The Theosophist Dec 1981
The Message for "Me"
Hugh Shearman
Most members of the several movements to which her
work gave rise will agree that Madame Blavatsky was a "messenger"; but
what
was the nature of the message? Many may think that this is fairly
obvious. They imagine that they can read her writings and pass on to
others what she said.
Those who proceed in this
way tend to expound a system of thought which
they represent as hers. But there are others who see a certain
difficulty
in this. Colonel Olcott remarked on the curious fact that, in much that
she
wrote, it did not seem to matter if one altered the order of the
paragraphs,
a fact brought home to him while he was assisting her to organize and
complete
the text of Isis Unveiled. Much that she wrote was not, in fact,
addressed
to the tidy mind that approaches things systematically and wants to
have
a beginning, a middle and an end.
Bishop Leadbeater,
who had a
strong temperamental preference for orderly and systematic exposition,
wrote
that "her mind, so far as we could understand it, for it was a
very gigantic mind, worked somewhat differently from ours. If one may
say it with respect and reverence, it was of an Atlantean type in that
it massed together vast accumulations of facts but did not make much
effort at arranging them".
"Swami T.
Subba Rao", he went on," said that The Secret Doctrine was a heap of
precious stones. There is no question that they are precious stones,
but one must classify them for oneself; [H.P.B] did not attempt to do
that for us, for she did not feel the need of it at all".
But must we really classify them? And do those who approach Madame
Blavatsky's writings in that spirit, trying to extract systems and put
things in what they think is the right order, not miss something
fundamental? She herself, in what she wrote, sometimes dropped passing
comments which show that she understood herself to be dealing with
something into which we may have insights but which cannot be made the
subject of explanation or argument or orderly presentation.
Early in The Secret Doctrine she refers to various Indian systems of
philosophy and then speaks of "the Esoteric Philosophy, which
reconciles all these systems and the nearest exponent of which is the
Vedanta as expounded by the Advaita Vedantists".
Advaitism might be translated as non two-ism. It does not just say that
all is One. It simply asserts that there is no other, no antithesis. It
denies the dualism which has been the basis of all our scientific and
systematic thinking.
It is customary to call our
usual way of thinking "Cartesian dualism", after the French philosopher
Descartes, who said, "I think, therefore I am", and took as the basis
for his world view a duality of self and not-self, knower and known,
subject and object.
Erosion of dualism
In our own times this dualistic view, though still firmly enthroned, is
beginning to be eroded a little. The recognition of scientific
situation
in which the observer must himself be seen as part of the experiment or
an
inseparable part of what he is observing, and certain developments in
physics,
have begun to demand a new understanding of the nature of
consciousness.
But the assertion that two-ness is an illusion which experience
dissipates
is very ancient. A classical statement of this occurs in the Yoga
Sutras
of Patanjali (1.41) where we are told that one who is drawing closer to
reality
finds that the knower, the knowledge and the known are one.
It is natural that anybody who approaches The Secret Doctrine or any
other work of Madame Blavatsky should begin by asking himself, "What is
there in this for me?' From that basis he will probably try to arrange
the material in some way that will make it converge upon his own
interests. But in so doing
he carries into it a dualism which Blavatsky's message, sometimes
directly but mostly by implication, repeatedly denies. The message for
the "me " is that its separate selfhood is an illusion and that the
supposed antithesis of "me" and " not me" has no reality.
Viewed superficially, there is much in Madame Blavatsky's writings, and
in the Theosophical literature that followed them, which is rather
flattering to "me". Reading it, we may say, "I am something much more
splendid than I
seem to be. In my true nature I am a Monad, a spark of ultimate
Divinity". But this is the very view which is brushed aside in The
Secret Doctrine as "ignorance". We are told there (1.230) that "the
Spiritual Monad is One, Universal,
Boundless and Impartite" and that its "Rays form what we, in our
ignorance,
call the "Individual Monads" of men". So the "me" cannot really "have"
a
Monad. It may not appropriate to itself the splendour of That which is
boundless
or grasp to itself a fragment of the impartite.
The source of our illusion is indicated in the much quoted sentence
from The Voice of the Silence which tells us that "the mind is the
great slayer of the Real". The mind slays the Real by being fixated to
the defence and perpetuation of a "me". It classifies all experience
according to whether it is pro "me" or anti "me", and it focuses
consciousness through the distorting lens of dualism which breaks
everything up into self and not-self.
In a sense
the "me" is real enough. It certainly exists, as a complex of memories
and reactions. It can look after itself, cross the road more or less
safely, give lectures at the Theosophical Society and so many other
quite
clever things. But it is not the Self. It is something temporarily
brought
into being in the service of the Self. When its function is finished,
consciousness
is to be dissociated from it - freed from imprisoning identification
with
it. Possibly part of its function is to provide the occasion for this
dissociation.
The fixated mind which slays the
Real is freed, not by any accumulation
of imagines in memory, but by a simplification of its own contents and
by
being finally emptied of those contents, including the habitual image
of
"me".
Gratification of the "me"
The first impulse of a "me" when confronted by the literature of modern
theosophy, is to start collecting from it information gratifying to
itself.
It may, for example, study the notion of reincarnation as a way of
extending
the "me" into the past and future, pursuing love affairs in ancient
Egypt
and hopes of occult promotion in future lives. Madame Blavatsky herself
did
not show any great interest in reincarnation except as an illustration
of
a still more fundamental periodicity in nature. Yet study of such a
subject
is not in vain if it leads to small concepts being absorbed into larger
ones
and the world image in the mind becoming more comprehensive, unified
and
simple.
The liberated person as portrayed in The
Voice of The Silence is certainly not mindless. There we are told that
"his mind, like a becalmed and boundless ocean, spreadeth out in
shoreless space". That is not, of course, the fixated mind of any
segregated "me".
And the true Theosophist, as
understood by Madame Blavatsky, had to become, not the anxious and the
competitive keeper of a separated fragment of life but "a mere
beneficent force in Nature". There, alone, is the fulfilment and
the splendour.
But here one pauses, for each of
us is probably still thinking largely in terms of "me". Indeed, Madame
Blavatsky herself in daily life often expressed herself very formidably
as a "me". How, then, can we respond to this message that she brought?
Does it ask too much? How are we to read what she wrote?
There are those who are naturally learned, who can carry - and like to
carry - large and complex concepts in the memory; they may be able to
read such a work as The Secret Doctrine very solidly. Even if they
often build systems out of what they read, those systems can be relied
upon gradually to destroy one another in time. But there are many who
cannot study in that way and who
will gain little but a kind of indigestion if they try to force
themselves to read and follow The Secret Doctrine as a feat of
intellectual continuity.
There are, indeed,
certain passages that readers are directed to, passages that stand out
as significant, certain "set pieces". Such as the three principles set
out in the Proem. But even these may not be the passages that will
speak most directly and intimately to everybody. For many, the best
approach is to start reading and go on until they come to something
that is strange, challenging
and poetic, something that is momentarily seen as being at odds with
values,
assumptions and thought habits they had hitherto taken for granted. At
that
point, the reader may shut the book and carry away that fresh insight,
not
only in thought but into the things of everyday life. Later, he may
come back
to the book for more. Each student has his own needs, and what causes
one
to stop and shut the book will be passed over by another.
The message that Madame Blavatsky brought is not addressed to the
argumentative mind. It seeks to speak to the heart, to the intuition,
to that in us which can awaken to a wholeness of things that lies
beyond what our mental process can infer. It is not something with a
beginning or an end, nor is nit a cumulative process or a goal set up
for achievement by a "me". It is an invitation to us to awaken from the
dream that we have hitherto imagined to be life.
Dr Hugh Shearman, a former Secretary of the Theosophical Society in Northern Ireland, is well known as a lecturer, and as the author of The Passionate Necessity, The Purpose of Tragedy and Modern Theosophy.