Discord Is the Harmony of the Universe

A Master of Wisdom, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 5 pages

A five-page piece, the shortest in this batch, opened by three epigraphs: Plotinus that virtue is harmony but vice dissonance, Blavatsky that discord is the concomitant of differentiation, and an anonymous verse on the eye of the storm silently watching its shadows.

The statement it exists to make is about the government of a society rather than about cosmology, and it is unusually direct: that not even the President-Founder has the right, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the freedom of thought of the humblest member, least of all to seek to influence his personal opinion. The consequence of failing in that generous consideration is described exactly — that it is only in its absence that the faintest shadow of difference arms seekers after the same truth, otherwise earnest and sincere, with what the text calls the scorpion-whip of hatred against their brothers. Those who fall into it are called deluded victims of distorted truth, who forget or never knew that discord is the harmony of the universe. The remainder comments on Dr Keightley's statement that harmony is essentially the law of the universe and that the contrasted aspects of nature can have no reality except in relation to one another — which is where the cosmological principle and the practical rule meet, and why a point of internal discipline is argued from a doctrine about differentiation.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.3 MB, 5 pages)