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Taking Theosophical ideas

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Is the Desire to "Live" Selfish?

H P Blavatsky

The passage "to live, to live, to live must be the unswerving resolve,"occurring in the article on the Elixir of Life, is often quoted by superficial and unsympathetic readers as an argument that the teachings of occultism are the most concentrated form of selfishness. In order to determine whether the critics are right or wrong, the meaning of the

word "selfishness" must first be ascertained.

According to an established authority, selfishness is that "exclusive regard to one's own interest or happiness; that supreme self-love or

self-preference which leads a person to direct his purposes to theadvancement of his own interest, power, or happiness, without regarding those of others."

In short, an absolutely selfish individual is one who cares for himself and none else, or, in other words, one who is so strongly imbued with a sense of the importance of his own personality that to him it is the crown of all thoughts, desires, and aspirations, and beyond which lies the perfect blank. Now, can an occultist be then said to be "selfish" when he desires to live in the sense in which that word is used by the writer of the article on the Elixir of Life? It has been said over and over again that the ultimate end of every aspirant after occult

knowledge is Nirvana or Mukti, when the individual, freed from all Mayavic Upadhi, becomes one with Paramatma, or the Son identifies

himself with the Father in Christian phraseology.

For that purpose, every veil of illusion which creates a sense of personal isolation, a,feeling of separateness from THE ALL, must be torn asunder, or, in other words, the aspirant must gradually discard all sense of selfishness with

which we are all more or less affected. A study of the Law of Kosmic Evolution teaches us that the higher the evolution, the more does it tend towards Unity. In fact, Unity is the ultimate possibility of

Nature, and those who through vanity and selfishness go against her purposes, cannot but incur the punishment of annihilation. The

occultist thus recognizes that unselfishness and a feeling of universal philanthropy are the inherent laws of our being, and all he does is to attempt to destroy the chains of selfishness forged upon us all by Maya.

The struggle then between Good and Evil, God and Satan, Suras and Asuras, Devas and Daityas, which is mentioned in the sacred books of all

the nations and races, symbolizes the battle between unselfish and selfish impulses, which takes place in a man, who tries to follow the higher purposes of Nature, until the lower animal tendencies, created by selfishness, are completely conquered, and the enemy thoroughly routed

and annihilated. It has also been often put forth in various Theosophical and other occult writings that the only difference between an ordinary man who works along with Nature during the course of Kosmic evolution and an occultist, is that the latter, by his superior knowledge, adopts such methods of training and discipline as will hurry

on that process of evolution, and he thus reaches in a comparatively short time the apex which the ordinary individual will take perhaps billions of years to reach. In short, in a few thousand years he approaches that type of evolution which ordinary humanity attains in the sixth or seventh Round of the Manvantara, i.e., cyclic progression. It is evident that an average man cannot become a MAHATMA in one life, or rather in one incarnation.

Now those, who have studied the occult teachings concerning Devachan and our after-states, will remember that between two incarnations there is a considerable period of subjective existence. The greater the number of such Devachanic periods, the greater is the number of years over which this evolution is extended.

The chief aim of the occultist is therefore to so control himself as to be able to regulate his future states, and thereby gradually shorten the

duration of his Devachanic existence between two incarnations. In the course of his progress, there comes a time when, between one physical

death and his next rebirth, there is no Devachan but a kind of spiritual sleep, the shock of death, having, so to say, stunned him into a state

of unconsciousness from which he gradually recovers to find himself reborn, to continue his purpose. The period of this sleep may vary from

twenty-five to two hundred years, depending upon the degree of his advancement. But even this period may be said to be a waste of time,

and hence all his exertions are directed to shorten its duration so as to gradually come to a point when the passage from one state of existence into another is almost imperceptible.

This is his last incarnation, as it were, for the shock of death no more stuns him. This

is the idea the writer of the article on the Elixir of Life means to convey when he says:

By or about the time when the Death-limit of his race is passed he is actually dead, in the ordinary sense, that is to say, he has relieved himself of all or nearly all such material particles as would have

necessitated in disruption the agony of dying. He has been dying gradually during the whole period of his Initiation. The catastrophe cannot happen twice over, he has only spread over a number of years the mild process of dissolution which others endure from a brief moment to a few hours. The highest Adept is, in fact, dead to, and absolutely

unconscious of, the World; he is oblivious of its pleasures, careless of its miseries, in so far as sentimentalism goes, for the stern sense

of Duty never leaves him blind to its very existence....

The process of the emission and attraction of atoms, which the occultist controls, has been discussed at length in that article and in other

writings. It is by these means that he gets rid gradually of all the old gross particles of his body, substituting for them finer and more ethereal ones, till at last the former sthula sarira is completely dead and disintegrated, and he lives in a body entirely of his own creation, suited to his work. That body is essential to his purposes; as the

Elixir of Life says:--

To do good, as in every thing else, a man most have time and materials to Work with, and this is a necessary means to the acquirement of powers

by which infinitely more good can be done than without them. When these are once mastered, the opportunities to use them will arrive....

Giving the practical instructions for that purpose, the same paper continues:--

The physical man must be rendered more ethereal and sensitive; the mental man more penetrating and profound; the moral man more

self-denying and philosophical.

Losing sight of the above important considerations, the following passage is entirely misunderstood:--

And from this account too, it will be perceptible how foolish it is for people to ask the Theosophist "to procure for them communication with

the highest Adepts." It is with the utmost difficulty that one or two can be induced, even by the throes of a world, to injure their own progress by meddling with mundane affairs. The ordinary reader will say: "This is not god-like. This is the acme of selfishness." ....But let him realize that a very high Adept, undertaking to reform the world,

would necessarily have to once more submit to Incarnation. And is the result of all that have gone before in that line sufficiently encouraging to prompt a renewal of the attempt?

Now, in condemning the above passage as inculcating selfishness, superficial critics neglect many profound truths. In the first place, they forget the other extracts already quoted which impose self-denial as a necessary condition of success, and which say that, with progress,

new senses and new powers are acquired with which infinitely more good can be done than without them. The more spiritual the Adept becomes the less can he meddle with mundane gross affairs and the more he has to confine himself to spiritual work. It has been repeated, times out of number, that the work on the spiritual plane is as superior to the work on the intellectual plane as the latter is superior to that on the

physical plane. The very high Adepts, therefore, do help humanity, but only spiritually: they are constitutionally incapable of meddling with

worldly affairs. But this applies only to very high Adepts. There are various degrees of Adept-ship, and those of each degree work for humanity on the planes to which they may have risen. It is only the

chelas that can live in the world, until they rise to a certain degree.

And it is because the Adepts do care for the world that they make their chelas live in and work for it, as many of those who study the subject

are aware. Each cycle produces its own occultists capable of working for the humanity of the time on all the different planes; but when the Adepts foresee that at a particular period humanity will he incapable of producing occultists for work on particular planes, for such occasions they do provide by either voluntarily giving up their further progress and waiting until humanity reaches that period, or by refusing to enter

into Nirvana and submitting to re-incarnation so as to be ready for work when the time comes. And although the world may not be aware of the

fact, yet there are even now certain Adepts who have preferred to remain in statu quo and refuse to take the higher degrees, for the benefit of the future generations of humanity. In short, as the Adepts work harmoniously, since unity is the fundamental law of their being, they have, as it were, made a division of labour, according to which each

works on the plane appropriate to himself for the spiritual elevation of us all--and the process of longevity mentioned in the Elixir of Life is

only the means to the end which, far from being selfish, is the most unselfish purpose for which a human being can labour.

H P Blavatsky

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The Blavatsky Blogger

Taking Theosophical ideas

into the 21^st century