Western European stream·Esoteric Buddhism·CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY.
The course of Nature provides, as the reader will now have seen, for the indefinite prog- ress towards higher phases of existence of all human entities. But no less will it have been seen that by endowing these entities, as they advance, with ever-increasing faculties and by constantly enlarging the scope of their activity, Nature also furnishes each human entity with more and more decisive opportunities of choos- ing between good and evil. In the earlier rounds of humanity this privilege of selection is not fully developed, and responsibility of ac- tion is correspondingly incomplete. The ear- lier rounds of humanity, in fact, do not invest the Ego with spiritual responsibility at all, in the larger sense of the term which we are now approaching. The Devachanic periods which follow each objective existence in turn dispose fully of its merits and demerits, and the most deplorable personality which the Ego during the first half of its evolution can possibly develop
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is merely dropped out of the account as regards the larger undertaking, while the erring per- sonality itself pays its relatively brief penalt}-, and troubles Nature no more. But the second half of the great evolutionary period is carried on on different principles. The phases of exist- ence which are now coming into view cannot be entered upon by the Ego without positive merits of its own appropriate to the new devel- opments in prospect ; it is not enough that the now fully responsible and highly gifted being which man becomes at the great turning-point in his career should float idly on the stream of progress ; he must begin to swim, if he wishes to push his way forward.
Debarred by the complexity of the subject from dealing with all its features simultane- ously, our survey of Nature has so far contem- plated the seven rounds of human development, which constitute the whole planetary undertak- ing with which we are concerned, as a continu- ous series throughout which it is the natural destiny of humanity in general to pass. But it will be remembered that humanity in the sixth round has been spoken of so highly developed that the sublime attributes and faculties of the highest adept-ship are the common appanage of all ; while in the seventh round the race has almost emerged from humanity into divinity.
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Now every human being in this stage of devel- opment will still be identified by an uninter- rupted connection with all the personalities which have been strung upon that thread of life from the beginning of the great evolution- ary process. Is it conceivable that the charac- ter of such personalities is of no consequence in the long run, and that two God-like beings might stand side by side in the seventh round, developed, the one from a long series of blame- less and serviceable existences, the other from an equally long series of evil and groveling lives? That surely could not come to pass, and we have to ask now, How do we find the congruities of Nature preserved compatibly with the appointed evolution of humanity to the higher forms of existence which crown the edifice ? Just as childhood is irresponsible for its acts, the earlier races of humanity are irresponsible for theirs ; but there comes the period of full growth, when the complete development of the faculties which enable the individual man to choose between good and evil, in the single life with which he is for the moment concerned, en- ables the continuous Ego also to make its final selection. That period — that enormous period, for Nature is in no hurry to catch its creatures in a trap in such a matter as this — is barely THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 191 yet beginning, and a complete round period around the seven worlds will have to be gone through before it is over. Until the middle of the fifth period is passed on this earth, the great question — to be or not to be for the future — is not irrevocably settled. We are coming now into the possession of the faculties which render man a fully responsible being, but we have yet to employ those faculties during the maturity of our Ego-hood in the manner which shall determine the vast consequences hereafter. It is during the first half of the fifth round that the struggle principally takes place. Till then, the ordinary course of life may be a good or a bad preparation for the struggle, but can- not fairly be described as the struggle itself. And now we have to examine the nature of the struggle, so far merely spoken of as the selec- tion between good and evil. That is in no way an inaccurate, but it is an incomplete, defi- nition. The ever-recurring and ever-threatened con- flict between intellect and spirituality is the phenomenon to be now examined. The com- monplace conceptions which these two words denote must of course be expanded to some extent before the occult conception is realized ; for European habits of thinking are rather apt to set up in the mind an ignoble image of spir-
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ituality, as an attribute rather of the character than the mind itself, — a pale goody-goodiness, born of an attachment to religious ceremonial and of devout aspirations, no matter to what whimsical notions of Heaven and Divinity in which the " spiritually -minded " person may have been brought up. Spirituality, in the occult sense, has little or nothing to do with feeling devout ; it has to do with the capacity of the mind for assimilating knowledge at the fountain-head of knowledge itself — of absolute knowledge — instead of by the circuitous and laborious process of ratiocination. The development of pure intellect, the rati- ocinative faculty, has been the business of Eu- ropean nations for so long, and in this depart- ment of human progress they have achieved such magnificent triumphs, that nothing in oc- cult philosophy will be less acceptable to Euro- peans themselves at first, and while the ideas at stake are imperfectly grasped, than the first aspect of the occult theory concerning intellect and spirituality ; but this does not arise so much from the undue tendency of occult science to depreciate intellect as from the undue ten- dency of modern Western speculation to depre- ciate spirituality. Broadly speaking, so far Western philosophy has had no opportunity of appreciating spirituality ; it has not been made THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 193 acquainted with the range of the inner faculties of man ; it has merely groped blindly in the direction of a belief that such inner faculties existed ; and Kant himself, the greatest modern exponent of that idea, does little more than contend that there is such a faculty as intuition, — if we only knew how to work with it. The process of working with it is occult sci- ence in its highest aspect, the cultivation of spirituality. The cultivation of mere power over the forces of Nature, the investigation of some of her subtler secrets as regards the inner principles controlling physical results, is occult science in its lowest aspect, and into that lower region of its activity mere physical science may, or even must, gradually run up. But the ac- quisition by mere intellect — physical science in excelsis — of privileges which are the proper appanage of spirituality is one of the dangers of that struggle which decides the ultimate destiny of the human Ego. For there is one thing which intellectual processes do not help mankind to realize, and that is the nature and supreme excellence of spiritual existence. On the contrary, intellect arises out of physical causes, the perfection of the physical brain, and tends only to physical results, the perfec- tion of material welfare. Although, as a con- cession to " weak brethren ' and lt religion,"
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on which it looks with good-humored contempt, modern intellect does not condemn spirituality, it certainly treats the physical human life as the only serious business with which grave men, or even earnest philanthropists, can concern them- selves. But obviously, if spiritual existence, vivid subjective consciousness, really does go on for periods greater than the periods of intellec- tual physical existence in the ratio, as we have seen in discussing the Devachanic condition, of
80to 1 at least, then surely man's subjective
existence is more important than his physical existence, and intellect in error, when all its efforts are bent on the amelioration of the phys- ical existence. These considerations show how the choice be- tween good and evil — which has been made by the human Ego in the course of the great struggle between intellect and spirituality — is not a mere choice between ideas so plainly con- trasted as wickedness and virtue. It is not so rough a question as that, — whether man be wicked or virtuous, — which must really at the final critical turning-point decide whether he shall continue to live and develop into higher phases of existence, or cease to live altogether. The truth of the matter is (if it is not impru- dent at this stage of our progress to brush the surface of a new mystery) that the question, to THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 195 be or not to be, is not settled by reference to the question whether a man be wicked or vir- tuous at all. It will plainly be seen eventually that there must be evil spirituality as well as good spirituality. So that the great question of continued existence turns altogether and of necessity on the question of spirituality, as com- pared with physicality. The point is not so much " shall a man live ; is he good enough to be permitted to live any longer? " as " can the man live any longer in the higher levels of existence into which humanity must at last evolve?" Has he qualified himself to live by the cultiva- tion of the durable portion of his nature ? If not, he has got to the end of his tether. The destiny which must befall him is annihilation, — not necessarily suffering in a conscious exist- ence, but that dissolution that must befall the soul which has wholly assimilated itself to matter. Into the eighth sphere of pure matter that Ego must descend which is finally con- victed of unfitness to go any further in the up- ward spiral path around the planetary chain. It need not be hurriedly supposed that occult philosophy considers vice and virtue of no con- sequence to human spiritual destinies, because it does not discover in Nature that these char- acteristics determine ultimate progress in evo- lution. No system is so pitilessly inflexible in
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its morality as the system which occult philos- ophy explores and expounds. But that which vice and virtue of themselves determine ,is happiness and misery, not the final problem of continued existence, beyond that immeasurably distant period, when in the progress of evolu- tion man has got to begin being something more than man, and cannot go on along the path of progress with the help only of the relatively lower human attributes. It is true again that one can hardly imagine virtue in any decided degree to fail in engendering, in due time, the required higher attributes ; but we should not be scientifically accurate in speaking of it as the cause of progress, in ultimate stages of eleva- tion, though it may provoke the development of that which is the cause of progress. This consideration — that ultimate progress is determined by spirituality irrespective of its moral coloring — is the great meaning of the oc- cult doctrine that "to be immortal in good one must identify one's self with God ; to be immor- tal in evil, with Satan. These are the two poles of the world of souls ; between these two poles vegetate and die without remembrance the use- less portion of mankind." l The enigma, like all occult formulas, has a lesser application (fitting the microcosm as well as the macrocosm), and
1Eliphas Levi.
THE PRG9RESS OF HUMANITY. 197 in its lesser significance refers to Devachan or Avitchi, and the blank destiny of colorless personalities ; but in its more important bear- ing it relates to the final sorting out of human- ity at the middle of the great fifth round, the annihilation of the utterly unspiritual Egos and the passage onward of the others to be immor- tal in good or immortal in evil. Precisely the same meaning attaches to the passage in Reve- lation (iii. 15, 16) : " I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of m}7 mouth." Spirituality, then, is not devout aspiration; it is the highest kind of intellection, that which takes cognizance of the workings of Nature by direct assimilation of the mind with her higher principles. The objection which physical intel- ligence will bring against this view is that the mind can cognize nothing except by observation of phenomena and reasoning thereon. That is the mistake, — it can ; and the existence of oc- cult science is the highest proof thereof. But there are hints pointing in the direction of such proof all around us if we have but the patience to examine their true bearings. It is idle to say, in face, merely for one thing, of the phe- nomena of clairvoyance — crude and imperfect as those have been which have pushed them-
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selves on the attention of the world — that there are no other avenues to consciousness but those of the five senses. Certainly in the ordi- nary world the clairvoyant faculty is an exceed- ingly rare one, but it indicates the existence in mar: of a potential faculty, the nature of which, as inferred from its slightest manifestations, must obviously be capable in its highest devel- opment of leading to a direct assimilation of knowledge independently of observation. One of the most embarrassing difficulties that beset the present attempt to translate the es- oteric doctrine into plain language is due really to the fact that spiritual perceptiveness, apart from all ordinary processes by which knowledge is acquired, is a great and grand possibility of human nature. It is by that method in the regular course of occult training that adepts im- part instruction to their pupils. They awaken the dormant sense in the pupil, and through this they imbue his mind with a knowledge that such and such a doctrine is the real truth. The whole scheme of evolution, which the fore- going chapters have portrayed, infiltrates into the regular chela's mind by reason of the fact that he is made to see the process taking place by clairvoyant vision. There are no words used in his instruction at all. And adepts themselves, to whom the facts and processes of THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 199 Nature are familiar as our five fingers to us, find it difficult to explain in a treatise which they cannot illustrate for us, by producing men- tal pictures in our dormant sixth sense, the com- plex anatomy of the planetary system. Certainly it is not to be expected that man- kind as yet should be generally conscious of possessing the sixth sense, for the day of its ac- tivity has not yet come. It has been already stated that each round in turn is devoted to the perfection in man of the corresponding princi- ple in its numerical order, and to its prepara- tion for assimilation with the next. The earlier rounds have been described as concerned with man in a shadowy, loosely organized, unintelli- gent form. The first principle of all, the body, was developed, but it was merely growing used to vitality, and was unlike anything we can now picture to ourselves. The fourth round, in which we are now engaged, is the round in which the fourth principle, will, desire, is fully developed, and in which it is engaged in assim- ilating itself with the fifth principle, reason, in- telligence. In the fifth round, the completely developed reason, intellect, or soul, in which the Ego then resides, must assimilate itself to the sixth principle, spirituality, or give up the business of existence altogether. All readers of Buddhist literature are famil-
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iar with the constant references made there to the Arhat's union of his soul with God. This, in other words, is the premature development of his sixth principle. He forces himself right up through all the obstacles which impede such an operation in the case of a fourth-round man, into that stage of evolution which awaits the rest of humanity — or rather so much of hu- manity as may reach it in the ordinary course of Nature — in the latter part of the fifth round. And in doing this, it will be observed, he tides himself right over the great period of danger, — the middle of the fifth round. That is the stu- pendous achievement of the adept as regards his own personal interests. He has reached the further shore of the sea in which so many of mankind will perish. He waits there in a con- tentment which people cannot even realize without some glimmerings of spirituality — of the sixth sense — themselves for the arrival there of his future companions. He does not wait in his physical body, let me hasten to add, to avoid misconstruction, but when at last priv- ileged to resign this, in a spiritual condition, which it would be foolish to attempt to describe, while even the Devachanic states of ordinary humanity are themselves almost beyond the reach of imaginations untrained in spiritual science. THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 201 But, returning to the ordinary course of hu- manity and the growth into sixth-round people of men and women, who do not become adepts at any premature stage of their career, it will be observed that this is the ordinary course of Nature in one sense of the expression ; but so also is it the ordinary course of Nature for every grain of corn that is developed to fall into appropriate soil, and grow up into an ear of corn itself. All the same a great many grains do nothing of the sort, and a great many human Egos will never pass through the trials of the fifth round. The final effort of Nature in evolving man is to evolve from him a being unmeasurably higher to be a conscious agent, and what is ordinarily meant by a creative principle in Nature herself ultimately. The first achievement is to evolve free-will, and the next to perpetuate that free-will by inducing it to unite itself with the final purpose of Na- ture, which is good. In the course of such an operation it is inevitable that a great deal of the free-will evolved should turn to evil, and after producing temporary suffering be dis- persed and annihilated. More than this, the final purpose can only be achieved by a profuse expenditure of material ; and just as this goes on in the lower stages of evolution, where a thousand seeds are thrown off by a vegetable
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for every one that ultimately fructifies into a new plant, so are trie god-like germs of Will, sown one in each man's breast, in abundance like the seeds blown about in the wind. Is the justice of Nature to be impugned by reason of the fact that many of these germs will perish ? Such an idea could only rise in a mind that will not realize the room there is in Nature for the growth of every germ which chooses to grow, and to the extent it chooses to grow, be that extent great or small. If it seems to any one horrible that an "immortal soul" should perish, under any circumstances, that impres- sion can only be due to the pernicious habit of regarding everything as eternity, which is not this microscopic life. There is room in the subjective spheres and time in the catenary manvantara, before we even approach the Dhyan Chohan, or god-like period, for more than the ordinary brain has ever yet conceived of immortality. Every good deed and elevated impulse that every man or woman ever did or felt must reverberate through aeons of spirit- ual existence, whether the human entity con- cerned proves able or not to expand into the sublime and stupendous development of the seventh round. And it is out of the causes generated in one of our brief lives on earth that exoteric speculation conceives itself capa* THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 203 ble of constructing eternal results ! Out of such a seven or eight hundredth part of our objective life on earth during the present stay here of the evolutionary life-wave, we are to expect Nature to discern sufficient reason for deciding upon our whole subsequent career. In truth, Nature will make such a large return for a comparatively small expenditure of human will-power in the right direction that, extrav- agant as the expectation just stated may ap- pear, and extravagant as it is applied to or- dinary lives, one brief existence may sometimes suffice to anticipate the growth of milliards of years. The adept may, in the one earth-life,1 achieve so much advancement that his sub- sequent growth is certain, and merely a matter of time ; but then the seed germ which pro- duces an adept in our life, must be very per- fect to begin with, and the early conditions of its growth favorable, and withal the effort on the part of the man himself, life-long and far more concentrated, more intense, more arduous, than it is possible for the uninitiated outsider to realize. In ordinary cases, the life which is divided between material enjoyment and spir- itual aspiration — however sincere and beau- tiful the latter — can only be productive of
1In practice, my impression is that this is rarely achieved in
one earth-life ; approached rather in two or three artificial incarna- tions.
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a correspondingly duplex result, of a spiritual reward in Devachan, of a new birth on eartji. The manner in which the adept gets above the necessity of such a new birth is perfectly scientific and simple, be it observed, though it sounds like a theological mystery when ex- pounded in exoteric writings by reference to Karma and Skandhas, Trishna, and Tanha, and so forth. The next earth-life is as much a consequence of affinities engendered by the fifth principle, the continuous human soul, as the Devachan ic experiences which come first are the growth of the thoughts and aspirations of an elevated character, which the person con- cerned has created during life. That is to sa}r, the affinities engendered in ordinary cases are partly material, partly spiritual. Therefore they start the soul on its entrance into the world of effects with a double set of attractions inhering in it ; one set producing the subjective consequences of its Devachanic life, the other set asserting themselves at the close of that Jife, and carrying the soul back again into re- incarnation. But if the person during his ob- jective life absolutely develops no affinities for material existence, starts his soul at death with all its attractions tending one way in the direc- tion of spirituality, and none at all drawing it back to objective life, it does not come back; THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 205 it mounts into a condition of spirituality, cor- responding to the intensity of the attractions or affinities in that direction, and the other thread of connection is cut off. Now this explanation does not entirely cover the whole position, because the adept himself, no matter how high, does return to incarna- tion eventually, after the rest of mankind have passed across the great dividing period in the middle of the fifth round. Until the exaltation of Planetary Spirithood is reached, the highest human soul must have a certain affinity for earth still, though not the earth-life of phys- ical enjoyments and passions that we are go- ing through. But the important point to re- alize in regard to the spiritual consequences of earthly life is that, in so large a majority of cases that the abnormal few need not be talked about, the sense of justice in regard to the destiny of good men is amply satisfied by the course of Nature step by step as time advances. The spirit-life is ever at hand to receive, re- fresh, and restore the soul after the struggles, achievements, or sufferings of incarnation. And more than this, reserving the question about eternity, Nature, in the intercyclic periods at the apex of each round, provides for all man- kind, except those unfortunate failures who have persistently adhered to the path of evil,
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great intervals of spiritual blessedness, far longer and more exalted in their character than the Devachanic periods of each separate life. Nature, in fact, is inconceivably liberal and patient to each and all her candidates for the final examination during their long prep- aration for this. Nor is one failure to pass even this final examination absolutely fatal. The failures may try again, if they are not utterly disgraceful failures, but they must wait for the next opportunity. A complete explanation of the circumstances under which such waiting is accomplished would not come into the scheme of this trea- tise ; but it must not be supposed that candi- dates for progress, self-convicted of unfitness to proceed at the critical period of the fifth round, fall necessarily into the sphere of annihilation. For that attraction to assert itself, the Ego must have developed a positive attraction for matter, a positive repulsion for spirituality, which is overwhelming in its force. In the absence of such affinities, and in the absence also of such affinities as would suffice to tide the Ego over the great gulf, the destiny which meets the mere failures of Nature is, as regards the pres- ent planetary manwantara, to die, as Eliphas Levi puts it, without remembrance. They hav? lived their life, and had their share of THE PROGRESS OF HUMANITY. 207 Heaven, but they are not capable of ascending the tremendous altitudes of spiritual progress then confronting them. But they are qualified for further incarnation and life on the planes of existence to which they are accustomed. They will wait, therefore, in the negative spiritual state they have attained till those planes of ex- istence are again in activity in the next plan- etary manivantara. The duration of such wait- ing is, of course, beyond the reach of imagina- tion altogether, and the precise nature of the existence which is now contemplated is no less unrealizable ; but the broad pathway through that strange region of dreamy semi-animation must be taken note of in order that the sym- metry and completeness of the whole evolution- ary scheme may be perceived. And with this last contingency provided for, the whole scheme does lie before the reader in its main outlines with tolerable completeness. We have seen the one life, the spirit, animat- ing matter in it lowest forms first, and evoking growth by slow degrees into higher forms. In- dividualizing itself at last in man, it works up through inferior and irresponsible incarnations until it has penetrated the higher principles, and evolved a true human soul, which is thence- forth the master of its own fate, though guarded in the beginning by natural provisions which
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debar it from premature shipwreck, which stim- ulate and refresh it on its course. But the ulti- mate destiny offered to that soul is to develop not only into a being capable of taking care of itself, but into a being capable of taking care also of others, of presiding over and directing, within what may be called constitutional limits, the operations of Nature herself. Clearly be- fore the soul can have earned the right to that promotion, it must have been tried by having conceded to it full control over its own affairs. That full control necessarily conveys the power to shipwreck itself. The safeguards put round the Ego in its youth — its inability to get into higher or lower states than those of interm lin- dane Devachan and Avitchi — fall from it in its maturity. It is potent, then, over its own destinies, not only in regard to the development of transitory joy and suffering, but in regard to the stupendous opportunities in both directions which existence opens out before it. It may seize on the higher opportunities in two ways ; it may throw up the struggle in two ways ; it may attain sublime spirituality for good or sub- lime spirituality for evil ; it may ally itself to physically for (not evil but for) utter annihila- tion ; or, on the other hand, for (not good but for) the negative result of beginning the educa* tional processes of incarnation all over again.