Part 14 (2/2)

But Theosophy and kindred cults have gone farther, since Pantheism itself must go farther. Directly you have identified creation and the creative power so intimately as Pantheism does, then you are under bonds, if you have any curiosity at all or any speculative force, to try to explain the ways in which a G.o.d, who is just to begin with all that there is, has managed to reveal Himself in such an infinitude of minute and sometimes unG.o.dlike ways. So Pantheism has its own scheme, not of creation, for there is no place in Pantheism for creation, but rather of emanation. Eastern thought subst.i.tutes for the cosmogony of the Old Testament which simply carries the world back to a creative G.o.d and seeks to go no farther, and for the methods of Western science which carries creation back to ultimate force and is unable to go any farther, an entirely different system.

_How the One Becomes the Many_

A paragraph in Mrs. Besant's ”The Ancient Wisdom” (page 41) may help us here. ”Coming forth from the depths of the One Existence, from the One beyond all thought and all speech, a Logos, by imposing on Himself a limit, circ.u.mscribing voluntarily the range of His own Being, becomes the manifested G.o.d, and tracing the limiting sphere of His activity thus outlines the area of His universe. Within that sphere the universe is born, is evolved, and dies; it lives, it moves, it has its being in Him; its matter is His emanation; its forces and energies are currents of His life; He is immanent in every atom, all-pervading, all-sustaining, all-evolving; He is its source and its end, its cause and its object, its centre and circ.u.mference; it is built on Him as its sure foundation, it breathes in Him as its encircling s.p.a.ce; He is in everything and everything in Him. Thus have the Sages of the Ancient Wisdom taught us of the beginning of the manifested worlds.”

It is not, of course, fair to say that here is something entirely different from the line of Western scientific and philosophic thought or wholly alien to elements in modern Christianity.[65] The real problem of modern Theism is to connect what science discovers with what faith a.s.sumes. The broader generalization of science resolves action and existence into the unities of an underlying and self-conserving force which grows more and more subtle and tenuous as we follow it from molecules to atoms, from atoms to eons and electrons, and even discern beneath these something more impalpable than themselves, and there must be some way in which a creative power conceived by faith in terms of personality has released the forces which have built themselves into the universe. The difference is, however, that Christian Theism refuses completely to identify G.o.d and His universe.

[Footnote 65: Indeed this is a better commentary on the prologue to the Gospel of John and certain pa.s.sages of Colossians than most of the orthodox theologies, and the self-limitation of G.o.d is the key to the moral freedom of the individual.]

There is, after all, a profound distinction between creating and becoming. Theosophy undertakes to explain for us how ”the One beyond all thought and all speech” has become us and our universe. It attempts also to provide a way by which we, who are entangled, to our pain and sorrow, in the web of things thus woven, may escape from it and lose ourselves again in the One. It takes the wheel for its symbol in more senses than one. Everything is a turning and returning and we ourselves are bound upon the wheel, carried down or up and finally to be set free, only by the acceptance of a certain discipline of life.

Theosophy, then, is both speculative and practical. Its speculations take an immense range necessarily; it is no simple thing to follow the One from the depths of His hidden existence to our earth-born lives and the forces which flow about them. Only an expert deeply versed in Eastern literature would be able to say whether Mrs. Besant follows her Eastern masters faithfully in reporting their conclusions, but she has plainly availed herself of many of the terms and suggestions of modern science in interpreting them to us. If one could use a figure borrowed from electricity, the One is ”stepped-down” through a series of planes and manifestations. Theosophy makes much of sevens--no use to ask why--and bridges the gulf between ultimate and present realities by a series of seven planes in which what is coa.r.s.est in the plane above becomes the germ of what is finest in the plane beneath. Even so, the One does not directly touch even the highest of these seven planes.

(Theosophy is, first of all, a study in descents and not in ascents; ascent comes later.) There are between the One and the topmost plane three emanations (but perhaps we would better let Mrs. Besant speak to us herself): ”The self-unfolding of the Logos in a threefold form: the first Logos the root of all being, from Him the second manifesting the two aspects of life and form, then the third Logos, the universal mind, that in which all archetypically exists, the source of beings, the fount of fas.h.i.+oning energies.”[66]

[Footnote 66: ”The Ancient Wisdom,” p. 41.]

_Evolution and Involution_

It would seem to the uninitiated that all this is a kind of smoke-screen of words to conceal our real ignorance of what we can never know and really have no need to know. It is evidently just an attempt to bridge the abyss between the immaterial and the material. If Theosophy wishes to bridge this abyss with conjecture, well and good, but its conjectures really leave us more deeply perplexed than we should be if we frankly recognized and accepted the limitations of our ignorance. Once within sight of the topmost of her seven planes, Mrs. Besant goes on a little more definitely though she confesses ”of what occurs on the two higher planes of the universe, the seventh and the sixth, we can form but the haziest conception.” Each plane has what she calls its own ”spirit matter”; this spirit matter becomes coa.r.s.er as we descend; each plane is an emanation from the plane above it and the spirit matter of each plane winds one more veil around those emanations of the immaterial One in whom or which the whole process took its beginning.

Theosophy does not speak of evolution as it attempts to account for our material world, it speaks of involution. Here it reverses what is most distinctive in modern Western religious thought as far as modern Western religious thought has accepted evolution. For us evolution, if we seek to give it a Theistic content, is G.o.d making manifest, in the vast ascent of form and existence, an always fuller revelation of Himself.

Our familiar phrase ”the self-revelation of G.o.d” posits a power which can never for a moment be contained in all that is, but which may always be more clearly known as we follow His creative record from stage to ascending stage. A gra.s.s blade is a richer revelation than a crystal, a bird than a gra.s.s blade; personality is almost infinitely richer than the lower forms, some personalities are more perfectly the instruments of the divine self-revelation than others, and Christian faith accepts in Jesus Christ the supreme self-revelation of G.o.d in terms of human experience.

_Theosophy Undertakes to Offer Deliverance to the Entangled Soul_

But Theosophy reverses all this. As the One comes down from emanation to emanation and from plane to plane He is always more deeply entangled in the veil of things, until on our last and lowest plane He is seven times enwrapped and smothered. We must not, however, confuse this last and lowest plane with our little world, or even our universe; these are but sensible aspects of it and they are really the manifestation of the deeply enwrapped Divine trying to struggle up and out again and so building our realities about us and eventually bringing us, with all our conscious powers, into being. (Here the theosophist has more in common with the evolutionist than one or two of the preceding paragraphs would seem to indicate.) If we follow the figure of the wheel our present plane, the last and lowest of them all, is really the turning point of the wheel; now it begins to turn back upon that from which it descended, and according to Theosophy our practical human task is so to avail ourselves of its upward movement as to be carried back with it toward the high planes of perfect being.

Theosophy undertakes to account for personality as it accounts for our sensible universe and along much the same line of speculation. Just as the whole physical plane on which our world exists has really somewhere deep wrapped up within it some emanation of the One from whom everything flows out, so our true selves, which have really come down from the One and should thence return, are wrapped up so deeply as also to be near lost and smothered with, nevertheless, the power to get themselves unwrapped. Our wrappings are our bodies, but we do not begin to understand Theosophy if we think of body in the ordinary sense; our physical body is only one and that the coa.r.s.est of the seven veils, for there are seven here also, in which the true soul is enmeshed. We have really seven bodies and we are not any one of them though each of them is useful and each one of them puts us in touch with a certain order of existence. Some of these bodies are mortal, others of them belong to the truly enduring order.

Now we are lost here unless we recognize the profound difference between all our usual ways of thinking or talking and the wisdom of Theosophy.

Theosophy begins at the top and comes down, at least until it reaches our present world; it also begins at the inside and works out. We think of our physical bodies as the instruments, on one side at least, through which the physical world communicates with us, but for the theosophist they are only instruments through which we communicate with the world.

Not quite so, however, for Theosophy recognizes the give and take of experience. The soul may slip out of the physical body in sleep and it--our physical body--is at the best a stupid, imprisoning, misleading sort of a husk which has its practical uses but ought by no means to be taken too seriously.[67] Its coa.r.s.e matter may be refined by discipline and diet and apparently the physical body of a vegetarian is a finer instrument than the physical body of one who feeds on the flesh of animals.

[Footnote 67: For a striking modern phrasing of this see Edward Carpenter's Free Verse ”The Stupid Old Body.”]

_But Becomes Deeply Entangled Itself_

The physical body has also an etheric double which duplicates in a more subtle way the const.i.tution of the physical body. This is the vehicle of the life force, whatever that means. The physical body and its double are in a rough way the vehicles of the give and take of physical existence, but for the experiences of pain and pleasure and for the dwelling place of the pa.s.sions, desires and emotions, we have an astral body. Here the theosophist makes much use of vibrations and colours, and apparently our changing play of emotion is reflected in a play of colour which puts the chameleon to shame and makes us in our most excited moment rivals of the rainbow itself. The astral body shows upon occasion browns, dark reds and greens and their combinations, lit from time to time with flashes of scarlet. Our better feelings reveal themselves in finer colours; rose indicates love, blue, religious feeling, yellow, intelligence, and violet, spirituality. The Theosophist believes that we can be trained to see all this and ill.u.s.trates it in coloured plates which are, to the uninitiated, not over convincing. Beside the body of physical existence and the astral body we possess also a mental body.

This is the seat of thought and mental action. In a sentence, maybe, the theosophist is trying to say that we have a body for each phase of personality through which we come into contact with the finer realities of the ascending planes of existence, and that the matter of these bodies is more subtly refined as we pa.s.s from mere sensation to higher spiritual states.

So within the astral body there is the mental body which, says Mrs.

Besant, is of finer material than the astral as the astral is finer than the physical. This is the body which answers by its vibrations to our changes of thought. The mental body may be refined by fitting disciplines as it is coa.r.s.ened by evil thoughts. These thoughts may become ”veritable diseases and maimings of the mental body incurable during its period of life.” These bodies we discard in due time, the physical at death and the astral when ready to enter the heaven world.

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