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Compassion - The Spirit of Truth

By Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

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Validate Imagination by Faith and Will

Genuine unselfish LOVE combined with WILL, is a “power” in itself. 
— Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 1
Imagination as well as will — creates. Suspicion is the most powerful provocative agent of imagination. . . . Beware! 
— Master KH 2

We operate by our imagination on the imagination of others. . . . by our sidereal body on theirs, by our organs on their organs, in such a way that, by sympathy, whether of inclination or obsession, we reciprocally possess one another, and identify ourselves with those upon whom we wish to act. Reactions against such dominations frequently cause the most pronounced antipathy to succeed the keenest sympathy. Love has a tendency to unify beings; in thus identifying it frequently renders them rivals, and, consequently, enemies, if in the depth of the two natures there is an unsociable disposition, like pride. To permeate two united souls in an equal degree with pride is to disjoin them by making them rivals. Antagonism is the necessary consequence of a plurality of gods.3

By vivifying memories of past lives, imagination is the world’s instrument of adaptation. Imagination is nothing but the memory of preceding births — Pythagoras tells us.4 Imagination applied to reason is genius. Reason is one, as genius is one, in the multiplicity of its works. There is one principle, there is one truth, there is one reason, there is one absolute and universal philosophy. Whatsoever is subsists in unity considered as beginning, and returns into unity considered as end. One is in one; that is to say, all is in all. Unity is the principle of numbers; it is also the principle of motion, and consequently, of life. The entire human body is summed up in the unity of a single organ, which is the brain.5

Imagination acts on faith, . . . and both are the draughtsmen, who prepare the sketches for Will to engrave, more or less deeply, on the rocks or obstacles and opposition with which the path of life is strewn. Says Paracelsus:

“Faith must confirm the imagination, for faith establishes the will. . . . Determined will is the beginning of all magical operations. . . . It is because men do not perfectly imagine and believe the result, that the arts (of magic) are uncertain, while they might be perfectly certain.”

This is all the secret. Half, if not two-thirds of our ailings and diseases are the fruit of our imagination and fears. Destroy the latter and give another bent to the former, and nature will do the rest.1

And frees man from the servility of worship. Two things . . . are necessary for the acquisition of magical power — the emancipation of the will from all servitude, and its instruction in the art of domination. The sovereign will is represented in our symbols by the woman who crushes the serpent’s head, and by the radiant angel who restrains and constrains the dragon with lance and heel. . . . The whole magical work consists, therefore, in our liberation from the folds of the ancient serpent, then in setting a foot upon its head, and leading it where we will.

“I will give you all the kingdoms of the earth, if thou wilt fall down and adore me,” 
said this serpent in the evangelical mythos. The initiate should make answer: 
“I will not fall down, and thou shalt crouch at my feet; nothing shall thou give me, but I will make use of thee, and will take what I require, for I am thy lord and master” 
— a reply which, in a veiled manner, is contained in that of the Saviour.2

The ardent desire of prayer proper strengthens Will. Prayer opens the spiritual sight of man, for prayer is desire, and desire develops WILL; the magnetic emanations proceeding from the body at every effort — whether mental or physical — produce self-magnetization and ecstasy. Plotinus recommended solitude for prayer, as the most efficient means of obtaining what is asked; and Plato advised those who prayed to
“remain silent in the presence of the divine ones, till they remove the cloud from thy eyes, and enable thee to see by the light which issues from themselves.” 1 When Hiuen-Tsang desired to adore the shadow of Buddha, it was not to “professional magicians” that he resorted, but to the power of his own soul-invocation; the power of prayer, faith, and contemplation. All was dark and dreary near the cavern in which the miracle was alleged to take place sometimes. . . . 2

Our Father, who is the true Christ, lives in the innermost chamber of our Spiritual Soul; not outside. Those who worship before [the Causeless Cause of all causes], ought to do so in the silence and the sanctified solitude of their Souls; making their spirit the sole mediator between them and the Universal Spirit, their good actions the only priests, and their sinful intentions the only visible and objective sacrificial victims to the Presence. . . . 
“When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are . . . but enter into thine inner chamber and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father who is in secret.”

Our Father is within us “in secret,” our 7th principle, in the “inner chamber” of our Soulperception. “The Kingdom of Heaven” and of God “is within us,” says Jesus, not outside. Why are Christians so absolutely blind to the self-evident meaning of the words of wisdom they delight in mechanically repeating? 3

Imagination is the best guide of our blind senses. Dreams differ. In that strange state of being which, as Byron has it, puts us in a position “with seal’d eyes to see,” 1 one often perceives more real facts than when awake. Imagination is, again, one of the strongest elements in human nature, or in the words of Dugald Stewart it
“is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. . . . Destroy the faculty, and the condition of men will become as stationary as that of brutes.”
It is the best guide of our blind senses, without which the latter could never lead us beyond matter and its illusions.2

Will is the exclusive possession of man on this, our plane of consciousness. . . . It divides him from the brute in whom instinctive desire only is active. Desire, in its widest application, is the one creative force in the Universe. In this sense it is indistinguishable from Will; but we men never know desire under this form while we remain only men. Therefore Will and Desire are here considered as opposed.
Thus Will is the offspring of the Divine, the God in man; Desire the motive power of the animal life.
Most of men live in and by desire, mistaking it for will. But he who would achieve must separate will from desire, and make his will the ruler; for desire is unstable and ever changing, while will is steady and constant.
Both will and desire are absolute creators, forming the man himself and his surroundings. But will creates intelligently — desire blindly and unconsciously. The man, therefore, makes himself in the image of his desires, unless he creates himself in the likeness of the Divine, through his will, the child of the light. Knowledge and will are the tools for the accomplishment of this purification.3

Inspiration is the mode of acting of the Will . . . And Will manifests in Memory, Judgment, and Imagination. 1
which joining itself to the triple Ternary . . . constitutes the human ontological Quaternary. It is the will which envelops the primordial Ternary in its unity, and which determines the action of each of its faculties according to its own mode without the will it would have no existence. The three faculties by which the volitive unity is manifested in the triple Ternary, are memory, judgment, and imagination. These three faculties, acting in a homogeneous unity, have neither height nor depth and do not affect one of the modifications of the being, any more than another; they are all wherever the will is, and the will operates freely in the intelligence or in the understanding; in the understanding or in the instinct: where it wills to be there it is; its faculties follow it everywhere. I say that it is wherever it wills to be when the being is wholly developed; for following the course of Nature, it is first in the instinct and only passes into the understanding and into the intelligence successively and in proportion as the animistic and spiritual faculties are developed.2