We all feel the suggestion of it in certain of our tempers. If we should take out of much of our finest poetry suggestions akin to the suggestions of Pantheism at its best, we should leave even Western poetry strangely poor, and we have beside, particularly in the contemplation of rare natural beauty, a feeling of kinship with the spirit which clothes itself in dawn and twilight, or speaks through the rhythmic beat of sea waves, or lifts itself against the skyline in far blue mountain summits, which helps us to understand this old, old faith. And if modern cults had done nothing more than appropriate the poetry of Pantheism they would have lent only a touch of oriental colour to the somberness of Western life.
But Theosophy and kindred cults have gone farther, since Pantheism itself must go farther. Directly you have identified creation and the creative power so intimately as Pantheism does, then you are under bonds, if you have any curiosity at all or any speculative force, to try to explain the ways in which a God, who is just to begin with all that there is, has managed to reveal Himself in such an infinitude of minute and sometimes ungodlike ways. So Pantheism has its own scheme, not of creation, for there is no place in Pantheism for creation, but rather of emanation. Eastern thought substitutes for the cosmogony of the Old Testament which simply carries the world back to a creative God and seeks to go no farther, and for the methods of Western science which carries creation back to ultimate force and is unable to go any farther, an entirely different system.
How the One Becomes the Many
A paragraph in Mrs. Besant's "The Ancient Wisdom" (page 41) may help us here. "Coming forth from the depths of the One Existence, from the One beyond all thought and all speech, a Logos, by imposing on Himself a limit, circumscribing voluntarily the range of His own Being, becomes the manifested God, and tracing the limiting sphere of His activity thus outlines the area of His universe. Within that sphere the universe is born, is evolved, and dies; it lives, it moves, it has its being in Him; its matter is His emanation; its forces and energies are currents of His life; He is immanent in every atom, all-pervading, all-sustaining, all-evolving; He is its source and its end, its cause and its object, its centre and circumference; it is built on Him as its sure foundation, it breathes in Him as its encircling space; He is in everything and everything in Him. Thus have the Sages of the Ancient Wisdom taught us of the beginning of the manifested worlds."
It is not, of course, fair to say that here is something entirely different from the line of Western scientific and philosophic thought or wholly alien to elements in modern Christianity.[65] The real problem of modern Theism is to connect what science discovers with what faith assumes. The broader generalization of science resolves action and existence into the unities of an underlying and self-conserving force which grows more and more subtle and tenuous as we follow it from molecules to atoms, from atoms to eons and electrons, and even discern beneath these something more impalpable than themselves, and there must be some way in which a creative power conceived by faith in terms of personality has released the forces which have built themselves into the universe. The difference is, however, that Christian Theism refuses completely to identify God and His universe.
[65] Indeed this is a better commentary on the prologue to the Gospel of John and certain passages of Colossians than most of the orthodox theologies, and the self-limitation of God is the key to the moral freedom of the individual.
There is, after all, a profound distinction between creating and becoming. Theosophy undertakes to explain for us how "the One beyond all thought and all speech" has become us and our universe. It attempts also to provide a way by which we, who are entangled, to our pain and sorrow, in the web of things thus woven, may escape from it and lose ourselves again in the One. It takes the wheel for its symbol in more senses than one. Everything is a turning and returning and we ourselves are bound upon the wheel, carried down or up and finally to be set free, only by the acceptance of a certain discipline of life.
Theosophy, then, is both speculative and practical. Its speculations take an immense range necessarily; it is no simple thing to follow the One from the depths of His hidden existence to our earth-born lives and the forces which flow about them. Only an expert deeply versed in Eastern literature would be able to say whether Mrs. Besant follows her Eastern masters faithfully in reporting their conclusions, but she has plainly availed herself of many of the terms and suggestions of modern science in interpreting them to us. If one could use a figure borrowed from electricity, the One is "stepped-down" through a series of planes and manifestations. Theosophy makes much of sevens—no use to ask why—and bridges the gulf between ultimate and present realities by a series of seven planes in which what is coarsest in the plane above becomes the germ of what is finest in the plane beneath. Even so, the One does not directly touch even the highest of these seven planes. (Theosophy is, first of all, a study in descents and not in ascents; ascent comes later.) There are between the One and the topmost plane three emanations (but perhaps we would better let Mrs. Besant speak to us herself): "The self-unfolding of the Logos in a threefold form: the first Logos the root of all being, from Him the second manifesting the two aspects of life and form, then the third Logos, the universal mind, that in which all archetypically exists, the source of beings, the fount of fashioning energies."[66]
[66] "The Ancient Wisdom," p. 41.
Evolution and Involution