Theosophical Society,
H P Blavatsky
Is the Desire to "Live" Selfish?
By
H P Blavatsky
The
passage "to live, to live, to live must be the unswerving resolve,"
occurring
in the article on the Elixir of Life, is often quoted by
superficial
and unsympathetic readers as an argument that the teachings
of
occultism are the most concentrated form of selfishness. In order to
determine
whether the critics are right or wrong, the meaning of the
word
"selfishness" must first be ascertained.
According
to an established authority, selfishness is that "exclusive
regard
to one's own interest or happiness; that
supreme self-love or
self-preference
which leads a person to direct his purposes to the
advancement
of his own interest, power, or happiness, without regarding
those
of others."
In
short, an absolutely selfish individual is one who cares for himself
and
none else, or, in other words, one who is so strongly imbued with a
sense
of the importance of his own personality that to him it is the
crown
of all thoughts, desires, and aspirations, and beyond which lies
the
perfect blank. Now, can an occultist be
then said to be "selfish"
when
he desires to live in the sense in which that word is used by the
writer
of the article on the Elixir of Life? It
has been said over and
over
again that the ultimate end of every aspirant after occult
knowledge
is Nirvana or Mukti, when the individual, freed from
all
Mayavic Upadhi,
becomes one with Paramatma, or the Son identifies
himself
with the Father in Christian phraseology.
For that purpose,
every
veil of illusion which creates a sense of personal isolation, a
feeling
of separateness from THE ALL, must be torn asunder, or, in other
words,
the aspirant must gradually discard all sense of selfishness with
which
we are all more or less affected. A
study of the Law of Kosmic
Evolution
teaches us that the higher the evolution, the more does it
tend
towards Unity. In fact, Unity is the
ultimate possibility of
Nature,
and those who through vanity and selfishness go against her
purposes,
cannot but incur the punishment of annihilation. The
occultist
thus recognizes that unselfishness and a feeling of universal
philanthropy
are the inherent laws of our being, and all he does is to
attempt
to destroy the chains of selfishness forged upon us all by Maya.
The
struggle then between Good and Evil, God and Satan, Suras
and
Asuras, Devas and Daityas, which is mentioned in the sacred books of all
the
nations and races, symbolizes the battle between unselfish and
selfish
impulses, which takes place in a man, who tries to follow the
higher
purposes of Nature, until the lower animal tendencies, created by
selfishness,
are completely conquered, and the enemy thoroughly routed
and
annihilated. It has also been often put
forth in various
Theosophical
and other occult writings that the only difference between
an
ordinary man who works along with Nature during the course of Kosmic
evolution
and an occultist, is that the latter, by his superior
knowledge,
adopts such methods of training and discipline as will hurry
on
that process of evolution, and he thus reaches in a comparatively
short
time the apex which the ordinary individual will take perhaps
billions
of years to reach. In short, in a few
thousand years he
approaches
that type of evolution which ordinary humanity attains in the
sixth
or seventh Round of the Manvantara, i.e., cyclic
progression. It
is
evident that an average man cannot become a MAHATMA in one life, or
rather
in one incarnation. Now those, who have
studied the occult
teachings
concerning Devachan and our after-states, will remember that
between
two incarnations there is a considerable period of subjective
existence. The greater the number of such Devachanic
periods, the
greater
is the number of years over which this evolution is extended.
The
chief aim of the occultist is therefore to so control himself as to
be
able to regulate his future states, and thereby gradually shorten the
duration
of his Devachanic existence between two incarnations. In the
course
of his progress, there comes a time when, between one physical
death
and his next rebirth, there is no Devachan but a kind of spiritual
sleep,
the shock of death, having, so to say, stunned him into a state
of
unconsciousness from which he gradually recovers to find himself
reborn,
to continue his purpose. The period of
this sleep may vary from
twenty-five
to two hundred years, depending upon the degree of his
advancement. But even this period may be said to be a
waste of time,
and
hence all his exertions are directed to shorten its duration so as
to
gradually come to a point when the passage from one state of
existence
into another is almost imperceptible.
This is his last
incarnation,
as it were, for the shock of death no more stuns him. This
is
the idea the writer of the article on the Elixir of Life means to
convey
when he says:
By
or about the time when the Death-limit of his race is passed he is
actually
dead, in the ordinary sense, that is to say, he has relieved
himself
of all or nearly all such material particles as would have
necessitated
in disruption the agony of dying. He has
been dying
gradually
during the whole period of his Initiation.
The catastrophe
cannot
happen twice over, he has only spread over a number of years the
mild
process of dissolution which others endure from a brief moment to a
few
hours. The highest Adept is, in fact,
dead to, and absolutely
unconscious
of, the World; he is oblivious of its
pleasures, careless
of
its miseries, in so far as sentimentalism goes, for the stern sense
of
Duty never leaves him blind to its very existence....
The
process of the emission and attraction of atoms, which the occultist
controls,
has been discussed at length in that article and in other
writings. It is by these means that he gets rid
gradually of all the
old
gross particles of his body, substituting for them finer and more
ethereal
ones, till at last the former sthula sarira is completely dead
and
disintegrated, and he lives in a body entirely of his own creation,
suited
to his work. That body is essential to
his purposes; as the
Elixir
of Life says:--
To
do good, as in every thing else, a man most have time and materials
to
Work with, and this is a necessary means to the acquirement of powers
by
which infinitely more good can be done than without them. When these
are
once mastered, the opportunities to use them will arrive....
Giving
the practical instructions for that purpose, the same paper
continues:--
The
physical man must be rendered more ethereal and sensitive; the
mental
man more penetrating and profound; the
moral man more
self-denying
and philosophical.
Losing
sight of the above important considerations, the following
passage
is entirely misunderstood:--
And
from this account too, it will be perceptible how foolish it is for
people
to ask the Theosophist "to procure for them communication with
the
highest Adepts." It is with the
utmost difficulty that one or two
can
be induced, even by the throes of a world, to injure their own
progress
by meddling with mundane affairs. The
ordinary reader will
say: "This is not god-like. This is the acme
of selfishness." ....But
let
him realize that a very high Adept, undertaking to reform the world,
would
necessarily have to once more submit to Incarnation. And is the
result
of all that have gone before in that line sufficiently
encouraging
to prompt a renewal of the attempt?
Now,
in condemning the above passage as inculcating selfishness,
superficial
critics neglect many profound truths. In
the first place,
they
forget the other extracts already quoted which impose self-denial
as
a necessary condition of success, and which say that, with progress,
new
senses and new powers are acquired with which infinitely more good
can
be done than without them. The more
spiritual the Adept becomes the
less
can he meddle with mundane gross affairs and the more he has to
confine
himself to spiritual work. It has been
repeated, times out of
number,
that the work on the spiritual plane is as superior to the work
on
the intellectual plane as the latter is superior to that on the
physical
plane. The very high Adepts, therefore,
do help humanity, but
only
spiritually: they are constitutionally
incapable of meddling with
worldly
affairs. But this applies only to very
high Adepts. There are
various
degrees of Adept-ship, and those of each degree work for
humanity
on the planes to which they may have risen.
It is only the
chelas
that can live in the world, until they rise to a certain degree.
And
it is because the Adepts do care for the world that they make their
chelas
live in and work for it, as many of those who study the subject
are
aware. Each cycle produces its own
occultists capable of working
for
the humanity of the time on all the different planes; but when the
Adepts
foresee that at a particular period humanity will he incapable of
producing
occultists for work on particular planes, for such occasions
they
do provide by either voluntarily giving up their further progress
and
waiting until humanity reaches that period, or by refusing to enter
into
Nirvana and submitting to re-incarnation so as to be ready for work
when
the time comes. And although the world
may not be aware of the
fact,
yet there are even now certain Adepts who have preferred to remain
in
statu quo and refuse to take the higher degrees, for
the benefit of
the
future generations of humanity. In
short, as the Adepts work
harmoniously,
since unity is the fundamental law of their being, they
have,
as it were, made a division of labour, according to which each
works
on the plane appropriate to himself for the spiritual elevation of
us
all--and the process of longevity mentioned in the Elixir of Life is
only
the means to the end which, far from being selfish, is the most
unselfish
purpose for which a human being can labour.
H
P Blavatsky
Cardiff Blavatsky Archive
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