Theos-Talk Archives (December 2006 Message tt00943)

Friends, 
 
Ethics is a science leading to inner liberty,   and as such it has nothing to do with any mechanisms of fearful blind belief about what is right or wrong.     
 
Of course, Christian exoteric ethics is mainly an external, controlling and manipulative use of  Ethics, with the exception, though,  of authentic mystics like St. John of the Cross, St. Francis of Assisi, Cardinal de Cusa, Teillard de Chardin, Mother Theresa of Calcutta, Anthony de Mello and  many others.  
 
Ethics in esoteric philosophy is a practical Science by which an independent student – one who is  consciously responsible for his own life –  can learn to act in such a way that will establish the foundations for his inner freedom from ignorance.
 
Esoterically, Ethics is the occult art of creating good Karma and of seeing and eliminating the sources of negative karma.  Ethics is, therefore, essential to Theosophy ; and it is a battlefield, too.  It is  not a coincidence that Mr. Henry Sidgwick, one of the most clever enemies the theosophical movement, was a  kind of scholar and wrote a long treatise on Ethics.  His “Methods of Ethics” was first published in 1874, one year before the foundation of the theosophical movement in New York, and it remains influential even today in ‘scholarly’ circles.  (1)   
 
Later  ‘moral relativists’ within the theosophical movement  — who call themselves “eclectic’ —   could  be well described as philosophical disciples of Mr. Henry Sidgwick, the 19th century president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) who presided over a fraudulent ‘investigation’ against HPB and her Masters. 
 
Sidgwick and some  like-minded theosophists have more in common than their decision to give  publicity to slanders against HPB.  Their premises and their methods, as their Epistemology,  are essentially the same.  
 
Perhaps one might say therefore that present-day ‘ theosophical moral relativists’ are disciples of Sidgwick’s. Yet it is even more accurate to say that both Mr. Henry Sidgwick and his minor followers, “theosophists” or not,  are the children of an older  tradition,  set by  Protagoras of Abdera, the famous  Sophist who lived in ancient Athens and had debates with Plato.
 
The fact may seem ironical  that  ten years before promoting the SPR  fraud against the theosophical movement, Henry Sidgwick had written a long book on Ethics.  Yet his fraud against the theosophists is but an enlightening example of the twisted Western “Ethics” in action: the Ethics put at the service of Power. The Ethics which has sophisticated ways to say that ‘Might is Right’. 
 
A complex ideology of moral relativism was, indeed,  built  by Utilitarians  like Sidgwick,  in order to provide powerful  mechanisms  of spiritual ignorance,  social injustice and  political corruption in the West with an elegant varnish of  Ethical self-justification. 
 
For Utilitarians and ‘ethical relativists’,  truth is that representation of facts which best serves one’s purpose.  The purpose in those days was to show that Theosophy was fake ;  as a result,  “truth” was created to meet that goal,  and  such a truth was “useful”.  Pragmatic philosophy  often serves the same purpose  of having “truth” at the service of wishful thinking. 
 
The very way Henry Sidgwick defines Ethics in the opening paragraph  of his book shows the Protagorean  essence  and substance of his viewpoint. He says: 
 
“The boundaries of the study called Ethics are variously and often vaguely conceived: but they will perhaps be sufficiently defined, at the outset, for the purposes of the present treatise, if a ‘method of Ethics’ is explained to mean any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings ‘ought’ — or what is ‘right’ for them — to do, or to seek to realise by voluntary action.” (2) 
 
He puts the main terms between inverted comas in order to convey the idea that they can be freely manipulated according to short term utilitarian goals, and therefore made to justify almost anything.  
 
In 1888,  14 years after the appearance of Sidgwick’s book,   HPB wrote on the results of Christian Sophistry and pseudo-ethics,   put at the service of  western Industrial Revolution. 
 
Her words:  
 
“As civilization progresses, moral darkness pervades the alleged light of Christianity. The chosen symbol of our boasted civilization ought to be a huge boa constrictor. Like that monstrous ophidian, with its velvety black and brilliant golden-hued spots, and its graceful motions, civilization proceeds insidiously, but as surely, to crush in its deadly coils every high aspiration, every noble feeling, aye, even to the very discrimination of right and wrong.”
 
Note that Ethics is classically defined as ‘the discrimination of right and wrong’. So Ethics is being “swallowed” by materialistic civilization.  And   HPB  goes on to mention in the following paragraph the occult process in man by which Ethics is suffocated. She says: 
 
“Conscience, ‘God’s vicegerent in the soul’, speaks no longer in man ; for the whispers of the still small voice within are stifled by the  ever-increasing din and roar of Selfishness.” (3)   
 
In  this, as in many other of her writings, HPB announces an ethical decadence. She did so because she had ahead of her the low cycle of the tide, in terms of human karma.  She knew and wrote that XXth century would be most difficult.  Yet now in the XXIth century we must set the foundations for the higher cycle of the tide ahead of us.  
 
At the lowest point in the cycle, one must look upwards.  There must be a rebirth of ethical and karmic hopes  in the years and decades ahead of us,  as HPB herself wrote,  when thinking of XXIth century. And that’s not a bad news at all.  
 
Of course, the  good news about XXIth century does not refer to the Outer Shell of our civilization, whose fate must follow its natural course. 
 
 
Regards,   Carlos.  
 
 
NOTES:
 
(1) “The Methods of Ethics”, by Henry Sidgwick, seventh edition,  Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge,  USA, 1981,  528 pp.  
 
(2) “The Methods of Ethics”, by Henry Sidgwick, seventh edition, see p. 01.
 
(3) “Our Christian XIXth Century E thics”, an article by HPB in “Lucifer”, August 1888.  See “Collected Writings”, H. P. Blavatsky, TPH India/USA, 1988, volume X, p. 81.  


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]