Metaphysical, mystical, and philosophical excerpts from Dr. N.I. Pirogov, Problems of Life: The Diary of an Old Physician. Selected and translated from the Russian by H.P. Blavatsky, with extensive annotations and commentary. The thoughts of the false “I” or “personality,” are mere shadows of the true Individuality and Higher Ego. The records of past events and passing thoughts, even the most trifling ones, are impressed on the imperishable waves of Astral Light, not in the brain alone. Intuition is divine but faith is human, and the misapplication of inner intuition. “Personality,” being the illusion of separateness, is the root cause of all selfishness and evil. It has to be conquered and crushed before the lower is united with its higher counterpart. Loss of mind is due to the paralysis of the higher functions in Kama-Manas, the physical mind and, in cases of incurable insanity, to the severance of the lower self from the Higher Self during a person’s lifetime, thus preventing the reunion of the two. When one falls into a love of self and love of the world, with its pleasures, losing the divine love of God and of the neighbour, he falls from the illusionary life and fear of death to real death. The higher principles, which constitute the essential elements of his humanity perish, and he lives only on the natural plane of his faculties. The “atoms” of Science are not of this earth but belong to quite a different plane. And the atomic theory is on a par only with the undulatory theory of light. The Ether of Space is considerably different from the medium of Science. The chasm between mind and matter is impassable. No theory of evolution or “heredity” will ever cover or explain the mystery. The incessantly rolling and waving Ocean of Life of Dr. Pirogov is the triply manifested Deity of the Occultists — two opposing forces of spirituality and animalism eternally reacting upon each other, Universal Mind, and Eternal Atom. The immortal Higher Ego (Nous) is man’s true Individuality, that keeps reincarnating in a new personality at every birth. Dr. Pirogov’s purely natural idealism is a spiritual perception of eternal truths, that no scientific sophistry could destroy or even blunt. He esteems Truth higher than Science. Physical Science calls “atoms” that which the Occultists regard as particles or molecules. The real Atoms are the inner principles and the intelligent, spiritual guides of the cells and particles they inform. Man is produced in the image of God or Divine Nature. Every cell in the human organism corresponds with a like “cell” in the divine organism or the manifested universe. The “I” of man or Microcosm, and the Universe or Macrocosm are illusions, inseparable and interdependent, but illusion nevertheless. The human mind, or lower manas, is a direct ray or reflection of a Higher Principle, the Noetic Mind. The latter is the reincarnating Ego, which old Aryan philosophers call Manasaputras, the “Sons of Mind” or Mahat — the Universal Cosmic Mind. Dr. Pirogov can hardly be taken to task and declared unscientific, in accepting the existence of a seven-dimensional space in co-ordination with the seven states of consciousness. In the course of natural evolution our “brain-mind” will be replaced by a finer and more spiritually receptive organism, helped by the sixth and the seventh senses. A Higher Principle may be independent of the matter it rules, but only when outside of space and time. God is the centre; the Intellectual-Principle, an unmoving circle; Soul, a circle in motion. As our mind is but the product of Universal Mind, so is the latter but a differentiated ray of the Absolute Mind or No-Mind — a state of Perfect Unconsciousness. Atom is not the smallest constituent unit of matter, not even a mathematical point, it is an immutable Entity, a reality within an appearance — the molecule being in Occult Philosophy but a figment of maya-illusion. It may be described as a compact or crystallized point of divine Energy and Ideation. Occultism affirms that there is no such thing as inert, dead, or even inorganic matter. Time is abstract motion in space, i.e., force acting in space and transforming itself, by this very action, into substance. In philosophy the term empirical is the product of experience and observation, plus Science. The “sensing principle” in us is an entity capable of acting outside as inside its material body; and it is certainly independent of any organ in particular, in its actions — although during its incarnation it manifests itself through its physical organs. Our Higher Ego is a ray of the Universal Mind, individualized for the span of a cosmic life-cycle, during which time it gets experience through almost numberless reincarnations or rebirths, before returning to its Parent-Source. There are two minds in man, two aspects of the same divine principle, the higher or true Individuality, and the lower or Personality. It is these two that during our lifetime are in incessant struggle, the one trying to gravitate heavenward, the other dragged down by its animal nature to the earth earthy. Nothing that takes place, no manifestation however rapid or weak, can ever be lost from the skandhic records of a man’s life. The Universal Memory preserves every motion, the slightest wave and feeling that ripples the waves of differentiated nature, whether of man or of Universe. The metaphysician and the theosophist will applaud almost every word Dr. Pirogov says, regretting only that men of such profoundly intuitional nature should be so rare among the men of science.

The arguments against Theosophy are like a verdant moss, which displays a velvety carpet of green, without roots, and with a deep bog below. Abuse, pure and simple, is the only weapon of partisans. When a man has lived in crime, his astral cadaver which holds him prisoner, seeks again the objects of his passions and desires to resume its earthly life. It torments the dreams of young girls, bathes in the vapour of spilt blood, and wallows about the places where the pleasures of his life flitted by. The term elementary applies not only to one principle or constituent part, i.e., an elementary primary substance, but also embodies the idea which we express by the term elemental — that which pertains to the four elements of the material world. Elementaries are earth-bound incarnated thoughts of evil men who have passed away. In the grain of sand, as in each atom of the human body, spirit is latent, not active. Yet, the atom is vitalized and energized by spirit, without being endowed with distinct consciousness. Spirit and matter co-existent, inseparable, interdependent, and convertible to each other. But European tongues are too materialistic to make room for such metaphysical ideas. A copious vocabulary, indeed, that has but one term for God and for alcohol! In Sanskrit, for instance, there are twenty words or more to render one idea in its various shades of meaning. Christendom, with its boasted civilization, has outgrown the fetishism of the Fijians. The anthropomorphic ideas of Spiritualists concerning spirit are a direct consequence of the anthropomorphic conceptions of Christians as to their Deity. Spirit is abstract light, uncreated, latent in every atom, in whose profound and sacred repose all motion must cease for ever. Spirit is a ray, a fraction of the Whole; and the Whole being Omniscient and Infinite, its fraction must partake, in degree, of the same abstract attributes. The critics of Theosophy refuse to comprehend the philosophical doctrine that every atom is imbued with Divine Light. It is only when this atom, magnetically drawn to its fellow atoms, that is transformed at last, after endless cycles of evolution, into Man — the crown of intellectual and physical evolution on earth.

These study notes are about a Fellow of the Theosophical Society in Paris, who asserted that Theosophy is a doctrine without proof, without authority, and without prestige in its origin; who accused Brother Theosophists of teaching pseudo-Theosophy and preaching annihilation of the spiritual ego; who talked about the yugas like a blind man about colours; who invented apocryphal Codes in order to discredit Oriental Theosophy; who was not aware of the relation between the sacred sound and the ether of space, or that the Yajur-Veda is “black” when recited by whose accent is impure.

The truth from the lips did not atone for the lie in the heart. Every man’s reasoned opinion has a right to pass into the common auditory, for arguments are the currency of the intellect. In the great theatre of literature there are no authorized door-keepers: for our anonymous critics are self-elected. But they have lost all credit with wise men by unfair dealing: such as their refusal to receive an honest man’s money, because they anticipate and dislike his opinion, and his intellectual coin is refused under pretence that it is light or counterfeit — without any proof given either by the money scales, or by sounding the coin in dispute together with one of known goodness. Either the intolerant person is not master of the grounds on which his own faith is built — which therefore neither is or can it be his own faith — and he is angry, not at the opposition to Truth, but at the interruption of his own indolence and intellectual slumber. Or he has no love of Truth for its own sake; no reverence for the divine command to seek earnestly after it, which command, if it had not been so often and solemnly given by revelation, is yet involved and expressed in the gift of reason, and in the dependence of all our virtues on its development. There can be no end without means; and God furnishes no means that exempt us from the task and duty of joining our own best endeavours. Yet these are not only not forbidden by the self-obscurant Papists without a Pope, and the Protestants who protest only against all protesting, to examine and propose our doubts, so to proceed from a real desire to know the Truth; but we are repeatedly commanded so as not to find reasons for faith, but pretexts for infidelity. The light of truth shines beyond our mortal ken with unfading glory. Men have done their best to veil every beam and to replace the solar rays with the false glare of error and fiction; none more so than the bigoted, narrow-minded theologians and priests of every faith, casuists and perverters through selfishness. This world of ours in the natural enemy of every truth. Thou art this, but thou knowest it not. Truth is the supreme religion and Theosophy, the religion of the future. There is but one Absolute Truth in the Kosmos. Truth will unveil her beauty only to the heavenly man. A Master of Wisdom on the Spirit of Truth. This Spirit is a force that can neither be hindered nor stopped. Those who recognize it, and feel that this is the supreme moment of their salvation, will be uplifted by it beyond the illusions of the great astral serpent. The majority of the public Areopagus is generally composed of self-appointed judges, who have never made a permanent deity of any idol save their own personalities, their lower selves.

Modern Science and Religions dissemble Truth. Only the Theogony of the Ancient Wisdom-Religion may afford a rare glimpse of Truth. And then Nature will give up her secrets to those who seek Truth for her own sake. And to those who are devoted to Truth, who disregard personal benefit, and who persevere and teach. Verily, that which is justice is truth. As a thing is not just because God wills it, but God wills it because it is just, so there can be no Religion more true or just, than to know the things that are, no Religion higher than Truth. Neither can happiness exist where Truth is absent and where intellectual progress refuses to be subordinated to ethical growth. If bereft of Truth, the whole world will turn upside down. That is why Philaletheia is every true Theosophist’s god and dogma.

What the masses call gods, are simply the First Principles of a Divine Essence permeating the creative and intelligent forces of Nature, and being diffused throughout the universe which is infinite. Theosophy is the spiritual as well as the physical science of that Truth, the very essence of deistic and philosophical research. We point to new intellectual horizons; we outline unexplored routes leading to the amelioration of humanity; and we offer a word of consolation to all the disinherited of the earth, whether suffering from starvation of soul or from lack of physical necessities. If one does not work for others one has no right to be called a Theosophist. The strife will be terrible between brutal materialism and blind fanaticism on the one hand, and philosophy and mysticism on the other — mysticism, that veil of more or less translucency, which hides Eternal Truth.

The degree of genius exhibited in works of fiction by the most renowned novelists, largely depends upon and is proportionate to the intensity and interest felt by them in their days of childhood for nursery tales. Also, the older a man becomes, the stronger he clings to and the clearer he seems to see the events of his early childhood. The Greeks of the days of Pericles — they who euhemerized a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses, and from whom Phidias had immortalized the Olympian Jupiter and Athena Promachos, could have no other descendants but those they actually have — the Virgin and Saint worshipping Hellenes. Thus we may believe that the form of worship depends more on the respective idiosyncrasies of races than on their powers of reasoning; and that the natural sympathies or antipathies of the forefathers will always be reflected more or less in the future generations. For it is but names and forms that change, ideas remain the same; and the older a faith, the stronger it clings to the relics of its youth.