Category: The Key To Theosophy (1889): H. P. Blavatsky

"Enq:  All this is very vague. What do you do more than Christians do?   Theo:  It is not what we members of the Theosophical Society do - though some of us try our best - but how much farther Theosophy leads to good than modern Christianity does. I say - action, enforced action, instead [...]

"Enq:  What do you understand precisely by "duty" in Theosophy? It cannot be the Christian duties preached by Jesus and his Apostles, since you recognize neither?   Theo:  You are once more mistaken. What you call "Christian duties" were inculcated by every great moral and religious Reformer ages before the Christian era.   All that [...]

"Enq:  Why, then, the need for rebirths, since all alike fail to secure a permanent peace?   Theo:  Because the final goal cannot be reached in any way but through life experiences, and because the bulk of these consist in pain and suffering.   It is only through the latter that we can learn. Joys [...]

"Enq:  The ultimate destiny of man, then, is not a Heaven presided over by God, but the gradual transformation of matter into its primordial element, Spirit?   Theo:  It is to that final goal to which all tends in nature.   Enq:  Do not some of you regard this association or "fall of spirit into [...]

"Enq:  Yet millions believe in the Christian dogma and are happy.   Theo:  Pure sentimentalism overpowering their thinking faculties, which no true philanthropist or Altruist will ever accept. It is not even a dream of selfishness, but a nightmare of the human intellect.   Look where it leads to, and tell me the name of [...]

"Enq:  Does it make the Christian happier than the Buddhist or Brahmin?   Theo:  No; not the educated man, at any rate, since the majority of these have long since virtually lost all belief in this cruel dogma. But it leads those who still believe in it more easily to the threshold of every conceivable [...]

"Enq:  What do you allude to?   Theo:  To the Doctrine of Atonement; I allude to that dangerous dogma in which you believe, and which teaches us that no matter how enormous our crimes against the laws of God and of man, we have but to believe in the self-sacrifice of Jesus for the salvation [...]

"Enq:  And is it that "intuition" which forces you to reject God as a personal Father, Ruler and Governor of the Universe?   Theo:  Precisely. We believe in an ever unknowable Principle, because blind aberration alone can make one maintain that the Universe, thinking man, and all the marvels contained even in the world of [...]

"Enq:   Thus it is on knowledge, not on faith, that you assert that the permanent principle, the Spirit, simply makes a transit through matter?   Theo:    I would put it otherwise and say - we assert that the appearance of the permanent and one principle, Spirit, as matter is transient, and, therefore, no better than [...]

"Enq:  If we lose even our individuality, then it becomes simply annihilation.   Theo:  I say it does not, since I speak of separate, not of universal individuality. The latter becomes as a part transformed into the whole; the dewdrop is not evaporated, but becomes the sea.   Is physical man annihilated, when from a [...]