Modern Religious Cults and Movements Part 15

What becomes of the mental body Mrs. Besant does not say.

Beyond these are bodies which belong to man's timeless existence, curiously named and obscurely defined. There is apparently a causal body which is possibly the vehicle of will and, more involved still, a super-spiritual body which is the reality of G.o.d deep within us, and the carrier and vehicle of our supreme and enduring personal values. All this is a curious enough mingling of psychology, a subtle materialism, and unbounded speculation; it is equally beyond proof and denial, though for the proof of it the theosophist offers the testimony of those whose senses are so refined by peculiar disciplines as to see in and about physical form a play of light and colour which are themselves the revelation of mental and emotional states. We literally go about, according to this testimony, "trailing clouds of glory" or of gloom.

While for the denial of it there is the deep-seated protest of Western reason, that personality, complex as it is, cannot possibly be so bafflingly complex as this.

_The West Accepts Suffering as a Challenge and Looks to Personal Immortality for Victory_

We are, therefore, according to the theosophist, emanations from the Divine; deeply enveiled and much enshrouded within us is a timeless and changeless self descended from the mysterious All which lies back of all things and under high compulsion to seek again, in some vast turning of the wheel of Being, that from which we sprang. Theosophy becomes more understandable in its practical reaction upon life, for this many veiled self is deeply involved in forces and states to which it is not really akin, and since it suffers greatly in being so involved the end of existence is, in discipline and ascent, to be set free from the pain and weariness of conscious existence, and to be absorbed in the changeless peace of that ultimate reality out of which we have issued and back again to which we are destined to go. We cannot be insensible to the vast scope of such a speculation as this for in one form or another there are, in all religion and in the deeper yearnings of life, elements akin to it.

The order of which we are a part bears hard upon the soul. No one who meditates deeply upon the strangeness of human destiny can fail to recognize the arresting estate of sensitive personality enmeshed in laws and forces which drive on with so little apparent consideration for those who are caught in the turning of their wheels, or ridden down in their drive. Western faith has generally seen in this situation a challenge to personality to a.s.sert its own supremacy over the impersonal and subject its encompa.s.sing order to the high purposes of the soul. If we are wounded in the fight we take our wounds as good soldiers; if the forces which face us are challengingly strong we fall back upon our deeper resources and in the end a.s.sert our own vaster powers.

We accept the conditions of the struggle as a part of the discipline of life and in our braver moments win from the fight itself those elements of personal steadfastness which, matured in character, give moral meaning to the endeavour, and though we antic.i.p.ate an ultimate release and blessed compensation for the present travail of our souls, we find that release and those compensations in a personal immortality which attends the termination of the individual life in the present order, and continues that life conscious, free and triumphant in an immortal order, and even there we ask neither to be released from effort nor denied progress. We challenge the fortunes of the Unknown in the poet's phrase, and seek "other heights in other lives, G.o.d willing."

_The East Balances the Accounts of Life in a Series of Reincarnations_

But just as the East casts the glamour of its speculation over the processes by which we have come to be where and what we are, so it casts the glamour of its speculation over the process of our release. The West stakes everything on the issue of one individual life even if death ends it, or else it a.s.sumes a conscious continuity of life rich in memory and persistent in individuality in whatever progress lies beyond the grave. Those whom Dante saw ascending from terrace to terrace of the Mount of Purgation were in all stages continuously and truly themselves.

They knew the faults for which they made atonement and looked back with unclouded vision along all the stages by which they had climbed. The East makes little of the continuity of individual life and everything of the sequence of individual lives. It offers for the solution of our problem of ultimate destiny and also for its solution of the problem of pain and sorrow and manifest inequality in human states, two simple and unescapable laws--the law of moral consequence and the law of reincarnation. The East and the West both believe that "whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap" but the West believes he gathers his harvests of pain or punishment in a continuity of conscious existence, the vaster part of which is lived beyond death, with no rebirth and with no travelling again the light or shadowed ways of earth and time. The Christian West believes also in redemption which is just that sharing of G.o.d in the process which makes faith and repentance definite and saving elements in the struggle of the soul.

The East believes in a series of reincarnations, each reincarnate state taking its character from the quality of the life before. The fact that the doors of recollection are shut and locked between each incarnate existence makes no difference to the East. If a man has lived well and justly and followed his light, he will hereafter be born higher up; if he has loved darkness because his deeds are evil, he will be born into some low estate; he may descend into the beast or ascend into the saint.

He will pay for present injustice with future suffering--

"Or reach a hand through time to catch The far-off interest of tears"

even though he have no conscious remembrance of the faults for which he atones, or the sorrow for which he is recompensed. If he is steadfast through countless rebirths, the slow turning wheel will bear him higher and higher until he begins to ascend the successive planes, discovering in each plane for which he has fitted himself a new wealth and reality of existence, until at last he is lost in the Infinite Existence and his struggle is ended.

Perhaps the word "struggle" as here used is wrong. Deliverance for the East is not so much struggle as acquiescence. For the theosophist desire is the master mischief maker. Desire leads us in wrong directions, complicates our spiritual problems and thrusts us against the turn of the wheel. We are rather, according to the theosophist, to reduce desire to its simplest terms, thereby freeing ourselves from restlessness, above all taking care not to hurt or embitter others.

_Theosophy Produces a Distinct Type of Character_

There is no denying that here is a faith capable of producing a distinctive type of character. It tends at its best toward an extreme conscientiousness and an always excessive introspection; it creates also a vast and brooding patience. "In countries where reincarnation and karma [the law of Cause and Effect] are taken for granted by every peasant and labourer, the belief spreads a certain quiet acceptance of inevitable troubles that conduces much to the calm and contentment of ordinary life. A man overwhelmed by misfortunes rails neither against G.o.d nor against his neighbours, but regards his troubles as the result of his own past mistakes and ill-doings. He accepts them resignedly and makes the best of them.... He realizes that his future lives depend on his own exertions and that the law which brings him pain will bring him joy just as inevitably if he sows the seed of good. Hence a certain large patience and philosophic view of life tending directly to social stability and to general contentment."[68]

[Footnote 68: "The Ancient Wisdom," Besant, p. 273.]

If such a faith as this be informed with humaneness and be deeply tempered with the principle of sacrifice, it may, and does, result in a distinct type of real goodness. It is possibly a good faith for helpless and more or less despairing folk, though it likely creates many of the evils from which it desires to escape. The very reach and subtlety and even splendour of its speculation will make a strong appeal to minds of a certain type.

Two elements in the whole system doubtless account for what hold it has upon the Western mind. It does offer, to begin with, a coherent explanation of the problem of pain and sorrow. As we have seen more than once in this study, Western Christianity has been deficient just here.

The accepted explanations of the shadowed side of life have not been great enough to meet the facts. Practically every cult we have studied has found its opportunity just here. Christian Science solves the problem by denying the essential reality of pain and disease. New Thought believes in an underlying and loving good to which life may be so attuned as to bring us generally into the current of health and happiness. Theosophy accepts pain, sorrow and all unhappy forces and explains them as the inevitable result of wrong action either in this or a previous existence.

_Theosophy a "Tour de Force" of the Imagination_

Christian Science saves the justice and affirms the love of G.o.d by making Him just a G.o.d with apparently no concern for and no partic.i.p.ation in the shadowed side of life. New Thought saves the love and justice of G.o.d by discovering in pain and unhappiness our lack of harmony with Him. Theosophy meets the whole shadowed order along its full front and explains everything in terms of compensation. Now there is much in this to appeal to our modern temper. Directly we recognize the scales in which the consequences of our actions are weighed as being so sensitive that not even a thought can be thrown in the one balance without disturbing the equilibrium, directly we recognize ourselves as involved in a sweep of law from whose consequences there is no possible escape, we have at least a consistent scheme in which there is room for no evasion, and if we balance the manifold inequalities of one life by what has been done or left undone in some previous life, we are always able to add weight enough to the scales to make them hang level. True enough, there is nothing to guide us here but imaginative ingenuity, but it is always possible to imagine some fault in a previous existence which we pay for in pain or loss or disappointment, or some good deed done in a previous existence which accounts for our happy fortune in this. And so justice is saved if only by a tour de force of the imagination. (Mrs. Besant, for example, explains the untimely death of a child as a penalty due the parents for unkindness to a child in an earlier incarnation.)

The speculative aspects of Theosophy also appeal to tempers which love to dream without accepting the laborious discipline of a truly reasoned speculation. To quote a phrase of Macaulay's quoted in turn by William James in one of his letters, there is a type of mind "utterly wanting in the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible supposition," and there has been amongst us of late a marked increase of this type of mind. There has been up to our own time no great amount of such speculation as this in the West. It is not native to the occidental temper and it has been held in control by our scientific approach to the facts of our world and our experiences therein. We have demanded for our speculations generally the demonstration of fact and this has heretofore held us to a rather narrow range, but that widening of the frontiers of the possible which has attended the new psychology with its emphasis upon the subconscious, along with the rather baffling character of psychic phenomena, has opened the flood gates and released a tide of speculation which goes far beyond the proved fact and accepts no limits but its own ingenious audacity. We have already seen how evident deficiencies in the discipline of present-day education and the loose state of mind too much in evidence amongst us has contributed to all this. There are everywhere a great number of perplexed people who want to believe something and find it far easier to believe in dreams and guesses and cloud-built systems than in restraining facts or even the rather clearly demonstrated realities of the moral order, and such as these have found a wealth of material in Eastern speculation.

_A Bridge of Clouds_

In trying to appraise the truth of Theosophy we have to disentangle the system and the needs and the seekings which lead its adherents to accept it. These needs and seekings are, after all, near and familiar; they are only our old questions Whence? and Whither? and Why? Theosophy is at least the attempt to really answer some of the questions which Western science is either content or compelled to leave unanswered. The creative point of contact between personality and matter and force is deeply enwrapped in mystery. Orthodox Christianity has been content to affirm the facts of creation without asking any questions at all as to its methods. It has affirmed the omnipotence of the Creator and has found in His omnipotence a satisfactory resting place. G.o.d is great enough to do what has been done and the detail of it is rather an affair for G.o.d than man. Scientific speculation generally has gone back as far as it can go in the resolution of its forces and laws and recognized its own limitations, leaving the rest to the theologian and the philosopher. The result has been a gap which has not been bridged over. Theosophy has undertaken to bridge that gap. But, examined more carefully, one sees that the abyss has been crossed by nothing more solid than a fabric of cloudy speculation. True enough these speculations are ingenious and touched with suggestive light, but they are strangely insubstantial.

After all they do absolutely nothing more than our Western affirmation of the immanence of G.o.d in life and force and law, and our Western thought has the advantage alike in simplicity, in scientific basis and reverent self-restraint.

We might as well recognize, and be done with it, that there are questions here which in all human probability are insoluble. There are elements of mystery in life and the universe beyond our present and likely our future power to definitely resolve. In the end faith can do nothing more than rest in G.o.d and accept as an aspect of life itself the necessary limits of our position. Our organized knowledge all too quickly brings us to regions where faith and faith alone completes the inquiry. But on the other hand, a faith which too far outruns either in the reach or audacity of its speculation those elements which organized knowledge supplies and reason validates, loses itself in futilities or else misleads us altogether. Eastern speculation is too far beyond either ordered knowledge or right reason to be of any practical use in the fruitful conduct of life. Believing too much does just as much harm as believing too little.

Theosophy's seven planes and ascending emanations and sevenfold veils and all the rest really explain nothing. On the other hand they tempt their faithful to take conjecture for reality; they create a credulous and uncritical temper; they are hostile to that honest dealing with fact which is just one condition of getting on at all. A brave confession of ignorance is often more truly reverent than knowing too many things which are not so. As we approach more nearly the reality of things as they are we find them always unexpectedly simple. The burden of proof is always upon the murky and the complex. Those who try to escape the difficulties in which our deeper understanding of the world order and our own personalities involve us, by taking refuge in Eastern occultism are on the wrong line.

_The Difficulties of Reincarnation_

The same criticism holds true of Reincarnation. It is involved in hopeless difficulties. There are apparent injustices and inequalities in life--so much is beyond debate--but we have in general, if we are honest enough to follow it through, the clue to even these. We are all parts of a struggling and, we trust, ascending order, an order which on the whole is not so greatly concerned for the individual as we are concerned for ourselves. We are hampered by our ignorance and we are deeply involved one with the other. The orthodox theology which blames everything upon sin as an abstraction is not convincing, but sin as the projection of wrong desires, through self-will, into the field of human action is a fact to be constantly reckoned with. The individual and social consequences of it are enormous, nor can they be confined either to one individual or one generation. Heredity continues weakness as well as strength. A vast deal of our bitter reaping is due to the wrong or foolish sowing of others, though fortunately we share the good as well as the bad. The laws of heredity will account for a vast deal in any one generation; the laws of social action and reaction for a great deal of the rest, and there is finally not a little for which we ourselves are responsible. A good many of our problems ought to be approached from the point of view of the well-being of humanity generally and not our own individual destiny.

We may safely trust our individual destiny to brave and unselfish living. I ought not to test what I do or leave undone by its effect upon me in some future reincarnation; I ought to test it by the effect which it has now upon the world of which I am a part, upon the generation which is to follow me and upon the quality of my own present life. True enough, the theosophist and myself find ourselves here in substantial agreement as to many of the things which a man ought practically to do to secure a happier future, but I maintain that the motives just named are far more solid and worthy motives than the camouflaged selfishness of Theosophy, and they are certainly in far deeper accord with the ascertained facts of life. If we recognize that the more shadowed side of life is partly the result of social and individual development conditioned by weakness, ignorance and sin, if we recognize that the present reaps what the past has sown, if we recognize that we suffer for the faults of others and that no one of us may hope to climb far until his neighbour climbs with him, if we recognize that pain and suffering are disciplinary, illuminating, educative, and finally, if we recognize that we do possess the power to take all the more difficult elements in experience and subdue them to an increased wealth of personality, we have really all the elements in hand for the solution of the problem of pain and sorrow in terms of action and understanding, and we do not need a series of reincarnations to help us out.

Reincarnation really explains, as it claims to explain, neither the exceptional individual nor the apparently unmerited sufferings of the individual, and it has beside inescapable difficulties of its own. It has to parallel the course of human existence with a range of supernal existence for which there is absolutely no proof; it has to numerically equalize birth and death--and these are not equal in an increasing terrestrial population--or else it has to a.s.sume, as it does of course, on other planes a storehouse of souls from which to draw. And more than that, it involves itself in a perfect tangle of heavenly bookkeeping.

Here is the best Mrs. Besant can do to explain the difficulties of reincarnation. "We have seen that man during his pa.s.sage to physical death loses, one after the other, his various bodies.... These are all disintegrated and their particles remixed with the materials of their several planes.... At this stage, then, only the man himself is left, the labourer who has brought his harvest home and has lived upon it till it is all worked up into himself. The dawn of a new life begins."[69]

[Footnote 69: "The Ancient Wisdom," p. 202--pa.s.sim.]

To condense, he now proceeds to build up for himself a new body for his coming life on the lower mental level. "This again exactly represents his desire nature, faithfully reproducing the qualities he evolved in the past; ... thus the man stands fully equipped for his next incarnation.... Meanwhile action external to himself is being taken to provide him with a physical body suitable for the expression of his qualities.... All this is done by certain mighty spiritual Intelligences often spoken of as the lords of Karma because it is their function to superintend the working out of causes continually set going by thoughts, desires and actions. They hold the threads of destiny which each man has woven, and guide the reincarnating man to the environment determined by his past. The race, the nation, the family thus determined, what may be called the mould of the physical body ... is built within the mother's womb by the agency of an elemental, the thought of the Karmic lords being its motive power." The difficulties which this statement evades are enormous, its conjectures are even more enormous.

This is the subversion of all the facts of biology and heredity to a capricious scheme, built up just to answer a few practical questions--Why do we differ? Why do we suffer? Why are we happy? Surely there are far more simple and reasonable answers to these questions than the answer of Theosophy, and the willingness of so many people to rest in such an answer as this can prove only one of two things--the capacity of the mind for credulity or the arresting failure of those whose business it is to interpret life to the perplexed, to have even begun their task.

_Immortality a n.o.bler, Juster and Simpler Balancing of Life's Account-Book_

If there be a want of opportunity in our present existence for a true balancing of the scales of justice, and if some future existence be needed to make things right, then the Christian doctrine of immortality has an immense advantage over the reincarnations of Theosophy. We have no right to underestimate the difficulties of a reasonable faith in immortality, but they are simplicity itself as compared with the difficulties of reincarnation, for reincarnation must answer every question which the possibility of immortality raises and answer even more difficult questions of its own. It is far simpler to believe that having survived the shock of death we go on with the same essential individuality we had before death, than to believe that having survived we are sent back again through the gates of birth and are really reincarnated in another individuality. More than that, the Christian belief in immortality is more ethical. The action and reaction of life have real meaning for me only as I know and remember. No theosophic evasion can take the force out of this.

If I consciously connect to-day's pain with yesterday's pain with the folly or fault of a previous existence of which I am really unconscious, the chain has been broken and no speculative question can supply the missing link. Very likely the accepted Christian doctrine of the finality of life after death has given Theosophy an opportunity in the West. Protestantism particularly has allowed absolutely no place after death for repentance, has offered no new chance to the adventuring soul; its h.e.l.l and its Heaven have been final states. Catholicism has eased the strain of this with purgatory, a belief wholly without Scriptural basis, but nevertheless evolved in answer to great necessities of life.

We need neither purgatory nor reincarnation; we need only the recognition of what is so centrally a part of any conception of immortality as to make one wonder why we have so greatly missed it; the reasonable confidence, that is, that we really go on very much as we left off here.

If there be in a future existence--and there must be if there be a future existence--any room for repentance born of a clearer recognition of fault and new and holier purposes born of a clearer understanding of the true values of life, then we shall go on in a truly moral process of growth, availing ourselves always of the teachings of experience and working toward the true well-being of our souls, and if the mercy and justice of G.o.d be not the figment of our imagination those who have been hardly dealt with here will be given new opportunity, the deficient and the handicapped released from what weighed them down will find a new departure, and the justices of eternity complete what time began. All this will be accomplished not in a series of existences, separated one from the other by abysms of forgetfulness, but in a remembered continuity of life deepening through endless growth. If this be only faith and speculation it is at least a far more reasonable faith and speculation than the alternative which Theosophy offers. Theosophy is a side issue in the real solution of the problems of life.

_Pantheism at Its Best--and Its Worst_

Finally, though this is possibly unfair, Eastern Pantheism generally must be tested by its fruits. We ought not, if we are to deal justly with it, to ignore its better side. The East at its best has been strong in a type of life wanting in the West; the East has been rich in patience and gentleness and in consideration for every kind of life, even the ant in the dust or the beast in the jungle. The East at its best has weighed conduct in delicate balances and traced the play of cause and effect in character far, far beyond the West; it has been content with simple things and found its true wealth in the inner life.

It has willingly, for the sake of truth and goodness, subjected itself to disciplines, some of which are admirable, others of which are loathsome. It has at its best ventured everything for the well-being of the soul, even when it has misconceived that well-being. It has had little of the hard driving quality of the West. Not a little of the teaching of Jesus fits in better with the temper and devotion of the Orient than the compet.i.tive materialism of the Occident. It is easily possible to pa.s.s not a little of the Gospels through the interpretation of Eastern mysticism and find therein arresting correspondences. For example, a little book called "At the Feet of the Master" by a young Indian student, has in it a wealth of insight and an understanding of the balanced conduct of life which is wanting in a good many of the Western interpretations of life, but none the less, things must be judged by their ma.s.sed outcome and the ma.s.sed outcome of Eastern Pantheism does not commend itself.

The larger part of the religious literature of the East is upon a distinctly lower level than those parts of it which are brought to us by its devotees, and when Pantheism--and the basis of all Eastern speculation is Pantheistic--comes down from its high places and begins practically to express itself in wors.h.i.+p and the conduct of the crowd, then it is such as to give us pause. What Kipling calls "the sculptured horrors" of the carved fronts of the temples in Benares are no accident; they are simply the logical outcome of a faith which lifts the whole to the level of the divine and has nothing beyond to correct what is by what ought or ought not to be. Almost inevitably Pantheistic religions unduly exalt those powers which make for fertility of field and the increase of life. As they do this they have on their side the elemental forces in human nature. When we begin to make G.o.ds of what after all must be sternly subordinated to higher things, and the East has done this in spite of its mystics and its dreamers, then we are not only in danger of sculpturing symbolic horrors on the fronts of our temples but of setting up therein strange altars to strange G.o.ds who are best wors.h.i.+pped by strange rites. All this, inevitably enough, has given to Eastern wors.h.i.+p a more than earthly character, and has invested with the sanction of religion forces which it must always be the business of religion to subordinate and control.

Along with all this has gone a grotesque mythology and an inconceivable multiplication of divinity. Since no one but an expert can hope to understand the complexities of a faith like this, the East has developed a priestly cla.s.s which bears harder upon its devotees and at the same time more contemptuously separates itself from them than perhaps any priestly cla.s.s in the world. If the East is to return upon the West in subst.i.tuting a refined and more or less mystic Pantheism for the sterner forms of Western faith, we ought at least to understand what it is which, with all its implications, is beginning to set up its altars amongst us. No one can follow the theosophic religion of the West without recognizing how largely Western Theosophy avails itself of Western science and informs itself with what Christianity has given to the West. If these were taken out of it it would be hopeless. Since, therefore, its speculations carry us beyond reason or science, since its solution of the problems of life is far too complex, since whatever is good in it may be found more richly and simply in what we already possess and since the practical outcome of it in the East itself is an arrested civilization which has many depths but few heights, one must inevitably conclude that Theosophy has no real meaning for those who possess already the knowledge which we have so laboriously gained and the faith and insight which Christianity has brought us.

X

SPIRITUALISM