Spirit, Spirits, Spiritualism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 5 pages

The complaint at the head is that the lack of any mutual agreement between writers in the use of this word has produced dire confusion, and that it is commonly made synonymous with soul — a usage the lexicographers countenance. In theosophical teaching the term is applied solely to what belongs directly to universal consciousness and is its homogeneous and unadulterated emanation. The higher Mind in man, his Ego or Manas, is a spirit when linked indissolubly with Buddhi; the word soul is applied only to Kama-Manas and qualified as the living soul, the nephesh of Hebrew, the breath of life. Spirit is formless and immaterial, being when individualised of the highest spiritual substance, Shuddasattva.

From that follows the refusal that gives the file its third word: Theosophists reject the appellation "Spirits" for the phantoms appearing in the phenomenal manifestations of the Spiritualists, and call them shells. Spirit is no entity in the sense of having form — for as Buddhist philosophy has it, where there is form there is a cause for pain and suffering — but each individual spirit, its individuality lasting only through the manvantaric life-cycle, may be described as a centre of consciousness, self-sentient and self-conscious: a state rather than a conditioned individual. The closing remark explains why the confusion is worse in English than in Sanskrit, which has a wealth of words for the different states of being, each showing the plane a unit belongs to and its degree of spirituality — terms she calls almost untranslatable into western tongues.

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