Indian Metaphysics
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Two peas in the same pod are the traditional symbol of mutual resemblance, and the time-honoured simile forced itself upon me when I read the twin letters of our two masked assailants in your paper of Feb. 22nd. In substance they are so identical that one would suppose the same person had written them simultaneously with his two hands, as Paul Morphy will play you two games of chess, or Kossuth dictate two letters at once. The only difference between these two letters – lying beside each other on the same page, like two babes in one crib – is, that "M.A. Cantab’s" is brief and courteous, while "Scrutator’s" is prolix and uncivil. By a strange coincidence both these sharp-shooters fire from behind their secure ramparts a shot at a certain "learned Occultist" over the head of Mr. C. C. Massey, who quoted some of that personage’s views, in a letter published May 10th, 1876. Whether in irony or otherwise, they hurl the views of this "learned Occultist" at the heads of Col. Olcott and myself, as though they were missiles that would floor us completely. Now the "learned Occultist" in question is not a whit more, or less, learned than your humble servant, for the very simple reason that we are identical. The extracts published by Mr. Massey, by permission, were contained in a letter from myself to him. Moreover it is now before me, and, save one misprint of no consequence, I do not find in it a word that I would wish changed. What is said there I repeat now over my signature – the theories of 1876 do not contradict those of 1878 in any respect, as I shall endeavour to prove, after pointing out to the impartial reader the quaking ground upon which our two critics stand. Their arguments against Theosophy – certainly "Scrutator’s" – are like a verdant moss, which displays a velvety carpet of green without roots and with a deep bog below. When a person enters on a controversy over a fictitious signature, he should be doubly cautious, if he would avoid the accusation of abusing the opportunity of the mask to insult his opponents with impunity. Who or what is "Scrutator"? A clergyman, a medium, a lawyer, a philosopher, a physician (certainly not a metaphysician), or what? Quien sabe? He seems to partake of the flavour of all, and yet to grace none. Though his arguments are all interwoven with sentences quoted from our letters, yet in no case does he criticize merely what is written by us, but what he thinks we may have meant, or what the sentences might imply. Drawing his deductions, then, from what existed only in the depths of his own consciousness, he invents phrases, and forces constructions, upon which he proceeds to pour out his wrath. Without meaning to be in the least personal – for, though propagating "absurdities" with the "utmost effrontery," I should feel sorry and ashamed to be as impertinent with "Scrutator" as he is with us – yet, hereafter, when I see a dog chasing the shadow of his own tail, I will think of his letter. In my doubts as to what this assailant might be, I invoked the help of Webster to give me a possible clue in the pseudonym. "Scrutator," says the great lexicographer, is "one who scrutinizes," and "scrutiny" he derives from the Latin scrutari, "to search even to the rags"; which scrutari itself he traces back to a Greek root, meaning "trash, trumpery." In this ultimate analysis, therefore, we must regard the nom de plume, while very applicable to his letter of February 22nd, as very unfortunate for himself; for, at best, it makes him a sort of literary chiffonnier, probing in the dust-heap of the language for bits of hard adjectives to fling at us. I repeat that, when an anonymous critic accuses two persons of "slanderous imputations" (the mere reflex of his own imagination), and of "unfathomable absurdities," he ought, at least, to make sure (1) that he has thoroughly grasped what he is pleased to call the "teachings" of his adversaries; and (2) that his own philosophy is infallible. I may add, furthermore, that when that critic permits himself to call the views of other people – not yet half digested by himself – "unfathomable absurdities," he ought to be mighty careful about introducing as arguments into the discussion sectarian absurdities far more "unfathomable" and which have nothing to do with either Science or Philosophy.
The very opposite of Oliver Johnson evidently, this Jesus-babe of " Scrutator’s." Such an argument might come with a certain force in a discussion between two conflicting dogmatic sects, but if picked "even to rags" it seems but "utmost effrontery" – to use "Scrutator’s" own complimentary expression – to employ it in a philosophical debate, as if it were either a scientific or historically proved fact! If I refused, at the very start, to argue with our friend "M.A. Oxon.," a man whom I esteem and respect as I do few in this world, only because he put forward a "cardinal dogma," I shall certainly lose no time in debating Theosophy with a tattering Christian, whose scrutinizing faculties have not helped him beyond the acceptance of the latest of the world’s Avataras, in all its unphilosophical dead-letter meaning, without even suspecting its symbolical significance. To parade in a would-be philosophical debate the exploded dogmas of any Church, is most ineffectual, and shows, at best, a great poverty of resource. Why does not "Scrutator" address his refined abuse, ex cathedrâ, to the Royal Society, whose Fellows doom to annihilation every human being, Theosophist or Spiritualist, pure or impure? With crushing irony he speaks of us as "our teachers." Now I remember having distinctly stated in a previous letter that we have not offered ourselves as teachers, but, on the contrary, decline any such office – whatever may be the superlative panegyric of my esteemed friend, Mr. O. Sullivan, who not only sees in me "a Buddhist priestess" (!), but, without a shadow of warrant of fact, credits me with the foundation of the Theosophical Society and its Branches! Had Colonel Olcott been half as "psychologized" by me as a certain American Spiritualist paper will have it, he would have followed my advice and refused to make public our "views," even though so much and so often importuned in different quarters. With characteristic stubbornness, however, he had his own way, and now reaps the consequence of having thrown his bomb into a hornet’s nest. Instead of being afforded opportunity for a calm debate, we get but abuse, pure and simple – the only weapon of partisans. Well, let us make the best of it, and join our opponents in picking the question "to rags." Mr. C. C. Massey comes in for his share, too, and though fit to be a leader himself, is given by " Scrutator" a chief! Neither of our critics seems to understand our views (or his own) so little as "Scrutator." He misapprehends the meaning of Elementary, and makes a sad mess of Spirit and Matter. Hear him say that Elementary
This sentence alone proves that he forces himself into the discussion, without any comprehension of the subject at issue. Evidently, he has neither read the mediaeval nor modern Kabalists. Henry Kunrath is as unfamiliar to him as the Abbe Constant. Let him go to the British Museum, and ask for the Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æternæ Kunrath. He will find in it illustrative engravings of the four great classes of elementary Spirits, as seen during an evocation of ceremonial Magic by the Magus who lifts the Veil of Isis. The author explains that these are disembodied vicious men, who have parted with their divine Spirits, and become as beasts. After reading this volume, "Scrutator" may profitably consult Éliphas Lévi, whom he will find using the words " Elementary Spirits" throughout his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, in both senses in which we have employed it. This is especially the case where (vol. i. p. 262, seq.) he speaks of the evocation of Apollonius of Tyana by himself. Quoting from the greatest Kabalistic authorities, he says:
Further, Lévi says (Op. cit., p. 164):
And in the face of this testimony – which he can find in the British Museum, two steps from the office of The Spiritualist (!) – that since the Middle Ages the Kabalists have been writing about the Elementaries, and their potential annihilation, "Scrutator" permits himself to arraign Theosophists for their ‘effrontery" in foisting upon Spiritualists a "new-fangled and ill-defined term" which is "not yet two years old"! In truth, we may say that the idea is older than Christianity, for it is found in the ancient Kabalistic books of the Jews. In the olden time they defined three kinds of "souls" – the daughters of Adam, the daughters of the angels and those of sin; and in the book of The Revolution of the Souls three kinds of "Spirits" (as distinct from material bodies) are shown – the captive, the wandering and the free Spirits. If "Scrutator" were acquainted with the literature of Kabalism, he would know that the term Elementary applies not only to one principle or constituent part, to an elementary primary substance, but also embodies the idea which we express by the term elemental – that which pertains to the four elements of the material world, the first principles or primary ingredients. The word "elemental" as defined by Webster, was not current at the time of Kunrath, but the idea was perfectly understood. The distinction has been made, and the term adopted by Theosophists for the sake of avoiding confusion. The thanks we get are that we are charged with propounding, in 1878, a different theory of the "Elementaries" from that of 1876! Does anything herein stated either as from ourselves, or Kunrath, or Lévi, contradict the statement of the "learned Occultist" that:
Italicizing some words of the above, but omitting to emphasize the one important word of the sentence, i.e., "latent," which contains the key to the whole mystery, our critic mars the sense. In the grain of sand, and each atom of the human material body, the Spirit is latent, not active; hence being but a correlation of the highest light, something concrete as compared with the purely abstract, the atom is vitalized and energized by Spirit, without being endowed with distinct consciousness. A grain of sand, as every minutest atom, is certainly "imbued with that vital principle called Spirit"; so every atom of both, following the law of evolution, whether of objective or semi-concrete astral matter, will have to remain eternal throughout the endless cycles, indestructible in their primary elementary constituents. But will "M.A. Cantab.," for all that, call a grain of sand, or a human nail-paring, consciously immortal? Does he mean us to understand him as believing that a fractional part of a fraction has the same attributes, capabilities, and limitations as the whole? Does he say that because the atoms in a nail-paring are indestructible as atoms, therefore the body, of which the nail formed a part, is necessarily, as a conscious whole, indestructible and immortal? Our opponents repeat the words trinity, body, soul, Spirit, as they might say the cat, the house, and the Irishman inhabiting it – three perfectly dissimilar things. They do not see that, dissimilar as the three parts of the human trinity may seem, they are in truth but correlations of the one eternal Essence – which is no essence; but unfortunately the English language is barren of adequate expressions, and, though they do not see it, the house, the physical Irishman, and the cat are, in their last analysis, one. I verily begin to suspect that they imagine that Spirit and Matter are two, instead of one! Truly says Vishnu Barva Brahmachâri, in one of his essays in Marathi (1869), that:
Kant, Schopenhauer and Hartmann seem to have written to little effect, and Kapila will be soon pronounced an antiquated ignoramus. Without at all ranging myself under Schopenhauer’s banner, who maintains that in reality there is neither Spirit nor Matter, yet I must say that if even he were studied, Theosophy would be better understood. But can one really discuss metaphysical ideas in a European language? I doubt it. We say "Spirit," and behold, what confusion it leads to. Europeans give the name Spirit to that something which they conceive as apart from physical organization, independent of corporeal, objective existence; and they call spirit also the airy, vaporous essence, alcohol. Therefore, the New York reporter who defined a materialized Spirit as "frozen whiskey," was right in his way. A copious vocabulary, indeed, that has but one term for God and for alcohol! With all their libraries of metaphysics, European nations have not even gone to the trouble of inventing appropriate words to elucidate metaphysical ideas. If they had, perhaps one book in every thousand would have sufficed to really instruct the public, instead of there being the present confusion of words, obscuring intelligence, and utterly hampering the Orientalist, who would expound his Philosophy in English. Whereas, in the latter language, I find but one word to express, perhaps, twenty different ideas, in the Eastern tongues, especially Sanskrit, there are twenty words or more to render one idea in its various shades of meaning. We are accused of propagating ideas that would surprise the "average" Buddhist. Granted, and I will liberally add that the average Brâhmanist might be equally astonished. We never said that we were either Buddhists or Brâhmanists in the sense of their popular exoteric Theologies. Buddha, sitting on his Lotus, or Brahmâ, with any number of teratological arms, appeals to us as little as the Catholic Madonna or the Christian personal God, which stare at us from cathedral walls and ceilings. But neither Buddha nor Brahmâ represents to His respective worshippers the same ideas as these Catholic icons which we regard as blasphemous. In this particular who dares say that Christendom with its civilization has outgrown the fetichism of Fijians? When we see Christians and Spiritualists speaking so flippantly and confidently about God and the "materialization of Spirit," we wish they might be made to share a little in the reverential ideas of the old Âryas. We do not write for "average" Buddhists, or average people of any sort. But I am quite willing to match any tolerably educated Buddhist or Brâhman against the best metaphysicians of Europe, to compare views on God and on man’s immortality. The ultimate abstract definition of this – call it God, Force, Principle, as you will – will ever remain a mystery to Humanity, though it attain to its highest intellectual development. The anthropomorphic ideas of Spiritualists concerning Spirit are a direct consequence of the anthropomorphic conceptions of Christians as to the Deity. So directly is the one the outflow of the other, that "Scrutator’s" handiest argument against the duality of a child and potential immortality is to cite
Christians call God an Infinite Being, and then endow Him with every finite attribute, such as love, anger, benevolence, mercy! They call Him all-merciful, and preach damnation for three-fourths of Humanity in every church, all-just, and the sins of this brief span of life may not be expiated by even an eternity of conscious agony. Now, by some miracle of oversight, among thousands of mistranslations in the "Holy" Writ, the word "destruction," the synonym of annihilation, was rendered correctly in King James’s version, and no dictionary can make it read either damnation or eternal torment. Though the Church consistently put down the "destructionists," yet the impartial will scarcely deny that they come nearer than their persecutors to believing what Jesus taught, and what is consistent with justice, in teaching the final annihilation of the wicked. To conclude, then, we believe that there is but one undefinable Principle in the whole Universe, which being utterly incomprehensible by our finite intellects, we prefer rather to leave undebated than to blaspheme Its majesty with our anthropomorphic speculations. We believe that all else which has being, whether material or spiritual, and all that may have existence, actually, or potentially in our idealism, emanates from this Principle. That everything is a correlation in one shape or another of this Will and Force; and hence, judging of the unseen by the visible, we base our speculations upon the teachings of the generations of Sages who preceded Christianity, fortified by our own reason. I have already illustrated the incapacity of some of our critics to separate abstract ideas from complex objects, by instancing the grain of sand and the nail-paring. They refuse to comprehend that a philosophical doctrine can teach that an atom imbued with divine light, or a portion of the great Spirit, in its latent stage of correlation, may, notwithstanding its reciprocal or corresponding similarity and relations to the one indivisible whole, be yet utterly deficient in self-consciousness. That it is only when this atom, magnetically drawn to its fellow-atoms, which had served in a previous state to form with it some lower complex object, is transformed at last, after endless cycles of evolution, into man – the apex of perfected being, intellectually and physically, on our planet – in conjunction with them it becomes, as a whole, a living soul, and reaches the state of intellectual self-consciousness.
say the Kabalists. And here again, is the wretched necessity of translating by the word "Spirit" an expression which means a celestial, or rather ethereal, transparent man. But if man is the crown of evolution on earth, what is he in the initiatory stages of the next existence, that man who, at his best – even when he is pretended to have served as a habitation for the Christian God, Jesus – is said by Paul to have been "made a little lower than the angels"? But now we have every astral spook transformed into an "angel"! I cannot believe that the scholars who write for your paper – and there are some of great intelligence and erudition who think for themselves, and whom exact science has taught that ex nihilo nihil fit; who know that every atom of man’s body has been evolving by imperceptible gradations, from lower into higher forms, through the cycles – accept the unscientific and illogical doctrine that the simple unshelling of an astral man transforms him into a celestial Spirit and "angel" guide. In Theosophical opinion a Spirit is a Ray, a fraction of the Whole; and the Whole being Omniscient and Infinite, Its fraction must partake, in degree, of the same abstract attributes. Man’s "Spirit" must become the drop of the Ocean, called "Îshvara-Bhâva" – the "I am one body, together with the universe itself" (I am in my Father, and my Father is in me), instead of remaining but the "Jîva-Bhâva," the body only. He must feel himself not only a part of the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer, but of the Soul of the Three, the Parabrahman, Who is above these and is the vitalizing, energizing and ever-presiding Spirit. He must fully realize the sense of the word "Sahajanund," that state of perfect bliss in Nirvâna, which can only exist for the It, which has become coëxistent with the "formless and actionless present time." This is the state called " Vartamâna," or the " ever still present," in which there is neither past nor future, but one infinite eternity of present. Which of the controlling "spirits," materialized or invisible, have shown any signs that they belong to the kind of real Spirits known as the "Sons of Eternity"? Has the highest of them been able to tell even as much as our own Divine Nous can whisper to us in moments when there comes the flash of sudden prevision? Honest communicating "intelligences" often answer to many questions: "We do not know; this has not been revealed to us." This very admission proves that, while in many cases on their way to knowledge and perfection, yet they are but embryonic, undeveloped "Spirits"; they are inferior even to some living Yogis who, through abstract meditation, have united themselves with their personal individual Brahman, their Âtman, and hence have overcome the "Agnyanam," or lack of that knowledge as to the intrinsic value of one’s "self," the Ego or self-being, so recommended by Socrates and the Delphic commandment. London has been often visited by highly intellectual, educated Hindûs. I have not heard of any one professing a belief in "materialized Spirits" – as Spirits. When not tainted with Materialism, through demoralizing association with Europeans. and when free from superstitious sectarianism, how would one of them, versed in the Vedânta, regard these apparitions of the circle? The chances are that, after going the rounds of the mediums, he would say: "Some of these may be survivals of disembodied men’s intelligences, but they are no more spiritual than the average man. They lack the knowledge of ‘Dryananta,’ and evidently find themselves in a chronic state of ‘Mâyâ,’ i.e., possessed of the idea that ‘they are that which they are not.’ The ‘Vartamâna’ has no significance for them, as they are cognizant but of the ‘Vishama’ [that which, like the concrete numbers in mixed mathematics, applies to that which can be numbered. Like simple, ignorant mortals, they regard the shadow of things as the reality, and vice versâ, mixing up the true light of the ‘Vyatireka’ with the false light or deceitful appearance – the ‘Anvaya.’ . . . In what respect, then, are they higher than the average mortal? No; they are not spirits, not ‘Devas,’ . . . they are astral ‘Dasyoos.’" Of course all this will appear to "Scrutator" "unfathomable
absurdities," for unfortunately, few metaphysicians shower down from
Western skies. Therefore, so long as our English opponents will remain in
their semi-Christian ideas, and not only ignore the old Philosophy, but
the very terms it employs to render abstract ideas; so long as we are forced
to transmit these ideas in a general way – particularly as it is impracticable
without the invention of special words – it will be unprofitable to push
discussion to any great lengths. We would only make ourselves obnoxious
to the general reader, and receive from other anonymous writers such unconvincing
compliments as "Scrutator" has favoured us with. |