Letter
Ten in the Mahatma Letters Explains:
“God” is But a Sad Fabrication, Made by Priests
A Mahatma
of the Himalayas
The universe is governed by an
absolute and immutable law
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Editorial Note:
The present letter from a
Mahatma
was received by Alfred P.
Sinnett at Simla,
India, in 1882. It was transcribed from a copy
in Mr. Sinnett’s handwriting
and published in “The
Mahatma Letters” as Letter
number 10, or X. In the
Chronological edition of the Mahatma
Letters, it is
Letter 88. It constitutes one
of the most important
texts in the theosophical
literature of all time.
(Carlos Cardoso Aveline)
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“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.”
“Remember
the sum of human misery will never
be
diminished unto that day when the better portion of
humanity
destroys in the name of Truth, morality, and
universal
charity, the altars of their false gods.”
“…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.”
“In
other words we believe in MATTER alone, 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.”
“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.”
(A
Mahatma of the Himalayas)
NOTES BY K.H. ON A “PRELIMINARY CHAPTER”
HEADED “GOD” BY HUME, INTENDED TO PREFACE
AN EXPOSITION OF OCCULT PHILOSOPHY (ABRIDGED).
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. 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. 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 Ishwar 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) cause, the theists assign them spiritual, super-natural
and unintelligible and un-known causes. 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 neque dari neque concepi potest substantia” - and
thus become Pantheists . . . . who but a Theologian nursed on mystery and the
most absurd super-naturalism 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. 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 brained 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 we cannot turn
our backs on it and become agnostics.
. . . . Were we to admit that even the highest Dyan Chohans 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.
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 so 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. 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.
(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. (1) 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 (2) 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.
(2) Matter 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 being - 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 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. 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 in
MATTER alone, 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 Bellinger 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.
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.
Our ideas on Evil. Evil has no existence per se and is but the
absence of good and exists but for him who is made its victim. It proceeds from
two causes, and no more than good is it an independent cause in nature. Nature
is destitute of goodness or malice; she follows only immutable laws when she
either gives life and joy, or sends suffering [and] death, and destroys what
she has created. Nature has an antidote for every poison and her laws a reward
for every suffering. The butterfly devoured by a bird becomes that bird, and
the little bird killed by an animal goes into a higher form. It is the blind
law of necessity and the eternal fitness of things, and hence cannot be called
Evil in Nature. The real evil proceeds from human intelligence and its origin
rests entirely with reasoning man who dissociates himself from Nature. Humanity
then alone is the true source of evil. Evil is the exaggeration of good, the
progeny of human selfishness and greediness. Think profoundly and you will find
that save death - which is no evil but a necessary law, and accidents which
will always find their reward in a future life - the origin of every evil
whether small or great is in human action, in man whose intelligence makes him
the one free agent in Nature. It is not nature that creates diseases, but man.
The latter’s mission and destiny in the economy of nature is to die his natural
death brought by old age; save accident, neither a savage nor a wild (free)
animal die of disease. Food, sexual relations, drink, are all natural
necessities of life; yet excess in them brings on disease, misery, suffering,
mental and physical, and the latter are transmitted as the greatest evils to
future generations, the progeny of the culprits. Ambition, the desire of
securing happiness and comfort for those we love, by obtaining honours and
riches, are praiseworthy natural feelings but when they transform man into an
ambitious cruel tyrant, a miser, a selfish egotist they bring untold misery on
those around him; on nations as well as on individuals. All this then - food,
wealth, ambition, and a thousand other things we have to leave unmentioned,
becomes the source and cause of evil whether in its abundance or through its
absence. Become a glutton, a debauchee, a tyrant, and you become the originator
of diseases, of human suffering and misery. Lack all this and you starve, you
are despised as a nobody and the
majority of the herd, your fellow men, make of you a sufferer your whole life.
Therefore it is neither nature nor an imaginary Deity that has to be blamed,
but human nature made vile by selfishness. Think well over these few
words; work out every cause of evil you can think of and trace it to its origin
and you will have solved one-third of the problem of evil. And now,
after making due allowance for evils that are natural and cannot be avoided, -
and so few are they that I challenge the whole host of Western metaphysicians
to call them evils or to trace them directly to an independent cause - I will
point out the greatest, the chief cause of nearly two thirds of the evils that
pursue humanity ever since that cause became a power. It is religion under
whatever form and in whatsoever nation. It is the sacerdotal caste, the
priesthood and the churches; it is in those illusions that man looks upon as
sacred, that he has to search out the source of that multitude of evils which
is the great curse of humanity and that almost overwhelms mankind. Ignorance
created Gods and cunning took advantage of the opportunity. Look at India and
look at Christendom and Islam, at Judaism and Fetichism. It is priestly
imposture that rendered these Gods so terrible to man; it is religion that
makes of him the selfish bigot, the fanatic that hates all mankind out of his
own sect without rendering him any better or more moral for it. It is belief in
God and Gods that makes two-thirds of humanity the slaves of a handful of those
who deceive them under the false pretence of saving them. Is not man ever ready
to commit any kind of evil if told that his God or Gods demand the crime?;
voluntary victim of an illusionary God, the abject slave of his crafty
ministers. The Irish, Italian and Slavonian peasant will starve himself and see
his family starving and naked to feed and clothe his padre and pope. For two
thousand years India groaned under the weight of caste, Brahmins alone feeding
on the fat of the land, and to-day the followers of Christ and those of Mahomet
are cutting each other's throats in the names of and for the greater glory of
their respective myths. Remember the sum of human misery will never be
diminished unto that day when the better portion of humanity destroys in the
name of Truth, morality, and universal charity, the altars of their false gods.
If it is objected that we too have temples, we too have priests and that
our lamas also live on charity . . . let them know that the objects above named
have in common with their Western equivalents, but the name. Thus in our
temples there is neither a god nor gods worshipped, only the thrice sacred
memory of the greatest as the holiest man that ever lived. If our lamas to
honour the fraternity of the Bhikkhus established by our blessed master
himself, go out to be fed by the laity, the latter often to the number of 5 to
25,000 is fed and taken care of by the Samgha (the fraternity of lamaic
monks) the lamassery providing for the wants of the poor, the sick, the
afflicted. Our lamas accept food, never money, and it is in those temples that
the origin of evil is preached and impressed upon the people. There they are
taught the four noble truths - ariya sakka, and the chain of causation,
(the 12 nidanas) gives them a solution of the problem of the origin and
destruction of suffering.
Read the Mahavagga and try to understand not with the prejudiced Western
mind but the spirit of intuition and truth what the Fully Enlightened one says
in the 1st Khandhaka. Allow me to translate it for you.
“At the time the blessed Buddha was at Uruvella on the shores of the
river Nerovigara as he rested under the Boddhi tree of wisdom after he had
become Sambuddha, at the end of the seventh day having his mind fixed on the
chain of causation he spake thus: ‘from Ignorance spring the samkharas of
threefold nature - productions of body,
of speech, of thought. From the samkharas springs consciousness, from
consciousness springs name and form, from this spring the six regions (of the
six senses the seventh being the property of but the enlightened); from these
springs contact from this sensation; from this springs thirst (or desire, Kama,
tanha) from thirst attachment, existence, birth, old age and death, grief,
lamentation, suffering, dejection and despair. Again by the destruction of
ignorance, the Sankharas are destroyed, and their consciousness name and form,
the six regions, contact, sensation, thirst, attachment (selfishness),
existence, birth, old age, death, grief, lamentation, suffering, dejection, and
despair are destroyed. Such is the cessation of this whole mass of suffering.”
Knowing this the blessed one uttered this solemn utterance. “When the
real nature of things becomes clear to the meditating Bikshu, then all his
doubts fade away since he has learned what is that nature and what its cause.
From ignorance spring all the evils. From knowledge comes the cessation of this
mass of misery, and then the meditating Brahmana stands dispelling the hosts of
Mara like the sun that illuminates the sky.”
Meditation here means the superhuman (not supernatural) qualities, or
arhatship in its highest of spiritual powers.
(Copied out Simla, Sept. 28,
1882.)
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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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