Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett - 1923
By A. T. Barker
Letter No XXII
Extract from Letter by K.H. to Hume. Received for my perusal towards the end of season 1882. (A.P.S.)
Did it ever strike you,—and now from the standpoint of your Western science and the suggestion of your own ego which has already seized up the essentials of every truth, prepare to deride the erroneous idea—did you ever suspect that Universal, like finite, human mind might have two attributes, or a dual power—one the voluntary and conscious, the other the involuntary and unconscious or the mechanical power. To reconcile the difficulty of many theistic and anti-theistic propositions, both these powers are a philosophical necessity. The possibility of the first or the voluntary and conscious attribute in reference to the infinite mind, notwithstanding the assertion of all the Egos throughout the living world—will remain for ever a mere hypothesis, whereas in the finite mind it is a scientific and demonstrated fact. The highest Planetary Spirit is as ignorant of the first as we are, and the hypothesis will remain one even in Nirvana, and it is a mere inferential possibility, whether there or here.
ere inferential possibility, whether there or here. Take the human mind in connexion with the body. Man has two distinct physical brains; the cerebrum with its two hemispheres at the frontal part of the head—the source of the voluntary nerves ; and the cerebellum, situated at the back portion of the skull—the fountain of the involuntary nerves which are the agents of the unconscious or mechanical powers of the mind to act through. And weak and uncertain as may be the control of man over his involuntary, such as the blood circulation, the throbbing of the heart and respiration, especially during sleep—^yet how far more powerful, how much more potential appears man as master and ruler over the blind molecular motion—the laws which govern his body (a proof of this being afforded by the phenomenal powers of the Adept and even the common Yogi) than that which you will call God, shows over the immutable laws of Nature. Contrary in that to the finite, the ** infinite mind," which we name so but for agreement sake, for we call it the infinite force—exhibits but the functions of its cerebellium, the existence of its supposed cerebrum being admitted as above stated, but on the inferential hypothesis deduced from the Kabalistic theory (correct in everyother relation) of the Macrocosm being the prototype of theMicrocosm. So far as we know the corroboration of it by modemscience receiving but Httle consideration—so far as the highestPlanetary Spirits have ascertained (who remember well have thesame relation with the trans-cosmical world, penetrating behindthe primitive veil of cosmic matter as we have to go behind theveil of this, our brute physical world—) the infinite mind displaysto them as to us no more than the regular unconscious throbbingsof the eternal and universal pulse of Nature, throughout themyriads of worlds within as without the primitive veil of our solarsystem.
So far—we know. Within and to the utmost limit, to the veryedge of the cosmic veil we know the facts to be correct—owingtoI>ersonal experience ; for the information gathered as to what takesplace beyond—we are indebted to the Planetary Spirits, to ourBlessed Lord Buddha. This of course may be regarded as secondhand information. There are those who rather than to yield tothe evidence of fact will prefer regarding even the planetary godsas '* erring" disembodied philosophers if not actually liars. Beit so. Everyone is master of his own wisdom—says a Tibetanproverb and he is at liberty either to honour or degrade his slave—. However I will go on for the benefit of those who may yet seizemy explanation of the problem and understand the solution.
It is the particular faculty of the involuntary power of the infinitemind—^which no one could ever think of calling God,—to beeternally involving subjective matter into objective atoms (you willplease remember that the two adjectives are used but in a relativesense) or cosmic matter to be later on developed into form. Andit is likewise that same involuntary mechanical power that weseeso intensely active in all the fixed laws of nature—^which governsand controls what is called the Universe or the Cosmos. Thereare some modern philosophers who would prove the existence ofa Creator from motion. We say and affirm that that motion—the universal j>erpetual motion which never ceases never slackensnor increases its speed not even during the interludes between thepralayas, or " night of Brahma" but goes on like a mill set inmotion, whether it has anything to grind or not (for the pralayameans the temporary loss of every form, but by no means thedestruction of cosmic matter which is eternal)—^we say this per-petual motion is the only eternal and uncreated Deity we are ableto recognise. To regard God as an intelligent spirit, and acceptat the same time his absolute immateriality is to conceive of anonentity, a blank void ; to regard God as a Being, an Ego andto place his intelligence under a bushel for some mysterious reasonis the most consummate nonsense ; to endow him with intelligence in the face of blind brutal Evil is to make of him a fiend—a most rascally God. A being however gigantic, occupying space and having length breadth and thickness is most certainly a Mosaic deity; ** No-being " and a mere principle lands you directly in the Buddhistic atheism, or the Vedantic primitive Acosmism. What lies beyond and outside the worlds of form, and being, in worlds and spheres in their most spiritualized state—(and you will perhaps oblige us by telling us where that beyond can be, since the Universe is infinite and limitless) is useless for anyone to search after since even Planetary Spirits have no knowledge or perception of it. If our greatest adepts and Boddhisatvas have never penetrated themselves beyond our solar system, —and the idea seems to suit your preconceived theistic theory wonderfully, my respected Brother—they should know of the existence of other such solar systems, with as mathematical a certainty as any western astronomer knows of the existence of invisible stars which he can never approach or explore. But of that which lies within the worlds and systems, not in the trans-infinitude—(a queer expression to use)—^but in the cis-infinitude rather, in the state of the purest and inconceivable immateriality, no one ever knew or will ever tell, hence it is something non-existent for the universe. You are at liberty to place in this eternal vacuum the intellectual or voluntary powers of your deity—if you can conceive of such a thing.
Meanwhile we may say that it is motion that governs the laws of nature ; and that it governs them as the mechanical impulse given to running water which will propel them either in a correct line or along hundreds of side furrows they may happen to meet on their way and whether those furrows are natural grooves or channels prepared artificially by the hand of man. And we maintain that wherever there is life and being, and in however much spiritualized a form, there is no room for moral government, much less for a moral Governor—a Being which at the same time has no form nor occupies space ! Verily if light shineth in darkness, and darkness comprehends it not, it is because such is the natural law, but how much more suggestive and pregnant with meaning for one who knows, to say that light can still less comprehend darkness, nor ever know it since it kills wherever it penetrates and annihilates it instantly. Pure yet a volitional Spirit is an absurdity for volitional mind. The result of organism cannot exist indef>endently of an organized brain and an organized brain made out of nihil is a still greater fallacy. If you ask me " Whence then the immutable laws?—laws cannot make themselves "—then in my turn I will ask you—and whence their supposed Creator?—A Creator cannot create or make himself if the brain did not make itself for this would be affirming that brain acted before it existed, how could intelligence, the result of an organized brain, act beforeits creator was made.
All this reminds one of the wrangling for seniorship. Yourdoctrines clash too much with your theories then we can easilygive up the subject and talk of something else. Study the lawsand the doctrines of the Nepaulese Swabbhavikas, the principalBuddhist philosophical school in India, and you will find them themost learned as the most scientifically logical wranglers in theworld. Their plastic, invisible, eternal, omnipresent, unconsciousSwabbhavat is Force or Motion ever generating its electricitywhich is life.
Yes : there is a force as limitless as thought, as potent asboundless will, as subtle as the essence of life so inconceivablyawful in its rending force as to convulse the universe to its centrewould it but be used as a lever, but this Force is not God, sincethere are men who have learned the secret of subjecting it to theirwill when necessary. Look around you and see the myriad manifestations of life, so infinitely multiform ; of life, of motion, ofchange. What caused these? From what inexhaustible sourcecame they, by what agency? Out of the invisible and subjectivethey have entered our little area of the visible and objective.Children of Akasa, concrete evolutions from the ether, it wasforce which brought them into perceptibility and Force will intime remove them from sight of man. Why should this plant inyour garden to the right, have been produced with such a shapeand that other one to the left with one totally dissimilar? Arethese not the results of varying actions of Force—unlike correla-tions? Given a perfect monotony of activities throughout theworld, and we would have a complete identity of forms, colours,shapes and properties throughout all the kingdom of nature. Itis the motion with its resulting conflict, neutralization, equilibration, correlation, to which is due the infinite variety which prevails. You speak of an intelligent and good—(the attribute israther unfortunately chosen)—Father, a moral guide and governorof the universe and man. A certain condition of things existsround us which we call normal. Under this nothing can occurwhich transcends our every-day experience ** God's immutablelaws." But suppose we change this condition and have the bestof him without whom even a hair of your head will not fall, asthey tell you in the West. A current of air brings to me fromthe lake near which, with my fingers half frozen I now write toyou this letter—I change by a certain combination of electricalmagnetic odyllic or other influences the current of air whichbenumbs my fingers into a warmer breeze ; I have thwarted theintention of the Almighty, and dethroned him at my will ! I cando that, or when I do not want Nature to produce strange and too visible phenomena, I force my nature-seeing^, nature-influencing self within me, to suddenly awake to new perceptions and feelings and thus am my own Creator and ruler.
But do you think that you are right when saying that " the laws arise." Immutable laws cannot arise, since they are eternal and uncreated, propelled in the Eternity and that God himself if such a thing existed, could never have the power of stopping them. And when did I say that these laws were fortuitous per se. I meant their blind correlations, never the laws, or rather the law—since we recognise but one law in the Universe, the law of harmony, of perfect equilibrium. Then for a man endowed with so subtle a logic, and such a fine comprehension of the value of ideas in general and that of words especially—for a, man so accurate as you generally are to make tirades upon an ** all-wise, powerful and love-ful God " seems to say at least strange. I do not protest at all as you seem to think against your theism, or a belief in an abstract ideal of some kind, but I cannot help asking you, how do you or how can you know that your God is all-wise, omnipotent and love-ful, when everything in nature, physical and moral, proves such a being, if he does exist to be quite the reverse of all you say of him ? Strange delusion and one which seems to over-power your very intellect.
The difficulty of explaining the fact that " unintelligent Forces can give rise to highly intelligent beings like ourselves, ' ' is covered by the eternal progression of cycles, and the process of evolution ever perfecting it's work as it goes along. Not believing in cycles, it is unnecessary for you to learn that which will create but a new pretext for you, my dear Brother, to combat the theory and argue upon it ad infinitum. Nor did I ever become guilty of the heresy I am accused of—in reference to spirit and matter. The conception of matter and spirit as entirely distinct, and both eternal could certainly never have entered my head, however little I may know of them, for it is one of the elementary and fundamental doctrines of Occultism that the two are one, and are distinct but in their respective manifestations, and only in the limited perceptions of the world of senses. Far from " lacking philosophical breadth " then, our doctrines show, but one principle in nature, —spirit-matter or matter-spirit, the third the ultimate Absolute or the quintessence of the two, if I may be allowed to use such an erroneous term in the present appHcation—losing itself beyond the view and spiritual perceptions of even the ** Gods " or Planetary Spirits. This third principle says the Vedantic Philo- sophers—is the only reality, everything else being Maya, as none of the Protean manifestations of Spirit and matter or Purusha and Prakriti have ever been regarded in any other light than that of temporary delusions of the senses. Even in the hardly outlined philosophy of Isis this idea is clearly carried out. In the bookofKin-te, Spirit is called the unultimate sublimation of matter, andmatter the crystallization of spirit. And no better illustrationcould be afforded than in the very simple phenomenon of ice watervapK>ur and the final dispersion of the latter, the phenomenon beingreversed in it's consecutive manifestations and called the Spiritfalling- into generations or matter. This trinity resolving itselfinto unity,—a doctrine as old as the world of thought—^was seizedupon by some early Christians, who had it in the Schools of Alexandria, and made up into the Father, or generative spirit ; the Sonor matter, —man; and into the Holy Ghost, the immaterial essence,or the apex of the equilateral triangle, an idea found to this dayin the pyramids of Egypt. Thus once more it is proved that youmisunderstand my meaning entirely, whenever for the sake ofbrevity I use the phraseology habitual with the Western people.But in my turn I have to remark that your idea that matter is butthe temporary allotropic form of spirit differing from it as charcoal does from diamond is as unphilosophical as it is unscientificfrom both the Eastern and the Western points of view, charcoalbeing but a form of residue of matter, while matter per se is in-destructible, and as I maintain coeval with spirit—that spiritwhich we know and can conceive of. Bereaved of Prakriti,Purusha (Spirit) is unable to manifest itself, —hence ceases to exist—becomes nihil. Without spirit or Force, even that which Sciencestyles as " not living" matter, the scM:ralled mineral ingredientswhich feed plants, could never have been called into form. Thereis a moment in the existence of every molecule and atom of matterwhen, for one cause or another, the last spark of spirit or motionor life (call it by whatever name) is withdrawn, and in the sameinstant with the swiftness that surpasses that of the lightningglance of thought the atom or molecule or an aggregation of molecules is annihilated to return to its pristine purity of intra-cosmic matter. It is drawn to the mother fount with the velocityof a globule of quick-silver to the central mass. Matter, force,and motion are the trinity of physical objective nature, as thetrinitarian unity of spirit-matter is that of the spiritual or subjective nature. Motion is eternal because spirit is eternal. Butno modes of motion can ever be conceived unless they be in connection with matter.
And now to your extraordinary hypothesis that evil with itsattendant train of sin and suffering is not the result of matter,but may be perchance the wise scheme of the moral Governorofthe Universe. Conceivable as the idea may seem to you trainedin the pernicious fallacy of the Christian, —'* the ways of the Lordare inscrutable ' ' —it is utterly inconceivable for me. MustIrepeat again that the best Adepts have searched the Universe during milleniums and found nowhere the slightest trace of such a Maochiavelian schemer—but throughout, the same immutable, in- exorable law. You must excuse me therefore if I positively decline to waste my time over such childish speculations. It is not *' the ways of the Lord " but rather those of some extremely intelligent men in everything but some particular hobby that are to me incomprehensible.
As you say this need "make no difference between us"—personally. But it does make a world of difference if you propose to learn and offer me to teach. For the life of me I cannot make out how I could ever impart to you that which I know since the very A. B.C. of what I know, the rock upon which the secrets of the occult universe, whether on this or that side of the veil, are encrusted, is contradicted by you invariably and a priori. My very dear Brother, either we know something or we do not know anything. In the first case what is the use of your learning, since you think you know better? In the second case why should you lose your time? You say it matters nothing whether these laws are the expression of the will of an intelligent conscious God as you think or constitute the inevitable attributes of an unintelligent, unconscious " God " as I hold. I say, it matters everything, and since you earnestly believe that these fundamental questions (of spirit and matter—of God or no God) ** are admittedly beyond both of us "—in other words that neither I nor yet our greatest adepts can know no more than you do, then what is there on earth that I could teach you? You know that in order to enable you to read you have first to learn your letters—yet you want to know the course of events before and after the Pralayas, of every event here on this globe on the opening of a new cycle, namely a mystery imparted at one of the last initiations, as Mr. Sinnett was told, — for my letter to him upon the Planetary Spirits was simply inci- dental—brought out by a question of his. And now you will say I am evading the direct issue. I have discoursed upon colatteral points, but have not explained to you all you want to know and asked me to tell you. I " dodge " as I always do. Pardon me for contradicting you, but it is nothing of the kind. There are a thousands questions I will never be permitted to answer, and it would be dodging were I to answer you otherwise than I do. I tell you plainly you are unfit to learn, for your mind is too full and there is not a comer vacant from whence a previous occupant would not arise, to struggle with and drive away the newcomer. Therefore I do not evade, I only give you time to reflect and deduce and first learn well what was already given you before you seize on something else. The world of force, is the world of Occultism and the only one whither the highest initiate goes to probe the secrets of being. Hence no-one but such an initiate can know anything- of these secrets. Guided by his Guru thechela first discovers this world, then its laws, then their centrifugalevolutions into the world of matter. To become a perfect adepttakes him long- years, but at last he becomes the master. Thehidden thing-s have become patent, and mystery and miracle havefled from his sight forever. He sees how to guide force in thisdirection or that—to produce desirable effects. The secretchemical, electric or odic properties of plants, herbs, roots,minerals, animal tissue, are as familiar to him as the feathers ofyour birds are to you. No change in the etheric vibrations canescape him. He applies his knowledge, and behold a miracle! And he who started with repudiation of the very idea that miracleis possible, is straight-way classed as a miracle worker and eitherworshipped by the fools as a demi-god or repudiated by still greaterfools as a charlatan ! And to show you how exact a science isoccultism let me tell you that the means we avail ourselves of areall laid down for us in a code as old as humanity to the minutestdetail, but everyone of us has to begin from the beginning, notfrom the end. Our laws are as immutable as those of Nature,and they were known to man and eternity before this struttinggame-cock, modern science, was hatched. If I have not givenyou the modus operandi or begun by the wrong end, I have atleast shown you that we build our philosophy upon experiment anddeduction—unless you choose to question and dispute this factequally with all others. Learn first our laws and educate yourperceptions, dear Brother. Control your involuntary powers anddevelop in the right direction your will and you will becomeateacher instead of a learner. I would not refuse what I havearight to teach. Only I had to study for fifteen years before I cameto the doctrines of cycles and had to learn simpler things at first.But do what we may, and whatever happens I trust we will haveno more arguing which is as profitless as it is painful.
