(Part 3)
by
by
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
CHAPTER IX.
EVOLUTION, REBIRTH, AND KARMA
The spiral sweep of Madame Blavatsky's grandiose cosmology carries with it an elaborate rationale of human life. Life is a continuum, says Theosophy, and reincarnation is its evolutionary method, Karma its determinant.Theosophists feel that in fostering the renaissance in modern Western thought of the idea of rebirth they are presenting a conception of evolution which makes Darwinism but an incident in a larger process. It becomes but a corollary of a more general truth. Darwinism, according to Theosophy, conceives of the evolution of a species or class through the successive advances of a line of individuals, who live and die in the effort to carry some new development forward for their successors. For themselves, they reap no reward--save the precarious satisfaction, while living, of having fought the good fight and kept the line intact.
But reincarnation makes evolution significant for the only thing that does evolve--the individual. The race does not evolve, as it is nothing but a mental figment, and has no permanent organic individuality. It does not exist apart from its individual constituents. The latter are the real and, for Theosophy, permanent existences, and hence, if evolution is to have solid relevance, it must appertain to the continuing life of the conscious units or Monads. It is a conclusion that can be deduced from empirical observation that growth at any stage leads to conditions out of which continued growth springs in the future. In short, the effect of growth, and its significance, is--just more growth.1
The entire program of universal activity is just the procedure of endless growth. with halts and rests at relay stations, but with no termini. The meaning of present growth only comes to light in the products of later growth. But it is a matter of infinite importance whether the growth accruing from the individual's exertions in his life span are effects for him or for another. It is not growth--if one struggle only to die. How can race history have significance if the history of the individuals in it has none? Under Madame Blavatsky's thesis the evolutionary reward of effort will go to the rightful party.
Theosophists base their endorsement of the reincarnation theory upon a number of dialectical considerations.
First there is the "argument from justice." Briefly, this holds that the concept of justice as applicable to mundane affairs can not be upheld on the basis of the data furnished by a one-life existence of human beings, and that if justice is to be predicated of the mundane situation, reincarnation is dialectically a necessary postulate to render the concept tenable. Looking at the world we see conditions that force us to admit the presence of inequalities which, on the theory of but one life spent here, must be interpreted as inequities or iniquities. If the single life here is the entirety of mortal existence, then the cosmos is socially unjust. The concept of justice must go, if, with but one chance for happiness, two persons are placed by forces beyond their control in conditions so flagrantly at variance. The vaunted Love and Justice that are alleged to rule at the heart of Nature become a travesty of even human fair play. No meanest man could wreak such a havoc of injustice in the world; no tyrant could so pitilessly outrage the fitness of things.
But, one may ask the Theosophists, how is it that obvious inequities can become reconstrued as equities, how can cosmic wrongs be turned to cosmic righteousness, merely by admitting additional existences? A wrong today is not made right simply because more days are to follow. Because, the reincarnationist replies, that event which when seen in its isolated setting in the one day's activities, takes on the appearance of injustice, when viewed in its relation to former days' doings is discerned to be a sequential event, proper in its time and nature, and fulfilling the requirements of justice in an enlarged scope of reactions. By mounting the hill of this evolutionary hypothesis, one becomes able to locate the grounds of justice over a wider area, to discover them, perhaps, entirely outside the bounds of the one-only life that was observable from the lowlands. The causes of all that one life unfolds for us can not in most cases be found in the occurrences of that life. The assumption that events in life come raw and uncolored ethically is only tenable if we are willing to regard many occurrences as unrelated and uncaused. Holding the theorem that every event in the world's history is a link in a chain of cause and effect, and that no occurrence stands alone as an absolute cause or final effect, modern moral theory (postulating but one life) arbitrarily breaks this continuum in illogical fashion in its assumption that the fortunes of a single life are not exactly the resultants of antecedents adequate to account for them. The vague and uncertain "laws of heredity" are dragged in to adjust the uneven balance of accounts. But they are found incompetent. Nothing can be found in Shakespeare's parents, or in Mozart's, or in Lincoln's to explain the flowering of power and genius in their progeny, or again the sterility of their descendants. Did this man sin or his parents, that he was born blind? Did Mozart learn to play the organ or his parents, that he could render a sonata on the pipe organ at four? Biological science stands in perplexity before the problems thus presented, and ethical science stands equally baffled by anomalous situations where right and wrong are apparently unaccountable. Theosophy says the difficulty here is that modern theory is trying to understand Chapter XV of the Book of Life without knowing that fourteen chapters have preceded it. The acts and the predicament of an individual today are inexplicable because he has had a long past, which is not known, but which, were it known, would enable us to say: nature is just after all; he has earned his present lot. What the reincarnation program offers is the identification of causation and justice. Things are justly caused. The modern eye can not see this because it has refused to view things in their true perspective, and instead sees them as partial, isolated, and out of their context; yet justice reaches its fulfilment in the individual
"Today or after many days."2
One life does not give Nature time to arrange her trial, hear the evidence, and render a verdict. The law of compensation must for the most part await the slow grinding of the mills of God, until its adjustments can be nicely achieved. When we give up the exaggerated mediaeval view of man's importance, and cease to limit to a few thousand years the time allotted the divine plan to work out our salvation, we may be open to the persuasion that to crowd the whole procedure of the law of compensation, with its millions of entangled situations, into the span of a human life, is as egregious an absurdity as that of trying to cram into the Biblical six thousand years the entire evolution of mankind, on a planet which has been fitted for habitation for millions of years. Theosophy affirms that man's life will never be properly interpreted until the whole long course of its unfoldment on the globe is envisaged. The individual is the cumulative product of a long experience, the fruits of which have passed into his subjective life and character, whence, though invisible, they will function as the causes of action. His relation to the past is the most substantial part of his constitution. His present can be explained only in the light of his past, and if our gaze is foreshortened to the scant confines of a single incarnation, the materials for understanding will be wanting.
The protagonist of rebirth attacks the one-life theory also with the argument that it defeats the attempt of the mind to read "meaning" into the terms of the life experience. To be sure, he admits, nobody perhaps can tell just what this consists of, or in what particular aspect of experience it is to be found.3 Ultimate "meaning" of world events is doubtless another of those abstract finalities which we reach only by a process of infinite regress to sheer negation, like ultimate being and ultimate reality, or ultimate substance. But it is permissible to employ the term for the purposes of the argument in its commonly accepted sense of the later outcome, result or eventuation of a set of conditions at any time prevalent, in accordance with the design of some directing intelligence. In this general sense the term is more or less equivalent to effect or consequence, now hidden but eventually revealed. The present or past comes to meaning in the future. The reincarnationist, of course, casts his "meanings" in the stream of an assumed teleological evolution-process.
But if "meaning" is thus assumed to be discoverable within the constant flow of things, the difficulty arises that it proves to be an ever-receding entity like a shadow. When we try to stabilize or grasp it, it has moved forward out of reach. The Theosophist's solution is, of course, that the ultimate and stable meaning of things in a temporal sequence is to be found only in that higher level of consciousness in which past, present, and future are gathered up in one eternal Now. The meaning of events in their three-dimensional aspects of time, space, and causality must be located in a four-dimensional world of consciousness, where the extended life history of the series appears as a unit. As all directions merge into one in the center of a circle, or at the pole of the earth, so all relations merge into a fixity of character in the center of consciousness. Down (or out) here, says the Theosophist, we are in a realm of relativity; we can not look for absolute meaning. All significance is relative, to the past, as cause, to the future, as effect. No event can have meaning if lifted out of the continuum and viewed by itself alone. An occurrence is the product of its precedents and the cause of its consequents. A single life, therefore, has meaning, only when scanned as one of a series. It is admittedly but a fragment of the life of the race; Theosophy adds that it is but a fragment of the life of the individual.
By this line of reasoning the occultist arrives at his grand conclusion: it is meaningless, first from man's viewpoint, for him to live but one physical life on Earth or any planet; it would be equally meaningless, from the viewpoint of a Cosmic Mind (if the laws of logic, the connotations of "meaning," are laws of all mind) to have man live but one such life. For a Deity to send us down here but once would be without logic or sense--as senseless as for a parent to send the child to school for one day only, or one term. Thus Theosophic argument sees the one-life theory reduced to absurdity.
The race's one sure verdict about this life is that it wants completeness and self-sufficiency. To what larger experience is it then related? And if related in some way to a hidden history of infinite reach and significance, where is the logic of the relation which brings us out of that infinite sea of other being for only one brief dip into the life of matter? Certain metaphysical schools of thought would answer that we go on progressing infinitely in the ethereal worlds. That very affirmation, says the occultist, makes the one life here infinitely illogical: on what imaginable basis can one mundane life be necessarily related to an infinite spiritual existence? Even were it whole, successful, and well-rounded, it would stand as but one moment somehow postulated as determining eternity. But suppose that one dies in infancy, or has every effort to live well thwarted?--the necessary inclusion of one physical life in a totality of indefinite being is empirically shown as invalid. To get a logical picture, in the Theosophist's view, you must trace a long series of short life-lines at intervals along your line of infinite being, and only then does the possibility arise of discerning logical structure, interrelation, and the "meanings" hidden in successive stages of growth.
Occultism points to another irrationality in the mundane situation if one life is predicated. It says briefly that we are only beginning to learn wisdom and the art of life, when we are torn away from the arena where those fruits of our experience can best be exploited. What irrationality possesses Nature that she exerts a tremendous effort to evolve in us gifts, faculties, and knowledge only to throw her mechanism away when she is just about to get us in shape for some good? Nature is thus convicted of being a prodigious spendthrift--unless she has a means of conserving the fruits of our present experience and putting them into practice in a later cycle. Unless we live again to profit by what we have learned, Nature is seen to create values only to destroy them. The only logical alternative is to believe that we reincarnate to carry on with the values and the capacities we have developed in our former turns at the earthly chores. Then Nature does not waste her products, but uses them as tools for further operations.
Again, Theosophy declares that philosophy in the West will find no place in which to deposit value unless it accepts the rebirth idea. Philosophy--the attempt to locate reality and permanent value--has been baffled in its effort because the organism in which it has presumed to find the value of evolution localized persists in dying under its eye. It has nowhere to place value except in the race, the components of which are constantly vanishing. Value can not be located in any structure which will continue to hold it. The race is a fiction, at any rate, and if the individual can not hold his gains, Nature can not be said to have achieved any progress that will be permanent. If the individual can not reap what he has sown, there is chaos in the counsels of evolution. If experience is to head up somewhere so as to become capital, Theosophy says it must do so in the individual. The very reason, affirms the esotericist, that the Greeks, that all races, "lost their nerve," lost their zest for earth life and turned away from it to an hypothecated heaven as a compensation for its unbearable hardships, was that in the face of death, at the relentless approach of what appeared to spell the doom of all one's efforts and one's loves, they were not fortified with the saving knowledge that the good done in this life was "made safe for permanency."
The Theosophist's case for reincarnation may be concluded with a quotation from L. Adams Beck,4 popular publicist of Orientalism, as follows:
"Therefore the logic of the Orient has seen as necessary the return of man to the area of experience . . . and if the truth of that law be denied, I have never heard from either priest or prophet any explanation of the mysteries or the apparent injustices of life. Seen by its light they are set at once in luminous clarity. That the earliest Christianity was itself imbued with belief in this fundamental law there can be no doubt, though it was soon overlaid with the easier, less individually responsible and more primitive teaching of interference by angry or placated Deity, and of the general supernatural order of things which commends itself to more primitive man and places his interests in the hands of intercessors or priests. It is much simpler as well as more comfortable to believe that intercession can obliterate a life's transgressions affecting millions of men or events, and a moment's penance fix an eternal destiny. So the Western churches set aside the great stream of philosophy and shut their eyes to its implications."
Here, alleges the Theosophist, was the real loss of nerve on the part of the human race. And it was the Christian theology that caused it. The Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins is regarded by the Orientals as a cheap and tawdry device of a cowardly spirit. The readoption of the rebirth hypothesis, avers the Theosophist, would yield for humanity the immense boon of a restored faith in the universal law of causality. Because our concept of inviolable law in every realm of life has been shattered, or left to stand unsupported by cosmic fact, we have reaped the natural harvest of a lawless age. The idea of salvation has taught us that law can be shirked, evaded, bought off.
The second great argument for reincarnation is "the argument from cyclic law." This is a deduction from a known process of nature, and not the postulate of a procedure in nature. Nature's activity is said to be but the play of the one Energy, manifesting to our eyes in countless modifications of the same general laws. There are not many laws in nature, but one law, taking on a variety of modes in adaptation to varying conditions and instruments. In a certain deep sense, then, all natural processes are analogous, the occultist tells us. Life knows but the one Law and all its manifestations typify it. On this generalization the Theosophists have justified their employment of the law of analogy, which figures so extensively in the cosmology and methodology of the cult.
The principle is stated in Theosophic terminology in the phrase, "As above so below." As in the macrocosm so in the microcosm. As in heaven (ideally), so on earth (physically). As in the universe at large, so in man, its image. Conceiving this principle as substantiated by empirical observation of the universe itself, the Theosophist proceeds to look at nature, and there observes in her mechanics a certain modus. She works by methods which suggest the terms periodic, cyclic, rhythmic. In the fields of natural science such processes are to be noted with considerable frequency. Chemistry, physics, music, biology, astronomy, and physiology yield instances. It was the thought of many an ancient philosophy that life runs in ever-revolving cycles. It has been affirmed that rhythmic pulsation is nature's invariable law. All life processes exhibit some form or other of the wave-motion principle. Inorganic nature shows it no less than organic. The atom itself displays an orbital swing; the stars gyrate in cycles. All force flows out in the form of a rhythmic or periodic beat in the pulse of energy.
Vibration appears to be the very essence of such things as light, color, sound, music, electricity, magnetism, heat, pressure, radio wave, X, N, alpha, beta, gamma, and the cosmic rays. Next the process of plant life, with startling clearness, reveal the same orderly periodicity of function. The pulse, the breathing, alternation of work and rest, of expenditure and repair, of intermittent fevers, are some of the more pronounced and observable evidences of this law, in the realm of the bodily mechanism. Life appears to be vibrational.
The Theosophist, too, points to each day as a miniature cycle, representative of the larger cycle of a life. It exemplifies the endless succession of active life and (comparative or partial) death for the human personality, in which respect the latter is seen as reflecting the nature of the Absolute Being, Brahm. Each day, furthermore, is to a degree anactual reincarnation; for the soul returns not to the same body, but to one vastly changed in cell structure and component elements throughout. The same soul takes up its life in a renewed body each day! Why, then, argues Theosophy, should the idea of reincarnation seem so bizarre and objectionable to the mind, when it is the recognized daily law of our being?
Outside the life of man, in the life of nature, the same procedure is revealed on an even larger scale. The life, the soul, of the vegetable kingdom (and of even large portions of the animal kingdom) reincarnates each springtime. The life energies of the plant world come to being in new forms. When these end their cycle, life withdraws into immaterial status for the winter. But it sleeps only to wake again. There is no commoner fact than reincarnation, the Theosophist reminds us; it is all about us and within us. And so we are asked: Does nature omit human life in its universal law of rhythmic progression? If so, it is the only place in the entire life of the cosmos, where periodical repetition of process is not found.
If it be objected that this is mere reasoning from analogy, the occultist rejoins that it is more: it is the application of a law seen to be applicable everywhere else in the universe to a particular portion of the universe. It is again, as in the argument from justice, the postulation of law for an area of experience to which we--in the West--do not believe or know that the law applies. The Oriental covers all life with his blanket of law; we segregate a portion of life from the rest and make it lawless. He says that history is rhythmic, racial life is rhythmic, planetary life is rhythmic, solar life is rhythmic and that even the life of God, Brahm, the Absolute, is rhythmic. Is the life of man then the only thing not rhythmic? A single life from this point of view seems to be a weird anomaly.
If one asks the Theosophist,--How does the individual survive and carry forward his values?--he advances an elaborate scheme based on knowledge allegedly obtained from the Supermen.
The peregrinations of the individual unit of consciousness through the worlds is but a minor detail in a vastly larger mechanism. Theosophy elaborates Platonic psychology by teaching that we have at least three principles lower than the spiritual one which survives. At any rate the outer part of us is but a temporary construction; the inner or subjective part of us is in truth the real "we." The body and several etheric or semi-material "souls" are but the temples, for a period, of the immortal spirit. If we may use St. Paul's language again, when the "natural body" disintegrates, we still have a "spiritual body" in which our unit of spirit functions and retains its identity. The Theosophist calls this underlying vehicle his "causal body," because in it are gathered up the effects of the causes he has generated in his various earth lives. That more ethereal vesture is the principle or part of the principle, that links the individual Ego to the permanent home of the human entity.
Man in his real inner nature is a unit portion of (originally) undifferentiated cosmic Being. He is a fragment of God, but plunged now in conditions described as material, for the purpose, as often stated, of lifting the blank spiritual consciousness of the Monad to acute spiritual self-consciousness. He must have traversed the whole vast gamut of the systems to make his experience complete. For the purposes of this varied experience he must clothe himself in garments of the matter composing the plane of life on which he finds himself; and as matter subsists in varying grades of density, as solid, liquid, gaseous, etheric, he must be provided with a garment of each type of material. This makes him a multiple being. Each garment of matter becomes his instrument of contact with the life of that plane. He thus expresses himself in a different capacity on each plane.
In the world in which he now is he has his permanent body, the causal, and three temporary vestures through which he reacts to the vibrations of sensation (through his physical body), emotion (through his astral or kamic body), and thought (through his mental body). The Ego, the lord of the body, can project his attention, or his focus of force, into any one of the three. He is the animating principle of all. He himself dwells aloft and surveys the results of his contact with the three worlds below. These contacts constitute his experience. No touch of experience is ever lost or forgotten. It is the postulate of Theosophy that on the substrate ether of nature there is an indelible record of every impression. Each one has inscribed his own history ineradicably on the Astral Light or Akasha.
The causal body, like the brain in the nervous system, receives the inner and ultimate impress of each stimulus from the outer world and records it there in perpetuity. So equipped, both for time and for eternity, man makes his début upon the earth level again and again, and takes back into himself each time a harvest of experience. But what becomes of him after physical death? He lives on in his causal body on its own plane--Devachan, the "heaven world"--after having dropped first his physical body, then his astral and finally his lower mental. It is the soul's time for rest, for assimilation, for renewal.
The soul is not omniscient in its own right, except potentially. Its experiences in the lower worlds are calculated to unfold its latent powers. Normally the spirit of man, on these sublimated levels of the immaterial world, does not have full cognizance of its every act while in the lower realms. Our sojourn on earth is in a manner an exile from our true home. The difference in vibration rate between the two levels of life makes it impossible either for the fragment of the soul in flesh to remember its former high condition, except in flashes, or for the higher Ego in the supernal regions to know what its lower counterpart is doing. However there are moments when a line of communication is established. During earth life the lower fragment is occasionally elevated to a momentary rapport with its higher Self, and in that instant receives a whole volume of helpful instruction, advice, or inspiration. These are the experiences that change the whole view and alter a life. On the other hand the higher principle at least twice during the sojourn of its lower self in the causal body is put in touch with its earthly life. Just after the conclusion of each earth period, and again just before the commencement of the next, the soul is granted a view of its total history, retrospective in the first case and prospective in the second.
The first of these experiences may occur while the soul is still in the body just before death, or, most commonly, in the finer sheaths just after it.5 It is an elevation of normal consciousness to a high pitch and covers a complete survey of the whole past life, with emphasis on the inner moral value of its acts.6 The Ego, in the light of this panoramic retrospect, is put in position to reflect over its past, note its progress, evaluate its record in relation to total evolutionary requirements, and is thus enabled to fix permanently the gain made, the faculty sharpened, the insight deepened, the poise established, and the capacity developed.
In similar fashion, just preceding its outgoing upon another mundane adventure the Ego, aided by higher and more resourceful beings known as the Lords of Karma, is shown in a summary manner the situation in which he stands in relation to cosmic evolution, the stage he has reached, the next succeeding problems to be met, the ground to be covered, and the possibilities of a variety of careers open to him in his next dip into concrete experience. In view of the most important considerations involved in this manifold situation, the Ego himself makes the choice of his next environment and personality! It is the man himself who prearranges the main outlines of his coming life on earth, and the great Lords of Karma aid him to carry his chosen plan into execution. We ourselves preside over our next-life destiny.
But we make that choice, not at random, but in strictly logical relation to the total retrospective view.
Being shown in a moment of vivid lucidity what we have next to learn, we make our selection of ways and means to meet the immediate requirements of the situation. Our choice is not entirely free, for we must choose with reference to past obligations and karmic encumbrances, which must be liquidated.
The soul with vision opened in the world of causes, sees oftentimes that salvation, progress, lies in no other course. The lower entity would not so choose, to be sure, but the higher Ego sees better what is good for its lower self to undergo. An outwardly untoward condition may provide the requisite setting for the working out of some particular moral advance. So he chooses his own parents, the race, nation or locale of his next life, the type of physical personality he will animate, the specific phases of character he will seek to build up. It is likely that he will aim to concentrate his experience upon the development of some one virtue which he has sadly lacked hitherto, and will choose a situation with a view to its influence in that direction. He must acquire all the virtues one after another.
His choice once made, the veil of Lethe is again drawn over his vision, the two elements of his being are again drawn apart into their separate spheres, and the lower man descends into the world of matter for another trial at life. But he is now oblivious of the fact that it was his own wish to be thrown into the habitat where he finds himself. He may either wonder at the fortunate fate that has befallen him, or rebel against a seeming injustice. He seeks happiness in diverse ways, but is seldom satisfied with what he gets. What he is sure to get, however, in whatever direction he may seek, is experience. And this is the one thing that evolution is concerned about. Growth, not happiness (except incidentally), is the goal of his life. Under the illusion that happiness may be found in this condition or in that, he will plunge into all sorts of experiences, which will prove educative.
There is much detail in connection with the methods used by nature to effect the transition of the soul into and out of the successive bodies. At death the Ego drops first the physical vehicle, which goes back to its mineral components. For a brief time thereafter it has for its outermost and densest sheath the etheric double, pictures of which have been caught in photography, and the material of which is the ectoplasm of the Spiritualists. All the finer bodies, be it understood, interpenetrate the physical and each other in turn, as solid, liquid, gas, and ether might be put into the same earthly vessel. The dropping of the outermost leaves the others intact and capable of freer activity. The occasional appearance of the etheric double, which while it lasts, has an affinity for the physical body, gives us the basis for ghost stories. It is not usually discernible by normal vision, but can be seen by sensitives.
After a few weeks at most this body likewise disintegrates, and the astral body is then the peripheral envelope. It keeps the Ego within the realm of emotional vibrations, and in this world the experiences which the Ego shared of this sort must be digested. The consciousness of the Ego must tarry on this plane until the strength of his desire and passional nature wears itself out, and he is purged of gross feeling. After months or a few years the astral in turn disintegrates. This leaves but one of the "onion-peels" to be thrown off before the soul is released finally from the interests and tendencies that held it on earth. This is the lower manas, or lower mental body, whose material responds to the energies of thought. As the physical body is absent, the forces going into concrete thought expend themselves, so to say, in thin air, until this body of "mind-stuff" eventually dissolves, like the others. The soul is then housed only in its spirit body, in which it abides until, after a long rest, it feels again the urge for additional physical experience.
The nature of the soul's life in the body of spirit is practically beyond the resources of human description. We can only conceive of it by making the effort to picture the play of immaterial vibrational energies apart from a mechanism. Its manifestations in terms of our cognitions are those of unimaginable bliss, buoyancy, elation, and vividness. It is the heaven world which all mystical religions have striven to depict. The tradition of its glories has served as the basic fact in all religions of post-modern compensation. Theosophy names it Deva-Chan, the home of the Devas. During the soul's residence there it bathes itself in the currents of finer energy, which serve to renew its vitality, somewhat depleted by its last contacts with the coarser vibrations of earth life. (The analogy with the nightly recuperation from the day's fatigues is obvious here.) The Theosophists and the Orientals have fixed the length of this interim roughly at 1,500 years, but analogy with human life would indicate a shorter duration. It is said, however, that the rest periods shorten as evolution proceeds, until finally an advanced Ego requires but a few years between incarnations. The less experienced souls require more rest.
However long or short, the soul's sleep, or life in the ethereal realms, comes to an end and the craving for another day's activities asserts itself. It is given the preliminary vision already spoken of, and then it begins its "descent" from a world of subtle to a world of coarse vibrations. A vibratory energy has the power to organize matter of appropriate constitution. The ideal forces of the Ego, emanating from the higher planes, contact in turn each lower plane, throw the matter of each plane into organization along the lines of magnetic radiation marked out by the subtle energies in play, and thus construct bodies shaped by their own inner nature. In this way the Ego builds up successively a lower mental, an astral, an etheric, and a new physical body. Taking possession of the last is a gradual process, which begins in reality about the age of seven and is not completed, we are told, until the later stages of youth. Before seven the infant body is said to be in control of an elemental entity or animal soul, a being quite distinct from the Ego himself. The Ego hovering over it, must make a gradual adaptation of its new home to its own nature, and the process is sometimes not easy. Sometimes the Ego realizes after a time of observation and trial that the young body is not capable of being properly used for a life period, and renounces its attempt to ensoul it. The body then languishes and is carried off by death.
With all its new vehicles gathered around it, the soul begins to function in the earth life once more. Its equipment is now complete for registering every type of contact, physical, emotional, and mental, and this activity constitutes its life. The new bodies are built on the model of the inner character, which as we have seen, has been preserved in germinal form within the depths of the spiritual organization, in a fashion analogous to the vegetable seed. All the bodies are thus the tell-tale indices of the inner nature. Our character comes to expressive form in our garments of flesh, feeling, and thought. The results of former practice, training, discipline, skill come to light as inherent ability, natural brilliancy, precocity, genius. We think these are the gifts of the child's parents. But the parents only furnish a fine body in which a fine soul may fitly incarnate. By the law of affinity a fine soul would not be drawn to a coarse body. Such a combination would also infringe the law of justice.
Naturally the question as to why we do not remember our former lives arises here. Theosophy explains, firstly, that many people have remembered their former lives, and, secondly, that the reason most of us do not is that the Ego, which does remember, can not easily impress its memories upon the new personality. At each rebirth the soul finds itself in a totally new body of flesh, and the old life must express itself through a new nervous mechanism, with a new brain. The lower personality does not have any memory of its former experiences, because they were strictly not its experiences. Those experiences were registered on another brain which is now mouldered away, and only the digest, the moral quintessence of those activities has been preserved, and even they have accrued to the higher Ego, not to the personality. As it is the purpose of our long evolution to effect the union between the lower and the higher personalities, we shall eventually come to the time when the Ego will be able to bring its accumulated memory of all its past through to the brain of the man on earth.
The occult psychologist asserts that by hypnotic methods one can be made to catch glimpses of his past life or lives through the subconscious mind. Likewise Oriental Yoga claims that without hypnotism, resolute mental control will enable the consciousness to penetrate into this past field. Theosophists allege that their practiced clairvoyants can at will direct their vision upon a person's former lives, and many records of these investigations have been published.
Indissolubly connected with the idea of reincarnation is the doctrine of Karma. If reincarnation is the method by which the individual reaps what he has sown, Karma is the principle back of the method. Reincarnation is the technique of justice in the universe, and hence Karma is the ¢rc» or deterministic principle. It is the law of necessity that determines the play of forces in evolution; it is in plain terms the law of cause and effect, of the equivalence of action and reaction. The word in Sanskrit etymology means "action." Acts bind the actor to consequences. Actions produce movements in the currents of evolutionary forces. The law which guides these forces into their inevitable courses and eventuations, is the law of Karma. It is the law of equilibrium and balance, the law of compensation. Nature abhors a moral vacuum (which the Theosophist alleges exists in want of the rebirth hypothesis) as she does a physical one, and Karma is the pressure which she brings to bear about and upon a moral deficiency to remove it.
A widespread idea has grown up among non-Theosophists that Karma means retributive punishment. This is essentially a misconception, though a certain measure of the law's operation may take a form roughly resembling that which punishment might take. But nature does not say to the culprit, "You have done wrong; now take that!" She says to him, "You have done wrong; now see what it has brought you." She does not hit back, even to redeem; she attaches consequences to acts.
There is much misunderstanding upon this point, even among Theosophists. It is a common expression among them, when some one is mentioned as having met with mishap, that it is the working out of his evil Karma. This may be crudely correct, yet it is more likely to be a misinterpretation of the doctrine. The educative value of experience may at times point to the future, and not always to the past. We live to learn, and we learn in order to move on to more expanded life. We can not be eternally paying off old scores. A strenuous ordeal may be the beginning of a new education, not the graduation from an old one. The Ego must be confronted with new problems and come into its heritage of evolved capacity through the solution of new difficulties. Much misconstrued "bad Karma" is simply our embroilment in new problems for our advanced lessons in the ars maius vivendi. It is thus difficult to dogmatize about the significance of karmic disabilities or predicaments. Strictly, in a sense, both past and future references are indicated in any experience. Karma links us all to the chain of cause and effect through the entire time process.
Not only are the causes set up by the individual persons bound to work out to fruition, but there is also what is called collective Karma. Wherever bodies or groups of people act together, as in a senate, a tribe, or a mob, their collective action must bear its fruit like any other action. Karma engendered aggregately must, of course, be carried aggregately. A nation or a race may be guilty of wrong on a colossal scale; reincarnation must reassemble these groups in order that the totality of responsible persons may pay the debt. A senate declares war: millions are killed; that senate, acting well or ill, must be brought within the sweep of the reaction later on. So there is community Karma, tribal Karma, national, racial, and other types of collective Karma. An organization such as the Church, the Government, even conventional social mentality, has its Karma, and not only the individual members of these groups, but more especially the single heads of them, must bear in themselves the brunt of nature's subsequent reactions.7
We are now ready to ask what the goal of all this long evolutionary training of the individual or groups may be. What is the purpose and in what will it eventuate? Or will the law of spiral growth carry us round and round eternally? That the question is one of primary importance is indicated by the fact that the answers commonly advanced for it have given determinate shape to most of the Oriental religions. The point at issue has been the central theme of the great religious faiths, and a dominant consideration in their ethical systems.
The answer accepted by Theosophy is--Nirvana. In much Oriental thought mortal life is endured only because it leads to Nirvana. The Buddhist philosophies of escape contemplate the bliss of Nirvana as the eventual house of refuge from these existences in the conditions of time, relativity, and imperfection.
But the Oriental does not seek annihilation. The West has discovered, or is discovering, that the interpretations forced upon the term Nirvana by its early scholars and Orientalists have missed the point quite decidedly. Opinion has wavered for a long time but inclines now to believe that the concept behind the term does not connote total extinction of conscious being. Oldenburg contended that it meant "a state beyond the conception or reason," and that satisfies most Orientals. Theosophy has, with practical unanimity, taken the position that it implies in no sense an annihilation of being, but that it does quite definitely involve the extinction of the personality of man. The personality, Theosophy claims, is only a temporary shadow of the man anyway, and its eventual dispersion and annihilation is highly desirable as liberating the true Self from hampering obstruction in the exercise of his full capacities for life. This lower counterpart or representative of the inner Self is what the Buddhists and Theosophists declare is destined for annihilation, partly at the end of each life, completely at the end of the cycle. But the eradication of his personality permits him a grander, freer life than ever before. Many schools of Hindu thought regard Nirvana as a life of bliss. This is a postulate of Theosophy likewise.
Nirvana, then, instead of being the extinction of consciousness, is the elevation of consciousness to a state of ineffable splendor and ecstasy. Feeling, thought, sensation are lost in the beatific vision.
Footnotes to Chapter 9
1 "Growth is regarded as having an end instead of being and end. . . . In reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth."--John Dewey: Democracy and Education.
3 See Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning.
4 Article in The Atlantic Monthly, May, 1926.
5 The instantaneous (from our point of view) retrospect of our whole past life in elaborate detail recounted by thousands of persons who had drowned or suffocated or fallen or been struck a blow, and lived to tell the tale, are, say Theosophists, instances of the vision falling this side of death. Nor is the phenomenon wanting with persons who pass out peacefully on their beds. The rapturous prevision of heaven usually includes elements of a life review.
6 Persons who have slept but ten seconds of clock time have told of the richness and vividness of this type of consciousness, in which the events of a lifetime are reviewed, weighed, and morally judged in a moment.
7 On page 646 of Vol. I, our seeress makes what looks like a prophecy of the World War of 1914: "Europe in general is threatened with, or rather is on the eve of, a cataclysm which her own cycle of racial Karma has led her to."
CHAPTER X
ESOTERIC WISDOM AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE
It is interesting to scan Theosophic doctrine with an eye to noting its relation to the discoveries of modern science. We might begin by comparing it with the Darwinian conception of evolution. Madame Blavatsky puts the Theosophic view of the evolution of man in four propositions in The Secret Doctrine:1. Man is a product of animal evolution on our planet only with reference to his physical body. The Deva evolution in other worlds was the source of his independent spirit and his intellect, his will and his divine nature.
2. Man preceded the mammalian animals on earth, instead of being evolved from them.
3. Man is not at all a descendant from any ape-like ancestor in an advancing line of evolution; on the contrary, the monkey is the descendent of (early) man.
4. Man has never been other than man, though not always as now.
Darwinian evolution and materialistic science envisage the development of matter into organic form, and out of that the unfolding of subjective ideation or psychic life--consciousness, reason, intuition--as products of the two elements, matter and motion or energy. Occultism views this process as predicable only of the building of the physical forms. Instead of regarding the body as having evolved the faculties of reason and intelligence, the secret teaching speaks of a spiritual evolution as going on concomitantly, and in attachment with, a physical one. The conscious intelligence in man is not the evolved expression of the psychic life of his organism. There is such a cell psychism in the body, and its totality is the subconscious mind, but it is in no sense the thinking, willing soul of the man. There are many "missing links" between organic instinct and conscious rationality.
Evolution in its higher aspects can not be accounted for if we limit the agencies at work to the blind forces of matter and motion acting under the mechanical influences of environment. "Nature unaided fails." The purely mechanical or semi-intelligent energies are able to carry the growing organisms of any kingdom from the lower to the higher forms of life in that kingdom, but without the aid of the superior intelligences of the kingdom just above them they are never able to leap over the gap--the difference in the atomic structure--which separates them from the next realm of higher vibratory existence. Plants bring minerals over the gap to cell organization; animals introduce plant cells to some degree of sensation experience; man tutors the higher animals right up to the door of rudimentary intelligence. In similar relationship the Deva evolution, completed in the Venus chain, is linked with animal man to bridge the gap for him into the kingdom of spiritual intelligence.
In line with this thesis Madame Blavatsky asserts that the principles of wisdom and spiritual aspiration never were evolved out of the material constitution of man's bodily life. They were superadded to his organism from the celestial worlds. They could not have come up to him from earth; they descended upon him from the skies. Each succeeding wave of outpouring life from the Logos carries evolution a step higher, and the law of the interrelation of all life is that each higher grade reaches back to help its lower neighbor ahead, the while it reaches out to grasp the hand of its superiors. This must be taken as accounting for the fact that all the religious Saviors have been depicted as Mediators coming down from a heavenly or celestial realm. Man's divine nature is the beautified angelic product of a former cycle of growth, and his true Self is itself the Deva that had consummated its salvation elsewhere. The fragment of divinity that constitutes our innermost Selfhood had itself been refined and purged in the fiery furnace of earlier experiences. Between man's purely physical development and the evolution of his spiritual nature "there exists an abyss which will not easily be crossed by any man in the full possession of his intellectual faculties. Physical evolution, as modern Science teaches it, is a subject for open controversy; spiritual and moral development on the same lines is the insane dream of a crass materialism."1
To trace the origin of human morals back to the social instincts of the ant and the bee, and to affirm that our divine consciousness, our soul, intellect, and aspirations have worked their way up from the lower capacities of the simple cell-soul of the "gelatinous Bathybius," hopelessly condemns modern thought to imbecility and renders its efforts to understand our growth futile. Instead of blind forces Madame Blavatsky posits not only a germinal design, but Designers.
"They are neither omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the term. They are simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given them by the . . . Master-Mason, the One Life and Law."2
Nature works not blindly, but through her own highly perfected agents, the Logoi, the Creators.
The second proposition--that man preceded the mammalian orders--runs counter to Darwinian hypothesis. The Secret Doctrine affirms that the mammalia were the products of early man. Man had gone first over the evolutionary ground of the stone, the plant, and the animal realms. But these stones, plants, animals were the astral prototypes, the filmy presentments, of those of the Fourth Round, and even those at the beginning of the Fourth Round were the spectral shadows of the present forms. No forms of life had as yet become physical. Around these ethereal shells, then, in the succeeding Round, which brought them closer to the physical scene, were aggregated the bodily forms which brought them into objective existence. The cast-off shells of man's former embodiments became the moulds of lower species. Before astral man descended into physical begetting, he had, it will be remembered, the power of Kriyasakti, by which he could procreate his replica by "the will, by sight, by touch, and by Yoga." So before the separation into sexes, "all this vital energy, scattered far and wide from him, was used by Nature for the production of the first mammalian-animal forms."3
All lower types, struggling toward man as their "divine" goal, are helped by receiving the effluvia from man's own life as animating principles and constructive models.
The third proposition follows: that man is not the descendant of any line of animal evolution, hence certainly not of the apes. The truth is, the monkey is the descendant of man. The case is stated as follows:
"Behold, then, in the modern denizens of the great forests of Sumatra, the degraded and dwarfed examples--'blurred copies,' as Mr. Huxley has it--of ourselves, as we (the majority of mankind) were in the earliest sub-races of the Fourth Root-Race. . . . The ape we know is not the product of natural evolution, but an accident, a cross-breed between an animal being, or form, and man."4
The apes are millions of years later than the speaking human being. They are entities compelled by their Karma to incarnate in the animal forms which resulted from the bestiality of the latest Third and earliest Fourth Race men. The numberless traditions about Satyrs are not fables, but represent an extinct race of animal-men. The animal Eves were their foremothers and the early human Adams their forefathers. All this means, as we are told, that the late Lemurian or Third Race men cohabited with huge female animals. This occurred when these early forebears of ours had not yet been endowed with the Manasic principle, or Mind. Their animal appetencies being fully active, with no check of mind or discernment of good and evil upon their acts, they thus committed the "Sin of the Mindless" in begetting hybrid monsters, half man, half animal. This is the occult explanation of the blending of both animal and human characteristics in the one creature. Later on in the Fourth or Atlantean Race, the men of that epoch, who were now endowed with Mind and should have known better, committed the same crime with the descendants of the Lemuro-animal conjunctions, and thus established the breeds of monkeys of the present era. But these semi-intelligent creatures will reach the human stage in the next cycle.
Madame Blavatsky endeavors to show that in animal evolution we see anything but an unbroken steady drift toward perfection of form. Evidence of one continuous line of unfoldment is totally wanting. There are many diverse lines, and furthermore, some of them apparently are retrograding.
Then the argument based on the study of the human embryo is pressed vigorously. Occultism accepts the evidence that the human foetus recapitulates quickly all the previous stages of racial evolution. Based on that fact there should be found a stage of foetal growth in which ape characteristics predominate. But there is no monkey stage of the foetus in evidence.
The fourth proposition--that man has never been less than man, though to be sure he has been different--is the outcome of the basic statement that he is, in his inner nature, a being who had already perfected his evolution. Theosophy claims that a thousand oddities and disparities manifest in our present life are elucidated by the assumption that we are high beings functioning at a level far beneath our proper dignity--for the sake of lifting up a host of animal souls to their next station. We have never been less than divine; it is our animal lower self that presents the aspects of fallibility and depravity.
But in relation to all these theories as to man's constitution, the question always arises: What is the authority for all this secret knowledge? Theosophy stands firmly on the affirmation that the only basis of authority in the revelation of any religion is long training in actual experience with life. Knowledge can be engendered only by living experience. There is no road to knowledge other than that of learning. Theosophic knowledge comes from our Elders in the school of life. They alone have been through enough of earthly experience to have acquired a master knowledge of its laws. Hence it is the position of Theosophy that no religion can claim more empirical authority than the esoteric ancient wisdom.
Madame Blavatsky declared that occultism had no quarrel with so-called exact science "where the conclusions of the latter are grounded on a substratum of unassailable fact." It is only when its exponents attempt to "wrench the formation of Cosmos and its living Forces from Spirit, and attribute all to blind matter, that the Occultists claim the right to dispute their theories." She declares that Science is limited to the investigation of one single aspect of human life, that which falls within the range of sense objectivity and rational inference. There are other aspects of that life and of nature,--the metaphysical, the supersensual, for the cognition of which science has no instrumentalities. Science is devoting its energies to a study of the forces of life as they come to expression in the phenomenal or sense domain. Hence it is constantly viewing nothing but the residuary effects of the activity of such forces. These are but the shadow of reality, says Madame Blavatsky. Science is thus dealing only with appearances, hints, adumbrations, and effects of life, and this is all it ever can deal with so long as it shuts its eyes to the postulates of occultism. Science clings to the plane of effects; occultism rises to the plane of causes. Science studies the expressions of life; esotericism looks at life itself, the real force behind the phenomenon. To bring the elements of real causality within his cognition, "the scientist must develop faculties which are absolutely dormant--save in a few rare and exceptional cases--in the constitution of the offshoots of our present Fifth Root-Race in Europe and America. He can in no other conceivable manner collect the facts on which to bear his operations. Is this not apparent on the principles of Inductive Logic and Metaphysics alike?"5
Science, however, asserts that we can predicate nothing of the nature of the metaphysical realm, unless and until our instruments bring its data within our sensuous purview. Occultists answer: earlier beings evolved on this or other planets have already developed the powers through which these metaphysical realities are brought under observation. Occultism adds that these claims are not based on imagination, but on the experience of those who have taken the trouble by right methods of discipline to prove for themselves the existence and reach of the powers in dispute. They are simply latent capacities of the human soul, as all our other capacities were once latent, and time and training will convince any one of their presence in the organism as an integral part of the endowment of man. The occultist rests his case at last, not on fantasy, but on a fancy empiricism. He ends by flaunting in the face of science its own present-day admissions that the door to further scientific knowledge of the world is barred by the limitations of its instruments and methods, not by the limitations of human experience.
Madame Blavatsky, fifty-odd years ago, prophesied the arrival of the present scientific predicament, and were she alive today she would doubtless register the "I-told-you-so" expression. She would tell the modern world that it is at the end of its survey of the mechanical activities of matter and that the search has left it uninstructed and unenlightened; it has but driven the mystery from the realm of the actual into that of the occult.
The development of Madame Blavatsky's treatise on the relation of the Old Science to the upstart modern pretender proceeds with the presentation of many angles, sides, or facets of the theories above propounded and the introduction of much evidence in support of the position. She begins by showing that science admits knowing nothing in reality of Matter, the Atom, Ether, Force. The atom is a fanciful construction, and variously constituted to suit the needs of each separate department of science, be it physics or chemistry. It is not known what Light is, whether corpuscular or not. First it was an undulation of matter, waves in the ether; then it was the passage of particles. Now it is discovered or believed to be both waves and particles, or wavicles.6 "The atom is the most metaphysical object in creation," she says. "It is an entified abstraction."
Matter, in its true inner essence, can not be fathomed by physical science, for the actual components of it lie several degrees (of rarefaction) further back on the inner planes. It is ether, and the soul of that, in its turn, is the elemental primordial substance, the Akasha. "It is matter on quite another plane of perception and being," and only the occult science can apprehend it. Newton is quoted7 as saying that "there is some subtle spirit by the force and action of which all movements of matter are determined." He adds that it is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should act upon other matter in the billiard-ball fashion, without the mediation of something else which is not material. Occultism sees the universe run by the Noumenon, "which is a distinct and intelligent individuality on the other side of the manifested mechanical universe." Matter is not the agent; it is rather the condition, the necessary vehicle, or sine qua non, for the exhibition of these subtler forces on the material plane.
We have noted Madame Blavatsky's references in Isis to the idea that gravitation was the wrong concept for the attractive power exerted by all bodies, and that magnetism was the better description. The same idea is emphasized in The Secret Doctrine repeatedly. She says that Kepler came to this "curious hypothesis" nearly three hundred years ago. It was what Empedocles meant by his Love and Hate, symbols of the intelligent forces of nature.
"That such magnetism exists in Nature is as certain as that gravitation does not; not at any rate in the way in which it is taught by science."8
Matter, to the occultist, has many more forms of existence than the one that science knows, and these more refined ones are the most important. Theosophy is largely built up on the supposed gradations of matter from the gross to the ultimately fine. It is the existence of the rarer ethereal grades which supply to thought the data essential for the construction of a metaphysical science. The true or essential nature of the higher potencies can never be inferred from their remote existential manifestations; and this is why science can never hope to come upon more fundamental knowledge while misled by the merely phenomenal phalanx of outward effects. Matter in its outer veil of solid substantiality is illusive, for it is the dead appearance of a living thing.
"It is on the doctrine of the illusive nature of matter and the infinite divisibility of the atom that the whole science of Occultism is built."9
This, she says, opens limitless horizons to states of substance of unimaginable tenuity, but all informed by the Divine Breath. Nature is as unlimited in her possibilities of fineness as she is in those of gross size, in the interior direction as in outward spatial extent.
Occult philosophy describes the Sun as a living glowing magnet. The photosphere is the reservoir of solar vital energy, "the vital electricity that feeds the whole system." The real living Sun, its Spirit, is continually "self-generating its vital fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out."10 There is thus a regular circulation--analogous to that in the human body--of vital fluid throughout our solar system during its Manvantaric or life period. The sun contracts rhythmically at every return of it, as does the heart. Only it takes the "solar blood" eleven years to pass through its auricles and ventricles before it washes the lungs and passes thence to the great veins and arteries of the system.
Madame Blavatsky notes modern science's statements about the eleven-year periodicity in the increase and diminution of sunspot activity as corroboration of her circulatory theory. The universe breathes as men do, and as our globe breathes every twenty-four hours, she asserts.
Madame Blavatsky has to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory statements of occultism "that matter is eternal" and that "the atom is periodical and not eternal." The trick is done by resorting to the distinction that matter, while eternal in its undifferentiated basic form, assumes periodically the atomic structure during each stage of manifestation. Sir William Crookes' "meta-elements" are referred to and his statement that atoms of certain elements showed "sensitive character" in effecting certain combinations. Sir William's assertion that the atoms share with all other creatures the attributes of decay and death is also noted. There will be a dissolution of the universe at the end of the Manvantara; but not a destruction, in the terms of physical science. That is, the energy will not be lost.
Sound is said to be--"a stupendous force, of which the electricity generated by a million of Niagaras could never counteract the smallest potentiality, when directed with occult knowledge."11
In the chapter on the "Elements and Atoms" chemistry is affirmed to be the science that will lead to the discovery of occult truth. Crookes, she says, is near to the lair of the "protyle." Scientists have often sought for an element of sub-zero atomic weight, hydrogen equalling 1. "A substance of negative weight is not inconceivable," says Helmholtz. Such a substance would approach the nature of the occult protyle, or sub-atomic spirit-matter. In other spheres and in interstellar regions there are infinite variations of material composition, of life formations, of semi- and super-intelligent beings.
Yet the life forces of these higher and lower existences are interblended with our own objective world; they are around us, and, what is more, in us; and they vitally affect our life. All forms of life are linked together in one immense chain. Some of these existent worlds may be as formless as Breathe, like the tail of a comet, which would sweep over our globe unknown to us, yet not without influence upon us.
Chemistry, she announces, once the unit protyle is hypothetically accepted, as ether was, will perish, to be reincarnated as the New Alchemy, or Metachemistry. "The discoverer of radiant matter will have vindicated in time the archaic Aryan works on Occultism and even the Vedas and Puranas."12
Madame Blavatsky formulates a law of occult dynamics that a given amount of energy expended on the spiritual or astral plane is productive of far greater results than the same amount expended on the physical objective plane of existence. This law becomes fundamental in the Theosophic system of ethics.
On page 612 of Book I, Madame Blavatsky makes a prophecy which was remarkably fulfilled, that "between this time (1886) and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the veil of nature and materialistic science will receive a death-blow." All science is familiar with the rapid incidence of new discoveries and revelations that fell within that period, crowned with the enunciation of the electrical nature of matter and the facts of radiant energy.
Madame Blavatsky's position with regard to modern scientific discovery and theory has been provocative of much discussion since her day. The same general situation obtains in her case as with Paracelsus, Boehme, Swedenborg, and other mystical prophets of science, who spoke with a show of authority of the hypotheses which science has in recent years taken up. They have repeatedly anticipated the propositions of our most advanced learning. Madame Blavatsky's achievement in this line is notable; and it is the common assertion of Theosophists that science in the past five decades has done little but verify their Founder's scientific pronouncements. Dr. A. Marques' book, Scientific Corroborations of Theosophy and William Kingsland's The Physics of the Secret Doctrine have set forth the many basic confirmations of H.P.B.'s work by our evolving physical science.13
It must be remembered in this connection that the scientific theories put forth by Madame Blavatsky can not be credited to her as spiritual intuitions or guesses, a certain proportion of which chanced to be well grounded. She did not arrive at these constructions in her own mentality; she gave them out as elaborations of an ancient science, of which she was merely the reinterpreter. Furthermore the various theories are put forward, not as isolated items of knowledge, but as integral parts of a comprehensive system which in its reach and inclusiveness has hardly elsewhere been matched. While science is obviously not proving the correctness of that large portion of her ideas which pass beyond its domain, in those matters touching its special province, into which she so boldly ventured now and again, it has frequently substantiated her "re-discoveries," though not all of them.
It is significant that Madame Blavatsky's occult philosophy aims to restore to scientific method the deductive procedure. It is her insistent claim that materialistic science, with its inductive method--an attempt to work from the rind back into the kernel, from effects back to causes--could never learn anything deep or true of the real universe. The world can only be explained in the light of great archaic principles; and these the modern world foolishly contemns, not knowing they were taught to disciplined students of old. They postulated that all things had their origin in spirit and thence they reasoned outward and downward; until they saw facts as items in a vast deductive plan. If man persists in rejecting such deduction, he will naturally never find the key to the great mystery; for by mulling around amongst the shadows of earthly existence, he merely learns to know the interplay of shadows. To understand the shadows he must start with the light.
Footnotes to Chapter 10
2 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 654.
3 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 170.
4 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 262.
5 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 478.
6 A. S. Eddington: The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, 1928). Madame Blavatsky had long ago hypothecated this dual nature of light. See The Secret Doctrine, passim.
7 Section XI of the Introduction to the Principia.
8 The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 517.
9 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 520.
10 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 541. Prof. Millikan's recent conclusions as to the constant refueling of the spheres by the influx of atomic structures "fixated" out of the ether of space may perhaps be regarded as in some sense corroborative of Madame Blavatsky's statement on this subject.
11 The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 547.
12 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 631.
13 The magazine Theosophy, published monthly by The United Lodge of Theosophists, runs a "Lookout Section" in which for fifteen or more years comment has been made upon the argument of current scientific discovery with Madame Blavatsky's systemology.
CHAPTER XI
THEOSOPHY IN ETHICAL PRACTICE
The Secret Doctrine set forth the basic conceptions of Theosophy; there remained for Madame Blavatsky one more task of large proportions--to make an application of the principles she had expounded to the problem of practical living. This was done to a large extent in a work which occupied her during a portion of the three or four years of life left her after the completion of her major effort. The Key to Theosophy was put out by her in response to much questioning as to how the vast body of knowledge outlined in her works could be related more closely to common understanding. It is done in the form of a dialogue between a questioner and a Theosophist, Madame Blavatsky herself. The work shows as much of the author's dynamic mind as do her other publications, but there is no attempt to make a further display of scholarship. It was an endeavor to bring out the intent and meaning of the doctrines, to ease difficulties, and to clarify and reënforce some earlier presentations. It was intended to serve as a manual, but it is far from elementary in parts. In it are two now notable items; her warning against Spiritualism in the early section, and near the end her seemingly prophetic statement that there would later develop an irresistible trend among her successors, in spite of her clarion warnings, to make a church out of her Society.Reflection, her own experience, and her observations of the behavior of many Theosophists, who were figuratively staggering about under the intoxicating spell of so strong a stimulant, deeply impressed her with the necessity of placing a far greater emphasis upon the relation of occult philosophy and ethics and spirituality. Her own performances of extraordinary psychic feats, she saw, had helped to create
the peril that lay in an overemphasis on the desirability of unfolding the latent powers of the soul. Madame Blavatsky was thus made keenly aware of her responsibility in giving out freely what supposedly had been wisely guarded.
Her solicitude was particularly aroused by the rush of many new devotees into the cultivation of the psychic senses, a feature implicit in the esoteric teachings. The persistent presupposition that psychic abilities were the infallible badge of lofty spirituality, soon showed its presence. Then, too, the subtle temptation to regard one's predisposition to Theosophy and one's connection with it as evidence that one has been singled out by the great Masters as uniquely worthy, or that one is far on in the line of evolution, was certain to come to the surface. Madame Blavatsky could be charitable to ordinary human frailties in these directions, but shallow spiritual pretension bought forth her lash.
We are prepared, then, to understand the vehemence with which she uttered her first official statement on this subject through the editorial pages of her new magazine, Lucifer, May 15, 1888. The article had the suggestive title: "Occultism versus the Occult Arts." It is prefaced with a triad from Milton:
"I have oft heard, but ne'er believed till now,
There are who can by potent magic spells
Bend to their crooked purpose Nature's laws."
She minces no words.
"Will these candidates to wisdom and power feel very indignant if told the plain truth? It is not only useful, but it has now become necessary to disabuse most of them and before it is too late. The truth may be said in a few words: There are not in the West half a dozen among the fervent hundreds who call themselves 'Occultists' who have even an approximately correct idea of the nature of the science they seek to master. With a few exceptions they are all on the highway to Sorcery. Let them restore some order in the chaos that reigns in their minds, before they protest against this statement. Let them first learn the true relation in which the occult sciences stand to occultism, and the difference between the two, and then feel wrathful if they still think themselves right. Meanwhile let them learn that Occultism differs from magic and other secret sciences as the glorious sun does from the rushlight, . . . as the immortal Spirit of Man . . . differs from the mortal clay . . . the human body."
She then enumerates four kinds of Esoteric Knowledge or Sciences:
1. Yajna-Vidya:1 Occult powers awakened by ceremonies and rites.
2. Mahavidya:2 The Great Knowledge, the magic of the Kabalists and the Tantrika worship, often sorcery of the worst description.
3. Guhya-Vidya:3 Knowledge of the mystic powers residing in sound; mantras and hymns, rhythm and melody; also knowledge of the forces of nature and their correlation.
4. Atma-Vidya:4 Knowledge of the Soul, called true wisdom by the Orientalists, but means much more.
It is the last of these that constitutes the only real Occultism that a genuine Theosophist ought to seek after. "All the rest are based on things pertaining to the realm of material Nature, however invisible that essence may be, and however much it has hitherto eluded the grasp of science."
The article continues:
"Let him aspire to no higher than he feels able to accomplish. Let him not take a burden on himself too heavy for him to carry.
Without ever becoming a Mahatma, a Buddha, or a Great Saint, let him study the philosophy and the science of the Soul, and he can become one of the modest benefactors of humanity, without any superhuman 'powers.' Siddhis (or the Arhat powers) are only for those who are able to 'lead the life,' to comply with the terrible sacrifices required for such a training, and . . . to the very letter. Let them know at once and remember always that true Occultism, or Theosophy, is the 'Great Renunciation of Self,' unconditionally and absolutely, in thought as in action. It is Altruism, and it throws him who practices it out of calculation of the ranks of the living altogether. 'Not for himself but for the world he lives,' as soon as he has pledged himself to the work. Much is forgiven during the first years of probation. But no sooner is he accepted than his personality must disappear, and he has to become a mere beneficent force in Nature. There are two poles for him after that, two paths, and no midward place of rest. He has either to ascend laboriously step by step, often through numerous incarnations and no Devachanic break, the golden ladder leading to Mahatmaship, or--he will let himself slide down the ladder at the first false step and roll down into Dugaship."
In another Lucifer article near the same time entitled "Practical Occultism," she defines a Theosophist as follows:
"Any person of average intellectual capacities and a leaning towards the metaphysical; of pure unselfish life, who finds more joy in helping his neighbor than in receiving help himself; one who is ever ready to sacrifice his own pleasures for the sake of other people; and who loves Truth, Goodness and Wisdom for their own sake, not for the benefit they may confer--is a Theosophist.
"It is impossible to employ spiritual forces if there is the slightest tinge of selfishness remaining in the operator. For unless the intuition is entirely unalloyed, the spiritual will transform itself into the psychic, act on the astral plane, and dire results may be produced by it. The powers and forces of animal nature can equally be used by the selfish and revengeful, as by the unselfish and the all-forgiving; the powers and forces of spirit lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart--and this is Divine Magic."
The article proceeds to set forth a list of conditions requisite for the practice of the soul science. The necessary conditions are eleven, taken from a list of seventy-three which she says are prescribed for Eastern neophytes. They are: suitable magnetic conditions of the spot selected (for meditation); membership in a company of harmonized students; a mind at peace and purified; a sense of unity with all that lives; renunciation of all vanities; obliteration of a sense of separateness or superiority; avoidance of impurely magnetized contacts; the blunting of the mind to terrestrial distractions; abstention from all animal foods, spirits, opium; expression of good will in thought, speech, and act; and oblivion of self. These precepts form much of the basis of Theosophic cult practice.
The result of such decisive utterances from the leader was to give pause to the fast-growing Society membership in its haste to enter upon the Occult Path. Enthusiasm was chilled. As the nature of the Master Science was revealed and its hardships and scant earthly rewards envisioned, the high qualities demanded and the perils depicted frightened many from the deliberate attempt to enroll as spiritual candidates. Yet there were aspirants both sincere and resolute. The needs of these had to be met, at the same time that the folly of the rash had to be rebuked.
To serve both purposes Madame Blavatsky issued many articles through the pages of Lucifer in London, from 1888 onward. And along with them came a booklet of one hundred and ten small pages which has since taken its place as one of the most beautiful expressions of Oriental spirituality now extant. This was The Voice of the Silence. The Preface states that it is a translation of a portion of the slokas or verses from The Book of the Golden Precepts, one of the works put into the hands of students in the East.5 She had learned many of these Precepts by heart, a fact which made translation a relatively easy task for her. The Book of the Golden Precepts formed part of the same series as that from which the "Stanzas of Dzyan" were taken, on which The Secret Doctrine is based. The Voice of the Silence may be said to be the ethical corollary of the cosmic and anthropological teachings of The Secret Doctrine. Its maxims form part of the basic system of the Yogacharya school of Mahayana Buddhism. Of the ninety distinct little treatises which The Book of the Golden Precepts contains, Madame Blavatsky states that she had learned thirty-nine by heart years before. The remainder is omitted.
"To translate the rest," says the Preface, "I should have to resort to notes scattered among a too large number of papers and memoranda collected for the last twenty years and never put in order, to make it by any means an easy task. Nor could they be all translated and given to a world too selfish and too much attached to objects of sense to be in any way prepared to receive such exalted ethics in the right spirit. . . . Therefore it has been thought better to make a judicious selection only from those treatises which will best suit the few real mystics in this country and which are sure to answer their needs."
The opening sentence says:
"These instructions are for those ignorant of the dangers of the lower Iddhi," or psychic faculties. The second page holds two short sentences which have ever since rung in the ears of occult students: "The Mind is the great slayer of the Real. Let the disciple slay the Slayer."
We must still the restless outgoing mind before we can hope to see into the depths of the reality within. We must strive with our unclean thoughts and overpower them, or they will dominate us. Our deepest sympathies must be linked with all that lives and breathes, we must lend our ears to every cry of mortal pain, or we can not hope to merge our consciousness into the Universal Soul. It is better to trust the heart than the head, for "even ignorance is better than head-learning with no Soul-wisdom to illuminate and guide it." Asceticism is a Via Dolorosa; it is not by self-torture that the lower self can be lifted to union with the higher. Homiletic morality breathes in the following: "Sow kindly acts and thou shalt reap their fruition." But stinging rebuke to negative righteousness echoes in the next sentence, one that has assumed large proportions in Theosophic ethics: "Inaction in a deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin." The basis of much Theosophic morality, as of equanimity and serenity, is found in this text as well as in its corollary, which assures us that no efforts--not the smallest--whether in right or wrong direction, can vanish from the world of causes. "If sun thou canst not be, then be the humble planet" is our admonition to stay modestly within the sphere of our capabilities, and not strain after things unmeet for us. We should humble ourselves before those greater than ourselves in wisdom, seek earnestly their counsel and strive to tread the high path they have traversed. At the same time we must not withhold the blessing of what knowledge we have acquired from the circle of lesser evolved souls who may come within our influence. We must be humble if we would learn; we will be humbler still when knowledge has begun to dawn. Reward for patient striving is held out to all devotees. The holy germs that took root in the disciple's soul will expand and send out shoots under the influence of steady spiritual zeal; the stalks will wax stronger at each new trial, they may bend like reeds, but will never break; and when the time of harvest comes, they blossom forth.
When the persevering soul has crossed the seventh path "all nature thrills with joyous awe." But does the victorious pilgrim then enter selfishly into the enjoyment of his hard-won guerdon of bliss, forgetful of his fellows who have toiled less successfully than he? Is selfishness justified in nature? The verses ask, "Can there be bliss when all that lives must suffer? Shalt though be saved and hear the whole world cry?" The answer is the key to all Theosophic ethic: the Nirmanakaya (literally, the "possessor of a transformation-body"), even he, facing his natural right to enter upon a higher state of being in the upper cycle where he will be free from limitation, turns back to aid the "great orphan humanity." He takes his place in that high Brotherhood whose members form a "Guardian Wall" about mankind. He joins the Society of the Masters of Compassion who by spiritual masonry build the wall "raised by their tortures, by their blood cemented, protecting him (man) from further and far greater misery and sorrow." This is the Great Renunciation of Self, the mighty sacrifice, itself typical of the cosmic sacrifice of Deity in its self-limitation under the cross of matter, and again typified by every symbolic sacrificial rite of the religions. But the universal life can not restrain a thrill of gladness as the prodigal's long exile in the worlds of matter is ended, and he returns to the Father's house. For "Hark . . . from the deep unfathomable vortex of that golden light in which the Victor bathes, all Nature's wordless voice in thousand tones ariseth to proclaim: A New Arhan is Born."
Such is The Voice of the Silence. Its verses ripple on in a rhythmic cadence aptly suited to assist the feeling of mystical devotion. Like other of the Oriental books it consists of ethico-spiritual maxims, which hardly so much attempt to give a systematic exposition of moral principles, as to reduce the spiritual essence of these principles to a mantric form capable of exerting a magical potency when used ritually. But it is not difficult to discover in the book the mainspring of much of that distrust of the purely psychic which marks Theosophy so distinctively among the modern cults. To carry a heart "heavy with a whole world's woe" is accounted a far more substantial merit than to bend some of the etheric and electric forces of nature to one's will.
What The Voice of the Silence aims to do is to strike the spiritual keynote of the ancient science of mystic union or Yoga as essentially a spiritual technique and not a system of magical practices. It is not at all a text-book of the great Yoga philosophy and its art, although it may be said that it in no way clashes with the general Oriental teachings on the subject of Yoga. Madame Blavatsky did not find it needful to formulate a distinctive technique of her own for the cultivation of the great science.
The Theosophical science of Yoga will be found delineated in three or four books which, along with The Voice of the Silence, are: the Bhagavad Gita, Light on the Path (a small collection of precepts alleged to have been dictated mystically by a Master to Mabel Collins in London about 1885), and the several commentaries on the Yoga Aphorisms (or Sutras) of Patanjali, written, according to Vyasa, perhaps 10,000 B.C., according to scholars, a few centuries B.C. Portions of the New Testament, when given esoteric interpretation, are accepted as descriptive of Yoga development. Light on the Path is highly mystico-spiritual in tone, a companion work to The Voice of the Silence. It is couched in allegorical and figurative language, depicting forms of nature as symbolical of spiritual truth. The Bhagavad Gita, or Lord's Lay, is a portion of the Mahabharata, and is by now so widely disseminated among Western students as to need no description or comment in this connection. It enjoys perhaps the place of foremost popularity among all the Oriental religious dissertations. But the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali come perhaps nearest to being a definite text-book of Theosophic devotional discipline. It is therefore important to look carefully at the features of the physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual regimen prescribed in this ancient text for the cultivation of the highest Theosophic virtue.
It is a handbook for the practice of the Science of Yoga. Yoga, in brief, means union,6 having specific reference to the eventual merging of the individual Soul or Monad into the Universal or World Soul, and in a larger view the absorption of all finite souls into the Absolute. Its rules and injunctions are the natural outgrowth of a philosophy which holds that man is an ensemble of several separate entities or principles, whose harmonious evolution postulates a cultus demanding the unification under one central control of the different individualities which, till that harmonization is effected, live together at odds and cross purposes within the same organism. To mollify that discordance it is requisite first of all that man should rise above the delusion that he is essentially his body, or his feelings, or even his mind. He must first learn through an inner realization that he, in his true Self, is none of these, but that he, the real inner man, uses these as his servants. He must recognize himself as the divine imperishable Ego, the Jivatma,7 and in so doing he will cease to commit the error of identifying himself with those temporary and transient aspects of himself which he so long mistook for his real being. This orientation of himself from his lower manifestations into his true plane of Selfhood will release him from all the pain and distress that attends his illusion that he is the impermanent lower self.
This in brief is the general aim of Eastern occult practices; but its complete rationale involves an understanding of the details of a labyrinthine science of soul unfoldment that in its intricacy staggers the psychological neophyte in the West. It is necessary in some degree to go into this psychological technology for a better comprehension of the theme.
Its adept devotees in the East tell us that Yoga is no mere cult, but an exact and complex science, with precise rules, very definite stages, and a quite scientific methodology.
There are several types or forms of Yoga practice, which must first be differentiated. The most definite forms are: (1), Karma Yoga; (2), Bhakti Yoga; and (3), Raja Yoga. Karma Yoga is the path of active exertion (Karma meaning "action"), by which the man at an early stage of evolution learns to acquire control of his physical organism and his sense apparatus for the purposes of an energetic bodily career in the world. It has been subdivided into two types, called Hatha Yoga and Laya Yoga. The first, or "forceful," gives control over the physical mechanism of the body; the second, or "inactive," governs the emotional or etheric component of man. In this process there are gradually brought into active operation the four force centers, wheels or chakras, which lie below the diaphragm. Karma Yoga is supposed to have been employed by the Lemurian or Third Race people, to enable them to perform their appropriate functions in the line of earthly racial evolution. It is not to be practiced by us.
Bhakti ("Love") Yoga, the second type, awakens the heart and throat centers in the etheric body, which latter is achieved by the exercise of devotion and affectional qualities. Love, affection, loyalty, attachment to personality, are the powerful stimuli that rouse the centers above the diaphragm to active functioning. It is the path of feeling and emotion, using the astral body. Its use was credited to the Atlanteans, or Fourth Race folk, as their most appropriate type of evolutionary expression, and is no longer our task.
Raja ("King") Yoga, type three, is the specific discipline for our Fifth Race, the Aryan. It is designed to awaken the centers in the head (the pineal gland and the pituitary body) crowning the work of the two earlier Yogas in the development of the functions of the etheric body. It is consequently the path of mentality, which is the Fifth principle in man; and hence it becomes the appointed task of the Fifth or Aryan Race to unfold it. As the work of Yoga is to unify the various principles in man into harmonious accord, it will be seen that, as Karma Yoga arouses the four lower centers, and Bhakti Yoga unites them with the two middle centers (the heart and throat), so it is the purpose of Raja Yoga to link the ascending forces with the centers in the head (the brain and the two glands mentioned above), and to use this uppermost station as the controlling and distributing center for all the energies of the unified personality.8
There are many stages in the long process of Yoga development. First the physical must be brought under control. Then the etheric centers must be quickened and linked with the head centers. Then the mind must be linked with the true soul, and eventually the latter with the common Soul of all things. According to Mrs. Bailey, Raja Yoga is a system giving the rules and means whereby,
1. Conscious contact can be made with the soul, the second aspect of the Christ within.
2. Knowledge of the Self can be achieved and its control over the Not-Self maintained.
3. The power of the Ego or Soul can be felt in daily life, and the soul powers manifested.
4. The lower psychic nature can be subdued and the higher psychic faculties developed.
5. The brain can be brought en rapport with the soul and the messages from the latter received.
6. The "light in the head" can be increased so that a man becomes a living Flame.
7. The Path can be found, and man himself becomes that Path.
The initial work of Raja Yoga is the recognition of the true nature of the Self as distinct from the illusory character of man's life in the three lower worlds--the difference between the Man himself and his lower vestures. This is achieved by a long course of meditation, with thought turned inward, until one empirically learns that he is not either his body, or his feelings, or his sensations, or even his thoughts; that all these belong to the world of evanescent things, and that he himself is the entity, the point of conscious being, which abides in unaffected permanence at the center of this changing world of experience. This is his first task--to learn to distinguish that which comes into being and goes out from that which abides. And the work involves more than a merely mental grasp of the fact; it requires that one should act, feel, and think, and at the same time learn to stand aside from the act, the feeling, the thought, and remain unaffected by them.
For ages during his preceding evolution, before the scales of illusion were torn from his eyes, the man was under the delusion that he was the lower objective self, as reported by his senses. This identification of himself with what is in reality but his outer clothing, is the cause of all the pain that besets his path. For this thinking himself to be the vestures which he wears subjects him to the vicissitudes which they themselves must undergo. He thus prescribes physical and sensuous limits to his destiny. He puts himself at the mercy of the fate which befalls his outward life. Before serenity can be achieved he must learn to detach himself from his vehicles, so that he can sit unaffected in the midst of changing fortunes. Ere long he must realize himself as part of the whole of being, yet as detached from it, free from the dominance of the world of form and the impressions of the senses. He must learn to use them, and no longer let them use him. His dominance over matter is achieved by a mastery of the subtle forces resident in the atom. This is done by developing a conscious control over what are called the Gunas, the three qualities of matter, which are Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas; or rhythm, action or mobility, and inertia. In Indian philosophy, however, these three terms mean, rather, "goodness, passion, and darkness," or "virtue, foulness, and ignorance." Therefore it is necessary to understand the theosophic interpretation of Gunas.
Eventually the disciple must be able to command the wind and the waves by instituting the proper balance between the rhythmic and the inert qualities of matter. Thus he learns to know of a surety that he is not those forms but a dynamic entity immeasurably greater than them. The acquirement of this knowledge is a part of the process necessary to the realization of his true character as a living spirit, and to the gradual withdrawing of himself from his entanglement in the world of matter. The five elements, earth, water, fire, air, and ether, and the five senses, as well as the distinctive forms of mental action, are the specific results of the interplay of the three Gunas in the world of material forces. But back of these external manifestations there are the "unspecific" or subjective forms of ethereal force; and eventually the disciple has to touch these unseen elements and control them.
To help detach himself from the influence of visible forms, the seeker must aim to actualize the unseen force which operates behind every form, and thus look through and beyond the form, which is but the effect of some cause, to that cause itself. The crucial operation in every Yoga practice is to work back from effects, which are material and secondary, to causes, which are spiritual and primary; from the material periphery of life in to its spiritual core. This he believes possible by virtue of the theory that "the whole world of forms is the result of the thought activity of some life; the whole universe of matter is the field for the experience of some existence."9
All objective forms are frozen thoughts of some mind, which gives its own coloring to both the objective and the subjective worlds presented to it. Hence, one of the first things the Ego has to do in seeking Yoga is to take the mind in charge and render it a perfect instrument for the Soul's higher vision. The central aim of the great discipline of meditation is summed up in the phrase "to still the modifications of the thinking principle." The mind's proper function, in the Yoga system, is to serve as a sublimated sixth sense, transcending yet supplementing all the others. Through persistent practice it is to be rendered into a finely poised spiritual sense, to become the organ of the Soul's acquisition of the higher knowledge. This is the use for which it is destined in the unfolding economy of nature; but it has hitherto failed to reveal this purpose because it has not been subjected--in the West--to the necessary discipline. In preceding aeons of evolution it subserved nature's intent by growing facile and mobile. It displayed the Rajas Guna, or mobility, to an advanced degree. But when spirit begins the long process of retirement from the thraldom of the form, this quality of the mind becomes more and more a hindrance. Its incessant activity must be poised. It must be brought under the sway of the Sattva Guna,--rhythm.
Hitherto the mind has been the slave of every lower sense. This was its proper service at the Lemurian or Karma Yoga stage. It is so no longer. It must be made blind and deaf to the insistent cry of the outer world, so that it may become prepared to picture forth, like a clear lens, the realities of an inner world, whose impressions it was never focused to reflect heretofore.
As it turns away from the clamorous din of sense contacts, it finds itself in a realm, first, where only emotions are left to be dwelt upon. The material world shut out, there is nothing but astral or feeling impulses to absorb its attention. Next all passional content must be rejected, leaving only intellectual material to deal with. At last even abstract thought must be stilled, until the mind is utterly emptied of content. It dwells in pure abstraction, in a state void of anything concrete. Or it may take an object, concrete and substantial, and by a supreme effort, successful after long trial, lose sight of its materiality and finally see it as a thing of pure spiritual construction. The actual substance of things disappears and only the noumenal concept of it is seen. The mind approaches nearer and nearer to sheer vacuity. Is Yoga thus to end in a blank of empty abstraction, with all concreteness gone from experience?
For a time it may seem so. But suddenly when the persevering devotee has at last succeeded in holding the mind calm and still as the placid surface of a lake, there ensues an experience of the light that never was on land or sea. With the increasing glow of the light there pours down into consciousness knowledge, mystic vision, and clear illumination, as the vibratory energies of the Augoeides, or Spiritual Soul, flood down into the brain. The mind now serves as the luminous pathway between the inner realm of spiritual light and the physical brain, and over that bridge the individual human soul may advance into a direct knowledge of the interior heart of nature.
"When a man can detach his eyes from all that concerns the physical, emotional and mental, and will raise his eye and direct them away from himself, he will become aware of 'the overshadowing cloud of spiritual knowledge,' or the 'raincloud of knowable things.'"
The human soul empties itself of earthly content, in order that it may be filled with heavenly light and wisdom. The perfecting of the mind as a sublimated sense instrument thus enables the Seer to do three important things:
1. To see the world of spiritual causation, as the eye sees the physical world.
2. To interpret that causal world in terms of the intellect.
3. To transmit this high knowledge to the physical brain.
The advance to this superior consciousness is made through the gateway of a number of Initiations, or specific stages in the expansion of conscious capacity. The training requisite to unify the soul with its organism constitutes the first stage called the Probationary Path. Stage two brings one to the Third Initiation, when the union of the mind with the Ego on his own plane is completed. The third stage accomplishes the union of the whole lower personality with the Monad, and covers the final steps on the Path of Initiation.
These stages of the Path are further symbolized in the literature of occultism by three halls through which man passes as he ascends: the Hall of Ignorance; the Hall of Learning; and the Hall of Wisdom. While he is in the realm of purely human life and identified with the phenomenal world, he is said to be in the Hall of Ignorance. The termination of his residence there brings him to the entrance to the Probationary Path. He then enters the Hall of Learning, wherein he follows the path of discipleship and instruction. This is the Mystic Life. At its end he passes by another initiation into the Occult Life and dwells within the Hall of Wisdom. Here he attains realization, undergoes heightened expansion of his consciousness, and identifies himself with the spiritual essence of his being.
The central features of occult discipline from the standpoint of the novitiate is the oft-mentioned "stilling of the senses and the mind." In the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna, the disciple, remonstrates with Krishna, the Lord, that he can not accept the Yoga teaching as to the steadfastness of the controlled mind. It is hard to tame he says, as the prancing horse or the fitful wind. Krishna answers:
"Well sayest thou, O Prince, that the mind is restless and as difficult to restrain as the winds. Yet by constant practice, discipline and care may it be mastered. . . . The Soul, when it has recognized the master-touch of the real Self, may attain unto true Yoga by care and patience, coupled with firm resolution and determination."
A little later he adds:
"Close tightly those gates of the body which men call the avenues of the senses. Concentrate thy mind upon thine inner self. Let thine 'I' dwell in full strength within its abode, not seeking to move outward. . . . He who thinketh constantly and fixedly on Me, O Prince, letting not his mind ever stray toward another object, will be able to find Me without overmuch trouble,--yea, he will find Me, will that devoted one."
There is a law of esotericism which governs the operation of all these psychic forces in mind and body. It is likewise the guarantee of the Soul's ultimate hegemony among the principles making up man's life. It is the occult law that "energy follows thought." It was this law which brought the universe into existence out of the Unmanifest; it is this law by which man has himself fashioned the instruments for his objective expression on the outer planes in the lower worlds. He, like the macrocosmic Logos before him, sent forth thought-waves, which, vibrating and impacting upon cosmic matter, moulded it to forms commensurate with the type of their activity. Thus he has built his own universe, which, however, binds him while it gives him expression.
Now the same law must, in reverse motion, so to say, be utilized to release him from the trammels of flesh and sense, of feeling and mind-wandering. With energy flowing in the grooves marked by thought, he must cease to send thought outward to the periphery of life, the material world. Essentially a psychic being, he must concern himself not with things but with psychic states. He must withdraw his attention
from sense contacts, whether pleasurable or painful, and end his subjection to the pairs of opposites, joy and sorrow, delight and anguish. He must cease to set his affections on things of desire; he must restrain wayward streams of thought. Refusing to direct further energies outward to these spheres, he invokes the law to terminate his further creations of form that will bind him to the world of the Not-Self.
The mind-stuff is susceptible to vibrations both from the lower bodies and from the Soul above. Man's destiny is in his own hands; it is daily decreed by the direction in which he turns his mind. As a man changes the nature and direction of his desires he changes himself.
Mind-control is acquired through two lines of endeavor: tireless effort and non-attachment. The first requirement explains why the Yoga student must be virtually a religious devotee. From no other source than religious devotion to the Way of Attainment can the necessary persistence spring to carry the candidate through to eventual success. The second prerequisite, non-attachment, is often spoken of as "renunciation of the fruits of action." It signifies that attitude toward things and toward the life of the personality which enables the Soul or Ego to regard the events that touch these with a sense of equanimity or nonchalance. It is the sublimation of Stoic ataraxia, and is called vairagya in Sanskrit. Our term indifference does not convey the correct significance of the concept. It connotes a combination of positive and negative attitudes practically unknown to the West. Krishna explains to Arjuna the seeming paradox in his injunction to service through action, which is coupled with a similar abjuration to ignore the fruits of action. The devotee is enjoined to perform right action for the sake of dharma, or duty, as the West has it, but at the same time to renounce the fruits of the action. In our vernacular this would mean to act with the zeal born of an interesting objective, but to leave the results with God. If one binds himself to the fruits of his actions, he creates ever new Karma for future expiation. He must act, and act resolutely; yet without thought of reward. Says the Bhagavad Gita:
"The wise man, setting himself free, mentally, from actions and their results, dwelleth in the Temple of the Spirit, even that which men call the body, resting calmly therein, at peace, and neither desiring to act nor causing to act, and yet always willing to play well his part in action, when Duty calleth him."10
Krishna clarifies the contradictory demands of duty and renunciation in the following:
". . . he who performeth honorably and to the best of his ability, such Action as may appear to him to be plain and righteous Duty, remembering always that he has nought to do with the reward or fruits of the Action, is both a Renouncer of Action, and also a Performer of the Service of Right Action. More truly is he an Ascetic and Renouncer than he who merely refuses to perform Actions; for the one hath the spirit of the doctrine, while the other hath grasped merely the empty shell of form and letter. Know thou such Intelligent Right Action as Renunciation; and also that the best of Right Action without Intelligent understanding of the renunciation of results is not Right Action at all."11
On the road to Seership, the aspirant advances by two stages. First there is the long Path of Probation; later the Path of Discipleship. He passes over many steps, commencing with the aspiration, entering upon Discipline, leading to Purification, followed by Initiation, Realization, and final union with the Over-soul. There are said to be seven major modifications of the thinking principle, or seven states of consciousness, as follows: desire for knowledge; desire for freedom; desire for happiness; desire to perform duty; sorrow; fear; and doubt. These seven basic yearnings severally reach their fulfillment as illumination ensues upon strenuous effort. These are called the seven stages of bliss, or the seven stations on the Way of the Cross.
The practice of Yoga involves the employment of what are known as the Eight Means. These are:
1. Yama: self-control, restraint; it relates to the disciple's contacts with others and with the outside world.
2. Nyana: right observances; the keeping of the Five Commandments and the Five Rules.
The Five Commandments are:
(a) Harmlessness: the aspirant must use the physical forces in the spirit of beneficence to all that lives. He hurts no thing.
(b) Truth: precise and straightforward speech, expressing inward truth. The voice must have lost the power to injure.
(c) Abstention from theft: rendering each his due; not using more than one's share; making one's maintenance cost no more than is right; not taking what others need.
(d) Abstention from incontinence: control of the relation between the sexes; unloosing of the Soul from too strong attachment to any physical or sense expression.
(e) Abstention from avarice: covetousness is theft on the mental plane.
The Five Rules enjoin:
(a) Magnetic purity: internal and external purity of the three bodies; unhindered flow of Prana through the system.
(b) Contentment: mind at rest; not a state of inertia, but one of poise and balance of energies.
(c) Fiery aspiration: a sine qua non before a disciple is accepted. Zeal to win through is a primary qualification.
(d) Spiritual reading: power to discern things in their spiritual, not physical, aspects; inner vision.
(e) Devotion to Ishvara: consecration of the lower man to the service of the higher. Devotion to God, or the Divine Spark within us.
3. Asana: right poise; correct physical, emotional and mental attitudes. It coördinates the three principles of the lower man into a perfect instrument.
4. Pranayama: breath control; control of the subtle energies of the inner sheaths; leads to organization of the etheric or vital body.
5. Pratyahara: abstraction; withdrawal of the Soul from the interests of the outer life.
6. Dharana: concentration; fixation of the mind; leads to coordination of the mind as the sixth sense of the Soul.
7. Dhyana: meditation; development of the capability of the Soul to transmit to the brain its higher ideas.
8. Samadhi: contemplation; dwelling consciously upon the "things of God"; leads to full illumination. It is the final stage of mystic vision, when the individual Ego looks upon the full splendor of the spiritual universe.
As the purification of the three lower vehicles proceeds, certain physical changes are said to occur within the head, following the awakening of the "lotus centers" below. "The vital airs" are organized to flow in regular currents up and down the two channels in the spinal cord; they rise to the head, circulate around the temples and pass inward to touch and arouse to active functioning the pineal gland and the pituitary body, located close to each other near the center of the cranium. This is the Kundalini or Serpent Fire, typified in may symbolisms of the ancients. Its play of force fills the whole body with light. It is so high-powered a current of etheric energy that its stirring to activity is attended with much danger, and, Theosophists say, should only be undertaken with the help of a Master.
No bizarre style of ascetic living is demanded of a Yogi. "Celibacy is not enjoined. Self-control is." If we may use Mrs. Bailey's words once more,
"The right use of the sex principle, along with entire conformity to the law of the land, is characteristic of every true aspirant."12
The basic principle of personal conduct is subsumed under the one rule: "Let every man attend to his own Dharma." The meddler, the reformer, the uplifter is looked upon askance in the Orient. The individual's kingdom to conquer is within. When he becomes master there he will be given larger worlds to subdue to law and harmony.
An interesting development at a later stage is the Yogi's increasing power to create on the mental plane by the use of the word or of sounds. He becomes a magician--a white one if his motive is pure and selfless. This power is achieved through continence, pure living, and clean thinking, and not through any perversions of the occult, such as sex magic, as emphasized by some so-called schools of occultism. The latter are on the black path, which does not lead to the portals of initiation.
There are four types of purity to be achieved, one for each vehicle: external (for the physical body); magnetic (of the etheric body); psychic (of the astral body); and mental (of the mental body). All kinds require refinement of the matter of which each body is composed. The law of synchronous and asynchronous vibrations attends to this, pure thoughts sifting out coarser particles from the bodies and building in finer ones. This is what is meant by burning out the dross.
Mrs. Bailey tells us that "in this cycle the interest of the hierarchy is being largely centered on the question of psychic purity, and this is the reason for the trend of the occult teaching at present developing. It is away from what is commonly understood as psychic development, lays no emphasis on the lower psychic powers and seeks to train the aspirant in the laws of the spiritual life."13
"The pure heart shall see God,"--who is the higher inner principle which suddenly manifests itself to the open-visioned seeker.
It is most necessary--Mrs. Bailey agrees with Madame Blavatsky--that students should follow the means of Yoga in the order laid down by Patanjali, and should thence see to it that the purificatory process, the discipline of the inner and the outer life, and one-pointedness of mind, should be undertaken prior to attempting the regulation of the etheric principle through breathing. The premature awakening of the centers is attended with positive danger, as before noted. The natural barriers between this world and the astral may be broken down before the pupil is ready to deal with the forces thus released. The untimely development of the lower psychism is regarded as the cause of insanity in many cases.
One must be a mystic before he becomes an occultist. The mystic rises to God through the path of feeling; the occultist through the path of knowledge. Each person must become both, but more fittingly the mystic first.
The eight final siddhis or powers are given as:
1. Minuteness: the ability to enter the infinitely small, the atom.
2. Magnitude: ability to expand the vision to embrace the cosmos.
3. Gravity: the ability to use the law of gravity.
4. Lightness: power to counteract gravity, and cause levitation.
5. Attainment of one's objective: the ability to gain one's purpose.
6. Irresistible will: sovereignty over the forces of nature.
7. Creative power: art of combining and recombining the elements.
8. Power to command: power of the word to organize matter into form.
At this stage we are at last dowered with some of the powers of gods. For "God meditated, visualized, spoke, and the worlds were made," and when our Christ principle is awakened to full functioning we become joint heirs of his power. At the final stage knowledge becomes possible even without the use of the senses, though these have themselves been refined to ethereal sensitivity and continue to serve the Ego in various capacities.
In the end spirit is victor over matter, because the long struggle eventuates in three attainments, described as:
1. The inability of matter and form to hold the Yogi confined.
2. The powerlessness of substance to prevent the Yogi cognizing any aspect of life he desires.
3. The helplessness of matter to withstand the will of the Yogi.
Freedom from the limitations of matter forms the basis of all white magic. Through his transcendent powers the Yogi now transforms the very vehicles into instruments of more expanded efficiency. The Soul and its vehicles now form a unit, and the Son of God can function unrestrictedly on earth, on any plane. The human Ego has become what he was all along, but had not demonstrated till now,--a God. His life is now hid with the Christos in the bosom of God, and for him humanity is transcended, and he needs no further rebirth as a mortal. The Spirit has then transcended space and time. Matter can no longer imprison him. He dwells consciously in the timeless Now.
A beautiful passage in the Bhagavad Gita may fittingly summarize this entire regimen of Yoga, which is the ideal of the Theosophist:14
"Having purified his mind and cleared his understanding; having mastered his personal self by firm resolution and having forsaken the objects of sense; having delivered himself from desire, dislike and passion; worshipping with intelligent discretion and understanding; eating with moderation and temperance; with controlled speech, body and mind; being well practiced in meditation and concentration; being dispassionate; having freed himself from ostentation, egotism, tyranny, vain-glory, lust, anger, avarice, covetousness and selfishness--possessing calmness and peace amidst the feverish unrest of the world around him--such a man is fitted to enter into the consciousness of the Universal Life."
How naturally unfitted Occidentals are to undertake the rigid discipline is evidenced by Madame Blavatsky's statement that hardly half a dozen of her followers faced any fair prospects of success in mastering the difficulties of the thorny path. Her own warming words disillusioned those whose hopeful and enthusiastic efforts had not already reaped for them a harvest of barren result. Leading the occult life was seen not to be at all the sensational and spectacular road to a magical victory. On the contrary it presented rather a drab and dreary prospect.
Thus while the life of a Yogi is the ultimate Theosophic ideal, the accepted code of morality and devotion, like many another body of ideal teaching, it is seldom actualized in performance. It is too intense for the average sincere person in the West. And perhaps, too, its practice and exemplification would mark the practitioner as eccentric.
The outcome of this disparity between goal and achievement is that the cult practice of Theosophy has become a sort of compromise; and the "life Theosophic" may be said to have been reduced for the rank and file of the membership to one or other, or all, of the following lines of endeavor:
(1), the performance of one's dharma;
(2), living the life of brotherhood;
(3), practicing meditation; (4) dietary regulation;
(5), a general effort to progress by reading, study, and service, to grow by enlarging the knowledge of life.
This menu is interesting as affording concrete demonstration of just how far the cult of Oriental subjectivism can be carried out in real life by a large segment of sincere and intelligent persons in our Western milieu.
Many Theosophic students at one time or another have seriously contemplated attacking the whole problem of spiritual attainment with all its obligations. But for the greater part they have elected the winding, if longer, road up the mountain, rather than challenge the rigors and the perils of the straight steep path. The latter course entails the "challenging of one's entire block of past evil Karma"; one undertakes to climb to the Mount of Transfiguration carrying the whole bundle of one's former wrongdoing. It is the testimony of hundreds of Theosophic idealists that their first virginal enthusiasm for a trial of the higher life of renunciation has in reality operated upon them in this way, so that they have been disposed by the severity of their experience to relinquish the harder method and be content with more gradual progress.
Yet in truth the compromise is regarded more as the consequence of want of resolute purpose than as a necessity occasioned by untoward circumstances. The claim is made that quiet and leisure are by no means indispensable conditions of success; that one can as well cultivate the fruits of the spirit amid the noise of modern life as in sequestered solitudes. The voice of the silence can be detected and heeded above the roar of traffic. The asceticisms which the Buddha decried are in no wise essential to the conquest of the inner nature. It is not outward circumstance but inner resolution that determines achievement or failure.
The five specified forms of leading the life of Theosophic culture may now be touched upon. The first one is the performance of one's dharma, one of the several translations of which is our "duty." For many Theosophists this covers their entire practice of occultism. Dharma is not quite the same thing as Karma, but it is taken to mean the obligations and duties incumbent upon one by virtue of one's karmic situation. It is equivalent to the Right Action spoken of by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. It is the performance of our duty in that particular place, time, and circumstance in which our lot is cast.
It has often been objected against Theosophic belief in reincarnation that its influence would be to narcotize earthly ambition and effort. On the presupposition that many more lives are to come, endeavor will be less strenuous, it is argued. But no Theosophist would concede the validity of this reasoning. He will contend that the effect of his philosophy is to energize his activities. A definite amount of work has to be done, and the sooner the better. Further, evolution couples its own peculiar penalties to wasted opportunity. Therefore the Theosophist will strive to be diligent in business and fervent in spirit, he will not be thrown off his balance by the urge to feverish haste which the one-life theory may engender. From his vastly extended perspective he may derive that calmness which comes from living in the spirit of eternity instead of in that of the temporal flux. An event which perturbs the mind of another as being absolute good or ill, is accepted by him in an equable mood, as it is seen to be but temporary and relative.
Contributing to his attitude of mental poise also is the doctrine that each fling of adverse fortune is the final rendering of some particular account, the last payment on some old claim, which, if borne with some patience, will soon be scratched off his slate. Physical ills are regarded as the eventual outcropping of spiritual faults on the material plane; they are therefore on their way out. Each stroke of ill is thought of as one more debt paid off. The debtor rejoices that he is thus one step nearer freedom.
To keep striving in the line of regular duty under every stress and strain is therefore a primary virtue. It makes Theosophists good, loyal, and dependable citizens of the state. Their native membership in any particular society is looked upon as entailing certain obligations laid upon them by the hand of Karma.
Along with racial, national, and professional dharma there is that other, especially sacred to the Theosophist, the family dharma. The relation of helpfulness in the family weighs with considerable impressiveness upon Theosophists. This function may be assumed from necessity, from the bare force of the idea of dharma, or from the belief that it may pay exceptional rewards for meritorious service to humanity.
The tenets of Theosophy likewise dispose their practitioners to the happy procedure of minding their own business, in the main. The Bhagavad Gita is insistent that one's dharma, insignificant as it may seem, is energy productively expended, while the effort to perform that dharma of another is a fruitless waste. Theosophy believes that charity begins at home, and "know thyself" is the main call to duty. To render oneself whole and lovely is the finest--ultimately the only--service one can do for the world. The world can ask no more from you than this, and to it you should devote yourself chiefly, using social contacts as in part the means of growth. "One's own dharma is good; the dharma of another is bad"--for you.
But humanity forms a brotherhood and the relation entails upon the Theosophist--who proclaims it as his central theme and only creedal requirement--a distinctive course of behavior toward his fellowmen. As Theosophy is an effort at scientific altruism, the conduct of members must involve no element that either positively harms, or, negatively, withholds good from a fellow mortal. "Do not hurt to any creature,"--this to insure peace and safety and good will as the basic condition of fraternity among mankind. Harmlessness is one of the Five Commandments, as we have seen. Abstinence from theft is another; and this is a further-reaching prohibition than it may seem at first sight. It means that one should not take from the common store more than one needs, lest another suffer privation. This places a ban on all ostentation, luxury, extravagance, which is living at the expense of others' labor.15
And herein is seen a most important aspect of Theosophic morality, one that sets a sharp contrast between the cult and others that have fed on its fundamental occult principles. There is in Theosophy an absence of that preachment concerning the "demonstration of prosperity," success, material well-being, which has been the bait held out by so many cults especially in America. Theosophists are taught that service to one's fellows, and not demonstrations of superiority over them, or ability to tax their labors, is the truest demonstration of godly power and the most direct way to put one's shoulder to evolution's wheel. To demonstrate prosperity is but to demonstrate selfishness, unless prosperity is rigidly made utilitarian to brotherhood. The cults in question regard Theosophy as partaking too strongly of Oriental non-aggressiveness in these respects, and they have attempted to supply to Eastern occultism the desirable quality of Yankee thrift, which the originators of the science were so thoughtless as to leave out. But Theosophy, with Ruskin, affirms that true spirituality demands neither your prosperity nor your poverty, is not signalized by either, but may utilize either or both for its ends. On the whole the possession of spirituality has been marked throughout history by demonstrations of poverty rather than by a parade of material wealth. Though there is no necessary relation of cause and effect between the two, poverty has probably engendered more spirituality than has success. Prosperity is no criterion of success, and may be the road to spiritual ruin. A man may gain the world and lose his soul. So Theosophy is no party to the "how to get what you want" ballyhoo, and is so loyal to the true spiritual ideal of service that it does not hesitate to characterize New Thought, Christian Science, Unity, Applied Psychology, and the others as forms of sorcery, and gray, if not quite black, magic.
Much the same considerations restrain occultists from rushing into the healing cults, which have added therapy to the lure of "prosperity." Theosophy has paused long enough to reflect that there may be ethical factors in the matter of healing. It is inclined to feel that there is a breach of both natural and moral law in the use of spiritual energies to heal bodily diseases.
If one is ill as the result of intemperance in living, eating, or as a consequence of wrong thinking, the disturbance is to be remedied by a rectification of ill-advised habits, not by resort to spiritual affirmation. Human welfare is to be achieved and promoted by obedience to the laws of life on all planes, not by jugglery of so-called spiritual forces. To use spiritual power as a means of escaping the penalties of violated physical laws is a perversion of high energies to base ends. Furthermore, it is a deduction from the technology of life on the several planes that a physical ill is the working out on the physical level of causes engendered on the inner planes, and that if ceremonial, or theurgical, or psychological powers are invoked to prevent its full deploying into the realm of the body on its way out to a final dispersion of its energies, it will be driven back into the inner bodies, only to emerge at some favorable time in the future with more pain than now.
Mental healing but drowns the symptoms, which are the effects, and does not cause or prevent its discovery. Theosophists tell us that there are infinitely deeper laws governing the processes of healing than either materia medica or cult therapy dreams of, and it is foolish for uninstructed zealots to rush into this field. The program of Theosophy in the face of the blatant cry for healing directed at every sect and cult, is to learn the basic laws of life, on all planes. Obedience to them will obviate the necessity for the special intervention of exceptional forces. Moreover, disease is needed by nature as a means to apprise us of our errors, and hence to enlighten our ignorance. Were it not for pain we could not grow in knowledge. It is more important that the laws of life be mastered than that some pains be removed.
Likewise not even happiness is made the criterion of Theosophical ethical idealism. Mankind has the right to happiness, to be sure, since Ananda (bliss) is the ultimate nature of the All. In the end, the abundant life, with happiness as its concomitant, will be the fruit of effort, and one of the marks of attainment. But in the present status of evolution, happiness is for the most part only tentative, or epiphenomenal, as transient as pain. Then, too, pain if often likely to be a more certain guide to progress than is joy. The primary task is to master the laws of life; and the processes of learning may not be the happiest experience. Dharma overshadows mere happiness.
Those Theosophists, then, who lay stress upon the dharmic aspect of ethical teaching may be said to live their faith through the practice of a sort of Karma Yoga. They follow neither the path of mysticism nor those of occultism and devotion in their purely psychological phases. They seek to build character through right action and to reach the inner kingdom through "meritorious deeds." They live Theosophy in conduct rather than in thinking.
A second type of occult practice is that which grows out of the emphasis laid upon the principle of Brotherhood.
One of the first and most striking forms in which this spirit emerges into practical conduct is the control of speech in the avoidance of gossip. New students of Theosophy have often been surprised at the emphasis laid in the ethical literature of the cult on the primary importance of this item of behavior. It is therein regarded as one of the most direct forms of sin against the law of love, the law of brotherhood, since the victim is not present to defend himself. It is the subterfuge of weakness and baseness. It foments discord and strife.
It is but the simplest sort of homiletic wisdom to realize that the exercise of brotherhood demands the obliteration of such harsh and gross emotions as anger, hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, avarice, brutality. They all spring from "the heresy of separateness" and feed on the sense of self as isolated from the common weal.
But perhaps the highest virtue in the way of human solidarity in the occultist's catalogue is that of tolerance. Theosophists are asked to exemplify tolerance because it is a prima facie fundamentum of any scheme of social friendliness whatever.
Esoterically the Theosophical Society was organized to form a nucleus of Universal Brotherhood, to bring under a common stimulus a group of men and women who should endeavor to manifest perfect unity on the basis of that one principle, who should constitute a node of spiritual force giving vitality to the evolution of the unified racial consciousness. Tolerance was the indispensable element in this enterprise.
The third road to Yoga followed by many in the movement is that of meditation. The degree of its actual employment by members of the Society is a variable quantity. Meditation was a requirement of the discipline in the Esoteric Section to the minimum extent of fifteen minutes a day. But outside that section few students held themselves to any set schedule. Its practice is intermittent and irregular, when undertaken at all. Avid beginners often bind themselves to a course of daily meditation, with fair results. But the task seems in most cases to prove irksome or to be attended with unsatisfactory consequences of one kind or another. It many cases it is eventually given up. The influences militating against its fruitful continuance are not entirely clear. Whether the pressure of the actual in our Western life is too heavy for steady progress in the art, or whether our nervous systems are not sufficiently receptive of the forces which would take us deeper into the core of consciousness, we are unable to determine.
This systematic character of spiritual exercise under a technique that has the sanction of hoary antiquity is one of the features of Theosophy that commends it to earnest folk in contrast with the loose indefinite procedure of most Christian practice. The occult system provides a regimen of definite discipline, with the promise of growth in the conscious spiritualization of life. It does not leave one in the atmosphere of a vague idealism, but furnishes the formulae of an exact science. Certain definite results are promised, in the event of sustained effort.
Most Theosophic meditation consists in concentrating upon a certain virtue of a lofty nature that the student desires to embody in his character. Working upon the theory that "a man becomes that upon which he thinks," he labors to implant new elements into his personality by the steady contemplation of desirable qualities. The keynote of the whole process is concentration. To focus consciousness in a steady stream upon one item of knowledge or one phase of virtue is tremendously to enhance the mental product. The effort of mind and will is supplemented here by the law of automatism, brought into operation by repetition. It is a variant of the old law of habit formation, and is regarded by the occultists as the only direct method of soul-culture that can be consciously applied, with safety, by the individual.
The objects of contemplation may vary from those which are concrete to those which are personal, or intellectual, or abstract. One may think of virtue as impersonal or as personally embodied. It is an aid in the earlier stages to visualize virtue, beauty, nobility, wisdom, truth as exemplified in some strong character. But eventually the aim is to absorb the spirit of those qualities in their pure or impersonal form. As Adeptship is reached and some of the loftier ranges of spirituality are attained, meditation tends to empty the mind of all content, whether intellectual or rhapsodic, and to bring into consciousness the cognition of sheer pure Being itself.
The fourth avenue of occult progress leads through a régime of bodily purification by means of diet. It grows out of the recognition of the relation between body and spirit, between the indwelling life and its various sheaths. Hence progress in the occult life is held to be materially conditioned by the dietary régime one follows.
The occultist is concerned with his food, then, with reference to its purity and its magnetic qualities, in addition to its general agency in sustaining life. It is a question of kind and quality first, and secondly of quantity. Theosophists long ago talked of the magnetic properties of foods. Certain ones tended to make one sluggish, as they contained heavier earthy elements. Others built coarse and sensuous fibre into the tissue and blood. Others heightened nervous instability. Some coarsened, others refined, the body. As the bodies of animals were attached to undeveloped intelligences, and were in the first place organized by the far slower vibrations of the soul of the beast, their edible flesh was indubitably permeated with the elemental constituents of sensuality and bestiality. To partake of it would be to introduce an inherent disposition to animal coarseness into the human vehicle, which would thus give freer course to the sensual impulses. The elemental qualities of the animal cells would stimulate the lower energies of the astral body. Meat would be a force retarding evolution, holding the man closer to the animal characteristics, which it is his task now to transcend. Hence it became catalogued as a definite enemy of the higher life, and was taboo.
Very many Theosophists have discarded it utterly from their diet for periods ranging from months to a score of years. Many have abandoned its use in their homes, but indulge when eating with others who use it. Thousands partake of it only in the most sparing degree. There are few who have not cut into their consumption of it drastically. Its total abandonment was once an obligatory requirement in certain degrees of the Esoteric Section. But members are under no compulsion in the matter. If the student eats no meat it is his own voluntary action, though it may have been determined by the suggestion of some one regarded as a leader. Some of these utterances have gone so far as to declare that spiritual progress beyond a certain point was impossible if one ate meat. Mr. C. W. Leadbeater listed eggs as hardly less detrimental.
Vegetable foods, fruits, nuts, plants, are regarded as best adapted for human use, as being most Sattvic in quality. But it is a mistake to classify Theosophists generally as vegetarians. Few in fact are. Most of them have eliminated meat in all forms, but such animal product foods as milk, cheese, eggs, butter, lard, still figure in the diet. With large numbers of Theosophists strict adherence to a non-meat régime is tempered by the countervailing influence of that other precept of good occult behavior, which says that any conduct becomes discordant with the brotherhood platform if it makes of one a spectacle of eccentricity. To render oneself "queer" in the eyes of others is largely to defeat one's usefulness in the rôle of a promoter of human solidarity. So it is often regarded as better to eat meat than to bring occultism into disrepute as an oddity.
It is quite well to reiterate, before dismissing this topic, that there is no prescribed regimen of life for Theosophists, and that many of the peculiarities of dietary habit observed here and there--and hardly more patently among Theosophists than among members of other sects--are to be assigned largely to individual whims.
There remains the last of our subdivisions of cult activity,--the constant effort to progress in the line of occult knowledge and wisdom. It is perhaps too broad an aim to be thus particularized, but it embraces the main currents in the drift of the average Theosophic life. Chiefly it consists in the steady endeavor to learn more of the occult version of life by continuous reading and study. It is primarily an intellectual enterprise. Its instrumentalities are study classes, addresses, magazines, and books, with the recent addition of correspondence courses. Originally captivated by the large cosmic graph which the system outlines, the disciple sets himself sedulously to the great task of mastering the complexities of the vast science. A few years will not complete it. It is the intellectual attempt to square oneself with the universe and with life by means of the rationale which the elaborate scheme of Theosophic ideology unfolds. This entails for the earnest student ever more reading, more study, more reflection. Then as the outlines are grasped and the basic doctrines assimilated into the thinking, there follows the serious problem of making a readjustment of both theoretical and practical attitudes toward a world that is now differently rationalized.
The first practical outcome of the study of so large a cosmic picture is a certain relaxation of life strain, with the acquisition of poise, steadiness, patience, and eventually tolerance, all framed against a background of non-attachment. The long vista of an infinite evolution to higher states, replaced the hurry and flurry of a one-life conception, tends to ground the life firmly in complacency. There is a decided approach to philosophic calm. From the assurance of the general beneficence of the evolutionary plan there arises a broader charity, a pervading kindliness and deep psychic sympathy, all of which dispose to equanimity.
There is a brief statement of the general aim and spirit of Theosophy that has been used for years by Lodges of the Society printed on leaflets for the benefit of inquirers. It might well have served as the text for this analysis.
"The Theosophical Society is composed of students, belonging to any religion in the world or to none, who are united in their approval of the three objects (brotherhood, psychism and eclecticism) by their wish to remove religious antagonisms and to draw together men of good will whatsoever their religious opinions, and by their desire to study religious truths and to share the results of their studies with others. Their bond of union is not the profession of a common belief, but a common search and aspiration for truth. They hold that any truth should be sought by study, by reflection, by purity of life, by devotion to high ideals, and they regard truth as a prize to be striven for, not as a dogma to be imposed by authority. They consider that belief should be the result of individual study or intuition, and not its antecedent, and should rest on knowledge, not on assertion. They extend tolerance to all, even to the intolerant, not as a privilege they bestow, but as a duty they perform, and they seek to remove ignorance, not to punish it. They see every religion as an expression of the Divine Wisdom, and prefer its study to its condemnation, and its practice to its proselytism. Peace is their watchword as truth is their aim."
Perhaps no one has translated the ethics of this philosophy into its practical expressions better than has Madame Blavatsky herself. Her digest of Theosophic morality, highly treasured by her followers, is given in the little work of hers entitled Practical Occultism:
"A clean life, an open mind, a pure heart, an eager intellect, an unveiled spiritual perception, a brotherliness for all, a readiness to give and receive advice and instruction, a courageous endurance of personal injustice, a brave declaration of principles, a valiant defence of those who are unjustly attacked, a constant eye to the ideal of human progression and perfection which the sacred science depicts--these are the golden stairs up the steps of which the learner must climb to the Temple of Divine Wisdom."
Footnotes to Chapter 11
2 In Sanskrit mahavidya means "great or exalted knowledge;" it ranks high in the scheme of wisdom. Madame Blavatsky calls it the great esoteric science and says that the highest Initiates alone are in possession of it. It embraces almost universal knowledge.
3 In Sanskrit this term means "knowledge to be hidden, esoteric knowledge," especially of the use of incantations and spells. Madame Blavatsky so describes it in the Glossary.
4 Atma (Sanskrit "breath, soul") and Vidya. The term connotes knowledge of the Soul or Supreme Spirit in man. This is in agreement with Madame Blavatsky's use of the term.
5 "The knowledge of them is obligatory in that School the teachings of which are accepted by many Theosophists."--From the Preface.
6 The term Yoga is commonly taken to mean union and its root is the same as that of our word yoke. However, Sanskrit dictionaries give other meanings of the word, several of which have relevance to its use to denote a system of spiritual practice. So far as the use of the word in Indian philosophy goes, it is a matter of dispute whether yoga is union of the individual soul with Brahma or the subjection of the human senses and emotions. Madame Blavatsky characterizes it as the practice of meditation as leading to spiritual liberation.
7 In Sanskrit jivatman means "the living or personal or individual soul" as distinguished from paramatma, the universal soul. By Theosophists, too, it is applied only to the individual.
8 Raja Yoga is thus characterized in The Light of the Soul, a commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali, by Alice A. Bailey: "Raja Yoga stands by itself and is the king science of them all; it is the summation of all the others, it is the climax of the work of development in the human kingdom. It is the science of the mind and the purposeful will, and brings the higher of man's sheaths under the subjection of the inner Ruler. This science coördinates the entire lower threefold man, forcing him into a position where he is nothing but the vehicle for the soul, or the God within. It includes the other Yogas and profits by their achievements. It synthesizes the work of evolution and crowns man as king."
9 Alice A. Bailey, The Light of the Soul, p. 164.
10 Page 65.
11 Ibid., p. 60.
12 The Light of the Soul, p. 234.
13 Ibid., p. 241.
15 John Ruskin, English art critic and economist, labored to impress this theory on modern attention.
CHAPTER XII
LATER THEOSOPHICAL HISTORY
While Madame Blavatsky in Europe was explaining the cosmos and acquainting mankind with its own origin, nature, and destiny, Theosophic affairs in America were moving forward under the steady guidance of Mr. Judge; but there was also a series of disturbances which culminated in the "Sun Libel Suit" in 1890. 1 This latter event had its remote beginnings in a situation arising out of the question of the inspired authorship of Light on the Path, The Idyll of the White Lotus, The Blossom and the Fruit, and Through the Gates of Gold, four small volumes given out by Miss Mabel Collins in England after 1884. Miss Collins had herself declared them dictated to her by a mysterious Master, though later she said that she had merely "written them down" from their astral inscription on a wall in the mystical "Hall of Learning" described in one of the four books. Aspiring eagerly for leadership in the Theosophical Society in America at the time was Prof. Elliott F. Coues, a man of talent and ability, somewhat versed in the field of science and anthropology, who had been led through his interest in psychic phenomena to affiliate with the Theosophical Society. He seems to have resented Mr. Judge's preferment over him in the esoteric counsels and leadership and urged himself upon Madame Blavatsky as the logical choice for the supreme office in the United States. Rebuffed by H.P.B., he became embittered. In the Religio-Philosophical Journal, of Chicago, he published his correspondence with Miss Collins relative to the mooted authorship of the brochures. This magazine, an organ of spiritistic-psychic interests, had given an airing to Mr. W. Emmette Coleman's attacks upon the authenticity of Madame Blavatsky's classical scholarship in Isis. Prof. Coues now used its columns to discredit Madame Blavatsky's theories of Mahatmaship by presenting some of Miss Collins' statements which virtually cast the charge of intellectual dishonesty at H.P.B.'s door. Miss Collins had stated to Prof. Coues in the first of her letters to him that she had made her declaration as to the Mahatma-inspired authorship of her Idyll of the White Lotus only because Madame Blavatsky had "implored and begged her to do so." This was as much as to say that she had lied about the inspirational nature of the writings because Madame Blavatsky urged her to do so.2
When H.P.B. came to London in 1887 she associated Miss Collins with herself as a sub-editor of her magazine Lucifer. This relation subsisted for two years, when Miss Collins' name was dropped from the editorial staff and her connection with the publication ended. No reason for the breach was given out publicly, but a letter of Madame Blavatsky's later charged that her protégé had proved unreliable and untrustworthy in her occult pledges.
Prof. Coues became more openly hostile to the Blavatsky-Judge hegemony in America and finally, upon preferment of formal charges of untheosophical conduct lodged against him by Mr. Arthur B. Griggs, of Boston, he was expelled from the Theosophical Society in June, 1889. Now fighting in the open, Prof. Coues, early in the next year, 1890, gave interviews to a correspondent of the New York Sun in Washington D.C., and painted his former cult-associates with the black hue of out-and-out imposture. In its Sunday issue, June 1, 1890, the Sun gave a half-column to a general statement of Theosophic and Blavatskian charlatanry. Tasting blood, Prof. Coues gave to the Sun representative an extended article detailing the whole alleged career of Madame Blavatsky and her dupes. It made a seven-column finely printed article in the Sun of Sunday, July 20. It included open declarations that Madame Blavatsky had in several instances been a member of the demi-monde in Paris and the mistress of two Russians mentioned by name, by one of whom she had given birth to a deformed child that died at Kieff in 1868.
Every untoward incident in the life of his subject was revamped and given a plausible rôle in a vast scheme of deceptive posing, with the Russian spy motive once more doing service. This was considered going too far, and Mr. Judge at once filed suit in New York against the Sun for libel. The case was delayed by congestion in the courts, and before it ever came to trial Madame Blavatsky passed from the stormy scene. Her death left the newspaper free from further legal responsibility. But its efforts to procure material evidence to defend its position revealed that Prof. Coues had overreached himself and that the allegations were for the greater part, if not entirely, unjust to the deceased leader. Finally, in its issue of Sept. 26, 1892, the Sun voluntarily retracted its offensive articles of 1891, repudiated the Coues interview, and gave Mr. Judge space to write a devoted tribute to his late co-worker.
"We were misled," the Sun observes, "into admitting into the Sun's columns an article by Dr. E. F. Coues, of Washington, in which allegations were made against Madame Blavatsky's character, and also against her followers, which appear to have been without solid foundation . . . we desire to say that his allegations respecting the Theosophical Society and Mr. Judge personally are not sustained by evidence, and should not have been printed."
The failure of so well-equipped an agency as the New York Sun to secure incriminating evidence on any of the many charges lodged by Prof. Coues against Madame Blavatsky is pointed to by Theosophists as a complete vindication of her name.
Charges to much the same general effect were launched in a renewed attack on the good faith of H.P.B. by V. S. Solovyoff in his volume, A Modern Priestess of Isis, after her death. Solovyoff, a Russian of good family, had met Madame Blavatsky in Paris in 1884, had been fascinated by her personality and her intriguing philosophy and occult powers and had joined her Society. He manifested every desire to be admitted to the inner mysteries of occultism, and it is the opinion of impartial students of the data of this controversy that Madame Blavatsky's knowledge of his spiritual unpreparedness for acceptance as a chela under her Master and her refusal to have him admitted to this exalted relationship turned his worship of her into feelings of another kind.3
His own letters during the years of his acquaintance with Madame Blavatsky and her sister Madame Jelihowsky discloses his enthusiastic interest in the esoteric program, and his own description of a number of psychic experiences which occurred to him in person through the agency of his compatriot and her Adept aides is noteworthy. He recounts the personal appearance to him one night of the Master Morya himself, and gives the gist of the conversation he had with the exalted personage who stood before him in his astral (materialized) form. M. Solovyoff's testimony was considerably weakened later when he repudiated the reality of this phenomenon and endeavored to explain it away with the statement that he was at the time suffering from overwrought nerves. The current of his entire narrative in the Modern Priestess thinly disguises a general inconsistency between the attitude his letters show at the time of his close association with H.P.B. (and her sister) and that which he assumed when he came to write his books after her death. Madame Jelihowsky's letters to him and her rebuttal of many of his specific charges, which are appended to his book as a supplement, indicate that the foundation of his accusations is erected on very shifty sands. M. Solovyoff
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shows the capabilities of a good novelist, and Theosophists are persuaded, after painstaking analysis of the entire situation, that he drew largely for the material of his book upon the romantic inventiveness of his literary genius. In any case, his book is added testimony to H.P.B.'s powerful personality, whatever inferences one draws from it regarding her methods.
In 1888 the General Convention in India adopted the policy of reorganizing the Theosophical Society on the plan of autonomous sections. The Society was thus changed from a quasi-autocracy to a constitutional federation, each part independent as to its internal and local affairs, but responsible to every other part for its loyal support of the movement, and to the headship which bound the sections together.
As Col. Olcott and his partner were driving each in his own direction--the one for an exoteric goal and the other toward an esoteric one--the history of the Society in the years antedating Madame Blavatsky's death reflects a struggle between the aims and interests of the two. Col. Olcott was cool to the establishment of the Esoteric Section. He frequently resented H.P.B.'s arbitrary overriding of his authority. It was in miniature the clash between church and state, the spiritual and the temporal power, all over again. While the priestess lived she left no doubts as to which had supremacy. And hardly less than in her day, the later developments of Theosophic history can be understood only in the light of the reverence given the Masters. A word dropped from their lips is the highest law in the Theosophic kingdom. Material interest or temporal expediency must bend before its authority.
Curiously also the attitudes taken toward their common enterprise by the two Founders reflect the views of two opposing schools of thought. Col. Olcott looked upon the growth of the movement as a development, not a teleological unfoldment. It had no determinate purpose in the beginning, no definite lines of direction, but was largely the product of unintended and unexpected events. Even its declared objects were a "development." His views on these matters were reflected in an article, "The Theosophical Society,"
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signed by "F.T.S." (thought to have been Mr. Richard Harte, one of the Colonel's lieutenants at Adyar), published in Theosophist for Jan, 1889. But at least one gesture of assent to the contrary view is made in the article when it says:
"This variation in the declared objects of the Society must not be taken as indicating any real change in the intentions of the Founders. There is abundant evidence in their writings and speeches that from the first their purposes were to stimulate the spiritual development of the individual and to awaken in the race the sentiment of Brotherhood."
Nevertheless, the Theosophist, during 1889, and thereafter, kept printing articles from Mr. Harte's pen, emphasizing the need of the Society's standing before the world divested of secret and mystical connection with, or at any rate vital dependence upon, the mysterious wire-pullers behind the scenes, the Mahatmas. Olcott's party, including Mr. Sinnett, Mr. Hume, and other prominent members, desired to avoid the inevitable storm of worldly contumely which adherence to the legend of the Masters provoked. They claimed that the organization rested on high scientific, philosophical, and ethical principles that stood on their own merits without adventitious supernatural aid. They wished it thus to take on the colors of anthroposophism and humanism. They desired first of all that the Theosophical Society should appear eminently respectable in the sight of intelligent people and not expose the questionable Masters to public view. To the Masters, on the other hand, H.P.B. and Mr. Judge were irretrievably committed. From the standpoint of these two the danger to be guarded against was that the exoteric leaders might make of the Society a worldly success, at the risk of occult failure. They feared that Theosophy might gain the whole world but lose its own soul. This division of aims explains most of the internal troubles which have arisen on board the ship of Theosophy.
In one of the Harte articles mention was made of Madame Blavatsky's "loyalty to Adyar," i.e., to Col. Olcott's outer headship and authority. She replied by saying that:
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"H.P.B. is loyal to death to the Theosophic Cause, and those great Teachers whose philosophy alone can bind the whole of humanity into one Brotherhood."
She would be loyal to Olcott and the Theosophic officialdom only so long as they held true to the Masters and their Cause. Her loyalty to the Colonel was based on his tireless labors for that Cause. If he deserted it her nexus of loyalty to him was broken.
Events moved on from year to year, with "crises" and storms every few years, yet with rapid increase in membership. In 1886 there were 8 Lodges in the United States; in 1887, 12; in 1888, 19; in 1889, 26; in 1890, 45; in 1891, 57; and in 1892, 69. The American Section worked for the ethical ideals of Theosophy. In Europe and India the interests of Fellows were largely centered upon the second and third objects, comparative religion and psychism.
In 1889 the Esoteric Section was changed to the "Eastern School of Theosophy," and about the same time the European branches and unattached Fellows were incorporated in a separate autonomous organization known as the Theosophical Society in Europe, of which Madame Blavatsky was constituted President.
In 1888 a most notable event in the life of Theosophy occurred in England, soon to be followed by momentous consequences for the movement everywhere. This was the accession to the ranks of Mrs. Annie Besant, the noted and eloquent radical leader in England. Her life is now so well known4 that it is needless here to recount the events of her long and notable public career in her native country. A child of deep religious feeling and almost Catholic devotion, she passed through the stages of doubt and unbelief to atheism; threw herself ardently into such movements as the Fabian Society, Socialism, and the Secular Society; worked for birth control and slum amelioration and education; and finally found her destiny and her spiritual refuge when in 1888 she was asked by Mr. W. T. Stead to write for his
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4 See her Autobiography, and a recent work by Jeoffrey West, The Life of Annie Besant (Gerald Howe, Limited, London, 1929).
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magazine a review of the new publication--The Secret Doctrine. She testifies that here, in the great scheme of cosmogony and wedded science and faith, she saw the light that she had so earnestly been seeking. She instantly adopted the new teaching, met H.P.B., and threw her great abilities for service at her feet. She was accepted, and soon became the very right hand of the aging messenger. One of the most eloquent orators of her sex in history, she brought the message of Theosophy to crowded halls in most convincing terms. Her advocacy gave to Theosophy a vigorous stimulus. She had attended the American General Convention in 1890, and her second visit to this country was made in 1891. Her name and standing made her lecture tour in that year a great success.
Mrs. Besant again visited America in 1892, her speaking tour of leading cities lasting from her arrival in November of that year until February of 1893. The largest halls were packed, and a new wave of public interest surged forward.
She and Mr. Judge had been made the two heads of the Esoteric Section, to carry on the functions of that body after Madame Blavatsky should have passed from earth. H.P.B. had in writing (1888) constituted Mr. Judge as her "only representative for said Section in America"; and she had appointed Mrs. Besant as "Chief Secretary of the Inner Group and Recorder of the Teachings" given in the organization. After Judge's death (Saturday, March 21, 1896) she was left as the sole guardian of the inner society, and through it she wielded for the years to come a potent sway over the destinies of the whole Theosophic body.
On May 8, 1891, not quite sixty years of age, Madame Blavatsky ceased her earthy labors for Theosophy. There was for a brief time a feeling of disorganization and helpless bewilderment when her leadership and strong guardian hand were withdrawn; but her death at the same time served to unite Theosophists everywhere, at least temporarily, in a glow of fraternal good will and renewed loyalty to her message. The leader gone, the message became the thing of paramount importance. She had held no office save that of Recording Secretary, which was declared unique and abolished with her death. So she could properly have no successor. But innumerable mystics, mediums, and psychics the world over sprang forth with assertions that they had had commissions from her spirit to step into her earthly place. Probably most prominent among these was Mr. Henry B. Foulke, of Philadelphia, who declared that H.P.B.'s spirit had appeared to him, reproduced her portrait to identify herself, and given him her mantle of leadership. His claims were officially repudiated by Mr. Judge.
In 1892 Col. Olcott presented his resignation as President of the whole Society, alleging ill-health as the reason. He was requested by the American Section to withdraw his action and later in the year did so, after a vacation in the Nilgiri Hills. The American Section had gone so far, however, as to vote for the election of Mr. Judge as his successor in office, and this choice was endorsed by similar action on the part of the European Section a little later. Mr. Judge was Vice-President of the Theosophical Society as well as head of the General Council in America.
In March, 1892, Col. Olcott began the serial publication of Old Diary Leaves, with the sub-title, "The True History of the Theosophical Society," in his magazine The Theosophist. He represented Madame Blavatsky as a very human person, with great weaknesses and foibles. He apparently wished to combat a natural disposition on the part of members to erect a "worship" of H.P.B., and to accept her writings as Theosophic "dogma." The Diary ran on for many years, and its effect was to weaken her prestige to an extent hardly less than the open attack of the Society for Psychical Research had done in 1885. There is reason to believe that the Colonel's representation of her in this narrative is an uncritical account. His estimate of her does not accord with several other statements he had at times made as to her greatness. Even to those who had associated most closely with her she remained an enigma, an insoluble mystery. One of Koot Hoomi's letters had intimated that she was a great soul (Mahatma) in her own right, a far greater Adept
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in the spiritual hierarchy than her outward personality seemed to indicate. This, at any rate, is the Blavatsky legend in some quarters of the movement. But the Colonel reduced the emphasis on this note in his reminiscences. He had always felt that the Theosophical Society could succeed, even without her and her invisible Sages.
In 1895 occurred the next momentous episode in American Theosophical history--the "Judge Case." It is a long story. It arose out of the elements of the situation already noted, viz., the emphasis of Col. Olcott and his party on the exoteric work of the Society, and the opposing attitude of Mr. Judge, consistently supported at first by Mrs. Besant, who emphasized Madame Blavatsky's esoteric teachings. The actual bone of contention was found in the articles put forth by Mr. T. Subba Row (Rao), eminent Hindu Theosophist and high chela, as far back at 1886, questioning Mr. Sinnett's transcriptions of the Master's teachings regarding the sevenfold constitution of man in Esoteric Buddhism, and the debate involving the status of Mars and Mercury in the solar chain. Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrinehad reversed the earlier cosmological teaching of K.H. as given out through Sinnett. The situation, of course, threw doubt on the trustworthy character of Mahatmic instruction and, by inference, on Madame Blavatsky's rôle as the agent of higher Sages. From this point discussion was carried further into the domain of Mahatmic messages in general, and the spurious or genuine nature of their reception by individuals. This question was thrown into more violent agitation about 1892 when Mr. Judge, together with his editorial assistant on The Path, Julia Campbell-Ver Planck (the "Jasper Niemand" of editorial prominence), and Mrs. Annie Besant, the latter most startlingly in her farewell address to her former Secularist associates, all publicly declared that they had had bona fide messages from the living Mahatmas. The significance of these declarations--H.P.B., the accused agent of all Mahatmic communication while she lived, being now not on the scene--was hardly to be exaggerated. But in the eyes of the Olcott-Sinnett faction
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they tended to lengthen the shadow of H.P.B., where its shortening was to be desired in furtherance of their partisan interests. They fell in opposition, too, to the hosts of psychic and mediumistic messages received by numerous members of the Society at séances and circles. Mr. Judge stood out for the authenticity of these messages, some of which he stated came to him, though he refused to submit, in corroboration of their genuineness, the "seal," handwriting or the other usual outward marks of the Master's letters. His opponents began more and more to allege forgery or invention on his part. The leading articles in the Theosophist, Lucifer, and The Path at this epoch dealt with phases of this debate. The insistent charges emanating from the exoteric party were that Judge and Mrs. Besant were trying to erect, in the matter of Mahatmic messages, a Theosophic dogmatism or orthodoxy. They reasserted the right of every Theosophist to accept or reject messages, and reiterated the cardinal principle of Theosophic free-thought. In fine, it was Judge's firm adherence to the fundamental thesis of Blavatskian hierarchical deputyship that made him more and more a thorn in the flesh of the other group. As long as Mrs. Besant stood with him it was difficult to weaken his position. The "anti-Blavatsky conspirators" then sought to wean her away from his support, and this was accomplished in 1893 through a series of circumstances.
In the fall of that year the notable Congress of Religions was held at Chicago in connection with the Columbian Exposition, and Mrs. Besant was the representative of Theosophy. Through Theosophical influence and financial assistance, the delegate chosen to represent Brahmanism in the Congress was one Prof. Gyanendra Nath Chakravarti, instructor in India and a member of the Theosophical Society. He and Mrs. Besant became almost the leading sensations of the convention, she through her eloquence and power, he through his dignity, suavity, and show of erudition. Interesting as they proved to be to outsiders, they shortly became far more so to each other. It was the delight of
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Chakravarti to keep watch and ward over the brilliant Western champion of his country's traditions, and on Mrs. Besant's part his reputed possession of great psychic abilities was a lure which, with her mental and spiritual leanings, became well nigh irresistible. It is said that Chakravarti slept outside her room door at the hotel to guard her from intrusion.5 A close association began between the two which lasted for some ten or twelve years, when Chakravarti's place of foremost psychic interest in her regard was usurped by Mr. C. W. Leadbeater. It appears beyond question that the Brahmin's influence upon the mind of Mrs. Besant was profound, and in directions which the future course of Theosophical history readily reveals.
In the late fall of 1893 Mrs. Besant went for the first time to India, her tours there veritably "trailing clouds of glory" for herself and the cause of Theosophy. At the annual General Convention, always held near Christmas, Col. Olcott announced in his presidential address that a complete accord had been reached between his office and the renowned leader, and that the latter would shortly measure up to the spiritual status of H.P.B. herself. This accord indicated, among other things, that Mrs. Besant had admitted into her mind some of the animus against the purely esoteric view of Theosophy, as upheld by H.P.B. and Judge. She had begun to look upon the latter with suspicion. Chakravarti's influence in her "conversion" brought into view the conflicting ethics of Brahmanism and Buddhism. Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy adhered to the Tibetan Buddhistic, or Mahayana, theory of the sacrifice by the Nirmanakayas of their Nirvanic bliss for a service in behalf of humanity. The Brahmanical philosophy, on the other hand, held before its followers the acceptance, rather than the renunciation, of the higher blessedness. The latter taught individual salvation, the former the "Great Renunciation." Madame Blavatsky's principle of Brotherhood rather than mystical isolation and exaltation, would be undermined by the Brahmanical hypothesis. Hence Chakravarti's influence tended to reduce the high status of H.P.B. in the eyes of Mrs. Besant, and to increase her animus toward Judge.
The specific charges brought by Mrs. Besant (founded on "complaints" of members, so it was stated) against Judge were "alleged misuse of the Mahatmas' names and handwriting." Mrs. Besant became the mouthpiece of the "demand for an investigation." Mr. Judge denied the charges as absolutely false, and demurred to the trial as illegal under the Constitution of the Theosophical Society because it would involve a decision by the President of the Society as to the existence or non-existence of the Mahatmas, which would of itself establish at least one dogma of Theosophy, a thing forbidden. The Society must remain neutral on this as on all other questions of belief, save Brotherhood.
"Letters from Mahatmas," he says in his answer, "prove nothing at all except to the recipient, and then only when in his inner nature is the standard of proof and the power of judgment. Precipitation does not prove Mahatmas. . . . By one's soul alone can this matter be judged. . . . By following the course prescribed in all ages the inner faculties may be awakened so as to furnish the true confirmatory evidence."6
He reasserted that he had received letters from Masters, both during and since the life of Madame Blavatsky.
Before the charges had even been formulated or his accuser named to him, Mr. Judge received an ultimatum from Col. Olcott, giving him the choice of resigning or of being investigated. Judge, instead of accepting either alternative, denied his guilt. At the ensuing Convention of the Theosophical Society in America, the Section unanimously upheld Judge, and urged that if he could be tried for allegations of having received Mahatmic letters, so, in fairness, could Mr. Sinnett, Col. Olcott, Mrs. Besant, and the others who had stated publicly that they had been favored with such letters.
The Secretaries of both the European and the Indian Sections issued letters to the membership condemning the President's unconstitutional methods of attacking Mr. Judge. Col. Olcott, thus thrown unexpectedly on the defensive, was aided by a new National Section, the Australian, which Mrs. Besant founded at that time and which voted on his side; and on the advice of Chakravarti and other lawyers at Adyar he appointed a Judicial Committee, to meet in London on June 27, 1894, to try the charges against the accused. He himself, contrary to his earlier intentions, found it imperative to attend the "trial" in person. The General Council did not meet in London until July 7. Its first act was to pass the motion that Mr. Judge could not be tried as an official of the Society, his guilt, if any, being that of an individual and hence not litigable.
The Special Judicial Committee met on July 10. Col. Olcott's party was in control. Mr. Judge was represented by his friends, Mr. Oliver Firth and Mr. E. T. Hargrove. Some of the eleven members of the Committee were convinced of the guilt of Judge beforehand; three or four were impartial, rather feeling he could not be tried; four others were convinced of his innocence. Probably half of them felt that the whole proceeding was a stupid business. Under the circumstances it was not surprising that the accusers saw the shabby nature of their accusation, and, with what grace they could muster, practically backed out of the transaction. Mr. Judge's dignity, frankness, and discretion turned the tables against his accusers. He denied the truth of the charges, protested that he could not be officially tried for his acts as an individual, but averred his readiness to produce actual proofs of his intercourse with Mahatmas. The opposition was forced to admit the legality of his position, and was naturally inclined to refrain from letting him produce his evidence on the last point. The Judicial Committee of July 10 adjourned after arriving at the decision that it had no jurisdiction to inquire into the charges. Col. Olcott reinstated Mr. Judge in his office of Vice-President of the Society.
Two days thereafter Mrs. Besant, stung by the failure of the procedure against Judge, read a full statement of her side of the case before the British-European Sections' Convention (the "trial" having been set to antedate the annual meeting by a few days). She said in one place, after telling how messages may be received in a variety of ways from invisible Intelligences,
"Any good medium may be used for precipitating messages by any of the varied entities in the occult world; and the outcome of these proceedings will be, I hope, to put an end to the craze for receiving letters and messages, which are more likely to be sublunary or human in their origin than superhuman, and to throw people back on the evolution of their own spiritual nature, by which alone they can be safely guided through the mazes of the superphysical world."
Nowhere, perhaps, is she truer to the cause of Blavatskian Spiritualism, or the true occult and sacred science of the Ancient Wisdom, than in this utterance; and nowhere are the contrasting aims of Theosophy and Spiritism so clearly delineated. She ended by asking Judge's pardon for any pain she may have given him in trying to do her duty.
A plan had been agreed upon that both accuser and accused should issue statements elucidating their positions. Mr. Judge gave his review of the case. He repeated his denial of having forged the names or writing of the Masters; he readmitted having received what he regarded as genuine letters from them; he declared himself to be an agent of the said Masters, but repudiated the claim that he was their only channel--that communication with them was "open to any human being who, by endeavoring to serve mankind, affords the necessary conditions." He agreed that there were diverse methods of receiving messages from higher intelligences, but that the genuineness of such communications must be tested by the inner subjective evidences in each case. He ended by admitting his human fallibility and forgiving "anyone who may be thought to have injured or tried to injure me."
The questions raised in the "Judge Case" are of great significance, for they are the key to most of the controversial history of the Theosophical movement. The question of alleged messages from the High Ones has been the opening wedge of most of the schisms of the cult. This should be kept in mind during the remaining sections of the history.
It is of interest to note that in her editorial in Lucifer following the dismissal of the case, Mrs. Besant ends with the statement that the disturbance caused by her bringing the charges against Mr. Judge will have been of value to the Society in having aired and settled the point at issue, that the precipitation of a letter gives it no authoritative character; and she adds that the Society would now be freer from "credulity and superstition, two of the deadliest foes of a true spiritual movement." Her critics have reminded her since that those were precisely the things that H.P.B. and Judge had tried to impress on Theosophic students from time to time. The episode did not clear the air of one persistent obsession for which Madame Blavatsky might, on Theosophic reasoning, be held karmically responsible to some extent. It was now understood, in theory at least, that "occult" phenomena, genuine or false, mediumistic or adept, formed no part of the legitimate pursuit of the Theosophical Society. Madame Blavatsky had insisted upon this fact, yet the very weight of interest aroused by her own performances in that line exerted its natural gravitational force.
Another outgrowth of the case was the realization "that occult phenomena cannot in the present state of human evolution be proved . . . in the same sense and to the same extent that physical phenomena can be proved."7
They must continue to rest on subjective evidence. The trial threw the whole case for the Mahatmas, their superior teachings, their hierarchical position, back into the locale of faith and inner sanction. Here such ideas had always been kept in antiquity. The West, true to mechanistic instinct, tried to "prove" them empirically.
At any rate, Madame Blavatsky had, in the Preliminary Memorandum sent out at the time of the formation of the Esoteric Section, expressly declared that in the higher section "the student will not be taught how to produce physical phenomena, nor will any magical powers be allowed to develop in him,"--that a mastery of self, ethically and psychologically, was the antecedent condition. If Judge or any other already had phenomenal abilities, their use must be subordinated to the needs of morality and unselfishness. One of the ethical prescriptions of the Esoteric Section itself was that no member should attack another. One was forbidden to bring charges against a fellow member or to hold suspicious or malevolent feelings towards him. Mrs. Besant in opposing Judge was charged with violating these rules though her opposition was not, strictly speaking, personal.
But the storm, temporarily lulled, was to rage again. Some wounded feelings and sullen resentments were not fully allayed. In October, 1894, the London Westminster Gazette commenced a series of articles by Edmund Garrett entitled "Isis Very Much Unveiled: The Story of the Great Mahatmic Hoax." It was an attempt to expose Madame Blavatsky's and Mr. Judge's alleged invention of the whole Mahatmic structure. His material had been furnished him by Mr. W. R. Old, one of Col. Olcott's sub-editors on the Theosophist, who was nursing a grudge for having been suspended from the Esoteric Section by Mrs. Besant for violation of his pledge of secrecy. With a mass of authentic data in his hand, Mr. Garrett made a vicious assault upon Theosophy and its Society. The attack stimulated the anti-Judge faction into renewed hostility, and they rushed again to the fray. On his part Judge, believing Mrs. Besant had violated her pledges to the Esoteric Section, by virtue of his authority as H.P.B.'s American representative in that organization, summarily deposed Mrs. Besant from her joint-headship with him. In his written notice to that effect, he stated that Mrs. Besant had fallen under the influence of minds hostile to the "tradition clustering around the work of H.P.B.," and named Chakravarti as the chief culprit. Judge in this connection reminded all concerned of the "Prayag Letter" (one sent to Mr. Sinnett in 1881 by Master K.H.) in which the Master himself had warned the Allahabad Lodge (the branch in which Sinnett, Hume, and Chakravarti were leading members), of the false occultism in the Brahmanical teachings. Judge set forth the conflict of two views in the Theosophical Society regarding the movement itself. The first one, implanted by H.P.B. herself, was that Theosophy is a body of eternal knowledge, unchanging, known of old, held in custody by Adept Guardians, of whom H.P.B. was the responsible and accredited agent in the world for her century. The other was that the whole teaching was itself a growth, a development, and as such had taken gradual shape as changing circumstances had led Madame Blavatsky onward to new vistas. He, Judge, was the official upholder of the first view, and would use his proxy from Madame Blavatsky to maintain her tradition. If his mentor could be proven false in one matter, doubt would be thrown upon all her work. Either Theosophy and its promulgator were what she said they were, or the Society might as well close its doors.
Mrs. Besant saw the order dismissing her from the Esoteric Section office, but refused to heed it. Instead of resigning she called upon loyal members to follow her. Her action thus split the Esoteric Section organization. She sent out a circular stating that not only had Madame Blavatsky made her the Chief Secretary of the Inner Group and Recorder of the Teachings, but had named her as her "Successor." She thus stood out against Judge's authority and proceeded to lay plans to drive him out of the Society. She made a journey to Australia and thence to India in the fall of 1894, and at the annual holiday Convention in India she and Olcott managed to swing the whole body of delegates against Judge, on the old charge of sending out forged Mahatma messages. He was vilified openly by a dozen orators, and a resolution was carried upon Col. Olcott to demand his resignation from the Vice-Presidency or his expulsion from the Society. Judge's first response was a statement that he could not reply to the charges because they had never been given to him. He refused to resign from the Vice-Presidency.
In April of 1895 the Convention of the American Section was held at Boston. With practical unanimity it upheld Mr. Judge. It went further. A resolution presented by Mr. C. A. Griscom, Jr., urged that the American Section declare its autonomy and take a new name, The Theosophical Society in America. The resolution was carried by a vote of nine to one and a new organization effected. A fraternal greeting, with a pledge of solidarity in the movement, was drawn up and sent to the Convention of the European Section then meeting. Judge was elected President. This act placed the Movement as paramount in importance to the Society. (A minority faction remained true to the old organization, and this became later the nucleus of the restored American Section of the Theosophical Society, now the largest numerical body.)
In London the overtures of the new American autonomous body were coldly received by the European Convention, dominated by Mrs. Besant. Olcott declared the greeting out of order, but it was read and "laid on the table." It amounted to an actual rejection of the overtures. The step taken by the American Section was spoken of as "secession."
The new organization in the United States got quietly to work, but Mr. Judge had been broken in health by the long struggle and his death came on March 21, 1896. He had conducted himself, all the while he was the target of the heavy attacks against his integrity, with a dignity, a lack of rancor, and a poise which in the light of later developments stand out in marked contrast to the fury and venom exhibited by his assailants. Whatever the merit or demerit of his position in the Theosophic movement, the fact is that he adhered with firm loyalty to his avowed principles of belief and conduct. He was at least free from that inconstancy to program or to theory which has since been so conspicuous a characteristic of Theosophic leadership. It is of record that Mr. Sinnett later "forgave" him, and that Mrs. Besant and
Col. Olcott repented of having persecuted him on personal charges to the detriment of Theosophical practice.
His death plunged Theosophy in America into its darkest days. It precipitated a period marked not so much by attacks from outside as by increasing dissensions and divergences within the ranks. Although Mrs. Katherine Tingley came forward almost immediately as Outer Head and successor to Judge, she did not long command the support and esteem of American Theosophists which he had enjoyed. One after another, small groups refused to follow her and established themselves as independent organizations, until the ranks were decimated by separate societies, each claiming to be the embodiment of true Theosophy, and each tracing its lineage to Madame Blavatsky. From this condition Theosophy in America has not yet recovered; consequently, it remains for us to describe the origins and aims of these various groups, leaving it to the reason of the reader and to the logic of history to decide the issues involved. The records of the time are none too clear, and the literature highly controversial. Since many of the documents of the Esoteric Section are necessarily secret, and since many of the issues are centered in personalities, it is impossible to get a clear picture of the events without an intimate acquaintance with the temperaments, the incidental circumstances, and the petty details which gave color and direction to the theoretical issues debated on paper and platform.
Immediately upon Judge's death a group of leading Theosophists in New York City, with Mr. E. T. Hargrove as an active spirit, called meetings as early as March 29 to consider a course of action. Mr. Hargrove read a statement to the effect that Mr. Judge had not left his followers without guidance; that among his private papers directions had been found as to successorship and future leadership; and that the form of assistance which Judge had enjoyed from the Hierarchy would be continued to them. This announcement was signed by E. T. Hargrove, James M. Pryse, Joseph H. Fussell, H. T. Patterson, Claude Falls Wright, Genevieve L. Griscom, C. A. Griscom, Jr., and E. Aug. Neresheimer, all people of character and prominence. Circulars and announcements were repeatedly issued to the membership from this group in New York, intimating that Mr. Judge's wishes concerning his successor were known and would be carried out.8
It was also announced that the Masters had imposed a condition, namely, that the name of the new head must be withheld for a year. Presumably this was to be a trial period during which the new leader was to test his abilities and readiness to assume the heavy responsibilities borne by Judge. Veiled references were made to him under the name of "Promise." It was stated that "a new light had gone out from the Lodge," and that this "Promise" was a person of psychic gifts and the recipient of messages from the Masters. From a speech made by Mrs. Tingley at this time we quote:
"Today the needs of humanity are embodied in one great call: 'Oh God, my God, is there no help for us?' All people should heed the call of the Master and help to belt the world within the compass of the 'cable-tow' of the crusaders, for in their force is the quality of the 'golden promise'--the Light of the Lodge. It will radiate throughout the world, and with the aid of the widow's mite will make perfect the Master's plan."
At the end of April, 1896, the Annual Convention of the Theosophical Society in America met in New York City. Mr. Hargrove was elected President of the organization. The Path was changed toTheosophy. Mrs. Tingley was present and spoke. She announced plans for founding a "School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity." Money was contributed liberally, and the leaders went ahead with their plans for the expansion of the movement.
Suddenly, on May 17, Mrs. Tingley announced to her associates that she had been informed that the New York press had discovered that she was the person referred to as the new Outer Head, and that they would publish the news the next day. To avoid such a "leak," Mr. Hargrove, as President of the Society, that morning anticipated the newspapers and made a public announcement to the effect that Mrs. Tingley had been designated as Judge's successor. On the following morning, May 18, 1896, a long article appeared in the New York Tribune on the subject. Thus the safeguard of anonymity, originally prescribed as a condition of Mrs. Tingley's appointment, was abrogated.
Meanwhile the leaders had announced their plans for a "Crusade" to carry the message of Theosophy around the world and more especially to vindicate the strength and authenticity of Judge's American Society before the eyes of Theosophists in Europe and India. Accordingly in June Mrs. Tingley, Mr. Hargrove, Mr. and Mrs. Claude F. Wright, Mr. Pierce, and two or three others, set sail for a trip around the world. They made numerous addresses at various points en route defending their cause. They also completed plans for the establishment of the School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity at Point Loma, California, and on the return voyage Mrs. Tingley laid the corner-stone of the school. Returning to New York early in 1897, they began the task of consolidating and organizing "The Universal Brotherhood."
But dissension arose almost immediately after their return from the "Crusade." A group of the leaders became increasingly suspicious that Mrs. Tingley's policies and practices were not in line with those established by Judge. The forces of ambition and jealousy also entered into the scene. Whatever the deeper issues were, the external friction came to a head in the dispute between Mrs. Keightley and Mr. Neresheimer over the control of the publishing business and the editorial policy of the magazine, Theosophy. Mr. Neresheimer was supported by Mrs. Tingley, whereas Mrs. Keightley, Mr. Hargrove, and their friends, took a firm stand against him. As a result of this disagreement, Mr. Hargrove resigned the presidency of the Theosophical Society in America, and Dr. Keightley resigned the presidency of the affiliated Theosophical Society in England. In January, 1898, Mrs. Tingley called representatives of the Theosophical Society from different parts of the United States to her home, and they drew up and adopted the Constitution of The Universal Brotherhood Organization. Meanwhile some of the friends of Mr. Hargrove proposed a rival plan calling for the election of Mr. Hargrove as President and Mrs. Tingley as "Corresponding Secretary" (H.P.B.'s former title). But Mrs. Tingley repudiated this scheme and in return Mr. Hargrove and his friends rejected Mrs. Tingley's leadership.
At the Annual Convention in Chicago, February, 1898, the whole issue was decided. Mrs. Tingley proceeded aggressively with her plans for The Universal Brotherhood, which she wished to absorb the Theosophic Society in America. Mr. Hargrove and his friends, on the other hand, refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new organization. When the issue was put to a vote, over ninety per cent of the delegates followed Mrs. Tingley.
Thereupon Mr. Hargrove and his associates withdrew with a few dozen delegates to another hall, declared the action of the majority to be illegal, and agreed to maintain the Theosophical Society as a distinct body. A month later they formally announced Mrs. Tingley's removal as Outer Head on the grounds that by slandering fellow members she had violated her vows and conducted her organization on policies unworthy of Theosophy.9 Several E.S.T. pamphlets were issued explaining the causes of their repudiation of Mrs. Tingley and incidentally throwing additional light on the circumstances of Mrs. Tingley's coming into power. This body then published The Theosophical Forum, in which it further defined its stand and claimed to be the legitimate continuation of Judge's work and organization. Legal proceedings were begun to recover the membership lists and archives of the Society from The Universal Brotherhood, but this move was unsuccessful.
During the next few months several hundred Theosophists expressed their adherence to this Society. This group, now known simply as The Theosophical Society, with headquarters in the New York Branch, continues to carry on its work through local branches. It publishes The Theosophic Quarterly, to which Mrs. Charles Johnston has contributed extensively. It naturally has its own Esoteric Section and has made many scholarly contributions to Theosophic research and literature. True to the spirit of Judge, it has emphasized Western rather than Oriental esoteric traditions, emphasizing the mystic elements in Christianity. It venerates the wisdom of the Master, Jesus, and some of the Christian Saints, but it has no ecclesiastical tendencies. It refuses to commit its members to any Theosophic creed, to any official pronouncements on the subject of "phenomena," or in general to any matters which concern personalities and personal beliefs. Its meetings are devoted largely to study, discussion, and meditation upon the writings of H.P.B. and other Theosophic classics. It remains a small but distinguished group.
After the Chicago Convention of 1898, the vast majority of American Theosophists followed Mrs. Tingley in The Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, with headquarters at Point Loma. Its official organ, The Searchlight, conducted a vigorous campaign and under the leadership of Mrs. Tingley, the organization flourished for several years. Through Mr. A. G. Spalding, of baseball fame, Ex-Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage, and others, sufficient funds were secured to establish permanent headquarters at Point Loma, a beautiful site overlooking the Pacific. The place became a colony, where new ventures in the education of children according to Theosophic ideas were embarked on, with results said to be exceptional. In 1900 the Râja-Yoga School was founded which was later expanded into the Theosophical University. An Aryan Memorial Temple was erected, now known as the Temple of Peace; and a Greek theatre was built, the first in the country, where Greek and Shakespearean dramas have been performed. The Headquarters are now conducted under the direction of Dr. Gottfried de Purucker and Mr. J. H. Fussell, both of whom were associated with Mrs. Tingley from 1898.
Mrs. Tingley lived until July 11, 1929, when her death was announced from Visingso, Sweden, where she had gone to a Theosophic community to recover from an automobile accident suffered in Germany.10 She had done much work of a humanitarian nature. Besides the School of Antiquity at Point Loma she had founded an International Brotherhood League, a summer home for children at Spring Valley, New York, and a home for orphan children at Buffalo. She had opened three schools in Cuba.
Another group of Theosophists in 1899 drifted into "The Temple of the People," sponsored by Dr. W. H. Dower and Frances J. Meyers, of Syracuse, New York. Messages coming through a Mrs. Francia A. La Due, known mediumistically as "Blue Star," were its inspiration until her death in 1923. A remnant of this group is established in a colony at Halcyon, California.
In 1899 another offshoot came to growth in "The Theosophical Society of New York," which is to be distinguished from "The New York Branch of the Theosophical Society" mentioned above. Dr. H. H. Salisbury, long a friend of Mr. Judge, Mr. Donald Nicholson, editor of the New York Tribune, also a friend of Judge and H.P.B., and Mr. Harold W. Percival, headed a group which numbered Dr. Alexander Wilder and Mrs. Laura Langford among its adherents. Mr. Percival for years edited a successful magazine, The Word.
Dr. J. D. Buck, of Cincinnati, an early member of the American Section and devoted supporter of Judge, later threw his strong influence on the side of the claims of a Mr. Richardson--known as "T.K."--and Mrs. Florence Huntley, to represent the Masters. Some of his friends went with him in this allegiance, but the exposure of "T.K." undermined his movement and he died shortly afterward.
Mrs. Alice L. Cleather, one of the inner group of students around Madame Blavatsky during the years preceding her death, formed a "Blavatsky Association," organized to combat the successorship of Mrs. Besant in particular. It was declared that Mr. Judge had fallen under the deception of Mrs. Tingley. Mrs. Cleather wrote three or four books upholding the esoteric character of Madame Blavatsky's mission.
In England Mr. G. R. S. Mead, long co-editor with Mrs. Besant of Lucifer, parted from her after 1907 and founded "The Quest Society," which until recently published The Quest. His Society has a highly respectable membership and devotes its energies to comparative religion and psychical research. Mr. Mead is most active in the scholarly activities of the Society.
In California, home of many cults, Mr. Max Heindel, originally a Theosophist, launched later a Rosicrucian Society, and published a valuable work, Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception. His association maintains headquarters at Oceanside, California, and following his death his wife has continued the direction of its activities.
Likewise in California Mr. Robert Crosbie established the parent United Lodge of Theosophists at Los Angeles in 1909. Mr. Crosbie adhered to the conviction that Mr. Judge alone worked in the true direction of H.P.B.'s movement, and he gave to his organization the task of perpetuating the original teaching of Blavatskian Theosophy, as promulgated by Judge. He founded the periodical Theosophy, a revival of The Path. He labored to restore the unique status of H.P.B. and Judge as esoteric teachers, and his society thus became a "drift back to source." As H.P.B. herself had looked after the spiritual side of the movement, regarding that as more important than its outward organization, so the United
Lodge of Theosophists has discounted the value of organization and of personalities in it. The names of the speakers are usually not attached to lecture announcements, nor those of authors to books and articles. The interests of the association are primarily in Theosophy and the movement, not in any Society; in Theosophic truth, not in any individual expression of it. A spirit of accord binds together various Lodges, isolated groups and scattered associates throughout the United States, and in recent years there has been marked growth, as the disturbances in the larger "Besant" section drove many of its old adherents into the U.L.T. The defection of Mr. P. B. Wadia, eloquent Hindu Theosophist, from the Besant fold and his affiliation with the United Lodge in 1922, furnished no small impetus to the latter's increased power. Mr. John Garrigues, of Los Angeles, has devoted indefatigable energy to the work of this body, and few persons have a wider acquaintance with the facts of Theosophic history than he. Residing in New York until 1930, he exerted a pronounced influence in the councils of the U.L.T. throughout the country.
In Washington, D.C., there has been published for many years by Mr. H. N. Stokes, a leaflet called The Oriental Esoteric Library Critic. Mr. Stokes conducts a circulating library of occult and Theosophic books, but finds time in addition to edit his diminutive sheet, which has been a veritable thorn in the flesh of the Besant leadership for many years. He seizes upon every inconsistency in the statements or policies of the Besant-Leadbeater-Wedgewood hegemony and subjects it to critical analysis. Many Theosophists tolerate his belligerent spirit and strong language for the sake of the facts he adduces, which have usually great pertinence to Theosophic affairs. He is particularly hostile to the developments of Neo-Theosophy under the Besant and Leadbeater régime, and above all to the institution of the Liberal Catholic Church as a Theosophic appanage.
As a result of the great impetus given by the Theosophical movement, scores of organizations with aims mystic, occult, divine, spiritual, Oriental, astrological, fraternal, and inspirational, have sprung up on all sides, to emphasize one or another aspect of the teaching, real or fancied. A reference to Hartmann's Who's Who in Occult, Psychic, and Spiritual Realms will astonish one with the number and diversified character of these bodies. Their existence marks one of the surprising phenomena of our contemporary religious life.
It remains to sketch with the greatest brevity the history since 1896 of the large international body of the Theosophical Society over which Mrs. Annie Besant has presided since 1907.
It will be recalled that when in Boston in 1895 the American Section, out of loyalty to its leader, Judge, "seceded" from the parent organization and became autonomous, a minority dissented from the action of the Convention and remained in adherence to Col. Olcott's Society. Prominent in this party were Dr. Mary Weeks Burnett, Mr. Alexander Fullerton, Dr. La Pierre, and others. This faction became the nucleus around which, as the larger Judge group disintegrated, gradual accretions of strength materialized. This was in part due to the prestige which officialdom and regularity carries with it, and in part to the position and prominence of Col. Olcott and the great influence wielded by Mrs. Besant. In a few years it became numerically far the strongest group, and today includes some ninety per cent of American Theosophical membership.
After Judge passed from the scene, Col. Olcott and Mrs. Besant could devote their undivided energies to Theosophic propaganda, both in the Society at large and in the Esoteric Section, so that the movement expanded rapidly in all parts of the world. Charters were given to National Sections in most of the countries on the map. The Society flourished outwardly and organically. The question as to whether it held true to its original spirit and purpose is of course a debatable one. It was at this time that the beginnings of the drift toward those later presentations of Theosophical teaching which have come to be known as Neo-Theosophy were becoming manifest.
Mrs. Besant and Mr. Leadbeater stood out unrivalled as the literary exponents and formulators of Theosophy. Their statements were hailed with as much respect and authority as those of Madame Blavatsky in the earlier days. Both of them wrote assiduously and lectured with great frequency, and their publications rapidly began to supplant all other works on the Theosophic shelves. With The Ancient Wisdom, A Study in Consciousness, and Esoteric Christianity Mrs. Besant began a literary output which has been rarely matched in volume. Some eighty or more works now stand in her name. Mr. Leadbeater's total may reach twenty, but they are mostly of a more pretentious character than Mrs. Besant's, being accounts of his clairvoyant investigations into the nature and history of the world and man. His works had to do mostly with subjects connected with the Third Object of the Society, the psychic powers latent in man. Mrs. Besant touched alike on all three of the objects, not neglecting the ethical aspects of Theosophy, which she emphasized in such works as The Path of Discipleship and In The Outer Court. Predominantly under the influence of these two leaders the power of Theosophy spread widely in the world.
Mr. Leadbeater was one of the participants with Mr. Sinnett and others in occult investigations carried on in the London Lodge, an autonomous group not fully in sympathy with some phases of Madame Blavatsky's work. He developed, as was reported, great psychic abilities, as the result of which, notwithstanding his frequent disclaiming of occult authority, he exercised great influence over the thought of a large number of members of the Society. His studies and his books reflected the attitude of "scientific common sense."
He claims to have brought the phenomena of the superphysical realms of life, of the astral and the mental plane, of the future disembodied life, and of the past and future of this and other spheres, under his direct clairvoyant gaze. He wrote elaborate descriptions of these things in a style of simplicity and clearness. He asserted that such powers enabled one to review any event in the past history of the race, inasmuch as all that ever happened is imprinted indelibly on the substance of the Astral Light or the Akasha, and the psychic faculties of trained occultists permit them to bring these pictures under observation. With the same faculties he asserted his ability to investigate the facts of nature in both her realms of the infinite and the infinitesimal.
Hence he explored the nature of the atom, its electrons and its whorls, and in collaboration with Mrs. Besant, who was alleged also to possess high psychic powers, published a work entitled Occult Chemistry. For years he stood as perhaps the world's greatest "seer," and in books dealing with Clairvoyance, Dreams, The Astral Plane, Some Glimpses of Occultism, The Inner Life, The Hidden Side of Things, Man: Whence, How and Whither, he labored to particularize and complement Madame Blavatsky's sweeping outline of cosmic evolution and human character, as given in The Secret Doctrine. Certain schools of his critics assert flatly that he has only succeeded in vitiating her original presentation. Two years ago The Canadian Theosophist, a magazine published under the editorship of Mr. Albert Smythe at Toronto, published a series of articles in which parallel passages from the writings of Madame Blavatsky and the Mahatma Letters on one side, and from the books of Mrs. Besant, Mr. Leadbeater, Mr. C. Jinarajadasa, on the other, give specific evidence bearing on the claims of perversion of the original theories by those whom they call Neo-Theosophists. The articles indicate wide deviations, in some cases complete reversal, made by the later interpreters from the fundamental statements of the Russian Messenger and her Overlords. The differences concern such matters as the personality of God, the historicity of Jesus, his identity as an individual or a principle, the desirability of churches, priestcraft and religious ceremonial, the genuineness of an apostolic succession, and a vicarious atonement, the authority of Sacraments, the nature and nomenclature of the seven planes of man's constitution, the planetary chains, the monad, the course of evolution, and many other important phases of Theosophic doctrine. This exhaustive research has made it apparent that the later exponents have allowed themselves to depart in many important points from the teachings of H.P.B.11
Whatever may be the causes operating to influence their intellectual developments, they have succeeded in giving Theosophy a somewhat different direction which, on the whole, has emphasized the religious temper and content of its doctrines. It should be added that these criticisms are not representative of the great majority of followers of the movement, who regard the later elaborations from fundamentals as both logical and desirable.
For years Mr. Leadbeater was looked upon as the genuine link between the Society and its Mahatmic Wardens, and his utterances were received as law and authority by members of the organization from the President downward. But at the height of his influence in 1906 came charges of privately teaching to boys under his care sexual practices similar to some of those practiced in certain Hindu temple rites. They cleft through the ranks of the Society like a bolt of lightning. Mrs. Besant, horrified, asked for his resignation. Mr. Leadbeater admitted the charges, explained his occult and hygienic reasons for his instruction, and resigned. But not many months had passed before Mrs. Besant reversed her position and began a campaign to restore Mr. Leadbeater to fellowship and good repute, she having received from him a promise to discontinue such teaching.
Col. Olcott had conducted an inquiry at London, and the disclosure probably hastened the aging President's death, though the main contributing cause was an accident on board ship. He died early in 1907, and the event caused a conflict over the matter of succession. It was noised about Adyar, Madras, where his death occurred, that there had been a visitation of a number of the Masters at the bedside of the dying President-Founder and that the succession had there been indicated. The extraordinary occurrence was said to have been witnessed by those present in the death chamber, who were Mrs. Besant, Mrs. Marie Russak Hotchener, and two or three others. As the matter is one of considerable moment in the history of the Theosophical Society, I take the liberty to quote several sentences from a personal letter which Mrs. Hotchener wrote me from Los Angeles under date of August 3, 1915, relative to the event:
"I was present when the Masters came to Col. Olcott. There was no possibility of hallucination, for too many things occurred physically which could be proven. I did some writing even, and did two or three things I was told to do, and besides the whole visit of the Masters to Colonel Olcott was to help him and to better the future of the Society. I also saw the Master lift Colonel from the floor where he had prostrated himself as HIS feet, and put him on the bed as though the Colonel were a baby. Master M. (Morya) did it, who is seven feet tall. When the Doctor came a few minutes later (when the Masters had gone) he scolded the nurse and myself for the fact that Colonel had been out of bed--his heart and condition of the body showed it and the terrible excitement. We were told of things which were afterwards proven and which none of us knew at the time; whole sentences were quoted from the Master's letters to H.P.B. which none of us had seen, and objects mentioned the existence of which none of us knew, and many other things. Then, too, the Colonel had seen the Masters with H.P.B. and there was no possibility of his being deceived. Their coming saved the Society from going into an era of the 'letter of the law' dominating completely the spirit, and both Mr. Leadbeater and Mrs. Besant have confirmed their coming and in their physical bodies. There is sufficient proof, but I could not write it all now."
The witnesses affirmed that the Masters had designated Mrs. Besant as the successor of Col. Olcott, as she was already that of H.P.B. This demonstration of the living interest of the Masters in the affairs of the Society 12 vitally enhanced Mrs. Besant's prestige, and as she was already in control of the "throbbing heart of the Theosophical Society," viz., the Esoteric Section, the ensuing world-wide election of a new President, held in 1907, could have but one result. She had practically no opposition, and has been re-elected at intervals since that time. Mr. Leadbeater was restored soon after these events, and the exposition of the major phases of the Neo-Theosophy began in earnest.
Many old and loyal members were forced out by the advent of one disagreeable situation or utterance after another, as they saw the old teachings warped or strangely reinterpreted; but the new interest brought in others in larger numbers. Perhaps the most spectacular of all Mrs. Besant's enterprises was inaugurated in 1909--the formation of The Order of the Star in the East, for spreading the idea, which she and Mr. Leadbeater had promulgated, of the approaching manifestation of the Lord Maitreya as the World Teacher. The basis of her grandiose scheme was Mr. Leadbeater's psychic discovery that the very body which the Lord was to occupy during the years of His coming earthly sojourn was already among them in the person of one Jiddu Krishnamurti, a fine young Brahmin, then in his early 'teens. Mrs. Besant forthwith legally adopted the youth, aided with his education, part of which was gained in England, and successfully resisted a law-suit of the boy's father to regain control of him. She then exploited him before the world as the "vehicle" of the coming World Teacher.
An abundance of effective publicity was gained, if nothing more substantial. Several times the lad's body seemed to have been obsessed by an overshadowing presence, and his lips at such times spoke unwonted words of wisdom. The young man was elevated to the headship of the Order of the Star in the East; a neat magazine, The Herald of the Star, was established for propaganda purposes, and the thousands of Theosophists and some outsiders who followed Mrs. Besant in this new field were worked up to a high pitch of hushed expectancy of the dénouement. Krishnamurti's sponsors had originally stated that the spirit of the Great Lord could be expected to use the body of the young Hindu fully in some fifteen or twenty-five years, but on the occasion of the visit of Mrs. Besant and the youth to America in August of 1926, the announcement was made that the consummation of the divine event was certain to be delayed no longer than Christmas of that year.
The affable young man bravely carried the mantle of near-divinity during all the intervening years; but finally in the course of the year 1929, speaking at a meeting of the followers of his cult at their European headquarters at Ommen, in Holland, he rather suddenly executed what he had intimated to some of his friends, who had noted his utterances against organizations for spiritual purposes, by dissolving the Order of the Star, by refusing to be regarded as an authority, and retaining for himself only the humble rôle of spiritual teacher. In spite of the exalted position gratuitously foisted upon him, he had evidently grown restive under Mrs. Besant's dominance. His action has been generally interpreted as a courageous assertion of his independence of mind and spirit. By it he has apparently gained rather than lost prestige. His public appearances continue to draw large audiences which express sympathy with his aims and react kindly to the appeal of his personality and spiritual cast of mind. Mrs. Besant was left to find devices of her own to explain the twenty-year-long fiasco. She has explained that Mr. Krishnamurti is a teacher in his own right.
In the early days of the Krishnamurti agitation, probably about 1912, Mr. Leadbeater published in serial form the results of a pretentious clairvoyant investigation, being no less than an account in much detail of the last forty reincarnations of the Indian lad in various nations including the Atlantean countries, with the concurrent lives of some score or more of individuals, nearly all prominent then in the Theosophical Society, who had been keeping in the same group life after life down through the ages. His work was styled The Lives of Alcyone, the latter appellation having been given to Krishnamurti as his true or cosmic name.13
About 1914 Mrs. Marie Russak was commissioned to introduce a ritualistic order within the Theosophic Society and in the course of the next two or three years she installed some twenty or more chapters of an organization given the name of "The Temple of the Rosy Cross." An elaborate regalia was required and a ceremonial was devised which a member of the Masonic body told the author equalled in beauty and dignity anything he was conversant with in the higher degrees of Masonry. The initiates took a solemn pledge to do nothing contrary to the interests of their Higher Selves and the ceremonies were said to have been attended with elevated types of spiritual experience. Great emphasis was laid on the "magnetic purity" of everything handled by the officiants.
Powerful sublimations of spiritual forces were thought to be operative through the instrumentality of the ritual. Mrs. Russak had proved to be an efficient organizer and the "Temple" had apparently done much to spiritualize the appeal of Theosophy. But suddenly after an existence of about three years the organization was declared at an end, for reasons never given out frankly to the membership.
Coincident with the "Alcyone" campaign a movement within the Theosophical Society was launched, again actuated by Mr. Leadbeater's mystic observations, that went in direct contradiction to Madame Blavatsky's warnings and prognostications on the subject of religious sectarianism. This was the establishment of "The Old Catholic Church" (later changed to "The Liberal Catholic Church") as carrying the true apostolic succession from the original non-Roman Catholic Church, the primitive Christian Church. The link of succession brought down from the early Middle Ages was picked up in Holland in the remnants of the Old Catholic Church still lingering there, and the first Bishop
consecrated from the old line was Mr. James I. Wedgewood, English Theosophist. He in turn anointed Mr. Leadbeater, who thus received the title of Bishop, by which he is now known. It was declared that the true unction of the original consecration was thus transmitted down to the present and reawakened to new virility in Theosophic hands.
Mr. Leadbeater wrote The Science of the Sacraments to give a new and living potency to ritual through occult science, and the new Church was declared to be the felicitous channel of expression for such Theosophists as needed the uplifting virtue of a dynamic ceremonial. The teachings of Theosophy might be intellectually satisfying; the Liberal Catholic Church would round out the Theosophic life by providing for the nourishment of the aesthetic and emotional nature, through means of white-magical potency. Mr. Leadbeater was more Catholic than any Roman in his claims of marvelous efficacy in the performance of the rituals. His pictures of the congregational thought-forms, the aggregate vibrational energies set in motion by devotion, which he says take definite shapes and hover over the edifice during a service, are daring and original.14
Agitation over Mr. Leadbeater's sex ideas cropped out at intervals, and in 1922 there was a renewed stir over this subject when a Mr. Martyn, of Sydney, Australia, a Theosophist of high standing, gave out a letter in which he recounted certain incidents which he alleged took place while Mr. Leadbeater was a guest in his home some time before.
There were charges and denials; and it should in fairness be said that Mr. Leadbeater had confided to personal friends that through his clairvoyant vision he was enabled to discern that much suffering could be saved the boys later on in their lives if some of the pent-up sexual energies could be given vent in the way he prescribed. He asserted that the "bad Karma" of such sex expression would be confined to the boys themselves and easily lived down, whereas otherwise they would be led to actions which would involve them in the sex Karma of others. Some Theosophists, including one or two medical men and women, have gone on record as declaring that the principles underlying Mr. Leadbeater's sexual philosophy in this particular might well save the world some of the misery and evil that arises from improper understanding of the issues involved. Mrs. Besant herself may have seen some such saving grace in the situation, which would account for her sudden and definite swing to Mr. Leadbeater's support following her first outraged sensibilities. The issue is not at present a live one. Certainly Mr. Leadbeater's ideas on sex, though tolerated by some, are to be regarded as generally repudiated by the vast majority of Theosophists.
Later Theosophical leadership in America passed successively through the hands of Dr. Weller Van Hook, of Chicago, Mr. A. P. Warrington, an attorney from Virginia and Mr. L. W. Rogers, a capable business executive, who is now the President of the large American Section. It was in Mr. Warrington's régime that the Theosophical settlement, under the name of Krotona, was located in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. This settlement was the outcome of a plan conceived by Mr. Warrington quite apart from any Theosophical connection, and it was not until after the leaders of the movement learned of the plan that it was determined to carry it out in the interest of Theosophists. After an exhaustive search of the South and the West for a suitable site, covering a period of five years or more,15 it was
finally decided to locate in California; acreage was secured in the Hollywood hills, some beautiful buildings erected, and the Theosophical Headquarters was transferred from Chicago. The Headquarters has since been transferred to Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, for the advantage of a centralized location; and the Krotona settlement has been removed to a beautiful site in Ojai Valley where it now flourishes and is known as Krotona, as before. Here institute courses in Theosophy and related subjects are given and headquarters are maintained for the E.S. in the Western Hemisphere.16
When Mrs. Besant's "Karma" (as Theosophists phrase it) took her to India, she saw India moving towards the fulfilment of her vision and (as has been recently publicly asserted) the wish of the Himalayan Adepts, in the constituting of India as a Dominion of the British Commonwealth. The Theosophical headquarters at Adyar, in Madras, has long been recognized as a center of educational reform in India, and of propaganda for the modern revival of Hindu painting in the oriental manner.
Dr. Besant, still a prominent figure, is advancing into the eighties, and Mr. Leadbeater, too, is aging. What direction the course of future Theosophic activity will take when these two dominant figures have been withdrawn, is matter for current speculation. Their policies have alienated some of the staunchest early adherents of Madame Blavatsky and Judge. Already certain trends are discernible which indicate the setting in of a back-to-Blavatsky movement within the ranks of the Theosophical Society. There is already in full swing in the West a tendency to turn to a study of oriental spiritual science, and the contributions of Madame Blavatsky to this field are hardly likely to diminish in importance during the coming decades. She herself prophesied that her The Secret Doctrine would be accepted as a text-book on modern science in the twentieth century. Whether that prophecy be fulfilled or not, it is of note that the list of students who are dragging it down from dusty shelves is rapidly increasing at the present writing. Through the efforts mainly of the United Lodge of Theosophists reprints of the original plates of the two (First and Second) volumes have been made, and the book made more readily available to the public. Announcement has also been made from Adyar that H. P. Blavatsky's first draft of volume one of The Secret Doctrine will be published in 1931. 17
Some statistics as to book circulation are indicative of the spread of this stream of philosophic thought. Officials at the United Lodge of Theosophists, New York City, supplied data on this score. As the U.L.T. is one of the lesser bodies propagating Theosophy, the figures here given would cover but a minor fraction of the actual circulation of Theosophic literature. In recent years the United Lodge organization has sold:
Ocean of Theosophy, W. Q. Judge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
50,000
|
Translation of the Bhagavad Gita, W. Q. Judge . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
40,000
|
The Voice of the Silence, H. P. Blavatsky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
30,000
|
Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, W. Q. Judge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
25,000
|
Key to Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky (Original Text). . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
10,000
|
Conversations on Theosophy: Pamphlet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
150,000
|
In addition, there are constantly increasing calls for the two ponderous Blavatskian works, Isis and The Secret Doctrine. These figures may be indicative of the strength of the back-to-Blavatsky movement in Theosophic ranks.
Theosophy is now organized in more than forty countries of the world, with an active enrolled membership of more than fifty thousand. There are said to be some ten thousand members in America with over two hundred forty branches or lodges. Many more thousands have come in and gone out of the Society. Various reasons account for these desertions, but in few cases does relinquishment of formal membership indicate a rejection of Theosophical fundamentals of doctrine. "Once a Theosophist always a Theosophist," is approximately true, pointing to the profound influence which the sweeping cosmology and anthropology of the system exercises over a mind that has once absorbed it. It may then be said that there are several millions of people who have assimilated organically the teachings of Theosophy, and who yield a degree of assent to those formulations.
Footnotes to Chapter 12
1 The material of this chapter has been drawn largely from the anonymous work, The Theosophical Movement, the statements in which are fortified throughout with an abundance of documentary data, and from the Theosophic periodical literature of the years covered by the narrative, as well as in a number of instances from the author's first-hand acquaintance with the events narrated.
2 Evidence arrived at by comparison of dates and known facts as to Madame Blavatsky's slight acquaintance with Miss Collins before 1887, and the testimony of prefatory remarks in each of the four books in question, leads to the definite conclusion that Miss Collins did herself ascribe the source of her books to Mahatmic or other high dictation, and that she had taken this position without any influence whatever from H.P.B. The whole matter is set forth in elaborate detail in The Theosophical Movement, pp. 195-210.
3 See statement of A. Trevor Barker, in his Introduction to Letters of H.P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett, p. vii, as follows: "Much fresh light is thrown on . . . her relation with the notorious Solovyoff, who in his rage and resentment at being refused the privilege of chelaship, did so much to injure her reputation."
5 See statement made in The Theosophical Movement, p. 453. The author has been informed by several veteran Theosophists that this is not likely, that perhaps Chakravarti deputed others to guard her in this way. She regarded him at this time as actually her Master, and he could not with dignity have assumed a rôle of such condescension.
7 Ibid., p. 559.
8 Mr. Judge's papers concerning Theosophy were turned over to the Theosophical Society in the presence of Mrs. Judge and are now in the possession of the International Headquarters at Point Loma, California. As most of them pertained to the Esoteric Section, their contents have naturally been kept secret. Consequently the evidence on which the claims that Mr. Judge had made his wishes known are based is still unavailable.
9 See signed statement by E. T. Hargrove in the New York Sun of March 13, 1898.
10 The career of the Theosophic leader was beset with at least three law-suits instituted against her by relatives of wealthy followers contesting the disposition of funds allotted to her under the terms of wills. Both the Thurston and the Spalding suits were settled with compromise agreements. In still another sensational case Mrs. Tingley was sued by Irene M. Mohn for damages in the amount of $200,000 for alienation of the affections of her husband, George F. Mohn, a follower of Theosophy. Mrs. Mohn was awarded $100,000 by a California jury, but Mrs. Tingley won a reversal of the judgment before the California Supreme Court.
11 The work of an independent Theosophist, Mr. Roy Mitchell, lecturing in New York and Toronto, has also emphasized the extent of these variations. He lays particular emphasis on the Blavatskian doctrine of the descent of angelic hosts into the Adamic races of humanity to perform the work of redeeming them from a fallen estate, by means of the gift of Promethean fire or wisdom.
13 Persons who have lived at the Theosophical headquarters at Adyar at the period of the publication of The Lives of Alcyone, have intimated to the author that certain residents of the colony who were not "put in" the early "Lives" went to Mr. Leadbeater and requested that he look into their past and if possible bring them into the story, with the result that he did as requested in certain instances. About 1925 also there was published in England, by Mr. W. Loftus Hare, in The Occult Review, an exposé of the whole "Alcyone" proceeding, the alleged sources of Mr. Leadbeater's material being divulged in the shape of some articles in old encyclopedias.
14 Brief mention should here be made of an incident arising out of the general situation occasioned by the founding of this Church, in view of the principles involved. Dr. William L. Robins, of Washington, D.C., long an honored member of the Theosophical Society, looked with disfavor upon the establishment of an ecclesiastical order in connection with Theosophy, and went so far as to adduce considerable evidence to show that the Liberal Catholic Church was not free from subserviency to the Roman Catholic Church. He resented the movement as an attempt to saddle religionism upon Theosophy, and endeavored to show the hand of Roman machination in the whole business. His statements and letters, coming to the notice of Mrs. Besant, were taken as an open attack upon the religion of members of the Theosophical Society, and as such constituted a breach of Theosophic conduct. Mrs. Besant straightway asked Dr. Robins to resign from the Esoteric Section, with a statement to the effect that no member ought to attack the religious affiliations of any member of the Theosophical Society.
15 It was his intention first to locate the colony somewhere in the James River region in Virginia, and it was thought for a time that some of the pirate gold of Captain Kidd could be discovered--by clairvoyant means--and utilized to finance the undertaking. A rusty key was actually found in the hands of a skeleton discovered where the clairvoyant described it as lying buried, but evidently the treasure chests were not unearthed. This item was given to the author by one of the group meeting with the clairvoyant at the time.
16 In 1929 an order was issued from Adyar by Dr. Besant suspending the Esoteric Section. A later order revived it in 1930.
17 Although Dr. Besant and her friends deny any substantial significance in the claims made, yet the two Keightleys, who typed the manuscript of H.P.B.'s The Secret Doctrine for the press, stated that Madame Blavatsky had completed not only a third volume which dealt with the lives of outstanding occultists down the ages, but practically a fourth volume, also; and Mrs. Alice L. Cleather has been quoted as saying that she herself saw literally hundreds of changes made in Madame Blavatsky's manuscripts in the handwriting of Mrs. Besant and Mr. Mead. As to these changes, Mr. C. Jinarajadasa, when Vice-President of the Theosophical Society, made a statement which will be found on page 110 of The Golden Book of The Theosophical Society:"The facts are that H.P.B. always recognized that her English was often defective. . . . When The Secret Doctrine was published, she realized that there were many emendations necessary in a subsequent edition. . . . This very heavy task of checking and revising was largely the work of G. R. S. Mead, who devoted a great deal of his time to carrying out H.P.B.'s wishes in the matter. . . .
"After H.P.B.'s death, all her remaining manuscript material was published as a third volume of The Secret Doctrine. She was under the impression that the material she had slowly collected during many years would make five volumes in all of The Secret Doctrine. But steadily as she wrote the first two volumes of The Secret Doctrine more and more of her material was incorporated into the first two volumes, and the remaining manuscript material made only one more volume."
The Keightleys insisted, however, that they had carefully revised the language of the first edition, working with H.P.B. through the various stages of proof, and that the extensive revisions in the second edition were uncalled for. They also stated that they had seen the manuscript of the third volume "ready to be given to the printers," and Alice Cleather pointed out that H.P.B. had made several direct references to it in the first edition which were deleted in the second. Because so little of the data has been made public, the issue is still too much beclouded for judgment.
CHAPTER XIII
SOME FACTS AND FIGURES
The Theosophical Society is therefore not composed of a band of believers in certain creedal items, but a body of students and seekers. They are travelers on a quest, not the settled dwellers in a creed. They seek to keep fluidic the impulses, intuitions, and propensities of the life of spiritual aspiration, in opposition to the tendency to harden them into dogma.It is quite impossible for any one to trace with precision the influence of the Theosophic ideology, first, upon the psychology and then upon the conduct of devotees. It can be done only within the limits of general outlines. The one consideration that determines for the Theosophist the value of any thought or act is whether it tends to promote that unification of human mass consciousness along the spiritual ideals pictured in the Ancient Wisdom. This demands of the individual Theosophist that he make of himself, through the gradual expansion of his own consciousness, a channel for the increased flow of high cosmic forces that will work like leaven through the corporate body of humanity and dissipate human misery by the power of light and virtue.
Nevertheless it seems possible to attempt to ascertain the type of people who have been attracted to Theosophy and to examine the special traits and environments, if any such were manifest, which have afforded the most fruitful ground for the seed of the Theosophic faith. Likewise it seems desirable to estimate the influence of Theosophy upon the lives of its votaries. Through the cordial coöperation of the Theosophical Headquarters at Wheaton, Illinois, a questionnaire was sent out.1 Answers were received from nearly seventy per cent of the two hundred addresses--an unusually high return--and they have been carefully tabulated. The names submitted for the mailing of the questionnaire were selected by the President of the American Section of the Theosophical Society, and they must therefore presumably be considered to represent, not all Theosophists, but those of the "Besant Society" exclusively.2
The professions and occupations represented an average cross-section of American life. A few admitted membership in no profession. There were included editor, bishop, railroad executive, corporation president, manufacturer, doctor, lawyer, dentist, teacher, musician, artist, writer, nurse, college tutor, house painter, army officer, insurance agent, draughtsman, carpenter, stenographer, merchant, realtor, business manager, engineer, college secretary, hotel consultant, photographer, advertising writer, Post Office inspector, restaurant proprietor, public accountant, social service worker, veterinary, beauty culturist, oil operator, jeweler, optometrist, Braille worker, and a college teacher of biology. In the list also were a motor car company president, a newspaper publisher, a life insurance superintendent, an educator, a motion picture producer, a city sanitary engineer, a sheet metal contractor, a factory head, and a railroad comptroller. It may be said that these Theosophists are a picked group and hardly to be regarded as truly typical of the rank and file of the personnel. Whether this be true or no, it appears that Theosophists are representative American people, gaining their livelihood in conventional and respectable ways. The mark of their Theosophy would have to be looked for in their avocations, not in how they earn their living. They seem to be of the typical urban middle class, with few farmers or workers.
The ages of those answering the letters ranged from 21 to 86, with an average at about 45. The average length of time the respondents had been actively affiliated with Theosophy was about 15 years. The replies chanced to come from an exactly equal number of men and women. This proportion is hardly to be explained as a result of artificial selection in the mailing list and is significant in view of the fact that in practically all Christian denominations women considerably outnumber men. Indirect evidence of this fact was revealed by the preponderance of women over men among those who came to Theosophy from the various Christian churches; which was offset by the preponderance of men over women among those who had previously been members of no religious organizations.
Geographically the distribution revealed that the strength of the movement lies in the Middle West. Illinois, California, and New York are the headquarters of the Society, and the replies indicated that the most active Theosophists were concentrated in these areas. New England and the South (with the exception of Florida) show only a very slight membership.
As to the matter of the former religious connections, the figures brought out several interesting facts. The complete table follows:
Methodists . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
32
|
Greek Catholics . . . . . . . .
|
2
|
Episcopalians . . . . . . . . . .
|
26
|
Christian (unspecified) . . .
|
2
|
Presbyterians . . . . . . . . . .
|
11
|
Spiritualists . . . . . . . . . . .
|
2
|
Congregationalists . . . . . .
|
10
|
Atheists . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
2
|
Lutherans . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
9
|
Reformed . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
1
|
Roman Catholics . . . . . . .
|
8
|
Masonic . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
1
|
Baptists . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
6
|
Freethinkers . . . . . . . . . . .
|
1
|
Unitarians . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
6
|
Agnostic . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
1
|
Jewish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
3
|
Non-Church . . . . . . . . . .
|
27
|
Aligning these into significant groups we get:
Evangelicals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
69
|
Episcopalians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
26
|
Catholics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
10
|
Non-Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
31
|
Scattering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
14
|
As might be expected, those who had been Episcopalians were most numerous in the East and South. The Evangelical denominations were, of course, most strongly represented in the Middle West, and they prove to be the most fertile soil for the inroads of Theosophy. The reasons for this fact are suggested below. About eighteen per cent of the respondents explicitly spoke of themselves as still Christians. About ten per cent came to Theosophy through an interest in psychic phenomena, healing or magic, of whom about fifty per cent came from Evangelical churches and none from the Catholic churches. The number of those who came to Theosophy from non-church environments is seen to be a fairly large proportion of the total. As to this element Illinois showed the heaviest rating, with California next, though the group was on the whole fairly evenly distributed over the country. Those from the non-church group supplied a disproportionately large percentage of the most active workers and leaders. The Liberal Catholic members seemed to come almost exclusively from the Episcopalian and the Evangelical groups, and those who had been Catholics were practically negligible.
The reasons given for the abandonment of their former faiths to embrace Theosophy are of interest. Theosophy came in the main to people who had already experienced a pronounced distaste for the creeds of the churches. However suddenly the transfer of loyalty and faith may have come, the way thereto had apparently been long in preparation. There is in the letters either a tacit inference or a direct statement that the espousal of Theosophy was largely attributable to the failure of the churches in meeting their intellectual needs. The increasing inadequacy of the church doctrines made Theosophy seem richer, or, to put the same fact positively, the largeness of the Theosophical system made Christian theology seem impoverished. The percentage of those explicitly noting their dissatisfaction with the churches was 47, while almost all the remainder emphasized the positive intellectual stimulation given them by Theosophy. However, such vague personal testimony must be received with a measure of caution until we estimate what particular elements were most effective.
While the specific motives for shifting from religious regularity, or from no institutional or creedal anchorage over to a new and exotic cult, have been quite variously set forth by the respondents, almost all of them used the general formula: Theosophy rendered life more intelligible than any other system. All the more detailed statements as to the reason for faith in Theosophy are but amplifications of this one theme. It is the only cult, we are told, that furnishes to the seeker after light and understanding an adequate rational support for the assumption of Law, Order, Love, Wisdom, Purpose, and Intelligence in the Course of Things. A closer examination into the meaning of these phrases soon reveals that certain specific issues were uppermost. Theosophy appeared to reconcile science (especially evolutionary science) with religion; it enlarged the moral drama to the vast proportions of cosmic epochs demanded by evolution. It gave a teleological explanation of evolution which was nevertheless not narrowly anthropocentric, and an explanation of the origin of evil which was not arbitrary or cruel. Then, too, as many replies definitely stated, the doctrine of reincarnation was regarded as an improvement over the orthodox doctrine of resurrection, day of judgment, heaven and hell, as well as over the vague liberal doctrine of immortality. And the law of Karma was felt to be more rational than salvation by forgiveness, vicarious atonement, or "faith" or "grace." Some of the writers found a higher form of theism in Theosophy, but the majority said little about God, and were quite content to substitute meditation and study for praying to a personal God. Here are a few typical statements:
"Theosophy answered the great problems. It made life intelligible on the basis of Love, Law, Intelligence."
"Orthodoxy nowhere furnished a satisfactory solution to the riddles of life."
"Theosophy presented a logical and reasonable theory of life, which in turn served as an inspiration to self-discipline and right living. It provides the only sure 'ground for morals.'"
"The general narrowness and inconsistency of religions and particularly their inability to explain wrong and suffering turned me away from the churches. Theosophy brought satisfaction, peace and happiness."
"Theosophy reconciled science and religion with each other, and both with philosophy, and me with all of them in one great synthesis."
"Theosophy gave me a satisfying philosophy of life and religion and restored me to Christianity after the church had lost me."
"I never knew there existed so rational and complete a theory of life until I met with Theosophy."
"Theosophy alone answered the questions that must be raised by any reflective mind."
"Theosophy appealed to me by its vast comprehensibility. It leaves no fact of life unexplained in a system into which the single facts fit with amazing aptness."
"Theosophy came to me through the death of my husband, when I stood face to face with a disenchanted universe and sought to break through to a rational understanding of the meaning of things."
"I felt the need for some way out such as that provided by reincarnation. I found Theosophy a complete philosophy answering my mental demands to the full."
"Christianity could not stand the test of thinking; Theosophy gave me the larger truths which could bear the brunt of logical questioning."
"Theosophy presented the only rational scheme of life that I had ever heard of."
"The laws of reincarnation and Karma for the first time enabled me to see life as under the reign of Order and Love."
"Theosophy was the first system I ever met with that reconciled me with the universe. I was a rebel before."
"I was happy to find in Theosophy an acceptable explanation of the soul-harrying problems connected with the apparent cruelty of life."
"Not only did Theosophy solve for me the riddles of the universe but it opened up new vistas of meaning in the service, rituals and traditions of the church itself."
"Theosophy quieted my feeling of uneasiness over the fact that so many religions must be wrong, by revealing the synthesis of truth back of all religions alike."
"My special studies in the lines of Social and Criminal Psychology made reincarnation a necessity for my thinking, and no longer a speculative luxury."
"While the church evades the main issues, Theosophy courageously attacks the vital problems at their root and succeeds in solving their meaning by revealing the hidden side of truth."
"I revolted at the fear which the churches, through some of their repellent doctrines, instil into the minds of children. Theosophy dispelled all this dark shadow and let in the light."
"I felt the hypocrisies of the religious leaders. I went from Applied Psychology to Christian Science, to Spiritualism and found rest only in Theosophy at last."
"The shallowness of church teaching drove me to agnosticism, from which happily Theosophy rescued me."
"From Christian Science I went to occultism, and I was once more happy to be shown that life could be understood after all."
"I found in Theosophy an unshakable foundation on which to base my logic."
"Theosophy came to me in the crisis of a nervous breakdown, and by giving me a flashing clear understanding of life and its problems, brought me safely through the ordeal. It revealed that I was part of the plan and gave me a new zest for living."
"Perhaps nothing within the scope of mind can solve the Mystery of Life, but Theosophy rendered it no longer a mystification."
"There were the sneers of skeptics and unbelievers on one side and horrified piety of believers on the other. Neither had any rational scheme of life to offer. Theosophy was a joyous refuge from this dilemma."
"There was something clearly wanting and illogical in the doctrine of salvation through the vicarious sacrifice and atonement; now all is clear."
"I found here a body of ideas systematized and unified, which, furthermore, rang true when tested out against the hard facts of life itself."
"I was a freethinker by nature, but after all one must think systematically, not loosely, and Theosophy presented to me a marvelous compact and well-knit structure."
"Work in the slums brought a sense of the breakdown of orthodox faith in the face of social disaster. I saw religion as a drug and curse to the lowly. I wanted Truth rather than religion. I found it in Theosophy."
"Theosophy gave me light after I had long been immersed in the grossness of materialism."
"Exactly where the church fell down Theosophy held its ground."
"A Sunday School teacher, what I taught choked me. Theosophy was like a cup of water to one dying of thirst."3
Some sixty-five per cent of the replies indicated that the philosophical and scientific aspects of Theosophy were the primary interests, leaving about thirty-five per cent attracted chiefly to the religious or devotional phases. Forty-two per cent gave definite time to daily meditation. Thirty- six per cent explicitly avowed a non-meat diet, though the proportion of abstainers from animal food is undoubtedly must larger. A few ladies testified to having forsworn the wearing of furs on humanitarian grounds. Alcohol and tobacco were taboo along with flesh foods in the case of several.
Whereas almost all the respondents spontaneously emphasized the intellectual aspects of Theosophy, comparatively few were explicit on the element which is supposed to be central in their faith, viz., the practice of universal brotherhood. Only about twenty per cent emphasized such interests (brotherhood, social service, etc.) as in Theosophic terminology would belong to the practice of Karma Yoga; and of these an unusually large percentage were women. They came mostly from Evangelical churches or no-church; few were Episcopalians. This group, emphasizing Karma Yoga, proved to be fairly distinct from the group which emphasized meditation, though both groups were recruited largely from former Evangelical Protestants.
The practice of meditation seemed to have little measurable effect one way or the other on the amount of time and energy devoted to work for the Theosophical Society. About fifty per cent said they gave a definite amount of time to specific Theosophic activities, and of these about thirteen per cent gave at least one-half of their time to the cause. Many gave from a half-hour to three, four, five hours per day; some "three evenings a week, with home study"; others "one-fourth to one-half of all time." Many devoted "all spare time" to it. But a significant element that crept into quite a large percentage of the answers was the statement that the pursuit of Theosophy "permeates all my activity"; "enters into my whole life as an undercurrent"; "colors all my behavior, modifies my attitude toward all I do"; is "a subconscious influence directing my entire life"; is "the background of my life, polarizing all I do to the one central principle of brotherhood"; forms "the pervasive spirit of all I do;" is "the motivating agent in all my efforts to work and to serve"; and the like expressions. In other words there is the persuasion with these people that one is a Theosophist all the time, whatever be one's momentary mode of activity. "The specific time I give to it is impossible to estimate," says one; and "it absorbs my thought and is the determining motive in every act of my life," avers another. The percentage so declaring themselves ran as high as seventy-four.
The query desiring to ascertain which leaders and which Theosophic organizations commanded higher allegiance brought answers which were a foregone conclusion from the fact that all the respondents were attached to the "Besant" organization. The favored leaders were naturally Mr. C. Jinarajadasa, Mr. A. P. Sinnett, Mr. G. S. Arundale, Mr. L. W. Rogers, Mr. Max Wardall, Bishop Irving Cooper, and others.
Although the name of the Society's great Founder, Madame Blavatsky, was brought in apparantly in most cases incidentally or as an after-thought, she or her writings were mentioned by one out of every three.
Only two failed to name Mrs. Besant or Mr. Leadbeater at all. As to favored writings, those of Mrs. Besant and her colleague again led the list, with J. Krishnamurti's books a good third. As to choice of organization the International Theosophical Society, of which Mrs. Besant is the presiding genius, found a unanimous approval in this selected group. Only two declared they were impartial or indifferent to all organization.
As a secondary interest (all Theosophists are urged to devote some energy to at least one outside humanitarian movement) many expressed allegiance to the Order of the Star in the East, Mrs. Besant's vehicle to prepare the way for the reception of the announced Avatar (since renounced by Krishnamurti himself and disbanded by him), the Order of Service, the League of Brotherhood, the Karma and Reincarnation Legion, the Liberal Catholic Church, the Co-Masonic Order, Anti-Vivisection Societies, the League for Prison Work, the Order of the Round Table (for children), and other subsidiary forms of extra-Theosophic activity.
Footnotes to Chapter 13
1 An official of the United Lodge of Theosophists declined to aid in sending letters to persons in that branch, stating that a questionnaire was irrelevant to the interests of true Theosophy.
2 The questions asked covered the points of age, sex, profession, and length of time connected with Theosophy; previous church affiliations, if any, and reason for abandoning them for Theosophy; the phase of Theosophy appealing most strongly to the individual, whether its philosophical, its religious and devotional side, or its scientific aspect; meditational practice and adherence to non-meat diet; favorite Theosophic authors and literature; and lastly the amount of time devoted to the Theosophic cause in one form or another.
3 But one person adds: "I heard a Theosophic lecturer who had something in his face no other man had ever had save Bishop Brent."
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