Mahatma Letter No. 88

This is Letter No. 10 in Barker numbering. See below for Context and background.

< Prev letter chrono  Next letter chrono >   < Prev letter Barker  Next letter Barker >

Cover sheet

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 1 transcription, image, and notes

NOTES BY K.H. ON A "PRELIMINARY CHAPTER" HEADED "GOD" BY HUME, INTENDED TO PREFACE AN EXPOSITION OF OCCULT PHILOSOPHY (ABRIDGED).

Received at Simla, 1881-? '82. 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

File:ML 0-1.JPG

NOTES:

Page 2

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

File:ML 0-0.jpg

NOTES:

Page 3

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 Iswar is the effect of Avidya and Maya, ignorance based upon the great delusion. The word "God" was invented to designate the unknown

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 4

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,

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 5

sensible and known (to us at least) cause, the theists assign them spiritual, super-natural and unintelligible an un-known causes. The God of the Theologians is simply and 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

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 6

human misery. Pantheistic we may be called — agnostic NEVER. If people are willing to accept and to regard as God our ONE LIFE immutable and unconscious in its eternity they may do so and thus keep to one more gigantic misnomer. But then they will have to say with Spinoza that there is not and that we cannot conceive any other substance than God; or as that famous and unfortunate philosopher says in his fourteenth proposition, "praeter Deum nulla dari neque concepi potest substantia" — and thus become Pantheists . . . .

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 7

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?

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 8

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.

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 9

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?"

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 10

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

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 11

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

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 12

ruly 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

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 13

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

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 14

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 —

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 15

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,

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 16

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 17

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 18

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 19

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 20

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 21

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 22

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 23

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 24

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 3

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 3

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 3

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES:

Page 3

TEXT HERE

File:ML 0-0.JPG

NOTES: