Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Part 2 of 3: Fragmentary Aspects of Philosophy Occult and Academic In Which the Truth of Reincarnation is Ably Discussed

 By Israel Regardie (1929)
 Edited (2009) by Sandra Tabatha Cicero

The whole system of the spiritual philosophy of the Rosicrucian Fraternity revolves, so to speak, around the doctrine of the Virgin Spirits or Monads; we shall endeavor to make this doctrine comparable with that held by a few of the recognized philosophers of the aca­demic world.

"Call, it by what name you will, it is a voice that speaks where there is none to speak—it is a messenger that comes, a messenger without form or substance; or it is the flower of the soul that has opened. It cannot be described by a metaphor. But it can be felt after, looked for, and desired, even amid the raging of the storm." (Light on the Path—M. C.)[1]

“Have perseverance as one who doth for evermore endure. The shadows live and vanish; that which in thee knows, for it is knowledge, is not of fleeting life, it is Man that was, that is, and will be, for whom the hour shall never strike.” (Voice of the Silence—Blavatsky)[2]

The Monad, is the name given by Leibnitz,[3] to simple unextended substance, (R.C. Cosmic Root Substance) that is, substance which has the power of action; active force is the essence of substance; the monads being simply substances are therefore the only real substances and that material things are phenomenal, but phenomena having their good and proper foundation and connected with each other—this is the conception of Leibnitz. The monads of Leibnitz are quantita­tively differentiated by their ideas. Every Soul is a Monad; plants and minerals, are, as it were, sleeping monads with unconscious ideas. In plants these ideas are formative vital forces, in animals they take the form of sensation and memory; in human souls they disclose themselves in the acquisition of self consciousness, reason; in a word they approach though they do not attain to the clearness of the adequate ideas possessed by God.

Mertz,[4] in his very thoughtful synopsis of the speculations of Leibnitz, states in regard to the monadic conception: "As a cone stands on its point or a perpendic­ular straight line cuts a horizontal plane only in one depth, so the essences of things really have only a punctual exist­ence in this physical world of space, but have an infinite depth of inner life in the metaphysical world of thought." This is good occultism, for this is the spirit, the very root of occult doctrine and thought; "Spirit-Matter" and "Matter-Spirit" ex­tend infinitely in depth and like the "es­sence-of-things" of Leibnitz, our essence of things real is at the seventh depth; while the unreal and gross matter of our Science and the external world is at the lowest end of our perceptive senses. It is interesting to note that were Leibnitz' and Spinoza's systems reconciled, the essence and spirit of esoteric philosophy would be made to appear. Leibnitz made of the two substances of Descartes two attributes of one Universal Unity, in which he saw God. Spinoza recognized but one Universal indivisible substance and Absolute All, like Parabrahmam, the Absolute. Leibnitz, on the contrary, perceived the existence of a plurality of substances. There was but ONE for Spinoza; for Leibnitz an infinitude of Beings, from and in the ONE. Hence, though both admitted but one real Entity, while Spinoza made it impersonal and indivisible, Leibnitz divided his personal Deity into a number of divine and semi-divine Beings. Now, if these two teach­ings were blended together and each cor­rected by the other—and, foremost of all, the One Reality weeded of its per­sonality—there would remain a sum total—a true spirit of esoteric philosophy in them; the impersonal attributeless, Divine Essence, which is NO "Being" but the root and cause of all being.

Draw a deep mental line between that ever-incognizable-essence, and the invis­ible yet comprehensible Presence, (Prima Materia), the Kabalistic Shekinah, in one aspect, from beyond and through which vibrates the Sound of the Verbum and from which evolve the numberless hier­archies of intelligent Egos, of conscious and of semi-conscious perceptive and apperceptive Beings, whose essence is spiritual Force, whose substance is the Elements and whose bodies are the atoms —and our esoteric doctrine is there. That which was to Leibnitz the primor­dial and ultimate element in every body and object was thus not the material atoms, or molecules, necessarily more or less extended, as were those of Epicurus and Gassendi,[5] but as Mertz has shown, immaterial and metaphysical atoms, mathe­matical points; or real souls, for in the words of this great philosopher Leibnitz, "that which exists outside of us in an absolute manner, are souls whose essence is Force.”

It will be apparent then, that to Leib­nitz, atoms and elements are centers of force, or rather "spiritual beings whose very nature is to act" for the elementary particles are not acting mechanically but from an internal principle. The monads are incorporeal spiritual units and differ from atoms in some particulars which are very important. Atoms are not dis­tinguished from each other; they are qual­itatively alike, but one monad differs from every other monad qualitatively, and every one is a peculiar world to itself. Not so with atoms, they are abso­lutely alike quantitatively and qualitat­ively and possess no individuality of their own. But the monads of Leibnitz closely resemble the elementals of mysti­cal philosophy—these monads are pre­sentative Beings. Every monad reflects every other, and it is a living mirror of the Universe within its own sphere, for upon it depends the power possessed by these monads, and upon this depends the work they can do for us; in mirror­ing the world, the monads are not mere passive reflective agents, but are spon­taneously active; they produce the im­ages spontaneously as does the soul in a dream.

But unfortunately it is at this point that Leibnitz' philosophy breaks down. No provision is made, nor any distinction established, between the "elemental" monad and that of a high planetary Spirit, or a creative Hierarch, or even the human monads or virgin spirit. He even goes so far as to sometimes doubt whether "God has ever made anything but Monads or substances without exten­sion." But what does Occultism say to this. It states that what is called collec­tively, "Monads," by Leibnitz, roughly viewed, and leaving every subdivision out of calculation for the present, may be separated into three distinct groups, which, counted from the highest and most spiritual planes, are firstly "gods," or conscious spiritual Egos, the Intelli­gent Architects, who work after the plan in the Divine Mind. Then come the elementals, or Monads, who form col­lectively and unconsciously the grand Universal Mirrors of everything con­nected with their respective realms. Lastly the atoms of material molecules, which are informed in their turn by their apperceptive monads, just as every cell in the human body is so informed. There are shoals of such informed atoms, which, in their turn, inform the mole­cules; an infinitude of monads, or ele­mentals proper, and countless spiritual forces—Monadless, for they are pure incorporealities, except under certain laws when they assume a form—(not necessarily human).

With Spinoza[6] neither intellect nor will pertains to the nature of God, in the usual sense in which these human qualities are attributed to the Deity, but rather the will of God is the sum of all causes and all laws, and the in­tellect of God is the sum of all mind. Or, as conceived by Santayana, the im­maculate materialist, "The mind of God is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, the diffused conscious­ness that animates the world." Life or mind is one phase or aspect of every­thing that we know, as material exten­sion or body is another; these are two aspects through which we perceive the oper­ation of substance, or God; in this sense, —God, the universal process and exter­nal reality behind the flux of things, may be said to have both a mind and body. Neither mind nor matter is God; but the mental processes and the molecular processes which constitute the double history- the word, these, and their causes and their Laws are God. All things in however diverse degree are animated.

"Mind," says Spinoza, in opposition to Malebranche, "is not matter, neither is matter mental, neither are mind and matter wholly independent and unre­lated; neither is the molecular process the cause of mind, nor is it the effect of thought, the two processes are de­pendent and parallel. There is but one process, seen now internally as thought, and now externally as motion. The de­cision of the mind and the desire and determination of the body are all one and the same thing." And all the world is double in this way, wherever there is an external material process, it is but one side or aspect of the real process, which a fuller view would show to in­clude as well an internal process, corre­lative in however different a degree, with the mental process which we see within ourselves. The inward and mental pro­cess corresponds at each stage with the external and material process. Thinking substances and extended substances are one and the same thing, comprehended now through this and now that attribute.

Spinoza said, "Our mind insofar as it understands, is an eternal mode of think­ing, which is determined by another mode of thinking and this one again by another and so on to infinity, so that they all constitute at the same time the eternal and infinite intellect of God." In this pantheistic merging of the individual with the All, the Orient speaks again; we hear the echo of Omar, the tent- maker, who "never called the ONE two" and of the old Hindu poem "Know in thyself and all oneself, the same soul; banish the dream that sunders part from whole;" or of the cry of the Vedantin ecstatic "Brahman is true, the world is false, the soul is Brahman—and is no­thing else." "Sometimes" said Thoreau, "as I drift idly, I cease to live and begin to be."

Hume[7] thought he had shown that there was no soul, and no science; that our minds are but ideas in procession and association, and that our certainties but probabilities in perpetual danger of violation. These false conclusions are the result of false premises; he assures that all knowledge comes from separate and distinct sensations ; naturally these cannot give us necessity, or invariable sequences of which we may be forever certain; and naturally we must not ex­pect to see our souls, even with the eyes of the internal sense. Let us grant that absolute knowledge comes from sensa­tion, from an independent external world which owes us no promise of be­havior. But what if we have knowledge that is independent of sense-experience, knowledge whose truth is certain to us even before experience, á priori. Then absolute truth and absolute science would become possible, would it not? Let us then call to our aid the philosopher Kant, who says in the Critique of Pure Reason: "Experience is by no means the only field to which our understanding can be confined. Experience tells us what is, but not that it must be neces­sarily what it is and not otherwise. It therefore can never give us any really general truths; and our reason, which is particularly anxious for that class of knowledge is aroused by it rather than satisfied. General truths, which at the same time bear the character of an in­ward necessity, must be independent of experience, clear and certain in them­selves." That is to say, they must be true no matter what our latest experience may be; true before experience and true á posteriori. "How far we can ad­vance independently of all experience, in á priori knowledge, is shown by the brilliant example of mathematics." For mathematical knowledge is necessary and certain; we cannot conceive of future experience violating it, as we cannot for the life of us conceive that two by two will ever make anything else than four. Such truths are true before experience; they do not depend on experience, past, present or future. Therefore they are absolute and necessary truths; it is in­conceivable that they should ever become untrue. But whence do we get this character of absoluteness and necessity. Not from Experience; for experience gives us nothing but separate sensations and events, which may alter their se­quence in the future. These truths derive their necessary character from the inherent structure of our minds, from the natural and inevitable manner in which our minds must operate. For the mind of man is not passive wax, upon which experience and sensation write their absolute and yet whimsical will, nor is it a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states; it is an active organ, so to speak, which moulds and coordinates sensations into ideas; an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought.


[3] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: a German philosopher and mathematician  whose theory of monads stand as his best known contribution to esoteric thought.  http://www.iep.utm.edu/leib-met/
[4] John Theodore Merz (without the “t”): an industrial chemist and philosopher who sought to bridge the gap between science and the arts. http://infomotions.com/etexts/archive/ia311537.us.archive.org/1/items/leibnizm00merzuoft/leibnizm00merzuoft_djvu.htm
[5] Pierre Gassendi: French priest, mathematician, and astronomer. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gassendi/
[6] Baruch Spinoza: Dutch rationalist philosopher and religious thinker, and foremost proponent of pantheism. http://www.iep.utm.edu/spinoza/

[7] Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume is a key figure in western philosophy. Empiricists maintain that all knowledge arises from experience. http://www.iep.utm.edu/humelife/

No comments:

Post a Comment