WHAT IS THE INNER GOD? by Clive Bellgrove
There are a great many references to this matter spread throughout the theosophical literature; but there are necessarily very few real details. There cannot be. It is a subject which cannot be approached through empiricism, the searching for and testing of facts; for what is there about Divinity of any kind that can be handled, inspected, tested? How much does anyone here present know about Divinity? Do any of us know what shape Divinity is?
We can approach the subject only through Reason, and we have been encouraged to reason from analogy; this we shall endeavour to do. When I was in my late teens two interesting matters dealing with the subject of this paper came to my attention. First, a wise old man I knew used to speak about the “Order, Method and System in all Nature.” Secondly, I was encouraged to read the Bible for the first time, and commenced with the Book of Revelations, which horrified me. The next book was the Gospel According to John, in which I read for the first time the astonishing words “Ye are gods.” I could not reconcile the facts of being a god and a human being at the same time. I went back to the “Order, Method and System” statement, and reasoned that where these occurred there must be a conscious intelligence working who ordained and governed these manifestations. I reasoned that, wherever one looks in visible Nature, there are so-called Laws of Nature in operation; Laws which clearly allow for some degree of latitude, but which, overall, are relentlessly precise. There is an ancient Greek saying, attributed to both Pythagoras and Plato, that “God geometrizes.: Geometry, Mathematics, is a precise science. One could see the application of this in the teaching about “Sowing and Reaping.” The seasons followed each other in regular order. Nature ensured that water always flowed downhill. In nothing was this mathematical regularity so conclusively proved to the modern mind than in the discovery of the planets Neptune and Pluto. Perturbations in the orbits of the known planets indicated that the regularity of the Solar System was disturbed by some unknown quantity. An English astronomer calculated, mathematically, that there should be a stellar object at a certain place in the night sky at a certain time. He communicated his ideas to other astronomers throughout
Europe; and within, it is said, a matter of hours the cause of the perturbations was found, the planet
Neptune. Similarly, and for the same reasons, in 1930 the planet Pluto was discovered. And it may be added that, also for the same reasons, astronomers are searching for yet more planets beyond the orbit of Pluto to account for the known disorder in the orbits of planets in the solar system. This process demonstrated the precision with which nature works. Philosophically, it would be impossible for such precision to operate in some areas of Nature and not in others. Above all things, Nature is consistent, ultimately. These – Order, Method and System – must be, and are, of universal application; not only in visible nature, but surely throughout universal Nature to infinity. These Laws, these methods must apply, always appropriately, to collections of galaxies, to galaxies, to universal solar systems, to solar systems, to human beings, to the members of the beast kingdom, to the vegetable kingdom, to the mineral kingdom, and to all phases of manifestation either above or below these just mentioned. Every atom in existence, whether on our visible plane, or higher or lower, is in motion; there is nothing static in all infinity. There being nothing static anywhere in all infinity, there must logically be varying degrees of intelligences to oversee, organize these varying manifestations. It is therefore reasonable to believe that the beings on one plane of manifestation would look to those who are on a higher plane as being Gods. Thus those who are gods to lesser beings, are themselves lesser beings to higher Gods who control their destinies. In a non-static infinity, there clearly is Motion everywhere. Where there is motion there must be Life, living intelligences to retain the repetitive action of such motion. And there can be no such thing as a reservoir of intelligence existing apart from conscious intelligences, intelligent beings. In the instance of a human being, ourselves, an area in which we can apply some measure of the principles of empiricism, we know that we are more than the mere physical body which we see in a mirror. We know that there are differences between the wakeful body and the inert, sleeping body. We know the difference between the live physical body and a dead one. We know that there must be reasons for these differences, and every human being has his or her own opinions about those differences. The multitude of atoms that make up the physical body, each with a life cycle of millionths of a second, ceaselessly dying and being replaced, are held together in an enduring framework, so that we see ourselves from day to day as the same person; yet physically not the same person that we were millionths of a second previously. According to theosophy, the vehicle or ‘body’ that holds all this multitude of atoms in place and functioning properly is the Astral Body, which itself develops from an infra-microscopic spec into, eventually, a fully matured and then aged body. Within these two, the Astral and the Physical Bodies, manifest many and varied emotions, which we know are not our total consciousness; because we can think in terms higher than mere emotion. And we know that Mind, our ordinary everyday thinking process is not the crown of our being which, in an everyday sense, is Idealism. We know that Mind is not the ceiling of our being, because we are able to change our mind, change our thought processes, and that therefore some part of our makeup, higher than mind, must have the ability to do this. We know that higher than Idealism, higher than ordinary, everyday thought, are Inspiration, Conscience and Intuition, characteristics which clearly must reach us from a source higher than the ordinary human mind. Into this higher realm enter the qualities of devotion, dedication, selflessness and all other altruistic characteristics, called by some the Christ-quality, by others the Buddhic Splendour. And at this point it is surely not difficult to reason a step further and envisage a being who manifests the highest qualities as a normal part of its being, in other words, a God. All great philosophies, all true religions, have taught the existence of Gods; and the plural has been and is used far and wide, even in the Christian teachings.
Conversely, we see that Gods come into manifestation, both for their own reasons, and because they are subject to the Laws of Nature, which call for descent into lesser ranges of manifestation to gain experience and to triumph over difficulties, then to evolve to a range of being higher than they had attained before. Astronomers see and photograph the night sky, and observe stellar systems and bodies in all-various stages of manifestation; some coming into existence, some in their babyhood, some in childhood, some in youth, some in maturity, some in old age, and some dying. They also see areas in space where systems or stars have been, but which are now “empty”, the entity that was there having died and withdrawn, temporarily, from manifestation. In all these areas of space empiricism applies; these things can be investigated, assessed, and checked. We can do the same with mankind, with the animal kingdom, the vegetable kingdom and the mineral kingdom. We see order, method and system throughout. Why should the process cease at those frontiers, higher and lower, which set the limit to human penetration? A divine being calls a galaxy into existence; a lesser divinity manifests as a universal solar system; lesser gods come into being as individual stars, planets, and in their early stages, comets. At the apex of the structure of each human being is a divinity, who manifests on a planet such as ours as the tip-end of a ray. That divine ray draws together the parents of the incoming entity and the substance it will need for the commencement of manifestation as a new-born babe. A comet does the same with the birth of a stellar body. Analogically and reasonably, where there is life and motion, there must be divinity in manifestation. It is not difficult to reason that a God who manifests as a galactic universe is, to use a term which I prefer and frequently use, a “Co-ordinator” of all the vast system of which he is the hierarch; which he emanates forth from himself, and eventually indraws into himself after an appropriate period of experience in the many and various planes of being in which he (or it) has functioned. He has brought into existence all the immensely powerful great “king” or “raja” suns, which govern the destinies of the lesser suns or stars, vehicles in which lesser gods “live and move and have their being.” As with all the stars in all the galaxies, visible and invisible through all Space, surely there is for each star an individual divinity who sends his life and energy throughout the system which he, too, emanates forth from himself, forming planets (still lesser divinities) and their races of humans, beasts, vegetable life, mineral life and entities less than these; imbuing atoms with their characteristics, and so on and on throughout the vast ranges of being of even a mere star! Similarly, each human being, commencing each phase of existence as the tip-end of a ray of a solar divinity, brought into manifestation by a god seeking further experience and evolution, has at the top of that ray a divinity in its own right, which organizes the entire existence over countless lifetimes of each such human being, from alpha to omega, from first to last, from beginning to end. Reasonably also, this process must apply to the beast, to every specimen of plant life, to every particle in the mineral world, to every atom, and to every items in every phase of manifestation less than the atom.
For myself, I see Divinity everywhere, and think of it as existing throughout infinity. I see “an impress of an invisible order on visible realities” (Schure 2/77). I see everywhere the delegation of power, authority and responsibility. Everywhere do I see co-ordination, Order, Method and System. Scientists with their spectroscopes can see the coloured lines which show that the elements of Earth exist also in the furthermost visible galaxy and the nearest star. Where there is such harmony, such co-ordination there clearly must be a Co-ordinator, a Divinity working. In his essay “Essay on Man’ Alexander Pope wrote “Man know thyself, presume not god to scan; the proper study of mankind is man.” This saying puzzled me for many years, until I realized that in understanding himself, man could understand all other beings, through analogical reasoning. For, surely, man himself is a god, governing the destinies of all the vast multitude of lesser beings who make up not only his physical body, but of all the other bodies or vehicles which house the other aspects of his entire being; his astral body, his emotional body, his mind, lower and higher, and that Christ quality, that Buddhic Splendour, that is within each and every one of us. The privilege, the responsibility of parenthood are immense, mysterious, beautiful and wonderful beyond the ability of words to frame. An entity is returning to earth life after so recently having been reunited with its parent God, whose habitat is the returning entity’s own Parent Star, one of the vast system of stars within our own home galaxy. How true the ancient Greek saying that “we entertain the gods unawares!” Far from being miserable sinners as is so often taught, we humans are splendid beings in our own right. By our mistakes in past lives we have drawn veils over the face of our Inner Divinity, and it is the purpose of our repeated existence in earth life to lift those veils, ultimately to see the face of our own Divinity “face to face.” In the meantime, that Inner Divinity strives to draw us, self-consciously, to a higher quality of life. It is not the Divinity within that errs; but rather the lesser thinking, emotional part of our being. Each and every human being, without exception, has great dignity within him, and endless resources to call upon if he will. Already we have evolved to our present phase of existence, but there is far yet to travel on the pathway to spiritual illumination.We, who start out on that pathway which eventually leads to the foothills of the
Himalayas of the Soul, hopefully eventually to scale the very Everests of Consciousness, help in their development all that vast universe of lesser beings to whom we are a god, already, now! Thus with this sort of reasoning I found my understanding of the expression “Ye are gods!” I could understand the meaning of the words “The Inner Divinity in
Man.” Perhaps these thoughts may be beyond the ready understanding of many people. At the entrance of the famous Institute at
Crotona, in
Magna Graecia where Pythagoras taught, there stood a statue of Hermes, the Messenger of the Gods. And on its pedestal were engraved the words “AWAY, YE PROFANE.” The profane never attempted to enter, such was the respect for that teacher and his school. But those who were ready, who had evolved beyond being merely profane, were welcomed and were taught these great cosmological teachings, and more. At Point Loma,
California,
U.S.A., (the former headquarters of our Theosophical Society (
Pasadena)), early in the 20th century, Katherine Tingley taught her pupils and once wrote these words:-
“OH MY DIVINITY! thou dost blend with the earth and fashion for thyself
Temples of mighty power.
OH MY DIVINITY! thou livest in the heart-life of all things and dost radiate a Golden Light that shineth forever and doth illumine even the darkest corners of the earth.
OH MY DIVINITY! blend thou with me that from the corruptible I may become Incorruptible; that from imperfection I may become Perfection; that from darkness I may go forth in Light.”
The text is from a lecture delivered at a meeting of the Theosophical Society (Pasadena) in Melbourne, Australia. The views expressed are those of the author, and not necessarily those of the Theosophical Society (Pasadena).