Letter №65

Letter 65 (ML-11)

Mahatma K.H. - A.P. Sinnett/A.O. Hume

30 June, 1882

Pages - 28.

Русский

Page 1

Note in Sinnett's handwriting:

Letter from K.H. to AOH. rec. June 30th, 1882.

Simple prudence misgives me at the thought of entering upon my new role of an "instructor." If M. satisfied you but little I am afraid of giving you still less satisfaction since besides being restrained in my explanations, — for there are a thousand things I will have to leave unrevealed — by my vow of silence I have far less time at my disposal than he has. However, I'll try my best. Let it not be said that I failed to recognise your present sincere desire to become useful to the Society, hence to Humanity, for I am deeply alive to the fact that none better than yourself in India is calculated to disperse the mists of superstition and popular error by throwing light

Page 2

on the darkest problems. But before I answer your questions and explain our doctrine any further, I'll have to preface my replies with a long introduction. First of all and again I will draw your attention to the tremendous difficulty of finding appropriate terms in English which would convey to the educated European mind even an approximately correct notion about the various subjects we will have to treat upon. To illustrate my meaning I'll underline in red the technical words adopted and used by your men of Science and which withal are absolutely misleading not only when applied to such transcendental subjects as on hand but even when used by themselves in their own

Page 3

system of thought.

To comprehend my answers you will have first of all to view the eternal Essence, the Swabavat not as a compound element you call spirit-matter, but as the one element for which the English has no name. It is both passive and active, pure Spirit Essence in its absoluteness, and repose, pure matter in its finite and conditioned state, — even as an imponderable gas or that great unknown which science has pleased to call Force. When poets talk of the "shoreless ocean of immutability" we must regard the term but as a jocular parodox, since we maintain that there is no such thing as immutability — not in our Solar system at least. Immutability say the theists

Page 4

and Christians "is an attribute of God" and forthwith they endow that God with every mutable and variable quality and attribute, knowable as unknowable, and believe that they have solved the unsolvable and squared the circle. To this we reply if that which the theists call God, and science "Force" and "Potential Energy," were to become immutable but for one instant even during the Maha-Pralaya a period when even Brahmthe creative architect of the world is said to have merged into non-being, then there could be no manwantara, and space alone would reign unconscious and supreme in the eternity of time. Nevertheless, Theism when speaking of mutable immutability is no more absurd

Page 5

than materialistic science talking of "latent potential energy," and the indestructibility of matter and force. What are we to believe as indestructible? Is it the invisible something that moves matter or the energy of moving bodies! What does modern science know of force proper, or say the forces, — the cause or causes of motion. How can there be such a thing as potential energy, i.e., an energy having latent inactive power since it is energy only while it is moving matter, and that if it ever ceased to move matter it would cease to be, and with it matter itself would disappear. Is force any happier term? Some thirty-five years back a Dr. Mayer offered the hypothesis now accepted as an axiom that force in the sense given

Dr. Mayer was Julius Robert von Mayer (1814-1878), a German physician and physicist, a founder of thermodynamics. He is best known for enunciating in 1841 that "energy can be neither created nor destroyed".

Page 6

it by modern science, like matter is indestructible namely when it ceases to be manifest in one form it still exists and has only passed into some other form. And yet your men of science have not found a single instance where one force is transformed into another, and Mr. Tyndall tells his opponents that "in no case is the force producing the motion annihilated or changed into anything else." Moreover we are indebted to modern science for the novel discovery that there exists a quantitative relation between the dynamic energy producing something and the "something" produced. Undoubtedly there exists a quantitive relation between cause and effect, between the amount of energy used in

Mr. Tyndall refers to John Tyndall (1820-1893), a prominent physicist who studied diamagnetism and thermal radiation. Mahatma is quoting his book "Fragments of Science" (1871).

Page 7

breaking one's neighbour's nose, and the damage done to that nose, but this does not solve one bit more the mystery of what they are pleased to call correlations, since it can be easily proved (and that on the authority of that same science) that neither motion nor energy is indestructible and that the physical forces are in no way or manner convertible one into another. I will cross-examine them in their own phraseology and we will see whether their theories are calculated to serve as a barrier to our "astounding doctrines." Preparing as I do to propound a teaching diametrically opposed to their own it is but just that I should clear the ground of scientific rubbish

Page 8

lest what I have to say should fall on a too encumbered soil and only bring forth weeds. "This potential and imaginary materia prima cannot exist without form," says Raleigh, and he is right in so far that the materia prima of science exists but in their imagination. Can they say the same quantity of energy has always been moving the matter of the Universe? Certainly not so long as they teach that when the elements of the material cosmos, elements which had first to manifest themselves in their uncombined gaseous state, were uniting the quantity of matter — moving energy was a million times greater than it is now when our globe is cooling off. For where did the heat that

materia prima means "primal chaos," or the primitive, formless base of the material world.

Raleigh indicates Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618), quoting his book History of the World.

Page 9

was generated by this tremendous process of building up a universe go to? To the unoccupied chambers of space they say. Very well, but if it is gone for ever from the material universe and the energy operative on earth has never and at no time been the same, then how can they try to maintain the "unchangeable quantity of energy," that potential energy which a body may sometimes exert, the FORCE which passes from one body to another producing motion and which is not yet "annihilated or changed into anything else." Aye, we are answered, "but we still hold to its indestructibility; while it remains connected with matter, it can never cease to be, or less or more."

Page 10

Let us see whether it is so. I throw a brick up to a mason who is busy building the roof of a temple. He catches it and cements it in the roof. Gravityovercame the propelling energy which started the upward motion of the brick, and the dynamic energy of the ascending brick until it ceased to ascend. At that moment it was caught and fastened to the roof. No natural force could now move it, therefore it possesses no longer potential energy. The motion and the dynamic energy of the ascending brick are absolutely annihilated. Another example from their own text books. You fire a gun upward from the foot of a hill and the ball lodges in a crevice of the rock on that hill.

Search form