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I
WOULD like to start with a quotation from the Catechism in The Secret
Doctrine (SD), vol. I, p. 120:
'Lift thy head, O Lanoo;
dost thou see one, or countless lights above thee, burning in
the dark midnight sky?'
'I sense one Flame, O Gurudeva, I see countless undetached sparks
shining in it.'
'Thou sayest well. And now look around and into thyself. That
light which burns inside thee, dost thou feel it different in
anywise from the light that shines in thy Brother men?'
'It is in no way different, though the prisoner is held in bondage
by Karma, and though its outer garments delude the ignorant
into saying, "Thy Soul and My Soul".' |
This quotation expresses
beautifully the essence of Wholeness. In the first part, it refers
to the fundamental Unity of Existence, the Oneness of life as it
might be experienced by a mystic, occultist or yogi. It reflects
the depth of a mystical experience of Oneness. The second
part indicates why this wholeness is not experienced in our normal
daily life: imprisoned by Karma and thus in bondage.
Wholeness is that which is undivided, that in which no part is missing.
We hear from the SD (vol. I, p. 2): the One Life, eternal, invisible,
yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end has one attribute - ceaseless
Motion, which is called in esoteric parlance the 'Great Breath',
and is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless,
ever-present SPACE. There is nothing 'absolutely motionless within
the universal soul'. Also that occultism sees no difference between
force or motion (SD, vol.1, p. 512). It means that there is nothing
without force or energy within the universal soul.
Forces are said to be dual in character; being composed of (a) the
irrational brute energy, inherent in matter and (b) the intelligent
soul or cosmic consciousness which directs and guides that energy
and is the Dhyan Chohanic thought reflecting the Ideation of the
Universal Mind. (The Dhyan Chohans are the divine Intelligences
charged withthe supervision of the Cosmos.) This results in a perpetual
series of physical manifestations and moral effects on Earth, during
manvantaric periods, the whole being subservient to Karma. As that
process is not always perfect - even results very often in evident
failures - therefore, there are no proper subjects for divine honours
and worship. All are entitled to the grateful reverence of Humanity,
however, and man ought to be ever striving to help the divine evolution
of Ideas, by becoming, to the best of his ability, a co-worker with
Nature in the cyclic task. The ever-unknowable and incognizable
Karana alone, the Causeless Cause of all causes, should have its
shrine and altar on the holy and ever untrodden ground of our heart
- invisible, intangible, unmentioned, save through 'the still small
voice' of our spiritual consciousness. Those who worship before
it, ought to do so in the silence and the sanctified solitude of
their Souls; making their spirit the sole mediator between them
and the Universal Spirit, their good actions the only priests, and
their sinful intentions the only visible and objective sacrificial
victims to the Presence.
How can we hear that still small voice of our spiritual consciousness?
How can we become like the Lanoo and see one flame with countless
undetached sparks, or become that intelligent soul or cosmic consciousness
which guides and directs irrational brute force? How can we become
co-workers in the divine evolutionary plan? A few hints have already
been given: good actions, which are the mediators with the universal
spirit, and the sacrifice of all sinful intentions.
A clearer idea of what this implies may be obtained by going deeper
into the meaning of Karma, taking the advice in the Mahatma Letters
(no. 16):
| . . . you can do nothing
better than to study the two doctrines - of Karma and Nirvana
- as profoundly as you can.... Karma and Nirvana are but two
of the seven Great Mysteries of Buddhist metaphysics.... |
The Maha Chohan says (Letters from the Masters
of the Wisdom, 1st Series, p. 3) that
| it is not the individual and
determined purpose of attaining oneself Nirvana (the culmination
of all knowledge and absolute wisdom) which is, after all, only
an exalted and glorious selfishness - but the self-sacrificing
pursuit of the best means to lead on the right path our neighbour,
to cause as many of our fellow-creatures as we possibly can
to benefit by it, which constitutes the true theosophist. |
This also is good action in a different way.
Good actions result in the spiritualizing of our lower nature.
We are apt to say that something is somebody's karma, but do we
know what is really meant by it and why it is so troublesome for
humanity? The word 'karma' means 'action', metaphysically the Law
of Retribution, of cause and effect or ethical causation. In the
SD (vol. II, p. 305) we find that the Law of Retribution
| .. . predestines nothing and
no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is ETERNITY
itself; and as such, since no act can be co-equal with eternity,
it cannot be said to act, for it is ACTION itself. It is not
the wave which drowns a man, but the personal action of the
wretch, who goes deliberately and places himself under the impersonal
action of the laws that govern the ocean's motion. Karma creates
nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates
causes, and Karmic law adjusts the effects; which adjustment
is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume
its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly,
rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate
the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall
we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our
own folly has brought us to grief? |
Further on the SD says:
| ... he who unveils
through study and meditation its intricate paths, and throws
light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men
perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life, is
working for the good of his fellow-men. |
And again SD, vol.
II, p. 306:
| Intimately, or rather
indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the law of rebirth,
or of the reincarnation of the same spiritual individuality
in a long, almost interminable, series of personalities. |
We find in The Theosophical Glossary: Karma is
the power that controls all things, the resultant of moral action,
or the moral effect of an act committed for the attainment of something
which gratifies a personal desire. Karma neither punishes nor rewards,
it is simply the one Universal Law which guides unerringly all other
laws, and is productive of effects arising from their respective
causations. Though nothing remains of each personality after death,
the causes remain until they are exhausted by their legitimate effects
during the life of the person who produced them. They will follow
the reincarnated Ego until a harmony between effects and causes
is fully re-established. Only that which is immortal in its very
nature and divine in its essence exists forever. Only when we live
a pure, spiritual life as a result of following the promptings of
our higher, divine nature, is it possible to experience something
of our divine life. In this case, there is no moral effect following
the satisfaction of personal desires and passions.
In the Mahatma Letters (Chr. edn., p. 472), KH explains to Hume
that they (the Masters) 'see a vast difference earth and may be
the evolutionary purpose of man, because it is in humans that the
manas principle has been activated, manas being the link between
spirit and matter, and the brain being the instrument of manas.
To do this manas must turn away from kama, that is, brute energy,
towards that 'guiding intelligence', Buddhi, which HPB describes
as an indescribable feeling of unity.
In The Inner Life of Krishnamurti (IL), Aryel Sanat states (p. 63)
that Krishnamurti has spoken from the beginning about the need for
radical transformation or mutation and that, without such a mutation
humanity would not have a spiritually meaningful future, and perhaps
no future at all. During the last years of his life, Krishnamurti
elucidated more carefully that this mutation was not only psycho-spiritual,
but also biological, a mutation of the brain cells. Sanat indicates
that only in the late twentieth century scientists have begun to
note that evolution in Nature does not take place gradually through
very small changes and adaptations, but in sudden spurts of mutation,
for reasons not yet clearly known, after long periods of relative
equilibrium that often last millions of years. HPB's teachers seem
to have said (IL, p. 235) that 'human consciousness is now ready
for mutation on a grand scale ... as a result of great crises that
cry out for transformation'.
It is obvious that transformation on a global scale will be the
result of the mutation of individuals. One of the reasons why the
TS was founded, with universal brotherhood as its foremost important
objective, is this mutation. 'But. . . universal brotherhood is
far from realized', to quote Radha Burnier (Human Regeneration,
p. 21); and
| unless we see that
this object implies a deep psychological revolution, we will
not be able to carry out the work of the Society with the requisite
energy. .. . universal brotherhood without distinctions of any
kind is a revolution in consciousness. It is the one thing which
will change humanity, and bring it to a new level of existence. |
Let us see whether we can get a clearer idea
about this necessary and urgent transformation on which we, as members
of the TS, are supposed to work. Krishnamurti talked again and again
about the necessity for all of us to 'cleanse the brain' (IL, p.
76), of the debris of conditioned patterns of response, the dying
to the known. It means letting go of every identification with a
particular religion, belief system, and one's expectations. Mutation
or transformation implies no identification. In a dialogue with
David Bohm, they noted that knowledge and thought are not adequate
to make us move away from patterns. Krishnamurti stated that insight,
arising in full, undirected attention without a centre, can alone
change the brain cells and remove destructive conditioning (p. 64).
Another perspective comes from what HPB says in How to Study Theosophy,
as reported in the well-known Bowen Notes:
| One must not be
a fool and drive oneself into the madhouse by attempting too
much at first. The brain is the instrument of waking consciousness
and every conscious mental picture formed means change and destruction
of the atoms of the brain... this new kind of mental effort
calls for something very different - the carving out of 'new
brain paths'... at last the mind and its pictures are transcended
and the learner enters and dwells in the World of No FORM. ... |
Master KH said in 1922 (IL, p. 57): 'Strive more
and more to bring the mind and the brain into subservience to the
true Self within.'
Krishnamurti also writes in his Notebook (p. 9) about the brain:
| The brain is the
centre of all the senses ... it's the centre of remembrance,
the past; it's the storehouse of experience and knowledge, tradition.
So it is limited, conditioned. Its activities are planned, thought
out, reasoned, but it functions in limitation, in space-time.
So it cannot formulate or understand that which is the total,
the whole, the complete.... Only when the brain has cleansed
itself of its conditioning, greed, envy, ambition, then only
it can comprehend that which is complete. Love is this completeness. |
When Krishnamurti was still very young, and at
the beginning of his process, in August 1922, it became clear to
him what he had to do. He started meditating every morning and,
to his astonishment, could concentrate with considerable ease and
within a few days he began to see clearly where he had
failed and where he was failing. Immediately
he set about, consciously, to annihilate the wrong accumulations
of the past years. I quote (op. cit, pp. 77-8):
With the same deliberation
I set about to find out ways and means to achieve my aim. First
I realized that I had to harmonize all my other bodies with
the Buddhic plane [the level of awareness immediately beyond
the conceptual mind] and to bring about this happy combination
I had to find out what my ego wanted on the Buddhic plane. To
harmonize the various bodies I had to keep them vibrating at
the same rate as the Buddhic and to do this I had to find out
what was the vital interest of the Buddhic.
With an ease that rather astonished me I found the main interest
on that high plane was to serve the Lord Maitreya and the Masters.
With that idea clear in my physical mind I had to direct and
control the other bodies to act and think the same as the noble
and spiritual plane. |
Ultimately, looking into the distance of man's
evolutionary journey, this process of the union of manas with Buddhi,
the sixth or spiritual principle in man, is, according to HPB's
The Secret Doctrine, one of the most important teachings of those
great beings who help humanity to achieve its evolutionary goal.
To quote the Mahatma Letters (no. 13, Rev. edn.):
the individuality
... has to assimilate to itself the eternal-life power residing
but in the seventh [Atma] and then blend the
three (fourth, fifth and seventh) into one exhaustless generator
- can transmute - the sixth, which is Buddhi - the low, brute
energy into a higher form of
Spiritual Soul. spiritual dynamics, the most refined |
But to be able to do this we must quality of
cosmic force, which means first of all become conscious of the using
energy/force for the benefit of the fact that the human brain -
being an individual and humanity.
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Reading the SD page by page as one reads any other book will
only end in confusion. The first thing to do, even if it takes
years, is to get some grasp of the 'Three Fundamental Principles',
given in Proem. Follow that up by study of the Recapitulation
- the numbered items in the Summing Up to vol. I (Part I).
Then take the Preliminary Notes (vol. II) and the Conclusion
(vol. II). . . .
Come to the SD without any hope of getting the final Truth
of existence from it, or with any idea other than seeing how
far it may lead TOWARDS the Truth. See in study a means of
exercising and developing the mind never touched by other
studies. . . .
No matter what one may study in the SD, let the mind hold
fast, as the basis of its ideation, to the following ideas:
(a) The FUNDAMENTAL UNITY OF ALL EXISTENCE.
. . .
(b) THERE Is No DEAD MATTER. ...
(c) Man is the MICROCOSM. As he is so, then
all the Hierarchies of the Heavens exist within him. But in
truth there is neither Macrocosm nor Microcosm but ONE EXISTENCE.
Great and small are such only as viewed by a limited consciousness.
(d) Fourth and last basic idea to be held
is that expressed in the Great Hermetic Axiom. It really sums
up and synthesizes all the others:
As is the Inner, so is the Outer; as is the Great so is the
Small; as it is above, so it is below: there is but ONE LIFE
AND LAW; and he that worketh it is ONE. Nothing Is Inner,
Nothing Is Outer; Nothing Is GREAT, nothing is Small; nothing
is High, nothing is Low, in the Divine Economy.
MaAame Blavatsky on How to
Study Theosophy
Robert Bowen
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Mrs All Ritsema, former General Secretary
of the TS in the Netherlands, delivered this talk at a recent summer
school in that country.
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