Re: Theos-World Re: On Personal Gods
Jul 27, 2009 06:31 AM
by adelasie
Anand,
While I have no desire to argue with you about this or anything, and
while I know that you are impervious to any opinion but your own, I must
make a few statements, for the sake of others who may be new to
Theosophy and/or to this list, and who may wonder what you could be
talking about.
Theosophists know there is no bearded man sitting on a throne in the sky
separate from humanity passing judgement on our personal lives and
listening to our petty woes. Theosophists know that this concept
belittles the vast power of the Infinite from whence all emanates and
whence all eventually returns. Theosophists know that this unknowable,
inconceivable, eternally unmanifest Absolute expresses itself in form in
cyclic rounds throughout infinity and that every unit of that expression
contains a spark of the eternal Source. Theosophists know that in that
sense, God, meaning the absolute, is in everything in manifestation, is
as intimately connected with mankind as is every atom of his body, every
thought of his mind.
Madame Blavatsky had the job of trying to explain this to a humanity
which had lost its way and was in danger of losing everything due to
wrong headed and wrong hearted practices for a long age. Theosophists
are grateful to her for bringing these teachings to light so they might
begin to understand what has gone wrong and how it might be addressed.
It is extremely offensive to read post after post criticizing HPB and
promoting misunderstanding after misunderstanding. It also indicates
that the poster might actually have some interest in these teachings.
Why else post on a theosophical network?
To all students if theosophy I suggest that when someone protests too
much, they have some hidden agenda, and they are to be avoided at all
costs. There is way too much at stake to allow ourselves to be
distracted from our work by doubt and confusion.
Adelasie
Anand wrote:
I can see incredible confusion caused by Blavatsky and Mahatma Letters
which were probably materialized by herself and so could not stop from
including her thoughts in Mahatma Letters.
There is certain sense in which Personal God of Christians does exist
and Gita supports the same idea of personal God of Christians. I don't
think Christians and Hindus were wrong and Blavatsky was right.
Anand Gholap
--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com
<mailto:theos-talk%40yahoogroups.com>, "robert_b_macd"
<robert.b.macdonald@...> wrote:
>
>
> Hi All,
>
> I wonder if Anand understands what a personal god is. What exactly
is theosophy denying when it argues that there can exist no personal
god. The idea of a personal god is at the heart of the Christian
religions. The Maha Chohan writes the following on this idea of the
personal god: "The world in general and Christendom especially, left
for two thousand years to the regime of a personal God as well as its
political and social systems based on that idea, has now proved a
failure." (Maha Chohan, Masters of the Wisdom) This particular idea of
a personal god working through the popes, priests, etc of the world is
a bankrupt idea. The violence perpetrated by the Church has proven it
beyond a doubt.
>
> A personal god takes notice of human affairs, gets angry when Man
misbehaves, and generally shows the emotional scale of a less advanced
member of the human race. This is what Christians and others who
follow a personal god worship, an emotionally crippled entity not wise
enough to deal with the growing pains of an adolescent humanity. The
Mahatma Letters refer to a different origin for humanity. There we
read: "The cycle of intelligent existences commences at the highest
worlds or planets — the term "highest" meaning here the most
spiritually perfect. Evolving from cosmic matter — which is akasa, the
primeval not the secondary plastic medium, or Ether of Science
instinctively suspected, unproven as the rest — man first evolutes
from this matter in its most sublimated state, appearing at the
threshold of Eternity as a perfectly Etherial — not Spiritual Entity,
say — a Planetary Spirit. He is but one remove from the universal and
Spiritual World Essence — the Anima Mundi of the Greeks, or that which
humanity in its spiritual decadence has degraded into a mythical
personal God. Hence, at that stage, the Spirit-man is at best an
active Power, an immutable, therefore an unthinking Principle (the
term "immutable" being again used here but to denote that state for
the time being, the immutability applying here but to the inner
principle which will vanish and disappear as soon as the spark of the
material in him will start on its cyclic work of Evolution and
transformation). In his subsequent descent, and in proportion to the
increase of matter he will assert more and more his activity." (ML 18)
>
> The Anima Mundi is not a personal God. It is an impersonal spirit
unable to receive the prayers of Mankind and hence personal in no
sense. Blavatsky explains as early as Isis:
>
> The existence of spirit in the common mediator, the ether, is denied
by materialism; while theology makes of it a personal god, the
kabalist holds that both are wrong, saying that in ether, the elements
represent but matter — the blind cosmic forces of nature; and Spirit,
the intelligence which directs them. The Hermetic, Orphic, and
Pythagorean cosmogonical doctrines, as well as those of Sanchoniathon
and Berosus, are all based upon one irrefutable formula, viz.: that
the ether and chaos, or, in the Platonic language, mind and matter,
were the two primeval and eternal principles of the universe, utterly
independent of anything else. The former was the all-vivifying
intellectual principle; the chaos, a shapeless, liquid principle,
without "form or sense," from the union of which two, sprung into
existence the universe, or rather, the universal world, the first
androgynous deity — the chaotic matter becoming its body, and ether
the soul. According to the phraseology of a Fragment of Hermias,
"chaos, from this union with spirit, obtaining sense, shone with
pleasure, and thus was produced the Protogonos (the first-born)
light."* This is the universal trinity, based on the metaphysical
conceptions of the ancients, who, reasoning by analogy, made of man,
who is a compound of intellect and matter, the microcosm of the
macrocosm, or great universe. (IU I, 341)
>
> Very clearly we read above that Blavatsky does not accept that
Spirit as described by the ancients is or could ever be a personal
god. It is a principle, not an existing entity. Combined with Matter
it produces the primordial light of the World.
>
> There is a sense of personal god that HPB sometimes uses. She writes:
>
> "May we be allowed a comparison, the best we can find, between the
concrete and the abstract; between what our critic calls "the triple
hypostasis" and we "the tetraktys"? Let us compare this philosophic
quaternary, composed of the body, the périsprit, the soul and the
spirit—to the ether—so well foreseen by science, but never defined—and
its subsequent correlations. The ether will represent the spirit for
us; the dead vapor that is formed therein—the soul; water—the
périsprit; ice—the body. The ice melts and for ever loses its shape,
water evaporates and is dispersed in space; the vapor is liberated
from its grosser particles and finally reaches that condition in which
science cannot follow it. Purified from its last defilements, it is
entirely absorbed into its first cause, and becomes a cause in its
turn. With the exception of the immortal nous—the soul, the périsprit
and the body, all having been created and having had a beginning, must
all have an end.
>
> "Does that mean that the individuality is lost in that absorption?
Not at all. But between the human Ego and the wholly divine Ego, there
is an abyss that our critics fill in without knowing it. As to the
périsprit, it is no more the soul than the delicate skin that
surrounds the almond is the kernel itself or even its temporary husk.
The périsprit is but the simulacrum of the man.
>
> "It follows that Theosophists understand the hypostasis, according
to the old philosophers, in a very different way from the
Spiritualists. For us, the Spirit is the personal god of each mortal,
and his only divine element. The dual soul, on the contrary, is only
semidivine. Being a direct emanation from the nous, everything it has
of immortal essence, once its earthly cycle is accomplished, must
necessarily return to its mother-source, and as pure as when it was
detached; it is that purely spiritual essence which the primitive
church, as faithful as it was rebellious to the Neo-Platonic
traditions, thought it recognized in the good daïmon and made into a
guardian angel; at the same time justly blighting the "irrational" and
fallible soul, the real human Ego (from which we get the word Egoism),
she called it the angel of darkness, and afterwards made it into a
personal devil. The only error was in anthropomorphizing it and in
making it a monster with tail and horns. Otherwise, abstraction as it
may be, this devil is truly personal because it is identical with our
Ego. It is this, the elusive and inaccessible personality, that
ascetics of every country think they chastise by mortifying the flesh.
The Ego then, to which we concede only a conditional immortality, is
the purely human individuality. Half vital energy, half an aggregation
of personal qualities and attributes, necessary to the constitution of
every human being as distinct from his neighbor, the Ego is only the
"breath of life" that Jehovah, one of the Elohim or creative gods,
breathed into the nostrils of Adam; and, as such, and apart from its
higher intelligence, it is but the element of individuality possessed
by man in common with every creature, from the gnat that dances in the
rays of the sun to the elephant, the king of the forest. It is only by
identifying itself with that divine intelligence that the Ego, soiled
with earthly impurities, can win its immortality.
>
> "In order to express our thought more clearly, we will proceed by a
question. Though matter may be quite indestructible in its primitive
atoms—indestructible, because, as we say, it is the eternal shadow of
the eternal Light and co-exists with it—can this matter remain
unchangeable in its temporary forms or correlations? Do we not see it,
during its ceaseless modifications, destroy today what it created
yesterday? Every form, whether it belongs to the objective world or to
that which our intelligence alone can perceive, having had a
beginning, must have an end. There was a time when it did not exist;
there will come a day when it will cease to be. Now, modern science
tells us that even our thought is material. However fleeting an idea
may be, its conception and its subsequent evolutions require a certain
consumption of energy; let the least cerebral motion reverberate in
the ether of space and it will produce a disturbance reaching to
infinity. Hence, it is a material force, although invisible."
>
> Here HBP states very clearly what she call the personal god. It is
our Atma or Nous, personal in the sense that it is our individual
personal spark or connection with the impersonal Spiritual World Essence.
>
> Do not put words into HPBs mouth. Understand what she writes before
you begin accusing her of anything. Chances are the confusion is not
in what she writes, but rather in your understanding of it. God and
Devil do not exist for theosophists except in this narrow sense of
Nous and Ego.
>
> This is how I read it,
>
> Robert Bruce
>
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