Theos-Talk Archives (May 2004 Message tt00230)

Mat 30 2004

Dear Friends:

Re: "God"


Most of us were raised in some theological system. The supreme figure
offered to us for "belief" was a "supreme being," or "GOD." NOTE HE
is offered as a BEING. A kind of gigantic "Man" with the arbitrary
and unquestionable power to break or obviate those impersonal and
impartial LAWS that HE is presumed to have instituted for the better
regulation of the UNIVERSE and more specifically for our little (and
rather insignificant) Earth..

Can this be reasonable?

Can common sense, ethics and morals be transgressed at will? Even by
a supposedly Divine Arbiter?  

If so, where then is there and consistency that can be depended on?  

Where are: mercy, compassion and justice? 

Why is a causal favoritism carelessly dispensed, and an avid desire
for "praise," and, lavish fawning "prayers" installed? Did God, or
the priesthoods of various religions, install those?

Was this Earth and the Universe "created" as a casual plaything by a
"Mighty Being" that, in His boredom, passes time in torturing the
minor intelligent creatures (humans, animals, etc..) thereon? 

If GOD is one and universal, what difference does it make which name
is used to designate that concept?  

If GOD regulates and creates everything, then why are there so many
religions, sects, and creeds? Why need there be such a conflict of
misunderstanding between the current representatives of the so many
religions? 

The Masters of Wisdom advance the proposition that this concept of a
"Personal GOD" -- which most "believe" in, is a self-proving fiction.
Why then, is it "believed" in so widely?

Belief is no proof. When Theology allows inquiry then logic takes
over.

THEOSOPHY is a record of facts and laws in the World and the Universe.
As such, It is essentially logical and demands intellectual and
impartial, universal proof of any statement or fact advanced.

The concept of a universal impartial, totally just and merciful POWER
-- of DEITY as a force -- underlying every being and all evolutionary
schemes is the rational alternative considered. In such a scheme
every being without exception lives in and partakes of the same divine
essence. 

The spiritual and perfect Unity of the Universe is the actual presence
of that DEIFIC FORCE. 

Hence all men are brothers and brotherhood and peace are the only ways
of harmonious existence and living. 

We find an instance of this taken from the MAHATMA LETTERS ( Barker
Edition, pp. 52-4, Letter X) where we find: it offered for our
consideration, as it was in 1881 to Mr. Sinnett:


"Neither our philosophy nor ourselves believe in a God, least of all
in one whose pronoun necessitates a capital H. 

Our philosophy falls under the definition of Hobbes. It is
preeminently the science of effects by their causes and of causes by
their effects, and since it is also the science of things deduced from
first principle, as Bacon defines it, before we admit any such
principle we must know it, and have no right to admit even its
possibility. 

Your whole explanation is based upon one solitary admission made
simply for argument's sake in October last. You were told that our
knowledge was limited to this our solar system: ergo as philosophers
who desired to remain worthy of the name we could not either deny or
affirm the existence of what you termed a supreme, omnipotent,
intelligent being of some sort beyond the limits of that solar system.


But if such an existence is not absolutely impossible, yet unless the
uniformity of nature's law breaks at those limits we maintain that it
is highly improbable. Nevertheless we deny most emphatically the
position of agnosticism in this direction, and as regards the solar
system. 

Our doctrine knows no compromises. It either affirms or denies, for it
never teaches but that which it knows to be the truth. 

Therefore, we deny God both as philosophers and as Buddhists. We know
there are planetary and other spiritual lives, and we know there is in
our system no such thing as God, either personal or impersonal. 

Parabrahm is not a God, but absolute immutable law, and Iswar is the
effect of Avidya and Maya, ignorance based upon the great delusion. 

The word "God" was invented to designate the unknown cause of those
effects which man has either admired or dreaded without understanding
them, and since we claim and that we are able to prove what we claim
-- i.e. the knowledge of that cause and causes we are in a position to
maintain there is no God or Gods behind them. 

The idea of God is not an innate but an acquired notion, and we have
but one thing in common with theologies -- we reveal the infinite. 

But while we assign to all the phenomena that proceed from the
infinite and limitless space, duration and motion, material, natural,
sensible and known (to us at least) cause, the theists assign them
spiritual, super-natural and unintelligible an un-known causes. 

The God of the Theologians is simply and imaginary power, un loup
garou as d'Holbach expressed it -- a power which has never yet
manifested itself. 

Our chief aim is to deliver humanity of this nightmare, to teach man
virtue for its own sake, and to walk in life relying on himself
instead of leaning on a theological crutch, that for countless ages
was the direct cause of nearly all human misery. Pantheistic we may be
called -- agnostic NEVER. 

If people are willing to accept and to regard as God our ONE LIFE
immutable and unconscious in its eternity they may do so and thus keep
to one more gigantic misnomer. But then they will have to say with
Spinoza that there is not and that we cannot conceive any other
substance than God; or as that famous and unfortunate philosopher says
in his fourteenth proposition, "practer Deum neque dari neque concepi
potest substantia" -- and thus become Pantheists . . . . who but a
Theologian nursed on mystery and the most absurd super-naturalism can
imagine a self existent being of necessity infinite and omnipresent
outside the manifested boundless universe. 

The word infinite is but a negative which excludes the idea of bounds.


It is evident that a being independent and omnipresent cannot be
limited by anything which is outside of himself; that there can be
nothing exterior to himself -- not even vacuum, then where is there
room for matter? for that manifested universe even though the latter
limited. 

If we ask the theist is your God vacuum, space or matter, they will
reply no. And yet they hold that their God penetrates matter though he
is not himself matter. When we speak of our One Life we also say that
it penetrates, nay is the essence of every atom of matter; and that
therefore it not only has correspondence with matter but has all its
properties likewise, etc. -- hence is material, is matter itself. How
can intelligence proceed or emanate from non-intelligence -- you kept
asking last year. 

How could a highly intelligent humanity, man the crown of reason, be
evolved out of blind unintelligent law or force! But once we reason on
that line, I may ask in my turn, how could congenital idiots,
non-reasoning animals, and the rest of "creation" have been created by
or evoluted from, absolute Wisdom, if the latter is a thinking
intelligent being, the author and ruler of the Universe? 

How? says Dr. Clarke in his examination of the proof of the existence
of the Divinity. "God who hath made the eye, shall he not see? God who
hath made the ear shall he not hear?" But according to this mode of
reasoning they would have to admit that in creating an idiot God is an
idiot; that he who made so many irrational beings, so many physical
and moral monsters, must be an irrational being. . . .

. . . We are not Adwaitees, but our teaching respecting the one life
is identical with that of the Adwaitee with regard to Parabrahm. And
no true philosophically brained Adwaitee will ever call himself an
agnostic, for he knows that he is Parabrahm and identical in every
respect with the universal life and soul -- the macrocosm is the
microcosm and he knows that there is no God apart from himself, no
creator as no being. Having found Gnosis we cannot turn our backs on
it and become agnostics. 

. . . . Were we to admit that even the highest Dyan Chohans are liable
to err under a delusion, then there would be no reality for us indeed
and the occult sciences would be as great a chimera as that God. If
there is an absurdity in denying that which we do not know it is still
more extravagant to assign to it unknown laws. 

According to logic "nothing" is that of which everything can truly be
denied and nothing can truly be affirmed. The idea therefore either of
a finite or infinite nothing is a contradiction in terms. And yet
according to theologians "God, the self existent being is a most
simple, unchangeable, incorruptible being; without parts, figure,
motion, divisibility, or any other such properties as we find in
matter. For all such things so plainly and necessarily imply
finiteness in their very notion and are utterly inconsistent with
complete infinity." 

Therefore the God here offered to the adoration of the XIXth century
lacks every quality upon which man's mind is capable of fixing any
judgment. What is this in fact but a being of whom they can affirm
nothing that is not instantly contradicted. 

Their own Bible their Revelation destroys all the moral perceptions
they heap upon him, unless indeed they call those qualities
perfections that every other man's reason and common sense call
imperfections, odious vices and brutal wickedness. 

Nay more he who reads our Buddhist scriptures written for the
superstitious masses will fail to find in them a demon so vindictive,
unjust, so cruel and so stupid as the celestial tyrant upon whom the
Christians prodigally lavish their servile worship and on whom their
theologians heap those perfections that are contradicted on every page
of their Bible. Truly and veritably your theology has created her God
but to destroy him piecemeal. Your church is the fabulous Saturn, who
begets children but to devour them. 

(The Universal Mind) -- A few reflections and arguments ought to
support every new idea -- for instance we are sure to be taken to task
for the following apparent contradictions. (1) We deny the existence
of a thinking conscious God, on the grounds that such a God must
either be conditioned, limited and subject to change, therefore not
infinite, or (2) if he is represented to us as an eternal unchangeable
and independent being, with not a particle of matter in him, then we
answer that it is no being but an immutable blind principle, a law.
And yet, they will say, we believe in Dyans, [Sages] or Planetaries
("spirits" also), and endow them with a universal mind, and this must
be explained. 

Our reasons may be briefly summed up thus: 

(1) We deny the absurd proposition that there can be, even in a
boundless and eternal universe -- two infinite eternal and
omni-present existences. 

(2) Matter we know to be eternal, i.e., having had no beginning (a)
because matter is Nature herself (b) because that which cannot
annihilate itself and is indestructible exists necessarily -- and
therefore it could not begin to be, nor can it cease to be (c) because
the accumulated experience of countless ages, and that of exact
science show to us matter (or nature) acting by her own peculiar
energy, of which not an atom is ever in an absolute state of rest, and
therefore it must have always existed, i.e., its materials ever
changing form, combinations and properties, but its principles or
elements being absolutely indestructible. 

(3) As to God -- since no one has ever or at any time seen him or it
-- unless he or it is the very essence and nature of this boundless
eternal matter, its energy and motion, we cannot regard him as either
eternal or infinite or yet self existing. We refuse to admit a being
or an existence of which we know absolutely nothing; because (a) there
is no room for him in the presence of that matter whose undeniable
properties and qualities we know thoroughly well (b) because if he or
it is but a part of that matter it is ridiculous to maintain that he
is the mover and ruler of that of which he is but a dependent part and
(c) because if they tell us that God is a self existent pure spirit
independent of matter -- an extra-cosmic deity, we answer that
admitting even the possibility of such an impossibility, i.e., his
existence, we yet hold that a purely immaterial spirit cannot be an
intelligent conscious ruler nor can he have any of the attributes
bestowed upon him by theology and thus such a God becomes again but a
blind force. Intelligence as found in our Dyan Chohans, is a faculty
that can appertain but to organized or animated being -- however
imponderable or rather invisible the materials of their organizations.
Intelligence requires the necessity of thinking; to think one must
have ideas; ideas suppose senses which are physical material, and how
can anything material belong to pure spirit? If it be objected that
thought cannot be a property of matter, we will ask the reason why? We
must have an unanswerable proof of this assumption, before we can
accept it. Of the theologian we would enquire what was there to
prevent his God, since he is the alleged creator of all -- to endow
matter with the faculty of thought; and when answered that evidently
it has not pleased Him to do so, that it is a mystery as well as an
impossibility, we would insist upon being told why it is more
impossible that matter should produce spirit and thought, than spirit
or the thought of God should produce and create matter. 

We do not bow our heads in the dust before the mystery of mind -- for
we have solved it ages ago. Rejecting with contempt the theistic
theory we reject as much the automaton theory, teaching that states of
consciousness are produced by the marshalling of the molecules of the
brain; and we feel as little respect for that other hypothesis -- the
production of molecular motion by consciousness. 

Then what do we believe in? Well, we believe in the much laughed at
phlogiston (see article "What is force and what is matter?"
Theosophist, September [1881]), and in what some natural philosophers
would call nisus the incessant though perfectly imperceptible (to the
ordinary senses) motion or efforts one body is making on another --
the pulsations of inert matter -- its life. 

The bodies of the Planetary spirits are formed of that which Priestley
and others called Phlogiston and for which we have another name --
this essence in its highest seventh state forming that matter of which
the organisms of the highest and purest Dyans [Sages] are composed,
and in its lowest or densest form (so impalpable yet that science
calls it energy and force) serving as a cover to the Planetaries of
the 1st or lowest degree. In other words we believe in MATTER alone,
in matter as visible nature and matter in its invisibility as the
invisible omnipresent omnipotent Proteus with its unceasing motion
which is its life, and which nature draws from herself since she is
the great whole outside of which nothing can exist. For as Bellinger
truly asserts "motion is a manner of existence that flows necessarily
out of the essence of matter; that matter moves by its own peculiar
energies; that its motion is due to the force which is inherent in
itself; that the variety of motion and the phenomena that result
proceed from the diversity of the properties of the qualities and of
the combinations which are originally found in the primitive matter"
of which nature is the assemblage and of which your science knows less
than one of our Tibetan Yak-drivers of Kant's metaphysics. 
The existence of matter then is a fact; the existence of motion is
another fact, their self existence and eternity or indestructibility
is a third fact. And the idea of pure spirit as a Being or an
Existence -- give it whatever name you will -- is a chimera, a
gigantic absurdity. " M L p. 52-54

Thus the problem of logically understanding omnipresence, omnipotence
and omniscience is defined and made comprehensible.

It is wise in all matters of questioning to go to the original source,
as often enough the explanations will be found there.


Best wishes, 

Dallas
(An inquiring mind in Los Angeles )
 
=============================================

-----Original Message-----
From: leonmaurer
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2004 1:56 AM
To: 
Subject: Re Do theosophists believe in God?


In a message dated 05/27/04 10:04:23 AM, paul at writes:


>It's a serious question.
>
>I am thinking of one of the passages in the Mahatma Letters, wherein
KH
>implies very strongly a lack of belief in the Christian (or other 
>Monotheistic) version of God. In fact, he suggests that the view of
the
>Adepts is quite close to a type of Atheism. They seem to deny the 
>existence of a single, isolated Divine Deity separate and apart from
His
>creation, which I guess also denies the Dvaita of Vaishnavism. (See 
>http://www.dvaita.org/faq.shtml). To me, this is closest to
Mahayana
>Buddhism, which apparently adopts a somewhat Atheistic approach.
>
>Atheism seems to follow three forms:
>
>The theistic position is belief in a deity. Then there are two
atheistic
>positions. The first, called implicit (or weak) atheism, is a
disbelief
>in a deity. The second, called explicit (or strong) atheism, is a
belief
>that there are no deities. So what we actually have is:
>
>Theism -- positive claim
>Implicit Atheism -- neutral claim
>Explicit Atheism -- negative claim
>
>The following link however suggests that Mahayana does not in fact
teach
>Atheism (being largely based on Vaishnavism), and suggests instead
that
>pure Atheism is to be found in the Theravada school.


>What do you'all think?
>-- 
>Paul G
>Confused in Vienna

===============================


LM answers

All those "schools" are purely exoteric and have little or no
relationship 
with pure theosophy or "esoteric Buddhism" or "Budhi-ism" (as HPB
spoke of it).  
This teaching does not deny God -- but only that It (the divine and
ineffable 
source of all) is not to be personalized. Thus, since theosophy (and 
occultism) follows none of those exoteric schools, all confusion ends.
:-)

Leon Maurer
Unconfused in New York ;-)