We Are More Often Victims of Words Rather Than of Facts

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 8 pages

Eight pages on a misunderstanding the Society never escaped, and the title states the diagnosis: that we are oftener victims of words than of facts. The Theosophical Society had been credited with atheism and materialism because the philosophy its founders followed refuses to recognise what is popularly called a personal God — and she does not soften the refusal. She maintains, and says she will maintain until her dying day, that a being possessing the range of associations carried by the word God does not exist anywhere in the universe or beyond it, if a beyond were possible.

That, she is careful to add, is only the negative side of the position. The positive side is stated in the words of the Upanishad — that from which all forms of existence emanate, in which they endure, and into which they return and enter, is Brahma. Viewed as the source of the substance of the universe, this is Mulaprakriti, a term she notes has had to be rendered in the poverty of English metaphysical vocabulary as undifferentiated cosmic matter, and whose differentiation produces the infinite forms of being. The headnote puts the same thing in a single line: a solitary ray of light is the unknown Father of every emanative causality and all things, and all else is nonsense and noise.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.0 MB, 8 pages)