HUMANITY is divided into thousands of languages, hundreds of sects and cults, castes, creeds, religious sects, and political ideologies.
For example, the website Ethnologue currently contains information about the world’s 7,111 known living human languages and their indigenous nationalities.
Such differences often divide rather than unite people. Instead of love and service to others, some groups encourage differences, foster criticism, opposition and attacks on others.
How, then, can we ever hope to achieve harmony and oneness, and become a new humanity that will unselfishly eschew all differences and personal enmities — promulgating the First Object of Theosophy, Universal Brotherhood? H. P. Blavatsky explained in The Secret Doctrine 2:760:
There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had one religion as they were of ‘one lip’.
A world united as One Being has been the hope of mankind for long ages. Poets, artists, philosophers, and statespersons idealize it. Self-interested politicians claim they have the grand solution to the problems of disease, hunger, poverty, homelessness.
But they have not succeeded, because of personal bias, and a failure to accept and value the spiritual unity of humanity as a whole.
In our obsession with the bitter roots of sectarian differences and selfish, materialist agendas, we remain blind to the reality of unified life. “Existence is ONE THING, not any collection of things linked together,” Blavatsky wrote. “Fundamentally there is ONE BEING.”
Many Lights, One Humanity
If all men would realize that in these alone can true happiness be found, and never in wealth, possessions, or any selfish gratification.
“But the world, in our day, judges everything on appearance. Motives are held as of no account, and the materialistic tendency is foremost in condemning a priori that which clashes with skin-deep propriety and encrusted notions. Nations, men, and ideas all are judged according to our preconceptions, and the lethal emanations of modern civilization kill all goodness and truth.”
“Then the dark clouds will roll away, and a new humanity will be born upon earth. Then, the GOLDEN AGE will be there, indeed. But if not, then the storm will burst, and our boasted western civilization and enlightenment will sink in such a sea of horror that its parallel History has never yet recorded.”
“The only God man comes in contact with is his own God,” wrote Mme. Blavatsky in Transactions, p. 68, “called Spirit, Soul and Mind, or Consciousness, and these three are one.
But there are weeds that must be destroyed,” she says, “in order that a plant may grow.” Weeds of human selfishness, we must think.
We must die, said St. Paul,
that we may live again.
“It is through destruction that we may improve, and the three powers, the preserving, the creating and the destroying, are only so many aspects of the divine spark within man.”
The god in man, degraded, is a thing unspeakable in its infamous power of production. The animal in man, elevated, is a thing unimaginable in its great powers of service and of strength.
The Power of Empathy
Evolution of God
“The noblest ideal to which the religious Spirit of one age can soar,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine, “will appear but a gross caricature to the philosophic mind in a succeeding epoch!”
The evolution of the God-idea proceeds apace with man’s own intellectual evolution.
The philosophers themselves had to be initiated into perceptive mysteries, before they could grasp the correct idea of the ancients in relation to this most metaphysical subject,” she writes, adding
“…for every thinker there will be a ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no farther,’ mapped out by his intellectual capacity, as clearly and as unmistakeably as there is for the progress of any nation or race in its cycle by the law of Karma.”
Right thought is a good thing,
but thought alone does not count for much
unless it is translated into action.
“Outside of initiation, the ideals of contemporary religious thought must always have their wings clipped and remain unable to soar higher,” Blavatsky writes, “for idealistic as well as realistic thinkers, and even free-thinkers, are but the outcome and the natural product of their respective environments and periods.”
The highest flights of modern (Western) metaphysics, have fallen far short of the truth.
“The ideals of both [idealist and realist] are only the necessary results of their temperaments, and the outcome of that phase of intellectual progress to which a nation, in its collectivity, has attained.”
A Golden Chain
Through the agency of politics alone, peace and progress can never be fostered between nations. We need a sea change of mind and heart, an ethical foundation built upon universal ideals and facts, as given out by the great spiritual teachers down the ages.
Mme. Blavatsky, in The Key to Theosophy, Section 12, describes four “Links of a Golden Chain” that, if implemented, would bind humanity into one universal family. They are:
Universal Unity and Causation – Human Solidarity – the Law of Karma – Reincarnation.
“From Gods to men, from Worlds to atoms, from a star to a rush-light, from the Sun to the vital heat of the meanest organic being,” she wrote, “the world of Form and Existence is an immense chain, whose links are all connected.”
The Separation Syndrome
The Rootless Root
What exactly is meant by H. P. Blavatsky’s phrase: “universal unity and causation?” From the Theosophical point of view, this universe was brought into being, not by a personal creator, rather by an omnipresent, omnipotent, imperishable principle of Life, the root and the source of all.
This idea is echoed today by The Biocentric Universe Theory of Robert Lanza and Bob Berman. In their Discovery Article: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself, they write:
“The farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves.”
“Is the web possible without the spider?”, Lanza asks. “Are space and time physical objects that would continue to exist even if living creatures were removed from the scene?” In The Secret Doctrine universal life is called “the rootless root”, and “the causeless cause” — it is “‘Be-ness’ rather than Being,” Mme. Blavatsky wrote.
It is this one radical cause that awakens at the dawn of manifestation — not in a haphazard way, but following universal Laws patterned on preceding worlds.
In this eternal, imperishable background, periodically appear and disappear numberless universes, say the ancient sages, called the “sparks of eternity.” It is this One Universal Life Force which is the omnipresent Reality throughout the cosmos.
“The Lotus plant exists not only as a miniature embryo in its seed (a physical characteristic), but its prototype is present in an ideal form in the Astral Light from ‘Dawn’ to ‘Night.’ — Like everything else, as a matter of fact, in this objective Universe:
…from man down to mite, from giant trees down to the tiniest blades of grass.
- H. P. Blavatsky, Three Fundamentals of The Secret Doctrine