Ernest
Egerton Wood was a prominent English Orientalist, yogi and theosophist, who in a lecture
delivered at the Blavatsky centenary birth celebration at Adyar, 12 August,
1931, he gave the following speech about the Secret Doctrine (in purple I added my comments).
I
It would not be an easy thing to
give an account of that extraordinary book, written by Madame Blavatsky, which
is named The Secret Doctrine.
Fortunately for me, however, I have only this afternoon the task of giving a
very brief description of it to an audience which, for the most part, is not
familiar with its contents. Although we, who are gathered here, are largely
members of the Theosophical Society, I take it that most have had but very
slight acquaintance with the book, and there are many present who have not even
looked inside the covers.
There are perhaps two principal
reasons why this book has not been as widely read as it ought to be. One is the
great length of it, which alarms many modern persons, who are busy with various
things. It is an interesting psychological feature of our present day that
people like to get to the end of things, and to say to themselves, “Now that is
done,” and so they are not willing to live with a book, that is, to have at
hand a book which they are not trying to finish, but which they enjoy, and
which they can dip into whenever they feel inclined to read. They are perfectly
willing to read ten books of one hundred pages each, but not one book of a
thousand pages. Many years ago, when I was librarian of the Manchester City
Lodge, I tried the experiment of rebinding each volume of The Secret Doctrine
in three parts, and then found that it became much more popular than before,
and most of the parts were constantly in demand.
This division was easily made in the
two volumes first published, since each is already in three Parts, dealing with
(1) evolution, (2) symbolism, and (3) various discussions, of the globes or
worlds in volume I and of the monads in volume II.
The second reason is that the book
not only states its own message, but it also goes out of its way hundreds, if
not thousands of times, in order to show a great variety of students and
scholars —Sanskritists, Egyptologists, Ethnologists, Archaeologists and
Scientists— that the doctrines which it presents are not new, but can be found,
if carefully searched for, among the traditions and the studies with which they
are concerned. And those traditions and studies are often somewhat technical
and rather recondite from the point of view of the average reader— even the
educated reader. It was part of Mme Blavatsky’s humility of character that she
tried to meet all enquirers and also opponents upon their own ground, and
instead of saying:
-
“I have brought you
something very precious, but you can take it or leave it.”
She would go to endless trouble to
make it easy for whomsoever she might be addressing to approach her truth from
his or her point of view. The Secret
Doctrine therefore presents a most heterogeneous collection of traditions,
myths and symbols; we shall understand the book and its purpose better if we
remember that it is not directly concerned with those relics, and that there is
no occult advantage to be gained by knowing a lot about them.
(There is also a third reason why theosophists have
studied that book little, and it is because Annie Besant dumped this work into
a corner to give prominence to the pseudo-theosophy that she and Leadbeater
elaborated, but which is full of errors, falsehoods and distortions.)
I have often thought that we might
try to make a smaller edition of The
Secret Doctrine, for the convenience of ordinary readers, and as an
introduction to the complete work, which might contain only H.P.B,’s own words,
but might omit all unnecessary descriptions and excursions. This I am sure
would not reduce the circulation of the complete book, but would probably
increase it.
It is well known that Mme Blavatsky
had prepared The Secret Doctrine on
the continent of Europe before she went to London at the invitation of some
Theosophical friends, and that while in London, and partly because those
friends pointed out various possible criticisms, she very much expanded it, so
much so indeed that a number of sections of her first draft had to be left out
of the two volumes at first published, though they were subsequently included
in a collection of her writings which was issued as a third volume.
(The
point is that this first draft —which is known as the Wurzburg manuscript— was
not intended to be published, and Annie Besant was who published that third
volume in a spurious way.)
It requires a little careful thought
to distinguish the relations between the writer and the reader of The Secret Doctrine. The writer makes it
perfectly clear that she herself is not a speculator with regard to these
doctrines, but is a propagandist of teachings concerning which she has conclusive
convictions. Although she quotes Montaigne, with the words:
-
“I have here made
only a nosegay of culled flowers and have brought nothing of my own but the
string that ties them.”
She also mentions that these flowers
have been so much neglected of recent centuries that to most people they will
present something new, and that will be an understanding of the laws of life,
of nature and of man which, if studied, will release people from the
materialistic conceptions which have distorted almost every branch of modern
thought — Religious, Philosophic, Scientific and even Social.
She makes no claim to a perfect
personal knowledge of the facts behind the doctrines which she announces, but asserts
that she has been instructed by others —Initiates or Masters— who have that
knowledge — a body of Adepts who have verified the facts for themselves, have
kept a consistent record of them, and have from time to time announced these
truths in the world, only to have them again and again misunderstood, and
therefore distorted and overlaid with errors. Therefore she says that the
truths appear in every system of thought and philosophy worthy of the name.
She claims no authority for her
statements on the ground of such superior tutelage, but holds that these truths
would easily prove acceptable to all men, if they could be persuaded to examine
them in the calm light of reason, setting aside the clinging to privileges, and
also the fears, which accompany crystallized traditions and obstruct the free
working of the mind in every part of the world. It is not by setting aside
traditions as such, but by admitting reason as applied to traditions that these
teachings may find acceptance, for there is scarcely a tradition or a symbol
coming from antiquity which does not enshrine some great truth.
Therefore Mme Blavatsky writes in
the Proem:
« Once that the reader has
gained a clear apprehension of them [the basic conceptions of The Secret Doctrine] and realized the
light which they throw on every problem of life, they will need no further
justification in his eyes, because their truth will be to him as evident as the
sun in heaven. »
And I presume she is here referring
only to the reasonableness of the teachings, not to the development and use of
any abnormal faculties.
One thing I may certainly mention in
the field of science, without going into detail. Nearly all that she had to say
on physics, biology and ethnology is very much more acceptable to the man who
knows modern science to-day than it was to his prototype of forty years ago.
While I may be tempted to emphasize this point, I must also remember that we do
not want to rest any belief in her as yet unproven statements on a probability
derived from a proof of such statements of hers as have since been found to be
correct — such as, for example, her assertion that the sun glowed but it did
not burn, put forward in a day when orthodox scientists were calculating a very
short life for the solar system on account of the shrinking of the sun due to
its burning away, or at least to the dissipation of its heat.
(More
precisely The Secret Doctrine states
that the Sun is not a burning globe [I, 541], which was the most accepted
theory by 19th century scientists, but was later discarded in the 20th century
when it was discovered that it is actually thermonuclear reactions that cause
solar radiation.)
Such an appeal to readers to put
credit in her as yet unproven statements, would oppose the wishes of the writer
herself, whose desire was to appeal to reason in relation to the known facts of
experience, to gain a hearing for her doctrines, but to leave herself out of
the picture. Besides, she herself wrote, in the book, that it would surely
contain “more than one mistake”.
The stanzas of Dzyan
After these preliminary remarks, I
may mention some of the teachings. A notable source of those teachings is
described as an ancient book, of which, it is said, there is only one copy, in
the custody of the Adepts, which contains a record of the formation of our
solar system and of the progress of humanity from the beginning. From that book
Mme Blavatsky takes seven Stanzas as the basis of her first volume of The Secret
Doctrine, and these are stanzas having to do chiefly with the formation of
the worlds — or what she sometimes calls the doctrine of the globes. In her
second volume, she takes twelve stanzas as her basis for describing the
evolution of living forms, which enshrine what she has alluded to as the
doctrine of the monads.
These two doctrines cover the study
of life and form, but these are realized to be but a limitation of one
principle which is beyond all description, because the unseen whole can never
be described in terms of a seen part of that whole. Even consciousness, as
known to men, must sink back before that conception, because common
consciousness accepts the limitation of itself as part, not whole.
The stanzas, which Mme Blavatsky
calls The Stanzas of Dzyan are not
very attractive to the modern reader. At first
glance their style shows a resemblance to some of the Vaidic and Pauranic writings. They are quite archaic in form, and in her translation Mme Blavatsky
explains that she has often found it
necessary to give a sentence or a phrase in
place of a word. But when we turn from the stanzas to Mme Blavatsky’s commentaries upon them, which form the greater part by volume, then we are in
the realm of perfectly modern
language and expression, perfectly modern explanation and discussion, showing no literary foibles and no attempt at dramatic effect. I think I do not know
any writer who can make clearer and
simpler statements upon metaphysical truths
than she does in these pages. So the reader who chooses to do so may almost ignore the stanzas, and confine himself to Mme Blavatsky’s commentary.
The story begins with a reference to
the state of things before the universe or the solar system took form. She
speaks then of the Eternal Parent slumbering in “ever-invisible robes”, which
are the mystic root of all matter. After a few pages on the subject of space
and time, in which she stretches the mind of the reader by a conception of
“duration” as the timeless container of all limited time-quantities, she comes
to the most important idea that Universal Mind has to appear before there can
be manifestation, and she makes the significant point that at first there was
not even Universal Mind, until the collective hosts of spiritual beings were
ready to contain it. This is in the first stanza, but further on she describes
the Logos as “a compound unity of manifested living spirits.” (I, 626)
Thus we find that mind is behind
matter, and that the universal mind is the collectivity of the spiritual beings
or monads, every one of which is indispensable to it. To put this matter
briefly—the origin of forms is life, and not simply a life, but equally lives,
because we have no right to bring in here our mathematical conceptions based
upon limited measures, by which we conceive of many as relative to one and even
of one as relative to many, in connection with forms which have limitation or
measure in space. If we are to seek for the cause of all things further back
than mind itself, it must be in something more inclusive than all that mind
contains and therefore some unity which is more, not less, than multiplicity or
its negation.
Quickly Mme Blavatsky passes on. She will never tire her reader with
any prolixity. I cannot, of course, give even the least outline of the picture
that she now paints. But it is possible to pick out certain points of thought,
and thereby to show what is the general modification in modern thinking which
would result if The Secret Doctrine
were widely accepted. First of all, it would be clear that all forms arose from
mind and not from matter. She writes:
« Every external motion, act,
gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and
preceded by internal feeling ox emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind. »
(DS I, p.295)
Herein, no doubt, we have a clue to
Mme Blavatsky’s intense dislike for the frequent allusion, especially by spiritualists,
to the subtle forms of departed persons as “spirits”, and the cause of her
break with the spiritualists, because she could not induce them to see that
they were only dealing with very external and imperfect forms, and not with the
spirit or life of the persons with whom they communicated. This outlook also
explains her rooted antipathy to materialism in all its forms, religious as
well as scientific.
II
Unusual
concepts for the West
There are three doctrines which one
might cull from these pages which were new in Europe at the time of her
writing.
1) Involution
One is the doctrine of involution,
which implies that the life expresses or shows itself less and less as it
associates itself more and more with material forms, so that expression is not
really expression, but the lack of it. This is a psychological principle very
easy to understand. If, for example, a person is reading a book, he is
manifesting less of himself than if he were running round the town with a red
flag. Or if a bee goes down into the heart of a flower he is not displaying
himself as much as if he were flying about in the field.
But psychologically there is benefit
to be gained by such deliberate limitations. In fact the whole process of every
life and of every deliberated action in that life shows the same mental series
— first concentration or limitation to something comparatively small, that is,
involution, then the experiencing of that small thing, and thirdly the fruit of
the experience, which leaves the life stronger in some way for having been
through it. Call this merely “descent into matter,” and the psychological
principle is at once lost to sight. We can hardly speak of mere descent into
matter if Mme Blavatsky is correct in the following statement:
« Matter, after all, is nothing
more than the sequence of our own states of consciousness, and spirit an idea
of psychic intuition. »
(DS I, p.592)
So the theory of involution puts
forward the process of concentration or limitation, followed by the process of
experience, followed again by liberation from the limitation, accompanied by
increased power. We may infer that all material processes are directly or
indirectly the result of this psychological process, and therefore all worlds
and all forms are temporary in character. All the cyclic processes of globes
and races and men, which Mme Blavatsky describes at great length in both
volumes, have their birth, their life and their decay, in a process of the
Divine Mind which is fundamental.
The same process appears in the mind
of every man, in every one of its complete actions, and in the cyclic progress
of each human life. Everywhere also Mme Blavatsky speaks of the law of analogy.
-
“The Law of Analogy,”
she says, “is the first key to the world problem.”
This is no mere parallelism or duplication,
no casual external symmetry, but the perpetual outcropping of the cause which
is in the root, just as all leaves on a tree are of the same type. “As above,
so below” — which Mme Blavatsky quotes so often-appears for the same reason;
for the “below” is still the “above,” though it is that “above” very much
covered up.
To H.P.B., therefore, the whole
universe, though instinct with intelligence, represents only that involution of
the life which is the first stage in the history of all forms.
2) The Devachan
A second doctrine with which Mme
Blavatsky was closely associated was also quite a novelty in the modern world —
her conception of heaven or swarga,
for which she used the Tibetan word devachan,
which means literally simply “the place of happiness”. It should not be
confused with the Sanskrit word deva.
(I
think Ernest Wood was wrong here because devachan is made up of the words deva
and chan, and therefore means "the place of the devas" or "the
abode of luminous or divine beings".)
She declared that the heaven world
which nearly all persons enjoy for some time and in some degree after death,
and which is a state of undiluted happiness according to the capacity of the
person concerned, is a subjective stage, but at the same time an objective
state.
This is not a contradiction in
terms. It simply means that it is a state in which the mind produces its
environment according to its own subjective materials, that is, according to
its own thoughts and feelings, not hampered by the degree of rigidity of time
and space limitations which we find in the physical world. In that state of
being, or in that “plane,” the dead person, having ceased to be attracted by
merely carnal pleasures and limitations, has around him the things and persons
whom he likes and loves. This is declared to be a state even more real than the
physical state.
3) The illusion of existence
Thirdly, even the physical world is
produced by the same mind process, only it works more slowly, having to use the
instrumentality of hands and feet, and the agency of karmic law. It is the same
process of each man making his own world, only it is a slower process, and
there is more collective activity. Thus it appears clear that to H.P.B. the
material worlds were very seriously incomplete, and that the worlds of mind and
what is beyond mind were richer and fuller, and contained all that is in the
world and very much more. I think it is because of this that she laid so much
stress upon metaphysics. In one place she wrote (Volume I, page 192) that there
had been much perplexity about the doctrine of the monads and the doctrine of
the globes, because they had not been sufficiently examined from their
metaphysical aspect, and she remarked that it was unfortunate that there were
so few who were inclined to handle these doctrines only metaphysically.
In reference
to this she quotes one of her Teachers, who said in this connection:
-
“Why this preaching
of our doctrines, all this uphill work and swimming in adversum flumen?”
Concluding
that point, she wrote:
-
“Outside of
metaphysics, no occult philosophy, no Esotericism is possible. It is like trying to
explain the aspirations and affections, love and hatred, the most private and
sacred workings in the soul and mind of a living man, by an anatomical
description of the thorax and brain of his dead body.”
It seems very clear to me that Mme
Blavatsky was anxious that the world should regard everything from the
standpoint of life, and that by metaphysics she was not referring merely to
finer grades of matter, but to that which in its very nature is not material,
but is living everywhere and in relation to all forms. Our being and our
treasure is really there, while the forms are merely temporary playthings. This
was H.P.B.’s doctrine of maya, or
illusion.
Summary of teachings
To conclude this portion of the
subject I may give a condensed statement of Madame Blavatsky’s own summaries of
the first seven stanzas — one of which appears in the proem (i, 48) and the
other at the end of her exposition (I, 293):
-
Stanzas
1 and 2 speak of the state of affairs before manifestation.
-
Stanza
3 brings us to the reawakening of the Universe, and the emergence of the monads
or centres of life-activity.
-
Stanza
4 tells of the appearance of the seven divisions or groups of monads which
embody what we call the laws of nature, and inform all manifestation by their
indwelling.
-
Stanza
5 describes the formation of cosmic matter and its condensation into worlds.
-
Stanza
6 continues with the formation of a world such as ours, and
-
Stanza
7 brings that history down to the appearance of man.
The Secret Doctrine is thus declared
to be the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages, compiled by generations of seers
whose flashing gaze saw the soul of things where the ordinary observer could
see only the external work of form. Its central teaching, round which all else
gravitates, is one omnipresent, homogeneous, divine, impersonal
substance-principle, the radical cause of all. Of this, the universe is a
periodical manifestation, which has been called a maya, or unreality (like a dream), because of the evanescence of
its forms.
The universe is worked and guided
from within outwards, and everything in it is conscious. There is no dead
matter and no blind or unconscious law, but the Living Ones, who embody the
law, who have no longer fleshly bodies and do not say “I am myself and no one
else”, are not ministering or protecting angels. Man cannot propitiate them,
but by eating the fruit of knowledge he may arrive at a realization of
non-separateness from the one self, and so reach their plane. All these
disembodied beings either have been men, or they are elementals who will be men
in the future, and all nature shows a progressive march towards higher life.
Men and universes are thus but the reflections of realities behind the snares
of the great illusion.
The second volume of The Secret Doctrine deals with the
evolution of man. Within it occurs a description of the general character of
the principal races and subordinate races of humanity which have peopled the
earth. Madame Blavatsky’s assertions on this subject are very startling, but
reasonable enough when we remember that all forms are only the expression of
mind. Thus she describes the first and second races of men on our globe as
quite ethereal and rather shapeless, and the third as going through a process
of considerable densification and thereby producing a gigantic, though very
clumsy, ancestor for both man and the ape.
This race had seven subdivisions, or
subordinate races, as all the races are said to have had, and at last it gave
place to the very dense or solid fourth race, called the Atlantean because its
chief centre was a continent now sunk beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Gradually the
third race men died away, until none were left, though some effects of its
admixture with the fourth are to be seen in primitive tribes. Their colour was
black, while that of the fourth race was red-yellow.
In due course, the fifth or
Indo-European race appeared, and it has now replaced the fourth in point of
influence, though not yet in numbers. In due course the sixth and seventh races
will come, until the cycle of the present group of monads will have run its
course on the earth. The whole process is one of cycles within cycles, down to
the smallest events.
One peculiarity of man is that he is
the great maker of artificial forms. Therefore, in any given cycle of
involution, evolution and liberation, he comes in later than the mineral, the
vegetable and the animal, because he has to use their forms as material for his
form building. This production of artificial forms is the sign of a being who
has come to the point when he can use matter for his own purposes. He is
beginning to rise out of his involution.
Understanding the forms, he is
superior to them, and that superiority is shown in his manipulations of forms.
To understand the forms and their relations is surely the sign of our rising
above them, and this is perhaps the greatest purpose of The Secret Doctrine — to teach men to realize that they are
superior to their creation. Therefore it has ultimately before it the old goal
of liberation through understanding, or, as it is put when it is called
nirvana, through the blowing out of the flame of attachment to the limitation
of form.
Final note
I am well aware that I have not been
able to give even the slightest sketch of the history of the globes and the
history of the monads which occupy the chief part of The Secret Doctrine, but I hope that I have been able to indicate
some of the fundamental principles and psychic processes which act within those
two lines of unfoldment.
In conclusion I must say a few words
about the relation of the book to its writer. They have so constantly been
discussed together that it is difficult entirely to separate the book from its
author. She has been the subject of much recent literature, a large part of it
produced by people not interested in the movement called theosophical, which
she left behind her. It has been shown that, when she was writing for effect,
as, for example, in The Caves and Jungles
of Hindustan and in The People of the
Blue Mountains, she allowed the richness of her imagination to give more
than tropical color to the foliage of her literary material. Even Col. Olcott,
her close friend and co-worker, remarked severely upon the exuberant fancy of
her Caves and Jungles.
Then people ask whether there may
not be something of the same dramatic talent in The Secret Doctrine itself, in
its allusion to the ancient book and the lost language of its stanzas, and even
to the personalities of her unseen assistants.
(Personally I think not because she was supervised,
helped and assisted by the masters Kuthumi and Morya to elaborate The Secret
Doctrine, in addition to traces of that ancient book have been found.)
I would suggest one ultimate reply
to all such questions, that the reader should resort to the advice of Madame
Blavatsky her self, study the doctrines themselves and consider their
reasonableness and coherence. What we have to avoid is personal authority and
personal criticism, which confuse the issue, and easily arouse prejudice,
fondness, hate, personal pride and fear, which cloud the vision and impede the
mind.
But I must say this also — that it
was misleading to accuse Madame Blavatsky of deliberate falsification in
writing her stories of adventure in India, when she maintained that all the
incidents therein mentioned had actually occurred at one time or another,
though she had allowed herself something of the license of novelist in
stringing them together into one narrative, for convenience, and in order to
pack the maximum of information into the minimum of literary space.
The evidence of her associates is
also very remarkable as to the occurrence of rare phenomena in her presence.
Still, we must rest the case for The
Secret Doctrine strictly upon its merits, as judged by educated and unbiased
men. Only such a method of presenting it can win the attention and respect of
those who respect themselves, and can help towards the spread of that knowledge
in the world which it was the intention of its author or authors to promote.
(Theosophist,
October 1931, p.60-66 and November 1931, p.168-175)
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