There
Is For the Immortal Ego Neither Past
Nor
Future, But Only One Everlasting Present
Helena P. Blavatsky
Alexey Petrovich Yermoloff
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An Editorial Note
The
following text was first published
in June
1890. It is reproduced here from
“Theosophical Articles”, by H. P.
Blavatsky,
Theosophy
Co., Los Angeles, 1981, volume II,
pp.
369-374. It is also published at “Collected
Writings
of H.P. Blavatsky”, TPH, vol. XII; but in
that
volume it has a significant number of small
editorial
changes made by Boris de Zirkoff according
to his
own technical criteria. We have checked it with the
original
text of the 1890 London magazine: the following
version,
published by “Theosophy Company”, is verbatim.
(Carlos
Cardoso Aveline)
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Every educated
Englishman has heard the name of General Yermoloff, one of the great military
heroes of this age; and if at all familiar with the history of the Caucasian
wars, he must be acquainted with the exploits of one of the chief conquerors of
the land of those impregnable fastnesses where Shamil and his predecessors have
defied for years the skill and strategy of the Russian armies.
Be it as it may, the strange event herein narrated by the Caucasian hero himself, may interest students of psychology. That which follows is a verbatim translation from V. Potto’s Russian work “The War in Caucasus”. In Volume II, chapter The Period of Yermoloff (pp. 829-30-31 and 832) one reads these lines:
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Silently and imperceptibly glided away
at Moscow the last days allotted to the hero. On April the 12th, 1861, he died
in his 85th year, seated in his favorite armchair, with one hand on the table,
the other on his knee; but a few minutes before, in accordance with an old
habit of his, he was tapping the floor with his foot.
It is impossible better to express
the feelings of Russia at the news of this death than by quoting the obituary
notice from the (Russian) Daily “Caucasus”, which did not say a word more than
was deserved.
“On April the 12th, at 11 3/4 a.m., at Moscow, the Artillery General,
famous throughout Russia - Alexey Petrovich Yermoloff, breathed his last. Every
Russian knows the name; it is allied with the most brilliant records of our
national glory: Valutino, Borodino, Kulm, Paris, and the Caucasus, will be ever
transmitting the name of the hero - the pride and ornament of the Russian army
and nation. We will not enumerate the
services of Yermoloff. His name and titles are: a true son of Russia, in the
full significance of the term.”
It is a curious fact that his death
did not escape its own legend, one of a strange and mystical character. This is
what a friend who knew Yermoloff well, writes of him:
Once, when leaving Moscow, I called
on Yermoloff to say good-bye, and found myself unable to conceal my emotion at
parting.
“Fear not,” he said to me, “we will
yet meet; I shall not die before your return.”
This was eighteen months before his
death.
“In life and death God alone is the
Master!” I observed.
“And I tell you most positively that my death will
not occur in a year, but a few months later” - he answered, “Come with me” - and with
these words he led me into his study; where, getting out of a locked chest a
written sheet of paper, he placed it before me and asked - “Whose handwriting
is this?” “Yours,” I said. “Read it
then.” I complied.
It was a kind of memorandum, a
record of dates, since the year when Yermoloff was promoted to the rank of
Lieutenant-Colonel, showing, as in a programme, every significant event that
was to happen in his life, so full of such events. He followed me in my
reading, and when I came to the last paragraph, he covered the last lines with
his hand. “This you need not read,” he said. “On this line, the year, the
month, and the day of my death are given. All that you have read here was
written by me beforehand, and has come to pass to the smallest details, and
this is how I came to write it.”
“When I was yet a young Lieutenant-Colonel,
I was sent on business to a small district town. My lodging consisted of two rooms - one for
the servants, the other for my personal use. There was no access into the
latter but through the former. Once, late at night, as I sat writing at my
desk, I fell into a reverie, when suddenly on lifting my eyes I saw standing
before me across the desk a stranger, a man, judging by his dress, belonging to
the lower classes of society. Before I had time to ask him who he was or what he wanted, the stranger said: ‘Take your pen and
write.’ Feeling myself under the influence of an irresistible power, I obeyed
in silence. Then he dictated to me all that was to happen to me during my whole
life, concluding with the date and hour of my death. With the last word he
vanished from the spot. A few minutes elapsed before I regained my full
consciousness, when, jumping from my seat, I rushed into the adjoining room, which
the stranger could not by any means avoid passing through. Opening the door, I
saw my clerk writing by the light of a candle, and my orderly lying asleep on
the floor across the entrance door, which door was securely locked and bolted.
To my question: ‘Who was it who has just been here?’ - the astonished clerk
answered, ‘No one.’ To this day I have never told this to anyone. I knew
beforehand that while some would suspect me of having invented the whole thing,
others would see in me a man subject to hallucinations. But for myself,
personally, the whole thing is a most
undeniable fact, an objective and palpable fact, the tangible proof of
which is in this very written document.”
The last date found on the letter
proved, after the death of the General, to be the correct one. He died on the
very day and hour of the year recorded in his own handwriting.
Yermoloff is buried at Orel. An
inextinguishable lamp, made of a fragment of a bomb-shell, burns before his
tomb. On the cast-iron of the shell these words are wrought by an unskilled
hand, “The Caucasian soldiers who served on the Goonib.”[1] The ever-burning lamp is established through the zeal and
grateful love of the lower ranks of the Caucasian Army, who collected among
themselves from their poor pittance (copeck by copeck, verily!) the needed sum.
And this simple monument is more valued and admired than would be the richest
mausoleum. There is no other monument to Yermoloff in Russia. But the proud and
lofty rocks of the Caucasus are the imperishable pedestal on which every true
Russian will always behold the majestic image of General Yermoloff, surrounded
by the aureole of an everlasting and immortal glory.
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And now for a few words about the
nature of the apparition.
No doubt every word of General
Yermoloff’s concise and clear narrative is true to a dot. He was pre-eminently
a matter-of-fact, sincere, and clear-headed man, with not the slightest taint
of mysticism about him, a true soldier, honorable, and straightforward.
Moreover, this episode of his life was testified to by his elder son, known to
the present writer and her family personally, for many years during our
residence at Tiflis. All this is a good warrant for the genuineness of the
phenomenon, testified to furthermore by the written document left by the
General, bearing the correct and precise date of his death. And now what about
the mysterious visitor? Spiritualists will, of course, see in it a disembodied
Entity, a “materialized Spirit.” It will be claimed that a human Spirit alone could
prophecy a whole series of events and see so clearly in Futurity. So we say,
too. But having agreed on that point, we diverge in all the rest; i.e., while Spiritualists would say that
the apparition was that of a Spirit distinct from and independent of the Higher
Ego of the General, we maintain precisely the reverse, and say it was that Ego.
Let us argue dispassionately.
Where is the raison d’être, the rationale of
such apparition or prophecy; and why should you or I, for instance, once dead,
appear to a perfect stranger for the pleasure of informing him of that which
was to happen to him? Had the General recognized in the visitor some dear
relative, his own father, mother, brother, or bosom friend, and received from
him some beneficent warning, slight proof as it would have been, there would
still be something in it to hang such theory upon. But it was nothing of the
kind: simply “a stranger, a man, judging by his dress, belonging to the lower
classes of society.” If so, why should the soul of a poor disembodied
tradesman, or a laborer, trouble itself to appear to a mere stranger? And if
the “Spirit” only assumed such
appearance, then why this disguise and masquerading, such post-mortem mystification, at all? If such visits are made of a
“Spirit’s” free will; if such revelations can occur at the sweet pleasure of a
disembodied Entity, and independently of any established law of intercourse
between the two worlds - what can be the reason alleged for that particular
“Spirit” playing at soothsaying Cassandra with the General? None whatever. To
insist upon it, is simply to add one more absurd and repulsive feature to the
theory of “Spirit-visitation,” and to throw an additional element of ridicule
on the sacredness of death. The materializing of an immaterial
Spirit - a divine Breath - by the Spiritualists, is on a par with the
anthropomorphizing of the Absolute, by the Theologians. It is these two claims
which have dug an almost impassable abyss between the Theosophist-Occultists
and the Spiritualists on the one hand, and the Theosophists and the Church
Christians on the other.
And now this is how a
Theosophist-Occultist would explain the vision, in accordance with esoteric
philosophy. He would premise by reminding the reader that the Higher
Consciousness in us, with its sui generis
laws and conditions of manifestation, is still almost entirely terra incognita for all (Spiritualists
included) and the men of Science preeminently. Then he would remind the reader
of one of the fundamental teachings of Occultism. He would say that besides the
attribute of divine omniscience in its own nature and sphere of action, there
exists in Eternity for the individual immortal Ego neither Past nor Future, but only
one everlasting PRESENT. Now, once this doctrine is
admitted, or simply postulated, it becomes only natural that the whole life,
from birth to death, of the Personality which that Ego informs, should be as
plainly visible to the Higher Ego as it is invisible to, and concealed from,
the limited vision of its temporary and mortal Form. Hence, this is what must
have happened according to the Occult Philosophy.
The friend is told by General Yermoloff that
while writing late in the night he
had suddenly fallen into a reverie,
when he suddenly perceived upon lifting the eyes a
stranger standing before him. Now that reverie was most likely a sudden doze,
brought on by fatigue and overwork, during which a mechanical action of purely
somnambulic character took place. The Personality
becoming suddenly alive to the Presence of its Higher SELF, the human sleeping
automaton fell under the sway of the Individuality, and forthwith the hand that
had been occupied with writing for several hours before resumed
mechanically its task. Upon awakening the Personality
thought that the document before him had been written
at the dictation of a visitor whose voice he had heard, whereas, in truth, he
had been simply recording the innermost thoughts - or shall we say knowledge - of
his own divine “Ego,” a prophetic, because all-knowing Spirit. The “voice” of
the latter was simply the translation by the physical memory, at the instant of
awakening, of the mental knowledge concerning the life of the mortal man reflected
on the lower by the Higher
consciousness. All the other details
recorded by the memory are as amenable to a natural explanation.
Thus, the stranger clothed in the
raiments of a poor little tradesman or laborer, who was speaking to him outside of himself, belongs, as well as
the “voice,” to that class of well-known phenomena familiar to us as the association of ideas and reminiscences in our dreams. The
pictures and scenes we see in sleep, the events we live through for hours,
days, sometimes for years in our dreams, all this takes less time, in reality,
than is occupied by a flash of lightning during the instant of awakening and
the return to full consciousness. Of such instances of the power and rapidity
of fancy physiology gives numerous examples. We rebel against the materialistic
deductions of modern science, but no one can controvert its facts, patiently
and carefully recorded throughout long years of experiments and observations by
its specialists, and these support our argument. General Yermoloff had passed
several days previously holding an inquest in a small town, in which official
business he had probably examined dozens of men of the poorer classes; and this
explains his fancy - vivid as reality itself - suggesting to his imagination
the vision of a small tradesman.
Let us turn to the experiences and
explanations of a long series of philosophers and Initiates, thoroughly
acquainted with the mysteries of the Inner
Self, before we father upon “departed spirits” actions, motives for which
could never be explained upon any reasonable grounds.
NOTE BY H.P.B.:
[1] “Goonib” is the name of the last stronghold of the
Circassians, on which the famous Murid Shamil,
the Priest-Sovereign of the Mountaineers was conquered and captured by the
Russians, after years of a desperate struggle. Goonib is a gigantic rock,
deemed for a long time impregnable but finally stormed and ascended by the
Russian soldiers at an enormous sacrifice of life. Its capture put virtually an
end to the war in the Caucasus, a struggle which had lasted for over sixty
years, and assured its conquest.
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On the role of the esoteric movement in
the ethical awakening of mankind during the 21st century, see the book “The Fire and Light of Theosophical
Literature”, by Carlos Cardoso Aveline.
Published in
2013 by The Aquarian Theosophist,
the volume has 255 pages and can be obtained through Amazon Books.
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