Theos-Talk Archives (March 2005 Message tt00705)

Mar 30 2005

Dear Steven:

Consider this also. please: What is the SOURCE OF RELIGIONS

Going way back a few million of years to the time of the great Atlantean
Races that preceded our series, named "Aryan" (Noble), we find: ---

“What was the religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common
acceptation of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the
Lemuro-Atlanteans, had any, as they knew no dogma, nor had they to believe
on faith. 

No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the
Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present as the ever to be unknown
and invisible ALL, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and
feeling in himself his inner God, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature,
though an animal in his physical Self. 

The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the
fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual and
the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the lower
principles by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the "Sons of Light."
Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves of Matter. 

>From "Sons of Light and Wisdom" they ended by becoming the "Sons of
Darkness." They had fallen in the battle of mortal life with Life immortal,
and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of
Atlanteans.* 

At the dawn of his consciousness, the man of the Third Root Race had thus no
beliefs that could be called religion. That is to say, he was equally as
ignorant of "gay religions, full of pomp and gold" as of any system of faith
or outward worship. 

REVERENCE AND WORSHIP

But if the term is to be defined as the binding together of the masses in
one form of reverence paid to those we feel higher than ourselves, of piety
— as a feeling expressed by a child toward a loved parent — then even the
earliest Lemurians had a religion — and a most beautiful one — from thevery
beginning of their intellectual life. Had they not their bright gods of the
elements around 
 

* The name is used here in the sense of, and as a synonym of "sorcerers."
The Atlantean races were many, and lasted in their evolution for millions of
years: all were not bad. They became so toward their end, as we (the fifth)
are fast becoming now. 
-----------------------------------------------

them, and even within themselves? * 

Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tendered by those who had
given them life and called them forth to intelligent, conscious life? We are
assured it was so, and we believe it. For the evolution of Spirit into
matter could never have been achieved; nor would it have received its first
impulse, had not the bright Spirits sacrificed their own respective
super-ethereal essences to animate the man of clay, by endowing each of his
inner principles with a portion, or rather, a reflection of that essence. 

The Dhyanis of the Seven Heavens (the seven planes of Being) are the
NOUMENOI of the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the
Seven Powers of nature - the grosser effects of which are perceived by us in
what Science is pleased to call the "modes of motion" — the imponderable
forces and what not — are the still higher noumenoi of still higher
Hierarchies. 

It was the "Golden Age" in those days of old, the age when the "gods walked
the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals." Since then, the gods departed
(i.e., became invisible), and later generations ended by worshipping their
kingdoms — the Elements. 


DEGENERATED TO WORSHIP OF FORMS OF MATTER


It was the Atlanteans, the first progeny of semi-divine man after his
separation into sexes — hence the first-begotten and humanly-born mortals—
who became the first "Sacrificers" to the god of matter. 

They stand in the far-away dim past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the
prototype on which the great symbol of Cain was built, † as the first
anthropomorphists who worshipped form and matter. 

That worship degenerated very soon into self-worship, thence led to
phallicism, or that which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolisms of
every exoteric religion of ritual, dogma, and form. Adam and Eve became
matter, or furnished the soil, Cain and Abel — the latter the life-bearing
soil, the former "the tiller of that ground or field." 

Thus the first Atlantean races, born on the Lemurian Continent, separated
from their earliest tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous; into
those who worshipped the one unseen Spirit of Nature, the ray of which man
feels within himself — or the Pantheists, and those who offered fanatical
worship to the Spirits of the Earth, the dark Cosmic, anthropomorphic
Powers, with whom they made alliance. These were the earliest Gibborim, "the
mighty men of renown in those 
 
* The "Gods of the Elements" are by no means the Elementals. The latter are
at best used by them as vehicles and materials in which to clothe
themselves. . .

† Cain was the sacrificer, as shown at first in chap. iv. of Genesis, of
"the fruit of the ground," of which he was first tiller, while Abel "brought
of the firstlings of his flock" to the Lord. Cain is the symbol of the first
male, Abel of the first female humanity, Adam and Eve being the types of the
third race. (See "The Mystery of Cain and Abel.") The "murdering" is
blood-shedding, but not taking life. 
-----------------------------------------------------

days" (Gen. vi.); who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim: Kabiri with
the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Rakshasas and
Daityas with the Indian races. 

Such was the secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern
religions, especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal
god. 


TRIBAL GOD and SEXUAL RELIGIONS

At the same time this sexual religion was closely allied to, based upon and
blended, so to say, with astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated
toward the North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors (the Hyperborean
Continent); the Atlanteans, toward the Southern Pole, the pit, cosmically
and terrestrially — whence breathe the hot passions blown into hurricanesby
the cosmic Elementals, whose abode it is. The two poles were denominated, by
the ancients, Dragons and Serpents — hence good and bad Dragons and
Serpents, and also the names given to the "Sons of God" (Sons of Spirit and
Matter): the good and bad Magicians. This is the origin of this dual and
triple nature in man. The legend of the "Fallen Angels" in its esoteric
signification, contains the key to the manifold contradictions of human
character; it points to the secret of man's self-consciousness; it is the
angle-iron on which hinges his entire life-cycle; — the history of his
evolution and growth. 

On a firm grasp of this doctrine depends the correct understanding of
esoteric anthropogenesis. It gives a clue to the vexed question of the
Origin of Evil; and shows how man himself is the separator of the ONE into
various contrasted aspects. 

The reader, therefore, will not be surprised if so considerable space is
devoted in each case to an attempt to elucidate this difficult and obscure
subject. A good deal must necessarily be said on its symbological aspect;
because, by so doing, hints are given to the thoughtful student for his own
investigations, and more light can thus be suggested than it is possible to
convey in the technical phrases of a more formal, philosophical exposition. 

FALLEN ANGELS are HUMANITY

The "Fallen Angels," so-called, are Humanity itself. 

The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, has never had any being
before the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has begotten,
nurtured, and allowed the fiend to develop in his heart; he, again, who has
contaminated the indwelling god in himself, by linking the pure spirit with
the impure demon of matter. And, if the Kabalistic saying, "Demon est Deus
inversus" finds its metaphysical and theoretical corroboration in dual
manifested nature, its practical application is found in Mankind alone. “
S D II 272-4


ATLANTEANS  

magic black & white I 192n; II 273 
magic lang of, priests I 464 
religion of II 273-4 
sorcerers, giants, & unholy destroyed I 419; II 93-4n, 350, 495, 636 
sorcery of I 397; II 272 &n, 286, 371n, 493, 503, 772 
used magic against Sun II 762 

(Courtesy T P H, Pasadena) 
============================================


Apparently there is a very short gap (if any) between all practised
religions and very real sorcery.

Mr. Judge wrote on religion & reform – theosophically considered : --


 
 
RELIGION AND REFORM FROM A THEOSOPHICAL VIEWPOINT

			
TWO great shadowy shapes remain fixed in the attention of the mind of the
day, threatening to become in the twentieth century more formidable and
engrossing than ever. They are religion and reform, and in their sweep they
include every question of pressing human need; for this first arises through
the introspective experience of the race out of its aspirations toward the
unknown and the ever present desire to solve the questions whence and why?
while the second has its birth in the conditions surrounding the bodies of
the questioners of fate who struggle helplessly in the ocean of material
existence.

Many men wielding small or weighty pens have wrestled with these questions,
attacking them in ways as various as the minds of those who have taken them
up for consideration, but it still remains for the theosophist to bring
forward his views and obtain a hearing. 

This he should always do as a matter of duty, and not from the pride of fame
or the self-assertion which would see itself proclaimed before men. For he
knows that, even if he should not speak or could not get a hearing, the
march of that evolution in which he thoroughly believes will force these
views upon humanity, even if that has to be accomplished by suffering
endured by every human unit.

The theosophist can see no possibility of reform in existing abuses, in
politics or social relations, unless the plan of reform is one which grows
out of a true religion, and he does not think that any of the prevailing
religions of the Occident are true or adequate. 

They do not go to the root of the evil which causes the pain and sorrow that
call for reform or alleviation. And in his opinion theosophy--the essence or
concentrated virtue of every religion alone has power to offer and effect
the cure.

None of the present attempts at reform will meet success so long as they are
devoid of the true doctrine as to man, his nature and destiny, and
respecting the universe, its origin and future course. Every one of these
essays leaves man where it finds him, neglecting the lessons to be drawn
from the cycles in their never-ceasing revolution. 

While efforts are made to meliorate his mere physical condition, the real
mover, the man within, is left without a guide, and is therefore certain to
produce from no matter how good a system the same evils which are designed
to be destroyed. At every change he once more proceeds to vitiate the effect
of any new regimen by the very defects in human nature that cannot be
reached by legislation or by dogmatic creeds and impossible hells, because
they are beyond the reach of everything except the power of his own thought.
Nationalism, Socialism, Liberalism, Conservatism, Communism, and Anarchism
are each and all ineffective in the end. 

The beautiful dream depicted by Nationalism cannot be made a physical fact,
since it has no binding inward sanction; Communism could not stand, because
in time the Communist would react back into the holder of individual rights
and protector of property which his human nature would demand ought not to
be dissipated among others less worthy. And the continuance of the present
system, in which the amasser of wealth is allowed to retain and dispose of
what he has acquired, will, in the end, result in the very riot and
bloodshed which legislation is meant to prevent and suppress.

Indeed, the great popular right of universal suffrage, instead of bringing
about the true reign of liberty and law, will be the very engine through
which the crash will come, unless with it the Theosophic doctrines are
inculcated. We have seen the suffrage gradually extended so as to be
universal in the United States, but the people are used by the demagogues
and the suffrage is put to waste. 

Meanwhile, the struggle between capital and labor grows more intense, and in
time will rage with such fury that the poor and unlearned, feeling the goad
of poverty strike deeper, will cast their votes for measures respecting
property in land or chattels, so revolutionary that capital will combine to
right the supposed invasion by sword and bullet. This is the end toward
which it is all tending, and none of the reforms so sincerely put forward
will avert it for one hour after the causes have been sufficiently fixed and
crystallized. This final formation of the efficient causes is not yet
complete, but is rapidly approaching the point where no cure will be
possible.

The cold acquirements of science give us, it is true, magnificent physical
results, but fail like creeds and reforms by legislative acts in the end.
Using her own methods and instruments, she fails to find the soul and denies
its existence; while the churches assert a soul but cannot explain it, and
at the same time shock human reason by postulating the incineration by
material fire of that which they admit is immortal. 

As a means of escape from this dilemma nothing is offered save a vicarious
atonement and a retreat behind a blind acceptance of incongruities and
injustice in a God who is supposed by all to be infinitely merciful and
just.

Thus, on the one hand, science has no terrors and no reformatory force for
the wicked and the selfish; on the other, the creeds, losing their hold in
consequence of the inroads of knowledge, grow less and less useful and
respected every year. The people seem to be approaching an era of wild
unbelief. Just such a state of thought prevailed before the French
revolution of 1793.

Theosophy here suggests the reconciliation of science and religion by
showing that there is a common foundation for all religions and that the
soul exists with all the psychic forces proceeding therefrom. As to the
universe, Theosophy teaches a never-ending evolution and involution.
Evolution begins when the Great Breath--Herbert Spencers "Unknowable" which
manifests as universal energy--goes forth, and involution, or the
disappearance of the universe, obtains when the same breath returns to
itself. This coming forth lasts millions upon millions of years, and
involution prevails for an equal length of time. As soon as the breath goes
forth, universal mind together with universal basic matter appears. In the
ancient system this mind is called Mahat, and matter Prakriti. Mahat has the
plan of evolution which it impresses upon Prakriti, causing it to
ceaselessly proceed with the evolution of forms and the perfecting of the
units composing the cosmos. 

The crown of this perfection is man, and he contains in himself the whole
plan of the universe copied in miniature but universally potential.

This brings us to ourselves, surrounded as we are by an environment that
appears to us to cause pain and sorrow, no matter where we turn. But as the
immutable laws of cause and effect brought about our own evolution, the same
laws become our saviors from the miseries of existence. 

The two great laws postulated by Theosophy for the world's reform are those
of Karma and Reincarnation. Karma is the law of action which decrees that
man must suffer and enjoy solely through his own thoughts and acts. His
thoughts, being the smaller copy of the universal mind, lie at the root of
every act and constitute the force that brings about the particular body he
may inhabit. 

So Reincarnation in an earthly body is as necessary for him as the ceaseless
reincarnation of the universal mind in evolution after evolution is needful
for it. And as no man is a unit separate from the others in the Cosmos, he
must think and act in such a way that no discord is produced by him in the
great universal stream of evolution. 

It is the disturbance of this harmony which alone brings on the miseries of
life, whether that be of a single man or of the whole nation. As he has
acted in his last life or lives, so will he be acted upon in succeeding
ones. This is why the rich are often unworthy, and the worthy so frequently
poor and afflicted. 

All appeals to force are useless, as they only create new causes sure to
react upon us in future lives as well as in the present. But if all men
believed in this just and comprehensive law of Karma, knowing well that
whatever they do will be punished or rewarded in this or other new lives,
the evils of existence would begin to disappear. 

The rich would know that they are only trustees for the wealth they have and
are bound to use it for the good of their fellows, and the poor, satisfied
that their lot is the just desert for prior acts and aided by the more
fortunate, would work out old bad Karma and sow the seeds of only that which
is good and harmonious.

National misery, such as that of Whitechapel in London (to be imitated ere
long in New York), is the result of national Karma, which in its turn is
composed of the aggregation of not only the Karma of the individuals
concerned but also of that belonging to the rest of the nation. 

Ordinary reforms, whether by law or otherwise, will not compass the end in
view. This is demonstrated by experience. But given that the ruling and
richer classes believe in Karma and Reincarnation, a universal widespread
effort would at once be made by those favorites of fortune toward not only
present alleviation of miserable conditions, but also in the line of
educating the vulgar who now consider themselves oppressed as well by their
superiors as by fate. 

The opposite is now the case, for we cannot call individual sporadic or
sectarian efforts of beneficence a national or universal attempt. Just now
we have the General of the Salvation Army proposing a huge scheme of
colonization which is denounced by a master of science, Prof. Huxley, as
utopian, inefficient, and full of menace for the future. And he, in the
course of his comment, candidly admits the great danger to be feared from
the criminal and dissatisfied classes. 

But if the poorer and less discriminating see the richer and the learned
offering physical assistance and intelligent explanations of the apparent
injustice of life which can be found only in Theosophy there would soon
arise a possibility of making effective the fine laws and regulations which
many are ready to add to those already proposed. 

Without such Theosophic philosophy and religion, the constantly increasing
concessions made to the clamor of the uneducated democracy's demands will
only end in inflating the actual majority with an undue sense of their real
power, and thus precipitate the convulsion which might he averted by the
other course.

This is a general statement of the only panacea, for if once believed in
even from a selfish motive it will compel, by a force that works from within
all men, the endeavor to escape from future unhappiness which is inevitable
if they violate the laws inhering in the universal mind.

By WILLIAM Q. JUDGE, F.T.S.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.    	
--	New York, March 12, 1891
 
===============================================


So ? What shall we all do now?

Best wishes 

Dallas

PS	see some more notes below, please

============================================
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Steven 
Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2005 6:39 AM
To: 
Subject: Re: Welcome Spring



Dal-

SL
I was rereading your recent comments, and I think your use of the 
Gunas (Satva, Rajas, and Tamas)to show one of the problems we have 
with our difficulty with religions of the past, is well taken. 

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

DTB	BHAGAVAD GITA I consider is not "religion" but an exposition of
psychology based on THEOSOPHY viewed as "eternal doctrine" and law.

Krishna is an Avatar -- a Mahatma -- a Rishi -- If you doubt me, then,
read carefully what Judge says in his short commentary: NOTES ON THE
BHAGAVAD GITA. It is pure THEOSOPHY.

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

SL
I think you have hit upon what I had intended to say, when I 
mentioned that as cultures become more material we end up worshiping 
ourselves. 

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

DTB	HPB says that happened to the Atlanteans, and so the first
anthropomorphic religions began (S D  

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

SL
This "ourselves" is composed of the Gunas, and if there is 
preponderance of Tamas (weighty and interia like-tendencies such as 
laziness and lack of imagination) and Rajas (zealous adoration or 
emotionalism without study or understanding leading to the mental 
entrapment of blind faith) or even the odd form of Satva (spiritual 
materialism)then that which we worship or follow for Spiritual 
guidence is modeled after our own inadequate states of mind.

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

DTB	If we realize that it indicates to me we can exercise control over
our own thinking and decision making. We need to discover and prove to
ourselves the value of the rules and laws of Nature which supports us all
and keeps life going. 

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

Steve