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Invisible Worlds
Annie Besant on Psychic and Spiritual Development
By Kurt Leland Theosophical Publishing House
Copyright © 2013 Kurt Leland
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-3088-7
CHAPTER 1
WHAT THEOSOPHY IS (CA. 1896)
No religion, no philosophy, no science, worthy the name, can be understood in all its bearings on life, can be explored to its obscurest recesses, without careful and prolonged study from the person who desires to understand. The metaphysics and the philosophy of Christianity have given birth to a literature totally incomprehensible to the "man in the street," but it does not therefore follow that Christianity is to be set aside as an obscure and difficult study, with nothing in it intelligible to the average man and woman. Christianity has its popular as well as its philosophical side—and so with Theosophy. Its subtle metaphysics may task the keenest intellect, but its main outline is intelligible to anyone of average mental capacity, while its ethical teachings may be rendered attractive to a child.
It is with its main outline that I am here concerned—its outline as a philosophy and a science. Its ethical teachings have been familiar to the world for millenniums and found exquisite expression in many of the sayings ascribed to Zoroaster in Persia, to Lao Tzu in China, to Krishna and Buddha in Hindustan, and to Jesus in Palestine. The moral teachings of all these great sages are identical, and Theosophy can only reiterate on this head the unanimous declarations of these teachers, endorsed as they are by the conscience, though not by the practice, of mankind.
"To him that causelessly injures me," says Buddha, "I will return the protection of my ungrudging love. The more harm goes from him, the more good shall flow from me." "Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love." [Dhammapada 1.5]
"The good I will meet with goodness; the not good I will meet with goodness also; the faithful I will meet with faith; the unfaithful I will meet with faith also" [Tao Te Ching 49]. "Overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth" [Dhammapada 17.223]. So Lao Tzu taught his disciples.
"Love your enemies, do good to those that hate you" [Luke 6:27]. "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome with good" [Rom. 12:21]. Such was the doctrine of Jesus.
To maxims of conduct such as these, Theosophy can add nothing more noble. But it does claim to add a compelling motive, rooted in a rational philosophy—a motive which will have an effect on conduct which the simple enunciation of these maxims has failed to produce.
The justification of the Theosophical propaganda lies in the present condition of Christendom, to say nothing of the condition of Eastern lands. The wars, the labor strifes, the heartbreaking poverty, the unbrotherly competition, the brutality, the prostitution, the drunkenness—all these evils are rife in a civilization that calls itself Christian. And those who love man, who seek for the progress of the race, cannot but welcome into the field as allies in their warfare against sin and sorrow those who bring in their hands the priceless weapon of a knowledge which explains man's nature and the nature of the universe, and so opens up the road to his final triumph.
"The first object of the society," wrote one of those Great Souls who sent their messenger to found it for the helping of the East and the West alike, "is philanthropy. The true Theosophist is a philanthropist. Not for himself, but for the world he lives." And this true philanthropy is not only the helping of the suffering in material ways, but also the feeding of the starving mind with knowledge. For "this and philosophy, the right comprehension of life and its mysteries, will give the necessary basis and show the right path to pursue" [LMW 1:101].
The first principle to grasp in the esoteric philosophy—spoken of as Theosophy in modern times—is that beneath all phenomena is an Eternal Existence manifesting itself, unfolding itself, in the universe. This Existence manifests as a trinity—the Logos, or Word, being the name by which the manifested God is described in Theosophy, and the Logos having three aspects: the First, Second, and Third. From Him proceeds the universe, He, as it were, breathing it out; a universe which is subtlest spirit at its core, physical matter at its outermost manifestation.
Spirit and matter are the two poles of the evolving universe, and at every point in that universe both are found—spirit the parent of energies or forces, matter the parent of forms. This is the duality so marked in nature, the "pairs of opposites": positive/negative, light/darkness, male/female, and so on. The Logos in His evolving work uses as His agents and ministers the perfected men of past universes, the archangels and angels of the Christian scriptures.
Next, this universe evolves in seven stages—each successive stage being marked by an increasing latency of the spiritual side, by an increasing manifestation of the material side. It is the One robed in garments becoming denser, until at last the garments hide the life within. As Goethe sang,
At the roaring loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the garments thou seest Him by.
Thus the universe at last takes its physical shape, and is but the materialization of the divine thought. Having reached the point of densest materiality, it begins a slow return, evolving the spiritual forces which had been involved during the densifying process, and rendering the material form which the thought had taken instinct with energy, radiant with life.
The question may here arise: "Why seven stages? Why not ten, seventeen, fifty?" Nature is ever repeating this number seven, which lies at the basis of our cycle of evolution. Why seven is the number which underlies our present evolution I do not know. But that it is so may be found by observation.
The moon, that so largely influences our life periods, marks them in multiples of seven, for it completes its cycle in twenty-eight days (the lunar month). The fourth of this, the quarter of the moon, gives our week, consisting of seven risings and settings of the sun. Periods of gestation last for multiples of the lunar months. The seventh year of postnatal life marks a stage of development in the growing child, as does the fourteenth. Fevers reach their critical stages on the seventh, fourteenth, and twenty-first days.
Illustrations might be indefinitely multiplied. All this repetition of seven in nature shows that this number is not a fanciful and arbitrary choice of the mystic, but that he merely recognizes a fact and accepts it.
The next important principle is that the universe and man mirror each other—all the forces that exist in great in the universe existing in small in man. Man is correlated to the universe, and this correlation enables him to investigate all regions of the universe, gaining in each, by the exercise of the corresponding faculties in his own nature, direct knowledge which he can register in his own consciousness. Thus he possesses
1. A physical body, divided into dense and etheric parts. By the first part, he comes into contact with the dense universe—the cells of his body receiving impressions from outside, and conveying those impressions inward. The eye, the ear, the touch, the taste, the smell, all are avenues of knowledge from the external universe. The second, or etheric double, is the vehicle of the life forces, of electric and magnetic energies, and is correlated to the ethereal world. In this plays the vitality which keeps in orderly activity all the cells and molecules of the physical body.
2. A body of desire; a graphic epithet, which expresses the collective whole of appetites, cravings, desires, and passions which are found in connection with the body. It is the bridge between the physical body and the mind. Pleasure and pain have in this their seat. Heat and cold, hunger and thirst, sexual desire, love and hatred, in their simplest forms, are contacted by the soul through this body of desire. This body is made of astral matter and is correlated to the astral world.
3. A mental body; this is made of mental matter and is correlated to the lower levels of the mental world. It is the immediate garment of the soul, and is often called the lower mind—the organ for all concrete thinking.
These three bodies, with the vitality that throbs through them, are the three garments of the soul, in which he is clad for his experience of life in the corresponding regions of the universe. In these he dwells in our physical world, and may range the astral and mental planes of existence, gathering knowledge of each.
While man possesses these three garments and (4.) vitality, he is
5. A soul, that is, a living intelligence, capable of learning by experience and evolving into a nobly intellectual and spiritual entity by the discipline of life on earth. This is the real man, or thinker, our word man being derived from the Sanskrit root man ("think").
6 and 7. Spirit in its vehicle, for which the English language has no distinctive name. By this, the realms of spirit may be directly known, instead of being taken on faith.
This analysis of man gives us a key to his complicated nature, enabling us to trace and to understand the workings of consciousness alike in the saint, the criminal, the average man and woman—and by understanding these, we learn how best to help the good towards expression, how best to help the higher to dominate the lower, to aid the man in his struggle to control, educate, and evolve the lower constituents of his nature.
At death, he shakes off the physical and astral bodies, the time occupied in the disrobing process varying according to conditions which I have not here space to discuss. The freed soul, clad in the mental body and brooded over by the spirit and its vehicle, then passes onward into a serene and happy state, in which he assimilates the experience gathered in the life passed through. Then the mental body also disintegrates, the soul weaving into his own nature all that in that life is worthy of immortality. For the average person, this rest of the soul lasts for about fifteen hundred years, but the period varies with the stage of evolution at which the soul has arrived.
Then comes the time for the return of the soul to earth to learn another lesson in life's school. The place of his incarnation, the nation, the family, are determined by the affinities he has formed in past lives. The soul that yielded to the cravings of his passional nature will be drawn to parents showing similar characteristics. The dominating ideas of one life govern the conditions of the next—hence the enormous importance of ideals and of the tendencies of our thoughts. The thoughts of one life make the character of the succeeding lives, and this can be escaped by none.
In each life the soul seeks experience—for by experience the soul gains knowledge, and by knowledge the power to increasingly guide the man of flesh in whom he dwells. A life which is sorrowful to outward vision may be a life in which the soul rejoices, for every obstacle conquered and every pain endured are transmuted, by this spiritual alchemy, into new forces and new qualities. Measure the difference in power and usefulness of the soul in some low type of savage and that in some hero or saint, and you will understand why the soul seeks experience and how his growth proceeds.
Thus the soul journeys on his way from life to life until all that earth can give him of experience has been reaped. He reaches the greatest altitude compatible with life in this world—and then a choice is before him. He can pass onward triumphant into realms of loftier nature and there expand and grow. Or, this glorious prize within his grasp, he may turn back to earth patiently again to bear the burden of the flesh until the lowliest child of man has reached his own level and he enters into peace with all his race.
The Great Souls that choose this lot are the saviors of the world, and they wait, watching to help whenever help can be given—the Elder Brothers of our race, the perfected Sons of Man. Blessed beyond all blessings are they who in any fashion can aid them in lifting the heavy burden of our world, and can cooperate, even if it be in humblest way, in hastening the evolution of the glorious destiny of man. For the service of man is the noblest of privileges, and to work for the world the richest of prizes. Our philosophy, our science, our religion have worth only as they make us more useful members of the brotherhood of man.
CHAPTER 2
AN INTRODUCTION TO THEOSOPHY (1896)
The Theosophical Society
The Theosophical Society was founded in New York City in the year 1875, the day recognized as its official birthday being November 17. Regarded as a spiritual movement inaugurated in the first year of the closing quarter of the nineteenth century for the helping of men, it has for its true founders certain great spiritual teachers, who devised this means of reawakening the East and awakening the West to the knowledge of the springs of spiritual truth that lay hidden in Eastern philosophy.
The spread of materialism in the West, with its consequent spread in the East, was threatening the very existence of spiritual life among men. The triumphs of Western science—so dazzling in their effects on material comfort and luxury, as well as in their intellectual promise—were alluring the most promising of the youth of every land towards a philosophy becoming more and more materialistic, while the minds whose bent was more religious than intellectual were slipping further and further into superstition. Already, the cry was being raised that between Rome and atheism there was no sure and defensible standing-ground, and that the battle of the near future was between a religion devoid of all science and a science devoid of all religion.
It was at this crisis that the great guardians of spiritual truth stepped forward, and sent into the arena a new combatant, the esoteric philosophy. As a center for those who held this philosophy, round whom might gather others who—agreed or not on philosophy—were willing to cooperate for the spreading of love and true brotherhood among men, they instigated the founding of the Theosophical Society. Regarded as an organized society existing in the world with definite objects, rules, and organization, it had for its founders Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a chela (disciple) of the spiritual teachers above spoken of, and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, whom she brought into contact with these same teachers.
Helena P. Blavatsky was a Russian of noble birth, descended on the father's side from the branch of the von Hahns settled in Russia, and on the mother's from the Fadeyevs and the Dolgorukis, she being the granddaughter of the Princess Helene Dolgorukova of the elder branch, and daughter of Helene Fadeyev. These facts have been certified by her uncle, Major-General Fadeyev, of the Tzar's staff, and Joint Secretary of State in the Russian Ministry of the Interior. She was the widow of a Councilor of State, General Nikifor Blavatsky, late Vice-Governor of the Province of Erivan, Caucasus. Renouncing rank and wealth, she had traveled in all lands, searching for occult knowledge, and had finally passed under the tuition of a great Eastern Adept, to the carrying out of whose directions in the service of man the whole of her later life was devoted. She passed from this life on May 8th, 1891, at 19 Avenue Road, Regent's Park, London.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Invisible Worlds by Kurt Leland. Copyright © 2013 Kurt Leland. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
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