GOD EXPLAINED BY THE TRANSHIMALAYAN MASTERS

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)

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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.

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(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)