Our Existence Is Fashioned Out of Chaos

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 6 pages

Six pages reproducing a correspondence in full: a reader's letter to the editor of The Theosophist published in December 1881, and the reply, republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume III under the title "Is Creation Possible for Man?" The letter runs to a page and a half and is signed only with the initial H.

The correspondent describes an argument with a friend. He had remarked that the Brothers of the first section were credited with powers so large that even creation was at times not impossible to them, citing the cup-and-saucer phenomenon narrated in Sinnett's Occult World as something more than the mere transference of a lost article; his friend objected warmly that creation is not possible to man whatever else he may accomplish. What makes the letter worth reprinting is the candour of the man's account of himself — twenty years tossed on a sea of doubt, a time when he would himself have repelled the idea indignantly, and a change of mind he attributes to reading The Theosophist, Sinnett and Isis Unveiled, adding drily that whether the revolution in his thinking is for good or bad has yet to be seen. The reply refuses to referee. It says the real question is hardly which of the two men is right, since the correspondent has taken the prudent position of a seeker who will neither affirm dogmatically that creation is possible nor accept the dogmatic denial. The friend is dealt with more sharply: to say creation is impossible he would have to have sounded all the mysteries of nature, know that no such process anywhere obeys the will of man, and know further that something in man makes it impossible — and without having done any of that, the denial is bold. What he is actually doing, the reply says, is the thing commonly done by people of merely ordinary culture and even by a few men of science: taking a large group of preconceived ideas as the standard against which every new idea is measured, smiling on whatever fits and excommunicating without ceremony whatever clashes.

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