Blavatsky on Spirit and Matter

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages from The Theosophist of January 1883, republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume IV. The format is a set of four numbered replies to the numbered questions a correspondent had put at the close of his letter.

The first answer says that spirit became entangled with gross matter for the same reason that life gets entangled with the matter of the foetus — it followed a law, and could not help the entanglement occurring. The second denies that any eastern philosophy teaches that matter originated out of spirit: matter is called as eternal and indestructible as spirit, neither being cognisable without the other even to the highest spiritual sense, and spirit taken by itself is called a non-entity and a non-existence, the negation of every affirmation and of all that is. The third denies that anyone has ever held spirit to be annihilable; spirit can be divorced from its manifested matter, its personality, and it is the personality that is annihilated — and rather than spirit breathing out matter, it is matter which manifests spirit. The fourth is the shortest: since neither God nor Satan is believed in as a personality or entity, there is neither Heaven nor Hell in the vulgar sense, and discussing the question would be a useless waste of time. The correspondent's own views on Karma are set aside at the outset as being his own, and his entitlement to them is granted rather than argued with.

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