Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett - 1923
By A. T. Barker
Letter No X
Notes by K.H. on a ** Preliminary Chapter " headed " God**BY Hume, intended to preface an exposition of Occult Philosophy (abridged).
Received at Simla, 1881
Neither our philosophy nor ourselves believe in a God, least ofall in one whose pronoun necessitates a capital H. Ourphilosophy falls under the definition of Hobbes. It is pre-eminently the science of effects by their causes and of causes bytheir effects, and since it is also the science of things deducedfrom first principle, as Bacon defines it, before we admit any suchprinciple we must know it, and have no right to admit even itspossibility. Your whole explanation is based upon one solitaryadmission made simply for argument's sake in October last. Youwere told that our knowledge was limited to this our solarsystem : ergo as philosophers who desired to remain worthy ofthe name we could not either deny or affirm the existence of whatyou termed a supreme, omnipotent, intelligent being of some sortbeyond the limits of that solar system. But if such an existenceis not absolutely impossible, yet unless the uniformity of nature'slaw breaks at those limits we maintain that it is highly improbable. Nevertheless we deny most emphatically the position ofagnosticism in this direction, and as regards the solar system.Our doctrine knows no compromises. Neither affirms or denies,for it never teaches but that which it knows to be the truth.Therefore, we deny God both as philosophers and as Buddhists.We know there are planetary and other spiritual lives, and weknow there is in our system no such thing as God, either personalor impersonal. Parabrahm is not a God, but absolute immutablelaw, and Iswar is the effect of Avidya and Maya, ignorance basedupon the great delusion. The word ** God " was invented todesignate the unknown cause of those effects which man haseither admired or dreaded without understanding them, and sincewe claim and that we are able to prove what we claim—i.e. theknowledge of that cause and causes we are in a position tomaintain there is no God or Gods behind them. The idea of God is not an innate but an acquired notion, andwe have but one thing in common with theologies—we reveal theinfinite. But while we assign to all the phenomena that proceedsfrom the infinite and limitless space, duration and motion,material, natural, sensible and known (to us at least) cause, thetheists assign them spiritual, super-natural and unintelligible and un-known causes. The God of the Theologians is simply an imaginary power, un loup garou as d'Holbach expressed it—a power which has never yet manifested itself. Our chief aim is to deliver humanity of this nightmare, to teach man virtue for its own sake, and to walk in life relying on himself instead of lean- ing on a theological crutch, that for countless ages was the direct cause of nearly all human misery. Pantheistic we may be called—agnostic never. If people are willing to accept and to regard as God our one Life immutable and unconscious in its eternity they may do so and thus keep to one more gigantic misnomer. But then they will have to say with Spinoza that there is not and that we cannot conceive any other substance than God ; or as that famous and unfortunate philosopher says in his fourteenth proposition, " praetu Deum nequi dari nequi concepi potest substantia "—and thus become pantheists. Who but a Theologian nursed on mystery and the most absurd supernaturalism can imagine a self existent being of necessity infinite and omnipresent outside the manifested boundless universe. The word infinite is but a negative which excludes the idea of bounds. It is evident that a being independent and omnipresent cannot be limited by anything which is outside of himself; that there can be nothing exterior to himself—not even vacuum, then where is there room for matter? for that manifested universe even though the latter limited. If we ask the theist is your God vacuum, space or matter, they will reply no. And yet they hold that their God penetrates matter though he is not himself matter. When we speak of our One Life we also say that it penetrates, nay is the essence of every atom of matter ; and that therefore it not only has correspondence with matter but has all its properties likewise, etc., hence is material, is matter itself. How can intel- ligence proceed to ernanate from non-intelligence—you kept asking last year. How could a highly intelligent humanity, man the crown of reason, be evolved out of blind unintelligent law or force ! But once we reason on that line, I may ask in my turn, how could congenital idiots, non-reasoning animals, and the rest of ** creation " have been created by or evoluted from, absolute Wisdom, if the latter is a thinking intelligent being, the author and ruler of the Universe? How? says Dr. Clarke in his examination of the proof of the existence of the Divinity. ** God who hath made the eye, shall he not see? God who hath made the ear shall he not hear? " But according to this mode of reasoning they would have to admit that in creating an idiot God is an idiot ; that he who made so many irrational beings, so many physical and moral monsters, must be an irrational being. We are not Adwaitees, but our teaching respecting the one life is identical with that of the Adwaitee with regard to Parabrahm.
And no true philosophically brained Adwaitee will ever call himself an agnostic, for he knows that he is Parabrahm and identicalin every respect with the universal life and soul—the macrocosmis the microcosm and he knows that there is no God apart fromhimself, no creator as no being. Having found Gnosis we can-not turn our backs on it and become agnostics.
Were we to admit that even the highest Dyan Chohans areliable to err under a delusion, then there would be no reality forus indeed and the occult sciences would be as great a chimera asthat God. If there is an absurdity in denying that which wedonot know it is still more extravagant to assign to it unknownlaws.
According to logic *' nothing " is that of which everything cantruly be denied and nothing can truly be affirmed. The ideatherefore either of a finite or infinite nothing is a contradiction interms. And yet according to theologians " God the self existentbeing is a most simple, unchangeable, incorruptible being ; with-out parts, figure, motion, divisibility, or any other such properties as we find in matter. For all such things so plainly andnecessarily imply finiteness in their very notion and are utterlyinconsistent with complete infinity." Therefore the God hereoffered to the adoration of the XlXth century lacks every qualityupon which man's mind is capable of fixing any judgment. Whatis this in fact but a being of whom they can affirm nothing that isnot instantly contradicted. Their own Bible their Revelationdestroys all the moral perceptions they heap upon him unless in-deed they call those qualities perfections that every other man'sreason and common sense call imperfections, odious vices andbrutal wickedness. Nay more he who reads our Buddhist scrip-tures written for the superstitious masses will fail to find inthem a demon so vindictive, unjust, so cruel and so stupid as thecelestial tyrant upon whom the Christians prodigally lavish theirservile worship and on whom their theologians heap those perfections that are contradicted on every page of their Bible. Trulyand veritably your theology has created her God but to destroyhim piecemeal. Your church is the fabulous Saturn, who begetschildren but to devour them (The Universal Mind)—A few reflections and arguments oughtto support every new idea—for instance we are sure to be takento task for the following apparent contradictions, (i) Wedenythe existence of a thinking conscious God, on the grounds thatsuch a God must either be conditioned, limited and subject tochange, therefore not infinite, or (2) if he is represented to us asan eternal unchangeable and independent being, with not a particle of nature in him, then we answer that it is no being but animmutable blind principle, a law. And yet, they will say, we believe in Dyans, or Planetaries (" spirits " also), and endow them with a universal mind, and this must be explained.
Our reasons may be briefly summed up thus :
(i) We deny the absurd proposition that there can be, even in a boundless and eternal universe—two infinite eternal and omnipresent existences.
(2) Matter we know to be eternal, i.e., having had no beginning (a) because matter is Nature herself (b) because that which cannot annihilate itself and is indestructible exists necessarily— and therefore it could not begin to be, nor can it cease to be (c) because the accumulated experience of countless ages, and that of exact science show to us matter (or nature) acting by her own peculiar energy, of which not an atom is ever in an absolute state of rest, and therefore it must have always existed, i.e., its materials ever changing form, combinations and properties, but its principles or elements being absolutely indestructible.
(3) As to God—since no one has ever or at any time seen him or it—unless he or it is the very essence and nature of this bound' less eternal matter, its energy and motion, we cannot regard him as either eternal or infinite or yet self existing. We refuse to admit a being or an existence of which we know absolutely nothing, because (a) there is no room for him in the presence of that matter whose undeniable properties and qualities we know thoroughly well (b) because if he or it is but a part of that matter it is ridiculous to maintain that he is the mover and ruler of that of which he is but a dependent part and (c) because if they tell us that God is a self existent pure spirit independent of matter—an extra cosmic deity, we answer that admitting the possibility of such an impossibility, i.e., his existence, we yet hold that a purely immaterial spirit cannot be an intelligent conscious ruler nor can he have any of the attributes bestowed upon him by theology and thus such a God becomes again but a blind force. Intel- ligence as found in our Dyan Chohans, is a faculty that can appertain but to organized or animated being—however imponderable or rather invisible the materials of their organizations. In- telligence requires the necessity of thinking ; to think one must have ideas ; ideas suppose senses which are physical material, and how can anything material belong to pure spirit? If it be objected that thought cannot be a property of matter, we will ask the reason why? We must have an unanswerable proof of this assumption, before we can accept it. Of the theologian we ould enquire what was there to prevent his God, since he is the alleged creator of all—to endow matter with the faculty of thought ; and when answered that evidently it has not pleased Him to do so, that it is a mystery as well as an impossibility, we would insist upon being told why it is more impossible that matter should produce spirit and thought, than spirit or the thought ofGod should produce and create matter.
We do not bow our heads in the dust before the mystery ofmind—for we have solved it ages ago. Rejecting with contemptthe theistic theory we reject as much the automaton theory, teach-ing that states of consciousness are produced by the marshallingof the molecules of the brain ; and we feel as little respect forthat other hypothesis—the production of molecular motion byconsciousness. Then what do we believe in? Well, we believein the much laughed at phlogiston (see article " What is forceand what is matter?" Theosophist, September), and in whatsome natural philosophers would call nisus the incessant thoughperfectly imperceptible (to the ordinary senses) motion or effortsour body is making on another—the pulsations of inert matter—its life. The bodies of the Planetary spirits are formed of thatwhich Priestley and others called Phlogiston and for which wehave another name—this essence in its highest seventh stateforming that matter of which the organisms of the highest andpurest Dyans are composed, and in its lowest and densest form(so impalpable yet that science calls it energy and force) servingas a cover to the Planetaries of the ist or lowest degree. In otherwords we believe in matter alone, in matter as visible nature andmatter in its invisibility as the invisible omnipresent omnipotentProteus with its unceasing motion which is its life, and whichnature draws from herself since she is the great whole outside ofwhich nothing can exist. For as Bellinger truly asserts ** motionis a manner of existence that flows necessarily out of the essenceof matter ; that matter moves by its own peculiar energies ; thatits motion is due to the force which is inherent in itself; that thevariety of motion and the phenomena that result proceed from thediversity of the properties of the qualities and of the combinationswhich are originally found in the primitive matter " of whichnature is the assemblage and of which your science knows lessthan one of our Tibetan Yak-drivers of Kant's metaphysics.
The existence of matter then is a fact ; the existence of motionis another fact, their self existence and eternity or indestructibility is a third fact. And the idea of pure spirit as a Beingoran Existence—give it whatever name you will—is a chimera, agigantic absurdity.
Our ideas on Evil. Evil has no existence per se and is but theabsence of good and exists but for him who is made its victim.It proceeds from two causes, —and no more than good is it anindependent cause in nature. Nature is destitute of goodness ormalice; she follows only immutable laws when she either giveslife and joy, or sends suffering and death, and destroys what shehas created. Nature has an antidote for every poison and her laws a reward for every suffering. The butterfly devoured by a bird becomes that bird, and the little bird killed by an animal gfoes into a higher form. It is the blind law of necessity and the eternal fitness of things, and hence cannot be called Evil in Nature. The real evil proceeds from human intelligence and its origin rests entirely with reasoning man who dissociates himself from Nature. Humanity then alone is the true source of evil. Evil is the exaggeration of good, the progeny of human selfish- ness and greediness. Think profoundly and you will find that save death—which is no evil but a necessary law, and accidents which will always find their reward in a future life—the origin of every evil whether small or great is in human action, in man whose intelligence makes him the one free agent in Nature. It is not nature that creates diseases, but man. The latter's mission and destiny in the economy of nature is to die his natural death brought by old age ; save accident, neither a savage nor a wild (free) animal die of disease. Food, sexual relations, drink, are all natural necessities of life ; yet excess in them brings on disease, misery, suffering, mental and physical, and the latter are transmitted as the greatest evils to future generations, the progeny of the culprits. Ambition, the desire of securing happiness and comfort for those we love, by obtaining honours and riches, are praiseworthy natural feelings but when they trans- form man into an ambitious cruel tyrant, a miser, a selfish egotist they bring manifold misery on those around him ; on nations as well as on individuals. All this then—food, wealth, ambition, and a thousand other things we have to leave unmentioned, be- comes the source and cause of evil whether in its abundance or through its absence. Become a glutton, a debauchee, a tyrant, and you become the originator of diseases, of human suffering and misery. Lack all this and you starve, you are despised as a nobody and the majority of the herd, your fellow men, make of you a sufferer your whole life. Therefore it is neither nature nor an imaginary Deity that has to be blamed, but human nature made vile by selfishness. Think well over these few words ; work out every cause of evil you can think of and trace it to its origin and you will have solved one-third of the problem of evil. And now, after making due allowance for evils that are natural and cannot be avoided, —and so few are they that I challenge the whole host of Western metaphysicians to call them evils or to trace them directly to an independent cause—I will point out the greatest, the chief cause of nearly two-thirds of the evils that pursue humanity ever since that cause became a power. It is religion under whatever form and in whatever nation. It is the sacerdotal caste, the priesthood and the churches. It is in those illusions that man looks upon as sacred, that he has to search out the source of that multitude of evils which is the great curse ofhumanity and that almost overwhelms mankind. Ignorancecreated Gods and cunning took advantage of opportunity. Lookat India and look at Christendom and Islam, at Judaism andFetichism. It is priestly imposture that rendered these Godssoterrible to man ; it is religion that makes of him the selfish bigot,the fanatic that hates all mankind out of his own sect withoutrendering him any better or more moral for it. It is belief inGod and Gods that makes two-thirds of humanity the slaves ofa handful of those who deceive them under the false pretence ofsaving them. Is not man ever ready to commit any kind of evilif told that his God or gods demand the crime? ; voluntary victimof an illusionary God, the abject slave of his crafty ministers.The Irish Italian and Slavonian peasant will starve himself andsee his family starving and naked to feed and clothe his padreand pope. For two thousand years India groaned under theweight of caste, Brahmins alone feeding on the fat of the land,and to-day the followers of Christ and those of Mahomet arecutting each other's throats in the names of and for the greaterglory of their respective myths. Remember the sum of humanmisery will never be diminished unto that day when the betterportion of humanity destroys in the name of Truth, morality, anduniversal charity, the altars of these false gods. If it is objected that we too have temples we too have priestsand that our lamas also live on charity ... let them knowthat the objects above named have in common with their Westernequivalents but the name. Thus in our temples there is neithera god nor gods worshipped, only the thrice sacred memory of thegreatest as the holiest man that ever lived. If our lamas tohonour the fraternity of the Bhikkus established by our blessedmaster himself, go out to be fed by the laity, the latter often tothe number of 5 to 25,000 is fed and taken care of by theLamgha (the fraternity of lamaic monks) the lamassery providingfor the wants of the poor, the sick, the afflicted. Our lamasaccept food, never money, and it is in those temples that theorigin of evil is preached and impressed upon the people. Therethey are taught the four noble truths—ariya sakka, and the chainof causation, (the 12 nid^nas) gives them a solution of theproblem of the origin and destruction of suffering.
Read the Mahavagga and try to understand not with the pre-judiced Western mind but the spirit of intuition and truth whatthe Fully Enlightened one says in the ist Khandhaka. Allow meto translate it for you.
** At the time the blessed Buddha was at Uruvella on theshores of the river Nerovigara as he rested under the Boddhitree of wisdom after he had become Sambuddha, at the end of the seventh day having his mind fixed on the chain of causation he spake thus : ' from Ignorance spring the samkharas of threefold nature—productions of body, of speech, of thoughts. From the samkharas springs consciousness, from consciousness springs name and form, from this spring the six regions (of the six senses the seventh being the property of but the enlightened) ; from these springs contact from this sensation ; from this springs thirst (or desire, Kama, tanha) from thirst attachment, existence, birth, old age and death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection and despair. Again by the destruction of ignorance, the Sankharas are destroyed, and their consciousness name and form, the six regions, contact, sensation, thirst, attachment (selfishness), existence, birth, old age, death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection, and despair are destroyed. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering."
Knowing this the blessed one uttered this solemn utterance. ** When the real nature of things becomes clear to the meditating Bikshu, then all his doubts fade away since he has learned what is that nature and what it's cause. From ignorance spring all the evils. From knowledge comes the cessation of this mass of misery, and then the meditating Brahmana stands dispelling the hosts of Mara like the sun that illuminates the sky."
Meditation here means the superhuman (not supernatural) qualities, or arhatship in its highest of spiritual powers.
Copied out Simla, Sept. 28, 1882.
