Theos-Talk Archives (January 2002 Message tt00034)

Brigitte, you have signed your name to the text BELOW,
which also includes a quote from ISIS UNVEILED. But
setting aside the HPB quote, did you write THE REST OF
THE TEXT that you signed your name to??

Also have you actually read DEALINGS WITH THE DEAD and
if you have, in what chapter or pages in that book
does Randolph actually deal with reincarnation in
similar terms to what HPB writes in the quote from
ISIS?

Daniel
http://blavatsky.info

-----------------------

Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 12:21:58 -0500 
Subject: P.B.Randolph and MAHATMAS...... 
To: "Theosophy Study List" <theos-l@list.vnet.net> 
From: "brigitte muehlegger" <bri_mue@yahoo.com> | 
Reply-to: "Theosophy Study List"
<theos-l@list.vnet.net> 

Despite a sea of ink, spilled by her and others in an
attempt to 
explain
the unexplainable, there can be no doubt that in her
New York years
Blavatsky denied the
reality of reincarnation in the sense of reincarnation
of the same
individual on earth, allowing only the exceptions
stated by 
Randolph-and
(unusually for her early work) she emphasized that her
position was
derived from ,,authority";

"We will now present a few fragments of this
mysterious doctrine of
reincarnation-as distinct from metempsychosis-which we
have from an
authority. Reincarnation, i.e., the appearance of the
same individual, 
or
rather his astral monad, twice on the same planet, is
not a rule in
nature; it is an exception, like the teratological
phenomenon of a two-headed infant. lt is preceded by a
violation of the
laws of harmony of nature, and happens only when the
latter, seeking to
restore its disturbed equilibrium, violently throws
back into 
earth-life
the astral monad which had been tossed out of the
circle of necessity 
by
crime or accident Thus, in cases of abortion,
of infants dying before a certain age, and of
congenital and incurable
idiocy, nature's original design to produce a perfeet
human heing, has
been interrupted.
Therefore, while the gross matter of each of these
several entities is
suffered to disperse itseif at death, through the vast
realm of being, 
the
immortal spirit and astral monad of the individual-the
latter having 
been
set apart to animate a frame and the former to shed
its divine light on
the corporeal organization-must try a second time to
carry out the 
purpose
of the creative intelligence.
If reason has been so far developed as to become
active and
discrirninative, there is no reincarnation on this
earth, for the three
parts of the triune man have been united together, and
he is cäpable of
running the race. But when the new being has not
passed beyond the
condition of monad, or when, as in the idiot, the
trinity has not been
completed, the immortal spark which illurninates it,
has to reenter on 
the
earthly plane as it was frustrated in its first
attempt. Otherwise, the
mortal or astral, and the immortal or divine, souls,
could not progress 
in
union and pass onward to the sphere above.... [T]he
monad which was
imprisoned in the elementary
being-the rudimentary or lowest astral form of the
füture man-after 
having
passed through and quitted the highest physical shape
of a dumb animal
.... . that monad,
we say, cannot skip over the physical and intellectual
sphere of the
terrestrial man, and be suddenly ushered into the
spiritual sphere 
above.
What reward or punishment can there be in that sphere
of disembodied 
human
entities for a foetus or a human embryo which had not
even tirne to
breathe on this earth, still less an
opportunity to exercise the divine faculties of the
spirit? Or, for an
irresponsible infant, whose senseless rnonad remaining
dormant within 
the
astral and physical casket, could as little prevent
him from buming
himself as another person to death? Or for one idiotic
from birth .... 
and
who therefore is irresponsible for either his
disposition, acts, or the imperfections of his
vagrant, half­developed
intellect? (Isis Unveiled, 1:xxxvi-xxxvii, 12, 179,
292, 345, 348-49,
351-52, 480.)

This is exactiy the doctrine first put forth by
Randolph in "Dealings 
with
the Dead" in 1862.

See also "A Few Questions to "HIRAF,'" BCW, 1:112;
"Madame Blavatsky on
the Views of the Theosophists," The Spiritualist
(February 8, 1878):
68-69, reprinted in BCW, 1:290-96 (the only examples
of reincarnation 
are
failures of nature: dead children and congenital
idiots). The meaning 
of
these fairly clear
statements and the conflict of these views with Madame
Blavatsky's 
later
ideas on reincarnation have been the subject of
interminable debate 
among
Theosophists since the early 1880s-so much so that the
editor of the
Theosophical University Press reprint of Isis Unveiled
has thought it
necessary to include with the volumes
several of Madame Blavatsky's subsequent attempts at
exegesis of the
passage cited. For a further indication of Madame
Blavatsky's early
rejection of reincarnation, see her letter of March
1875 to Professor
Corson. (Unpublished Letters of H. P. Blavatsky,
compiled and with
introduction by Eugene Rollin Corson, London: Rider &
Co., 1929,p.138)

Brigitte




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