Is there, beyond man, a new
order of evolutionary beings, critically different?
And, if so, by what is it uniquely
marked?
Amorphous matter of sea and
sky is sundered from the vast crystalline masses of Alp
and Himalaya by a gulf of form, self-born and
self-perpetuated.
The backbone of Rockies and
Andes is separated by an equally deep chasm from its
verdure, however intimately this sinks roots into every
crevice. The miracle of plant adaptation, assimilation and growth is
denied the vast rampart clothed by sequoia, lichen, fir,
moss, cedar, fern and great gums.
A
tree may be conceived, and by some Burbank grown, which
would yield the ruby flesh of
pomegranates, saffron pears, dark olives and Alphonso
mangoes — but
it would [Page
10]nevertheless remain
plant, parted from animal by that inward otherness which
appears to us outwardly as mobility, thought and seeking.
However
imperceptible the gradations in the basic stuff of evolution — energy
unit into element, element into crystal, crystal to bacterium,
bacterium to protozoon —
it is nevertheless a patent fact that the grand aggregations
of these primitive fine-world forms are significantly different
the one from the other.
The
break between man and animal is no less sharp, however
similar the ovulaemay
be, the organs, the chemistry. As plant is distinguished
from rock by feeling-linked-with-digestion (a relation
acknowledged by all after dinner, if not before); as
beast is marked off from tree by thought linked with
a mobility which enables him to seek experience and run
from it; so man is equipped with unique self-consciousness
linked with tool-using. The otherness here is somewhere
within the self-awareness.
Are
there, beyond mankind, beings utterly new, and if so
by what are they set off from man?[Page
11]
I am proposing to examine in
this book that gap between man and superman, holding
that the next stage beyond is a clean-cut affair; and
that no man, however fruitful as man, bodies forth the
god by being merely a bigger and better human. The trick
is in angular direction, not linear progression. It is
a problem in new dimensions, not greater volumes. However
complete may be the humanity of the Men beyond mankind,
as touching their godhood, we must conceive a wholly
new departure, a definitely new evolutionary stage.
My
thesis is that this stage can be clearly defined and
studied, and, still more important, personally anticipated
by self-development. There is a mark for humanity;
there is also a mark for demi-gods, and if we can discover
in humanity the beginning of the god, we may find the
method of stimulating that factor so that we need no
longer be merely human but may attain the stage beyond
humanity. To put it differently, there are those who
have found the way of quickening the evolutionary process
so that they now stand in much the same relation to
us as we do to the animal. These beings know the road
they have gone, and can and [Page
12]do
explain it to us, so that we can follow it if we have
the strength and the desire.
This, of course, is the problem
of problems, involving all manner of controversial points
in philosophy, general science and psychology, for it
deals with the very nature of humanity. Moreover, it
is an attempt to examine that which is yet to come, and
this scrutiny, though it may seem so speculative and
so remote as to be impractical, is really even more important
than the study of mankind, because to understand what
we are now it is necessary to understand what we shall
be.
The
great problem which faces humanity at present, as ever,
is the search for security. We have failed in that
search because we have been content with the human
measure. But, if we can anticipate what is yet to come,
it may be possible to assume a power above human events,
exactly as man is above animal life in his higher nature,
and can therefore control the destinies of animals.
Any little directional advance we can make over the
front ranks of evolution, so that we are less and less
merely human and more and more the demi-god, is to
our advantage because it will give us the right kind
of [Page
13]security,
which does not depend on environment but comes from self-mastery.
The
principal immediate difficulty in discussion is not
that our proposal is impracticable, but that it involves
so many controversial points. Take this very question
of what consciousness is. Does the psychologist recognize
anything simple and clear in the term consciousness? I
employ it in reference to the point of awareness which
appears to be able to attend to one thing at one time.
I do not mean a state of mind. Let us not enter now
into all these difficulties, but only say that evolution
has stages. "Carrots is
carrots and pigs is pigs", and men are men, but
there may be something more, demi-gods are demi-gods,
and not human beings. Through a discovery of this fact
comes a kind of peace and certainty that cannot be derived
from any other source. We feel we can come to grips with
our destiny when we find that this long evolutionary
story can be broken down into great critical episodes.
Our hope is to visualize the possibility that the next
great strategic move for us is within our own hands and
so close to us, in our very nature, that by a little
change in the angle of vision we [Page
14]may
see that freedom and release which is just before us.
We can at least say that we
now have the physical sciences generally, if only very
generally, on our side, in one established factor which
strongly supports our proposition. Modern scientific
philosophy has isolated the life process. We know now
that this mysterious self-organizing power that is within
us and around us on every side is not energy. That isolation
of life enables us to study it in new terms.
This
is the first great contribution that relativity, wave
mechanics and the quantum theory have brought to us.
We now see, rooted in the heart of matter, the life
principle apparent as waves, throbbing in the very
substance of the universe. For the first time in the
history of science a kind of duality has arisen in
physics itself, not resolvable by any known logical
process — the difference between the atomic and
the wave aspects of matter. Physics has caught up with
Hindu realism. These are the anu and vibhu classes
of the Vaisheshika outlook. The physical and chemical
sciences are thus coming to the support of biology in
a new yaw, by saying that there is reason to believe [Page 15]that
in the nature of matter there is organization, plan and
design. This makes life no longer a sort of feeble by-product
of energy but an intrinsic part of the stuff of the universe,
yet with laws of its own which are being discovered in
the recent advances of modem physics.
This
freedom which has come to biology promises other contributions
to our study. No longer is it the science of the living
as a by-product of the non-living. For twenty years
of his life Woltereck has done battle with himself
over the problem of whether the living has any right
to be scrutinized on its own account. But at last he
admits himself defeated. He is the third of the great
German biologists to come over lately to the belief
that life is unique, and that, although it clothes itself
in matter, it has laws of its own. Since von Nexküll
and others have finally abandoned mechanistic attempts
to explain life, since we now realize, thanks to physics,
that life is a process on its own account, different
in many ways from the material process, the likelihood
is that within our lifetime we shall know what this life
principle is. Instead of having to turn to Oriental knowledge
for an understanding [Page
16]of life, we shall
know it through the development of European thought.
This item is germane to our
subject, for to get anywhere with the matter in hand
we cannot for a moment acknowledge that materialism and
mechanism are all. We assume many things that have nothing
to do with materialism in the crass sense. Formerly,
the belief was that the human being was merely a machine,
the heart a pump. Now we know that both heart and brain
include ductless glandular tissue. Prior to this discovery
the brain was regarded as a machine, highly convoluted
no doubt, but just a kind of complicated noodle, after
all. In those days, to a noodle all men were just noodles.
Now, through the physical and biological developments,
and especially some medical developments within biology,
we realize there is something else present that is not
mechanical nor physical. The messenger (hormone) implies
a sender and a message. So, in a sense, biology is very
much with us.
If
now we acknowledge that there is a break between life
and matter, why should there not also be some other
kind of break in the universe? If science supports
a [Page
17]working
distinction between the living and non-living, why not
a distinction between man and all other living? Such
an advance in the scientific world is possible now that
psychology has almost come to the point of acknowledging
that man is as much a fresh beginning from the animals
as life is a fresh beginning from matter.
If
we could enlist the help of anthropology the story
would be more complete, but unfortunately anthropology
is the science of cracked and empty skulls, and is
not in a position to support us. One difficulty with
this science is its vastness. Moreover, unlike psychology,
anthropology has been eaten through and through with
neo-Darwinian dogmatism. The result is that today anthropology
is by no means as advanced as psychology in establishing
mankind as a fresh departure. The time no doubt will
arrive when we shall recognize this and acknowledge
that our present anthropology is fitting the skulls
into a theory and not moulding a theory according to
the skulls. Certain humorists already recognize this,
and where humorists lead science is almost bound to
follow in a generation. Anthropologists may be a little
laggard, but Will Cuppy put the issue clearly [Page 18]in
his How to Tell Your Friends from
the Apes. He said: "The Java Man lived in Java
500,000 or 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 years ago and was lower
than we are. He was Lower Pleistocene and Lower Quaternary
and Knock-Kneed. He was called Pithocanthropus ('Ape-man')
erectus because he walked with a slight stoop. The Java
Man consisted of a calvarium, three teeth and a femur
belonging to himself or two other Ape-men. Professor
Dubois made him a face which proves that he was dolichocephalic
or long headed and that he was 5 feet 6½ inches high
and that Barnum was right. The Java Man was more Manlike
than Apelike and more Apelike than Manlike. He had immense
supra-orbital ridges of solid bone and was conscious
in spots. The spiritual life of the Java Man was low
because he was only a beginner.
He
was just a child at heart and was perfectly satisfied
with polygamy, polygyny, polyandry, ondogamy and exogamy.
How he ever became extinct is beyond me. The Java Man
has been called the Missing Link by those who should
know."
How
does it happen that there is no contemporary philosopher
who has dealt [Page
19]adequately
with this problem of human evolution and the anticipation
of the next stage? Only William James and H. A. Overstreet
in his book “The Enduring Quest” have, for example, taken
any account of Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness. Surely,
one would think there must have been many men of genius
who thought about this question. But after all we must
remember that, outside of India, we have known about
evolution in any adequate sense of the word only since
the middle of last century. Since then we have been too
much engaged in explaining how man got as far as he has
to devote any time to what is going to happen next. It
is only recently that biological science has attained
its freedom at the hands of physics, and some progress
has been made in bringing philosophy out of crass materialism.
During this brief period there have not been many geniuses
to scrutinize this problem.
There
are numbers of controversial elements involved in the
idea that man can anticipate evolution. The first of
these is that no progress can be made in the study
of the future of evolution unless the existence of
the invisible is accepted. The second [Page 20]assumption
is that the invisible is highly organized and complicated;
and, further, that the invisible is extremely alive;
and a high form of determinism is also presumed, as
we shall see. How many are willing to accept these
propositions? Much of evolution, yet
to come, is of a psychic and spiritual character; hence
any anticipation of that evolution is bound to occur
in the invisible. Therefore the invisible must be accepted
and investigated if we are to scrutinize this next stage
in evolution, and especially if we are ourselves to anticipate
it.
One prime doctrine involved
is that life not only has laws of its own but is one;
as yet biology has not actually any clear concept of
what life is. At present biology in the West is not really
the science of life at all; it is still the science of
the behaviour of matter in the living.
We
know that underlying the phenomena of matter is one
great sea of energy, which is witnessed coming out
in a multitude of forms. We can transform energy, but
we cannot do that with life because we do not know
what life is in its unity. It was only lately decided
that it is not energy. This issue is important because
the development [Page
21]of
the human into the demi-god involves the conquest of
life, and how can we conquer what we do not know?
Further,
as we have seen, this study of consciousness must be
to us, on a working basis, distinct from life. Again
we must believe that there is a plan for evolution
if we are to anticipate it, and, if there is a plan
for evolution, the future must be fixed in some sense,
which is determinism. And determinism leads to a belief
that nature has purpose, or teleology, than which there
is nothing more old-fashioned. For if we believe that
we can anticipate evolution we believe that the future
is in some sense drafted out, and in that sense we
must be determinists and believers in final cause. The
last is the most difficult point of all: if
we believe that we can anticipate evolution, then we
must believe in a very peculiar kind of God. God is to
many the end, the totality, but he who acknowledges our
doctrine must of necessity believe that God is not above
him in an absolute sense but, in a very real way, his
colleague.
Before
dealing with these issues, we should first dispose
of two common false assumptions as to the Men beyond
mankind. In the [Page
22]unconscious cerebration
of many of us is the error of attempting to interpret
the Masters in terms of humanity. Yet what is most certain
about the Masters is that they are not human at all in
their essential nature, and therefore cannot be interpreted
in terms of purely human virtues. Let us try to clear
this up by looking back into the animal kingdom. I have
not the least doubt that animals look upon us as bigger
and better animals. Even a dog, without our help, has,
I feel sure, no way to find out that we are not dogs.
We may think he must wonder at the things we do, but
it is not very likely. We
eat and he eats too, the only difference being that instead
of getting down to business with our muzzles we stupidly
fiddle about with knives and forks. We read a newspaper. A dog has fun with a newspaper too — he tears it up, scatters it all about
and hides it in a rat hole. We may get certain things
out of a newspaper that he does not, but he cannot know
that, because there is a great gap between him and us — the gap of self-consciousness.
To
say of the Men beyond mankind that they are bigger
and better human beings is a mistake. They are not
just good men. [Page
23]They
are gods. If God is omnipotent and yet admits cruelty
and darkness, the latter must have purpose, and a step
towards Him must be synthetic of good and evil, not
merely their severance. If we could only strip our
minds of all this excessive adulation of virtue and
look at life candidly, we might get somewhere. At any
rate, let us not follow the example of the animals
and interpret these things in terms of ourselves.
There
is some hope that psychology may soon help us in this
direction. The old Freudian view, now being broken
down by Freud and Jung themselves, was only a confirmation
of neo-Darwinism telling us that the inner life is
like the outer life, part and parcel of the animal
kingdom. Now much hope lies in the study of high-level
response, from a theosophical point of view, marking,
as it does, the beginning of the recognition that man
is a stage apart from animals. That recognition will
not be full until two things are seen to be involved:
the unique ordering power of humanity, and the manner
in which consciousness functions in relation to this.
An animal has, personally, no ordering power. He can
respond to [Page
24]the
rhythms of nature and so produce a nest when the time
comes, but he cannot plan independently. This ordering
power might be called a personal soul, but that is not
consciousness. The sense of order is, after all, implicit
in nature itself. But there is that in man which is above
nature, not only the power of recognising and employing
order, but the power of starting over again.
The latter of these two factors
is, in every sense, the more important, because, through
this, the power of consciousness, the beginnings of development
in a new direction are made possible. This originating
power of consciousness enables us to remake and enrich
the world constantly. We can train the organism along
new lines.
We
may, as a child, have learned the subtle art of patting
the stomach and rubbing the head at the same time.
How difficult it was at first! And afterwards, though
we were able to do the two things at once, we were
still able only to attend to one at a time. It was
consciousness that did the attending. Consciousness
is that which can introduce the new; soul is that which
can organize all things to ends of beauty. The [Page
25]study
of consciousness, independent of soul, is the study
of the gateway into the new world.
The
new psychology does not yet make that distinction as
clearly as it should, but it is coming along. Jung
speaks of a
"world-unconscious", and now says that in each
individual psyche there is a series of patterns — the
patterns of a human being. See his introduction to The
Secret of the Golden Flower. Engraved on these patterns,
he says, are the personal peculiarities of that individual.
In other words, there is a psychical world in which there
are psychical patterns which are just as typical as is
the human face. That is what theosophists would term the
aura, on which are engraved the personal traits and feelings,
the results of the operations of the individual consciousness.
I have no doubt that in a short time we shall be so near
to the problem of uniqueness that we can defend it in scientific
terminology.
The
second error we are likely to make is one of practice
rather than of theory. In the West the hope has been
that peace would come to humanity through free will
and a moulding of the environment. [Page 26]We
have a deep-rooted idea that nature can be made to
bow to humanity, which is true in a sense, but not
as we have followed it. We are at last learning that
we shall not build Jerusalem merely by putting in good
drains. If enough men are put in a Ford plant we get
a splendid motor-car but not necessarily a better human
being. This fallacy has been largely due to popular
science. We point to the electric light and say, "How
marvelous of man to make nature obey!" When
Edison made the electric light he did not invent the
properties of carbon, he found them out. He obeyed,
not nature. The properties of matter are its own, and
all man can do is to stoop to conquer. He cannot alter
those properties. He must accept the world fundamentally
as it is, but he can model new forms of beauty from
the old.
The
sentimental Margaret Fullers exclaim: "I accept the
universe!"
The realistic Carlyles add: "Gad! She'd better".
Vanity
has led us to a real peril. Because we have not recognized
that we must stoop to conquer matter, we still less
realize that we must also stoop to conquer life. Life
is a thing of itself; it has properties and rhythms [Page
27]of its
own; it is the seat of beauty and the freshener of the
world. Those who turn away from life and deny its rhythms
are not on their way to freedom. Life suddenly traps
them and defeats them at the very time they are least
aware of its existence and its powers. It is necessary
for us to have a good look at what life is, so that we
can see it in its essence and so learn its laws and obey
them. It is when we ignore the laws of life that they
operate quickly and intimately, and even more strongly
than the laws of matter. This is because they operate
unseen in our psyche, whereas matter impedes us only
objectively. It is clear that the laws of life must be
known and understood before the life process can be modulated.
These laws are the laws of love, which is why the next
step in human evolution is in the invisible.
There
is a difference between the attitude I would recommend
to you and that which is religious; though Christ is
a Man beyond mankind, and Buddha, too. This path ahead
of mankind is definitely laid down in nature, is there
on its own divine account, if you like, and not dependent
on anyone. Its laws can be known, and what the Christ
or [Page
28]Buddha
says are only descriptions of these laws, not moral
preachments. That is, I think, very different from
the religious attitude. The average person thinks that
by enough faith and love for the Christ all will be
made clear and secure. No doubt that is beautiful and
true as far as it goes; but I believe that Jesus really
made an attempt to describe that which He knew to be
inevitable for those who desire to join Him. It is
possible to show that the passage, "Our Father
Who art in Heaven", is a complete description of
energy levels (the planes of matter) and the evolution
of man to godhood, in the most exact terminology, a definition
of a process which, though ahead of most people and remote
for some, can become an immediate reality.
We
may further inquire that even if we can determine what
demi-gods are, will not our efforts to be like them in
any case be vain? The answer lies in the difference
which we notice between domestic and wild animals. Bringing
them near to us has made a difference. In a human being
there is soul and that makes him a man; but there is
also consciousness, which is the beginning of godhood.
In the dog there is a wolf with [Page
29]a sense of
order imposed upon him and self-consciousness is being
drawn out of him by the presence of a human being. The
analogy brings the hope that by being near to the Masters
we can somehow get a glimmering, through consciousness
alone, of that which they are. This does not mean that
we must propitiate intermediaries, but that it is possible
to touch in contemplative study something which will
quicken in fact that which dwells within.
The
feeling grows that this imaginative projection of the
stage beyond mankind is not imagination alone. There
comes a little glint of something different, and with
it an increase of power and a spreading of peace within,
until at last we have, ourselves, evidence that there
are Men beyond mankind. The coming stage is toward unity
and brotherhood; we need to be impelled to live together
in one great organization in simple friendship, without
distinction of race or creed or sex or colour.
I
believe that that is the greatest contribution which
is being made in this matter of the future development
of humanity — the
chance is given us today to comprehend and work and live
with people who stand in the [Page
30]presence
of these great beings, who do not claim to carry us to
them but who are organizing their own lives on that model,
however feebly, tentatively and almost hopelessly, as
it may sometimes seem.
These
people look at life from the theosophical point of
view, by which I mean that attitude towards nature
and Man, universally held prior to the historical mishap,
by which the neo-Platonists were driven from the church,
some four centuries after Christ. This view, with its
ideal of the demi-god, is still prevalent in India
today and must, if we are to survive, inevitably come
back to the culture of the West. [Page 31]
CHAPTER
-2-
THE
CRESTS OF THE LIFE CYCLES
IN
the last chapter I maintained that we interpret the Men
beyond mankind in human terms, because we are ourselves
in that train of waves, in the grand strategy of evolution,
which is human, mainly. Backward we are rooted in the
animal, the vegetable, and all that has gone before,
but forward the plan has not yet revealed itself. So
we constantly interpret the Masters in terms of our own
limitations. Many people hope that they can come to understand
them by phenomenal methods. They are always asking such
questions as this: "Are not these Beings masters
of life, and hence men who have lived longer than the
usual span?" If we answer yes, the question is
then asked, "But how do you know a person has lived
two or three hundred years if you did not live in the
time of Cromwell yourself ?" Although one may meet
men of extraordinary power over nature, magicians, [Page
32]known in India
as yogis, it does not follow that such men are necessarily
more developed in consciousness because they have advanced
knowledge of the phenomenal laws of life. After all,
we see in our own scientists men who are advanced over
the pigmy in Africa; yet they are not necessarily more
advanced in our present sense of the term. They have
developed their field of knowledge laterally, as it were:
but we are speaking of a definitely directional progress.
There
is a current story that illustrates this point. A certain
Carolina senator had a new maid who answered the telephone
one evening two or three times identically in the strangest
way. She would say first, "It is", then, after
a moment, "It sure is!" Then she would hang
up the receiver. Finally her master said, "Mary,
what is the meaning of this strange conversation, which
three times has been exactly the same?" She replied,
"Well, sir, the person calling asked, 'Is this the
residence of Senator Kilgore?' So I says, 'It is.' Then
she says, 'It's a long distance from Washington to Senator
Kilgore.' And so I says, 'It sure is!' "
The
long distance from the Men beyond [Page
33]mankind
to the human being is not entirely one of distance,
but more especially of direction. Yet the key to the
situation lies in the knowledge of where we stand now
and how we got here; for it will open the gate to the
future. We must grasp firmly in our consciousness
the living instrument that nature has made for us, with
our co-operation, and we must make it obey. With such
obedience achieved we can study the world as it is, and
when that study has been accomplished, advance from this
point is possible. We cannot re-orient ourselves intelligently
until we know where we are.
It
is particularly as regards life in relation to consciousness
that the first advance in knowledge must be made. At
the outset we must admit that, phenomenally, life is
not energy nor consciousness.
The first stage in freedom is the study of life through
consciousness, so that we can modulate our lives to given
ends. Within ourselves, with such knowledge, we might change
one kind of living emotion into another, just as we can
change friction into heat, in an energetic sense. We must
find out exactly what life is, or first, if you like, what
it is not.
Science
has for years made a kind of[Page 34]identity
between the living and the energetic, acknowledging
only energy in the universe. We have believed
that the world was running down instead of building up,
and in that running down we saw energy alone operating.
There has not been acknowledged any kind of cosmic element
which can recreate, as man obviously does recreate. The
publication of Einstein's first paper started a re-survey
of the situation. Now it is suggested that the universe
began as a unique particle, without mass, without property,
and grew through expansion. This thought of Lemaitre's
represents a change in the right direction, for consciousness
is very much like a particle which is everywhere and
nowhere at the same time. We are coming to the perception
that it is not energy which made the universe, but something
else, by correlating energy-chaos, through life-order.
Still
more remarkable is the current recognition of the fact
that the life process has very definite categories
or energy-levels at which it operates. If the universe
were energy running down, it would obviously keep on
convulsively decaying, and the periods would not be regular
and recognized. But the pageant of evolution tells us
that [Page 35]the
universe must at some time have been built up into categories,
in which it is obviously now developing.
We
now see that the processes of life are significant. There
has been a gradual re-survey of the whole cosmic development,
with the idea of explaining the great stages of the evolutionary
stream. Still, science does not know very much about
life; its main interest is in the secondary, not the
primary characteristics. If we limit life to vegetables
and animals, the result is that we regard what is most
pronounced in these as the only signs of life. That will
not suit my purposes at all. Assimilation, growth and
reproduction are regarded by orthodox science as the
significant indicators of life. That is of little value
if we are to interpret wave mechanics to mean that life
is everywhere, as energy is everywhere. These, chaos
and chronos, are two sides of consciousness. Therefore
we must look for a more comprehensive description of
life, one which will include crystals, at the beginning. Fritz
Rinne, professor of mineralogy at Leipzig, and others,
accept this view. From that point we can begin a positive
study of the underlying processes of life, with [Page
36]a view to modulating
it to the ends of freedom.
Let
us start with a definition: Life is that which is not
material nor energetic; it modulates energy to its own
ends, and is therefore self-sustaining, self-perpetuating
and purposeful. The question then arises as to what there
is in nature that is not energy. Obviously, from the
point of view of Western science it would be very difficult
to identify anything of the kind. We shall therefore
have to think in Oriental terms. The Oriental believes
that reality is more than the phenomenal, that there
is something so deep in the universe that there are stages
upon stages between it and us, although reality is in
phenomena too. Among those many stages there may be conditions
where we can experience without a great content of energy.
As one proceeds into the invisible, life makes itself
more and more apparent. In that sense, life is not energetic
yet very real.
Now
if we study the properties of the living, as invisible
life operates in ponderable matter, we come upon certain
general principles. One
is that in its own nature, unimpeded by energetic environment,
a living thing is [Page
37]symmetrical. In
the hot-house, where there are no winds, the little plants
are symmetrical as they grow, row on row, in the calm,
moist, warm atmosphere. Under conditions of control in
the laboratory, a crystal will grow with a symmetry seldom
found in nature, where energy struggles constantly with
life.
It
is the nature of the living to be symmetrical in space
if there is no undue energetic strain from without.
This symmetry is progressive; point in crystal, line
in plant, plane (bilateral) in animal. Man
appears to have bilateral symmetry; but he has more,
because his beauty and growth are inward. His animal
symmetry does not matter; he goes on in inner symmetry
and beauty.
It
is possible to show that every living thing, without
exception, is derived from the five Platonic solids. See
the works of Samuel Colman, J. Hambidge, etc. Life
is so simple, so homogeneous, that we find its multitudinous
forms can be so organized that they return to the Platonic
solids — the tetrahedron, the cube, the octohedron,
the dodecahedron and the icosahedron. With a point at
one end and a sphere at the other, seven living forms
of the universe are before [Page
38]us.
This fact is not yet of significance to the biologist,
who thinks in terms of energy and mind rather than of
life and beauty.
Another
important fact is that life is rhythmic in time. This,
indeed, is even more significant to our study than
its symmetry in space. Beauty extends its conquest
in time as well as in space. This aspect of the living
is important for freedom. Some of us are masters of
static beauty but not of kinetic beauty, beauty in
time. Music is the highest and most subtle of the arts
because it is so entirely in time; the vehicle remains
the same before and after the episode of beauty. Life is rhythmically as well as spacially
beautiful. We must understand the rhythms of our lives,
so that we can impose upon them, in time as well as in
space, an exquisite symmetry. This is more important
than physical, static beauty, for we are already conditioned
in space, whereas half of our life in time is yet to
come, and we therefore can do something about that.
I
should like first to point out some of the rhythm in
nature. In the lower orders of crystals not much rhythm
can be perceived, for they are caught between life
and energy, and there they remain. In vegetables, [Page
39]however,
we find rhythms. For instance, there is the Tasmanian
bean, whose blossom opens by days and winds up by night.
However, when the bean was transplanted to Boston, it
continued the same rhythm that it had in Tasmania — winding
up its blossom in the morning and opening it at night.
It did not do at sunrise in Boston what it had done at
sunrise in Tasmania because it was life that governed
the plant, and not the energy of the sun. Life has its
own character; the rhythms in nature are due to life
and not to energy, which is chaotic and dark.
As
regards animals, let me use a quotation from Moore's Origins
and Nature of Life (pp. 250-252)
as regards certain phosphorescent animals:
"It might be supposed, at first thought, that these
phosphorescent organisms are not observed to emit light
during the day because of the presence of sunlight, and
that if taken into a dark room, such as is used for photographic
purposes, they would be found to phosphoresce just as brilliantly
as at night. Such is, however, not the case, not a spark
can be elicited from them even by vigorous shaking, so
long as there is daylight in the outer world. But if one
stands by and watches in the dark room, as twilight [Page
40]is
falling outside, although the organisms have not been exposed
to light all day, one observes the little lamps light up
and flash out one by one like coruscating diamonds in the
darkness, till the whole dish is studded with flashing
and disappearing light, a glorious sight in the darkness
and stillness". They do not know,
in any external sense, whether the sun has risen or set,
but they have a pulse of their own.
These
rhythms are deeper than we can intellectually understand. Here
is the commonly cited case of the yucca plant, which
has existed for thousands of years little changed,
yet can be fertilized only by a certain kind of moth.
If the yucca moth did not come forth from its cocoon
at the proper time there would be no yucca plant. Thus
rhythms in the life-process also span and join the
kingdoms of nature.
Life
in space is governed by what Oriental science calls yantra,
the spatial laws of vitality, or prana.
The laws of life in time are called mantra, the
laws of rhythm, musical sound. The knowledge of yantra and mantra makes
the outer science of prana. The word prana is cognate
with the Latin word anima, whence animation. So prana is
that which [Page 41]breathes
out; in a secondary sense, breath, that which is correlated
to human life in a very wonderful way. The desire of the
Indian hatha-yogin is to learn the science of breath
which governs the ductless glands, so that as they derive
sustenance from the blood stream they will also get the
required amount of oxygen, rhythmically. By this process
they achieve an inner metabolic harmony, the result of
which is an harmonious organism. Indian science has advanced
beyond ours in the understanding and conquest of life,
for it recognizes the symmetrical and the rhythmical. If
we will only realize that inner consciousness exists, with
laws of its own, the study of life will immediately become
possible in terms of those laws.
If
we understand some of the rhythms of life we can understand
the times. In India
the idea is that the castes take precedence in order:
in the West we see that first the Catholic priests (brahmins)
ruled; then came the days of the feudal lords and barons
(khashattriyas); then the bankers or vaishyas,
who have controlled Europe since the kings left us; and
now — a farewell to bankers! There
is one more caste left, that includes poor you and me,
the ordinary shudra, [Page
41]apparently nothing
and yet everything of which society is made. These cycles
are greater than even historical episodes. Race development
is just as symmetrical in time as are plants and crystals
in space. The seven great root races of occultism correspond
to the Platonic solids. Today we are in the fifth of
these great races. The sixth, it is said, will be founded
in the new world — America — and the seventh on a continent
not yet arisen from the sea.
When
a planet finally winds up its story there is no death
in the sense of chaotic interruption, but a quiet,
reasoned withdrawal of the life process, which moves
on to another planet, for planets also grow symmetrically
in time and space. Our mineral, plant
and animal kingdoms proceed in due order on this earth
because there has been practice on some other planet,
where you and I were not human but part of the waves
of that order which was animal. So the story goes on
and on, until we come to the tremendous idea of kalpa,
the last of the ideas connected with prana in
the Indian point of view. It is that the whole universe
is throbbing to music unheard; not only the floor of
our particular heaven "is inlaid [Page
43]with
patines of bright gold", but
the whole cosmos is one systematic development. Twenty
millions and more of island universes are operating in prana just
as certainly as iron is in the most distant of the nebulae
as seen by means of the spectroscope. The order is not
apparent to astronomy on a large scale as yet, though
Kepler, Bode and others suspected it in our solar system.
Astrologers,
however, as well as Hindu philosophers, realize that
as the solar system winds its way through the cosmos,
a vaster order is brought to it by the stages of cosmic
energy imposed upon it. The universe can hence be called
in its living sense a kalpa, literally
"ritual", symmetrical in time and space, emerging
in due order from a point and leading, in due order again,
to its source, just as a church, a masonic or a domestic
ritual unwinds itself. As human life goes from birth to
death, from spring to autumn, so the whole universe is
seen as one grand choral, set to incredibly beautiful,
though to us unheard, music in invisible worlds. This is
life, and we shall never understand how life controls us
until we recognize these its properties.
The
more sensitively alive, the greater is [Page 44]the
beauty revealed in time rather than in space. A leopard
is lovely as he stands immobile, but when he moves
he is far more lovely, for nothing is more beautiful
than the moving creature. The running or walking elephant
is beautiful. Uncouth, ugly, he may be, as he stands
still, and in his small movements lumbering, nevertheless
in totality there is one grand movement like waves
on the surface of the ocean, which bespeak a stream
of energy that has been brought into order by life.
So
we may say that on the whole life is timeful, but energy
is spaceful. Life can be
everywhere at once. Energy is spatially bound, but the
life process can inhabit hundreds of a species of creatures
at the same time. The life of a species is one, for though
the creatures may be thousands of miles apart they have
their inner link in prana.
If
we are to conquer life we must first recognize its
unity in a species. For man the lesson is humanity,
human brotherhood. There is one great life process
which is called man, just as there is one called cats,
another cabbages, another crystals. There is one life
which is humanity, the grand man, the solar man, if
you like, and until that brotherhood [Page
45]is recognized
there is no possibility of recognition of that stage
beyond human life, the Christ-species. We do not have
to move from one race to another; it is within. The final
art is that of living humanity, which must include every
human being without distinction of race, of creed, of
sex, of caste or of colour.
A
further essential requirement is that we search for
the beauty in an individual life even though we do
not see it. In order to escape we must avoid repudiation.
When a creature or an event appears ugly to us, we
must be able to realize that it is alive and therefore
cannot be ugly. We must be able to say, "I
will see beauty; I will find the significance of life". By
that process it is possible to penetrate beneath the
surface of ugliness and pain and sorrow — beneath
the energetic side of life — and
see more beauty than was ever thought of.
Life
is a delicate, sensitive process. When we give the
attention to its study that is required we perceive
its incredible beauty. When a life is over in time
and space, the result is a lovely symmetry of form.
At the end of a given life all the people whom we have
loved and hated surround us in the invisible world, [Page
46]and
pour out upon us all the energies which we have balanced
against each other. The forms thus thrown off from life
are those found in crystals, vegetables and animals;
they are the Platonic solids. It is possible to show
that at the end of every one of Shakespeare's plays
there is a geometric frame which is the cross-section
of a Platonic solid. Even if the play is a tragedy,
full of hatred and jealousy, nevertheless the Logos,
Who makes life, has not hated, and He snatches beauty
even from the life of a Hamlet or a Lear.
He
is also snatching beauty from our life, though we may
not realize it because the actor can never see the
whole. But by a practice of consciousness we draw ourselves
to the point where we can see life whole. When a musician
first learns to play an instrument he performs in an
insipid manner, for he is attending to form, to the
notes laid down by the composer. The real musician
considers within himself how best to interpret the
composition, and so brings the beauty out of the form.
The great difference between a young man with genius
and an older man with genius is that the elder has lived
longer and therefore has more [Page
47]consciousness
in time. By the long application of consciousness the
finished artist can evoke soul and life, and draw out
the beauty that lies within.
We
can draw out the beauty in life by persevering to the
end. If someone hurts us we must learn to say, "I
wonder what he meant by that. What meaning is there in
that for me?" This will open up a new kind of life;
the life of a master of life; for evolution is inner
as well as outer. Along with the vegetable's power of
assimilation is its power of emotion. Along with the
animal's power of locomotion is its power of thought,
one visible, the other invisible. Along with man's power
to think is the inner beauty. The kind of freedom we
seek is related to two changes that have transpired with
us — the development of the power of beauty and of the
power of creation, or consciousness. With this comes
a change in the outer, though not necessarily physical,
sense. In man there is a kind of stratification of the
waves of the aura when seen by a clairvoyant; the emotions
and the mind are arranged in levels. In the Man beyond
mankind there is a new concentric arrangement — the aura
swirls around him, and [Page
48]within
that castle he is the master. It is an outer change in
a psychic rather than a physical sense. The change in
the aura is profound because it is the difference between
freedom and captivity. The average person is like a fish
swimming in the invisible sea of life, whose tide carries
him where it likes, though he may swim a few feet to
one side or the other. This is due to the arrangement
of the aura in levels. But he is really free who goes
down into the seat of consciousness and brings up a cloud
of his own inner beauty, concentric globes of life through
which pour great rays of energy and beauty. When external
threats and frictions strike him they must pierce these
several media, and he is strong because he meets them
systematically, as they come. He is very different outwardly
in his aura from the merely human being. But this is
result, not cause.
Those
who are interested meditate upon life, not so much
in terms of matter, as in terms of what beauty is,
what love is, what life is, realizing that time and
beauty and life and peace belong to one pattern, whereas
power and matter belong to another category. The totality
is consciousness, and consciousness [Page49]needs
them both. Peace and power are actually the same, but
he who seeks for power in material things will be deluded
because peace, as life, will always trip him. Yet a person
who is tranquil, who lives without ever making an effort
and looks at beauty as negative, will never grow; for
to grow one must meet and conquer the strife caused by
energy. He who masters strife and yet is tranquil in
himself is in the end the master, because he is at once
strong and peaceful. [Page
50][Page51][Page52]
CHAPTER
-3-
THE
PATH AS A NATURAL PROCESS
THE
study of the essential character of life opens up the
possibility of prophetic vision. We have already seen
that one of the properties of the living is that it is
symmetrical and rhythmic. From this it follows that prophecy
regarding the living is possible, although ordinary science
today usually assumes that the living is unpredictable.
It is true that within the living, when also mental,
there is something which cannot be foreseen; but life,
seen in itself, is broadly predictable, differing from
matter in that regard. Although the movements of an
individual dog cannot be fully predicted, the growth
and development of the dog species can be indicated in
advance. If we recognize the origin of a particular seed,
the form of life that will result from the planting of
that seed can be predicted for years ahead. One of the strange and wonderful things
about the living, then, is this: because of [Page
53]their
rhythms in time and their symmetries in space, prophecy
is possible.
A scientific examination of
the stars gives us a certain amount of general prophetic
knowledge. Young stars are blue and old stars red, and
our sun is therefore middle-aged. It is possible to foretell
that hundreds of thousands of years hence the sun will
not be golden-yellow, but some other colour. But once
we know enough about the elements behind the living,
prophecy becomes more accurate and more amazing. Anyone
who understands the nature of water might go to the tropics,
where naturally there is no ice, and meet many people
who know nothing about the kind of life that forms when
water is frozen. Here again prophecy is possible.
Since
life is at present the master of man, it follows that
races can be broadly prophesied, and the story of what
is yet to be done upon this planet foreseen. The growth
of an individual can also be forecast in its broad
outline as the races go on, because the individual
must obey laws of life yet to come. Unless we speed
our growth you and I must die and return again and
again according to the great law of incarnation, [Page
54]dipping
over and over again into races yet unborn, and conform
thereunto. As time goes on we shall experience definite
and certain changes in character. Our future can therefore
be forecast, and this whether we take a quick road
or the slow road of wholly surrendering to the life
that is to come and returning again and again to incarnation.
The outline is precisely the same, the only difference
being that in the case of the individual who determines
upon rapid growth the outline is condensed, for in
the life he leads he anticipates briefly the races
that are to come, living now the kind of life that
will be theirs in due course. Every individual who
is born recapitulates all the life that has ever been,
reproducing in his early years the primitive childhood
of our race. The children of the next great race will
recapitulate the mental equipment painfully acquired
by our race. Therefore, anyone who hastens his psychic
and spiritual evolution is bound to recapitulate all
the races that are yet to come.
The
steps of this process of anticipation are called initiations,
and the process is called yoga; while the name used
to cover both stages and process is the Path. The [Page
55]Path,
then, is a scientific fact; if, that is, you take occultism
as a science. The trouble we find in a word like initiation
does not arise out of the unreasonableness of the subject
but out of our own unreasonableness. Many people, for
example, say, "I don't want to force my evolution — I
want to grow as the flower grows, I want to be free as
the bird".
Unfortunately we are neither cabbages nor crows: the laws
of human life are not those of the vegetable or animal,
and for us fulfillment is something quite different. There
is that in the individual which he cannot possibly deny.
He must use it. The question is, will he use it for the
anticipation of God's own process, forging ahead, lighting
the Path that humanity must eventually follow, or will
he use it little and go slowly?
That is the only difference. We cannot refrain from being
conscious, and we must be demi-gods eventually
There
is one more difficulty as regards the word initiation.
We often associate the term with rather noisy and worldly
organizations. For most people, in fact, the word is
associated with acceptance into a society with the
payment of dues and some sort of mysterious ritual,
which may be old and beautiful and even [Page
56]very
significant, as in the case of Masonry, or new and "brash",
What
I mean by the term "initiation"
is not an artificial but a special and wonderful thing.
These stages on the path of quickened evolution which
anticipate the progress to be made by future races.
If we consider the word initiation carefully we shall
see that it has this sense. It is from the Latin, and
has the meaning "a beginning",
in the sense that we start to learn the rudiments, to be
enrolled in a secondary sense, to be taught or to teach,
as the case may be. It is, however, the beginning. When
we look in turn at the word beginning we come close to
something which has meaning for us, because it is an Anglo-Saxon
rather than a Latin root. (See The New Word, by
Allen Upward, as regards Latin and Anglo-Saxon root values.) "Ginnan", the
root, means "to open", and the word initiation
is equivalent to the process of opening. Going back to
the Latin origin, we find that it is connected with a small
source from which something wells up. Jesus declares that
those who go forward to enter the Kingdom of Heaven must
reach it through "a mustard seed".
By this He meant that there is in the average individual [Page
57]something
tiny and not yet sprouted which can be made to grow. That
growth is the episode which is indicated in the roots of
the words initiation and beginning. Life is now planting
round consciousness, as if it were some germinal process,
a tiny deposit of something very lovely, the quintessence
of life. If we will dig down
into ourselves to that seed of consciousness which has
been planted in the life process, we can make it sprout
in a new world, in a new direction. That is why the first
of these initiations is symbolized in Christian literature
by the birth of Jesus with the star of His consciousness
hanging over Him, while He is surrounded by the stones,
the hay and the cattle of the manger, representing the
three great Kingdoms of nature. We finally leave our humanity
behind with the mineral, vegetable and animal, and start
out in a new direction, the starry direction. Compare
also nirvana, literally "blown out", and
the Greek term metastrophe.
Taken
in that sense we are face to face with the most significant
fact that through consciousness, this starry thing
which is only a point of light shining within us, there
is the possibility of a new beginning. That [Page
58]beginning
entails pain, for we must repudiate not only our families
but the race itself; for we are going ahead faster even
than the races yet to come. We shall quicken our evolution
so much that we become no longer national but international,
and finally leave behind for a while laggard racial humanity.
The
first stage is to accept all races — to
take in every race without exception and to repudiate
one's own, because nationalism means today that we think
our own nation finer than any other, and implies that
we must do everything possible to see that it comes out
on top. "My country, right or wrong", is a
terrible phrase. We cannot believe, if we take the Path,
that our own country is better absolutely than any other.
Every race has something to give, and those who would
go forward must first step backward in order to start
in the right direction, toward unity and simplicity,
in brotherhood.
This
is a marvelous doctrine, and we wonder why it is not
taught everywhere. The reason is simply that there
is no positive philosophy of the intangible. There
are some philosophies of life such as Bergson's; there
are Bradley and Josiah Royce, among the [Page 59]most
remarkable men the West has yet produced, philosophers
devoted to the transcendental, but they are negatively
anti-realistic rather than positively idealistic. It
might be possible to create an entirely new psychology
to go with the philosophy of the intangible if people
would realize the immense difference between consciousness
with self (ego) and consciousness without self, which
is greater than ego. That philosophy of the conscious,
beyond self and beyond nationalism, would be a philosophy
of intangibles.
What,
then, is the future for the race and for humanity? The
first step provides that we catch up with the completed
development of the Aryan race, into which we are now
born. This is not so difficult, for we are biologically
and psychologically suited to this task. This first
stage is called probation. We
begin by becoming interested in this whole problem of
quickening growth, and from that time on we make stronger
and stronger efforts towards liberating ourselves from
our present limitations. By that effort to become impersonal
and international we attract the attention of People
who are already like that. The stage of being [Page 60]watched
by them is called probation, and it must end in complete
liberation from the limitations of our special, racial
psychology, by its ideal fulfilment. We must qualify.
We must fulfil the Aryan race, just as we have already
completed the Atlantean, Lemurian and other races that
have gone before.
We
then begin the recapitulation of the great races yet
unborn, of which there are two ahead, to make a total
of seven. The recapitulation of the next, or sixth,
the intuitional race is entered upon at the end of
probation, after the first initiation, and that of
the seventh race after the second initiation. Then
comes the third initiation, which ends the experience
of anticipating the life of man on this globe. The two
great initiations which follow later have to do with
life and circumstances on other planets, for they correspond
to rounds, not races. The fourth initiation, Arhat,
and the fifth, Asekha, deal with two other rounds,
and that is the end of our conscious growth. It follows
that these last two are almost incomprehensible, because
we have no analogies, and the words which are used in
regard to them are almost without meaning for us. I have, [Page
61]however,
referred to them for the sake of completeness.
First
of all, let us take the stage which begins with the
first initiation and covers the next great race after
the Aryan. It is called in Pali terminology Sotopanna,
which means literally the process of "entering
the stream". It is
so called because when probation is finished the initiate
enters a stream of life which has, as yet, no forms.
It is not a series of current existences, it is a stream
that is pouring from the fountain-head of the life-world.
It is a real event, for it is the first time we attempt
to live so far ahead of humanity, and we find ourselves
in a world strange in a psychological and spiritual sense.
This point on the Path marks the entering of a stream
of life undeveloped, unresolved, inchoate at the lower
levels until, having mastered it completely, we emerge
at the other end an adept.
The
sixth race, whose recapitulation is begun with the
first initiation, is now being born in the United States.
It will have, as its characteristic, intuition, instead
of mind, the Aryan quality. Americans presumably have
a head start! The first Initiation therefore
involves the introduction to [Page
62]intuitional
experience, with the help of the Personages who guard
this great Path and who make it possible for us. Thereby
we gain a taste of what is yet to come, an indescribable
experience for those who really have it. After such a
taste, we begin to throw off difficulties standard to
all, which are fetters that prevent us from fulfilling
this experience.
These
fetters are three in number, all connected with the
race's development. The first
is the delusion of self, and to overcome it we must be
quite sure that we are not the isolated individuals we
think we are. We must fully recognize that we are also
everybody else, and we have to achieve that recognition
without getting mixed up with them. There is a stage
where people feel they know something and want to fulfil
it by telling the other fellow what to do. We must find
out about him from within, and when we have done that
we will respect him so much we will want to let him alone.
The
next of these fetters is concerned with doubt, with
the feeling that the world cannot be depended upon.
Before we come to the stage of intuitional experience
which is [Page 63]sometimes,
though wrongly, called illumination, we are not quite
sure whether the world is beneficent or not, and whether
there is a Path to tread. We take it all very largely
on faith or belief. But after the first initiation we
can know that the future is determined, without doubt,
and we depend on the Law.
There is, finally, the throwing
off of the fetter of dependence on works good or bad.
It seems strange to advocate that the way to quicken
evolution is not to depend even on good works. This means,
first of all, that we must not depend on others or the
action of others. We cannot depend finally on any society
or church to help us, for they all belong to the past.
The only dependence we can put upon good works is to
use them for the sake of society.
All
of these are fetters upon the individual, and when
we have destroyed them we will be as those of our race
who will live thousands of years from now. Think of
not having to suffer from the things that surround
us now! no advertising to be inflicted on us, for instance! There
are weaknesses even in the beauty of our contemporary
civilization, as in the quick response and too often [Page
64]fatuous
kindness so characteristic, for example, of American
life.
The
second initiation is called sakadagami,
which means "only once returning", for he who
passes this initiation is able to quicken his evolution
so that he need be born only once more. He is now entering
on the recapitulation of the last of the physical races,
the seventh, and therefore is coming in anticipatory
recapitulation to the point where even the race need
not be born again. It is interesting to note that there
are no fetters to be cast off after the second initiation.
It is at this stage that we, as individuals, assimilate
all the events that have gone before. We are now making
a tremendous convulsive effort to do what the race is
to do, and a rest period is needed. Furthermore, the
race that one is about to recapitulate is the last to
come on the globe, one that will be strange, and wonderful,
without laws. Laws now are largely intended to protect
property rather than life, and since everyone will then
have all he wants of wealth, there will be no necessity
for such laws. It will be possible to rule the world
by anarchy — an Irish phrase! which means no archons,
no rulership.
Every man will be [Page
65]a law
unto himself, but life will be so far forward by that time
that laws will be unnecessary and fetters non-existent.
Then
comes the third initiation, called anagami,
"not born again". The person who passes this
initiation need not return unless he so desires, for he
has recapitulated the seventh race, which ends the life
of his humanity on this globe. Two great sections of the
Path now are before him, one to the Arhat and one to the
Asekha level. The first involves two fetters, and the second
five. The word Arhat means "the venerable", and
the word Asekha means "no more disciple" — of
anybody.
Certain
questions now arise. One might wonder why it is necessary
to cast off those fetters in that order? One reason
is that those who are going to help us in the process
have so determined. This Path is guarded by those who,
knowing what is best, allow no other arrangement. We
can grow without the help of the brotherhood of Men
beyond mankind, but if their help is accepted it must
be along the lines they lay down. After the first
initiation we see intuitionally that there can be no
other order, although during the probationary stage
we might [Page
66]imagine
others possible. There is an Indian phrase I should
like to quote, for it really should be echoed by everyone
who travels this Path: "N'anyah panthah vidyate
yanaya", which means, "No other Path at all
is there to go". When a genius is born he must
yet recapitulate the development of the race, as does
every other child. Those who go forward are bound as
much.
I
might add here a suggestion that will help to make
the notion of initiations a fact in nature, especially
for the benefit of those unaware of the complete unity
of Hinduism and Buddhism upon the character of these
forward steps, and who have not as yet examined the
Christian materials from this point of view. The suggestion
is that (a determined future for the world-process
granted) the principle of biogenesis or the theory
of recapitulation, Haeckel's famous generalization,
may reasonably be expected to apply to the future as
well as to the past. That is to say, if the future
of the race is fixed in broad outline by something
like Platonic ideas or archetypes, as the evolutionary
story to date is in fact recorded by such summary experiences
in the individual, how then shall we expect the individual
man [Page
67]who is forging his
way ahead to escape fulfilling, at least in outline,
these Ideas? This point of view takes the strain off
of a weak point in older descriptions of the Path in
Western literature. For the idea that the future of mankind
is in the hands of a small group of individuals for arbitrary
disposal, however magnificent that group may be, presents
the same defect as the notion that the world-process
is ruled by an arbitrary anthropomorphic personal God.
Another
question is, "Why
must one be a disciple; why cannot one make this effort
alone?" There is no reason why we should not, if
we are strong enough, but when this Path is taken we
challenge society, and therefore will need the association
of many people who know this road, to encourage and help
us. What is more, intuitive development, which is involved
in the early stages of the Path, requires that one must
co-operate with people, and we cannot co-operate in the
fullest measure of the word, with those whom we are leaving
behind. We must have friends, therefore, with whom we
can associate and co-operate, a group of which all the
members are going along into this new world. When we
know it is right we will [Page
68]take
guidance; otherwise we will go our own way, obeying the
broad laws which are accepted and which we have understood.
Finally, there is the problem
of the recognition of the disciple. What a disciple is
doing is this. He is making a conquest of life inwardly,
so naturally, he may not appear outwardly to be different.
He is inwardly post-Aryan, though he may appear to be
a Swede or a Pole. He is anticipating a race that is
to come; but he does not look like that race physically.
It is life, not matter, that he is trying to mould. The
way in which he differs from other people is subtle.
We might look at him from a material point of view and
never see that he is a disciple. Of the two conquests
which offer themselves to us, that of life and that of
matter, he has chosen the conquest of life, and as it
is subtler, higher and inner, the peculiar differences
that he displays are inner and subtle, also. Therefore
he is not to be judged roughly by the world's measure,
or without deep knowledge of him.
The
first difference in him is that he has worked down
deep into his consciousness and is going out from it.
It looks as though he were attending more to his own
inner life [Page 69]than
to his outer life, trying to be honest first with himself,
and this gives him a kind of childlike quality. As
far as the outer person goes, he appears to be all
sorts of things which he is not, and appears not to
be all sorts of things which he is. There is a certain
childlike simplicity and honesty in him, which we find,
however, only when we get through the external man.
The
second great difference is that his object is to recover
the estate of that which caused the world, so his object
is not primarily to be saintly, but Godlike. What there
is in disciples of ugliness and weakness they are conscious
of and honest about. They are
"back-tracking through sin", going back where
the world started, but they are carrying with them an incredibly
beautiful experience.
Hence,
the worst of them is in plain view, not inside as it
is in ordinary folk, because of the laggard world's
pressure. That is what Jesus meant when he said that
most people are whited sepulchres. If we go to Palestine
and look at the graveyards of the East, we notice that
this phrase has real meaning. The body is just laid
out on a bier, put in the grave, and covered with a [Page
70]white-washed
stone. Above, all is white and shiny; below, corruption.
But
the disciple has it the other way around; the lovely
light that shines within is real. The average man has
his beauties on top and his ugliness below the diaphragm,
in the invisible aura, although he innocently imagines
himself, without deceit, to be only beautiful. Here
is the stone above the sepulcher, and death is down
beneath, in the passionate aura. In the initiate all
this latter has been uniformly put on the outside,
and in the “mustard seed” of his inner life
is purity and beauty. He is radiating from that. He may
outwardly appear to be much too candid and difficult,
but when we understand him fully we realize that deep
within him is incredible beauty, for he has conquered
life. He is no longer a man of faith or belief — one
the commitment of emotions to truth, the other of mind
to truth — but the occultist, who has neither faith
nor belief because he does not need them. Experience,
by the conquest of the life within, has united faith
and belief. Yoga, which means yoke or union, signifies
that these two have been brought into equilibrium. So
this individual, despite his outer appearance, gives
us power [Page
71]from
deep within him, which produces peace.
Let us honour those few individuals
who have not spared their personalities the strain of
added consciousness, but have been willing to grow, no
matter how badly the world might judge them. By touching
here and there the outline of the approaching life of
races yet to come they brighten the way for others. Let
us honour them, for they can give to humanity that incredible
union of beauty and strength which alone gives peace,
for it comes from the centre of immobility, consciousness
itself, quiet because it is not energy or life, but both. [Pages72-73]
[Page74]
CHAPTER
- 4 -
LET
MAN FIRST RECALL HIS HUMANITY
WE have developed the idea that
the path of human perfection must necessarily be preordained,
laid down by nature and maintained by a group of individuals
to whose society the initiate belongs — all
part of a plan determined in evolution for the future. The
individual who attempts to perfect himself must take
the road that the future has planned out. That Path includes
the first three initiations, which anticipate the remaining
two races of the globe, and then two further stages,
which are beyond immediate or terrestrial experience.
Now
it follows that if we are to achieve this development,
and discover a world of consciousness that is both
life and energy, we must not only anticipate the future
but must also remember the past. This is required by
several considerations. In other words, unless the
universe is vain, and all a dream; unless experience
is a nightmare of [Page 75]senseless
struggle without benefit, it follows that we carry
along with us all that we have done and been. We must
therefore consider how man has come to this point in
evolution and what he has experienced, so that we may
be fully aware of the immensity of his destiny, which
includes the past as well as the future. That past
is composed of all the lives that we have lived, yes,
but also of something much more. Since we, as mankind,
have dwelt in the past of mankind again and again, there
exists somewhere in us all mankind. How can we be aware
of it?
There
lies hidden within the subconscious everything we have
experienced. Nothing is lost, although the memories
we have are insufficient even to recall for us the
content of this present life. Yet the whole remote
past can be touched. As we can discover the experiences
of this life (which seem to have been entirely lost)
by magnetization, hypnosis, auto-suggestion, and so
on, it is reasonable to hope to recover racial memories,
and all that man has ever been.
We have seen
that the universe is constituted of three apparently
distinctive elements: (1) energy or matter, which is
universal, apparently homogeneous, and therefore [Page 76]inter-changeable;
(2) life (which is not energy in the ordinary sense of
the word), a principle of beauty and light; and finally
(3) consciousness as man, that is, self-consciousness,
as unique as are the other two. These are a unity, I
admit. By the very fact
that there is uniformity in nature there must be uniformity
as a source. This is evident everywhere. We depend on
plants to go on with their racial history, and we also
depend in physical science on nature's uniformity. Therefore,
unity is behind all. Scholars, who apparently know nothing
of the occult point of view, recognize this fact, and
constantly seek for that unity. For example, George Perrigo
Conger, Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Minnesota, says in A World of Epitomizations:
"The
universe is a vast system of systems which strikingly
resemble one another in the details of their structures
and processes. Among these systems, or realms, are matter,
life and mind."
Mind
here appears to be a mixed category of thought plus awareness,
or personal consciousness.
"The
structures and processes of matter, [Page 77]or
the physical world, resemble those of life, or the
organisms, and both matter and life resemble mind.
But below or beyond the realm of matter there appear
to be three other systems, also by the similarities of
their structures and processes identifiable as realms.
These are the realms of Logic, Number and Geometry-kinematics,
constituting a great cornice sub-structure just beginning
to be known as such. The universe, although it is not
a mind, begins with structures and processes which are
logical and culminates in structures and processes which
are personal. Human personality, socially developed,
is thus far the highest concentration, the most complete
epitome of the universe."
The categories which he specifies
are extremely interesting. They show how very near to
the occult point of view philosophy has come:
"Levels
in Cosmogonic Realm
1.
Radiation (lines or tubes of force).
2.
Units of electrical charge (protons, electrons, neutrons,
photons).
3.
Atoms (hyd. to uranium). 4.
Astronomical bodies.[Page
78]
5.
Astronomical systems.
6.
Galaxies (spiral nebulae).
7.
Clusters of galaxies.
8.
Clusters of clusters.
9.
The cosmogonic universe as a monad.
Levels
in the Biotic Realm
1.
Organic compounds, inc. ammo. acids.
2.
Molecular, incl. colloids.
3.
Infracellulars and Unicellulars.
4.
Multicellulars (plants, colonies and animals).
5.
Societies.
6.
Tribes.
7.
States.
8.
Races.
9.
Biotic monad.
Neuro-Psychological
1.
Neuroid conductions in excitation arcs.
2.
Conductions in Receptor-Effector systems.
3.
Reflexes.
4.
Pattern conductions or Reaction (chromofine, autonomic
and cerebro-spinal).
5.
End-reaction complexes.
6.
Sentiments.
7.
Valuations. 8.
Selves. [Page
79]
9.
Individual nervous system, especially human personalities
as monads.
Thus
we see three great realms that resemble one another
all the way through in their internal structures. These
are a unity, for they must surely arise from one thing. For
man this One is
consciousness, which man may know when he grows. This
process is an unfolding of the universe, what the Greeks
called "metastrophe", going down into oneself
and starting from the “mustard seed” in a new direction,
beyond the realm of personality. That is our goal, the
Unity, recognized also, in a sense, by modern mind.
People
often wonder if man is a fresh point of departure;
that is to say, if it is really true that man is unique
in the same sense that life is. I believe our difficulty
is that we are haunted by the old-fashioned idea, learned
in childhood, that life was produced from matter, and
can therefore be explained in simple terminology and
eventually remanufactured. Scientists have held two
theories about the origin of life, both unsatisfying.
One contends that life originated on this or some other
planet by an [Page
80]accidental
collocation of matter. Although that theory is supposed
to be reasonable, it denies all facts. There is not a
single laboratory instance known of life originating
spontaneously from the non-living. There is a second
theory, the possibility that elements were formerly radiant,
and that life arose then. However, we notice this: life
does not depend on the radiant elements, but rather on
those which are non-radiant — the lightest of the
chemical elements. The radiant elements are too heavy,
and are, in fact, inimical to life. There is not much
to support either of these theories.
There
is yet another proposal, namely, that when matter densified
out of the nebulae, life was also
there, and consciousness was behind both. This theory
of the origin of life in the universe is defended by
McDougall in Body and Mind, p. 223:
"The
assumption of the continuity of evolution of living
things from inorganic matter, in the sense which rules
out the incoming of any new factor, is a very great
assumption which nothing compels us to accept; it has,
in fact, but the slender basis of the demand for symmetry
and simplicity [Page
81]made by our minds.
The gap between the organic and the inorganic in nature
is an immense one; the two kinds of material phenomena
present fundamental differences, and there is every appearance
of the incoming of a new factor with the first living
things, a teleological factor which is capable of working
against or controlling the physical law of the degradation
of energy, a law which seems to rule throughout the inorganic
world.
"Suppose,
then, that we had a full history of the evolution of
organic beings from inorganic matter by slow steps
of gradually increasing complexity of molecular organization;
suppose that the progress of synthetic chemistry enabled
us to reproduce the steps of this evolution in the
chemical laboratory and to bring about the appearance
of living organisms by way of abiogenesis: even that
would not prove that the physical did not begin to
intervene in the material processes at the point at
which the increasing complexity of molecular organization
rendered possible or necessary the co-operation of
this new factor; a factor latent or inoperative up
to that point because the conditions which permit of
its co-operation were lacking. [Page
82]For
it, as all facts indicate, certain physico-chemical conditions
are necessary conditions of the co-operation of the psychical
factor, then that factor will have begun to cooperate
only when those necessary conditions were realized."
We
know that there is something which presses outward
from within, as the crystal forms when the temperature
of water is lowered. If life is primal there is no
reason why man should not be regarded in his conscious
form as primal, lying in wait for the universe to give
him conditions. Why make the division between man and
animals and vegetables, rather than say, for instance,
that vegetables are a unique departure? There
is this great difference: that although the lower kingdoms
obey laws of beauty and purpose, there is in man something
strangely creative which marks a new beginning. He is
original, an artist, whereas lower nature, in the
individual entity, is not original. The forms in nature result from
the imposition of the plan of evolution, but man has
some kind of revolutionary temperament. He is originating,
and that in two senses: he has the power to go back to
the origin (at any rate to the realm of sub-consciousness)
and [Page 83]also
to go forward in a new direction, that of cosmic consciousness.
What
are we in our racial and larger character?
Theosophy sees man as a continuity just as life is. Man
is just as much one as energy is one, as life is one, and
the stages of man are just as definite as those of life.
Races come and go but man remains; you and I, who are unique
because of something within us, nevertheless remain eternally
the same, in consciousness. The stages of man are seven-fold,
like everything else in the phenomenal world. What a grand
structure he is, seen clothed in the living garments of
nature! First is cosmic man — man
before there was a universe; next, nebular man; then, third,
solar man. Fourth is racial man; fifth, sub-racial man;
sixth, the various types within the sub-race, and then
the seventh, the individual man. These are the categories,
but humanity is all one, although appearing temporally
and phenomenally. Just as life is all one pattern so man
is all one unified Man, not God. God appears to us to be
a goal and somewhat like ourselves, for the same reason,
as Yeats pointed out, that if you are a deer you believe
that God is a deer. [Page 84]God
is not man, but consciousness in its
totality is one humanity. Matter and life, as we see them
emerging from the invisible, are one, and the power behind
man is similar unity, more primal than life or matter.
He can therefore unify other entities."Æ"
speaks thus of the unifying power in man:
THE GREAT BREATH
"Its
edges foamed to amethyst and rose
Withers
once more the old blue flower of day:
There
where the other like a diamond glows
Its
petals fade away.
A shadowy tumult stirs the dusky
air:
Sparkle the delicate dews, the
distant snows.
The great deep thrills, for
through it everywhere
The
breath of Beauty blows.
I saw how all the trembling
ages past
Moulded to her by deep and deeper
breath,
Neared to the hour when Beauty
breathes her last
And
knows herself in death."
There
is an immortal principle in life, and there is a unity
in man that transcends this phenomenal world, and which
he can impose upon nature. In that unity we may see
man united with his cosmic progenitors. [Page
85]
The
three appearances (matter, life and consciousness)
are, in theosophical literature, called outpourings.
These are great tides that set out in the sea of matter
from consciousness — the
tides of energy, life and mankind, in the grand sense — all
coming from one source. The principal difference among
the three is tempo. Energy can
organize matter for its own purposes more quickly than
can life, so it emerges first. Life, however, is close
on the heels of energy. The moment energy produces a
globe life rushes out and organizes chemical substances.
Finally, man comes, just a step behind life. The moment
life appears matter is seized by man, through life, for
his own purposes. Questions arise: How far had life gone
in the organization of physical matter before man emerged
from the invisible? What occurred between man in consciousness — the
totality of man — and
physical man? What is the structure between us and the
absolute, as compared with the structure between the
living and the absolute? The answers to these questions
are fascinating. They state that man emerged when life
was only partly organized.
Evidence,
which is perhaps not ordinarily [Page
86] acceptable
to science, supports the belief that man emerged long
before the apes appeared. Man re-assorted the elements
of nature's experimentation and built himself a body,
at first shadowy in character, but later, as the densification
went on, taking more and more elements from the animal
kingdom. Man was at first sexless, and reproduced shadows
of himself, as ectoplasm is thrown off from a medium.
Then he began to divide into sexes — as
all the scriptures try fumblingly to tell us — copying
nature as nature experimented. But at last he grew to
be so dense as to be isolated from the animal kingdom.
In the early days there was a kind of primal identity
between life, matter and man, hence totemism. The ancestral
belief that man is descended from the animal is in that
psychological sense true, because there was then a great
swirling exchange between man visible and life invisible.
Man was allied to nature by the very fact of his ethereal
character and psychic sensitiveness. But as he became
more self-conscious, more powerful, he became also more
and more isolated. His inner weaknesses overcame him.
It is a strange and beautiful story, [Page
87] throwing
immense light on anthropology and folklore. All the old
tales of magicians who turned into birds, fishes and
so on actually happened at one time, though only the
racial memory of primitive man has preserved the story
intact for us. If the reader is revolted by the idea
that folk-memory is so remote-reaching, let him recall
Andrew Lang's phrase: "Tradition is as fluid as
water, and as tough as steel".
The
first of the great physical races was gigantic, nebulous
in its early stages, but growing dense as time went
on. It inhabited the continent to which Haeckel gave
the name Lemuria. He correctly believed that this continent
probably stretched from Madagascar into the Pacific,
including Easter Island. The race erected gigantic
monuments, splendid in their pristine power, which
are impressive when observed, and overwhelmingly convincing
in the light of the story which lies behind them. The
race was one-eyed, cyclopeon and could still see, in
the invisible, the descending psychic man. Out of that
race developed the Atlanteans, who brought us to the
densest point of our humanity, when the race became
so crude that nature eventually [Page
88] had
to blot it out. There is evidence for the existence of
Atlantis, the continent, now sunk, which housed the race.
The subject was first dealt with by Donnelly, and since
then by Spence's several books, and also in theosophical
literature. The Atlanteans were a wonderful race, of
incredible emotional power, whose great gift to humanity
was that it endured the emotional crisis in matter and
brought us out on the other side.
Finally came the Aryan race and its sub-races,
each of which has had its smaller crisis of materialization,
in one of which we are now living. What a splendid thing
it would be if we understood the unity of humanity and
could deal with our crisis in terms of intelligence,
based, in turn, on experience in the past!
One
of the redeeming features of these crises in ancestral
races is that at least there were men at that time
who understood them. There have always been men to
help humanity, even if the race were on the downward
road — men who knew, moving with mankind in the
mystery schools. Even in primitive Lemuria there was
a kind of childlike dependence on leadership. Is the
Aryan race, on account of its mentality, to [Page 89] be
denied the privilege of that help? I
shall deal with this at much length later. In all the
cults of the ancient world, in every mystery school,
there were men who were recognized and accepted as guides
of humanity. Thus, up to the Middle Ages, the knowledge
of the world process was either instinctively, intuitively,
or otherwise present with humanity.
Then
came the darkness of the Middle Ages, which dropped
the curtain between us and our origin, hence the necessity
for recovering this Ancient Wisdom for humanity. It
would be a splendid thing if we had that knowledge
and could invite those men back again.
This
crisis that the world is facing is the end of a long
episode. The Middle Ages in Europe led up to the Great
War. That was the most desperate point in the Aryan
race, when science and religion were divorced and both
grossly material. I declare,
as one who has seen the struggle of the world through
the Great War, that theosophical teaching is our greatest
point of hope in the way of light. Are we not being
put through a sort of funnel? The Jews are going back
to their own land, Jerusalem, and the Roman [Page
90] Catholics
back to Rome. Simultaneously with this migration of Jews
and Catholics, the Protestants are returning from the
South Sea Islands to Europe and America, where they belong
after all, bringing a little of the light of Christianity
to the barbaric people of the West. And the spiritual
child of ancient Rome is losing its grip on India, just
as Rome lost its grip on Judea when Jesus was born.
There
finally comes an emotional crisis, with a meeting of
East and West, a strange exchange of doctrines, and
all manner of faiths abroad in the land, as in the
Roman world. All this means that through the great
fires of humanity's suffering, we are experiencing
another of these transformations of the world. Theosophy
had its light shut off in the past by the bid of the
church for power in Europe. The old knowledge will re-emerge
as more and more are willing to go back to the primal
source, recovering the ancestral wealth of Atlantis and
Lemuria, and to anticipate the races yet to come by the
process of initiation. It can only come back by the help
of those people who are no longer treading on the heels
of life and merely obeying nature's laws.
A
point of intense interest in this matter of [Page
91] memory
of the past has been dealt with in the thought of India.
In what does this memory reside, and how can it be
recovered — firstly,
as individual past lives in Chaldea, in Egypt and other
cultures; secondly, as the memory of Man? It would be
an undertaking quite beyond our immediate scope to deal
with. Briefly, Indian experience and the resultant philosophy
have led to a description of the world process in three
forms, as follows: Hindu realism (Nyaya and Vaisheshika),
which exhausts logic and declares that reality is unspeakable
because it is unthinkable; secondly two further attacks
on reality from another point of view, the Sankhya and
Yoga systems, not identifiable with any Western philosophical
method; finally, two exegetical systems, the Mimamsas,
of which the Vedanta is the most widely known in the
West and the dominant one of India — although the Sankhya is the key to the
situation as approached by the Western mind. Now all
these methods, or views, are experimental and pragmatic
in essence, and never far from experience in details,
and in consequence the conclusions as regards the nature
of sensation, memory and the like are useful conclusions.
Among these [Page
92] is
a surprising and fruitful notion that in the sensory
experiences hearing is unique, being rooted in a special
ultimate. This ultimate is called the Akasha, and is
analogous to the concept of an ether. In that medium
every event is held available in suspense, as in a plenum
of fluid glass. Sound, however, is mental first (so to
say) and physical by resonance. Hence the recovery of
the past involves a special discipline for the mind and
the psyche generally, and the achievement is a definite
mental event. The process in question is a form of the
Yoga practice. Such a frontal attack is fraught with
danger, however. Spirituality and virtue must be antecedent
to power. [Page
93]
CHAPTER
- 5 -
THE
INVISIBLE WORLDS
THE
existence of worlds beyond the physical should be inquired
into first on an evidential basis. It is true that
the problem is so wide that the evidence is correspondingly
broad. In some of its aspects, therefore, it may appear
to be unlike the evidence accepted in physical research;
but in no case is the evidence anywhere nearly as incomplete
in substance or faulty in treatment as that which is
accepted every day in law courts in the governing of
matters of life and death. The
existence of invisible worlds beyond or within the physical
is of such tremendous importance that the inquiry should
long ago have been pursued upon a scale at least commensurate
with cancer research. But the peculiar nature of the
problem, the strange lust to acquire publicity, and other
human and material factors have, in the judgment of many,
made this matter of psychical research and all related
to it the [Page
94] most
unsatisfactory of all aspects of modern knowledge.
Nevertheless,
the late Lord Balfour, when Premier of England, was
even then able to say, with reference to the survival
of man, that there was enough evidence to convince
a British jury upon any subject except this one. He
had in mind the intricacy of the material. It is overwhelming
in its mass, but only an intelligent and friendly approach
enables the student to integrate and make sense of
it. Even so simple
a matter as the breaking down of the problem into two
parts is often overlooked: first, that there are invisible
conditions surrounding us and interpenetrating us — which
only a very ignorant person would deny upon the basis
of pure physical science; second, that man is so constituted
as to survive in this invisible world after death. By
a careful examination of the evidence it becomes possible
to distinguish between the general and the particular
problems, and then reintegrate the evidence in such a
way as to make not only human survival certain in personal
aspects, but also to meet the several philosophical issues
that arise out of an admission of the reality of the
invisible worlds.[Page 95]
First,
a brief reference to the evidence. It was all summarized
by F. W. H. Myers in 1906 to that date, when he published
his two-volume work, Human Personality and Its Survival
of Bodily Death.
Mr. Myers's theories are mostly inchoate and unimportant,
for a reason that I shall make clear shortly, but his collection
of material is magnificent. The literature subsequent
to that date is large, but the best documented books are
comparatively few in number, being those of Geley, von
Schrenck-Notzing, and, of course, Lodge. Myers's difficulty
is partly because of the limitations of the science of
his day, and more largely because what might be called
psychism in its vital aspect was not distinguished clearly
from psychism in its material aspect. That is to say, upon
the death of a human being no loss of weight is noticed;
hence, if a person is to survive, he must survive in some
conditions which, if material, has no mass. Quite evidently,
if he survives in something which has mass and extension
in the ordinary physical way, the withdrawal of that material
would be made noticeable at death by a change in weight.
No such change is noticed, and it is well known that if
disintegration is [Page
96] immediately
arrested the unchanging weight of the body will continue
indefinitely. Since, then, there is no change in weight,
survival cannot be admitted upon a basis of some kind of
psychical matter. Early psychical literature could not
meet this issue because of the undeveloped condition of
science. In a positive way the problem can be phrased thus:
Is there any kind of matter which even in considerable
volume has no appreciable mass, and yet has directive influence
when associated with other kinds of matter? (The term matter
is here used in the modern sense as being bodies displaying
mass, momentum and stress, of which the principal constituent
is mass or energy.) The answer from science for this question
is now in the affirmative. It is universally admitted and
commonly seen that forms of energy, such as electrical
energy, may be immensely effective in the movement of objects
and the doing of work, though the motive masses are infinitesimal.
An electrical current can hardly be said to weigh anything.
The electron has immense velocity in proportion to its
mass. An electrical battery does not weigh appreciably
more or less before and after being discharged, but there
is a world [Page
97] of difference
in utility. Electricity was known in the days of Myers's Human
Personality, of course, but it was still regarded as
a rather special case.
The work of Thompson and Rutherford
had not been advanced to that point where it could be
unequivocally stated that underlying all matter is this
radiant energy. That has now become generally acknowledged,
and there is no reason in science to doubt that a living
man is vital because of the organization of the solids,
liquids and gases by a more intricate organization of
radiant or psychic matter; and that upon the failure
of the body at death this specialized radiant content
may withdraw intact.
It
is interesting to notice, in this connection, that
all the evidence of seers and clairvoyants has anticipated
this proposal. Normally invisible beings, such as angels
and the dead, are universally regarded as more radiant
than physical beings. A special word in India is employed
to designate the creatures of the invisible world: deva.
This term literally means
"the shining ones". This is what one would expect.
Solids have three physical constants: constant mass, constant
shape and constant [Page
98] volume.
When we pass to the liquids we drop constant form and have
only constant volume and constant mass remaining. Transference
to the purely gaseous leaves constant volume behind, gases
being constant only as to mass or weight.
Hence, if a man survives, withdrawing from his body of
solids, liquids and gases, he must survive in a form which
has none of these constants — constant form, constant volume
or constant mass. In short, he must dwell in a radiant
vehicle made of matter somewhat resembling the matter in
a neon tube.
The
reason why psychical research in its more official
aspects has completely failed to persuade European
civilization to a belief in survival and the existence
of invisible worlds is that the approach to the problem
has been along lines of matter and not along lines
of life. We hold that life and matter, though ultimately
one, nevertheless, observed from the physical world,
display different properties. Matter is broadly chaotic,
dark, without plan, whereas life is related to plan,
order, symmetry, and so on. No proper understanding
of the physical evidence is possible until a very simple
assumption is made, which is as follows: We must visualize [Page 99] the
physical world as being materially self-contained; that
is, with our present knowledge it is impossible to transform
physical matter into non-physical matter.
We
can drive ice up into water and then into steam by
the application of heat, but that is the dead end.
Intricate chemical changes do not defeat the conservation
of energy. In short, if there is any matter of which
the invisible worlds are composed, we cannot add to
that nor draw upon it by the processes of physical
science. (The case of electrical and radiant matter
is too complicated to discuss here.) But there is
reason to suppose that beyond the border of the gases
there are conditions of matter which we cannot draw
upon any more than the invisible can draw upon our
matter. That is to say, a living being consists of
matter in the psychic state and matter in several physical
states. When he dies he continues in the psychic matter,
the anima is still alive. In short, the mistake of
psychical research has been its search for a material
bridge when the bridge is the life-process. Very little
advance can be made in science until laws and theories
are outlined. Science
is full of examples of this: the speed with [Page
100] which
chemical elements were discovered according to Mendeleyeff's
prophecies (his periodic table). Hence, with regard
to clarifying the materials of psychical research, a
sound theory is necessary. And that theory lies in the
direction of an understanding of the life process as
the bridge.
Let
us take an example, which I shall here quote at full
length, begging the student to be so good as to observe
in it certain critical points. First, the reputed communicating
entity is by no means a telepathic phantom, as he resists
all suggestions made by the living around him.
Second, it is an excellent evidential case for survival. Third,
the return of the suicide to communicate is clearly in
a category different from the return of people who die
more normally. There are other points which I shall bring
out after the reader has covered this material. The case
is that of a Col. Gurwood, who, without previous warning,
emerges as the invisible communicant in some planchette-writing
done by a group of which a Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood (1838–98)
was the principal personage. Mr. Wedgwood was the cousin
and brother-in-law of Charles Darwin. (Myers' Human
Personality, Vol. 11, p. 163 et seq.): [Page
101]
"Extract
from Journal of Wednesday, June 26th, 1889, and copy
of planchette-writing with Mr. Wedgwood:
'A spirit is here today who
we think will be able to write through the medium. Hold
very steady and he will try first to draw.'
We turned the page and a sketch
was made, rudely enough, of course, but with much apparent
care.
'Very
sorry can't do better. Was meant for test. Must write for
you instead. — J.
G.'
We
do not fully understand the first drawing, taking it for
two arms and hands clasped, one coming down from above. Mr.
Wedgwood asked the spirit of J. G. to try again, which
he did.
Below
the drawing he wrote: 'Now look.' We did, and this time
comprehended the arm and sword.
'Now
I will write for you if you like.'
Mr. W.: 'What did the drawing represent?'
'Something
that was given me.'
I said: 'Are you a man or a woman?'
'Man. John G.'
Mr. W.: 'How was it given to you?'
'On
paper and other things. . . .
My [Page
102] head is bad, from
an old wound I got there, when I try to write through
mediums.'
Mr.
W.: ' We don't know J. G. Have you
anything to do with us?'
'No connection.'
Mr. W. said he knew a J. Giffard, and wondered
if that was the name.
'Not
Giffard. Gurwood.'
Mr. W. suggested that he was
killed in storming some fort.
'I killed myself
on Christmas Day, years ago. I wish I had died fighting.'
Were you a soldier?
' I was in the army.'
Can you say what rank?
' No. . . . It was the pen did
for me and not the sword.'
The word pen was imperfectly
written, and I thought it was meant for fall.
I asked if this was right?
'No.'
Mr. W.: 'Is the word, pen ? '
'Yes; pen did for me.'
We suggested that he was an
author who had failed, or had been maligned.
'I
did not fail. I was not slandered.
Too much for me
after. . . pen was too much for me after the wound.' [Page
103]
Where were you wounded and when
did you die?
'Peninsula to first question.'
We were not sure about the word Peninsula,
and asked him to repeat.
'I
was wounded in the head in Peninsula. It will be forty-four
years next Christmas Day since. I killed myself. Oh,
my head. . . . I killed myself, John Gurwood.'
Where did you die?
'I
had my wound in 1810. I
cannot tell you more about myself. The drawing was a
test.'
We asked if the device was intended
for his crest.
'I had it seal' [sic].
Had it anything
to do with your wound? (I cannot remember the exact form
of this question)
'It
came from that and was given me. Power fails to explain. Remember
my name. Stop now.' "
Further extract from Mrs. R's
Journal, September 27th, 1889 (three months later):
"The
effort was at first incoherent, but developed into the
following sentences: [Page
104]
'Sword
. . . when I broke in, on the table with plan of fortress
. . . belonged to my prisoner; I will tell you his
name tonight. It was
on the table when I broke in. He did not expect me;
I took him unawares. He was in his room looking at a
plan, and the sword was on the table. Will try and let
you know how I took the sword tonight.'
In the evening after dinner:
'I
fought my way in. His name was Banier.' (Three times
repeated.) 'The sword was lying on the table by a written
scheme of defence.
Oh, my head. Banier had a plan written out for defence
of the fortress. It was lying on the table, and his sword
was by it.'
To a question:
'Yes: surprised him.'
Mr. Wedgwood thinks the name
of the Governor of the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo was
Banier; but says this would not be a test, as he knew
it. He is going to see if he can find anything in Napier's Peninsular
War corroborative of what is said about the
sword.
'Look.
I have tried to tell you what you can verify.' [Page
105]
Mr. Wedgwood reports his verification
as follows:
'When
I came to verify the message of planchette I speedily
found that Colonel Gurwood, the editor of the Duke's
dispatches, led the forlorn hope at the storming of
Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812 (note error in date) "and received a wound in the skull
from a musket ball which affected him for the remainder
of his life" — Annual Register, 1845. In
recognition of the bravery shown on that occasion he
received a grant of arms in 1812, registered in the College
of Arms as having been passed
"upon the narrative that he (Captain G.) had led the
forlorn hope at Ciudad Rodrigo, and that, after the storming
of the fortress, the Earl of Wellington presented him with
the sword of the Governor, who had been taken prisoner
by Captain Gurwood."
In
accordance with the assertion of planchette, Colonel
Gurwood killed himself on Christmas Day, 1845, and
the AnnualRegister of that
year, after narrating the suicide, continues: "It
is thought that this laborious [Page
106] undertaking
(the editing of dispatches) produced a relaxation of
the nervous system and consequent depression of spirits.
In a fit of despondency the unfortunate gentleman terminated
his life." ' "
What
is noticeable about this case is the following astonishing
state of affairs, if we take it on its face value.
Colonel Gurwood for thirty-three years suffered pain in
the flesh from this wound, and had been dead forty-four
years when he communicated. While dead he felt no pain,
but on his own evidence he feels this ache when he clothes
himself in matter. What are we to conclude from this?
It seems to me incontestable
that physical matter with its properties is completely
left behind at death, and that the properties of psychic
matter are quite different, leading to emotional stress
and strain not physical pain and pleasure. But all that
counts of memory and continuity remains.
Death
only puts into abeyance what, during physical existence,
was living, and one deduces, incidentally, that it
is just as well that the memory of previous lives is
shrouded by nature by some intricate device of her [Page
107] own.
Everything that counts of memory and personality persists
on the other side. The difference is not in the vital
aspect of the dead person but in the matter which clothes
that life. For Colonel Gurwood the picking up of physical
matter induces habits of pain, even though that matter
is not drawn from his own body.
Along
these lines a complete case for the invisible worlds
is possible, not along the lines of the negative mediumship
of a Eusapia Palladino, nor even the spiritual seership
of Joan of Arc, but the positive observation of a person
like H. P. Blavatsky, the occultist. The questions
then arise, how many invisible worlds are there? What
is the condition of matter therein? How,
besides through life, do these worlds interlock with
the physical? Where is consciousness amid them? What
can one do during life to master the invisible? What
are the relative values of the physical, the psychic,
the spiritual and any other possible invisible worlds? [Page 108]
CHAPTER
- 6 -
THE
TESTIMONY OF THE ILLUMINATI
So
far we have indicated, firstly, that there are waves
in evolution and, from the fact that there are crests
in those waves,
— namely, mineral, vegetable, animal and human — we deduced
that either now or at some future time there will appear
another crest of men who are not altogether human, men
who are gods. We associated this next step then with consciousness.
Secondly,
we examined life, since it is that which frames evolution,
and we discovered that life is as unique as matter: that
life and matter together may possibly be the explanation
of consciousness. Yet it may only be possible to understand
consciousness when we distinguish the properties of life
from those of matter, in order to master both.
Thirdly,
we discovered that the problem of the anticipation
of this next step into the [Page
109] godlike
world is that of the anticipation of races yet unborn,
and that many an individual has gone through this process
in the past. The steps summarizing those future races
we called initiations, the technique yoga, and the broad
process the Path.
Then we found that it was necessary
not only to anticipate the future but also to redeem
the past. In every individual there are latent the memories
of all the races since the very beginning of mankind,
and in order to perfect oneself it is necessary to redeem
oneself. To achieve personal redemption it is essential
to impregnate with consciousness the past, represented
in us by the unconscious. This in conduct is universal
brotherhood.
Finally,
the subject involves the existence of the invisible.
If there is a world which is the seat of races yet
to come, where the path of the future is already drawn:
if there is a realm in which the memory of the past
is engraved and in which all the treasures of experience
are stored, then that must be an invisible world. It
cannot be physical, though it is material. It must
be beyond normal daily experience. In short, the whole
of this argument rests upon the [Page
110] invisible. One
must accept the existence of realms beyond death. The
evidence for these worlds I have indicated briefly.
We must now consider that these
ranges of inner experience are definitely within the
grasp of humanity during life, though they are not physical
experience.
As to this, one common error
haunts us, the assumption that if there is another world
there can at least be only that one. As a result of this
state of mind another follows, namely, that that further
world is not material, but is in complete antithesis
to this one. Here matter; there spirit.
In
order to advance our argument from this point forward
we shall have to abandon, to some extent, the patient,
logical method we have tried our best to employ up
to this point — not
because what we have before us is unreasonable, but because
the supplying of the needed materials for full documentation
would swell our study beyond reasonable limits.
Therefore,
however didactic and offensively dogmatic it may seem,
we must proceed from this point with a little less meticulous
regard to detailed justification, and we start out by
saying that the invisible worlds [Page
111] are
by no means pure spirit — whatever that may be,
wherever it be found! — but are material. The matter
(energy) is, however, radiant, not physical, and instead
of being simple it is more complex than that of the physical
world. There is reason to believe that the veil which
exists between this world and the very next is only the
first of three great veils, which are sometimes called
the veils of Isis, or the webs of life, because they
have to do with nature's vital processes. The first
vital veil closes off physical matter, as it were. By
piercing that veil at death we come out on the other
side and find ourselves in psychic matter, which consists
of vitality, emotions and lower mind.
Long
after death we pass through a second veil, which leads
into the world of the soul, more marvelous even than
the psychic.
Here matter is so tenuous, cobweb-like and fine, that it
is almost imperceptible. Yet it is matter embodying a life-process
with characteristic properties, a world wholly beautiful
and yet not fulfilled. It is almost impossible to describe
this world beyond the second veil. However, as the psychic
world is radiant — a world of emotions built up from within
by its own internal power — so [Page 112] the
higher world in a single phrase may be called a conceptual
world, that of constant rebirth and refreshment, of quickening
and life-renewal.
But
that is not all. There
is a veil beyond those two, between the soul and consciousness,
between the soul and the oversoul. This is the last veil
of which we can have any conception at all, and it is
important to us, for it is this veil which gives rise
to individual consciousness. Beyond it is the unity
of all humanity. This veil is indescribably fine, a vestment
of glory, exquisite, tenuous, sometimes called the auric
web, related to the highest form of vitality. This is
the realm of the true will, generalized vitality. Beyond
is a world which shines into ours by but a single point
of light, the point of consciousness. This is the world
of consciousness which cannot be easily characterized
as it is beyond reason, beyond language. There is, however,
an ancient figure which describes it in precise terms.
It is the magnificent analogy that arose from the great
law,
"as above so below", of macrocosm and microcosm.
So, through analogy, one can describe the world of consciousness
beyond the third veil. [Page
113]
In
this figure the solid earth is the physical world.
The psychic realm of vitality, emotion and mind corresponds
to the waters of the earth, for the psychical has always
been symbolized by water — the
realm of the seas, the rivers, the lakes, the rains and
the clouds that give the rain. Thus the lower atmosphere,
where the average man is bound to live, can be called
the psychic realm, where the vitalizing waters of the
emotions fall from the heavenly sky, so to speak. Beyond
is another world, not of water but of air, as above the
rain-clouds there is a realm not untouched by storm but
where are no passionate winds, the ordered, isolated
realm of the soul. Next is the sun hanging ill heaven,
which represents self-consciousness. And finally, beyond,
the world of which the sun is only the aperture, the
ether. This is the meaning of the medieval phrase, "earth,
water, air, fire and ether."
In this concept, the sun is only a tiny point of light,
for the other is a glowing world, and the world we are
to enter through consciousness is glowing also. It is indescribable,
but if we meditate on the figure we shall find some inspiration
which will lift us to a world beyond reason.
Through
these correspondences, as above [Page 114] so
below, there is indicated also the method of escape
from this world. The lower or psychic world consists
of vitality, emotions and intellect, and the higher
or spiritual world is made up of the higher mind corresponding
to intellect, intuitions corresponding to emotions,
and the will corresponding to lower physical vitality.
The correspondence of three above to three below is
the ladder of escape by fulfilment, that leads to development
in the other world. The average man's
principal realms of experience are in the psychic and
physical worlds. The Masters dwell in the world above,
and thus their activities are dominated by soul-like
characters, as they have eliminated the animal.
Thus
there are two worlds, mirror images the one of the
other, and the trick or art of transition from the "unreal" to
the "real" world
is in the will. I have already elsewhere maintained
that "free will" or free choice of action,
in the naive sense, is an illusion. There is a reason. The
average individual has a curious division in the middle
of his aura. Psychically, it is observed that the aura
above the waist-line reflects the higher thoughts and
emotions, [Page
115] and
below is the passionate stratum. His psychic world is
thus split into two parts. On this account, it is found
that the vital (or etheric) and lower emotions go together,
and the higher emotions and lower mind go together, in
the average person. The significance of this is seen
when we realize that the lower emotions are passionate
and disorderly. They are not easily governed, and they
are attached to the outer world. The higher emotions
do not dwell with the lower emotions, hence they are
captured and exploited by the analytical mind. Thus the
average individual surrenders to his passions and lets
his vitality go with them, and "spends
his substance in riotous living". Take, for instance,
the kind of person who goes into a shop to buy cigarettes.
For weeks and weeks he has been persuaded to choose a
certain brand, not by the cigarette itself but by the
picture of a beautiful lady in the advertisements. What
has she to do with tobacco? Nothing, but she has everything
to do with the gentleman's emotions! The salesman prides
himself on his sales talk, but it is the lady that has
done the selling. The psychologist in the business office
knows much more than most people in a university; [Page 116] he
has to know, for his livelihood depends on it. In a
university the average psychology professor has a salary,
and thus he is secure and does not need to know much.
He is not paid enough to know much.
This psychic division in ourselves
is the cause of much trouble. One of its results is that
our consciousness dwells in our lower minds and higher
emotions in our quiet moments, and we ignore our lower
grossness. We walk about like dinosaurs and say how wonderful
we are, but there is nothing more than a tiny brain on
top of a long stem, and we do not look at the shapeless
body beneath. Nevertheless, we are drawn down and fastened
upon by the vitalities, and these are exploited by the
world and we waste ourselves. We say we do this and that
for such and such a reason, but it is not so. We are
intimate witnesses to a betrayal so subtle as to elude
us.
What
are we to do about it? It
is simple. We must establish ourselves in the middle
of the emotions, that is, in the sympathies. The sympathies
are green in colour, being in the middle of the spectrum,
with the rose of affection on one side and the violet
of aspiration on the other end. It is necessary [Page
117] to
feel sympathy for everybody, not for one person alone.
When the green of emotion is beautiful in the aura, the
lower and higher emotions are gradually brought together
in the sympathies, and a marvelous change
comes over the individual. Instead of the analytical mind
preying on the higher emotions, and the lower emotions
preying on the vitality, the man is "healed", in the
right sense of the Christian word, "through love".
We
must accomplish this task alone, by enriching our central
emotions and not allowing the lower mind to dominate.
Instead of being critical, destructive and barbaric,
we must become human, drawing our passions up for redemption.
This does not mean that we have to be without passions.
Even Jesus had passions, but he used them, and just
so, must we use them, not to destroy others but to
quicken life. When that happens the vitality goes back
to serve the body instead of the passions, and we are
then ready to enter the world of the soul. When the
lower mind no longer preys upon the higher emotions,
we have the higher mind at our command, and think in
its terms rather than in these of the lower mind. This
is the [Page 118] beginning
of the new adjustment, and of awakening in ourselves
the soul powers, as they are called. Although the world
beyond humanity has nothing to do with virtue, virtue
is the step to it. The discovery of the soul is the first
stage, and the first step in the journey of discovery
is taken on the road of brotherhood.
To do that we must be with people.
One way is to associate with people who are working for
real brotherhood, who have sympathy not only for all
the races that exist, but also for all those not yet
born. One place where we can find that kind of brotherhood
is in the Theosophical Society, where the only qualification
for joining is a belief in the brotherhood of man, without
regard for sex, race, creed or colour.
The
first principle in the development of the soul is mental
clairvoyance. By that I mean something real, not figurative.
Normal clairvoyance is closed to most people because
the glandular and nervous development necessary is
beyond the power of the average individual to achieve.
That being so, there is almost no use going after ordinary
clairvoyance. What can be done without any danger is
the adjustment of the bridge [Page 119] between
the soul and the psyche, first, by developing mental
clairvoyance, second, by quickening the intuitions,
and third, by the development of the real will.
Mental clairvoyance is that
curious insight which enables one to know the future.
It is the development of the higher mind in conjunction
with the lower, which conjunction follows on the process
of healing described above. Mental clairvoyance can be
developed by anyone who desires to do so. It is a question
of pursuing knowledge impersonally. It is the attempt
to know something, not because we need it desperately,
but because we believe in truth, and whatever the result,
we want it.
This
sounds simple, but it is not. Looking at our friends,
who belong to all sorts of advanced movements, we see
that they are often afraid of new kinds of truth because
it might change them. Our Christian friends frequently
fear that their faith in Jesus might be destroyed by
some new kind of truth. A man who has a highly scientific
attitude toward religious problems, who is impersonal
in his search, will go where the truth shines. After
years of devotion to that search one acquires the strange
power of [Page 120] peering
out over the world beyond personal factors. This dealing
with eternal values means operating in a world beyond
time, where one can foresee events in this world as they
are normally predetermined. That is why the neophyte,
after acquiring this power, can anticipate races yet
unborn; he dimly perceives what is coming. As this power
develops, he perceives it more and more accurately until
his whole life is spent in the conscious fulfilment of
that which is yet to come. In many cases this extends
to knowledge of events in his own life, though I am using
the term mental clairvoyance in respect to the future
of the world, not the man.
The next step is the development
of the intuitions, and this can also be achieved by anyone
who desires it. It means the development of the impersonal
emotions. Everything personal is chaotic and disorderly;
everything impersonal is orderly. Developing the intuitions
means quickening the generalized emotions.
The
impersonal emotions have to do with all the realms
of nature, and with the redemption of mankind, because
when this quickening process is induced there begins [Page
121] a
high
aesthetic experience. That which seemed ugly becomes beautiful.
It seems unbelievable that anyone should have a sense
of beauty, which can make beautiful, things, patently
terrible. The power of intuition, the beginning of which
can be seen in the "hunch",
will be developed as the race advances.
Finally,
there is the third method of development of the soul.
That is in the domain of the real will. Just as the
intuitions are above the emotions, the higher mind
above the lower, so is the will above the vitality.
There are generalized vitalities. A person who has
the higher kind of vitality available is, first of
all, better off himself, and is also able to give off
this vitality to other people, who have, when with
him, the strange feeling of being more alive. This
godlike vitality is called in occult literature the
auric egg. We may regard it as the calling down into
oneself of more powers, as Jesus did when He performed
miracles. How is it possible to develop this faculty? It
comes through service, by living for movements rather
than for oneself alone. So long as people desire money,
security, and all the rest of it, they will get nothing [Page 122] else.
Such people will live in their own little prison with
their own little jewels; but when we love all humanity,
when to us one man is as good as another in an absolute
sense, then there comes this new vitality. By working
for and with people who are bringing a new world into
being, one becomes aware of these generalized vitalities.
Hundreds of people who know nothing about occult matters
are doing this all the time. These men and women may
not perhaps live longer in years, but they live the lives
of other people as well as their own. Hence they live
more, if not longer.
When
these three ranges of development have been achieved
there comes still another experience. That is that
the lowest (the body) and the highest (consciousness)
are linked in a new, strange way, and then there comes
the birth in the individual himself of a new world which
begins slowly to open. A new direction has finally been
taken. The sun, hanging in mid-heaven, is seen as a gateway
into a world that was formerly dark. The earth seems
to be all aglow, not only where the sun is, but also
within ourselves. This
world within is the seat of our true Being; it is beyond
the pallid soul; it is [Page
123] the
world of the monad itself. The development of consciousness
through these impersonal procedures brings that indescribable
power into the body. It is a birth and a renewal. There
have been hundreds who have taken this road, and I assure
you, my friends, it is a fact. Its laws are well known.
They are not vague generalities, not creeds laid down
by someone, nor mere pious hopes. They are truths, not
the only truths, but great truths offered so that we
may use them. [Page
124]
CHAPTER
- 7-
SELF-DISCOVERY
THROUGH EXPERIMENT
IT
is a common experience for many of us to meet and know
a good many Hindus, partly because the knowledge which
we are studying came in its original form from India,
prior to its extension and application through Western
experience. Those who are not familiar with Indians
find in them a strange psychological difference from
Westerners, which they interpret in a way that would
perhaps be different did they know Hindus better. To
put it bluntly, they often suppose that the Indian, and,
in general, the Oriental, is uncertain. In many cases
it is charged that he does not keep his engagements,
not necessarily in big things, but in small matters.
For example, a lady said to me recently that an Indian,
in response to an invitation to dinner, had accepted,
saying he would be there. "He not only did not come" she
told me, "but he had no [Page
125] intention of coming". Out
of such experiences is born the impression that, in spite
of his knowledge and philosophy, there is something wrong,
something lacking in the Hindu. Those of us who know
Indians well put upon these facts an entirely different
interpretation. The difference between the Hindu and
the American as regards reliability in small and large
matters is merely nominal. Even if we acknowledge that
his engagements are not kept so exactly as we should
like, there is, nevertheless, a way of looking at it
which makes judgment less harsh.
The
apparent difference in reliability between the two peoples
is simply that the Hindu is more experienced in deep
indwelling, for he is in the habit of studying himself
from within. Because he has expertly developed the technique
of self-awareness his motives are more obvious to himself.
In a sense, all his action is more objective to himself
and, therefore, he is more candid with himself than other
people might be. So when he is conversing about anything —
even so simple a matter as a dinner engagement — deep within
himself he accepts the invitation on this basis, and if
he does not [Page126] keep
it, justifies himself. The candour of the Westerner as
regards himself begins from the surface and does not go
so deep. When he says he will come to dinner, doubtless
you can expect him. He is giving his word, and his word
is objective — it is outside of him somewhere, and because
of this objectivity he wants to redeem that commitment.
The Hindu, by reason of his indwelling life, is on a very
different basis. In short, consciousness dwells more deeply
in the Indian. He is, therefore, more conscious of human
weaknesses. Our ignorance is our loss! We are more aware
of the objective world than of our own failings, so we
keep our promises. You may think that the higher moral
state, but the balance is fairly even. It is just as important
to be candid with ourselves. The world in which promises
are kept to the last detail is capable of terrible exaggeration,
because people will make all kinds of promises that cannot
properly be kept — such as promises to salesmen. In some
parts of the world there is a kind of give and take in
matters of this kind, but in the West we live under pressure,
having always to be on our toes, at the very limit of external
possibilities. [Page
127]
Knowledge
of inner things makes the Hindu more ready to experiment
with his life than we are, hence his willingness to
break off worldly life to seek the Truth. He dwells
a little more deeply within himself, and because of
that there exists in India a civilization with a certain
underlying calm. Western rush and hurry are lacking.
Indians do not place the same emphasis even on matters
that seem important. For example, the Indian peasant
is not nearly so urgent about catching trains as we
are. If the train happens to come to the station when
an Indian arrives, he takes it. If it is just pulling
out he does not get excited. He takes the next one,
or, possibly, stays over-night. The climate is calm,
the evening balmy; he has his luggage with him, and,
in all likelihood, his family and servants too. So
to spend the night there, calmly waiting for the next
day to bring the train again, is not unusual. Such an
attitude leads to a kind of inner peace. Although it
cannot be recommended for the Occident, there is, nevertheless,
a lesson in it — that the inner things count just as
much as the outer, and that in the search for the inner
light of the personality a new world may be opened. [Page
128]
It
is along these lines that experiments may be carried
out. The only way to find the higher world of the Masters
is by experiment. The bridge between the two worlds,
theirs and ours, is this point of light which we call
consciousness. Broadly speaking, the average human is
more or less securely resident in his soul, but this
is neither well-lighted nor active. Wisdom, intuition
and will are largely slumbering; his life experience
is in the psyche and the body. In the Master, on the
contrary, the psyche is the lowest dwelling-place. For
the Master, the soul, embracing wisdom, intuition and
the higher generalized vitality we call will, is the
field of triumphant experiment. To him the psyche and
body are only useful vestures. The psyche has conformed
to the soul already. The link between man and superman
is in consciousness. In man consciousness is a point
of light; in the Master it is the universe. Yet the same
consciousness exists in man and Master. So the beginning
of the development of consciousness will lead to the
Masters' world and quicken the powers of the soul, eventually
subjecting the psyche, and hence involving a gradual
extension in the new world. [Page
129]
That
is our goal. The method is of great practical importance
for us. It is inward retreat. It is the shifting of
the centre of consciousness, by withdrawing it a step,
which really is not such an effort as many people think.
The animal is unaware of himself. We can be aware of
the psyche, or self. Looking out from the soul we can
see our emotions operating, illuminated by consciousness.
It is possible to withdraw consciousness one more stage — behind
soul, and this is the critical event. One's first efforts
toward it are necessarily tentative. However, it must
not be regarded as a convulsion involving a tremendous
amount of effort. It is a natural episode, a transition,
as it were. The stage in which the Master now stands
is in the same relation to ours, as ours is to that
of the animal. By shifting the consciousness one stage
we join them. We now look at the mind and emotions
with candour. The task has begun. This first stage
consists simply of examining our soul powers very carefully
by means of consciousness, instead of looking out so
that consciousness may enjoy the fruits of sensation
in the psyche. We have seen that the powers of the
soul are wisdom, intuition and will. We [Page130] increase
wisdom by the impersonal search for truth, intuition by
generalizing the emotions, and vitality by an increase
of our spirit of service. By living for and with other
people we can share in their vitality and they in ours,
and that process induces the development of the real will.
The
first step, then, is to withdraw in consciousness behind
the whole psyche and then behind the soul, and visualize
quite candidly the amount of soul we have. We must
look at ourselves and ask, how wise are we? Are we impersonally devoted to
truth? How much do we mind losing our previous judgments
and having to take up others? The beginning of the process
of reaching out for freedom is the effort to dwell behind
the soul rather than in it. It means also, of course,
the search for beauty in everything, for in the level
of the soul all life is lovely, not only those things
which bring pleasure to the psyche but also those which
bring pain.
This
must be accomplished along an experimental line. Study
only in a broad, philosophical sense, because consciousness
does not represent merely a reasonable world. What
we are trying to reach is in the realm [Page
131] of experiment.
Emotion is nearer to it than thought, and vitality and
action are still nearer, because generalized vitality
is on the very border of consciousness. Anything which
might be said about this highest world is really misleading.
We must experiment with our life, especially the inner
life. A definite beginning is marked when the individual
says, "I no longer rest content with the canons
of judgment which this world accepts. My political, social
and family outlook must henceforth be my own. Are the
things I am now doing in accord with my deepest needs? Have
they been imposed upon me, or have I chosen them?"
The
great religious teachers, without exception, have taken
this road. Buddha is the foremost example of the individual
experimenting with life. He had all the world could
give, but it did not cast light on His burning problems.
Therefore, He roused within Himself the strength to
put it all aside. He left His garden, cut off His hair
with His own sword, gave back His horse to the men
who accompanied Him a little way, and went into the
outer world to experiment with life. So many people
think that after studying they will know all about
life and [Page 132] can
then act. But study cannot unveil the mystery because
it is beyond mind. It is a question of doing. In
a science or art one might know all the theory, yet it
would have no value unless practised. As I have said,
it is a matter of anticipation of the future. The venture
therefore must be carried out by yourself alone. The
laws laid down are of the broadest, and one's own fulfilment
must be a unique personal experience. The rules that
have been discovered and established by the great teachers
may help, but in the end the road must be traveled by
oneself alone.
It
may be asked, "How can
we start out on this experiment unless we know the goal? If
I am willing to experiment with my life, to look at it
subjectively from deep within, where am I going? What
is my objective?" There is no goal; there is process.
The goal, if any, is the fulfilment of consciousness,
and as that experience is not explicable in mental terms,
anything said about it in prose is bound to be misleading.
The reason is simple. Consciousness has to do with unity.
No mental system ever devised has established a monistic,
unified world, although intuitive philosophers, such
as [Page 133] Bergson, Bradley
and others have come near to it; because intuition is one
stage nearer unity than mind. But, in the end, all philosophy
must break down. Logic cannot lead us to the given end.
There must be assumptions.
We
come now to the critical angular difference between
Master and man.
Let
us assume unity. And let us assume that consciousness
is in the nature of unity, and therefore underlies all
mankind. That is not a difficult assumption, for deep
in human nature there is a strong inclination to believe
the world homogeneous and coordinated. This deep need
has led to much atrocious metaphysics, but such errors
of minds must not deter the heart. Assuming unity, then,
and consciousness, the clearest aspect of this unity
within us, though not final, what of consciousness? The
psyche is chaotic, disorderly and exciting; the soul
conceptual, orderly and freshening in character. The
question is, what of the world from which we wish to
operate after the soul has been objectified by this retreat
from the external world into our inner being?
If
the world is a unity in consciousness, then it follows
that one of the aspects of [Page
134] consciousness
must be inconceivable simplicity. If there is something
that underlies everything and everybody in the universe — board
chairmen and charwomen, you and me, and, what is more,
all animals, plants, minerals, the electron, and a drop
of water or a bolt of lightning — it
must be simple, because if not it would be a special
statement and therefore conditioned to a certain form.
If there is something that underlies everything, without
exception, its simplicity must be inconceivable. Yet
we can append the quality simplicity to consciousness.
Consciousness is naive, very simple indeed, having no
parts, dimensions or properties. Perhaps all religious
teachers have preached that the childlike are nearest
the kingdom of heaven, because of this essential simplicity
of the new world.
Next,
if something simple underlies everything, it follows
that when the universe is wound up and manifestation
over, that which is simple must survive. It is widely
held that the insect will survive man because it is
so much more simple than that other insect that we
call the human being. This can be applied to the macrocosm.
The structure of mountains is simple, as it is [Page
135] merely
a reduplication of that of crystals. It is this that
permits of its long-continued existence. Hence the unity-principle
survives all manifestations and (please note) it is also
that which starts the universe when the show begins again.
Hence the unity-principle survives the universe and has
that power of beginning over again. This is a quality
which we associate with independent entities and aspects
of the cosmos, and thus independence must be the second
manner in which consciousness shows forth in matter.
Now if it is true that consciousness
is simple and independent, it follows next that consciousness
must be infinitely original, because one of the peculiar
properties of the universe is that there have never been
two events or two entities alike. If the causal principle
is this independent, simple thing we call consciousness,
then it must be behind this infinite variety. There never
have been or will be two people or two events alike in
the universe. Therefore we must deduce that the conscious
principle is original, independent and simple.
This
may not seem, in words, an impressive array of majestic
powers, worthy to [Page136] mark
off from man the Men beyond mankind, but a little reflection
may justify the notion.
Is
it not curious that the highest consciousness has nothing
to do with morality? "Goodness
and virtue" are important temporarily, not finally.
Attempts to bind men to goodness alone have not succeeded.
Simplicity, independence and originality have nothing
to do with morality. The goal is something beyond even
archetypal goodness. The road, then, is easy, for anybody
can be simple and independent. Every one of us is original,
nor do we require some complex structure of alien ethics.
It
is obvious, however, that anybody completely simple,
independent and original could not fit into modern
society. That is why I shall in a later chapter describe
the kind of world which would be built by such people.
The economic, political and social bearings of this
attitude are inconceivable in their extent and devastating
in result. Nothing is more relieving than to study
this doctrine, because, instead of feeling poor miserable
worms, we realize, in going deep down inside ourselves,
that we find the wealth of the Eternal. We discover
in this exercise [Page 137] of
simplicity, independence and originality our personal
God, built according to our own dimensions.
It
may be said that this doctrine would disintegrate society.
However, it will not, for it is caviare to the general.
Few are capable of understanding or acting upon it.
One cannot imagine, for instance, fifty per-cent of
the uncomfortable men who read this walking forth thereafter
without their Western clothes, in reformed garments! Do the Masters go their way? When
they are associated with people it is necessary to be
as near them as possible in things that do not matter,
but they are completely independent in the clothing of
the mind! Anyhow, there is no danger in preaching this
doctrine, for most people are so embroiled in sensation
that they are not going to be candidly themselves.
People
achieving this attitude have come to interesting conclusions
about the ultimate character of the world. Attitudes
toward the nature of the universe and what we ought
to do about it take two forms in the West, aside from
materialism, which is practically extinct. One is that
there is a divine Presence that has found humanity
in such a trap that [Page 138] only
by the interposition of His virtue can we get out.
Here God is looked upon as an eleemosynary agency.
The world is not a unity from that point of view, since
He did not get us into this difficulty. For if God
got us into trouble so that He might play the hero,
we could not think also that He was virtuous. The dualistic
attitude that God is one thing and the devil another
leads to no sound doctrines. The other point of view
is that the universe was made by God in this unpleasant
manner so that by getting people into trouble and then
rescuing them they would love Him for the relief He has
given them. This is creation for gain. What are we to
think of such a God?
The
Indian attitude is that the universe is not made artificially,
but comes into being by its own inner nature, which
is neither benevolent nor gainful. The word they use
to describe the process is Lila, which means
sport. When you believe that the universe is made for
play and not for morality, you enjoy life. If you believe
that God made it full of virtue you are practically
in despair about it, but when you know that it is a
game in which you are a player, sharing the fun, you
can start all over again. Is toothache sport? [Page
139] It is
if you know, under natural law, that you yourself scored
this goal on yourself. Are tennis feet or football rib
fun?
In
another sense of the word, a good
"sport" designates a person who does everything
to the best of his ability; if he knows the rules he tries
to conform to them, and every good sport knows the rules
before he enters the game. The word sport also has a biological
connotation, the sense that things start away from the
species and go in a new direction. The soul as archetype
is related to the species and life conforms to the species,
but consciousness has the power of starting in new directions
and making new rules. Hence the word sport applies almost
exactly. The same thing is true with regard to the words
game and play. When we say a person is game, we mean he
stands up to what is in front of him, and the word play
is almost exactly the equivalent of Lila. The things
that we think so desperately important — getting married,
losing money, making a fortune — all these are part of
the external world. When we are quite simple and independent
in our point of view, we discover that the world is a scheme
intended [Page
140] neither
for benevolence nor artificial gain, but a field of delight
into which we can enter now that we have no more man-made
moral responsibilities, but can count invariably on natural
law, in every relationship.
We
cannot act as though we had no artificial moral responsibilities
until we really know we have none. We agreed to be
born and have responsibilities, and they are part of
the game we are now playing. There comes a time at
last when these rules no longer apply. Buddha left
his family and responsibilities for something he could
not otherwise have gained, for them. Just as he was
the sole judge of his conduct, so you are the sole
judge of yours. It is for each of us to see how much
restraint by our present circumstances we are forced
to acknowledge, and how much we accept because we enjoy
it. There is no conflict with society, for the person
who takes this road is above all ordinary laws. He would
never commit a crime or be involved in unethical conduct;
nor would he take part in a society like ours, built
on exploitation. Only in the sense that he is a challenge
to society to become honest is he a danger. And he is [Page
141] none
in the absolute sense, for such a course can be pursued
not by humanity at large, but only by those who have
the power.
Finally,
we ask ourselves, "Who
makes the rules?" According to our attitude, they
are made by God, and so long as we believe in His universe
we must acknowledge His rules. (For purposes of immediate
convenience we may define God as life's totality.) It
is well known that even the highest of the Masters dwell
in bodies like our own. Even those few whose bodies have
not been born by the normal process, but have been moulded
imperishably from matter and life to their own ends,
around their own consciousness, wear forms in appearance
very much like those of ordinary human beings. They also
desire to obey the rules of God. They look like men,
though they are more beautiful and perfect because their
bodies are archetypal in character, unmarked by the passions
of an errant and disobedient psyche, being moulded upon
souls entirely controlled. So also with regard to their
relations with us. They accept the rules as we must,
out of a conscious and deliberate desire to fulfil the
tasks before them.
It
is, however, impossible for us to reach [Page
142] the
Masters by ordinary worldly channels. Anyone who desires
to take this road must face the problem of finding
a teacher. The Masters obey the rules so fully they
would never think of interfering in our lives in order
to bring us to them. The great distinction of Masters
is that they no longer have any personal karma (action
and reaction) with people. They are utterly free, independent
and simple. There is no way by which we can sink hooks
into them by which to claim them. The only way to reach
them is to go towards them, for only in the measure in
which we go to them they come to us, so that at any time
the balance between Master and disciple is equal. Some
know the Masters as a fact and have touched them. They
have the peculiar distinction and duty of being the media
of communication between the Masters and the outer world,
simply because they are a little free, and so come nearer
the freedom of the Masters. They uniquely inspire the
world with ideals which the Masters possess, for the
Masters cannot communicate directly, because humanity
is unwilling to take the smallest step towards freedom.
They realize their limitations and commitments to others,
but [Page 143] are
doing something about it, for in their intercourse with
other people they keep the Masters in mind. Because they
are teaching us how to teach others (and only by teaching
do we learn), they are able to make the bridge that the
Master himself, in his respect for freedom, cannot make.
Do
you remember how Jesus stood above the sacred city
and wept that there was nothing He could do to teach
it, because there were no people to make the bridge? Yet,
knowing that, He was unwilling to come down and disturb
the life they were living. Knowing independence, He
cherished it for others.
Let
us lead our own lives and move amongst people with
the desire to be of what little help we can. By keeping
always in mind the idea of the Masters, we can slowly
make a link between the independent world above and
the world down here. By that constant indwelling in
the midst of the life of outward going, we can make
the bridge to consciousness. What we want of the Master
is not so much intellectual instruction as friendship,
that he may be near us vitally and so induce in us
a sufficient simplicity and independence that this
consciousness may permeate the [Page 144] whole
of our being. Fortunately, for this we do not require
the physical presence of the Masters. The link will
be made by inward reaching out, not by claims. By obeying
the rules we discover those who know them better than
ourselves.
What
would the world be like if everybody knew this? What
would it be like if these divine kings came back to
society? It is almost inconceivable.
Yet, strangely enough, there have been civilizations
like that in the past, when races were young. All our
myths are memories of the days when the divine kings
moved amongst men. The myths of the American Indians
and the Chinese are memories of days when Atlantis was
a glorious civilization led by these beings. Now, instead
of ruling society in a patriarchal manner, it will become
possible for them to rule more idealistically. In those
days there was not the leisure possible now; although
machines existed they were not what they are today. What
society should we try to create to welcome them? That
is the question of burning necessity to the world. The
thing that makes the world so chaotic is lack of leadership;
there is no one who is simple, independent and original. [Page
145] Humanity
is playing a game already obsolete — capitalism — holding
to rules of an age long gone by, leading to power over
others. Suppose leaders come who want power over none,
but who, by their example, can induce in humanity the
type of world I have described, beyond even virtue? What
will they be like? That kind of society we must now
examine.[Page
146]
CHAPTER
- 8 -
THE
FREE MAN IN SOCIETY
THERE
is only one treatise, as far as I know, produced in
modern times which is thoroughly occult in character.
With this work fortunately everyone is familiar: Alice
in Wonderland and Through
the Looking Glass. The beings in these books are
constantly undergoing transformation, which is characteristic
of life, especially when we see it from the point of
view of the psyche. Those who pass as human beings, the
various cards in the pack, Tweedledum and Tweedledee,
the two footmen, one like a frog and the other like a
fish, possess, or are possessed by, the subtle animal
characteristic underlying humanity. They are not a little
mad. There are several other features which make this
work distinctly occult; for example, the one reasonable
person in the book is the child, that is, the being who
represents the gods is a childlike character, with the
power [Page
147] of
making herself, as they say in Sanskrit, "greater
than the great and smaller than the small". She
is simple and independent. Furthermore, the book is
a description of the world we have been living in of
late. Instead of "Alice in Wonderland", our
times have become a display of "Malice in Blunderland". The
Queen of Hearts becomes so insane that she tries to chop
the head off the cat, but the cat has no body from which
to chop the head! It is much like that today.The
people who run society are trying to get from people
that which they do not possess.
In
the midst of this astonishing setting, when they send
to the pepper-filled kitchen for the Duchess, Alice
remembers the scene with her in the kitchen, and, moralizing
on what makes people's temper vary so much, says: "When
I am a Duchess I won't have any pepper in my kitchen
at all. Maybe it's always pepper that makes people
hot-tempered and vinegar that makes them sour — and
camomile that makes them bitter — and — and
barley sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered.
I only wish people knew that; then they would not be
so stingy about it". [Page
148]
It
seems so simple that we look down on it as childishness.
Yet the world is very much like Alice's Wonderland, administered
by people who don't know what it is all about, playing
at games where things won't stay put, like the arches
in the famous croquet match that got up and walked away
at inconvenient moments. Now and then, however, people
like Alice descend into the world, with simple, direct
powers, and try their best to transmit the light of reason
to it. Such people are in an interesting but difficult
position. They are not merely physical beings; they have
come from a world above, and are animated very largely
by experiences of an inner character.
We
have already seen that there is a series of invisible
worlds, beginning just over the border of the physical:
first, a group that we call the psyche, made up of vitality,
emotion and lower mind; next, a group made up of higher
mind, intuition and will, the latter corresponding to
vitality; and finally, another world beyond all that,
into which consciousness leads. We suggested that this
last world corresponds to the physical, so that consciousness
is in a special way revealed by physical life. Hence,
those [Page
149] who
want to live physically correctly must somehow penetrate
into that world. The distinction, then, of the free
man in society is that he has entered that world. To
him the spiritual realm, just below the world of consciousness —
that is, generalized vitality (called in Christian literature
the vesture of glory), intuition and wisdom — is objective,
whereas those who dwell in the ego are surrounded by
cloudy spirituality. He is behind spirituality and so to
him it is a kind of show, an outward display, which he
looks upon objectively.
The strange experience of having
even the spiritual world objective makes him a realist.
One is apt to think of the Masters as idealists, dreamers,
but, in fact, their power of realistic action is much
greater than ours, because they belong largely to that
world beyond the spirit which is the key to the physical.
They are above time, for time in the ordinary human sense,
ends with spiritual experience. Hence, being beyond the
archetypal world, they look down on the plan of the inevitable
future, and do not waste their energies on idealism that
cannot be realized.
Many
beautiful characters waste themselves in the attempt
to alter society because [Page
150] they
do not know the direction in which society must go.
The
knowledge which the theosophical literature offers
of what is to happen in the ensuing periods of history
is unique. The Masters, of course, know what will result
from the world crisis. They understand the significance
of the machine, and foresee the future of humanity.
So with them we can throw our weight, even though it
be but small and personal, where it counts. The knowledge
which they have makes them reformers of a special kind.
Not only have they an eye to what actually exists in
modern times
— as modernists, understanding today, but they are also
futurists in that they know to what the machine, literary
and other developments lead. Therefore, they strike where
it counts and nowhere else.
Let
us first limit ourselves to persons who have been merely
touched by that tongue of flame from the highest realm.
We cannot expect to understand these people and their
conduct by merely observing them objectively. They
have a baffling, mask-like personality, though the
psyche and the body make them resemble normal, ordinary
human beings in many ways. Hence, [Page 151] undeveloped
people would not perceive their higher powers. Moreover,
they know that humanity can only live and grow in beauty
and power if it is free, and so they never impose their
insight on other people. In political life or social
action, therefore, they often do not appear as powerful
as in fact they are.
How, then, does the man act
who is not yet fully organized, but newly oriented to
freedom in the light of his new experiences?
The
touch of the conscious world has many effects. One
is the realization of unity. What kind of conduct would
result from such an experience? We have
already seen that all mankind would be alike. Hence no
national feelings, nothing like the recent amusing predicament,
for example, of the London G.P.O. Having adopted a cancellation
stamp for letters reading
"Buy British", it was discovered that the machine
was made in America!
Another amusing story is told of the naturalization of
a group of people in an American city. There was a gathering
of the patriotic clans, including, of course, the Daughters
of the American Revolution, the American Legion and several
other distinguished patriotic bodies, to [Page152] welcome
the new citizens. The new nationals were all given American
flag buttons to wear, and counseled to "Buy American".
Unfortunately, one of them examined the button and found
it stamped "Made
in Japan". Imagine the surprise of the Daughters! But
imagine still more the surprise of a group of Chinese peasants
who have gone to war, equally patriotically, and have been
blown up by munitions bought by the Japanese in America,
to find a card in the shambles reading, "This program
sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution and
the Killem Powder Works". There is, in short, another
view of nationalism! That is a side of the picture our
patriots do not see. They are keen on their own virtue,
for they are lost in their own spiritual world. They may
be individually desirable but innocent people, living in
Alice's Wonderland, as white queens, red queens, Duchesses,
or "Daughters".
Those who have touched that higher world of consciousness
are people who have given themselves to brotherhood without
any pretence. There is no pious mockery about it. There
is something simple and independent about such people,
so that they are [Page
153] honestly, freely
fraternal. It is impossible for them to mask under an artificial
spirituality the selfish purposes or mixed motives we have
so constantly in our world.
I
have another example before me. The other day I noticed
in the Press some headlines regarding a well-known
banker, which read something like this: " — makes
national appeal for the relief of home owners". The
headlines were written, of course, by men in the newspaper
office, not by the banker. Such a display of humanity!
Further on came a second series of longer headlines,
which read, "Existing rates
are a menace both to owner and to mortgagee". In
other words, the kindness to the owner was only by the
way. The words of the banker himself revealed his intent,
as chairman of a financial group, to support the sound
mortgages, the others having fallen by the way — that is,
to skim the cream. He says, "The
sacredness of the contractual financial obligations is
especially impressive to all the members". Since
when has a debt or mortgage been a sacrament? This reminds
one of the use of the word "sanctions" a while
ago in connection with going into Germany with arms.
All this [Page
154] pseudo-brotherhood
is part of that mixture of human and divine which we
find in individuals not wholly of that other world. Are
these the highest ethics of mankind?
If
we call volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and so on, "acts of God",
ethics must play a part in them. There is no doubt that
the sinking of continents, the striking of lightning
and every other natural phenomenon are all beneficial
in the end. Although individuals may be killed, benefit
ensues in the increased richness that comes to life.
When a continent sinks with a deplorable race, nature
has sat in judgment, and it is not for us to challenge
her. When we observe the jungle, for instance, because
the strong prey on the weak we read cruelty into the
law of the jungle, and say it is unmoral. But life, after
all, proceeds only by one creature living on another.
Nature
appears careless of individual and even of type, only
because we do not understand her larger purposes. But
we must look to our own conduct, not seek to excuse
ourselves by blaming nature.
Consider this case. The other day, whilst traveling, I
sat in the dining-car, opposite a lady who had a cat in
a basket, and we talked principally [Page 155] about
the cat. She complained bitterly of the needless cruelty
of the animal, which would not be satisfied with mice,
but insisted on killing birds. All the time she was deploring
the cruelty of animals, she sat eating chicken! To her
it was all right to eat a dead bird because the butcher,
not she, had killed it. She had rationalized her thoughts
and actions. Although she was filled with good intentions
and was probably very kind hearted, when it came to rigorously
reasonable conduct in physical life, that corresponds with
Atman, she failed. So
much for nature's ethics. Now, how about Man's?
Most
of us have not penetrated behind our own vital processes.
We are afraid that if we do we will die of discouragement.
Death is unfamiliar to us. We have not touched the
generalized world. Life and death seem such insoluble
problems, that we have never tried to go beyond, and
thus never understood ourselves fully. Jesus made a
perfectly clear statement as to human ethics, the ordinary
conduct required of human beings. He said,
"Love thy neighbour as thyself". Jesus was aware
of how much we love ourselves, and He knew if He could
only get us to love our neighbours as much, everything [Page156] would
be all right. The outcome of this would mean thinking in
social terms — a
state of society where nobody is of more value than anyone
else, and everyone acknowledges the fact quite simply,
as any spiritual person would.
The
ethics of a demi-god are now those of another world.
They are, first of all, those of a person who sees
the whole of beauty. His sense of ethics is based on
the supreme achievement of having viewed the whole
scene from a very high point. Besides being an artist
in the fullest sense of the world, he is a sportsman.
That is, in his social conduct he always allows the
other fellow to have the fullest chance and complete
freedom. Because he has been independent in his own
experience, he wants everyone else to grow, to live,
to learn, to have the fullest opportunity of expression.
If that expression involves his own death he is likely
to accept it as Jesus did, because his death might mean
more to the world than his life. It is clear to me that
the violent death of Jesus meant simply this: He had
taught all He could to the people around Him by living;
they could learn no more from that. Yet one last lesson
He might teach them — how to die. [Page 157] So
He died, although He might have escaped if He wished.
In
what category of ethics, of the three above-mentioned,
shall we place this recent item from the American Press? In
1929 there was a group of gentlemen who owned an automobile
business. This group sold out its common stock at $25
a share — today it is worth about
50 cents. It is said they made $ 18,000,000 by the sale.
After the crisis came, the company fell on hard times,
and for two years could not pay its quarterly preferred
dividends. This group continued to hold the control of
the preferred stock. When the company could no longer
pay on the preferred stock, they stepped in (according
to law!) and took control without paying any more, having
already made $18,000,000 from the sale of the common
stock. Now they are "rebuilding the company."
The company's current debts were only $1,500,000. If they
would pay that amount they would rescue the company; there
would be no need for receivership, but then they would
not come in as owners. Instead they have kept the $18,000,000
and the company too, and now they are posing as protecting
it. [Page 158]
When
people hear this they say they know that the Stock
Exchange or Wall Street is a gamble. But it is more
than a gamble — it
is a racket. In gambling the other person at least has
a chance. If you buy a ticket for the Irish Sweepstakes,
for instance, you have a chance to draw a horse. The
chance that you draw the winning horse is about one in
a million, but you know the odds from the first. When
you go into the stock and share market you have no idea
what you are doing, although you are probably safe in
expecting the worst.
The
society of enlightened men is based upon the principle
that everyone shall have a chance to live, to grow,
to become himself in the fullest sense of the word.
To humans, to acquire the ethical outlook of demigods
means simply to assume their point of view, which we
must try to see. They are wholly brotherly, whereas
we merely accept brotherhood theoretically, and go
on buying stocks and bonds. What are we to do? We
should take no interest on money, have nothing to do
with the kind of business that exploits others. Everything
we do should be honest, candid and simple. If there is
anything we can do to help build up a [Page
159] society
which gives the other fellow at least an equal chance,
that we should do.
Let
me take as a final example the psychological garbage
that disgraces the popular newspaper press on both sides
of the Atlantic. If we were really independent we would
say that this is a greater crime against humanity than
the physical and financial exploitation we have above
examined. What chance has a child into whose home comes
stuff of this kind, day after day? The free man in society
turns away from it in horror, for it is heavy with the
misery of human beings. The dregs of society furnish
the cream of the news.
All
this belongs to a dying age. Our world-crisis will
end these horrors. The free man has his own deep feelings,
and he sees this crisis broadly, as part of a plan.
Like crises have been the cause of great changes in
the past, with always the advent of a new culture,
indescribably beautiful. As he knows the plan and the
inevitability of the law, he is not impassioned about
these changes, but determined. This supreme attitude,
which can be understood and acquired by growth, encourages
action in the right direction and produces larger [Page
160] centres
of people who act in the way, along which nature is going,
so that they throw their weight in the right direction
and do not waste their energy in vain idealism. If ever
social guidance was needed it is now. The light that
the Masters can cast upon the scene is the only one that
will pierce the storm and stress of the era through which
we are passing. They are not dreamers, but persons of
action. A consideration of this may not only bring us
peace, but may cast a little light on the problems that
perplex and harass us. [Page
161]
CHAPTER
- 9 -
SOCIETY
IN THE ERA OF LEISURE
FOR
the first time in generations multitudes of people are
awake to the fact that this rich world, with all its
vast resources, has been for a long time without intelligent
leadership, social in its outlook. In a sense, this
situation marks the transition from the old world to
the new. Thousands of people realize that a new order
of society is about to appear. Two worlds are now clearly
visualized, even by the uncultured and ignorant, and
although they do not know how the new order of things
is to be brought about, they are determined that it shall
transpire.
How
can we contrast simply the attitude of the old world
with that of this other world that is to come? I might
quote a few words from two men who are both of the
old order, yet one of whom belongs also to the new
in his activities and peculiarly individual [Page
162] outlook.
I have selected, for my example of the old age, the revered
Dr. Frank Crane. His outlook, now that we have passed
it, is a kind of object lesson to all who once drifted
with the world to which he belongs, whose dead remains
lie now about us awaiting decent burial — a world in
which the attitude of individualism was on a selfish
rather than an ethical or spiritual basis. That selfish
individual outlook made the giants of industry and capitalism,
and Dr. Crane was a watchdog for that kind of society.
In some of his writings, although it comes out incidentally,
we see this curious, anti-social individualism. For example,
in 1928, he wrote of the case of a boy who was arrested
in New York for sleeping in the subway. It appears that
the boy was not poor. He had been able to save several
hundred dollars to give his mother by working by day,
and, in order to save the cost of lodging, sleeping by
night in the trains, just shuttling back and forth. He
was arrested for this and was to be put in jail, but
was later released and fined $3.00. Then Dr. Crane moralized
as follows:
"He ought to have been given a prize. He may have
technically violated the law by sleeping in the subway,
but the [Page 163] value
of his general actions far outweighs his wrongdoing. He
had learned the first lesson that a boy ought to learn,
and that is to save money." That, in short, was the
esteemed first lesson of this old world: to save money
by putting it in a bank.
Now
let me quote a recent single sentence, published over
the name of Henry Ford: "Things
must bow to life, for life is plainly notifying us that
she will no longer bow to things". This may not
be Mr. Ford's conscious philosophy, yet his conduct has
been in that direction. He has not made machines to govern
people, although no doubt his factory has resulted in
this, but has striven to build a new world that man may
be free to live in nature, doing his job with the help
of a machine.
It
is this new world of life which we wish to examine. One
of its characteristics, we may be sure, is leisure.
It is a debatable question how leisure will come. Some
think there must first be violence, a revolt of the
suffering elements, the lower strata of society against
the upper, producing confusion for a time and finally
bringing about a new social and political constitution.
Others say it can come only by some type of supervised
authority, [Page 164] which
will take over the machinery of government by declaring
that a public emergency exists, in that society has broken
down, and therefore that the constitution gives those
in public authority an extension of power not normally
theirs. (This course of action, in fact, was taken recently
in political America.) I think, however, that something
much more striking will occur the emergence of leadership
of a kind that we have never known before, not purely
political or social in the economic sense, but leadership
that has to do with cultural values that we shall desperately
need in the age that is to come. If we are going to have
leadership of only a fascistic or revolutionary kind
to bring us leisure without telling us how to use it,
before we are sufficiently organized or developed to
employ it rightly, it would be almost better to struggle
on as we are.
Let
us first examine the whole question of leisure. Instead
of a society like the Greek or Egyptian, where leisure
was only for the cultured classes, who therefore produced
a civilization which they handed out to the lowly,
we are coming to a stage of development where everyone
will have leisure equally, and with it, equality of
income. [Page165] Many
believe this inevitable, though perhaps not immediate.
The secret of how it is to transpire lies in the machine
and in freedom from the debt structure, and in nothing
else. It will not come from the rescue of the banks,
or international adjustments, or even total disarmament.
No amount of public works, artificially taking up the
slack of labour on a large scale, will give it to us.
The plain fact is that interest on the enormous, complicated,
internal debt structure at rates anywhere from five
to even two-hundred per-cent has been the crushing
burden! As long as new needs could be created — and
society was not yet satiated with the excitement of new
toys —
it was possible to keep people busy paying on that structure,
but now that technique and technology have developed to
a point where it is clear that fundamental necessities
are more than provided, and that society is a little satiated
with toys, that operation can be carried on no longer.
It really came to an end when we inaugurated the partial
payment system and mortgaged the future with regard to
things that were not essential.
We
now know that the machine can produce enough for all,
and the only question is the kind of society that will
come to fit the [Page 166] machine.
That means, of course, a society where the product
of the machine returns to the producer. Stuart Chase,
in reviewing a book on economics by Frederick Soddy,
the eminent physicist, said: "Money has evolved
on a basis of scarcity economy; the threat of not enough
to go round ever furnishing its dominating drive. The industrial
revolution, culminating in the marvels of modern technology,
has achieved a surplus economy — more than enough
to go round if the engineers were granted a free hand.
The two systems do not interlock; money puts the engineer
on half-time. Capacity production of industrial America
is twice the normal output of consumable goods. There
is no more important problem than that of dragging money
out of dreamland and forcing it to correlate with the curve
of physical production, as governed by the technical arts."
In
terms of reality, the new era means that all this money
which is privately owned must gradually become public
property, no matter at what price we buyout
the former owners. It is even now proposed that we buy
the railroads so that their revenue will go back to the
state to refresh eternally the [Page
167] resources
of the country. That policy one presumes will be gradually
extended until at last there will be no place where any
man can put his money privately, in the old sense. The
machines will bring about this change, with the revision
of the debt structure. We may have to cut our capital
to half or one-quarter of what it is at present, or abolish
it altogether, which means that in effect all economic
wealth — petroleum, mines, forestry, etc., all of
which are public welfare institutions — will
be gradually bought in or confiscated by the government. The
banking system will be revised accordingly. No doubt
in time the post office will become the banker, for already
many are putting what little they have in the postal
savings bank.
Through
all this kind of enterprise, we are gradually approaching
an era in which the fundamental necessities of human
life will be guarded by society for society. That,
of course, is sensible as well as necessary. Imagine
a country putting its forestry into private hands!
All that competition can do is to cut down the trees.
It will seldom put them in again, because it cannot
afford to wait, but the government can, for it is there
always. The same with petroleum. When a [Page
168] field
is discovered, men will no longer come and destroy 50
per-cent of that wealth. The government will claim all
these fields for society, and will develop one at a time,
getting out 80 per-cent of the oil and using all the
by-products for the benefit and protection of the people
as a whole. Such an order of society has long been anticipated. Money
owned privately will later receive no interest, no matter
where it is kept. And the longer we keep it the less
it will become, since money is energy and must obey the
thermal laws.
The
question which people now raise is: when we have such
a state of affairs, what about humanity? Greece and
Egypt had security, more or less, between wars, with
a leisure class to keep the lower classes busy, but when
there is leisure and security for everyone, what will
happen? The problem of what we are to do with our spare
time is very real. The lower classes are undeveloped — whatever
we mean by "lower classes"! Aldous Huxley,
about three years ago, aptly said: "For these people,
existence on the lower, animal level is perfectly satisfactory.
Given food, drink, the company of their fellows, sexual
enjoyment, and plenty of noisy distractions from without,
they are [Page
169] happy.
They enjoy bodily, but hate mental, exercise. They cannot
bear to be alone, or to think. Contemporary urban life,
with its jazz bands, its negroid dancing, its movies,
theatres, football matches, newspapers, and the like,
is for them ideal. They can live out their lives without
once being solitary, without once making a serious mental
effort (for the work which most of these people do is
mainly mechanical and requires little or no thought),
without once being out of sight or sound of some ready-made
distraction. The notion that one can derive pleasure
from arduous intellectual occupations is to such people
merely absurd. More leisure and more prosperity mean
for them more dancing, more parties, more movies, more
distractions in general. Most of the inhabitants of ancient
Rome belonged to this type; so probably do most of the
inhabitants of modern New York and
London. And unless some system of eugenics is practised
in the interval, there is no reason to suppose that the
inhabitants of the great Cities in the year A.D.
3000 will be radically different."
This
takes no account of nature's trump card — children, the
fresheners of earth. With a system of education that
teaches children to [Page 170] be
free of authority, even of the school teacher (who ought
to teach hidden in the closet so that the pupil could
not be modeled after him!), we would have a society that
was independent, simple and original, and therefore able
to make the right use of leisure. It is unmistakable
that children by nature love things worth while — the
out-of-doors, nature, games, etc. To evoke from
children a feeling of independence, simplicity, originality,
we have to organize society on the basis of a new kind
of leadership. In this new age they are not supposed
to obey their leaders, or to believe anything unless
it is an established fact. As for social policy, if
they are to fit into the society that is coming, as they
grow up it will be their business
to question it at every step.
That
society will cherish individualism. Most
people believe that when society organizes itself it
will stamp out individualism. But it is our society
that destroys individualism, not the future society. We
of today either live on others or for others. People
who have no jobs live on somebody else, and that applies
to many house-wives, whose job at home does not fill
their lives because machinery now gives them so much [Page
171] leisure.
Thousands of men live on others also — psychically
and in other ways. What we want badly is a form of society
where, from childhood, people will be trained to be unselfish
individualists. Genius comes only from people who are
highly individualistic.
Now we take people and compel them to earn a living, which,
though precarious, is necessary for those they love. So
they are bound. On the other hand, those who depend on
that living want to do nothing whatever to interrupt it,
and consequently come to the point where they will not
for any consideration interfere with that precarious security.
They thus betray themselves. But when we have the kind
of society where nobody depends on anyone else, because
there is enough to go around, we shall all be free and
independent. If the bookkeeper finds he should have been
a poet, and the man who has written poetry for twelve years
discovers that nobody wants to read it and that his real
bent is mathematics, he and the book-keeper exchange vocations.
Today this is impossible to the book-keeper on account
of paying the balance on the furniture.
Besides
this coming socialization, which [Page
172] will
produce that special freedom, individualism, and leave
room for originality, independence and the rest of
it, there will come inevitably out of that leisure
a new culture, for life is rhythmic procedure. We shall
have a new outlook toward art, humanity and religion.
We have seen it already in past cycles in architecture.
Gothic architecture was the product of people who lived
for the emotions. The vast cathedral in the midst of
a town that otherwise, except for its palaces, was squalid,
was the one place where people could find relief in high
emotions. So the buildings were emotional spires rushing
up to heaven, with rose windows disguising the real light
of day; and in the dim beauty inside one could shut oneself
off from one's misery. So, also, the Greek temple was
simple, sunlit and cheerful, as befitted a Greek. Already
our own architecture has been stripped of all its ornaments,
and we are now about to build on the basis of the bones
a style that will fit the coming society. Modern economics
have made the office building — there
was no money for ornament, everything had to be stripped
to the bone, to bare steel and stone, to get the utmost
in rents. But in future we [Page 173] shall
put new flesh and blood on those bones.
Finally,
we shall see the return of the guidance of those cultured
people, the Masters, that we need so badly, for in a
free society this is possible. In the centuries that
go by we shall see the Masters coming to guide the people,
not as kings ruling on thrones, but as kings of culture,
giving society guidance, living amongst mankind when
society is fitted to receive them, and thus crowning
the arts, both social and individual, with their genius — for
the Masters are artistic as well as humanitarian. Indeed,
these are linked characteristics.
This
matter of the redemption of leisure with culture has
also been anticipated in the teachings of religion,
as in the case of Jesus.
The devil suggested, in a famous passage, that Jesus should
arrange with Deity that man should live without labour,
but that he should be held accountable for his sins. Jesus
declined on the ground that if man had only leisure his
sins would increase so fast that even Deity could not take
care of them. He said, in effect: What people need is soul.
Rather than redeem them physically by bread alone I will
give them my beauty, and that will redeem them. If humanity [Page
174] has both beauty
and leisure, beauty will redeem leisure.
Nature
will give us the needed factors for change. India is
one. The Indian treasures the science of individual
self-sufficiency, which gives us poets and artists
of all kinds as well as leaders in public welfare.
Society will be organized with the help of Oriental
thought, which is redemption, because it holds the
inner as important as the outer. Genius arises from
the invisible worlds. Hence, unless we have a culture
in which nations explore the invisible, we cannot have
genius. India will point the way, as she will provide
us with philosophy, and supply us with teachers who
will come in the right circumstances. Then we shall
have that knowledge of the vital structures of the invisible
and the effect of the invisible on the visible to give
us a new order and outlook. In India this has been achieved
through knowledge such as that of mantram and yantram.
The caste system, ideally, is also based on the archetypes
of nature. China will give us knowledge, too, but India
more especially, for she is our Aryan cousin, thinking
in terms intelligible to the Aryan mind. [Page 175]
Second,
there is Russia. The occult point of view about Russia
is most interesting. Russia thus far has been in reserve,
as a runner-up to fulfil the function that has been
America's destiny should she fail. And now that the
time has come when America is about to accept her destiny,
Russia is no longer kept in shackles, but rushes forward
to quicken her own and America's development. When
new races appear some country has to give them birth.
It is America's destiny to produce, with Australia
and New Zealand, the intuitional race that will follow
the Aryan. Nature cannot afford mistakes, and so she
always has a second line of defence, another wave coming
on to take the leader's place should there be some
failure. In the eventuality that certain souls should
decline to incarnate in America to make this new effort,
and nature thus be frustrated there, she keeps another
nation in reserve. That nation has been Russia. This
has been known in esoteric circles since long before
the Russian revolution. Having the technical genius,
America, in accepting her destiny, will no doubt make
that transition in her own way; and, I trust, without
the bloodshed and turmoil there was in Russia. [Page 176] Thus
Russia, India, Britain and America have in their hands
the destiny of the new race and the new age, the freshest
contributions coming from Russia, America and India,
the stable frame from England. All this, which is the
occult teaching, will work out in due course.
When
this has come to pass and a great world-empire or commonwealth
has been set up, with India, the English-speaking peoples
and Russia the dominating factors, there will come at
long last a new race in America. That hour is near at
hand, only a few centuries away. And with the coming
of that new race the hour will strike when the Masters
must live physically amongst us again. This race will
be physically, psychically and spiritually different
from the Aryans of Europe as these were in turn different
from the Atlanteans. It is to be a race of intuition,
and the Masters will live amongst men to evoke this quality
in humanity. The kind of religions and rituals which
will be developed by them, the kind of society which
they will have — all this will
be fascinating to see and experience.
Before
this can transpire the profound shake-up which we are
at present experiencing [Page
177] is necessary, and
we are by no means through it. There have yet to be more
astonishing changes. These will be brought about by agitators. But
what of spiritual and philosophical agitators? These
are a little different from the usual kind, but also
persons who will not bow to unworthy authority, people
who have outstripped authority. They are not more Christian
then they are Buddhist, not more Buddhist than Hindu,
and, in India, not more Hindu than Christian. These people
do not believe in nationalism in a narrow sense, and
are therefore, by their independence, agitators. There
cannot be too many of these. We are coming to see their
value more and more. Some
years ago Blatchfordwrote, in Merrie England (1893): "The
agitator is not a nice man. He disturbs the general calm;
he shakes old and rotten institutions with a rude hand;
he drags into the light of day some loathsome and dangerous
abuse which respectable rascality or cowardly conservatism
has carefully covered up and concealed under a film of
humbug. He tramples upon venerable shame; he injures
old-established reputations; he bawls out shameful truths
from the house-tops; he is fierce and noisy; uses [Page 178] strong
language; and very often in his rage against wrong, or
in the heat of his grief over unmerited suffering, he
mixes his own truth with error and carries his righteous
denunciations to the point of injustice. The privileged
classes hate him; the oppressed classes do not understand
him; the lazy classes shun him as a pest. He finds himself
standing, like Ishmael, with every man's hand against
him."
The
agitator along occult and theosophical lines is, however,
a new sort, being of the kind who knows the plan and
does not protest only because he has a grievance, but
because he knows that tomorrow will produce a new
culture centering around England as a national unit,
in which American and all English-speaking countries
will have a great future, a tomorrow that will produce
leisure and security for all. He realizes that this
can only be accomplished by leveling out the present
world-economy, in which people dwell without security.
He knows that of that leisure and that culture will
be born the newest baby of all the races, the New American,
and that in America will be produced a civilization
in which the inner and outer will be joined. The American, [Page
179] with
his sensitiveness, his simplicity, his generosity, his
love of beauty, which has gone almost to the extreme
of loving luxury beyond honour, will give birth to a
race where the invisible will be studied as a living
structure, interlocking with the visible. His effect
may not be felt so much on society in its economic aspect
as his influence will be more subtle, but his changes
will be all the more effective because of that.
Progress
is commensurate to the degree in which earnest people
associate themselves, form groups that advocate intelligently
something that is inevitable in any case, and shake
up men's thoughts as well as their lives. For, however
feeble they may feel themselves to be, they are strong
because they have the Masters behind them. The glory
and power of nature's ordination of a new society will
be with them, and invested with this power their delight
is sure, since they are working with that which must
inevitably be. Such labour is a reward in itself; neither
security nor glory in a physical sense, but the inward
peace that comes from moving intelligently with that
which directs nature and common man as well. [Page 180]
CHAPTER
- 10 -
VITAL
EXPLORATION OF THE INVISIBLE
IN
the foregoing chapter we tried to examine the state
of a man who is independent, original and simple, with
regard to his duty to society, not only as an isolated
individual with a unique experience, but as a person
with a high social sense, such as the Masters are.
Unquestionably, such a man would believe in a greater
democracy, one with forms unknown to us today except
by such meaningless terms as Socialism, Communism — or
even an anarchy, in which every individual is a law
unto himself, because he knows the eternal laws, and
therefore lives at a better and much more useful level
in society than could a man of good intention who is
without a knowledge of nature's laws.
Let
us now examine the principal development in this new
world, which will be signalized by leisure with security.
Leisure, we found, is the only characteristic of the
new [Page 181] society
upon which all agree. We have discussed the fact that
the coming of leisure might not be wholly happy or beneficial
if, with it, we did not gain some new attitude toward
life, humanity and nature — a
new sense of the duty of the individual both toward that
which is outside himself and that which is within. If
life in that era of leisure is to be just an endless
series of cross-word or jig-saw
puzzles, and nothing else, leisure has no meaning. Used
only for pleasure it destroys humanity.
It
is a truism that the world has grown so small that,
in certain directions, discovery has practically ceased.
Both poles have been trodden and flown over. We know
most corners of the planet, except part of the Himalayas
and some of the fastnesses of the Amazonian basin.
We know a great deal about the constitution of matter,
and have reached the stage where its further study
must proceed insecurely and slowly because of the difficulty
of making instruments with a sufficiently fine reaction.
We have extended our knowledge of the external universe
until, at last, we realize the homogeneity of the system.
On every side, as it were, our knowledge has reached
out to the [Page 182] physical
borderland. We now ask ourselves what we shall do next.
There is, of course, a tremendous territory yet to
be explored in the arts, but that is not enough. Everyone
must realize that if the world were reduced to a monotony
of leisure, with only the things we now know available,
there would be no bite to existence, but only a terrible
ennui. This we can see already affecting many young
people.
From
that unhappy fate, however, nature will preserve us.
We can anticipate that there will be an immense increase
in the exploration of the invisible world as a vital
territory. As we have seen in previous chapters, we
can only hope to understand the invisible by approaching
it as something living, surrounding and interpenetrating
this world. Humanity will desperately need to know
the invisible as the source and the goal of its life,
and there will therefore result an enormous increase
of knowledge in that direction. To this end, more and
more people capable of guiding humanity in this field
will be needed, until eventually the Masters themselves
will find it possible to return amongst men, to give
by their personal presence and guidance a knowledge of
the [Page
183] invisible to the
world at large. The technique is dreamed of only by a
few, and known to a still smaller number. When once the
goal is shown, and the method to some extent explained,
hundreds of thousands, at present lost in the desert
of grossly materialistic science, will transfer their
leisure and activities to the new study. Life will then
be strikingly different.
Life will be much more hopeful,
especially for children, who, because they come so recently
from the invisible and bring with them so much that is
new, are in every sense of the word the hope of humanity.
Children will be understood at least a little better
than they are now. They will not be judged merely as
the products of certain environments. They will be regarded
as strange beings, coming to our world with dreams warm
and radiant within them. By an understanding of the invisible,
whence all children arise, we shall understand them better,
and help them to make their dreams the substance of our
life. Nothing is more wonderful than to see teachers
crying out for a new society.
There
are, moreover, certain guiding principles for a study
of the invisible. [Page
184] Occultists are aware
of the experiments of spiritualism, of psychical research
and of medical science in so far as the latter bears
on the invisible, as well as of the explorations of physics
and chemistry and speculation as regards electricity,
but their attitude is strangely different from that of
men and women working in those fields in the following
respects:
First,
their attitude is that there is close at hand an inner
existence in every individual and anybody who wants
to can know it by objectifying his psyche and his soul-life
before his own consciousness.
Second, they recognize that the invisible is incredibly
complex, but that as a human being experiences within himself,
in summary form, everything in the invisible, he can understand
it, however complex, if he looks within himself.
Third, they believe that the inner corresponds to the outer:
not only do we possess inner bodies, but they, within themselves,
correspond to one another very beautifully. Indeed, there
is no physical thing possible throughout nature except
it be an accumulation guided and moulded by the invisible.
So we may say with regard to forms in space and the relation
of forms — [Page
185] indeed,
the whole external world — that
the inner is the compelling factor and the directing intelligence. Fourth,
because of this it is the inner we seek.
Hence
is derived a new point of view on many matters of moment.
Take, for instance, the mystery of the relationship
between man and woman. One of the most baffling items
in modern knowledge and in universal experience is
the psychology of the sexes — we
might say of the several sexes, for there is a third,
children. The sexes remain the problem they are today
for the reason that they are quite evidently wholly alike
in some respects and wholly different in others. The
point is that the nearer we come to the physical, the
more striking the differences, so that in the body we
see the development of the glandular and soft tissues
in woman, as contrasted with the muscular and bony system
in man. Because of the excessive emphasis upon physical
life we find the adjustment of these different manifestations
difficult. That is one problem the future will face.
The outline of the inquiry is available in theosophical
literature, though, so far, little has been done in the
investigation of the psychic evolution of sex. On examining [Page 186] the
relationship between the sexes in the inner, vital sense,
we see immediately that the differences diminish as we
retreat into the invisible until at last, on reaching
the soul, the distinction is dropped entirely. There
is a new relationship; humanity as a whole becomes masculine
and a parallel order of evolution, the angelic hosts
become feminine; so that positive and negative remain,
as I imagine they do to the end of the universe. To understand
and employ the differences of sex one only needs to examine
the vital and necessary differences in the physical bodies,
in the emotions, and in the lower mind. At that point
the distinction vanishes, since there we enter the realm
of the soul, and between the sexes there is no difference
in growth of soul.
When
studied in this way the distinction becomes a genuine
source of enlightenment. We see how natural is the
excess activity of emotion in the glandular tissues
and short-fibred muscles, whereas in the long-fibred
muscles there is an excess of will pouring through
mind, and we understand the consequent distinction
between character through emotions and character through
mind, of the two sexes. Therefore, we look [Page 187] for
the embodiment of emotions in one sex and of mind in
the other, because the forces of the soul are flowing
just a little differently. Yet we also look for complete
unity; for, after all, the bodies are homogeneous all
the way through, with the differences merely temporary,
and when the soul is reached these differences vanish.
Still
more important is it that we realize the function of
the intermediate sex, children. In children the soul
can be seen because sex is not specialized. The particularity
is neither vitality and emotion, nor mind nor matter.
In the era to come children will be venerated because
of their power, their strange prophetic vision, their
incredible union by neutral purity with the soul. Children
will indeed be set apart as gods, young and beautiful,
from whom adults can learn. We shall see in the future
a return to the conception of the symbolic identity
of man with God, the Father, and woman with the Virgin
Mary, Maya, the feminine aspect, while the child will
be recognized as the real intercessor, the Christ,
the son aspect. We shall have a new accent in religion,
in which it will be recognized that Christ is born
in every family that has a [Page
188] child,
and we shall worship children because of their purity,
simplicity and gentleness, because of their close link
with the soul. Out of that new understanding and veneration
of children, which can be achieved only by the study
of the invisible, will come further help to humanity.
The interlocking between the
invisible and the visible gives reality to both. Within
the last fifty years our medical friends have discovered
the ductless glands, and have learned of another form
of control of the body besides the brain. The endocrine
glandular system exercises a so-called chemical control,
manufacturing from the blood, and returning to it, substances
which formerly were called hormones but are now more
generally known as the autocoids, a term that is applicable
to the positive and negative (or inhibitory) ductless
glandular secretions.
We
have seen that the principal glands correspond to the
Oriental chakras — the
pineal corresponding to the crown chakram, the
pituitary to the brow, and so on. The medical attitude
in the past was that when these glands secreted they
produced sensations. That is, if a dog runs at you, the [Page
189] sensorium
reports to the mind and on to the glands, and the body,
through the lower portion of the brain, makes its adjustments,
which include the release of special autocoids, with
the result that the blood drains away from the skin and
you blanch. There would also be muscle tension owing
to special changes and so on. The point of view was that
the perception of the dog automatically produced certain
glandular secretions, the whole thing being mechanical.
Therefore, there were no emotions, and even falling in
love was only a matter of glandular disturbance, confusedly
perceived.
Very
few now hold such a crassly materialistic attitude.
But there is a danger, in that when we discover that
the emotions are really separable from the body and,
indeed, leave it temporarily in sleep and completely
at death, we may fall into the equal and opposite error
of believing that the invisible is wholly responsible
for the external. Occultists need never make that mistake,
but it is quite common in some groups of students,
who believe vaguely that it is possible to ignore the
body, and yet if they arouse the right glands these
will set up some kind of activity of their own, and
the [Page
190] resultant
exaltation will be so marvelous that they will be irresistible.
There is no doubt that mind and emotion have their
own powerful functions, but, as we have seen, the physical
world is materially self-contained, and the psychic
world is also materially self-contained. So naturally,
any relationship between the physical body and the
emotions must be harmonic. The bridge is life, not
matter. When we feel emotions, what happens is that
the matter of the mind does not affect the matter of
the body directly, but that the life of the mind alters
the life of the body. The common causal principle goes
back to the soul and beyond. Our mind and emotions are
part of that causal principle, and though we may alter
in one world we have not necessarily altered in another.
Therefore we have to do battle at both levels — physical
as well as emotional. This view leads to a doctrine of
elegant precision and the reality of both worlds. It
is not a doctrine of division but of unity, though, of
course, the sciences of both worlds must be studied.
Our attitude towards emotion, and mind, and the body
is perfectly realistic. No matter how beautifully exalted
our emotions may be, if we go on eating [Page 191] pork
chops we must take the physical consequences. There is
the seed-bed of physical evil, no matter how beautiful
the flowers above the rank soil. Once we have that point
of view the whole relationship of inner to outer becomes
reasonable.
That
rational point of view India holds. She knew about
the glands centuries ago, and the Indian has conceded
the need to lead the physical life necessary to sublimate
the desires of the body — hunger, thirst,
desire for self-reproduction, rest, etc.. He understands
those laws of life and of the matter in which they operate.
He likewise understands the laws of mind and emotion,
and by that correspondence in harmonic unity of the realms
of psyche and body he has been able to prevision that
which we are now just beginning to discover through our
chemical analysis. Transcending psyche and soul is consciousness.
Its nature is impossible to describe in a few words,
but analogy is found in chemistry which recognizes that
certain reactions proceed more rapidly in the presence
of particular kinds of entities that do not themselves
react — catalytic agents. Consciousness may be said to
operate as a catalytic agent on matter, itself never [Page
192] changing. It is
outside the world of psyche — beyond space; and outside
the world of the soul — beyond time. How, then, can it
change? Yet it is consciousness, not soul or psyche,
that has entered into everything that has ever transpired.
It has called out all the increasing activity of matter,
building up all the hundreds of millions of forms
through the centuries, yet it has remained unchanged
from primordial states. Every great teacher of humanity
known to us has testified to the presence of this eternal,
changeless entity within himself. We see it also in the
most ordinary people; for, indeed, it is all humanity.
It has existed since the dawn of time and will remain
while there is a universe in which it may operate. The
Indian people visualize this as a lame man with sight
riding on the shoulders of a blind man. The blind man
is the material world;on
his shoulders sits consciousness, watchful and observant.
But matter wearies of carrying consciousness and is finally
overcome by the pressure. Then consciousness remains,
bereft of mobility, awaiting the evocation of some other
carrier from the ashes of the first. The combination
of the two, carried and carrier, is life. This [Page
193] eternal
and unchanging entity is beyond death and indifferent
to death. Nothing exhausts tissues so much as concentration
of attention.
If
this unifying element is the supreme principle, we
may wonder that everything is not uniform. If, in itself,
it is unity, how can it give rise to such diversity? The
Indian declares that the answer is in the matter that
encases it. When consciousness ensouls matter and a
world begins, its first veilings are of very fine matter,
which become coarser and coarser, until after many
changes we reach the physical. The reason that there
is not uniformity in the physical is that it is the
last of the worlds, and changes and variety without
come from the changes within it. In the very beginning
the first veiling of matter which is projected is,
like the entity which made it, more uniform. The
highest and most celestial worlds are so like consciousness,
though made of matter, that no words can possibly explain
them. But even here are the inherent properties of matter,
the three universal gunas, seen below as
the generalizations of mass, momentum and stress. There
Gods exist that are so near to the thing beyond, consciousness, [Page
194] that
they are Gods from the start. These Gods in turn fashion
the lower worlds according to their own personalities,
recalled from ages gone by, moulding the psychic and
physical worlds in an infinite variety. That is the way
in which this diversity arises. In the invisible worlds,
both psychical and spiritual, there is variety of life
and of form inherent in the matter whereof they are built.
Humanity
is consequently in a curious position. We are different
from other entities because of the kind of God that
gave birth to us — the
human causal principle. Unlike other creatures in the
physical world, we must attain the highest worth, while
still remaining physical. We are unique in that. There
are other lines of evolution on this earth, but they
are quite different. For instance, when fishes reach
a certain point they cease embodiment in physical life
and become psychic and finally spiritual, first fairies,
then angels. Just what an angel-from-fish would be like
I am unprepared to venture! Humanity, on the other hand,
remains within the physical world until quite free. We
reincarnate over and over in physical bodies until perfection
ensues, [Page 195] and
then at last we may surrender the psychic with the physical,
going over to the realm of consciousness once and for
all. When we compare man with other vital entities around
him we see how strange he is. Compare him, for instance,
with the primitive gods, these beings that existed when
time was not. Homer and the Greeks believed that there
is a kind of god which does not have our moral sense
because he has never been born physically. The laws of
the physical world, the requirements of impartible matter,
are without meaning for such beings, because they dwell
in radiant energy, because they have not lived in the
physical world. So we see the gods interfering in human
affairs, fighting with the strong and with the weak,
making sport with humanity. Here, again, we see consciousness
as "lila" — sport, not moral, in our sense.
We can only be one with the gods in that respect when
we are indifferent to life and death.
It
is interesting, also, to compare the dead with the
living. It is often said that the dead change very
little — Uncle Jake is still your Uncle Jake!
but there is, of course, a difference. Essentially, in
his inner nature, he is the same, but he is no longer
clothed in [Page
196] physical
matter. The radiant energy in which he now dwells makes
him increasingly indifferent to the world, a little like
the gods, though not so intelligent nor so beautiful.
He is out of the world of three-dimensional space, and
he can move as never before. It is a great mistake to
regard the dead as omniscient, as they do in spiritualistic
circles. When a man is dead he may know
more, but it does not necessarily follow, the dead do
experience a life very different from the physical. When
a man dies there is a curious adjustment of the matter
of the bodies. In physical life the bulk of the aura
is locked up in, or interpenetrates, the physical form.
The aura outside of the body is tenuous and thin, extending
to about eighteen inches on all sides, but that part
which is enclosed within the body is coarse and dense.
When passing out of the body in sleep into the psychic
or emotional world, it is seen by clairvoyants that the
portion of the aura, which is the counterpart of the
physical body, is so dense that the remaining extension
of the aura is hardly noticeable by comparison. When
death occurs, however, this dense matter, after a few
weeks, is redistributed to the edges of the aura, and
the [Page 197] inner
now is much finer than before. The purpose of the psychic
life is to increase the scope of the emotions and mind,
not physical reactions. This state persists for centuries,
until another birth.
The
dead can do for us and to us many things that were
not possible when they were alive, because the psyche
is now so powerful. So the dead person is to be respected,
or feared, as the case may be. This fact, no doubt,
is behind ancestor worship, and it is no wonder that
the Chinese — an old and wise people — worship
ancestors, as all animistic people do, knowing the ancestor
is much stronger dead than alive. So even do Christians,
on the Day of All Souls.
There
are other prime factors of the invisible to be explored
in the future. The invisible world contains not only
human beings, living and dead. It also contains what
correspond to animals and amorphous matter in this
world. These are fairies and elemental matter, the
latter sometimes called in theosophical terminology
elementals, and sometimes called the elementaries, corresponding
to our solids, liquids and gases. In the invisible worlds
the elementals exchange with us by thought and feeling — not
by [Page 198] bumping
into us, but by absorption, so that there is a direct
exchange. They are, so to speak, the by-products of the
psychic life, and are produced by other entities as well,
but strongly by man. The invisible world is crowded with
them. Human beings digest psychic matter and throw it
off. Fairies also live on psychic matter and cast off
forms, the by-products of fairy life. The fairy is important
even though directly he has little to do with humanity.
The elemental life he passes off is to us a kind of healing
influence, a surcease from our own elementals, much as
plants give off for us oxygen and absorb from us carbon
dioxide. Knowledge of this will in the future spell the
death of cities. We live only with the off-scouring of
our own society. Cities are saturated with elemental
stuff thrown off by the dregs of humanity. It is like
living in an eternal celestial cemetery. We live and
prey on each other all the time. That is a terror we
shall escape when we understand the invisible as a vital
process, the fairies as facts.
Each
of us has a duty and a privilege. The duty is to tell
our friends about the reality of the invisible worlds;
the privilege is that [Page
199] of working
with those who know this fact and are making the new
world in those terms. It is quite true that the new world
will come in any case. But the question is, are we going
to have the fun of helping usher it in? If we adjust
ourselves to the invisible we can make this new world
in our own little environment. This will redeem leisure
as nothing else could, passing from the individual to
society. If leisure is to come alone, then, in the soil
of gross physical life, let humanity perish; but if leisure
comes redeemed by the invisible, in that quick soil humanity
shall flourish. Much rests with us, who know. [Page
200]
CHAPTER
- 11 -
THE
RETURN OF THE DIVINE KINGS
THERE
is a curious phenomenon in history which at first seems
paradoxical. It is that nature constantly compensates
her own exaggerations and the willfulness of mankind. During
the last several centuries Europe, for instance, has
had a religion that is the antithesis of the European
character — for
we are, as a whole, factual, scientific and rather hard-headed.
The religion of Europeans compensates for their nature,
for, if I may say so without being disrespectful, it
appears, at a lower level of observation, to be almost
wholly unreasonable. The race is logical and the religion
is illogical, or, if you prefer, super-logical. Such
compensation is true, not only of Europe, but of the
world. In India was founded a religion so wholly reasonable
that it should content the people of Europe exceedingly,
but they have never received it. Moreover, it has gone
from its [Page 201] homeland,
India, which is in possession of a race of logical and
reasonable people, to China and Japan. For Buddhism is
dead in India. Indeed, the only Aryans who now have any
of the religion of Buddha are the people of Ceylon, who
have in many ways a strong admixture of the emotional in
the mental. The religion, reasonable as it is, has gone
elsewhere — to
China, where it served a race which was then more emotional
and mystical than reasonable. So, also, the religion
of the people who formerly inhabited Judea is one of
power, the race having been denied power for many centuries.
Nature has thus compensated every race by the faith,
or attitude, which it supplies for culture.
That
is true in other ways, as we observe in the case of
evolution and revolution. The revolutionary movement
proclaims every man to be as good as his fellows. At
the same time that nature released revolution she released
also the idea of evolution, to stand beside revolutionary
democracy, the one the corrective of the other. Evolution
tells us that individuals are not all the same, but
very different, and that the whole story of the development
of the universe is a [Page 202] revelation
of inequalities. When properly
applied the idea of evolution would give revolutionary
society an understanding of evolutionary differences
in humanity, so that in democracy we could have reverence
for cultural leadership. Then with this challenge of
equal opportunity there would be some recognition of
inner, relative capacities.
If
we accept all this, it comes as no surprise that this
paradox is to go on in history. We are entering a stage
where, indeed, I hold, it will be even more prominent,
for along with the increase of democracy will come
the emergence of divine kings. In short, my argument
is that the Masters may emerge just because of democracy,
for we shall need them badly. The present democracy
is the recognition of the counting of heads — most
of them empty — and
we desperately need among those heads a few that are
full. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to expect this
return as part of the beneficence of nature. The term "kings"
may sound out of date, I acknowledge, since kings have
more or less gone. But the new society will reverence leadership,
in an inner sense, so much more surely than it reverences
forms of democracy that these men, by their obvious [Page 203] capacity,
will become the counselors of society.
How
will these people return to us? How will they emerge,
and why? In my judgment
they will come only if asked. Leisure will demand of
people a study of the invisible through which they will
discover the existence of super-human beings, and when
we all know of the Masters I think we shall quite naturally
ask them to come forth from seclusion. An intelligent
and sincere invitation will bring them to us. It may
be said that we are even now constantly asking for spiritual
guidance. True, Congress continually invokes divine guidance,
but it is really only asking for approval of its deeds. If
the Great Jehovah introduced a bill to increase production
and send the increase to starving people all over the
world, Senator Wilblah N. Borem, of Hootah, would prove
it unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court would uphold
him. Our little national prejudices eat away our ideals.
The invitation I am contemplating is not of that Congressional
character. It is one imbued with the knowledge that the
invisible worlds are so constituted that we can develop
ourselves in them successfully only by the help [Page 204] of
those who are strong in them already. Such an attitude
would appeal to the Masters, and in a world in which
they might live quietly and peaceably with man, a world
which is bound to come — they
would emerge.
Many
feel that the Masters' apparent lack of interest in
practical affairs is an obstacle to their emergence.
Why should they come and teach us how to live our daily
life? Cannot they, by
pressure on the soul or psyche, teach us all that is
necessary? Why a physical presence?
The answer lies in the correspondence between the physical
and consciousness. The physical itself is the direct mirrored
image of the lowest form of atma, consciousness, and therefore
the physical presence of the Masters is of great importance.
Their bodily presence has a kind of magical power which,
under the proper conditions, would effect an evolution
of the physical that would be of incredible value to society.
The Masters are much interested in physical society. Otherwise,
why should many of them remain on the planet and take pupils
in physical incarnation? When bodies are such a burden,
why do they wear them, if it is not for some good [Page
205] end?
They do it because the physical world and all its operations — nightmare
though it be for some — is
for them of great beauty. So through living with us they
can help us with problems that otherwise could not be solved.
As
long ago as the 1880'S, a Personage, whom we may call
a Master of Masters, was asked by one of the Masters
to pronounce upon the western world. He did so, and
the document may be found in the Letters
of the Masters of Wisdom, First Series, page 7. The
words of this Personage, recorded by a pupil, are astonishing
to some. He said (in the 1880'S) that nothing could be
done with the western world until everybody was freed
from the nightmare of earning a living. He said this
because the Masters know how much of an obstacle the
physical can be to higher things. If we continually worry
about a livelihood, living for people who live on us,
we cannot be happy, we cannot be independent; things
are not simple, they can never be original. So we find
in the words of this seer a definition of progress in
terms of physical life. His interest in our economic
system shows us how very glad, indeed how eager, the
Masters would be to [Page
206] live
amongst us and give us the benefit of their knowledge.
Their coming is altogether a reasonable thing, if it
is desirable from their point of view as well as from
ours.
The
question is what is the nature of the obstacles to
their emergence? What keeps
them from coming to us when they so much want to help
and when so many need them? One of the difficulties
is that so few people really accept the existence of
the Masters. You cannot very well sincerely invite an
illusion or a dream to come and live with you! There
must be conviction; better than that, there must be knowledge,
by some at least. People will not take action because
they are not quite sure. One of the functions of a book
like this is to convince a few people, or make their
conviction more profound, that the Masters do exist and
can be invited. That invitation can be issued by anyone.
There are so few who understand that when a person knows
and acts, the Masters see it and are rejoiced. It is
not a question of our level of formal education; it is
a question of inner life, attitude and actions — whether
we are trying to make a world suitable to them. That is
all that is [Page
207] involved
in this particular obstacle. All we need to do is to
mould our life to that end, and to increase the understanding
and expectations of the people around us. Then we can
call out to them and they will come to us.
In the past in Egypt and India
and other lands the Masters were understood and served
in many ways. No doubt they retired from them from time
to time, and no doubt they will so retire from our civilization
when they have fulfilled their work, but the responsibility
for that retirement will be ours. The Masters would be
content to dwell with us always if conditions were right,
but they can live with us only if there are intelligent
and cultured souls to receive them. So they approach
with culture, and retire as new humanity comes in on
a lower level to exploit the culture.
Examine,
for instance, the case of Count de St. Germain, a familiar
figure in French history; he was willing to move in
society, and for a time did so, trying to guide the
French revolution along non-violent lines. There is
no questioning of this historical fact. Here was a
man who was known by many ordinary people to have extraordinary [Page
208] powers.
He was driven away only by the increase of violence
in the political life of Europe. Finally he retired,
by death it seemed, but he left under conditions which,
rightly studied, show death was simulated. There are
other cases of this kind. In the history of India there
are countless names, going back to times prehistoric,
of Masters who have dwelt quite simply with the Indian
people, because that people understood the character
of these beings. Buddha lived many years, whereas Jesus
died violently at an early age. A fascinating book on
this subject is the Return of the Magi, by Magré.
From the repeated retirements of these people, lessons
can be learned about their re-invitation. We can call
them back if we understand why they left us. Pythagoras
is an illustration. He not only taught the people himself,
but he sent out disciples and helped rule the land. All
around his settlement in southern Italy, called the Sodality
of Crotona, were cities and villages benefiting by the
political and social wisdom derived from him through
his disciples. In the end the reaction against this group
was so great that they had to flee the country. It is
said that Pythagoras died in the turmoil of the [Page
209] time,
but in fact he, like the Count de St. Germain, retired
to his island birthplace, Samos, in the Aegean,
where he lived until very old and ended his incarnation
very peaceably, after a life both politically and scientifically
far ahead of his time. We are unwilling to accept such
people's guidance in physical affairs, believing they
want to have nothing to do with them. We think: "Let
us invite them on the basis of spiritual inspiration
alone; while we do as we like physically." But
if we want them we must be prepared to have our lives
changed by their conduct and their rulership. In short,
for us they must be Truth.
A
case much nearer to us is the Poet called Shakespeare.
Was the poet Bacon or not? Not
Shakespeare, I hold. The poet had a tragedy of kingly
proportions in his life in the refusal of society to
accept him as a man capable of ruling. Looking at his
plays with dispassionate gaze, we see the author revealed
as a man of giant stature. All his life he seems to have
been fascinated by rulership. The histories, running
through his works from beginning to end of his development,
are studies that he himself made into the problem of
kingship, as much as to say, "By [Page
210] these
analyses of history I shall examine the weakness of ordinary
kingship and then I shall be fit, and they ready to receive
me".
His plays throughout indicate as clearly as any biography
could what the man was and how his early years were those
of genius in ungoverned ascent. First comes a period signalized
by his tossing off dramatic effects like Romeo and Juliet — the
exaltation of passionate, youthful, romantic love. But
the Poet is not yet himself, and this first period comes
to an end with a play The Merchant,
in which tragedy and comedy are equally balanced. The
second period was marked by his own recognition of his
power, and the simultaneous discovery (if we for the moment
accept the Baconian theory) that he was the Son of Queen
Elizabeth. Even if illegitimate, he had the hope that he
might rule. Thus the dramas now centre round expectations
of power. This period is, perhaps, the most important,
because it reveals a man whose ambitions were touched,
yet a man illuminated with godlike power. He is happy to
look forward to ruling England, and, through her, eventually
all the world. But at the close of this period he comes
to know that he is not to rule anyone but himself and that [Page
211] his
incarnation was to be a form of crucifixion, that he might
fulfil himself. This sorrow, to know that he was of the
royal blood, but so circumstanced by his birth that he
would never be acknowledged, brings us to the third period.
Now the plays are heartbreaking, Hamlet and King
Lear, dramas of unstable minds, the former sensitive
and beautiful, the latter breaking down through the passions.
Rulers, in both cases, denied power. These indicate that
he himself went through similar experiences. There is a
crisis, with plays mad, obscene, wild. Then suddenly, out
of this tempest and turmoil, he comes into the quiet waters
of the last period, when he wrote plays like Cymbeline and
the final and last drama of this epoch, The Tempest,
which should really be called 'The Tranquillity'. Now
he realizes his own powers as a Master and is indifferent
to external rulership. He is satisfied to live on an island
and govern nature, where his own little circle know him
as a Master of the secrets of life and death. The events
which I have described are his crucifixion, leading to
Attainment. His life is the story of a person who came
into the world and was repudiated by the world, and, if
we are to [Page 212] believe
the Baconians, even by his own mother.
Madame
Blavatsky has put our duty magnificently in that famous
passage of The Golden
Stairs.
"A
clean life, an open mind, a pure heart, an eager intellect,
and unveiled spiritual perception, a brotherliness for
one's co-disciple, a readiness to give and receive advice
and instruction, a loyal sense of duty to the Teacher,
a willing obedience to the behests of TRUTH, once we
have placed our confidence in, and believe that Teacher
to be in possession of it; a courageous endurance of
personal injustice, a brave declaration of principles,
a valiant defence of those who are unjustly attacked,
and a constant eye to the ideal of human progression
and perfection which the secret science (Gupta Vidya)
depicts — these
are the golden stairs up the steps of which the learner
may climb to the Temple of Divine Wisdom."
A group
of people working on this basis make the right conditions
for the reception of the Masters. This we call the establishment
of a centre, where the conditions of inner life are right,
where there is no personal strife, where the achievement
of peace is more important than seeing oneself justified.
At present [Page
213] people
are continually feeling that they are being wronged in
some way. If someone thinks evil of us, what does it
matter? Their belief does not make it true, and we should
not care about it. The Theosophists do not want to protect
their personalities. On the contrary, they want to expose
them. Such centres are already in existence in various
parts of the world, and, I have no doubt, will develop
elsewhere. A small group will carry on this work and
eventually others will fall in behind and receive the
guidance of such people. It will take a century or two
to effect much, but eventually it will be done.
To
effect this end there must be complete freedom of soul.
There is now quite a good deal of freedom in the world.
We no longer have slavery; and although as yet we are
not free to live, we are usually free to die when we
like. But freedom is not only of body but of psyche,
and of soul. If we desire to achieve this we must live
without reference to external appearances. Jesus was
willing to live with all kinds of people, publicans
and sinners, men and women, repudiated by society. He
was free in His own soul and they were trying to be free
in [Page 214] theirs,
in spite of the difficulties of personality, so He was
willing to live with them, and live with them He did,
in spite of His family and others.
And there must be privacy. Privacy
is absolutely necessary, but the right of private life
in the intermediate stages of democracy is impossible.
We can see that democracy in Russia produces the violation
of private life. We must recognize that for the Masters
privacy is absolutely essential. They are so different
from others that their conduct toward even the people
they are teaching is bound to seem strange. If they were
exposed to the multitude they would never be understood.
The Masters must necessarily have places where they can
work with people of higher levels of development quite
privately, and this might not be interpreted rightly
by many. There is a kind of prying attitude in our society
at large. All these curious epi-phenomena of advertising
and the rest of it, that sink hooks into us all the time,
must be mitigated extensively before we can have a considerable
group of truly spiritual people amongst us.
There
must also be a great diminution of incidental violence.
Consider the case of [Page
215] advertising
by radio. The advertisers try to make us responsive with
music that they may pounce on us with Ovaltine! Think
of our attitude toward the glands, and think of what
the Masters know. They are aware that the physical body
is the focus of different worlds, the psychic, spiritual,
etc., coming in from various angles, and that the ductless
glands are, so to speak, a cross-section of part of those
worlds. There are some seven groups of ductless glands
altogether, representing the seven aspects of nature.
Hence, all the other worlds are partially focused in
the ductless glands, from the higher point of view, if
not from the doctor's point of view. What if, after
the Masters emerge, someone decides everyone has to be
vaccinated or have thyroid or something? They could
not accede to that.
First we must create a non-violent society. When we stop practicing violence
on our children, for instance, by not having them vaccinated,
and so on, then only will there be a chance for these beings
to emerge. The world will
then be a place of beauty, filled with people who have
a desire to learn, and not a crass democracy where everyone
thinks himself theoretically as [Page 216] good
as his fellow, and, in fact, just a little better.
What
can the Men beyond mankind give us by their physical
presence? May it not be a
sense of simplicity and harmony resulting from a complete
understanding of the fundamental pattern of life. As
analogy, take our units of measurement. The foot, the
inch, and all such units of measure have come to us from
divine sources, the people who built the pyramids ordained
the cubit. Where did they get it? From celestial sources.
The cubit, about the length of the forearm, is composed
of digits and palms in Egypt and elsewhere. We speak
of the foot not because a person's foot is twelve inches
long, but because in the old style of calculation it
was an integer. The divine kings taught natural measures;
arbitrary measures were ordained by Napoleon. They laid
down their measurements by divine and natural law; hence
the cubit, the palm, the digit, the foot, in the original
form, do no violence to the
aesthetics of nature and yet satisfy the needs of science.
We
must ask ourselves if we could endure the Masters if
they came. It would mean being willing to live with
people who are [Page 217] always
right, not because they think they are, but because
they cannot be anything else. The torture would be
unendurable unless we were developed enough to endure
the experience. The Masters touch people infrequently
simply because they know we cannot endure the contrast
between those who know the laws of nature and our ignorant
selves. The answer to this problem lies in the very fact
of historical development. The birth of the intuitive
race in the new age is one of the things that will make
the return of the Masters possible. We shall not be better
than others, but we shall be so conditioned biologically
and psychologically that even if we cannot understand
the Masters we shall, through feeling, know they are
right.
Finally,
how shall we know them? Was
it not Thomas who said to Jesus, "How shall we know
the way, when we don't know where you are going?" And
Jesus replied, "I am the way". The Masters
by their works shall be known. There are many who have
gained a knowledge of occultism, only to exploit it for
their own ends. How could we distinguish the Masters
except by watching their lives? The only test of what
is in people's hearts can be made by watching [Page
218] their
lives and seeing whether that which they claim as their
ideal is followed and achieved by them in some measure.
That same test will be applied to the Masters. They will
not come with a rush of power. They will infiltrate society.
Suddenly some of us will be aware that the new culture
has been born, and that the new race is imminent. We shall
look to these Masters, who by their lives have justified
this description, and shall realize that we are face to
face, in every sense of the word, with the return of the
divine kings, the Men beyond mankind. [Page
219]
CHAPTER
- 12 -
AMERICA
IN THE NEW AGE
IN
1907 the Federal government of the United States received
the final report of one of those commissions sometimes
set up by democracies in bursts of intelligent idealism — and
upon which the aforesaid democracies almost never act
with finality. This one was headed by Dr. Franz Boas,
the celebrated anthropologist of Columbia University,
and functioned for the United States Immigration Commission.
The report is Document No. 208, of the second session
of the 61st Congress, dated 1911. So the report was four
years getting to Congress and has since been some twenty-odd
years getting nowhere. It is a startling, courageous
and factual document. Professor Boas himself brought
the findings to light in his books, Race and Nationality,
etc., but here again the full import was lost.
I
first quote his own words, The
Mind of Primitive Man (1916), page 53: [Page
220]
"It
has been my good fortune to be able to demonstrate
the existence of a direct influence of environment
upon the bodily form of man by a comparison of immigrants
born in Europe and their descendants born in New
York. I have investigated four groups of people — the
South Italians . . . the Central European type . .
. the Northwest European type and an extended series
of East European Hebrews. . . . The traits I have
selected for examination are head measurements, stature,
weight and hair colour.
The
results of our inquiry have led to the unexpected
result that the American-born descendants of these
types differ from their parents; and that these differences
develop in early childhood and persist throughout
life. It is furthermore remarkable that each type
changes in a peculiar way."
Summarized:
1. Head of American-born Sicilian
becomes rounder than the foreign-born. Face becomes narrower,
stature and weight decrease.
2.
Head of American-born Central European loses in length
and width, more so in [Page
221] width,
thus becomes more elongated. Face decreases very much
in width; stature and weight increase.
3. American-born Hebrew: (a) Head longer
and narrower, considerably elongated therefore.
(b) Face narrower.
(c)
Stature and weight increased.
"Investigations
of Hebrews show very clearly that the cephalic index
of foreign born is practically the same, no matter how
old the individual at the time of immigration. This might
be expected when the immigrants are adults or nearly
mature; but it is of interest to note that even children
who come here when one year or a few years old develop
the cephalic index characteristic of the foreign born.
. . . The effect of American environment makes itself
felt immediately (i.e. on children born here, of course)
and increases slowly with the increase of time elapsed
between the immigration of the parents and the birth
of the child.
The
conditions among the Sicilians and Neapolitans are
quite similar to those observed among the Hebrews.
The cephalic index of the foreign born remains throughout [Page
222] on
almost the same level. Those born in America immediately
after the arrival of their parents show an increase of
the cephalic index. In this case, the transition, although
rapid, is not quite so sudden as among the Hebrews, probably
because among those born a year before or after immigration
there is some doubt as to the place of their birth."
But
that is not all that is amazing, for as Boas points
out in the Report itself (page 5), bodily changes are
intimately locked into psychical, emotional and mental
changes: "We are compelled
to conclude that when these features of the body change,
the whole bodily and mental make-up of the immigrant
may change". Again, page 76 of the Report: "From
these facts we must conclude that the fundamental traits
of the mind, which are closely related with the physical
condition of the body and whose development continues
over many years after physical growth has ceased, are
the more subject to far-reaching changes. It is true
that this is a conclusion by inference, but if we have
succeeded in proving changes in the form of the body,
the burden of proof will rest on those who, notwithstanding
those [Page
223] changes,
continue to claim the absolute permanence of other forms
and functions of the body."
Dr.
Ales Hrdlicka, rather more conservative than Dr. Boas,
in my opinion, and more concerned with anthropology
in its narrower sense of skulls, both dead and living,
has himself exploded the Nordic myth and to that extent
confirms the notion of a new race type in America,
appearing with what is, in a geologic sense, astonishing
speed. In the Smithsonian Bulletin, 69, 1921, page
456, he speaks of a definite type, "the
Old Americans" — by which, in his backward leaning
manner, he means the New Race type in America. "The
affinity of the Old American with the Nordic blonde is
seen from this to be rather secondary". And Hrdlicka
himself says somewhere in effect that physical changes
are last and most stubborn.
Until
hostile and conservative critics have contraverted
these findings by examining the whole subject and measurements
over thousands of cases, we must adjust ourselves to
a fact of prime importance, namely, that a new type
is present in the world. And those of us who have been
studying history [Page
224] in
terms of the rhythmic laws of prana (the life principle,
recognized in India) can fairly hold that the crest of
a new wave in human types is appearing in America (and
Australia and New Zealand, etc.,) and that this fact,
as it is to us, please, means that we need a new educational
outlook toward whatever is the essential racial-psychology
of the new type.
But what, then, is the
new-race-type psychological advance? In what way does
the new child differ from the Aryan, as the Aryan differs
from the races that preceded? Or is it a change only
within the Aryan general mental field, making the new
child different from the Teuton-Saxon, as he is different
from the Latin-Celt, or from the Slav?
The
occultists' answer has to be given bluntly, here, as
there is no time to argue it out. It is that the new
race involves both changes, one after the other in
time. That is to say, first of all a new sub-race difference
is appearing, with a comparatively small differentiation
from the European, but that from this is to grow a
new root-race, with a contrast to the Aryan in general
just as he is different (being
mental) from the Atlantean [Page
225] (who
was largely emotional) or the Lemurian (who was essentially
physical).
This new departure, in psychological
terms, may be put thus: in its branch-race, first development,
the new type will display the hunch, and in its
root-race, final form, it will display the intuition.
The differences may be summed up roughly by saying that
the first form will be inventive, the second will display
genius. Or, to revive an outmoded differentiation of
the Romantic poets, the first will display fancy and
the second imagination, or the hunch will be applied
to mechanics and to matter, the true intuition to life
and to art.
Now,
what concerns us here is the cruelty which is being
practised on those souls sent by nature into bodies
to create the new type from the body-material incidentally
supplied by parents. What a brutal business, this forcing
of children whose glory is the hunch into musty old moulds
of mind — and
what is more, analytical mind! For while the Aryan race,
as it comes to its grand fulfillment later on, will display
a splendid philosophical aspect to compensate the early
critical developments (a change we see proceeding with
great rapidity even now [Page
226] among
the British, Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch and Flemish);
at this stage the mind of the Aryan in Europe is of a
lower order. When India is freed to live her own life,
she will increase incredibly rapidly the philosophical
development of the Aryan people. She is destined to that.
But meantime the poor miserable American and Australian
child is brought up by lower mental methods, outmoded
even among Aryans!
The
whole system must be recast from the start. An intelligent
study of the hunch and the intuitive powers must be
made. It is well known that European philosophy is
still mathematical, logical, Cartesian in spirit. A
few rebels like Einstein will insist on playing the
violin between thoughts, and thus get an intuitive
insight: an occasional Lemaitre brings religion to
bear on the matter in hand. But these are personal
rebels against the model-making Teuton mind. "Count
it; construct it of bits of hay-wire, putty and string;
muddle along with the lower mind", are the watch-words
of a defunct, exclusively critical intellectualism.
But
where is beauty, and poetic insight into life? Life,
we have seen, has laws of its [Page
227] own, and life is
the supreme kingdom of intuition. Logic has its place;
but so has the organizing flash of a Mendeleyeff, the
prescience of a Leonardo, the cosmic wonderments and
atomic guesses of a Heisenberg. And
the American child, in his tender new impulses of body
and mind, is offering unnoted the beginnings of organized
intuition. Nothing fills one with more despair than the
stupendous folly of a nation which cannot see consciously
a simple fact like this, and accept its immense consequences.
One wants to advance upon all centres of learning and
smoke them out with some new brand of physically harmless
bomb, so that educators will come pouring out of antiquated
monuments erected to a development which is dead and
gone even among mental Europeans, and which are, to the
new race type, cold tombs in which to immure the fresh
young soul life of the incoming race. If we could only
drive the university mind out of these strongholds, perhaps
the teacher in the grades would have some chance to attend
to the young flutterings of intuitive wings, without
regard to the learned gentry upstairs.
The
question, however, after all, is also [Page 228] one
of economics. The new leisure and the new intra-urban
metropolises are coming along to the rescue of the
new children. For intuition must have flowers and fields
as its soil, and as mind must have its laboratories,
so intuition must have leisure for dreams and visions.
Its matrix is in personal freedom as much as in love
and beauty. Even the best of mankind can hardly sit down
by the clock and say, "Now I shall intuit for a
few hours." The singular allegiance of this soul
function to rhythm means that times and seasons must
be respected as they occur.
From
some considerable examination of these new race individuals
a type has emerged for me. For one thing, the new child
is amazingly impersonal even in his domestic relations.
This is assisting the break-up of the old-style family.
For another, he is humane but not necessarily charitable.
In consequence we shall be spared the astonishing sight
of rich idlers creating a pauper class and then trying
to relieve the distress they have made in their ignorant
and selfish folly by opening kitchens and the like
where, as honorary shopkeepers, they compete with honest
shopkeepers and increase pauperization. This sort of
thing [Page 229] is
perfectly possible among otherwise reasonable people,
but becomes ridiculous when intuition of even the lowest
order is brought to bear. Again, there is a love of beauty
as contrasted with art. We must expect to see, then,
a marvelous state of affairs presently, when the mighty
mental genius of the Aryan (become philosophical) is
supplemented by the intuitive creative power of the New
Age. Further, as the intuitions are generalized emotions,
as the higher mind is abstract thought, and as the will
is a glory in which vitality is generalized for social
ends, there will be, in consequence, a splendid development
of energetic, clean emotions. The gulf between that state
of affairs and musty furtiveness will, fortunately, be
complete.
Ruskin
employed, in the fourth volume of Modern Painters,
an interesting word and an interesting figure with
which I might summarize this matter of the intuitions
which the new race is bound to display. He speaks of "Theoria", in
the true Greek sense of
"viewing", as contrasted with the modern meaning
of theory, or speculation. (This is precisely equivalent
to the Sanskrit darsana, seeing things as a whole,
or a vision of truth.) [Page
230] I
like the word. The example he offers is even more delightful.
He says, in effect, that if we could conceive of a painter
who could be prevailed upon to alter a painting by another
man, such as a landscape by introducing a tree, the job
could be gone about in two ways. First, a tree might be
built into the scene by considering intellectually the
colouring, the masses, the light, the structure, and so
on. Then, experimentally, quite a good tree could be set
up, lopping off a branch here, and adding thickness there.
This, says Ruskin, would be the work of a carpenter and
joiner. But, he goes on, suppose that one had the capacity
to enter the scene through contemplation, until through ecstasy of
union one could feel what winds blew over that landscape,
how cold the winters were, how hot the summers, what rains
slanted into the earth, what creatures needed shelter in
what boughs; then, says he, a creative fever would suddenly
seize the man, and he would with one stroke paint there
and then on that spot the tree and the only tree that could
grow there. He would be incarnate God for that deed.
What
is this power? This I
have declared to you to be the command of ideal beauty [Page
231] from
above and from within. In short, not spiritual experience
as a subject thereof, but a command of spiritual experience.
This is the important distinction. I think that even
Plato fails to make it in explicit terms, though as an
initiate he must have known of it. Great as the Greek
genius was, form remained important; even to them there
were moral values. The Oriental sees it differently. "Vakyam
rasatmakam kavyam: Art is a statement informed by ideal
beauty," according to the Sahitya Darpana, I, 3.
As Ananda Coomaraswamy has pointed out (Int. to the Art
of Eastern Asia, p. 6):
"The nature of the statement is immaterial, for all
conceivable statements about God must be true. It is only
essential that a necessity for a particular statement should
have existed, that the artist should have been identified
with the theme". Our cheering football and baseball
multitudes may seem far from all this, but note that they
are "identified with the theme",
and when the theme is something grander still, the effect
shall be correspondingly impressive.
This
matter of a new race type emerging with such rapidity
in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, forms
an [Page 232] interesting
example of the manner in which the prophetic knowledge
of the Men beyond mankind may be made to serve the
most practical purposes. If we accept the anthropological
indications with which I opened my remarks, there arises
at once a need for a philosophy with which to put so
extraordinary a fact in its proper place. A philosophy
for this purpose is at hand. The precious distillation
which comes to us from the experiences of those who
have forged ahead of humanity in its slow evolutionary
progress comprises just such a philosophy. From the
high vantage ground the Masters have achieved, such
matters as the emergence of new races becomes systematic,
symmetrical; the whole world-process becomes in its majestic
entirety, a kalpa, a cosmic ritual. The mental
system which results from the attainment of that vantage
ground has been available to mankind throughout the centuries,
except for the brief period which historians call the
Dark Ages in Europe.
What
is still more important is that the method of attaining
that point of vantage is also available. The process,
we have seen, must be regarded primarily from the [Page
233] vital
aspect rather than the material; for the material worlds
of the past have dissolved and those of ages yet to come
for human perfection are as yet but vital archetypes,
awaiting their hour in a realm of soul only tenuously
material. Hence for the rounding of the man, the making
of him Master, the outline anticipation of the future
as well as the recovery of the past is a vital process
which welds past and future into the eternal now. That
past and that future exist in the many and curiously
related invisible worlds, and hence the process of self-discovery
must be experimental as regards inner life as well as
outer conduct. Surprisingly, virtue leads to a realm
beyond virtue (formal morality) to another realm simple
and pervasive, independent and causal, original and originating.
The result of the achievement of the realm of the light
from which consciousness shines forth is, first, to put
current human society in a new relation to the Experimenter.
This age of transition becomes a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland
dream of mad nationalism, of mixed motives that end by
becoming pretended virtue, a seeking for security which
culminates in blind greed, of self-defence and [Page
234] self-justification
ending in false values. But the same elevation permits
of seeing a new era of culture just beyond the current
confusion. In this era leisure will demand the return
of the Magi. Man, by recovering the invisible for exploration,
through the development of a reasonable religion, and
by the rediscovery of the world-plan in the archetypal
aspect of those invisible worlds, will be able to make
an intelligent invitation to the Spiritual Lords to emerge
from their retreats.
It
must be fully acknowledged that, for the attainment
of the angular change of vision from that of mere man
to that of superman, in practice the presence of the
higher being is necessary. It is the pressure of consciousness
through linked forms that has evoked dog from wolf;
and, similarly, modesty demands the admission that
the next stage, man become Master, demands the focusing
of world-consciousness through the personal consciousness
of the Master, that the bud may become blossom.
For
man, says the ancient figure, is like the lotus. His
roots are in the mud of physical life, the lightless
depths which are the seat of decay and at the same
time the origin of nourishment. The waving stems [Page
235] of his
psyche pass upward through the dim-lighted waters of
personal vitality, emotion and critical mind. There,
half within the waters and half without, surrounded by
the broad green leaves of his meritorious deeds to act
as chlorophyll-conductors of the sunlight to the roots
below, is the scaly bud of personal consciousness, the
ego. It is turned upward into the air, the realm of soul,
upon it shines the warm sun. Then begins that mysterious
alchemy of direct radiance. Through the broad leaves
go down those messages from a higher world to the roots
in the darkness; upon the blossom beats the almost unendurable
light of summer. The whole waters of the psyche are still
and warm. The mud settles to the earth below, and a special
clarity comes to the surrounding stream of life. Slowly
the bud breaks, and the selfish brown-green shows delicate
sympathetic tints. With amazing speed, the work once
begun, the blossom opens to show to a delighted world
above the delicate colouring, the spotless purity of
the ray-petalled flower with the golden heart. The hard,
mud-spotted, insect-bitten bud of ego is turned inside
out, by that metastrophe which is the [Page
236] rule
in every energy vortex, every monad — thus Nirvana (literally
blown out), the extinction of ego and by the same stroke
the emergence of radiant loveliness.
What
determines this moment for the man? He himself, or nature, or both conjoined? Who
is to say? This much, however, must be true. Each must
give his own consent, and do his own growing. Above the
turbid waters of psyche the sun rises and sets in ceaseless
rhythm for all alike. There is no partiality, no chance.
The good Law reaches into every atom of mud, of water,
and into the vitals of every growing creature.The pulse of the life-process
brings forth the heart-beat, the swing of day and night,
the seasons and the centuries, nations and races, planets
and their rhythmic rounds, in one grand orchestration
of kalpa. When and where each shall throw the
thread of his own life struggling into the upper air
is for him to determine. Enough to know that the golden
blossom dwells within the heart, and that in its own
proper time it will cast its fragrance abroad freely
in the world of the light.