Theos-Talk Archives (August 1998 Message tt00186)

>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...

Tony,

An excellent passage. Not having the book, is Besant quoting an HPB letter
or just relying on memory of a conversation with HPB?

Also, you probably know, near the end of MAHATMA LETTER 86, KH writes of
the "brutal aura" of this pamphlet on birth-control by Besant & Bradlaugh.

Of course critics on auto-pilot will utter "mere Victorian morality".
But the reasons given by HPB are based in traditional occultism, not any
era's ethical fashions.

--
<> Nicholas Weeks <> am455@lafn.org <> Los Angeles
	"Men must learn to love the truth before they thoroughly believe it."
		Blavatsky