The following text are notes by master Kuthumi on a "Preliminary
Chapter" Headed "God" wrote by Allan Hume, intended to preface
and exposition of Masters’ Occult Philosophy.
(And in brackets I added my
comments)
«
THE GOD OF RELIGIONS DOES NOT EXIST
Neither our philosophy nor ourselves believe in a God, least of all in
one whose pronoun necessitates a capital H. Our philosophy falls under the
definition of Hobbes. It is preeminently the science of effects by their
causes, and of causes by their effects, and since it is also the science of
things deduced from first principle, as Bacon defines it, before we admit any
such principle we must know it, and have no right to admit even its
possibility.
Your whole explanation is based upon one solitary admission made simply
for argument's sake in October last. You were told that our knowledge was
limited to this our solar system: ergo as philosophers who desired to remain
worthy of the name we could not either deny or affirm the existence of what you
termed a supreme, omnipotent, intelligent being of some sort beyond the
limits of that solar system. But if such an existence is not absolutely
impossible, yet unless the uniformity of Nature's law breaks at those limits we
maintain that it is highly improbable.
(In a later letter, Kuthumi
pointed out that: "the best Adepts have searched the Universe during millenniums
and found nowhere the slightest trace of a God or a Devil as religion advocates
— but throughout, the same immutable, inexorable law.” CM 22, p.142)
Nevertheless we deny most emphatically the position of agnosticism in
this direction, and as regards the solar system. Our doctrine knows no
compromises. It either affirms or denies, for it never teaches but that which
it knows to be the truth.
(The masters explained that the
complete development and activation of their spiritual senses, as well as the
teaching they have received from more advanced beings, assures them that what
they know is the truth.)
Therefore, we deny God both as philosophers and as Buddhists. We know
there are planetary and other spiritual lives, and we know there is in our
system no such thing as God, either personal or impersonal.
Parabrahm is not a God, but absolute immutable law, and Iswar is the
effect of Avidya and Maya, ignorance based upon the great delusion. The word
God was invented to designate the unknown cause of those effects which man has
either admired or dreaded without understanding them, and since we claim and that
we are able to prove what we claim — i.e. the knowledge of that cause
and causes we are in a position to maintain there is no God or Gods behind
them.
The idea of God is not an innate but an acquired notion, and we have but
one thing in common with theologies — we reveal the infinite. But while we
assign to all the phenomena that proceed from the infinite and limitless Space,
Duration and motion, material, natural, sensible and known (to us
at least) causes, the theists assign them spiritual, super-natural
and unintelligible an unknown causes.
(And that is why the theists
continue with the belief that behind those causes there is a God and not the laws
that govern the Universe.)
The God of the Theologians is simply an imaginary power, un loup
garou as d'Holbach expressed it — a power which has never yet manifested
itself. Our chief aim is to deliver humanity of this nightmare, to teach man
virtue for its own sake, and to walk in life relying on himself instead of
leaning on a theological crutch, that for countless ages was the direct cause
of nearly all human misery.
Pantheistic we may be called — agnostic never. If people are willing to
accept and to regard as God our one life immutable and unconscious in its
eternity they may do so and thus keep to one more gigantic misnomer.
But then they will have to say with Spinoza that there is not and that
we cannot conceive any other substance than God; or as that famous and
unfortunate philosopher says in his fourteenth proposition, "Praeter Deum {nulla} dari neque concipi
potest substantia" — and thus become Pantheists . . . . who but a
theologian nursed on mystery and the most absurd supernaturalism can imagine a
self existent being of necessity infinite and omnipresent outside the
manifested boundless universe.
The word infinite is but a negative which excludes the idea of bounds.
It is evident that a being independent and omnipresent cannot be limited by
anything which is outside of himself; that there can be nothing exterior to
himself — not even vacuum, then where is there room for matter? for that
manifested universe even though the latter limited. If we ask the theist is
your God vacuum, space or matter, they will reply no. And yet they hold that
their God penetrates matter though he is not himself matter.
When we speak of our One Life we also say that it penetrates, nay is the
essence of every atom of matter; and that therefore it not only has
correspondence with matter but has all its properties likewise, etc. — hence is
material, is matter itself.
(This was said by Master Kuthumi
in 1882, 22 years before science officially accepted that matter is made of
energy. And what Kuthumi specified here is that energy is the essence of One
Life, also called the Logos.)
How can intelligence proceed or emanate from non-intelligence — you kept
asking last year. How could a highly intelligent humanity, man the crown of
reason, be evolved out of blind unintelligent law or force!
But once we reason on that line, I may ask in my turn, how could
congenital idiots, non-reasoning animals, and the rest of "creation"
have been created by or evoluted from, absolute wisdom, if the latter is a
thinking intelligent being, the author and ruler of the Universe?
How? says Dr. Clarke in his examination of the proof of the existence of
the Divinity. "God who hath made the eye, shall he not see? God who hath made
the ear shall he not hear?"
But according to this mode of reasoning they would have to admit that in
creating an idiot God is an idiot; that he who made so many irrational beings,
so many physical and moral monsters, must be an irrational being. . . .
. . . We are not Adwaitees, but our teaching respecting the one life is
identical with that of the Adwaitee with regard to Parabrahm. And no true
philosophically trained Adwaitee will ever call himself an agnostic, for he
knows that he is Parabrahm and identical in every respect with the universal
life and soul — the macrocosm is the microcosm and he knows that there is no
God apart from himself, no creator as no being. Having found Gnosis (i.e. the knowledge of the divine) we cannot turn our backs on it and
become agnostics (because that would be
equivalent to affirm that the information we have received from divine beings
is wrong).
. . . . Were we to admit that even the highest Dyan Chohans (i.e. the higher minds that direct the Universe) are liable to err under a delusion,
then there would be no reality for us indeed and the occult sciences would be
as great a chimera as that God. If there is an absurdity in denying that which
we do not know it is still more extravagant to assign to it unknown laws.
(I consider extremely improbable that
the Dyan Chohans may be wrong about what they taught, because we are talking
about beings who have a level of perception and knowledge that exceeds our
understanding.)
According to logic "nothing" is that of which everything can
truly be denied and nothing can truly be affirmed. The idea therefore either of
a finite or infinite nothing is a contradiction in terms.
And yet according to theologians "God, the self existent being, is
a most simple, unchangeable, incorruptible being; without parts, figure,
motion, divisibility, or any other such properties as we find in matter. For
all such things do plainly and necessarily imply finiteness in their very
notion and are utterly inconsistent with complete infinity."
Therefore the God here offered to the adoration of the XIXth century
lacks every quality upon which man's mind is capable of fixing any judgment.
What is this in fact but a being of whom they can affirm nothing that is
not instantly contradicted.
Their own Bible their Revelation destroys all the moral perceptions they
heap upon him, unless indeed they call those qualities perfections that every
other man's reason and common sense call imperfections, odious vices and brutal
wickedness.
(The God of the Old Testament is
truly terrifying.)
Nay more he who reads our Buddhist scriptures written for the
superstitious masses will fail to find in them a demon so vindictive,
unjust, so cruel and so stupid as the celestial tyrant upon whom the Christians
prodigally lavish their servile worship and on whom their theologians heap
those perfections that are contradicted on every page of their bible. Truly and
veritably your theology has created her God but to destroy him piecemeal. Your
church is the fabulous Saturn, who begets children but to devour them.
ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST
(The Universal Mind) — A few reflections and arguments ought to support
every new idea. For instance we are sure to be taken to task for the following
apparent contradictions:
A) We deny the existence of a thinking conscious God, on the grounds
that such a God must either be conditioned, limited and subject to change,
therefore not infinite, or
B) if he is represented to us as an eternal unchangeable and independent
being, with not a particle of matter in him, then we answer that it is no being
but an immutable blind principle, a law.
And yet, they will say, we believe in Dyans, or Planetaries
("spirits" also), and endow them with a universal mind, and this must be explained. Our
reasons may be briefly summed up thus:
1) We deny the absurd proposition that there can be, even in a boundless
and eternal universe — two infinite eternal and omni-present existences.
(Here, I think Kuthumi is
referring to the God and the Devil of Catholicism.)
2) Matter (in its transcendental state) we know to be eternal, i.e.,
having had no beginning:
(a) because matter is Nature
herself;
(b) because that which cannot
annihilate itself and is indestructible exists necessarily — and therefore it
could not begin to be, nor can it cease to be:
(c) because the accumulated
experience of countless ages, and that of exact science show to us matter (or
nature) acting by her own peculiar energy, of which not an atom is ever in an
absolute state of rest, and therefore it must have always existed, i.e.,
its materials ever changing form, combinations and properties, but its
principles or elements being absolutely indestructible.
(3) As to God — since no one has ever or at any time seen him or it — unless
he or it is the very essence and nature of this boundless eternal matter, its
energy and motion, we cannot regard him as either eternal or infinite or
yet self existing.
We refuse to admit a being or an existence of which we know absolutely
nothing; because:
(a) there is no room for him in
the presence of that matter whose undeniable properties and qualities we know
thoroughly well;
(b) because if he or it is but a
part of that matter it is ridiculous to maintain that he is the mover and ruler
of that of which he is but a dependent part and
(c) because if they tell us that
God is a self existent pure spirit independent of matter — an extra-cosmic
deity, we answer that admitting even the possibility of such an impossibility, i.e.,
his existence, we yet hold that a purely immaterial spirit cannot be an
intelligent conscious ruler nor can he have any of the attributes bestowed upon
him by theology and thus such a God becomes again but a blind force.
Intelligence as found in our Dyan Chohans, is a faculty that can
appertain but to organized or animated beings — however imponderable or rather invisible
the materials of their organizations. Intelligence requires the necessity of
thinking; to think one must have ideas; ideas suppose senses which are physical
material, and how can anything material belong to pure spirit?
If it be objected that thought cannot be a property of matter, we will
ask the reason why
We must have an unanswerable proof of this assumption, before we can
accept it. Of the theologian we would enquire what was there to prevent his
God, since he is the alleged creator of all — to endow matter with the faculty
of thought; and when answered that evidently it has not pleased Him to do so,
that it is a mystery as well as an impossibility, we would insist upon being
told why it is more impossible that matter should produce spirit and thought,
than that spirit or the thought of God should produce and create matter.
We do not bow our heads in the dust before the mystery of mind — for we have
solved it ages ago. Rejecting with contempt the theistic theory we reject
as much the automaton theory, teaching that states of consciousness are
produced by the marshalling of the molecules of the brain; and we feel as
little respect for that other hypothesis — the production of molecular motion
by consciousness.
WHAT DO MASTERS BELIEVE IN?
Then what do we believe in? Well, we believe in the much laughed at phlogiston
(see article "What is force and what is matter?" Theosophist,
September), and in what some natural philosophers would call nisus the
incessant though perfectly imperceptible (to the ordinary senses) motion or
efforts one body is making on another — the pulsations of inert matter — its
life.
The bodies of the Planetary spirits are formed of that which Priestley
and others called phlogiston and for which we have another name — this essence
in its highest seventh state forming that matter of which the organisms of the
highest and purest Dyans are composed, and in its lowest or densest form (so
impalpable yet that science calls it energy and force) serving as a cover to
the Planetaries of the 1st or lowest degree.
In other words we believe alone in matter (spiritual, material and energy that makes up everything that exists), in matter as visible nature and
matter in its invisibility as the invisible omnipresent omnipotent Proteus with
its unceasing motion which is its life, and which Nature draws from herself
since she is the great whole outside of which nothing can exist.
For as Bilfinger truly asserts "motion is a manner of existence
that flows necessarily out of the essence of matter; that matter moves by its
own peculiar energies; that its motion is due to the force which is inherent in
itself; that the variety of motion and the phenomena that result proceed from
the diversity of the properties of the qualities and of the combinations which
are originally found in the primitive matter" of which nature is the
assemblage and of which your science knows less than one of our Tibetan
Yak-drivers of Kant's metaphysics.
(And this is because scientists
can only investigate a small portion of all of Creation.)
CONCLUSION
The existence of matter then is a
fact; the existence of motion is another fact, their self existence and
eternity or indestructibility is a third fact. And the idea of pure spirit as a
Being or an Existence — give it whatever name you will — is a chimera, a
gigantic absurdity.
»
(Mahatma Letter 10, p.52-55)
OBSERVATIONS
Master Kuhumi explained more
about the phlogiston in an article that was published
in Theosophist magazine, September 1882, entitled "What is force and what
is matter?"
We see that for the transhimalayan
masters, God is not a supreme, omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient deity who
created and directs the Universe, like as most deists claim.
The masters assert that this God
is a fictitious character, and that the true God is the Life itself, which
moves the Universe, and therefore is also matter itself in its numerous
densities, the most dense being physical matter and in its subtle degrees being
energy.
And it is interesting to note
that the concept that transhimalayan masters have about God is more similar to
the vision that science advocates, which affirms that behind everything that
happens in the Universe, there is no personal or impersonal God, but simply the
laws that govern the Universe.
But while scientists remain
anchored to that point, because their perceptual abilities prevent them from
seeing beyond that. Instead the transhimalayan masters explain that these laws
are the expression of the Logos, which we could also identify as "God",
but he is a much more complex God that the Churches conceptions have about God,
and which I explain in this other article:
God explained by esoterism
(then I put it)