"From every page of the Upanishads, deep, original lofty thoughts step forth to meet us." . . . So spoke the great lover and expounder of this ancient world-philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. But we of less lofty intellect are only too naturally inclined to make an irreverent periphrasis of this illustrious saying: from every page of the Upanishads, deep, original and hopeless puzzles step forth to meet us.
Let our attention strive and strain as it may, there always is and most probably will be for a long time yet, something we can not either catch, or follow, or classify in this philosophy, so obscure to us and yet so eloquent and clear. Yet the Upanishads are very strict, their sense of order is highly developed, and the uniformity of their basic thought is perfect. Then, whence comes the fact that all information and data, so important for the completion of anything like a definite teaching, are scattered all through their voluminous contents in bits and shreds? Why is it that such information and data have no pretence even to be tidily arranged in some fixed and easily found place? The answer is simple: The Upanishads have nothing to do with definite teachings or dogmas of any kind. And to understand this thoroughly we must always try to remember one thing, namely the fact that the European mind and the Asiatic mind work quite differently, aiming as they do at quite different results.
The European mind proceeds from particulars to universals, trying to build up, out of separate facts and details, theories and systems which could be applied to generalities. In fact, we are so used to dealing with small matters, details, peculiarities and even exceptions, that the general thought, which underlies them all, often disappears out of our sight, and only too often we altogether lose the thread which connects the various sides and aspects of one and the same basic thought.
Not so in the case of the Asiatic mind! Asiatic thought most decidedly works from universals to particulars, taking in all the details in one general thought and frequently substituting the various aspects of the same basic thought one for the other.
And this brings me to a subject important for all real Theosophists, who feel themselves able to deal with real realities, and not mere preconceived ideas of right and wrong, however attractive and pretty these preconceived ideas may be. This subject is the particular working of Mme. Blavatsky's mind. All the Russians who knew her even slightly always said that, in spite of her long absence from her country, in spite of her having spoken and written foreign tongues, she was decidedly more Russian than the most Russian of them all. And the tendencies of real Russian thought are, for the most part, much more Asiatic than anything else. I must confess, that I for one could never see anything offending in the French saying: Scratch the Russian and you will find the Tartar. Half Asiatic we certainly are, and Mme. Blavatsky's thought very possibly was more than usually so. Her thought always proceeded from universals to particulars. And many a good earnest man and woman in the Theosophical Society and out of it has been baffled and entirely misled through being familiar only with the European way of thinking.
I am going to make this clear by an illustration. For whoever is acquainted with the Upanishads, and more particularly with Shankara's commentaries, it is no secret that their thought often connects fire, imagination, sight and the capacity of going, as being in a way parallel ideas, working in different spheres. And happening to be familiar with this, Mme. Blavatsky would speak, for instance, in one of her writings about our eyes, the organ of sight, being occultly connected with the element of fire. In another place she would say that this same organ of sight, by means of which our soul is in the habit of going into the outside world, has something to do with our feet, which also are a medium of going, though in a different sphere.
The beautiful poetic idea of fire and the prosaic thought of a man's feet! I must confess, I could find no fault with a person who would think it perfectly ridiculous, not to say absurd, to mention the two in one breath, let alone maintaining they were two different aspects of one and the same basic thought. Comparing the two statements, a Western mind would quite naturally think there was a mistake somewhere, an inconsistency or, still more to the point, pure and simple nonsense. Ergo: Mme. Blavatsky did not know what she was talking about, or, maybe, she was a liar, and, at any rate, there was nothing in Theosophy.
But if the said Western mind could, by some miracle, go away from and above its purely Western mould, perhaps it would dawn upon him that what she meant was neither feet nor fire, but imagination, which the Upanishads also take to be one of the expressions of the one great Forward Life-Breath. Perhaps in this case the harassed and perplexed Western mind would find relief in the thought that, throughout all her contradictory statements and apparent blunders, Mme. Blavatsky had in her mind only the general idea, the universal truth, caring nothing about mixing up its various aspects and expressions.
As much can be said about her quotations. In the "Secret Doctrine" and elsewhere, she often misquoted her authors, and as often, consciously or unconsciously, omitted the quotation marks. Human nature is human nature, and no wonder that, as a result of these proceedings, all her enemies and a good many of her friends said: H. P. B. plagiarized; H. P. B. did not always know what she was talking about, or, maybe, she simply was a clever impostor. But if only, by some still greater miracle, these enemies and friends could be brought to deal with generalities and universals, as she always did in all her really important writings, they would invariably come to the conclusion that what she quoted was the meaning, the very essence of this or that author's argument and belief, and that in this way her quotations always were splendidly correct.
Whoever wants to get at the true inwardness of the Upanishads and all that was written under their direct or indirect influence — a very large order indeed, if I am permitted to use slang — must always remember that in the remote antiquity, when the Upanishads were recorded, human speech was more than what it has come to be now. The short sayings of these short little books, with their cut and dried precision of expression, were more than words, mere semi-material masks of this or another abstract idea. They were living symbols, possessing the living power of influencing the spiritual being of the listeners straight away, without the intervention of any medium or go-between, and this by the mere sound of their vowels and consonants, more than by their precise meaning.
The more one tries to penetrate into the spirit of the Upanishads, the more certain one becomes that in these books every word of every line has, so to speak, its genealogy and history, and was assigned its original place not by the chance choice, or, still less, the whim of some ancient teacher, but simply because the laws of the ancient Asiatic thought, now almost entirely forgotten, were such as not to permit the use of any other word, be it as closely connected in meaning with the one used as possible. These words, evidently, were meant to make a certain, possibly semi-physical, impression on the listener, to awaken in him a certain train or association of ideas, the best adapted to make clear for him the doctrines which his reason alone would be utterly unable to grasp.
When I was a little girl I remember being present at an experiment in physics, which since has grown very suggestive to me. There was a metallic disc with some sand sprinkled over it, and an ordinary fiddle-bow, touching one point or another on the disc's rim, made the sand to-move and to form perfectly definite patterns. So it is, or, at least, so it ought to be with the working of the potent human word. A word ought to be able to evoke in human minds whole files of living notions and ideas, by touching some sensitive though not material point.
But, also, the world-old saying, that there are no roses without thorns, still continues perfectly true. Asiatic thought, proceeding as it does from universals to particulars, is only too apt to become so abstruse and impalpable as to altogether lose hold of the common mortal. On the other hand, European thought, proceeding from particulars to universals, cannot help continually losing itself in the mazes, tangles, and formidable labyrinths of all kinds of words, facts, details, various hypotheses and theorizings, which, one and all, beat about the bush, hardly ever attempting to touch the only really important point.
Now, I wonder what is American thought going to do for the world? And would it not be a happy solution of the difficulty if it struck a happy medium and found its way to blending the two methods, getting rid of their respective inconveniences and doubling the value of all that is good in them.
Thought, as we know it in modern books and sciences, only too often, disregards the fact that the living spirit is never to be found in the dead letter and very seldom in the meaning which we can reach by our reasoning, by the intending and doubting part of our minds. There is something beyond either of them which is not altogether out of our reach, for humanity has had it and is going to have it again. And this something is the final aim of all our present studies, arguments and theories and the only solace from all our deceptions and mental perplexities; this something is the direct spiritual perception.