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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of London Lectures of 1907, by Annie  Besant
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: London Lectures of 1907
+
+Author: Annie  Besant
+
+Release Date: March 12, 2007 [EBook #20800]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON LECTURES OF 1907 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Thierry Alberto, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           London Lectures
+
+                               of 1907
+
+
+
+                                  By
+
+                             Annie Besant
+
+                President of the Theosophical Society
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          London and Benares
+
+                 The Theosophical Publishing Society
+
+               City Agents: Lund, Humphries & Co., Ltd.
+
+               Adyar, Madras: The _Theosophist_ Office
+
+                         New York: John Lane
+
+                Chicago: The Theosophical Book Concern
+
+                                 1907
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+PART I
+
+PSYCHISM AND SPIRITUALITY
+
+THE PLACE OF MASTERS IN RELIGIONS
+
+THEOSOPHY AND THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE PLACE OF PHENOMENA IN THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
+
+SPIRITUAL AND TEMPORAL AUTHORITY
+
+THE RELATION OF THE MASTERS TO THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
+
+THE FUTURE OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE VALUE OF THEOSOPHY IN THE WORLD OF THOUGHT
+
+
+PART IV
+
+THE FIELD OF WORK OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Part I
+
+
+Psychism and Spirituality
+
+The Place of Masters in Religions
+
+Theosophy and the Theosophical Society
+
+
+_Three public Lectures delivered in the smaller Queen's Hall,
+London, on 16th, 23rd, and 30th June 1907._
+
+
+
+
+Psychism and Spirituality
+
+
+Our subject to-night consists of two words: psychism--spirituality. I
+am going to speak to you on the subjects denoted by these two words,
+because there is so much confusion about them in ordinary
+conversation, in ordinary literature, and out of that confusion much
+of harm arises. People think of one thing and use the name of the
+other, and so continually fall into blunders and mislead others with
+whom they talk. I want to-night to draw a sharp and intelligible
+division between psychism and spirituality; if possible, to explain
+very clearly what each of them means; so that, thoroughly
+understanding the meaning of the things, people may choose for
+themselves which of the two they desire to evolve, or unfold, within
+themselves. For if a person, desiring to unfold the spiritual nature,
+uses the means which are only adapted for developing the psychic
+nature, disappointment, possibly danger, will result; while, on the
+other hand, if a person desires to develop the psychic nature, and
+thinks that he will reach that development quickly by unfolding his
+spiritual powers, he also is equally doomed to disappointment; but in
+the second case, only to disappointment for a time. For while it is
+not true that the great psychic is necessarily a spiritual person, it
+is true that the great spiritual person is inevitably a psychic. All
+the powers of Nature are subject to the Spirit, and hence, when a man
+has truly unfolded his spiritual nature, there is nothing in the lower
+world which is not open to him and obedient to his will. In that
+sense, then, the man who follows the spiritual path will not
+ultimately be disappointed if he is seeking psychic development, but
+the very seeking for it will, on the spiritual path, act as a certain
+barrier. I shall return to the point again presently, and show you in
+what sense, and why, it is true that the development of the psychic
+powers may hinder the unfolding of the spiritual.
+
+Now, to distinguish clearly between the two, I will begin with two
+brief definitions. They will be expanded naturally in the course of
+the lecture, but I will define each of these two words in a single
+sentence so as to make the definition clear and brief. Spirituality is
+the Self-realisation of the One; psychism is the manifestation of the
+powers of consciousness through organised matter. Each word of that
+definition has its own value. We are far too apt, in our ordinary
+thought and talking, to limit the words "psychical," "psychic," or
+"psychism" in a quite illegitimate way, and the popular use of the
+term is illegitimate. It is generally used amongst us to mean unusual
+manifestations of the powers of consciousness, whereas, properly
+speaking, the word ought to cover every outer manifestation of
+consciousness, whether on the physical, on the astral, on the mental,
+or on the buddhic plane. It does not matter in what world you
+are moving, in what matter your consciousness is acting; so long as
+it is utilising organised matter for its own expression so long are
+those manifestations psychic, and are properly included under the term
+psychism. You may perhaps wonder why I lay stress on this. You will
+see it at once if I remind you that unless we keep this definition in
+mind--accurate, legitimate as it is--we shall be making a division
+between the manifestation of the consciousness on the physical and on
+the astral and mental planes, between its manifestation in the
+physical and those in the astral and mental bodies; and if we do that
+the whole of our thought will be on mistaken lines. You need
+practically to be pressed back to what you know of consciousness on
+the physical plane, before you can thoroughly follow its
+manifestations on the astral and on the mental. If you try to separate
+off manifestations which are the same in kind though differing in
+degree, according to the fineness of the matter which is employed, if
+you try to separate them off, you will always regard what you call
+psychism--that is, astral and mental manifestations in the subtler
+bodies--in an artificial and unwise manner. If, on the other hand, you
+realise that consciousness is one, that its manifestation on any plane
+is conditioned by the matter of the plane, that it is one in essence,
+only varying in degree according to the lessening or the increase of
+the resistance of the matter of the planes, then you will not be
+inclined to take up exaggerated views with regard to what people are
+so fond of calling psychism. You will not denounce it in the foolish
+way of many people, because in denouncing it you will know that you
+denounce all intellectual manifestations, an absurdity of which very
+few people are likely to be guilty; if you take your intellectual
+manifestations in the physical world as admirable things, to be always
+encouraged, strengthened, developed, then you will be compelled, by
+parity of reasoning, to understand that the manifestations of the same
+consciousness in finer matter, astral or mental, are equally worthy,
+and no more worthy, of development, of consideration. You will not
+find yourself in the absurdly illogical position of declaring it a
+good thing to train the physical plane consciousness, while it is
+dangerous to cultivate the astral and mental plane consciousness. You
+will understand that all psychism is of the same kind, that on each
+plane the development of psychism has its own laws; but that it is
+absurd to admire the working of consciousness on the lower plane, and
+shrink from it as something dangerous, almost diabolical, when it
+appears on a plane higher than the physical.
+
+It is this rational and common-sense view which I want to impress upon
+you to-night, to get you out of the region of mystery, marvel, wonder,
+and fear, which to so many people surround what is called psychism; to
+make you understand that you are unfolding consciousness, showing out
+your powers on one plane after another according to the organisation
+and the fineness of the bodies in which your consciousness is working;
+and that if you will only keep your common sense and reason, if you
+will only not allow yourself to be terrified by what at present is
+unusual, you may then walk along the psychic pathway in the astral or
+mental world, as resolutely, and with as great an absence of hysteria,
+as you walk along the psychic pathway in the physical world. That is
+the general idea; and, of course, this is the meaning in which, after
+all, the word is often used down here. When you say "psychology" you
+do not mean only the workings of consciousness in astral and mental
+bodies; you mean the whole consciousness of the man, the workings of
+the mind, wherever the mind is active; the whole of that you include
+under "psychology." Why, then, when you change its form, should you
+narrow it down, as though that which is mind on one plane is not also
+mind on all planes on which the mind is able to function?
+
+Now let us consider for a moment the workings of the mind on the
+physical plane: they are familiar. There is, however, one important
+point about them. In the materialistic science of the last century you
+had very widely spread, amongst scientific men, the view that thought
+was only the result of certain kinds of vibration in certain kinds of
+matter. I need not dwell on that. But you are aware that both in
+England, and more especially in France and Germany, most elaborate
+disquisitions were written to prove that thought was only the product
+of nervous matter. You rarely, I think never, now find a well-trained
+scientist prepared to commit himself to that position. Those who
+survive as representatives of that same school may do so, but they are
+literally survivals. The mass of psychologists of to-day admit that
+the manifestations of mind cannot any longer be regarded as the
+results of vibrations in the physical brain, that at least we must go
+beyond these limitations when dealing with the results of the study
+of consciousness, as it is now studied amongst scientific men. They
+will no longer, then, regard thought as the product of matter. They
+certainly will not be prepared to go as far as I now propose to go,
+and say that the thinking organism is the production of thought--the
+very antithesis, you will agree, of the other position, but which is
+vital to the understanding of the unfolding of the powers of
+consciousness through matter. It is recognised in ordinary biology
+that the function appears before the organ. There I am on safe
+scientific ground. It is recognised that the exercise of the function
+gradually builds up the organ. All the researches into the simpler
+forms of organisms go to prove that. It is also recognised that when
+the exercise of the function has built the organ in a very simple
+form, the exercise of the function continually improves the organ
+which originally it builded. So far we are hand in hand with ordinary
+science. I think I shall not go too far in saying that a large number
+of the more scientific psychologists of to-day will at least agree
+that the brain as you find it in the adult man is very largely the
+result of the exercise of thinking through the earlier years of life.
+I do not think they would go so far as to say that thinking has
+literally produced it. They would, however, judging by very many
+things that have been said, be willing to admit that by hard thinking
+we can improve our apparatus of thought. That is one reason for
+thinking hard--in order to think better. And the harder you think, the
+more will your thinking instrument improve.
+
+In my next step, however, I cannot by any stretching of ordinary
+science persuade it to accompany me, or give me a foundation; for the
+point is that your consciousness, working on the next plane above the
+one on which the organ of consciousness is being built, is the shaper
+of that mechanism. To put it concretely: your physical brain is built
+up from the astral plane, and it is your consciousness working in
+matter finer than the physical which builds up the brain in the
+forming child within the limits laid down by karma. Now, that is a
+general law for healthy evolution. You will see the importance of this
+law a little further on. Every body which we possess--physical,
+astral, mental, buddhic--is always built up by consciousness
+working in the plane next above it; the next plane, or world, is a
+world very much more "next" than you are next each other sitting
+here--not far away beyond the stars, removed by great spaces. It is
+interpenetrating you in every portion of your being. It is only "next"
+in the sense that the solids, liquids, and gases of your bodies are
+next each other in the body--not far away, but here. So that the
+working is of the closest and most intimate kind. Some of you who are
+students of Theosophical literature will remember that H.P.B. has
+spoken of all of us as working in the astral consciousness. You will
+see that you are not working with a physical consciousness in the
+literal sense of the term, if you think for a moment. How much do you
+know of the consciousness working in the various cells and tissues of
+your physical body? Practically nothing, except when you are ill. Only
+when the body is disorganised do you become conscious of that working.
+Normally, the motion of your blood, the building up by assimilation
+of your muscles and nerves, the life of your cells, the protective
+action of some of the living cells in your body--the "devourers," as
+they are called--go on without your knowledge, without your thought,
+without your giving one moment's conscious attention to them. In the
+Perfect Man, the consciousness of all this is ever present, but in us,
+imperfect, it is not; we are not yet sufficiently vitalised and
+unfolded to carry on the whole of our consciousness, with full
+awareness of all its activities. We are only able to manage a very
+small part of it, and so have let go the consciousness that keeps at
+work the physical body, to concentrate ourselves in a higher world,
+and utilise the nervous mechanism as the apparatus of our thinking.
+That law obtains, then, all through. If you want to organise and build
+up your astral body, you can only do it from the mental plane. You
+must raise your thought to a higher power by concentration, by regular
+meditation, by deliberately working on the consciousness, before you
+can raise it to that power from which it shall be able to organise
+your astral body, as it has already organised your physical body. That
+is the reason why meditation is necessary in all these things; because
+without the creative power of thought we cannot organise the body in
+the world which is nearest to the physical.
+
+Now, supposing that we recognise that our consciousness working in the
+physical brain, the instrument over which we have complete control, is
+continually at work contacting the outer world, using the brain as an
+instrument on which it can play, and continually bringing down from
+higher worlds impressions which it transmits more or less perfectly
+to the physical plane, we need not dwell upon our ordinary thinking.
+Let us take thinking a little more unusual, where the finer part of
+the brain, its etheric matter, is being more largely vitalised, more
+definitely used. The powers of the imagination--the creative
+power--the artistic powers, all creative in their nature, these
+utilise most the ethers of the brain, and, by working in those, bring
+into activity the lower and coarser matter of the dense brain. Now,
+the thought passes from the consciousness through vehicle after
+vehicle to find its clear expression here. But do you not have many
+mental impressions that are not clear, not well defined, and yet which
+impress you deeply, and of which you feel sure? They are of many
+kinds, and reach you in many ways. What is important to you is simply
+this for the moment: that being surrounded by the astral and mental
+worlds, contacts from these are continually touching you, continually
+causing changes in your consciousness. If your astral body were
+thoroughly organised like your physical, the impressions made would be
+clear and sharp like the physical. If your mental body were well
+organised, the impressions of that plane, the heavenly plane, would be
+clear and sharp like the physical. But as the astral and mental bodies
+at this stage of evolution are not well organised, the impressions
+received by them, causing changes in the consciousness, are vague and
+indeterminate, and it is these which are generally called "psychic."
+And when you have a Psychical Research Society, it is not dealing with
+the ordinary processes of thought, but with those which are not
+ordinary; and all those things to which it gives many strange names
+are all workings of the consciousness, in sheaths or bodies of which
+it has not yet gained the mastery, which it has not yet definitely
+organised for its purposes. Slowly and gradually they become
+organised, and strenuous thinking is the method for the astral body,
+and the working of the pure reason is the method for the mental body.
+Let us consider with regard to this, whether there is any other way of
+bringing the astral body and mental body into activity. For you may
+have noticed that I used the word "normal" evolution, orderly
+evolution on the lines of natural evolution, always from above. But
+you may stimulate it from below. It is possible to stimulate the
+astral body, at least, from the physical plane, but you do it at the
+cost of higher evolution a little later on, and the reason you can do
+it is simple enough. In the astral body are all the centres of your
+senses. You know how after death a man's desires are the same as they
+were during his physical life. You know how in dreams your desires
+resemble desires that you may have in your waking consciousness. The
+centre of all your psychic powers, of your conscious powers, the
+centres of these are in the astral, and if (especially with your
+senses, each of which has its own centre in the astral body) you
+overstrain the physical senses down here, you will get an action on
+the astral plane, but an unhealthy, because disorderly one, one not
+going along the line of evolution but trying to create from below
+instead of from above. None the less, you may have some results, and
+in the two famous Indian systems for developing the powers of the
+consciousness, and for unfolding the consciousness itself, you have
+this recognised, and you read of Raja Yoga and of Hatha Yoga, of the
+Kingly Yoga and of the Yoga of Effort. The Yoga of Effort is Hatha
+Yoga, and is practised by physical means and followed by physical
+effects. The eye is stimulated in certain ways, and the effect of
+straining the physical eye is to bring about a certain limited kind of
+clairvoyance. You can gain it in that way by gazing into crystals, and
+so on. They do stimulate the centre of physical sight, but not the
+astral; and that is why they cannot go very far. You can get a certain
+amount of clairvoyance by these means, but you are only expanding your
+physical sight, and working on centres of the astral body connected
+with the physical organ of vision, the eye. The true astral sight is
+an entirely different thing. That comes from a centre of its own in
+the astral body. It has to be created from the mental body, as the
+organ of the physical was from the astral. The centre of that sight
+will be in the mental body and not in the astral, and only the organ
+of it in the astral body. The method of the Kingly, the Raja Yoga, is
+always by thought--concentrate, meditate, contemplate, think: by that
+means, in a healthy, normal, natural way you will inevitably develop
+the powers of sight on the astral, as in the course of Nature the
+powers of sight were developed on the physical plane. And if you
+realise that your consciousness is one, building its bodies for its
+fuller and more complete expression, that you are here in order to
+become masters of matter instead of its slaves, to become lords of
+matter, using every organ of matter for knowledge of the world to
+which that matter belongs, and not to be blinded by it, as we are for
+so long a time in our climb upwards, then you will see that this
+natural development of astral powers is inevitable in the course of
+evolution, and all that you can do is to quicken it, following the
+line which Nature has traced. As Nature slowly will evolve in every
+human being the power of using the astral body as freely as you use
+the physical body now, so can you quicken the coming of that day for
+yourselves by understanding the powers of thought and turning them to
+the object you desire to obtain. There are many ways in which this may
+be done, and many rules you may learn for your guidance. Those rules
+may be summed up under two heads: clear and strenuous thinking,
+discipline for the bodies that you are trying to evolve; and also, I
+should add, for the body below them in evolution. Those are the two
+great laws for the safe evolution of these so-called psychic powers,
+what I call the powers of the consciousness on the astral and mental
+planes. There must be a discipline for the bodies, for you have to
+choose the material which will serve you best in the work you are
+doing out of the innumerable combinations of matter with which Nature
+presents you. You must choose the combinations that will serve your
+purpose, which you can utilise in the building of the organs of sense
+on plane after plane. Just as really as the man who is a drunkard will
+injure his nervous system by his excesses, and by supplying coarse and
+over-active compounds will injure the physical body, so making it a
+less useful instrument for the man--as any excess, not only
+drunkenness, but gluttony, profligacy, and so on--as these injure the
+physical body as an instrument of consciousness, and to have full and
+perfect consciousness here we must train, discipline, build up our
+body with knowledge and with self-control, so also is that true on the
+higher planes. A regimen is necessary when you are dealing with the
+organisation of the subtler matter of the astral and mental worlds,
+for you cannot build up your physical body out of the coarser
+combinations of matter on the physical, and have finer combinations on
+the astral and mental. The bodies have to match each other. They have
+to correspond with each other; and as you find all sorts of
+combinations related the one to the other on every plane, you must
+choose your combinations on the physical if you desire to choose them
+also on the astral and mental. You cannot make your physical body
+coarse, and organise the astral and mental bodies for the finer
+purposes of the man; and you must settle that in your minds if you
+wish to try to develop these higher powers of consciousness. Not only
+because if you gather together the coarser materials of the astral
+world, you will find yourself hampered by them in the higher
+expression of consciousness, but also because the presence of these
+combinations in you exposes you to a number of dangers on the astral
+plane. The purer the elements of your astral body, the safer you are
+in your earlier wanderings on that plane. It is important to mention
+this, because in some of the schools of thought which are trying only
+to develop astral powers, you will find that they deliberately use
+other methods in order to make their astral body active. Many schools
+of the "left hand path" in India will use spirits, wines, meats of all
+sorts, in order to bring about a certain astral condition, and they
+succeed, because by these means they attract to themselves, and for a
+time govern, the elemental powers of those lower planes--the
+elementals of the lower astral worlds. So that you may find that an
+Indian, who knows a little of this and wants to use it for his own
+purposes, will deliberately use these things which are attractive to
+the elementals of those lower worlds, and gather them around him and
+use them. But he does it knowing what he does, and aiming at that
+which he desires to conquer. But amongst those who practise black
+magic of the higher kinds--of the mental kinds--you have an asceticism
+as stern and rigid as has ever been used by those who are trying to
+develop their higher bodies for nobler ends. It is a mistake to think
+that the brothers of the dark side are, as a rule, licentious and
+indifferent to what you call morality. On the contrary, they are
+exceedingly strict. Their faults are the faults of the mind, not the
+faults of the lower desires, of the organs of the different bodies
+which may gratify them. Their faults are the more dangerous faults of
+mental powers misused for personal ends. But they realise very well
+that if they want the mental powers and the higher ranges of those
+powers, they must be as rigid in the discipline of the lower bodies as
+any pupil of the White Lodge could be. Take it, then, that to develop
+in this way, a regimen for the bodies, as well as the strict working
+and training of the mind, is absolutely necessary. But with these the
+result is sure. You cannot set a time for the result, for it depends
+where the worker is beginning in his present life. In all these
+matters Nature's laws will not permit of what is called miraculous
+growth, and if you find persons developing psychic powers very
+rapidly, when perhaps they have been meditating only a few months, it
+is because in a previous life they have cultivated these powers and
+are taking up their lessons again in a more advanced class of
+evolution, and not in the infant class, as many do in the present
+life. So that there are differences. Some now beginning are not likely
+to succeed in their present incarnation; but if that discourages them,
+one can only say: "If you do not do it now, you will have to begin
+again next life, and so on and on and on. For Nature's laws cannot be
+violated, and Nature knows no favoritism and no partiality. Some time
+or other you have to begin, and the sooner you begin the sooner will
+you succeed."
+
+Now the whole of this, you will remark, is the training, the
+organising of _bodies_. And psychism implies that. You must train,
+purify, organise, in order that the powers of the consciousness may
+show forth. You will see very fully now why at the beginning I urged
+you to realise that the whole of these manifestations are similar in
+kind, so that when you find someone saying to you: "Oh! So-and-so is a
+psychic," as though that were to condemn the person; "Such-and-such a
+person is a mere clairvoyant," and so on, as though the fact of
+possessing clairvoyance were a disadvantage rather than an advantage;
+then the proper answer is: "Are you prepared to go the whole way with
+that?" Many Indians do so (it is the point to which I said I would
+return); they say that the siddhis, the powers of consciousness
+manifested on the lower planes, are hindrances to the spiritual life.
+And so they are in a sense. The spiritual life goes inwards: all
+psychic powers go outwards. It is the same Self in either case--the
+Self turning inwards on Itself, or the Self going outwards to the
+world of objects. But it does not make one scrap of difference whether
+it goes out to physical, astral, or mental objects: it is all the
+objective consciousness, and therefore the very reverse of the
+spiritual. But the Indian does not shrink from that as ordinarily the
+man in the West does. He is perfectly honest. He says: "Yes, the
+powers of the intellect applied to the objects of the world are a
+hindrance in the spiritual life. We do not want them, do not care to
+think about it. We give up all the objects of the physical plane when
+seeking the Self." And if you are prepared to say that, then by all
+means turn aside from psychism, but do not at one and the same time
+encourage intellectuality on the physical plane and denounce what you
+call psychism on the others, because that is mere folly. If it is
+better to be blind here than to see--and the Indian will tell you it
+often is, because it shuts out all the distracting objects of the
+physical plane--if you are prepared to say that, and say: "Yes, I
+would rather be blind than see," then you may go on to denounce seeing
+on the astral plane. But if you value your physical sight, why not
+value the astral sight--it is a stage higher--as well? and the mental
+sight--which is a stage higher yet--as well? Why denounce astral and
+mental, and praise up the physical? Why admire the power of sight of
+the painter, who sees more shades than you can see, and denounce the
+sight of the clairvoyant, who sees very much more than the cleverest
+painter? They all belong to the object world; they all lead the Self
+away from the realisation of himself, and they are all exactly on the
+same level. It seems strange when one sees the same person exalting
+the psychic on the physical plane and denouncing it on the astral and
+mental.
+
+But now let us turn to "spirituality" and see what that means. "The
+Self-realisation of the One"; not the declaring that all men are one,
+that all men are brothers: we can all do that. Anyone who has reached
+a certain stage of intellectual knowledge will recognise the unity of
+mankind; will say, with the writer in the Christian book, that God has
+made all men of one blood--quoted again from what is called a Pagan
+book. That intellectual recognition of the unity is practically
+universal among educated people; but very few are prepared to carry
+out the intellectual recognition into practical life and practical
+training. Now for the development of what are called psychic faculties
+some amount of retirement from the world is very useful. For the
+development of the spiritual consciousness no such retirement is
+necessary. In fact, for the most part, except in the earlier stages
+perhaps, seclusion is a mistake; for the world is the best place for
+the unfolding of the sense of unity, and best amongst men and women
+and children can we call out the powers of the spiritual life. And
+that for a simple reason. In the lower world the Spirit shows itself
+out by love, by sympathy; and the more we can love, the more we can
+sympathise, the greater will be the unfolding of the consciousness of
+the Self within. It was a true word of the early Christian Initiate,
+that if a man loves not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he
+love God whom he hath not seen? And if the perfection of the
+spiritual consciousness be that vision of the Supreme, the
+consciousness which knows itself to be one with God, then the way to
+the realisation will be by the partial realisation of loving sympathy,
+for which the world is the most fitting field, and our brethren around
+us the natural stimulus. Love, sacrifice, these are the manifestations
+of the Spirit on the physical plane, as is right knowledge also. For
+the Spirit is not a one-sided thing, but a Trinity, and knowledge is
+as necessary as love. The special value of love lies in its unifying
+power, and in the fact that it makes what the world calls sacrifice
+natural and delightful. You know it in your own experience. Just in
+proportion as you love another is it a joy and not a sorrow to give up
+things in order that the happiness of the other may be increased. It
+is no sacrifice for a mother to give up personal enjoyment for the
+sake of giving it to her children. A deeper joy is felt in the
+happiness of the child than could possibly have been felt in the
+enjoyment of the thing by herself; a sweeter, finer, profounder
+happiness is the enjoyment of the happiness of the beloved. And that a
+little widens out the consciousness, and hence family life is one of
+the best schools for spiritual unfolding; for in the continual
+sacrifices of the family life, springing from love and rendered joyful
+by affection, the Self feels itself a larger Self, and reaches the
+sense of unity with those immediately around. And after the family the
+public life, the life of the community, the life of the nation: these
+also are schools for the unfolding of the spiritual consciousness. For
+the man who is a good citizen of the community feels the life of the
+community as his own life, and so becomes conscious of a larger Self
+than the narrow self of the family. And the man who loves his nation,
+his Self widens out to the boundaries of the nation, and he is
+conscious of a larger Self than the self of the family, or the
+community within the State. And just in proportion as the love
+widening does not grow superficial and shallow (for if you have only a
+certain amount of water and you make your dish wider and wider, the
+water will become shallower and shallower) does it approach spiritual
+love. Too often love becomes unreal with those who try to love the
+far-off when they do not love the near. But if you avoid the
+temptation, and remembering that the Spirit has no limitations, and
+that you can draw and draw and draw on the love within you and never
+find the bottom of the source of love; if you are strong enough to do
+that, then the love of the family, of the community, of the State,
+will widen out into the love of humanity, and you shall know yourself
+as one with all, and not only with your family, or your community, or
+your nation. All these local loves are schoolmasters to bring us to
+the wider love of man. But do not blunder in the idea that you can
+have the wider unless you have gone through the narrower; for the bad
+husband, the bad citizen, the bad patriot, will never make a real
+lover of humanity. He must learn his alphabet before he can read in
+this book of love, and must spell out the letters before he may
+pronounce the word. None the less, these successive stages are all
+stages towards the spiritual life, and prepare the man for the
+consciously spiritual realisation. And if you would really train
+yourself for the unfolding of this life within you, practise it on
+those who are nearest to you by meeting them with love and sympathy in
+the daily paths of life. Not only those whom you like, but those you
+care not for as well; not with those who love you only, but with those
+who dislike you also. Remember that you have to break down
+barriers--barriers of the bodies that bar you out from your fellow
+Selves in the worlds around you, and that breaking down of the
+barriers is part of the training in the spiritual life. Only as
+barrier after barrier is broken down, only as wall after wall is
+levelled to the ground, will the freedom of the Spirit become possible
+in manifestation on every plane and in every world. The Spirit is ever
+free in his own nature and his own life, but, confined within the
+barriers of the body, he has to learn to transcend them, before, on
+these planes of matter, he can realise the divine freedom which is his
+eternal birthright. So long as you feel yourself separate from others,
+so long are you shut out from the realisation of the unity; so long as
+you say "my" and "mine," so long the realisation of the Spirit is not
+yet possible for you. Love of individual possessions, not only
+physical but moral and mental, not the vulgar pride of physical wealth
+only, but moral pride, intellectual pride, everything that says "I" as
+against "you," and does not realise that I and you are one--all this
+is against the spiritual life. Hardest of all lessons when brought
+down to practical life; most difficult of all attainments when effort
+is made to realise it, and not only to talk about it and imagine it.
+It is best practised by continual renunciation of the individual
+possessions on every plane, and the constant thought of unity. When
+you are trying to live the life of the Spirit, you will try to be
+pure. You do well, but why? In order that you may be pure, and leave
+your impure brethren in their impurity? Oh no! You must try to be
+pure, in order that there may be more purity in the world to share
+amongst all men, because you are pure. You are not wanting to be purer
+than others, but only gathering purity that you may spread it in every
+direction, and most joyous when your own purity lifts someone from the
+mire, who is trampled into it under the feet of the world. You want to
+be wise. You do well; for wisdom is a splendid possession. But why? In
+order that you may look down on the ignorant and say: "I am wiser than
+thou," as the pure man might say: "I am holier than thou"? Oh no! but
+in order that the wisdom that you gather may enlighten the ignorant,
+and become theirs and not only yours. Otherwise it is no spiritual
+thing; for spirituality does not know "myself" and "others"; it only
+knows the One Self, of whom all forms are manifestations.
+
+We dare not call ourselves spiritual until we have reached that point
+which none of us as yet has reached, for to reach it means to become a
+Christ. When, looking at the lowest and basest and most ignorant and
+vilest, we can say: "That is myself, in such-and-such a garb," and say
+it feeling it, rejoicing in it--because if there are two of you, and
+one is pure and the other impure, and the two are one, then neither is
+perfect, but both are raised above the level of the lowest--that is
+the true atonement, the real work of the Christ; and the birth of
+Christ within you means the willingness to throw down all walls of
+separation, and the stature of Christ within you means that you have
+accomplished it.
+
+For the most part we claim our unity above; we do not take pride in
+claiming our unity below; we are glad to say, "Yes, I also am Divine;
+I am a Christ in the making; I am one with Him." Harder to say: "I am
+one with the lowest of my brethren, sharing with them the same Divine
+life." Yet our Divinity is only realised as we recognise that same
+Divinity in others. You may remember that exquisite story of Olive
+Schreiner, breathing the very essence first of the unspiritual, and
+then of the spiritual life. In the first case a woman, pure and
+spotless, her garments shining with whiteness, and her feet shod as
+with snow, went up to the Gates of Heaven and trod the golden streets.
+And as she trod them in her shining robes the angels shuddered back,
+and said: "See, her garments are blood-spotted, and her sandals are
+stained with mire and blood." From the throne the Christ asked:
+"Daughter, how is it that your garments are blood-spotted and your
+sandals stained?" And she answered: "Lord, I was walking in miry ways,
+and I saw a woman there down in the mire, and I stepped upon her that
+I might keep my sandals clean." The Christ and the angels vanished,
+and the woman fell from heaven, and wandered again in the miry ways of
+earth. Once again she came to the heavenly portal and trod the golden
+streets, and this time she was not alone. Another woman was with her,
+and the garments of both were blood-flecked, and the sandals of both
+were stained with the mire and blood of earth. But the angels seeing
+them pass by, cried out: "See how whitely their garments shine! And
+see how white are their feet!" And the Christ, when they came before
+the throne, said: "How come ye here in garments that are soiled?" And
+the answer came: "I saw this my sister trampled upon, and I bent down
+to lift her up, and in the picking of her up my garments were soiled,
+but I have brought her with me to Thy presence." And the Christ smiled
+and lifted them up beside Him, and the angels sang for joy. For it is
+not the sin and the shame that are shared that soil the garments of
+the Spirit, and leave upon it the mire of earth.
+
+If, then, you would lead the spiritual life, go downwards as well as
+upwards. Feel your unity with the sinner as well as with the saint.
+For the only thing that makes you divine is the Spirit that lives in
+every human heart alike, in all equally dwelling, and there is no
+difference in the divinity of the Spirit, but only in the stage of its
+manifestation. And just as you and I climb upwards and show more of
+the spiritual life in the lower worlds, should we raise our brethren
+with us, and know the joy of the redeemer, and the power of the life
+that saves. For Those whom we call Masters, Those who are the Christs
+of the world, Those are reverenced and beloved, because to Them there
+is no difference, but the sinner is as beloved as the saint--nay,
+sometimes more, because compassion flows out to the weaker more than
+to the strong.
+
+Such is the spiritual life; such the goal that every man who would
+become spiritual must place before his eyes. Very different from the
+psychic, and not to be confused with it--the unfolding of the divinity
+in man, and not the purification and the organisation of the
+vehicles. Both are good, both necessary, and I finish with the words
+with which I began, that while to be psychic is no proof of
+spirituality, to be spiritual is to possess every power in heaven and
+on earth. Choose ye each your road. Tread whichever you will, but
+beware that by the growth of your powers here, in separation, you do
+not delay the growth of the spirituality which is the realisation of
+the unity of the Self. For everything which divides becomes evil, by
+the very fact of its dividing; every power which is shared is a wing
+to carry us upwards, but every power that is kept for the lower self
+is a clog that holds us down to earth.
+
+
+
+
+The Place of Masters in Religions
+
+
+Everyone of us who belongs to any special religion can trace back along
+the line of his religion further and further into the past, until he
+comes to its beginning, its first Teacher. And round that Teacher is
+usually a group of men and women who to the Founder of the religion are
+disciples, but to those who accept the religion later are teachers,
+apostles. And this is invariably true. The Hebrew, if you ask him, will
+trace back his religion to the time of the great legislator Moses, and
+behind Him to a yet more heroic figure, Abraham, the "friend of God."
+Look back to some yet older faith, the faith of Egypt, of Chaldea, of
+Persia, of China, of India, and you will find exactly the same thing is
+true. The Parsi, representative of a splendid tradition, but whose
+religion, as it now, is, as has been well said, "a religion of
+fragments" only--he will trace back his religion to his own great
+Prophet, the Prophet of the Fire, who led the exodus from the centre of
+Asia and guided His people into what we now call the land of Persia.
+Egypt, if you ask her story, will show you heroic figures of her past,
+and amongst them that great King and Priest, Osiris, who, slain, as the
+old legend tells us, rises again, as Lord and Judge of His people.
+Buddhism, spread in the far East, will trace back its story to the
+Buddha, and will declare in addition to that, that not only is the
+Buddha the Teacher of that particular faith, but that a living
+person still exists on the earth as Teacher, as Protector, whom they
+call the Bodhisattva, the wise and the pure. India will tell
+you of a great group of teachers gathered round their Manu, the
+tradition of whose laws is still preserved, and is still used as the
+basis of the social legislation administered now by the English rulers.
+And round that great Lawgiver of the past, wise men are gathered whose
+names are known throughout the land, each of them standing at the head
+of some noble Indian family, that traces its ancestry backward and
+backward till it ends in the Sage, the Teacher. And this is equally true
+of more modern religions. Take the Christian religion, and the Christian
+traces his religion back until it finds its source in the personality of
+the Prophet of Judea, of Jesus the Christ. And it is interesting, as one
+of those strange parallels which meet us often in the comparative study
+of religions, that just as the Buddhist has his Buddha and
+also his Bodhisattva, so the Christian has the two names:
+Christ, representing the living Spirit, a stage in the spiritual
+unfolding, the name representing a stage, an office, rather than a
+special man, and joined to that the individual name of Jesus, in order
+to mark the intimate connection, as some would say the identity, between
+the two. But just as among the Buddhists the distinction is drawn,
+so among the early Christians you will find a similar distinction was
+made between the man Jesus and the spiritual Christ. So that in those
+early days many of those who were called "Gnostics" divided the two in a
+similar fashion, although uniting them at a certain stage of the
+teaching, of the ministry. And if you take the latest born of the
+religions, the Mussulman, the religion of Islam, that again is traced
+backward to a Prophet, the Prophet Muhammad, the great Prophet of
+Arabia. Universally this is true, that the religion traces itself back
+to a single mighty figure, whom some call a "God-man," a man too divine
+to be regarded as wholly like those amongst whom he lived and moved and
+taught; above them and yet of them, closely bound to them by a common
+humanity, although raised above them by a manifestation of the God
+within, mightier, more complete, more compelling, than the manifestation
+in the ordinary men and women around Him. So with all religions, and in
+that thought of the divine figure, the Founder of every faith, you have
+the fullest, the truest, the most perfect conception of that which we
+Theosophists call the ideal of the Master. All such mighty beings by the
+Theosophist would be given the name of Master. And not by the
+Theosophist alone, for that word in other religions has been applied to
+the Founder, the Chief of the faith. Nay, to the Christian it should
+come with special force, with special significance, for it was the name
+that Christ the Teacher chose as best expressing His own relationship to
+those who believed on Him, to those who followed Him. "Neither be ye
+called masters," He said; "for one is your Master, even Christ." And so
+again you may remember that, in speaking to His disciples, He said: "Ye
+call Me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am." So that to the
+Christian heart the name Master should be above all other names sacred
+and beloved, since it was the chosen name of their own Teacher, the name
+that He claimed from His disciples, that name that He used as
+representing His relation to them. So this idea of a Master in religion
+certainly should be one which comes with no alien sound, no foreign
+significance, among those who look up to the Master Christ. And exactly
+the same idea is that of a Master in any great religion; it is a common
+idea--it signifies the Founder, the Teacher, divine and yet human. To
+that point I will return later.
+
+Let us study the central idea of these Masters a little more closely,
+and see what are the special characteristics which mark Them in the
+religions of the past. If you go back very, very far, you will always
+find that the Master wears a double character: ruler, law-giver, on the
+one side; teacher upon the other. In all the old civilisations this is
+characteristic; for in those days the idea had not arisen of sacred and
+secular, or sacred and profane, as we say in the modern world. To the
+old civilisations there was no such thing as sacred history and profane
+history; no division was made between sacred science and secular
+science; all history was sacred, all science was divine. And so much was
+that the case that, when you find an ancient pupil asking of an ancient
+teacher as to divine science, the answer was given: "There are two forms
+of divine science, the higher and the lower." And the lower divine
+science was made up of all the things that now you call literature,
+science, and art; all those were run over by name, and summed up under
+the heading of the lower divine science. The higher, supreme Science
+was that knowledge of God, to which accurately the word Wisdom ought
+only to be applied. So that to their thought Deity was everywhere, and
+there was only variety in the manifestations of Deity. All Nature was
+sacred. God expressed Himself in every object, in every form. All that
+could be said was that through one form more of His glory came than
+through another. The form might be more or less transparent, but the
+inner radiant light was the same in all. And it was natural, inevitable,
+with such a conception of Nature and of God, that the Master, the
+Founder, of a religion should unite in His sole person the office alike
+of the Priest and of the King. And so you find it. The only likeness in
+modern days is not now a very fortunate one in the eyes of many--the
+King-Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. For so ill had the duties of
+the King been performed in that high seat, that the people lost the
+sense of the divinity, and revolted against it, and cast it off, and
+left that Pontiff shorn of his royal character. But far back in the old
+civilisations, in the one person the two offices were united. The
+Pharaoh of Egypt was truly the Lord of the triple diadem, but also the
+supreme Priest in every temple of his land. So also in Chaldea, in
+India, and in many another land; and wherever that is the case you find
+a certain outline given to the civilisation, differing in detail, but
+marvellously similar in the broad touches of that sketch. You find that
+in those days the Priest-King, the Ruler of the land and the supreme
+Teacher of his people, shaped the polity of the nation as he shaped the
+doctrines taught in the temples of the religion. Both the religion and
+the polity have the keynote of duty. And always with increasing power
+there came greater weight of responsibility, heavier burden of duty; and
+the freest in those civilisations were the poorest. Those who were
+regarded as the children of the national household were ever cared for
+with extremest care. The very fact that they were the lowest in
+development gave them the greatest claim on the divine Man who ruled, so
+that all through the note of those civilisations is the note which
+to-day would be called socialistic--with one enormous difference, that
+the most wise ruled. The result, in a sense, would be the result that
+the Socialist dreams of, the absence of poverty, the universality of
+some form of work done for the State as a whole, a duty of each man to
+bear a share of the burden; but the burden grew lighter and lighter as
+it came downwards to the younger members of the family, of the nation;
+the duty the most burdensome was placed on the highest. And you will
+find that, while still the tradition remained, it was very difficult
+sometimes to get rulers and governors of large States and small. It
+comes out in the Chinese books. The Emperor sends down word that
+So-and-so is to be governor of a State, and So-and-so, in those
+degenerate days, generally tried to escape from it, because of the
+tremendous burden that the governorship imposed. For in the case of the
+old Rulers, in the days when the divine Kings were the Kings and Priests
+of the people, anything that was wrong in the nation was related to the
+Ruler, and not to the people at large. Remember the words of one great
+Teacher of later days, Confucius, when a King turned to him and said:
+"Master, why is there robbery, why is there murder in my land? How shall
+I stop it?" His stern answer was: "If you, O King, did not steal and
+murder, there would be no robbery and no murder in your land." Always
+the highest with the weight of responsibility; the younger with the
+right to enjoy, to be happy, to be cared for. Where food was short, they
+were the last to starve, and the King the first; where anything went
+short of material things, they were the first to be given their share,
+and the King the last. Such was the outline of the social organisation.
+Slight traces of it remain even to the present day. You can see traces
+of it in the civilisation that was destroyed in Peru by the conquerors,
+the Spanish conquerors, of that land. Some traces of it still remain in
+India, although degraded and decayed. The note is always the same: the
+higher, the more burdened; the higher, the harder the life; the higher,
+the greater the duty. For that is the type of the Master, and the idea
+ran through the whole of the civilisation. He, the Priest-King, mighty
+in knowledge and in power, must bear upon his broad shoulders the burden
+that would crush a weaker man. And so downwards through all the degrees
+of ruler, in proportion to the power and its expansion, so in proportion
+the weight and the responsibility.
+
+They passed away from earth as humanity grew out of its infant stage.
+My phrase is too strong--I should not have said: "They passed away
+from earth." They passed away into silence, not from earth; thereon
+many of Them still remain. But They drew back from the outer position,
+from outer power, and became the great company of Elder Brothers of
+humanity, only some of whom remained in close touch with the race.
+
+And that is the next point in the idea of the Master. Those who
+founded a religion were bound to remain wearing the body of man, fixed
+to the earth, bound to the outward semblance of humanity, so long as
+the religion lived upon earth which They had given to it. That was the
+rule: no liberation for the Man who founded a religion until all who
+belonged to that religion had themselves passed out of it, into
+liberation, or into another faith, and the religion was dead. The
+death of a religion is the liberation from all bondage of the Master
+who gave it to the world. He in a very real sense is incarnate in the
+religion that He bestows. While that religion lives and teaches, while
+men still find in it the expression of their thought, so long that
+divine Man must remain, and guide and protect and help the religion
+which He gave to earth. Such is the law. No Master may leave our
+humanity while that which He started as a human school is still
+existing upon earth. Some have passed away, and would no longer be
+spoken of as Masters--the name given to Them in the occult world is
+different--but Those who have passed away have passed away because
+Their religions are dead: the Masters of ancient Egypt, of ancient
+Chaldea, have gone from this earth into the mighty company of Those
+who no longer bear the burden of the flesh. But the Masters of every
+living religion live on earth, and are the links, for the people of
+that religion, between God and man; the Master is the divine Man, one
+with his brothers, who look to him for help, one with the God around
+and above, and through Him the spiritual life is ever flowing. The
+word "mediator," applied in the Christian scriptures to the Christ,
+signifies a real and living relation. There are such mediators between
+God and man, and they are all God-men, true Christs. Such links
+between the God without and the God within us are necessary for the
+helping by the one, and for the manifestation of the other. The God
+within us, unfolding his powers, answers to the God without us, and
+the link is the God-man who shares the manifested nature of divinity,
+and yet remains one with His brethren in the flesh. A bondage, yes.
+But a voluntary bondage--a bondage assumed in the day in which the
+Messenger came forth from the great White Lodge to bring a new
+revelation, to found a new divine kingdom upon earth. Heavy the
+responsibility of a divine Man who takes upon Himself the tremendous
+burden of speaking out to the world a new Word in the divine
+revelation. All that grows out of it makes the heavy burden of His
+destiny. Everything which happens within that communion of which He is
+the centre must react upon Him, and He is ultimately responsible; and
+as that divine Word is always spoken in a community of men and women
+imperfect, sinning, ignorant, that Word is bound to be distorted and
+twisted, because of the medium in which it works. That is why every
+such Teacher is called a "sacrifice"--Himself at once the sacrificer
+and the sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice that man may make to man, a
+sacrifice so mighty that none in whom Deity is not unfolded to the
+greatest height compatible with human limitation is strong enough to
+make it, is strong enough to endure it. That is the true sacrifice of
+the Christ; not a few hours' agony in dying, but century after century
+of crucifixion on the cross of matter, until salvation has been won
+for the people who bear His name, or until they have passed under some
+other Lord. Hence is that road always called "the Way of the Cross."
+Long before Christianity came to birth, the "Way of the Cross" was
+known to every Initiate, and Those were said to tread it who
+volunteered for the mighty service of proclaiming the old message
+again in the ears of the world of the time. A sacrifice: for none may
+tell, who volunteers for the service, what lies before the religion
+that He founds, what shall be the deeds of the community that He
+begins on earth. And every sin and crime of that religion, or that
+Church, falls into the scales of Karma stamped with the name of the
+Founder. He is responsible for it, and bearing that responsibility is
+the mighty sacrifice He makes; and the result is inevitable; for in a
+world imperfect no perfection can be perfectly mirrored. As the
+sun-ray falling upon water is twisted and distorted, so is it with the
+rays of a perfect truth falling in amongst a community of imperfect
+men; and no action down here can be a perfect action, for "action," it
+is written in an ancient book, "is surrounded with evil as a fire is
+surrounded with smoke." The imperfection of the medium makes the smoke
+round every Word of Fire, every Word of Truth. And the Founder must
+endure the pungency of the smoke, if He would speak the Word of Fire.
+The realisation of that, however dimly, however imperfectly, makes the
+passion of gratitude in the human heart to those Men who bear their
+infirmities and open up the way to God for man. It is that which in
+some forms of popular Christianity has been distorted in speaking of
+the sacrifice of the Christ, when it has been made a sacrifice, not
+for man, sinful and foolish, but to the Father of all perfection, who
+needs no sacrifice of suffering in order to reconcile Him to the
+children sprung from His life. That is one of the distortions of the
+ignorance of man; that the falsification which has been spoken in the
+name of religion and has obscured the perfect love of God--for every
+divine Man who comes out is a manifestation of the divine heart, and a
+revelation of God to man. And how could it be that the Master of
+Compassion, who wins human hearts by the tenderness of His love, could
+be a Revealer of God, if there were not in God a compassion mightier
+than His own, and profounder than His humanity, as God is greater than
+man? But the splendor of the truth dazzled the eyes of those to whom
+it was presented, and their own ignorance, and fear, and limitation,
+imposed upon that perfect sacrifice the terrible aspect of a sacrifice
+to God--an aspect which it assumed, not only in Christianity, but in
+other faiths as well. For the most part, not always, in the elder
+religions they understood that the story of the life and death was an
+allegory, a "myth," as they called it, revealing a deeper truth. And
+so they avoided the pain and the sense of revulsion which has roused
+the conscience of civilised man to revolt against the cruder
+presentments of the doctrine; the great truth of the sacrifice is
+true, but it is not a legal, a contract, sacrifice, made between man's
+representative and God; but the effort of the divine to make itself
+understood, and the voluntary binding of the sacrifice to the cross
+of matter until His people are set free. And then, as I said, He
+passes on into other worlds, to other work, and is no longer called a
+Master of the Wisdom.
+
+Now, looking at this idea, let us ask: "What is the work of these
+Masters in the religions of the world, and why is it that this thought
+of the Masters has been so revived in the modern world, and made so
+much more living, in a sense, than it has been for many a long year?"
+In the early days of Christianity, as I said, you find the idea; but
+it has largely vanished from the Churches as a living truth, and they
+think of Jesus, the Christian Master, as risen from the dead and
+ascended into heaven. And the materialising spirit of ignorance has
+made the ascent a going away, and the Man has gone, although the God
+remains. But that is only a materialisation of the older truth; for,
+according to the truth, heaven is not a faraway place to which people
+go. No one _goes_ there; they only open their eyes and see it on every
+side around them. For heaven is a state of the psychic life which is
+realised in the higher bodies, the bodies of the mental plane, and it
+does not need to go hither and thither, North, South, East, or West,
+to find it; for, as the great Teacher said: "Behold, the Kingdom of
+Heaven is within you"--not far away, beyond the sun or moon or stars.
+And the ascension of Jesus to heaven, as the Church of England puts
+it--in words that sound very strange in modern ears, because they have
+lost their mystic meaning and are only taken in what S. Paul used to
+call the "carnal" interpretation--in the fourth article of the Church
+of England, was that He ascended into heaven, taking with Him His
+"flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man's
+nature." Now when you take that in the literal and crude
+signification, naturally the thoughtful man revolts against it. What
+is this about a physical body and physical bones going up through the
+air into the sky? And where has it gone to? The modern man cannot
+believe it in that sense, and so he loses the spiritual verity
+enshrined in words of symbolism and of allegory. For the fact that
+Jesus the Master went away, but still dwells on earth in the flesh,
+that is the truth which the article tries to indicate; and not that He
+is gone far away into a far-off heaven to sit at the right hand of
+God, whence He shall come again to judge. He lives in the body, and
+also lives in the midst of the Church, which is His true mystical
+body; and so long as that Church exists, so long as that Church is
+found on earth, so long its Master shall live within it, and shall
+dwell in a human body. He is not gone away, He has not ascended
+anywhere in the literal sense, but is permeating the whole of His
+Communion, and living upon earth until the last Christian has passed
+away to liberation, or is born into some other faith. That is the
+inner meaning. He lives and may be reached. And if the teachings of
+the Theosophical Society have any value for the Christian Church, it
+is because they are bringing back to live in Christian hearts this
+living truth of the bodily ever-presence of the Christ amongst them.
+Theosophists who are Christians, and remain within the limits of the
+Christian Church, have gained a vivid view of this real humanity of
+Jesus. They learn that He may be reached as truly now as when He
+walked near the sea of Galilee, or taught in the streets of Jerusalem,
+that they may know Him with as real a sense of His presence, may
+learn from Him as truly as any apostle or disciple in the past, that
+it is a living and real presence--not only, as the Roman Catholic
+Church says, in the Sacrament of the altar, but in the experience of
+the Christian heart. And it has never been left without a witness.
+Look all through the history of the Christian Church, and see how one
+after another has come into living touch with the Master Jesus. Every
+great saint has proclaimed his own experience as regards his contact
+with his Lord. And only in comparatively modern days, and in parts
+only of the Christian Church, has that great and vivifying truth been
+lost sight of. The Greek Church has never lost it; the Roman Catholic
+Church has never lost it. The testimony of the saints in those ancient
+communions bears witness to the continuing connection between the
+Christian and the Christ. You find it in some of the extreme
+Protestant communities also, where they bear a living testimony to the
+reality of the personal communion. Not through books and churches
+only, but within the living heart of man, visible sometimes even to
+physical eyes, shining out in the vision of the saint, speaking in the
+rapture of the prophet--it has never quite passed away from
+Christianity. It is coming back more strongly year after year, coming
+back with increased vitality, with more reality and strength behind
+it; coming back because the Christ within the Church, finding that
+forgetfulness was coming over the modern mind, has, as in the olden
+days, used a scourge of whipcord instead of only the voice of love.
+For inasmuch as the voice of love was not listened to, and the reality
+of His presence was being forgotten, He has used the whip of what is
+called the Higher Criticism to drive men out of books back to the
+living Master of the Christian faith. When you build the house of your
+faith on books and manuscripts, on councils and traditions, you are
+building on the sand, and the storm has come--the storm of criticism,
+of investigation, of scholarship, and the house of faith totters,
+because it is founded on the sand. But build the house of your faith
+on the rock of human experience, on the one rock on which every true
+Church is founded, the individual touch between the human Spirit and
+the divine, the personal experience of the human man on earth with the
+divine Man in the heaven, beside and around him, and you build the
+house of your faith on a rock that nothing can shake nor destroy, and
+it will shelter you, no matter what storms may rage outside. And so,
+as in the temple, the whip has been used in order that men may learn
+what they would not learn by the gentle instruction spoken only in the
+words of the friend. The enemy has been used for it, the foe, the
+assailant, who has made sharp his weapons, and has cut many of the old
+manuscripts in pieces; and the result of that is that the Christian
+Church is thrown back upon the Christ Himself, no longer seen dimly
+through history, but in vivid reality before the eyes of the heart of
+the Christian, and that He will give to Christianity a new life. The
+mystic belief will come back, and the literal interpretations will
+fall away. And when that is done, then Christianity shall have renewed
+its youth and its power, and shall know that the Master is living in
+His Church, and is still the Master of life and death, as in the olden
+days.
+
+And by a very real instinct you will find that the most earnest
+Christians cling to the humanity of Jesus, and that is the value of
+the Master to us, when inside our hearts is written the truth of His
+existence. If there were only such men as we, and God, the gulf would
+be too vast, the difference too terrible--nothing to encourage us to
+believe that Divinity was within us. We seem so trivial, so foolish,
+so childish, that we hardly dare sometimes to believe that we are
+truly God. It seems impossible for us in our modern life, with all the
+follies in which we spend ourselves, with all the childish ambitions
+and terrors with which we amuse or frighten ourselves. This little
+modern life seems so petty and so vulgar that we scarcely dare to
+believe ourselves divine. We speak of the old heroic days, and think
+that if we had lived then, we too should have been heroic, as the
+heroes and martyrs and saints of earlier times. But in truth humanity
+is just as divine to-day, as it ever was in the past. And if the
+divine were manifested in us as it was in the great ones of the past,
+we should be heroic as they were; it is not circumstances that make
+the difference, but only that the God within us is more in the stage
+of childhood than in those mighty ones of the past, in which He had
+risen to the stature of divine manhood. And when we think of the
+Masters and realise that They are; still more, perhaps, when in some
+happy moment we catch a glimpse of such divine Men, or feel Their
+presence closer than that of a human friend, ah! then it is that the
+inspiration which flows from Them, as from a ceaseless source,
+encourages and vivifies the life within. For we realise that it was
+not so very, very long ago that They were as we are, plunged down in
+the trivialities of earth; that They have climbed above them by the
+unfolding of the God within. And what They have done, you and I may
+also do. They are a constant inspiration and encouragement for
+humanity. They are men, and only God as we are God; the only
+difference being that They have God more manifest in Them than He is
+in us. They also in Their day were weak and foolish; They also strove
+and struggled, as we strive and struggle now; They also failed, as we
+are failing now; They also blundered, as we are blundering now; and
+They have risen above it all, strength after strength revealed in
+Them, wisdom and power and love growing ever more and more divine. And
+what They have done, you and I can do. For They are truly but the
+first fruits of humanity, the promise of the harvest, and not
+something strange, miraculous, and far away. The Christian clings to
+the manhood of Jesus for the reason that as "He hath suffered, being
+tempted, He is able to succour them that are tempted." And it is a
+true instinct, a wise faith, for it is by coming into touch with such
+links between humanity and God, that you and I in time will become
+divine. In Him that divine seed of Spirit has unfolded into flower and
+fruit. When you sow a seed in the soil of your garden, you sow it in
+the full belief that it will grow, that it will become a plant with
+leaf and flower and fruit. And you believe it by all the promise of
+the past, which has proved that out of such seeds grow such flowers;
+all that is behind you to make your faith a reasonable faith; and when
+you plant that trivial thing, a little larger than a pin's head, and
+hide it in the darkness of the ground out of sight, you have a living
+faith within you that out of that seed shall grow the perfect flower.
+Have the same faith for the seed of divinity that is planted within
+you, though it be planted in the darkness of your heart. Even if at
+present the first little shoot has not come up above the darkness of
+the soil in which it is buried, none the less the seed is there; it
+will grow and ripen into the perfect fruit. It must be so. There are
+no failures for the divine Husbandman, no seed which is not living,
+which falls from His hands into the ground. And near us the Masters
+stand ever, the living truth of what man can be--nay, what he shall be
+in the centuries to come. They are proofs of what you and I shall be,
+the finished copies of the statues which lie as yet so rough, so
+unhewn, in the marble of our humanity. That is Their value for all
+men, and part of Their work is to help us to become what They are, to
+foster in us every shoot of the spiritual life, to strengthen in us
+every effort and struggle towards the light. Theirs the glorious work,
+not only of building up mighty faiths, but of living in them, and
+pouring out spiritual life on the heart of each who enters within the
+portals of those faiths. That is Their splendid work; and if Theosophy
+is doing much in all the religions of the world to make them more real
+to their adherents, and give to them fresh vitality and strength and
+vigor, it is only because it is the latest impulse from the Masters of
+the WISDOM, and so is the most convenient channel through which that
+life may be poured into all the religions of the world. Only the
+latest of the impulses. All religions have been born out of such an
+impulse, and the only difference between this and the earlier impulses
+is that while they each founded a religion and round that religion a
+wall was built, so that there were believers inside the wall and
+unbelievers outside, round this spiritual forthstreaming no walls are
+to be built, but the waters are to spread everywhere without
+limitation, without exception. That is the specialty in the message of
+Theosophy. It belongs to all alike. As much yours, though you do not
+call it by that name, perhaps, as it is theirs who call it by that
+name. It is only living, because it lives in every religion; it is
+only true, because it comes from the same Masters of the eternal
+WISDOM, belongs equally to all, to every religion that cares to take
+any of the truth that it has re-proclaimed. And all over the world the
+glad message is going. There is not one religion which is now living,
+amongst whose adherents Theosophy is not spreading, and making them
+better members of their religions than they were before. For there is
+many a man and woman, in East and West alike, who had gone away from
+the religion into which they were born, because the mystic element had
+vanished and the literal sense of the doctrines was in truth the
+letter which killeth, while the spirit that was life seemed to have
+escaped. Many such men and women, in East and West, have come back
+with joy to the religion in which they were born, in realising that it
+is only an expression of the one divine WISDOM, and that the Masters
+of the WISDOM live and move amongst us.
+
+And it may be that if the world grows more spiritual, it may be that
+if Spirit again becomes triumphant over matter, after passing through
+the darkness which was necessary in order that the intellect might be
+thoroughly developed and might learn its powers and its limitations;
+it may be that, in days to come, when the world is more spiritualised
+than to-day, climbing as it is again the upward arc, these living
+Masters of the world's religions will come amongst us again visibly as
+in the earlier days. It is not They who keep back in silence. It is we
+who shut Them out, and make Their presence a danger rather than an
+encouragement and an inspiration. And every one of you--no matter what
+your faith may be, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Theosophist,
+what matters it?--every one of you who makes the Master of your own
+faith a living reality, part of your life, nearer than friend and
+brother, every such believer and worker is hastening the day of joy
+when the world shall be ready for the open reception of the Masters,
+that They may move visibly amongst humanity once more. That it may be
+so, open your heart to every breath of truth; that it may be so, open
+your eyes to every ray from the one eternal Sun. In the past the world
+would have none of the Masters. They slew the Christ; they made the
+prophets outcasts. And until in our heart the love of the Master
+awakens, until with passionate longing, with continual insistence, we
+call to the divine Men the welcome, without which They may not come,
+They must remain hidden. Only when there comes up from heart after
+heart one vast chant of devotion and appeal, only then will They come
+to the many as They have already come to the few, and show out the
+visible splendor of Their manhood, as the glory of Their divinity has
+ever been upon the earth.
+
+
+
+
+Theosophy and the Theosophical Society
+
+
+I want to put before you clearly and plainly what Theosophy means, and
+what is the function of the Theosophical Society. For we notice very
+often, especially with regard to the Society, that there is a good
+deal of misconception touching it, and that people do not realise the
+object with which it exists, the work that it is intended to perform.
+It is very often looked upon as the expression of some new religion,
+as though people in becoming Theosophists must leave the religious
+community to which he or she may happen to belong. And so a profound
+misconception arises, and many people imagine that in some way or
+other it is hostile to the religion which they profess. Now Theosophy,
+looked at historically or practically, belongs to all the religions of
+the world, and every religion has an equal claim to it, has an equal
+right to say that Theosophy exists within it. For Theosophy, as the
+name implies, the Divine WISDOM, the WISDOM of God, clearly cannot be
+appropriated by any body of people, by any Society, not even by the
+greatest of the religions of the world. It is a common property, as
+free to everyone as the sunlight and the air. No one can claim it as
+his, save by virtue of his common humanity; no one can deny it to his
+brother, save at the peril of destroying his own claim thereto. Now
+the meaning of this word, both historically and practically, the
+WISDOM, the Divine WISDOM, is a very definite and clear meaning; it
+asserts the possibility of the knowledge of God. That is the point
+that the student ought to grasp; this knowledge of God, not the belief
+in Him, not the faith in Him, not only vague idea concerning Him, but
+the _knowledge_ of Him, is possible to man. That is the affirmation of
+Theosophy, that is its root-meaning and its essence.
+
+And we find, looking back historically, that this has been asserted in
+the various great religions of the world. They all claim that man can
+know, not only that man can believe. Only in some of the more modern
+faiths, in their own modern days, the knowledge has slipped into the
+background, and the belief, the faith, looms very large in the mind of
+the believer. Go back as far as you will in the history of the past,
+and you will find the most ancient of religions affirming this
+possibility of knowledge. In India, for instance, with its antique
+civilisation, you find that the very central idea of Hinduism is
+this supreme knowledge, the knowledge of God. As I pointed out to you
+the other day with regard to this old Eastern religion, all knowledge
+is regarded in a higher or a lower degree as the knowledge of God; for
+there is no division, as you know, in that ancient faith, between the
+secular and the sacred. That division is a modern division, and was
+unknown in the ancient world. But they did make a division in
+knowledge between the higher and the lower; and the lower knowledge,
+or the lower science, called the "lower divine science," was that
+which you will call "science" nowadays, the study of the external
+world. But it also included all that here we speak of as Literature,
+as Art, as Craft--everything, in fact, which the human brain can study
+and the human fingers can accomplish--the whole of that, in one grand
+generalisation, was called "Divine Wisdom," but it was the lower
+divine Wisdom, the inferior knowledge of God. Then, beside, or rather
+above that, came the Supreme Knowledge, the higher, the superior, that
+beyond which there was no knowledge, which was the crown of all. Now,
+that supreme knowledge is declared to be "the knowledge of Him by Whom
+all things are known"--a phrase indicating the Supreme Deity. It was
+that which was called the supreme knowledge, or, _par excellence_, the
+Divine Knowledge, and that old Hindu thought is exactly the same as
+you have indicated by the name Theosophy.
+
+So, again, classical students may remember that among the Greeks and
+the early Christians there was what was called the Gnosis, the
+knowledge, the definite article pointing to that which, above all
+else, was to be regarded as knowledge or wisdom. And when you find
+among the Neo-Platonists this word Gnosis used, it always means, and
+is defined to mean, "the knowledge of God," and the "Gnostic" is "a
+man who knows God." So, again, among the early Christians. Take such a
+man as Origen. He uses the same word in exactly the same sense; for
+when Origen is declaring that the Church has medicine for the sinner,
+and that Christ is the Good Physician who heals the diseases of men,
+he goes on to say that the Church has also the Gnosis for the wise,
+and that you cannot build the Church out of sinners; you must build it
+out of Gnostics. These are the men who know, who have the power to
+help and to teach; and there can be no medicine for the diseased, no
+upholder of the weak, unless, within the limits of the religion, the
+Gnostic is to be found. And so Origen lays immense stress on the
+Gnostic, and devotes page after page to a description of him: what he
+is, what he thinks, what he does; and to the mind of that great
+Christian teacher, the Gnostic was the strength of the Church, the
+pillar, the buttress of the faith. And so, coming down through the
+centuries, since the Christian time, you will find the word Gnostic
+used every now and again, but more often the term "Theosophist" and
+"Theosophy"; for this term came into use in the later school, the
+Neo-Platonists, and became the commonly accepted word for those who
+claimed this possibility of knowledge, or even claimed to _know_. And
+a phrase regarding this is to be found in the mystic Fourth Gospel,
+that of S. John, where into the mouth of the Christ the words are put,
+that the "knowledge of God is eternal life"--not the faith, nor the
+thought, but the knowledge--again declaring the possibility of this
+Gnosis. And the same idea is found along the line of the Hermetic
+Science, or Hermetic Philosophy, partly derived from Greece and partly
+from Egypt. The Hermetic philosopher also claimed to know, and claimed
+that in man was this divine faculty of knowledge, above the reason,
+higher than the intellect. And whenever, among the thoughtful and the
+learned, you find reference made to "faith," as where, in the Epistle
+to the Hebrews, it is said to be "the _evidence_ of things not seen,"
+the same idea comes out, and Faith, the real Faith, is only this
+intense conviction which grows out of the inner spiritual being of
+man, the Self, the Spirit, which justifies to the intellect, to the
+senses, that there is God, that God truly exists. And this is so
+strongly felt in the East that no one there wants to argue about the
+existence of God; it is declared that that existence cannot be proved
+by argument. "Not by argument," it is written, "not by reasoning, not
+by thinking, can the Supreme Self be known." The only proof of Him is
+"the conviction in the Spirit, in the Self." And thus Theosophy, then,
+historically, as you see, always makes the affirmation that man can
+know; and after that supreme affirmation that God may be known, then
+there comes the secondary affirmation, implied really in that, and in
+the fact of man's identity of nature with the Supreme, that all things
+in the universe can be known--things visible and invisible, subtle and
+gross. That is, so to speak, a secondary affirmation, drawn out of the
+first; for clearly if in man resides the faculty to know God as God,
+then every manifestation of God may be known by the faculty which
+recognises the identity of the human Spirit with the Supreme Spirit
+that permeates the universe at large. So in dictionaries and in
+encyclopedias you will sometimes find Theosophy defined as the idea
+that God, and angels, and spirits, may hold direct communication with
+men; or sometimes, in the reverse form, that men can hold
+communication with spirits, and angels, and even with God Himself;
+and although that definition be not the best that can be given, it has
+its own truth, for that is the result of the knowledge of God, the
+inevitable outcome of it, the manifestation of it. The man who knows
+God, and knows all things in Him, is evidently able to communicate
+with any form of living being, to come into relation with anything in
+the universe of which the One Life is God.
+
+In modern days, and among scientific people, the affirmation which is
+the reverse of this became at one time popular, widely accepted--not
+Gnostic but "Agnostic," "without the Gnosis"; that was the position
+taken up by Huxley and by many men of his own time of the same school
+of thought. He chose the name because of its precise signification; he
+was far too scientific a man to crudely deny, far too scientific to be
+willing to speak positively of that of which he knew nothing; and so,
+instead of taking up the position that there is nothing beyond man,
+and man's reason, and man's senses, he took up the position that man
+was without possibility of knowledge of what there might be, that his
+only means of knowledge were the senses for the material universe, the
+reason for the world of thought. Man, by his reason, could conquer
+everything in the realm of thought, might become mighty in intellect,
+and hold as his own domain everything that the intellect could grasp
+at its highest point of growth, its highest possibility of attainment.
+That splendid avenue of progress Huxley, and men like Huxley, placed
+before humanity as the road along which it might hope to walk, full of
+the certainty of ultimate achievement. But outside that, beyond the
+reason in the world of thought and the senses in the material world,
+Huxley, and those who thought like him, declared that man was unable
+to pierce--hence "Agnostic," "without the Gnosis," without the
+possibility of plunging deeply into the ocean of Being, for there the
+intellect had no plummet. Such, according to science at one time, was
+man; and whatever man might hope for, whatever man might strive for,
+on, as it were, the portal of the spiritual universe was written the
+legend "without knowledge." Thither man might not hope to penetrate,
+thither man's faculties might never hope to soar; for when you have
+defined man as a reasoning being, you have given the highest
+definition that science was able to accept, and across the spiritual
+nature was written: "imagination, dream, and phantasy."
+
+And yet there is much in ordinary human history which shows that man
+is something more than intellect, as clearly as it shows that the
+intellect is greater than the senses; for every statesman knows that
+he has to reckon with what is sometimes called "the religious
+instinct" in man, and that however coldly philosophers may reason,
+however sternly science may speak, there is in man some upwelling
+power which refuses to take the agnosticism of the intellect, as it
+refuses to accept the positivism of the senses; and with that every
+ruler of men has to deal, with that every statesman has to reckon.
+There is something in man which from time to time wells up with
+irresistible power, sweeping away every limit which intellect or
+senses may strive to put in its path--the religious instinct. And even
+to take that term, that name, even that is to join on this part of
+man's nature to a part of nature universal, which bears testimony in
+every time, and in every place, that to every instinct in the living
+creature there is some answer in the nature outside itself. There is
+no instinct known in plant, in animal, in man, to which nature does
+not answer; nature, which has woven the demand into the texture of the
+living creature, has always the supply ready to meet the demand; and
+strange indeed it would be, well-nigh incredible, if the profoundest
+instinct of all in nature's highest product on the physical plane, if
+that ineradicable instinct, that seeking after God and that thirst for
+the Supreme, were the one and only instinct in nature for which there
+is no answer in the depths and the heights around us. And it is not
+so. That argument is strengthened and buttressed by an appeal to
+experience; for you cannot, in dealing with human experience and the
+testimony of the human consciousness, leave entirely out of court,
+silenced, as though it were not relevant, the continual testimony of
+all religions to the existence of the spiritual nature in man. The
+spiritual consciousness proves itself quite as definitely as the
+intellectual or the sensuous consciousness proves itself--by the
+experience of the individual, alike in every religion as in every
+century in which humanity has lived, has thought, has suffered, has
+rejoiced. The religious, the spiritual nature, is that which is the
+strongest in man, not the weakest; that which breaks down the barriers
+of the intellect, and crushes into silence the imperious demands of
+the senses; which changes the whole life as by a miracle, and turns
+the face of the man in a direction contrary to that in which he has
+been going all his life. Whether you take the facts of conversion, or
+whether you take the testimony of the saint, the prophet, the seer,
+they all speak with that voice of authority to which humanity
+instinctively bows down; and it was the mark of the spiritual man when
+it was said of Jesus, the Prophet: "He taught them as one having
+authority, and not as the scribes." For where the spiritual man
+speaks, his appeal is made to the highest and the deepest part in
+every hearer that he addresses, and the answer that comes is an answer
+that brooks no denial and permits no questioning. It shows its own
+imperial nature, the highest and the dominant nature in the man, and
+where the Spirit once has spoken the intellect becomes obedient, and
+the senses begin to serve.
+
+Now Theosophy, in declaring that this nature of man can know God,
+bases that statement on identity of nature. We can know--it is our
+continual experience--we can know that which we share, and nothing
+else. Only when you have appropriated for yourself something from the
+outside world can you know the similar things in the outside world.
+You can see because your eye has within it the ether of which the
+waves are light; you can hear because your ear has in it the ether and
+the air whose vibrations are sound; and so with everything else.
+Myriads of things exist outside you, and you are unconscious of them,
+because you have not yet appropriated to your own service that which
+is like unto them in outer nature. And you can know God for exactly
+the same reason that you can know by sight or hearing--because you are
+part of God; you can know Him because you share His nature. "We are
+partakers of the Divine Nature," says the Christian teacher. "Thou art
+That," declares the Hindu. The Sufi cries out that by love man and
+God are one, and know each other. And all the religions of the world
+in varied phrase announce the same splendid truth of man's Divinity.
+It is on that that Theosophy founds its affirmation that the knowledge
+of God is possible to man; that the foundation, then, of Theosophy,
+that the essence of its message.
+
+And the value of it at the time when it was re-proclaimed to the world
+was that it was an affirmation in the face of a denial. Where Science
+began to cry "agnosticism," Theosophy came to cry out "gnosticism." At
+the very same time the two schools were born into the modern world,
+and the re-proclamation of Theosophy, the supreme knowledge, was the
+answer from the invisible worlds to the nescience of Science. It came
+at the right time, it came in the right form, as in a few moments we
+shall see; but the most important thing of all is that it came at the
+very moment when Science thought itself triumphant in its nescience.
+This re-proclamation, then, of the most ancient of all truths, was the
+message of Theosophy to the modern world. And see how the world has
+changed since that was proclaimed! It is hardly necessary now to make
+that affirmation, so universal has become the acceptance of it. It is
+almost difficult to look back to the year 1875, and realise how men
+were thinking and feeling then. I can remember it, because I was in
+it. The elder amongst you can remember it, for the same reason. But
+for the younger of you, who have begun to think and feel in the later
+times, when this thought was becoming common, you can scarcely realise
+the change in the intellectual atmosphere which has come about during
+these last two-and-thirty years. Hardly worth while is it to proclaim
+it now, it is so commonplace. If now you say: "Man can know God," the
+answer is: "Of course he can." Thirty-two years ago it was: "Indeed he
+cannot." And that is to be seen everywhere, all over the world, and
+not only among those people who were clinging blindly to a blind
+faith, desperately sticking to it as the only raft which remained for
+them to save them from being submerged in materialism. It is
+recognised now on all hands; literature is full of it; and it is not
+without significance that some months ago _The Hibbert Journal_--which
+has in it so much of the advanced thought of the day, for which
+bishops and archbishops and learned clerics write--it is not without
+significance that that journal drew its readers' attention to "the
+value of the God-idea in Hinduism." And the only value of it was
+this, for man: that man is God, and therefore can know God; and the
+writer pointed out that that was the only foundation on which, in
+modern days, an edifice that could not be shaken could be reared up
+for the Spirit in man. That is the religion of the future, the
+religion of the Divine Self; that the common religion, the universal
+religion, of which all the religions that are living in the world will
+be recognised as branches, as sects of one mighty religion, universal
+and supreme. For just as now in Christianity you have many a sect and
+many a church, just as in Hinduism we find many sects and many
+schools, and as in every other great religion of the world at the
+present time there are divisions between the believers in the same
+religion, so shall it be--very likely by the end of this century--with
+all the religions of the world; there will be only one religion--the
+knowledge of God--and all religious sects under that one mighty and
+universal name.
+
+And then, naturally, out of this knowledge there must spring a large
+number of other knowledges subservient to it, that which you hear so
+much about in Theosophical literature, of other worlds, the worlds
+beyond the physical, worlds that are still material, although the
+matter be of a finer, subtler kind; all that you read about the
+astral, and mental, and buddhic planes, and so on--all these
+lower knowledges find their places naturally, as growing out of the
+one supreme knowledge. And at once you will ask: "Why?" If you are
+really divine, if your Self is the same Self of which the worlds are a
+partial expression, then it is not difficult to see that that Self in
+you, as it unfolds its divine powers, and shapes the matter which it
+appropriates in order to come in contact with all the different parts
+of the universe, that that Self, creating for itself bodies, will be
+able to know every material thing in the universe, just as you know
+the things of the physical plane through the physical body. For it is
+all on the same lines: that which enables you to know is not only
+body--that is the medium between you and the physical world--but the
+Knower in you is that which enables you to know, the power of
+perception which is of consciousness, and not of body. When
+consciousness vanishes, all the organs of consciousness are there, as
+perfect as ever, but the Knower has left them, and knowledge
+disappears with him; and so, whether it be in a swoon, in a fainting
+fit, in sleep, or in death, the perfect instrument of the physical
+body becomes useless when the hand of the master workman drops it. The
+body is only his tool, whereby he contacts the things in a universe
+which is not himself; and the moment he leaves it, it is a mere heap
+of matter, doomed to decay, to destruction. But just as he has that
+body for knowledge here, so he has other bodies for knowledge
+otherwhere, and in every world he can know, he who is the Knower, and
+every world is made up of objects of knowledge, which he can perceive,
+examine, and understand.
+
+And the world into which you shall pass when you go through the portal
+of death, that is around you at every moment of your life here, and
+you only do not know it because your instrument of knowledge there is
+not yet perfected, and ready there to your hand; and the heavenly
+world into which you will pass out of the intermediate world next to
+this, that is around you now, and you only do not know it because your
+instrument of knowledge there has not yet been fashioned. And so with
+worlds yet higher, knowledge of them is possible, because the Knower
+is yourself and is God, and you can create your instruments of
+knowledge according to your wisdom and your will.
+
+Hence Theosophy includes the whole of this vast scheme or field of
+knowledge; and the whole of it is yours, yours to possess at your
+will. Hence Theosophy should be to you a proclamation of your own
+Divinity, with everything that flows therefrom; and all the knowledge
+that may be gathered, all the investigations that may be made, they
+are all part of this great scheme. And the reason why all the
+religions of the world teach the same, when you come to disentangle
+the essence of their teaching from the shape in which they put it, the
+reason that they all teach the same is that they are all giving you
+fragments of knowledge of the other worlds, and these worlds are all
+more real than the world in which you are; and they all teach the same
+fundamental truths, the same fundamental moral principles, the same
+religious doctrines, and use the same methods in order that men may
+come into touch with the other worlds. The sacraments do not belong to
+Christianity alone, as sometimes Christians think; every religion has
+its sacraments, some more numerous than others, but all have some. For
+what is a sacrament? It is the earthly, the physical representative of
+a real correspondence in nature; as the catechism of the Church of
+England phrases it: "An outward and visible sign of an inward and
+spiritual grace." It is a true definition. A sacrament is made up of
+the outer and inner, and you cannot do without either. The outer thing
+is correlated to the inner, and is a real means of coming into touch
+with the higher, and is not only a symbol, as some imagine. The great
+churches and religions of the past always cling to that reality of the
+sacrament, and they do well. It is only in very modern times, and
+among a comparatively small number of Christian people, that the
+sacrament has become only a symbol, instead of a channel of living and
+divine power. And much is lost to the man who loses out of his
+religion the essential idea of the sacrament; for it is the link
+between the spiritual and the physical, the channel whereby the
+spiritual pours down into the physical vehicle. Hence the value that
+all religions put upon sacraments, and their recognition of their
+reality, and their priceless service to mankind. And so with many
+other things in ceremonies and rites, common to all the different
+faiths--the use of musical sounds, a use which tunes the bodies so
+that the spiritual power may be able to manifest through them and by
+them. For just as in your orchestra you must tune the instruments to a
+single note, so must you tune your various bodies in order that
+harmoniously they may allow the spiritual force to come through from
+the higher to the lower plane. It is a real tuning, a real making of
+harmonious vibrations; and the difference between the vibrations that
+are harmonious and the vibrations that are discordant, from this point
+of view, is this: when all the bodies vibrate together, all the
+particles and their spaces correspond, so that you get solid
+particles, then spaces, and then solid particles, and spaces again,
+corresponding through all the bodies; whereas in the normal condition
+the bodies do not match in that way, and the spaces of one come
+against the solid parts of the other, and so you get a block. When
+sounds are used, the mystical sounds called mantras in Hinduism,
+the effect of those is to change the bodies from this condition to
+that, and so the forces from without can come into the man, and the
+forces in him may flow out to others. That is the value of it. You are
+able to produce mechanically a result which otherwise has to be
+produced by a tremendous exertion of the will; and the man of
+knowledge never uses more force than is necessary in order to bring
+about what he desires, and the Occultist--who is the wise man on many
+planes--he uses the easiest way always to gain his object. Hence the
+use of music, or mantras, in every faith. Pythagoras used music in
+order to prepare his disciples to receive his teachings. The Greek and
+the Roman Catholic Churches use special forms of music to produce a
+definite effect upon the worshippers who hear them. All of you must be
+aware that there are some kinds of music which have the remarkable
+effect upon you, of lifting you higher than you can rise by your own
+unassisted effort. Even the songs of illiterate Christian bodies do
+have some effect upon them, in raising them to a higher level,
+although they possess little of the true quality of the mantra. In
+Theosophy you find all these things dealt with scientifically--a mass
+of knowledge, but all growing out of the original statement that man
+can know God.
+
+Now it is clear that in all that, there is nothing which a man of any
+faith cannot accept, cannot study. I do not mean that he will accept
+everything that a Theosophist would say; but I mean that the knowledge
+is knowledge of a kind which he will be wise to study, and to
+appropriate so far as it recommends itself to his reason and his
+intuition. And that is all the man need do--study. All this knowledge
+is spread out for you freely: you can take it, if you will. The
+Theosophical Society, which spreads it broadcast everywhere, claims in
+it no property, no proprietary rights, but gives it out freely
+everywhere. The books in which much of it is written are as free to
+the non-Theosophist as to the Theosophist. The results of Theosophical
+investigation are published freely that all who choose may read.
+Everything is done that can be done by the Society to make the whole
+thing common property; and nothing gives the true Theosophist more
+delight than when he sees the Theosophical teachings coming out in
+some other garb which gives them a different name, but hands them on
+to those who might be frightened perhaps by the name "Theosophy." And
+so, when we find a clergyman scattering broadcast to his congregation
+Theosophical teaching as Christian, we say: "See, our work is bearing
+fruit"; and when we find the man who does not label himself
+"Theosophist" giving any of these truths to the world, we rejoice,
+because we see that our work is being done. We have no desire to take
+the credit of it, nor to claim it as ours at all; it belongs to every
+man who is able to see it, quite as much as it does to anyone who may
+call himself "Theosophist." For the possession of truth comes of right
+to the man who can see the truth, and there is no partiality in the
+world of intellect or of Spirit. The only test for a man's fitness to
+receive is the ability to perceive; and the only claim he has to see
+by the light is the power of seeing.
+
+And that, perhaps, may explain to you what some think strange in our
+Society--we have no dogmas. We do not shut out any man because he does
+not believe Theosophical teachings. A man may deny every one of them,
+save that of human brotherhood, and claim his place and his right
+within our ranks. But his place and his right within our ranks are
+founded on the very truths that he denies; for if man could not know
+God, if there were no identity of nature in every man with God, then
+there would be no foundation for our reception of him, nor any reason
+for welcoming him as a brother. Because there is only one life, and
+one nature, therefore the man who denies is God, as is he who affirms.
+Therefore each has a right to come; only the one who affirms knows why
+he welcomes his brother, and the one who denies is ignorant, and knows
+not why he has a right within our ranks. But those of us who try to be
+Theosophists in reality, as well as in name, we understand why it is
+that we make him welcome, and it is based on this sane idea, that a
+man can see the truth best by studying it, and not by repeating
+formulae that he does not understand. What is the use of putting a
+dogma before a man and saying: "You must repeat that before you can
+come into my Church"? If the man repeats it not understanding it, he
+is outside, no matter how much you bring him in; and if he sees it,
+there is no need to make that as a portal to your fellowship. And we
+believe, we of the Theosophical Society, that just because the
+intellect can only do its best work in its own atmosphere of freedom,
+truth has the best chance of being seen when you do not make any
+conditions as to the right of investigation, as to the claim to seek.
+To us, truth is so supreme a thing that we do not desire to bind any
+man with conditions as to how, or where, or why, he shall seek it.
+These things, we say, we know are true; and because we know they are
+true, come amongst us, even though you do not believe them, and find
+out for yourself whether they be true or not. And the man is better
+worth having when he comes in an unbeliever, and wins to the knowledge
+of the truth, than is the facile believer who acknowledges everything
+and never gets a real grip upon truth at all. We believe that truth is
+only found by seeking, and that the true bond is the love of truth,
+and the effort to find it; that that is a far more real bond than the
+repetition of a common creed. For the creed can be repeated by the
+lips, but the seeing of truth as true can only come from the intellect
+and the spirit, and to build on the intellect and the spirit is a
+firmer foundation than to build on the breath of the lips. Hence our
+Society has no dogmas. Not that it does not stand for any truths, as
+some people imagine. Its name marks out the truth for which it stands:
+it is the Theosophical Society; and that shows its function and its
+place in the world--a Society that asserts the possibility of the
+knowledge of God; that is its proclamation, as we have seen, and all
+the other truths that grow out of that are amongst our teachings. The
+Society exists to spread the knowledge of those truths, and to
+popularise those teachings amongst mankind. "But," you may say, "if it
+be the fact that you throw out broadcast all your teachings, that you
+write them in books that every man can buy, what is, then, the good of
+being a member of the Theosophical Society? We should not have any
+more as members than we have as non-members." That is not quite true,
+but it may stand as true for the moment. Why should you come in? For
+no reason at all, unless to you it is the greatest privilege to come
+in, and you desire to be among those who are the pioneers of the
+thought of the coming days. No reason at all: it is a privilege. We do
+not beg you to come in; we only say: "Come if you like to come, and
+share the glorious privilege that we possess; but if you would rather
+not, stay outside, and we will give you everything which we believe
+will be serviceable and useful to you." The feeling that brings people
+into our Society is the feeling that makes the soldier spring forward
+to be amongst the pioneers when the army is going forth. There are
+some people so built that they like to go in front and face
+difficulties, so that other people may have an easier time, and walk
+along a path that has already been hewn out for them by hands stronger
+than their own. That is the only reason why you should come in: no
+other. Do not come to "get"; you will be disappointed if you do. You
+can "get" it outside. Come in to give, to work, to be enrolled amongst
+the servants of humanity who are working for the dawn of the day of a
+nobler knowledge, for the coming of the recognition of a spiritual
+brotherhood amongst men. Come in if you have the spirit of the pioneer
+within you, the spirit of the volunteer; if to you it is a delight to
+cut the way through the jungle that others may follow, to tread the
+path with bruised feet in order that others may have a smooth road to
+lead them to the heights of knowledge. That is the only advantage of
+coming in: to know in your own heart that you realise what is coming,
+and are helping to make it come more quickly for the benefit of your
+fellow-men; that you are working for humanity; that you are co-workers
+with God, in making the knowledge of Him spread abroad on every side;
+that you are amongst those to whom future centuries will look back,
+thanking you that you saw the light when all men thought it was dark,
+and that you recognised the coming dawn when others believed the
+earth was sunk in midnight. I know of no inspiration more inspiring,
+of no ideal that lifts men to greater heights, of no hope that is so
+full of splendor, no thought that is so full of energy, as the
+inspiration, and the ideal, and the hope, and the thought, that you
+are working for the future, for the day that has not yet come. There
+will be so many in the days to come who will see the truth, so many in
+the unborn generations who will live from the hour of their birth in
+the light of the Divine WISDOM. And what is it not to know that one is
+bringing that nearer? to feel that this great treasure is placed in
+your hands for the enriching of humanity, and that the bankruptcy of
+humanity is over and the wealth is being spread broadcast on every
+side? What a privilege to know that those generations in the future,
+rejoicing in the light, will feel some touch of thanks and gratitude
+to those who brought it when the days were dark, to those whose faith
+in the Self was so strong that they could believe when all other
+things were against it, to those whose surety of the divine knowledge
+was so mighty that they could proclaim its possibility to an agnostic
+world. That is the only reason why you should come into the vanguard,
+that the only reason why you should join the ranks of the pioneers.
+Hard work and little reward, hard words and little praise, but the
+knowledge that you work for the future, and that with the co-operation
+of Deity the final result is sure.
+
+
+
+
+Part II
+
+
+The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society
+
+Spiritual and Temporal Authority
+
+The Relation of Masters to the Theosophical Society
+
+The Future of the Theosophical Society
+
+
+_Four Lectures delivered to the Blavatsky Lodge, London, on 13th and
+27th June, 4th and 11th July 1907._
+
+
+
+
+The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society
+
+
+I have taken for these four lectures, confined to members of the
+Theosophical Society, four subjects of great interest to ourselves,
+and in dealing with them I propose to ask you to look at them from a
+wide standpoint rather than a narrow one, and to consider the
+Theosophical Movement and the Theosophical Society, not as an isolated
+movement or Society, not as a separate thing, but rather as one of a
+series of spiritual impulses, like to its predecessors in its nature,
+interested in the same questions, and subject to the same conditions
+as those that preceded it in time.
+
+We find, looking back over the history of the past, that great
+spiritual impulses occur from time to time, and each of these in the
+past has founded a new religion, or stamped some marked change in a
+religion already existing. The spiritual impulse that brought to birth
+the Theosophical Society is to be thought of as of the same nature as
+those which founded one religion in the world after another. And if we
+regard it in this way we can sometimes, looking at the whole
+succession of such movements, recognise certain definite principles
+working in all of them, and then apply those principles to the
+movement of our own time. And this seems to me to be a wiser and saner
+way of regarding the Theosophical Society than looking upon it as
+unique and isolated. Certainly it is more easy to see our way in the
+solution of difficult problems of our own time, if we regard these
+problems as similar in nature to the problems that have been presented
+to our predecessors. Because always, in dealing with the problems of
+our own time, we are apt to be confused and bewildered by secondary
+issues that rise up around them, complicating them, perhaps largely
+clouding them, when we try to understand; whereas if we can catch
+sight of the underlying principle and study it apart from any
+difficulties of our own time, we are then able to apply that same
+principle, as discovered apart from the circumstances of the moment,
+and in that way there is a hope of applying it more justly amid the
+more exciting incidents of our own day. And it is that which I want to
+do in these lectures--to take our movement as a part of a world
+series, to study the principles that underlie the whole of that
+series, to trace out the working of these principles amongst the
+societies that have preceded us in the spiritual world, and then,
+having grasped them, to apply them to the solution of the problems of
+our own time. For there is a tendency in the Theosophical Society to
+narrow itself down to its time, instead of trying to widen out the
+thought of its time. It is a tendency which we see affecting every
+religion, every church, every great society, and it is useless to
+recognise this fact in the history of others unless we apply the fact
+for instruction in our own.
+
+Now in all the religions of the past, so far as we have any knowledge
+of them in history or from what are called the "occult records," there
+is one thing we see in their early days--the presence of happenings
+regarded as abnormal. I have used the word "phenomena," but it is a
+very stupid word. One uses it because it is generally used; there is
+no justification in using that particular word in relation to some
+outer manifestations rather than to all. Properly speaking,
+"phenomena," of course, will cover the whole of the objects in the
+world, in the Not-Self, everything outside the Self; but the word has
+been narrowed down, especially in our own time, to those occurrences
+in the world around us, in the Not-Self, which are unusual, which seem
+to be abnormal, which are the results of laws which are not familiar,
+and therefore which are regarded by some people as supernatural, by
+others, speaking more carefully, simply as superphysical. And we lose
+much by separating off what we call "abnormal" happenings, the
+so-called "phenomena," from the normal every-day happenings of life.
+For there is no fundamental difference between them. All planes are
+equally within the realm of law; all worlds, denser or grosser in
+material organisation, are equally worlds moving by order and law.
+There is nothing really abnormal in Nature. Some things happen more
+seldom than others--are unusual; but the very idea of abnormal seems
+to me in many respects mischievous and harmful. It is better to look
+on the whole world-system--universe, call it what you will--as a part
+of a definite order in which all the things that happen happen by law,
+in which there no gaps, no abnormalities, but only limitations of our
+own knowledge at a certain time. All the gaps in Nature are gaps in
+the knowledge of the observers of Nature. There is nothing miraculous
+or supernatural, but everything is the orderly product of Nature
+working along definite lines and guided by definite intelligence.
+
+And one reason why it is so important to recognise this is in order to
+clear away the atmosphere of wonder, of marvel, of awe, of reverence,
+that is apt, very much to the detriment of the observers, to enshroud
+everything unusual, every manifestation of a force with which we are
+not familiar, everything that in the old days was called "miraculous."
+And one thing I want strongly to impress upon you is, that in
+everything that can be called a "phenomenon," you ought to deal with
+it according to the same laws, according to the same canons of
+observation, as you deal with the phenomena with which you are most
+familiar on the physical plane. You should not regard an unusual
+phenomenon as one which is necessarily to be regarded with reverence
+in any way. You should not necessarily talk in whispers, when speaking
+about what we call "phenomena." It is better to talk in your natural
+voice, and apply your ordinary common sense and the laws of sane
+judgment in every case. If you do that instead of getting alarmed or
+astonished, if you will stand on your feet instead of falling on your
+knees, your study of the other worlds will be more profitable, and the
+dangers you are likely to meet will be very much diminished.
+
+To come back to the point of the beginnings of all religious
+movements, we find that all begin in the atmosphere of "phenomena."
+The divine Man who founds the religion, and those who immediately
+surround Him, are always people who have a knowledge of more worlds
+than one. And because they are possessors of that first-hand
+knowledge, they are able to speak with authority. Now, the authority
+that should be recognised in all these matters is simply the authority
+of knowledge.
+
+Another of the difficulties we want to clear away in studying
+phenomena is the idea that the happening of a certain thing by a law
+that we do not understand in the realm of matter gives any sort of
+authority on questions of spiritual knowledge, or gives a person a
+right to speak with authority on things not concerned with the
+particular laws under which that phenomena takes place. The mischief
+of the old idea of miracle was that it was supposed to be a proof, not
+of knowledge of another world or other forces, but of the title of the
+miracle-worker to speak with authority on religious and moral
+questions; while, as a matter of fact, the knowledge of what occurs on
+the astral plane, the knowledge of what occurs on the mental plane, or
+the power to utilise the forces of these planes in the production of
+certain happenings here which are not usual, these things by no means
+give a man any authority to speak on moral problems or to decide on
+spiritual questions. That is a matter of the utmost importance, for
+knowledge of the astral and mental worlds is the same in kind as
+knowledge of the physical world; and it no more follows that a
+clairvoyant or clairaudient, or a man who can use any of the powers of
+subtler planes down here, has more authority on religious and moral
+questions than a good mathematician, a good electrician, or a good
+chemist. You are not likely, on the physical plane, to fall into the
+blunder of thinking that because a man is a good chemist he has
+authority on moral problems: you will at once see the absurdity. But
+many of you do not see that the same is true when you deal with good
+chemists or electricians belonging to the astral or mental planes.
+They have no more authority _qua_ their knowledge of these planes than
+the chemist. I often wish that in the Theosophical Society the old
+fable of the Jewish Rabbis was better remembered and applied. Two
+Rabbis were arguing, and one of them, to support his side of the
+argument, made a wall fall down; whereupon the other Rabbi sensibly
+remarked: "Since when have walls had a voice in our discussions?" That
+spirit is of enormous importance, and does not in any sense touch the
+fact that you find the great Founders of religions and the illuminated
+men who surrounded them were men who had power to produce phenomena of
+various kinds, to heal the sick, to make the lame to walk, and so on,
+and that phenomena always accompanied the great religious Teacher in
+the past. These things did not give Him His religious authority: they
+were simply the outcome of His knowledge of natural laws; for a man
+who is thoroughly spiritual has matter subject to him on every plane
+in Nature. But it by no means follows that the man who can manipulate
+matter on the lower planes is therefore able to speak with authority
+on the higher. The fact that the spiritual man is always a great
+psychic, always has power to utilise higher forces for controlling
+physical matter, that fact, while true, does not prove the truth of
+the opposite idea, that the man who has power over matter is
+necessarily highly unfolded as regards the spirit. It is true, of
+course, that the founders of religion were men surrounded with clouds
+of phenomena, and the reason for that is the one I have just stated:
+that to the truly spiritual man matter is an obedient servant; to use
+a quotation from an Indian book: "The truly spiritual man all the
+siddhis stand ready to serve."
+
+Now it was necessary for the founding of religions and for the
+teaching of many of the doctrines of religions which had to do with
+worlds invisible to the physical eye, that the man who first
+promulgated these doctrines should be a man who had a first-hand
+acquaintance with the conditions they described. For you must remember
+that in every religion there are two sides to its teaching: the side
+of the spiritual truths known only to the unfolded divine
+consciousness; the side of the existence of other worlds than this,
+and of the conditions existing in those worlds--important to men, as
+they have to pass into those worlds after death, important to men
+also, as much of the symbolism, the rites and ceremonies, are
+connected with what we may roughly call occult science. As the
+Buddha said when speaking of worlds beyond the physical: "If you
+want to know your way to a village and particulars about the village,
+you ask a man who lives there and who has gone along the roads leading
+to it: and so you do right to come to me when you want to know about
+the Devas and about the invisible worlds, for I know those worlds
+and I know the way thereto." So that looking back to these great
+spiritual Teachers and Revealers of the unseen, we find they are
+always men of first-hand knowledge. That first-hand knowledge was
+shared by Their immediate followers, who carried on the teaching of
+the system after the Teacher had withdrawn. And it matters not what
+religion you take, living or dead, you will find it equally true, that
+phenomena were common in the earlier days of the teaching of that
+religion.
+
+Now let me take two typical religions, one Eastern and one Western,
+with regard to the continuance of the phenomena of the earlier
+days--the Hindu religion in the East for the Eastern example, and
+the Roman Catholic Church in the West for the Western example. In both
+these great religious movements we find a continuance of phenomena;
+neither Hinduism as typical of Eastern teaching, nor Roman
+Catholicism as the most widespread form of Christianity in the West,
+has ever taken up the position that the life which showed itself
+through the earlier teachers was cut off and no longer irrigated the
+fields of the religion. On the contrary, you find both these typical
+religions claiming continuity of life and of knowledge. Amongst the
+Hindus it is a commonplace to assert the possibilities of yoga,
+that a man can now, as much as in the days of the Manu or of the great
+Rishis, do what They did, can free himself from the physical
+body, can travel into other worlds of the systems, can acquaint
+himself with the forces and objects of those worlds, and carry on as
+definite a study of the Not-Self in those worlds, as anyone who wishes
+to do so may carry on a definite study of the Not-Self in the physical
+world. The claim has never been given up; the practice never wholly
+disappeared. So also with the Roman Catholic communion. There has
+been there a succession of saints and of seers who have always claimed
+to be in direct touch with other worlds, and who have claimed and
+exercised the powers of those worlds manifestly on the physical plane.
+To-day in the Roman Catholic Church similar phenomena are said to
+occur, and certainly the evidence offered for these phenomena is far
+more easily verifiable than the evidence offered for such phenomena in
+the earlier centuries of the Christian story. So also among the
+Hindus it is more easy to prove nowadays the powers possessed by a
+yogi, than it is to prove the possession of those powers thousands of
+years ago in the obscurity of the earlier days of Hinduism.
+Consequently you find amongst Roman Catholics and Hindus a definite
+belief that these things are still possible; and the only thing that
+either will say with regard to their happening is that the greater
+descent of the people as a whole into materiality has made the
+possession of these powers a far rarer qualification of a believer in
+one or other of the religions, than was the case in the early days of
+enthusiasm, and of a greater outpouring of spiritual life. There is no
+doubt, so far as Christianity is concerned, that the sacred books of
+the Christians entirely support the Roman Catholic contention. I am
+not going into the question of the authenticity of particular phrases;
+I simply take the New Testament, as it is admitted to be a sacred
+book. There you have placed in the mouth of Jesus the distinct
+declaration that those who believe on Him should do greater works than
+He did; and in one passage--rejected, I know, as not in the original
+manuscripts by many scholars, but still coming down from a great
+Christian antiquity--you have the distinct statement that they shall
+be able to drink poison, and so on. So it is clearly a part of the
+definite Christian teaching and tradition, that these so-called
+abnormal powers are within the reach of believers in Christianity. And
+so also with regard to Hinduism.
+
+Now another thing is to be observed in this connection: that as the
+religion has gone on generation after generation, century after
+century, there has been a diminution of the powers, and a much less
+frequent happening of these so-called miracles. Side by side with the
+weakening of these powers and the lessening in number of the phenomena
+has been also the gradual lessening of the power of the religion over
+the minds and lives of men. The inroads of other forms of thought, the
+slackening of the grasp of the believer on the realities of the unseen
+worlds, have diminished religious authority, and the power of those
+unseen realities has weakened as time has gone on. So if we take the
+case of Hinduism or Christianity we find them giving back before
+the inroads of a more materialistic philosophy, before the inroads of
+a self-assertive science. We find among cultured and thoughtful people
+in the East and West there has been a great slackening of hold on the
+teachings of religion, and that the power exercised over the lives of
+believers has become much less real than in earlier days. That is
+inevitable, the result of the efflux of time, and the need for the
+recurrence of spiritual impulses lies in that fact, which is ever
+repeating itself. Just in the same way in which we read in the
+_Bhagavad-Gita_ that by the efflux of time this yoga
+disappears, and then some teacher comes in order to restore vividness
+to the life, so it is over and over again in the case of every great
+spiritual movement.
+
+Now when we apply these manifest principles and facts to the latest
+spiritual movement, that which gave birth to the Theosophical Society,
+we find that we are running through, in a very short time, the same
+series of facts as characterised the religions of the past. Here also,
+as with them, a great outburst of phenomena in the earlier days;
+H.P.B. living in a cloud of phenomena and those who came in touch with
+her bathed in phenomena of all kinds. You can see the result of that
+early training in our late President, Colonel Olcott, to whom
+phenomena in connection with the Theosophical Society were the most
+natural things in the world. He had no hesitation in talking of them,
+was always bubbling over with his experiences of them in the past. You
+must remember, when he was over here, how much he thought about them,
+the pleasure he took in recalling his earlier experiences, and of
+showing the material articles produced phenomenally in those earlier
+days; and you cannot take up _Old Diary Leaves_ without finding
+yourself face to face with every-day happenings of phenomena. Life
+then seemed to be made up of the abnormal, in the sense in which that
+word is used. The normal for the time being had disappeared. If a
+duster had to be hemmed, an elemental did it. If pencils were needed,
+a hand was put forward, twisted the pencils about, and there were
+twelve in place of the one, and so on. Much greater people than H.P.B.
+were concerned in producing these phenomena. Colonel Olcott tells us
+how H.P.B. on one occasion drank some lukewarm water which a Master
+drew from a water-skin on a camel, and magnetised, and made her
+believe it to be coffee. On his removing the magnetism before she had
+finished drinking, she found to her disgust that she had been drinking
+this lukewarm water. The present-day Theosophist would probably have
+objected to such playfulness, but such things were continually
+happening in the early days. When Colonel Olcott came into the Society
+he came straight from the investigation of spiritualistic phenomena--a
+thoroughly well-trained observer, beginning with a good deal of
+scepticism, and beaten out of it by his own observations in
+innumerable spiritualistic seances. So that when he came in touch with
+H.P.B. he was no credulous, unobservant person, overborne by a number
+of wonderful happenings, but a thoroughly equipped and cold-blooded
+and well-trained observer of the super-physical, and he naturally
+brought his powers of observation to bear on these wonderful
+happenings. He has left on record the full stories of these earlier
+days. You may find similar stories, not to the same extent indeed, in
+Mr. Sinnett's book, _The Occult World_. There we find similar
+instances, similar marvels worked by H.P.B. in order to arouse his
+attention, and to prove to him the existence of certain laws; which
+otherwise would have remained, so to speak, in the air. So there were
+also there a large number of unusual happenings--letters in
+pillow-cases, letters on branches of trees, and so on. You would all
+do well to re-read the _Old Diary Leaves_ or _The Occult World_. Each
+one of you should deliberately ask himself: "Why do I believe these
+things to be true?" Because it seems to me that most members of the
+Theosophical Society are rather slipping into the position of the
+modern Christian, that in order that a miracle may be true it must be
+old, and if it happens nowadays it must immediately be discredited.
+That is not rational. But it is a perfectly rational position to take
+up with all phenomena to say: "I shall not accept one of them unless
+thoroughly satisfied with the evidence on which it rests"; that is a
+perfectly reasonable attitude; but what seems to me a little less
+reasonable is to swallow wholesale the phenomena of the early days,
+and to look very much askance at anything that happens now; to glance
+back proudly to the past, and to regard anything which might happen
+now as wrong, as undesirable. Because if that is the right position,
+then it ought to be applied all round; it ought to be applied to the
+early phenomena of the Society as much as to anything that may occur
+now; and the same rigid demand for evidence should be made as is made
+at the present time. But, on the other hand, if the evidence be as
+full and as satisfactory now as that which supported the earlier
+phenomena, then it does not seem quite reasonable to accept the
+earlier and deny the later.
+
+Let us for a moment see how far the Society has been going along the
+same line as that along which the other religions have gone--the
+gradual disappearance of phenomena and the substitution for them of
+teaching appealing to the reason only, and not to the senses, claiming
+its authority on grounds which appeal to the consciousness in man, as
+far as is practicable divorced from matter, or to that consciousness
+working through comparatively thick and gross veils of matter. After
+the Coulomb difficulty there was a cessation almost entirely of these
+phenomena in the Theosophical Society. Two reasons led up to that:
+first, the utter disinclination of H.P.B. herself to continue to
+expose herself to the attacks of people with regard to her good faith.
+She was so maligned and slandered, so many friends turned against her
+and spoke of the powers she possessed as fraudulent and as tricks,
+that when her Master raised her from the bed that might have been her
+death-bed, and would have been, save for His coming to her at
+Adyar, she made the condition that she should not be forced to
+produce phenomena in the way she had been forced before; that she
+should be allowed to put that aside. The consent was given.
+Lion-hearted as she was, she shrank from the storm of slander that
+broke on her. The other reason was that people belonging to the
+Society took fright. The pressure of public reprobation was so strong,
+the force of unbelief so crushing, that the members of the Society
+itself shrank back and were afraid to face public opinion, ignorant
+and persecuting as it was; and it is pathetic and interesting to read
+the letters she wrote in the years immediately succeeding the Coulomb
+difficulty, in which she pointed out that those to whom she had
+brought the light were ashamed to stand beside her under the
+conditions to which she was then exposed. She complained that the
+writings in the Society were changing their character; that they were
+no longer occult and full of teaching of the unseen, but had become
+purely philosophical and metaphysical; that her own journal had
+turned aside from its earlier occultism, and confined itself to
+articles addressed only to the intellect; and she says in one of these
+letters: "Say what you may, it was my phenomena on which the
+Theosophical Society was founded. It is my phenomena by which that
+Society has been built up." It was a natural feeling of half
+resentment against the policy of the time, that had left her in the
+lurch, and put the Society upon a different footing. It was in
+connection with that terrible time, in the turmoil and whirl of
+conflicting opinions, that those words recorded of her Master, spoken
+to herself, in one of the records left to the Society, occurred, in
+which He said: "The Society has liberated itself from our grasp and
+influence ... it is no longer ... a body over the face of which broods
+the Spirit from beyond the Great Range." Along those newer lines the
+Society went, and there are many who will say: "They are better lines.
+It is better that these abnormal happenings should fall into the
+background, that they should not be presented to a scornful and
+sceptical world, that we should rely on the literature that we have,
+without desiring to increase it by new knowledge, in which much can
+only be gained by abnormal means. Better to rest on what we have, and
+not try to add to it." Very many of our members take that view, and it
+is a perfectly reasonable view to take, a view which ought to have its
+place in the Theosophical Society, a view which is useful as
+correcting the tendency to undue credulity, which otherwise might hold
+on its way unchecked. For the life of the Society depends on the fact
+that it should include a vast variety of opinions on all the
+questions on which difference of opinion is possible; and it is not
+desirable that there should be only one school of thought in the
+Society. There should be many schools of thought, as many schools as
+there are different thinkers who can formulate their thought, and each
+standing with an equal right to speak and of claiming a respectful
+hearing. None of them has a right to say: "There is no place for you
+in the Theosophical Society." Neither must the person who is strong on
+the subject of phenomena try to silence those who meet phenomena with
+disbelief, or who think them dangerous; nor should a person who stands
+only on philosophy and metaphysics say to the Theosophical acceptor of
+the phenomena: "Your views are wrong and dangerous." Perfect freedom
+of thought is the law and life of the Society; and if we are not fit
+for that, if we have not reached the position where we can understand
+that the more we can enrich the Society with differences of opinion
+and different standpoints, the more likely is it to do its work and
+live for centuries to come, when other new avenues of knowledge unfold
+before it, we are not ready to be members of the Theosophical Society
+at all.
+
+Now the Society has gone along those lines, along which every religion
+has gone, from the time of the Coulomb trial. What has been the effect
+of that on religions? A weakening power. We have to beware that the
+same thing does not take place with us that has taken place with the
+different religions of the past; we should take care--especially in an
+era wherein ordinary science on the physical plane is pressing onwards
+into the higher realms of the physical plane, and on to the very
+threshold of the astral plane, and bids fair to cross that threshold
+and demonstrate its teaching there--lest we, who claim to be in the
+forefront of this great movement, do not fall into the background, and
+become unworthy of carrying on the standard of knowledge. Therefore I
+would claim for the Society its place as a seeker after new knowledge,
+investigation by what we call clairvoyance, the definite and regular
+carrying out of the third object, which has been far too much
+neglected of late years; practically, where many years ago the Society
+was leading the way in the investigation of the hidden laws in Nature
+and the hidden powers in man, it now has to take a back seat with
+regard to the contributions it is making under that particular object
+for which amongst others it was founded. For more work has been done
+of late years by the Psychical Research and similar Societies than by
+the Theosophical Society, and that is neither right or wise--not
+right, because as long as we keep such research as one of our objects
+we ought to live up to it; not wise, because the lessons we have
+learnt, the various theories we have studied, are better guides to
+investigation than anything which the other Societies have, who have
+not yet been able to formulate theories but are simply in the state of
+collecting phenomena. For that reason it seems to me that the Society
+can do work here which the others cannot. They collect and verify with
+patient care masses of most interesting and valuable phenomena. The
+work done by the late Mr. Gurney and Mr. Myers, and a large number of
+their co-workers, is invaluable work from the standpoint of the
+Theosophical student. But there is no order in it; there is no reason
+in it. It is a mere chaos of facts, and they cannot explain or
+correlate them. They cannot classify or place them in order. They have
+no world-embracing knowledge which enables them to place each fact in
+its own place, and to show the relation of one set of facts to the
+other. There are splendid observations, but no co-ordination and
+building of them into a science; and it seems to me that it is a duty
+of the Theosophical Society, not only to deal with the facts that
+others have verified, but to carry on researches by properly qualified
+persons among its own members; to utilise its magnificent theories,
+its knowledge--for they are more than theories--for the explanation of
+new phenomena, for the gradual evolution of new powers among greater
+numbers of its members; and I do not believe that in that there is so
+much danger as some people fear. I do not believe that the study of
+the hidden side of Nature is so perilous a study as some think. All
+researches at first hand in the early days of a science have some
+danger: chemistry, electricity, had dangers for their pioneers, but
+not dangers from which wise people and brave should shrink; and I fear
+for the future of the Theosophical Society if it follows the track of
+many of the religions and lets go its hold of knowledge of the other
+worlds, and comes to depend on hearsay, tradition, belief in the
+experience of others, and the avoidance of the reverification of
+experience. For it must be remembered that in giving a vast mass of
+knowledge to the world, H.P.B. distinctly stated that these are facts
+which can be reverified by every generation of observers; she did not
+give a body of teaching to be swallowed, to be taken on authority, to
+be accepted by what is called faith; but a body of verifiable
+teachings, facts to be examined over again, facts to be experimented
+on, to be carefully studied, as the scientific man studies the part of
+the world he knows. Unless we can do that, I fear we shall tend only
+to become another religion among the religions of the world; that we
+also shall lose our power over the thought of our generation, and to
+that which has been done so splendidly in past years--the spreading of
+these ideas so that they are becoming commonplace now among cultured
+and intellectual people--pause will be given, and the spreading
+influence will be checked, because we have left part of our work
+undone, part of our message unsaid. And I would urge on you in
+relation to this that which I said in a sentence at the beginning of
+my address, that there is one condition of research into these matters
+common to ordinary science and to the science of the higher worlds,
+and that is a balanced judgment, acute and accurate observation, and a
+constant readiness to reverify and recast earlier observations in the
+light of the later ones that are made. All science grows by
+modification as more and more facts are collected by the scientific
+observers, and no scientific man would make any progress in his
+science, if he were always in the reverential attitude of the devotee
+before a spiritual truth when he is working out experiments in his
+laboratory. You may show reverence to great beings like the Masters,
+there the posture of reverence is the right one; but when you are
+dealing with the phenomena of the astral plane there is no more need
+to show reverence than with phenomena of the physical plane. It is out
+of place, and if you make that atmosphere round it, you will always
+be at the mercy of misconception and error of all kinds. You must try,
+in all psychical research, in all weighing of observation of
+phenomena, to cultivate the purely scientific spirit, indifferent save
+to the truth and the accuracy of the results, looking on every matter
+with a clear eye, without bias and without prejudice; not seeking for
+facts to verify a doctrine already believed in, but seeking for facts
+in order to draw conclusions from them as to the laws and truths of
+the unseen world. There is no other safe way of investigation, no
+other reasonable condition of mind in face of the objective world; and
+if it be possible amongst us to break down this wall between the
+physical, astral and mental, to see all objects in all worlds as
+simply part of the Not-Self which we are studying, dealing with them
+in the same way, interpreting them in the same spirit, then we are
+likely to add largely to our knowledge without risking the loss of our
+judgment or becoming mere enthusiasts, carried away by marvels and
+unable either to observe accurately or judge correctly. The place of
+phenomena in the Theosophical Society seems to me to be a constant
+place. They must be recognised as fit objects for the study of the
+Theosophist. We must recognise frankly that our future literature
+depends on the development of these powers which can be utilised in
+the worlds beyond the physical; that we are not satisfied to be only
+receivers, but also desire to be investigators and students; that
+while we will check the observations of to-day by the observations of
+the past, and hold our conclusions lightly until they have been
+repeatedly verified, we will not be frightened back from
+investigation by the idea that psychism is a thing to be disliked, to
+be shrunk from, to be afraid of. Some of you think that I have laid
+too much stress, when speaking of observations in the other worlds, on
+the probability of mistake. Some have blamed me from time to time
+because I have guarded myself so much by saying: "It is likely that
+mistakes have come into these observations." But it is only by keeping
+that frame of mind, that reiterated observation can correct the
+blunders which we inevitably fall into in our earlier investigations.
+There is no scientific man in the world who, when making experiments
+in a new branch of science, is not well aware that he may blunder, is
+likely to make mistakes, likely to have to correct himself, to find
+out that wider knowledge alters the proportion between his facts. And
+I have tried to lay stress on the fact that these things are true as
+regards the astral plane as much as they are true of the physical;
+that it is not a question of revelation by some highly evolved being,
+but a question of observation by gradually developing beings--a very,
+very different thing. And unless you are prepared to take up that
+reasonable position, unless you will allow the investigator to make
+mistakes and to correct them, without calling out too loudly against
+them, or abusing them for not being perfect and invariable, you will
+build a wall against the gaining of further knowledge, and cramp the
+Society, and give it only tradition instead of ever fresh knowledge,
+ever widening information.
+
+So that I declare thus the place of phenomena in the Theosophical
+Society: I declare that it was founded with them, built up by them,
+nourished by them, and that they ought to continue to be a department
+of our work, a proper subject for our investigation. Only, do not get
+confused by bringing faith into the region of phenomena. There is only
+one thing to which the word faith ought really to be applied: and that
+is the conviction of Deity within us. That is the real faith, the
+faith in the Self within, an unconquerable, imperial conviction of the
+Divinity which is the root of our nature. That faith is truly above
+reason; that conviction transcends all proofs and all intellect; but
+nothing in the object world is an object of faith; all are objects of
+knowledge. If you can keep that distinction clear in your mind; if you
+can remember that the only warranted conviction above reason is that
+conviction of your eternity, then you may go safely into the region of
+phenomena, into the manifestations and happenings of the objective
+world, with clear judgment, clear sight, unbiased mind; and knowledge
+shall reward you in your researches into Nature, for Nature always has
+a reward for the seeker into her secrets.
+
+
+
+
+Spiritual and Temporal Authority
+
+
+I am to speak to-night, as you know, on "Spiritual and Temporal
+Authority," and I have chosen this, with the other subjects, as
+bearing on questions of immediate interest to the Theosophical
+Society. But in dealing with each of these, as on the first occasion,
+I want, if I can, to lift you above any controversy of the moment, and
+to put before you broad outlines rather than mere details, and to lead
+you to look at all these questions from the wider standpoint of the
+experience of the past, trying to apply that experience as far as you
+can to the questions, the difficulties, of the present. And this
+question that I have chosen for the subject of our thought to-night is
+one which carries us back into the very beginnings of human history on
+our globe, which we may trace downwards through civilisation after
+civilisation, and we can then study, as it were by contrast, many of
+our modern civilisations. And out of all this it may be that we shall
+learn some lesson for our own small affairs of the moment. For local
+affairs are only really interesting as we see them as manifestations
+of the great principles which work out in the history of humanity; and
+we can only rightly, I think, understand the power of the
+Theosophical Movement, if we see it in its proper place in history,
+and not as a mere bubble on the water of the present.
+
+Now, far, far back--I suppose some people will say "not in history," for
+the time I am speaking of is what would be called "prehistoric"--when
+the great Lords from the planet Venus came to our globe to guide and
+train the humanity which just then had come to the birth, we find a
+group of Teachers and Rulers, not belonging to our humanity at all, but,
+as I said, coming from the planet Venus, from the far more highly
+evolved humanity living in that world. They came for the specific
+purpose of making the evolution of the new humanity more rapid than
+otherwise it would be. For, as you know, at that time humanity was
+facing a very terrible danger. The bodies had evolved up to a certain
+point, the brooding Spirit was over each body, but the intellectual
+evolution had scarcely begun to dawn; mind, as we know it now, had
+scarcely asserted itself; only mind, as we see it in the animals, had
+been slowly unfolding its powers in the upward-climbing towards the
+light. And as it is always true that any force which is poured down into
+a body must necessarily flow along the channels which that body has
+prepared for it, in these animal men, as we may call them, when they
+received a new influx of spiritual life--or, if we prefer the phrase,
+"as the influx grew stronger and stronger"--that new life, that
+additional force, inevitably ran into animal channels, lacking the
+guiding and directing force of the intelligence. Hence the immediate
+result of any increased down-pouring from the spiritual plane was an
+increase in animality in the growing man; and his body, growing up out
+of the animal kingdom, influenced by that--although, as you remember,
+human from the beginning, yet retracing its ancestry in those early
+days--was driven by the incoming life into various lines of activity,
+harmless to the brute, but that would have been destructive to the
+upward-climbing human being. Hence the need for a swift intervention on
+the part of the Guardians of all humanities; and our planetary Logos
+called to His help humanity from a chain older than His own, so that He
+might have for His infant children guides that would protect them
+against danger, and would lead them upwards more swiftly than they
+themselves could have climbed alone. Hence the coming of those Mighty
+Ones, and it was They who were the first Adepts, Masters, for our
+humanity. There is no other term for the moment to apply to them,
+although the term "Master" is really inappropriate: They were far higher
+in the Occult Hierarchy than Those we speak of as the Masters of Wisdom
+and Compassion. They became the first Teachers and Kings of our child
+humanity, and They were of many grades. "Divine Kings" They are called
+in the old records; Teachers and Kings in one. They established the
+polities of the infant nations; They gave to those same nations their
+religions; and in those early days, as in the days that will close our
+human history, there was no distinction recognised between "sacred" and
+"profane." It was seen that Spirit, clothing itself in matter, should be
+regarded in each of its tabernacles as a single individual. Spirit and
+matter were not regarded, so to speak, as distinguished from each
+other, save in quality. The two combined into the making of the man. And
+the man's life was a human life, and the body guided by human
+consciousness; but the body was not thought of as separate from the
+Spirit, nor the Spirit from the body; both were combined into a single
+being. And in all true organisations that is the point which is to be
+aimed at: that the informing life shall shape and mould the organism
+which is thus expressing the life on planes of matter; that that
+organism shall ever be an organism spirit-inspired, life-shaped, so as
+to become more and more perfectly the expression of the life which it
+enfolds. We shall see presently that for a time, when Spirit became
+utterly blinded by matter, that matter, as it were, took the upper hand
+and claimed to be monarch. But in those far-off days it was still
+recognised that Spirit was the master of matter, and the Gods walked
+amongst men and were recognised by men as their Teachers and Kings. And
+humanity in its infancy clung to These, who were as fathers and mothers
+of the race, and looked to Them for everything necessary to nourish and
+develop the young life. So that looking back to those earlier days, the
+great lawgivers like the Manus were at once Kings and Priests. They gave
+everything to the humanity that They guarded: literature, science, art,
+architecture, everything which was necessary to the national life. And
+under that mighty protection grew up the vast civilisations of the past.
+You find traces of them, of course, in Egypt; traces of them, in fact,
+everywhere in the older, the now dying, or dead peoples. And these
+King-Priests, these King-Prophets, summed up in Their own divine persons
+all the ruling powers of Spirit and matter alike. The State was a
+Church, or the Church was a State.
+
+Gradually, as these Great Ones withdrew, as Those who only lived for
+service saw that humanity had begun to take its first steps, and
+needed less physical guidance and visible helping, others still great,
+but not as superhuman as the earlier ones, took up the royal and
+priestly rank. Still the two ran together: the temporal and spiritual
+power in one pair of hands; and so on and on, from Atlantis downwards.
+Some traces of it still survive, as in the Indian civilisation, where
+the ideal of the monarch is always that of the Divine representative
+upon earth. But in India, after the earliest days, you see the
+beginning division, and the offices of the King and of the Teacher
+gradually diverged the one from the other. And as time went on, and
+man grew a little older in his childhood, those who ruled over the
+State gave away out of their hands the teaching of the religion.
+Rightly and well; for it was necessary that humanity should learn to
+guide itself. It was on the downward arc still, not yet beginning its
+upward climbing, and it had to plunge deeper and deeper into matter.
+The eyes of the Spirit had to be blinded in order that the eyes of the
+intellect might open, and so gradually prepare humanity for a loftier
+manifestation of the spiritual life.
+
+And then we find that with the dividing of the two offices, the Kings
+grew less and less fathers of their peoples, and became more and more
+tyrants over the nations. In the elder days the principle that was
+taught was clear and simple: the greater the power, the greater the
+sacrifice; the greater the power, the greater the duty. And on that
+principle of the Law of Sacrifice the old civilisations were built up;
+to that they owed their splendor; to that the long ages through which
+they lived and flourished; to sacrifice, as the very basis of the
+national and religious polity, they owed the vigor, the young vigor,
+of humanity. Their literature was grandiose; their architecture
+magnificent; their art sublime. The traces of divinity ran through the
+whole of it. But, beautiful as it was, it would not have been well
+that it should have lasted, for had it been so, mankind would have
+grown to depend too much upon the manifested Divine life walking
+incarnate side by side with it. And it was necessary that the growing
+child should prove his own limbs, and the growing intelligence should
+learn to depend upon itself. Then we come to a long period when the
+tyranny of the King brought out more and more strongly the usefulness
+of the Teacher, and when the Teacher was continually standing between
+the power of the tyrant and the helplessness of the people; when
+religion became a shield for the weak, a strong check for the violence
+of power. And we pass thus through all that long period of human
+history where the oppressed found their only refuge in the priests of
+the religions, and found them a sure protection against the sword of
+the secular power. So went on for hundreds, nay, for thousands of
+years, the growth of humanity; and the two powers went further and
+further apart, coming more and more the one into opposition with the
+other. And the people, the nations, gradually grew in power, grew in
+intelligence, to a considerable extent. The priest was still the
+teacher, and still the schools and the temples were united.
+Unfortunately, after a while the religions became corrupted as well as
+the royalties, and priests began to share the worldliness that had
+already degraded the Kings; and then, with the failure of the
+priesthood, practically ceased the education of the people for many
+and many a long century, and intelligence was not developed, and the
+power of the mind was not assisted to manifest itself.
+
+And so onward and onward till we come to Middle Age Europe, and we
+find a down-trodden proletariat, an indifferent and luxurious kingship
+and priesthood, allied now to oppress, not to raise. Therefore,
+contest between the Church and the State, until the Pontiff of Rome
+remained the only representative of the union of the spiritual and
+temporal authority--his spiritual authority enormous, his temporal
+authority growing smaller, and badly used, so that in the States of
+the Church in Italy there was almost the acme of bad temporal
+government; and there was little to choose, really, between the States
+of the Church and the odious tyranny of Naples. In the States of the
+Church the old ideal of the Priest-King was degraded to its lowest
+point, and neither on the side of Pontiff, nor on the side of King,
+was the ruler of Rome the father, the shepherd of his people, but
+often only a devouring wolf. Hence the last degradation of a once
+magnificent office.
+
+Meanwhile the Democracy was growing, and numbers were beginning to
+claim their power, until the people, having seen how badly Kings and
+priests could rule, thought that they could not, after all, do very
+much worse themselves, if they seized authority by the power of
+numbers, and took the helm of the States, of the Nations, into their
+own rough and untrained grip. And so has risen in the modern life of
+Europe the power, as it is called, of the Democracy. Practically, at
+the present time, Democracy may be said to be on its trial. It cannot
+claim so far to be a very splendid success, but its trial is not yet
+over, and many a year may yet lie before it, in order that the world
+may have an object-lesson to show that the only true authority is the
+authority of Wisdom, and not the authority of numbers; and that it is
+not possible for humanity to take its next step onwards until it has
+managed to draw out of the lessons of the past and of the present some
+way of blending, some way of uniting, the different experiences
+through which it has passed. For all who study the world's unfolding
+and believe that this world is not alone, but is a part linked with
+other worlds, and that other beings above humanity take their share in
+humanity's evolution--all who thus look at history and see the powers
+that lie behind the veil and that pull the strings of those whom we
+call kings, and statesmen, and generals, and the mighty ones of earth,
+they know that no great human experiment can be void of its value, and
+no great human experiment but has some fruit of wisdom to be gathered
+from it. So that no wise man, no thoughtful Theosophist, should look
+with a feeling of repulsion and anger on the experiments that are
+being made all over the world to-day in the effort of the nations to
+rule themselves by numbers rather than by wisdom. For it is a
+necessary experience. Only in this fashion can the lower mind complete
+its evolution and be ready to give up its sceptre to that Pure Reason
+which is to be the mark of the Sixth Race, which is to find its
+expression in the polity of that coming Race. Out of all these
+experiments we are to learn, out of all successes and all failures we
+are to spell out, the lesson whereon the next civilisation will be
+built, whereby its foundation will gradually be laid. For if one sees
+the Theosophical Society aright, it is as one of the builders of that
+coming time, one of the builders of the civilisation that has not yet
+really dawned on earth, the civilisation of the Sixth Root Race, with
+the experiments that will go before it in the Sixth and Seventh
+sub-races of the Fifth. For these experiments take long in the making,
+and, as a great teacher once said: "Time is no object with us." There
+is plenty of time for all the experiments, and all the blunders, and
+all the failures; and all the successes of the future will grow out of
+these, because every failure rightly seen is the seed of a coming
+success, and only by the failures that we make in our ignorance may
+the plant of wisdom be sown, and presently flower and bear fruit for
+the feeding of the nations. So that there is time enough, and no need
+for impatience, when we see the blunders of our various democratic
+governments. But there is much need that thoughtful people should take
+care so to see the signs of the time, and so to understand the forces
+at work, that the same blunder be not made in the days of the present
+as was made at the close of the eighteenth century in France; for
+there also was a time when an effort was made for a great step
+forward, a step too big, apparently, to be possible of being then
+taken, a step which only caused the drowning of the forward movement
+in blood, and has thrown France backward, and not forward as some
+people suppose; for ever since that time she has had a cancer at the
+heart of her, and no effort that has been made has borne due fruit.
+Nay, it is even possible that that was her opportunity in which she
+failed, and that the opportunity will have to pass to other peoples,
+to be worked out by other hands.
+
+Looking at the democracies of to-day, we see that both the great
+powers are rejected, King and priest alike, royalty reduced to a mere
+puppet, priesthood looked on with suspicion and with hatred; and in
+both cases one is bound to admit that there is much justification, for
+they are the result of the harm that unbridled power in Church and in
+State alike have wrought to the people, who are now revolting against
+both. But the revolt is only a passing thing. Humanity does not really
+change; only passing manifestations of it change; and though the
+passing manifestations be counted by centuries, what is that in the
+length of a day counted by myriads of years, and to peoples who are
+spiritual intelligences unfolding their powers in humanity? Kingship
+and priesthood are mighty powers, and the need for them deep-rooted in
+the nature of humanity. Only on the upward path they are different
+from what they were on the path of descent, and the way in which those
+are to be shaped and moulded and again made mighty, that will be the
+answer of human experience after it has proved the rule of ignorance
+to be a mistake and a failure. Gradually, in some way that as yet we
+do not see, a way will be found of discovering the wise, who alone
+have the right to rule. For there is no authority for the
+intelligence, there is no authority for the free intellect of man,
+save the authority of Wisdom, to which the intellect bows because it
+is itself in flower. And those who develop the intelligence of men, as
+humanity is beginning to evolve its intelligence, they will only find
+their Kings and Priests where they see a wisdom greater than their
+own, a knowledge which transcends theirs, but is the promise of what
+they themselves in the future should become. And out of all the
+birth-throes of the present, and the ugly shapes which humanity takes
+on, will come the fairer birth of Wisdom, when again it shall sit on
+the combined throne of King and Priest. For it is necessary that human
+life should regain its unity, and that again the Spirit shall be known
+to be master, and the body its instrument, its tool, its expression.
+And on the upward-climbing arc we have again to come to the same
+levels that we passed in our downward-going arc of the ages of the
+past. In the half circle we had first the Priest-King; and then the
+two side by side, co-operators; and then the separation and the
+rivalry; and, finally, an evil junction to oppress the ignorant and
+the poor. And slowly we shall have to climb on the path where Spirit
+is manifesting more and more, and matter is becoming more and more
+obedient, until each of those stages is again seen in the history of
+humanity, and until, at the end, Spirit shall be lord unchallenged,
+and matter obedient servant, carrying out his will. And in the
+humanity of the great Sixth Race in which Buddhi, or Pure
+Reason, is to be the mark, in which Wisdom will be the shaper of
+humanity's plans, and the strength of matter will be used in order to
+carry them out, in those days there will be the building-up of the
+dual authority once more, and the shaping of it to diviner ends than
+even in those early days of the infant humanity. And in those days,
+again, ruler and priest shall be one, until at last the unity shall be
+realised in the life of those who are to accomplish their human
+evolution upon earth; until finally in each spiritual individual these
+two characteristics are unfolded, and each man is King and Priest,
+uniting the two phases in his own individuality, and learning, in that
+dual power, to become the servant of those who are less evolved than
+himself. You see a touch of that when the Christian religion was sent
+out into the world, a glimpse of the splendid ideal when the Apostle,
+writing to his infant Church, spoke of them as "Kings and priests unto
+God"; in each individual this identity is to be at last achieved, so
+that no outer rule is any longer necessary, the inner rule being
+enough. That unity will mark the closing scenes of life on earth in
+each of those whose human evolution will be finished, who will have to
+pass on into other worlds when they shall have united again each of
+these in their own persons, and shall use that twofold power for the
+training of the humanity below them, ascending towards the point which
+they shall have gained and shall occupy.
+
+Such the vast sweep of humanity's evolution: from Spirit, through
+densest matter, upward-climbing again to Spirit, bearing with it all
+the powers that by the experience in matter it has gained. Such the
+great sweep, and the great history. What relation has that to our
+little Society and our little movement? Some would be inclined to say:
+"None; no relation at all. You cannot bring down into so small a
+microcosm those great principles shown out in their working in a
+macrocosm." And yet if you and I, in our tiny personalities, repeat in
+miniature the life of the Logos in the vast sweep of His creative
+activity, who shall say that in a movement such as ours there is not
+similarly a retracing of the lines along which humanity at large has
+to grow? And who shall say whether we may not understand our movement
+better, and guide it more wisely, if we recognise these
+correspondences of the great growth of the world to the small growth
+of our Movement--a world-reflection in a tiny mirror? For it is no
+true humility to lessen too much the varied operations of the Great
+White Lodge in the world of men, any more than it is a true humility
+for the individual to be ashamed to claim his divine inheritance, and
+look upon himself as a "mere worm of earth." The men or women who only
+feel themselves to be of the earth, and not of Deity, their lives
+become more vulgar and common than they ought to be; for it is a great
+thing to realise possibilities and to see correspondences, and to take
+out of them their inspiring value, their invigorating force. And just
+as you and I have the right to say that we are Gods in the making, and
+that there is nothing in the great power of the LOGOS that does not
+lie hidden in germ within ourselves, just as we have the right to say
+that, as man best understands himself when he knows himself divine and
+realises the possibilities within him, and sees the road to Deity
+which he is to tread, so is every spiritual movement great in
+proportion to the realisation of its one-ness with the great
+world-movement, and small and petty when the men and women who
+compose it can only keep their eyes on the muck of the earth instead
+of looking up to the crown of stars that the angel holds over their
+head. So that I do not fear to provoke a false pride, but rather to
+get rid of a false humility, when I ask you to see in this Movement,
+which belongs to the Great Lodge and is its child, to see in it the
+same forces at work that you see working in the world-history, and to
+realise that here also correspondences exist, and that we may guide
+our Movement most worthily by seeing those correspondences and
+utilising them for the common good.
+
+So let us pause now, after these high flights, in the little valley in
+which we live, and see whether in the Theosophical Society any such
+process of events may be seen as has been played on the great world
+theatre, in the drama of evolving humanity. For mind! we have no meaning
+unless we are related to that, and our Movement has no sense unless it
+retraces the steps of the great world drama, as every great spiritual
+movement does, from the time of its birth to the time of its passing
+away, and its incarnation in some other form. I do not claim it for our
+Society only, but for all great spiritual movements--churches,
+religions, call them what you will.
+
+Now, we began our Movement as humanity began its education. There was
+no difference between spiritual and temporal. The whole Society was
+regarded as a spiritual movement; and if you go back to those early
+days, and read the earliest statements, you will find it said that
+this Society existed in what then were called three Sections: First,
+Second, and Third. The First Section was the Brotherhood, the Elder
+Brothers of Humanity; the Second, those who were striving to lead the
+higher, the more spiritual life, and were in training for the purpose;
+and the Third Section made up the bulk of the Society. Those three
+Sections were the Theosophical Society. So that it began on a very
+lofty level; and its First Section, the Elder Brothers, Those whom we
+speak of as Masters, They were regarded as forming the First Section
+of the Society, and as part of it; and the Society has linked closely
+the Second and Third Sections under the First, as in the days when the
+Gods walked with men, in the early story of humanity. And They came
+and went far more freely then than later, and mingled more with the
+Society, taking a more active part in this work; and it is wonderful
+to read some of the old letters of the time, and the close and
+intimate knowledge shown by those great Teachers of the details of the
+work of the Society, even of what was written about it in an Indian
+newspaper, and what ought to be answered, and so on. And the Society
+grew, became more numerous, and spread in many lands; and naturally as
+it spread, many of these ties somewhat weakened so far as the Society,
+as a whole, was concerned--not weakened with individuals, but somewhat
+weakened with the Body at large. And so things went on and on, until
+the Society passed through the same stage through which humanity had
+passed when the Priest-Kings entirely disappeared, and when those
+words were spoken by one of the Great Ones: "The Society has liberated
+itself from our grasp and influence, and we have let it go; we make no
+unwilling slaves.... Out of the three Objects the second alone is
+attended to; it is no longer either a Brotherhood, nor a body over
+the face of which broods the Spirit from beyond the Great Range." And
+when that time was well established a change was made in the
+organisation of the Society. It was no longer, so to speak, one and
+indivisible, but two parts were made--Exoteric and Esoteric; and, as
+you know, for some time the Colonel fought against that, thinking it
+meant an unwise and dangerous division of authority in the Society,
+until, as he was coming over here with his mind in opposition to the
+proposal that H.P.B. should form the Esoteric Section, he received, on
+board the steamer on which he travelled, a letter from his Master
+telling him to carry out what H.P.B. wished; and, ever obedient as he
+was, for when his Master spoke he knew no hesitation, when he arrived
+here in England he did what he had been told, and authorised the
+formation of what was then called the Esoteric Section of the
+Theosophical Society. You can read all this for yourselves; it is all
+in print. Then came that distinct cleavage of Exoteric and
+Esoteric--the two heads, H. S. Olcott and H.P.B., one wielding the
+temporal and the other the spiritual authority in the Society. It
+meant that the Society had ceased to be the spiritual vehicle it was
+in the earlier days. It meant, as was printed at that time, that some
+of the members wished to carry on the Society on its original lines,
+and so they formed themselves into this Section under her, on the
+original lines. So it went on, like that time in the history of
+humanity, in order that certain faculties might grow and become
+strong, and that the spiritual side for a time might seem apart, and
+the other might go its own way unruled. Many difficulties grew out of
+it, but still they were not insuperable--a certain clashing of
+authorities from time to time, and certain jealousy between the one
+and the other. These things were the inevitable concomitants of the
+separation, of the differences between the spiritual and temporal
+sides, the Spirit and the body, as it were. So things went on until
+the President passed away. When H.P.B. left us, she left me in charge
+of her work, as her colleague did in Adyar lately, thus uniting
+again the two powers, the two authorities, in a single person.
+
+Now, what does it mean to the Society? That is the question for us.
+What is it to bring forth in our Movement? Ill or well? It is only
+possible, at this beginning of the road, to point out the two things
+that _may_ happen. For the Society and its President together will
+have to settle which of the two shall come. It may be that They, who
+from behind look on, may foresee what is coming; or it may be, as it
+often is, that They also are not able completely to say what shall
+come out of the clashing wills of men, differing views, possible
+antagonisms. Two possibilities there clearly are before us, either of
+which, I suggest, may come. For you and for me it is to decide which
+shall come. And I can only tell you how it seems to me, and you must
+judge and act as you think right. For at last our Society, like
+humanity, has reached the point when the individual must do his duty,
+and must no longer be a child guided entirely from without, but a man
+with the God within co-operating with the God without. Hence it is not
+a question for any to decide for us: we have to decide it for
+ourselves. And as I say, I can only put to you what seem to me the two
+possibilities. Let me take the bad possibility first. It may be that
+I, in whose hands these two powers now are placed, shall prove too
+weak to bear that burden, too blind to walk along that difficult path.
+It may be that I shall err on the one side or on the other, either
+making the Society too exoteric and empty, a material thing, or, on
+the other hand, pressing too far the spiritual side, with all that
+that means. It may be that the task is too great, and that the time
+has not come. I recognise that as possible; for in all questions of
+peoples, persons, and times, experiments may be made which it is known
+will fail, in order that out of the failure fresh wisdom may be
+gathered, and it may be that this shall be a failure. And if so it
+matters not, for out of that failure some higher good will spring.
+That is the conviction of those who know that the Self is ever in us,
+and that the Self can never perish; so that it matters not what
+catastrophe may come, provided faith in the Self remains secure with
+His endless possibilities of recovery, and greater powers of
+manifestation. And it may quite well be that, in hands as weak and
+knowledge as limited as mine, failure will meet this great experiment
+which the Masters are making, and that we shall find that neither
+President nor Society is fit to take that step forward, are both still
+too childish, not sufficiently mature, and therefore not able to tread
+the path which is the path upwards to the spiritual life, when the
+organisation shall again become but the mere outside veiling of the
+spiritual life, carrying the message of regeneration to the world, and
+the birth of a new civilisation. That is one possibility that should
+be faced. And the other?
+
+The other is that we may permit the Great Ones to be sufficiently in
+touch with our little selves to send Their forces through us, and that
+Their life shall become the life of the Society; that out of this
+rejoining of spiritual and temporal a greater spirituality shall
+circulate in every vein and vessel of the Society, and it shall become
+again truly a vehicle of the Masters of the Wisdom. It may be that it
+is preparing for a greater and a nobler life, making the place ready
+for some greater one to come, who shall worthily and strongly wield
+the power that I am bound to wield too weakly, but yet, perhaps,
+strongly enough to make that preparation possible. Perhaps you and I
+together are strong enough and wise enough to till the field, where
+another shall sow the seed that shall grow up into a greater
+civilisation and mark a step forward in the history of humanity. That
+is our great opportunity, that the possibility that I see opening
+before us in this policy now changed for the second time. It may be
+that we have learned enough in the last eighteen years to tread this
+path rightly, to tread it sufficiently to prepare a field for a
+greater one to come; and that is the hope in which I live at the
+present time. I believe that it is possible, if only we can rise to
+the height of our great opportunity, that someone will come from the
+far-off land where greater than we are living, and take this
+instrument and make it fit to be a tool in a Master's hand--some
+Disciple greater and mightier than I, someone belonging to the same
+company, but far wiser and far stronger than I. And that such a one
+will take this Movement and make it a little more what the heart of
+the Masters desires--more truly a Brotherhood, more full of knowledge,
+more really linked to the higher worlds by a centre of wise
+Occultism--that seems to me the great possibility which is opening
+before us. But, as I said, I know not if we are great enough to take
+it, or are still too small; but it is to that great work that I would
+invite your co-operation; it is to that mighty task that I would ask
+you to address yourselves. At least believe in the possibility of it;
+at least raise your eyes to that great stature to which it may be our
+Society shall attain. For if we can rise to it, then it means that we
+shall be builders of the next civilisation, that our hands shall take
+part in the making of the foundation of the humanity that is still to
+be born; it means that we shall be its forerunners, its heralds, that
+we shall be the messengers whose feet shall be fair upon the
+mountains, telling of the coming of a greater man, of the birth of a
+more spiritual humanity. And even supposing that, accepting that
+ideal, we fail, supposing that we are not strong enough, and wise
+enough, and unselfish enough, to do it, then, then--if I may quote the
+words of Giordano Bruno--"It is better to see the Great and fail in
+trying to achieve it, than never to see it, nor try to achieve it at
+all."
+
+
+
+
+The Relation of the Masters to the Theosophical Society
+
+
+Those of you who have been present in the Queen's Hall on Sunday
+evenings will remember that I spoke there a fortnight ago on "The
+Relation of Masters to Religions." There, of course, I dealt with the
+subject in the most general possible way, while here I propose to deal
+with it more closely; but I must ask all of you, as I asked you last
+Thursday and the preceding Thursday, to remember that in dealing with
+the Theosophical Society we are only dealing with one part of a
+world-wide and, as I might say, century or millennium-wide story--the
+story, practically, of the relation of the spiritual world to the
+physical. Although I am now going to deal specially with the relation
+of the Masters to our own Society, I would ask you all to bear in mind
+the more general relation of which I have spoken elsewhere. I do not
+want to repeat what there I said, but I want to recall to your minds
+the leading principle that the Theosophical Society cannot claim an
+exclusive right to any special spiritual privilege, that the spiritual
+privileges that it enjoys are part of the general spiritual heritage
+of the world, and that you have to consider any special case in
+relation to those general principles. So that in thinking of the
+Masters in relation to our own Society, we must bear in mind how very
+wide are their relations to all great spiritual movements, to all
+religions, and that all who are spoken of in the different faiths as
+Founder or Founders of a particular religion would fall under the
+name, Master.
+
+Now I was hesitating a moment in completing that sentence, because one
+almost has to explain that in thus using the word one is including in it
+a little more than is included under the term in the special
+significance with which we are going to use it now; for in the case of
+the religions of the Hindus, the religion of the Buddhists, and
+the religion of the Christians, when we speak of the Founder of each of
+these religions, we are speaking of great personages who, in the Occult
+Hierarchy, are higher than those whom we call Masters: in the case of
+Hinduism, the Manu, who is the Lord really of the whole of the Fifth
+Root Race; in the case of Buddhism, the Buddha, who is a
+teacher of all gods and men before He takes up His place as the
+illuminated, the supreme Buddha. And in the case of the Christian
+Religion also, there is something peculiar in the life of the Founder.
+You have there, in the first place, a being whom we call by the name
+Jesus, in himself a disciple, but living in the world at that time under
+exceedingly strange and peculiar conditions. Some of you may have read
+with some amount of care that section of the third volume of _The Secret
+Doctrine_ which is called "The Mystery of the Buddha." I am bound
+to confess that as it stands there it is very confused, partly
+intentionally, I think, on the part of the writer, but also partly in
+consequence of the fact mentioned in that volume, that you have there
+put together a large number of fragments, and they were put together by
+myself at a time when I knew very much less of the arrangement, so to
+speak, of those relationships between the higher and lower worlds than I
+do now. Hence there is some darkness there that belongs to the subject,
+and some that belongs to the incompetence of the compiler. The result of
+the two together is a good deal of confusion to any student who has not
+the key to it. I am only concerned for the moment with one of these
+statements, with what are called "the remains of the Buddha"--not
+a very comfortable name, because it gives one the idea of a corpse--that
+is, empty bodies of the Buddha on the various planes. Those have
+been preserved on the higher planes for special purposes, and are
+occasionally used under very peculiar conditions, when subtle bodies of
+a very pure and very lofty character are needed for some particular
+purpose. Now in the case of Him who was known as Jesus, the subtle
+bodies were these particular bodies that are kept on the higher planes,
+and He was allowed to use these for a number of years, holding them, as
+it were, as tenant for the great personage who was to take possession of
+them later. Then came the lofty being known as the Bodhisattva,
+who took possession of these vehicles which had thus been kept ready for
+Him, and He who was the disciple and now is the Master Jesus took birth
+later as Apollonius of Tyana, and so passed onwards step by step until
+he became one of the Masters of the Wisdom.
+
+I made that slight digression because otherwise I should have conveyed
+a slightly false impression by the phrase "all Founders of religions."
+We mean amongst ourselves by the word "Master," when used accurately,
+a very distinctly marked rank in the Occult Hierarchy; He is a being
+who has attained what is called "liberation" in the East, what is
+called "salvation" in the West; a being whose soul and Spirit have
+become unified, who lives consciously on the highest plane of our own
+universe--the fivefold universe--and whose centre of consciousness is
+on the atmic, sometimes called the nirvanic, plane. Living in
+full consciousness on that plane, He has no sense of bondage in any
+form with which He may ally Himself. He has passed during His
+Arhatship beyond all desire for life in form, or life out of form.
+He has thrown away those fetters; together with the limiting
+"I-making" faculty, the limit of individuality, that also has gone.
+His consciousness, then, working on this atmic plane, works
+indifferently up and down through all the five planes, and the whole
+of these together form to Him but a single plane, the plane of His
+waking consciousness. That is an important point to remember, for
+there is often a certain confusion of thought with regard to this term
+"waking consciousness." It ought not to mean simply the consciousness
+that you and I may have as waking consciousness, confined to the
+physical world; but the consciousness which--enlarging stage by stage
+as the active centre of consciousness rises through the planes
+inwards--is aware of all which is below that centre; and is aware
+thereof without it being necessary for the person to leave the
+physical body, in order that that consciousness may be in an active
+and working condition. The waking consciousness is the normal, daily
+consciousness, and may include the physical plane; or physical and
+astral; or physical, astral, mental; one more when you take in the
+buddhic; one more when you take in the atmic; and provided
+that the person whose consciousness is spoken of does not need to
+leave his active body, his body of action, in using his consciousness
+on any of these planes, does not have to throw the body into trance in
+order to be conscious on any or on all of them, we speak always, then,
+of that consciousness as being "his waking consciousness." Some
+disciples, for instance, will often include in the waking
+consciousness the astral, mental, and even buddhic planes; but
+it is characteristic of the Master alone that He unites in His waking
+consciousness the whole of the five planes on which our universe is
+gradually unfolding. So that we may define the position of the Master,
+for the moment, as that of a Person who has reached liberation; the
+meaning of that being that he is living in the Spirit consciously;
+that he is in conscious relation to the Monad, above the atmic
+plane; his centre of consciousness is there, and as the result of the
+centre of consciousness being in the Monad, the whole of the five
+planes become part of his waking consciousness. As regards the bodies
+there is also a difference: the whole of the five bodies of these
+planes act for Him as a single body, His body of action. That does not
+mean, of course, that He cannot separate off the parts if He needs to
+do so; but it means that in His ordinary, normal condition, the whole
+of His bodies are only layers of a single body, just as much as solid,
+liquid, gases, and ethers, for you and me, form our physical body, and
+we need not trouble to distinguish the matter belonging to one
+sub-plane or another. So to the Master, the matter of the whole of
+these planes forms His body of action, and although He is able to
+separate one part from another if he desires, normally He will be
+working with the whole of them together, and the whole will constitute
+the instrument of His physical or waking consciousness.
+
+It is hardly necessary to add to that definition that He is one who is
+always in possession of a physical body; it is implied in the very
+description I have been giving. That part of it is important only, or
+chiefly, when you are considering the question of liberation in
+relation to a number of different classes, as we may say, in this
+great Occult Hierarchy, the names in the West are not familiar, and
+there is no particular need to trouble you with them for the moment in
+the Samskrit form. Speaking generally, you have a class I have
+just alluded to, the Masters who possess the physical body, and
+another who are without that body, and are therefore not called
+Jivanmuktas (the name you so often find in our books in relation to
+the Masters) but Muktas, with a prefix which means "without a
+body." Then again you may have other classes, Beings who perform
+various functions in the universe; some, for instance, animate the
+whole of the physical universe, and are distinguished as being what is
+called blended with matter, the class that gives the sense of life,
+of consciousness, to all those things in Nature which so much impress
+the mind occasionally when we are face to face in solitude with some
+splendid landscape--some great forest, perhaps, in the silence. We
+need not go into these various classes; I only mention them in order
+to separate from the rest that particular class of freed, liberated,
+or, if you like the Christian term, "saved," persons, who no more need
+come involuntarily into incarnation, but who are free both as regards
+consciousness and as regards matter.
+
+Now these great Beings that I have just defined ought to be separated
+in your thought for a very practical reason that we shall see in a
+moment; they ought to be separated in your thought from those still
+mightier Beings in the grades of the Occult Hierarchy that stretch
+further and further upwards into the invisible worlds. For you lose a
+great deal practically when you mass the whole of them together, and
+fail to recognise the particular function of a Master, as regards the
+world in which He voluntarily takes incarnation. It is the kind of
+distinction that we have sometimes put to students as regards the use
+of the words Jesus and Christ; Jesus denotes specifically the man, the
+living man, the Master, who is still in possession of a physical body,
+and in close relation to the physical earth; the Christ, in a higher
+sense, is an indwelling spiritual being, who can be reached by the
+Spirit, but not seen as such by the eyes in any phenomenal world. So
+again there is the yet loftier Being to whom the name of Christ is
+applied amongst the Christians, when they are speaking of One we call
+the Second LOGOS; these are Beings of different grades, and in
+different relations to mankind; but the Master, as Master, is a man,
+and the manhood must never be forgotten. It was on that point that
+H.P.B. laid so much stress in speaking of those Beings with whom she
+had come into physical contact, whom she knew in their physical
+bodies; and one thing, as you know, which she protested against in
+relation to this type of Being was the putting Them too far away from
+human love and sympathy, making Them belong to a class of beings to
+whom at present They do not belong, and hence making a gulf between
+Them and humanity which ought not to be made, because the making of it
+destroys Their value to the people who make it. A phrase she once
+used, that I have quoted to you before, is the complaint that "they
+have turned our Masters into cold far-off stars, instead of living
+men," and on the fact that They are living men she continually
+insisted; for it is by virtue of that living manhood that They are
+able to play the part that They play in the evolution of the race.
+Others have other work to do as regards humanity, as regards the
+destinies of the nations, and so on, but these particular people are
+still in close touch with the humanity to which They belong, and They
+deliberately refuse to go on away from it, remaining with it until
+humanity, at least with regard to very, very large numbers of its
+members, has reached the position in which They stand to-day, as the
+promise of what humanity shall be, the first-fruits of humanity as it
+is. They are specially concerned with the direct teaching, training,
+and helping of man, in the quickening of his evolution; and the reason
+the body is retained is in order that this close personal touch may
+be kept, primarily with Their disciples, and then through Their
+disciples with comparatively large numbers of people. And it is a
+marked and significant fact, that just in proportion as a religion has
+lost touch with this aspect of the Divine Life which we call the Life
+of the Master, so has it tended to become more formal, less highly
+vitalised, less spiritual, with less of the mystic element in it, and
+more of the literal; so that it becomes necessary in the efflux of
+time that every now and again a Master should come forth from the
+Great White Lodge, and testify again upon earth to the reality of the
+tie between the Elder Brothers of the race and the younger brothers
+who are living constantly in the physical world.
+
+Now one distinguishing mark of a Master, His chief function, we may
+say, is to perform the greatest act of sacrifice which is known in the
+Occult Hierarchy, save the act of the One who is called The Great
+Sacrifice, the Silent Watcher, whose sacrificial act is still greater
+than the sacrificial acts performed by Those who are spoken of as
+Masters. This particular act of sacrifice, occurring from time to time
+at the beginning of a new epoch in religion and civilisation, is
+performed by one of the Body, who volunteers to start a further
+spiritual impulse in the world, and to bear the karma of the impulse
+that He generates. That may not appear to you at first glance, unless
+you have gone into the subject carefully, to be such a transcendent
+act of sacrifice as it really is. It may seem a comparatively small
+thing to start such an impulse, and very vague probably are the ideas
+of many of you as to what is implied in the statement "bearing the
+karma," which the generation of the impulse implies. The great act of
+sacrifice lies not only in the truth that He is wearing a physical
+body of coarse matter, which hampers Him from time to time, but that
+He cannot lay that body aside, once He has used it for giving this
+great spiritual impulse, until that impulse is entirely exhausted, and
+the religion, or the association, to which it has given birth has
+vanished out of the physical world. Take, for instance, the case of
+the Master, Jesus: He--by His own voluntary act of course, in the
+beginning, for it is always a volunteer who comes forward; such a
+sacrifice cannot be imposed--He, voluntarily, giving up His body, and
+later taking from the Bodhisattva the guarding of the infant
+plant of which the Bodhisattva had sown the seed which was to
+grow into the great tree of Christianity, taking that from Him, He
+bound Himself by the acceptance of that work to remain in the bonds of
+the physical body until the Christian Church had completed its work,
+and until the last Christian had passed away, either into liberation,
+or re-birth into some other faith. It is the same with the other great
+religions, so many of which are now dead--the religion of Egypt, of
+Chaldea, and many another. The Masters who had to do with those have
+long since cast away Their physical bodies, and thereby ceased to be
+what we call Masters, because the religion that each gave to the world
+had done its work, and no souls remained who could be further helped
+by passing through the teaching and the training of that particular
+religion. This is the central idea of the act of sacrifice, and it
+becomes the more a sacrificial act because the One who undertakes this
+tremendous task cannot tell how the impulse will flow in all its
+details, cannot even estimate the amount of difficulty, of delay, nay,
+of mischief, that may grow out of the impulse that He has given. In
+the first place, He Himself is limited by these bodies that He has
+assumed. He cannot use the whole of His vast consciousness within the
+limitations of a physical brain and a physical body. Thus, although He
+has unified His bodies and is able, so to speak, to run up and down
+the ladder of the planes as He will, He is still largely limited in
+His activities where He is working in the unplastic matter of the
+physical plane; and so, when He undertakes a work like this, He
+generates causes whose effects He cannot thoroughly calculate, He
+takes the risk which surrounds every great undertaking, He submits
+Himself to the conditions of this task upon which He enters, and He is
+obliged, having once taken it, to bear it until success or failure has
+crowned the effort that He makes.
+
+Those of you who have carefully thought on these subjects will realise
+that while the knowledge of a Master is, as regards you or me,
+practical omniscience, it is by no means omniscience on His own plane,
+relative to the problems with which He has to deal and which He has to
+solve. A Master amongst Masters, a Master within the Great White
+Lodge, He is amongst His peers, in the presence of His Superiors, and
+the problems with which that Lodge has to deal, the questions on which
+that Lodge has to decide, are, if I may use the phrase, as difficult
+and as puzzling on that plane of being as the problems that we have to
+decide down here are on our plane. Hence the possibility of
+miscalculation, the possibility of error, the possibility of mistake;
+and you can well understand that these beings are subject to such
+limitations when you remember the startling assertion that even the
+Lord Buddha Himself, high above the Masters, that even He
+committed an error in His work on the physical plane. When, then, a
+Master volunteers to serve as what may literally be called the
+scapegoat of a new spiritual movement, He takes up a karma whose whole
+course He is unable to see. And it need not, therefore, be a matter of
+surprise that when the time was approaching when another great
+spiritual impulse might again be given, according to cyclic law, when
+the two who volunteered to undertake the task, to make the sacrifice,
+offered Themselves in the Great White Lodge, differences of opinion
+arose as to whether it was desirable or not that what we now call the
+Theosophical Society should be founded.
+
+The time came, as most of you know, I suppose, for an effort of some
+sort to be made. It had been so since the fourteenth century, for it
+was in the thirteenth century that in Tibet a mighty personage then
+living in that land, promulgated His order to the Lodge that at the
+close of every century an effort should be made to enlighten the
+"white barbarians of the West." That order having gone forth, it
+became necessary, of course, to obey it; for in those regions
+disobedience is unknown. Hence at the close of each century--as you
+may verify for yourselves if you choose to go through history
+carefully, beginning from the time when Christian Rosenkreuz founded
+the Rosicrucian Society late in the fourteenth century--you will find
+on every occasion, towards the close of the century, a new ray of
+light is shed forth. Towards the close of the last century--I do not
+mean the one to which we belong, but the century before, the
+eighteenth--a mighty effort was made, of which the burden fell upon
+two great personages closely connected with the Lodge, though neither
+of them, I believe, at that time was a Master--he who was then known
+as the Comte de St. Germain, who is now one of the Masters, and his
+colleague in that great task, closely allied to him, of a noble
+Austrian family, known to us in later days as H.P.B. When those made
+their attempt to change the face of Europe, they failed, the time not
+being ripe; the misery and the wretchedness of the epoch, the
+degradation of the masses of the population, the horrible poverty, the
+shameful starvation, all these were the rocks on which split, and was
+broken up into foam, the spiritual wave of which those two personages
+were the crest. The karma of that, for the one whom we know of as
+H.P.B., was the trying and suffering incarnation that she spent
+amongst us, when she founded, under the order of her Master, the
+Theosophical Society, and gave her life to it that it might live. And
+it was that fact, that the last great spiritual effort had been
+drowned in bloodshed, it was that which gave her her marked horror of
+mixing up the spiritual movement with a political effort, which made
+her realise that before a spiritual movement could be successful in
+the outer world it must shape, raise, remodel the conscience of those
+who were affected by it, that it must not dare to put its hand as a
+whole to any great political or social movement before it was strong
+enough to control the forces which it evoked. Hence her shrinking
+from all idea of this Society plunging, as a Society, into political
+work or social reform. Not that individuals of the Society might not
+do it, not that members of it might not use their best thought and
+energy in order to bring forward and strengthen any movement which was
+really for the benefit of mankind; but that the Society as a Society,
+as the vehicle of this great torrent of life, must not pour that
+torrent into any physical and earthly vessel, lest again it should
+break the vessel into pieces, lest again it should put the hands of
+the clock back, instead of forward, as was done in France. So for this
+time it was to be a spiritual movement, and the work was to be
+spiritual, intellectual, and ethical. Those were to be its special
+marks, this its special work; and when the two great Teachers who were
+identified with the movement--her own Master and His closest co-worker
+in the Great White Lodge, the two who over and over again in centuries
+gone by had stood side by side as fellow-workers in the civilisations
+of the past--when They volunteered for this great emprise, doubt, as I
+said, arose among Their peers. The lesson of the eighteenth century
+was not forgotten; the question inevitably arose: "Is the West ready
+for a movement of this sort again? Can it be carried on in such an
+environment without doing, perhaps, more harm than the good which it
+is capable of accomplishing?" And so, much discussion arose--strange
+as that may sound to some, in connection with a body of workers so
+sublime--and most were against it, and declared the time was not ripe;
+but these two offered to take the risk and bear the burden, offered to
+bear the karma of the effort, and to throw their lives into the
+shaping, guiding, and uplifting. And as the question of time is always
+one of the most complicated and difficult questions for Those who have
+to deal with the great law of cycles and the evolution of man, it was
+felt that it was possible that the effort might succeed, even although
+the time was not quite ripe, the clock had not quite struck the hour.
+And so permission was given, and the two assumed the responsibility.
+How the earlier stages were made is familiar to you all; how they
+chose that noble worker Their disciple, known to us as H.P.B., and
+prepared her for the work she had to do; how in due course They sent
+her to America to search there for a comrade who would supply what was
+lacking in herself--the power of organisation, the power of speaking
+to men and gathering them around him, and shaping them into a movement
+in the outer world. And you all know the story of how they met; you
+all know how they joined hands together. One of them has put the whole
+thing on record, for the instruction of the younger members of the
+Society now and in centuries to come. The movement began, as you know,
+closely watched over, constantly protected by those two who had taken
+this burden of responsibility upon Themselves. And you may read in
+many of H.P.B.'s letters, how continual in those days was the touch,
+how constant the directions; and it went on thus year after year--for
+the first seven years at least of the Society's life, and a little
+more; you may read in the issue of the _Theosophist_ (June) a letter
+from one of these same Teachers, showing how close was the interest
+taken, how close the scrutiny which was kept up in all the details of
+the Society's work. In publishing that letter I thought it only right
+to strike out the names which occur in the original. It would not be
+right or fair to print those publicly yet, as you can perfectly well
+see when you are able to supply the blanks which are left for names.
+You may read in that letter how the Master who wrote it had been
+watching the action of a particular branch, how He had marked in
+connection with another branch some of the members of the branch who
+were working ill or not well; how He pointed out that such-and-such
+members would be better out of the branch than in it, were hinderers
+rather than helpers--all going to show how close was the watch which
+They then kept upon the branches of Their infant Society. And so again
+you may read in other letters than that, suggestions of writing
+letters to newspapers, and so on, which would strike you as very
+trivial if they came from the Masters at the present time; how a
+letter might be written here, an article answered there; how a leading
+article ought not to be allowed to remain with its false suggestions
+to the injury of the Society, and so on. But there came a time, with
+the increase of the numbers in the Society, when many came in who had
+not the strong belief of the outer founders in the reality of the life
+of the Masters and Their connection with the Theosophical Society, and
+disputes and arguments arose. And if you turn back to the
+_Theosophist_ of those days you will see a great deal of discussion
+going on as to who were the Brothers, and what They did, and what
+relation they bore to the Society, and so on; until at last They grew
+a little weary of this continual challenging of Their life, and work,
+and interest, and gave the warning which still exists amongst the
+papers of the Society, that unless before a very short time these
+questions were set at rest, and the fact of Their relation to the
+Society was generally recognised, They would withdraw again for a time
+into the silence in which They had remained so long, and would wait
+until conditions were more favorable before they again took Their
+active part in the guiding of the Society's work. Unfortunately the
+warning was not taken, and so the withdrawal into the comparative
+silence took place, and the Society entered on that other cycle of its
+work on which, as you know, the judgment of the Master was passed in
+the quotation I made the other day, that "the Society has liberated
+itself from our grasp and influence, and we have let it go; we make no
+unwilling slaves. It is now a soulless corpse, a machine run so far
+well enough, but which will fall to pieces when.... Out of the three
+objects, the second alone is attended to; it is no longer either a
+Brotherhood, nor a body over the face of which broods the Spirit from
+beyond the great Range." Thus Their relations to the Society of the
+time altered, became less direct, less continual. Their direct
+influence was confined to individuals and withdrawn for the Society at
+large, save as to general strengthening, not because They desired it
+should be so, but because so the Society desired, and the Society is
+master of its own destiny, and may shape its own fate according to the
+will of its majority. Still They watched over it, though not permitted
+to "interfere" with its outer working so much as They had done in the
+earlier days, and H.P.B. was obliged to declare that They did not
+direct it. The relation remained, but was largely in abeyance, latent
+to some extent, as we may say, and They were waiting for the time when
+again the possibility might open before Them of more active work
+within the movement which They had started, whose heavy karma They
+were compelled to bear.
+
+The fact that They bear the karma of the Society as a whole, seems to
+me one which members of the Society ought never to forget; for, coming
+into this movement as we have done, finding through the Society the
+teachings which have changed our lives, having received from it the
+light which has made all our thought different, which has rendered
+life intelligible, and life on other planes familiar, at least in
+theory, and to some in practice, it would seem that the very commonest
+gratitude, such as men or women of the world might feel for some small
+benefactions shown by friend to friend, that even that feeling, small
+and poor as it is, might live in the heart of every member towards
+Those who have made the existence of the Theosophical Society
+possible. I do not mean, of course, in those who do not believe in the
+fact of Their existence; and there are, quite rightly and properly,
+many such amongst us; for it is the foundation of the Theosophical
+Society that men of all opinions may come within its ranks and benefit
+by the splendor of its teachings, whether or not they accept them one
+by one. Their non-belief does not alter the fact that the teachings
+come to them through the Society, and from Those who made the Society
+a living organism upon earth. Nor do I mean in saying that this
+feeling of gratitude should exist in the heart of each, that anyone
+need take the particular view of the Masters which I myself take,
+founding that view, it may be, on more knowledge than very many of
+those who reject it personally can be said to possess. In all these
+matters every member is free, and I am only urging upon you your
+responsibility at least to try to understand, where you touch matters
+of such far-reaching importance; and at least to consider that you
+should not add to the burden on those mighty shoulders more than you
+can avoid adding. Now none of us, whatever we may happen to know--the
+differences of knowledge between us are trivial as compared with the
+difference between all of us and Them--can surely escape the duty of
+considering whether by his own ignorance, and carelessness, and folly,
+and indifference, he is adding to that burden which They bear. For
+They cannot avoid taking the karma that you and I largely generate, by
+virtue of Their unity with this Society, and the fact that Their life
+circulates through it, and that They have sacrificed Themselves in
+order that it may live. By that sacrifice they cannot avoid sharing
+the karma that you and I are making by every careless thought, by
+every foolish action, by every wilful or even not wilful ignorance,
+the burden that They have taken out of love for man and for his
+helping. And I have often thought, when I have been trying dimly to
+understand the mysteries of this divine compassion, and the greatness
+of the love and of the pity which moves those mighty Ones to mix
+themselves up with our small, petty selves, I have often thought how
+strange must seem to Them, from Their position, the indifference with
+which we take such priceless blessings, the indifference with which we
+accept such mighty sacrifice. For the love that These deserve at our
+hands is surely beyond all claim of kindred, of blood, of touch
+between man and man; the claim that They have upon us, these Men who
+are Masters and Teachers, for what They have given and made possible
+for you and me, seems to me a claim beyond all measuring, a debt
+beyond all counting. And when one looks at the Society as a whole, and
+realises how little as a whole it takes account of those deep occult
+truths into touch with which it has come, how little it realises how
+mighty the possibility that these supreme acts of sacrifice have
+opened before every one of us, it seems almost too sad to be credible,
+too pathetic to be expressed; one realises how sometimes Their hearts
+must be wrung, as the heart of the Christ was wrung when He stood and
+looked over Jerusalem, and knew that the people to whose race He
+belonged were driving further and further away their possibilities,
+and were despising that which He had brought for their redemption. How
+often His cry: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets
+and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have
+gathered thee together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her
+wings, and ye would not"--how often must that same cry go out from the
+heart of the Masters, when They look at the movement for which They
+are responsible, and realise how little its greatness is understood by
+those who are its members, and are reckoned within its pale.[1] For if
+even for one brief hour you could realise the heart of the Master,
+and what He feels and knows with regard to this movement which is His,
+it seems to me that in the light of even that brief meditation there
+would be a throwing away of personalities, there would be a trampling
+down of silly pride, a casting aside of careless obstinacy, a yearning
+to have some share in the sacrifice, and to give ourselves, however
+petty we may be, side by side with that sublime sacrifice which They
+are making year after year for us, unworthy of Their compassion. And
+yet nothing less than that is the movement which lives by Their life;
+nothing less than that is the relation of the Masters to the
+Theosophical Society. They bear it in Their heart, They bear it on
+Their shoulders, They offer daily sacrifice that this spiritual effort
+may succeed in the helping and the uplifting of the world. And They,
+so great, speak to us, so small; and none will surely refuse to listen
+who catches one glimpse of the possibility of Their speech; none will
+reject Their pleading, who can hear one whisper of that Voice; and the
+one thing that one hopes for, that one longs for, with regard to
+oneself and to all who are members of the Society, is that amongst us
+there may be some ears found to hear the voice of the Masters, and
+some hearts mirroring enough of their compassion to at least sacrifice
+themselves for the helping of the world.
+
+[Footnote 1: This was spoken some weeks before the issue of Mr.
+Sinnett's extraordinary manifesto, denying "the things most surely
+believed among us."]
+
+
+
+
+The Future of the Theosophical Society
+
+
+There are two futures of the Theosophical Society to which we may
+address our attention: the immediate future, and a future further off.
+And I am going to begin with the future further off, because it is
+only by recognising the nature of that future that we can properly
+devise the means whereby we may bring it about. For in all human
+affairs it is necessary to choose an end to which effort should be
+directed, and the nature of the end will govern the nature of the
+means. One of the great faults, I think, of our modern life is to live
+in what is called a hand-to-mouth way, to snatch at any momentary
+advantage, to try to bring about something which serves as an
+improvement for the moment without trying to understand, without
+caring to consider, whether in very many cases the temporary
+improvement may not bring with it a more fatal mischief than that
+which it is intended to remedy. And at least in the Theosophical
+Society, where we try to study tendencies, and to understand something
+of the forces which are working around us in life, we ought to avoid
+this popular blunder of the time, we ought to try to see the goal
+towards which we are moving, and to choose our immediate methods with
+reference to that goal. Of course, when I speak of a goal and an end,
+I am using the terms in a relative, not in an absolute sense--the
+goal, the end which is within a measurable distance, and so may be
+taken as a point towards which the roads on which we travel should
+tend. Let us, then, look first on that goal, and see its nature and
+the kind of methods which will help to realise it upon earth.
+
+You are all familiar in the Theosophical Society with the theory of
+cycles, so that you are accustomed to look upon events as tending to
+repeat themselves on higher and higher levels of what has been called
+the "spiral of evolution." For while it is true that history does not
+repeat itself upon the same level, it is also true that it does repeat
+itself upon successively higher levels, and that anyone who is
+studying Theosophical teaching as to the evolution of man, the
+evolution of globes, the evolution of systems, the evolution of
+universes, may very much facilitate his study by grasping the main
+truths which underlie each of these in turn. We are continually
+repeating on a higher plane that which we have done upon a lower. Our
+terms are a constant series of repetitions, so that if we understand
+their meaning in one series we are able to argue to their meaning in
+another. And I have often pointed out to you with respect to these
+recurring cycles of events, and recurring terms, that especially among
+Hindus, and in the Samskrit language, you find whole series
+of terms, the meaning of each of which varies with the term from
+which the series starts; so that if you know them once, you know them
+for all occasions. Take a very familiar case. Let me remind you of the
+word "samadhi." That is a relative term, and is the last of a
+series, which has regard to the waking consciousness of the individual
+and the plane on which the centre of the waking consciousness is
+found. So that before you can say what the word "samadhi" means for
+any individual, you must ascertain on what plane of consciousness his
+normal centre is at work; and when you know that, then you can pass up
+step by step until you come to the term in the series which is
+represented by that word "samadhi." It is the same over and over
+again in our Theosophical studies, and especially do we find this to
+be true in the characteristics--important in this particular
+relation--the characteristics of the great Races, the Root-Races, as
+represented in miniature in the sub-races of each Root-Race. If we can
+find out those characteristics, trace them and see how they are
+brought about in the course of evolution in the small cycle which is
+nearer to us, the cycle of the sub-race, then it is comparatively easy
+for us, as regards the future, to foresee the appearance of those
+characteristics in the Root-Race that corresponds to the sub-race. And
+I shall want to use that method in dealing with the future of the
+Society; it is for that reason that I draw your attention to these
+continually recurring cycles of times and events. Now if we look back
+to the Fourth Root-Race, we can study in the history of that Race the
+evolution of the Fifth. We can see the methods used to bring about
+that evolution. We can trace the means which were employed in order
+that that evolution might be made secure; and we can see, by studying
+that which lies behind us, that the fourth sub-race of that Root-Race
+showed out the characteristics of the Fourth Race as a whole; that the
+fifth sub-race of that Fourth showed out some of the characteristics
+of the Fifth Root-Race that was to follow in the course of evolution.
+And in this way, applying the analogy, if we can trace out to some
+extent for ourselves the characteristics of the sixth sub-race which
+is to succeed our own fifth sub-race, then we shall be on the track of
+the line of evolution which will bring about the Sixth Root-Race when
+the time for its coming strikes. Let us glance back for a moment to
+see the main points of the evolution of a sub-race and a Race.
+
+When our own Fifth Root-Race was to be evolved, certain types were
+chosen out of the fifth sub-race of the Fourth Root-Race, and they
+were chosen by the Manu who was to guide the evolution of the Fifth
+Root-Race. Those types showed out in a comparatively germinal fashion
+the mental characteristics which were to grow out of the selected
+groups. And you may learn, if you care to do it, how those choices
+were made, and how the first choice was a failure. Chosen as it was by
+the wisdom of the highly exalted being whom we speak of as the Manu,
+none the less the material in which He tried to work proved too
+stubborn, too little plastic, to adapt itself to His influence
+striving to shape and to mould it. And in consequence, after prolonged
+efforts, He threw aside the families that thus He had selected, and
+began making a new choice, a fresh selection, in order to see if the
+second choice would prove more fortunate than the first. And the way
+He chose them was a simple and effective one: He selected a certain
+number of His own disciples and sent them out as messengers to the
+various nations of the world, that constituted that part of the great
+Fourth Race which He had chosen for His second experiment. He sent
+them into nation after nation, with the mission to gather out of that
+nation those who appeared to be the most promising for the work which
+He had to carry out. They tried in various fashions, sometimes by
+direct invitation, where the characteristic that was being sought was
+clearly developed, namely, the lower mind. It was the development of
+the lower manas that was the keynote of the selection; for the Fifth
+Root-Race was to show out that development of the lower manas. I say
+"lower manas" rather than "manas"; because the full development of the
+manasic principle in man is reserved for the Fifth Round, and not for
+the Fourth, and we, of course, are still in the Fourth Round. That
+Fourth Round, pre-eminently kamic, must necessarily color every
+evolution which goes on during its existence, and high as we may
+strive to raise manasic powers amongst us, we cannot escape from the
+fundamental vice of our birth, from the manasic standpoint, that we
+are plunged in kamic matter, and that the matter in which we work is
+matter of the Fourth Round, adapted to the kamic principle, and not
+matter of the Fifth, adapted to the manasic. Hence the best thing that
+we can do is to evolve the lower manas, manas deeply tinged with kama.
+Out of that Fourth Race, then, were selected the people who showed
+most plainly the budding of this intelligence which was needed, the
+messengers of the Manu striking a note which attracted those in whom
+this lower manasic principle was more highly developed than among
+their comrades and peers. Gradually from different nations groups of
+men and women gathered round the messengers of the Manu, who then
+began to lead them away from their own people, from their own nation,
+from all their surroundings, in order to seek the appointed place
+where the Manu was grouping those on whom the great experiment was to
+be made for the second time. Slowly and gradually they were thus
+gathered together out of the nations into which the fifth sub-race of
+the Fourth Race had spread. And the flower of those nations, attracted
+by the key-note struck by the messengers, gradually gathered round the
+Manu, and became the material, the nucleus, of the new Root Race. As
+you know, He took them far away to the Sacred Land, shutting them away
+from the masses of the Fourth and Third Race peoples, and dividing
+them by physical barriers from all that might contaminate and stain.
+Very, very different were those people from the generations which
+thousands upon thousands of years later were to spring from them in
+physical succession; rather, to the people about them were they folk
+who were developed in an uncongenial fashion, people who were by no
+means looked up to and admired in the nations amongst whom they dwelt,
+amongst whom they had grown up. For the building of a new type is not
+made out of those in whom the type of the old Race, that which is
+before those who are selected for a changed line of evolution, has
+flowered. The triumphs of evolution in the Fourth Race, as the Fourth
+Race judged them, were by no means the best material for the building
+of the Fifth. Those who were most admired in the Fourth, those who
+were regarded as the flowers of their own nations, were those in whom
+the kamic faculty, with its allied psychic powers, was most developed,
+was most triumphant. For you must remember that in the very different
+civilisation of those days, psychic powers were playing an enormous
+part in all the most highly developed people of the time. Where the
+dawning principle of manas began somewhat to triumph over the kamic,
+there the psychic faculties inevitably diminished in their power, and
+showed themselves very much more feebly than in the leaders of the
+time, those who were the pioneers of the civilisation of the day. The
+faculties most valued at that time were least to be recognised in
+those who were the chosen of the Manu; for what He was seeking was the
+dawn of the intellectual principle, and where that dawns, the psychic
+for a time is submerged. I cannot dwell now on the reason for that;
+the psychism of the time was the psychism of the whole of the astral
+body, and not the psychism which succeeds the intellectual
+development, which is the result of a higher organisation of that body
+into special organs of astral senses--the well-known chakras. The
+reason is well known among all students of the different stages of
+evolution, and the only reason I allude to it now is because I want
+you to recognise a very significant fact: that those who were chosen
+out of that civilisation by the Manu, in order that he might make a
+new Race out of them, were not the people who were the leading
+examples of the highest civilisation of the time. Those were left
+behind in their own environment. Those were left behind to carry on
+their evolution along the lines already becoming the lines of the
+past, and not the lines of the future. And these people in whom the
+psychic powers were less shown, and in whom the less valued
+intellectual power was germinating, on lines more fitted for the
+development in future, they were chosen out for the building of the
+Fifth Race, and carried away from their Fourth Race surroundings into
+the far-off land of their education. There of course they remained
+until the time came when the Manu incarnated amongst them--and so on.
+That is old history on which I need not dwell.
+
+Let us apply those same principles to the choosing out of another
+Root-Race, and we shall see that just as then, for the fifth Root-Race,
+the manasic principle was selected, so in the choosing out for a Sixth
+Root-Race, the buddhic principle must be the one which must be
+sought for in order that the material may be shaped in which it will be
+possible for it in its turn to develop. There again I must remind you
+that the buddhi of the Sixth Root-Race in this Round will be
+something very different from the evolution of the pure buddhic
+principle in its own Round, the Round that belongs to it in the future
+evolution of humanity: it will be buddhic contaminated with kama,
+showing out much of the kamic characteristics--inevitably, inasmuch as
+it must work in kamic matter. Hence you must not take quite your ideal
+buddhi, such as you may fancy it in its perfection--the
+magnificent principle of Pure Reason, in its higher intuitive power--but
+a shadow, a reflexion of it, such a shadow and reflexion as is able to
+take its veils, its garments, from the matter of our own Round. None the
+less, that will be the distinguishing, the dominant principle of the
+Sixth Root-Race, and therefore I ask you to fix your mind on that as the
+goal towards which all roads in the present should tend. Far-off indeed
+it is, counting as we count time; but tendencies show themselves long,
+long before they appear upon the surface, recognisable to the eye of the
+flesh. In each sub-race appears a principle which manifests itself more
+fully, more thoroughly, in the corresponding Root-Race; and therefore,
+though it will only be possible for us at the present time to work
+towards the next sub-race of our own Fifth Race, which is already
+beginning to appear upon the surface of our globe, none the less is it
+true that in quickening the evolution of that sub-race it is the next
+Root-Race to which we must look for our guiding principle; that is the
+far-off Pole-star by which we must guide our ships at the present time,
+that the point towards which we must steer, however far off we must
+sorrowfully admit that it is.
+
+Let us then, recognising that fact, that the Sixth Root-Race will be
+the embodiment of the next principle in us, the buddhic
+principle, that of Pure Reason--as distinguished from Intellect, which
+is Reason reflected in Activity--when you realise that, and remember
+that the note of buddhi is union--not yet unity but union--you
+will find that as much as you require for your guiding principle in
+the evolution of the corresponding sub-race, whose foot is now on the
+threshold. So that in this fashion, though seeming to go so far abroad
+into the past and the future, I bring you to the practical question
+of the next step forward in human evolution.
+
+The next thing you must remember is that the flowering of the Fifth
+Root-Race will go on long, long after the beginning of the sixth
+sub-race is seen. For these Races and sub-races overlap each other;
+and just as at the present time the majority of mankind belongs to the
+Fourth Root-Race and not to the Fifth, but the Fifth Root-Race
+dominates the evolution of the world, although still in a minority, so
+is it of sub-races also. The sixth sub-race will be at first in an
+almost inappreciable minority, but coloring the whole; then
+multiplying more and more, until it becomes an appreciable minority.
+Then, as it grows more and more numerous, and nations are born of it,
+it will begin to dominate and lead the civilisation of the then world.
+But even then the Fifth Race will be in an enormous majority for ages
+and ages yet to come. The fifth sub-race has not yet touched its
+highest point, has not yet asserted itself to the point to which its
+evolution will reach in the centuries that lie immediately before us.
+It is nearing its highest point; it is climbing rapidly now to its
+zenith; but still many years of mortal time intervene between the
+present day and the day when it will rule in the height of its power.
+It is climbing fast in these days; but still, compare it with the
+corresponding point in the Atlantean civilisation, and you will
+realise that it has not yet climbed to its highest point. For every
+Race must overtop the Race that has gone before it, and we have not
+yet reached even the level of the old Atlantis in knowledge, and
+therefore in power over the lower nature, although, as I said, the
+climbing now is rapid, and will become more and more rapid with every
+ten years that pass over our heads. For there is that speciality in
+evolution, that it ever goes forward at an increasing rate. The more
+it develops its powers, the more swiftly do those powers multiply
+themselves; so that, to quote a well-known phrase of a great Teacher,
+"it grows not by additions but by powers." And this civilisation of
+ours will rush forward more and more rapidly with every decade that
+passes. Still, the very fact that it has not reached the highest
+levels of the Fourth tells you that time lies before us in the
+building of the sixth sub-race, and that is our immediate work. We
+need not trouble now any further about the Sixth Root-Race; for
+whatever builds the sixth sub-race amongst us is contributing to the
+building of that Root-Race of the future. The same faculties are
+demanded, although then at a higher level, and we can come down to our
+humbler level and consider what the sixth sub-race is to be. And in
+that we shall realise the work and the future of the Theosophical
+Society.
+
+The great characteristic of that Race is to be union, and all that
+tends to union is a force which is working for the coming of that
+sub-race, no matter whether very often the force looked at from
+without is often repellent. It is not the outer manifestation of the
+moment, but the tendency, the direction of the force which is
+important. There may be many things, more beautiful on the surface,
+which have accomplished their aim, and are on the downward path
+towards decay, whilst the things that are rising, still below the
+horizon, have, as all germinal things have, much about them that is
+repellent and that will be used up in the growth of the coming
+creature, before it really manifests upon earth. It has been said by a
+Master that if we could see with the eye of the Spirit the generation
+of the human being, his ante-natal life, we should understand the
+generation of worlds, the generation of universes. And that, again, is
+a general principle. Let us see one or two lessons that we may draw
+from it at the moment.
+
+Take the evolution of a seed into a plant, and what do you find? A
+tiny germ surrounded by a mass of nutrient matter; and before that
+tiny germ will show itself in root, and stem, and leaf above the
+ground and become visible to the eye of the observer on the earth,
+that nutrient material must be absorbed by the growing germ, and
+changed into the exquisite tissues of the plant that is to be. And so,
+if you take the growing germ, animal or human, how unlike is that
+budding creature from the animal or the man that shall be! How lacking
+in beauty in many of the methods of its growth, of its nutrition, of
+its gradual shaping! And by what marvellous alchemy of inspiring life
+does the living germ gather into itself all the nutrient matter that
+surrounds it, and shapes it into organ after organ, until the perfect
+creature is ready to be born into the world. And as in these cases, so
+with the growth of a sub-race, of which the germ is planted now. How
+much has to be done before it is ready for the birth-hour, that yet is
+at a measurable distance from the moment that the germ is planted in
+the womb of time. Try to realise the analogy by means of the image
+that I have suggested, and it will not then seem so unlikely to you,
+that which is true, that in our own times again many messengers have
+come out from the Manu of the future, in order that those messengers
+may strike certain keynotes, which mark the chief characteristic of
+the child that is to be. That note is well known at the present time:
+we call it Brotherhood.
+
+Now notice at the present time how many such messengers are found
+scattered throughout the world, and how the varied organisations of
+men of every kind are tending in that direction, and are more and more
+recognising that as the keynote of their progress and their evolution.
+There are, so far as I know, only two great organisations at the
+present time that have deliberately taken Universal Brotherhood as
+their motto, their cry, in the world: the one is Masonry, the other is
+the Theosophical Society. Those are the only two which proclaim
+Universal Brotherhood. For although many religions declare
+Brotherhood, they do not make it universal; it is a Brotherhood within
+the limits of their own creed, and a man to become a brother must come
+within the limits of the religion. See how clearly that is declared in
+the great and universal baptismal ceremony which marks the entrance of
+the child into the Christian Church. In that sacrament he is "_made_ a
+child of God." He was not a child of God before, from the Church
+standpoint. He was born under the wrath of God, in the kingdom of
+Satan. In the ceremony of baptism he is made a child of God, an heir
+of the kingdom of heaven; and that is the keynote of the Churches
+everywhere: those outside are not children of God. And you must
+remember that it is that Fatherhood of God which connotes the
+Brotherhood of man. Only by the rooting in the Father-Life is the
+Brother-Life intelligible. And because the Theosophical Society knows
+no limit of creed, no limit of religion, and declares that every human
+being is, in his own essential nature, one with the Supreme Life and
+the Supreme God, because of that its Brotherhood is universal, and
+knows none as outside its pale. Every man, no matter what he is, is
+recognised as brother. He comes not into the Brotherhood, nor can he
+be cast out from it. His Spirit, his Life, places him in it: it is a
+fact beyond us, above us. We have no power either to create it or to
+destroy. We recognise the great fact, and we do not call ourselves the
+Universal Brotherhood, but only a nucleus in it--a very different
+thing; the Brotherhood is as universal as humanity, that is our
+fundamental doctrine, and it implies that Brotherhood is as universal
+as Life. So also with Masonry, where it is rightly seen and
+understood--no barriers of creed, all men equally welcome within the
+Masonic Lodge. I say "where rightly understood," for there are lands
+where Masonry has spread, where the Lodge has become exclusive as the
+creed has become exclusive; and among American Masons, I believe, the
+negro, as negro, is not admitted into the Masonic Lodge. But that is
+the denial of Masonry, a disgrace to it, and not a triumph. And
+although it be true that Masonry has lost widely its knowledge, it
+still for the most part remains a Brotherhood, and in that it has in
+it the link of a life that will not die, and that has every
+possibility of revival throughout the earth.
+
+Quite outside these two, limited brotherhoods are proclaimed in every
+direction now. The Church asserts it within its own limits. All
+religions assert it within their respective limitations. Outside
+religions and churches the same cry is heard. Socialism declares it,
+and tries to build its policy upon it. Everywhere this cry of
+Brotherhood is heard, although it has not yet been lived, and that is
+one of the signs of the coming birth of the sub-race, in which
+Brotherhood shall be the dominant note of its every civilisation, and
+in which a civilisation that is not brotherly, in which there are
+ignorant people, and poor people, and starving people, and diseased
+people, will be looked at as barbarous, and not really as civilisation
+at all. Its note is Brotherhood, the dominant note of the coming day.
+And because we have taken that as our first object, we have a right to
+call ourselves a nucleus thereof; and because we definitely recognise
+it, we can consciously co-operate with nature. That is the real
+strength of our Movement--not our numbers, they are comparatively
+small, but our conscious working with the forces that make for the
+future. The Theosophical Society is a fragment of the vast
+Theosophical Movement which is surging upon every side around us; but
+this we have that enables us to be on the crest of that great wave,
+that we know for what we are working, we understand the tendencies
+which make for the future. Hence in our Theosophical Society we must
+above all else hold up this word, and work for it in every phase of
+human activity. That word marks out for your Theosophical Lodges what
+movements you should help, and what movements you should not help. It
+is no use to pour water into a broken vessel, and every vessel that
+has not on it the name or the principle of Brotherhood is a broken
+vessel that will not hold water for the coming time. But every
+movement, however mingled with ignorance, with folly, with temporary
+mischief, which seeks after Brotherhood and strives to realise it, is
+a living vessel, into which the Water of Life may be poured; and with
+those movements you should work, trying to inspire and to purify, to
+get rid of that which comes from ignorance, and to replace it with the
+wisdom which it is your sacred duty to spread abroad among the
+children of men. So that in your public work you have this great
+keynote.
+
+And that leads me to pause for a moment on that spreading Socialist
+Movement that you see around you on every side. Now, it is making one
+tremendous blunder that I need not dwell on here, but that I shall
+dwell on to-morrow night in addressing a Socialist Society. They are
+forgetting the very root of progress, they are forgetting the building
+of brothers, out of which to build a Brotherhood hereafter. They think
+that the future depends on economic conditions, on who holds land, and
+who holds capital. These conditions are conditions to be discussed
+carefully, to be worked out intellectually. But whatever ownership you
+have of any of the means of life, if the life is poisoned, it cannot
+be healthy in the midst even of a well-arranged society. For society
+grows out of men, and not men out of society, and until that is
+realised all schemes must fail, for they are founded on sand, and not
+on rock. You who have studied and understand, to some small extent at
+least, the powers which are working in the world of the present, you
+ought to be able to help to eliminate the evil and to strengthen the
+good. And the Theosophical Society, among these movements of the day,
+must hold up firmly a true ideal. It is the function of the prophet,
+of the spiritual teacher, to hold up the ideal, and point ever towards
+it, so that individuals may have it ever before their eyes and choose
+the roads which lead in the right direction.
+
+And again, the principles that I have put to you may explain to you
+why this Theosophical Society, so weak, is yet so strong--weak in its
+numbers, weak in the qualifications of its members, not numbering
+amongst its adherents the most learned and the most mighty of the
+earth, made up of very mediocre, average people, not the great leaders
+of the civilisation of the day; but in them all, else would they not
+be members of the Theosophical Society, is the dawning aspiration
+after a nobler condition, and some willingness to sacrifice themselves
+in order that the coming of that condition may be quickened upon
+earth. That is the justification of our Society now. We are like the
+nutrient material that surrounds the germ, and the germ grows out of
+the love, and the aspiration, and the spirit of self-sacrifice, which
+are found in our movement, however little developed to-day. And the
+fact that we recognise it as duty, as ideal, is the promise for the
+future. We are what our past has made us; we shall be what our present
+is creating; and if within your heart and mine the longing for the
+nobler state is found, that marks our place in the future, and our
+right to be among the earlier members of the sub-race that is now
+preparing to be born. For our thoughts now are what we shall be in our
+next life; our aspirations now mark our capacities then. You know how
+the intermediate life is spent, between the death that will close your
+present lives and the birth that will open the portal of your next
+lives. You know that in the heavenly places you will be weaving into
+faculty, into capacity, every thought and every aspiration towards the
+higher life which in these days of your weakness you are generating,
+and are trying to cherish and cultivate. It is not you as you are who
+will make the future, but you as you shall be, self-created from your
+aspirations now. And just in proportion as each of you nourishes those
+aspirations, and cherishes those ideals, and tries, however feebly, to
+work them out amid the limitations of your past which cramps your
+present life, just so far will you, in the interval between death and
+birth, make the nobler faculties which shall qualify you to be born in
+the sixth sub-race upon earth. That should be your keynote in your
+lives now, that the inspiring motive, the controlling power. And if
+you want to assure yourselves that that sub-race is on the threshold,
+as I said, then look at the world around you, and measure the change
+which is coming over it. I said we were weak in numbers, that we are
+only average and mediocre people; but what about the spread of our
+ideas? What about the way in which, during the last thirty years,
+these Theosophical ideas have spread through this Fifth Race
+civilisation, have permeated its literature, are beginning to guide
+its science, are beginning to inspire its art? That is the proof of
+the strength of the force, despite the feebleness of the vehicles in
+which that force is playing. Very clearly not to you nor to me is the
+spread of these ideas due, but to the Mighty Ones behind the Society,
+who give the forces in which we are lacking. For the whole Movement is
+Theirs; They are working outside as well as within. And Their outside
+working shows itself in the innumerable movements which are all
+tending in the same direction. It is not we who have spread the ideas.
+The ideas are scattered in the mental atmosphere around us, and our
+only merit is that we caught them up a little more quickly than other
+people, and realise that they are a part of the Eternal Wisdom. That
+is our only claim, our only prerogative--consciously, deliberately we
+choose these ideas, and however weakly we carry them out, none the
+less the choice has been made and registered in the books of Destiny.
+For whether you will or not, you must grow in the direction of your
+thought; and you cannot be part of this Movement without your thought
+being more or less colored by the Theosophical ideal.
+
+People often say: "Why should I come into the Theosophical Society?
+You give us your books. You spread your knowledge broadcast
+everywhere. I can buy it in the book-shops. I can hear it in the
+lectures. Why should I come in?" And I always say: "There is no reason
+why you should come in, if you do not wish to come. Take everything we
+can give, and take it freely. You are more than welcome to it. We are
+only trustees for you. And if you do not care to be among the
+pioneers, by all means stay outside, and walk along the smoother paths
+which others have carved out for you." But there is one reason that I
+may say to you--I do not say it to those outside--there is a reason
+why you should be within it. You are more in touch with the forces
+that make the future. You are surrounded, bathed, in the atmosphere in
+which the future shall grow. All that is good in you is nourished by
+those forces. All that is harmonious with them is strengthened by
+their overmastering might. You cannot be amongst us without sharing
+that inspiration; you cannot be a member without sharing the life
+which is poured out unstinted through all the vessels of the
+Theosophical Society. Outside it is not worth while to say this, for
+that is not a reason for inducing people to come in; but you may
+rejoice that good karma in the past has brought you into the Society
+in the present. It has given you the right to have this opportunity of
+a nobler birth in the coming time, has given you the opportunity of
+taking part in that great work which is beginning to be wrought among
+humanity. It gives you, from your life in the heavenly places, touch
+with powers and opportunities that belong to these ideals in the world
+of men, and it gives you the possibility there of touch with the
+Mighty Ones whom here, however unworthily, we strive to follow. So
+that it is a great thing to be within it, and it means much for the
+future of you, if you can keep in it. For the immediate future of the
+Theosophical Society is the work of building that next sub-race which
+is to come. That is the work for which consciously it ought to be
+working now. In proportion as you realise it, so will be the strength
+of your labor; in proportion as you understand it, so should be your
+share in the gladder work of that happier time. For the future of the
+Theosophical Society is to be the mother, and even the educator, of
+the child sixth sub-race which already is going through its ante-natal
+life. That is its future, secure, inevitable; yours the choice if you
+will share that future or not.
+
+
+
+
+Part III
+
+
+The Value of Theosophy in the World of Thought
+
+
+_An Address on taking office as President of the Theosophical Society.
+Delivered at the Queen's Hall, Langham Place, London, W., on 10th July
+1907._
+
+
+
+
+The Value of Theosophy in the World of Thought
+
+
+You will have seen on the handbill announcing the lecture, that we are
+holding this meeting in connection with my taking office as President
+of the Theosophical Society, and it is my purpose, in addressing you
+to-night, to try to show you, at least to some small extent, what is
+the value which the Society represents, as regarded from the
+standpoint of human activities, manifested in the world of thought. I
+want to try to show you that when we say THEOSOPHY we are speaking of
+something of real value which can serve humanity in the various
+departments of intellectual life. I propose, in order to do this, to
+begin with a very brief statement of the fundamental idea of
+Theosophy; and then, turning to the world of religious thought, to the
+world of artistic thought, to the world of scientific thought, and
+lastly to the world of political thought, to point out to you how that
+which is called Theosophy may bring contributions of value to each of
+these in turn.
+
+Now Theosophy, as the name implies, is a Wisdom, a Divine Wisdom; and
+the name historically, as many of you know, is identical with that
+which in Eastern lands has been known by various names--as Tao, in
+China; as the Brahmavidya, in India; as the Gnosis, among the
+Greeks and the early Christians; and as Theosophy through the Middle
+Ages and in modern times. It implies always a knowledge, a Wisdom that
+transcends the ordinary knowledge, the ordinary science of the earth;
+it implies a wisdom as regards life, a wisdom as regards the essential
+nature of things, a wisdom which is summed up in two words when we say
+"God-Wisdom." For it has been held in elder days--although in modern
+times it has become largely forgotten--that man can really never know
+anything at all unless he knows himself, and knows himself Divine;
+that knowledge of God, the Supreme, the Universal Life, is the root of
+all true knowledge of matter as well as of Spirit, of this world as
+well as of worlds other than our own; that in that one supreme
+knowledge all other knowledges find their root; that in that supreme
+light all other lights have their origin; and that if man can know
+anything, it is because he is Divine in nature, and, sharing the Life
+that expresses itself in a universe, he can know at once the Life that
+originates and the Matter that obeys.
+
+Starting from such a standpoint, you will at once realise that
+Theosophy is a spiritual theory of the world as against a
+materialistic. It sees Spirit as the moulder, the shaper, the arranger
+of matter, and matter only as the obedient expression and servant of
+the Spirit; it sees in man a spiritual being, seeking to unfold his
+powers by experience in a universe of forms; and it declares that man
+misunderstands himself, and will fail of his true end, if he
+identifies himself with the form that perishes instead of with the
+life which is deathless. Hence, opposed to materialism alike in
+science and philosophy, it builds up a spiritual conception of the
+universe, and necessarily it is idealistic in its thought, and holds
+up the importance of the ideal as a guide to all human activity. The
+ideal, which is thought applied to conduct, that is the keynote of
+Theosophy and its value in the varied worlds of thought; and the power
+of thought, the might of thought, the ability that it has to clothe
+itself in forms whose life only depends on the continuance of the
+thought that gave them birth, that is its central note, or keynote, in
+all the remedies that it applies to human ills. Idealist everywhere,
+idealist in religion, idealist in art, idealist in science, idealist
+in the practical life that men call politics, idealist everywhere; but
+avoiding the blunder into which some idealists have fallen, when they
+have not recognised that human thought is only a portion of the whole,
+and not the whole. The Theosophist recognises that the Divine Thought,
+of which the universe is an expression, puts limitations on his own
+power of thought, on his own creative activity. He realises that the
+whole compels the part, and that his own thought can only move within
+the vast circle of the Divine Thought, which he only partially
+expresses; so that while he will maintain that, on the ideal depends
+all that is called "real" in the lower worlds, he will realise that
+his creative power can only slowly mould matter to his will, and
+though every result will depend on a creative thought, the results
+will often move slowly, adapting themselves to the thought that gives
+them birth. Hence, while idealist, he is not impracticable; while he
+sees the power of thought, he recognises its limitations in space and
+time; and while asserting the vital importance of right thought and
+right belief, he realises that only slowly does the flower of thought
+ripen into the fruit of action.
+
+But on the importance of thought he lays a stress unusual in modern
+life. It is the cant of the day, in judging the value of a man, that
+"it does not matter what he believes but only what he does." That is
+not true. It matters infinitely what a man believes; for as a man's
+belief so he is; as a man's thought, so inevitably is his action.
+There was a time in the world of thought when it was said with equal
+error: "It does not matter what a man does, provided his faith is
+right." If that word "faith" had meant the man's thought in its
+integrity, then there would have been but little error; for the right
+thought would inevitably have brought right action; but in those days
+right thought meant only orthodox thought, according to a narrow canon
+of interpretation, the obedient repetition of creeds, the blind
+acceptance of beliefs imposed by authority. In those days what was
+called Orthodoxy in religion was made the measure of the man, and
+judgment depended upon orthodox acquiescence. Against that mistake the
+great movement that closed the Middle Ages was the protest of the
+intellect of man, and it was declared that no external authority must
+bind the intellect, and none had right to impose from outside the
+thought which is the very essence of the man--that great assertion of
+the right of private judgment, of the supreme principle of the free
+intelligence, so necessary for the progress of humanity. But like all
+things it has been followed by a reaction, and men have run to the
+other extreme: that nothing matters except conduct, and action alone
+is to be considered. But your action is the result of your thought of
+yesterday, and follows your yesterday as its expression in the outer
+world; your thought of to-day is your action of to-morrow, and your
+future depends on its accuracy and its truth, on its consonance with
+reality. Hence it is all-important in the modern world to give back to
+thought its right place as above action, as its inspirer and its
+guide. For the human spirit by its expression as intellect judges,
+decides, directs, controls. Its activity is the outcome of its
+thinking; and if without caring for thought you plunge into action,
+you have the constant experiments, feeble and fruitless, which so
+largely characterise our modern life.
+
+Pass, then, from that first assertion of the importance of right
+thinking, to see what message Theosophy has for the world of religious
+thought. What is religion? Religion is the quenchless thirst of the
+human spirit for the Divine. It is the Eternal, plunged into a world
+of transitory phenomena, striving to realise its own eternity. It is
+the Immortal, flung into a world of death, trying to realise its own
+deathlessness. It is the white Eagle of Heaven, born in the
+illimitable spaces, beating its wings against the bars of matter, and
+striving to break them and rise into the immensities where are its
+birthplace and its real home. That is religion: the striving of man
+for God. And that thirst of man for God many have tried to quench with
+what is called Theology, or with books that are called sacred,
+traditions that are deemed holy, ceremonies and rites which are but
+local expressions of a universal truth. You can no more quench that
+thirst of the human Spirit by anything but individual experience of
+the Divine, than you can quench the thirst of the traveller parched
+and dying in the desert by letting him hear water go down the throat
+of another. Human experience, and that alone, is the rock on which all
+religion is founded, that is the rock that can never be shaken, on
+which every true Church must be built. Books, it is true, are often
+sacred; but you may tear up every sacred book in the world, and as
+long as man remains, and God to inspire man, new books can be written,
+new pages of inspiration can be penned. You may break in pieces every
+ceremony, however beautiful and elevating, and the Spirit that made
+them to express himself has not lost his artistic power, and can make
+new rites and new ceremonies to replace every one that is broken and
+cast aside. The Spirit is deathless as God is deathless, and in that
+deathlessness of the Spirit lies the certainty, the immortality of
+religion. And Theosophy, in appealing to that immortal experience,
+points the world of religions--confused by many an attack, bewildered
+by many an assault, half timid before the new truth discovered every
+day, half scared at the undermining of old foundations, and the
+tearing by criticism of many documents--points it back to its own
+inexhaustible source, and bids it fear neither time nor truth, since
+Spirit is truth and eternity. All that criticism can take from you is
+the outer form, never the living reality; and well indeed is it for
+the churches and for the religions of the world that the outworks of
+documents should be levelled with the ground, in order to show the
+impregnability of the citadel, which is knowledge and experience.
+
+But in the world of religious thought there are many services, less
+important, in truth, than the one I have spoken of, but still
+important and valuable to the faiths of the world; for Theosophy
+brings back to men, living in tradition, testimony to the reality of
+knowledge transcending the knowledge of the senses and the reasoning
+powers of the lower mind. It comes with its hands full of proof,
+modern proof, proof of to-day, living witnesses, of unseen worlds, of
+subtler worlds than the physical. It comes, as the Founders and the
+early Teachers of every religion have come, to testify again by
+personal experience to the reality of the unseen worlds of which the
+religions are the continual witnesses in the physical world. Have you
+ever noticed in the histories of the great religions how they grow
+feebler in their power over men as faith takes the place of knowledge,
+and tradition the place of the living testimony of living men? That is
+one of the values of Theosophy in the religious world, that it teaches
+men to travel to worlds unseen, and to bring back the evidence of what
+they have met and studied; that it so teaches men their own nature
+that it enables them to separate soul and body, and travel without the
+physical body in worlds long thought unattainable, save through the
+gateway of death. I say "Long thought unattainable"; but the
+scriptures of every religion bear witness that they are not
+unattainable. The Hindu tells us that man should separate himself from
+his body as you strip the sheath from the stem of the grass. The
+Buddhist tells us that by deep thought and contemplation mind
+may know itself as mind apart from the physical brain. Christianity
+tells us many a story of the personal knowledge of its earlier
+teachers, of a ministry of angels that remained in the Church, and of
+angelic teachers training the neophytes in knowledge. Islam tells us
+that its own great prophet himself passed into higher worlds, and
+brought back the truths which civilised Arabia, and gave knowledge
+which lit again the torch of learning in Europe when the Moors came to
+Spain. And so religion after religion bears testimony to the
+possibility of human knowledge outside the physical world; we only
+re-proclaim the ancient truth--with this addition, which some
+religions now shrink from making: that what man did in the past man
+may do to-day; that the powers of the Spirit are not shackled, that
+the knowledge of the other worlds is still attainable to man. And
+outside that practical knowledge of other worlds it brings by that
+same method the distinct assertion of the survival of the human Spirit
+after death. It is only in very modern times that that has been
+doubted by any large numbers of people. Here and there in the ancient
+world, like a Lucretius in Rome, perhaps; like a Democritus in Greece;
+certainly like a Charvaka in India, you find one here and there who
+doubts the deathlessness of the Spirit in man; but in modern days that
+disbelief, or the hopeless cynicism which thinks knowledge impossible,
+has penetrated far and wide among the cultured, the educated classes,
+and from them to the masses of the uneducated. That is the phenomenon
+of modern days alone, that man by hundreds and by thousands despairs
+of his own immortality. And yet the deepest conviction of humanity,
+the deepest thought in man, is the persistence of himself, the "I"
+that cannot die. And with one great generalisation, and one method,
+Theosophy asserts at once the deathlessness of man and the existence
+of God; for it says to man, as it was ever said in the ancient days:
+"The proof of God is not without you but within you." All the greatest
+teachers have reiterated that message, so full of hope and comfort;
+for it shuts none out from knowledge. What is the method? Strip away
+your senses, and you find the mind; strip away the mind, and you find
+the pure reason; strip away the pure reason, and you find the
+will-to-live; strip away the will-to-live, and you find Spirit as a
+unit; strike away the limitations of the Spirit, and you find God.
+Those are the steps: told in ancient days, repeated now. "Lose your
+life," said the Christ, "and you shall find it to life eternal." That
+is true: let go everything that you can let go; you cannot let go
+yourself, and in the impossibility of losing yourself you find the
+certainty of the Self Universal, the Universal Life.
+
+Pass again from that to another religious point. I mentioned
+ceremonies, rites of every faith. Those Theosophy looks at and
+understands. So many have cast away ceremonies, even if they have
+found them helpful, because they do not understand them, and fear
+superstition in their use. Knowledge has two great enemies:
+Superstition and Scepticism. Knowledge destroys blind superstition by
+asserting and explaining natural truths of which the superstition has
+exaggerated the unessentials; and it destroys scepticism by proving
+the reality of the facts of the unseen world. The ceremony, the rite,
+is a shadow in the world of sense of the truths in the world of
+Spirit; and every religion, every creed, has its ceremonies as the
+outward physical expression of some eternal spiritual truth. Theosophy
+defends them, justifies them, by explaining them; and when they are
+understood they cease to be superstitions that blind, and become
+crutches that help the halting mind to climb to the spiritual life.
+
+Let us pass from the world of religious thought, and pause for a
+moment on the world of artistic thought. Now to Art, perhaps more than
+in any other department of the human intelligence, the ideal is
+necessary for life. All men have wondered from time to time why the
+architecture--to take one case only--why the architecture of the past
+is so much more wonderful, so much more beautiful, than the
+architecture of the present. When you want to build some great
+national building to-day you have to go back to Greece, or Rome, or
+the Middle Ages for your model. Why is it that you have no new
+architecture, expressive of your own time, as that was expressive of
+the past? The severe order of Egypt found its expression in the mighty
+temples of Karnak; the beauty and lucidity of Grecian thought bodied
+itself out in the chaste and simple splendor of Grecian buildings; the
+sternness of Roman law found its ideal expression in those wondrous
+buildings whose ruins still survive in Rome; the faith of the Middle
+Ages found its expression in the upward-springing arch of Gothic
+architecture, and the exquisite tracery of the ornamented building.
+But if you go into the Gothic cathedral, what do you find there? That
+not alone in wondrous arch and splendid pillar, upspringing in its
+delicate and slender strength from pavement to roof, not there only
+did the art of the builder find its expression. Go round to any
+out-of-the-way corner, or climb the roof of those great buildings, and
+you will find in unnoticed places, in hidden corners, the love of the
+artist bodying itself forth in delicate tracery, in stone that lives.
+Men carved for love, not only for fame; men carved for beauty's sake,
+not only for money; and they built perfectly because they had love and
+faith, the two divine builders, and embodied both in deathless stone.
+Before you can be more than copyists you must find your modern ideal,
+and when you have found it you can build buildings that will defy
+time. But you have not found it yet; the artist amongst us is too much
+of a copyist, and too little of an inspirer and a prophet. We do not
+want the painter only to paint for us the things our own eyes can see.
+We want the artist eye to see more than the common eye, and to embody
+what he sees in beauty for the instruction of our blinded sight. We do
+not want accurate pictures of cabbages and turnips and objects of that
+sort. However cleverly done, they remain cabbages and turnips still.
+The man who could paint for us the thought that makes the cabbage, he
+would be the artist, the man who knows the Life. And so for our new
+Art we must have a splendid ideal. Do you want to know how low Art may
+sink when materialism triumphs and vulgarises and degrades? Then see
+that exhibition of French pictures that was placed in Bond Street some
+years ago, which attracted those who loved indecency more than those
+who loved the beautiful, and then you will understand how Art
+perishes where the breath of the ideal does not inspire and keep
+alive. And Theosophy to the artist would bring back that ancient
+reverence which regards the artist of the Beautiful as one of the
+chief God-revealers to the race of which he is a portion; which sees
+in the great musical artist, or the sculptor, or the painter, a
+God-inspired man, bringing down the grace of heaven to illuminate the
+dull grey planes of earth. The artists should be the prophets of our
+time, the revealers of the Divine smothered under the material; and
+were they this, they would be regarded with love and with reverence;
+for true art needs reverence for its growing, and the artist, of all
+men--subtle, responsive, sensitive to everything that touches
+him--needs an atmosphere of love and reverence that he may flower into
+his highest power, and show the world some glimpse of the Beauty which
+is God.
+
+And the world of science--perhaps there, after the world of religion,
+Theosophy has most of value to offer. Take Psychology. What a
+confusion; what a mass of facts want arrangement; what a chaos of
+facts out of which no cosmos is built! Theosophy, by its clear and
+accurate definition of man, of the relation of consciousness to its
+bodies, of Spirit to its vehicles, arranges into order that vast mass
+of facts with which psychology is struggling now. It takes into that
+wonderful "unconscious" or "sub-conscious"--which is now, as it were,
+the answer to every riddle; but it is not understood--it takes into
+that the light of direct investigation; divides the "unconscious"
+which comes from the past from that which is the presage of the
+future, separates out the inheritance of our long past ancestry which
+remains as the "sub-conscious" in us; points to the higher
+"super-conscious," not "sub-conscious," of which the genius is the
+testimony at the present time; shows that human consciousness
+transcends the brain; proves that human consciousness is in touch with
+worlds beyond the physical; and makes sure and certain the hope
+expressed by science, that it is possible that that which is now
+unconscious shall become conscious, and that man shall find himself in
+touch with a universe and not only in touch with one limited world.
+That which Myers sometimes spoke of as the "cosmic consciousness," as
+against our own limited consciousness, is a profound truth, and
+carries with it the prophecy of man's future greatness. Just as the
+fish is limited to the water, as the bird is limited to the air, so
+man has been limited to the physical body, and has dreamed he had no
+touch with other spaces, to which he really belongs. But your
+consciousness is living in three worlds, and not in one, is touching
+mightier possibilities, is beginning to contact subtler phenomena; and
+all the traces of that are found in your newest psychology, and are
+simply proofs of those many theories about man which Theosophy has
+been teaching in the world for many a century, nay, for many a
+millennium.
+
+And physics and chemistry is there anything of value along
+Theosophical lines of thought and investigation, which might aid our
+physicists and our chemists, puzzled at the subtlety of the forces
+with which they have to deal? Has it never struck some of the more
+intuitive physicists and materialists that there may be subtler
+senses which may be used for investigation of the subtler forces? That
+man may have in himself senses by the evolution of which he will able
+to pierce the secrets that now he is striving vainly to unveil? Has it
+never even struck a physicist or a chemist that, if he does not
+believe in the possibility of himself developing those subtler forces,
+he might utilise them in others in order to prosecute further his own
+investigations? They are beginning to to do that in France. They are
+beginning to now try to use those whom they call "lucid"; that is,
+people who see with eyes keener than the physical; they are beginning
+to use those in medicine, are using them for the diagnosis of disease,
+are using them for the testing of the sensitiveness of man, are
+beginning to use them to try to discover if man has any body subtler
+than the physical. And while I would not say to the scientific man:
+"Accept our theories," I would say to him: "Take them as hypotheses by
+which you may direct your further experiments, and you may go on and
+make discoveries more rapidly than you can at the present time." For
+there is many a clairvoyant who, put before a piece of some elemental
+substance, could describe it very much better than is done by your
+fractional analysis. And along other lines--chemical and
+electrical--surely there is something a little unsatisfactory, when a
+few years ago men told us that the atom was composed literally of
+myriads of particles, and during the last year it has been suggested
+that perhaps one particle is all of which an atom is composed. Might
+it not be wise to try to get hold of your atoms by sight keener than
+the physical, as it is possible to do, whether by the ordinary
+clairvoyant who is sometimes developed up to that point, or by an
+untrained sensitive whose senses are set free from the limitations of
+the physical brain, and from that sensitive try to gather something of
+the composition of matter which may guide you in your more scientific
+search? I realise that what one, or two, or twenty people see, is no
+proof for the scientific man; but it may give a hint whereby
+mathematical deductions may be made, and calculations which otherwise
+would not be thought of. So that I only suggest the utilising by
+science of certain powers that are now available, keener than those of
+the ordinary senses--a new sort of human microscope or human
+telescope--whereby you may pierce to the larger or the smaller, beyond
+the reach of your physical microscopes and telescopes, made of metal
+and not of intelligence showing itself in matter.
+
+Is there anything of value in Theosophical ideas, shall I say to the
+science of medicine? Some say it is not yet a science, but works
+empirically only. There is some truth in that; but are there not here
+again lines of investigation which the physician might well study? For
+instance, the power of thought over the human body, all that mass of
+facts on which partly is built up such a science as Mental Healing, or
+what is called Faith Cure, and so on. Do you think that these things
+have been going on for hundreds of years, and that there is no truth
+lying behind them? "The effects of imagination," you say. But what is
+imagination? It does not matter of what it is the effect, if it brings
+cure where before there was disease. If you put into a man's body a
+drug that you do not understand, and find that it cures a disease and
+relieves a pain, will you throw the drug aside because you do not
+understand it? And why do you throw the power of imagination aside
+because you cannot weigh it in your balance, nor find that it
+depresses one scale more than the other? Imagination is one of the
+subtlest powers of thought: imagination is one of the strongest powers
+that the doctor might utilise when his drugs fail him and his old
+methods no longer serve his purpose. Suggestion, the power of thought.
+Why, there are records of cases where suggestion has killed! That
+which has killed can also cure, and man's body being only a product of
+thought, built up through the ages, answers more rapidly to its
+creator than it does to clumsier products from the mineral and
+vegetable kingdoms. Here again I only ask experiment. You know that
+you can produce wounds upon the body of the hypnotised patient, in a
+state of trance. By suggestion lesions are made, burns are caused,
+inflammation and pain appear by the mere suggestion of a wound. A
+blister is placed on a patient and forbidden to act; the skin is
+untouched when the blister is removed: a bit of wet paper is given by
+thought the qualities of the blister, and it will raise the skin, with
+all the accompaniments of the chemical blister. Now these things are
+known. You can see the pictures of wounds thus produced, if you will,
+in some of the Paris hospitals, for along this line the Frenchman is
+investigating further than the Englishman has done. And along that
+line also lies much of useful experiment to be brought to the relief
+of the diseases of humanity.
+
+But as I have touched upon medicine, let me say--for I ought here to
+say it--that there are some methods of modern medicine which Theosophy
+emphatically condemns. It declares that no knowledge which is gained
+from a tortured, a vivisected creature, is legitimate, even if it were
+as useful as it has been proved to be useless. It declares that all
+inoculations of disease into the healthy body are illegitimate, and it
+condemns all such. It declares that all those foul injections of modern
+medicine which use animal fluids to restore the exhausted vitality of
+man are ruinous to the body into which they are put. Here again France,
+by the very excess of its methods, is beginning to recoil before the
+results which have come about. Only two years ago I was told by a
+leading physician of Paris that many of the doctors had met together to
+look at the results which had grown out of the methods that for years
+they had been following without hesitation and without scruple, and that
+they feared that they had caused more diseases than they cured. Why are
+these things condemned as illegitimate? Because the building up of the
+human body is the building by a living Spirit of a temple for himself,
+and it is moulded by that Spirit for his own purposes. The higher powers
+of intelligence have made the human body what it is, different from the
+animal bodies out of which, physically, in ages long gone by, it has
+grown. Your delicacy of touch, the exquisite beauty and delicacy of your
+nervous system, these things are the outcome of the higher powers of the
+Spirit expressing themselves in the human body, where they cannot
+express themselves in the animal form. And if you ignore this, if you
+forget it, if you forget that this splendid human temple built up by
+the Spirit of man through ages of toil and of suffering, to express his
+own higher qualities--compassion, tenderness, love, pity for the weak
+and the helpless, protection of the helpless against the strong--if you
+forget the whole of that, and act as a brute even would not act, in
+cruelty and wickedness to men and animals alike, you will degrade the
+body you are trying to preserve, you will paralyse the body you are
+trying to save from disease, and you will go back into the savagery
+which is the nemesis of cruelty, and ruin these nobler bodies, the
+inheritance of the civilised races.
+
+I pass from that to my last world, the world of political thought. Now
+Theosophy takes no part in party politics. It lays down the great
+principle of human Brotherhood, and bids its followers go out into the
+world and work on it--using their intelligence, their power of
+thought, to judge the value of every method which is proposed. And our
+general criticism on the politics of the moment would be that they are
+remedies, not preventions, and leave untouched the root out of which
+all the miseries grow. Looking sometimes at your party politics, it
+seems to me as though you were as children plucking flowers and
+sticking them into the sand and saying: "See what a beautiful garden I
+have made." And when you wake the next morning the flowers are dead,
+for there were no roots, but only rootless flowers. I know you must
+make remedies, but you should not stop at that. When you send out your
+Red Cross doctors and nurses to pick up the mutilated bodies that your
+science of war has maimed, they are doing noble work, and deserve our
+love and gratitude, for the wounded must be nursed; but the man who
+works for peace does more for the good of humanity than the Red Cross
+doctors and nurses. And so also in the political world. You cannot
+safely live "hand-to-mouth" in politics any more than in any other
+department of human life. But how many are there in the political
+parties who care for causes and not only for effects? That is the
+criticism we should make. We see everywhere Democracy spreading; but
+Democracy is on its trial, and unless it can evolve some method by
+which the wise shall rule, and not merely the weight of ignorant
+numbers, it will dig its own grave. So long as you leave your people
+ignorant they are not fit to rule. The schools should come before the
+vote, and knowledge before power. You are proud of your liberty; you
+boast of a practically universal suffrage--leaving out, of course, one
+half of humanity!--but taking your male suffrage as you have it, how
+many of the voters who go to the poll know the principles of political
+history, know anything of economics, know anything of all the
+knowledge which is wanted for the guiding of the ship of the State
+through troubled waters? You do not choose your captains out of people
+who know nothing of navigation; but you choose the makers of your
+rulers out of those who have not studied and do not know. That is not
+wise. I do not deny it is a necessary stage in the evolution of man. I
+know that the Spirit acts wisely, and guides the nations along roads
+in which lessons are to be learned; and I hope that out of the
+blunders, and the errors, and the crudities of present politics there
+will evolve a saner method, in which the wise of the nation will have
+power and guide its councils, and wisdom, not numbers, shall speak
+the decisive word.
+
+Now there is one criticism of politics that we often hear in these
+days. It is said that behind politics lie economics. That is true. You
+may go on playing at politics for ever and ever; but if your economic
+foundation is rotten, no political remedies can build a happy and
+prosperous nation. But while I agree that behind politics lie
+economics, there is something that lies also behind economics, and of
+that I hear little said. Behind economics lies character, and without
+character you cannot build a free and a happy nation. A nation
+enormous in power, what do you know of the way in which your power is
+wielded in many a far-off land? How much do you know about your vast
+Indian Empire? How many of your voters going to the poll can give an
+intelligent answer to any question affecting that 300,000,000 of human
+beings whom you hold in your hand, and deal with as you will? There
+are responsibilities of Empire as well as pride in it, and pride of
+Empire is apt to founder when the responsibilities of Empire are
+ignored. And so the Theosophist is content to go to the root of the
+matter, and try to build up for you the citizens out of whom your
+future State is to be made. Education, real education, secular
+education, is now your cry. They tried secular education in France;
+they destroyed religious teaching; they tried to give morality without
+religion. But the moral lessons had no effect: they were too cold and
+dull, and dead. Is it not a scandal that in a country like this, where
+the vast majority are religious, you are quarrelling so much about the
+trifles that separate you, that the only way to peace seems to be to
+take religion out of the schools altogether, and train the children
+only in morality, allowing an insignificant minority to have its way?
+Why! we have done better than that in India, we Theosophists. Hindu
+Theosophists have founded there a College in which, despite all their
+sects and all their religious quarrels, they have found a common
+minimum of Hinduism on which their children can be trained in
+religion and morality alike. I grant it was a Theosophical inspiration
+that began the movement; but the whole mass of Hindus have fallen
+in with it, and are accepting the books as the basis of education.
+Government has recognised them, and has begun to introduce them for
+the use of Hindus in its own schools. That is the way in which we
+Theosophists work at politics. We go to the root to build character,
+and we know that noble characters will make a noble and also a
+prosperous nation. But you can no more make a nation of free men out
+of children untrained in duty and in righteousness, than you can build
+a house that will stand if you use ill-baked bricks and rotten timber.
+Our keynote in politics is Brotherhood. That worked out into life will
+give you the nation that you want.
+
+And what does Brotherhood mean? It means that everyone of us, you and
+I, every man and woman throughout the land, looks on all others as
+they look on their own brothers, and acts on the same principle which
+in the family rules. You keep religion out of politics? You cannot,
+without peril to your State; for unless you teach your people that
+they are a Brotherhood, whether or not they choose to recognise it,
+you are building on the sand and not on the rock. And what does
+Brotherhood mean? It means that the man who gains learning, uses it to
+teach the ignorant, until none are ignorant. It means that the man who
+is pure takes his purity to the foul, until all have become clean. It
+means that the man who is wealthy uses his wealth for the benefit of
+the poor, until all have become prosperous. It means that everything
+you gain, you share; everything you achieve, you give its fruit to
+all. That is the law of Brotherhood, and it is the law of national as
+well as of individual life. You cannot rise alone. You are bound too
+strongly each to each. If you use your strength to raise yourself by
+trampling on your fellows, inevitably you will fail by the weakness
+that you have wronged.
+
+Do you know who are the greatest enemies of a State? The weak, injured
+by the strong. For, above all States, rules an Eternal Justice; and
+the tears of miserable women, and the curses of angry, starving men,
+sap the foundations of a State that denies Brotherhood, and reach the
+ears of that Eternal Justice by which alone States live, and Nations
+continue. It is written in an ancient scripture that a Master of Duty
+said to a King: "Beware the tears of the weak, for they sap the
+thrones of Kings." Strength may threaten: weakness undermines.
+Strength may stand up to fight: weakness cuts away the ground on which
+the fighters are standing. And the message of Theosophy to the modern
+political world is: Think less about your outer laws, and more about
+the lives of the people who have to live under those laws. Remember
+that government can only live when the people are happy; that States
+can only flourish where the masses of the population are contented;
+that all that makes life enjoyable is the right of the lowest and the
+poorest; that they can do without external happiness far less than
+you, who have so many means of inner satisfaction, of enjoyment, by
+the culture that you possess and that they lack. If there is not money
+enough for everything, spend your money in making happier, healthier,
+purer, more educated, the lives of the poor; then a happy nation will
+be an imperial nation; for Brotherhood is the strongest force on
+earth.
+
+
+
+
+Part IV
+
+
+The Field of Work of the Theosophical Society
+
+
+_The Presidential Address delivered to the Convention of the British
+Section of the Theosophical Society, held in Essex Hall, London, 7th
+July 1907._
+
+
+
+
+The Field of Work of the Theosophical Society.
+
+
+It is my duty now to bring to a close this Convention, and to bid you
+all farewell, to scatter to your various places and to do, let us
+hope, with fresh courage and deeper knowledge, the varied works which
+you are called upon to perform. And let me, before I take up the
+subject upon which I am to speak--"The Field of Work of the
+Theosophical Society"--let me, ere beginning that subject, say one
+word of gratitude to her without whom the Theosophical Society could
+not till any field, nor sow any seed--to H.P.B., our Teacher and our
+Helper, let us offer our heart's gratitude; for without her we could
+not have met together, without her we could not have learned the
+Theosophical teaching. It may be that many of us have learned much
+since she first taught us, but she was the first Teacher, and the
+Bringer of the Light. It may be that some, since they met her, have
+known their Master face to face; but it was she who led them to His
+presence, she to whom the possibility in this life was due. It may
+well be that had she not come some other might have come to do the
+work, but that matters not to us; that she did it is her claim to our
+homage, and we, who live in the light she brought, may well pay
+tribute of gratitude to her.
+
+What is the Field of our Society's work? It is sketched in our Three
+Objects; and those of you who have looked upon the Objects with care,
+in the various recensions through which they have passed, may have
+noticed that each one of them covers one of the aspects of human
+consciousness. In the first, that which declares the truth of the
+Universal Brotherhood, we have the field of work of the Activity
+aspect, the active principle of the consciousness, of the Spirit,
+which seeks expression in service to the race. In the second, the
+study of the religions and the philosophies of the world, we have the
+field of work for the Cognition aspect of consciousness, that which
+gathers together the fruit of knowledge; it is the Knower gathering
+the food by which he unfolds his powers. And in the third we have the
+field of work of the Will, the Power aspect of the consciousness, the
+deepest root of our being, that by which the worlds exist, as they are
+supported by the Wisdom, as they are created by the Activity. So that
+when we thus look at the objects of the Society and realise the
+relation that they bear to our conscious selves, we see that the field
+of the work of the Theosophical Society is wide as the world, and
+knows no limit where Will and Knowledge and Activity can make their
+way. And it is true, now and always, that everything which helps and
+benefits man is Theosophical work, and that nothing can be excluded
+from the sphere of our work which includes every aspect of
+consciousness. So let us take this natural, this scientific division
+of our work, and see what we may do in each field which offers itself
+to the appropriate power in our nature.
+
+The first will naturally cover all active working for humanity, all
+service which one can offer to another; and it will be well, in the
+days that lie before us, if we realise that there is no scheme for
+human helping, no possible effort for human uplifting, which is
+outside the field of work of the First Object of our Society. Every
+Lodge of the Society should make it one of its activities to serve
+humanity in the place where the Lodge is founded; and the value of the
+Lodge should be in the knowledge that is there gathered with the
+object of spreading it. For Theosophy should be your touch-stone as to
+the value of every scheme, as to the tendency of every proposition. In
+all the countless schemes around us in these active times, some work
+only for the moment; others, based on sound principle, are preparing
+the world for a better and happier future. By your Theosophical
+knowledge you can judge the value of every such scheme, and throw
+yourselves into those alone which work on lines beneficial to the
+future, which are laying the foundations of a civilisation greater
+than our own. For among the many schemes and many methods there are
+ways in which each man inspired by the Spirit of Brotherhood may find
+work that satisfies his reason and is justified by his conscience. And
+there is no one particular method, no one special road, along which
+the Society, as Society, can go. It lays down the principle of
+Brotherhood as an active working spirit in the life of every member,
+and then it leaves the member free to use his own judgment and his own
+conscience as to which among the many methods recommends itself most
+to him as an individual. So that in speaking of that field of work, it
+is not for me to say: "This plan, that method, the other means, that
+is what you ought to follow"; but only that you are not carrying out
+the First Object of the Society, unless you are engaging your activity
+in some task which in your intelligence and conscience is working for
+the benefit of your fellow-men. That is a point I want to put to your
+Lodges; for when I see questions discussed as to giving new life to
+Lodges, vivifying Lodges, and so on, I know well that the only cause
+for the need of such discussion is because men allow the life to
+stagnate within the Lodge, instead of sending it forth a living stream
+to fertilise the place in which the Lodge is built. There would be no
+lack of life were it not that you keep it bottled up for your own
+advantage, for your own needs. The source of life is inexhaustible,
+and it only ceases to flow where there is stagnation, because it is
+not allowed to run out to the people who have need of it, but is kept
+within the narrow limits of a Lodge. If you worked as well as talked,
+if you labored as well as discussed, if you served as well as praised
+service, there would be no time and no need to discuss how the Lodges
+of the Theosophical Society shall be vivified.
+
+Your Lodge should be your place of inspiration, the place where you
+learn how you are to serve, the place where you find the bread of
+life. But the bread of life is meant to feed the hungry, and not to
+surfeit those already filled, to feed the hungry crowds around you
+starving for knowledge, that life may be made intelligible and thus
+tolerable to them; and it is yours to feed the flock of the Great
+Shepherd, and to help those who, without this Wisdom, are helpless.
+And all need it; not the poor alone, nor the rich alone, but every
+child of man. For the one thing that presses upon all alike, the
+bitterness of life, is the sense of wrong, the want of intelligibility
+in life, and therefore a feeling of the lack of justice upon earth;
+that is the sting which pierces every heart; whether the heart belong
+to the rich or the poor, it matters not. When you understand life,
+life becomes bearable; and never till you understand it will it cease
+to be a burden grievous to be borne; but when you understand it,
+everything changes. When you realise its meaning, its value, you can
+put up with the difficulties. And our work with regard to those around
+us is to bring that knowledge, and by that knowledge to lift them to a
+place of peace. That is the work which demands to be done, and which
+your Lodges have the duty of doing. For there ought not to be one
+scheme for human helping, in any place where a Lodge of the
+Theosophical Society is established, where in that Lodge workers may
+not be found ready and eager to give labor to the helping of their
+brothers amongst whom they live. What is the use of prattling about
+Universal Brotherhood, if you do not live it? Sometimes, in
+discussions on Brotherhood, it is spoken of as though it only meant
+soft words and well-turned phrases, sentimentality and not reality. It
+means work, constant, steadfast, unwearied work, for those who require
+service at our hands; not soft words to each other, but work for the
+world, that is the true meaning of Brotherhood.
+
+Pass from that to our next field of work, sketched out by our Second
+Object. Without that you cannot rightly work for Brotherhood, for you
+will not understand the knowledge already garnered. You must learn in
+order to teach, you must study in order to understand, and this Object
+is not carried on in our Lodges as effectively as it ought to be; for
+it is translated into one man studying, and pouring out the fruits of
+his study into the open mouths round him on every side. That is all
+very well in the beginning when the young bird comes out of the egg.
+It is necessary that the father and mother bird should pour food into
+the wide open beak; but some of you ought to have gone beyond that in
+the thirty-two years of life of the Society: you ought to be ready to
+help, and not only to be helped. And the life of the Society will not
+be healthy while so few are students, and therefore so few are fit to
+teach. Every Lodge should have its classes for study under this
+object. There are other ways in which you must learn as well as by the
+teaching of brother Theosophists, and there is a plan they are just
+adopting in the Paris Lodge for the work of the coming winter, which
+is a very good one; instead of Theosophists studying the books of
+scholars, and then giving out what they have learned, the French Lodge
+is inviting leading representatives of the various branches of
+thought, those specially interesting to us, in order that they may put
+their knowledge from their own standpoint, and that the Theosophist
+may have the advantage of listening to them at first hand. That seems
+to me a very admirable plan, and I know not why in some of the London
+Lodges you should not try to take a leaf out of our French neighbor's
+book, and why one Lodge at least should not try, if only for one six
+months, to bring to that Lodge some leader in the world of thought,
+who shall tell it what he believes, and explain the lines of his work.
+If you could persuade specialists along the many lines of study,
+religious and philosophical, to give you the fruits of their work, you
+would learn more rapidly, you would learn the spirit of a school in a
+more satisfactory manner, than when you are only studying books, and
+then giving out the books you have read. You value, and rightly value,
+the knowledge that Mr. Mead brings you along his special lines of
+study, but why should you not have that same advantage similarly from
+others who follow other lines of thought, and would speak similarly
+from first-hand knowledge? There is a life in it that there never is
+in second-hand knowledge, a vigor and strength in it that you can
+never get when it has only been learned second-hand, and then poured
+forth. Men who study deeply are glad to find audiences who are willing
+to listen to the results of their study, and who will give them glad
+hearing when they come out into the world from the study to tell what
+by labor and toil they have learned. And so I suggest that some of you
+should see whether you might not make your Lodges more valuable if,
+instead of always going round the same wheel of a few local lecturers,
+you tried to win to each locality now and again a really learned and
+well-trained man, and then, with your own Lodge as a nucleus of
+hearers, gather round them others also who would be only too glad of
+the opportunity that your Lodge would give in the place where it
+happens to be. You have Lodges in the suburbs, Lodges in the towns
+outside the area of London, and how glad many of these would be, if
+you made yourselves the channels for knowledge of that sort to be
+poured out amongst them. There is one line of work you might well take
+up, and the country Lodges might do the same, winning down from London
+now and again some thinker who would come and give the benefit of his
+study; and if you were known all over England as the places where such
+knowledge might be gained, and the bringers of such within the reach
+of your fellow-townsmen, the Society would profit by your labor as
+well as those who immediately benefit by the effort. And wherever you
+deal with the study of a religion, learn it from the lips of one who
+believes it rather than by the exposition of one who does not; for
+only so will you catch the spirit of the different religions. If you
+would learn about Roman Catholicism, win a Roman Catholic student or
+priest to come and tell you how his Church appeals to him; or if you
+want to learn about the Church of England, win some clergyman who will
+come and tell you what that Church means to him; or about
+Buddhism, win a Buddhist to come and tell you what his own
+religion is to him; and so with the Hindu, and on and on, all round
+the different religions. For none can really tell what a religion is
+to its followers who does not believe in it, and no one can give you
+its spirit who does not feel it. And it is in that way that your
+Theosophy should lead you into sympathy with every form of religious
+thought, learning it as it comes from the mouth of a believer, and not
+in the sort of warmed-up fashion in which one who does not believe it
+re-cooks it for his fellow Theosophists. There, it seems to me, is
+your field of work under the Second Object; and out of this study
+would grow literature, illuminating these various religions and
+philosophies, and from your classes should be evolved teachers, to
+carry to the different communities the results of their study on
+different lines, thus bringing the Second Object to the helping of the
+First.
+
+I had a letter the other day from a good member of the Theosophical
+Society, and the writer said, being a Christian, that Christian lines
+of work attracted her, and she thought she ought to leave the Society
+in order to help people along those lines. But what sort of Theosophy
+is that? You who are Christians, or believers in any other faith, you
+should become Theosophists to help your own religions, and to bring
+them the life, not by leaving the Society, but by learning in the
+Society to help them; that is the duty of every believer in whatever
+religion you may happen to believe. For you should be messengers to
+the various religions, helping them to understand more deeply than
+many of them do to-day; and if you would understand that that is part
+of your duty, to help your own faiths, to enlighten those who will not
+come to the Theosophical Lodge but yet will listen to the fellow
+believer offering them the knowledge that in the Lodge he has gained,
+then the spread of our doctrines, rapid as it is, would be far more
+rapid and along healthy lines. For we do not exist as a Society simply
+to study, but to spread the light, and every religion should be the
+richer and the fuller in proportion to the number of Theosophists that
+it enrolls amongst its followers.
+
+Pass to the Third Object. There also we have work to do, and we cannot
+work for Brotherhood effectively without understanding the nature of
+man. And I feel that one or two who criticised the Society this
+afternoon on that point had the right to make the criticism that they
+did; for, while in the earlier days that Third Object was so carried
+out in the Society that it was the leader in the fields of all such
+research, it certainly now has fallen into the background, and is only
+a gleaner in the fields where others are reaping, and that is not
+right. The knowledge that you have in theory as to the constitution of
+man and nature, should be a guide to you in researches, and not simply
+remain theoretical knowledge. That which was said this afternoon about
+the Psychical Research Society is true. It goes into everything
+unusual with a prejudice against it, rather than with a feeling that
+there is something to be learned; but on the other hand, one is bound
+to say that during the last ten or twelve years that Society has done
+more to familiarise the public with these facts of the hidden powers
+of man than our own has done in practice, though we have done much
+more in theory. Now I am not in favor of much experiment preceding a
+study of theory; I believe that we need the theory in order to
+experiment wisely; but I also believe that having a true theory we
+should use it to guide our investigations, and thus to add to the
+knowledge of the world. A part of our work, it seems to me, that lies
+before us in the coming time, is to help the world to walk wisely
+along those roads of research on which it has entered now. You cannot
+prevent it going forward along them, knowledge is already too widely
+spread for that; but what you can do is to help men to walk wisely,
+and to avoid many a pitfall into which otherwise they would be very
+likely to fall. And along those lines there is very much to be done:
+plans to be worked out, methods of research to be planned and tested;
+and I hope before very long to see some groups in our Society that
+will take up this special line of work as part of their activities,
+and, headed by someone who knows practically something of that with
+which he is dealing, will then help the younger students to learn
+wisely and to experiment carefully. And in these matters it is well,
+so far as you can, to bring the more scientific members of the Society
+into touch with this work; for one of the reasons that Spiritualism
+fell into discredit for a time was because the scientific and the
+thoughtful abstained from it, and left it in the hands of the
+credulous and the unwise. The leaders of the scientific world who
+ought to have joined in the work which Sir William Crookes, Alfred
+Wallace, and others began, instead of following them and strengthening
+their hands, turned their backs on it all, leaving it to be carried on
+by those who knew far less than they, and who were not accustomed to
+accurate observation and careful recording of phenomena. Now leading
+scientific men are beginning to work at it. Along all lines of
+psychical research work should be done by us, if we do not mean to
+cancel the Third Object in our Society.
+
+Thus, then, a great field of work opens out before us, so wide a
+field, so great, that you would have no need to ask for work if you
+would only begin to labor along these lines. And take that other line
+about which Mrs. Cooper Oakley spoke--the line of Historical Research
+into Mysticism. Has it ever struck you how much of the work of our
+forerunners remains unknown, because their work is not scanned by
+sympathetic eyes? How many of the pioneers in the past centuries lie
+under a heap of calumny, because none has tried to understand, none
+has tried to realise, the nature of their work? Men like Paracelsus,
+Cagliostro, and many another whose name I might mention, who are
+crying out, as it were, for research, and thought, and labor on
+mystical and occult lines. There again I have good hope that some
+really efficient work will be going on; for to my mind one of the
+purposes for which our Presidency should exist is to act as a centre
+round which every country may gather together, and thus communicate
+with each other, and form bodies scattered all over the world for
+mutual aid. The strength of our Society is in that unity of thought,
+which can only be brought about as one part of the Society realises
+that other parts are linked with it, as it ought to be, by the
+President of the whole. For the Presidency would be an idle show, if
+it is not to be a centre for inspiration and labor. The great work
+done by the late President is, as I have said elsewhere, practically
+complete; he has given the Theosophical Society an organisation by
+which it can work and live; ours to use the organisation that he made,
+ours to employ this splendid instrument which is now in our hands for
+world-wide labor and for world-wide helping. That is the work to which
+I would summon you now, and pray your help. Let us not stand apart one
+from the other, and work always along isolated lines; in addition to
+the isolated work, we should have the combined work; for many often
+can bring about a result which one cannot do. Take, for instance, the
+great libraries of Europe, far, far apart. It is very laborious for a
+person to travel all over Europe and labor alone in them all; but if
+we had students working in every great library, we should have feeders
+who would send in to a common centre the result of their work, which
+could then be shed over the world.
+
+Along those lines the Society will become respected, when it is known
+for honest and useful work in all departments of human activity. There
+is no good in glorifying it by words and saying what a splendid thing
+it is, unless we justify ourselves to the world by the work which we
+contribute for the world's helping.
+
+In this way, then, I would ask you to look at our great field of work.
+Laborers are wanted. There is more than work enough for all, and in
+this work the principle that must guide us is, as we have so often
+said, freedom of thought, freedom of expression. But let it be
+understood in the Society, for there is danger of this being
+forgotten, that there is freedom for those who assert as well as for
+those who deny; that all alike are free. Those who know have a right
+to speak, and there should be no outcry against them; those who do not
+believe have a right to say they do not believe, and there should be
+no outcry against them because they believe not But there is a danger
+lest those who believe not should think that they have the only right
+of speech, and that those who experience have no right to say out that
+which they know to be true. It is the danger which dogs the steps of
+Freethought everywhere. You can see it in France at the present time,
+where the Freethinker, smarting against the oppression of the Church,
+tries to silence the Church, as he has been silenced in the past; but
+it is a bad reaction, and we cannot have that within the
+Society--there must be liberty for all. I do not wish to impose my own
+beliefs on any man or woman in the Society, but I claim the right
+amongst you to speak the truth I know, and to bear witness to the
+reality of my Master whom for eighteen years I have served, without
+being attacked vehemently by those who deny my experience. I know
+whereof I speak. I ask you not to believe; that is your own choice. I
+ask you not to accept; that is for you to decide. But you have no
+right to try to stop my lips, nor to say that the assertion of my
+belief is outside the liberty allowed in the Theosophical Society. I,
+as President, will defend to the utmost the right of each to speak his
+thought--believers and non-believers of every type; but I will not
+recognise the right of any to impose upon the Society a dogma of
+unbelief, any more than a dogma of belief. Only by that liberty of all
+can we live and grow; only by the perfect freedom, and the recognition
+of every man's right to speak, no matter what he says, can the health
+of the Society be secured. For in the years that lie before us there
+is much new knowledge to be gained, many new facts to be discovered,
+many new experiences to go through, and we must not discourage the
+seekers and investigators by making it difficult for them to speak
+amongst us. We need every fact that any human being can bring to us.
+We have the right to challenge the fact and investigate it, and either
+to say: "It is fact"; or: "To me it is not fact"; but we have no right
+to say to any human being: "You shall not search nor speak," for that
+would be the death-knell of our liberty, that the denial of the
+foundation on which we stand.
+
+And so let us go forward to a future, I hope, fairer than anything we
+have in our past. Let us welcome all thought, all refusal of thought,
+all investigation, all speech, however different it may be from our
+own speech and thought, and doing this with full respect of each for
+each, full recognition that minds are different, and that each mind
+has its own sphere in which it can do useful work for all, let us
+encourage in our Society every school of thought, every form of
+opinion, every expression of thought which is in a man's mind. And out
+of all that clash of opinion, out of all that discussion, Truth should
+come out stronger, richer, larger than ever. And never mind if
+sometimes falsehoods are spoken; never mind if sometimes mistakes are
+made. An old scripture says: "Truth conquers, not falsehood"; for God
+is Truth, and nothing that is not drawn from His Life can live,
+nothing that is drawn from His life can die; and realising that, we
+can go forward fearlessly into the unknown future, sure that to brave
+hearts and true lives every experience, every failure, every mistake,
+is only another rung of the ladder by which we climb from ignorance
+into knowledge, from the bondage of matter into the liberty of
+Spirit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's London Lectures of 1907, by Annie  Besant
+
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