Theos-Talk Archives (December 2004 Message tt00295)

	2005

Years ago H P B wrote as powerful article to inaugurate a new Theosophical
Journal in Paris. Its principles are valid today and well worth re-reading
as we approach 2005. [ 2 + 5 = 7 ]

Best wishes for the seasons' changes.

Dallas (Solstice 2004)
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THE NEW CYCLE

H. P. Blavatsky

La Revue Theosophique, March 21, 1889 

We cannot inaugurate this first issue of an official and strictly
Theosophical Magazine without giving our readers some information that seems
essential to us. 

Indeed, the ideas held to this day with regard to the Theosophical Society
in India, as it has been called, are so vague and so varied, that even many
of our members entertain very erroneous views concerning it. Nothing could
show more convincingly the necessity of making well known the goals we
pursue in a Magazine devoted exclusively to Theosophy. Also, before asking
our readers to become interested in it, or even to take up its study, they
need to be given some preliminary explanations. 

WHAT IS THEOSOPHY? 

What is Theosophy? Why use this pretentious name, we are asked at the
outset. When we answer that Theosophy is Divine Wisdom, or the Wisdom of the
Gods (Theo-Sophia), rather than that of a God, a still more extraordinary
objection is raised: "Then, are you not Buddhists? Yet we know that the
Buddhists believe neither in a, nor several Gods. . . ." 

Nothing could be more correct. But, in the first place, we are no more
Buddhists than we are Christians, Mussulmans, Jews, Zoroastrians or
Brahmins. 
Furthermore, concerning the question of Gods: we hold to the esoteric method
of the Hyponia taught by Ammonius Saccas--i.e., to the occult meaning of the
term. 

Did not Aristotle say: "The Divine Essence permeating nature and diffused
throughout the entire Universe (which is infinite), that which the hoi
polloi call Gods, is simply . . . the first principles" -- in other words,
the creative intelligent forces of Nature. 

>From the fact that Buddhist philosophers admit and know of the nature of
these forces as well as anybody, it does not follow that the Society--as a
Society--is therefore Buddhist. 

The Society, in its capacity as an abstract corporation, believes in
nothing, accepts nothing, teaches nothing. The Society per se cannot and
must not have any religion, for it contains all religions. 

TRUTH

Cults are, after all, but external vehicles, more or less material forms and
containing more or less of the essence of the One and Universal Truth. 
In its essential nature Theosophy is the spiritual as well as the physical
science of this Truth--the very essence of deistic and philosophical
research. As visible representative of the universal Truth, since it
contains all religions and philosophies, and since each of them contains in
its turn a portion of this Truth--the Society could not be sectarian, have
preferences, or be any more partial than, say, an anthropological or
geographic society. Do the latter care to what religion their explorers
belong, so long as each of their members bravely carries out his duty? 

Now, if we are asked, as has been done already so many times, whether we are
deists or atheists, spiritualists or materialists, idealists or positivists,
royalists, republicans, or socialists, we can only answer that each of these
opinions is represented in the Society. 

I have but to repeat what I said just ten years ago in a lead article in the
Theosophist, to show how much that which the general public thinks of us is
different from what we really are. Our Society has been accused from time to
time of the most baroque and contradictory misdeeds, and has been charged
with motives and ideas that it has never had. 

What has not been said of us! One day we were an association of ignoramuses,
believers in miracles; the next day, we were declared to be thaumaturgists;
our aim was secret and entirely political, it was said in the morning--that
we were Carbonari and dangerous Nihilists; then, in the evening, we were
found to be spies salaried by autocratic and monarchic Russia. At other
times, without any transition, we were believed to be Jesuits seeking to
ruin French Spiritism. American Positivists saw in us religious fanatics,
while the clergy of all nations denounced us as emissaries of Satan etc.,
etc.... Finally, our good critics with impartial urbanity divided all
theosophists into two categories: charlatans and dupes.... 

Well, men slander only those they hate or "fear." Why should we be hated? As
to fearing us, who can say? 

Truth is not always welcome and, perhaps, we utter too many real truths! 

Yet, since the day our Society was founded in the United States, fourteen
years ago, our teachings have received wholly unhoped-for attention. The
original program had to be enlarged, and the territory of our researches and
combined explorations now extends towards unlimited horizons. 

This expansion was made necessary by the ever growing number of our members,
a number still increasing daily; the diversity of their races and their
religions requiring ever deeper studies on our part. However, although our
program was enlarged, nothing was changed as to the three main objects,
except, alas, with regard to the one dearest to our heart, the first, that
is: Universal Brotherhood without distinction of race, color or creed. 

Notwithstanding all our efforts, this object has almost always been ignored,
or has remained a dead letter, in India especially, thanks to the innate
superciliousness and national pride of the English. Except for that, the
other two objects, that is to say, the study of Oriental religions,
especially of the ancient Vedic and Buddhistic scriptures, and our
researches into the latent powers of man, have been pursued with a zeal that
has received its reward. 
Since 1876 we have been compelled to deviate more and more from the main
highway of general principles, originally laid down, and to take ever
widening subsidiary paths. 

THE SECRET DOCTRINE  

Thus in order to satisfy all Theosophists, and to follow the evolution of
all religions, we have been forced to travel clear around the globe,
beginning our pilgrimage at the dawn of the cycle of nascent humanity. 

These researches have resulted in a synthesis which has just been sketched
in THE SECRET DOCTRINE, certain portions of which will be translated in this
Magazine. 

The doctrine is barely outlined in our volumes; and yet the mysteries
unveiled therein concerning the beliefs of the prehistoric peoples,
cosmogenesis and anthropology, had never been divulged until now. 

Certain of its dogmas and theories are in conflict with scientific theories,
especially with those of Darwin; yet they explain and throw light on what to
this day had remained incomprehensible; and fill more than one gap, left
open, nolens volens, by official science. 

But we had to present all these doctrines, such as they are, or never to
broach the subject at all. He who is frightened by these infinite prospects
and would seek to reduce them by using the shortcuts and the "flying
bridges" artificially constructed by modern science over its thousand and
one gaps, will do better not to enter the Thermopylae of archaic science. 

Such has been one of the results our Society has achieved; a poor one,
perhaps, but one that will certainly be followed by further revelations,
exoteric or purely esoteric. If we speak thereof it is to prove that we do
not preach any religion in particular, leaving each member utterly free to
follow his own particular belief. 
The prime object of our organization, of which we strive to make a real
brotherhood, is fully expressed in the motto of the Theosophical Society and
of all its organs: 

"There is no Religion higher than Truth." 

Hence, as an impersonal Society, we must welcome Truth wherever it may be
found, without partiality for any one belief as against another. This leads
directly to a quite logical deduction: if we acclaim and welcome with open
arms every earnest seeker after truth, it follows that there is no place in
our ranks for the ardent sectarian, for the bigot, or for the hypocrite
surrounded by a "Chinese wall" of dogmas, each stone of which bears the
inscription: "No one may pass here." 

FREEDOM OF RESEARCH	

What, indeed, could be the position in our midst of a fanatic whose religion
forbids all research, and does not admit the free use of reason--when the
original concept, the very root from which grows the beautiful plant that we
call Theosophy, is free and complete research into all the mysteries,
natural, divine, or human! 

Except for this restriction, the Society invites everyone to participate in
its investigations and discoveries. Whoever feels his heart beating in
unison with the great heart of humanity, whoever feels his interests at one
with those who are poorer and less fortunate than himself; whoever, man or
woman, is ever ready to lend a helping hand to those who suffer, whoever is
fully conscious of the real meaning of "Egoism," is a Theosophist by birth
and by right. He can always be sure of finding sympathetic hearts amongst
us. Our Society is in fact a small, special humanity, where, as among
mankind at large, one may always find his counterpart. 

If it is objected that in it the atheist rubs elbows with the deist, and the
materialist with the idealist, we answer: "What of it?" If an individual is
a materialist, that is, discerns in matter an infinite potency for the
creation, or rather for the evolution of all terrestrial life; or else a
spiritualist endowed with a spiritual perception the other one does not
have, why should this prevent one or the other from being a good
Theosophist? 

Besides, those who worship a Personal God or Divine Substance are far more
materialistic than the Pantheists who reject the idea of a carnalized God
but who perceive the divine essence in each atom. 

A UNIVERSAL DEIFIC PRINCIPLE

The whole world knows that Buddhism recognizes neither a God nor Gods. And
yet the Arhat, for whom each atom of dust is as full of Swabhavat (plastic
substance, eternal and intelligent, though impersonal) as he is himself, and
who tries to assimilate this Swabhavat by identifying himself with the All
in order to reach Nirvana, must in order to reach it follow the same Path of
sorrows, of renunciation, of good works and of altruism, and has to lead as
saintly a life, although less selfish in motive, as the beatified Christian.


What matters the passing form if the goal pursued is the same Eternal
Essence, whether that Essence appear to human perception under the guise of
a Substance, of an immaterial Breath, or of a No-thing! 

Let us admit the PRESENCE, whether called Personal God or Universal
Substance, and let us admit a cause, since we all see effects. But these
effects being the same for the Buddhist atheist as for the Christian deist,
and the cause being as inscrutable for the one as for the other, why should
we waste our time pursuing an illusive shadow?

In the final analysis, the greatest of materialists, as well as the most
transcendental of philosophers, admits the omnipresence of an impalpable
Proteus, omnipotent in its ubiquity throughout all kingdoms of nature,
including man--a Proteus indivisible in its essence, without form and yet
manifesting itself in all forms, which is here, there, everywhere and
nowhere, which is the All and the Nothing, which is all things and always
One, Universal Essence which binds, limits and contains everything, and
which everything contains. What theologian can go beyond that? 

It is enough to recognize these verities to be a Theosophist; for such a
confession amounts to admitting that not only humanity--even though
consisting of thousands of races--but all that lives and vegetates, all that
in one word is, is made up of the same essence and substance, is animated by
the same spirit, and that, therefore, there is solidarity throughout nature,
on the physical as well as on the moral plane. 

We have already said in the Theosophist:

"Born in the United States of America, the Theosophical Society was
constituted on the model of its mother country. The latter, as we know,
omits the name of God from its constitution, lest, said the Fathers of the
Republic, this word someday afford the pretext for a State religion; for
they wanted to grant absolute equality in its laws to all religions so that
all would support the State and all in their turn would be protected."
 
The Theosophical Society was established on this beautiful model. 

As of today its one hundred seventy-three [173] branches are grouped into
several Sections. In India these sections are self-governing and
self-supporting; outside of India there are two large Sections, one in
America, and the other one in England (American Section and British
Section). Thus each branch as well as each member, having the right to
profess the religion and to study the sciences or philosophies it or he
prefers, provided that the whole remains united by bonds of solidarity and
fraternity--our Society may be truly called the 

"REPUBLIC OF CONSCIENCE." 

While being free to engage in those intellectual pursuits that please him
the most, each member of our Society must, however, give some reason for
belonging to it, which means that each member must do his own chosen part,
however small it may be, by way of mental work or otherwise, for the good of
all. 

If he does not work for others, he has no reason for being a Theosophist. 
All of us must work for the liberation of human thought, for the elimination
of selfish and sectarian superstitions, and for the discovery of all the
truths that are within the reach of the human mind. This goal cannot be
attained with greater certainty than through the culture of solidarity on
the plane of mental work. No honest worker, no serious seeker, has ever
returned therefrom empty-handed; and there are hardly any men or women,
however busy they may be thought to be, unable to lay their moral or
pecuniary mite on the altar of Truth. 
Henceforth it will be the duty of the Presidents of branches and Sections to
see to it that there be no such drones who do nothing but buzz in the
Theosophical beehive. 

One further word. How many times have not the two founders of the
Theosophical Society been accused of ambition and autocracy! How many times
have they not been reproached with a pretended desire to impose their will
on other members! Nothing could be more unjust. 

The founders of the Society have always been the first and humblest servants
of their co-workers and colleagues; always showing themselves ready to help
others with the feeble lights at their disposal, and to support them in the
fight against the egoists, the indifferent and the sectarians; for such is
the first battle for which everyone must be prepared who enters our Society,
so little understood by the general public. 

Besides, the reports published after each Annual Convention are there to
prove this. At our last convention, held in Madras, in December 1888,
important reforms were proposed and adopted. Anything resembling a financial
obligation was discontinued, even the payment of 25 francs for the cost of a
diploma having been abolished. Hereafter members will be free to donate what
they wish, if their heart is set on helping and supporting the Society, or,
not to give anything. 

Under these conditions, and at this moment of Theosophical history, it is
easy to understand the goal of a Magazine devoted exclusively to the spread
of our ideas. In it we would like to be able to open up new intellectual
horizons, to trace unexplored paths leading to the amelioration of
humankind; to offer words of comfort to all the disinherited of the earth
who suffer from a spiritual void, or from an absence of material goods. We
invite all noble-hearted persons who would respond to this appeal to join us
in this humanitarian work. 

THE FUTURE

Every contributor, whether a member of our Society or merely in sympathy
with it, can help us to make of this Magazine the only organ of true
Theosophy in France. We are now facing all the glorious possibilities of the
future. Once again the hour has struck for the great periodical return of
the rising tide of mystic thought in Europe. We are surrounded on all sides
by the ocean of universal science--the science of life eternal--bringing in
its waters the buried and long forgotten treasures of vanished generations,
treasures still unknown to the modern civilized races. The powerful current
rising from the submarine abysses, from the depths where lie the learning
and arts engulfed with the antediluvian Giants--demi-gods, though mortals
hardly yet formed; this current blows us in the face, murmuring: "That
which was, still is; that which is forgotten, buried for æons in the depths
of Jurassic strata, may once again reappear on the surface. Prepare
yourselves." 

Happy those who understand the language of the elements. But, where are
those heading to whom the word element conveys no other meaning than the one
given to it by materialistic physics and chemistry? Will the great waters
carry them toward familiar shores when they will have been swept off their
feet in the oncoming flood? Will they be carried toward the summit of a new
Ararat, toward the heights where are light and sun and a safe spot to stand
on, or toward a bottomless abyss that will engulf them as soon as they
attempt to fight against the irresistible waves of a new element? 

Let us prepare, and let us study Truth in all its aspects, trying not to
ignore any of them, if we do not wish, when the hour will have struck, to
fall into the abyss of the unknown. It is useless to rely on chance, and to
await the approaching intellectual and psychic crisis with indifference if
not with total incredulity, saying to oneself that if worse comes to worst,
the tide will carry us quite naturally to the shore; for there is a strong
likelihood of the tide stranding but a corpse! The battle will be fierce, in
any case, between brutal materialism and blind fanaticism on the one hand,
and on the other philosophy and mysticism--that more or less thick veil of
the Eternal Truth. 

It is not materialism that will have the upper hand. Everyone fanatically
clinging to an idea isolating him from the universal axiom -- "There is no
Religion higher than Truth" -- will find himself separated like a rotten
plank from the new ark called Humanity. Tossed by the waves, chased by the
winds, buffeted by this element so terrible because unknown, he will soon
find himself swallowed up
 
Yes, thus it must be, and it cannot be otherwise when the flame of modern
materialism, artificial and cold, will be extinguished for lack of fuel.
Those who cannot conceive of a spiritual Ego, of a living Soul, and of an
eternal Spirit, within their material shell (which owes its illusory life
only to these principles); those for whom the great wave of hope in a life
beyond the grave is a bitter draught, the symbol of an unknown quantity, or
else the subject of a belief sui generis, the result of mediumistic or
theological hallucinations--those will do well to be prepared for the
keenest of disappointments the future could have in store for them. 

For, from the depths of the muddy black waters of matter, hiding from them
on all sides the horizons of the great beyond, a mystic force is rising
towards the closing years of this century. A mere touch, at the most, until
now, but a superhuman touch, "supernatural" only for the superstitious and
the ignorant. 

The Spirit of Truth is at this moment moving upon the face of these black
waters, and, separating them, forces them to yield their spiritual
treasures. This spirit is a force that cannot be either checked or stopped.
Those who recognize it and feel that this is the supreme moment of their
salvation, will be carried by it beyond the illusions of the great astral
serpent. 

The bliss they will experience will be so sharp and so keen that were they
not in spirit detached from their bodies of flesh, this beatitude would
wound them like a sharpened blade. 

It is not pleasure that they will feel, but a bliss which is a foretaste of
the wisdom of the gods, of the knowledge of good and evil, and of the fruits
of the Tree of Life. 

CHOOSE YOUR OWN FUTURE

But whether the man of today be a fanatic, a skeptic, or a mystic, he must
realize that it is fruitless to struggle against these two moral forces now
unleashed and engaged in a fight to the finish. He is at the mercy of these
two adversaries and there is no intermediary power capable of protecting
him. 

It is but a matter of choice: to let oneself be carried away naturally and
without struggle by the flood of unfolding mysticism, or else to struggle
and react against the stresses of the moral and psychic evolution and to
feel oneself swallowed up in the Maelstrom of the new tide. 

At this very time the whole world with its centers of great intellect and of
human culture, with its political, literary, artistic and commercial
centers, is in turmoil, everything is tottering, falling apart, and now
tending to re-form. It is useless to blind oneself to this, useless to hope
one will be able to remain neutral between these two warring forces; one can
only be crushed, or has to choose between them. 

The man who thinks he has chosen freedom and who nevertheless remains
submerged in this seething and foaming cauldron of filth called social life,
utters the most terrible lie to his Divine Self; a lie that will blind this
Self through its long series of future incarnations. 

All of you who waver on the path of Theosophy and of the occult sciences,
who tremble on the golden threshold of Truth, the only Truth still open to
you, since all the others have failed, one after the other--look the Great
Reality now offering itself to you straight in the face. These words are for
the mystically inclined only, for them alone they will be of some
importance; for those who have already made their choice they will prove
vain and useless. 

But you Occultists, Kabalists and Theosophists, you know well that a word as
old as the world, though new to you, has been sounded at the beginning of
this cycle, and lies potentially, although not articulate for those others,
in the sum of the ciphers of the year 1889; you know that a note, never
before heard by the men of the present era, has just been sounded, and that
a new kind of thought has arisen, fostered by the evolutionary forces. This
thought differs from all that has ever been produced in the 19th Century;
yet it is identical with what was the keynote and the keystone of every
century, especially the last one:

"ABSOLUTE FREEDOM OF HUMAN THOUGHT." 

Why try to kill, to suppress, that which cannot be destroyed? Why fight when
one has no other choice than either to allow oneself to be lifted up to
heaven on the crest of the spiritual tide, beyond stars and universes, or to
be swallowed in the gaping abyss of the ocean of matter? 

Vain are your efforts to plumb the unsoundable in search of the roots of
that matter so glorified in our century; for these roots grow in Spirit and
in the Absolute, and do not exist, though being eternal. 

This continuous contact with flesh, blood, and bones, with the illusion of
differentiated matter only blinds you; and the more you advance in the realm
of chemical and impalpable atoms the more will you become convinced that
they exist only in your imagination. 

Do you believe that you will really discover all truths and all the
realities of being there? But, death stands at the door of all of us, ready
to close it on the soul of the beloved escaping from its prison, on that
soul which alone gave reality to the body; and is love eternal to be likened
to the molecules of that matter which changes and disappears? 

But perhaps you are indifferent to all this; if so, of what importance to
you are the love and the souls of those whom you loved, since you do not
believe in these souls? Be it so. Your choice is already made. You have
entered the path that crosses but the arid wastes of matter. You have doomed
yourself to vegetate there through a long series of lives, content
henceforth with feverish hallucinations instead of spiritual perceptions,
with passions instead of love, with the rind instead of the fruit. 

But you, friends and readers, who aspire to something more than the life of
the squirrel in its ceaselessly revolving wheel; you who are not satisfied
with the cauldron which is ever boiling without producing anything, you who
do not mistake hollow echoes as old as the world for the divine voice of
Truth, prepare yourselves for a future that few of you have dreamed of
unless you have already set your feet upon the Path. For you have chosen a
way which, in the beginning lined with thorns, will soon widen, and lead you
straight to the Divine Truth.
 
You are free to doubt at first; free not to accept on someone's word what is
taught concerning the source and the cause of this Truth, but you can always
listen to what the voice is saying, you can always watch the effects
produced by the creative force which emerges from the depths of the unknown.


The arid soil upon which our present generations are moving at the close of
this age of spiritual starvation and material satiety, is in need of a sign,
of a rainbow
--symbol of hope--above its horizon. For, of all past centuries, the
nineteenth is the most criminal. 

It is criminal in its fearful selfishness, in its scepticism that scoffs at
the mere idea of something beyond matter; in its idiotic indifference to all
that is not the personal "I"--far more so than any of the centuries of
barbaric ignorance and intellectual darkness. 

Our century must be saved from itself before its last hour strikes. Now is
the time for action by all who see the sterility and foolishness of an
existence blinded by materialism and so ferociously indifferent to the fate
of others. It is for them to devote their best energies, all their courage
and all their efforts to bring about an intellectual reform. 

This reform cannot be accomplished except through Theosophy, and, let us say
it, Occultism, or the Wisdom of the East. Many are the paths leading to it,
but Wisdom is forever one. 

Artists foresee it, those who suffer dream of it, the pure in spirit know
it. Those who work for others cannot remain blind before its reality even
though they do not always know it by name. It is only the light-headed and
empty-minded, the selfish and vain drones deafened by the sound of their own
buzzing who can ignore this high ideal. They will live until life itself
becomes an unbearable burden to them. 

Let it be known, however, that these pages are not written for the masses.
They are neither a call for reform nor an effort to win over to our views
those who are happy in life. They are addressed only to those who are ready
to understand them, to those who suffer, to those who are thirsty and hungry
for any reality in this world of shifting shadows. 

And why should those not have enough courage to give up their frivolous ways
of life, above all their pleasures and even some of their business
interests, unless the care of these interests is a duty owed to their
families or to others? 

No one is so busy or so poor that he cannot be inspired by a noble ideal to
follow. Why hesitate to blaze a trail toward that ideal through all
obstacles, all hindrances, all the daily considerations of social life, and
to advance boldly until it is reached? Ah! those who would make this effort
would soon find that the "narrow gate" and "the thorny path" lead to
spacious valleys with unlimited horizons, to a state without death, for one
rebecomes a God! 

AN IDEAL PATH

It is true that the first requisites for getting there are absolute
unselfishness and unlimited devotion to the interests of others, and
complete indifference as to the world and its opinions. To take the first
step on this ideal path requires a perfectly pure motive; no frivolous
thought must be allowed to divert our eyes from the goal; no hesitation, no
doubt must fetter our feet.

Yet, there are men and women perfectly capable of all this, and whose only
desire is to live under the aegis of their Divine Nature. Let these, at
least, have the courage to live this life and not to hide it from the sight
of others!
 
No one's opinion could ever be above the rulings of our own conscience, so,
let that conscience, arrived at its highest development, be our guide in all
our common daily tasks. As to our inner life, let us concentrate all our
attention on our chosen Ideal, and let us ever look beyond without ever
casting a glance at the mud at our feet.... 

Those capable of such an effort are true Theosophists; all others are but
members more or less indifferent, and quite often useless. 

H. P. BLAVATSKY
La Revue Theosophique, March 21, 1889 


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