Five Years of Theosophy

by Unknown

Or, again, he accepts the Vedantic conception of Brahma, who, in the Upanishads, is represented as "without life, without mind, pure," unconscious, for Brahma is "Absolute Consciousness." Or, even finally, siding with the Svabhavikas of Nepaul, maintains that nothing exists but "Svabhavat" (substance or nature) which exists by itself without any creator—he is the true follower of pure and absolute Theosophy. That Theosophy which prompted such men as Hegel, Fichte and Spinoza to take up the labours of the old Grecian philosophers and speculate upon the One Substance—the Deity, the Divine All proceeding from the Divine Wisdom—incomprehensible, unknown and unnamed by any ancient or modern religious philosophy, with the exception of Judaism, including Christianity and Mohammedanism. Every Theosophist, then, holding to a theory of the Deity "which has not revelation but an inspiration of his own for its basis," may accept any of the above definitions or belong to any of these religions, and yet remain strictly within the boundaries of Theosophy. For the latter is belief in the Deity as the ALL, the source of all existence, the infinite that cannot be either comprehended or known, the universe alone revealing It, or, as some prefer it, Him, thus giving a sex to that, to anthropomorphize which is blasphemy. True Theosophy shrinks from brutal materialization; it prefers believing that, from eternity retired within itself, the Spirit of the Deity neither wills nor creates; but from the infinite effulgence everywhere going forth from the Great Centre, that which produces all visible and invisible things is but a ray containing in itself the generative and conceptive power, which, in its turn, produces that which the Greeks called Macrocosm, the Kabalists Tikkun or Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man, and the Aryans Purusha, the manifested Brahm, or the Divine Male. Theosophy believes also in the Anastasis, or continued existence, and in transmigration (evolution) or a series of changes of the personal ego, which can be defended and explained on strict philosophical principles by making a distinction between Paramatma (transcendental, supreme spirit) and Jivatma (individual spirit) of the Vedantins.

To fully define Theosophy, we must consider it under all its aspects. The interior world has not been hidden from all by impenetrable darkness. By that higher intuition acquired by Theosophia, or God-knowledge, which carries the mind from the world of form into that of formless spirit, man has been sometimes enabled, in every age and every country, to perceive things in the interior or invisible world. Hence, the "Samadhi," or Dhyan Yog Samadhi, of the Hindu ascetics; the "Daimonlonphoti," or spiritual illumination of the Neo-Platonists; the "sidereal confabulation of soul," of the Rosicrucians or Fire-philosophers; and, even the ecstatic trance of mystics and of the modern mesmerists and spiritualists, are identical in nature, though various as to manifestation. The search after man's diviner "self," so often and so erroneously interpreted as individual communion with a personal God, was the object of every mystic; and belief in its possibility seems to have been coeval with the genesis of humanity, each people giving it another name. Thus Plato and Plotinus call "Noetic work" that which the Yogi and the Shrotriya term Vidya. "By reflection, self-knowledge and intellectual discipline, the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty—that is, to the Vision of God. This is the epopteia," said the Greeks. "To unite one's soul to the Universal Soul," says Porphyry, "requires but a perfectly pure mind. Through self contemplation, perfect chastity, and purity of body, we may approach nearer to It, and receive, in that state, true knowledge and wonderful insight." And Swami Dayanund Saraswati, who has read neither Porphyry nor other Greek authors, but who is a thorough Vedic scholar, says in his "Veda Bhashya" (opasna prakaru ank. 9)—"To obtain Diksha (highest initiation) and Yog, one has to practise according to the rules….. The soul in the human body can perform the greatest wonders by knowing the Universal Spirit (or God) and acquainting itself with the properties and qualities (occult) of all the things in the universe. A human being (a Dikshit or initiate) can thus acquire a power of seeing and hearing at great distances." Finally, Alfred R. Wallace, F.R.S., a spiritualist and yet a confessedly great naturalist, says, with brave candour: "It is spirit that alone feels, and perceives, and thinks, that acquires knowledge, and reasons and aspires….. There not unfrequently occur individuals so constituted that the spirit can perceive independently of the corporeal organs of sense, or can, perhaps, wholly or partially quit the body for a time and return to it again; the spirit communicates with spirit easier than with matter." We can now see how, after thousands of years have intervened between the age of the Gymnosophists* and our own highly civilized era, notwithstanding, or, perhaps, just because of such an enlightenment which pours its radiant light upon the psychological as well as upon the physical realms of Nature, over twenty millions of people today believe, under different form, in those same spiritual powers that were believed in by the Yogis and the Pythagoreans, nearly 3,000 years ago.

———— * The reality of the Yog-power was affirmed by many Greek and Roman writers, who call the Yogis Indian Gymnosophists—by Strabo, Lucan, Plutarch, Cicero (Tusculum), Pliny (vii. 2), &c. ————

Thus, while the Aryan mystic claimed for himself the power of solving all the problems of life and death, when he had once obtained the power of acting independently of his body, through the Atman, "self," or "soul;" and the old Greeks went in search of Atmu, the Hidden one, or the God-Soul of man, with the symbolical mirror of the Thesmophorian mysteries; so the spiritualists of today believe in the capacity of the spirits, or the souls of the disembodied persons, to communicate visibly and tangibly with those they loved on earth. And all these, Aryan Yogis, Greek philosophers, and modern spiritualists, affirm that possibility on the ground that the embodied soul and its never embodied spirit—the real self—are not separated from either the Universal Soul or other spirits by space, but merely by the differentiation of their qualities, as in the boundless expanse of the universe there can be no limitation. And that when this difference is once removed—according to the Greeks and Aryans by abstract contemplation, producing the temporary liberation of the imprisoned soul, and according to spiritualists, through mediumship—such a union between embodied and disembodied spirits becomes possible. Thus was it that Patanjali's Yogis, and, following in their steps, Plotinus, Porphyry and other Neo-Platonists, maintained that in their hours of ecstasy, they had been united to, or rather become as one with, God several times during the course of their lives. This idea, erroneous as it may seem in its application to the Universal Spirit, was, and is, claimed by too many great philosophers to be put aside as entirely chimerical. In the case of the Theodidaktoi, the only controvertible point, the dark spot on this philosophy of extreme mysticism, was its claim to include that which is simply ecstatic illumination, under the head of sensuous perception. In the case of the Yogis, who maintained their ability to see Iswara "face to face," this claim was successfully overthrown by the stern logic of the followers of Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya philosophy. As to the similar assumption made for their Greek followers, for a long array of Christian ecstatics, and, finally, for the last two claimants to "God-seeing" within these last hundred years—Jacob Bohme and Swedenborg—this pretension would and should have been philosophically and logically questioned, if a few of our great men of science, who are spiritualists, had had more interest in the philosophy than in the mere phenomenalism of spiritualism.

The Alexandrian Theosophists were divided into neophytes, initiates and masters, or hierophants; and their rules were copied from the ancient Mysteries of Orpheus, who, according to Herodotus, brought them from India. Ammonius obligated his disciples by oath not to divulge his higher doctrines, except to those who were proved thoroughly worthy and initiated, and who had learned to regard the gods, the angels, and the demons of other peoples, according to the esoteric hyponia, or under-meaning. "The gods exist, but they are not what the hoi polloi, the uneducated multitude, suppose them to be," says Epicurus. "He is not an atheist who denies the existence of the gods, whom the multitude worship, but he is such who fastens on these gods the opinions of the multitude." In his turn, Aristotle declares that of the "Divine Essence pervading the whole world of Nature, what are styled the gods are simply the first principles."

Plotinus, the pupil of the "God-taught" Ammonius, tells us that the secret gnosis or the knowledge of Theosophy, has three degrees-opinion, science, and illumination. "The means or instrument of the first is sense, or perception; of the second, dialectics; of the third, intuition. To the last, reason is subordinate; it is absolute knowledge, founded on the identification of the mind with the object known." Theosophy is the exact science of psychology, so to say; it stands in relation to natural, uncultivated mediumship, as the knowledge of a Tyndall stands to that of a school-boy in physics. It develops in man a direct beholding; that which Schelling denominates "a realization of the identity of subject and object in the individual;" so that under the influence and knowledge of hyponia man thinks divine thoughts, views all things as they really are, and, finally, "becomes recipient of the Soul of the World," to use one of the finest expressions of Emerson. "I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect," he says in his superb "Essay on the Oversoul." Besides this psychological, or soul state, Theosophy cultivated every branch of sciences and arts. It was thoroughly familiar with what is now commonly known as mesmerism. Practical theurgy or "ceremonial magic," so often resorted to in their exorcisms by the Roman Catholic clergy, was discarded by the Theosophists. It is but Jamblichus alone who, transcending the other Eclectics, added to Theosophy the doctrine of Theurgy. When ignorant of the true meaning of the esoteric divine symbols of Nature, man is apt to miscalculate the powers of his soul, and, instead of communing spiritually and mentally with the higher celestial beings, the good spirits (the gods of the theurgists of the Platonic school), he will unconsciously call forth the evil, dark powers which lurk around humanity, the undying, grim creations of human crimes and vices, and thus fall from theurgia (white magic) into goetia (or black magic, sorcery). Yet, neither white nor black magic are what popular superstition understands by the terms. The possibility of "raising spirits," according to the key of Solomon, is the height of superstition and ignorance. Purity of deed and thought can alone raise us to an intercourse "with the gods" and attain for us the goal we desire. Alchemy, believed by so many to have been a spiritual philosophy as well as a physical science, belonged to the teachings of the Theosophical School.

It is a noticeable fact that neither Zoroaster, Buddha, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Confucius, Socrates, nor Ammonius Saccas, committed anything to writing. The reason for it is obvious. Theosophy is a double-edged weapon and unfit for the ignorant or the selfish. Like every ancient philosophy it has its votaries among the moderns; but, until late in our own days, its disciples were few in numbers, and of the most various sects and opinions. "Entirely speculative, and founding no schools, they have still exercised a silent influence upon philosophy; and no doubt, when the time arrives, many ideas thus silently propounded may yet give new directions to human thought," remarks Mr. Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie, himself a mystic and a Theosophist, in his large and valuable work, "The Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia" (articles "Theosophical Society of New York," and "Theosophy," p. 731).* Since the days of the fire-philosophers, they had never formed themselves into societies, for, tracked like wild beasts by the Christian clergy, to be known as a Theosophist often amounted, hardly a century ago, to a death-warrant.

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* "The Royal Masonic Cycloptedia of History, Rites, Symbolism, and
Biography." Edited by Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie IX. (Cryptonymus) Hon.
Member of the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge, No. 2, Scotland. New York J.
W. Bouton, 706, Broadway. 1877.
————

The statistics show that, during a period of 150 years, no less than 90,000 men and women were burned in Europe for alleged witchcraft. In Great Britain only, from A.D. 1640 to 1660, but twenty years, 3,000 persons were put to death for compact with the "Devil." It was but late in the present century—in 1875—that some progressed mystics and spiritualists, unsatisfied with the theories and explanations of Spiritualism started by its votaries, and finding that they were far from covering the whole ground of the wide range of phenomena, formed at New York, America, an association which is now widely known as the Theosophical Society.

(—H.P. Blavatsky)