Theosophical University Press Online Edition
The title of the present chapter, 'Webs of Destiny,' has been chosen with deliberation because graphically descriptive and therefore highly suggestive of the manner in which conscious and self-conscious beings enwrap themselves in the consequences or results or effects which flow forth from thoughts had, emotions felt, and actions done by reason of inner impulses.
The Esoteric Philosophy rejects as both puerile and philosophically untenable in every sense the notion prevailing today in the Western world to the effect that hap or hazard, chance or fortuity, whether in the great or in the small, and in any wise and in any manner, is the cause of either circumstances or environment or of the directing impulses which beings have and follow while living in the environment which at any time may be theirs. When considered with some degree of attentive thought, it clearly becomes evident that a Universe which contains chance or blind fortuity in any smallest degree must be a Universe which is lawless, anarchic, and based on neither reason nor mind; and when the matter is presented in this rather striking fashion, probably not one man in a hundred million would consent to accept the prevailing notion as true.
Conversely, therefore, what men popularly call chance or hazard or even fortuity, is merely what knowledge or research or investigation has not yet brought sufficiently to light as being a link or links in the chain of universal causation; and such words therefore are merely vocables descriptive of human ignorance -- or, if the words be preferred, of knowledge not yet attained.
Nature, using the word in the largest sense possible, or what we may call the Universal Kosmos, is organic, an Organism, builded up of and from literally innumerable minor beings and entities and things which distributively and individually are each one likewise an organism; for Nature, as has been before frequently stated, is repetitive throughout her boundless structure, so that what prevails in the small is but a reproduction or mirroring or reflexion of the Cosmic Reality, whether considered as cosmic intelligence or mind or substance, which throughout prevails in the mighty whole.
Thus, in consequence of the foregoing reasoning, All Nature may be viewed as a vast and incomprehensibly great Cosmic Web, into which everything that is is woven, because forming a component part of the Cosmic Whole; and it is from this fundamental conception or conceptual philosophical idea that the Esoteric Philosophy, in its own forms of graphic or descriptive expression, speaks of the relations of all beings to each other and to the environing Cosmic Whole as of the nature of a Web -- an inextricably interwoven, interlocked, interlinked, and interpermeant fabric of lives.
Thus it is that Man, as such an individual minor organism, is throughout eternity interwoven and interlocked with the environing cosmic strands of the great Web of Life; and he therefore repeats, perforce, in all his ideations or feelings and their consequent results, the Cosmic Pattern or Law and Substance which form the Universe in which he lives and moves and has his being. Every thought he has, every emotion he experiences, and every action consequent upon the impulses arising from these thoughts and emotions, is thus to be seen as forming a most intricate and fascinating Web of Destiny which man is constantly weaving around himself, and which, in very truth, is from one point of view himself.
Nor should the foregoing philosophical reflexions in any wise be supposed to imbody the idea of Fatalism, or that man is the mere puppet or blind and will-less victim of an inscrutable destiny which tosses him hither and yon, whether he will or whether he nill. Such a conception as this last is totally erroneous. It is not the teaching of the Esoteric Philosophy, and is not intended to be understood in anything that may be said in the present chapter or elsewhere. On the contrary, the teaching of the Esoteric Philosophy, the Esoteric Tradition, is that man is a willing agent throughout his beginningless and endless course of destiny -- in other words, he constantly exercises his modicum of Free Will. His will is free precisely in proportion with the degree which he has attained in rising towards self-conscious reunion with the spiritual divinity which is his own individual inmost essence, i. e., his Monad, the Self of his many human selves manifesting as reincarnations or reimbodiments in the spheres through which he passes.
The general doctrine of the weaving of such Webs of Destiny as man is continuously involving himself in by means of the exercise of his own free will, is what is called in the Esoteric Philosophy by the Sanskrit term Karman -- the doctrine that everything, thought or emotion or inner impulse, is followed by ineluctable consequences or results or effects, which thus man involves himself in, and by so doing weaves the strands of the web of destiny in which at any moment he finds himself. Probably the general teaching has never been more graphically expressed than by the Great Theosophist, H. P. Blavatsky, who wrote as follows:
Those who believe in Karma, have to believe in destiny, which, from birth to death, every man is weaving thread by thread around himself, as a spider does his cobweb; and this destiny is guided either by the heavenly voice of the invisible prototype outside of us, or by our more intimate astral, or inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the embodied entity called man. Both these lead on the outward man, but one of them must prevail; and from the very beginning of the invisible affray the stern and implacable law of compensation steps in and takes its course, faithfully following the fluctuations. When the last strand is woven, and man is seemingly enwrapped in the net-work of his own doing, then he finds himself completely under the empire of this self-made destiny. It then either fixes him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or carries him away like a feather in a whirlwind raised by his own actions, and this is -- KARMA. (213)
And again she says:
. . . the closer the union between the mortal reflection MAN and his celestial PROTOTYPE, the less dangerous the external conditions and subsequent reincarnations -- which neither Buddhas nor Christs can escape. This is not superstition, least of all is it Fatalism. The latter implies a blind course of some still blinder power, and man is a free agent during his stay on earth. He cannot escape his ruling Destiny, but he has the choice of two paths that lead him in that direction, . . . for, there are external and internal conditions which affect the determination of our will upon our actions, and it is in our power to follow either of the two. (214)
It is evident enough from the graphic descriptions thus extracted from The Secret Doctrine that man's free will is free precisely in proportion as he the more unites himself with the divine Prototype within him which is his own inmost Monadic Self, the latter being, so to say, a spiritual droplet in the Divine Ocean of the universal Mind-Consciousness-Life-Substance. But as every human being is a composite entity, formed into a unitary being by the congruency of several monadic entities which thus compose his constitution, and which by their continuous and incessant interaction and interworking make him the complex being he obviously is, it is evident, as said clearly above in the extracts from H. P. Blavatsky, that the ordinary human being, or the physical-astral man, is often, as such a vehicle, the unconscious or quasi-conscious victim or slave of karmic causes set in motion previously in other lives, of which the present physical man is in no wise conscious, has in no wise willed, and of which therefore he is the 'victim.'
Thus it is that there is what superficially it is proper to call 'unmerited suffering' in man's destiny, because the thoughts and acts of others are continuously at work helping to build the same web of destiny in which the man himself is enwrapped. We are continuously giving and taking to and from each other; and thus it is that our individual Webs of Destiny are so intricately and inseparably interwoven. Nevertheless, granting all the above, which is obvious enough to any perceiving and reflective mind, were we able to trace back to their ultimate causal sources the reasons why this or that or some other mishap or mischance or suffering falls upon us, we would see very clearly that even the entirety of all this so-called 'unmerited suffering' is in its origins due to our own thoughts, emotions, or actions -- long since forgotten and passed from our consciousness, but active just as effectually as if we remembered. As H. P. Blavatsky again writes so well:
Nor would the ways of Karma be inscrutable were men to work in union and harmony, instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of those ways -- which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and intricate; while another sees in them the action of blind Fatalism; and a third, simple chance, with neither gods nor devils to guide them -- would surely disappear, if we would but attribute all these to their correct cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a confident conviction that our neighbours will no more work to hurt us than we would think of harming them, the two-thirds of the World's evil would vanish into thin air. Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work for, nor weapons to act through. It is the constant presence in our midst of every element of strife and opposition, and the division of races, nations, tribes, societies and individuals into Cains and Abels, wolves and lambs, that is the chief cause of the "ways of Providence." We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. But verily there is not an accident in our lives, not a misshapen day, or a misfortune, that could not be traced back to our own doings in this or in another life. . . .
. . .
Karma-Nemesis is no more than the (spiritual) dynamical effect of causes produced and forces awakened into activity by our own actions. (215)
Or again, with equal penetration and inflexible logic the same writer states:
An Occultist or a philosopher will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence; but, identifying it with Karma-Nemesis, he will teach that nevertheless it guards the good and watches over them in this, as in future lives; and that it punishes the evil-doer -- aye, even to his seventh rebirth. So long, in short, as the effect of his having thrown into perturbation even the smallest atom in the Infinite World of harmony, has not been finally readjusted. For the only decree of Karma -- an eternal and immutable decree -- is absolute Harmony in the world of matter as it is in the world of Spirit. It is not, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we, who reward or punish ourselves according to whether we work with, through and along with nature, abiding by the laws on which that Harmony depends, or -- break them. (216) (217)
And, finally, in connexion with the nature or character of this universal and eternally active operation or habit of Universal Nature, which the Theosophist calls Karman, the Great Theosophist, in answering a question "But what is Karma?" says:
As I have said, we consider it as the Ultimate Law of the Universe, the source, origin and fount of all other laws which exist throughout Nature. Karma is the unerring law which adjusts effect to cause, on the physical, mental and spiritual planes of being. As no cause remains without its due effect from greatest to least, from a cosmic disturbance down to the movement of your hand, and as like produces like, Karma is that unseen and unknown law which adjusts wisely, intelligently and equitably each effect to its cause, tracing the latter back to its producer. Though itself unknowable, its action is perceivable.
. . . For, though we do not know what Karma is per se, and in its essence, we do know how it works, and we can define and describe its mode of action with accuracy. We only do not know its ultimate Cause, just as modern philosophy universally admits that the ultimate Cause of anything is "unknowable." (218)
Webs of Destiny! We have seen somewhat of the character and significance of this grandly descriptive phrase. Such a web of destiny in the life of man indeed is not only the man himself, but the intricate tangle of circumstances in which he has involved himself; woven, as above stated, of unseen but tremendously strong strands of thought and feeling and will resulting in action. Life itself is the Great Web, a Web woven by living beings, 'creators,' each one in its own sphere, of those particular strands which each brings to the weaving of this Web of Life as its contribution to the general whole. It is precisely these multitudes of living beings and creatures and things of all-various types and kinds, which make life so complex and which play so large a part in the web of destiny which every man weaves around himself.
These multitudes of beings and creatures are not only those which exist on our small earth, but in very truth comprise in their number likewise the almost innumerable series of hierarchies, great and small, visible and invisible, which in the large weave the Cosmic Web. For indeed the Universe is filled full with spiritual beings and entities -- call them 'gods' or 'spiritual beings' as Theosophists and others do; or 'angels and archangels' as the Jews and the Christians do; or 'rishis' and 'devas' as the Hindus do; or 'Dhyani-Chohans' and 'devas' as the Buddhists do; or 'Theoi' and 'Dii' as the ancient Greeks and Romans respectively did: it matters not at all what term is given to these various hierarchies of beings thus called by different names in different nations and peoples, as long as there abides the fundamental conception that these energizing beings and entities -- these causal intelligent and quasi-intelligent Forces -- form the very roots and the hierarchical structure both of the noumenal and of the phenomenal Universe in which we live, and thus provide for that Universe the entirety of the causal forces and energies which infill and move and agitate it. "Mens agitat molem," as Vergil, the Latin poet, so truly said in his Aeneid.
These causal forces express themselves in and through the phenomenal Universe in many and divers and diverse manners, for they are the noumenal or productive agents of the so-called Forces of Nature that are so often spoken of, and concerning which so little is really known. Electricity and gravitation, for example, which even in our ultra-modern science have become, because of recent truly occult discoveries, veritably mystic as well as mysterious, are such expressions on our plane of the noumenal Powers, the latter manifesting as such phenomenal appearances on the very lowest plane of their respective hierarchical lines. We may actually speak of either of them as being either the force or the energy, on the one hand, or the substance, on the other hand, of Invisible Beings, for they are both.
We humans verily are the children, the offspring, as the ancients put it, of these inner energizing forces, of these noumenal gods, of these spiritual beings, who exist in all-various degrees of evolutionary development; and who exist, as just stated, in hierarchical or scalar degrees or states; and therefore are we in our own highest parts also such gods -- but, as we may say, 'fallen gods,' fallen into the material worlds, out of which and through which we are slowly working our way back to our Divine Cosmic Source, as the Universal Wisdom of the ancient times taught.
All these multitudinous hierarchies, composed of the divine, spiritual, and ethereal, as well as physical beings just mentioned, for ever do their work under the unerring sway of that incomprehensibly mysterious and occult Habit of Nature, or POWER, which we call Karman. This word itself is a Sanskrit term, and as a word it means only 'action' or 'working.' Such is the meaning of the mere word, of the vocable alone. But it is in Theosophy a highly technical word, and as such it has a recondite and wonderful significance. What is this technical meaning? It can briefly be expressed in four English words, when considered as imbodied in a teaching: 'the doctrine of consequences' -- otherwise, and more popularly phrased, the universal 'law of cause and effect.'
The Esoteric Tradition repudiates, and on grounds swept by its inflexible logic, any idea of there being 'chance,' 'fortuity' -- whatever these words may really mean -- in the boundless Universe. Certainly nobody can give a satisfactory definition of 'chance' or 'fortuity' as a fundamental attribute or quality existing in Nature herself. When carefully examined, the idea is seen to be a mere phantasy; and, as great men even in the West have said: "We use the word 'chance' in order to describe our ignorance of things that we do not yet understand causally." Things happen, the origins of which are unknown or not understood. Not understanding them, people ascribe them to 'chance,' 'fortuity,' or say that 'it happened so.' Nevertheless our minds are logical in their operations, and when the forces and energies flowing into this physical universe appear here, we see in them consistency and coherency throughout; we see that they appear in logical and connected sequences, apparently always the same if the circumstances and conditions be the same, and we therefore say 'a law of Nature.'
But where, pray, is the law-giver? A law presupposes a lawgiver. One sees in this term the influence of the old Occidental theology, just as one sees in the terms 'chance' and 'fortuity' the still-living influence of the now moribund if not dead scientific materialism of former generations. The Theosophist prefers to use the phrase 'the operations of Nature.' Modern scientific thinkers, unconsciously approaching the Theosophical doctrine, speak of 'the law of cause and effect,' and in doing so unconsciously to themselves state a fundamental postulate of the Esoteric Philosophy.
Truly, Nature exists in all her operations; and all the beings in Nature exist; but when we talk of 'laws of Nature' do we mean certain operations of natural forces that pursue always the same courses, and that these forces have been set in motion by some great supreme Individual whom men call 'God'? Obviously were that the fact, then this great supreme Individual, a Titan, Cosmic Man, if you like, fashioned by man's imagination after man's own structure, inner and outer, would de facto be responsible for everything that takes place in the Universe supposedly created by such a Being and working according to the laws imposed and set in motion by such a Being as the supposititious supreme law-giver. This would reduce man and all other entities, conscious and quasi-conscious, and all things, merely to natural automata; and to ascribe to such natural automata the possession of a free will which neither by origin nor nature they would have, and, not having, could not use, is a mere petitio principii -- a begging of the question.
Such an idea is an 'easy way' to shoulder off on to somebody else or something else the responsibility, spiritual, intellectual, and ethical, for what we ourselves do or have done for good or for bad, for weal or for woe, for ourselves and for others. But the inflexible universal logic of the Esoteric Philosophy does not permit us to do this. Man is but one of an innumerable host of beings, imbodied Consciousnesses, who infill the Universe. Nowhere do we find anything other than these hierarchies of beings, these consciousnesses active during the Cosmic Manvantara, and each individual of these hosts weaving its own Web of Destiny, its energies pouring out of its own inner being and directed by the intelligence streaming from its own spiritual and mental foci. It is the combination and incessant interaction and interweaving of all these intelligences and wills and their consequent activities unceasingly operative in the Universe that account for the inequalities that we see around us: as much for the imperfections that we see and of which we are more or less sensible, as for the beauty and splendor and the order and law of which we are likewise conscious.
It is this interaction and in minor cases ensuing conflict of wills which is the origin of all the evil in the world -- not only among men but among the beings strung all along the rungs of the ascending Ladder of Cosmic Life, from the supergods downwards through all intermediate stages to men; and the evil or disharmony which is apparent among the beasts and in less degree in the plants and minerals is due to exactly the same cause. There would be no evil or disharmony on Earth, so far as human beings are concerned, if it were not for this conflict of human wills, which is another way of saying the wrong exercise or use of that divine faculty -- a god-like power working within us -- our relatively free Will. (219)
It has been said by Occidental writers, miseducated to believe certain things that have no real existence outside the educational, religious, philosophical, and scientific fads of the Occidental world, that the origin of evil in the world, and its continuance, form an unsolvable mystery. Verily it does not. What indeed is evil? What indeed is good? Are they things in themselves, or are they, as is perfectly obvious, solely conditions, states, through which beings and entities pass? Evil is disharmony, because it is imperfection; and good is harmony because it is relative perfection. Again, these two, human good and human evil, apply almost solely to the particular hierarchy in which we humans move and live and have our being. Evil is not an entity; it is not a power or an energy or a force which flows forth from the heart of some thing or some being, unless we restrict it to human evil-doing, and then assuredly it is just that. Abstractly speaking, it is the state or condition of an evolving being or entity which has not yet fully placed itself in accord and concord with Nature's fundamental laws: the condition or state of a being or an entity or a group of beings or entities in greater or less degree opposing the forwards-moving evolutionary Stream of Life. Evil may also be called that course of action brought about by the individual or individuals which has not or have not yet evolved forth the latent divinity within, and therefore is always traceable to its origin in the misuse and abuse of will and intelligence by a being or entity which finds itself in temporary inharmonious condition with its environment because of its own imperfections. (220)
Good, as said above, is relative harmony, and therefore relative perfection; and evil therefore is relative disharmony, born of relative imperfection. Neither good nor evil as conditions exist apart from each other. There could be no 'good' things in the Universe unless there were 'evil' things which by contrast set off the former. Contrariwise, there could be no 'evil' things in the Universe, our Home-Universe, unless there were 'good' things by which alone the former appear in contrast. Evil is not created out of nothing. Good is not created out of nothing. The former is disharmony, the latter is harmony. Consequently they are two poles of the same causal origin. There cannot exist such a thing as evil apart from imperfect or inharmonious things or entities, and there is no such entity per se as 'evil' which exists apart from entities or things who or which are relatively 'evil.' Precisely the same observation may be made, mutatis mutandis, with regard to good.
Paradoxically speaking, evil is a condition through which we humans pass as we grow to become better. This better, however, is 'evil' to a larger and loftier better, and this larger and loftier better is imperfect and inharmonious and therefore relatively 'evil' to something still grander, and so on ad infinitum. Good is not spirit. Evil is not the nether pole of spirit, which men call matter; because that would be saying that matter is essentially evil, which is not true. Evil is imperfection, whether spiritual or material, and is whatever is imperfect and passing through the stage or phase of growing to something better. If such stage or phase of growing be a very low one, we humans can properly and justifiably speak of 'malignant evil.' If that stage or phase of imperfection be only slightly inferior to the stage of humanity in which we as human beings at present should be, we properly speak of small or slight evil. (221)
There is no 'devil' in the Universe, wrongly supposed to be the ever-active suggester of evil and the arbiter of its crooked ways. Equally so, there is no anti-polar god in the Universe, who is similarly and wrongly supposed to be the creator and suggester of good, and the arbiter of its working. Either and both involve the matter of evolutionary growth, of unfolding progress, of passing from imperfection to a less imperfect stage or condition or phase, and continuously. Matter is not evil per se, as some schools have wrongly held in the past; and for precisely the same reason, Spirit is not good per se. That is to say, neither the one nor the other possesses this or the other condition or state absolutely, and for eternity. A spiritual entity is growing, is evolving or unfolding, just as much as any material being or entity is in growth or in unfolding of inner and latent capacity and power. Nevertheless, precisely because spirit, and the hierarchies of spiritual beings which manifest more largely spirit, are nearer to Nature's divine heart -- i. e., to its fundamental essence and laws -- therefore spirit and spiritual entities are, collectively speaking, more perfect, obviously therefore better, and equally obviously therefore less 'evil,' than matter and material entities are, because these latter are much farther removed from Nature's heart of divinity -- i. e., Nature's fundamental essence and her therein inhering laws of harmony.
Nor does evil per se become good per se, which is an absurdity. That is like saying that one state becomes through growth another state, which is absurd. If this were so, we should have one individuality retaining its individuality in order that it might continue to be the same being -- and yet becoming another contrary individuality, which is absurd. Evil per se is not an entity which can grow or become good per se -- i. e., evolve into some other supposititious entity. Thus, length is not an entity which exists, although there are things which are long; similarly, there is no such thing per se as depth, although there are things which are deep. Length and depth do not exist as entities. They are abstract conditions or states of entities.
How can 'evil' become divine? How can imperfection be perfection? How can disharmony be harmony? How can hate be love? Evil never becomes divine, because evil is not a thing which grows. Childhood is not a thing. It is a condition or state or phase through which a growing entity passes. Stupidity is not a thing, nor does it ever become intelligence. It is a phase, a condition, an imperfect state of evolution, or growth, of beings. It is quite wrong, therefore, to say that evil becomes good. Only beings or entities 'become.'
This fallacy, that evil will in time become good, is born of the idea that the origin of all is good, and therefore that evil will re-become what it once was. But is it not a trifle bold to suppose that the origin of all is good? Good and evil are wholly human terms; being human terms they have human connotations. It is like ethics. The ethics of a South Sea Islander are not the ethics of a European, nor of an American -- that is, let us hope, in all details! In certain senses or fundamentally in certain relations perhaps we may say yes. The ethics of a devil-worshipper are very different indeed from my ethics; but yet in each case they are 'ethics' to the being who follows them and practises them. Good and evil are human terms, and we call good what men understand to be harmonious: harmonious relations with other beings and things. In fact, as is notorious enough, what some men might or would call evil, other men might actually call relative good. Deduction: when we speak of divinity, dare we endow that incomprehensible -- what shall we call it? Being? No; Essence perhaps is a better word: shall we endow that which to us in its fulness, and in its amazingly beautiful and often perplexing operations and characteristics, is incomprehensible Life, with the attributes of the good and the evil that we men understand? Who would dare so to limit, to circumscribe, the Boundless Life? In this connexion, all that can be said is that the heart of incomprehensible Kosmic BEING is law and order and impersonal love and impersonal harmony; that out of this incomprehensible heart of BEING flow the origins or seeds of all that is, including the innumerable hosts of Monadic Individuals; that these Monadic Individuals, in the beginning of their evolutionary journey through Kosmic Time-Space, are learning Monads; and that as these embryo-entities continue their journey through Time-Space, because of wrong choosings of will and intelligence, they pass oft through 'evil shadows.'
It is so easy to say that 'God is love'; but when we say that 'God is love,' do we not immediately perceive that infinite love must include also what we men call evil? Can infinite love, which is boundless, both in space and time, exclude from its encompassing infinitude even the greatest erring creature which in its origin had flowed forth from its own heart? Infinite love is infinite compassion, and includes even the erring and the ne'er-do-wells everywhere. The 'heart' of the Universe is ineffable Harmony, but not all beings anywhere and everywhere are harmonious. The Universe is filled full with all kinds of creatures, with all sorts and grades and stages of evolving beings and entities; but the 'Heart' of Divinity includes them all, for it is their Parent and their Source, and is the ultimate Goal towards which all and everything is evolving through innumerable ages on their return pilgrimage to Itself.
Shall we hold the heart of divinity responsible for what an erring child does? Shall we and dare we say that there is such a thing as an infinite and eternal crime? The idea is monstrous, for it is incredible and inadmissible on any ground of argument or of thought. What we do know is that it is the weak and erring hosts of imperfectly evolved beings and entities, who pass on their pilgrimage through many valleys of shadow, which some men call sin: imperfectly evolved beings and entities, who nevertheless, all of them, are children of the Cosmic Life. But to hold the Cosmic Life, to hold the Cosmic Heart, responsible for what these innumerable armies and hosts and multitudes of evolving beings and entities do, is incredibly absurd.
What is Divinity? Is it 'a Big Man up there,' as the untutored savage thinks? A Big Man 'up there' who makes good and tolerates evil; who makes good creatures and makes evil creatures? If one say that 'God' is responsible for any evil and erring part of infinity, however small the part may be: if one say that 'God' 'created' such an entity, this is to make that supposititious 'God' individually and eternally responsible for whatever the hapless and irresponsible creature may do in the future forever, for, ex hypothesi, Eternal and Infinite Wisdom foresaw the infinity of the future, and 'created' the creature for whatever pathway it is destined to follow. In such case in both logic and even human justice -- to say naught of infinite love and wisdom -- is not the true evil doer the supposititious 'God' himself? (222)
The Theosophist summarily rejects this evil thought, for to him it is blasphemously evil. To him the Heart of Being is compassion absolute, harmony absolute, infinite wisdom. But what is this 'Heart of Being'? In the last analysis, and when due allowance is made for the frailties of human understanding and the imperfections of human speech which interpret the relatively feeble efforts of that understanding, we are bound to admit that this Heart of Being is not the frontierless, beginningless, and endless infinitude and eternity, but the Hierarch, the chief hierarchical Guardian, of our own Kosmic Galaxy, our own Home-Universe -- the divine-spiritual Being or Entity beyond all possibility of human investigation or description, but who by comparison with Kosmic Entities still vaster and still more incomprehensibly sublime, is but a relatively minute godling.
The Theosophist therefore rejects the idea that 'God' creates certain multitudes of men unto evil, which is exactly the idea according to the logic of at least one old theory; or, contrariwise, that 'God' creates other certain multitudes of men unto eternal good, which is likewise exactly the teaching of another and contrasted old theory of the West -- if we may dignify this belief by the name 'theory.' To the Theosophist, either idea or teaching is indeed blasphemous, because it makes the supposititious creating 'God' wholly and for ever responsible, and thus makes him likewise the original doer because 'creator.' According to this theory, being infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, such a 'God' knew at the instant of creation all that his creature would become, would do through eternity, and therefore according to this old teaching 'God' deliberately created certain men unto eternal damnation -- or contrariwise.
Lest these words be thought to be unfair, one ventures to quote here, with due respect to the many fine men and women who may still accept it, Article XVII of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, as these Articles were laid down in Convention assembled in 1562-3, to wit:
Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel, secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honor.
This seventeenth Article is mild in its tone and doctrine as compared with the Doctrine of Reprobation of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which was formulated at Westminster also, by a Convocation of English Divines during the period 1643-1649. It should be remembered that Reprobation is a technical term in Christian theology, and means the doctrine that "God has predestined some to everlasting death." This Westminster Confession of Faith was largely drawn up by clergymen having strong Calvinistic leanings, and in its Article III, 3, 4, we find the following:
By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and other foreordained to everlasting death. These angels and men, thus predestined and foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed; and their number is so certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or diminished. (223)
Abomination of this sort was never taught in ancient times when the great Mysteries of antiquity prevailed in their mighty influence over human souls; which Mysteries taught men not merely how to live but also taught them the secrets of Universal Nature, and therefore likewise of man's interior constitution and his being, and his origin and his destiny. Nor, may one add, was it the teaching of the Avatara Jesus, called the Christ, nor is it the teaching of the Brotherhood of the Masters of Wisdom and Compassion and Peace. It is a dark and ignoble idea, evolved from the obscured minds of mediaeval theologians and in the early ages of the Christian Era.
The Theosophist accepts no such God, for such a god is very truly man's own creation, created by man's weak and erring and imperfect mind, when projecting its own imperfect imaginations on the background of infinity. Instead, to the Theosophist the heart of the Universe is the source of all life; the source of all intelligence, the source of all order, the source of all regular procedures, the source of everything that in man's inmost heart and highest mind he aspires towards, in order by such aspiration to ennoble his own life and dignify his existence. Indeed, it is the supremest and highest part of man's own constitution, for his inmost essence is identic with the divine-spiritual Essence of the Kosmic Universe.
The foregoing observations and reflexions do not signify, however, that the teachings of the Esoteric Philosophy, the Esoteric Tradition, in any wise ignore the existence in the Universe of all imperfectly evolved spacial and durational phases of the Cosmic Life, nor, on the other hand, the great multitudes of evolving or unfolding or growing beings who still are plunged in the lower deeps or densities of the many phases of existence in the so-called material world. Indeed, the Titan Intellects of the human race have long ages since as carefully explored these left-hand realms or mansions of life as they have carefully explored and understood the great mansions and realms of the Cosmic Life which belong to what is technically called the rising or Ascending Arc of manifested being. Minds of even greater penetrating power, and wisdom still more impersonal and permeant, than those even of the Titan Intellects of the human race, have transmitted unto the latter, who in turn transmit their knowledge to those who are found worthy and well prepared to receive it, wide and profound ranges of Cosmic Verities, of which the average human being has no conception, nor does he even dream of the existence thereof.
There are hierarchies of spiritual, quasi-spiritual, and ethereal beings and entities which exist in and inhabit the material hierarchies, and they are of as many kinds in their respective ways as are the other hierarchies at the other or spiritual end of the scale. There are, in fact, beings whom we may qualify as entities of 'spiritual wickedness' even as Paul of the Christians taught. (224) What then is meant by this expression 'entities existing in a state of spiritual wickedness'? Obviously, and speaking generally, this phrase refers to those entities who, because of their imperfection, combined with their modicum of free will, although belonging to the spiritual realms, produce a certain disharmony there, and consequently they are evil in that state.
Furthermore, this difficult phrase refers also, and much more specifically, on the one hand to beings possessing certain intellectual and psychical development, but who have deliberately chosen to follow the 'path of matter'; and, on the other hand, it refers to the so-called Mamo-Chohans, as they are termed in Tibet, which are those somber and mysterious entities who in their aggregate are the karmic agents or controllers or guardians of the matter-side of the Universe. Lords of the dark, the dark Lords, the Mamo-Chohans individually are, as it were, Monads who were of some material development even before the time when they began their pilgrimage in this Cosmic Manvantara, through the lower spheres in order -- in the far distant future -- to become men, and later to become self-conscious gods of Light. They are at work or in operation all around us, and continuously so. It is really they who hold the material worlds in hierarchic coherence. Nevertheless it is through these material worlds that the Lords of Light work; it is in the material worlds that the Light Lords clothe themselves with and in bodies. 'Material' as just hereinbefore used, is not restricted in its meaning to our physical spheres only: the term as here used comprises the vehicular side of the Universe, the substantial side as contrasted with the energy-side, the spirit-side -- the vast and interworking Hierarchies of Light.
Now these various classes of beings 'of spiritual evil' above mentioned, are not by any means all of them Mamo-Chohans; they also contain among their number entities much farther advanced along the evolutionary pathway than even human beings are, although most of them have arisen to their present status out of the human stock; and in most cases, perhaps in all, these deliberately ally themselves, in the wickedness of their spirituality, with the Mamo-Chohans and thus become what Mankind has always vaguely intuited as the 'forces of evil.' They are in fact spiritual sorcerers who are, or who make themselves to be, the active agents on Earth and in other material spheres for the unevolved matter-portion of Life, and therefore are what humans call 'evil' influences coming from the 'dark side' of Nature. As a matter of fact, every human being who deliberately does an evil deed from choice, i. e., because he loves the evil thing for its own sake, is an agent of and for spiritual wickedness. This is so because he is then using spiritual and intellectual forces for unholy and wicked purposes and ends. This again is possible because man is a god in his essence, and in his higher nature his will is supreme -- if only he knew how to apply it here in the world of men; and thus it is that he can use spiritual energies by his will and apply them to evil uses, wicked uses.
Every individual everywhere, human or other, is pursuing its own pathway of destiny, weaving its own web, but not merely around itself, for it itself is that Web of Destiny, because it is a web of character, therefore composite of a mingling of forces and substances which belong to its sevenfold (or tenfold) constitution. Here then is the simple explanation of how evil or wickedness arises in the world: because of the intricate and wayward action of multitudes of individuals using their relatively free will and relatively unfolded intelligence; and because these imperfect entities often choose wrongly and to the detriment and injury of other similar individuals around them, because of ignorance and passion, this conflict of wills brings about the complicated interweaving of the strands of the many Webs of Destiny. This is the great cause, at least among men, of the suffering and misery of which we are all as human beings so painfully conscious.
The explanation itself is exactly correspondent with all Nature that we know; it answers completely the intuitive sense of justice that whatever touches our own life originates in ourselves and that we are our own parents and our own children, so to say; for what we now sow we shall reap; and we reap what we have sown in this or in another life and naught else. No outside God creates misery and unhappiness and destruction to come upon us, any more than does an outside God surround us with unearned joy and fortunate conclusions of the acts that we undertake; for in either of such cases neither of these states would we ourselves then be responsible for. We ourselves build ourselves; and in doing so we co-operate with other hierarchies to build the Universe -- i. e., that particular portion of the Universe in which we are.
All the beings and things, therefore, that everywhere we cognise, are really individual Webs of Destiny. The Universe itself is such a Web of Destiny, builded by the wills and consciousnesses of the beings and entities and things which infill it, and which actually compose it -- all operative or rather co-operative in producing both its invisible and immeasurably wonderful Worlds, and the outward manifestations comprising the gorgeous natural sights that we see; yea, and the imperfections that we see also.
For every point in Space may be considered to be the domicile of a Monadic entity, this point being ensouled and inspirited by its own deathless and stainless Monadic essence, i. e., its own Consciousness-Center, which expresses itself through such infinitesimal 'point' as best it can, thus progressing in the weaving of its Web of Destiny on its journey upward and back to the spheres of ineffable Light. The worlds above us, the stars and planets, are all living beings, growing beings, evolving beings; and these worlds themselves, all of them and without exception, are filled full with other subordinate beings and entities, each one itself similarly engaged in weaving its own individual Web of Destiny, which is itself, and which by such weaving is pouring forth from itself as it learns better how to do so ever larger portions or streams or floods of its guiding conscious spiritual essence. Moreover the natural phenomena that we see around us are but the effects or results in our physical universe of the action of multitudes of intelligent entities in the invisible realms, of whom we vaguely intuit or feel or sense the powers and qualities and attributes and forces, as they flow into our sphere of life.
In this continuous action which perdures throughout the course of the immensely long Cosmic Manvantara, every such being or entity acts and interacts with multitudes of other beings more or less like unto itself, and because of this interwoven hierarchical structure of the Universe, every entity everywhere, no matter what its size, is but one of the entities in the 'life-stream' of some still greater being. As it has been explained at more length in previous chapters, Nature's structure is hierarchical throughout, so that her multitudes of Cosmic Planes which compose her own Being are repetitive each of the Plane higher than itself, and thus it is that any Individual Unit is comprised within the life-stream and constitution and substance of another Cosmic Individual Unit of far greater magnitude.
This thought at first sight may seem very mysterious and difficult to understand, but the composition of a man's body will furnish a simple illustration of Nature's repetitive structure. A man's mind controls the conscious motions of his body; and his so-called and mis-called 'sub-conscious mind' likewise controls the so-called involuntary actions and involuntary and reflex-movements of whatever kind they may be. Remove this mind or this consciousness and death ensues, leaving what we call 'dead' bodies. What takes place in 'dead' bodies? Decay, dissolution, a breaking up of the organic union into its constituent molecular and atomic parts. The controlling and guiding and energizing power has left the body which thus remains 'dead'; the inner forces no longer inflow into or stream into that physical body and move it, either to agitate it or to give it peace, as the case may be, according to whether these inflowing forces proceed from the lower or the higher part of man's interior constitution. Yet our body, considered as a physical vehicle, is composed of nothing but vast hosts of infinitesimal entities, each one of which has the same right and title to be called a 'learning entity,' a 'consciousness-center' on its upward way, as the man himself has, with his dominant and enclosing consciousness and will. During life, over all these vast hosts of entities in the human body -- and they are practically numberless, so great is the multitude of them -- the human spirit, the human consciousness, the human mind, is their combined overlord and has them all in its enclosing and guiding grasp.
So, on the macrocosmic scale, is it with the Universe; and there are innumerable hosts of such Universes, as our modern scientists are beginning to recognise when they talk about 'island universes' outside our own Home-Universe comprised within the encircling zone of the Milky Way.
We thus see that we are interlinked and interlocked by the inseparable and ineluctable bonds of a Cosmic Consciousness, these bonds expressing themselves as an all-permeant will and intelligence. Yea, every force in the Universe thrills through our being, and every substance in the Universe has done its proportionate part in building us up and therefore has given to us somewhat of itself. Thus it is that all the ancient mystical Schools have spoken of man as being the Microcosm or 'little world' containing in itself portions of everything that the Universal Parent contains and is. Therefore, because we are all parts of one all-inclusive Cosmic Consciousness and its vehicular expression, the surrounding Universe, we are all now and here together, and therefore do we feel others' doings upon us, even as they feel what we do to them. This is why also the expenditure of a certain amount of its own native energy by any entity will instantaneously act upon surrounding Nature, which in its turn automatically reacts thereto. This reaction, however, may be instant or it may not take place for a long time; in some cases the reaction may be delayed even for aeons, but in all events and in all cases surely the reaction will somewhen occur, for it is inescapably determined by the factors involved in the equation itself.
This doctrine, expressive of the fact that we are all but parts of a greater Being is not to be misunderstood to signify the teaching of Fatalism, as already briefly discussed elsewhere. Fatalism is the idea -- it can hardly be called a teaching, it is rather the notion or speculation -- that man and all other entities, conscious and unconscious, un-self-conscious and self-conscious, and no matter where, are the blindly driven motes of a soulless cosmic mechanism controlled by some overpowering, overdominating force, which some think acts altogether as chance, hazard, altogether and everywhere as fortuity: blind, soulless, insensate, involving aimless wandering anywhere, purposeless, coming from nowhere, and all without any defined objective whatsoever.
This is the view of one form of Fatalism -- that of the old materialistic School which happily is now become an outworn and virtually abandoned belief. The other fatalistic view, rather more difficult to describe, because there are or have been several varieties or shades of opinion about it, is that men and all other things in the Universe are the puppets of an inscrutable cosmic Force, which probably possesses intelligence and will, and, as it were, exercises these attributes in producing the cosmic phantasy of Creation, and in which naught but itself has any true power of self-choice.
There is but little to choose between these two Schools, for they are as alike as two peas in a pod, except for the ascription of names to the one which are not used in the other; and the giving to one of certain supposititious qualities which are only names after all, because they are vacuous and empty of substance.
European scientists long since discerned the existence throughout the Universe of a Chain of Causation, and it has been and still is called the law of cause and effect; for its existence is so obvious in Nature's structure and in her operations, that although one cannot understand the origin and meaning of this dark and mysterious law, as it seems to be, nevertheless its presence and its operations are perceptible everywhere, not only in ourselves, but in all things and beings that surround us.
The most modern or ultra-modern notions regarding this law of cause and effect are, however, undergoing some very curious and interesting changes. The old physical determinism of the effete and now moribund materialism of our fathers, has practically vanished, due to the new light that more recent scientific discovery and philosophico-scientific deduction therefrom have thrown upon the nature of the universe surrounding us.
Our scientists seem to be bewildered, and in some cases proceed to what one can qualify as being nothing other than illogical explanations of the causes and meaning of the physical phenomena which they are laying bare by their very conscientious work. Reacting from the old and fatalistic determinism above mentioned, many eminent scientific men today are speaking of a 'principle of indeterminacy,' but just precisely what the significance or inner meaning of this term or phrase implies, it is extremely difficult for an outsider to say -- and after a careful study of many scientific works in which this principle of 'indeterminacy' is mentioned, one feels almost driven to conclude that the eminent gentlemen who have coined this phrase are themselves in doubt as to just what they mean by it.
Are we to look upon this so-called 'indeterminacy' as signifying that the atoms or the electric particles composing the atoms have a modicum, however small, of free will which causes them to act in an apparently erratic and wilful manner, often contrary to expectations? Or, mayhap, shall we suppose that 'indeterminacy' as the term is used, signifies a state of things where hap or hazard or chance or fortuity or cosmic lawlessness rules everywhere, every atom refusing to be bound or restricted within those frontiers of causal concatenation which even the old materialism defined as determinism? Who can say what these bigwigs of our scientific laboratories themselves think -- and, perchance, even they themselves know not! Yet some great scientists (e. g., Einstein, Planck, etc.) do admit causality in 'indeterminacy.' Such an atmosphere of nescience, or possibly better phrased, such an attitude of agnostic 'indeterminacy,' prevails in scientific minds, that one retires from a sincere and searching study of much of modern scientific work with the feeling that nothing really definite or certain is known anywhere, and that the cocksureness and dogmatic orthodoxy of the science that was, has been replaced by amazingly conscientious work in new discovery which thus far has been productive only of bewilderment and guesswork in scientific circles.
Hence it is that the Theosophist can accept neither the 'determinism' of the old Materialism nor the 'indeterminacy' of the modern scientific schools, nor again the various varieties of Fatalism which have at different times prevailed among philosophers and religionists, for they find none of these to meet the needs of man's intellect, nor the intuitions of his spirit, nor the aspirations of his soul; nor does any one of them respond in any wise adequately to the instincts of his moral sense. Neither 'chance' nor 'Kismet' is satisfactory; although he sees in both these views certain adumbrations of the cosmic reality -- that infinitely universal, never-erring, and wholly impersonal Operation of Nature which he studies under the term long since given to it -- KARMAN. This is the doctrine of ineluctable consequences, otherwise called in ordinary human speech, the Law of Cause and Effect, which we may likewise speak of as the all-permeant Law of Causation and Effectual Results.
The Theosophist, as much as the veriest fatalist, if indeed there be such a being, believes in this chain or concatenation or stream of interlocked or interwoven circumstances existent everywhere in the Cosmic Life, and he believes in the consequent fact that every being or entity everywhere, and every act done by any being or entity anywhere, and every thought or emotion felt by any being or entity anywhere, is the enchained effect of some precedaneous cause -- in every case arising in the chain of causation in the being of some living entity. Moreover, universes, worlds, solar systems, nebulae, comets, planets, cosmic spirits, men, elementals, life-atoms, matter, and all the various planes and spheres of being: in fact all things: are not merely the resultants or consequences of each one's preceding and individual aggregate of karmic causes. Each one for itself is originating new karmic causes constantly and from itself in combination or in interconnexion with all others.
The question yet remains: What originates these causes operative in and building the Webs of Destiny which we are studying? We here put our finger, so to speak, on the true solution of this problem which has so vexed and perplexed the minds of men for ages: What originates causes? The teaching of the Esoteric Philosophy, the Esoteric Tradition, is: There never was a 'beginning' of such origination. A hard saying, perhaps. But the explanation is simple enough when the key-thought is grasped. Every cause in the Chain of Causation which stretches from eternity to eternity is but the effect of a precedaneous cause which in its turn is but the effect of a cause preceding it, and so forth ad infinitum; just as, looking forwards into what men call the future, every cause produces its effect, which instantly becomes a 'new' cause in turn followed by an effect, which instantly becomes a 'new' cause and so forth, ad infinitum. (225)
Here then is the Key: and in illustration of it as a general teaching let us turn again to man as an instance in point. Man is a composite being. His highest parts are pure divinity, therefore are pure consciousness, therefore pure mind, pure will, pure force. Having these qualities aggregated into a unity, and thus being an individual composite of both force and substance, not only interacting but acting exteriorly and receiving effects from the outside world, he is, therefore, an 'actor' in the original sense of that word -- one who originates acts: who moves, who does: because the heart of him, the core of him, is this central divine consciousness, this pure divine mind-will-energy; and this unity is by its very nature perpetually active and at work, cosmically speaking, even in the lowest of things; therefore in man, as in every other being or entity or thing. This divine mind-will-force, this inner divine consciousness, always is attempting to self-express its transcendent powers through the veils of matter which in man, just as in all other beings and entities, enshroud it. The essential nature of this divine unity is wholly free, because being pure, unfettered consciousness -- a droplet, so to say, of the Cosmic 'Shining Sea.'
Moreover, this fundamental and supreme cosmic self at the heart of beings and things, is altogether 'above Karman,' to speak popular language -- although indeed it is the very origin and source of all possible Karman, and therefore naturally has its own Karman which we may specify as being divine -- and consequently is never affected by such lower Karman for the very simple reason that this divine entity may be called itself the fundamental operative Consciousness-Mind-Substance of the Universe. It is the causal Harmony of that Universe, therefore likewise the causal Harmony of all beings and all things included in that Universe; and therefore it is the very root and fount and source of all the operations of Nature whatsoever: the root of Karman itself. To say in other words just what Karman is would be extremely difficult, because it is and it involves the profoundest cosmic Mystery -- the nature and operative activity of the essential being of Cosmic Consciousness-Mind-Substance-Force itself.
Acting incessantly throughout all manifested differentiations, it encloses within itself all imperfect expressions thereof. But it is only these differentiations or imperfections which work imperfectly. Obviously, it is only the previously involved which later evolves: in other words, evolution or unfolding follows involution or infolding; and that which by its very nature is the Absolute Perfection or divine unity of the Universe is the causal root or source of all and every one of the so-called operations of Nature -- of the so-called 'laws of Nature.' Thus we see why this divine part of man's composite constitution is causally unaffected by the lower natural operations which are nevertheless its own outflowings, except in so far as these outflowings are destined in future aeons to return unto itself.
When this supreme consciousness of a being or of an entity like man can so self-express its own transcendent powers, as somewhat and sometimes it can and does in individuals of the human race, then we have what is called really free will; and in proportion as man unwraps and unfolds, i. e., evolves forth, these inner and transcendent faculties and powers, which are the core of him, and which are of the very nature of this transcendent consciousness within and above him, by so much does he possess in ever larger degree this wondrous attribute or faculty of free choice, free action, free will. For free will is one aspect or energy of that ever-unbroken thread of consciousness-mind-substance-force which unites us with Boundless Infinity. No man has free will ungeared from the Universe, as so many superficial thinkers are apt to imagine; for this would mean that he is outside the Universe. Man has free will in greater or less degree depending upon his individual development, because his inmost core, the heart of the heart of him, is literally Infinity, or what the Vedic Sages called, refusing to employ any attributive adjective -- THAT. His free will, therefore, in ever-inextricable unity with his other divine-spiritual attributes and qualities, is the element or principle that links him with the Cosmic Ultimate, because his utmost or inmost SELF is identical with the Heart of Parabrahman. (226) Evolution, therefore, in addition to the incessant and progressive unfolding of faculty and power and organ, means likewise growth or unfolding of free will -- all because of the fundamental fact that evolution signifies the slowly progressive but incessant unfolding into ever fuller expressions of the Parabrahmic Essence within and above the man. Free will, therefore, increases both in power and freedom in proportion as the evolving man advances upwards on the Luminous Arc of Nature, i. e., on the consciousness-side of the Universe; and it likewise decreases as the evolving man recedes from the consciousness-side towards an ever greater descent or 'fall' into absolute matter, which in the last analysis may be described as crystallized or passive Monads, which move, as it were, in perfect automatism with Nature's own operations there.
The student of ancient literatures, particularly those of the Orient and their more or less modern commentaries, has doubtless met with observations, particularly in the latter, to the effect that when a man has reached the status or condition of Mastership of and in life -- in other words, when he has become one of the great Sages and Seers, or indeed, perhaps has reached a still more lofty stature in spirituality -- he is then 'above Karman,' above karmic reaction, and thus has passed beyond its sway. Such statements need to be taken with great reserve and should be examined with equal care. Now it is perfectly true, according to the teaching of the Esoteric Philosophy, the Esoteric Tradition, that an evolving Individual, such as man, may and indeed can achieve so high a status in spiritual evolution by unfolding from within himself his inner transcendent powers which act always in accordance with Cosmic Law, that he thereby becomes a direct and self-conscious collaborator and agent, in his own sphere of course, with these Cosmic Laws; and thus he may be truly said to be 'above Karman,' in so far as the term Karman here applies to his own evolution and character and activity as a Man -- however high may be the stage thus attained by him.
Yet it is also and equally true that the universal Karman of Cosmic Being is the ultimate background of activity of the karman of the individual, because any individual whatsoever is inseparable from Cosmic Being -- from the Universe. Moreover, it must be said that the highest god in highest heaven, so to speak, is as much subject to universal Karman as is the humblest ant climbing up a sandhill only to go tumbling down again.
Is there then a contradiction either in ordinary logic or in metaphysics between these two statements? There is not, although indeed there may be one of the numerous paradoxes that the student of the Esoteric Philosophy finds constantly confronting him. The following is offered as an explanation of the paradox. A man or any entity, whatever the high state of evolutionary development attained may be, passes beyond, as above said, the sway or sweep of the karmic action of the hierarchy to which he belongs when he has become at-one or in complete unity with the loftiest part or portion of such a hierarchy. For the time being, the glorified man has reached quasi-divinity, because he has allied himself with the divine-spiritual portions of his own hierarchy; and as all the movements of his nature are then entirely harmonious and in accord with the hierarchy with which he is divinely and spiritually in strait union, it is obvious that thus being at one with the spiritual nature of that hierarchy, and thus 'working with Nature,' he is beyond the stage where as a subject of the hierarchy he comes under the sway or 'rule' or 'control' of the general field of karmic action in that hierarchy. Hence that hierarchical karman has no further sway over him, for in that hierarchy he has become a Master of its Life, because he is an Agent of its inmost impulses and mandates. His mind and consciousness have slipped into the Shining Sea.
Nevertheless, so far as the Universe is concerned, and because hierarchies in the Boundless All are numberless, the particular hierarchy to which he belongs and in which he now finds himself a Master of Life, is but one of hosts of hierarchies, some of them far lower, and others far higher. As compared with the Boundless All -- the frontierless spaces of Infinitude -- his own hierarchy, however great, shrinks to the dimensions of a mere mathematical point, so to say, and becomes simply an aggregated hierarchical atom in the fields of Universal Life.
All this means that as the evolution of such a man or entity progresses, and the time comes when he leaves his own hierarchy for larger spheres in the Cosmic Life, he enters into still vaster and sublimer spheres of experience and of consequent action, wherein, at his entrance, he finds himself on the lowest rung of this new cosmic Magnitude on the Ladder of Life, and thereupon immediately falls under the sway or 'rule' or 'governance' of the still greater karman of this sublimer hierarchical sphere.
Thus it is seen that a man may indeed rise above the karmic sphere of the relatively limited hierarchy in which he may find himself, by becoming spiritually at-one with that hierarchy's own inmost essence, and thus an Agent, an obedient Servant thereof. Yet existence in, or his karmic peregrinations or pilgrimage through, any such particular or limited hierarchy, is seen to be but the taking of a single cosmic step higher or upwards on the limitless 'Ladder' of Cosmic Life through the interwoven and interlocked and interacting Worlds of which the Kosmos itself is builded.
Now the main faculties or attributes in any evolving being, such as man, which bring about this evolutionary ascent through the Spheres, as just briefly sketched, are first the unfolding Will, becoming progressively freer as man evolves more largely, guided and over-seen and directed by the progressively unfolding faculty or attribute of consciousness or rather mind; the twain evolving strictly together and relatively in equal measure -- pari passu, with equal step. As said elsewhere, man's will at any moment, whether of his past or of his present or of his future, may justly be said to be partly fettered or bound and partly free -- the 'freedom' steadily increasing as the evolving Individual becomes ever more at-one with the divinity at his core, which is his own Higher Self and which is likewise the source of the consciousness or mind which guides his will into action.
Thus it is in the Spirit of a being, in his inner spiritual sun, in his inner consciousness, that resides the source or fount of free will, expressing itself always outwards through the encircling and enshrouding ethereal veils of the being's sevenfold constitution. The more evolved the entity, the greater the freedom of its will and consequently of its chosen actions. Free will is one of the constitutional and therefore innate or rather inherent attributes or powers that man has -- and it is a godlike quality, in its origin a truly divine attribute. Yes, even though the entire forces of the cosmos impinge upon him on all sides continuously and without an instant's cessation, as completely during earth-life as in the ante-natal and post-mortem periods, he nevertheless has his portion of unfolded or developed free will with which he may carve his destiny as he wills it to be, for good or for evil for himself and his fellows.
It is of course not denied that there are mechanisms in the Universe, for there certainly are, nor is it denied that the Universe in its outer form as we understand it -- that cross-section of the Cosmos which we call our physical sphere or the wide dimensions of our physical universe -- is mechanical in its physical operations. To be sure it is; so indeed is our own physical body. Everything moves according to so-called 'mechanical' laws in the worlds that we at present cognise. These 'mechanical laws' are the outermost and physical expression of inner and ever active spiritual and ethereal forces; and just herein lies the solution of the riddle of life. The physical universe is in incessant movement; and it moves by reason of, and solely by reason of, the indwelling intelligences and wills which are on all the almost innumerable steps of the inner hierarchical Ladder of Life, from the highest Dhyani-Chohan or archangel down to the least unfolded or evolved elemental. Behind the mechanisms there are the inner and invisible and ever active mechanicians; behind and within the machines there are the invisible motive powers, the movers.
Thus, in a sense, we human beings, too, may be looked upon as living mechanisms of a spiritual and intellectual type, animated and inspirited each one of us by the indwelling and over-enlightening divinity; and we weave our Webs of Destiny in which, alas, we entangle ourselves all too frequently, as we travel through time and space, winding and unwinding the strands of the web that our own goodness, or mayhap our own folly, has led us into making. Just as does the spider weave its own gossamer web out of the substance of its own physical self, so in somewhat similar manner do we human beings weave each one our Web of Destiny from the forces and substances drawn from within ourselves -- our will, our intelligence, our emotions and feelings, and our substance -- knotting and unknotting these delicate strands of thought and feeling. Wonderful it is that the Web of Destiny which each one of us thus weaves, is himself!
FOOTNOTES:
213. The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 639. (return to text)
214. Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 639. (return to text)
215. Op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 643-4. (return to text)
216. Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 643. (return to text)
217. The strictest and most impartial justice rules the Worlds, for it is the result of the Kosmic Harmony permeant everywhere, and broken only by the exercise of the free wills of beings who foolishly, and in vain, attempt to sway this cosmic equilibrium. The very Heart of Universal Nature is compassion or what many call Infinite Love, which means Infinite Harmony.
It is truly a non-understanding of the fundamental principle of this Kosmic Harmony as outlined in the text above which has been the rock on which have split into two currents the two main bodies of human philosophical thought concerning the character and nature of Free Will in man. One School, the Fatalists, have denied it in toto, or nearly so, whether the members of this School belong to the class which invokes an Almighty Autocrat assigning unto man his lot in life, from which he has no escape; or whether it be the other class: that of the absolute Materialists, who see no free will in man, but see him only as a plaything or bit of jetsam wholly subject to the rigid determinism of their school -- the result of blind chance or fortuity.
The other School is that of the Autonomists, or absolute Free-Willists, to coin a word, who seem to think that man is wholly or very largely an entirely independent willing agent, different from the Universe in which he lives so far as his will goes, and therefore possessing unrestricted voluntary action.
The Esoteric Philosophy rejects both these notions as being neither of them founded on fact, and takes the middle line: that the will of man is partially free and partially bound or restricted by the karmic consequences of his past actions for weal or for woe; but that he can attain an ever-increasing measure of freedom in his will proportionately as he unfolds or evolves an ever-increasing and larger measure of the divine force which is at the spiritual root of his being, and by which he is linked to the Cosmic Consciousness, the Cosmic Will.
Indeed, this is shown clearly enough when one considers the wide ranges, or distances rather, which separate the different Kingdoms of Nature. Thus, those Monadic Rays which are aggregated or grouped in such enormous numbers in the simple unism of the rocks, and which are in consequence bound and limited in mind and action, nevertheless aspire to higher things and essay to climb out of the Mineral Kingdom into the larger measure of intelligence and will in the Vegetable Kingdom; out of which in turn they slowly climb -- out of these restricted fields of mind and will into the still larger measure of liberty and action that is offered in the Animal Kingdom; the members of which in their turn in precisely similar fashion, and possessing the dawn of mind and the beginnings of free choice, are striving to leave their relatively limited fields in this respect and to climb upwards into the Human Kingdom, where self-conscious voluntary action is accompanied with the exercise of a relatively free intelligence.
It is only a superficial study of this most difficult of all Theosophical doctrines, Karman, which could induce anyone to believe that its explanation, as given hereinbefore in the text, could ever bring about a selfish or cruel ignoring of the claims upon us humans which our fellow human beings perpetually have. Woven as we all are together in intricate and complicate webs of destiny, man with man and these with all other things in the Universe, it becomes an obvious philosophical and religious postulate of the first order that co-operative aid and mutual help and the carrying of each other's burdens, and the refraining from evil-doing in any manner or guise whatsoever, is the first law of our own destiny.
It is precisely upon this incomprehensibly intricate web of interwoven destinies that reposes our conception of ethics or morals as being no mere human convention, but as founded in the primordial laws of the Universe itself. As H. P. Blavatsky so nobly puts it in her phrasing of a passage from the Sacred Books of the East from which she quotes: "Inaction in a deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin." (The Voice of the Silence, Fragment II, 'The Two Paths,' p. 31, orig. ed.)
Whether we will or nill, we cannot avoid affecting others for weal or for woe, and if we by means of the exercise of our self-choice, otherwise our free will, affect others to their undoing or to their injury, the majestic and inscrutable and unerring law of Cosmic Justice and Compassion instantly moves into action, and we shall feel the inevitable punitive consequences upon ourselves in this or in some later life. This is Karman.
Thus, in the life of every individual human being, there is "not an accident in our lives, not a misshapen day, or a misfortune," as H. P. Blavatsky says in the text above, except what comes to one from one's own thoughts and feelings and actions in this or in some former life. There is no chance or fortuity in the Universe, and if anything could happen to us that we ourselves were not in some manner, near or distant, concerned with, or that we did not originate, then there would be gross injustice, fortuitous cruelty, and ground for genuine despair. We make our lives great and sublime, or mean and ignoble, and all stages between, because of what we ourselves think, feel, will, and therefore do. It is only the human physical man with his human soul which often suffers 'unmerited' karmic retribution for what the Reincarnating Ego did in other lives; but for this 'unmerited' suffering, Nature has provided ample recompense and reward in the special devachanic interludes between lives, as H. P. Blavatsky so truly says in her The Key to Theosophy (p. 161).
When a man refuses to extend a hand of help, or to assuage the tears of suffering, or refuses to aid those whose piteous call reaches him, he is but a semi-fiend in human shape, and Nature's retribution, guided by infinite Mind and Wisdom, will search him out through the ages and reach him some day, and then he will say: "Why has this fallen upon me? It is unmerited. I have done nothing to merit this suffering." (return to text)
218. The Key to Theosophy, p. 201. (return to text)
219. Plotinus, in answer to a general question as to what it is that has brought peregrinating souls to forget their divine origin and thus to become oblivious of their innate spirituality, thus bringing about confusion and evil, remarks:
"The evil in souls [which likewise means largely the evil in the world] has its source in the self-will of the souls themselves, and in their longing for self-expression thus bringing about embodiment. Pleasure came to them in this false freedom, which in turn brought them to long for their own motions and ways of doing, so that thus, drifting idly farther and farther, they were swept along the paths of evil and wrong, even finally losing all recollection of their primordial home as rays of the divine. . . . just so the wandering souls forget both the divine and their own intrinsically spiritual character." -- Enneads, 'The Three Primordial Essences,' V, i, 1.
220. The fact that human evil, and by analogy evil of other kinds in the world, arises out of the depravation of the will of individuals towards evil-doing, which means doing contrary to or more or less opposed to the fundamental spiritual currents of the Universe, as a theory is found even in Christianity, and in the works of one of its most respected and eminent writers, to wit: the ex-Manichaean and ex-Neo-Platonist, Augustine. This old writer whose influence in the Christian Church has always been a powerful one, has the following to say in his De civitate Dei ('The City of God'), Book XII, chapter vi:
"The will is not depraved by inferior influences [or things], but it is the will which depraves itself by its inordinate appetite for following inferior things."
221. A caveat should be entered here lest the words in the text alarm those sensitive souls who prefer to think that there is positive and individual evil in the world existing as an entity. It should be understood that evil, however abominable and ignoble and wicked it may humanly be, is nevertheless the result of the misuse of man's relatively free will -- a divine thing. Why some people should prefer to believe in a devil who is continually lying in wait to trap the unwary steps of men, rather than to believe that man himself by aspiring to the divinity within him can cease from evil-doing, is just one of those strange psychological problems that are traceable back to the erratic and wandering mind of lower man.
Moreover, let it here be stated once for all that the Esoteric Philosophy does not teach that human beings become good only by deliberately choosing evil as a course of action and learning by it, as some may deliberately misunderstand the words in the text to mean. This would be teaching a species of diabolism running directly counter to all the precepts of the Philosophy. Giving oneself up to evil by choice is the infallible and sure way to spiritual and intellectual and ethical degeneration, and is what is called in the Esoteric Tradition, 'following the lunar path.' It can result only in spiritual wickedness of the worst kind, bringing about a 'loss of the soul.'
These words therefore are not merely conclusive, they are extremely graphic, and are a most emphatic warning to those whose erratic genius may lead them to misinterpret and therefore to distort the simple but luminous and philosophical teaching, which, when once properly understood, fills human life with hope and brilliant promise, because it shows how man may rise out of the mire of worse things into better and then best, thus making of himself a man-god on Earth. (return to text)
222. The Church-Father Lactantius, writing 'On the Anger of God,' chapter xiii, quotes Epicurus, who puts the problem of evil in the following curiously significant way:
"Either God wishes to remove evil from this world, and cannot, or he can and will not, or he neither can nor will, or, to conclude, he both can and will. If he will and cannot, it is impotence, which is contrary to the nature of God; if he can and will not, it is wickedness, and that is no less contrary to his nature; if he neither will nor can, it is wickedness and impotence at once; if he both can and will (which alone of these conditions is suitable to God), whence comes the evil which exists in the world?"
The pious Church-Father naturally disagrees with the above. The argument, however, which he makes against Epicurus is not only weak but sidesteps the main question: i.e., what is the origin of evil?
The great St. Augustine, in one of his Letters to St. Jerome, states emphatically that not even new-born infants can escape eternal damnation except by being baptized. The Jewish Rabbis boldly stated that God alone was the author of evil, and pointed to exactly the same doctrine as taught in the Bible in passages such as are found in Isaiah, xlv, 7, where the Hebrew prophet writes: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil."
On the other hand, the entire civilized world, outside of Jewish and Christian sources, stated that evil proceeds from imperfect beings themselves who refuse to accommodate their will and their doings to the divine laws which rule the Universe. Hermes, for instance, in the treatise called the Crater, says: "Evil does not proceed from God, but from ourselves, who prefer it to good." (return to text)
223. This Article III of the Westminster Confession of Faith is logical enough provided that one can do such violence to his intuitions as to admit the obvious premisses upon which it reposes, to wit: an Infinite and Eternal Creator of the World and of Man, who is both Infinite Wisdom and Infinite Power; for it is obvious that could such a being exist every act of his would be directed by eternal wisdom and foreknowledge, and hence every created being would be created to do exactly and precisely what Eternal Wisdom foresaw it would do and created it to do.
The ascription of free will to such a created automaton is but a petitio principii, a begging of the question, and would be but the hollowest and most wicked of cosmic mockeries by a creator, for such creator, according to the hypothesis, in his Infinite Wisdom created beings, and knew beforehand all that such created beings would be or do.
Indeed, the above Article of this Westminster Confession not only recognises this but positively affirms it, stating that certain men and angels are "predestinated unto everlasting life," and others "foreordained to everlasting death." Such a 'God' to the Theosophist is simply a phantom of the imagination of perverse and obscured minds, however sincere they might have been.
When one adds to the above premisses, the other premiss equally universally accepted, that this creator is Infinitely and Eternally Good, the strict logic mentioned above instantly vanishes -- unless, indeed, one choose to consider such a Cosmic 'God' as a Cosmic 'Demon' -- and then why speak of him as 'Infinite Good'? One can only wonder when the teachings and immortal precepts of the Christ-man, whom Christians follow as their Master, and whose life is a perpetual exemplar of beauty and love and wisdom, will be understood and followed; and the somber and often terrible -- because so inhuman -- phantoms of the imaginations of Mediaevalists once and for ever abandoned. (return to text)
224. Ephesians, vi, 12. (return to text)
225. The phrasing of the very subtil and profound thought of the text above should never be misunderstood to mean that Karman and its action in time is merely mechanical and soulless. It is a fundamental doctrine of the Esoteric Philosophy that all Karman of whatever kind, of whatever class, and of whatever degree, is guided and controlled and therefore directed fundamentally by Cosmic Consciousness, and secondly by the multitudes of interlocking hierarchies each conscious in its own degree and manner, which infill and indeed compose Space. Karman is thus essentially not only a 'function' of consciousness but is, in the manner above described, consciousness itself in action. The human mind with its imperfect development and therefore necessarily restricted range of vision cannot follow the movements of Cosmic Consciousness because of the immense amplitude of its vital motion, so that the human mind at best can conceive of Cosmic Consciousness existent in Cosmic Space as a shoreless Sea apparently immutable and incomprehensibly still.
It is like the inhabitant of an infinitesimal particle forming a part of the human body imagining to itself the time-interval between two human heart-beats which would be to it a quasi-eternity; the sevenfold denary number of human heart-beats in a single human minute (say 72) would be to it of a rate utterly and inconceivably slow, and covering to it a time-period which would seem endless. Thus the motions of even an organ of the human body are of magnitude so great, of amplitude so immense, that the infinitesimal percipient consciousness can intuit its existence or being, but cannot take it in.
The truth is, however, that the Cosmic Consciousness during the Cosmic Manvantara is in unceasing motion and indeed throughout the Cosmic Pralaya likewise, but just because Cosmic Space is divided up in particular hierarchies forming worlds and planes, and these in turn are again on the hierarchical analogical principle divisible into entities still smaller, we can perceive that as these amplitudes of movement or magnitudes in space become smaller, as we humans understand the matter, the stage finally is reached where human intelligence can begin to see and to grasp these cosmically smaller groups and their movements. The various Galaxies forming Families in Space, then a single Galaxy, then the Star-Clusters, then a Solar System, then a planet -- thus we can descend the scale in our thought and perceive the small encompassed within continuously increasing ranges of greatness, and the small enclosing continuously decreasing ranges of other magnitudes reaching the infinitesimal.
Throughout it all KARMAN is incessantly active; and it should be carefully noted for a correct understanding of the idea, that each minutest point in Cosmic Space or in the Cosmic Consciousness may be considered to be a Monadic Center, itself participating in the Karmic Cosmic Labor. Everything and every being and every entity, great or small, collaborates on its own scale in the ranges of karmic action, and therefore is an agent of this mysterious, and to us humans, incomprehensible, operation of Nature's own essence which for purposes of easy description we may call the 'Law' of Karman -- through Infinity guided by Ineffable Mind.
It is no wonder that really great scientific minds occasionally have an intuition of the truth and that such men as Einstein, Jeans, Eddington, etc., now openly declare that in their judgment the essence or fundamental stuff of the Universe is -- Mind! The cycle of human thought has thus made a complete round! (return to text)
226. Parabrahman is a Sanskrit compound which means 'beyond Brahman' -- para, 'beyond,' and Brahman, 'the Cosmic Ultimate' or 'the Cosmic Spirit.' The term thus signifying 'beyond Brahman' has not only reference to all the incomputably numerous multitudes of Hierarchies beyond the Brahman of our own Galaxy, but is more particularly a descriptive term pointing to the utterly unthinkable and therefore indescriptible divine Deeps of Infinitude. (return to text)