. The nature of the struggle that takes place in Kâma loca between the upper and lower duads may now, I believe, be apprehended
more clearly than at first. That struggle appears to be a very protracted
and variegated process, and to constitute,- not as some of us may have conjectured
at first, an automatic or unconscious assertion of affinities or forces quite
ready to determine the future of the spiritual monad at the period of death,
- but a phase of existence which may be, and in the vast majority of cases
is more than likely to be, continued over a considerable series of years.
And during this phase of existence it is quite possible for departed human
entities to manifest themselves to still living persons through the agency
of spiritual mediumship, in a way which may go far towards accounting for,
if it does not altogether vindicate, the impressions that spiritualists derive
from such communications.
But
we must not conclude too hastily that the human soul going through the struggle
or evolution of Kâma loca is in all respects what the first glance at the position, as thus defined,
may seem to suggest. First of all, we must beware of too grossly materializing
our conception of the struggle, by thinking of it as a mechanical separation
of principles. There is a mechanical separation involved in the discard of lower principles when the
consciousness of the Ego is firmly seated in the higher. Thus at death the
body is mechanically discarded by the soul, which (in union, perhaps, with
intermediate principles), may actually be seen by some clairvoyants of a
high order to quit the tenement it needs no longer. And a very similar process
may ultimately take place in Kâma loca itself, in regard to the matter of the astral principles. But postponing
this consideration for a few moments, it is important to avoid supposing
that the struggle of Kâma loca does itself constitute this ultimate division of principles, or second
death upon the astral plane.
The
struggle of Kâma loca is in fact the life of the entity in that phase of existence. As quite
correctly stated in the text of the foregoing chapter, the evolution taking
place during that phase of existence is not concerned with the responsible
choice between good and evil which goes on during physical life. Kâma loca is a portion of the great world of effects, - not a sphere in which causes
are generated (except under peculiar circumstances). The Kâma loca entity, therefore, is not truly master of his own acts; he is rather
the sport of his own already established affinities. But these are all the
while asserting themselves, or exhausting themselves, by degrees, and the Kâma loca entity has an existence of vivid consciousness of one sort or another
the whole time. Now a moment’s reflection will show that those affinities, which are gathering strength and
asserting themselves, have to do with the spiritual aspirations of the life last experienced, while those which are exhausting themselves
have to do with its material tastes, emotions, and proclivities. The Kâma loca entity, be it remembered, is on his way to Devachan, or, in other words,
is growing into that state which is the Devachanic state, and the process
of growth is accomplished by action and reaction, by ebb and flow, like almost
every other in Nature, - by a species of oscillation between the conflicting
attractions of matter and spirit. Thus the Ego advances towards Heaven, so
to speak, or recedes towards earth, during his Kâma loca existence, and it is just this tendency to oscillate between the two
poles of thought or condition, that brings him back occasionally within the
sphere of the life he has just quitted.
It
is not by any means at once that his ardent sympathies with that life are
dissipated. His sympathies with the higher aspects of that life, be it remembered,
are not even on their way to dissipation. For instance, in what is here referred
to as earthly affinity, we need not include the exercise of affection, which
is a function of Devachanic existence in a pre-eminent degree. But perhaps
even in regard to his affections there may be earthly and spiritual aspects
of these, and the contemplation of them, with the circumstances and surroundings
of the earth-life, may often have to do with the recession towards earth-life
of the Kâma loca entity referred to above.
Of
course it will be apparent at once that the intercourse which the practice
of spiritualism sets up between the Kâma loca entities as here in view, and the friends they have left on earth, must
go on during those periods of the soul’s existence in which earth memories engage its attention; and there are two considerations
of a very important nature which arise out of this reflection.
1st.
While its attention is thus directed, it is turned away from the spiritual
progress on which it is engaged during its oscillations in the other direction.
It may fairly well remember, and in conversation refer to, the spiritual
aspirations of the life on earth, but its new spiritual experiences appear
to be of an order that cannot be translated back into terms of the ordinary
physical intellect, and, besides that, to be not within the command of the
faculties which are in operation in the soul during its occupation with old-earth
memories. The position might be roughly symbolized, but only to a very imperfect
extent, by the case of a poor emigrant, whom we may imagine prospering in
his new country, getting educated there, concerning himself with its public
affairs and discoveries, philanthropy, and so on. He may keep up an interchange
of letters with his relations at home, but he will find it difficult to keep
them au courant with all that has come to be occupying his thoughts. The illustration will only
fully apply to our present purpose, however, if we think of the emigrant
as subject to a psychological law which draws a veil over his understanding
when he sits down to write to his former friends, and restores him during
that time to his former mental condition. He would then be less and less
able to write about the old topics as time went on, for they would not only
be below the level of those to the consideration of which his real mental
activities had risen, but would to a great extent have faded from his memory.
His letters would be a source of surprise to their recipients, who would
say to themselves that it was certainly so-and-so who was writing, but that
he had grown very dull and stupid compared to what he used to be before he
went abroad.
2ndly.
It must be borne in mind that a very well-known law of physiology, according
to which faculties are invigorated by use and atrophied by neglect, applies
on the astral as well as on the physical plane. The soul in Kâma loca, which acquires the habit of fixing its attention on the memories of
the life it has quitted, will strengthen and harden those tendencies which
are at war with its higher impulses. The more frequently it is appealed to
by the affection of friends still in the body to avail itself of the opportunities
furnished by mediumship for manifesting its existence on the physical plane,
the more vehement will be the impulses which draw it back to physical life,
and the more serious the retardation of its spiritual progress. This consideration
appears to involve the most influential motive which leads the representatives
of Theosophical teaching to discountenance and disapprove of all attempts
to hold communication with departed souls by means of the spiritual séance. The more such communications are genuine the more detrimental they are
to the inhabitants of Kâma loca concerned with them. In the present state of our knowledge it is difficult
to determine with confidence the extent to which the Kâma loca entities are thus injured. And we may be tempted to believe that in some
cases the great satisfaction derived by the living persons who communicate,
may outweigh the injury so inflicted on the departed soul. This satisfaction,
however, will only be keen in proportion to the failure of the still living
friend to realize the circumstances under which the communication takes place.
At first, it is true, very shortly after death, the still vivid and complete
memories of earth-life may enable the Kâma loca entity to manifest himself as a personage very fairly like his deceased
self, but from the moment of death the change in the direction of his evolution
sets in. He will, as manifesting on the physical plane, betray no fresh fermentation
of thought in his mind. He will never, in that manifestation, be any wiser,
or higher in the scale of Nature, than he was when he died; on the contrary,
he must become less and less intelligent, and apparently less instructed
than formerly, as time goes on. He will never do himself justice in communication
with the friends left behind, and his failure in this respect will grow more
and more painful by degrees.
Yet
another consideration operates to throw a very doubtful light on the wisdom
or propriety of gratifying a desire for intercourse with deceased friends.
We may say, never mind the gradually fading interest of the friend who has
gone before, in the earth left behind; while there is anything of his or
her old self left to manifest itself to us, it will be a delight to communicate
even with that. And we may argue that if the beloved person is delayed a
little on his way to Heaven by talking with us, he or she would be willing
to make that sacrifice for our sake. The point overlooked here is, that on
the astral, just as on the physical plane, it is a very easy thing to set
up a bad habit. The soul in Kâma loca once slaking a thirst for earthly intercourse at the wells of mediumship
will have a strong impulse to fall back again and again on that indulgence.
We may be doing a great deal more than diverting the soul’s attention from its own proper business by holding spiritualistic relations
with it. We may be doing it serious and almost permanent injury. I am not affirming that this
would invariably or generally be the case, but a severe view of the ethics
of the subject must recognize the dangerous possibilities involved in the
course of action under review. On the other hand, however, it is plain that
cases may arise in which the desire for communication chiefly asserts itself
from the other side: that is to say, in which the departed soul is laden
with some unsatisfied desire - pointing possibly towards the fulfilment of
some neglected duty on earth - the attention to which on the part of still-living
friends may have an effect quite the reverse of that attending the mere encouragement
of the Kâma loca entity in the resumption of its old earthly interests. In such cases
the living friends may, by falling in with its desire to communicate, be
the means, indirectly, of smoothing the path of its spiritual progress. Here
again, however, we must be on our guard against the delusive aspect of appearances.
A wish manifested by an inhabitant of Kâma loca may not always be the expression of an idea then operative in his mind.
It may be the echo of an old, perhaps of a very old, desire, then for the
first time finding a channel for its outward expression. In this way, although
it would be reasonable to treat as important an intelligible wish conveyed
to us from Kâma loca by a person only lately deceased, it would be prudent to regard with
great suspicion such a wish emanating from the shade of a person who had
been dead a long time, and whose general demeanour as a shade did not seem
to convey the notion that he retained any vivid consciousness of his old
personality.
The
recognition of all these facts and possibilities of Kâma loca will, I think, afford theosophists a satisfactory explanation of a good
many experiences connected with spiritualism which the first exposition of
the esoteric doctrine, as bearing on this matter, left in much obscurity.
It
will be readily perceived that as the soul slowly clears itself in Kâma loca of the affinities which retard its Devachanic development, the aspect
it turns towards the earth is more and more enfeebled, and it is inevitable
that there must always be in Kâma loca an enormous number of entities nearly ripe for a complete mergence in
Devachan, who on that very account appear to an earthly observer in a state
of advanced decrepitude. These will have sunk, as regards the activity of
their lower astral principles, into the condition of the altogether vague
and unintelligible entities, which, following the example of older occult
writers, I have referred to as “shells” in the text of this chapter. The designation, however, is not altogether a happy
one. It might have been better to have followed another precedent, and to
have called them “shades,” but either way their condition would be the same. All the vivid consciousness
inhering, as they left the earth, in the principles appropriately related
to the activities of physical life, has been transferred to the higher principles
which do not manifest at séances. Their memory of earth-life has almost become extinct. Their lower principles
are in such cases only reawakened by the influences of the mediumistic current
into which they may be drawn, and they become then little more than astral
looking-glasses, in which the thoughts of the medium or sitters at the séance are reflected. If we can imagine the colours on a painted canvas sinking
by degrees into the substance of the material, and at last re-emerging in
their pristine brilliancy on the other side, we shall be conceiving a process
which might not have destroyed the picture, but which would leave a gallery
in which it took place, a dreary scene of brown and meaningless backs, and
that is very much what the Kâma loca entities become before they ultimately shed the very material on which
their first astral consciousness operated, and pass into the wholly purified
Devachanic condition.
But
this is not the whole of the story which teaches us to regard manifestations
coming from Kâma loca with distrust. Our present comprehension of the subject enables us to
realize that when the time arrives for that second death on the astral plane,
which releases the purified Ego from Kâma loca altogether and sends it onward to the Devachanic state - something is
left behind in Kâma loca which corresponds to the dead body bequeathed to the earth when the soul
takes its first flight from physical existence. A dead astral body is in
fact left behind in Kâma loca, and there is certainly no impropriety in applying the epithet “shell” to that residuum. The true shell in that state disintegrates in Kâma loca before very long, just as the true body left to the legitimate processes
of Nature on earth would soon decay and blend its elements with the general
reservoirs of matter of the order to which they belong. But until that disintegration
is accomplished, the shell which the real Ego has altogether abandoned, may
even in that state be mistaken sometimes at spiritual séances for a living entity. It remains for a time an astral looking-glass, in
which mediums may see their own thoughts reflected, and take these back,
fully believing them to come from an external source.
These
phenomena in the truest sense of the term are galvanized astral corpses;
none the less so, because until they are actually disintegrated a certain
subtle connection will subsist between them and the true Devachanic spirit;
just as such a subtle communication subsists in the first instance between
the Kâma loca entity, and the dead body left on earth. That last-mentioned communication
is kept up by the finely-diffused material of the original third principle,
or linga sharira, and a study of this branch of the subject will, I believe, lead us up to a better
comprehension than we possess at present of the circumstances under which
materializations are sometimes accomplished at spiritual séances. But without going into that digression now, it is enough to recognize
that the analogy may help to show how, between the Devachanic entity and
the discarded shell in Kâma loca a similar connection may continue for awhile, acting, while it lasts,
as a drag on the higher spirit, but perhaps as an after-glow of sunset on
the shell. It would surely be distressing, however, in the highest degree,
to any living friend of the person concerned, to get, through clairvoyance,
or in any other way, sight or cognition of such a shell, and to be led into
mistaking it for the true entity.
The
comparatively clear view of Kâma loca which we are now enabled to take, may help us to employ terms relating
to its phenomena with more precision than we have hitherto been able to attain.
I think if we adopt one new expression, “astral soul,” as applying to the entities in Kâma loca who have recently quitted earth-life, or who for other reasons still
retain, in the aspect they turn back towards earth, a large share of the
intellectual attributes that distinguished them on earth, we shall then find
the other terms in use already, adequate to meet our remaining emergencies.
Indeed, we may then get rid entirely of the inconvenient term “elementary,” liable to be confused with elemental, and singularly inappropriate to the beings
it describes. I would suggest that the astral soul as it sinks (regarded
from our point of view) into intellectual decrepitude, should be spoken of
in its faded condition as a shade, and that the term shell should be reserved
for the true shells or astral dead bodies which the Devachanic spirit has finally quitted.
We
are naturally led in studying the law of spiritual growth in Kâma loca to inquire how long a time may probably elapse before the transfer of
consciousness from the lower to the higher principles of the astral soul
may be regarded as complete; and as usual, when we come to figures relating
to the higher processes of Nature, the answer is very elastic. But I believe
the esoteric teachers of the East declare that as regards the average run
of humanity - for what may be called, in a spiritual sense, the great middle
classes of humanity - it is unusual that a Kâma loca entity will be in a position to manifest as such for more than twenty-five
to thirty years. But on each side of this average the figures may run up
very considerably. That is to say, a very ignoble and besotted human creature
may hang about in Kâma loca for a much longer time for want of any higher principles sufficiently
developed to take up his consciousness at all, and at the other end of the
scale the very intellectual and mentally-active soul may remain for very
long periods in Kâma loca (in the absence of spiritual affinities in corresponding force), by reason
of the great persistence of forces and causes generated on the higher plane
of effects, though mental activity could hardly be divorced in this way from
spirituality except in cases where it was exclusively associated with worldly
ambition. Again, while Kâma loca periods may thus be prolonged beyond the average from various causes,
they may sink to almost infinitesimal brevity when the spirituality of a
person dying at a ripe old age, and at the close of a life which has legitimately
fulfilled its purpose, is already far advanced.
There
is one other important possibility connected with manifestations reaching
us by the usual channels of communication with Kâma loca, which it is desirable to notice here, although from its nature the realization
of such a possibility cannot be frequent. No recent students of theosophy
can expect to know as yet very much about the conditions of existence which
await adepts who relinquish the use of physical bodies on earth. The higher
possibilities open to them appear to me quite beyond the reach of intellectual
appreciation. No man is clever enough, by virtue of the mere cleverness seated
in a living brain, to understand Nirvana; but it would appear that adepts
in some cases elect to pursue a course lying midway between re-incarnation
and the passage into Nirvana, and in the higher regions of Devachan; that
is to say, in the arupa state of Devachan may await the slow advance of human evolution towards the
exalted condition they have thus attained. Now an adept who has thus become
a Devachanic spirit of the most elevated type would not be cut off by the
conditions of his Devachanic state - as would be the case with a natural
Devachanic spirit passing through that state on his way to reincarnation
- from manifesting his influence on earth. His would certainly not be an influence which would make itself felt by the instrumentality of any physical
signs to mixed audiences, but it is not impossible that a medium of the highest
type - who would more properly be called a seer - might be thus influenced.
By such an Adept spirit, some great men in the world’s history may from time to time have been overshadowed and inspired, consciously
or unconsciously as the case may have been.
The
disintegration of shells in Kâma-loca will inevitably suggest to any one who endeavours to comprehend the process
at all, that there must be in Nature some general reservoirs of the matter
appropriate to that sphere of existence, corresponding to the physical earth
and its surrounding elements into which our own bodies are resigned at death.
The grand mysteries on which this consideration impinges will claim a far
more exhaustive investigation than we have yet been enabled to undertake;
but one broad idea connected with them may usefully be put forward without
further delay. The state of Kâma-loca is one which has its corresponding orders of matter in manifestation
round it. I will not here attempt to go into the metaphysics of the problem,
which might even lead us to discard the notion that astral matter need be
any less real and tangible than that which appeals to our physical senses.
It is enough for the present to explain that the propinquity of Kâma loca to the earth which is so readily made apparent by spiritualistic experience,
is explained by Oriental teaching to arise from this fact, - that Kâma-loca is just as much in and of the earth as, during our lives, our astral
soul is in and of the living man. The stage of Kâma-loca, in fact, the great realm of matter in the appropriate state which constitutes
Kâma-loca and is perceptible to the senses of astral entities, as also to those
of many clairvoyants, is the fourth principle of man. For the earth has its
seven principles like the human creatures who inhabit it. Thus, the Devachanic
state corresponds to the fifth principle of the earth, and Nirvana to the
sixth principle.
CHAPTER
VII
The
Human Tide-Wave
A
GENERAL account has already been given of the way in which the great evolutionary
life-wave sweeps round and round the seven worlds which compose the planetary
chain of which our earth is a part. Further assistance may now be offered,
with the view of expanding this general idea into a fuller comprehension
of the processes to which it relates. And no one additional chapter of the
great story will do more towards rendering its character intelligible, than
an explanation of certain phenomena connected with the progress of worlds,
that may be conveniently called obscurations.
Students
of occult philosophy who enter on that pursuit with minds already abundantly
furnished in other ways, are very liable to misinterpret its earlier statements.
Everything cannot be said at once, and the first broad explanations are apt
to suggest conceptions in regard to details which are most likely to be erroneous
with the most active-minded and intelligent thinkers. Such readers are not
content with shadowy outlines even for a moment. Imagination fills in the
picture, and if its work is undisturbed for any length of time, its author
will be surprised afterwards to find that later information is incompatible
with that which he had come to regard as having been distinctly taught in
the beginning. Now in this treatise the writer’s effort is to convey the information in such a way that hasty weed growths of
the mind may be prevented as far as possible, but in this very effort it
is necessary sometimes to run on quickly in advance, leaving some details,
even very important details, to be picked up during a second journey over
the old ground. So now the reader must be good enough to go back to the explanation
given in Chapter III of the evolutionary progress through the whole planetary
chain.
Some
few words were said then concerning manner in which the life impulse passed
on from planet to planet in “rushes or gushes; not by an even continuous flow.” Now the course of evolution in its earlier stages is so far continuous that
the preparation of several planets for the final tidal-wave of humanity may
be going on simultaneously. Indeed, the preparation of all the seven planets
may, at one stage of the proceedings, be going on simultaneously but the
important point to remember is, that the main wave of evolution - the foremost
growing wave - cannot be in more than one place at any time. The process
goes on in the way which may now be described, and which the reader may be
the better able to follow, if he constructs either on paper or in his own
mind a diagram consisting of seven circles (representing the worlds) arranged
on a ring. Calling them A,B,C &c., it will be observed from what has been already stated that circle (or globe)
D stands for our earth. Now the kingdoms of Nature as known to occultists,
be it remembered, are seven in number, three having to do with astral and
elementary forces, preceding the grosser material kingdoms in the order of
their development. Kingdom 1 evolves on globe A, and passes on to B, as kingdom
2 begins to involve on A. Carry out this system and of course it will be
seen that kingdom 1 is evolving on globe G, while kingdom 7, the human kingdom,
is evolving on globe A. But now what happens as kingdom 7 passes on to globe
B. There is no eighth kingdom to engage the activities of globe A. The great
processes of evolution have culminated in the final tidal-wave of humanity,
which, as it sweeps on, leaves a temporary lethargy of Nature behind. When
the life-wave goes on to B, in fact, globe A passes for the time into a state
of obscuration. This state is not one of decay, dissolution, or anything that can be properly called death.
Decay itself, though its aspect is apt to mislead the mind, is a condition
of activity in a certain direction, this consideration affording a clue to
the meaning of a great deal which is otherwise meaningless, in that part
of Hindu mythology which relates to the deities presiding over destruction.
The obscuration of a world is a total suspension of its activity; this does
not mean that the moment the last human monad passes on from any given world,
that world is paralyzed by any convulsion, or subsides into the enchanted
trance of a sleeping palace. The animal and vegetable life goes on as before,
for a time, but its character begins to recede instead of advancing. The
great life-wave has left it, and the animal and vegetable kingdoms gradually
return to the condition in which they were found when the great life-wave
first reached them. Enormous periods of time are available for this slow process by which the obscured world settled
into sleep, for it will be seen that obscuration in each case lasts six times
*[Or we may say five times, allowing for the half period of morning which
precedes and the half period of evening which follows the day of full activity.]
as long as the period of each world’s occupation by the human life-wave. That is to say, the process which is accomplished
as above described in connection with the passage of the life-wave from globe
A to globe B, is repeated all along the chain. When the wave passes to C,
B is left in obscuration as well as A. Then D receives the life-wave, and
A. B. C, are in obscuration. When the wave reaches G, all the preceding six
worlds are in obscuration. Meanwhile the life-wave passes on in a certain
regular progression, the symmetrical character of which is very satisfactory
to scientific instincts. The reader will be prepared to pick up the idea
at once, in view of the explanations already given of the way in which humanity
evolves through seven great races during each round period on a planet -
that is to say, during the occupation of such planet by the tidal wave of
life. The fourth race is obviously the middle race of the series. As soon
as this middle point is turned, and the evolution of the fifth race on any given planet begins, the preparation for
humanity begins on the next. The evolution of the fifth race on E for example,
is commensurate with the evolution, or rather with the revival, of the mineral
kingdom on D, and so on. That is to say, the evolution of the sixth race
on D, coincides with the revival of the vegetable kingdom on E, the seventh
race on D, with the revival of the animal kingdom on E, and then when the
last monads of the seventh race on D have passed into the subjective state
or world of effects, the human period on E begins, and the first race begins
its development there. Meanwhile the twilight period on the world preceding
D has been deepening into the night of obscuration in the same progressive
way, and obscuration there definitely sets in when the human period on D
passes its half-way point. But just as the heart of a man beats and respiration
continues, no matter how profound his sleep, there are processes of vital action which go on in the resting
world even during the most profound depths of its repose. And these preserve,
in view of the next return of the human wave, the results of the evolution
that preceded its first arrival. Recovery for the re-awaking planet is a
larger process than its subsidence into rest, for it has to attain a higher
degree of perfection against the return of the human life-wave, than that
at which it was left when the wave last went onward from its shore. But with
every new beginning, Nature is infused with a vigour of its own - the freshness
of a morning - and the later obscuration period, which is a time of preparation
and hopefulness as it were, invests evolution itself with a new momentum.
By the time the great life-wave returns, all is ready for its reception.
In
the first essay on this subject it was roughly indicated that the various
worlds making up our planetary chain were not all of the same materiality.
Putting the conception of spirit at the north pole of the circle and that
of matter at the south pole, the worlds of the descending arc vary in materiality
and spirituality, like those of the ascending arc. This variation must now
be considered more attentively if the reader wishes to realize the whole
processes of evolution more fully than heretofore.
Besides
the earth, which is at the lowest material point, there are only two other
worlds of our chain which are visible to physical eyes - the one behind and
the one in advance of it. These two worlds, as a matter of fact, are Mars
and Mercury - Mars being behind and Mercury in advance of us - Mars in a
state of entire obscuration now as regards the human life-wave, Mercury just
beginning to prepare for its next human period. [It may be worth while here
to remark for the benefit of people who may be disposed, from physical science
reading, to object that Mercury is too near the Sun, and consequently too
hot to be a suitable place of habitation for Man, - that in the official
report of the Astronomical Department of the United States on the recent “Mount Whitney observations,” statements will be found that may check too confident criticisms of occult science
along that line. The results of the Mount Whitney observations on selective
absorption of solar rays showed, according to the official reporter, that
it would no longer be impossible to suggest the conditions of an atmosphere
which would render Mercury habitable, at the one extreme of the scale, and Saturn at the other. We have no concern with Saturn at present, nor if it were necessary
to explain on occult principles the habitability of Mercury, should the task
be attempted with calculations about selective absorption. The fact is that
ordinary science makes at once too much and two little of the Sun, as the
storehouse of force for the solar system, - too much in so far as the heat
of planets has a great deal to do with another influence quite distinct from
the Sun, and influence which will not be thoroughly understood till more
is known than at present about the correlations of heat and magnetism, and
of the magnetic, meteoric dust, with which inter-planetary space is pervaded.
However it is enough - to rebut any objection that might be raised against
the explanation now in progress, from the point of view of loyal devotees
of last year’s science - to point out that such objections would be already out of date. Modern
science is very progressive, - this is one of its greatest merits, - but
it is not a meritorious habit with modern scientists to think, at each stage
of its progress, that all conceptions incompatible with that stage must necessarily
be absurd.]
The
two planets of our chain that are behind Mars, and the two that are in advance
of Mercury, are not composed of an order of matter which telescopes can take
cognizance of. Four out of the seven are thus of an ethereal nature, which
people who can only conceive matter in its earthly form will be inclined
to call immaterial. But they are not really immaterial at all. They are simply
in a finer state of materiality than the earth, but their finer state does
not in any way defeat the uniformity of Nature’s design in regard to the methods and stages of their evolution. Within the scale
of their subtle “invisibility,” the successive rounds and races of mankind pass through their stages of greater
and less materiality just as on this earth; but whoever would comprehend
them must comprehend this earth first, and work out their delicate phenomena
by correspondential inferences. Let us return therefore to the consideration
of the great life-wave in its aspects on this planet.
Just
as the chain of worlds treated as a unity has its north and south, its spiritual
and material pole, working from spirituality down through materiality up
to spirituality again, so the rounds of mankind constitute a similar series
which the chain of globes itself might be taken to symbolize. In the evolution
of man in fact, on any one plane as on all, there is a descending and an
ascending arc; spirit, so to speak, involving itself into matter, and matter
evolving itself into spirit. The lowest or most material point, in the cycle
thus becomes the inverted apex of physical intelligence, which is the masked
manifestation of spiritual intelligence. Each round of mankind evolved on
the downward arc (as each race of each round if we descend to the smaller
mirror of the cosmos) must thus be more physically intelligent than its predecessor,
and each in the upward arc must be invested with a more refined form of mentality
commingled with greater spiritual intuitiveness. In the first round therefore we find man,
a relatively ethereal being compared even on earth with the state he has
now attained here, not intellectual, but super-spiritual. Like the animal
and vegetable shapes around him, he inhabits an immense but loosely organized
body. In the second round he is still gigantic and ethereal, but growing
firmer and more condensed in body - a more physical man, but still, less
intelligent than spiritual. In the third round he has developed a perfectly
concrete and compacted body, at first the form rather of a giant ape than
of a true man, but with intelligence coming more and more into the ascendant.
In the last half of the third round his gigantic stature decreases, his body
improves in texture, and he begins to be a rational man. In the fourth round
intellect, now fully developed, achieves enormous progress. The earliest
races with which the round begins, acquire human speech as we understand it. The world teems with the results of intellectual
activity and spiritual decline. At the halfway point of the fourth round
here, the polar point of the whole seven-world period is passed. From this
point outwards the spiritual Ego begins its real struggle with body and mind
to manifest its transcendental powers. In the fifth round the struggle continues,
but the transcendental faculties are largely developed, though the struggle
between these on the one hand with physical intellect and propensity is fiercer
than ever, for the intellect of the fifth round, as well as its spirituality,
is an advance on that of the fourth. In the sixth round humanity attains
a degree of perfection both of body and soul, of intellect and spirituality,
which ordinary mortals of the present epoch will not readily realize in their
imaginations. The most supreme combinations of wisdom, goodness, and transcendental
enlightenment which the world has ever seen or thought of, will represent the ordinary type of manhood.
Those faculties which now, in the rare efflorescence of a generation, enable
some extraordinary gifted persons to explore the mysteries of Nature and
gather the knowledge of which some crumbs are now being offered (through
these writings and in other ways) to the ordinary world, will then be the
common appanage of all. As to what the seventh round will be like, the most
communicative occult teachers are solemnly silent. Mankind in the seventh
round will be something altogether too God-like for mankind in the fourth
round to forecast its attributes.
During
the occupation of any planet by the human life-wave, each individual monad
is inevitably incarnated many times. This has been partly explained. If one
existence only be passed by the monad in each of the branch races through
which it must pass at least once, the total number accomplished during a
round period on one planet, would be 343 - the third power of seven. But
as a matter of fact each monad is incarnated twice in each of the branch
races, and also comes in, necessarily, for some few extra incarnations as
well. For reasons which are not easy for the outsider to divine, the possessors
of occult knowledge are especially reluctant to give out numerical facts
relating to cosmogony, though it is hard for the uninitiated to understand
why these should be withheld. At present, for example, we shall not be able
to state what is the actual duration in years of the round period. But a
concession, which only those who have long been students of occultism by the old method will fully appreciate, has been made
about the numbers with which we are immediately concerned; and this concession
is valuable at all events, as it helps to elucidate an interesting fact connected
with evolution, on the threshold of which we have now arrived. This fact
is, that while the earth, for example, is inhabited as at present, by fourth
round humanity, by the wave of human life, that is to say, on its fourth
journey round the circle of the worlds, there may be present among us some
few persons, few in relation to the total number, who, properly speaking,
belong to the fifth round. Now, in the sense of the term at present employed,
it must not be supposed that by any miraculous process, any individual unit
has actually traveled round the whole chain of worlds once more often than
his compeers. Under the explanations just given as to the way the tide-wave
of humanity progresses, it will be seen that this is impossible. Humanity has not yet paid its fourth visit
even, to the planet next in advance of our own. But individual monads may
outstrip their companions as regards their individual development, and so
become exactly as mankind generally will be when the fifth round has been
fully evolved. And this may be accomplished in two ways. A man born as an
ordinary fourth round man, may, by processes of occult training, convert
himself into a man having all the attributes of a fifth round man, and so
become what we may call an artificial fifth rounder. But independently of
all exertions made by man in his present incarnation, a man may also be born
a fifth rounder, though in the midst of fourth round humanity, by virtue
of the total number of his previous incarnations.
It x stands
for the normal number of incarnations which in the course of Nature a monad
must go through during a round period on one planet, and y for the margin of extra incarnations into which by a strong desire for physical
life he may force himself during such a period, then, as a matter of fact,
24½ (x + y) may exceed 28x; that is to say, in 3½ rounds a monad may have accomplished as many incarnations as an ordinary monad
would have accomplished in four complete rounds. In less than 3½ rounds the result could not have been attained, so that it is only now that
we have passed the halfway point of evolution on this halfway planet, that
the fifth rounders are beginning to drop in.
It
is not possible in the nature of things that a monad can do more than outstrip
his companions by more than one round. This consideration notwithstanding,
Buddha was a sixth round man, but this fact has to do with a great mystery
outside the limits of the present calculation. Enough for the moment to say
that the evolution of a Buddha has to do with something more than mere incarnations
within the limits of one planetary chain.
Since
large numbers of lives have been recognized in the above calculations as
following one another in the successive incarnations of an individual monad,
it is important here, with the view of averting misconceptions, to point
out that the periods of time over which these incarnations range are so great,
that vast intervals separate them, numerous as they are. As stated above,
we cannot just now give the actual duration of the round periods. Nor, indeed
could any figures be quoted as indicating the duration of all round periods
equally, for these vary in length within very wide limits. But here is a
simple fact which has been definitely stated on the highest occult authority
we are concerned with. The present race of humanity, the present fifth race of the fourth round period, began to evolve about one million of years ago.
Now it is not yet finished; but supposing that a million years had constituted
the complete life of the race, [The complete life of a race is certainly
much longer than this; but when we get to figures of this kind we are on
very delicate ground, for precise periods are very profound secrets, for
reasons uninitiated students (“lay chelas,” as the adepts now say, coining a new designation to meet a new condition of
things) can only imperfectly divine. Calculations like those given above
may be trusted literally as far as they go, but must not rashly be made the
basis of others.] how would it have been divided up for each individual monad?
In a race there must be rather more than 100, and there can hardly be 120
incarnations for an individual monad. But say even there have been already
120 incarnations for monads in the present race already. And say that the
average life of each incarnation was a century, even then we should only
have 12,000 years out of the million spent in physical existence against
988.000 years spent in the subjective sphere, or there would be an average
of more than 8000 years between each incarnation. Certainly these intervening
periods are of very variable length, but they can hardly ever contract to
anything less than 1500 years - leaving out of account of course the case of adepts who have placed themselves quite outside the
operation of the ordinary law - and 1500 years if not an impossibly short,
would be a very brief interval between two rebirths.
These
calculations must be qualified by one of two considerations, however. The
cases of children dying in infancy are quite unlike those of persons who
attain full maturity, and for obvious reasons, that the explanations now
already given will suggest, A child, dying before it has lived long enough
to begin to be responsible for its actions, has generated no fresh Karma.
The spiritual monad leaves that child's body in just the same state in which
it entered it after its last death in Devachan. It has had no opportunity
of playing on its new instrument, which has been broken before even it was
tuned. A re-incarnation of the monad, therefore, may take place immediately
on the line of its old attraction. But the monad so reincarnated is not to
be spiritually identified in any way with the dead child. So, in the same
way, with a monad getting into the body of a born idiot. The instrument cannot
be tuned, so it cannot play on that any more than on the child's body in the first few years of childhood. But both these
cases are manifest exceptions that do not alter the broad rule above laid
down for all persons attaining maturity, and living their earth lives for
good or evil.
Annotations
Later
information and study - the comparison, that is to say, of the various branches
of the doctrine, and the collocation of other statements with those in the
foregoing chapter - show the difficulty of applying figures to the Esoteric
Doctrines in a very striking light. Figures may be quite trustworthy as representing
broad averages, and yet very misleading when applied to special cases. Devachanic
periods vary for different people within such very wide limits that any rule
laid down in the matter must be subject to a bewildering cloud of exceptions.
To begin with, the average mentioned above has no doubt been computed with
reference to fully matured adults. Between the quite young child who has
no Devachanic period at all and the adult who accomplishes an average period
we have to take note of persons dying in youth, who have accumulated Karma, and who must therefore pass through the usual stages of spiritual development,
but for whom the brief lives they have spent have not produced causes which
take very long to work themselves out. Such persons would return to incarnation
after a sojourn in the world of effects of corresponding brevity. Again there
are such things as artificial incarnations accomplished by the direct intervention
of the Mahatmas when a chela who may not yet have acquired anything resembling the power of controlling the
matter himself, is brought back into incarnation almost immediately after
his previous physical death, without having been suffered to float into the
current of natural causes at all. Of course in such cases it may be said
that the claims the person concerned has established on the Mahatmas are
themselves natural causes of a kind, the intervention of the Mahatmas, who
are quite beyond the liability of acting capriciously in such a matter, being
so much fruit of effort in the preceding life, so much Karma. But still either
way such cases would be equally withdrawn from the operation of the general
average rule
Clearly
it is impossible when the complicated facts of an entirely unfamiliar science
are being presented to untrained minds for the first time, to put them forward
with all their appropriate qualifications, compensations and abnormal developments
visible from the beginning. We must be content to take the broad rules first
and deal with the exceptions afterwards, and especially is this the case
with occult study, in connection with which the traditional methods of teaching,
generally followed, aim at impressing every fresh idea on the memory, by
provoking the perplexity it at last relieves. In relation to another matter
dealt with in the preceding pages, an important exception in Nature has thus,
it seems to me now, been left out of account. The description I have given
of the progress of the human tide-wave is quite coherent as it stands, but
since the publication of the original edition of this book some criticism
was directed, in India, to a comparison between my version of the story and certain passages
in other writings, known to emanate from a Mahatma. A discrepancy between
the two statements was pointed out, the other version assuming the possibility
that a monad actually might have traveled round the seven planets once more often than the compeers among
whom he might ultimately find himself on this earth. My account of the obscurations
appears to render this contingency impossible. The clue to the mystery appears
to lie outside the domain of those facts concerning which the adepts are
willing to speak freely; and the reader must clearly understand that the
explanation I am about to offer is the fruit of my own speculation and comparison
of different parts of the doctrine - not authentic information received from
the author of my general teaching.
The
fact appears to be that the obscurations are so far complete as to present
all the phenomena above described in regard to each planet they affect as a whole. But exceptional phenomena for which we must be ever on the alert, come into
play even in this matter. The great bulk of humanity is driven on from one
planet to the next by the great cyclic impulse when its time comes for such
a transition, but the planet it quits is not utterly denuded of humanity, nor is it, in every region of its surface rendered, by the physical and climatic changes that come
on, unfit to be the habitation of human beings. Even during obscuration a
small colony of humanity clings to each planet, and the monads associated
with these small colonies following different laws of evolution, and beyond
the reach of those attractions which govern the main vortex of humanity in
the planet occupied by the great tide-wave, pass on from world to world along
what may be called the inner round of evolution, far ahead of the race at
large. What may be the circumstances which occasionally project a soul even
from the midst of the great human vortex, right out of the attraction of
the planet occupied by the tide wave, and into the attraction of the Inner
Round - is a question that can only be a subject for us at present of very
uncertain conjecture.
It
may be worth while to draw attention, in connection with the solution I have
ventured to offer as applicable to the problem of the Inner Rounds to the
way in which the fact of Nature I assume to exist, would harmonize with the
widely diffused doctrines of the Deluge. That portion of a planet which remained
habitable during an obscuration would be equivalent to the Noah’s Ark of the biblical narrative taken in its largest symbolical meaning. Of course
the narrative of the Deluge has minor symbolical meanings also, but it does
not appear improbable that the Kabalists should also have associated with
it, the larger significance now suggested. In due time when the obscured
planet grew ready once more to receive a full population of humanity, the
colonists of the ark would be ready to commence the process of populating
it afresh.
CHAPTER
VIII
The
Progress of Humanity
THE
course of Nature provides, as the reader will now have seen, for the indefinite
progress towards higher phases of existence of all human entities. But no
less will it have been seen that by endowing these entities, as they advance
with ever-increasing faculties and by constantly enlarging the scope of their
activity. Nature also furnishes each human entity with more and more decisive
opportunities of choosing between good and evil. In the earlier rounds of
humanity this privilege of selection is not fully developed, and responsibility
of action is correspondingly incomplete. The earlier rounds of humanity,
in fact, do not invest the Ego with spiritual responsibility at all in the
larger sense of the term which we are now approaching. The Devachanic periods
which follow each objective existence in turn, dispose fully of its merits
and demerits, and the most deplorable personality which the ego during the
first half of its evolution can possible develop, is merely dropped out of the account as regards the
larger undertaking, while the erring personality itself pays its relatively
brief penalty, and troubles Nature no more. But the second half of the great
evolutionary period is carried on on different principles. The phases of
existence which are now coming into view, cannot be entered upon by the ego
without positive merits of its own appropriate to the new developments in
prospect; it is not enough that the now fully responsible and highly gifted
being which man becomes at the great turning-point in his career, should
float idly on the stream of progress; he must begin to swim, if he wishes
to push his way forward.
Debarred
by the complexity of the subject from dealing with all its features simultaneously,
our survey of Nature has so far contemplated the seven rounds of human development,
which constitute the whole planetary undertaking with which we are concerned,
as a continuous series, throughout which it is the natural destiny of humanity
in general to pass. But it will be remembered that humanity in the sixth
round has been spoken of as so highly developed that the sublime attributes
and faculties of the highest adeptship are the common appanage of all; while
in the seventh round the race has almost emerged from humanity into divinity.
Now every human being in this state of development will still be identified
by an uninterrupted connection with all the personalities which have been
strung upon that thread of life from the beginning of the great evolutionary
process. Is it conceivable that the character of such personalities is of
no consequence in the long-run, and that two God-like beings might stand side by side
in the seventh round, developed, the one from a long series of blameless
and serviceable existences, the other from an equally long series of evil
and grovelling lives? That surely could not come to pass, and we have to
ask now, how do we find the congruities of Nature preserved compatibly with
the appointed evolution of humanity to the higher forms of existence which
crown the edifice?
Just
as childhood is irresponsible for its acts, the earlier races of humanity
are irresponsible for theirs; but there comes the period of full growth,
when the complete development of the faculties which enable the individual
man to choose between good and evil, in the single life with which he is
for the moment concerned, enable the continuous ego also to make its final
selection. That period - that enormous period, for Nature is in no hurry
to catch its creatures in a trap in such a matter as this - is barely yet
beginning, and a complete round period around the seven worlds will have
to be gone through before it is over. Until the middle of the fifth period
is passed on this earth, the great question - to be or not to be for the
future - is not irrevocably settled. We are coming now into the possession
of the faculties which render man a fully responsible being, but we have
yet to employ those faculties during the maturity of our ego-hood in the manner which shall determine the vast consequences hereafter.
It
is during the first half of the fifth round that the struggle principally
takes place. Till then, the ordinary course of life may be a good or a bad
preparation for the struggle, but cannot fairly be described as the struggle
itself. And now we have to examine the nature of the struggle, so far merely
spoken of as the selection between good and evil. That is in no way an inaccurate,
but it is an incomplete, definition.
The
ever-recurring and ever-threatened conflict between intellect and spirituality,
is the phenomenon to be now examined. The commonplace conceptions which these
two words denote, must of course be expanded to some extent before the occult
conception is realized; for European habits of thinking are rather apt to
set up in the mind an ignoble image of spirituality, as an attribute rather
of the character than of the mind itself, - a pale goody-goodiness, born
of an attachment to religious ceremonial and of devout aspirations, no matter
to what whimsical notions of Heaven and Divinity in which the “spiritually-minded” person may have been brought up. Spirituality, in the occult sense, has little
or nothing to do with feeling devout; it has to do with the capacity of the
mind for assimilating knowledge at the fountain-head of knowledge itself
- of absolute knowledge - instead of by the circuitous and labourious process
of ratiocination.
The
development of pure intellect, the ratiocinative faculty, has been the business
of European nations for so long, and in this department of human progress
they have achieved such magnificent triumphs, that nothing in occult philosophy
will be less acceptable to Europeans themselves at first, and while the ideas
at stake are imperfectly grasped, than the first aspect of the occult theory
concerning intellect and spirituality; but this does not arise so much from
the undue tendency of occult science to depreciate intellect, as from the
undue tendency of modern Western speculation to depreciate spirituality.
Broadly speaking, so far Western philosophy has had no opportunity of appreciating
spirituality; it has not been made acquainted with the range of the inner
faculties of man; it has merely groped blindly in the direction of a belief
that such inner faculties existed; and Kant himself, the greatest modern
exponent of that idea, does little more than contend that there is such a faculty as intuition - if we
only knew how to work with it.
The
process of working with it, is occult science in its highest aspect, the
cultivation of spirituality. The cultivation of mere power over the forces
of Nature, the investigation of some of her subtler secrets as regards the
inner principles controlling physical results, is occult science in its lowest
aspect, and into that lower region of its activity mere physical science
may, or even must, gradually run up. But the acquisition by mere intellect
- physical science in exelsis - of privileges which are the proper appanage of spirituality, - is one of the
dangers of that struggle which decides the ultimate destiny of the human
ego. For there is one thing which intellectual processes do not help mankind
to realize, and that is the nature and supreme excellence of spiritual existence.
On the contrary, intellect arises out of physical causes - the perfection
of the physical brain - and tends only to physical results, the perfection
of material welfare. Although, as a concession to “weak brethren” and “religion” on which it looks with good-humoured contempt, modern intellect does not condemn
spirituality, it certainly treats the physical human life as the only serious
business with which grave men, or even earnest philanthropists, can concern
themselves. But obviously, if spiritual existence, vivid subjective consciousness,
really does go on for periods greater than the periods of intellectual physical
existence in the ratio, as we have seen in discussing the Devachanic condition,
of 80 to 1 at least, then surely man’s subjective existence is more important than his physical existence, and intellect
is in error when all its efforts are bent on the amelioration of the physical
existence.
These
considerations show how the choice between good and evil - which has been
made by the human ego in the course of the great struggle between intellect
and spirituality - is not a mere choice between ideas so plainly contrasted
as wickedness and virtue. It is not so rough a question as that - whether
man be wicked or virtuous - which must really at the final critical turning-point
decide whether he shall continue to live and develop into higher phases of
existence, or cease to live altogether. The truth of the matter is (if it
is not imprudent at this stage of our progress to brush the surface of a
new mystery) that the question, to be or not to be, is not settled by reference
to the question whether a man be wicked or virtuous at all. It will plainly be seen eventually that there must be evil spirituality as
well as good spirituality. So that the great question of continued existence
turns altogether and of necessity on the question of spirituality, as compared
with physicality. The point is not so much “shall a man live, is he good enough to be permitted to live any longer?” as “can the man live any longer in the higher levels of existence into which humanity
must at last evolve? Has he qualified himself to live by the cultivation
of the durable portion of his nature? If not, he has got to the end of his
tether.
It
need not be hurriedly supposed that occult philosophy considers vice and
virtue of no consequence to human spiritual destinies, because it does not
discover in Nature that these characteristics determine ultimate progress
in evolution. No system is so pitilessly inflexible in its morality as the
system which occult philosophy explores and expounds. But that which vice
and virtue of themselves determine, is happiness and misery, not the final
problem of continued existence, beyond that immeasurably distant period,
when in the progress of evolution man has got to begin being something more
than man, and cannot go on along the path of progress with the help only
of the relatively lower human attributes. It is true again that one can hardly
imagine virtue in any decided degree to fail in engendering, in due time,
the required higher attributes, but we should not be scientifically accurate
in speaking of it as the cause of progress, in ultimate stages of elevation, though it may provoke the development of that
which is the cause of progress.
This
consideration - that ultimate progress is determined by spirituality irrespective
of its moral colouring, is the great meaning of the occult doctrine that “to be immortal in good one must identify oneself with God; to be immortal in
evil with Satan. These are the two poles of the world of souls; between these
two poles vegetate and die without remembrance the useless portion of mankind” [Eliphas Levi]. The enigma, like all occult formulas, has a lesser application
(fitting the microcosm as well as the macrocosm, and in its lesser significance
refers to Devachan or Avitchi, and the blank destiny of colourless personalities;
but in its more important bearing it relates to the final sorting out of
humanity at the middle of the great fifth round, the annihilation of the
utterly unspiritual Egos and the passage onward of the others to be immortal
in good, or immortal in evil. Precisely the same meaning attaches to the
passage in Revelation (iii 15, 16): “I would thou wert cold or hot; so then because thou art lukewarm, and neither
cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
Spirituality,
then, is not devout aspiration; it is the highest kind of intellection, that
which takes cognizance of the workings of Nature by direct assimilation of
the mind and her higher principles. The objection which physical intelligence
will bring against this view is that the mind can cognize nothing except
by observation of phenomena and reasoning thereon. That is the mistake -
it can; and the existence of occult science is the highest proof thereof.
But there are hints pointing in the direction of such proof all around us
if we have but the patience to examine their true bearings. It is idle to
say, in face, merely for one thing, of the phenomena of clairvoyance - crude
and imperfect as those have been which have pushed themselves on the attention
of the world - that there are no other avenues to consciousness but those
of the five senses. Certainly in the ordinary world the clairvoyant faculty
is an exceedingly rare one, but it indicates the existence in man of a potential faculty, the nature of which,
as inferred from its slightest manifestations, must obviously be capable
in its highest development of leading to a direct assimilation of knowledge
independently of observation.
One
of the most embarrassing difficulties that beset the present attempt to translate
the esoteric doctrine into plain language, is due really to the fact, that
spiritual perceptiveness, apart from all ordinary processes by which knowledge
is acquired, is a great and grand possibility of human nature. It is by that
method in the regular course of occult training that adepts impart instruction
to their pupils. They awaken the dormant sense in the pupil, and through
this they imbue his mind with a knowledge that such and such a doctrine is
the real truth. The whole scheme of evolution, which the foregoing chapters
have portrayed, infiltrates into the regular chela’s mind by reason of the fact that he is made to see the process taking place
by clairvoyant vision. There are no words used in his instruction at all.
And adepts themselves to whom the facts and processes of Nature are familiar
as our five fingers to us, find it difficult to explain in a treatise which
they cannot illustrate for us, by producing mental pictures in our dormant
sixth sense, the complex anatomy of the planetary system.
Certainly
it is not to be expected that mankind as yet should be generally conscious
of possessing the sixth sense, for the day of its activity has not yet come.
It has been already stated that each round in turn is devoted to the perfection
in man of the corresponding principle in its numerical order, and to its
preparation for assimilation with the next. The earlier rounds have been
described as concerned with man in a shadowy, loosely organized, unintelligent
form. The first principle of all, the body, was developed, but it was merely
growing used to vitality, and was unlike anything we can now picture to ourselves.
The fourth round, in which we are now engaged, is the round in which the
fourth principle, Will, Desire, is fully developed, and in which it is engaged
in assimilating itself with the fifth principle, reason, intelligence. In
the fifth round, the completely developed reason, intellect, or soul, in
which the Ego then resides, must assimilate itself to the sixth principle, spirituality, or give
up the business of existence altogether.
All
readers of Buddhist literature are familiar with the constant references
made there to the Arhat’s union of his soul with God. This, in other words, is the premature development
of his sixth principle. He forces himself right up through all the obstacles
which impede such an operation in the case of a fourth round man, into that
stage of evolution which awaits the rest of humanity - or rather so much
of humanity as may reach it in the ordinary course of Nature - in the latter
part of the fifth round. And in doing this it will be observed he tides himself
right over the great period of danger - the middle of the fifth round. That
is the stupendous achievement of the adept as regards his own personal interests.
He has reached the further shore of the sea in which so many of mankind will
perish. He waits there in a contentment which people cannot even realize
without some glimmerings of spirituality - of the sixth sense - themselves
for the arrival there of his future companions. He dos not wait in his physical
body, let me hasten to add to avoid misconstruction, but when at last privileged to resign this, in a spiritual condition, which it would be foolish to attempt to describe,
while even the Devachanic states of ordinary humanity are themselves almost
beyond the reach of imaginations untrained in spiritual science.
But,
returning to the ordinary course of humanity and the growth into sixth round
people, of men and women who do not become adepts at any premature stage
of their career, it will be observed that this is the ordinary course of Nature in one sense of the expression, but so also is
it the ordinary course of Nature for every grain of corn that is developed
to fall into appropriate soil, and grow up into an ear of corn itself. All
the same a great many grains do nothing of the sort, and a great many human
Egos will never pass through the trials of the fifth round. The final effort
of Nature in evolving man is to evolve from him a being unmeasurably higher,
to be a conscious agent, and what is ordinarily meant by a creative principle
in Nature herself ultimately. The first achievement is to evolve free-will,
and the next to perpetuate that free-will by inducing it to unite itself
with the final purpose of Nature, which is good. In the course of such an
operation it is inevitable that a great deal of the free-will evolved should
turn to evil, and after producing temporary suffering, be dispersed and annihilated.
More than this, the final purpose can only be achieved by a profuse expenditure of material, and just as this
goes on in the lower stages of evolution, where a thousand seeds are thrown
off by a vegetable, for every one that ultimately fructifies into a new plant,
so are the god-like germs of Will, sown one in each man’s breast, in abundance like the seeds blown about in the wind. Is the justice
of Nature to be impugned by reason of the fact that many of these germs will
perish? Such an idea could only rise in a mind that will not realize the
room there is in Nature for the growth of every germ which chooses to grow,
and to the extent it chooses to grow, be that extent great or small. If it
seems to any one horrible that an “immortal soul” should perish, under any circumstances, that impression can only be due to the
pernicious habit of regarding everything as eternity, which is not this microscopic
life. There is room in the subjective spheres, and time in the catenary manvantara,
before we even approach the Dhyân Chohan of God-like period, for more than the ordinary brain has every yet conceived
of immortality. Every good deed and elevated impulse that every man or woman
ever did or felt, must reverberate through æons of spiritual existence, whether the human entity concerned proves able or
not to expand into the sublime and stupendous development of the seventh
round. And it is out of the causes generated in one of our brief lives on
earth, that exoteric speculation conceives itself capable of constructing
eternal results! Out of such a seven or eight hundredth part of our objective
life on earth during the present stay here of the evolutionary life-wave,
we are to expect Nature to discern sufficient reason for deciding upon our
whole subsequent career. In truth, Nature will make such a large return for
a comparatively small expenditure of human will-power in the right direction,
that, extravagant as the expectation just stated may appear, and extravagant
as it is applied to ordinary lives, one brief existence may sometimes suffice to anticipate
the growth of milliards of years. The adept may in the one earth-life [In
practice, my impression is that this is rarely achieved in one earth-life;
approached rather in two or three artificial incarnations.] achieve so much
advancement that his subsequent growth is certain, and merely a matter of
time; but then the seed germ which produces an adept in our life, must be
very perfect to begin with, and the early conditions of its growth favourable,
and withal the effort on the part of the man himself, life-long and far more
concentrated, more intense, more arduous, than it is possible for the uninitiated
outsider to realize. In ordinary cases, the life which is divided between
material enjoyment and spiritual aspiration - however sincere and beautiful
the latter -can only be productive of a correspondingly duplex result, of
a spiritual reward in Devachan, of a new birth on earth. The manner in which the adept gets above the necessity
of such a new birth, is perfectly scientific and simple be it observed, though
it sounds like a theological mystery when expounded in exoteric writings
by reference to Karma and Skandhas, Trishna, and Tanha, and so forth. The
next earth-life is as much a consequence of affinities engendered by the
fifth principle, the continuous human soul, as the Devachanic experiences
which come first are the growth of the thoughts and aspirations of an elevated
character, which the person concerned has created during life. That is to
say, the affinities engendered in ordinary cases are partly material, partly
spiritual. Therefore they start the soul on its entrance into the world of
effects with a double set of attractions inhering in it, one set producing
the subjective consequences of its Devachanic life, the other set asserting
themselves at the close of that life, and carrying the soul back again into re-incarnation. But if the person during his
objective life absolutely develops no affinities for material existence,
starts his soul at death with all its attractions tending one way in the
direction of spirituality, and none at all drawing it back to objective life,
it does not come back; it mounts into a condition of spirituality corresponding
to the intensity of the attractions or affinities in that direction, and
the other thread of connection is cut off.
Now
this explanation does not entirely cover the whole position, because the
adept himself, no matter how high, does return to incarnation eventually,
after the rest of mankind have passed across the great dividing period in
the middle of the fifth round. Until the exaltation of Planetary Spirithood
is reached, the highest human soul must have a certain affinity for earth
still, though not the earth-life of physical enjoyments and passions that
we are going through. But the important point to realize in regard to the
spiritual consequences of earthly life is, that in so large a majority of
cases, that the abnormal few need not be talked about, the sense of justice
in regard to the destiny of good men is amply satisfied by the course of
Nature step by step as time advances. The spirit-life is ever at hand to
receive, refresh, and restore the soul after the struggles, achievements,
or sufferings of incarnation. And more than this, reserving the question about eternity, Nature, in the intercyclic periods at the
apex of each round, provides for all mankind, except those unfortunate failures
who have persistently adhered to the path of evil, great intervals of spiritual
blessedness, far longer and more exalted in their character than the Devachanic
periods of each separate life. Nature, in fact, is inconceivably liberal
and patient to each and all her candidates for the final examination during
their long preparation for this. Nor is one failure to pass even this final
examination absolutely fatal. The failures may try again, if they are not
utterly disgraceful failures, but they must wait for the next opportunity.
A
complete explanation of the circumstances under which such waiting is accomplished,
would not come into the scheme of this treatise; but it must not be supposed
that candidates for progress, self-convicted of unfitness to proceed at the
critical period of the fifth round, fall necessarily into the sphere of annihilation.
For that attraction to assert itself, the Ego must have developed a positive
attraction for matter, a positive repulsion for spirituality, which is overwhelming
in its force. In the absence of such affinities, and in the absence also
of such affinities as would suffice to tide the Ego over the great gulf,
the destiny which meets the mere failures of Nature is, as regards the present planetary manwantara, to die, as Eliphas Levy puts it, without remembrance. They have lived their
life, and had their share of Heaven, but they are not capable of ascending
the tremendous altitudes of spiritual progress then confronting them. But
they are qualified for further incarnation and life on the planes of existence
to which they are accustomed. They will wait, therefore, in the negative
spiritual state they have attained, till those planes of existence are again
in activity in the next planetary manwantara. The duration of such waiting is, of course, beyond the reach of imagination
altogether, and the precise nature of the existence which is now contemplated
is no less unrealizable; but the broad pathway through that strange region
of dreamy semi-animation must be taken note if, in order that the symmetry
and completeness of the whole evolutionary scheme may be perceived.
And
with this last contingency provided for, the whole scheme does lie before
the reader in its main outlines with tolerable completeness. We have seen the one life, the spirit, animating
matter in its lowest forms first, and evoking growth by slow degrees into
higher forms. Individualizing itself at last in man, it works up through
inferior and irresponsible incarnations until it has penetrated the higher
principles, and evolved a true human soul, which is thenceforth the master
of its own fate, though guarded in the beginning by natural provisions which
debar it from premature shipwreck, which stimulate and refresh it on its
course. But the ultimate destiny offered to that soul is to develop not only
into a being capable of taking care of itself, but into a being capable of
taking care also of others, of presiding over and directing, within what
may be called constitutional limits, the operations of Nature herself. Clearly
before the soul can have earned the right to that promotion, it must have
been tried by having conceded to it full control over it own affairs. That full control necessarily conveys the power to shipwreck
itself. The safeguards put round the Ego in its youth - its inability to
get into the higher or lower states than those of inter-mundane Devachan
and Avitchi - fall from it in its maturity. It is potent, then, over its
own destinies, not only in regard to the development of transitory joy and
suffering, but in regard to the stupendous opportunities in both directions
which existence opens out before it. It may seize on the higher opportunities
in two ways; it may throw up the struggle in two ways; it may attain sublime
spirituality for good, or sublime spirituality for evil; it may ally itself
to physically for (not evil, but for) utter annihilation; or, on the other
hand, for (not good, but for) the negative result of beginning the educational
processes of incarnation all over again.
ANNOTATIONS
The
condition into which the monads failing to pass the middle of the fifth round
must fall as the tide of evolution sweeps on, leaving them stranded, so to
speak, upon the shores of time, is not described very fully in this chapter.
By a few words only is it indicated that the failures of each manwantara
are not absolutely annihilated when they reach “the end of their tether,” but are destined after some enormous period of waiting to pass once more into
the current of evolution. Many inferences may be deduced from this condition
of things. The period of waiting which the failures have thus to undergo,
is to begin with, a duration so stupendous as to baffle the imagination.
The latter half of the fifth round, the whole of the sixth and seventh have
to be performed by the successful graduates in spirituality, and the later
rounds are of immensely longer duration than those of the middle period.
Then follows the vast interval of Nirvanic rest, which closes the manwantara,
the immeasurable Night of Brahmâ, the Pralaya of the whole planetary chain. Only when the next manwantara begins
do the failures begin to wake from their awful trance - awful to the imagination
of beings in the full activity of life, though such a trance, being necessarily
all but destitute of consciousness, is possibly no more tedious than a dreamless
night in the memory of profound sleeper. The fate of the failures may be
grievous first of all, rather on account of what they miss, than on account
of what they incur. Secondly, however, it is grievous on account of that
to which it leads, for all the trouble of physical life and almost endless
incarnations must be gone through afresh, when the failures wake up; whereas
the perfected beings, who outstripped them in evolution during that fifth
round in which they become failures, will have grown into the god-like perfection
of Dhyân Chohan-hood during their trance, and will be the presiding geniuses of the next manwantara, not its helpless
subjects.
Apart
altogether, meanwhile, from what may be regarded as the personal interest
of the entities concerned, the existence of the failures in Nature at the
beginning of each manwantara is a fact which contributes in a very important
degree to a comprehension of the evolutionary system. When the planetary
chain is first of all evolved out of chaos - if we may use such an expression
as “first of all” in a qualified sense, having regard to the reflection that “in the beginning” is a mere façon de parler applied to any period in eternity - there are no failures to deal with. Then
the descent of spirit into matter, through the elemental, mineral, and other
kingdoms, goes on in the way already described in earlier chapters of this
book. But from the second manwantara of a planetary chain, during the activity
of the solar system, which provides for many such manwantaras, the course
of events is somewhat different - easier, if I may again be allowed to use
an expression that is applicable rather in a conversational than severely
scientific sense. At any rate it is quicker, for human entities are already
in existence, ready to enter into incarnation as soon as the world, also
already in existence, can be got ready for them. The truth thus appears to
be, that after the first manwantara of a series - enormously longer in duration
than its successors - no entities, then first evolved from quite the lower
kingdoms, do more than attain the threshold of humanity. The late failures pass into incarnation, and then eventually
the surviving animal entities already differentiated. But, compared with
the passages in the esoteric doctrine which affect the current evolution
of our own race, these considerations, relating to the very early periods
of world-evolution, have little more than an intellectual interest, and cannot
as yet by any contributions of mine be very greatly amplified.
CHAPTER
IX
Buddha
THE
historical Buddha, as known to the custodians of the esoteric doctrine, is
a personage whose birth is not invested with the quaint marvels popular story
has crowded round it. Nor was his progress to adeptship traced by the literal
occurrence of the super-natural struggles depicted in symbolic legend. On
the other hand, the incarnation, which may outwardly be described as the
birth of Buddha, is certainly not regarded by occult science as an event
like any other birth, nor the spiritual development through which Buddha
passed during his earth-life a mere process of intellectual evolution, like
the mental history of any other philosopher. The mistake which ordinary European
writers make in dealing with a problem of this sort, lies in their inclinations
to treat exoteric legend either as a record of a miracle about which no more
need be said, or as pure myth, putting merely a fantastic decoration on a
remarkable life. This, it is assumed, however remarkable, must have been lived according to the theories of
Nature at present accepted by the nineteenth century. The account which has
now been given in the foregoing pages may prepare the way for a statement
as to what the esoteric doctrine teaches concerning the real Buddha, who
was born, as modern investigation has quite correctly ascertained, 643 years
before the Christian era, at Kapila-Vastu, near Benares.
Exoteric
conceptions, knowing nothing of the laws which govern the operations of Nature
in her higher departments, can only explain an abnormal dignity attaching
to some particular birth, by supposing that the physical body of the person
concerned was generated in a miraculous manner. Hence the popular notion
about Buddha, that his incarnation in this world was due to an immaculate
conception. Occult science knows nothing of any process for the production
of a physical human child other than that appointed by physical laws; but
it does know a good deal concerning the limits within which the progressive “one life,” or “spiritual monad,” or continuous thread of a series of incarnations may select a definite child-bodies
as their human tenements. By the operation of Karma, in the case of ordinary
mankind, this selection is made, unconsciously as far as the antecedent spiritual
Ego emerging from Devachan is concerned. But in those abnormal cases where
the one life has already forced itself into the sixth principle - that is
to say, where a man has become an adept, and has the power of guiding his
own spiritual Ego, in full consciousness as to what he is about, after he
has quitted the body in which he won adeptship, either temporarily or permanently
- it is quite within his power to select his own next incarnation. During
life, even, he gets above the Devachanic attraction. He becomes one of the
conscious directing powers of the planetary system to which he belongs, and
great as this mystery of selected re-incarnation may be, it is not by any
means restricted to its application to such extraordinary events as the birth of a Buddha. It is a phenomenon
frequently reproduced by the higher adepts to this day; and while a great
deal recounted in popular Oriental mythology is either purely fictitious
or entirely symbolical, the re-incarnations of the Dalai and Teshu Lamas
of Tibet, at which travelers only laugh for want of the knowledge that might
enable them to sift fact from fancy, is a sober, scientific achievement.
In such cases the adept states beforehand in what child, when and where to
be born, he is going to re-incarnate, and he very rarely fails. We say very
rarely, because there are some accidents of physical nature which cannot
be entirely guarded against; and it is not absolutely certain that, with
all the foresight even an adept may bring to bear upon the matter, the child
he may choose to become - in his re-incarnated state - may attain physical
maturity successfully. And, meanwhile, in the body, the adept is relatively helpless. Out of the body he is just what he has been
ever since he became an adept; but as regards the new body he has chosen
to inhabit, he must let it grow up in the ordinary course of Nature, and
educate it by ordinary processes, and initiate it by the regular occult method
into adeptship, before he has got a body fully ready again for occult work
on the physical plane. All these processes are immensely simplified, it is
true, by the peculiar spiritual force working within; but at first, in the
child's body, the adept soul is certainly cramped and embarrassed, and, as
ordinary imagination might suggest, very uncomfortable and ill at ease. The
situation would be very much misunderstood if the reader were to imagine
that re-incarnation of the kind described is a privilege which adepts avail
themselves of with pleasure.
Buddha’s
birth was a mystery of the kind described, and by the light of what has been
said, it will be easy to go over the popular story of his miraculous origin,
and trace the symbolic references to the facts of the situation in some even
of the most grotesque fables. None, for example, can look less promising,
as an allusion to anything like a scientific fact, than the statement that
Buddha entered the side of his mother as a young white elephant. But the
while elephant is simply the symbol of adeptship - something considered to
be a rare and beautiful specimen of its kind. So with other ante-natal legends
pointing to the fact that the future child's body had been chosen as the
habitation of a great spirit already endowed with superlative wisdom and
goodness. Indra and Brahma came to do homage to the child at his birth -
that is to say, the powers of Nature were already in submission to the Spirit
within him. The thirty-two signs of a Buddha, which legends describe by means of a ludicrous physical symbolism, are
merely the various powers of adeptship.
The
selection of the body known as Siddhartha, and afterwards as Gautama, son
of Suddhodana, of Kapila-Vastu, as the human tenement of the enlightened
human spirit, who had submitted to incarnation for the sake of teaching mankind,
was not one of those rare failures spoken of above; on the contrary, it was a signally
successful choice in all respects, and nothing interfered with the accomplishment
of adeptship by the Buddha in his new body. The popular narrative of his
ascetic struggles and temptations, and of his final attainment of Buddhahood
under the Bo-tree, is nothing more, of course, than the exoteric version
of his initiation.
From
that period onward, his work was of a dual nature; he had to reform and revive
the morals of the populace and the science of the adepts - for adeptship
itself is subject to cyclic changes, and in need of periodical impulses.
The explanation of this branch of the subject, in plain terms, will not alone
be important for its own sake, but will be interesting to all students of
exoteric Buddhism, as elucidating some of the puzzling complications of the
more abstruse “Northern doctrine.”
A
Buddha visits the earth for each of the seven races of the great planetary
period. The Buddha with whom we are occupied was the fourth of the series,
and that is why he stands fourth in the list quoted by Mr Rhys Davids, from
Burnouf - quoted as an illustration of the way the Northern doctrine has
been, as Mr Davids supposes, inflated by metaphysical subtleties and absurdities
crowded round the simple morality which sums up Buddhism as presented to
the populace. The fifth, or Maitreya Buddha, will come after the final disappearance
of the fifth race, and when the sixth race will already have been established
on earth for some hundreds of thousands of years. The sixth will come at
the beginning of the seventh race, and the seventh towards the close of that
race.
This
arrangement will seem, at the first glance, out of harmony with the general
design of human evolution. Here we are, in the middle of the fifth race,
and yet it is the fourth Buddha who has been identified with this race, and
the fifth will not come till the fifth race is practically extinct. The explanation
is to be found, however, in the great outlines of the esoteric cosmogony.
At the beginning of each great planetary period, when obscuration comes to
an end, and the human tide-wave in its progress round the chain of worlds
arrives at the shore of a globe where no humanity has existed for milliards
of years, a teacher is required from the first for the new crop of mankind
about to spring up. Remember that the preliminary evolution of the mineral,
vegetable, and animal kingdoms has been accomplished in preparation for the
new round-period. With the first infusion of the life-current into the “missing link” species, the first race of the new series will begin to evolve. It is then that
the Being, who may be considered the Buddha of the first race, appears. The
Planetary Spirit, or Dhyân Chohan, who is - or, to avoid the suggestion of an erroneous idea by the use
of a singular verb, let us defy grammar, and say, who are - Buddha in all
his or their developments, incarnates among the young, innocent, teachable
fore-runners of the new humanity, and impresses the first broad principles
of right and wrong, and the first truths of the esoteric doctrine on a sufficient
number of receptive minds, to ensure the continued reverberation of the ideas
so implanted through successive generations of men in the millions of years
to come, before the first race shall have completed its course. It is this
advent in the beginning of the round-period of a Divine Being in human form
that starts the ineradicable conception of the anthropomorphic God in all
exoteric religions.
The
first Buddha of the series in which Gautama Buddha stands fourth, is thus
the second incarnation of Avaloketiswara - the mystic name of the hosts of
the Dhyân Chohans or Planetary Spirits belonging to our planetary chain - and though
Gautama is thus the fourth incarnation of enlightenment by exoteric reckoning,
he is really the fifth of the true series, and thus properly belonging to
our fifth race.
Avaloketiswara,
as just stated, is the mystic name of the hosts of the Dhyân Chohans; the proper meaning of the word is manifested wisdom, just as Addi-Buddha
and Amitabha both mean abstract wisdom.
The
doctrine, as quoted by Mr Davids, that “every earthly mortal Buddha has his pure and glorious counterpart in the mystic
world, free from the debasing conditions of this material life - or, rather,
that the Buddha under material conditions is only an appearance, the reflection,
or emanation, or type of a Dhyani Buddha” - is perfectly correct; the number of Dhyani Buddhas, or Dhyân Chohans, or planetary spirits, perfected human spirits of former world-periods,
is infinite, but only five are practically identified in exoteric, and seven
in esoteric, teaching, and this identification, be it remembered, is a manner
of speaking which must not be interpreted too literally, for there is a unity
in the sublime spirit-life in question that leaves no room for the isolation
of individuality. All this will be seen to harmonize perfectly with the revelations
concerning Nature embodied in previous chapters, and need not, in any way,
be attributed to mystic imaginings. The Dhyani Buddhas, or Dhyân Chohans, are the perfected humanity of previous manwantaric epochs, and their collective intelligence is described by the name “Addi Buddha,” which Mr Rhys Davids is mistaken in treating as a comparatively recent invention
of the Northern Buddhists. Addi-Buddha means primordial wisdom, and is mentioned
in the oldest Sanscrit books. For example, in the philosophical dissertation
on the “Mandukya Upanishad,” by Gowdapatha, a Sanscrit author contemporary with Buddha himself, the expression
is freely used and expounded in exact accordance with the present statement.
A friend of mine in India, a Brahmin pundit of first-rate attainments as
a Sanscrit scholar, has shown me a copy of this book, which has never yet,
that he knows of, been translated into English, and has pointed out a sentence
bearing on the present question, giving me the following translation: “Prakriti itself, in fact, is Addi-Buddha, and all the Dharmas have been existing
from eternity.” Gowdapatha is a philosophical writer respected by all Hindoo and Buddhist sects
alike, and widely known. He was the guru, or spiritual teacher, of the first
Sankaracharya, of whom I shall have to speak more at length very shortly.
Adeptship,
when Buddha incarnated, was not the condensed, compact hierarchy that it
has since become under his influence. There has never been an age of the
world without its adepts; but they have sometimes been scattered throughout
the world, they have sometimes been isolated in separate seclusions, they
have gravitated now to this country, now to that; and finally, be it remembered,
their knowledge and power has not always been inspired with the elevated
and severe morality which Buddha infused into its latest and highest organization.
The reform of the occult world by his instrumentality was, in fact, the result
of his great sacrifice, of the self-denial which induced him to reject the
blessed condition of Nirvana to which, after his earth-life as Buddha, he
was fully entitled, and undertake the burden of renewed incarnations in order
to carry out more thoroughly the task he had taken in hand, and confer a
correspondingly increased benefit on mankind. Buddha re-incarnated himself, next after his existence
as Gautama Buddha, in the person of the great teacher of whom but little
is said in exoteric works on Buddhism, but without a consideration of whose
life it would be impossible to get a correct conception of the position in
the Eastern world of esoteric science - namely, Sankaracharya. The latter
part of this name, it may be explained - acharya - merely means teacher.
The whole name as a title is perpetuated to this day under curious circumstances,
but the modern bearers of it are not in the direct line of Buddhist spiritual
incarnations.
Sankaracharya appeared
in India - no attention being paid to his birth, which appears to have taken
place on the Malabar coast - about sixty years after Gautama Buddha’s death - about sixty years after Gautama Buddha’s death. Esoteric teaching is to the effect that Sankaracharya simply was Buddha in all respects, in a new body. This view will not be acceptable to the uninitiated Hindu authorities, who attribute a later date to Sankaracharya’s appearance, and regard him as a wholly independent teacher, even inimical to
Buddhism; but none the less is the statement just made the real opinion of initiates in esoteric science, whether these call themselves Buddhists or Hindus. I have
received the information I am now giving from a Brahmin Adwaiti of Southern
India - not directly from my Tibetan instructor - and all initiated Brahmins,
he assures me, would say the same. Some of the later incarnations of Buddha
are described differently as overshadowings by the spirit of Buddha, but
in the person of Sankaracharya he reappeared on earth. The object he had
in view was to fill up some gaps and repair certain errors in his own previous
teaching; for there is no contention in esoteric Buddhism that even a Buddha
can be absolutely infallible at every moment of his career.
The
position was as follows: - Up to the time of Buddha, the Brahmins of India
had jealously reserved occult knowledge as the appanage of their own caste.
Exceptions were occasionally made in favour of Tshatryas, but the rule was
exclusive in a very high degree. This rule Buddha broke down, admitting all
castes equally to the path of adeptship. The change may have been perfectly
right in principle, but it paved the way for a great deal of trouble, and,
as the Brahmins conceived, for the degradation of occult knowledge itself
- that is to say, its transfer to unworthy hands, not unworthy merely because
of caste inferiority, but because of the moral inferiority which they conceived
to be introduced into the occult fraternity together with brothers of low
birth. The Brahmin contention would not by any means be, that because a man
should be a Brahmin, it followed that he was necessarily virtuous and trustworthy;
but the argument would be: It is supremely necessary to keep out all but the virtuous and trustworthy
from the secrets and powers of initiation. To that end it is necessary not
only to set up all the ordeals, probations, and tests we can think of, but
also to take no candidates except from the class which, on the whole, by
reason of its hereditary advantages, is likely to be the best nursery of
fit candidates.
Later
experience is held on all hands now to have gone far towards vindicating
the Brahmin apprehension, and the next incarnation of Buddha, after that
in the person of Sankaracharya, was a practical admission of this; but meanwhile,
in the person of Sankaracharya, Buddha was engaged in smoothing over, beforehand,
the sectarian strife in India which he saw impending. The active opposition
of the Brahmins against Buddhism began in Asoka’s time, when the great efforts made by that ruler to spread Buddhism provoked
an apprehension on their part in reference to their social and political
ascendency. It must be remembered that initiates are not wholly free in all
cases from the prejudices of their own individualities. They possess some such god-like attributes that outsiders, when they first begin to understand
something of these, are apt to divest them, in imagination, even too completely
of human frailties. Initiation and occult knowledge, held in common, is certainly
a bond of union, among adepts of all nationalities, which is far stronger
than any other bond. But it has been found on more occasions than one to
fail in obliterating all other distinctions. Thus the Buddhist and Brahmin
initiates of the period referred to were by no means of one mind on all questions,
and the Brahmins very decidedly disapproved of the Buddhist reformation in
its exoteric aspects. Chandragupta, Asoka’s grandfather, was an upstart, and the family were Sudras. This was enough to
render his Buddhist policy unattractive to the representatives of the orthodox
Brahmin faith. The struggle assumed a very embittered form, though ordinary
history gives us few or no particulars. The party of primitive Buddhism was
entirely worsted, and the Brahmin ascendency completely re-established in
the time of Vikramaditya, about 80 B.C. But Sankaracharya had traveled all
over India in advance of the great struggle, and had established various mathams, or schools of philosophy, in several important centres. He was only engaged
in this task for a few years, but the influence of his teaching has been
so stupendous that its very magnitude disguises the change wrought. He brought
exoteric Hinduism into practical harmony with the esoteric “wisdom religion,” and left the people amusing themselves still with their ancient mythologies,
but leaning on philosophical guides who were esoteric Buddhists to all intents
and purposes, though in reconciliation with all that was ineradicable in
Brahminism. The great fault of previous exoteric Hinduism lay in its attachment
to vain ceremonial, and its adhesion to idolatrous conceptions of the divinities
of the Hindu Pantheon. Sankaracharya emphasized, by his commentaries on the
Upanishads, and by his original writings, the necessity of pursuing gnyanam in order to obtain moksha - that is to say, the importance of the secret knowledge, to spiritual progress
and the consummation thereof. He was the founder of the Vedantin system -
the proper meaning of Vedanta being the final end or crown of knowledge -
though the sanctions of that system are derived by him from the writings
of Vyasa, the author of the “Mahabharata,” the “Puranas,” and the “Brahmasutras.” I make these statements, the reader will understand, not on the basis of any
researches of my own - which I am not Oriental scholar enough to attempt
- but on the authority of a Brahmin initiate who is himself a first-rate
Sanscrit scholar as well as an occultist.
The
Vedantin school at present is almost co-extensive with Hinduism, making allowance,
of course, for the existence of some special sects, like the Sikhs, the Vallabacharyas,
or Maharajah sect, of very unfair fame, and may be divided into three great
divisions - the Adwaitees, the Vishishta Adwaitees, and the Dwaitees. The
outline of the Adwaitee doctrine is that brahmum or purush, the universal spirit, acts only through prakriti, matter, that everything takes place in this way through the inherent energy
of matter. Brahmum, or Parabrahm, is thus a passive, incomprehensible, unconscious
principle, but the essence, one life, or energy of the universe. In this
way the doctrine is identical with the transcendental materialism of the
adept esoteric Buddhist philosophy. The name Adwaitee signifies not dual, and has reference partly to the non-duality, or unity of the universal spirit,
or Buddhist one life, as distinguished from the notion of its operation through
anthropomorphic emanations; partly to the unity of the universal and the
human spirit. As a natural consequence of this doctrine, the Adwaitees infer
the Buddhist doctrine of Karma, regarding the future destiny of man, as altogether
depending on the causes he himself engenders.
The
Vishishta Adwaitees modify these views by the interpolation of Vishnu as
a conscious deity, the primary emanation of Parabrahm, Vishu being regarded
as a personal god, capable of intervening in the course of human destiny.
They do not regard yog, or spiritual training, as the proper avenue to spiritual achievement, but conceive
this to be possible, chiefly by means of Bhakti, or devoutness. Roughly stated in the phraseology of European theology, the
Adwaitee may thus be said to believe only in salvation by works, the Vishishta
Adwaitee in salvation by grace. The Dwaitee differs but little from the Vishishta
Adwaitee, merely affirming, by the designation he assumes, with increased
emphasis the duality of the human spirit and the highest principle of the
universe, and including many ceremonial observances as an essential part
of Bhakti.
But
all these differences of view, it must be borne in mind, have to do merely
with the exoteric variations on the fundamental idea, introduced by different
teachers with varying impressions as to the capacity of the populace for
assimilating transcendental ideas. All leaders of Vedantin thought look up
to Sankaracharva and the mathams he established with the greatest possible
reverence, and their inner faith runs up in all cases into the one esoteric
doctrine. In fact the initiates of all schools in India interlace with one
another. Except as regards nomenclature, the whole system of cosmogony, as
held by the Buddhist-Arhats, and as set forth in this volume, is equally
held by initiated Brahmins, and has been equally held by them since before
Buddha’s birth. Whence did they obtain it? the reader may ask. Their answer would be
from the Planetary Spirit, or Dhyân Chohan, who first visited this planet at the dawn of the human race in the
present round-period - more millions of years ago than I like to mention
on the basis of conjecture, while the real exact number is withheld.
Sankaracharya
founded four principal mathams, one at Sringari, in Southern India, which
has always remained the most important; one at Juggernath, in Orissa; one
at Dwaraka, in Kathiawar; and one at Gungotri, on the slopes of the Himalayas
in the North. The chief of the Sringari temple has always borne the designation
Sankaracharya, in addition to some individual name. From these four centres
others have been established, and mathams now exist all over India, exercising
the utmost possible influence on Hinduism.
I
have said that Buddha, by his third incarnation, recognized the fact that
he had, in the excessive confidence of his loving trust in the perfectibility
of humanity, opened the doors of the occult sanctuary too widely. His third
appearance was in the person of Tsong-ka-pa, the great Tibetan adept reformer
of the fourteenth century. In this personality he was exclusively concerned
with the affairs of the adept fraternity, by that time collecting chiefly
in Tibet.
From
time immemorial there had been a certain secret region in Tibet, which to
this day is quite unknown to and unapproachable by any but initiated persons,
and inaccessible to the ordinary people of the country as to any others,
in which adepts have always congregated. But the country generally was not
in Buddha’s time, as it has since become, the chosen habitation of the great brotherhood.
Much more than they are at present, were the Mahatmas in former times, distributed
about the world. The progress of civilization, engendering the magnetism
they find so trying, had, however, by the date with which we are now dealing
- the fourteenth century - already given rise to a very general movement
towards Tibet on the part of the previously dissociated occultists. Far more
widely than was held to be consistent with the safety of mankind was occult
knowledge and power then found to be disseminated. To the task of putting
it under the control of a rigid system of rule and law did Tsong-ka-pa address
himself.
Without
re-establishing the system on the previous unreasonable basis of caste exclusiveness,
he elaborated a code of rules for the guidance of the adepts, the effect
of which was to weed out of the occult body all but those who sought occult
knowledge in a spirit of the most sublime devotion to the highest moral principles.
An
article in the Theosophist for March, 1882, on “Re-incarnations in Tibet,” for the complete trustworthiness of which in all its mystic bearings I have
the highest assurance, gives a great deal of important information about
the branch of the subject with which we are now engaged, and the relations
between esoteric Buddhism and Tibet, which cannot be examined too closely
by any one who desires an exhaustive comprehension of Buddhism in its real
signification.
“The
regular system,” we read, “of the Lamaic incarnations of ‘Sangyas’ (or Buddha) began with Tsong-kha-pa. This reformer is not the incarnation of
one of the five celestial Dhyanis or heavenly Buddhas, as is generally supposed,
said to have been created by Sakya Muni after he had risen to Nirvana, but
that of Amita, one of the Chinese names for Buddha. The records preserved
in the Gon-pa (lamasery) of Tda-shi Hlum-po (spelt by the English Teshu Lumbo) show that Sangyas incarnated himself in Tsong-kha-pa in consequence of the
great degradation his doctrines had fallen into. Until then there had been
no other incarnations than those of the five celestial Buddhas, and of their
Boddhisatvas, each of the former having created (read, overshadowed with
his spiritual wisdom) five of the last named . . . . . It was because, among
many other reforms, Tsong-kha-pa forbade necromancy (which is practiced to
this day with the most disgusting rites by the Bhöns - the aborigines of Tibet, with whom the Red Caps or Shammars had always fraternized)
that the latter resisted his authority. This act was followed by a split
between the two sects. Separating entirely from the Gyalukpas, the Dugpas
(Red Caps), from the first in a great minority, settled in various parts
of Tibet, chiefly its border-lands, and principally in Nepaul and Bhootan.
But, while they retained a sort of independence at the monastery of Sakia-Djong,
the Tibetan residence of their spiritual (?) chief, Gong-sso Rimbo-chay,
the Bhootanese have been from their beginning the tributaries and vassals
of the Dalai Lamas.
“The
Tda-shi Lamas were always more powerful and more highly considered than the
Dalai Lamas. The latter are the creation of the Tda-shi Lama, Nabang-lob-sang,
the sixth incarnation of Tsong-kha-pa, himself an incarnation of Amitabha
or Buddha.”
Several
writers on Buddhism have entertained a theory, which Mr Clements Markham
formulates very fully in his “Narrative of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet,” that whereas the original Scriptures of Buddhism were taken to Ceylon by the
son of Asoka, the Buddhism which found its way into Tibet from India and
China was gradually overlaid with a mass of dogma and metaphysical speculation.
And Professor Max Müller says: - “The most important element in the Buddhist reform has always been its social
and moral code, not its metaphysical theories. That moral code, taken by
itself, is one of the most perfect which the world has ever known; and it
was this blessing that the introduction of Buddhism brought into Tibet.”
“The
blessing,” says the authoritative article in the Theosophist, from which I have just been quoting, “has remained and spread all over the country, there being no kinder, purer-minded,
more simple, or sin-fearing nation than the Tibetans. But for all that, the
popular lamaism, when compared with the real esoteric, or Arahat, Buddhism
of Tibet, offers a contrast as great at the snow trodden along a road in
the valley to the pure and undefiled mass which glitters on the top of a
high mountain peak.”
The
fact is, that Ceylon is saturated with exoteric, and Tibet with esoteric,
Buddhism. Ceylon concerns itself merely or mainly with the morals, Tibet,
or rather the adepts of Tibet, with the science, of Buddhism.
These
explanations constitute but a sketch of the whole position. I do not possess
the arguments nor the literary leisure which would be required for its amplification
into a finished picture of the relations which really subsist between the
inner principles of Hinduism and those of Buddhism. And I am quite alive
to the possibility that many learned and painstaking students of the subject
will have formed, as the consequences of prolonged and erudite research,
conclusions with which the explanations I am now enabled to give, may seem
at first sight to conflict. But none the less are these explanations directly
gathered from authorities to whom the subject is no less familiar in its
scholarly than in its esoteric aspect. And their inner knowledge throws a
light upon the whole position which wholly exempts them from the danger of
misconstruing texts and mistaking the bearings of obscure symbology. To know
when Gautama Buddha was born, what is recorded of his teaching, and what popular legends have gathered round
his biography, is to know next to nothing of the real Buddha, so much greater
than either the historical moral teacher, or the fantastic demigod of tradition.
And it is only when we have comprehended the link between Buddhism and Brahaminism
that the greatness of the esoteric doctrine rises into its true proportions.
CHAPTER
X
Nirvana
A COMPLETE assimilation
of esoteric teaching up to the point we have now reached will enable
us to approach the consideration of the subject which exoteric writers
on Buddhism have generally treated as the doctrinal starting-point
of that religion.
Hitherto, for want of any
better method of seeking out the true meaning of Nirvana, Buddhist
scholars have generally picked the world to pieces, and examined its
roots and fragments. One might as hopefully seek to ascertain the
smell of a flower by dissecting the paper on which its picture was
painted. It is difficult for minds schooled in the intellectual processes
of physical research - as all our Western nineteenth-century minds
are, directly or indirectly - to comprehend the first spiritual state
above this life, that of Devachan. Such conditions of existence are
but partly for the understanding, a higher faculty must be employed
to realize them, and all the more is it possible to force their meaning
upon another mind by words. It is by first awakening that higher faculty
in his pupil, and then putting the pupil in a position to observe
for himself, that the regular occult teacher proceeds in such a matter.
Now there are the usual
seven states of Devachan, suited to the different degrees of spiritual
enlightenment which the various candidates for that condition may
obtain; there are rûpa and arûpa locas
in Devachan - that is to say, states which take (subjective) consciousness
of
form and states which transcend these again. And yet the highest Devachanic
state in arûpa loca is not to be compared to that wonderful
condition of pure spirituality which is spoken of as Nirvana.
In
the ordinary course of Nature during a round, when the spiritual monad has accomplished
the tremendous journey from the first planet to the seventh, and has
finished for the time being its existence there - finished all its
multifarious existences there, with their respective periods of Devachan
between each - the Ego passes into a spiritual condition, different
from the Devachanic state, in which, for periods of inconceivable
duration, it rests before resuming its circuit of the worlds. That
condition may be regarded as the Devachan of its Devachanic states
- a sort of review thereof - a superior state to those reviewed, just
as the Devachanic state belonging to any one existence on earth is
a superior state to that of the half-developed spiritual aspirations
or impulses of affection of the earth-life. That period - that intercyclic
period of extraordinary exaltation, as compared to any that have gone
before, as compared even with the subjective conditions of the planets
in the ascending arc, so greatly superior to our own as these are
- is spoken of in esoteric science as a state of partial Nirvana.
Carrying on imagination through immeasurable vistas of the future,
we must next conceive ourselves approaching the period which would
correspond to the intercyclic period of the seventh round of humanity,
in which men have become as gods. The very last, most elevated, and
glorious of the objective lives having been completed, the perfected
spiritual being reaches a condition in which a complete recollection
of all lives lived at any time in the past returns to him. He can
look back over the curious masquerade of objective existences, as
it will seem to him then, over the minutest details of any of these
earth-lives among the number through which he has passed, and can
cognizance of them and of all things with which they were in any way
associated, for in regard to this planetary chain he has reached omniscience.
This supreme development of individuality is the great reward which
Nature reserves not only for those who secure it prematurely, so to
speak, by the relatively brief, but desperate and terrible struggles
which lead to adeptship, but also for all who, by the distinct preponderance
of good over evil in the character of the whole series of their incarnations,
have passed through the valley of the shadow of death in the middle
of the fifth round, and have worked their way up to it in the sixth
and seventh rounds.
This sublimely blessed
state is spoken of in esoteric science as the threshold of Nirvana.
Is it worth while to go
any further in speculation as to what follows? One may be told that
no state of individual consciousness, even though but a phase of feeling
already identified in a large measure with the general consciousness
on that level of existence, can be equal in spiritual elevation to
absolute consciousness in which all sense of individuality is merged
in the whole. We may use such phrases as intellectual counters, but
for no ordinary mind - dominated by its physical brain and brain-born
intellect - can they have a living signification.
All
that words can convey is that Nirvana is a sublime state of conscious rest
in omniscience.
It would be ludicrous, after all that has gone before, to turn to
the various discussions which have been carried on by students of
exoteric Buddhism as to whether Nirvana does or does not mean annihilation.
Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with which the
graduates of esoteric science regard such a question. Does the last
penalty of the law mean the highest honour of the peerage? Is a wooden
spoon the emblem of the most illustrious pre-eminence in learning?
Such questions as these but faintly symbolize the extravagance of
the question whether Nirvana is held by Buddhism to be equivalent
to annihilation. And in some, to us inconceivable, way the state of
para-Nirvana is spoken of as immeasurably higher than that of Nirvana.
I do not pretend myself to attach any meaning to the statement, but
it may serve to show what a very transcendental realm of thought the
subject belongs.
A great deal of confusion
of mind respecting Nirvana has arisen from statements made concerning
Buddha. He is said to have attained Nirvana while on earth; he is
also said to have foregone Nirvana, in order to submit to renewed
incarnations for the good of humanity. The two statements are quite
reconcilable. As a great adept, Buddha naturally attained
to that which is the great achievement of adeptship on earth, - the
passing of his own Ego-spirit into the ineffable condition of Nirvana.
Let it not be supposed that for any adept such a passage is one that
can be lightly undertaken. Only stray hints about the nature of this
great mystery have reached me, but, putting these together, I believe
I am right in saying that the achievement in question is one which
only some of the high initiates are qualified to attempt, which exacts
a total suspension of animation in the body for periods of time compared
to which the longest cataleptic trances known to ordinary science
are insignificant, the protection of the physical frame from natural
decay during this period by means which the resources of occult science
are strained to accomplish; and withal it is a process involving a
double risk to the continued earthly life of the person who undertakes
it. One of these risks is the doubt whether, when once Nirvana is
attained, the Ego will be willing to return. That the return will
be a terrible effort and sacrifice is certain, and will only be prompted
by the most devoted attachment, on the part of the spiritual traveler,
to the idea of duty in its purest abstraction. The second great risk
is that allowing the sense of duty to predominate over the temptation
to stay, a temptation, be it remembered, that is not weakened by the
notion that any conceivable penalty can attach to it - even then it
is always doubtful whether the traveler will be able to return. In
spite of all this, however, there have been many other adepts besides
Buddha who have made the great passage, and for whom those about them
at such times have said the return to their prison of ignoble flesh,
- though so noble ex hypothesi compared to most such tenements,
- has left them paralyzed with depression for weeks. To begin the
weary round of physical life again, to stoop to earth after having
been in Nirvana, is too dreadful a collapse.
Buddha’s
renunciation was in some inexplicable manner greater again, because he not
merely returned
from Nirvana for duty’s sake, to finish the earth-life in which he
was engaged as Gautama Buddha, but when all the claims of duty had
been fully satisfied, and his right of passage into Nirvana for incalculable æons entirely earned under the most enlarged view of his earthly
mission, he gave up that reward, or rather postponed it for an indefinite
period, to undertake a supererogatory series of incarnations for the
sake of humanity at large. How is humanity being benefited by this
renunciation? it may be asked. But the question can only be suggested
in reality by that deep-seated habit, we have most of us acquired,
of estimating benefit by a physical standard, and even in regard to
this standard of taking very short views of human affairs. No one
will have followed me through the foregoing chapter on the Progress
of Humanity without perceiving what kind of benefit it would be that
Buddha would wish to confer on men. That which is necessarily for
him the great question in regard to humanity, is how to help as many
people as possible across the great critical period of the fifth round.
Until
that time everything is a mere preparation for the supreme struggle, in the
estimation
of an adept, all the more of a Buddha. The material welfare of the
existing generation is not even as dust in the balance of such a calculation;
the only thing of importance at present is, to cultivate those tendencies
in mankind which may launch as many Egos as possible upon such a Karmic
path that the growth of their spirituality in future births will be
promoted. Certainly it is the fixed conviction of esoteric teachers
- of the adept co-workers with Buddha - that the very process of cultivating
such spirituality will immensely reduce the sum of even transitory
human sorrow. And the happiness of mankind, even in any one generation
only, is by no means a matter on which esoteric science looks with
indifference. So the esoteric policy is not to be considered as something
so hopelessly up in the air that it will never concern any of us who
are living now. But there are seasons of good and bad harvest for
wheat and barley, and so also for the desired growth of spirituality
amongst men; and in Europe, at all events, going by the experience
of former great races, at periods of development corresponding to
that of our own now, the great present uprush of intelligence in the
direction of physical and material progress is not likely to bring
on a season of good harvests for progress of the other kind. For the
moment the best chance of doing good in countries where the uprush
referred to is most marked, is held to lie in the possibility that
the importance of spirituality may come to be perceived by intellect,
even in advance of being felt, if the attention of that keen though
unsympathetic tribunal can but be secured. Any success in that direction
to which these explanations may conduce, will justify the views of
those - but a minority - among the esoteric guardians of humanity
who have conceived that it is worth while to have them made.
So Nirvana is truly the
key-note of esoteric Buddhism, as of the hitherto rather misdirected
studies of external scholars. The great end of the whole stupendous
evolution of humanity is to cultivate human souls so that they shall
be ultimately fit for that as yet inconceivable condition. The great
triumph of the present race of planetary spirits who have reached
that condition themselves, will be to draw thither as many more Egos
as possible. We are far as yet from the era at which we may be in
serious danger of disqualifying ourselves definitively for such progress,
but it is not too soon even now to begin the great process of qualification,
all the more as the Karma which will propagate itself through successive
lives in that direction will carry its own reward with it, so that
an enlightened pursuit of our highest interests, in the very remote
future, will coincide with the pursuit of our immediate welfare in
the next Devachanic period, and the next rebirth.
Will it be argued that
if the cultivation of spirituality is the great purpose to be followed,
it matters little whether men pursue it along one religious pathway
or another? This is a mistake which, as explained in a former chapter,
Buddha, as Sankaracharya, set himself especially to combat - viz the
early Hindu belief that moksha can be attained by bhakti
irrespective of gnyanam - that is, that salvation is obtainable
by devout practices irrespective of knowledge of eternal truth. The
sort of salvation we are talking about now is not escape from a penalty,
to be achieved by cajoling a celestial potentate - it is a positive
and not a negative achievement - the ascent into regions of spiritual
elevation so exalted that the candidate aiming at them is claiming
that which we ordinarily describe as omniscience. Surely it is plain,
from the way Nature habitually works, that under no circumstances
will a time ever come when a person, merely by reason of having been
good, will suddenly become wise. The supreme goodness and wisdom
of the sixth-round man, who, once becoming that, will assimilate by
degrees the attributes of divinity itself, can only be grown by degrees
themselves, and goodness alone, associated, as we so often find it,
with the most grotesque religious beliefs, cannot conduct a man to
more than Devachanic periods of devout but unintelligent rapture,
and in the end, if similar conditions are reproduced through many
existences, to some painless extinction of individuality at the great
crisis.
It
is by a steady pursuit of, and desire for, real spiritual truth, not by an
idle, however
well-meaning acquiescence in the fashionable dogmas of the nearest
church, that men launch their souls into the subjective state, prepared
to imbibe real knowledge from the latent omniscience of their own
sixth principles, and to re-incarnate in due time with impulses in
the same direction. Nothing can produce more disastrous effects on
human progress, as regards the destiny of individuals, than the very
prevalent notion that one religion followed out in a pious spirit,
is as good as another, and that if such and such doctrines are perhaps
absurd when you look into them, the great majority of good people
will never think of their absurdity, but will recite them in a blamelessly
devoted attitude of mind. One religion is by no means as good as another,
even if all were productive of equally blameless lives. But I prefer
to avoid all criticism of specific faiths, leaving this volume a simple
and inoffensive statement of the real inner doctrines of the one great
religion of the world which -presenting as it does in its external
aspects a bloodless and innocent record - has thus been really productive
of blameless lives throughout its whole existence. Moreover, it would
not be by a servile acceptance even if its doctrines that the development
of true spirituality is to be cultivated. It is by the disposition
to seek truth, to test and examine all which presents itself as claiming
belief, that the great result is to be brought about. In the East,
such a resolution in the highest degree leads to chelaship, to the
pursuit of truth, knowledge, by the development of inner faculties
by means of which it may be cognized with certainty. In the west,
the realm of intellect, as the world is mapped out at present, truth
unfortunately can only be pursued and hunted out with the help of
many words and much wrangling and disputation. But at all events it
may be hunted, and, if it is not finally captured, the chase on the
part of the hunters will have engendered instincts that will propagate
themselves and lead to results hereafter.
CHAPTER XI
The
Universe
IN all Oriental literature
bearing on the constitution of the cosmos, frequent reference is made
to the days and the nights of Brahmâ; the in-breathings and the out-breathings
of the creative principle, the periods of manvantara, [As transliterated
into English, this word may be written either manwantara
or manvantara; and the proper pronunciation is something
between the two, with the accent on the second syllable.] and the
periods of pralaya. This idea runs into various Eastern mythologies,
but in its symbolical aspects we need not follow it here. The process
in Nature to which it refers is of course the alternate succession
of activity and repose that is observable at every step of the great
ascent from the infinitely small to the infinitely great. Man has
a manvantara and pralaya every four-and-twenty hours, his periods
of waking and sleeping; vegetation follows the same rule from year
to year as it subsides and revives with the seasons. The world, too,
has its manvantaras and pralayas, when the tide-wave of humanity approaches
its shore, runs through the evolution of its seven races, and ebbs
away again, and such a manvantara has been treated by most exoteric
religions as the whole cycle of eternity.
The major manvantara of our planetary
chain is that which comes to an end when the last Dhyân Chohan of the seventh
round of perfected humanity passes into Nirvana. And the expression has thus
to be regarded as one of considerable elasticity. It may be said indeed to have
infinite elasticity, and that is one explanation of the confusion which has
reigned in all treatises on Eastern religions in their popular aspects. All
the root-words transferred to popular literature from the secret doctrine have
a seven-fold significance at least, for the initiate, while the uninitiated
reader, naturally supposing that one word means one thing, and trying always
to clear up its meaning by collating its various applications, and striking
an average, gets into the most hopeless embarrassment.
The planetary chain with
which we are concerned is not the only one which has our sun as its
centre. As there are other planets besides the earth in our chain,
so there are other chains besides this in our solar system. There
are seven such, and there comes a time when all these go into pralaya
together. This is spoken of as solar pralaya, and within the interval
between two such pralayas, the vast solar manvantara covers seven
pralayas and manvantaras of our - and each other - planetary chain.
Thought is baffled, say even the adepts, in speculating as to how
many of our solar pralayas must come before the great cosmic night
in which the whole universe, in its collective enormity, obeys what
is manifestly the universal law of activity and repose, and with all
its myriad systems passes itself into pralaya. But even that tremendous
result, says esoteric science, must surely come.
After the pralaya of a
single planetary chain there is no necessity for a recommencement
of evolutionary activity absolutely de novo. There is only
a resumption of arrested activity. The vegetable and animal kingdoms,
which at the end of the last corresponding manvantara had reached
only a partial development, are not destroyed. Their life or vital
energy passes through a night, or period of rest; they also have,
so to speak, a Nirvana of their own, as why should they not, these
fœtal and infant entities? They are all, like ourselves, begotten
of the one element. As we have our Dhyân Chohans, so have they in
their several kingdoms elemental guardians, and are as well taken
care of in the mass as humanity is in the mass. The one element not
only fills and is space, but interpenetrates every atom of
cosmic matter.
When, however, the hour
of the solar pralaya strikes, though the process of man’s advance
on his last seventh round is precisely the same as usual, each planet,
instead of merely passing out of the visible into the invisible, as
he quits it in turn, is annihilated. With the beginning of the seventh
round of the seventh planetary chain manvantara, every kingdom having
now reached its last cycle, there remains on each planet, after the
exit of man, merely the mâyâ of once living and existing
forms. With every step he takes on the descending and ascending arcs,
as he moves on from globe to globe, the planet left behind becomes
an empty chrysaloidal case. At his departure there is an outflow from
every kingdom of its entities. Waiting to pass into higher forms in
due time, they are nevertheless liberated, and to the day of the next
evolution they will rest in their lethargic sleep in space, until
brought into life again at the new solar manvantara. The old elementals
will rest till they are called on to become in their turn the bodies
of mineral, vegetable, and animal entities on another and a higher
chain of globes on their way to become human entities, while the germinal
entities of the lowest forms - and at that time there will remain
but few of such - will hang in space like drops of water suddenly
turned into icicles. They will thaw at the first hot breath of the
new solar manvantara, and form the soul of the future globes. The
slow development of the vegetable kingdom, up to the period we are
now dealing with, will have been provided for by the longer interplanetary
rest of man. When the solar pralaya comes, the whole purified humanity
merges into Nirvana, and from that intersolar Nirvana will be reborn
in the higher systems. The strings of worlds are destroyed, and vanish
like a shadow from the wall when the light is extinguished. “We have
every indication,” say the adepts, “that at this very moment such
a solar pralaya is taking place, while there are two minor ones ending
somewhere.”
At the beginning of the
new solar manvantara the hitherto subjective elements of the material
worlds, now scattered in cosmic dust, receiving their impulse from
the new Dhyân Chohans of the new solar system (the highest of the
old ones having gone higher), will form into primordial ripples of
life, and, separating into differentiating centres of activity, combine
in a graduated scale of seven stages of evolution. Like every other
orb of space, our earth has, before obtaining its ultimate materiality,
to pass through a gamut of seven stages of density. Nothing in this
world now can give us an idea of what that ultimate stage of materiality
is like. The French astronomer Flammarion, in a book called La
Résurrection et la Fin des Mondes, has approached a conception
of this ultimate materiality. The facts are, I am informed, with slight
modifications, much as he surmises. In consequence of what he treats
as secular refrigeration, but which more truly is old age and loss
of vital power, the solidification and desication of the earth at
last reaches a point when the whole globe becomes a relaxed conglomerate.
Its period of child-bearing has gone by; its progeny are all nurtured;
its term of life is finished. Hence its constituent masses cease to
obey those laws of cohesion and aggregation which held them together.
And becoming like a corpse, which, abandoned to the work of destruction,
leaves each molecule composing it free to separate itself from the
body, and obey in future the sway of new influences, “the attraction
of the moon,” suggests M. Flammarion, “would itself undertake the
task of demolition by producing a tidal wave of earth particles instead
of an aqueous tide.” This last idea must not be regarded as countenanced
by occult science except so far as it may serve to illustrate the
loss of molecular cohesion in the material of the earth.
Occult physics pass fairly into the
region of metaphysics, if we seek to obtain some indication of the way in which
evolution recommences after a universal pralaya.
The one eternal, imperishable
thing in the universe, which universal pralayas themselves pass over
without destroying, is that which may be regarded indifferently as
space, duration, matter or motion; not as something having these four
attributes, but as something which is these four things at
once and always. And evolution takes its rise in the atomic polarity
which motion engenders. In cosmogony the positive and the negative,
or the active and the passive, forces correspond to the male and female
principles. The spiritual efflux enters into the veil of cosmic matter;
the active is attracted by the passive principle, and if we may here
assist imagination by having recourse to old occult symbology - the
great Nag - the serpent emblem of eternity, attracts its tail to its
mouth, forming thereby the circle of eternity, or rather cycles in
eternity. The one and chief attribute of the universal spiritual principle,
the unconscious but ever active life-giver, is to expand and shed;
that of the universal material principle is to gather in and fecundate.
Unconscious and non-existing when separate, they become consciousness
and life when brought together. The word Brahmâ comes from the Sanscrit
root brih, to expand, grow, or fructify, esoteric cosmogony
being but the vivifying expansive force of Nature in its eternal evolution.
No one expression can have contributed more to mislead the human mind
in basic speculation concerning the origin of things than the word
“creation.” Talk of creation, and we are continually butting against
the facts. But once realize that our planet and ourselves are no more
creations than an iceberg, but states of being for a given time -
that their present appearance, geological or anthropological, is transitory
and but a condition concomitant of that stage of evolution at which
they have arrived - and the way has been prepared for correct thinking.
Then we are enabled to see what is meant by the one and only principle
or element in the universe, and by the treatment of that element as
androgynous; also by the proclamation of Hindu philosophy that all
things are but Mâyâ - transitory states - except the one
element which rests during the maha-pralayas only - the nights of
Brahmâ.
Perhaps we have now plunged
deeply enough into the fathomless mystery of the great First Cause.
It is no paradox to say that, simply by reason of ignorance, do ordinary
theologians think they know so much about God. And it is no exaggeration
to say that the wondrously endowed representatives of occult science,
whose mortal nature has been so far elevated and purified that their
perceptions range over other worlds and other states of existence,
and commune directly with beings as much greater than ordinary mankind,
as man is greater than the insects of the field, it is the mere truth
that they never occupy themselves at all with any conception remotely
resembling the God of churches and creeds. Within the limits of the
solar system, the mortal adept knows, of his own knowledge, that all
things are accounted for by the law, working on matter in its diverse
forms, plus the guiding and modifying influence of the highest
intelligences associated with the solar system, the Dhyân Chohans,
the perfected humanity of the last preceding manvantara. These Dhyân
Chohans, or Planetary Spirits, on whose nature it is almost fruitless
to ponder, until one can at least realize the nature of disembodied
existence in one’s own case, impart to the reawakening worlds at the
end of a planetary chain pralaya such impulses that evolution feels
them throughout its whole progress. The limits of Nature’s great law
restrain their action. They cannot say, let there be paradise throughout
space, let all men be born supremely wise and good; they can only
work through the principle of evolution, and they cannot deny to any
man who is to be invested with the potentiality of development himself
into a Dhyân Chohan, the right to do evil, if he prefers that to good.
Nor can they prevent evil, if done, from producing suffering. Objective
life is the soil in which the life-germs are planted; spiritual existence
(the expression being used, remember, in contrast merely to grossly
material existence) is the flower to be ultimately obtained. But the
human germ is something more than a flower seed; it has liberty of
choice in regard to growing up or growing down, and it could not be
developed without such liberty being exercised by the plant. This
is the necessity of evil. But within the limits that logical necessity
prescribes, the Dhyân Chohan impresses his conceptions upon the evolutionary
tide, and comprehends the origin of all that he beholds.
Surely
as we ponder in this way over the magnitude of the cyclic evolution with which
esoteric science is in this
way engaged, it seems reasonable to postpone considerations as to the origin
of the whole cosmos. The ordinary man in this earth-life, with many, certainly
some hundred, earth-lives to come, and their very much more important inter-incarnation
periods (more important, that is, as regards duration and the prospect of happiness
or sorrow) also in prospect, may surely be most wisely occupied with the inquiries
whose issue will affect practical results, than with speculation in which he
is practically quite uninterested. Of course, from the point of view of religious
speculation resting on no positive knowledge of anything beyond this life,
nothing
can be more important or more highly practical than conjectures as to the attributes
and probable intentions of the terrible, personal Jehovah, pictured as an omnipotent
tribunal, into whose presence the soul at its death is to be introduced for
judgement. But scientific knowledge of spiritual things throws back the day
of judgement into a very dim perspective, the intervening period being filled
with activity of all kinds. Moreover, it shows mankind that certainly, for
millions
and millions of centuries to come, it will not be confronted with any judge
at all, other than that all-pervading judge, that Seventh Principle, or Universal
Spirit, which exists everywhere, and, operating on matter, provokes the existence
of man himself, and the world in which he lives, and the future conditions
towards
which he is pressing. The Seventh Principle, undefinable, incomprehensible
for us at our present stage of enlightenment, is of course the only God recognized
by esoteric knowledge, and no personification of this can be otherwise than
symbolical.
And yet, in truth, esoteric knowledge,
giving life and reality to ancient symbolism in one direction, as often as it
conflicts with modern dogma in the other, shows how far from absolutely fabulous
are even the most anthropomorphic notions of Deity associated by exoteric tradition
with the beginning of the world. The Planetary Spirit, actually incarnated among
men in the first round, was the prototype of personal deity in all subsequent
developments of the idea. The mistake made by uninstructed men in dealing with
the idea is merely one of degree. The personal God of an insignificant minor
manvantara has been taken for the creator of the whole cosmos, a most natural
mistake for people forced, by knowing no more of human destiny than was included
in one objective incarnation, to suppose that all beyond was a homogeneous spiritual
future. The God of this life, of course, for them, was the God of all lives
and worlds and periods.
The reader will not misunderstand
me, I trust, to mean that esoteric science regards the Planetary Spirit
of the first round as a god. As I say, it is concerned with the working
of Nature in an immeasurable space, from an immeasurable past, and
all through immeasurable future. The enormous areas of time and space
in which our solar system operates is explorable by the mortal
adepts of esoteric science. Within those limits they know all that
takes place, and how it takes place, and they know that everything
is accounted for by the constructive will of the collective host of
the Planetary Spirits, operating under the law of evolution that pervades
all Nature. They commune with these Planetary Spirits, and learn from
them that the law of this, is the law of other solar systems as well,
into the regions of which the perceptive faculties of the Planetary
Spirits can plunge as the perceptive faculties of the adepts themselves
can plunge into the life of other planets of this chain. The law of
alternating activity and repose is operating universally; for the
whole cosmos, even though at unthinkable intervals, pralaya must succeed
manvantara, and manvantara, pralaya.
Will
any one ask to what end does this eternal succession work? Is it better to
confine the
question to a single system, and as to what end does the original
nebula arrange itself in planetary vortices of evolution, and develop
worlds in which the universal spirit, reverberating through matter,
produces form and life and those higher states of matter in which
that which we call subjective or spiritual existence is provided for.
Surely it is end enough to satisfy any reasonable mind that such sublimely
perfected beings as the Planetary Spirits themselves come thus into
existence, and live a conscious life of supreme knowledge and felicity,
through vistas of time which are equivalent to all we can imagine
of eternity. Into this unutterable greatness every living thing has
the opportunity of passing ultimately. The Spirit which is in every
animated form, and which has even worked up into these, from forms
we are generally in the habit of calling inanimate, will slowly but
certainly progress onwards until the working of its untiring influence
in matter has evolved a human soul. It does not follow that the plants
and animals around us have any principle evolved in them as yet which
will assume a human form in the course of the present manvantara;
but though the course of an incomplete evolution may be suspended
by a period of natural repose, it is not rendered abortive. Eventually
every spiritual monad - itself a sinless unconscious principle, will
work through conscious forms on lower levels, until these, throwing
off one after another higher and higher forms, will produce that in
which the God-like consciousness may be fully evoked. Certainly it
is not by reason of the grandeur of any human conceptions as to what
would be an adequate reason for the existence of the universe, that
such a consummation can appear an insufficient purpose, not even if
the final destiny of the planetary spirit himself, after periods to
which his development from the mineral forms of primæval worlds
is but a childhood in the recollection of the man, is to merge his
glorified individuality into that sum total of all consciousness,
which esoteric metaphysics treat as absolute consciousness, which
is non-consciousness. These paradoxical expressions are simply counters
representing ideas that the human mind is not qualified to apprehend,
and it is waste of time to haggle over them.
These
considerations supply the key to esoteric Buddhism, a more direct outcome of
the universal
esoteric doctrine than any other popular religion, for the effort
in its construction has been to make men love virtue for its own sake
and for its good effect on their future incarnations, not to keep
them in subjection to any priestly system or dogma by terrifying their
fancy with the doctrine of a personal judge waiting to try them for
more than their lives at their death. Mr Lillie is mistaken, admirable
as his intention has been, and sympathetic as his mind evidently is
with the beautiful morality and aspiration of Buddhism, in deducing
from its Temple ritual the notion of a Personal God. No such conception
enters into the great esoteric doctrine of Nature, of which this volume
has furnished an imperfect sketch. Not even in reference to the farthest
regions of the immensity beyond our own planetary system, does the
adept exponent of the esoteric doctrine tolerate the adoption of an
agnostic attitude. It will not suffice for him to say, “As far as
the elevated senses of planetary spirits, whose cognition extends
to the outermost limits of the starry heavens - as far as their vision
can extend, Nature is self-sufficing; as to what may lie beyond, we
offer no hypothesis.” What the adept really says on this head is,
“The universe is boundless, and it is a stultification of thought
to talk of any hypothesis setting in beyond the boundless - on the
other side of the limits of the limitless.”
That
which antedates every manifestation of the universe, and would lie beyond the
limit of manifestation,
if such limits could ever be found, is that which underlies the manifested
universe within our own purview - matter animated by motion, its Parabrahm
or Spirit. Matter, space, motion, and duration, constitute one and
the same eternal substance of the universe. There is nothing else
eternal absolutely. That is the first state of matter, itself perfectly
uncognizable by physical senses, which deal with manifested matter,
another state altogether. But though thus in one sense of the word
materialistic, the esoteric doctrine, as any reader of the foregoing
explanations will have seen, is as far from resembling the gross narrow-minded
conception of Nature, which ordinary goes by the name of Materialism,
as the North Pole looks away from the South. It stoops to Materialism,
as it were, to link its methods with the logic of that system, and
ascends to the highest realms of idealism, to embrace and expound
the most exalted aspirations of Spirit. As it cannot be too frequently
or earnestly repeated - it is the union of Science and Religion -
the bridge by which the most acute and cautious pursuers of experimental
knowledge may cross over to the most enthusiastic devotee, by means
of which the most enthusiastic devotee may return to Earth and yet
keep Heaven still around him.
CHAPTER
XII
The Doctrine Reviewed
LONG familiarity
with the esoteric doctrine will alone give rise to a full perception
of the manner in which it harmonizes with facts of Nature such as
we are all in a position to observe. But something may be done to
indicate the correspondences that may be traced between the whole
body of teaching now set forth and the phenomena of the world around
us.
Beginning
with the two great perplexities of ordinary philosophy — the conflict
between free-will and predestination, and the origin of evil, it will
surely be recognized that the system of Nature now explained enables
us to deal with those problems more boldly than they have ever yet
been handled. Till now the most prudent thinkers have been least disposed
to profess that either by the aid of metaphysics or religion could
the mystery of free-will and predestination be unraveled. The tendency
of thought has been to relegate the whole enigma to the region of
the unknowable. And, strange to say, this has been done contentedly
by people who have been none the less contented to accept as more
than a provisional hypothesis the religious doctrines which thus remained
incapable of reconciliation with some of their own most obvious consequences.
The omniscience of a personal Creator, ranging over the future as
well as the past, left man no room to exercise the independent authority
over his own destinies which nevertheless it was absolutely necessary
to allow him to exercise in order that the policy of punishing or
rewarding him for his acts in life could be recognized as anything
but the most grotesque injustice. One great English philosopher, frankly
facing the embarrassment, declared in a famous posthumous essay that,
by reason of these considerations, it was impossible that God could
be all-good and all-potent. People were free to invest him
logically with one or other of these attributes, but not with both.
The argument was treated with the respect due to the great reputation
of its author, and put aside with the discretion due to respect for
orthodox tenets.
But the
esoteric doctrine comes to our rescue in this emergency. First of
all it honestly takes into account the insignificant size of this
world compared to the universe. This is a fact of Nature which the
early Christian church feared with a true instinct, and fought with
the cruelty of terror. The truth was denied, and its authors were
tortured for many centuries. Established at last beyond even the authority
of papal negations, the Church resorted to the “desperate expedient,”
to quote Mr Rhys David’s phrase, of pretending that it did not matter.
The
pretense till now has been more successful than its authors could have hoped.
When they dreaded astronomical discovery, they were crediting the
world at large with more remorseless logic than it ultimately showed
any inclination to employ. People have been found willing as a rule
to do that which I have described esoteric Buddhism as not requiring
us to do, to keep their science and their religion in separate water-tight
compartments. So long and so thoroughly has this principle been worked
upon, that it has finally ceased to be an argument against the credibility
of a religious dogma to point out that it is impossible. But when
we establish a connection between our hitherto divided reservoirs,
and require them to stand at the same level, we cannot fail to see
how the insignificance of the earth’s magnitude diminishes in a corresponding
proportion the plausibility of theories that require us to regard
the details of our own lives as part of the general stock of a universal
Creator’s omniscience. On the contrary, it is unreasonable to suppose
that the creatures inhabiting one of the smaller planets of one of
the smaller suns in the ocean of the universe, where suns are but
water-drops in the sea, are exempt in any way from the general principle
of government by law. But that principle cannot co-exist with government
by caprice, which is an essential condition of such predestination
as conventional discussions of the problems before us associate with
the use of the word. For be it observed that the predestination which
conflicts with free-will is not the predestination of races, but individual
predestination, associated with the ideas of divine grace of wrath.
The pre-destination of races, under laws analogous to those which
control the general tendency of any multitude of independent chances,
is perfectly compatible with individual free-will, and thus it is
that the esoteric doctrine reconciles the long-standing contradiction of Nature. Man has control over his own destiny within constitutional
limits, so to speak; he is perfectly free to make use of his natural
rights as far as they go, and they go practically to infinity as far
as he, the individual unit, is concerned. But the average human action,
under given conditions, taking a vast multiplicity of units into account,
provides for the unfailing evolution of the cycles which constitute
their collective destiny.
Individual
predestination, it is true, may be asserted, not as a religious dogma
having to do with divine grace or wrath, but on purely metaphysical
grounds — that is to say, it may be argued that each human creature
is fundamentally, in infancy, subject to the same influence by similar
circumstances, and that an adult life is thus merely the product or
impression of all the circumstances which have influenced such a life
from the beginning, so that, if those circumstances were known, the
moral and intellectual result would be known. By this train of reasoning
it can be made to appear that the circumstances of each man’s life
may be theoretically knowable by a sufficiently searching intelligence;
that hereditary tendencies, for example, are but products of antecedent
circumstances entering into any given calculation as a perturbation,
but not the less calculable on that account. This contention, however,
is no less in direct conflict with the consciousness of humanity,
than the religious dogma of individual predestination. The sense of
free-will is a factor in the process which cannot be ignored, and
the free-will of which we are thus sensible is not a mere automatic
impulse, like the twitching of a dead frog’s leg. The ordinary religious
dogma and the ordinary metaphysical argument both require us to regard
it in that light; but the esoteric doctrine restores it to its true
dignity, and shows us the scope of its activity, the limits of its
sovereignty. It is sovereign over the individual career, but impotent
in presence of the cyclic law, which even so positive a philosopher
as Draper detects in human history — brief as the period is which
he is enabled to observe. And none the less does that collateral quicksand
of thought which J S Mill discerned alongside the contradictions of
theology — the great question whether speculation must work with the
all-good or all-potent hypothesis — find its explanation in the system
now disclosed. Those great beings, the perfected efflorescence of
former humanity, who, though far from constituting a supreme God,
reign nevertheless in a divine way over the destinies of our world,
are not only not omnipotent, but, great as they are, are restricted
as regards their action by comparatively narrow limits. It would seem
as if, when the stage is, so to speak, prepared afresh for a new drama
of life, they are able to introduce some improvements into the action,
derived from their own experience in the drama with which they were
concerned, but are only capable, as regards the main construction
of the piece, of repeating that which has been represented before.
They can do on a large scale what a gardener can do with dahlias on
a small one; he can evolve considerable improvements in form and colour,
but his flowers, however carefully tended, will be dahlias still.
Is
it nothing, one may ask in passing, in support of the acceptability of the
esoteric
doctrine, that natural analogies support it at every turn? As it is
below, so it is above, wrote the early occult philosophers; the microcosm
is a mirror of the macrocosm. All Nature lying within the sphere of
our physical observation verifies the rule, so far as that limited
area can exhibit any principles. The structure of lower animals is
reproduced with modifications in higher animals, and in Man; the fine
fibres of the leaf ramify like the branches of the tree, and the microscope
follows such ramifications, repeated beyond the range of the naked
eye. The dust-laden currents of rain-water by the roadside deposit
therein “sedimentary rocks” in the puddles they develop, just as the
rivers do in the lakes and the great waters of the world over the
sea-bed. The geological work of a pond and that of an ocean differ
merely in their scale, and it is only in scale that the esoteric doctrine
shows the sublimest laws of Nature differing in their jurisdiction
over the man, and their jurisdiction over the planetary family. As
the children of each human generation are tended in infancy by their
parents, and grow up to tend another generation in their turn, so
in the whole humanity of the great manvantaric periods, the men of
one generation grow to be the Dhyân Chohans of the next, and then
yield their places in the ultimate progress of time to their descendants,
and pass themselves to higher conditions of existence.
Not
less decisively than it answers the question about free-will, does the
esoteric doctrine deal with the existence of evil. This subject has
been discussed in its place in the preceding chapter on the Progress
of Humanity; but the esoteric doctrine, it will be seen, grapples
with the great problem more closely than by the mere enunciation of
the way human free-will, which it is the purpose of Nature to grow
and cultivate into Dhyân Chohanship, must by the hypothesis be free
to develop evil itself, if it likes. So much for the broad principle
in operation, but the way it works is traceable in the present teaching
as clearly as the principle itself. It works through physical Karma,
and could not but work that way, except by a suspension of the invariable
law that causes cannot but produce effects. The objective man born
into the physical world is just as much the creation of the person
he last animated, as the subjective man who has in the interim been
living the Devachanic existence. The evil that men do lives after
them, in a more literal sense even than Shakespeare intended by those
words. It may be asked, how can the moral guilt of a man in one life
cause him to be born blind or crippled at a different period of the
world’s history several thousand years later, of parents with whom
he has had, through his former life, no sort of physical connection
whatever? But the difficulty is met, by considering the operation
of affinities, more easily than may be imagined at the first glance.
The blind or crippled child as regards his physical frame, may have
been the potentiality rather than the product of local circumstances.
But he would not have come into existence unless there had been a
spiritual monad pressing forward for incarnation and bearing with
it a fifth principle (so much of a fifth principle as is persistent,
of course) precisely adapted by its Karma to inhabit that potential
body. Given these circumstances, and the imperfectly organized child
is conceived and brought into the world, to be a cause of trouble
to himself and others — an effect becoming a cause in its turn — and
a living enigma for philosophers endeavouring to explain the origin
of evil.
The
same explanation applies with modifications to a vast range of cases that
might be cited to illustrate the problem of evil in the world. Incidentally,
moreover, it covers a question connected with the operation of the
Karmic law that can hardly be called a difficulty, as the answer would
probably be suggested by the bearings of the doctrine itself, but
is none the less entitled to notice. The selective assimilation of
Karma-laden spirits with parentage which corresponds to their necessities
or deserts, is the obvious explanation which reconciles rebirth with
atavism and heredity. The child born may seem to reproduce the moral
and mental peculiarities of parents or ancestors as well as their
physical likeness, and the fact suggests the notion that his soul
is as much an offshoot of the family tree as his physical frame. It
is unnecessary to enlarge here on the multifarious embarrassments
by which that theory would be surrounded, on the extravagance of supposing that a soul thus thrown off, like a spark from an anvil, without any
spiritual past behind it, can have a spiritual future before it. The
soul, which was thus merely a function of the body, would certainly
come to an end with the dissolution of that out of which it arose.
The esoteric doctrine, however, as regards transmitted characteristics,
will afford a complete explanation of that phenomenon, as well as
of all others connected with human life. The family into which he
is born is, to the re-incarnating spirit, what a new planet is to
the whole tide of humanity on a round along the manvantaric chain.
It has been built up by a process of evolution working on a line transverse
to that of humanity’s approach; but it is fit for humanity to inhabit
when the time comes. So with the re-incarnating spirit, it presses
forward into the objective world, the influences which have retained
it in the Devachanic state having been exhausted, and it touches the
spring of Nature, so to speak, provoking the development of a child
which without such an impulse would merely have been a potentiality,
not an actual development; but in whose parentage it finds — of course
unconsciously by the blind operation of its affinities — the exact
conditions of renewed life for which it has prepared itself during
its last existence. Certainly we must never forget the presence of
exceptions in all broad rules of Nature. In the present case it may
sometimes happen that mere accident causes an injury to a child at
birth. Thus a crippled frame may come to be bestowed on a spirit whose
Karma has by no means earned that penalty, and so with a great variety
of accidents. But of these all that need be said is that Nature is
not at all embarrassed by her accidents; she has ample time to repair
them. The undeserved suffering of one life is amply redressed under
the operation of the Karmic law in the next, or the next. There is
plenty of time for making the account even, and the adepts declare,
I believe, that, as a matter-of-fact, in the long-run undeserved suffering
operates as good luck rather than otherwise, thereby deriving from
a purely scientific observation of facts a doctrine which religion
has benevolently invented sometimes for the consolation of the afflicted.
While the
esoteric doctrine affords in this way an unexpected solution of the
most perplexing phenomena of life, it does this at no sacrifice in
any direction of the attributes we may fairly expect of a true religious
science. Foremost among the claims we may make on such a system is
that it shall contemplate no injustice, either in the direction of
wrong done to the undeserving, or of benefits bestowed on the undeserving;
and the justice of its operation must be discernible in great things
and small alike. The legal maxim, de minimis non curat lex,
is means of escape for human fallibility from the consequences of
its own imperfections. There is no such thing as indifference to small
things in chemistry or mechanics. Nature in physical operations responds
with exactitude to small causes as certainly as to great, and we may
feel instinctively sure that in her spiritual operations also she
has no clumsy habit of treating trifles as of no consequence, of ignoring
small debts in consideration of paying big ones, like a trader of
doubtful integrity content to respect obligations which are serious
enough to be enforced by law. Now the minor acts of life, good and
bad alike, are of necessity ignored under any system which makes the
final question at stake, admission to or exclusion from a uniform
or approximately uniform condition of blessedness. Even as regards
that merit and demerit which is solely concerned with spiritual consequences,
no accurate response could be made by Nature except by means of that
infinitely graduated condition of spiritual existence described by
the esoteric doctrine as the Devachanic state. But the complexity
to be dealt with is more serious than even the various conditions
of Devachanic existence can meet. No system of consequences ensuing
to mankind after the life now under observation, can be recognized
as adapted scientifically to the emergency, unless it responds to
the sense of justice, in regard to the multifarious acts and habits
of life generally, including those which merely relate to physical
existence, and are not deeply coloured by right or wrong.
Now,
it is only by a return to physical existence that people can possibly
be conceived to reap with precise accuracy the harvest of the minor
causes they may have generated when last in objective life. Thus,
on a careful examination of the matter, the Karmic law, so unattractive
to Buddhist students, hitherto, in its exoteric shape, and no wonder,
will be seen not only to reconcile itself to the sense of justice,
but to constitute the only imaginable method of natural action that
would do this. The continued individuality running through successive
Karmic rebirths once realized, and the corresponding chain of spiritual
existences intercalated between each, borne in mind, the exquisite
symmetry of the whole system is in no way impaired by that feature
which seems obnoxious to criticism at the first glance, — the successive
baths of oblivion through which the reincarnating spirit has to pass.
On the contrary, that oblivion itself is in truth the only condition
on which objective life could fairly be started afresh. Few earth-lives
are entirely free from shadows, the recollection of which would darken
a renewed lease of life for the former personality. And if it is alleged
that the forgetfulness in each life, of the last, involves waste of
experience and effort, and intellectual acquirements, painfully or
laboriously obtained, that objection can only be raised in forgetfulness
of the Devachanic life in which, far from being wasted, such efforts
and acquirements are the seeds from which the whole magnificent harvest
of spiritual results will be raised. In the same way the longer the
esoteric doctrine occupies the mind, the more clearly it is seen that
every objection brought against it meets with a ready reply, and only
seems an objection from the point of view of imperfect knowledge.
Passing
from abstract considerations to others partly interwoven with practical
matters, we may compare the esoteric doctrine with the observable
facts of Nature in several ways with the view of directly checking
its teachings. A spiritual science which has successfully divined
the absolute truth must accurately fit the facts of earth whenever
it impinges on earth. A religious dogma in flagrant opposition to
that which is manifestly truth in respect of geology and astronomy,
may find churches and congregations content to nurse it, but is not
worth serious philosophical consideration. How then does the esoteric
doctrine square with geology and astronomy?
It is not
too much to say that it constitutes the only religious system that
blends itself easily with the physical truths discovered by modern
research in those branches of science. It not only blends itself with,
in the sense of tolerating, the nebula hypothesis and the stratification
of rocks, it rushes into the arms of these facts, so to speak, and
could not get on without them. It could not get on without the great
discoveries of modern biology; and, as a system recommending itself
to notice in a scientific age, it could ill afford to dispense with
the latest acquisitions of physical geography.
The
stratification of the earth’s crust is, of course, a plain and visible record
of
the inter-racial cataclysms. Physical science is emerging from the
habits of timidity which its insolent oppression by religious bigotry
for fifteen centuries engendered, but it is still a little shy in
its relations with dogma, from the mere force of habit. In that way
geology has been content to say, such and continents, as their shell-beds
testify, must have been more than once submerged below and elevated
above the surface of the ocean. It has not yet grown used to the free
application of its own materials to speculation which trenches upon
religious territory. But surely if geology were required to interpret
all its facts into a consistent history of the earth, throwing in
the most plausible hypotheses it could invent to fill up gaps in its
knowledge, it would already construct a history for mankind which
in its broad outlines would not be unlike that sketched out in the
foregoing chapter on the Great World Periods; and the further geological
discovery progresses, our esoteric teachers assure us, the more closely
will the correspondence of the doctrine and the bony traces of the
past be recognized. Already we find experts from the Challenger vouching for the existence of Atlantis, though the subject belongs
to a class of problems unattractive to the scientific world generally,
so that the considerations in favour of the lost continent are not
yet generally appreciated. Already thoughtful geologists are quite
ready to recognize that in regard to the forces which have fashioned
the earth, this, the period within the range of historic traces, may
be a period of comparative inertia and slow change; that cataclysmal
metamorphoses may have been added formerly to those of gradual subsidence,
upheaval, and denudation. It is only a step or two to the recognition
as a fact, of what no one could any longer find fault with as a hypothesis,
that great continental upheavals and submergences take place alternately;
that the whole map of the world is not only thrown occasionally into
new shapes, like the pictures of a kaleidoscope as its coloured fragments
fall into new arrangements, but subject to systematically recurrent
changes, which restore former arrangements at enormous intervals of
time.
Pending
further discoveries, however, it will, perhaps, be admitted that we
have a sufficient block of geological knowledge already in our possession
to fortify the cosmogony of the esoteric doctrine. That the doctrine
should have been withheld from the world generally as long as no such
knowledge had paved the way for its reception can hardly be considered
indiscreet for the part of its custodians. Whether the present generation
will attach sufficient importance to its correspondence with what
has been ascertained of Nature in other ways remains to be seen.
These
correspondences may, of course, be traced in biology as decisively as in geology.
The broad Darwinian theory of the Descent of Man from the animal kingdom
is not the only support afforded by this branch of science to the
esoteric doctrine. The detailed observations now carried out in embryology
are especially interesting for the light they throw on more than one
department of this doctrine. Thus the now familiar truth that the
successive stages of ante-natal human development correspond to the
progress of human evolution through different forms of animal life,
is nothing less than a revelation, in its analogical bearings. It
does not merely fortify the evolutionary hypothesis itself, it affords
a remarkable illustration of the way Nature works in the evolution
of new races of men at the beginning of the great round-periods. When
a child has to be developed from a germ which is so simple in its
constitution that it is typical less of the animal — less even of the vegetable — than of the mineral kingdom, the familiar scale of
evolution is run over, so to speak, with a rapid touch. The ideas
of progress which may have taken countless ages to work out in a connected
chain for the first time, are once for all firmly lodged in Nature’s
memory, and thenceforth they can be quickly recalled in order in a
few months. So with the new evolution of humanity on each planet as
the human tide-wave of life advances. In the first round the process
is exceedingly slow, and does not advance far. The ideas of Nature
are themselves under evolution. But when the process has been accomplished
once, it can be quickly repeated. In the later rounds the life-impulse
runs up the gamut of evolution with a facility only conceivable by
help of the illustration which embryology affords. This is the explanation
of the way the character of each round differs from its predecessor.
The evolutionary work which has been once accomplished is soon repeated;
then the round performs its own evolution at a very different rate,
as the child, once perfected up to the human type, performs its own
individual growth but slowly, in proportion to the earlier stages
of its initial development.
No elaborate
comparison of exoteric Buddhism with the views of Nature, which have
now been set forth — briefly indeed, considering their scope and importance,
but comprehensively enough to furnish the reader with a general idea
of the system in its whole enormous range — will be required from
me. With the help of the information now communicated, more experienced
students of Buddhist literature will be better able to apply to the
enigmas that may contain, the keys which will unlock their meaning.
The gaps in the public records of Buddha’s teaching will be filled
up readily enough now, and it will be plain why they were left. For
example, in Mr Rhys Davids’ book, I find this: “Buddhism does not
attempt to solve the problem of the primary origin of all things;”
and quoting from Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism,” he goes on,
“When Malunka asked the Buddha whether the existence of the world
is eternal or not eternal, he made him no reply; but the reason of
this was that it was considered by the teacher as an inquiry that
tended to no profit.” In reality the subject was manifestly passed
over because it could not be dealt with by a plain yes or no, without
putting the inquirer upon a false scent; while to put him on the true
scent would have required a complete exposition of the whole doctrine
about the evolution of the planetary chain, an explanation of that
for which the community Buddha was dealing with, was not intellectually
ripe. To infer from his silence that he regarded the inquiry itself
as tending to no profit, is a mistake which may naturally enough have
been made in the absence of any collateral knowledge, but none can
be more complete in reality. No religious system that ever publicly
employed itself on the problem of the origin of all things, has, as
will now be seen, done more than scratch the surface of that speculation,
in comparison with the exhaustive researches of the esoteric science
of which Buddha was no less prominent an exponent than he was a prominent
teacher of morals for the populace.
The positive
conclusions as to what Buddhism does teach — carefully as he has worked
them out — are no less inaccurately set forth by Mr Rhys Davids than
the negative conclusion just quoted. It was inevitable that all such
conclusions should hitherto be inaccurate. I quote an example, not
to disparage the careful study of which it is the fruit , but to show
how the light now shed over the whole subject penetrates every cranny,
and puts an entirely new complexion on all its features.
“Buddhism
takes as its ultimate fact the existence of the material world, and
of conscious beings, living within it; and it holds that everything
is subject to the law of cause and effect, and that everything is
constantly, though imperceptibly, changing. There is no place where
this law does not operate; no heaven or hell therefore in the ordinary
sense. There are worlds where angels live whose existence is more
or less material according as their previous lives were more or less
holy; but the angels die, and the worlds they inhabit pass away. There
are places of torment where the evil actions of men or angels produce
unhappy beings; but when the active power of the evil that produced
them is exhausted, they will vanish, and the worlds they inhabit are
not eternal. The whole Kosmos — earth and heavens, and hells — is
always tending to renovation or destruction, is always in a course
of change, a series of revolutions or of cycles, of which the beginning
and the end alike are unknowable and unknown. To this universal law
of composition and dissolution, men and gods form no exception; the
unity of forces which constitutes a sentient being must sooner or
later be dissolved, and it is only through ignorance and delusion
that such a being indulges in the dream that it is a separable and
self-existent entity.”
Now, certainly
this passage might be taken to show how the popular notions of Buddhist
philosophy are manifestly thrown off from the real esoteric philosophy.
Most assuredly that philosophy no more finds in the universe than
in the belief of any truly enlightened thinker — Asiatic or European
— the unchangeable and eternal heaven and hell of monkish legend;
and “the worlds where angels live,” and so on — the vividly real though
subjective strata of the Devachanic state — are found in
Nature truly enough. So with all the rest of the popular Buddhist
conceptions just passed in review. But in their popular form they
are the nearest caricatures of the corresponding items of esoteric
knowledge. Thus the notion about individuality being a delusion, and
the ultimate dissolution as such of the sentient being, is
perfectly unintelligible without fuller explanations concerning the
multitudinous æons of individual life, in as yet, to us, inconceivable,
but ever progressive, conditions of spiritual exaltation, which come
before that unutterably remote mergence into the non-individualized
condition. That condition certainly must be somewhere in futurity,
but its nature is something which no uninitiated philosopher, at any
rate, has ever yet comprehended by so much as the faintest glimmering
guess. As with the idea of Nirvana, so with this about the delusion
of individuality, writers on Buddhist doctrine derived from exoteric
sources, have most unfortunately found themselves entangled with some
of the remote elements of the great doctrine, under the impression
that they were dealing with Buddhist views of conditions immediately
succeeding this life, The statement, which is almost absurd, thus
put out of its proper place in the whole doctrine, may be felt, not
only as no longer an outrage on the understanding, but as a sublime
truth, when restored to its proper place in relation to other truths.
The ultimate mergence of the perfect Man-god or Dhyân Chohan in the
absolute consciousness of paranirvana, has nothing to do, let me add,
with the “heresy of individuality,” which relates to physical personalities.
To this subject I recur a little later on.
Justly
enough, Mr Rhys Davids says, in reference to the epitome of Buddhist
doctrine quoted above: “Such teachings are by no means peculiar to
Buddhism, and similar ideas lie at the foundation of earlier Indian
philosophies.” (Certainly by reason of the fact that Buddhism, as
concerned with doctrine, was earlier Indian philosophy itself.) “They
are to be found indeed in other systems widely separated from them
in time and place; and Buddhism, in dealing with the truth which they
contain, might have given a more decisive and more lasting utterance,
if it had not also borrowed a belief in the curious doctrine of transmigration,
a doctrine which seems to have arisen independently, if not simultaneously,
in the Valley of the Ganges and the Valley of the Nile. The word transmigration
has been used, however, in different times and at different places
for theories similar, indeed, but very different; and Buddhism, in
adopting the general idea from post-Vedic Brahminism, so modified
it as to originate, in fact, a new hypothesis. The new hypothesis,
like the old one, related to life in past and future births, and contributed
nothing to the removal here, in this life, of the evil it was supposed
to explain.”
The
present volume should have dissipated the misapprehensions on which these
remarks rest. Buddhism does not believe in anything resembling the
passage backwards and forwards between animal and human forms, which
most people conceive to be meant by the principle of transmigration.
The transmigration of Buddhism is the transmigration of Darwinian
evolution scientifically developed, or rather exhaustively explored,
in both directions. Buddhist writings certainly contain allusions
to former births, in which even the Buddha himself was now one and
now another kind of animal. But these had reference to the remote
course of pre-human evolution, of which his fully opened vision gave
him a retrospect. Never in any authentic Buddhist writings will any
support be found for the notion that any human creature, once having
attained manhood, falls back into the animal kingdom. Again, while
nothing indeed could be more ineffectual as an explanation of the
origin of evil, than such a caricature of transmigration as would
contemplate such a return, the progressive rebirths of human Egos
into objective existence, coupled with the operation of physical Karma,
and the inevitable play of free-will within the limits of its privilege,
do explain the origin of evil, finally and completely. The effort
of Nature being to grow a new harvest of Dhyân Chohans whenever a
planetary system is evolved, the incidental development of transitory
evil is an unavoidable consequence under the operation of the forces
of processes just mentioned, themselves unavoidable stages in the
stupendous enterprise set on foot.
At the
same time the reader, who will now take up Mr Rhys Davids book and
examine the long passage on this subject, and on the skandhas,
will realize how utterly hopeless a task it was to attempt the deduction
of any rational theory of the origin of evil from the exoteric materials
there made use of. Nor was it possible for these materials to suggest
the true explanation of the passage immediately afterwards quoted
from the Brahmajala Sutra: —
“After
showing how the unfounded belief in the eternal existence of God or
gods arose, Gautama goes on to discuss the question of the soul, and
points out thirty-two beliefs concerning it, which he declares to
be wrong. These are shortly as follows: ‘Upon what principle or on
what ground, do these mendicants and Brahmans hold the doctrine of
future existence? They teach that the soul is material, or is immaterial,
or is both or neither; that it will have one or many modes of consciousness;
that its perceptions will be few or boundless; that it will be in
a state of joy or of misery or of neither. These are the sixteen heresies,
teaching a conscious existence after death. Then there are eight heresies
teaching that the soul material or immaterial, or both or neither,
finite or infinite, or both or neither, has one unconscious existence
after death. And, finally, eight others which teach that the soul,
in the same eight ways, exists after death in a state of being neither
conscious nor unconscious. Mendicants,’ concludes the sermon, ‘that
which binds the teacher to existence (viz. tanha, thirst)
is cut off, but his body still remains. While his body shall remain,
he will be seen by gods and men, but after the termination of life,
upon the dissolution of the body, neither gods nor men will see him.’
Would it be possible in a more complete and categorical manner to
deny that there is any soul — anything of any kind which continues
to exist in any manner after death?”
Certainly,
for exoteric students, such a passage as this could not but seem in
flagrant contradiction with those teachings of Buddhism which deal
with the successive passages of the same individuality through several
incarnations, and which thus along another line of thought may seem
to assume the existence of a transmissible soul, as plainly as the
passage quoted denies it. Without a comprehension of the seven principles
of man, no separate utterances on the various aspects of this question
of immortality could possibly be reconciled. But the key now given
leaves the apparent contradiction devoid of all embarrassment. In
the passage last quoted Buddha is speaking of the astral personality,
while the immortality recognized by the esoteric doctrine is that
of the spiritual individuality. The explanation has been fully given
in the chapter on Devachan, and in the passages quoted there from
Colonel Olcott’s “Buddhist Catechism.” It is only since fragments
of the great revelation this volume contains have been given out during
the last two years in The Theosophist [magazine] , that the important
distinction between personality and individuality, as applied to the
question of human immortality, has settled into an intelligible shape;
but there are plentiful allusions in former occult writing, which
may now be appealed to in proof of the fact that former writers were
fully alive to the doctrine itself. Turning to the most recent of
the occult books in which the veil of obscurity was still left to
wrap the doctrine from careless observation, though it was strained
in many places almost to transparency, we might take any one of a
dozen passages to illustrate the point before us. Here is one: ---
“The
philosophers who explained the fall into generation their own way, viewed spirit
as something wholly distinct from the soul. They allowed its presence
in the astral capsule only so far as the spiritual emanations or rays
of the “shining one” were concerned. Man and soul had to conquer their
immortality by ascending toward the unity, with which, if successful,
they were finally linked, and into which they were absorbed, so to
say. The individualization of man after death depended on the spirit,
not on his body and soul. Although the word ‘personality’ in the sense
in which it is usually understood, is an absurdity if applied literally
to our immortal essence, still the latter is a distinct entity, immortal
and eternal per se, and as in the case of criminals beyond redemption,
when the shining thread which links the spirit to the soul from the
moment of the birth of a child, is violently snapped, and the disembodied
entity is left to share the fate of the lower animals, to dissolve
into ether, and have its individuality annihilated — even then the
spirit remains a distinct being.” [“Isis Unveiled,” volume
1, Page 315]
No one
can read this — scarcely any part, indeed, of the chapter from which
it is taken — without perceiving, by the light of the explanations
given in the present volume, that the esoteric doctrine, now fully
given out, was perfectly familiar to the writer — though I have been
privileged to put it for the first time into plain and unmistakable
language.
It
takes some mental effort to realize the difference between personality and
individuality, but the craving for the continuity of personal existence
— for the full recollection always of those transitory circumstances
of our present physical life which make up the personality — is manifestly
no more than a passing weakness of the flesh. For many people it will
perhaps remain irrational to say that any person now living, with
his recollections bounded by the years of his childhood, is the same
individual as some one of quite a different nationality and epoch
who lived thousands of years ago, or the same that will reappear after
a similar lapse of time under some entirely new conditions in the
future. But the feeling “I am I,” is the same through the three lives,
and through all the hundreds; for that feeling is more deeply seated
than the feeling, “I am John Smith, so high, so heavy, with such and
such property and relations.” Is it inconceivable — as a notion in
the mind — that John Smith, inheriting the gift of Tithonus, changing
his name from time to time, marrying afresh every other generation
or so, losing property here, coming into possession of property there,
and getting interested as time went on in a great variety of different
pursuits — is it inconceivable that such a person in a few thousand
years should forget all circumstances connected with the present life
of John Smith, just as if the incidents of that life for him had never
taken place? And yet the Ego would be the same. If this is conceivable
in the imagination, what can be inconceivable in the individual continuity
of an intermittent life, interrupted and renewed at regular
intervals, and varied with passages through a purer condition of existence.
No less
than it clears up the apparent conflict between the identify of successive
individualities and the “heresy” of individuality, will the esoteric
doctrine be seen to put the “incomprehensible mystery” of Karma, which
Mr Rhys Davids disposes of so summarily, on a perfectly intelligible
and scientific basis. Of this he says that because Buddhism “does
not acknowledge a soul,” it has to resort to the desperate expedient
of a mystery to bridge over the gulf between one life and another
somewhere else, the doctrine, namely, of Karma. And he condemns the
idea as a “non-existent fiction of the brain.” Irritated as he feels
with what he regards as the absurdity of the doctrine, he yet applies
patience and great mental ingenuity in the effort to evolve something
that shall feel like a rational metaphysical conception out of the
tangled utterances concerning Karma of the Buddhist scriptures. He
writes: —
“Karma,
from a Buddhist point of view, avoids the superstitious extreme, on
the one hand, of those who believe in the separate existence of some
entity called the soul; and the irreligious extreme on the other of
those who do not believe in moral justice and retribution. Buddhism
claims to have looked through the word soul for the fact it purports
to cover, and to have found no fact at all, but only one or other
of twenty different delusions which blind the eyes of men. Nevertheless,
Buddhism is convinced that if a man reaps sorrow, disappointment,
pain, he himself and no other must at some time have sown folly, error,
sin, and if not in this life, then in some former birth. Where, then,
in the latter case, is the identity between him who sows and him who
reaps? In that which alone remains when a man dies, and the constituent
parts of the sentient being are dissolved, in the result, namely,
of his action, speech, and thought, in his good or evil Karma (literally
his doing), which does not die. We are familiar with the doctrine,
‘Whatever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,’ and can therefore
enter into the Buddhist feeling that whatever a man reaps that he
must also have sown; we are familiar with the doctrine of the indestructibility
of force, and can therefore understand the Buddhist dogma (however
it may contravene our Christian notions) that no exterior power can
destroy the fruit of a man’s deeds, that they must work out their
full effect to the pleasant or the bitter end. But the peculiarity
of Buddhism lies in this, that the result of what a man is or does
is held not to be dissipated, as it were, into many separate streams,
but to be concentrated together in the formation of one new sentient
being — new, that is, in its constituent parts and powers, but the
same in its essence, its being, its doing, its Karma.”
Nothing
could be more ingenious as an attempt to invent for Buddhism an explanation
of its “mystery” on the assumption that the authors of the mystery
threw it up originally as a “desperate expedient” to cover their retreat
from an untenable position. But in reality the doctrine of Karma has
a far simpler history, and does not need so subtle an interpretation.
Like many other phenomena of Nature having to do with futurity, it
was declared by Buddha an incomprehensible mystery, and questions
concerning it were thus put aside, but he did not mean that because
it was incomprehensible for the populace, it was incomprehensible
or any mystery at all for the initiates in the esoteric doctrine.
It was impossible to explain it without reference to the esoteric
doctrine, but the outlines of that science once grasped, Karma, like
so much else, becomes a comparatively simple matter, a mystery only
in the sense in which also the affinity of sulphuric acid for copper,
and its superior affinity for iron, are also mysteries. Certainly
esoteric science for its “lay chelas” at all events, like chemical
science for its lay chelas, — all students, that is to say, of its
mere physical phenomena, — leaves some mysteries unfathomed in the
background. I am not prepared to explain by what precise molecular
changes the higher affinities which constitute Karma are stored up
in the permanent elements of the fifth principle. But no more is ordinary
science qualified to say what it is in a molecule of oxygen, which
induces it to desert the molecule of hydrogen with which it was in
alliance in the raindrop, and attach itself to a molecule of the iron
of a railing on which it falls. But the speck of rust is engendered,
and a scientific explanation of that occurrence is held to have been
given when its affinities are ascertained and appealed to.
So
with Karma, the fifth principle takes up the affinities of its good and
evil deeds in its passage through life, passes with them into Devachan,
where those which are suitable to the atmosphere, so to speak, of
that state, fructify and blossom in prodigious abundance, and then
passes on, with such as have not yet exhausted their energy, into
the objective world once more. And as certainly as the molecule of
oxygen brought into the presence of a hundred other molecules will
fly to that with which it has the most affinity, so will the Karma-laden
spiritual monad fly to that incarnation with which its mysterious
attractions link it. Nor is there in that process any creation of
a new sentient being, except in the sense that the new bodily structure
evolved is a new instrument of sensation. That which inhabits it,
that which feels joy or sorrow, is the old Ego — walled off by forgetfulness
from its last set of adventures on earth, it is true, but reaping
their fruit nevertheless — the same “I am I” as before.
“Strange
it is,” Mr Rhys Davids thinks, that “all this,” the explanation of
Buddhist philosophy which esoteric materials have enabled him to give,
“should have seemed not unattractive, these 2300 years and more, to
many despairing and earnest hearts — that they should have trusted
themselves to the so seeming stately bridge which Buddhism has tried
to build over the river of the mysteries and sorrows of life . . .
. They have failed to see that the very keystone itself, the link
between one life and another, is a mere word — this wonderful hypothesis,
this airy nothing, this imaginary cause beyond the reach of reason
— the individualized and individualizing grace of Karma.”
It would
have been strange indeed if Buddhism had been built on such a frail
foundation; but its apparent frailty has been simply due to the fact
that its mighty fabric of knowledge has hitherto been veiled from
view. Now that the inner doctrine has been unveiled, it will be seen
how little it depends for any item of its belief on shadowy subtleties
of metaphysics. So far as these have clustered round Buddhism they
have merely been constructed by external interpreters of stray doctrinal
hints that could not be entirely left out of the simple system of
morals prescribed for the populace.
In that
which really constitutes Buddhism we find a sublime simplicity, like
that of Nature herself — one law running into infinite ramifications
— complexities of detail, it is true, as Nature herself is infinitely
complex in her manifestations, however unchangeably uniform in her
purposes, but always the immutable doctrine of causes and their effects,
which in turn become causes again in an endless cyclic progression.
Bibliography
Blavatsky, H.P. Isis
Unveiled, two Volumes, New York, 1877
Davids, Rhys, T. W. Buddhism,” etc. New York, 1878
Draper, J. W. History of the Intellectual Development
of Europe. New York,
1863
Flammarion, Camille.La Résurrection
et la Fin des Mondes. Paris
Hardy, Robert Spence. Manual of Buddhism,
in its Modern Development, translated from
Singhalese mss. 2nd ed London, 1880
Lévi, Éliphas. (pseudo of Alphonse Louie Constant) Dogme
et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Paris, 1861. (later translated by A. E. Waite as Transcendental Magic)
Lillie, Arthur. Buddha and Early Buddhism, Edinburg, 1880
Olcott, Henry Steel. Buddhist Catechism, Madras, 1881
Oldenberg, Hermann. Buddha: His Life,
His Doctrine, His Order, Translated by Hoey,
London, 1882
The Theosophist (periodical) started by H.P. Blavatsky and issued continuously
from Madras, India since 1879. Issues cited: October 1881; March 1882; June
1883.
Appendix
Mr. Sinnett's statement that our humanity has passed through Mars and
will continue on to Mercury is very much in need of reevaluation. A short time
after publication, it became apparent that this explanation did not fit with
the occult axiom, as above, so it is below. The Secret Doctrine, published
five years later, drew attention to the discrepancy, and laid the blame upon
vagueness in correspondence, and the gap between eastern and western terminology,
coupled with the obvious fact that the entire doctrine could not be given out
carte blanche to an uninitiated westerner.
Try to understand that you are putting to me questions pertaining to the highest
initiation; that I can give you (only) a general view, but that I dare not
nor will I enter upon details …
wrote one of the Teachers to the author of Esoteric Buddhism.
The letter quoted was among those collected from Mr. Sinnett's estate-and published
by Rider and Co. in 1923, as The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, transcribed
and compiled by A. Trevor Barker. In his appendix to that work, after reviewing
two opinions by Annie Besant, Mr Barker continues as follows:-
Attention has been drawn to the fact that Mme. Blavatsky was not accurate in
her quotation of the Master's letter to the extent that she added the word
etc. and omitted the word yet-and there are some who would like to convince
themselves and others that this fact is sufficient to invalidate the whole
of H.P.B.'s exposition of the teaching regarding the nature of the septenary
Planetary Chains. It should be evident to every student that in reality,
at the worst, this misquotation invalidates the hypothesis which Mme. Blavatsky
offered as a possible explanation of Mr. Sinnett's misunderstanding, and
it
leaves utterly untouched the doctrine of the septenary Chain with one physical
Globe which is implied in every line of The Secret Doctrine and is in fact
an integral part of the esoteric philosophy.
As stated over and over again and from every point of view in these pages of
The Secret Doctrine
… neither Mars nor Mercury belong to our Chain. They are along with other planets,
Septenary Units in the Great host of Chains of our System and all are as visible
as their upper Globes are invisible.
Again:-
The one Eternal Law unfolds everything in the to be manifested Nature, on a
sevenfold principle; among the rest, the countless circular Chains of worlds
composed of seven Globes, graduated on the four lower planes of the World of
Formation, the three others belonging to the Archetypal Universe. Out of these
seven only one, the lowest and the most material of these Globes, is within
our plane or means of perception, the six others lying outside it and being
therefore invisible to the terrestrial eye … To make it clearer; we are told
that each of the planets, of which seven only were called sacred, as being
ruled by the highest Regents or Gods … is a septenary, as also is the Chain
to which the Earth belongs … while the superior fellow Globes of these planets
are on other planes quite outside that of our terrestrial senses … These invisible
companions correspond curiously to that which we call the principles” in man.
The seven are on three material planes and one spiritual plane …
And again:-
… but it may be stated that our satellite is only the gross body of its invisible
principles. Seeing then that there are seven Earths, so there are seven Moons,
the last alone being visible. The same for the Sun, whose visible body is
called a Maya , a reflection, just as man's body is. The real Sun and the real
Moon
are as invisible as the real man.
Says an occult axiom.
Could words be plainer? Hardly - and yet for over thirty years the Theosophical
Society has permitted itself to spread this misleading superstition, preferring
to assume that it was Madame Blavatsky who did not understand what she was
writing about. The mystery is after all as clear as it well nigh can be.
The septenary Chains of Globes about which Theosophical textbooks talk so much,
are seven principled Units, each having a physical body and six higher or
subtler
principles invisible to the ordinary senses, but coexisting and inter-penetrating
each other.
Students of Astrology at least are able to prove for themselves that the correspondence
between man and a planet is exact; for just as the six invisible principles
of a planet correspond to the six invisible principles in man, so do the seven
sacred Planets correspond to the whole of the seven principles of our Earth
and therefore of man. How then is it possible that the theory, which credits
the Earth Chain with three physical planets, can be correct from any point
of view? It is manifestly ridiculous, because if it were true, it would mean
by the occult law of correspondence, that man also must have three physical
bodies which is an absurdity, and proves the whole theory false from beginning
to end.
The publication of these letters gives to the student an opportunity to examine
the whole range of Theosophic teaching in their light-while adding thereto
the faculty of criticism-the highest and most discriminative of which he is
capable. That faculty is an impersonal one; it is neither critic nor respecter
of persons-for to it persons are without significance. But with ideas-with
doctrines, it has everything to do, and if it is inevitable that the use of
that faculty by students the world over will reveal many discrepancies in the
accepted Theosophical doctrines of the day, it is equally certain that a large
part of that teaching will receive a confirmation which cannot be gainsaid.
-A.T. Barker
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