theosophy
The theosophical teachings on evolution given out since the formation of the Theosophical Society in 1875 are merely a general outline of the information in the possession of the Brotherhood of Adepts.1 This information is said to have been compiled and repeatedly verified by countless generations of sages and seers, whose occult powers grant them access to the inner realms of nature and enable them to read the records of the earth’s history clairvoyantly. The adepts are also said to possess written records, fossils, technological inventions, and other artifacts from bygone ages. They disseminate their knowledge in proportion to people’s ability to respond to it intelligently.
Darwinism is rooted in the materialistic assumption that the universe consists essentially of physical matter and energy, and that mind and consciousness are merely byproducts of the brain. According to the theosophic tradition, on the other hand, the physical world is the outer shell of inner worlds – astral, mental, and spiritual. Likewise, every physical organism is animated by inner, subtler ‘bodies’ or souls, including an astral model-body (the template for the physical body), an instinctive or selfconscious mind, of widely varying degrees of development, and a spiritual-divine self or monad. Evolution involves the unfolding of latent powers and capacities in response to impulses from within and stimuli from without, and the development of suitable physical forms through which they can be expressed.
Theosophy rejects the darwinian theory of common descent, i.e. the notion that the first unicellular organisms have undergone successive bodily transformations, leading eventually to all the present creatures, including man. The enormous gaps in the fossil record prove that there has been no continuous, gradual transformation of one species into a higher species. Darwinists of the ‘punctuationist’ school recognize this and argue that new species arise relatively suddenly in small, isolated populations, and that such episodes of speciation are separated by long periods of stasis, in which species undergo little change. However, their insistence that these sudden spurts of evolutionary creativity are ultimately based on blind chance places great strains on our credulity.
H.P. Blavatsky and G. de Purucker cited various pieces of evidence contradicting the ape-ancestry theory, including finds of human remains, footprints, and stone tools, such as those presented in section 3, showing that humans of one type or another existed in much earlier geologic periods than orthodox evolutionary theory allows,1 and evidence such as that mentioned in the previous section, showing that the modern human anatomy is simpler and less specialized than that of our supposed ancestors.2 They also mentioned several contemporary scientists who believed that apes had evolved from man, while man had evolved from other types of animals.3 Blavatsky called the ape-ancestry hypothesis ‘self-degrading’ and ‘the most extravagant theory of the ages’.4
Referring to the Lemurian episode of interbreeding, the Stanzas of Dzyan7 state that ‘those who had no spark’ (i.e. nonselfconscious humans) ‘took huge she-animals unto them’,* which belonged to several species and were quite different from any known today, and ‘begat upon them dumb races’. The offspring are described as a ‘race of crooked, red-hair-covered monsters, going on all fours’, ‘a truly pithecoid species, now extinct’, and a Commentary mentions: ‘Red-haired, swarthy men going on all-fours, who bend and unbend (stand erect and fall on their hands again) who speak as their forefathers, and run on their hands as their giant fore-mothers.’8
In the epic Hindu poem the Ramayana, the apes are depicted as far more humanlike than they are today; they even talk and have their own governments and laws. Led by Hanuman, the monkey god, they fight on the side of Rama against the Rakshasas of Lanka in the great epic war of India. Viewed theosophically, the depiction of the apes in the Hindu legend is not entirely fictional.
Darwinism is rooted in the materialistic assumption that the universe consists essentially of physical matter and energy, and that mind and consciousness are merely byproducts of the brain. According to the theosophic tradition, on the other hand, the physical world is the outer shell of inner worlds – astral, mental, and spiritual. Likewise, every physical organism is animated by inner, subtler ‘bodies’ or souls, including an astral model-body (the template for the physical body), an instinctive or selfconscious mind, of widely varying degrees of development, and a spiritual-divine self or monad. Evolution involves the unfolding of latent powers and capacities in response to impulses from within and stimuli from without, and the development of suitable physical forms through which they can be expressed.
Theosophy rejects the darwinian theory of common descent, i.e. the notion that the first unicellular organisms have undergone successive bodily transformations, leading eventually to all the present creatures, including man. The enormous gaps in the fossil record prove that there has been no continuous, gradual transformation of one species into a higher species. Darwinists of the ‘punctuationist’ school recognize this and argue that new species arise relatively suddenly in small, isolated populations, and that such episodes of speciation are separated by long periods of stasis, in which species undergo little change. However, their insistence that these sudden spurts of evolutionary creativity are ultimately based on blind chance places great strains on our credulity.
H.P. Blavatsky and G. de Purucker cited various pieces of evidence contradicting the ape-ancestry theory, including finds of human remains, footprints, and stone tools, such as those presented in section 3, showing that humans of one type or another existed in much earlier geologic periods than orthodox evolutionary theory allows,1 and evidence such as that mentioned in the previous section, showing that the modern human anatomy is simpler and less specialized than that of our supposed ancestors.2 They also mentioned several contemporary scientists who believed that apes had evolved from man, while man had evolved from other types of animals.3 Blavatsky called the ape-ancestry hypothesis ‘self-degrading’ and ‘the most extravagant theory of the ages’.4
Referring to the Lemurian episode of interbreeding, the Stanzas of Dzyan7 state that ‘those who had no spark’ (i.e. nonselfconscious humans) ‘took huge she-animals unto them’,* which belonged to several species and were quite different from any known today, and ‘begat upon them dumb races’. The offspring are described as a ‘race of crooked, red-hair-covered monsters, going on all fours’, ‘a truly pithecoid species, now extinct’, and a Commentary mentions: ‘Red-haired, swarthy men going on all-fours, who bend and unbend (stand erect and fall on their hands again) who speak as their forefathers, and run on their hands as their giant fore-mothers.’8
In the epic Hindu poem the Ramayana, the apes are depicted as far more humanlike than they are today; they even talk and have their own governments and laws. Led by Hanuman, the monkey god, they fight on the side of Rama against the Rakshasas of Lanka in the great epic war of India. Viewed theosophically, the depiction of the apes in the Hindu legend is not entirely fictional.
posted by CaptainGoldStar at 12:36 AM
2 Comments:
I tend to think that both evolutionary biology and theosophy need not be mutually exclusive.
indeed
unless one or the other is false.
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