Reprinted from The Theosophist
of May 1914 and May 2002
THERE is a curious
tendency, which springs up now and again in our ranks, to criticize occasionally
the early writings of Madame Blavatsky, and to take a a delight in finding
therein a certain of what might be called error. And yet the last few decades
have taught us, again and again, that where Madame Blavatsky seemed wrong,
it was not really so, but that we were wrong in misunderstanding what she
wrote. Our present leaders have cleared up one by one many of the obscurities
of her writings and doctrine, and now present them to us in pre-digested form,
in simple terminology since invented and perfected. We are beginning to learn
that Madame Blavatsky was face to face, in her attempt to launch, as gently
as possible, the Ancient Wisdom once more upon the world, with the stupendous
difficulty of conveying accurately to other minds, in a language almost unknown
to her,many unfamiliar things which she knew to be true. That she could have
been less in error than many suppose is evident from her words in a little
article 'My Books', which she wrote in Lucifer shortly before her
passing from the body. There she says, with reference to Isis Unveiled:
Save quotations and misprints,
every word of information found in this work comes from our eastern Masters,
and many a passage in it has been written by me under their dictation.
And speaking of the proof "corrections'
that were often made in her absence, she adds:
Witness the word 'plane' for
'cycle' as originally written, corrected by some unknown hand (I.347),
a 'correction' which shows Buddha teaching that there is no rebirth
on this planet (!!) when the contrary is asserted on page 346, and
the Lord Buddha is said to teach how to 'avoid' reincarnation; the use
of the word 'planet' for plane, of 'monas' for manas; and the sense
of the ideas sacrificed to grammatical form, and changed by the substitution
of wrong words and erroneous punctuation, etc.
Sir Thomas More and the Nilgiri
Master, who are spoken of in Man: Whence, How and Whither as Adepts,
are both said to have taken part in the writing of Isis Unveiled, and
they certainly understood what they were about, and most surely knew what
they were attempting to describe. And without deification on the one hand
or irreverence on the other, we may say that Madame Blavatsky was at least
this much advanced, that she could not deliberately pretend to knowledge where
she had none. Yet sometimes smaller minds, unable to leap the obstacles of
terminology that her unusual difficulties of exposition involved, and unable
to intuit the meaning behind her words, strike their heads against the barriers,
and blame her for the carelessness, ignorance or pretension with which they
have hurt themselves. Let us rather find what foothold we can in the heap
of rubbish that our imperfect language has raised in our path, so that presently
we may reach the top and, peeping over, obtain a glimpse of the realms of
truth that she had explored.
Perhaps in no subject more than
that of Reincarnation has Madame Blavatsky been so misunderstood. Again and
again we hear it said that Madame Blavatsky denied the truth of reincarnation
when she wrote Isis Unveiled, or at least that she did not know it
to be a fact. We venture to affirm that she would not have categorically stated,
'It is not true', unless she had know herself to be speaking truth. That she,
a true Messenger of the great Masters, could have pretended to knowledge that
she did not possess, or could have blankly denied what she did not know to
be false,is absurd; and to say that she did not know of the Indian beliefs
on the subject is ridiculous, when she speaks of them so definitely in the
same work. But did she say that reincarnation was not a fact? If so, then
in the sense in which she was using the word, she spoke truly. Let us see
what she has to say on the subject in Isis Unveiled (Volume I, page
351):
We now present a few fragments
of this mysterious doctrine of reincarnation - as distinct from metempsychosis
- which we have from an authority. Reincarnation, i.e., the appearance
of the same individual, or rather of his astral monad, twice on the same
planet [plane], is not a rule in nature; it is an exception, like the
teratological phenomenon of a two-headed infant.
Here she indicates that the doctrine
of reincarnation is a mysterious one, that it is not the same thing as metempsychosis,
that she has it from an authority, and that she is prepared to give only a
few fragments of it. What does she mean here by reincarnation? The appearance
of the same astral monad, that is to say, of the same ego working in the same
astral body; and this, twice on the same plane, is not a rule in Nature.
Does this disagree with the highly
philosophical conception of reincarnation that we have at the present day?
First of all we have the man living in what we call the causal body, on the
higher mental plane. When he is ready for birth he puts forth a ray ( a minute
fragment of himself) into the lower mental world. That ray draws round itself
the matter of that world or plane until it has gathered enough to form the
mental auric egg for its new earth-life After the short stay necessary for
this purpose, the ray of consciousness, not the whole ego, descends still
further into the astral world, and again stays long enough to draw round itself
enough matter of that plane to form its astral auric egg. Once more the ray
of consciousness descends on to the earth-plane, as it attaches itself to
a body that is being prepared for birth, so that presently this centre of
consciousness, this 'I' within the body, is born and it looks forth and says:
'This am I', and it identifies itself with the body in which it sees and feels
and thinks and moves. Then,as it grows in experience, it builds a new personality
round the 'I', and, as its body grows, its counterpart also appears in the
middle of the astral and the mental auric eggs. This personality, when complete,manifests
in its life its triple capacity of acting, feeling and thinking, all three
of which ought to be developed in the course of the life, and to be
to some extent harmonized as the personality grows to old age.
Then the man dies. He loses this
physical body. But the counterpart remains on the astral plane, and on that
he finds himself living, feeling and thinking just as before, though he can
no longer move the dense physical objects of the world that he has left. In
other words, such part of him as is fitted to exist in the astral world as
a conscious being survives, and he lives on for some time according to his
desires. Then comes the death of the astral body, and the person now lives
on the mental plane, in the devachanic state. There he has all that is the
outcome of the higher emotions and thoughts that he had during earth-life,
and he has lost only the power to move the objects of the lower planes and
the ability to be swayed by lower feelings and emotions. And, once more, he
loses his mental body on the mental plane, and all that is left of him is
with the ray of the man which was put forth at the beginning of this cycle
of necessity. Just as a swimmer, diving from a high bank into a lake with
cliffs on one side and a sandy beach on the other, must swim to the low shore
on the opposite side or be drowned; so must the soul, the ego, the man, having
plunged a ray of himself into birth, permit that ray to pass through the cycle
of necessity of that birth, through the mental to the astral and then to the
physical; through the physical to the astral and then to the mental, and through
that back to its true parent - or else lose that birth altogether.
Then, when the personality has
finished this cycle of necessity, and the ray is thus indrawn again, then
the personality, having left to it only such part of itself as is pure enough
to live in that high state - all that is noble and true and wise, and is fit
to be immortal - will enter into that immortal life of the true man, and will
never come forth again, but enjoy for ever the immortality of the spiritual
life. Yet the same man, thus enriched, will again put forth a
ray to enrich himself with still further experience; but it will be another
ray, not the same one, for that is joined with its parent and can never be
reincarnated again. The immortal man thus does not reincarnate; the personal
man does not reincarnate; but the immortal man puts forth from time to time
a slender ray from himself, until he no more needs or seeks further experience
or traffic with the earth. He is then free from any desire for worldly objects,
having fully realized the greater value of the things of his spiritual life;
he no longer needs successive births; he is an Arhat and, as Madame Blavatsky
says: 'At his death the Arhat is never reincarnated' - unless, of course,
he chooses to descend.
So then, was not Madame Blavatsky
right in saying that reincarnation, in the sense in which she used the word,
is not the rule, but the exception? Let us see how this bears out the rest
of her statement on the subject:
It (reincarnation) is preceded
by a violation of the laws of harmony of Nature, and happens only when
the latter, seeking to restore its disturbed equilibrium, violently throws
back into earth-life the astral monad which had been tossed out of the
circles of necessity by crime or accident. Thus, in cases of abortion,of
infants dying before a certain age, and of congenital and incurable idiocy,
Nature's original design to produce a perfect human being has been interrupted.
Therefore, while the gross matter of each of these several entities is
suffered to disperse itself at death through the vast realm of being,
the immortal spirit and astral monad of the individual - the latter having
been set apart to animate a frame, and the former to shed its divine light
on the corporeal organization - must try a second time to carry out the
purpose of the creative intelligence.
It is perfectly clear that the
writer is here referring to the reincarnation of the man in the same astral
body. She gives some of the reasons for what she here calls reincarnation
- what we usually now call rebirth from the astral plane. We can easily see
that unless there is in the personality at least some fragment of experience
which is good enough for immortality, for union with the immortal man, the
whole birth will be a failure, and that this something can only be gained
when the three principles of bodily experience, feeling and thought work together,
or are to some extent harmonized. If the earthly body is injured or destroyed
before the intelligence has thus harmonized itself with the lower principles,
a new attempt must be made to reincarnate with the same astral body, so that
the ray may come back enriched. Madame Blavatsky interprets the words of the
Christ as given in the Gospel story in exactly the same manner, emphasizing
the divine man within as a worker through bodies on earth, and denying any
recurrent incarnations of the personal man, the illusive and essentially decaying
personal self. In The Secret Doctrine, III.
66 she writes:
The most suggestive of Christ's
parables and 'dark sayings' is found in the explanation given by him to
his apostles about the blind man: 'Master, who did sin, this man or his
parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered: 'Neither hath this [blind,
physical] man sinned nor his parents; but that the works of [his] God
should be made manifest in him.' Man is the 'tabernacle', the 'building'
only, of his God; and of course it is not the temple but its inmate -
the vehicle of 'God' (the conscious Ego, or Fifth Principle, Manas, the
vehicle of the divine Monad or 'God' - that had sinned in a previous incarnation,
and had thus brought the karma of cecity upon the new building. Thus Jesus
spoke truly; but to this day his followers have refused to understand
the words of wisdom spoken. The Saviour is shown by his followers as though
he were paving, by his words and explanation, the way to a preconceived
programme that had to lead to an intended miracle. For such is the true
sense of the words 'that the works of God should be made manifest in him',
in the light of theological interpretation, and a very undignified one
it is, if the esoteric explanation is rejected
Returning once more to the text of
Isis Unveiled, we find that the passage continues:
If reason has been so far developed
as to become active and discriminative, there is no reincarnation on this
earth, for the three parts of the trine man have been united together, and
he is capable of running the race.
To the words 'there is no reincarnation
on this earth', we must add 'for this personality'. Now, what is this race of
which she speaks? For a clue to this we may turn to pages
345 and 346 of the same volume:
This philosophy
teaches that Nature never leaves her work unfinished; if baffled at the
first attempt, she tries again. When she evolves a human embryo, the intention
is that a man shall be perfected - physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
His body is to grow mature, wear out, and die; his mind to unfold, ripen,
and be harmoniously balanced; his divine spirit to illuminate and blend
easily with the inner man. No human being completes its grand cycle,
or the 'cycle of necessity', until all these are accomplished. As the laggards
in a race struggle and plod in their first quarter while the victor darts
past the goal, so, in the race of immortality, some souls out-speed all
the rest and reach the end, while their myriad competitors are toiling under
the load of matter, close to the starting point. Some unfortunates fall
out entirely, and lose all chance of the prize; some retrace their steps
and begin again. This is what the Hindu dreads above all things - transmigration
and reincarnation; only on other and inferior planets [planes],
never on this one.
That he is capable
of running the race means that he is capable of entering the immortal life and
sharing in that effort of the man within, who is at once his father and himself,
to gain that immortality which is called Arhatship. The average Hindu greatly
fears the opposite possibility, his sinking back into a lower condition of life,
or becoming a bhuta or spook, an unwholesome class of entities left severely
alone by self-respecting believers; whereas the human birth is regarded as giving
an opportunity to reach Moksha or liberation (truly, Arhatship), and thus to
cease reincarnating.
Our author does not
say that when a man has united his three parts and has perfected or completed
his human or personal nature, he has finished the race and become an
Arhat, but that he is capable of running the race for the achievement of perfect
immortality. There is a vast field of growth between the imperfection of an
idiot and the perfection of an Arhat, as we may see by her further explanation:
But when the
new being has not passed beyond the condition of Monad, or when, as in the
idiot, the trinity has not been completed, the immortal spark which illuminates
it has to re-enter on the earthly plane, as it was frustrated in its first
attempt. Otherwise, the mortal or astral, and the immortal or divine, souls,
could not progress in unison and pass onward to the sphere [plane] above.
The Monad which
was imprisoned in the elementary being- the rudimentary or lowest astral
form of the future man - after having passed through and quitted the highest
physical shape of a dumb animal - say an orang-utan, or again an elephant,
one of the most intellectual of brutes - that Monad, we say, cannot skip
over the physical and intellectual sphere of the terrestrial man, and be
suddenly ushered into the spiritual sphere above.
Does not the writer
here show that the Monad which passes through the animal kingdom must incarnate
in the human kingdom, and that before that which is now in the lower animals
can do so, it must pass into and through the highest order of animals, such
as the orang-utan or elephant, and is this not what we now mean by reincarnation?
And does she not mean that the essence of which the personality is built in
the astral and lower mental planes cannot enter in to the spiritual sphere above
(the higher mental, the plane of immortality) then or at any other time, without
passing through the development of the intellect in the human kingdom? And she
winds up with a strong statement in favour of reincarnation:
No need to remark
that even if [regarded as ] hypothetical, this theory is no more ridiculous
than many others considered as strictly orthodox.
One more passage
and we have done. On page 347 , we read:
This former
life believed in by the Buddhists, is not a life on this planet
[cycle], for, more than any other people, the Buddhistical philosopher appreciated
the great doctrine of cycles.
It is on this paragraph
that Madame Blavatsky comments in the note to 'My Books':
Witness the word
'planet' for 'cycle' as originally written, corrected by an unknown hand,
a 'correction' which shows Buddha teaching that there is no rebirth on
this planet (!!), when the contrary is asserted on
page 346, and the Lord Buddha is said to teach how to 'avoid' reincarnation.
And the cycle that
is here mentioned is again the cycle of necessity, which the ray must go through
in the course of one birth.
There is thus more
than enough to show that Madame Blavatsky, at the time of writing Isis Unveiled,
had nothing to say against the great truth of reincarnation as we hold
it today, and she certainly did know a great deal about the cycle of birth.
It is not clear that the writer desired most emphatically to deny the doctrine
of metempsychosis, but yet not launch suddenly upon an unprepared world the
full and staggering truth? Even more is this evident when we are told by Colonel
Olcott, in the midst of a mass of misunderstanding, that the passages relating
to the subject were approved, if not actually written, by one of the Mahatmas.
He writes in Old Diary Leaves, I, 288:
Why she and I
were permitted to put the misstatement into Isis, and, especially,
why it was made to me by the Mahatma, I cannot explain... They certainly
did not teach us what we now accept as the truth about Reincarnation; nor
bid us keep silent about it, nor resort to any vague generalities capable
of being now twisted into an apparent agreement with our present views;
nor interpose to prevent us from writing and teaching the heretical and
unscientific idea that, save it in certain few cases,the human entity was
not, and could not be, reincarnated on one and the same planet.
Madame Blavatsky
was not a tyro, and surely the Mahatma was not ignorant for we read in C.W.Leadbeater's
Invisible Helpers that an Initiate of even the first degree is required
to learn, not theoretically but of his own certain and direct knowledge, of
the truth of reincarnation. The conclusion is obvious; Madame Blavatsky was
neither deceiving nor deceived; but she was misunderstood in this, as in many
other of the teachings that she offered to an unprepared world.
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