T
Teacher
Guest
Letter No. 17
[K.H.'s Replies to Mr. Sinnett's queries are printed in bold type. -- ED.]
Received Simla, June, 1882
(1) Some fifth round men have already begun to appear on earth. In what way are they distinguishable from fourth round men of the seventh earthly incarnation? I suppose they are in the first incarnation of the fifth round that that a tremendous advance will be achieved when the fifth round people get to their seventh incarnation.
(1) The natural-born Seers and clairvoyants of Mrs. A. Kingsford's and Mr. Maitland's types; the great adepts of whatsoever country; the geniuses -- whether in arts, politics or religious reform. No great physical distinction yet: too early and will come later on.
Quite so. If you turn to Appendix No. I (1) you will find it explained.
(2) But if a 1st-5th round man devoted himself to occultism and became an adept, would he escape further earthly incarnations?
(2)No; if we except Buddha -- a sixth round being, as he had run so successfully the race in his previous incarnations as to outrun even his predecessors. But then such a man is to be found in a billion of human creatures. He differed from other men as much in his physical appearance as in spirituality and knowledge. Yet even he escaped further reincarnations but on this earth; and, when the last of the sixth round men of the third ring is gone out of this earth, the Great Teacher will have to get reincarnated on the next planet. Only, and since He sacrificed Nirvanic bliss and Rest for the salvation of his fellow creatures He will be re-born in the highest -- the seventh ring of the upper planet. Till then He will overshadow every decimillenium (let us rather say and add "hasovershadowed already" a chosen individual who generally overturned the destinies of nations. See Isis, Vol. I, pp. 34 and 35 last and first para. on the pages).
(3) Is there any essential spiritual difference between a man and a woman, or is sex a mere accident of each birth -- the ultimate future of the individual furnishing the same opportunities?
(3) A mere accident -- as you say. Generally a chance work yet guided by individual Karma, -- moral aptitudes, characteristics and deeds of a previous birth.
(4) The majority of the superior classes of civilized countries on earth now, I understand to be seventh "ring" people (i.e. of the seventh earthly incarnation) of the fourth round. The Australian aborigines I understand to be of a low ring? which? and are the lower and inferior classes of civilized countries of various rings or of the ring just below the seventh. And are all seventh ring people born in the superior classes or may not some be found among the poor?
(4) Not necessarily. Refinement, polishedness, and brilliant education, in your sense of these words have very little to do with the course of higher Nature's Law. Take a seventh ring African or a fifth ring Mongolian and you can educate him -- if taken from the cradle -- save his physical appearance, and transform him into the most brilliant and accomplished English lord. Yet, he will still remain, but an outwardly intellectual parrot. (See Appendix No. 11).
(5) The Old Lady told me that the bulk of the inhabitants of this country are in some respects less advanced than Europeans though more spiritual. Are they on a lower ring of the same round -- or does the difference refer to some principle of national cycles which has nothing to do with individual progress?
(5) Most of the peoples of India belong to the oldest or the earliest branchlet of the fifth human Race. I have desired M. to end his letter to you with a short summary of the last scientific theory of your learned Ethnographers and Naturalists, to save myself work. Read what he writes and then turn to No. III of my Appendix.
What is the explanation of "Ernest" and Eglinton's other guide? Are they elementaries drawing their conscious vitality from him or elementals masquerading? When "Ernest" took that sheet of "Pioneer" notepaper how did he contrive to get it without mediumship at this end?
I can assure you it is not worth your while nowto study the true natures of the "Ernests" and "Joeys" and "other guides" as unless you become acquainted with the evolution of the corruptions of elemental dross, and those of the seven principles in man -- you would ever find yourself at a loss to understand -- what they really are; there are no written statutes for them, and they can hardly be expected to pay their friends and admirers the compliment of truth, silence or forbearing. If some are related to them as some soullessphysical mediums are -- they shall meet. If not -- better leave them alone. They gravitate but to their likes -- the mediums; and their relation is not made but forced by foolish and sinful phenomena-mongers. They are both elementaries and elementals -- at best a low, mischievous, degrading jangle. You want to embrace too much knowledge at once, my dear friend; you cannot attain at a bound all the mysteries. See however Appendix -- which is in reality a letter.
I do not know Subba Rao -- who is a pupil of M. At least -- he knows very little of me. Yet I know, he will neverconsent to come to Simla. But if ordered by Morya will teach from Madras, i.e., correct the MSS. as M. did, comment upon them, answer questions, and be very, very useful. He has a perfect reverence and adoration for -- H.P.B.
K. H.
Letter No. 18
Received Simla, June, 1882.
APPENDIX
(I) Every Spiritual Individuality has a gigantic evolutionary journey to perform a tremendous gyratory progress to accomplish. First -- at the very beginning of the great Mahamanvantaric rotation, from first to last of the man-bearing planets, as on each of them, the monad has to pass through seven successive races of man. From the dumb offshoot of the ape (the latter strongly differentiating from the now known specimens) up to the present fifth race, or rather variety, and through two more races, before he has done with this earth only; and then on to the next, higher and higher still. . . . But we will confine our attention but to this one. Each of the seven races send seven ramifying branchlets from the Parent Branch: and through each of these in turn man has to evolute before he passes on to the next higher race; and that -- seven times. Well may you open wide your eyes, good friend, and feel puzzled -- it is so. The branchlets typify varying specimens of humanity -- physically and spiritually -- and no one of us can miss one single rung of the ladder. With all that there is no reincarnation as taught by the London Seeress -- Mrs. A.K., as the intervals between the re-births are too immeasurably long to permit of any such fantastic ideas. Please, bear in mind, that when I say "man," I mean a human being of our type. There are other and innumerable manvantaric chains of globes bearing intelligent beings -- both in and out of our solar system -- the crowns or apexes of evolutionary being in their respective chains, some -- physically and intellectually -- lower, others immeasurably higher than the man of our chain. But beyond mentioning them we will not speak of these at present.
Through every race then, man has to pass making seven successive entrances and exits and developing intellect to degrees from the lowest to the highest in succession. In short, his earth-cycle with its rings and sub-rings is the exact counterpart of the Great Cycle -- only in miniature. Bear in mind again, that the intervals even between these special "race re-incarnations" are enormous, as even the dullest of the African Bushmen has to reap the reward of his Karma, equally with his brother Bushman who may be six times more intelligent.
Your Ethnographers and anthropologists would do well to ever keep in their minds this, unvarying septenary law which runs throughout the works of nature. From Cuvier -- the late grand master of Protestant Theology -- whose Bible-stuffed brain made him divide mankind into but three distinct varieties of races -- down to Blumenbach who divided them into five -- they were all wrong. Alone Pritchard, who prophetically suggested seven comes near the right mark. I read in the Pioneer of June 12th forwarded to me by H.P.B. a letter on the Ape Theory by A.P.W. which contains a most excellent exposition of the Darwinian hypothesis. The last paragraph page 6 column 1 would be regarded -- barring a few errors -- as a revelation in a millenium or so, were it to be preserved. Reading the nine lines from line 21 (counting from the bottom) you have a fact of which few naturalists are yet prepared to accept the proof. The fifth, sixth and seventh races of the Fifth Round -- each succeeding race evoluting with and keeping pace, so to say with the "Great Cycle" rounds -- and the fifth race of the fifth round, having to exhibit a perceptible physical and intellectual as well as moral differentiation towards its fourth "race" or "earthly incarnation" you are right in saying that a "tremendous advance will be achieved when the fifth round people get to their seventh incarnation."
(II) Nor has wealth nor poverty, high or low birth any influence upon it, for this is all a result of their Karma. Neither has -- what you call -- civilization much to do with the progress. It is the inner man, the spirituality, the illumination of the physical brain by the light of the spiritual or divine intelligence that is the test. The Australian, the Esquimaux, the Bushmen, the Veddahs, etc., are all side-shooting branchlets of that Branch which you call "cave-men" -- the third race (according to your Science -- the second)that evoluted on the globe. They are the remnants of the seventh ring cave-men, remnants "that have ceased to grow and are the arrested forms of life doomed to eventual decay in the struggle of existence" in the words of your correspondent?
See "Isis" Chapter 1, -- " . . . . . the Divine Essence (Purusha) like a luminous arc" proceeds to form a circle -- the mahamanvantaric chain; and having attained the highest (or its first starting point) bends back again and returns to earth (the first globe) bringing a higher type of humanity in its vortex -- "thus seven times. Approaching our earth it grows more and more shadowy until upon touching ground it becomes as black as night --" i.e. it is matter outwardly, the Spirit or Purusha being concealed under a quintuple armour of the first five principles. Now see underlined three lines on page 5 for the word "mankind" read human races, and for that of "civilization" read Spiritual evolution of that particular race and you have the truth which had to be concealed at that incipient tentative stage of the Theosophical Society.
See again pp. 13 last paragraph and 14 first paragraph, and note the underlined lines about Plato. Then see p. 32 remembering the difference between the Manvantaras as therein calculated and the MAHAMANVANTARAS (complete seven round between two Pralayas, -- the four Yugs returning seven times, once for each race. Having done so far take your pen and calculate. This will make you swear -- but this will not hurt your Karma much: lip-profanity finds it deaf. Read attentively in this connection (not with the swearing process but with that of evolution) pp. 301 last line "and now comes a mystery . . ." and continue on to p. 304. "Isis" was not unveiled but rents sufficiently large were made to afford flitting glances to be completed by the student's own intuition. In this curry of quotations from various philosophic and esoteric truths purposely veiled, behold our doctrine, which is now being partially taught to Europeans for the first time.
(III) As said in my answer on your notes, most of the peoples of India -- with the exception of the Semitic (?) Moguls -- belong to the oldest branchlet of the present fifth Human race, which was evoluted in Central Asia more than one million of years ago. Western Science finding good reasons for the theory of human beings having inhabited Europe 400,000 years before your era -- this cannot so shock you as to prevent your drinking wine to-night at your dinner. Yet Asia, has as well as Australia, Africa, America and the most northward regions -- its remnants -- of the fourth -- even of the third race (cave-men and Iberians). At the same time, we have more of the seventh ring men of the fourth race than Europe and more of the first ring of the fifth round, as, older than the European branchlets, our men have naturally come in earlier. Their being "less advanced" in civilization and refinement trouble their spirituality but very little, Karma being an animal which remains indifferent to pumps and white kid gloves. Neither your knives nor forks, operas and drawing-rooms will any more follow you in your onward progress than will the dead-leaf coloured robes of the British Esthetics prevent the proprietors thereof and wearers from having been born among the ranks of those, who will be regarded -- do what they may -- by the forthcoming sixth and seventh round men as flesh-eating and liquor-drinking "savages" of the "Royal Society Period." It depends on you, to so immortalize your name, as to force the future higher races to divide our age and call the sub-division -- the "Pleisto-Sinnettic Period" but this can never be so long as you labour under the impression that "the purposes we have now in view would be met by reasonable temperance and self-restraint." Occult Science is a jealous mistress and allows not a shadow of self-indulgence; and it is "fatal" not only to the ordinary course of married life but even to flesh and wine drinking. I am afraid that the archaeologists of the seventh round, when digging out and unearthing the future Pompeii of Punjab -- Simla, one day, instead of finding the precious relics of the Theosophical "Eclectic," will fish out but some petrified or vitreous remains of the "Sumptuary allowance." Such is the latest prophecy current at Tzigadze.
And now to the last question. Well, as I say, the "guides" are both elementals and elementaries and not even a decent "half and half" but the very froth in the mug of the mediumistic beer. The several "privations" of such sheets of notepaper were evoluted during E's stay in Calcutta in Mrs. G's atmosphere -- since she frequently received letters from you. It was then an easy matter for the creatures in following E's unconscious desire to attract other disintegrated particles from your box, so as to form a double. He is a strong medium, and were it not for an inherent good nature and other good qualities, strongly counteracted by vanity, sloth, selfishness, greediness for money and with other qualities of modern civilization a total absence of will, be would make a superb Dugpa yet, as I said he is "a good fellow" every inch of him; naturally truthful, under control -- the reverse. I would if I could save him from. . . .
NOTE. -- The rest of the original letter is missing. It is in K.H.'s hand writing. -- ED.
Letter No. 19
[Fragments in K.H.'s writing. -- ED.]
Attached to Proofs of Letter on Theosophy. Received August 12th, 1882.
Yes; verily known and as confidently affirmed by the adepts from whom --
"No curtain hides the spheres Elysian,
Nor these poor shells of half transparent dust;
For all that blinds the spirit's vision
Is pride and hate and lust."
(Not for publication)
Exceptional cases, my friend. Suicides can and generally do, but not so with the others. The good and pure sleep a quiet blissful sleep, full of happy visions of earth-life and have no consciousness of being already for ever beyond that life. Those who were neither good nor bad, will sleep a dreamless, still a quiet sleep; while the wicked will in proportion to their grossness suffer the pangs of a nightmare lasting years: their thoughts become living things, their wicked passions -- real substance, and they receive back on their heads all the misery they have heaped upon others. Reality and fact if described would yield a far more terrible Inferno than even Dante had imagined!
Letter No. 20a
[The original letter of A.O.H. to K.H. has some passages numbered and underlined with blue pencil by K.H. These are printed in bold type. The numbers refer to K.H.'s replies, for which see post Letter No. 20c. -- ED.]
Received August, 1882.
10[X]
My dear Master,
In speaking of Fragments No. III of which you will receive proofs soon, I said it was far from satisfactory though I had done my best.
It was necessary to advance the doctrine of the Society another stage, so as gradually to open the eyes of the spiritualists -- so I introduced as the most pressing matter the Suicide etc. view given in your last letter to S.
Well it is this that seems to me most unsatisfactory and it will lead to anumber of questions that I shall feel puzzled to reply to.
Our first doctrine is that the majority of objective phenomena were due to shells. 1½ and 2½ principled shells, i.e. principles entirely separated from their sixth and seventh principles.
But as a further (1) development we admit that there are some spirits, i.e. 5th and 4th principles not wholly dissevered from their sixth and seventh which also may be potent in the seance room. These are the spirits of suicides and the victims of accident or violence. Here the doctrine is that each particular wave of life must run on to its appointed shore and with the exception of the very good, that all spirits prematurely divorced from the lower principles, must remain on earth, until the foredestined hour of what would have been the natural death strikes.
Now this is all very well but this being so, it is clear that in opposition to our former doctrine, shells will be few and spirits many (2).
For what difference can there be to take the case of suicides, whether these be conscious or unconscious, whether the man blows his brains out, or only drinks or womanizes himself to death, or kills himself by over-study? In each case equally the normal natural hour of death is anticipated and a spirit and not a shell the result -- or again what difference does it make whether a man is hung for murder, killed in battle, in a railway train or a powder explosion, or drowned or burnt to death, or knocked over by cholera or plague, or jungle fever or any of the other thousand and one epidemic diseases of which the seeds were not ab initio, in his constitution, but were introduced therein in consequence of his happening to visit a particular locality or undergo a given experience, both of which he might have avoided? Equally in all cases the normal death hour is anticipated and a spirit instead of a shell the result.
In England it is calculated that not 15% of the population reach their normal death period -- and what with fevers and famines and their sequeloe, I fear the percentage is not much larger here even -- where the people are mostly vegetarian and as a rule live under less unfavourable sanitary conditions.
So then the great bulk of all the physical phenomena of spiritualists ought apparently to be due to these spirits and not to shells. I should be glad to have further information on this point.
There is a second point (3) very often as I understand the spirits of very fair average good people dying natural deaths, remain some time in the earth's atmosphere -- from a few days to a few years -- why cannot such as these communicate? And if they can this is a most important point that should not have been overlooked.
(4) And thirdly it is a fact that thousands of spirits do appear in pure circles and teach the highest morality and moreover tell very closely the truths as to the unseen world (witness Alan Kardec's books pages on pages of which are identical with what you yourself teach) and it is unreasonable to suppose that such are either shells or bad spirits. But you have not given us any opening for any large number of pure high spirits -- and until the whole theory is properly set forth and due place made for these which seem to me a thoroughly well established fact, you will never win over the spiritualists. I dare say it is the old story -- only part of the truth being told to us and the rest reserved -- if so it is merely cutting the Society's throat. Better to tell the outside world nothing -- than to tell them half truths the incompleteness of which they detect at once, the result being a contemptuous rejection of what is truth and though they cannot accept it in this fragmentary state.
Yours affectionately,
A. O. Hume.
Letter No. 20b
[Letter from Mr. Sinnett to H.P.B. on the backs of the pages of which is part of a long letter from K.H. (No. 20c) re queries of Hume's. The passages in bold type have been underlined in blue by K.H. -- ED.]
Received August 1882.
Simla, July 25th.
My Dear Old Lady,
I began to try to answer N.D.K.'s letter at once so that if K.H. really meant the note to appear in this immediately "next" appearing Theosophist for August it might just be in time. But I soon got into a tangle. Of course we have received no information that distinctly covers the question now raised, though I suppose we ought to be able to combine bits into an answer. The difficulty turns on giving the real explanation of Eliphas Levi's enigma in your note in the October Theosophist.
If he refers to the fate of this, at present existing race of mankind his statement that the intermediate majority of Egos are ejected from nature or annihilated, would be in direct conflict with K.H.'s teaching. ** They do not die without remembrance, if they retain remembrance in Devachan and again recover remembrance (even of past personalities as of a book's pages) at the period of full individual consciousness preceding that of absolute consciousness in Pari-Nirvana.
But it occurred to me that E.L. may have been dealing with humanity as a whole, not merely with the fourth round men. Great numbers of fifth round personalities are destined to perish I understand, and these might be his intermediate useless portion of mankind. But then the individual spiritual monads, as I understand the matter, do not perish whatever happens, and if a monad reaches the fifth round with all his previous personalities preserved in the pages of his book awaiting future perusal, he would not be ejected and annihilated because some of his fifthround pages were "unfit for publication." So again there is a difficulty in reconciling the two statements.
X. But again is it conceivable that a spiritual monad though surviving the rejection of its third and fourth round pages, cannot survive the rejection of fifth and sixth round pages. That failure to lead good lives in these rounds means the annihilation of the whole individual who will never then get to the seventh round at all.
But on the other hand if that were so the Eliphas Levi case would not be met by such a hypothesis, for long before then the individuals who had become co-workers with nature for evil would have been themselves annihilated by the obscuration of the planet X. between the fifth and sixth rounds -- if not by the obscuration between the fourth and the fifth, for to every round there is one obscuration we are told. (5) There is another difficulty here because some fifth rounders being here already it is not clear when the obscuration comes on. Will it be behind the avant couriers of the fifth round, who will not count as commencing the fifth, that epoch only really beginning after the existing race has totally decayed out -- but this idea will not work.
Having got so far in my reflections yesterday, I went up to Hume to see if he could make out the puzzle and so enable me to write what was wanted for this post. But on looking into it and looking back to the October Theosophist we came to the conclusion that the only possible explanation was that the October Theosophist note was utterly wrong and totally at variance with all our later teaching. Is that really the solution? I do not think so or K.H. would not have set me to reconcile the two.
But you will see that at present, with the best will in the world I am utterly unable to do the job set me, and if my dear Guardian and Master will kindly look at these remarks he will see the dilemma in which I am placed.
And then in the way which will be the least trouble to himself either through you or directly he will perhaps indicate the line which the required explanation ought to take. Manifestly it cannot be done for the August number, but I am inclined to believe he never intended this as the time is now so short.
We all feel so sorry for you, over-worked amid the heat and the flies. When you have got the August number off your hands you might perhaps be able to take flight for here, and get a little rest amongst us. You know how glad at any time we should be to see you. Meanwhile my own individual plans are a little uncertain. I may have to return to Allahabad, in order to leave Hensman free to go as special correspondent to Egypt. I am fighting my proprietors tooth and nail to avert this result -- but for a few days still the issue of the struggle will be uncertain.
Ever Yours,
A. P. S.
P.S. -- As you may want to print the letter in this number, I return it herewith, but hope that this may not be the case and that you will send it me back again so that I may duly perform my little task with the help of a few words as to the line to be followed.
Letter No. 20c
Received August, 1882.
**Except in so far, that he constantly uses the terms "God" and "Christ" which taken in their esoteric sense simply mean "Good" -- in its dual aspect of the abstract and the concrete and nothing more dogmatic, Eliphas Levi is not in any direct conflict with our teachings. It is again a straw blown out of a hay-stack and accused by the wind to belong to a hay-rick. Most of those, whom you may call, if you like, candidates for Deva Chan -- die and are reborn in the Kama-Loka "without remembrance"; though (and just because) they do get some of it back in the Deva-Chan. Nor can we call it a full, but only a partial remembrance. You would hardly call "remembrance" a dream of yours; some particular scene or scenes, within whose narrow limits you would find enclosed a few persons -- those whom you loved best, with an undying love, that holy feeling that alone survives, and -- not the slightest recollection of any other events or scenes? Love and Hatred are the only immortal feelings, the only survivors from the wreck of Ye-damma, or the phenomenal world. Imagine yourself then, in Deva-Chan with those you may have loved with such immortal love; with the familiar, shadowy scenes connected with them for a background and -- a perfect blank for everything else relating to your interior, social, political, literary and social life. And then, in the face of that spiritual, purely cogitative existence, of that unalloyed felicity which, in proportion with the intensity of the feelings that created it, last from a few to several thousand years, -- call it the "personal remembrance of A. P. Sinnett" -- if you can. Dreadfully monotonous! -- you may think. -- Not in the least -- I answer. Have you experienced monotony during -- say -- that moment which you considered then and now so consider it -- as the moment of the highest bliss you have ever felt? -- Of course not. -- Well no more will you experience it there, in that passage through the Eternity in which a million of years is no longer than a second. There, where there is no consciousness of an external world there can be no discernment to mark differences, hence, -- no perception of contrasts of monotony or variety; nothing in short, outside that immortal feeling of love and sympathetic attraction whose seeds are planted in the fifth, whose plants blossom luxuriantly in and around the fourth, but whose roots have to penetrate deep into the sixth principle, if it would survive the lower groups. (And now I propose to kill two birds with one stone -- to answer your and Mr. Hume's questions at the same time) -- remember, both, that we create ourselves our devachan as our avitchi while yet on earth, and mostly during the latter days and even moments of our intellectual, sentient lives. That feeling which is the strongest in us at that supreme hour; when, as in a dream, the events of a long life, to their minutest details, are marshalled in the greatest order in a few seconds in our vision (1) -- that feeling will become the fashioner of our bliss or woe, the life principle of our future existence. In the latter we have no substantial being, but only a present and momentary existence, -- whose duration has no bearing upon, as no effect, or relation to its being -- which as every other effect of a transitory cause will be as fleeting, and in its turn will vanish and cease to be. The real full remembrance of our lives will come but at the end of the minor cycle -- not before. In Kama Loka those who retain their remembrance, will not enjoy it at the supreme hour of recollection. -- Those who know they are dead in their physical body -- can only be either adepts or -- sorcerers; and these two are the exceptions to the general rule. Both having been "co-workers with nature," the former for good, the latter -- for bad, in her work of creation and in that of destruction, they are the only ones who may be called immortal -- in the Kabalistic and the esoteric sense of course. Complete or true immortality, -- which means an unlimited sentient existence, can have no breaks and stoppages, no arrest of Self-consciousness. And even the shells of those good men whose page will not be found missing in the great Book of Lives at the threshold of the Great Nirvana, even they will regain their remembrance and an appearance of Self-consciousness, only after the sixth and seventh principles with the essence of the 5th (the latter having to furnish the material for even that partial recollection of personality which is necessary for the object in Deva Chan) -- have gone to their gestation period, not before. Even in the case of suicides and those who have perished by violent death, even in their case, consciousness requires a certain time to establish its new centre of gravity, and evolve, as Sir W. Hamilton would have it -- its "perception proper" henceforth to remain distinct from "sensation proper." Thus, when man dies, his "Soul" (fifth prin.) becomes unconscious and loses all remembrance of things internal as well as external. Whether his stay in Kama Loka has to last but a few moments, hours, days, weeks, months or years; whether he died a natural or a violent death; whether it occurred in his young or old age, and, whether the Ego was good, bad, or indifferent, -- his consciousness leaves him as suddenly as the flame leaves the wick, when blown out. When life has retired from the last particle in the brain matter, his perceptive faculties become extinct forever, his spiritual powers of cogitation and volition -- (all those faculties in short, which are neither inherent in, nor acquirable by organic matter) -- for the time being. His Mayavi rupa may be often thrown into objectivity, as in the cases of apparitions after death; but, unless it is projected with the knowledge of (whether latent or potential), or, owing to the intensity of the desire to see or appear to someone, shooting through the dying brain, the apparition will be simply -- automatical; it will not be due to any sympathetic attraction, or to any act of volition, and no more than the reflection of a person passing unconsciously near a mirror, is due to the desire of the latter.
Having thus explained the position, I will sum up and ask again why it should be maintained that what is given by Eliphas Levi and expounded by H.P.B., is "in direct conflict" with my teaching? E.L. is an Occultist, and a Kabalist, and writing for those who are supposed to know the rudiments of the Kabalistic tenets, uses the peculiar phraseology of his doctrine, and H.P.B. follows suit. The only omission she was guilty of, was not to add the word "Western" between the two words "Occult" and doctrine (see third line of Editor's note).She is a fanatic in her way, and is unable to write with anything like system and calmness, or to remember that the general public needs all the lucid explanations that to her may seem superfluous. And, as you are sure to remark -- "but this is also our case; and you too seem to forget it," -- I will give you a few more explanations. As remarked on the margin of the October Theosophist -- the word "immortality" has for the initiates and occultists quite a different meaning. We call "immortal" but the one Life in its universal collectivity and entire or Absolute Abstraction; that which has neither beginning nor end, nor any break in its continuity. Does the term apply to anything else? Certainly it does not. Therefore the earliest Chaldeans had several prefixes to the word "immortality," one of which is the Greek, rarely-used term -- panaeonic immortality, i.e. beginning with the manvantara and ending with the pralaya of our Solar Universe. It lasts the aeon, or "period" of our pan or "all nature." Immortal then is he, in the panaeonic immortality whose distinct consciousness and perception of Self under whatever form -- undergoes no disjunction at any time not for one second, during the period of his Egoship. Those periods are several in number, each having its distinct name in the secret doctrines of the Chaldeans, Greeks, Egyptians and Aryans, and, were they but amenable to translation, -- which they are not, at least so long as the idea involved remains inconceivable to the Western mind -- I could give them to you. Suffice for you, for the present to know, that a man, an Ego like yours or mine, may be immortal from one to the other Round. Let us say I begin my immortality at the present fourth Round, i.e., having become a full adept (which unhappily I am not) I arrest the hand of Death at will, and when finally obliged to submit to it, my knowledge of the secrets of nature puts me in a position to retain my consciousness and distinct perception of Self as an object to my own reflective consciousness and cognition; and thus avoiding all such dismemberments of principles, that as a rule take place after the physical death of average humanity, I remain as Koothoomi in my Ego throughout the whole series of births and lives across the seven worlds and Arupa-lokas until finally I land again on this earth among the fifth race men of the full fifth Round beings. I would have been, in such a case -- "immortal" for an inconceivable (to you) long period, embracing many milliards of years. And yet am "I" truly immortal for all that? Unless I make the same efforts as I do now, to secure for myself another such furlough from Nature's Law, Koothoomi will vanish and may become a Mr. Smith or an innocent Babu, when his leave expires. There are men who become such mighty beings, there are men among us who may become immortal during the remainder of the Rounds, and then take their appointed place among the highest Chohans, the Planetary conscious "Ego-Spirits." Of course the Monad "never perishes whatever happens," but Eliphas speaks of the personal not of the Spiritual Egos, and you have fallen into the same mistake (and very naturally too) as C.C.M.; though I must confess the passage in Isis was very clumsily expressed, as I had already remarked to you, about this same paragraph in one of my letters long ago. I had to "exercise my ingenuity" over it -- as the Yankees express it, but, succeeded in mending the hole, I believe, -- as I will have to many times more, I am afraid, before we have done with Isis. It really ought to be re-written for the sake of the family honour.
X It is certainly inconceivable, therefore, there is no mortal use to discuss the subject.
X You misconceived the teaching, because you were not aware of what you are now told: (a) who are the true co-workers with nature; and (b) that it is by no means all the evil co-workers, who drop into the eighth sphere and are annihilated. (2)
The potency for evil is as great in man -- aye -- greater -- than the potentiality for good. An exception to the rule of nature, that exception, which in the case of adepts and sorcerers becomes in its turn a rule, has again its own exceptions. Read carefully the passage that C.C.M. left unquoted -- on pp. 352-353, Isis Volume I, Para. 3. Again she omits to distinctly state that the case mentioned relates but to those powerful sorcerers whose co-partnership with nature for evil affords to them the means of forcing her hand, and thus accord them also panaeonic immortality. But oh, what kind of immortality, and how preferable is annihilation to their lives! Don't you see that everything you find in Isis is delineated, hardly sketched -- nothing completed or fully revealed. Well the time has come, but where are the workers for such a tremendous task?
Says Mr. Hume (see affixed letter (3) marked passages -- 10 [X] and 1, 2, 3). And now when you have read the objections to that most unsatisfactory doctrine -- as Mr. Hume calls it -- a doctrine which you had to learn first as a whole, before proceeding to study it in parts, -- at the risk of satisfying you no better, I will proceed to explain the latter.
(1) Although not "wholly dissevered from their sixth and seventh principles" and quite "potent" in the seance room, nevertheless to the day when they would have died a natural death, they are separated from the higher principles by a gulf. The sixth and seventh remain passive and negative, whereas, in cases of accidental death the higher and the lower groups mutually attract each other. In cases of good and innocent Egos, moreover, the latter gravitates irresistibly toward the sixth and seventh, and thus -- either slumbers surrounded by happy dreams, or, sleeps a dreamless profound sleep until the hour strikes. With a little reflection, and an eye to eternal justice and fitness of things, you will see why. The victim whether good or bad is irresponsible for his death, even if his death were due to some action in a previous life or an antecedent birth; was an act, in short, of the Law of Retribution, still, it was not the direct result of an act deliberately committed by the personal Ego of that life during which he happened to be killed. Had he been allowed to live longer he may have atoned for his antecedent sins still more effectually: and even now, the Ego having been made to pay off the debt of his maker (the previous Ego) is free from the blows of retributive justice. The Dhyan Chohans who have no hand in the guidance of the living human Ego, protect the helpless victim when it is violently thrust out of its element into a new one, before it is matured and made fit and ready for it. We tell you what we know, for we are made to learn it through personal experience. You know what I mean and I CAN SAY NO MORE! Yes; the victims whether good or bad sleep, to awake but at the hour of the last Judgment, which is that hour of the supreme struggle between the sixth and seventh, and the fifth and fourth at the threshold of the gestation state. And even after that, when the sixth and seventh carrying off a portion of the fifth have gone into their Akasic Samadhi, even then it may happen that the spiritual spoil from the fifth will prove too weak to be reborn in Deva-Chan; in which case it will there and then reclothe itself in a new body, the subjective "Being" created from the Karma of the victim (or no-victim, as the case may be) and enter upon a new earth-existence whether upon this or any other planet. In no case then, -- with the exception of suicides and shells, is there any possibility for any other to be attracted to a seance room. And it is clear that "this teaching is not in opposition to our former doctrine" and that while "shells" will be many, -- Spirits very few.
(2) There is a great difference in our humble opinion. We, who look at it from a stand-point which would prove very unacceptable to Life Insurance Companies, say, that there are very few if any of the men who indulge in the above enumerated vices, who feel perfectly sure that such a course of action will lead them eventually to premature death. Such is the penalty of Maya. The "vices" will not escape their punishment; but it is the cause not the effect that will be punished, especially an unforeseen though probable effect. As well call a suicide a man who meets his death in a storm at sea, as one who kills himself with "over-study." Water is liable to drown a man, and too much brain-work to produce a softening of the brain which may carry him away. In such a case no one ought to cross the Kalapani nor even to take a bath for fear of getting faint in it and drowned (for we all know of such cases;) nor should a man do his duty, least of all sacrifice himself for even a laudable and highly-beneficent cause, as many of us -- (H.P.B. for one) -- do. Would Mr. Hume call her a suicide were she to drop down dead over her present work? Motive is everything and man is punished in a case of direct responsibility, never otherwise. In the victim's case the natural hour of death was anticipated accidentally, while in that of the suicide, death is brought on voluntarily and with a full and deliberate knowledge of its immediate consequences. Thus a man who causes his death in a fit of temporary insanity is not a felo de se to the great grief and often trouble of the Life Insurance Companies. Nor is he left a prey to the temptations of the Kama Loka but falls asleep like any other victim. A Guiteau will not remain in the earth's atmosphere with his higher principles over him -- inactive and paralysed, still there. Guiteau is gone into a state during the period of which, he will be ever firing at his President, thereby tossing into confusion and shuffling the destinies of millions of persons; where he will be ever tried and ever hung. Bathing in the reflections of his deeds and thoughts -- especially those he indulged in on the scaffold, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [Two lines in original have been deleted here. -- ED.] his fate. As for those who were "knoched over by cholera, or plague, or jungle fever" they could not have succumbed had they not the germs for the development of such diseases in them from birth.
"So then, the great bulk of the physical phenomena of Spiritualists" my dear brother, are not "due to these Spirits" but indeed -- to "shells."
(3) "The Spirits of very fair average good people dying natural deaths remain . . . in the earth's atmosphere from a few days to a few years," the period depending on their readiness to meet their -- creature not their creator; a very abstruse subject you will learn later on, when you too are more prepared. But why should they "communicate"? Do those you love communicate with you during their sleep objectively? Your Spirits, in hours of danger, or intense sympathy, vibrating on the same current of thought -- which in such cases, creates a kind of telegraphic spiritual wires between your two bodies -- may meet and mutually impress your memories; but then you are living, not dead bodies. But how can an unconscious 5th principle (see supra) impress or communicate with a living organism, unless it has already become a shell? If, for certain reasons they remain in such a state of lethargy for several years, the spirits of the living may ascend to them, as you were already told; and this may take place still easier than in Deva Chan, where the Spirit is too much engrossed in his personal bliss to pay much attention to an intruding element. I say -- they cannot.
(4) I am sorry to contradict your statement. I know of no "thousands of spirits" who do appear in circles -- and moreover positively do not know of one "perfectly pure circle" -- and "teach the highest morality." I hope I may not be classed with slanderers in addition to other names lately bestowed upon me, but truth compels me to declare that Allan Kardec was not quite immaculate during his lifetime, nor has become a very pure Spirit since. As to teaching the "highest morality," we have a Dugpa-Shammar not far from where I am residing. Quite a remarkable man. Not very powerful as a sorcerer but excessively so, as a drunkard, a thief, a liar, and -- an orator. In this latter role he could give points to and beat Messrs. Gladstone, Bradlaugh, and even the Rev. H. W. Beacher -- than whom, there is no more eloquent preacher of morality, and no greater breaker of his Lord's Commandments in the U.S.A. This Shapa-tung Lama, when thirsty, can make an enormous audience of "yellow-cap" laymen weep all their yearly supply of tears, with the narrative of his repentance and suffering in the morning, and then get drunk in the evening and rob the whole village by mesmerising them into a dead sleep. Preaching and teaching morality with an end in view proves very little. Read "J.P.T.'s" article in Light and what I say will be corroborated.
(To A.P.S. (5).) The "obscuration" comes on only when the last man of whatever Round has passed into the sphere of effects. Nature is too well, too mathematically adjusted to cause mistakes to happen in the exercise of her functions. The obscuration of the planet on which are now evoluting the races of the fifth Round men -- will, of course "be behind the few avant couriers" who are now here. But before that time comes we will have to part, to meet no more, as the Editor of the Pioneer and his humble correspondent.
And now having shewn that the October Number of the Theosophist was not utterly wrong, nor was it at "variance with the later teaching," may K.H. set you to "reconcile the two"?
To reconcile you still more with Eliphas, I will send you a number of his MSS. -- that have never been published, in a large, clear, beautiful handwriting with my comments all through. Nothing better than that can give you a key to Kabalistic puzzles.
I have to write to Mr. Hume this week; to give him consolation, and to show, that unless he has a strong desire to live, he need not trouble himself about Deva-Chan. Unless a man loves well or hates as well, he will be neither in Deva-Chan nor in Avitchi. "Nature spews the luke-warm out of her mouth" means only that she annihilates their personal Egos (not the shells, nor yet the sixth principle) in the Kama Loka and the Deva-Chan. This does not prevent them from being immediately reborn -- and, if their lives were not very very bad, -- there is no reason why the eternal Monad should not find the page of that life intact in the Book of Life.
K. H.
[K.H.'s Replies to Mr. Sinnett's queries are printed in bold type. -- ED.]
Received Simla, June, 1882
(1) Some fifth round men have already begun to appear on earth. In what way are they distinguishable from fourth round men of the seventh earthly incarnation? I suppose they are in the first incarnation of the fifth round that that a tremendous advance will be achieved when the fifth round people get to their seventh incarnation.
(1) The natural-born Seers and clairvoyants of Mrs. A. Kingsford's and Mr. Maitland's types; the great adepts of whatsoever country; the geniuses -- whether in arts, politics or religious reform. No great physical distinction yet: too early and will come later on.
Quite so. If you turn to Appendix No. I (1) you will find it explained.
(2) But if a 1st-5th round man devoted himself to occultism and became an adept, would he escape further earthly incarnations?
(2)No; if we except Buddha -- a sixth round being, as he had run so successfully the race in his previous incarnations as to outrun even his predecessors. But then such a man is to be found in a billion of human creatures. He differed from other men as much in his physical appearance as in spirituality and knowledge. Yet even he escaped further reincarnations but on this earth; and, when the last of the sixth round men of the third ring is gone out of this earth, the Great Teacher will have to get reincarnated on the next planet. Only, and since He sacrificed Nirvanic bliss and Rest for the salvation of his fellow creatures He will be re-born in the highest -- the seventh ring of the upper planet. Till then He will overshadow every decimillenium (let us rather say and add "hasovershadowed already" a chosen individual who generally overturned the destinies of nations. See Isis, Vol. I, pp. 34 and 35 last and first para. on the pages).
(3) Is there any essential spiritual difference between a man and a woman, or is sex a mere accident of each birth -- the ultimate future of the individual furnishing the same opportunities?
(3) A mere accident -- as you say. Generally a chance work yet guided by individual Karma, -- moral aptitudes, characteristics and deeds of a previous birth.
(4) The majority of the superior classes of civilized countries on earth now, I understand to be seventh "ring" people (i.e. of the seventh earthly incarnation) of the fourth round. The Australian aborigines I understand to be of a low ring? which? and are the lower and inferior classes of civilized countries of various rings or of the ring just below the seventh. And are all seventh ring people born in the superior classes or may not some be found among the poor?
(4) Not necessarily. Refinement, polishedness, and brilliant education, in your sense of these words have very little to do with the course of higher Nature's Law. Take a seventh ring African or a fifth ring Mongolian and you can educate him -- if taken from the cradle -- save his physical appearance, and transform him into the most brilliant and accomplished English lord. Yet, he will still remain, but an outwardly intellectual parrot. (See Appendix No. 11).
(5) The Old Lady told me that the bulk of the inhabitants of this country are in some respects less advanced than Europeans though more spiritual. Are they on a lower ring of the same round -- or does the difference refer to some principle of national cycles which has nothing to do with individual progress?
(5) Most of the peoples of India belong to the oldest or the earliest branchlet of the fifth human Race. I have desired M. to end his letter to you with a short summary of the last scientific theory of your learned Ethnographers and Naturalists, to save myself work. Read what he writes and then turn to No. III of my Appendix.
What is the explanation of "Ernest" and Eglinton's other guide? Are they elementaries drawing their conscious vitality from him or elementals masquerading? When "Ernest" took that sheet of "Pioneer" notepaper how did he contrive to get it without mediumship at this end?
I can assure you it is not worth your while nowto study the true natures of the "Ernests" and "Joeys" and "other guides" as unless you become acquainted with the evolution of the corruptions of elemental dross, and those of the seven principles in man -- you would ever find yourself at a loss to understand -- what they really are; there are no written statutes for them, and they can hardly be expected to pay their friends and admirers the compliment of truth, silence or forbearing. If some are related to them as some soullessphysical mediums are -- they shall meet. If not -- better leave them alone. They gravitate but to their likes -- the mediums; and their relation is not made but forced by foolish and sinful phenomena-mongers. They are both elementaries and elementals -- at best a low, mischievous, degrading jangle. You want to embrace too much knowledge at once, my dear friend; you cannot attain at a bound all the mysteries. See however Appendix -- which is in reality a letter.
I do not know Subba Rao -- who is a pupil of M. At least -- he knows very little of me. Yet I know, he will neverconsent to come to Simla. But if ordered by Morya will teach from Madras, i.e., correct the MSS. as M. did, comment upon them, answer questions, and be very, very useful. He has a perfect reverence and adoration for -- H.P.B.
K. H.
Letter No. 18
Received Simla, June, 1882.
APPENDIX
(I) Every Spiritual Individuality has a gigantic evolutionary journey to perform a tremendous gyratory progress to accomplish. First -- at the very beginning of the great Mahamanvantaric rotation, from first to last of the man-bearing planets, as on each of them, the monad has to pass through seven successive races of man. From the dumb offshoot of the ape (the latter strongly differentiating from the now known specimens) up to the present fifth race, or rather variety, and through two more races, before he has done with this earth only; and then on to the next, higher and higher still. . . . But we will confine our attention but to this one. Each of the seven races send seven ramifying branchlets from the Parent Branch: and through each of these in turn man has to evolute before he passes on to the next higher race; and that -- seven times. Well may you open wide your eyes, good friend, and feel puzzled -- it is so. The branchlets typify varying specimens of humanity -- physically and spiritually -- and no one of us can miss one single rung of the ladder. With all that there is no reincarnation as taught by the London Seeress -- Mrs. A.K., as the intervals between the re-births are too immeasurably long to permit of any such fantastic ideas. Please, bear in mind, that when I say "man," I mean a human being of our type. There are other and innumerable manvantaric chains of globes bearing intelligent beings -- both in and out of our solar system -- the crowns or apexes of evolutionary being in their respective chains, some -- physically and intellectually -- lower, others immeasurably higher than the man of our chain. But beyond mentioning them we will not speak of these at present.
Through every race then, man has to pass making seven successive entrances and exits and developing intellect to degrees from the lowest to the highest in succession. In short, his earth-cycle with its rings and sub-rings is the exact counterpart of the Great Cycle -- only in miniature. Bear in mind again, that the intervals even between these special "race re-incarnations" are enormous, as even the dullest of the African Bushmen has to reap the reward of his Karma, equally with his brother Bushman who may be six times more intelligent.
Your Ethnographers and anthropologists would do well to ever keep in their minds this, unvarying septenary law which runs throughout the works of nature. From Cuvier -- the late grand master of Protestant Theology -- whose Bible-stuffed brain made him divide mankind into but three distinct varieties of races -- down to Blumenbach who divided them into five -- they were all wrong. Alone Pritchard, who prophetically suggested seven comes near the right mark. I read in the Pioneer of June 12th forwarded to me by H.P.B. a letter on the Ape Theory by A.P.W. which contains a most excellent exposition of the Darwinian hypothesis. The last paragraph page 6 column 1 would be regarded -- barring a few errors -- as a revelation in a millenium or so, were it to be preserved. Reading the nine lines from line 21 (counting from the bottom) you have a fact of which few naturalists are yet prepared to accept the proof. The fifth, sixth and seventh races of the Fifth Round -- each succeeding race evoluting with and keeping pace, so to say with the "Great Cycle" rounds -- and the fifth race of the fifth round, having to exhibit a perceptible physical and intellectual as well as moral differentiation towards its fourth "race" or "earthly incarnation" you are right in saying that a "tremendous advance will be achieved when the fifth round people get to their seventh incarnation."
(II) Nor has wealth nor poverty, high or low birth any influence upon it, for this is all a result of their Karma. Neither has -- what you call -- civilization much to do with the progress. It is the inner man, the spirituality, the illumination of the physical brain by the light of the spiritual or divine intelligence that is the test. The Australian, the Esquimaux, the Bushmen, the Veddahs, etc., are all side-shooting branchlets of that Branch which you call "cave-men" -- the third race (according to your Science -- the second)that evoluted on the globe. They are the remnants of the seventh ring cave-men, remnants "that have ceased to grow and are the arrested forms of life doomed to eventual decay in the struggle of existence" in the words of your correspondent?
See "Isis" Chapter 1, -- " . . . . . the Divine Essence (Purusha) like a luminous arc" proceeds to form a circle -- the mahamanvantaric chain; and having attained the highest (or its first starting point) bends back again and returns to earth (the first globe) bringing a higher type of humanity in its vortex -- "thus seven times. Approaching our earth it grows more and more shadowy until upon touching ground it becomes as black as night --" i.e. it is matter outwardly, the Spirit or Purusha being concealed under a quintuple armour of the first five principles. Now see underlined three lines on page 5 for the word "mankind" read human races, and for that of "civilization" read Spiritual evolution of that particular race and you have the truth which had to be concealed at that incipient tentative stage of the Theosophical Society.
See again pp. 13 last paragraph and 14 first paragraph, and note the underlined lines about Plato. Then see p. 32 remembering the difference between the Manvantaras as therein calculated and the MAHAMANVANTARAS (complete seven round between two Pralayas, -- the four Yugs returning seven times, once for each race. Having done so far take your pen and calculate. This will make you swear -- but this will not hurt your Karma much: lip-profanity finds it deaf. Read attentively in this connection (not with the swearing process but with that of evolution) pp. 301 last line "and now comes a mystery . . ." and continue on to p. 304. "Isis" was not unveiled but rents sufficiently large were made to afford flitting glances to be completed by the student's own intuition. In this curry of quotations from various philosophic and esoteric truths purposely veiled, behold our doctrine, which is now being partially taught to Europeans for the first time.
(III) As said in my answer on your notes, most of the peoples of India -- with the exception of the Semitic (?) Moguls -- belong to the oldest branchlet of the present fifth Human race, which was evoluted in Central Asia more than one million of years ago. Western Science finding good reasons for the theory of human beings having inhabited Europe 400,000 years before your era -- this cannot so shock you as to prevent your drinking wine to-night at your dinner. Yet Asia, has as well as Australia, Africa, America and the most northward regions -- its remnants -- of the fourth -- even of the third race (cave-men and Iberians). At the same time, we have more of the seventh ring men of the fourth race than Europe and more of the first ring of the fifth round, as, older than the European branchlets, our men have naturally come in earlier. Their being "less advanced" in civilization and refinement trouble their spirituality but very little, Karma being an animal which remains indifferent to pumps and white kid gloves. Neither your knives nor forks, operas and drawing-rooms will any more follow you in your onward progress than will the dead-leaf coloured robes of the British Esthetics prevent the proprietors thereof and wearers from having been born among the ranks of those, who will be regarded -- do what they may -- by the forthcoming sixth and seventh round men as flesh-eating and liquor-drinking "savages" of the "Royal Society Period." It depends on you, to so immortalize your name, as to force the future higher races to divide our age and call the sub-division -- the "Pleisto-Sinnettic Period" but this can never be so long as you labour under the impression that "the purposes we have now in view would be met by reasonable temperance and self-restraint." Occult Science is a jealous mistress and allows not a shadow of self-indulgence; and it is "fatal" not only to the ordinary course of married life but even to flesh and wine drinking. I am afraid that the archaeologists of the seventh round, when digging out and unearthing the future Pompeii of Punjab -- Simla, one day, instead of finding the precious relics of the Theosophical "Eclectic," will fish out but some petrified or vitreous remains of the "Sumptuary allowance." Such is the latest prophecy current at Tzigadze.
And now to the last question. Well, as I say, the "guides" are both elementals and elementaries and not even a decent "half and half" but the very froth in the mug of the mediumistic beer. The several "privations" of such sheets of notepaper were evoluted during E's stay in Calcutta in Mrs. G's atmosphere -- since she frequently received letters from you. It was then an easy matter for the creatures in following E's unconscious desire to attract other disintegrated particles from your box, so as to form a double. He is a strong medium, and were it not for an inherent good nature and other good qualities, strongly counteracted by vanity, sloth, selfishness, greediness for money and with other qualities of modern civilization a total absence of will, be would make a superb Dugpa yet, as I said he is "a good fellow" every inch of him; naturally truthful, under control -- the reverse. I would if I could save him from. . . .
NOTE. -- The rest of the original letter is missing. It is in K.H.'s hand writing. -- ED.
Letter No. 19
[Fragments in K.H.'s writing. -- ED.]
Attached to Proofs of Letter on Theosophy. Received August 12th, 1882.
Yes; verily known and as confidently affirmed by the adepts from whom --
"No curtain hides the spheres Elysian,
Nor these poor shells of half transparent dust;
For all that blinds the spirit's vision
Is pride and hate and lust."
(Not for publication)
Exceptional cases, my friend. Suicides can and generally do, but not so with the others. The good and pure sleep a quiet blissful sleep, full of happy visions of earth-life and have no consciousness of being already for ever beyond that life. Those who were neither good nor bad, will sleep a dreamless, still a quiet sleep; while the wicked will in proportion to their grossness suffer the pangs of a nightmare lasting years: their thoughts become living things, their wicked passions -- real substance, and they receive back on their heads all the misery they have heaped upon others. Reality and fact if described would yield a far more terrible Inferno than even Dante had imagined!
Letter No. 20a
[The original letter of A.O.H. to K.H. has some passages numbered and underlined with blue pencil by K.H. These are printed in bold type. The numbers refer to K.H.'s replies, for which see post Letter No. 20c. -- ED.]
Received August, 1882.
10[X]
My dear Master,
In speaking of Fragments No. III of which you will receive proofs soon, I said it was far from satisfactory though I had done my best.
It was necessary to advance the doctrine of the Society another stage, so as gradually to open the eyes of the spiritualists -- so I introduced as the most pressing matter the Suicide etc. view given in your last letter to S.
Well it is this that seems to me most unsatisfactory and it will lead to anumber of questions that I shall feel puzzled to reply to.
Our first doctrine is that the majority of objective phenomena were due to shells. 1½ and 2½ principled shells, i.e. principles entirely separated from their sixth and seventh principles.
But as a further (1) development we admit that there are some spirits, i.e. 5th and 4th principles not wholly dissevered from their sixth and seventh which also may be potent in the seance room. These are the spirits of suicides and the victims of accident or violence. Here the doctrine is that each particular wave of life must run on to its appointed shore and with the exception of the very good, that all spirits prematurely divorced from the lower principles, must remain on earth, until the foredestined hour of what would have been the natural death strikes.
Now this is all very well but this being so, it is clear that in opposition to our former doctrine, shells will be few and spirits many (2).
For what difference can there be to take the case of suicides, whether these be conscious or unconscious, whether the man blows his brains out, or only drinks or womanizes himself to death, or kills himself by over-study? In each case equally the normal natural hour of death is anticipated and a spirit and not a shell the result -- or again what difference does it make whether a man is hung for murder, killed in battle, in a railway train or a powder explosion, or drowned or burnt to death, or knocked over by cholera or plague, or jungle fever or any of the other thousand and one epidemic diseases of which the seeds were not ab initio, in his constitution, but were introduced therein in consequence of his happening to visit a particular locality or undergo a given experience, both of which he might have avoided? Equally in all cases the normal death hour is anticipated and a spirit instead of a shell the result.
In England it is calculated that not 15% of the population reach their normal death period -- and what with fevers and famines and their sequeloe, I fear the percentage is not much larger here even -- where the people are mostly vegetarian and as a rule live under less unfavourable sanitary conditions.
So then the great bulk of all the physical phenomena of spiritualists ought apparently to be due to these spirits and not to shells. I should be glad to have further information on this point.
There is a second point (3) very often as I understand the spirits of very fair average good people dying natural deaths, remain some time in the earth's atmosphere -- from a few days to a few years -- why cannot such as these communicate? And if they can this is a most important point that should not have been overlooked.
(4) And thirdly it is a fact that thousands of spirits do appear in pure circles and teach the highest morality and moreover tell very closely the truths as to the unseen world (witness Alan Kardec's books pages on pages of which are identical with what you yourself teach) and it is unreasonable to suppose that such are either shells or bad spirits. But you have not given us any opening for any large number of pure high spirits -- and until the whole theory is properly set forth and due place made for these which seem to me a thoroughly well established fact, you will never win over the spiritualists. I dare say it is the old story -- only part of the truth being told to us and the rest reserved -- if so it is merely cutting the Society's throat. Better to tell the outside world nothing -- than to tell them half truths the incompleteness of which they detect at once, the result being a contemptuous rejection of what is truth and though they cannot accept it in this fragmentary state.
Yours affectionately,
A. O. Hume.
Letter No. 20b
[Letter from Mr. Sinnett to H.P.B. on the backs of the pages of which is part of a long letter from K.H. (No. 20c) re queries of Hume's. The passages in bold type have been underlined in blue by K.H. -- ED.]
Received August 1882.
Simla, July 25th.
My Dear Old Lady,
I began to try to answer N.D.K.'s letter at once so that if K.H. really meant the note to appear in this immediately "next" appearing Theosophist for August it might just be in time. But I soon got into a tangle. Of course we have received no information that distinctly covers the question now raised, though I suppose we ought to be able to combine bits into an answer. The difficulty turns on giving the real explanation of Eliphas Levi's enigma in your note in the October Theosophist.
If he refers to the fate of this, at present existing race of mankind his statement that the intermediate majority of Egos are ejected from nature or annihilated, would be in direct conflict with K.H.'s teaching. ** They do not die without remembrance, if they retain remembrance in Devachan and again recover remembrance (even of past personalities as of a book's pages) at the period of full individual consciousness preceding that of absolute consciousness in Pari-Nirvana.
But it occurred to me that E.L. may have been dealing with humanity as a whole, not merely with the fourth round men. Great numbers of fifth round personalities are destined to perish I understand, and these might be his intermediate useless portion of mankind. But then the individual spiritual monads, as I understand the matter, do not perish whatever happens, and if a monad reaches the fifth round with all his previous personalities preserved in the pages of his book awaiting future perusal, he would not be ejected and annihilated because some of his fifthround pages were "unfit for publication." So again there is a difficulty in reconciling the two statements.
X. But again is it conceivable that a spiritual monad though surviving the rejection of its third and fourth round pages, cannot survive the rejection of fifth and sixth round pages. That failure to lead good lives in these rounds means the annihilation of the whole individual who will never then get to the seventh round at all.
But on the other hand if that were so the Eliphas Levi case would not be met by such a hypothesis, for long before then the individuals who had become co-workers with nature for evil would have been themselves annihilated by the obscuration of the planet X. between the fifth and sixth rounds -- if not by the obscuration between the fourth and the fifth, for to every round there is one obscuration we are told. (5) There is another difficulty here because some fifth rounders being here already it is not clear when the obscuration comes on. Will it be behind the avant couriers of the fifth round, who will not count as commencing the fifth, that epoch only really beginning after the existing race has totally decayed out -- but this idea will not work.
Having got so far in my reflections yesterday, I went up to Hume to see if he could make out the puzzle and so enable me to write what was wanted for this post. But on looking into it and looking back to the October Theosophist we came to the conclusion that the only possible explanation was that the October Theosophist note was utterly wrong and totally at variance with all our later teaching. Is that really the solution? I do not think so or K.H. would not have set me to reconcile the two.
But you will see that at present, with the best will in the world I am utterly unable to do the job set me, and if my dear Guardian and Master will kindly look at these remarks he will see the dilemma in which I am placed.
And then in the way which will be the least trouble to himself either through you or directly he will perhaps indicate the line which the required explanation ought to take. Manifestly it cannot be done for the August number, but I am inclined to believe he never intended this as the time is now so short.
We all feel so sorry for you, over-worked amid the heat and the flies. When you have got the August number off your hands you might perhaps be able to take flight for here, and get a little rest amongst us. You know how glad at any time we should be to see you. Meanwhile my own individual plans are a little uncertain. I may have to return to Allahabad, in order to leave Hensman free to go as special correspondent to Egypt. I am fighting my proprietors tooth and nail to avert this result -- but for a few days still the issue of the struggle will be uncertain.
Ever Yours,
A. P. S.
P.S. -- As you may want to print the letter in this number, I return it herewith, but hope that this may not be the case and that you will send it me back again so that I may duly perform my little task with the help of a few words as to the line to be followed.
Letter No. 20c
Received August, 1882.
**Except in so far, that he constantly uses the terms "God" and "Christ" which taken in their esoteric sense simply mean "Good" -- in its dual aspect of the abstract and the concrete and nothing more dogmatic, Eliphas Levi is not in any direct conflict with our teachings. It is again a straw blown out of a hay-stack and accused by the wind to belong to a hay-rick. Most of those, whom you may call, if you like, candidates for Deva Chan -- die and are reborn in the Kama-Loka "without remembrance"; though (and just because) they do get some of it back in the Deva-Chan. Nor can we call it a full, but only a partial remembrance. You would hardly call "remembrance" a dream of yours; some particular scene or scenes, within whose narrow limits you would find enclosed a few persons -- those whom you loved best, with an undying love, that holy feeling that alone survives, and -- not the slightest recollection of any other events or scenes? Love and Hatred are the only immortal feelings, the only survivors from the wreck of Ye-damma, or the phenomenal world. Imagine yourself then, in Deva-Chan with those you may have loved with such immortal love; with the familiar, shadowy scenes connected with them for a background and -- a perfect blank for everything else relating to your interior, social, political, literary and social life. And then, in the face of that spiritual, purely cogitative existence, of that unalloyed felicity which, in proportion with the intensity of the feelings that created it, last from a few to several thousand years, -- call it the "personal remembrance of A. P. Sinnett" -- if you can. Dreadfully monotonous! -- you may think. -- Not in the least -- I answer. Have you experienced monotony during -- say -- that moment which you considered then and now so consider it -- as the moment of the highest bliss you have ever felt? -- Of course not. -- Well no more will you experience it there, in that passage through the Eternity in which a million of years is no longer than a second. There, where there is no consciousness of an external world there can be no discernment to mark differences, hence, -- no perception of contrasts of monotony or variety; nothing in short, outside that immortal feeling of love and sympathetic attraction whose seeds are planted in the fifth, whose plants blossom luxuriantly in and around the fourth, but whose roots have to penetrate deep into the sixth principle, if it would survive the lower groups. (And now I propose to kill two birds with one stone -- to answer your and Mr. Hume's questions at the same time) -- remember, both, that we create ourselves our devachan as our avitchi while yet on earth, and mostly during the latter days and even moments of our intellectual, sentient lives. That feeling which is the strongest in us at that supreme hour; when, as in a dream, the events of a long life, to their minutest details, are marshalled in the greatest order in a few seconds in our vision (1) -- that feeling will become the fashioner of our bliss or woe, the life principle of our future existence. In the latter we have no substantial being, but only a present and momentary existence, -- whose duration has no bearing upon, as no effect, or relation to its being -- which as every other effect of a transitory cause will be as fleeting, and in its turn will vanish and cease to be. The real full remembrance of our lives will come but at the end of the minor cycle -- not before. In Kama Loka those who retain their remembrance, will not enjoy it at the supreme hour of recollection. -- Those who know they are dead in their physical body -- can only be either adepts or -- sorcerers; and these two are the exceptions to the general rule. Both having been "co-workers with nature," the former for good, the latter -- for bad, in her work of creation and in that of destruction, they are the only ones who may be called immortal -- in the Kabalistic and the esoteric sense of course. Complete or true immortality, -- which means an unlimited sentient existence, can have no breaks and stoppages, no arrest of Self-consciousness. And even the shells of those good men whose page will not be found missing in the great Book of Lives at the threshold of the Great Nirvana, even they will regain their remembrance and an appearance of Self-consciousness, only after the sixth and seventh principles with the essence of the 5th (the latter having to furnish the material for even that partial recollection of personality which is necessary for the object in Deva Chan) -- have gone to their gestation period, not before. Even in the case of suicides and those who have perished by violent death, even in their case, consciousness requires a certain time to establish its new centre of gravity, and evolve, as Sir W. Hamilton would have it -- its "perception proper" henceforth to remain distinct from "sensation proper." Thus, when man dies, his "Soul" (fifth prin.) becomes unconscious and loses all remembrance of things internal as well as external. Whether his stay in Kama Loka has to last but a few moments, hours, days, weeks, months or years; whether he died a natural or a violent death; whether it occurred in his young or old age, and, whether the Ego was good, bad, or indifferent, -- his consciousness leaves him as suddenly as the flame leaves the wick, when blown out. When life has retired from the last particle in the brain matter, his perceptive faculties become extinct forever, his spiritual powers of cogitation and volition -- (all those faculties in short, which are neither inherent in, nor acquirable by organic matter) -- for the time being. His Mayavi rupa may be often thrown into objectivity, as in the cases of apparitions after death; but, unless it is projected with the knowledge of (whether latent or potential), or, owing to the intensity of the desire to see or appear to someone, shooting through the dying brain, the apparition will be simply -- automatical; it will not be due to any sympathetic attraction, or to any act of volition, and no more than the reflection of a person passing unconsciously near a mirror, is due to the desire of the latter.
Having thus explained the position, I will sum up and ask again why it should be maintained that what is given by Eliphas Levi and expounded by H.P.B., is "in direct conflict" with my teaching? E.L. is an Occultist, and a Kabalist, and writing for those who are supposed to know the rudiments of the Kabalistic tenets, uses the peculiar phraseology of his doctrine, and H.P.B. follows suit. The only omission she was guilty of, was not to add the word "Western" between the two words "Occult" and doctrine (see third line of Editor's note).She is a fanatic in her way, and is unable to write with anything like system and calmness, or to remember that the general public needs all the lucid explanations that to her may seem superfluous. And, as you are sure to remark -- "but this is also our case; and you too seem to forget it," -- I will give you a few more explanations. As remarked on the margin of the October Theosophist -- the word "immortality" has for the initiates and occultists quite a different meaning. We call "immortal" but the one Life in its universal collectivity and entire or Absolute Abstraction; that which has neither beginning nor end, nor any break in its continuity. Does the term apply to anything else? Certainly it does not. Therefore the earliest Chaldeans had several prefixes to the word "immortality," one of which is the Greek, rarely-used term -- panaeonic immortality, i.e. beginning with the manvantara and ending with the pralaya of our Solar Universe. It lasts the aeon, or "period" of our pan or "all nature." Immortal then is he, in the panaeonic immortality whose distinct consciousness and perception of Self under whatever form -- undergoes no disjunction at any time not for one second, during the period of his Egoship. Those periods are several in number, each having its distinct name in the secret doctrines of the Chaldeans, Greeks, Egyptians and Aryans, and, were they but amenable to translation, -- which they are not, at least so long as the idea involved remains inconceivable to the Western mind -- I could give them to you. Suffice for you, for the present to know, that a man, an Ego like yours or mine, may be immortal from one to the other Round. Let us say I begin my immortality at the present fourth Round, i.e., having become a full adept (which unhappily I am not) I arrest the hand of Death at will, and when finally obliged to submit to it, my knowledge of the secrets of nature puts me in a position to retain my consciousness and distinct perception of Self as an object to my own reflective consciousness and cognition; and thus avoiding all such dismemberments of principles, that as a rule take place after the physical death of average humanity, I remain as Koothoomi in my Ego throughout the whole series of births and lives across the seven worlds and Arupa-lokas until finally I land again on this earth among the fifth race men of the full fifth Round beings. I would have been, in such a case -- "immortal" for an inconceivable (to you) long period, embracing many milliards of years. And yet am "I" truly immortal for all that? Unless I make the same efforts as I do now, to secure for myself another such furlough from Nature's Law, Koothoomi will vanish and may become a Mr. Smith or an innocent Babu, when his leave expires. There are men who become such mighty beings, there are men among us who may become immortal during the remainder of the Rounds, and then take their appointed place among the highest Chohans, the Planetary conscious "Ego-Spirits." Of course the Monad "never perishes whatever happens," but Eliphas speaks of the personal not of the Spiritual Egos, and you have fallen into the same mistake (and very naturally too) as C.C.M.; though I must confess the passage in Isis was very clumsily expressed, as I had already remarked to you, about this same paragraph in one of my letters long ago. I had to "exercise my ingenuity" over it -- as the Yankees express it, but, succeeded in mending the hole, I believe, -- as I will have to many times more, I am afraid, before we have done with Isis. It really ought to be re-written for the sake of the family honour.
X It is certainly inconceivable, therefore, there is no mortal use to discuss the subject.
X You misconceived the teaching, because you were not aware of what you are now told: (a) who are the true co-workers with nature; and (b) that it is by no means all the evil co-workers, who drop into the eighth sphere and are annihilated. (2)
The potency for evil is as great in man -- aye -- greater -- than the potentiality for good. An exception to the rule of nature, that exception, which in the case of adepts and sorcerers becomes in its turn a rule, has again its own exceptions. Read carefully the passage that C.C.M. left unquoted -- on pp. 352-353, Isis Volume I, Para. 3. Again she omits to distinctly state that the case mentioned relates but to those powerful sorcerers whose co-partnership with nature for evil affords to them the means of forcing her hand, and thus accord them also panaeonic immortality. But oh, what kind of immortality, and how preferable is annihilation to their lives! Don't you see that everything you find in Isis is delineated, hardly sketched -- nothing completed or fully revealed. Well the time has come, but where are the workers for such a tremendous task?
Says Mr. Hume (see affixed letter (3) marked passages -- 10 [X] and 1, 2, 3). And now when you have read the objections to that most unsatisfactory doctrine -- as Mr. Hume calls it -- a doctrine which you had to learn first as a whole, before proceeding to study it in parts, -- at the risk of satisfying you no better, I will proceed to explain the latter.
(1) Although not "wholly dissevered from their sixth and seventh principles" and quite "potent" in the seance room, nevertheless to the day when they would have died a natural death, they are separated from the higher principles by a gulf. The sixth and seventh remain passive and negative, whereas, in cases of accidental death the higher and the lower groups mutually attract each other. In cases of good and innocent Egos, moreover, the latter gravitates irresistibly toward the sixth and seventh, and thus -- either slumbers surrounded by happy dreams, or, sleeps a dreamless profound sleep until the hour strikes. With a little reflection, and an eye to eternal justice and fitness of things, you will see why. The victim whether good or bad is irresponsible for his death, even if his death were due to some action in a previous life or an antecedent birth; was an act, in short, of the Law of Retribution, still, it was not the direct result of an act deliberately committed by the personal Ego of that life during which he happened to be killed. Had he been allowed to live longer he may have atoned for his antecedent sins still more effectually: and even now, the Ego having been made to pay off the debt of his maker (the previous Ego) is free from the blows of retributive justice. The Dhyan Chohans who have no hand in the guidance of the living human Ego, protect the helpless victim when it is violently thrust out of its element into a new one, before it is matured and made fit and ready for it. We tell you what we know, for we are made to learn it through personal experience. You know what I mean and I CAN SAY NO MORE! Yes; the victims whether good or bad sleep, to awake but at the hour of the last Judgment, which is that hour of the supreme struggle between the sixth and seventh, and the fifth and fourth at the threshold of the gestation state. And even after that, when the sixth and seventh carrying off a portion of the fifth have gone into their Akasic Samadhi, even then it may happen that the spiritual spoil from the fifth will prove too weak to be reborn in Deva-Chan; in which case it will there and then reclothe itself in a new body, the subjective "Being" created from the Karma of the victim (or no-victim, as the case may be) and enter upon a new earth-existence whether upon this or any other planet. In no case then, -- with the exception of suicides and shells, is there any possibility for any other to be attracted to a seance room. And it is clear that "this teaching is not in opposition to our former doctrine" and that while "shells" will be many, -- Spirits very few.
(2) There is a great difference in our humble opinion. We, who look at it from a stand-point which would prove very unacceptable to Life Insurance Companies, say, that there are very few if any of the men who indulge in the above enumerated vices, who feel perfectly sure that such a course of action will lead them eventually to premature death. Such is the penalty of Maya. The "vices" will not escape their punishment; but it is the cause not the effect that will be punished, especially an unforeseen though probable effect. As well call a suicide a man who meets his death in a storm at sea, as one who kills himself with "over-study." Water is liable to drown a man, and too much brain-work to produce a softening of the brain which may carry him away. In such a case no one ought to cross the Kalapani nor even to take a bath for fear of getting faint in it and drowned (for we all know of such cases;) nor should a man do his duty, least of all sacrifice himself for even a laudable and highly-beneficent cause, as many of us -- (H.P.B. for one) -- do. Would Mr. Hume call her a suicide were she to drop down dead over her present work? Motive is everything and man is punished in a case of direct responsibility, never otherwise. In the victim's case the natural hour of death was anticipated accidentally, while in that of the suicide, death is brought on voluntarily and with a full and deliberate knowledge of its immediate consequences. Thus a man who causes his death in a fit of temporary insanity is not a felo de se to the great grief and often trouble of the Life Insurance Companies. Nor is he left a prey to the temptations of the Kama Loka but falls asleep like any other victim. A Guiteau will not remain in the earth's atmosphere with his higher principles over him -- inactive and paralysed, still there. Guiteau is gone into a state during the period of which, he will be ever firing at his President, thereby tossing into confusion and shuffling the destinies of millions of persons; where he will be ever tried and ever hung. Bathing in the reflections of his deeds and thoughts -- especially those he indulged in on the scaffold, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [Two lines in original have been deleted here. -- ED.] his fate. As for those who were "knoched over by cholera, or plague, or jungle fever" they could not have succumbed had they not the germs for the development of such diseases in them from birth.
"So then, the great bulk of the physical phenomena of Spiritualists" my dear brother, are not "due to these Spirits" but indeed -- to "shells."
(3) "The Spirits of very fair average good people dying natural deaths remain . . . in the earth's atmosphere from a few days to a few years," the period depending on their readiness to meet their -- creature not their creator; a very abstruse subject you will learn later on, when you too are more prepared. But why should they "communicate"? Do those you love communicate with you during their sleep objectively? Your Spirits, in hours of danger, or intense sympathy, vibrating on the same current of thought -- which in such cases, creates a kind of telegraphic spiritual wires between your two bodies -- may meet and mutually impress your memories; but then you are living, not dead bodies. But how can an unconscious 5th principle (see supra) impress or communicate with a living organism, unless it has already become a shell? If, for certain reasons they remain in such a state of lethargy for several years, the spirits of the living may ascend to them, as you were already told; and this may take place still easier than in Deva Chan, where the Spirit is too much engrossed in his personal bliss to pay much attention to an intruding element. I say -- they cannot.
(4) I am sorry to contradict your statement. I know of no "thousands of spirits" who do appear in circles -- and moreover positively do not know of one "perfectly pure circle" -- and "teach the highest morality." I hope I may not be classed with slanderers in addition to other names lately bestowed upon me, but truth compels me to declare that Allan Kardec was not quite immaculate during his lifetime, nor has become a very pure Spirit since. As to teaching the "highest morality," we have a Dugpa-Shammar not far from where I am residing. Quite a remarkable man. Not very powerful as a sorcerer but excessively so, as a drunkard, a thief, a liar, and -- an orator. In this latter role he could give points to and beat Messrs. Gladstone, Bradlaugh, and even the Rev. H. W. Beacher -- than whom, there is no more eloquent preacher of morality, and no greater breaker of his Lord's Commandments in the U.S.A. This Shapa-tung Lama, when thirsty, can make an enormous audience of "yellow-cap" laymen weep all their yearly supply of tears, with the narrative of his repentance and suffering in the morning, and then get drunk in the evening and rob the whole village by mesmerising them into a dead sleep. Preaching and teaching morality with an end in view proves very little. Read "J.P.T.'s" article in Light and what I say will be corroborated.
(To A.P.S. (5).) The "obscuration" comes on only when the last man of whatever Round has passed into the sphere of effects. Nature is too well, too mathematically adjusted to cause mistakes to happen in the exercise of her functions. The obscuration of the planet on which are now evoluting the races of the fifth Round men -- will, of course "be behind the few avant couriers" who are now here. But before that time comes we will have to part, to meet no more, as the Editor of the Pioneer and his humble correspondent.
And now having shewn that the October Number of the Theosophist was not utterly wrong, nor was it at "variance with the later teaching," may K.H. set you to "reconcile the two"?
To reconcile you still more with Eliphas, I will send you a number of his MSS. -- that have never been published, in a large, clear, beautiful handwriting with my comments all through. Nothing better than that can give you a key to Kabalistic puzzles.
I have to write to Mr. Hume this week; to give him consolation, and to show, that unless he has a strong desire to live, he need not trouble himself about Deva-Chan. Unless a man loves well or hates as well, he will be neither in Deva-Chan nor in Avitchi. "Nature spews the luke-warm out of her mouth" means only that she annihilates their personal Egos (not the shells, nor yet the sixth principle) in the Kama Loka and the Deva-Chan. This does not prevent them from being immediately reborn -- and, if their lives were not very very bad, -- there is no reason why the eternal Monad should not find the page of that life intact in the Book of Life.
K. H.