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THREE KINDS OF BROTHERHOOD AN old proverb says that the worst is the perversion of the best. Man can be more cruel than the tiger. A motor accident or an airplane crash is worse than the tumble of a running man. Therefore a superstition, which is perversion, is most dangerous, and the greater the truth connected with it the more carefully must its application be studied and watched. This is my preface to a study of human brotherhood in its three forms, which are (I) our relation to our equals or companions by the way, (2) our relation to the unfortunate, the weak and the ignorant, and (3) our relation to the superior persons or teachers. Brotherhood is a great truth, but the idea of it has its danger. LAME DOGS AND STILES To many it has come to mean a life of [Page 118] benevolence, or helpfulness, No one can object to this, if it does not occupy the giver's time with a mere repetition of old activities which do not exercise his intelligence and educate his understanding, or if it does not prevent that best of all brotherhood, the proper relations between equals, the friendship which is the charity that begins at home, or if it does not trench upon the individuality of those who are helped. If people are helped so that afterwards they can help themselves, it is good. If not, it is bad, and the benevolence is only a mask for the indulgence of weak vanity. Certainly it was good to help Russia's millions of starving children, to carry food to them across thousands of miles of land and sea. It was intelligent, without blighting common life. It was an act of brotherhood towards the unfortunate and weak. All brotherhood in this class is of temporary utility. We feed the destitute only that they may become strong enough to feed themselves. And we teach the ignorant so that in future we shall not need to teach them, because they will teach themselves. These things are not gifts, but a contribution to the common work. We have received from mankind; now let us do our share of giving. Those Russian [Page 119] children will owe more to the men who have taught or will teach the people to live, that is to say, to use their intelligence, their love and their energy, and use them all together, so that such a state of desperate need may never occur again. Similarly in the great Japanese earthquake of 1923, the Americans instantly conveyed great help to the stricken people, who were as helpless as the victims of a railway accident, and could resort only to the virtues of courage, fortitude and endurance. They helped a lame dog over a stile, but nobody suggests, except in some religious circles, that the lame dog should be carried all along the road. There are special times in which we can help one another, as the expression is, but let us recognize that this is not normal living, and that those who are being helped are not at the moment making progress, are not themselves evolving. They are merely being “saved”. There may be some personal satisfaction, which I would call emotional dissipation, in carrying a lame dog all along the road, but in that case, there is no progress either for the carrier or for the dog. It may be argued that there is affectionate feeling, and that that involves living and [Page 120] evolution. But people who carry lame dogs all along the road usually do so to gratify their own feelings, not for real love. They must have someone to help, or they are at a loss to know what to do with themselves. But the true test of the living which is love is in association with those who do not need our help. It is easy to be kind to the unfortunate, the ignorant, the inferior, because that at the same time ministers to our pride, but what is much more needed is kindness or friendliness to equals in ordinary life. If you have reason to go to a doctor, he may possibly give two things — pills to modify the indigestion and wisdom to think about. Quite frequently the latter is forgotten, or I must say, in justice to the doctors, is not wanted, and would be resented. Our doctors know quite well that most of our diseases and ill-health are not natural, but the result of idleness, indulgence, disordered imagination and sensuality — in other words they are all superstitious, physical, emotional and mental. Sometimes this is openly recognized, as when a certain little boy went into a chemist's shop and piped forth; “Please, sir, mother wants a bottle of indigestion mixture, because we are going to have crumpets for tea in our house [Page 121] All help is medicine. If I were a doctor I should be a poor man, for I would give wisdom with my pills. It is said that in civilized lands, as they are called, our doctors have caused more disease than they have cured, but this must not be misunderstood. It means that people become less careful about their health because they think that the doctor is there to cure them, or at least to relieve them of their pain. Let the man think that he can live without exertion (that is to say, can enjoy sensations without true living) and it is all up with him. Cannot people recognize that every step upwards is self-taken, that we can receive help in all outside things, but not in growth or evolution? The only thing of permanent value that the doctor can supply is his wisdom, and that cannot be given, it must be received. All life is like learning a language. To learn it we must speak it, and badly at first. If someone else speaks for us until we can speak well we shall never speak well. Every helper becomes a parasite unless his help is for the moment, and is in the nature of exchange, or his contribution to the common lot. It is this exchange that constitutes true brotherhood; it is not gift, except in so far as our contribution [Page 122] to the common lot of things is made in the spirit of gift, without thinking of the particular return or the particular exchange that we shall receive, though we know full well that it must be received. BROTHERHOOD NOT SENTIMENTAL We need not make brotherhood sentimental in order to fill it full of happy goodwill and affection. It is best based on the theory of exchange, for even exchange is ensured by the law, anyhow, and it hurts nobody's feelings, Madame Blavatsky used to say that people never forgive those whom they have injured, and it is almost equally difficult to forgive those who have helped us. The old Hindu theory was that a gift should always be made absolutely freely, as the Americans would say “without any strings to it”, even in thought or feeling. The Indian sannyasi will take no gift that is not absolutely unconditional, and his own services are given free. If a gift is true, I have no sense of being a giver. If the help is genuine, I have no thought of being a helper. It is all too natural for that. And if in India the recipient does [Page 123] not say “Thank you” it is often because he does not want to offend me with what is practically an accusation of selfishness. He receives as freely as I give, and in return he will give as freely as he has received. Though we recognize that brotherhood is based on even exchange, we need not bargain. It is better to live more universally, and trade with the cash of love. The power of brotherhood depends on individuality. There is no brotherhood in a row of pins. Football is better education than rowing, because in the latter you simply pull together, but in the former you use individual intelligence as well. I would not call rowing team work; it is nearer slavery. Yet there is all the difference in the world between individuality and selfishness — let us not confuse them. I may be interested in the welfare of my family, my community, my country. My individuality is all the greater and all the stronger for that. Selfishness is the narrow individuality of one who is really interested in nothing outside his own skin, except in so far as it affects what is inside that skin. Human individuality can be as strong as cheese and yet as big as the world. Individualities cross without interference, like rays of light, They [Page 124] are without bounds. In each a universal character and impulse shines forth, for each is a center without a circumference. Brotherhood leads to organized work, and what we have of this in the world shows what its power might easily be. Brotherhood is a sort of divine arithmetic, in which two and two do not make four, but forty, four hundred and even four thousand. Because we have some of it in the world the average person can now enjoy the use in a single day of things which he could not have made for himself, living alone in a separate world, in ten thousand years. Brotherhood is the expression of our inward unity, and is such that the power of many is reflected in each man's life. Some day it will be the power of all. How marvellous will human life be when nearly all men have learned to put their very best talent into the common stock. But each man grows by what he puts into the common stock, not by what he takes out of it. His effort in contributing develops his capacity to receive. Without any capacity you would sleep blissfully through apparently empty time and space, where others with capacity would find varied and busy life, [Page 125] Individuals share achievements when they are more or less at the same level, and their capacity to share depends upon their making their own contribution. LOYALTY TO ALL Brotherhood is so great and so deep a truth that it can never be entirely escaped. Personal likes and dislikes are both swept into its service. There are no enemies. All human contacts are beneficial. The man who hurts our feelings or puts obstacles in the way of our plans, or presents to our vision the ugliness of dissipation or cruelty, has his high uses. He teaches me very forcibly what not to do, as others teach me what to do. And if gratitude is owing to the one, it is also due to the other. I might say: “Thank you, friend, you have done that for me, so that now I need not do it. You have saved me some of the misery of future lives.” And if somebody injures me, as the common idea is, I think I might reasonably go down on my knees and beg his pardon, for if that had not been coming to me, he could not have found himself in that unhappy state. It is for this reason that loyalty to persons [Page 126] is wrong in principle. I have known some people whom I would call great, but have found in each case that there was something to learn from them of what not to do. Like everybody else they are here to learn, and since all people, even to the very threshold of human perfection, are engaged in getting rid of their faults, and displaying them in the process, no one is an objective ideal. Besides, each man has his own talent, his own experience, his own problem. We are bound to live our own lives, and do the best we know. Even if it is not the best, it will bring us to that. To silence our own thoughts because others “know better” leads only to confusion and pointless life. Each has his plot of ground, though all plots do make a public park. Edison cannot be the leader of inventors, because there are other inventors, and many of them have arisen in places where even he would have least expected them. He may be the greatest inventor — but that is another matter. He cannot invent everything, and the others will come nearest to new truths when they are least like sheep. Let us clearly recognize the difference between leaders and great people. All men [Page 127] are our friends, but no men are our masters. We meet in our bodies like leaves upon a tree. The same one life vitalizes all, and by that we are united, not by any strings tied from one leaf to another. The tree holds together by its own one life, and needs no veil or net cast over it to prevent its falling apart. [Page 128] CHAPTER
11
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MASTERS AND MEN |
THE LIBERATED MAN
THE theosophical world seems to be dividing itself on the old question: which is more important for educative purposes, environment or character? Nobody of any consequence has ever suggested that character can be implanted by environment. No Theosophist proposes the method of the builder, which assumes that a man evolves as a house is built, that he is a vacant site to which you bring various materials and there build them up into a house. Nor the method of the sculptor, which assumes that human character is crude stone and someone must from the outside chip away the unwanted portions, just as a sculptor takes a block of stone and leaves a statue, which in a sense was in the stone all the time. Thousands of forms were in that stone; the sculptor chooses one. But every man is a living being with a character of his own. [Page 129]
By Masters we mean those men who have realized the goal of human life and are no longer in bondage to things. They know the world of life. So they regard the temporary creations as merely a shadow-world. They may remain in that world, using human bodies, but they are interested as teachers in calling people to enter their world, which is the world of life.
Those who recognize the life never become builders or sculptors of men, but may be gardeners or teachers, who know that every seed will grow according to its kind, that both the pattern that is to be made and the power with which it is to be built come from within the seed itself. Therefore no thoughtful writer has ever suggested that Masters can give life to anybody or can evolve anybody or can help anybody to evolve themselves. They can give money, and have been known to do so. And they can give thought-forms. But they cannot give growth or evolution, understanding or love or power.
The Theosophical Society has the same function as the Masters. Its purpose is not to attempt to feed the people, but to call their attention to great truths with which they can feed, clothe, shelter, amuse and educate themselves [Page 130] as men, without the suffering which they have been bringing upon themselves so long, Its first object — brotherhood — is to be understood in this deep and essential way. Greater than any material gift is the offering of wisdom.
Consider understanding. It is one of the powers of our life. It is tested by power, for if I have made a machine, and it will not work, that tells me that my understanding was wrong, Let me tell a story about thought-power, which is vouched for by some good and honorable friends. In a certain city in America there was over a deep gully a bridge which came popularly to be known as “suicide bridge”, because from it a number of people threw themselves to destruction every year. A group of friends who were accustomed to experimenting with thought-power decided to meet once a week, fix their attention upon that bridge, and think thoughts of cheerfulness, strength and hope. They told me that since they had begun the practice, which was about two years before, there had not been a single suicide from that bridge. I cannot personally vouch for their accuracy, but I can easily believe in such an occurrence, because I have had other striking experiences of the power of thought.
What would happen in this case ? The [Page 131] thought-form acts as one speaking. It says: “Come now, things are not as bad as they have appeared, and besides there is a possibility of happy life, which you really want. Please do not lose your balance, but consider the facts.” Reason prevails, and the would-be suicide changes his mind. The thought-form reminds him at a critical moment of ideas which had been obscured in his troubled mind.
This is good work, of course, in the way of lifting a lame dog over a stile, but now there is life to be lived and it must live in its own strength. Every teacher recognizes that, however simple may be the idea which he is putting before his class, no student will grasp it until he has made some effort of attention and of thought. There is a moment between the hearing of his words or the seeing of the experiment that he is doing, and the student's understanding. In that moment the student thinks, and nobody can do it for him.
Consider in the same way the work of an artist. With skill he produces beauty. Beauty is the test of skill, as power is the test of knowledge, and both these come from inward effort alone. Painting pictures for a man who has no hands will not make him into a painter — or even for a man who has hands.[Page 132] Carrying babies does not teach them to walk. On the contrary, I knew a naughty little boy who when about four years old would insist upon being carried up hill when out for a walk. He had been carried too much.
Similarly, the guiding lines given to us when we are learning to write prevent us from writing straight, because they teach us to think that they are necessary. Only a few days ago I was writing a letter on an unruled writing block. Suddenly I said to myself: “Why, I am writing straight, without lines !” From that moment my writing became crooked. Such is the power of suggestion. Crutches are only for cripples. You do not teach a baby to walk with crutches.
THE MASTER'S PRESENCE
If people think they need a personal Master, by that thought they destroy their own power and delay their own progress. If they think they could do better with a personal Master than without one, it is the same thing. If they could, he would be there. There are two kinds of persons to whom the Masters cannot communicate their contribution to the common brotherhood — those who cannot get [Page 133] on with them, and those who cannot get on without them. But really there is no need to search for a teacher, because when we start learning he is always there. The entire galaxy of all who have attained liberation or entered into the world of life is always at hand, for they are the one life, which is also our essential life. No one can shut that open door.
The Masters work behind the scenes, and are not out of touch with any part of life. Some one wrote to Madame Blavatsky and asked to be put in connection with the Brothers. Her reply was: “ Do you know so little of the laws of their order as not to understand that by this very act of yours — which was entirely unsolicited and a spontaneous proof of your loyalty — you have drawn their attention to you already, and that you have established relations with them yourself ?
“ It is not within our power to do anything for you more. Occultism is not like Christianity, which holds out to you the false promise of mediatorial interference and vicarious merit. Every one of us must work his own way up towards the Brothers. If you want to see them, act so as to compel them to let you do so. They are equally with all of us subject to the laws of attraction and repulsion; [Page 134] those who most deserve their companionship get it. Take a half hour each morning upon first rising, and in an undisturbed place free from all noises and bad influences concentrate your thoughts upon them and upon your own higher self, and will that you shall become wise, and illuminated and powerful.”
THE MASTER'S WORK
What then does a Master do? He is a witness to the life beyond all appearances, even his own. As fire tells us not to burn ourselves, so does the Master tell us not to forget ourselves. People forget themselves not only in anger sometimes, but in a thousand things and nearly always.
The Master's human form is beautiful because his life is true. Consider the beautiful limbs of a race horse They have been produced quite naturally by life trying to run. What would be the use of a small horse worshiping that beauty of limb ? He must run. So the Master says to us: “ Do not worship me. Know that there is life which can be fulfilled in full living, and from which all beauty, truth and love will flow.”
I can realize that the Masters see benefit [Page 135] wherever people are trying to express their life, even though there be grave attendant defects. Let me take a crude and rather painful example — that of the old practice of foot-binding in China. This was not done, .as some have suggested, to keep women in subjection to men, but, as Chinese poets have explained, as an assertion of human superiority to earth, that women might not be gross and earthly, like men, but delicate as a flower that sways lightly upon its slender stem. It was an attempt to express beauty and spirituality, somewhat similar to the old Western custom of tight-lacing the figure. They have now recognized the folly and harmfulness of these external means, that small and beautiful feet belong to those who balance themselves and walk well, and that the shapely waist is produced by healthy activity, so that if we have it not in our age as well as in our youth it is entirely our own fault.
Yet the main point of all this, the abiding good of it, is that they show an effort. However ignorant they were, they were well-meant, and were therefore in their degree expressions of life. Whenever mankind puts itself to some trouble for an idea, however stupid, it is good, for there will then be progress. There is no [Page 136] room for ridicule, and little for interference or correction.
There is great danger in what is usually called devotion. True devotion is respect for the beautiful, the good and the true, wherever it may be seen. It is respect for life. But most devotion implies disrespect for life, inasmuch as it singles out one expression of life for its fervent admiration, and almost equally despises the rest. So is God shut away, as people go into caves to worship the sun.
True devotion has nothing to do with that self-abasement which makes a man think that because he is inferior to another he must not rely on his own judgment. However evolved or unevolved he may be, that is exactly what he must do. The man who does not make his own vision of the goal for himself does not awaken to the full his own life in the present moment of living, and therefore does not make the most use possible for him of that moment.
There is always some danger even when virtues are extolled. Such praise implies or suggests that they are beyond ordinary life, and the feeling arises; “It would be uncommonly good of us if we did this. We are not quite expected to do it”. In India I find when [Page 137] some attainment is mooted, there will be someone to say; “O, but that is for those who have taken the yellow robe”.
I have come across some cases of partial mental paralysis due to misuse of the idea of Masters. I have heard one say; “This work has failed; that shows that the Masters did not want it.” It was perfectly clear to me that the cause of the failure was that he had not used his brains in the work under reference. Then again, when the thought was habitually turned to the Master as if he were a separate entity, in moments of difficulty, for example, when there was a blank in conversation, the man would find himself able to think only of the Master's name. And also in danger, or in any crisis, do you pray or do you keep your head ? You cannot do both. Every occasion is a crisis, did people but recognize it.
But what of Master's authority ? Does he not know more than we? The Master is a witness of the light, but it is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. His form is only an illusion; it is not our goal, but our life, which is also his life, is our goal. There cannot be a form of a Master. There is nothing unusual in this. In a chemistry class the professor is not our goal, but chemistry [Page 138] is our goal. Leaf whispers to leaf, and tells rejoicingly of the life it feels, like lovers hand in hand looking at the same moon. It is the power of love that with it we thus at last come to look with all eyes at all things.
And Master's work and orders ? I see no use in them unless they are our own work and orders at the same time. If a man does his honest best he will be doing what the Master wants to have done. If our understanding rises to what the Masters call their mind-plane their ideas become our ideas, we think their thoughts with them, and there is nothing to be gained by insisting that the ideas or purposes are theirs, not ours, which is a mode of separation of the Masters and ourselves, and tends to prevent our union in the one life.
You cannot have this separation in fact. You cannot have men gradually making their own noses perfect according to their own thoughts, feelings and actions, and at the same time the Masters moulding those noses according to some external plan. Masters' work and orders are surely a question of our being attuned to their spirit and their law, which is our own true spirit and law, In that service (if such it can be called) is perfect freedom, [Page 139] Their teaching is an intuition, but not usually peculiar and distinguishable from what we call our own thought. There is no necessity to import into the idea of our relation to Masters the dramatic and separative characteristics of human domination or interference by man with man. Masters are masters of life not masters of men. [Page 143]
PART II
THE MEANING OF THEOSOPHY
TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when I was a comparatively young theosophist (that was in the days when young theosophists were meant to be seen, not heard), I wrote a book dealing with every aspect of theosophy from a natural point of view. It was some months before I could induce any elderly theosophist of my acquaintance even to turn over the pages, but at last one locally revered, if somewhat testy, elder consented to look through it. After some little time he returned it to me with slightly disparaging remarks about my presumption — apparently what was new in it was not true, and what was true in it was not new, and in the main it erred on the side of not being true, With the beautiful humility of the young theosophists of those days I put the visible results of six months' strenuous thinking into the fire, though there were also invisible results which remained indelibly stamped upon my personal brain and character. [Page 144] I have since realized that my old acquaintance, though very respectably full of knowledge, was not really a theosophist, and did not even know what theosophy meant, so after many years I have set myself once more to write upon natural theosophy.
Let us think to the fullest possible extent of all the people in the world at this moment. Some are in cities, some in the country. Some are on the land, some on the sea, some deep in the mines, some few flying about in the air. Some are dressed, some undressed. Some are well-fed and busy with gossip; others are half-starved and busy with common duties and work. One man does not know how the rest of the world lives, and even to think of it in imagination comes to him with rather a shock of surprise. It seems so strange that all those people can be doing all those things, and can be so completely engrossed by them.
With this picture before the mind I ask the question: Can it be that all the different things with which all these people are concerned are of no importance, that God or Nature has arranged the things of life with such futility that in order to reach what is really worth while — happiness and perfection — people must put aside all that life, [Page 145] all those things and the feelings and thoughts which they engender, and must take to something else, some particular and special mode of activity or thought ?
Some so-called religious authorities have said so again and again, and have prescribed out of millions of possible activities one or two which alone, they declare, can lead to salvation or happiness, and have denounced the rest as a waste of time, if nothing worse. But with the picture of the full life of the millions of people in all their variety before our mental vision we see the absurdity of these narrow paths, the impossibility of these stupid prescriptions. On the contrary, we see that all experience is good. All these millions of whirling atoms, making their ever-changing forms, like pictures in the glowing embers or in the clouds or, if you like, even in the tea cups, are awakening in the people who experience them a response to truth or the completeness of life as surely as there is a meaning in these printed words, which in themselves are only funny marks.
This reverent attitude towards all experience is the theosophic life. Thousands of years ago theosophy was declared to be the knowledge that man is never sundered from [Page 146] God. Theosophy is the belief that man can know God, and more than that, that man is knowing God. We cannot lay irreverent hands upon this vast creation, and say: “Away with you, mocker, tempter, seducer who would imprison our souls and stifle our lives.” Subjectivism is no theosophy, but is a denial of the divine only one degree less egregious than that which prevailed in the Dark Ages of Europe, when it was said that both the world of nature and the mind of man were the seat of the devil, and the less we had to do with either the better.
We recognize the wisdom of primal impulses, such as that of the man in the street who defines his life (if ever called upon to do so) not as a set of thoughts and feelings, but as the interplay on that line of time where his consciousness meets his experience. He might say: “ My life ? I drink, and fight, and fall down and get up again, and a policeman takes me away.” The common man is suspicious of subjectivism — with just cause,
Every development in human consciousness — of the will or love or thought — calls into real being the material partner in our life, so that at each step the two fit perfectly, like a man and a woman dancing together as one being. [Page 147] Suppose that I have done some work, such as that of designing and building a house. In course of time the house is worn away or falls down. The work was not lost, because while I was consciously building the house I was unconsciously building my character, developing my capacity for thought, feeling and will. But my future life will not consist in the mere passive enjoyment of these qualities of consciousness. Those qualities will come forth to meet a new arrangement of the world, which will once more exercise them according to their new condition, and will provide new difficulties or problems or tasks which will still further cultivate their strength. My world grows greater as I grow stronger, and I expect that the whole world will become my world when I have harmonized my consciousness with all consciousness. We have no reason to anticipate either perfection or happiness in separation.
In all the world there is greater life than that which we already know, and it is ever ready to flow into us. We cannot contemplate the beauty of a sunset without afterwards being more harmonious or peaceful, and thereby stronger than before. This is what I mean by God — the greater life all round us, which is ever at hand [Page 148] to give us its truth, its unity and its beauty, We do not know the extent or the height of that greatness, but to know it as ever-present is to rejoice in all experience and drink the very nectar of life.
The truth of this attitude is evident even in common things. If a man invents a motorcar according to principles which he has thought out in his mind, he will learn in what particulars his thoughts were accurate, and will at least to some extent correct the erroneous part of them, when he tries the machine out on the road. Meditation is one part of learning and experience the other, and between these two our consciousness must constantly pass, like the shuttle in the loom.
It is the sign of a theosophist that his devotion is complete. He is a knower of God everywhere, and therefore he accepts all experience willingly, while others prejudge every item of it according to their pleasure and pain, or the comforts and discomforts of the body, the emotions and the mind. I knew a man who met with a serious motor accident which kept him in bed several months; when he was getting better he told me he was very glad that it had happened, because it had caused him to learn to love the members of his family more [Page 149] than before. A man thrown into prison might , say: “ Now I have an opportunity to meditate”.
There is always something worth while that we can do, and thereby be active, positive, alive. There is always something to be gained by willingness. Said Epictetus: “There is only one thing for which God has sent me into the world, namely, to perfect my own character in all kinds of virtue, and there is nothing in all the world that I cannot use for that purpose.”
The theosophist should be free, because no experience happens contrary to his will. He should be free also because he knows the unity in the life as well as in the form. Thus if I have no carriage and must walk, and I see another man who has a carriage and can ride, and is happy in riding, can I not enjoy the fact of his happiness ? If it is a question of possessions, all things are mine which my brother men are enjoying for me. This is to be a theosophist. It is not fantastic, but simple fact, and the only liberation.
No one can narrow down theosophy into a religion, a creed, or a church, without destroying it in the process. It is true that many theosophists (not all) believe in reincarnation and karma as laws of nature, but belief in those laws does not make people theosophists. It is, [Page 150] knowledge of the presence of God or the larger life which makes the theosophist, and it is because we are theosophists first that most of us can easily believe in reincarnation and karma afterwards. Because we value experience we consider that there should be more of it.
I doubt if anybody, were he to search to the bottom of his heart, would acknowledge belief in a religion, that is to say a special set of actions or thoughts prescribed as leading to union with God. The basis of religion is intuitive in every one of us. It is seen in our instinctive response to beauty, to truth and to goodness, which is goodwill or unity. What do we want more than goodness, truth and beauty, and will we not accept them everywhere ?
In
our consciousness truth is understanding, goodness or unity is love, and
beauty is peace and calm strength, which is the same as freedom. The world
perpetually educates us in these powers, and when we have them we find that
we live more, and in so doing create goodness, truth and beauty through all our
acts. This creation is union with the one will; therefore in it man finds his
unchanging happiness.[Page
151]
It is the part of our reason
to recognize that all things are beneficial; of our love, that all persons are
helpful; and of our will, to rejoice in the adventure of life.
This is natural theosophy. Within it there is room for all sciences, popular or occult, for all art, religion, philosophy, and common life. It is for all men, for it is the understanding of life — theos being life, and sophia the understanding. This is the theosophy of ancient India and the early Mediterranean world, and it has also been the theosophy of modern times for those who have not confused the part with the whole and mistaken some departments of knowledge for the whole truth, and some limited activities for life itself.[Page 152]
LIFE AFTER DEATH
IF we say that life is for experience we mean that circumstances enrich consciousness. A scientist learns by experiment, and while so learning develops his intelligence, so that after a given investigation he not only knows more, but has also gained in capacity, and is now able to grasp a larger idea (one containing more, and more varied, constituent details) than he could before. An artist who is composing a picture, or a piece of music or poetry, formulates his idea in his mind, but while he is working it out on paper he is learning by experiment and thus by experience in exactly the same way as the scientist.
We are all scientists and artists in some degree, all the time. There are three lines — all human effort to know is of the nature of science; all human effort to achieve some piece of work is of the nature of art; all human co-operation, however slight, is of the nature of love. Science teaches us the unity of the [Page 153] material or external world; co-operation teaches us the power, and therefore the truth, of the unity of conscious beings. Art teaches us the still greater unity of consciousness and matter, that is, of what are sometimes called the subjective and the objective.
We have not stated the whole of the fact, however, when we have said that life is for experience, or circumstances enrich consciousness. Consciousness is also for the enrichment of circumstances. Life does not consist in the subjective contemplation of possible circumstances. For each one of us life exists on that line of time where our consciousness meets our world. Without the circumstances consciousness would not be what it is; without the consciousness circumstances would not be what they are.
My world is the world as specifically related to my consciousness. My consciousness is likewise the consciousness as specifically related to my world. There is thus a twofold education proceeding through the influence of the world and the consciousness, which are behind my world and my consciousness. Because of this, there is tuition and intuition — instruction by experience from the world, and through contemplation from the [Page 154] consciousness. Surely if this were even faintly and distantly understood we should hear no more of subjectivism and the “reflection” theory as theosophical philosophy or explanation of life. Theosophy is the finding of the infinite in the finite.
Every one of our activities of consciousness shows the same duality of nature, and in practice the same shuttle-like action. By thought we perceive and observe, and judge (which is only a deeper observing) the things of the world and the relations between them. But thought is also a creative power. Knowledge is power, not simply in the sense that if we have knowledge we consequently know how to act, but in the deeper sense that all action is knowledge and nothing more.
When several actions are considered in consciousness, and the consideration ceases and contemplation of an action begins, the action takes place. To decide that a glass shall be lifted is to stop considering whether it shall be lifted or not, and to contemplate its being lifted, and that alone. Then the hand moves and the glass is lifted. The hand lifts: the glass, but the thought lifts the hand. And if there be some actions which are reflex or involuntary in the body, they represent [Page 155] “lapsed” intelligence, just as a motor car does, for we have made it and there it is, expressing our thought at the time of making.
Similarly the twofold action of love or human feeling is shown in its sympathy, which is perception of the consciousness of another, and in its active goodwill or love-power. And once more, the twofold action of the will is to be seen in the concentration of consciousness which we call decision, and in the concentration of action which results in skill and therefore produces beauty, that is, in art.
If we have established an understanding of the double teaching of life, through tuition and intuition, through experience and contemplation, we shall readily understand the reason for death and what happens after death. In experience we see what happens; in contemplation we understand. Let us take the simile of reading a book. I see the printed letters; a fraction of a second later I understand their meaning. The understanding is always, at bottom, intuitive, or from the consciousness.
When the consciousness becomes overloaded with facts and a long period of contemplation is requisite for the understanding of the facts, death is necessary. Death is the cessation of the accumulation of experiences. The experiments [Page 156] and observations have ceased; now is the time for contemplation, for the education of consciousness. The child has learned some letters; now he shall understand their combination, the meaning of their unity. As people grow older objects make less and less impression upon them, because their attention is more and more taken up with their accumulated experiences, which are incoherent and confused. Even the most avid enthusiast for crossword puzzles or chess problems will stop when he has collected a certain quantity of unfinished problems, and will show irritation if more are thrust upon him. Then, if you ask him for a word of eleven letters indicating the Queen of Sheba's little toe ring, he will say: “Oh, wait a bit; I must clear up some of these others first” — or other words to that effect.
It is the people who have most completely thought out their problems as they have traveled the road of life, and who have thereby kept their minds simple (however full) who enjoy a keen interest in experience for the longest time. Old age comes late for them; for even the decay of the physical body and brain are related to the loss of interest in experience. An illustration showing the influence of mind occurred in a statement made by the famous [Page 157] physician, Sir James Crichton-Browne, at his eighty-seventh birthday party, when he was asked for a recipe for long life, and he said, among other things: “Those keep going longest who love most.”
We come into the world to learn. We can say that the world is the scripture of God, or that the world is God's school for man, if we remember that the similes are not complete and we guard against being led into the false but plausible suppositions of subjectivism. We come to learn, but it must be confessed that at death we go away without having learned more than a fraction of the lessons contained in the material that we have gathered, in our accumulation of experiences. There has been much observation and experiment; now, there must be reflection and contemplation. The shuttle has been moving to the objective side: now it must return to the subjective, though these terms objective and subjective must be understood only relatively, and as meaning nothing more than gathering experience and thinking it out.
What then, should happen after death ? The after-death state is the subjective result of the objective experiences of the life-period (or rather, body-period) just closed. It is not [Page 158] a state for the meeting of new facts. The man is no longer sitting at dinner; he is digesting and assimilating the food which he has taken into his system — that particular food and no other. He has set going in himself many feelings and thoughts, for his experience is accumulated in the form of thoughts and feelings about objects and persons. Now he has to do two things — eliminate the waste and absorb the nutriment. He is to read a book, and as he grasps the significance of what is on each page, he tears that page out and throws it away, keeping the understanding and discarding the book. Thus he gradually becomes a wise man along the lines of his experience, and develops new capacity for thought and feeling, or the understanding of life.
The succession of two stages in the after-death life, which is mentioned so widely, though often with great crudity, in religious traditions, is perfectly natural. Purgatory and heaven correspond to elimination and assimilation. If a dead man's desire is to sit at his cottage door with a pipe and a mug of beer and a newspaper, he may very well sit there, as so many clairvoyants and mediums have described him as doing. But he will not sit there for ever, because it will gradually dawn upon him that [Page 159] the cottage, the chair, the pipe, the beer and the newspaper are not what he really wants. Why should I read an idea in a book, if I have that idea in my own mind and can think it without the book ? In such a case the book would be a burden. Any experience would be a burden if we had already assimilated its lesson.
When men die they can do what they like. But they cannot usually govern their own likes and dislikes or wishes, unless they have been very much in the habit of doing so while on earth. In the body “second thoughts” are possible as they are not possible after death. It is the characteristic of the bodily life that it is obstructive, Even the brain and body mechanism, though specially adapted to the transmission of thought and feeling, are to some extent obstructive, so that if we have a desire or thought, before it passes into action another may come chasing after it so as to modify or even cancel it. I might desire to strike somebody, but stop myself in time, that is, before the action takes place. Not so, however, when released from the body and brain. When a man has lost that ballast his first feeling or thought will take entire possession of him, and hurry him away into the action or to [Page 160] the object with which it is concerned. Therefore, no doubt, we hear that in the finer grade of matter which is usually called the astral plane, dead men and women go to the objects of their desire or surround themselves with them. The desires succeed one another; when one is finished with, another comes out of memory or habit. Thus the dead gradually set aside their attachment to objects and establish states of mind and feeling by which they can in future lives make use of those objects for greater purposes of the life, instead of being held by them in a kind of bondage or servitude.
But men's attachments are of two kinds — to material things, and to their fellow-beings. There is knowledge, or the understanding of things; there is also love, or the understanding of living beings. Love in any of its forms (parental, filial, devotional, brotherly, friendly, etc.), is a greater delight than the fulfilment of any material desire. Therefore it is essential to any real heaven or truly happy state. Witness the well-known story in The Mahâbhârata, in which king Yudhishthira is depicted as going to heaven, but not finding there the brothers whom he loved. He told the angels that they ought not to expect him to be happy there, while he had not the company of his [Page 161] beloved brothers, no matter how excellent the climate, and how well-furnished the countryside with all that might delight the senses of man. He would rather go to hell if they were there; to be with them in that state would be more like heaven than to be in these beautiful gardens and palaces without them.
If we die without much understanding, we also die without much love. I have loved my father and mother, and wife and friend. But how much ? Do we not often rebuke ourselves for not loving them as they deserve to be loved, and do we not sometimes feel how much more we would love them if only we could ? We have developed the possibilities of love rather than love itself. It is therefore natural that when, during the “purgatorial” period, we have divested our attention of the material affections which occupied its imagination or field of vision, we should, by the same subjective process, arrive at the state in which our love-desires come forth and create their own realities of the subtle world, in which we may love with an ever-increasing quality of love, until we have developed in our character a capacity along those specific lines beyond anything of which we were capable on earth, except in the most fleeting glimpses in our [Page 162] rarest and best moments ? Have I loved beauty and truth as well as living beings ? How much ? And do not we cherish these also from seed to bud and from bud to flower in the “heaven life”?
If, therefore, some clairvoyants tell us that they see people in heaven enjoying the company of those whom they have loved on earth, amid, scenes consonant with those with which experience has filled their minds on earth, we can say: “That is not unnatural; your testimony is interesting, but we did not really need it, for the process is eminently logical.”[Referring to this “heaven-life”, the following is written in the Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett: “Change there must be, for that dream life is but the fruition, the harvest-time of those psychic seed-germs dropped from the tree of physical existence in our moments of dreams and hopes, fancy glimpses of bliss and happiness stifled in an ungrateful social soil, blooming in the rosy dawn of Devachan, and ripening under its ever-fructifying sky. No failures there, no disappointments. There, all unrealized hopes, aspirations, dreams, become fully realized, and the dreams of the objective become the realities of the subjective existence.” Another letter says: Many of the subjective spiritual communications — most of them when the sensitives are pure minded — are real; but it is most difficult for the uninitiated medium to fix in his mind the true and correct pictures of what he sees and hears,” The term initiation here refers to the final human initiation.]
“But how interesting to establish communication [Page 163] with the dead, and hear their opinions and descriptions of their new state !” No more interesting at present than chemistry to a musician. Each man will have his turn. Meantime, it is better generally not to disturb their reflections. “But can we not have some material evidence for the existence of a man as mind in regions of subtle matter ?” By all means. If reason does not suffice, there is no lack of experimental science in this field. Read the researches of Geley, Drayton Thomas, Crawford. Consider the “wax gloves”, the “ newspaper tests”, the “cross references”, the evidences of sensation without nerves and action without muscles; and you will soon find perfectly natural causes to believe in the existence of finer matter and the operation within it of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind. [Page 164]
REINCARNATION
IN the last chapter I described the course of a human life as consisting of two phases — life in the body, and life after death. All this is really one continuous life. When the hands of a clock have passed the number 6, they begin to go upwards instead of downwards, yet it is all part of one continuous movement. It is only from a limited point of view, which has no reality for the clock, that we speak of upward and downward. So also do we speak of the life before death and the life after death. Life in the body is more objective, and is used mainly for gathering experience; life after death in the mind-planes is more subjective, and is used for turning it over, thinking about it, understanding it, converting it into wisdom.
The mind of a man at the beginning of the subjective period is like a wilderness where thousands of plants are growing in a hustling and chaotic manner, with no orderly relation to one another. At the end of that period it is [Page 165] like a smiling garden, in which there is no competition between one plant and another, for the weeds have been thrown away (or rather they have been chopped up and dug into the soil) and the fair plants have been cultivated to great beauty and in harmonious relation to one another. In other words, the numerous half-formed feelings and unfinished thoughts are developed and sorted until the mind has become organic, simple, as a motorcar is simple because it contains no unrelated or useless or unessential parts. The diversity or variety may be great, but the unity of harmonious relations is over all, and therefore there is simplicity. How simple it is to raise an arm, though in that action some hundreds of adjustments in the body are involved. At the end of the subjective life the mind becomes simple like that. It acts as one thing; that is character.
Character is simple, though it may not be complete, just as a motor-car is simple but is capable of alterations and additions. When we act from character we do not act from memory. The body has character, because if we would walk we need not think of every muscle and tendon that is involved in the movement. A man has character when his [Page 166] mind is simple and he decides and thinks from a center that is not confused. Suppose you had a motor-car, and every time you returned from a journey you disassembled its parts. Every time you wanted to use it you would have to reassemble them. That is the state of the average mind. It has many parts which have never been assembled. It has to be partially assembled every time it is used, and the assembling is rarely well done. When it has a problem, it must remember what happened yesterday, last month, and last year in similar connections. If it had permanently assembled those experiences of yesterday and last month and last year as they came along it would not need to remember them now. It could act from its integral character.
Character is the working of a mind or consciousness of which every part is properly assembled or adjusted to unity, whether the number of parts be few or many, whether the man has much or little knowledge. The great powers of consciousness (knowledge, love and will) are all adjustments to unity: knowledge in the world, love in society, and the will because it brings new power into the individual and the collective life. The great ideals of all men — truth, goodness and beauty — are visions [Page 167] of unity. That is why they are guiding stars for us through the fields of chaos.
The search for truth which is science discloses the unity of all the material world, shows that no particle is loose or disconnected from the rest, but that there is a mantle of “law” thrown over all things, a mantle of many folds. The principle of truth expressed in human character also reveals the power of unity as inward law. Only as the mind is true to the man, true to the truth he already knows, free from disconnected fancies and faithful to co-ordinated knowledge, can it grow in mental power. Its sane function gives expression to the unity within its walls.
Similarly, goodness or good-will creates unity of feeling, which is the cement of cooperation; and this unity also discloses its value in the great power that it gives to human life. This ideal expresses itself in love, which is a declaration in terms of feeling of the perception of our real unity.
Beauty also is unity. In a picture, composition, which is unity, is essential to beauty, And the expression of beauty in human life is also composition, harmony, organic perfection, skill.
All ideals belong to character, Truth and [Page 168] thought go together; also goodness and love; also beauty and the will, which is the expression of our integrity.
I have mentioned these ideals at length, because they and they alone are the fruit of experience, of an incarnation. Thought, love and will are the powers of consciousness. Truth, goodness and beauty are universal reality, or life itself. Our sensations of the universal also correspond to these, and are understanding, happiness and freedom.
The objective period in a human life-cycle is mainly for gathering material; the subjective mainly for the building of character. This character is life. You cannot make a list of true facts, good deeds and beautiful things, for circumstances alter cases, as life is fluid. Not all the precedents in Halsbury's Laws of England, if made into commandments, could tell us what to do and what not to do, but will, love and truth can always declare it. Character is living law.
To understand reincarnation one must know what character is, and how it is produced from experience.
When, at the end of the subjective period, the material gathered in a given lifetime (or rather bodytime) has been fully woven into [Page 169] character, it is time for the man to return to birth in this world, to make new and further experiments, to gather new materials of experience, to exercise and confirm his character. It would not be natural for the man to proceed onward and upward for ever in some spiritual realm, where the conditions of restraint, of obstacle, are not provided as they are provided in this material world. As has already been explained, men need necessity; in conditions of no restraint they will not face that part of life which they dislike or of which they are even slightly afraid, and also they will not know a millionth part of the variety of life. A certain great lady used to say: “ If I knew the future I could not do my work.” Certainly if men could determine the future (if they could predetermine the result of every experiment they make) there would be an end to education through experience, for they need not make the experiment. This world is a necessity for men. Looking round, we see that it provides for all the varieties of their necessities.
Some are but savages, with little mind; surely when they have assimilated the lessons of their present experience they will come back to earth for the kind of experience which we see all round us being gathered by men in a [Page 170] more civilized state of development. Surely it is here on earth also that the mediocre will return when the time comes for them to develop further the knowledge, the love, the skill which they desire, and on which they have already moderately embarked. If there were spiritual spheres in which exactly the same thing could be done as is being done in this material world, this world would not be a necessity for any one, even for one lifetime. Besides, two worlds of experience cannot be different and yet the same. Therefore reincarnation on earth is natural for those who have not reached the goal of human life. Therefore also men of spirit, while here, often feel like animals in cages; they pace to and fro, looking hungrily through the bars into the lands of freedom and understanding which they call ideals. They must conquer fire and water, earth, wind and sky by experiment, experience, knowledge, love and power, and so win freedom in this great cage.
Let me show by a common simile how character works at the time of reincarnation. I will take the case of Mr. Henry Ford? It is especially permissible as he is himself convinced of the truth of reincarnation. Long ago, when he was designing his motor-car, he [Page 171] used to work at it himself in a little shop behind his house, and now and then the neighbors would see him trying the machine on the road, and they would look at one another and tap their foreheads significantly. Consider one of his days, and compare it with one incarnation, a day of life. In the morning, let us say, he would work on some part of the machine; in the afternoon he would try it on the road and see what happened (that is to say, he would experiment and observe); in the evening he would sit quietly reflecting upon what had happened on the road, until he had considered the significance of the afternoon's experience. Then he would come to a conclusion as to the next day's work, and he would say: “Well then, tomorrow morning I will alter such-and-such a point; I will do such-and-such a thing.” So, the next morning, he would go to his workshop, not to puzzle over anything, but definitely to carry out the decision made the previous evening. Thus men come to re-birth with character, with purpose, with hunger for certain kinds of experiment and experience, and they do not need memory of past lives, which would be confusing and troublesome, and would delay the present work.
True knowledge is always power. Knowledge [Page 172] of reincarnation releases men's faculties for their fullest use. How many people envy the abilities of the great, yet do not strive for that which they so much want, because they think to themselves: “Alas, life is too short; I could not possibly become a great poet before I die.” But he who knows reincarnation says to the despondent man, that is, to the average man: “Trust life to find a way for its fulfilment. Be a middling poet now, but the best middling poet that you can, or at least make a beginning, and you will surely in another life become the great poet that you want to become. Do not think of time nor of death; your present life and power are not yours by chance, but are the outcome of your past efforts, and your future will be the result of the present. Thought of the future is only useful if it inspires the present. Know that you are master of your destiny, and you can make your future of the kind you choose and as great as you choose. But you must do that now.”
This knowledge removes inhibitions and releases our power. Even those who do not believe in human immortality must act as though they did if they would achieve great things; they must not consider that time is a [Page 173] great limitation, or dwell upon the idea or belief that chance is full of power to stand accidentally in the way of achievement. Time is opportunity to evolve. Those who believe in chance with respect to human life remind me of some of the Chinese, who are said to believe that harmful demons are lurking everywhere, and so to thwart them or mislead them they build queer gables and crooked entrances to their houses and hide inside, fearing the chances of open life. Similarly, primitive men fear thunder and lightning as the voice and weapon of an arbitrary god, a deity of chance moods, of unintelligible designs. When Benjamin Franklin sent up his kites to test the lightning many protested and said that he should be stopped in his blasphemous action, which would anger the god and bring his vengeance upon mankind. In republican Rome it was punishable blasphemy to say that an eclipse of the sun was naturally caused; for the priests held that the gods were in trouble.
He who believes in reincarnation is he who regards even human immortality as a natural thing, subject to no arbitrariness. If we believe in reincarnation we fear nothing (except possibly our own folly) and all our [Page 174] powers are released for work which must surely bring its fruit. This knowledge satisfies the hungry will, and what man's will is not hungry in some degree, in what man's breast does not hope spring anew when opportunity is seen? Let us never think of reincarnation as a satisfaction of human desire for immortality, but only as knowledge which is power and opportunity. It is not for a solace, but to release the will. It is not to “provide time” but to assure them that nothing will cut them off from success until they have achieved. Yet reincarnation is not a necessity. It is a sign of our failure to live a fully human life, to employ in the midst of limitation all the organs of the soul.[Page 175]
KARMA
ALL the objects presented to a man in his world of experience are his own work or karma. The literal translation of the word karma is “work” rather than “action”. It does not imply mere action, for which there are other words in common use in Sanskrit, but action with some purpose, that is to say, work. Each man paints a picture, which is his expression or work. Looking at it afterwards he is dissatisfied; he sees his own inadequacy. That is the utility of karma.
Every man's condition in life is the picture he has painted, and it represents himself as he was in character or in development of the powers of consciousness at the time of its painting — so much cruelty or affection, folly or thoughtfulness, clarity or confusion, skill or clumsiness. This fact has been represented rather crudely by the statement than a man causes what happens to himself, but the fact is that his work is his world, his environment is the expression of his character.[Page 176]
Though all work is individual it is not all done separately. There is much in which men act together or in the same way, so that as there is similar and common action there is also a common and similar world. As much as our bodies are alike our minds are alike and our worlds are alike. We are in a world which is common to all of us, and we share the same sky, the same ocean and sometimes the same omnibus. When, for example, we acquiesce in bad laws or customs, there is our stroke on the canvas, along with many others.
All
these pictures, and the great picture of which each is a part (though the
great picture is chaotic to the extent to which the separate painters are
acting without consideration for one another, without unity of life) represents
our past. A motor-car of last year's model may still be an efficient vehicle.
We may ride in it for pleasure or for other business, but as a vehicle it
represents our lapsed intelligence, and sooner or later we shall revolt against
this old car and declare its inadequacy, like a painter who looks at his
picture of yesterday and says; “ This
is not good enough for me; I ought to be able to do better than that.“ [Page
177]
Individual and social
life and thought are full of last year's models — instruments, books,
clothing, houses, customs, manners, emotions and even ideas — and
the only thing that can convert them into new models is life itself.
Thought, love, will — these enlarge and renew the world of our
personal experience and power, because they are life. And because life is
never lacking, because man is never entirely sleeping or dead, we all have at
least some discontent with the things of the world as they are. At last nothing
but completeness, the fullness of life, will satisfy. We are most awake,
most living, when we recognize our environment as consisting not of mere
things, but of the expressions of our own past, that is to say of our own
incompleteness. When we realize them to be the exterioration of our own
inadequacy the wheels of life — of thought, love and will — begin
to turn. This is creative life. It is also character.
Studying the course of an incarnation we have seen that it is undertaken for experience, “The world exists for the education of each man,” We must not be misled by the word experience, so as to imagine that it is giving us something from the outside. All through the ages men have worked at the building of [Page 178] palaces and temples; Nature has kindly reduced these to dust, but there remains permanently in the men who built them the development of character or life resulting from their efforts to express themselves. As the Bhagavad Gîtâ says, all works result in wisdom.
It is always the life that is the positive principle. So experience results in the awakening of parts or degrees of our life which were dormant before. Thus character, or what makes a mark upon circumstances, grows. A man who wills, or loves, or thinks, does not take his color from his circumstances, like a block of glass, which looks green or red when it is placed on sheets of paper of those colors. He is positive, is alive, has character. So by the end of a human life cycle the character resulting from the work has been formed, and the man is ready to face his old picture, to which he has grown superior while making it, and is ready to use his new powers for altering it or painting it anew. The important point to grasp, on account of its bearing on the practical policy of our lives, is that throughout all the changes in the course of the cycle the life is the positive thing, and it grows only by unfoldment from within.
This positive use of circumstances was put [Page 179] in another way by Emerson when he gave his interpretation of the Beotian Sphinx, as follows: “Near and proper to us is that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events ? In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the domination of facts, as one that comes of a higher race, remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supply into their places: they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.”
The need for karma or circumstances as a means to the attainment of any particular evolution of consciousness becomes less as a man evolves. The more evolved or awakened life can find great significance in things which [Page 180] seem to the less evolved small and insignificant. One needs a range of mighty mountains or the vast ocean to inspire him with visions of great beauty and power, where another can obtain the same from a tiny flower or a grain of sand. Many a time when there has been a house on fire some man who never before showed any signs of courage has rushed into danger to save a child or even the family cat. People have then said that “he rose to the occasion”. Good, but he who rises to the occasion without the occasion, if I may so put it, rises above circumstances. Then he really lives with purpose, as a positive character.
Strictly, circumstances are necessary because we have failed to will, to love or to think. A new incarnation, with the karma which it contains, represents the extent of our failure in the last incarnation, and thus expresses to us the inadequacy of our past willing, thinking and loving. In this way the whole world is in league with our secret souls, to help them to their flowering and completion. For every “mistake” leads to experience which awakens some part of our nature, and so removes the possibility of that mistake for the future. The world punishes idleness, selfishness and thoughtlessness, [Page 181] with pain, which should be to us the sign of our own inadequacy. In this incarnation I may meet the mistakes of the last, and if through experience I rise superior to those mistakes I shall not need the same lessons again.
If we understand karma in this way we can no longer regard it as a punishment or a hindrance. We shall not wait for the clouds to roll by, as though karma were something purely external to ourselves, but we shall face every bit of it with character and with rejoicing, delighting in altering the picture of the past. Such a joyous spirit removes the drudgery from work, fills our efforts with delight and makes them true play. Karma, properly understood in terms of life, that is, really theosophically understood, should be a source of perennial joy.
I must perhaps give some common instance of the way in which character is built from karma. Suppose I waylaid a man, knocked him down and robbed him. That piece of work would represent my deficiency of character, my lack of universal life, along the lines of sympathy and love; my violence would be the expression of my crudeness, my insensitiveness. This violence would appear [Page 182] in the circumstance of my future life. In my own experience I should be brought face to face with my misdeed. The violence to which I would then be subjected would tend to awaken in men, or rather to cause me to awaken in myself, the sensitiveness in which I had been deficient before, so that on the next occasion on which I was about to knock a man down I should pause and say to myself: “It is not a very pleasant thing for the poor fellow”. Karma would continue its operation on those lines until that action became impossible for me, because I should have evolved sympathy, or love, which must be mine if I have the consciousness of the other man's life.
At the end of a given incarnation, then, a man has done two things; he has responded with certain feelings and ideas to the circumstances presented to him in that incarnation, and he has expressed himself or worked according to his present character. If he has acted without thought and love; if he has loved without thought and action; if he has thought without love and action; or if he has acted and thought without love, or loved and thought without action, or acted and loved without thought, he will have produced painful condition for somebody. They will be due to [Page 183] the inadequacy of his character. These mistakes will await him as his karma; they will exactly suit his character or deficiencies, and will be the means to his filling up the gaps in his character.
Life is like a game to be won. You may go on trying again and again, playing one game after another, each from the beginning. Some day you will win a game of life (that is you will make no failures in will, love or thought) and then no further incarnation will be necessary, because you will now have those faculties at your full command. You are no longer learning to develop them. You are free from the bondage of circumstances or the necessity of going to school. It is not expected that the man shall be ideally perfect to attain this freedom, just as it is not expected that the body will develop innumerable arms, legs and other organs. But it is expected that he shall have his spiritual or life powers about him always, just as a serviceable body would have its regulation number of fingers, teeth and other parts, functioning in good order.
Therefore karma is a liberator, insomuch as it forcibly or emphatically places before each man the picture with which he is dissatisfied. It helps him to define his goal, or [Page 184] to come nearer in each incarnation to a conception of full and adequate life. It is not easy for most people to think with great clearness. They give birth vaguely to a small thought, and then see it clearly by acting it out on the stage of experience. But later, when they have grown stronger in thought, they will be able to make much even of a slight experience; the mental life will become clear and full. There will be understanding of life. But through all the process it is the life itself that expands and grows; no addition can be made to it from the outside; karma at every point only provides the tuition which intuition or the power of the man's own direct thought fails to give.
One striking piece of karma is the formation of the body. When certain activities have been established for constant use, the function lapses but the form remains as an organ. Therefore the body is “lapsed intelligence”. This does not mean that intelligence is not going on, but with respect to that particular activity it is not. The knees bend one way. We have quite settled that matter, although in the amoeba they may be said to bend in any way. The body is the result of the lapsing of will, love and thought in certain [Page 185] matters. We carry our houses about with us as truly as does any crustacean.
Similarly, the mind is lapsed intelligence in the form of knowledge, or settled habits of thought (ideas), and feelings or emotions (affections). It is not difficult to trace out the formation and development of mind, from childhood onwards. True knowledge and false are here jumbled together in a conglomerate of which the basis is mental inertia. When we have settled upon an idea or, as we call it, attained a belief, we cease thinking anew upon it, even though we may use it in more elaborate schemes of thought, as, for example, when we use the theory of equations for the binomial theorem, and later the binomial theorem for the calculus. It then becomes a knee-joint in the mind.
We could regard body and mind as two bundles of prejudices — good and bad, or true and untrue — one as to activity, the other as to knowledge. Then, in practical life, the important matter is not to live in our prejudices, for that would be a living death. We must live not in our vehicles but through them. They must be mere tools in our hands — with serious limitations, of course, but still tools. 'There is no objection to this. Even Buddha's [Page 186] knees bent only one way; but he was sensible enough to use those knees to make his peregrinations in the valley of the Gagnes.
Such living forms are natural, by which I mean that they are nothing but a portion, a limitation or incomplete expression of the reality of the life itself. That is behind the idea of archetypes of natural forms, which are sui generis, and not to be questioned. Life essays a certain activity in relation to its environment, and that form naturally results. The horse strives to run well — hence its legs. The grasshopper jumps — hence its legs. Of course, we may trace the running and jumping to the instinct of self-preservation in a given environment. There is, however, not mere self-preservation, but the instinct of self-expansion.
The function produces the form, not the reverse. No status will come to life. No Frankenstein's monster will acquire an independent will, and haunt its originator. Though thought-power can mould forms, it cannot give them function. Beauty acquired for appearances, and morality through copy-book maxims, are only skin deep. Not so the living laws of the Self — thought, love and will — which can make of every form a window into the infinite, [Page 187] and transform a dung-heap into a garden of delightful flowers.
To teach a child to walk we need not tell it all about the joints, muscles, tendons, nerves, etc. of its legs. Why trouble it with that lapsed intelligence? If the life does what it really wants to do, the form can take care of itself. If not, we shall begin again, like a person who rewrites an essay. How stupid he who will not write at all for fear of using up his paper and pencil!
In India a great distinction is made between Râja Yoga and Hatha Yoga. In the former the will governs the mind, and through that all the vehicles. It decides when and in what way emotions and ideas shall be active. In the latter you work first upon the body. By concentrating on certain bodily activities and on certain organs you try to enhance the life. The latter, if I may say so is a superstition which has grown up and displaced the former here and there. Concentrate on the pituitary body and the pineal gland? Yes, but be careful; you may cause them to swell, and produce — disease. But concentrate and meditate in perfect calm, contemplate some thought worth while, and the organ will quickly form itself, so that even [Page 187] that high thought can become a part of your “lapsed intelligence”.
It is a sad thing to build into our personality any “ lapsed unintelligence”, which shows itself as disease of body or mind. Persistent neglect of our own reason, love interest, or individual purpose can always produce this. External working upon our own vehicles is a very radical way of denying the power of life itself in the government of form. The desire for it implies past error and present sleepiness, otherwise will, love and thought would fill the day with their eager life,
I can illustrate this, though a little crudely; by a reference to Monsieur Coué's famous formula: “Every day in every way I am getting better and better”. He told his people to say this very quickly, so as to leave no time for thought between the end of one utterance and the beginning of the next. Otherwise the man could not stop himself from saying: “I am getting better and better — I wonder if I am — I am getting better and better — I wonder if I am”, and so on. And if you were to think, for example, of the heart, you simply must not picture your heart as functioning well. If you did, your imperfect knowledge of it would cause your thought-power to do more harm than [Page 189] good. Let the life be intent upon health — that is all. And even that is a poor idea, for if the life is true to itself there will be no disease. Even for curing, external methods are not fundamentally good.
One great difference between the natural and the artificial form is that you need not know how the former works. But in a motorcar you must know the works, and put them right now and then, so that it will go, for running it will not perfect the machine.
How, then, can there be channels or forms made from the outside for the life ? Make a chair. It will not follow you about like a dog, waiting to be sat upon. Produce a family of growing children. You will soon find out whether they are willing to be channels for your superior life. They have their own life. An iron pipe will conduct water if you arrange for the water to flow in. But life ? Life is not even thoughts, but thought, not even emotions, but love, not even will, but being. Another may put an idea before me, but my thinking makes it mine, or rather by my thinking I expand to include it — I “understand” it. Forces on every plane are the common factors of our collective manifestation. All karma, all creation, is negative. [Page 190]
THE EGO
THERE is great danger of misunderstanding in the expression “the ego”. While there is a use in technical terms there is also a danger. A familiar example of this is the word “heredity”. In answer to the question why children resemble their parents, people often say: “ Because of heredity, of course !” And then, when asked what heredity is, they reply: “The fact that children resemble their parents.” Thus a word passes for knowledge, and the questioning mind is silenced. What do words matter, when we want to find out how children come to resemble their parents, to make a science of heredity? Thus terminology degenerates into jargon.
The danger in the expression “the ego” lies in the effect of the little word the. Ego has the force of “I am”, which is a subjective statement, but as soon as we use the expression “the ego”, we have given it an objective flavor and have materialized what is in itself [Page 191] life. In nine cases out of ten the enquirer who is told about the ego is thereby debarred from a knowledge of the life which he is. The unfortunate person begins to think of a kind of balloon on higher planes which is somehow attached to him. If he calls it an aura, he thinks that aura has a skin, like a bladder of lard, But the ego is to be known only by the experience “I am.” It is the positive life that we are, at any time, on any plane.
Everyone knows Descartes' famous saying; “ I think, therefore I am”. We might equally say, “I love, or I will, therefore I am”. But it would be still more in consonance with our conscious experience to say: “I am, therefore I think, I love, I will.” Thinking, loving and willing are the activities of the life that we are, and these express themselves in our work of all kinds in daily life. It is dangerous even to say: “ I am the life.” It is safer to say “I live”.
This living of ours is fundamental, and produces all the forms and experiences round us. Thinking, loving and willing are powers; they are positive. Those powers flicker like candle flames in a draught while they are in course of evolution and not yet fully strong. Then we have present thinking obscured by past ideas (which should have become [Page 192] inadequate), present loving stifled by past attachments, and present willing destroyed by the worship of external things. When men worship or fear external things their own will is gone, and they forget that all things without exception are for our use — the material things for our thinking and understanding, the living beings for our loving and understanding. To wish that something might be different is to abrogate our will, which should be employed always with those things which are in our power. To wish is ignorance and it results in waiting. To will is knowledge of the life that we are. To want is vision of the fuller life.
The powers of life are all-unifying. Great thought is understanding; it stands under and holds, as it were, many facts at once, and sees their relationships or sees them as one whole. Every idea is single, though it may be as big as the world and contain everything in the world, and it corresponds to a single fact, though there may be great diversity within the unity of that fact. At bottom the whole universe expresses one single idea. Great love also is understanding, but it is the understanding of life instead of material things, so that love is but the manifestation of the perception. [Page 193] of the unity of all lives. And willing also is unifying, for it co-ordinates all the expressions of our individual life.
The ego is the one idea for the body. It has made fingers and toes and all other organs in course of time, and these are unified under one dominion. I have expressed the matter badly. I should say, not that the ego is the one idea and that the ego has done this, but that I am the miller, the lover and the thinker, and my unity must appear in this which is my work. When I have mastered my environment it will be as organic as my body.
Personality is my expression at any given time, not only in the body and its habitual ideas and habitual feelings, but in dress, manners, residence and its furnishings, business, etc. Personality is expression. If a man digs in the garden with a spade, there is personality, If he writes in his library with a fountain pen, there is personality. But if the man's life is so clotted with ignorance that he cannot put down the spade and take up the pen, or put down the pen and take up the spade, you have what has been called “self-personality”, which is only in degree removed from the condition of the insane, who think themselves to be teapots, north poles and [Page 194] Queen Elizabeths. Fear and pride produce self-personality. A man must have a pose, a manner, a calling, a name, a title, in order to be comfortable in society, to have a place, an identity, a self in the social order, and to this he clings at all times in public pose and even in private thought, because there is little thought, love and will in him, and this absurd fear and pride, or timidity and conceit, will not let them grow.
Seated in such self-made prisons, men nevertheless do sometimes have a gleam of real life, and then they say: “The ego has come down”. One friend used to amuse me occasionally, though quite unintentionally, when, in the course of conversation, he would say, putting his finger to his head: “Wait a moment, while I consult my higher self”. There was, of course, something in it; he was obtaining a slight ray of light, but it is better to stand in the sunshine. Whenever I think or love or will, I am; that is the ego. Whenever we rise superior to circumstances, using them, this is the case. This does not refer only to great occasions; any thought, any love, any willing is egoic.
“The ego” is commonly considered to have a great quantity of stored magnificence, [Page 195] accumulated through many lives. Unquestionably, at any given time, I am greater than my expression. If I am a carpenter I can turn over in my mind in the morning all the possible things that I may make. I can think of chairs, tables, bookcases, wardrobes, etc. I may decide to engage myself in the making of a stool. I shall then be occupied with that, and I hope I shall be trying to make my stool better than any stool I have made before. In my memory and in my subconscious mind are all the ideas of other things that I may have made or may think of making. But fundamentally my desire is to learn, that is, to expand my powers, and therefore I shall engage myself with the stool.
It is not the business of my life to entertain myself by repeating perpetually the things which I have already learnt to do. We are not here to express ourselves in that sense. We are at school, and therefore life is a thing of phases for us. The picture which we have painted in the past is spread out like one of those old-fashioned panoramic views of pre-cinematographic days, in which the picture gradually rolled off one roller on to another. Thus we have phases such as childhood, youth, maturity, etc, each having its own talents [Page 196] or virtues, and its own obscurations or weaknesses.
The giving of attention to one thing at a time is concentration, an expression of will, which in its perfection would be the attention of the whole given to a part of itself. It is the will that divides the mind into the conscious and subconscious, and constantly in a different place.
It cannot be said that “the ego” resides on a particular material plane. At all times he is doing the same thing on all planes, but when the higher planes, as they are called, are invested in imagination with the characteristics of the physical plane, an artificial and unnatural quality is at once given to them. The physical plane has great clarity, solidity, because it is the expression in work or karma of our greatest concentration. When we have so perfected the power of our thought and love that we do not need this narrowness or concentration to give that clearness or substantiality, then the planes of the ego, as they are called, will have this character of reality. To put it in another way, the carpenter will be able to make all his chairs, tables, etc., at once. Such an attainment will mean that the process of schooling has come to an end [Page 197] because the powers of the ego have reached their full strength. The ego will then be free, without the necessity for the concentration process which we sometimes call the physical plane, fancying that it is something in itself, instead of a mere expression of life.
The “I am” of which I have been writing, which is three-in-one in its expression, has long been indicated by the use of the three Sanskrit words âtmâ, buddhi and manas, often translated as the spiritual will, intuitional love and active intelligence. Each of these powers is again dual; for example, perception and observation are the more receptive aspects of thought, while judgment and planning are the more positive, and similarly sympathy and goodwill are the receptive and active forms of love. Each of the three is a form of cognition; by manas we get to know things, by buddhi we get to know lives, by âtmâ (a confusion of terms — strictly ahamkâra, “ I-making”) we get to know the one life. Then our expressions along these lines are respectively thinking, loving and willing. Atmâ, buddhi and manas are not objects sitting on high planes, like the deities in an upper corner of an Egyptian papyrus.
Even in a particular incarnation nothing [Page 198] essential is lost; there is what has been called conditional immortality. In one of the Mahâtmâ, letters to Mr. Sinnett it was said: “The personality hardly survives.” But what does survive is immortal, because it is ego. Only in so far as personality expresses life can personality survive. Really there is no survival about the matter; it is life which never dies, which cannot die. We may put it that at the end of an incarnation, when experience becomes character, the additional character is the unfoldment of “the ego” as the result of that incarnation. So true personality is the new part of “the ego” that is being evolved. To put it crudely, the pure part of the personality has become one with “the ego”, has obtained immortality, and therefore the condition of the personality's immortality is its purity from the egoic point of view. That does not then in particular reincarnate. Therefore those who do not believe in reincarnation have some truth on their side or in their argument, as well as those who do. “The ego” once more starts on a new concentration, which makes an entirely new personality. So “the ego” reincarnates, but the personality does not.[Page 199]
PROGRESS AND INITIATION
THERE is no such thing as material evolution or progress. Certainly there is a succession of forms, and the later are very often more complicated organisms than the earlier; but it cannot be said that the earlier has evolved into the later form.
The definition of evolution, so excellently given by Herbert Spencer, clearly shows the characteristic effect of life working upon matter. He said that evolution is a progressive change from a state of incoherent homogeneity to a state of coherent heterogeneity of structure and function. Let me give illustrations to explain these terms. Incoherent homogeneity may be represented by a quantity of pins, all of the same size, thrown loosely upon a tray; they are homogeneous because they are alike, and they are incoherent because they do not combine. Incoherent heterogeneity might be represented by a workshop in which all the various parts of a motor-car are lying [Page 200] about on the floor, on shelves and on tables; there is heterogeneity because the parts are all different from one another, and there is still incoherence. Coherent heterogeneity is shown when all those parts are fully assembled and the motor-car is there. And when the motorcar is running you have coherent heterogeneity in both structure and function. The motor-car is an expression of life; so is the human body; so is a piece of music; so is a house. And the greater the life that is expressing itself the greater will be the heterogeneity, and the greater the coherence.
The same thing happens in human minds. The man who understands is he whose knowledge is greatly heterogeneous, but at the same time coherent. “Variety in unity” seems to be the motto of life, The body is one because it is the expression of one life, one power; one great; hand stretches out and grasps a handful of the world, and instantly it shows the unity.
Thus when a man comes into incarnation, as the expression is, he gathers in his net a quantity of things which then express him or constitute his personality. The tiny child is busy gathering; he finds out what he can do and what he cannot do; he listens to what people say about him, and so he forms opinions, [Page 201] develops habitual emotions, and sets up bodily habits and poses, so that from the standpoint of common opinion by the age of about twenty-one there is a fully formed personality. It cannot be said that this is a reincarnation of a previous personality. The successive personalities are like successive roses on a bush, or like successive pictures painted by an artist.
If the personality is really an instrument, like a spade in the hand of a gardener or a pencil in the hand of a painter, the power of the life will soon manifest itself by producing coherent heterogeneity in the environment as well. This is the true sign of progress, that one's environment does not remain unorganized and one's life-story a succession of casual and unrelated incidents, but the power of the life sweeps everything into one stream, one purpose, one idea. Life is simple because it is coherent. The expression is like a train of camels, which can be led by one man.
There is no material evolution, or influence of the past upon the present and the present upon the future. The process is more like that of a cinematographic picture in which there is a black space thrown upon the screen between one picture and the next.
A personality is not the reincarnation of a [Page 202] previous personality, but it is a new effort on the part of the ego to paint a more perfect picture than before, or, to take another simile, to play a game of chess and to win. If there is any power outside us, it is to be regarded like an opponent in a game of chess rather than as some one guiding the painter's hand while he paints his picture, The champion chess player of a certain country told me regretfully that he could not improve his game because he could not find better players against whom he might contend. In the game of our personal life there is not this disability. God, playing on the other side of the board, gets us down every time. But every game that is well played makes us stronger and is therefore a success, even though it may be lost, so I look forward to the day when I shall win my game, and show this God that I am just as good as he. What I am trying to say is that progress is not to be measured by success, triumph, pleasure and other such things. Those may be the rewards and desires of the life that is nearly asleep, that needs to be stirred into activity by the vibrations that pleasantly excite the body, the emotions and the mind. But he who knows the thrill of thinking, loving and willing, of the great unifying powers of life [Page 203] itself, is suspicious of success, for it seems to indicate that he has not aimed as high as he might have done.
In each game it is character or power that counts, not memory. This is sufficient explanation of the puzzle why we do not remember our past lives. A life governed by the recollection of previous experiences would always be dependent — indeed the conception is a paradox. But a life full of living power knows what to do, and violates no law of love, thought or decision. Ten commandments have proved a poor guide to humanity; ten million commandments even could not advise us for all occasions. But three simple spiritual laws — never to fail in will, love and thought — govern every possibility of expression or experience.
Because it is character that matters, the unfoldment of life, all evolution is from within. Every man must use his own conscience, and there cannot possibly be such a thing as was suggested by a certain Archbishop — “ the conscience of a fool.” The fool is he who tries to guide his life by the conscience of another; he is as foolish as one who would ask another to eat his breakfast for him or to learn Greek for him, Each of us is what he is. He has [Page 204] evolved to a certain point, and if he would go further he must start from that point, making use of all persons and things in his own plan.
Initiation
means starting, and in this case it means to establish ourselves firmly in
the life of “the ego”. The first stage is to recognize spiritual
laws, or laws of the life, as above material laws, or the dominion of forms.
All this has been
put very well in the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, which describes three
kinds of men in the world. First comes the sluggish man, who eats and sleeps;
second, the aggressive, who is full of personal desires and ambitions. The first
suffers from indolence, the second from greed. In very modern psychological terms,
the first is the slave, the second the careerist. Thirdly comes the thoughtful
man, who observes and considers the laws of nature and of health, and lives according
to those laws. But Shrî Krishna, the teacher, told Arjuna, the pupil,
to rise above all these three conditions and establish himself in a deeper understanding — in
other words, to have the intuitional thought, which is the perception of the
ever-present life which we are, and therefore to follow the egoic or spiritual
laws primarily, to have egoic motives and purposes.[Page
205]
The application of the word
initiation to any state, or rather states, is often somewhat arbitrary. In theosophical
circles what has been called the first great initiation applies to the further
awakening at which the man realizes himself not merely as the life, but as not
different or separate in interests from the life expressing itself through other
bodies. The true initiate recognizes all other living
beings as other fingers on the same hand.
This recognition is the foundation of ethics. It is natural for us to love others, because we are not a different life and no one is sufficient unto himself. This initiation might be expressed in other terms by saying that when the thinking principle, manas, bows before the loving principle, buddhi, and says: “Henceforward I am your servant, and I shall work for you in the external world which is my sphere”, there is the beginning of a new and greater life. In all activities there is some thought, some love and some will, but in this joint stock company the principle of love has now become the chairman of the board of directors. Initiation is the beginning of the life of love — not love which is pumped up or flogged into activity or awakened by others, but love which naturally overflows the boundaries [Page 206] of personality, and associates with the life expressing itself through other forms.
It is not necessary that this attainment of what is sometimes called the buddhic consciousness should be marked by external events in the personality or in the planes of matter. When that is the case it resembles the conferring of a degree in a university. The candidate has to pass his own examinations, make his own attainments, and even then he can receive his degree in absentia. Or he may have been what is usually called a private student. Who can tell in how many different ways people achieve initiation, and in how many different ways they interpret that change of life, or realization of life, when they seek to invest the personality with a conception of its new obedience and dignity, as with cap and gown ?
In the letters to Mr Sinnett there is an occasional reference to initiated adepts and initiates. The initiate there described is he who has really begun his life. While “the-ego” is working with these personalities or incarnations one after another, however far he may have gone in the unfolding of his powers he is still a child at school, is still concentrating upon one thing at a time, and therefore is, [Page 207] not living a full and free life. But when a boy or a girl leaves school or college and goes forth into the world to mingle on an equal footing with the men and women of his time, he uses all his acquirements (history, music, mathematics and everything else) simultaneously, or rather just when they are needed in the business of that life. Then the true life really begins, for which all this painting of pictures was only a practice and a preparation.
No one can describe that expanded life in the terms of concentrated life, that full reality in terms of limited expression. Even the powers of the life in expression — thinking, loving and willing — cannot characterize that fullness or fulfilment of life. It is not even enough to say that it sees everywhere without eyes, hears everywhere without ears, works everywhere without hands, for those organs belong to the time-process or egoic expression. They are only the powers with which that time-process conquers the space-limitation of the material expression. Even the time-process is conquered by him who has found the whole.
“The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.” “The river has found the ocean.” Consider the drop and the ocean. What made the drop [Page 208] water — the watery substance of it, or the non-watery externals that kept it away from the other drops ? When we find our watery substance we shall not fear the “shining sea”. It is the same drop in the ocean as it was out of it. Think then of a world of life in which the very sands of the seashore and the grains of dust of the streets are glorious gods or buddhas, of whom the most material integument is a singing ecstasy of beauty and understanding, the “Dhyan-chohanic” world in which the least and lowest is free from the need of thought or love or will.[Page 209]
GURUS AND TEACHERS
THE “goal of human life is perfection; not in the sense that we shall be able to manage or govern all things (which would merely constitute a great interference with other people's experiments), nor that we should know all the facts and laws of Nature (for the so-called facts are only fleeting forms, and the so-called laws are only their general qualities or properties), but that we shall not be carried away by circumstances, but always act from our own true center. Such finding of the center of our own being, and action from that center, imply that under any circumstances will, love and thought never fail, but rather they become free of effort — like the speech of a practiced orator, or the touch of an expert pianist — so that all eccentricity is at an end.
Various names have been used to indicate such a state — the Hindu philosophers call it jivanmukti or “freedom while living”, theosophists often speak of “the adept”, and think [Page 210] of human perfection as being characterized by considerable psychic power, such as clairvoyance and traveling in the subtle body, the prominence of this idea being due to the influence of modern materialism, which accepts the world as an important thing. Buddha spoke of the stages of the arhat (the man who is “ready” or “competent”), and the asekha (one who has no more to learn from the world), who is also buddha (wise or illuminated).
The perfect man is the man who has found his own true life, and does not need to make any more material forms or experiments, (reincarnations), but enters the world of life.
Picture, then, a world of life in which there is no matter (that is to say, no outside restriction) though there is all the reality and all the infinite variety which we think of in connection with the material world, but originated in the life. The world of life is more, not less, than the world of matter, for the world of matter is only a limitation of the world of life, or rather a concentration in it. So that, if we may use the simile, the very grains of sand on the shores of the ocean of life are awakened monads, glorious buddhas, What we call the world of matter is still there, but to these glorious beings it is part of the [Page 211] world of life, and presents no obstacles, any more than the school in a town presents an obstacle to the graduates who have left it. All space-forms and all time-forms are there, but they present no restrictions. This is the meaning of nirvana. Let me explain it in terms of planes, though that method is liable to be crude. The reality is here and now. The physical plane is the nirvanic plane, but with a screen or grating before it which shuts out almost all the reality.
As a grown-up person may enter the nursery, so may a liberated man mingle in personal form in the “material” world; but this is abnormal; they are liable to muddle the children. All liberated lives are one, and not separated from us, so that all beauty, truth and love in the world are from that high source. The Master is in the beauty of the rose.
When a liberated man speaks of the life he knows, he is called Master, Teacher, or guru. His object is not to interfere with any experiments, but to remind us of our true, free state. He cannot give life to the aspirant, who must grow by the exercise of his own powers. Since the guru is not an ordinary man, but is an awakened monad or free life, his appearance is only his instrument for a [Page 212] limited purpose, though he uses it freely. Therefore the being who is seen by the pupil, the beautiful man, with hair and eyes and mein about which a poetic pupil might rave, is not the Master himself, who wants men to come out of their world of forms into his world of true life. He tells us that full life is to be won by effort (of will, love and thought). He may exhibit a rare expression in human form of the creative powers of life, but so doing he shows merely the work, and not the life. He wants the pupil to find the life.
The message always is, “Come out of your world into ours” not “Call us, and we will come out of our world into yours”. Since all our activities are the play of children, it would be rather ridiculous for liberated men to come out of their world into ours in order to improve our mud pies or to build better sand castles than ours all along the beach. Forms are the things men play with. Their life also is behind the scenes. It is the attitude towards the forms that is creative, and unfolds or awakens the power of the life.
The Master's world is the world of life. The flawless music of a Master's life is the expression of his mastery, but we cannot know the Master by his music. The limbs of a racehorse [Page 213] are beautiful; they have become so because the life trying to run in the form of that animal has produced an expression of itself. Another horse could not develop such limbs for itself merely by admiring the exquisite limbs of a racehorse, but only by developing the life in the desire to run. And if the other horse, went to the racehorse and said; “Please teach me, so that I may have beautiful legs like yours”. the racer might well reply, “You had better forget the loveliness of legs, and put your whole heart into the desire and the effort to run well; beauty will come of itself, for it is only the expression of life”.
Life unifies and co-ordinates wherever its touch falls: it is unity in diversity. Order opens our eyes to the vision of life, which is itself beauty. So Masters want no praise or personal devotion or obedience, except obedience to their never-failing advice that we seek to express the fullness of our life through our will, love and thought. As one of them wrote to Mr. Sinnett: “The fact is that to the last and supreme initiation every chela is left to his own devices and counsel. We have to fight our own battles, and the familiar adage “the Adept becomes, he is not made is true to the letter”.
If one loves the guru first and the life [Page 214] afterwards, one misses the reality, for he in a human form, even in an egoic form, is not an ideal, but may easily be made into an illusion.
Each one of us is exactly what he is, and it is from that point that he must evolve, and only in freedom can this be. If the goal is freedom, then each step towards it must be a little freedom. Therefore, as a philosopher once wrote, all imitation is suicide. We have to do our work, even if it is the work of children. Sometimes when people ask why the Masters do not interfere when things go wrong, even when their names are dragged in, the answer is; because these are the entertainments and education of children. Conditions may often be trying for some of us; all the more reason for us to exercise understanding and love, all the more opportunity for the expression of our strength.
That is one reason why Masters do not show themselves more in personal form. Secondly, such showing is dangerous, and the chief danger is perhaps that of mistaken external devotion. Probably the next danger is that people, seeing the Masters, would make less effort, for two reasons — they would be discouraged by the sense of their own inferiority, and they would be satisfied without [Page 215] knowledge and achievement, saying, “The Masters know that everything is all right, so we need not worry. All is well with the world while they exist”. It is not well for mankind to come too near to genius and glory — even spiritual genius. He who speaks too well silences many. It is one of the disadvantages of the facility of modern travel that the genius imposes himself upon the world, and destroys the middle sort of talent; our pianist from Vienna or Poland makes music in the home ridiculous, and our printing presses have slain the village poets.
In
one of the Mahâtmâ Letters to Mr. Sinnett, the writer said that
they would never give satisfactory proof of their existence. If they did
so, most people would cease to strive. It can only be given to those few
who have already awakened themselves to such an extent, and have already
had such a vision of the importance of the life in themselves and others,
that nothing can check their efforts. To them the Master may be known as
a man, as a wise and helpful friend, even as an instructor or teacher. But
even in this the relationship has mostly an impersonal character, although
the pupil may personalize his memory of such contacts.[Page
216]
If much personal intercourse
were established and certain people were announced as authorised to act
as mediums or mediators for them, that would soon set up a standard of our
proper relation to the Masters' world, and then the Open Door would soon
be forgotten or despised.
Inseparate from our life, though not mingling in our forms, they called and call us to that world of theirs, to which every human, heart is a door. Those who “reject the Masters” are not they who do not wish to follow a particular and limited manifestation, but those whose conception of them is limited to their appearances “outside the precincts ''. They tacitly reject their great power and presence, beating inwardly at all our hearts.
Another proof that the Open Door is the general policy of the Masters, and that external intercourse is abnormal for them, is that they are limited by the human body, and cannot through it associate with many persons. In the letters to Mr. Sinnett the Master stated that he was very busy, and sometimes. had to keep his correspondent waiting for days for a reply. Also one of them wrote, ”I care very little for objective intercourse”,
But just as externally we may add to our [Page 217] power by making machines which associate us with the forces of Nature, so internally we can enter the “mind-plane” of the Masters, and think their thoughts with them.
There is a collective or brotherhood principle in knowledge and ideas, as there is to a large extent in material things. If two people happen to have the same idea it is the same idea, not two ideas which are the same. A person who has so purified his life that it is not in a state of perpetual response to gross stimuli, and has so developed his understanding that he can grasp big ideas, is thereby more in tune than others are with the Masters. In connection with this principle, the Master K.H. wrote: “For a clearer comprehension of the extremely abstruse and at first incomprehensible theories of our occult doctrine, never allow the serenity of your mind to be disturbed during your hours of literary labors, nor before you set to work. It is upon the serene and placid surface of the unruffled mind that the visions gathered from the invisible find a representation in the visible world. Otherwise you would vainly seek those visions, those flashes of sudden light which have already helped to solve so many of the minor problems and which alone can bring the truth [Page 218] before the eye of the soul. It is with jealous care that we have to guard our mind-plane from all the averse influences which daily arise in our passage through earth-life.”
The thoughts of a Master might look very much like orders to those who are predisposed to regard them in that way, and who do not stop to reflect that understanding is not separate from the will, that clear knowledge impels action. An interesting instance of mind-plane contact with the Master was given by Dr. Besant. She remarked recently that her Master sent her into Indian politics in 1877. That was about twelve years before she had any belief in Masters. Retrospectively she recognized the relationship which existed before she knew of it. There must be many more who have it, and do not directly know the fact.
It must not be assumed, of course, that Dr. Besant took the work up merely because told to do so; the heart and the will leaped forth in harmony with the idea. There can be no objection to the brotherhood of all life, as a source of our intuitions. If the intuition of our own will is not the spring of our action, the life is shut off or deadened down, and as our evolution is proportional to the amount of [Page 219] life in activity, orders from another are deadening. This puts contact with Gurus on a reasonable basis — each man must decide for himself what to do on all occasions, how to employ his time, where to give his sympathy, his money and his energy. If his decisions come out of the Masters' mind-plane they are still his own, though they contain fruits of divine friendship; and if they are from “governors of the world”, he is of the “governors”. Whether his mind is pure enough for that is entirely the matter of his own effort, but it must be remembered that health, not strength, of mind is required to see the meaning of life.
One cannot separate Master and pupil into two entities, one of whom is directing the other; that is why it used so often to be said that one's own higher self was the Master. I do not like the expression “ higher self”, but it can certainly be said that anyone who can be his own higher self is thereby in contact with the Master, All true intuitions have to do with Masters, and conversely association with a Master in his appearance or body on any plane on the part of anyone who was not yet himself his own higher self would be no contact with the Master, because he would not understand the Master, but would be somewhat in the [Page 220] position of a cat or a dog in the Master's house.
There is only one way to associate with a Master as a Master, and that is from “within” by our own living power. I know a man who has been conscious of a Master (or thinks he has) for many years, who said that some time ago the Master had made himself specially clear as to visible form, and then reproached him, saying: “You must not make this distinction between us; what you do I do.” That Master had been a teacher to him. Their way of teaching is to help the pupil to grow into his subject, but this friend had wrongly fallen into the idea of regarding it as instruction from the outside.
As regards outside instruction, the world is not lacking in literature which tells how man may reach perfection. The records of Christ, Buddha, Shankara and others are with us, and the truth peeps out in a thousand other places. Some weak persons desire a teacher to tell them what is true, what they should believe and do. But their attitude is absurd for it is only by facing their own problem that they can awaken themselves to fuller living,, and enter the Masters' world.
The Gurus are like the sun, We need not [Page 221] worship the sun or request it to shine more and more, but we need to make use of the sunshine. That is the greatest worship, In all this the example of children is an excellent guide, for they are not content to watch and admire their elders, but must at once start in and do for themselves that which has caught their imagination. They have not the psychology of a crowd which watches a football match or reads novels as a substitute for life. The orthodox Guru is too external a thing, like the orthodox God. [Page 222]
RELIGION
IN the material world there is a supreme superior, something that differs entirely from every thing, and yet of it all things are parts. One thing is dependent on another, but there is something upon which all are at last dependent. A table stands upon the floor. It is dependent upon that support for its position in space. The floor in its turn rests upon beams, and those upon walls, and those upon the foundations of the building and the earth. It is a commonplace of modern science that the earth also is where it is in space because of the various forces which connect it with the sun, and the sun in its turn leans upon other celestial bodies. Ultimately it is only the entirety of things which is self-sustaining. This shows us that somehow all the parts depend upon the whole — the world is not made up of a great quantity of particulars which are somehow independent and have merely come together by chance or caprice. It is one thing [Page 223] and that unity is the foundation and support of all the parts.
In human consciousness we find a similar truth. The body acts as an organized unit because there is an “ I” or a will in that body. After death all the parts of the body go their respective ways, and there is decay and dissolution, but while there is life there is unity. Many years ago Professor Thomas Huxley spoke of this, though in a slightly different connection. He told his audience that though it might appear to them that while lecturing he was exhibiting a good deal of life, what they were witnessing was a process of dying, because with every word that he uttered he was wearing away the cells of his body. Then, in his always humorous way, he begged them not to be alarmed, for he would not permit the process to go too far, but would go home, have recourse to the substance called mutton, and stretch his protoplasm back to its original size, The point is that Professor Huxley would take steps to repair his body because he himself was a life governing that body.
If we study ourselves psychologically, we find there is something coordinating all; and that even our thoughts and feelings come under that. The will might be defined as that faculty [Page 224] by which we govern our own thoughts and feelings. In itself it seems to be the principle of unity and order. We have thus seen that whatever power it is which is the support of all material things, it is of exactly the same nature as that which we find in ourselves as the will.
Therefore many religious philosophers have declared that because there is one world and one law from which nothing can escape, there must be one first cause which is the source of all. That supreme source of all also shows itself in man in the principle of order, so that men know “God” by expressing more and more of that ultimate reality in themselves.
The word religion is connected with other familiar words, such as ligament, or ligature, something that holds or binds, and it may therefore be taken that religion consists of any means which may be used to bind a man into that service, to make him true to his best and inmost self. Such a man will try to understand experience, and such understanding shows the principle of unity, because taking into account many things at once and seeing them as parts of one system is understanding. Such a man. will also express the principle of love, which also unites, shows interest beyond the limits of [Page 225] one personality, and binds many together in one united group.
It is impossible to think of God as any particular form, however big. Only the whole can represent to us that self-dependence. But somehow that whole is reflected in each one of us, and we find it as the will or principle of unity. Some dictionaries tell us that theosophy is an intimate knowledge of divine things. That does not mean a special knowledge, attainable by the development of some peculiar and unusual faculty, but simply recognition of this principle of unity in us, which is the will and the life. Because he was a theosophist, Jacob Boehme could say, “ In some sense, love is greater than God”.
The same idea is seen in the paradoxical argument about God's inability to create a man. It is said that there are some things which God could not do; he could not make a square circle or a tall dwarf, and similarly he could not make a dependent will. If there is any creation in this matter it is within, and we are he creating us. There can thus be no mediators between man and God, since they are not separate things, but the whole reflecting in the part.
Also there can be no outside authorities [Page 226] to tell a man what to do to increase or perfect this union. That process is best taking place when the man himself is developing his knowledge of the world through understanding, and his knowledge of life through love, in obedience to the principle of will in himself, which is always working for greater order or unity. If there is any outside authority, then everything is an authority, even a mosquito, because it causes us to resort to various methods of self-defense, and in thinking out those devices we are using and developing our intelligence and understanding. If there is an external God he is explicit, not implicit, in everything.
All religions, if carefully understood, show the same principle at the bottom. Christianity, for example, cannot be confined to the acts and things of which Christ spoke, but must include all in which He acquiesced. This is taken so in practice, for our modern civilization has inherited much from the thought and the beauty of Greece, and yet men call it a Christian civilization. The idea is perfectly consistent, and it is not difficult to trace the full movement.
In the early days of what is technically the white race we find that very much attention was given to abstract philosophic and [Page 227] religious thought. Those thinkers were discovering that there is a “soul” working through the body, much as a child gradually learns the same thing and in consequence acquires when grown up a sense of responsibility and purpose, instead of continuing life as a succession of casual adventures and incidents. The child very gradually finds the unitary or organizing principle, and the man applies it. The race does exactly the same thing on a larger scale. By the time that the early Greek philosophers had thus made the perception of the “soul” quite clear the season was ripe for the expression of that “soul” in action, and we find men beginning to turn its powers consciously and deliberately to creative art and the management of external things. Beauty is the expression of that order in work, and it spread from Greece not only westwards but also eastwards into the Hindu and Buddhist worlds.
Philosophers found that human life is ordered because there is one life working through the body, and when they began to observe that the world was also an ordered whole, they asked themselves whether there was not a similar principle governing and uniting all things. In the world they found, [Page 228] according to their predilections, the expression of the different faculties of the soul or life. Thus we have an Anaxagoras, putting the relations of things down to the workings of divine or universal nous or reason. If man's life becomes orderly through reason which he exercises, the same, it could be argued, must be true of the world. Empedocles ascribed the relations of material bodies to principles of love and hate, that is to say, to universal feelings. But Pythagoras seems to have seen most deeply, for he said that in human life both reason and emotion are but subordinate and assistant to a principle of order, number or unity.
Out of those Greek times there has come down to us the practical religion of truth, goodness, and beauty. Truth is thought governed by unity; goodness or love is feeling governed by unity, and beauty is the result of work, which is action governed by unity — for all great skill in action produces beauty both in the object that is made and in the limb or organ with which it is made. Truth, goodness and beauty are living religion, because, they are the reflection of the one life or order, in each of our lives.
The Greeks were not so successful in [Page 229] manifesting goodness as they were in expressing truth and beauty, and I think we might ascribe to the fact that the Greeks could not hold together, and love one another, the necessity for Christ's special emphasis upon goodness. Certainly he did not object to truth and beauty, and they are therefore part of his religion, but it was necessary to strengthen especially the weak link in the chain.
Thus religion is thus not a special set of activities, different from ordinary life. It is that life properly lived.
The world of our experience cannot be left out of consideration; it is not a senseless, cruel place; the God in us is stamping its nature upon it, bringing it into order and developing our own powers in the process.
Life properly lived is life with a great goal in view, life lived with understanding of the principle of unity. Every thought, feeling and action should take place in the light of that purpose, and then it will make the most or fullest use of every moment and occasion. When a man is using his own intelligence, his own best feelings, or love, and his own will, he is doing his best, because his faculties will then grow. There is no need to fear mistakes if we are using our best thought, love and will, [Page 230] But there is great reason to fear fear itself, which postpones life. The man who never made a mistake, it is said, never made anything at all. It is reasonable to listen to advice, and to follow it if one's own judgment pronounces it the best thing, but merely to follow the direction of another because he or she is supposed to be superior in judgment, is to stifle our own life and prevent its growth. Men cannot be uplifted from the outside. The common soldier may be well drilled, but the result is he is unintelligent and lacking in initiative. We may paint many pictures for a friend, but that will not make him into an artist, even if he holds the pencils and we guide his hand by holding it with ours.
The average man is living in the stream of things. He is attracted and repelled. He does not know himself. His personality is a piece of music bound together only by a repeating motive. He is a commuter, so that even when he travels he takes with him that criterion which will prevent him from being lost in the varied flow of new experience; just as an old lady travels with her parrot, and when she wakes up in the morning and sees her parrot she remembers who she is. Sooner or later comes to him a message “Be a man !” This [Page 231] was the Buddha's message and also the Christ's. The Buddha's was philosophical or metaphysical; he directed the people away from the events to the man. Find yourselves. He was talking to children. They were to become householders — the household being the body, into the life of which they were to bring coordination, or unity and power.
Most of the organized religions have failed badly. They have mistrusted both man and the world, and so have partially destroyed those very experiences and activities which make him more like God. In religious circles there are many “guiding lines”, and fixed ceremonials, and models for devotion and imitation. They play a great part in hiding the essential nature and the vitality of religion.
Errors
go very far and very high. I have heard of people who love their fellow-men,
but who could say about certain religious ideas, “ Yes, I know they are
probably false, but they do good; they make people gentle and kind”. Such
persons do not take into account the fact that truth, goodness and beauty cannot
be separated — that the lack of any one of these places a shutter in front
of the corresponding aspect of life. They are the foot-binders of the moral realm. [Page
232]
I do not know to what extent
guiding lines help a child to write straight; I think on the whole that if he
tried from the beginning without them he would be doing best. As it is many people
seem to think that there is no correct writing except that which is between these
ancient lines; they think that God is nearer to them in church and on Sundays
than in the office, or the home, or the street on week days. It may be that people
are so weak that they cannot remember to open their hearts and minds on all occasions,
and must therefore have these special reminders or pick-me-ups; but I cannot
see that they will have begun to be religious until they can bring some power
from within themselves without the necessity for such stimulants.
It would be poor economy on the part of a being who wanted to give his best help or stimulus to mankind to arrange that it should flow only on certain occasions, and those attended often with great inconvenience and surrounded by great expense. In other words, divine “grace” presented only on special occasions, when special words are recited, when special clothes are worn, and through special persons, would be a disgrace. Indeed, many of the best minds have rejected the idea [Page 233] of God because it is sometimes surrounded by these appliances.
Most of us agree that collective human thought is powerful, and that it may be further supplemented with that of Masters and other beings. But at the same time it is logical to believe that the principle works everywhere, that all Nature is trans-substantiable, so that to go out into the forest or under the stars on a quiet night and feel the thrill of Nature's beauty, or to respond to the life in other human beings, is equally to excite the divine grace or flow of the forces of unity. Surely all true life is sacramental.
It has been a common mistake of religions to miss the goal or purpose of our existence. Many have held the vehicle theory instead of the instrument theory, and have in consequence obstructed the life in their adherents, instead of awakening it. Most of them have advocated supplication and hope instead of a courageous life. Most have taught consolation in the rewards and happiness of a future life, and have thereby denied the paramount utility of present experience. Most of them have preferred darkness to light, and would go into a cave with a candle to worship the sun. In the main they have ignorantly formulated [Page 234] external laws, and ultimately used them to counteract the best impulses of the human mind and heart, as for example when only a short time ago a priest of a narrow though large sect, when called upon to give evidence relating to excessive cruelty in a vivisection case, declared that though the cruelty was repugnant to human feelings, no one should set up human feelings against the divine law announced in the Bible, which fully authorized these things. Though the world punishes thoughtlessness, the religions have often encouraged blind belief, and have resisted the natural tendency in man to give ever fuller expression to the life within himself through the powers of will, love, and thought.
All such activities are contrary to the principle of theosophy, which is the antithesis of materialism, and declares that all things are divine because they belong to the life, and that true living alone can be religious or a cause of realization of unity or the one life. The theosophist is one who so fully realizes the omnipresence of the divine that he is willing to put his trust in all life. For him, God is out in the open and need not be sought in boxes, and all the world is a beautiful lawn across which all can walk without the need of a beaten path.[Page 235]
THEOSOPHY is a dignified old word, honored by seventeen centuries of consistent use. Yet, strange to say, today, and even in the Theosophical Society, the question is still raised: what is theosophy ? The Greek theosophia, from which our word is derived, is a compound, composed of theos. and sophia, which may be translated respectively God and wisdom. In practice, the term knowledge has generally been used, rather than wisdom, but this is not a point about which for our present purpose we need be punctilious.
The combination of theos and sophia can be read in two quite different ways, according as we take the first term to have the sense of a noun or that of an adjective. We thus find that theosophy means either “knowledge of the divine” or “divine knowledge”. There can be no question but that the former is the fundamental and historical meaning. It is [Page 236] also in entire agreement with the Sanskrit term Brahma-vidyâ, to which it has frequently been compared, for that means “ knowledge of Brahma ”.
Some of the dictionaries make its meaning “knowledge or wisdom concerning God or the divine”, but the weakness of this view lies in the fact that there is no knowledge with which the divine is not concerned. If that definition were true all theology would be theosophy, and all science also, since knowledge of astronomy or of crystallography improves a man's conception of deity. Similarly it cannot be taken as “an explication of God's ways or God's plan”, because there is nothing which is not his way or his plan; as stated in the Gîtâ, he is not only the splendor of splendid things, but also the gambling of the cheat.
The interpretation of theosophy as “divine wisdom” making it a collection of statements about the way in which the machinery of life works, including reincarnation, karma, etc, has come very much to the front during the last thirty years, because of the influence of fundamental and popular concepts of modern science, especially the wrong idea that there are natural laws and qualities of materials which belong to some substance which all the [Page 237] same has not in itself the creative power with which we are familiar by direct experience in ourselves. Science has shown that man and the mineral are “brothers”, or of one nature. From this a wrong inference has been drawn, namely, that man is only a more complex mineral. It should on the contrary be said that since man and the mineral are brothers, the mineral is a little man. We all know what man is.
It is an easy step from the definition of theosophy as “divine wisdom” to the wrong conception that theosophy is “a body of truths” which are in the special custody of groups of people who have a vision of higher planes of nature. I am not, of course, decrying such knowledge, but am simply pointing out that that is not what is meant by theosophy, but belongs to the same department of human activity as physics, chemistry, physiology and astronomy. I have had too much to do with occult researches not to know something of their value, but I would point out that we can regard superphysical research and information either theosophically or materialistically, just as we may make use of the physical sciences in either of those two ways.
Some of the dictionaries make it out that [Page 238] the knowledge of God which is understood as theosophy is obtained by shooting upwards, as it were, into some fine region and finding God there, and thus acquiring special “knowledge obtained by direct intercourse with God and superior spirits”. I may digress to the extent of remarking that as to such a view the famous Sir Henry More wrote in 1656: “This disease many of our chymists and several theosophists, in my judgment, seem very obnoxious to, who dictate their own conceits and fancies so magisterially and imperiously, as if they were indeed, authentic messengers from God Almighty”. This may be one of the diseases or superstitions which are liable to attach themselves to any theosophical movement, but obviously that is not knowledge of God or the divine, which is to be found just as much on the physical plane as on any other plane.
The danger arises when the materialistic idea creeps in. Then a horizontal dividing line is made, and what is above it is considered to be spiritual, while what is below is regarded as material. But the fact is that the dividing line should be drawn vertically through all planes, not horizontally at all, because the spirit or life exists everywhere in its own right [Page 239] and not on the sufferance of any forms. It makes the forms.
I can make this point clear by saying that on every plane or collection of expressions of a state of consciousness there are always both consciousness and form, and in all the cases of coherent form-building that we know there is evidence of the power of consciousness at work. Where there is life there is initiative in form-building, which at the same time is a display of the unification or integration of otherwise incoherent matter. In modern science we never meet mere energy or force as a form-builder. Gravity, for example, is a force used by the engineer, just as wood and stone are used by him. Similarly, a tree raises an immense amount of water. The tendency of natural energies is, on the contrary, towards dissipation in space, and the production of uniformity or homogeneity in matter, The casual forms of clouds or of mountains are exhibiting decay or dissipation, not organization.
The main point of theosophy is that we regard our power as fundamental, and therefore to us small things and particular things are just as spiritual as big things. On one side of the vertical line there is the material, [Page 240] and on the other the divine. It is knowledge of this divine which is theosophy, and it is acting according to this divine which is the theosophic life in the world, and this may be achieved on any plane.
For the sake of illustration I will explain how a human being is more divine than a conger-eel. The conger-eel gives birth to about 150,000,000 young at a time. It might be argued that it must be superior to man, who generally gives birth to only one at a time. The young eels are perfectly good ones, but they are nothing new. They are just the same or almost the same as what have gone before. But the human being who tries to make improved conditions for even one child is really showing creative power far more than the conger-eel, that easily produces millions.
You can never judge progress by the quantity of work done, but only by the quality. Therefore a human being having a very small and humble position in the world, who puts into that position the new efforts which are involved in thought and love, is generally far more advanced than other persons who may be making a great success in the world. I may conclude this portion of my argument with the statement that while science deals with the [Page 241] form side only, theosophy takes into account also the life side of every plane.
I think we can better understand the relations between life and form on any plane by observing that the plane is not something existing on its own account, but is merely the effect of a mood of the former. In other words, a plane expresses a state of consciousness, and all the forms existing on that plane are nothing but expressions of consciousness acting in that state. So the fundamental thing about a plane is that it is essentially a state of consciousness. The collection of material forms is subordinate and secondary.
The forms by themselves mean nothing, just as the print on this page by itself means nothing. But since the forms made by consciousness in a certain state represent that consciousness (just as when a painter paints a picture he represents himself, or as our own calligraphy represent us individually), when the form is understood the state of consciousness which produced it is realized, just as when the page of printing is understood the ideas which gave rise to it are realized. So-called facts are very evanescent, but the development of capacities, of consciousness is conterminous with time itself, Because theosophy [Page 242] studies the states of consciousness it is not empiric. Though it may be found that, let us say, affection produces a rosy color in the aura of a person on the astral plane, you cannot develop affection in an astral personality by painting him red with the colors from your astral palette. All the color equivalents of the emotions form merely a kind of astral phrenology, in which the success of the professor depends upon the accuracy of his color-sense, and education in color-variety.
Forms
are utterly helpless. Words are only used to indicate experiences — they
cannot record fact or life, which must be lived to be known. How Christ
must have despaired of words when he said: “To this end was I born, and for
this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.
Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice”. You can calculate on
things, but not on human beings. Out of that incalculable comes invention. And
out of
invention comes new experience and new power to the consciousness. All this incalculable
life is divine; therefore every individual is sacred. Edison may be the greatest
of inventors, but he could not predict Marconi. No theosophist can treat another
as if he were a mere form. [Page
243]
Nearly all those dictionaries
which have tried to define theosophy as “knowledge of the divine” have
made the mistake of regarding it as introspective, as interested in the life
and notin the form, and have therefore considered the theosophic life as involving at
least mental and emotional retirement or aloofness from the world. But this cannot
be so, since all forms express life. Because they express it they are not mere
forms. They are not finite things, to be abandoned as foreign to our nature and
poisonous to us. On the contrary, the theosophic life consists in the finding
of the infinite in the finite every time. For example, it cannot be my business
to meet all the mothers in the world, and love them as mothers should be loved.
I do not lose anything at all
by not being able to meet all those mothers. The important point is that if in
the course of my experience I have come to love my own mother, then I have the
capacity to love all mothers whom I meet. In that case, I have found the infinite
in the finite. There are no circumstances at all in which we cannot find the
infinite in the finite, for thought, love or will applied to any experience soon
reveals its divine value.
The special virtue of love in the matter is [Page 244] that it is a living recognition of the unity of life, and therefore adds the experience of others to our own. If I have no motor-car, but my friend has one, and I love my friend, that is just as good as if I have the motor-car. So love liberates me from personal limitations, not through indifference or renunciation, but through their very opposite. That is freedom. It is life.
The theosophic life stands for whatever promotes understanding, love and freedom. It is not subject to the blinding effects of materialism. It distinguishes very clearly between freedom and the exercise of power. I do not want to make or to control in any way the millions of forms with which other people are experimenting. I do not want to paint their pictures for them, while they sit for ever in swaddling-clothes. I have no desire whatever to give birth to 150,000,000 little conger-eels every season. If we have freedom, it is not because we can do everything, but because we do not want to do everything, but to be true to ourselves. That is why I particularly like a sentiment expressed in a letter from the Master M. to Frau Mary Gebhard in 1884. “ You have offered yourself for the Red Cross; but, sister, there are sicknesses and wounds of [Page 245] the soul that no surgeon's art can cure. Shall you help us to teach mankind that the soul-sick must heal themselves ? Your action will be your response”.
I hope I have been able to show that there are not two theosophies, but only one; that the term means, as I found it very well put in one dictionary, “an intimate knowledge of divine things”. Although some, translating it “the divine wisdom” have made it simply “a body of truths”, and of these some would go so far as to say exactly which truths are theosophy and which are not, they have missed the point. All that is simply Science, and it has its normal place in the study of that collection of impermanences which is popularly called the world. That is truth, in the sense of fact, while it lasts, but is not the same thing as that eternal truth which governs the relation of the life to these things, whatever they may be, and howsoever they may change their forms.
Each man is busy with his own karma and his own life. Science, whether ordinary or occult, is a study of the karmas or works or creations alone but, theosophy is a study of the lives which are being lived with the aid of those karmas. This is easy to understand if we do [Page 246] not start by taking it for granted that there is a world which exists in its own strength, and that we are small things which must somehow climb up to the tops of the mountain of that world. But if this popular supposition creeps in the whole argument will be spoiled.
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