---

The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett - 1923

By A. T. Barker

---

Letter No XXIVA

THE FAMOUS *' CONTRADICTIONS " 
Received Simla, Autumn 1882.

I hope you will give me great credit for obedience in havinglaboriously and against my inclination endeavoured to compileacase for the plaintiff in re the alleged contradiction. As I havesaid elsewhere these appear to me not much worth worrying about; though for the present they leave me cloudy in my ideas aboutDeva Chan and the victims of accident. It is because they do notfret me that I have never hitherto acted on your suggestion thatI should make notes of them,

(1)
Hume has been inclined to trace contradictions in some lettersreferring to the evolution of man, but in conversation with himI have always contended that these are not contradictions at all, —merely due to a confusion about rounds and races—a matteroflanguage. Then he has pretended to think that you have builtup the philosophy as you have gone on, and got out of the difficultyby inventing a great many more races than were contemplatedatfirst, which hypothesis I have always ridiculed as absurd. 

(2)
I have not re-copied here the passages about victims of accidentquoted in my letter of the 12th August and in apparent conflictwith the correction on the proof of my Letter on Theosophy.You have already said apropos to these quotations, on backofmine dated August 12th : — 

(3) " I can easily understand we are accused of contradictions andinconsistencies aye even to writing one thing to-day and denyingit to-morrow. Could you but know how I write my letters andthe time I am enabled to give to them perchance you would feelless critical if not exacting.

(4)
This passag-e it was which led me to think it might be that some of the earlier letters had been perhaps the *' victim of accident " itself. But to g-o on with the case for the plaintiff : — 

(5) ** Most of those whom you may call, if you like, candidates for Deva Chan die and are reborn in the Kama loka without re- membrance. . . . You can hardly call remembrance a dream of yours, some particular scene or scenes within whose narrow limits you would find enclosed a few persons . . . etc., call it the personal remembrance of A. P. Sinnett if you can. ' ' Notes on back of mine to Old Lady. 

(6) " Certainly, the new Ego, once that it is reborn in the Deva Chan retains for a certain time proportionate to its Earth life, a * complete recollection of his spiritual life on Earth. ' Long Devachan letter. 

(7) All those who have not slipped down into the mire of unredeemable sin and bestiality—go to the Deva chan, ibid. 

(8) It (Devachan) is an idealed paradise in each case of the Ego's own making and by him filled with the scenery crowded with the incidents and thronged with the people he would expect to find in such a sphere of compensative bliss. Ibid. 

(9) Nor can we call it a full but only a partial remembrance. X. Love and hatred are the only immortal feelings, the only sur- vivors from the wreck of the Ye—Damma or phenomenal world. Imagine yourself in Devachan then, with those you may have loved with such immortal love, with the familiar shadowy scenes connected with them for a background, and a perfect blank for everything else relating to your interior social political and literary life—Former letter: i.e. Notes. 

(10) Since the conscious perception of one's personality on Earth is but an evanescent dream, that sense will be equally that of a dream in the Devachan—only a hundred fold intensified. Long Devachan letter, 

(11) '* . . . . a connoisseur who passes aeons in the rapt delight of listening to divine symphonies by imaginary angelic choirs and orchestras long letter. See (g) X ante. See my notes lo and ii about Wagner etc.

 (12a) "In no case then, with the exception of suicides and shells isthere any possibility for any other to be attracted to a seance room.Notes. ,.^ . 

(12b) ** On marg-in I said rarely but I have not pronounced the wordnever." Appended to mine of 12th Aug.