(The Theosophist, March 1880)
The title prefixed to the following observations may well have suggested
a more metaphysical treatment of the subject than can be attempted on the
present occasion. The doctrine of the trinity, or trichotomy of man,
which distinguishes soul from spirit, comes to us with such weighty,
venerable, and even sacred authority that we may well be content, for the
moment, with confirmations that should. be intelligible to all,
forbearing the abstruser questions which have divided minds of the
highest philosophical capacity. We will not now inquire whether the
difference is one of states or of entities; whether the phenomenal or
mind consciousness is merely the external condition of one indivisible
Ego, or has its origin and nature in an altogether different principle;
the Spirit, or immortal part of us being of Divine birth, while the
senses and understanding, with the consciousness � Ahankara � thereto
appertaining, are from an Anima Mundi, or what in the Sankhya
philosophy is called Prakriti. My utmost expectations will have been
exceeded if it should happen that any considerations here offered should
throw even a faint suggestive light upon the bearings of this great
problem. It may be that the mere irreconcilability of all that is
characteristic of the temporal Ego with the conditions of the superior
life � if that can be made apparent � will incline you to regard the latter
rather as the Redeemer, that has indeed to be born within us for our
salvation and our immortality, than as the inmost, central, and
inseparable principle of our phenomenal life. It may be that by the light
of such reflexions the sense of identity will present no insuperable
difficulty to the conception of its contingency, or to recognition that
the mere consciousness which fails to attach itself to a higher principle
is no guarantee of an eternal individuality.
It is only by a
survey of what individuality, regarded as the source of all
our affections, thoughts, and actions, is, that we can realise
its
intrinsic worthlessness, and only when we have brought ourselves
to a real and felt acknowledgment of that fact, can we accept
with full
understanding those "hard sayings" of sacred authority which bid us "die
to ourselves," and which proclaim the necessity of a veritable
new birth. This mystic death and birth is the keynote of all
profound religious
teaching; and that which distinguishes the ordinary religious
mind from spiritual insight is just the tendency to interpret
these expressions as
merely figurative, or, indeed, to overlook them altogether.
Of all the reproaches which modern Spiritualism, with the prospect it is
thought to hold out of an individual temporal immortality, has had to
encounter, there is none that we can less afford to neglect than that
which represents it as an ideal essentially egotistical and borne.
True it is that our critics do us injustice through ignorance
of the enlarged views as to the progress of the soul in which
the speculations
of individual Spiritualists coincide with many remarkable spirit
teachings. These are, undoubtedly, a great advance upon popular
theological opinions, while some of them go far to satisfy the
claim of Spiritualism to be regarded as a religion. Nevertheless,
that slight
estimate of individuality, as we know it, which in one view too
easily allies itself to materialism, is also the attitude of
spiritual idealism,
and is seemingly at variance with the excessive value placed
by Spiritualists on the discovery of our mere psychic survival.
The idealist
may recognise this survival, but, whether he does so or not,
he occupies a post of vantage when be tells us that it is of
no ultimate importance.
For he, like the Spiritualist who proclaims his "proof palpable of
immortality," is thinking of the mere temporal, self-regarding
consciousness � its sensibilities, desires, gratifications and
affections
� which are unimportant absolutely, that is to say, their
importance is relative solely to the individual. There is, indeed,
no more characteristic outbirth of materialism than that which
makes a
teleological centre of the individual. Ideas have become mere
abstractions, the only reality is the infinitely little. Thus
utilitarianism can see in the State only a collection of individuals
whose "greatest happiness", mutually limited by nice adjustment to the
requirements of "the greatest numbers," becomes the supreme end of
government and law. And it cannot, I think, be pretended that
Spiritualists in general have advanced beyond this substitution of a
relative for an absolute standard. Their "glad tidings of great joy" are
not truly religious. They have regard to the perpetuation in
time of that lower consciousness whose manifestations, delights
and activity, are in
time, and of time alone. Their glorious message is not essentially
different from that which we can conceive as brought to us by
some great alchemist, who had discovered the secret of conferring
upon us and upon
our friends a mundane perpetuity of youth and health. Its highest
religious claim is that it enlarges the horizon of our opportunities.
As such, then, let us bail it with gratitude and relief, but,
on peril of
our salvation, if I may not say of our immortality, let us not
repose upon a prospect which is, at best, one of renewed labours
and trials, and
efforts to be free even of that very life whose only value is
opportunity.
To estimate the
value of individuality, we cannot do better than regard man
in his several mundane relations, supposing that either of
these
might become the central, actuating focus ot his being � his "ruling
love", as Swedenborg would call it � displacing his mere egoism,
or self-love, thrusting that more to the circumference, and identifying
him,
as to speak, with that circle of interests to which all his energies
and affections relate. Outside this substituted ego we are to
suppose that he
has no conscience, no desire, no will. Just as the entirely selfish
man views the whole of life, so far as it can really interest
him solely in
relation to his individual well-being, so our supposed man of
a family, of a society, of a church, or a State, has no eye for
any truth or any
interest more abstract or more individual than that of which
he may be rightly termed the incarnation. History shows approximations
to this
ideal man. Such a one, for instance, I conceive to have been
Loyola, such another, possibly, is Bismarck. Now these men have
ceased to be individuals
in their own eyes, so far as concerns any value attaching to
their own
special individualities. They are devotees. A certain "conversion"
has been effected, by which from mere individuals they have become
"representative" men. And we � the individuals � esteem them
precisely in proportion to the remoteness from individualism
of the spirit that
actuates them. As the circle of interests to which they are "devoted"
enlarges � that is to say, as the dross of individualism is purged
away � we accord them indulgence, respect, admiration and love.
From self to
the family, from the family to the sect or society, from the
sect or society to the Church (in no denominational sense) and
State, there is the ascending scale and widening circle, the
successive
transitions which make the worth of an individual depend on the
more or less complete subversion of his individuality by a more
comprehensive
soul or spirit. The very modesty which suppresses, as far as
possible, the personal pronoun in our addresses to others, testifies
to our sense
that we are hiding away some utterly insignificant and unworthy
thing; a thing that has no business even to be, except in that
utter privacy which
is rather a sleep and a rest than living. Well, but in the above
instances, even those most remote from sordid individuality,
we have fallen far short of that ideal in which the very conception
of the
partial, the atomic, is lost in the abstraction of universal
being, transfigured in the glory of a Divine personality. You
are familiar with
Swedenborg's distinction between discrete and continuous degrees.
Hitherto we have seen how man � the individual � may rise continuously
by throwing himself heart and soul into the living interests
of the world,
and lose his own limitations by adoption of a larger mundane
spirit. But still he has but ascended nearer to his own mundane
source, that soul of
the world, or Prakriti to which, if I must not too literally
insist on it, I may still resort as a convenient figure. To transcend
it, he must
advance by the discrete degree. No simple "bettering" of the
ordinary self, which leaves it alive, as the focus � the French
word "foyer" is
the more expressive � of his thoughts and actions; not even that
identification with higher interests in the world's plane just
spoken of, is, or can progressively become, in the least, adequate
to the
realisation of his Divine ideal. This "bettering" of our present
nature, it alone being recognised as essential, albeit capable
of "improvement",
is a commonplace and, to use a now familiar term, a "Philistine"
conception. It is the substitution of the continuous for the
discrete degree. It is a compromise with our dear old familiar
selves. "And Saul
and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of
the oxen, and of the fallings, and the lambs, and all that was
good, and would not
utterly destroy them; but everything that was vile and refuse,
that they
destroyed utterly." We know how little acceptable that compromise
was to the God of Israel; and no illustration can be more apt
than this
narrative, which we may well, as we would fain, believe to be
rather typical than historical. Typical of that indiscriminate
and radical
sacrifice, or "vastation," of our lower nature, which is insisted
upon as the one thing needful by all, or nearly all [Of
the higher religions teachings of Mohammedanism I know next to
nothing, and therefore cannot say if it should be excepted from
the statement. ]the
great
religions of the
world. No language could seem more purposely chosen to indicate
that it is the individual nature itself, and not merely its accidental
evils,
that has to be abandoned and annihilated. It is not denied that
what was spared was good; there is no suggestion of an universal
infection of
physical or moral evil; it is simply that what is good and useful
relatively to a lower state of being must perish with it if the
latter is to make way for something better. And the illustration
is the more
suitable in that the purpose of this paper is not ethical, but
points to a metaphysical conclusion, though without any attempt
at metaphysical
exposition. There is no question here of moral distinctions;
they are neither denied nor affirmed. According to the highest
moral standard, A
may be a most virtuous and estimable person. According to the
lowest, B may be exactly the reverse. The moral interval between
the two is within
what I have called, following Swedenborg, the "continuous degree".
And perhaps the distinction can be still better expressed by
another
reference to that Book which we theosophical students do not
less regard, because we are disposed to protest against all exclusive
pretensions of
religious systems. The good man who has, however, not yet attained
his
"sonship of God" is "under the law" � that moral law which is
educational
and preparatory, "the schoolmaster to bring us into Christ," our
own Divine spirit, or higher personality. To conceive the difference
between
these two states is to apprehend exactly what is here meant by
the false, temporal, and the true, eternal personality, and the
sense in which the
word personality is here intended to be understood. We do not
know whether, when that great change has come over us, when that
great work [The "great work", so often
mentioned by the Hermetic philosophers; and which is exactly
typified by the operation of alchemy, the conversion of the base
metals to gold � is now well understood to refer to the analogous
spiritual conversion. There is also good reason to believe that
the material process was a real one. ]
of our lives has been accomplished � here or hereafter � we shall
or shall not retain a sense of identity with our past, and for
ever discarded
selves. In philosophical parlance, the "matter" will have gone,
and the
very "form" will have been changed. Our transcendental identity
with the A or B that now is [A person
may have won his immortal life, and remained the same inner
self he was on earth, through eternity; but this does not
imply necessarily that he must either remain the Mr. Smith or
Brown be
was on earth, or lose his individuality." � "Isis Unveiled",
Volume 1, page 316 ]
must depend
on that question,
already disclaimed in
this paper, whether the Divine spirit is our originally central
essential
being, or is an hypostasis. Now, being "under the law" implies
that we do not act directly from our own will, but indirectly,
that is, in willing
obedience to another will. The will from which we should naturally
act � our own will � is of course to be understood not as mere
volition, but as
our nature � our "ruling love," which makes such and such things
agreeable to us, and others the reverse. As "under the law," this
nature is kept in suspension, and because it is suspended only
as to its
activity and manifestation, and by no means abrogated, is the
law � the substitution of a foreign will � necessary for us.
Our own will or nature
is still central; that which we obey by effort and resistance
to ourselves is more circumferential or hypostatic. Constancy
in this
obedience and resistance tends to draw the circumferential will
more and
more to the centre, till there ensues that "explosion," as St.
Martin called it, by which our natural will is for ever dispersed
and
annihilated by contact with the divine, and the latter henceforth
becomes
our very own. Thus has "the schoolmaster" brought us unto "Christ," and
if by "Christ" we understand no historically divine individual,
hut the
logos, word, or manifestation of God in us � then we have,
I believe, the essential truth that was taught in the Vedanta,
by Kapila,
by Buddha, by Confucius, by Plato, and by Jesus. There is another
presentation of possibly the same truth, for a reference to which
I am indebted to our brother J. W. Farquhar. It is from Swedenborg,
in the
Apocalypse Explained, No. 527: � "Every man has an interior
or exterior mind, and a mind superior or inferior. These two
minds are
altogether distinct. By the inferior mind man is in the natural
world together with men there; but by the superior mind he is
in the spiritual
world with the angels there. These two minds are so distinct
that man so long as he lives in the world does not know what
is performing within
himself in his superior mind; but when he becomes a spirit, which
is immediately after death, he does not know what is performing
in his
mind." The consciousness of the "superior mind," as a result
of mere separation from the earthly body, certainly does not
suggest that sublime
condition which implies separation from so much more than the
outer garment of flesh, but otherwise the distinction between
the two lives, or
minds, seems to correspond with that now under consideration.
What is it that
strikes us especially about this substitution of the divine-human
for the human-natural personality? Is it not the loss of
individualism? (Individualism, pray observe, not individuality.)
There are certain sayings of Jesus, which have probably offended
many in their
hearts, though they may not have dared to acknowledge such a
feeling to
themselves: "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" and those other
disclaimers of special ties and relationships which mar the perfect
sympathy of our reverence. There is something awful and incomprehensible
to us in this repudiation of individualism, even in its most amiable
relations. But it is in the Aryan philosophies that we see this negation
of all that we associate with individual life most emphatically and
explicitly insisted on. It is, indeed, the impossibility of otherwise
than thus negatively characterising the soul that has attained Moksha
(deliverance from bonds), which has caused the Hindu consummation to be
regarded as the loss of individuality and conscious existence. It is just
because we cannot easily dissociate individuality from individualism that
we turn from the sublime conception of primitive philosophy as from what
concerns us as little as the ceaseless activity and germination in other
brains of thought once thrown off and severed from the thinking source,
which is the immortality promised by Mr. Frederick Harrison to the select
specimens of humanity whose thoughts have any reproductive power. It is
not a mere preference of nothingness, or unconscious absorption, to
limitation that inspires the intense yearning of the Hindu mind for
Nirvana. Even in the Upanishads there are many evidences of a contrary
belief, while in the Sankhya the aphorisms of Kapila unmistakably
vindicate the individuality of soul (spirit). Individual consciousness is
maintained, perhaps infinitely intensified, but its "matter" is no longer
personal. Only try to realise what "freedom from desire," the
favourite phrase in which individualism is negated in these systems,
implies! Even
in that form of devotion which consists in action, the soul is
warned in
the Bhagavad-Gita that it must be indifferent to results.
Modern Spiritualism
itself testifies to something of the same sort. Thus we are
told by one of its most gifted and experienced champions: "Sometimes the evidence will come from an impersonal source, from some
instructor who has passed through the plane on which individuality is
demonstrable." � M. A. (Oxon), Spirit Identity, p. 7.
Again: "And
if he" (the investigator) "penetrates far enough, he will find
himself in a region for which his present embodied state unfits
him: a region in
which the very individuality is merged, and the highest and subtlest
truths are not locked within one breast, but emanate from representative
companies whose spheres of life are inter-blended." � Id.,
p. 15.
By this "inter-blending" is of course meant only a perfect sympathy and
community of thought; and I should doubtless misrepresent the author
quoted, were I to claim an entire identity of the idea he wishes to
convey, and that now under consideration. Yet what, after all, is
sympathy but the loosening of that hard "astringent" quality (to use
B�hme's phrase) wherein individualism consists? And just as in
true sympathy, the partial suppression of individualism and of
what is
distinctive, we experience a superior delight and intensity of
being, so it may be that in parting with all that shuts us up
in the spiritual
penthouse of an Ego � all, without exception or reserve � we may for
the first time know what true life is, and what are its ineffable
privileges. Yet it is not on this ground that acceptance can be hoped for
the conception of immortality here crudely and vaguely presented in
contrast to that bourgeois eternity of individualism and
the family affections, which is probably the great charm of Spiritualism
to
the majority of its proselytes. It is doubtful whether the things
that "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard," have ever taken strong
hold of the imagination, or reconciled it to the loss of all
that is definitely
associated with the joy and movement of living. Not as consummate
bliss can the dweller on the lower plane presume to commend that
transcendent
life. At the utmost he can but echo the revelation that came
to the
troubled mind in Sartor Resartus: "A man may do without happiness,
and instead thereof find blessedness." It is no sublimation of hope, but
the necessities of thought that compel us to seek the condition of true
being and immortality elsewhere than in the satisfactions of
individualism. True personality can only subsist in consciousness by
participation of that of which we can only say that it is the very
negation of individuality in any sense in which individuality can be
conceived by us. What is the content or "matter" of consciousness we
cannot define, save by vaguely calling it ideal? But we can say that in
that region individual interests and concerns will find no place. Nay,
more, we can affirm that only then has the influx of the new life a free
channel when the obstructions of individualism are already removed. Hence
the necessity of the mystic death, which is as truly a death as that
which restores our physical body to the elements. "Neither I am, nor is
aught mine, nor do I exist," a passage which has been well explained by a
Hindu Theosophist (Peary Chand Mittra), as meaning "that when
the
spiritual state is arrived at, I and mine, which belong to the
finite mind, cease, and the soul, living in the universum and
participating in infinity with God, manifests its infinite state," I
cannot refrain from quoting the following passage from the same
instructive writer: �
Every human being has a soul which, while not separable from
the brain or nerves, is mind, or J�vatma, or sentient soul,
but when regenerated or spiritualised by yog, it is free from
bondage, and manifests the divine essence. It rises above all phenomenal
states � joy, sorrow, grief, fear, hope, and in fact all states resulting
in pain or pleasure, and becomes blissful, realising immortality,
infinitude, and felicity of wisdom within itself. The sentient soul is
nervous, sensational, emotional, phenomenal, and impressional. It
constitutes the natural life and is finite. The soul and the non-soul are
thus the two landmarks. What is non-soul is prakrit, or created.
It is not the lot of every one to know what soul is, and therefore
millions live and die possessing minds cultivated in intellect and
feeling but not raised to the soul state. In proportion as one's soul is
emancipated from prakrit or sensuous bondage, in that proportion
his approximation to the soul state is attained; and it is this that
constitutes disparities in the intellectual, moral, and religions culture
of human beings, and their consequent approximation to God. �
Spiritual Stray Leaves, Calcutta, 1879.
He also cites some
words of Fichte, which prove that the like conclusion is
reached in the philosophy of Western idealism: "The real spirit which
comes to itself in human consciousness is to be regarded as an impersonal
pneuma � universal reason, nay, as the spirit of God Himself; and the
good of man's whole development, therefore, can be no other than to
substitute the universal for the individual consciousness".
That there may
be, and are affirmed to be, intermediate stages, states,
or discrete degrees, will, of course, be understood. The
aim of this
paper has been to call attention to the abstract condition of
the immortalised consciousness; negatively it is true, but
it is on this very
account more suggestive of practical applications. The connection
of this Society with the Spiritualist movement is so intimately
sympathetic, that
I hope one of these may be pointed out without offence. It is
that immortality cannot be phenomenally demonstrated. What
I have called
psychic survival � can be, and probably is. But immortality is
the attainment of a state, and that state the very negation
of phenomenal
existence. Another consequence refers to the direction our culture
should take. We have to compose ourselves to death. Nothing
less. We are each of
us a complex of desires, passions, interests, modes of thinking
and feeling, opinions, prejudices, judgment of others, likings
and
dis-likings, affections, aims, public and private. These things,
and whatever else constitutes the recognisable content of
our present
temporal individuality, are all in derogation of our ideal of
impersonal being � saving consciousness, the manifestation
of being. In some minute,
imperfect, relative, and almost worthless sense we may do right
in many of our judgments, and amiable in many of our sympathies
and affections.
We cannot be sure even of this. Only people unhabituated to introspection
and self-analysis are quite sure of it. These are ever those
who are loudest in their censures, and most dogmatic in their
opinionative
utterances. In some coarse, rude fashion they are useful, it
may be indispensable to the world's work, which is not ours,
save in a
transcendental sense and operation. We have to strip ourselves
of all that, and to seek perfect passionless tranquility.
Then we may hope to
die. Meditation, if it be deep, and long, and frequent enough,
will teach even our practical Western mind to understand
the Hindu mind in its
yearning for Nirvana. One infinitesimal atom of the great conglomerate
of humanity, who enjoys the temporal, sensual life, with its
gratifications and excitements as much as most, will testify
with unaffected sincerity that he would rather be annihilated
altogether than
remain for ever what he knows himself to be, or even recognisably
like it. And he is a very average moral specimen. I have
heard it said, "The
world's life and business would come to an end, there would be
an end to all its healthy activity, an end of commerce, arts,
manufactures, social
intercourse, government, law, and science, if we were all to
devote
ourselves to the practice of Yoga, which is pretty much
what your
ideal comes to." And the criticism is perfectly just and true.
Only I believe it does not go quite far enough. Not only the
activities of the
world but the phenomenal world itself, which is upheld in consciousness,
would disappear or take new, more interior, more living, and
more significant forms, at least for humanity, if the consciousness
of
humanity was itself raised to a superior state. Readers of St.
Martin and
of that impressive book of the late James Hinton "Man and his
Dwelling-place", especially if they have also by chance been
students of the idealistic philosophies, will not think this
suggestion extravagant.
If all the world were Yogis, the world would have no need of
those special activities, the ultimate end and purpose of which,
by-the-by, our
critic would find it not easy to define. And if only a few withdraw,
the
world can spare them. Enough of that.
Only let us not talk of this ideal of impersonal, universal being in
individual consciousness as an unverified dream. Our sense and impatience
of limitations are the guarantees that they are not final and
insuperable. Whence is this power of standing outside myself, of
recognising the worthlessness of the pseudo-judgments, of the prejudices
with their lurid colouring of passion, of the temporal interests, of the
ephemeral appetites, of all the sensibilities of egoism, to which I
nevertheless surrender myself, so that they indeed seem myself? Through
and above this troubled atmosphere I see a being, pure, passionless,
rightly measuring the proportions and relations of things, for whom there
is, properly speaking, no present, with its phantasms, falsities, and
half-truths: who has nothing personal in the sense of being opposed to
the whole of related personalities: who sees the truth rather than
struggles logically towards it, and truth of which I can at present form
no conception: whose activities are unimpeded by intellectual doubt,
unperverted by moral depravity, and who is indifferent to results,
because he has not to guide ins conduct by calculation of them, or by any
estimate of their value. I look up to him with awe, because in being
passionless he sometimes seems to me to be without love. Yet I know that
this is not so; only that his love is diffused by its range, and elevated
in abstraction beyond my gaze and comprehension. And I see in this being
my ideal, my higher, my only true, in a word, my immortal self.
This document is a publication
of the
Canadian Theosophical Association (a regional association of the Theosophical
Society in Adyar)
89 Promenade Riverside,
St-Lambert, QC J4R 1A3
Canada