Mystics

"Ah, were men's voices like the wood-birds' melody— Each happy note distinct, but all in harmony!"

"How short our span! If you once realized how brief, you would refrain from causing any beast or man the smallest grief, the slightest pain."

"All Heaven is within thee, Man, And all of Hell within thy heart: What thou dost choose and will to have, That hast thou wheresoe'er thou art."

"A Loaf holds many grains of corn And many myriad drops the Sea: So is God's Oneness Multitude And that great Multitude are we."

"The Spirit is like new wine, see the disciples all, Like men inebriate, swept away and enthralled By both its heat and strength; thus it remains true still That the disciples had of sweetest wine their fill"

"O Man, as long as you exist, know, have, and cherish, You have not been delivered, believe me, of your burden."

"How fleeting is this world yet it survives. It is ourselves that fade from it and our ephemeral lives."

"Christ could be born a thousand times in Bethlehem – but all in vain until He is born in me."

"Where is my dwelling place? Where I can never stand. Where is my final goal, toward which I should ascend? It is beyond all place. What should my quest then be? I must, transcending God, into the desert flee"

"The Thought and Deed of Deity Are of such richness and extent That It remaineth to Itself An Undiscovered Continent."

"If you know how to launch your ship into God's sea Oh, what a blessed fate, submerged in it to be"

"Two eyes our souls possess: While one is turned on time, The other seeth things Eternal and sublime"

"To comment upon the residue of truth or wisdom enshrined in the utterances of Angelus Silesius does not lie within my scope. For mystics the heart is always the supreme court of appeal and within their community, though so widely extended in space and time, there has always been a remarkable unanimity in its findings ...They are those who can say with Angelus Silesius: Turn whereso'er I will, I find no evidence Of End, Beginning, Centre or Circumference. There are perhaps few to-day who will find the language of Angelus Silesius adequate in every respect to the expression of their deepest intuitions. He spoke in the dialect of a venerable creed, but the experience of which he spoke is immemorial. And it appears to be unchanging. Those who are in possession of the code will readily decipher the message."

"Although the influence of Boehme was to be felt far and wide, ranging from French and German theosophers and esoterists to Russian contemplatives, perhaps the most artistically powerful expression of purely sapiential teachings deeply influenced by him are to be found in the hymns of Christian gnosis which comprise the Cherubic Wanderer of Angelus Silesius (1624-1677) which are also among the most remarkable works of German literature. This collection, so close in both form and content to Sufi poetry, is based upon the central theme of return to God...it is the al-ma'rifah of Islam or the jnana of Hinduism and very much in accord with works of such nature whether they be in Arabic and Persian or Sanskrit."

"Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme and Angelus Silesius describe their spiritual vision of the sublime and ultimate reality of God, as well as their participation therein, by a dramatic use of the power of imagery of the German language which, although rooted in time and space, seems to be free from the constraints of these elements. Time and space alone are incapable of grasping eternity; only when struck by a shaft of eternal light can they reflect its splendor. Such a reflection of the eternal is present in the language of Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme and Angelus Silesius. It is, more-over, the light of eternity that makes it at all possible to see the teachings of these great metaphysicians and mystics as a unity, in spite of their having lived at different times and belonged to differing Christian confessions. The uniformity of their spiritual vision arises from the inner unity of Divine Reality itself. Human language becomes inadequate when confronted with this mystery of the inner unity of the Godhead; “the most beautiful statement about God of which man is capable is his silence in the face of his inner riches.”...Angelus Silesius summarized his spiritual vision in rhymes whose beauty is filled with an inner certainty that derives directly from the knowledge of the divine being. This direct knowledge of God is founded on the identity of essence between God and the soul, which occurs when the soul once more corresponds to its original state of being created in the image of God."

"One of the most prominent and interesting mystics of Germany, Johannes Scheffler, or as he is better known by his adopted name, Angelus Silesius ... was born of Protestant parents at Breslau, the capital of Silesia, in 1624 ... Scheffler's mystic inclinations had long before alienated him from the dogmatic and anti-artistic spirit of the religion of his birth which during the middle of the seventeenth century was more severe and bigoted than ever before or afterwards. At the same time there was a religious revival in the Roman Catholic world which proved attractive to him, and so it was but natural that finally in 1653 he severed his old affiliations, and joined the Church that by the mystical glamor of its historical traditions was most sympathetic to him"

"I have been told that Queen Christina had a decided leaning toward this opinion, and as M. Naude, who was her librarian, was imbued with it, he probably communicated to her what he knew of the secret views of the celebrated philosophers with whom he had had intercourse in Italy. Spinoza, who admits only one substance, is not far removed from the doctrine of a single, universal spirit, and even the New Cartesians, who claim that God alone acts, establish it likewise without noticing it. Apparently Molinos and several other New Quietists, among others, a certain Joannes Angelus Silesius, who wrote before Molinos and some of whose works have recently been reprinted, and even Weigelius before them, embraced this opinion of the Sabbath or rest of souls in God. This is why they believed that the cessation of particular functions was the highest state of perfection."

"God, being a great abyss, to men his depth reveals Who climb the highest peak of the eternal hills"

"In schools throughout the world God's but described to you. Within the spirit's school one sees and loves him too."

"A spark without its fire, a drop without its sea, Without rebirth what more, pray, wouldst thou be?"

"Never in endless time will ring a sound as sweetly As when a human heart in God is tuned completely."

"Here I still flow in God as a small stream of time, There I shall be a sea of blessedness sublime"

"Thou laughest that a child cries o'er its broken doll;— The things o'er which thou mournest—are they not playthings all?"

"God is a flowing well which constantly may pour Into his whole Creation, and yet be as before."

"Three days: Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday, I know, Yet if the past were cancelled within the here and now And then the future hidden, I could regain that Day Which I, before I was, had lived in God's own way."

"I say it speeds thee not That Christ rose from the grave, So long as thou art still To death and sin a slave."

"The resurrection is In spirit done in thee, As soon as thou from all Thy sins hast set thee free."

"If neither love nor pain Will ever touch thy heart, Then only God's in thee, And then in God thou art"

"Who would expect it so? From darkness light is brought, Life rises out of Death, And Something comes from Naught."

"The nearest way to God Leads through love's open door; The path of knowledge is Too slow for evermore"

"Many years ago in lovely Lindau on the Bodensee, I happened upon a thin volume of Angelus Silesius' couplets which startled, amused and greatly interested me. Although it was in 1657 the world had first received them it seemed to me that they had lost little of their significance in 300 years. Their pithy comments upon human frailty, their wholesome attempt to direct a way toward peace of mind, their often half concealed humor, have modern application."

"I will end with a great line by the poet who, in the seventeenth century, took the strangely real and poetic name of Angelus Silesius. It is the summary of all I have said tonight — except that I have said it by means of reasoning and simulated reasoning. I will say it first in Spanish and then in German: La rosa es sin porqué; florece porque florece. Die Rose ist ohne warum; sie blühet weil sie blühet"

"What H. P. Blavatsky was the world may some day know. She was of heroic stature, and smaller souls instinctively resented her strength, her titanic nature. Unconventional, careless of appearances, frank to unwisdom — as the world estimates wisdom — too honest to calculate against the dishonesty of others, she laid herself open to continual criticism and misunderstanding. Full of intellectual strength and with extraordinary knowledge, she was humble as a little child. Brave to recklessness, she was pitiful and tender. Passionately indignant when accused of sins she loathed, she was generous and forgiving to a repentant foe. She had a hundred splendid virtues, and a few petty failings. May the Master she served with unfaltering courage, with unwavering devotion, send back to us again "the Brother you know as H. P. B., but we — otherwise.""

"There was one policy with regard to the Masters, the phenomena worked by her, and Their communications, which she would not tolerate: the attempts to separate the occult from the philosophical, and to evade the criticism and the hostility of an ignorant world by exalting the philosophical at the expense of the occult. To do this, she repeatedly declared, was to invite the destruction of the Society. She was bitterly conscious of the unfairness with which she had been treated, and of the way in which many Theosophists were willing to sacrifice her to the mob, while profiting by her teachings, and declaring that the Theosophical Society had its own foundation, and could continue to exist, even if she were regarded as a fraud."

"Madame Fadeeff: proceeds: "The phenomena produced by the mediumistic power of my niece Helena are very curious and wonderful... so much force concentrated in a single individual — a whole group of the most extraordinary manifestations emanating from a single source... is certainly exceedingly rare and perhaps unparallelled... when she was here this power was in a condition far inferior to that which it has now reached... Helena... cannot be compared with anyone else. As child, as young girl, as woman, she was always too superior to her environment to be appreciated at her real value. She received the education of a girl of good family. She was well brought up, but was not at all learned, and as for scholarship, of that there was no question. But the unusual richness of her intellectual nature, the delicacy and swiftness of her thought, her marvellous facility in understanding, grasping and assimilating the most difficult subjects, such as would require from anybody else years of laborious study; an eminently developed intelligence, united with a character loyal, straightforward, frank, energetic — these gave her such an unusual superiority, raised her so high above the ordinary level of the insipid majority of human societies, that she could never avoid attracting general attention, and the consequent envy and animosity of all those who, in their trivial inferiority, felt wounded by the splendor of the faculties and talents of this really marvellous woman."

"Helena Petrovna was married, as a girl of seventeen, to an old man, and promptly took flight from her husband, on discovering what marriage meant, and roamed about the world in search of knowledge. In August, 1851... on a moonlight night, as her diary tells us, beside the Serpentine, " I met the Master of my dreams." He then told her that he had chosen her to work in a society, and some time afterwards, with her father's permission, she went into training for her future mission, passing through seven and ten years of probation, trial and hard work...."

"Madame Fadeeff: "She was well brought up, well educated as a woman of the world, that is to say, very superficially. But as to serious and abstract studies, the religious mysteries of antiquity, Alexandrian Theurgy, ancient philosophies and philologies, the science of hieroglyphs, Hebrew, Samskrit, Greek, Latin, etc., she never saw them even in a dream. I can swear to it. She had not the least idea of the very alphabet of such things.... my niece spoke to me about them (the Masters of Wisdom), and that very fully, years ago. She wrote to me that she had seen and reknitted her connection with several of them before she wrote her Isis. Why should she have invented these personages? With what object ? and what good could they do her if they did not exist? Your enemies are neither wicked nor dishonest, I think; they are, if they accuse you of that, only idiotic."

"H. P. Blavatsky said, in language which no thoughtful mind could misinterpret: Come unto me, my Brothers. I have been taught. Only as I have been taught am I authorized to give; but what I have been taught I can give, and it is my duty to give it. She gave, and gave lavishly. What she gave was not her own; it is not my own; it is not your own. It is the common spiritual and intellectual heritage of mankind; it belongs to us all as human beings, to every son of man; and anyone who studies this common heritage of mankind and who follows the pathway that it opens... The pathway, remember, is endless, for it leads over and through the spacious fields of the spaces of invisible space."

"In her efforts to teach and help she was ready to investigate all subjects; she pointed out with abundant logic the necessity of the ideas of Theosophy being implanted in the minds of the people of the present age; that these ideas might lead the people from dogmatism and materialism into a larger and broader life. She declared that unless humanity awakened to its real needs and to its opportunities, the human family as a whole must retrograde into the shadow and lose sight of the spiritual life and light that rightfully belong to every man. So it was that she established the Theosophical Society on entirely unsectarian and non-political lines. She accentuated tirelessly the truths of Theosophy; she declared that man's essential divine nature was a potent quality which should be aroused continuously: i. e., that man was dual in his nature -- that the higher, the nobler, the divine part, was the corrective and inspiring part, and that the human mind, no matter how splendidly trained, must be controlled by this higher self: before this man could not find his true place or realize his latent possibilities. She declared in her teachings that one who would know his strength must find his divinity, not outside himself but within; that he must understand the laws of evolution and involution; that spiritually he must realize that he is a part inseparable of the great human family; and that if he carried the investigation of Theosophy far enough, he would readily conceive of Deity as an all-powerful, omnipresent principle, rather than as a personal God existing at some point in space."

"Unconventionality was with her almost a cult, and nothing pleased her more than to do and say things to shock the prudish... HPB felt herself in revolt to every conventional idea of society, being in beliefs, tastes, dress, ideals, and behavior a social helot; ...The world was to her an empty sham, its prizes but dross, her waking life a lugubrious existence, her real life that of the night when, leaving the body, she would go and sit at the feet of her Masters. So she felt little else than scorn and profound contempt for the blind bigots and narrow-thinking men of science, who had not even a stray glimpse of the truth, yet who would judge her with unrighteous judgment and conspire to silence her by a conspiracy of calumny. For clergymen as a body she felt hatred, because, being themselves absolutely ignorant of the truths of the spirit, they assumed the right to lead the spiritually blind, to keep the lay conscience under control, to enjoy revenues they had not earned, and to damn the heretic, who was often the sage, the illuminatus, the adept. We had one scrapbook into which we used to paste paragraphs from the newspapers telling of the crimes of clergymen and priests who had been brought to justice, and before we left for India there was a large collection of them. HPB made numberless friends, but often lost them again and saw them turned into personal enemies. No one could be more fascinating than she when she chose, and she chose it when she wanted to draw persons to her public work. She would be caressing in tone and manner, and make the person feel that she regarded him as her best, if not her only friend."

"Sixteen years and a half have gone since Helena Petrovna Blavatsky passed away from this mortal world. Yet attacks are still made upon her veracity, upon her character, and good and sympathetic men still turn away from the Theosophical Society with: " Oh ! I do not care to belong to it ; it was founded by Mme. Blavatsky, who was convicted of fraud by the Psychical Research Society." The articles which defended her at the time have long been out of print, and are forgotten. Dr. Hodgson, the writer of the S.P.R. report, became a believer in phenomena far more wonderful than those which he denied in his youthful self-confidence, and also became himself the victim of misrepresentation and ridicule. The large circulation of Mme. Blavatsky's priceless works, the spread of the ideas which she spent her life in learning and teaching, the growth of the Theosophical Society which she founded at the orders of her Master, and with the aid of her colleague Colonel H. S. Olcott. the ever-increasing literature published by her pupils — all these form her substantial defence, the justification of her life's work. p. 1"

"From boyhood no problem had interested me so much as the mystery of man... [On meeting H.P.B.,] our acquaintance at once ripened into a friendship. We found ourselves to be congenial in opinion, and she brought to our intercourse the great resources of a mind stored with a mass of erudition with regard to the arcane or esoteric philosophies of the ancient times. I found her the most intellectual woman I had ever met in my life, a very eccentric personage, but a person who compelled you to either like her very much or to be very antagonistic to her. Besides these extraordinary literary and mental accomplishments of hers, she also possessed in a very striking degree psychical powers such as we read about in the accounts of the lives of ancient sages, and the proof of the reality of which powers was vouchsafed to many witnesses in America for years before we sailed from New York for India; so that naturally those of us who knew her in those times and subsequently, have been unaffected by all the imputations upon her character that have been so rife during the later years of her life... I now look back to that meeting as the most fortunate event of my life; for it made light shine in all the dark places, and sent me out on a mission to help to revive... occult science, which grows more absorbingly interesting every day."

"She was a splendid pianist, playing with a touch and expression that were simply superb. Her hands were models—ideal and actual—for a sculptor and never seen to such advantage as when flying over the keyboard to find its magical melodies... There were times when she was occupied by one of the Mahâtmas, when her playing was indescribably grand. She would sit in the dusk sometimes, with nobody else in the room beside myself, and strike from the sweettoned instrument improvisations that might well make one fancy he was listening to the Gandhâvas, or heavenly choristers. It was the harmony of heaven...she was loyal to the last degree to her aunt, her other relatives, and to the Masters; for whose work she would have sacrificed not only one, but twenty lives, and calmly seen the whole human race consumed with fire, if needs be."

"It is not right that the continued crucifixion of the Teacher should be regarded with complacency, while the world profits by the teachings, nor that she should be branded as fraud and impostor who brought to this age the truths now gaining such world-wide acceptance. It is but just that her defence should be obtainable so long as she is slandered. Therefore I — who reverence her as my first Teacher, and who keep her in my heart with unceasing gratitude as the one who led me to my Master, whom I have now served with ever-increasing thankfulness for more than eighteen years — place here on record the facts of the past, with such comment as seems necessary."

"And we, who lived around her, who in closest intimacy watched her day after day, we bear witness to the unselfish beauty of her life, the nobility of her character, and we lay at her feet our most reverent gratitude for knowledge gained, lives purified, strength developed."

"I — who reverence her as my first Teacher, and who keep her in my heart with unceasing gratitude as the one who led me to my Master, whom I have now served with ever-increasing thankfulness for more than eighteen years — place here on record the facts of the past, with such comment as seems necessary."

"Mme Blavatsky is a bit wild and somewhat irrational and speaks as if she were the Oracle of Delphi. But I will admit that I find some interesting observations in her book which was published as you know, back in 1888, at a time when physics and science were in their swaddling clothes... I'm astonished how much in keeping it is with modern Physics... There are many other significant statements of hers which I find interesting, but for which i have no time to discuss now."

"Reincarnation. The doctrine of rebirth, believed in by Jesus and the Apostles, as by all men in those days, but denied now by the Christians. All the Egyptian converts to Christianity, Church Fathers and others, believed in this doctrine, as shown by the writings of several. In the still existing symbols, the human-headed bird flying towards a mummy, a body, or “the soul uniting itself with its sahou (glorified body of the Ego, and also the kâmalokic shell) proves this belief. “The song of the Resurrection” chanted by Isis to recall her dead husband to life, might be translated “Song of Rebirth”, as Osiris is collective Humanity. “Oh! Osiris [here follows the name of the Osirified mummy, or the departed], rise again in holy earth (matter), august mummy in the coffin, under thy corporeal substances”, was the funeral prayer of the priest over the deceased. “Resurrection” with the Egyptians never meant the resurrection of the mutilated mummy, but of the Soul that informed it, the Ego in a new body. The putting on of flesh periodically by the Soul or the Ego, was a universal belief; nor can anything be more consonant with justice and Karmic law."

"Paracelsus. The symbolical name adopted by the greatest Occultist of the middle ages—Philip Bombastes Aureolus Theophrastus von Hohenheim—born in the canton of Zurich in 1493. He was the cleverest physician of his age, and the most renowned for curing almost any illness by the power of talismans prepared by himself. He never had a friend, but was surrounded by enemies, the most bitter of whom were the Churchmen and their party. That he was accused of being in league with the devil stands to reason, nor is it to be wondered at that finally he was murdered by some unknown foe, at the early age of forty-eight. He died at Salzburg, leaving a number of works behind him, which are to this day greatly valued by the Kabbalists and Occultists. Many of his utterances have proved prophetic. He was a clairvoyant of great powers, one of the most learned and erudite philosophers and mystics, and a distinguished Alchemist. Physics is indebted to him for the discovery of nitrogen gas, or Azote."

"Pre-existence. The term used to denote that we have lived before. The same as reincarnation in the past. The idea is derided by some, rejected by others, called absurd and inconsistent by the third yet it is the oldest and the most universally accepted belief from an immemorial antiquity. And if this belief was universally accepted by the most subtle philosophical minds of the pre-Christian world, surely it is not amiss that some of our modern intellectual men should also believe in it, or at least give the doctrine the benefit of the doubt. Even the Bible hints at it more than once, St. John the Baptist being regarded as the reincarnation of Elijah, and the Disciples asking whether the blind man was born blind because of his sins, which is equal to saying that he had lived and sinned before being born blind..."