Selfishness Is the Cause of All Sin and Suffering

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 9 pages

Nine pages on a single proposition, and one of the more directly ethical documents in the series. If people could see that life on this earth, even at its happiest, is a burden and an illusion — that it is our own Karma, cause producing effect, which is our judge and our saviour in lives to come — then, Blavatsky argues, the struggle for life would soon lose its intensity. Might is not right; it is, in her phrase, the triumph of the most unprincipled.

The essay's force is in its account of consequence. Vanity and selfishness, by hindering what Nature might otherwise bring about, sow the seeds of their own disintegration, and that is the destiny of the callous and the spiritually selfish. The closing image is taken from The Voice of the Silence: disciples likened to the strings of the soul-echoing Vīnā, mankind to its sounding board, and the hand that sweeps it to the tuneful breath of the Great World Soul — with the string that fails to answer beneath the Master's touch left, pointedly, unresolved.

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