politics and religion: christianity versus the pantheistic

[prozak at anus.com]

[ Digging up information on Hinduism and materialism for a project 
about Judeo-Christian ethics in language. ]

Commentary -- From Savitri Devi's "Impeachment of Man", 1959.

PESSIMISTIC PANTHEISM

Besides th[e] man-centered outlook of more thn half the world... 
there is
the entirely different view of the Hindus and of the main religions 
that
have
sprung from Hinduism, namely Jainism and Buddhism.  We should, for 
the
sake of
convienience, call this view the Indian view, as opposed to the 
formerly
described Jewish view, for the oly great international religion which 
has
inherited it -- Buddhism -- is as essentially indebted to earlier 
Indian
thought as Christianity and Islam are to [Israelite] tradition, and 
even
more
so.

The Indian view can be summarized in one sentence: it consists of 
seeing,
in all forms of life, manifestations of the selfsame divine Power at 
play
on
various levels of consciousness.  It is centered around the 
fundamental
idea
of the everlastingness of the individual soul -- not merely of its
immortality -- and of its life in millions and millions of bodies, 
through
millions and millions of successive births.  It proclaims the 
continuity
of
life in time and space, which is the logical corrollary of the dogma 
of
birth
and rebirth, and denies the breach between man and the rest of the 
animal
world.  Such a breach, according to it, is artificial.  Man's 
tendency to
believe in its existence is either the produce of superficial 
observation,
badly interpreted, or else the result of an arbitrary valuation, 
rooted in
human pride, and hardly less ridiculous than that of those rabid
nationalists
who, without any justification, hold their own people to be 
"objectively"
the
most gifted on earth and the most precious to the world.

Nobody knows when and where the dogma of birth and rebirt originated. 
 It
may well be as old as mankind, and it was perhaps put forth 
simultaneously
in
different parts of thje world during the long unrecorded centuries of
prehistory.  But it is undoubtedly in India that it found its most
elaborate
expression, and rose from the status of a spontaneous animistic 
belief to
that
of a consistent explantion of the universe -- a philosophy.  And that
philosophy, one can say, is not only the one of the mighty 
subcontinent
which
stretched from the Himalayas to Ceylon -- the basis that all Indian
schools of
thought accepted as a starting point -- but it seems also, to be the 
one
common element in all the various tendencies of Asiatic thought which
India
has influenced, directly or indirectly, through Buddhism.  And the 
success
of
all attempts at extending the influence of Indian thought to the West
depends -
- and cannot but depend -- primarily upon the widespread preaching of 
tht
one
fundamental belief in successive reincarnations.

That belief is, as we have said, incompatible with any theory that
pretends
man to be different by nature from the rest of living creation, and 
that
concedes special "rights" to him on that assumption.  The endeavor of 
some
Theosophists to maintain an irreducible breach between humanity and
animalhood
by introducing in their explanation of the hereafter the idea of 
animal
"group-
souls" [is] nothing more than a subtle reaction of the many centuries 
old
Christian that lies half-asleep bt fully alive -- and unexpectedly
assertive
at times -- below the superficial layer of Indian thought in most of 
these
strange neo-Hindus from the West.  The Bagawad Gita makes no mention
whatsoever of group souls;  nor does, as far as we know, any 
recognized
Hindu "shastra" in which the question of birth and rebirth is 
discussed
On
the contrary, it would seem that, in the eyes of the Indian sages, 
authors
of
the Scriptures, as well as in those of the ordinary Hindu, every soul 
is
endowed from all times (and not merely from the day it enters a human
body)
with an individuality that persists throughout all its successive
incarnations, whatever be the different species in which these might 
take
place.

The same can be said of the theory that, once a soul has reached its 
first
human incarnation, it cannot but always take birth henceforth in a 
human
or
superhuman form, never in a subhuman one, whatever be its deeds;  the
theory
that the admission of a soul on the human place is "like passing an
examination", and that the sort of "diploma" thus acquired is 
irrevocably
granted, whether the candidate remains worthy of it or not.  These is
nothing
to confirm his view in the traditional beliefs of the Hindus.  On the
contrary, there are, in Hindu (and Buddhist) legend, instances of men
reborn
as animals for some time at least.  King Bharat (often called 
Jadabharat)
is
said to have beebn reborn as a deer;  and good King Asoka, the most
powerful
patron of buddhism -- an undoubtedly historic figure, whose dates are
known to
every Indian schoolboy -- was reborn, for a week or so, as a
boa-constricter,
in punishment for a temporary lack of equanimity, according to an
assumption,
the Buddhist tradition has recorded.

In other words, a believer in the doctrine of reincarnation can never 
be
quite sure that the mangy dog that he sees lying in the slush is not 
one
of
his deceased relatives or friends expiating some unsuspected yet 
greivous
offence in that miserable garb -- some offence perhaps unknown to the
sinner
himself;  perhaps benial in the eyes of human justice, but serious 
enough,
when judged from the standpoint of the divine, immanent laws of cause 
and
effect, to give its author a canine body, to starve him, to afflict 
him
with
mange, and to send him to die in the gutter.  And similarly it may be 
that
a
particular man's human enemy is none but the hungry dog that lay at 
his
door
some thirty years before, and which he did not care to feed.  It may 
be
that a
woman's son, source of joy and pride to her, is none but the 
abandoned
kitten
that she once picked up in the street, and that purred in her hand as 
she
brought it home.  No one can tell and as soon as one admits the
possibility
for the same everlasting soul to pass from one body to another -- 
from a
lesser species to a more evolved one, or vice versa, according to its
deeds --
one can, logically, be expected to have, on the whole scheme of life, 
an
entirely different outlook from that implied in the religions that 
teach
that
man alone has a soul, and, moreover, an immortal but not an 
uncreated,
everlasting one.  One can be expected to feel the majestic unity of 
life
which
unerlies the endless diversity of the visible world, and to look upon
animals
(and plants) as potential men and supermen, and to treat them with 
all the
loving kindness which the Christians, Mohammedans, and hmanitarian 
Free
Thinkers are taught to treat the people of the inferior human races 
(and
the
inferior men of their own race), potential saints of heaven or, at 
least,
potential useful citizens in a better earthly social order, according 
to
the
respective man centered creeds.

And that is not all.  The Hindu teaching, inherited by Jainism and
Buddhism, and practically all the life centered schools of thought 
drawing
their inspiration from India, does not merely imply the identity of 
the
individual soul, thoughout all its successive incarnations.  It 
stresses
to
the utmost the fundamental identity of all the individual souls, be 
they
incarnated in many or any stratum of the living world, at the same 
time or
at
different times.  Not only is every soul now embodied in an earth-
worm "on
its
way" to earn superior consciousness after millions and millions of 
births
and
to become, in the course of time, an all-knowing, liberated sage,
a "tirthankara" as the jains say, but the soul of every individual
earthworm,
of every individual snail or toad, ass or pig, man or monkey -- of 
every
living creature -- is by nature, substantially, identical to that of 
the
god
like sage.  It only differs from it in broadness and clearness of
consciousness, that is to say, in degree of knowledge.  It can reach 
the
glorious goal that the sage has reached.  And the sage himself, 
before
being
what he is, had lived through untold milleniums of ignorance and 
unrest,
haltingly striving towards supreme peace as an average man, as an 
inferior
man, as an ape, as a donkey, as an earth worm;  as a jeely-fish in 
the
middle
of the sea.

It would seem, at first, that nothing can prepare a man to love all 
living
nature better than that grand vision of universal evoltion, physical 
and
spiritual, provided by Hindu Pantheism -- that knowledge that every
individual
body, whether fitted with only two legs or with four, with six or 
with
eight,
or many more, be it of a man, of an animal or of a plant, is an 
actual
spark
of the Divine, just as his own soul is, only at a somewhat lower or 
more
advanced stage of consciousness;  farther from or nearer to the 
ultimate
goal
of liberating knowledge and of supreme peace than he is himself.  And 
when
one
reads the words addressed to Arjuna by Lord Krishna, in the Bhagwad-
Gita:
"In
the learned Brahman, in a cow, an elephant, a dog, and in the man who 
eats
a
dog's flesh, the wise one discerns the Identical ..."  one is 
inclined, at
first to wonder how it is that dogs -- and Sudras -- are not better
treated
today in the blessed Land in which the seers of old evolved the most
beautiful
of all living religions.
-- 
Backup Rider of the Apocalypse
www.anus.com/metal/
DEATH AND BLACK METAL