Desiderata

Latin for "desired things," a prose-poem by Max Ehrmann (1927) 

"Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

"Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

"Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

"Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.

"Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

"Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

"Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

"And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its shams, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy."

Conquering Ourselves

"As Rosicrucian students we are not out to conquer the world. We are here to conquer ourselves. As we conquer ourselves and strengthen our weaknesses we are helping to strengthen the links in the chain of life. We all know that we do help or hinder those about us by the attitude we take toward them and life. Let us strive to develop our inner faculties and spiritual natures that through Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Feeling and Right Action we may help not only those immediately about us but stimulate and create harmonious mutual understanding, friendly feeling and constructive co-operation among all our associates." 

- From A Way of Life for the Rosicrucian Student (1955) by One of the Brethren

Keeping it Real

I found this insightful article on the website of The Daily Om. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

___________________

Taking the Risk: Permission to Be Real by Madisyn Taylor

When we present ourselves to the world without a mask and keep it real, we offer the same opportunity for others to do the same.

Most of us are familiar with the idea of keeping it real and have an intuitive sense about what that means. People who keep it real don’t hide behind a mask to keep themselves safe from their fear of how they might be perceived. They don’t present a false self in order to appear more perfect, more powerful, or more independent. People who keep it real present themselves as they truly are, the good parts and the parts most of us would rather hide, sharing their full selves with the people who are lucky enough to know them.

Being real in this way is not an easy thing to do as we live in a culture that often shows us images of physical and material perfection. As a result, we all want to look younger, thinner, wealthier, and more successful. We are rewarded externally when we succeed at this masquerade, but people who are real remind us that, internally, we suffer. Whenever we feel that who we are is not enough and that we need to be bigger, better, or more exciting, we send a message to ourselves that we are not enough. Meanwhile, people who are not trying to be something more than they are walk into a room and bring a feeling of ease, humor, and warmth with them. They acknowledge their wrinkles and laugh at their personal eccentricities without putting themselves down.

People like this inspire us to let go of our own defenses and relax for a moment in the truth of who we really are. In their presence, we feel safe enough to take off our masks and experience the freedom of not hiding behind a barrier. Those of us who were lucky enough to have a parent who was able to keep it real may find it easier to be that way ourselves. The rest of us may have to work a little harder to let go of our pretenses and share the beauty and humor of our real selves. Our reward for taking such a risk is that as we do, we will attract and inspire others, giving them the permission to be real too.

THE CULT OF ISIS AND OSIRIS

"The Laments of Isis and Nephthys."
Berlin Papyrus 1425

(Taken from "The Wisdom of the East Series" - "The Burden of Isis")

 

 

Invocation of Isis

Come to thy Temple, come to thy Temple, O An! Come to thy Temple, for thine enemies are not! Come to thy Temple! Lo I, thy sister, love thee - do not thou depart from me! Behold Hunnu, the beautiful one! Come to thy Temple immediately - come to thy Temple immediately! Behold thou my heart which grieveth for thee; Behold me seeking for thee - I am searching for thee to behold thee! Lo, I am prevented from beholding thee - I am prevented from beholding thee, O An! It is blessed to behold thee - come to the one who loveth thee! Come to the one who loveth thee, O thou who art beautiful, Un-Nefer, dead. Come to thy sister - come to thy wife Come to thy wife, O thou who makest the heart to rest. I, thy sister, born of thy mother, go about to every temple of thine Yet thou comest not forth to me; Gods, and men before the face of the gods, are weeping For thee at the same time, when they behold me! Lo, I invoke thee with wailing that reacheth high as heaven - Yet thou hearest not my voice. Lo I, thy sister, I love thee More than all the Earth - And thou lovest not another as thou dost thy sister - Surely thou lovest not another as thou dost thy sister!

Remarks:

An is the moon god form of Osiris. 
Hunnu a sun god form of Osiris.
Un-Nefer a title of Osiris.
Osiris is so named because he is the dispenser of benefits, a form of the 
Absolute; one Egyptian dogma makes Osiris to be Hes-iri, which would seem 
to mean the "seat of Isis." (Iamblichus, "The Egyptian Mysteries").

http://www.sria.org/Isis-Osiris.htm

Part 3 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.

Now, just what is meant by sensations and perceptions, and how does the mind change the former into the latter? By itself a sensation is merely the awareness of a stimulus, we have a taste on the tongue, an odor in the nostrils, a sound in the ears, a temperature on the skin, a flash of light on the retina, a pressure on the fingers; it is the crude, raw be- ginning of experience; it is what the infant has in the early days of its grop­ing mental life; it is not yet knowledge. But, let these various sensations group themselves about an object in space and time—say, an apple; let the odor in the nostrils and the taste on the tongue, the light on the retina, and the shape reveal­ing pressure on the fingers and the hand, unite and group themselves about this "something;" and there is now a con­sciousness not so much of a stimulus as of a specific object, there is perception. Sensation has passed into knowledge. But was this passage, this grouping auto­matic? Did the sensations of themselves spontaneously and naturally fall into a cluster and an order, and so become perceptions. Our modern so-called psy­chologists, echo with Locke and Hume—"Yes." "Not at all"—states the esoteric philosophy. For these various sensations come to us through the varied channels of senses, through a thousand different nerves that pass from skin and eye and ear and tongue into the brain. What a medley of messengers they must be, as they crowd into the chambers of the mind, calling for attention. And left to themselves they remain a rabble, a chaotic "mani­fold" pitifully impotent, waiting to be ordered into meaning and purpose and power. As readily might the message brought to a general from a thousand sec­tions of the battle line weave themselves unaided into comprehension and com­mand. No; there is a lawgiver for this mob; a directing and coordinating power that does not merely receive, but takes these atoms of sensation and moulds them into sense; it is the real man, the Theosophical Manas, the Rosicrucian Human Spirit, the inner spiritual Ego in action.

Again, reverting to the subject of life and reincarnation, although we cannot prove it, in the ordinary concept of the word, we feel intuitively that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not one of those dreams so beloved by the people in which every villain is punished and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue and morality, it would not be wise to be too good, and yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel that this life is only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening; if we did not vaguely know that in that latter exist­ence the balance will be redressed and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundred fold.

All nature is built on a plan of ebb and flow. As day succeeds day, with intervening nights, so season succeeds season, and the trees die and bloom again. The tides ebb and flow; the moon waxes and wanes. There is not a cor­ner of the earth into which we may not look and find these successive alterna­tions. The life of man, as imagined by conventional belief, exhibits a glaring contrast with all its surroundings and stands out as the monumental instance of fatuity and incapacity on the part of the caricature of a Deity who is supposed ir­reverently to have designed it. No truly scientific brain would look at a single earth life and not pronounce with cer­tainty that it is but a fragment of a whole; so unmistakably are the missing parts forthshadowed in the part that is seen.

Finally and by the same token there IS a Deity. If the sense of Duty in­volves and justifies belief in rewards to come, the postulate of immortality must lead to the supposition of the existence of a cause adequate to the effect; (Kant) ; in other words to postulate the existence of Deity. Our reason leaves us free to believe that behind the thing-in-itself there is a just Law; our moral sense commands us to believe it. Rous­seaur[8] was right—above the logic of the head is the feeling in the heart. Pascal[9] was right—the heart has reason of its own, which the head can never, never understand.

As to the denial of atheists that there is such a being as God, we answer that atheism is refutable on the very face of it. For atheism may be termed materi­alism in its naked and not in its trans­cendental sense. If then, as they say, Man—the highest form of matter is unable to create or annihilate his com­ponent parts, how is it likely that any lower form of matter should have this marvelous power. Materialism in its transcendental sense states that under this phenomenal matter, there is a more subtle state, which is real; matter in its zero state; but then this may be imagined to be Universal Existence, without be­ginning and without ending, and it is really then a sublime Pantheism, for it declares that all matter is but the exter­nal manifestation, an illusion, if you please, of the Reality, that underlies ALL.

For as Tyndal[10] states, "When I at­tempt to give the power which I see manifested in the Universe, an objective form, personal or otherwise, it slips away from me, declining all intellectual mani­pulations. I dare not, save poetically, use the pronoun "He" regarding it ; I dare not call it a Mind; I refuse to call it even a Cause. Its mystery over­shadows me, but it remains a mystery, while the objective frames which my neighbors try to make it fit, simply dis­tort and desecrate it."

Even the materialistic Haeckel,[11] in his History of Creation,[12] makes the state­ment: "The low dualistic conception of God corresponds with a low animal stage of development of the human organism. The more development of mind the present day is capable of; and is justi­fied in conceiving that infinitely nobler and sublimer idea of God which alone is compatible with the monistic concep­tion of the Universe, and which recog­nizes God's spirit and power in all phenomena and without exception. This monistic idea of God, which belongs to the future has already been expressed by Giordano Bruno in the following words: `A spirit exists in all things, and no body is so small but contains a part of the Divine Substance within itself, by which it is animated.' It is of this noble idea of God that Goethe says, 'Certainly there does not exist a more beautiful worship of God than that which needs no image, but which arises in our heart from converse with nature.' By it we arrive at the Sublime idea of the UNITY OF GOD AND NATURE."

We must therefore negate all attempts to anthropomorphise this Incomprehen­sible Reality, which in Fichte's time, drew the ire of this Great Philosopher in the following words: "You attribute personality and consciousness to God, but what do you call personality and consciousness ? That, no doubt which you have found in yourselves, becomes cognizant of you in yourselves and is distinguished by that name. But if you will give only the slightest attention to the nature of your conception, you will see that you do not and cannot con­ceive of this without limitation and finality. By attributing that predicate to this Being, you in consequence make it a finite one, a creature like unto your­selves; you have not, as was your wish, conceived God, but merely the multiplied representative of yourselves. Even con­sciousness, personality, and even sub­stance, attributed to Deity, carry with them the idea of necessary limitations and are as attributes of relative and limited beings; to affirm this of God is to bring him down to the rank of rela­tive and limited beings."

But, we might add, in spite of the foregoing, it is better for us to maintain a somewhat neutral position, for some definitions contain nothing but concep­tions of our minds, which may conceive many things that have no existence in fact and are extremely prolific in multi­plying conceptions of things once formed, and it is sometimes impossible to infer from the conception one has of God, that God exists at all. The proof of the existence of Deity must spring from a loftier source than the mind, from the Deific font in man, the source of his higher inspirations; from the Spiritual Monad, which being God itself, can alone prove that the existence of Deity is a surety.

---

[1]  http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/lightpat/lightpa1.htm

[2] http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/voice/voice.htm

[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/

[8] Jean Jacques Rousseau: an important 18th- century writer, thinker, and composer whose works influenced the romantic movement.   http://www.iep.utm.edu/rousseau/

[9] French mathematician and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal, laid the foundations for the theory of probability. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal/

[10] John Tyndall: British physicist who studied the behavior of light beams passing through various substances. http://www.answers.com/topic/john-tyndall

[11] Ernst Haeckel: German biologist, physician, artist, and philosopher. http://www.slate.com/id/2124625/

[12] http://www.geology.19thcenturyscience.org/books/1876-Haeckel-HistCrea/Vol-I/htm/doc.html

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.

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[1]  http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/lightpat/lightpa1.htm

[2] http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/voice/voice.htm

[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/