On God or Gods

To regard God as an intelligent spirit, and accept at the same time his absolute immateriality is to conceive of a nonentity, a blank void.

The idea ... either of a finite or infinite nothing is a contradiction in terms.

We deny God both as philosophers and as Buddhists,’ says KH. 

He adds: ‘We know there are planetary and other spiritual lives’ – often called planetary spirits or dhyani-chohans (a term that usually refers to beings who have evolved beyond the human kingdom). 

But they are certainly not ‘extra-cosmic’ or ‘supernatural’ spirits devoid of any substantial nature. 

‘Intelligence as found in our dhyan chohans,’ he says, ‘is a faculty that can appertain but to organized or animated being – however imponderable or rather invisible the materials of their organizations.’ 

The organisms of the highest planetary spirits or dhyani-chohans are composed of matter in its seventh state. 

Even the lowest planetary spirits are made of matter ‘so impalpable ... that science calls it energy and force’.

Most of the mahatmas are said to be advanced fifth-rounders, meaning that they have developed their consciousness to a level that most humans will not attain until far into the fifth round of the earth’s evolution. 

Gautama Buddha is described as a sixth-rounder.KH writes:

When our great Buddha – the patron of all the adepts, the reformer and the codifier of the occult system – reached first nirvana on earth, he became a planetary spirit; i.e. his spirit could at one and the same time rove the interstellar spaces in full consciousness, and continue at will on earth in his original and individual body. ... 

That is the highest form of adeptship man can hope for on our planet. 

But it is as rare as the buddhas themselves ...

The God of the theologians,’ says KH, ‘is an imaginary power ...’

Our chief aim is to deliver humanity of this nightmare, and to teach man virtue for its own sake, and to walk in life relying on himself instead of leaning on a theological crutch, that for countless ages was the direct cause of nearly all human misery. 

Pantheistic we may be called – agnostic NEVER.

The one life of which occultists speak is anything but an extra-cosmic deity. Infinite and all-pervading, it is ‘the essence of every atom of matter’ in infinite space and is in fact ‘matter itself’.

KH continues:

Who but a theologian nursed on mystery and the most absurd supernaturalism can imagine a self-existent being of necessity infinite and omnipresent outside the manifested boundless universe? ... 

We deny the absurd proposition that there can be, even in a boundless and eternal universe, two infinite eternal and omnipresent existences.

Commenting on the behaviour of Jehovah as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible, KH says:

He who reads our Buddhist scriptures written for the superstitious masses will fail to find in them a demon so vindictive, unjust, so cruel and so stupid as the celestial tyrant upon whom the [orthodox] Christians prodigally lavish their servile worship and on whom their theologians heap those perfections that are contradicted on every page of their Bible.

Ignorance created Gods and cunning took advantage of the opportunity. ... 

The sum of human misery will never be diminished until that day when the better portion of humanity destroys in the name of truth, morality, and universal charity, the altars of their false gods.

David Pratt