Theos-Talk Archives (August 1998 Message tt00182)

A Theosophical View:

"So does each man create for himself in verity the form wherein he
functions, and what he is in his present is the inevitable outcome of his
own creative energies in his past. Applying this to the Neo-Malthusian
theory, we see in sexual love not only a passion which man has in common
with the brute, and which forms, at the present stage of evolution, a
necessary part of human nature, but an animal passion that may be trained
and purified into a human emotion, which may be used as one of the levers in
human progress, one of the factors in human growth.  But, instead of this,
man in the past has made his intellect the servant of his passions; the
abnormal development of the sexual instinct in man - in whom it is far
greater and more continuous than in any brute - is due to the mingling with
it of the intellectual element, all sexual thoughts, desires, and
imaginations having created thought-forms, which have been wrought into the
human race, giving rise to a continual demand, far beyond nature, and in
marked contrast with the temperance of normal animal life.  Hence it has
become one of the most fruitful sources of human misery and human
degredation, and the satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised
countries lies at the root of our worst social evils.  This excessive
development has to be fought against, and the instinct reduced within
natural limits, and this will certainly never be done by easy-going
self-indulgence within the marital relation any more than by self-indulgence
outside it.  By none other road than that of self-control and self-denial
can men and women now set going the causes which will build for them brains
and bodies of a higher type for their future return to earth-life.  They
have to hold this instinct in complete control, to transmute it from passion
into tender and self-denying affection, to develop the intellectual at the
expense of the animal, and thus to raise the whole man to the humanstage, in
which every intellectual and physical capacity shall subserve the purposes
of the soul.  From all this it follows Theosophists should sound the note of
self-restraint within marriage, and the gradual - for with the mass it
cannot be sudden - restriction of the sexual relation to the perpetuation of
the race.

       "Such was the bearing of Theosophical teaching on Neo-Malthusianism,
as laid before me by H.P. Blavatsky, and when I urged, out of my bitter
knowledge of the miseries endured by the poor, that it surely might, for a
time at least, be recommended as a palliative, as a defence in the hands of
a woman against intolerable opression and enforced suffering, she bade me
look beyond the moment, and see how the suffering must come back and back
with every generation, unless we sought to remove the roots of wrong.  "I do
not judge a woman," she said, "who has resort to such means of defence in
the midst of circumstances so evil, and whose ignorance of the real causes
of all this misery is her excuse for snatching at any relief.  But it is not
for you, an Occultist, to continue to teach a method which you know must
tend to the perpetuation of the sorrow."  I felt that she was right, and
though I shrank from the decision - my heart somewhat failed me at
withdrawing from the knowledge of the poor, so far as I could, a temporary
palliative of evils which too often wreck their lives and bring many to an
early grave, worn old before even middle age has touched them - yet the
decision was made.  I refused to reprint the "Law of Population," or to sell
the copyright, giving pain, as I sadly knew, to all the brave and loyal
friends who had so generously stood by me in that long and bitter struggle,
and who saw the results of victory thrown away on grounds to them inadequate
and mistaken.  Will it alwayas be, I wonder, in man's climbing upward, that
every step must be set on his own heart and on the hearts of those he loves?"
(Annie Besant, an autobiography, 1st ed, 1893, this ed. 1917)

Tony