Theosophy - Thoughts on "At the Feet of the Master" by George S.Arundale
THOUGHTS
ON
“AT THE FEET OF THE MASTER”
By George S. Arundale
Of the National Educational Service (India)
Theosophical Publishing House Adyar Chennai India, 1918
Part 1 of 2 - go to part 2
PREFATORY NOTE
THE following chapters are reprinted from a series of Correspondence Studies
on At the Feet of the Master which I have been writing for the last two years on
behalf of members of the Order of the Servants of the Star.
I
have left the studies practically as I originally
wrote them — permitting myself
only a verbal alteration here and there. There may
be a certain amount of repetition, since I began
writing the series in Bude, Cornwall, in 1914,
and only
finished them in Adyar, Madras, in 1918. And there
has been no time to rewrite or even to submit them
to a thorough revision.
But
some of my friends think them helpful, and at least
they may draw the attention of their readers to
the wonderful book which inspired them. For myself,
I
can truly say that At the Feet of the Master is my constant companion, guide, and
mentor. Ever by my side is the little copy given
me by my young teacher. That which he heard, I am
trying to understand; and I find in the priceless
words in
which the teaching is clothed all that, indeed far,
far more than, I need for discipline and training. At the Feet of the Master has an appropriate message for
every human being who at all strives to lead an unselfish
life. [Page VI] I earnestly commend it to teachers and students of all faiths and of all races. With
the companion volume Education as Service, a teacher or student has a
complete guide for daily life. And the truths these two great volumes enshrine are
the truths upon the recognition and following of which all true citizenship
depends. At the Feet of the Master and Education as Service are Heralds of the
New Age, Signs of the Coming Times, and should be carefully studied by those
who seek to co-operate with the future, and who are not slaves of prejudice and
custom.
Adyar,
Madras,1918
GEORGE S. ARUNDALE
Page |
CONTENTS
|
|
|
|
The Giving of the Teachings |
|
Alcyone's Foreword |
|
The Qualifications for Discipleship |
|
There is Time to Achieve Perfection |
|
The Living of the Life |
|
Training the Body |
|
The Astral and Mental Bodies
|
|
The Hidden Laws of Nature |
|
"A Small Thing" |
|
Service as Education |
|
Discrimination |
|
Desirelessness |
|
Desirelessness (Concluded)
|
|
The Six Points of Conduct
|
|
The Six Points of Conduct (Continued)
|
|
The Six Points of Conduct (Continued) |
|
The Six Points of Conduct (Continued) |
|
The Six Points of Conduct (Concluded) |
|
Love |
|
Sins against Love |
|
Tests of Love |
|
The Growth of Love |
|
Love and Service |
|
Conclusion
|
CHAPTER I
THE GIVING OF THE TEACHINGS
IN
many ways the little book we are going to study
together is the most important gift the world has
received for hundreds of years, for the words are
from the lips
of a mighty Teacher, known to the world as Pythagoras
and to some of us as the blessed Master Koot Hoomi,
the Master K. H. as He is generally called in
Theosophical literature. I must take for granted
that you know who Masters are— if not you will find plenty of information in such
a book as Herbert Whyte's The
Great Teachers, or in Mrs. Besant's The Masters and the Way to Them. Let us
proceed to see how these instructions apply, so that we may follow them
intelligently.
In
the Preface, Mrs. Besant writes : " The teachings . . . were given to him by his
Master in preparing him for Initiation." Several questions arise here: How were
they given to him ? Where were they given to him
? What is Initiation ?
HOW THE TEACHINGS WERE GIVEN
Question
No. 1. You probably know that some people are able
to be quite useful
on the astral plane [Page 2]I
must leave the explanation of this term to some
friend, if you do not understand it — and try to help in all good work as much as they can.
Many of you who are reading these lines probably
help very much when the physical body is asleep
and the astral body is the vehicle in which for the
time you are living and working.
But there is quite as much learning as helping, and
many young people, or those who are not yet very
far advanced, gather round some one more advanced
and
learn much that is not only useful to them on the
astral plane but helpful on the physical plane
also. These elders in turn sit at the feet [An
expression which
figuratively expresses “learning from”, and in the East is literally true.] of
someone who knows yet more, while a few will be receiving
instructions from the Masters Themselves.
Now
Alcyone — to give the name used to mark the soul apart from the
various bodies he has been wearing life after life — is one of these elders, " young in body
verily, but not in Soul", as Mrs. Besant tells us in the Preface. Marked out
for a special destiny, he is privileged to receive
instruction direct from the Master's lips,
and he is told to write down each morning the phrases
which sum up and express the teachings he has received
during the night. Alcyone is in a special
position because he was already a pupil of the Master
when these particular teachings were begun, and they
were, therefore, intended to help him to reach
quickly the next stage of his spiritual journey — Initiation. The language, it will be
noticed, is very simple, for the Master was, in this [Page 3] case,
addressing Himself to a physical brain which was
still very young, and so was careful to speak in such terms that the young
brain might remember and understand the next day. Every sentence, indeed, is
exceedingly clear, because
Alcyone did not then know much English — the teachings were given in the
autumn and winter of 1909—and only a very little was taught at a time, partly in
order that he might remember all that was said and partly in order that he
might practise each suggestion as it came. Out of the body he knew much more,
of
course; but each lower body is a limitation of the one next above (of less
dense matter, perhaps I should say, as there is no "above" or "below"), and the
teaching had to be adapted to the needs of lower
bodies, so that they might be brought under perfect
control.
I
do not know whether the Master's physical body
was asleep when He gave the teachings. Probably
the Master retires early, for He can use all His
bodies
perfectly, and, therefore, functions as easily out
of the physical body as in — perhaps more easily, since the matter of other bodies
is less dense. If so, as Alcyone would not be at
the Master's house until, perhaps, nine or even
later, the
teaching would be given by the Master in a subtle
body and would, of course, be received by Alcyone
astrally, i.e. on the astral plane. On the other hand, there
may have been occasions on which the Master was still
using the physical body, in which case you may
imagine Him seated in the big arm chair in the
large room
where He often receives visitors, or perhaps in His
[Page 4] study
adjoining; Alcyone receiving the instructions "at His Feet". To the Master,
all planes are equally accessible, and though awake
in His physical body He would see and talk to astral
Alcyone as well as He could see and talk to anyone
on the physical plane. He would probably withdraw
His attention from the
physical plane to the astral, simultaneously bringing
into play the organs of His subtle body. Physical
objects would then be thrown out of focus, just
as nearer
objects appear vague when we are looking at objects
far off. Perhaps the Master experiences no dimness
with regard to objects at which He is not directly
looking; I do not know. At any rate, our astral Alcyone
would be as real to Him as, perhaps more real than,
any physical object near Him— the sofas or the table;
and He would talk to His pupil using the astral plane
as the medium for His voice.
WHERE THE TEACHINGS WERE GIVEN
Question
No. 2 - I have already told you that the teachings
were probably given at the Master's house in Tibet.
If you turn to the map of Asia and find Tibet north
of
the great Himalayan range, you may see the name of
a town called Shigatse. In the vicinity of this
town the Master lives in His physical body, and
so Alcyone,
living right down in the south of India at Adyar,
quite close to Madras, could hardly receive the
teaching in his physical body. Adyar is a village
whose main
distinction is the headquarters of the Theosophical
Society — situated on a large [Page 5] piece
of land facing the sea and bordered by the Adyar
river. In this headquarters is a fine building
containing rooms for various workers and,
on the first floor, the abode of the President
of the Society together with a few other rooms
appropriated to the use of various members of the
headquarters staff. Close to Mrs. Besant's
rooms lived Alcyone and his
younger brother, further off being Mr. Leadbeater's
big room; and thence, night after night, the physical
bodies were left asleep while their owners sailed
away
over the snow-topped peaks of the Himalayas to their
Master's home — a long
journey, which would occupy many days if the physical
body had to do the travelling, but almost as quick
as thought for inhabitants of the astral plane.
No doubt our travellers stopped on their way
to look at scenery, or perhaps to help some one
in trouble, but it would not do to be late at the
Master's house
for He is exceedingly busy and must not be
inconvenienced by our carelessness. Probably
the teaching did not take a very long time —about
fifteen minutes; so, when the party was
dismissed, the rest of the night would be filled
with all kinds of useful experience in the training
of
Alcyone's astral and other bodies for future
work. At about 5.30 in the morning the physical body
would be awakened by its owner, and, after a bath
and some food, and then exercises and study,
Alcyone would go into Mrs.
Besant's room to take his seat at a table in the
verandah. There he wrote out very carefully by himself
that which had been taught him by the Master, the
Master having summed up in a single [Page 6] sentence or so the gist of the quarter of an hour's teaching. Thus At the Feet of
the Master came
gradually to be written, the greater part ... a reproduction of
the Master's own words; that which is not such a verbal reproduction is
the
Master's thought clothed in the pupil's words".
WHAT INITIATION IS
Question
No. 3. "Preparing him for Initiation". What does this mean ? Well, we
must begin some way back if we are to understand
what Initiation means. I hope you all know that
the real "ourselves", behind the bodies we happen to be using
in this particular life, are immortal sparks of the
flame of God, and that each little spark which
is one of us has been through the mineral, vegetable
and animal
kingdoms before entering the human kingdom to which
we now belong. In the early stages, millions of
years ago and not on this earth at all, the little
sparks
were not so much separated off from one another as
they now are in the human kingdom; they were not,
to use a difficult word, "self-conscious" or alive to the
world around them. In the mineral kingdom these little
sparks were hardly awake at all. In the vegetable
kingdom, however, they were somewhat less sleepy;
while
in the animal kingdom they really began to stir about.
So much so that individual sparks began to live separated
existences instead of being content, as
heretofore, to share their experiences with brother-sparks
and live a common [Page 7] life.
You have perhaps noticed that while most animals
of a particular species have many peculiarities
in common, some have very distinct individualities
of
their own. This is the beginning of the road which
is leading them direct to the human kingdom, and
then comes a time in the case of each animal when
it
begins to live so definite a life of its own that
the spark inhabiting it finally breaks off from
fellow-sparks and, to use a Theosophical phrase, "becomes
individualised", i.e., enters the human kingdom.
THE FIRST STEP
Now this individualisation is the first great step made by the divine spark on its
way to the realisation of what divinity really means. The first definite step on the
road to perfection has been taken when the soul, if I may use the term, traverses
the bridge that, leads from the animal to the human kingdom, that, separates
definite individual existence from a more or less conscious existence shared with
other souls. In the lower kingdoms of nature, souls are joined in groups according
to their kind, and the stage of separated existence, when the soul in the animal
enters the human kingdom is, as I have said, the first great step on the path of
evolution.
THE SECOND STEP
The
second great step is when the human being at last
begins to develop a
definite sense of right and [Page 8] wrong and to realise, however faintly, that wrong must not be done, while right
must be followed. This may be called the dawning of conscience, aroused
through ages of experience that happiness follows the less selfish action
while pain follows the more selfish action. At last the individual begins to
realise that he
cannot live for himself alone, and the God within him thankfully looks upon
a vehicle gradually tuning itself to the divine harmony. The battle is by no
means
over. Indeed it is hardly begun; but the man's face is set towards the goal
and the higher nature begins at last to receive conscious response to the training
and
moulding of its lower vestures, so that both become better instruments in
the plan
of Him Who is our world.
Each
of these steps is an expansion of consciousness,
the soul — from having
been but an unconscious cell in the body of God — begins to awaken and to take
the first definite steps towards becoming a God itself;
and this is God's object in spreading self-consciousness
in each part of the organism that is Himself.
THE THIRD STEP — INITIATION
Now
Initiation is the third great step — another expansion of consciousness, a
further growth of the soul. The second great step
was, as we have seen, the awakening of conscience.
But conscience had to become definitely established
as the dominant factor in the man's nature, and he
had yet to learn to [Page 9] realise
that while self-preservation might be a necessary
law at a certain stage, self-sacrifice is the only
true guide for the soul eager to know itself divine.
Indeed,
while conscience had doubtless been aroused, the
individual had yet to realise himself and his powers,
had yet to assert himself and, for the time, to
become
entirely centred in himself and his individual growth.
In other words, he had to practise his conscience
in all kinds of ways. To borrow a phrase from Mr.
Leadbeater, he had to become "the centre of his circle", to learn the powers of
the lower vehicles and their limitations, and to
apply his conscience to their use. At last, developing
slowly his various faculties, and gradually coming
to the
conclusion that self-sacrifice brings more lasting
happiness than self-seeking, he begins to live for
the world instead of expecting the world to live
for him. Now and
again he doubtless lapses into the more selfish mode
of living, but unselfishness begins to predominate
over selfishness; and when the Masters see that nothing
will in the long run affect his determination to
serve the world, one of Them, who
has been watching the man for lives, determines to
give him special teaching so that he may quickly
gain added power to help.
DlSCIPLESHIP
The individual then enters into an apprenticeship in
the school of a particular Master and begins a
series of very hard but very helpful lives. [Page
10] Perhaps
you know that the government of the world is in
the hands of a graded band of Mighty Brethren whom
we call the Great White Lodge — using the word "Lodge" in its masonic sense of an organised
fraternity. At Their head stands the Great Ruler
of the world, and around Him are grouped His Ministers,
some
functioning as organisers, rulers, heads of the races
of the world, others as teachers of religions, others
guiding the various continents and countries, others
influencing non-human races such as Angels and Devas,
yet others acting as
assistants to these Greater Ones and preparing to
take Their places when They shall have passed on
to still higher work. Now most of you young people
belong
to one or to another of these departments in the
world's government, and some great Master has His
eye upon you, watching for the time when you intend
from
your heart to give yourself to the world's service,
showing unmistakable signs of earnestness. Alcyone,
for example, belongs to the teaching department and
will
some day become a great teacher of religion. The
Master who teaches him is, therefore, Himself a mighty
Teacher destined to precede Alcyone in a great office
in the teaching department. Just as would-be engineers
enter an engineering shop to be trained by a thoroughly
qualified engineer, so in the real professions
of life still more scientific training is available,
and the Master Koot Hoomi will train Alcyone to fulfil
perfectly the destiny to which he is to be called.
This training
has definite stages — the first being when the Master determines to take
a [Page 11] possible
pupil on trial, this stage being called probationary
discipleship. Passing successfully through the
period of probation or trial, long or short according
to
circumstances, the pupil is definitely enrolled as
a member of the Master's school and becomes an
accepted disciple. Very often many years pass — seven or even
more — before a candidate reaches this second stage, but Alcyone
had in previous lives satisfied the Master as to
his fitness for discipleship, so in his case
these two stages and the third, sonship of the Master,
a specially intimate relationship, were passed in
the course of a few months, his Initiation following
on January llth, 1910. The object of the Master's
school is thus to prepare its
pupils for the world's service, and exists partly
to train them in such self-control and purity as
may enable them to present themselves as candidates
for
admission to the lowest rank in the Great White Lodge.
Such admission is the third great stage on the pathway
of evolution — you remember, I hope, the other
two — and is called Initiation because it not only means
the entry of the approved candidate into an organised
fraternity with all that such entry involves, c.f. the
masonic initiation ceremony, but because the candidate
is for the first time brought into touch, during
the ceremony, with certain great truths of life which,
heretofore, he has only dimly sensed. These truths
will have been known to him
intellectually long before and he will for long have
striven to practise them; but not until the ceremony
of Initiation will he feel them as laws of his nature, [Page 12] will he experience them as living realities. His consciousness,
his touch with God, expands, and truths which were
outside him, however much he may have
realised them with his mind, now become part of his
very being, and he can never again think or feel
or act as if they were outside him.
EXPANSION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Imagine
a circle to include all you are and know. Imagine much knowledge outside
yourself and a constant pressure from within the circle to include the
knowledge outside. In many places the circle expands in the endeavour to
touch the truths beyond. After a time some truth outside, which has persistently
been
touched, is drawn within the circle, and the circle increases its size by
the amount of the knowledge gained. Initiation is, as it were, the moment
at which some
special truths notably the law of unity, pass within the circle. Until this
time, the truths were accepted, their existence was admitted. Henceforth,
these truths are
realised as part, of consciousness itself.
THE VALUE OF INITIATION
To
be accurate, I should observe that the object of
Initiation is to confer upon its recipient power
for service, derived partly from the added truths,
and partly from
the fact that the individual is now a member of a
Great Brotherhood and shares, for use, the power
Their unity generates. The word "Initiation" as [Page 13] used in At the Feet of the Master means
admission to membership of the lowest rank in that
great Hierarchy which governs the world, the ranks
stretching
upwards until alone in His degree towers the Ruler
of our world Himself. Each rank is separated from
the rank below by deeper knowledge and more selfless
service, and admission from a lower rank to that
next higher depends upon
proved self-surrender, in the world of men, to the
needs of others. Initiation is the third great
expansion of consciousness, expansion meaning here
an increasing
realisation by the individual consciousness of the
unity of all life, of the God within us as identical
with the God without. At the ceremony itself the
Master
presents His pupil for admission, having previously
satisfied himself as to the pupil's worthiness,
and the candidate being approved, enters the Brotherhood,
formally dedicating himself thenceforward to lives
lived for the world's helping.
You will notice that in the Preface Mrs. Besant calls
Alcyone "brother", and
you must remember that this word is deliberately used
to mark the special relationship between them as
both Brothers (there is no sex distinction) in
one
Brotherhood.
THE PURPOSE OF INITIATION
People
often wonder why it is necessary to pass through
the ceremony of Initiation at all. What can a ceremony
do to increase our capacity for service ? As
a matter of fact, I imagine that by a very slow process
of growth mankind as a
whole may reach the [Page 14] results
of Initiation without passing through any ceremony
whatever, drifting almost unconsciously through
this third great step. But some people are eager
to
do quickly that which otherwise would take a long
time, and they submit to what may be called a kind
of forced growth, so as to complete within a few
lives that
which is usually spread over many. This involves
very hard work in a Master's school, and the student
needs much help. As the eagerness for progress
is
entirely unselfish, the student is shown, after a
certain amount of training, how to wield powers
which normally would come to him much later. Purity
of life, and
self-discipline, added to definite teaching from
a Master, are the certificates entitling him to
a spiritual degree which confers upon him definite
powers, and
these powers are explained to him during the ceremony
of Initiation by a delegate from The One in whose
Hands our destinies lie. The ceremony of Initiation is an official examination demonstrating
the candidate's fitness so to use
the new powers to be conferred on him that he may
become a better helper in the world of men. Such
powers are not common to the period in which the
world
is now living, and if an individual is to receive
them he must prove his fitness before Those who
alone can confer them before the normal time.
"TO THOSE WHO KNOCK"
Notice
also, please, how Mrs. Besant writes of the "great Portal" as having
swung open to receive the [Page 15] new
brother, and in this connection see the words which
precede the preface — "To Those Who Knock". The Great
White Lodge — "white" because white is the
symbol of purity and spirituality — is believed to be a Temple of Wisdom, entry to
which is through its "great Portal", a door "which opens to those who knock" in
the spirit of a great love for the world in which
they live, of an eager willingness to use their powers
for the benefit of others, and of a humble gratitude
to Those
who may deign to guide them to wider usefulness and
to a love more beautiful.
LIVE THE TEACHING
Initiation,
then, is the third great step, the step which many
of you are now, I hope, approaching. Another great
step is reached when from the human kingdom
a Brother passes to the superhuman kingdom, the region
of perfected Men, gains the expansion of consciousness
associated with the fifth great Initiation — the one
referred to in At the Feet of the Master being the first — and becomes a Master,
Man who has learned all this world can teach. We
need not, however, consider this step. Enough that
the teachings which fitted Alcyone for admission
to the
great White Brotherhood have been given to us at
the command of the great World-Teacher Himself. Enough
that we too are privileged to know how our lives
should be lived if we would become one of the band
of servers and helpers. [Page 16] "But” says Mrs. Besant, "the
teaching can only be fruitful if it is lived, as he has
lived it since it fell from his Master's lips". So we must now try to see what this
teaching is, how we are to apply it to our daily
lives. Remember, as an encouragement, that we are
not expected to live the teaching perfectly — to do
that would need the soul of a Master Himself. But
in the effort will lie the measure of success, and
there is nothing in this world that we cannot try
to do. Young
people in many parts of the world are trying hard,
and some of them have gained admission to a Master's
school. The great World-Teacher needs many helpers
for His work in the world. Will you not try to become
useful to Him by training
yourself beforehand, so that when He comes He may
find a disciplined band of workers ready to go anywhere
and do anything, a band bringing to Him not mere
willingness to help, but, which is far more important,
trained capacity to help as well ?
THE REAL AND THE UNREAL
The
Samskrit verse which precedes Alcyone's own Foreword
or Introduction sums up, as it were, the whole
of the teaching that any Master can give His pupil. "From the unreal lead me to the real" is the cry of all who are in earnest. More
than anything else we desire to distinguish between
the true and the false, between that which gives
pain and that which brings joy; and in every life
the
lessons we learn from pain are teaching us to recognise
more [Page 17] unerringly,
and, therefore, to cast aside, those thoughts,
feelings and actions which belong to the unreal,
to that which separates us from the knowledge of
God. The unreal is that which does not last, it is
the form which veils the soul,
and if only we were better able to distinguish the
self from its sheaths, there would be much less
unhappiness in the world. It is not enough to know
with the
mind, you must know with the heart. Most of us know
with our minds that the body is merely a temporary
form chosen by the soul for a particular life,
but so
much is the form associated with the life within,
that we feel we have lost the soul when the form
breaks up at death. So you see we are still very
much bound up in
the unreal, however much in theory we may be able
to distinguish it from the real. But you must not
therefore think that the unreal is useless. It
is through the
unreal that we reach the real, which shows up the
more vividly by contrast. The stars are shining
on us as much in the daytime as at night, but it is because of
the contrast with the darkness of the night that
we are able to gaze awestruck at the splendour
of the starlit heavens.
The
world of matter corresponds to the blackness of
night, and the souls of men may be likened to the
stars. Living in the world of matter we learn to
realise — from its ever-changing forms — that there is something which remains
unchanged behind these changing forms. Living in
the midst of change, the unreal, we are forced to
seek the changeless, the real, and each one of us
is
gradually learning to [Page 18] understand
that every changing mood and feeling is no more
the full expression of ourselves than is the child-body
the complete expression of the soul within.
The child-body grows into the youth-body, and the
youth-body becomes the man. Behind each the soul
has been pressing to express itself more fully,
and so it is
with each mood and feeling. The mood passes, another
comes, and yet another. And the soul may look back
upon those that are past and say: "I was not that
mood, for it is dead and I remain". So the object of all the teaching is to discover
what is this "I" that ever remains, and how best it may be expressed
that the form shall be the perfect mirror of the
soul. Even then the form must still be
unreal, for all that veils the soul is as a fleeting
shadow, but the purer the form the longer it lasts,
and even the coarse physical body lasts the longer
if its
particles are pure. We are told, indeed, that those
Masters who use physical bodies may cause one body
to last for several hundred years if so They choose,
and this shows us that purity is more real than impurity,
for our own bodies could
never endure so long.
DARKNESS AND LIGHT
The
second line: "From darkness lead me to light", is another form for the same
idea, as is also the third : "From death lead me to immortality". We may look
upon the word "darkness" as symbolising ignorance, while "light" is ever the [Page 19] sign
of wisdom, as the sun is the source of all life.
I write the word "wisdom" and
not " knowledge", for knowledge belongs but to the mind, while wisdom
is the science of the spirit. "From death lead me to immortality" — let the lower nature
pass away and the higher shine forth for ever.
Much more might, of course, be written in explanation of this beautiful verse, but I
must leave any difficult points for elucidation by some elder friend.
CHAPTER II
ALCYONE'S FOREWORD
WE
now come to the Foreword itself, and from the first
Alcyone makes it clear that he is merely passing
on teaching which has enabled him to knock
successfully at the portal giving access to the Temple
of Initiation.[I might note here that the actual
ceremony of Initiation does take place in a kind
of temple, so
the simile is true literally as well as symbolically.] "These are not my words; they
are the words of the Master who taught me". And then comes what is to me one
of the most important sentences in the whole book. "Without Him I could have
done nothing; but through His help I have set my
feet upon the Path". Many
people continually wonder how it is that so many
earnest and selfless workers seem to be toiling day
after day, year after year, and yet make no apparent
progress. Surely X, or Y, or Z, who seem to practise
perfectly the teachings given
in At the Feet of the Master, are in special touch with some Elder Brother, are
pupils of some Master, have become members of the
great White Lodge. Now we must face this difficulty
frankly. Mere goodness is not enough to win
admission to a Master's school, else there were [Page
21] hundreds
of thousands of members. Mere knowledge, however
deep, is not enough, else all our foremost scientists
and scholars were pupils. Not
even a combination of goodness and knowledge
suffices. What, then, is the standard ? A definite
spiritual tone, certainly, and a record, either
in this
life or in those gone by, of effort devoted to
the needs of the world. Also, a certain intellectual
level, not necessarily that of a genius, but that
of
an ordinary well educated man or woman. But beyond
this there must be elements of true wisdom, of
a true understanding of the purpose of life. It
is
not for me to presume to suggest a general standard
below which a Master would not look for recruits
to His school but, so far as I have been taught,
there
must not only be a realisation of the general
plan of the world's government but also an acceptance
of the Elder-Brethren as Guides and Teachers.
How can anyone enter a school unless he
recognises its existence ? How can we expect the
Masters to spend Their time in teaching the elementary
lessons of life to those who could learn them from
elders less evolved than
the great Teachers Themselves, but at least sufficiently
informed to impart the teaching required ? It is
not until we have already learned, during our course
of
lives, many of the lessons life in the outer world
teaches us, that we are qualified to enter the Masters'
world — the world of realities — for which
ours is as a preparatory school.
Alcyone
at once proclaims his fitness for membership of
the Master's school by declaring that "without [Page 22] Him
I could have done nothing". Many people believe, no doubt, in the Christ,
in Sri Krishna, in the Lord Buddha, in the Lord Muhammad; but either they
expect some return for their belief, for example, salvation for themselves,
or
they regard the object of their devotion as
a pillar of strength whose principal function
is to stand between themselves and the mistakes
of
their weaknesses. In other words, the belief
of most people as regards one or another of these
Mighty Brethren is based rather on the longing
for personal
salvation than on a recognition that where
These great Ones are, there we may one day stand
if we gradually learn to live our lives as They
lived Theirs
before reaching the present summits of Their
achievements. Some spiritual people are content
to live their lives in feeble yet sincere imitation
of
the example set them by their Lord, asking nothing
for themselves and giving to all who need, irrespective
of creed or race, and these are drawing near to
that formal discipleship which comes to those who
strive, without desire for reward, but out of great
love, to live as disciples in the outer world. [I think I
ought to point out that in using the term “spiritual” as applied to people who are
drawing near to discipleship I do not wish to suggest
that they are paragons of virtue. The higher ranks
of discipleship are only to be won through the constant
practice of all the virtues, but the entry to discipleship
and the passing through
the portal of Initiation may be gained while the
candidate is still very far from adequately displaying
the perfect life. If you know any among the lower
ranks of
disciples you will realise that all have many weaknesses,
while some may by no means conform to the world’s conventional standards of behaviour. Pure-minded
the disciple must be, reverent at heart, loving by
nature, tolerant in attitude, and eager in his Master’s service. Having these qualities in a reasonable state
of development, there must be some comparatively
outstanding power which lifts
him above the normal level as regards usefulness
to the Master. Perhaps he is a great speaker, a great
writer, a great inspirer, a great artist, a great
healer — possessing some force which may be employed in drawing
people nearer to realities. Then Karma must be favourable, for he must have exhausted
all Karma which might considerably hinder the Master from employing
him. We should not be very useful if we had to spend
much time in paying off our own
debts. But the outstanding power may have its own
outstanding weakness, and while the disciple is likely
to have himself fairly well in hand, you would gain
a
very false idea of discipleship if you were to imagine
that it involved a personality negative rather than
positive and, in consequence, a somewhat turbulent
disposition. You do not look for perfection in young
disciples, but you will certainly
see power of one kind or another.] But there
must inevitably be much ignorant belief as regards
the Great Teachers, however sincere it may be,
before Their true place in our lives can become
[Page 23] known,
and where many people shut themselves off from
much inspiration they might otherwise receive,
is in imagining that their special Teacher is the
only
source of truth for all. There is a whole age of
growth between the statement that Christ is the
only Saviour of the world and the knowledge that
there are many
Saviours, and until we learn through experience that
there are many roads to God, that each human being
is travelling along a road as direct as our own,
though he may be behind us on his pathway, we shall
not have gained the power
to help each person on his own road-—an indispensable qualification for
admission to a Master's school. Out of goodness we
may strive to bring others to our own road, but that
is a narrow and ignorant goodness, and a Master's
school
trains its pupils to serve and honour all faiths,
to help each individual to tread his [Page 24] own way according to the plan marked out for him by the God-to-be within him.
THE UPWARD CLIMB
If
you understand what I have written, you will realise
that once we begin to gain a glimpse of the real
principles of evolution and know that others are
in
front of us on life's pathway, just as many
are behind us, we must naturally long for the
guidance of those who know more, not that we may
know for
ourselves alone, but that our power of helping others
may increase. Struggling hard to know the truth,
giving up all that the world prizes if only truth
may shine
upon us, we break asunder the bonds of convention,
we reject the dogmas in which lies concealed the
spirit of the religion to which we happen to belong.
Read
Mrs. Besant's Autobiography and see how rocky and steep was her pathway to
the Masters. At last, clinging only to a passionate
determination to serve the world as best she might,
giving to it her ignorance if she can find no better
offering, she wins her way to her Master's feet.
She longs for power and
wisdom only that she may use them for others,
and when no personal sorrow or despair prevents
her from giving all encouragement in her power to
those who cry for protection, then at last she shows
herself worthy of that true
knowledge which may be given only to those who
could never use it for themselves alone. Through
such battle, you and I, young friends,
must pass. Perhaps the struggle will not [Page
25] yet
be so hard for us as it was for her, for she is
at the end of her pilgrimages to a world from which
she has learned all it can teach her, and has in
this life for the
last time re-lived within the short space of a few
years the hardships of man's upward climbing. She
has, as it were, recapitulated the lessons learned
during
many lives in the world school, so that she may stand
before the Masters to prove she knows those lessons
perfectly. We are still in the world school, and
the
lessons we learn are adapted to our powers of understanding.
But, knowing of Those in front, we are sure that
They live but to show us the way to eternal life,
and however little we may be able consciously to
feel Their guidance, in some
dim way at least we know that They are with us, and
that without Them we could do nothing. For the
time, we may forget Their presence, and then we
must still
struggle on as did Mrs. Besant, but sooner or later
we come to Them, and as a ray of sunlight illumines
a dark room, so do we then know that without Them we
could have done nothing, that all we have done is
because of Them. Do not think, my young friends,
that this is dependence upon another, for not only
in
Their service is perfect freedom, but there is the
One Life ensouling us all, and They cannot do without
us, reverently be it said, any more than we can
do
without Them. We are one in spirit; what They are
we shall be; what we are They have been; and
to the great Shepherd we are all sheep of His world-wide
fold.
I
have written on this subject at length, for I think
it very necessary that you
should understand these [Page 26]
important facts, since, rightly understood, they will protect you from much doubt
and difficulty when you enter the outside world.
SUCCESS CONSISTS IN REPEATED EFFORT
I
should like you to pay special attention to the
rest of the Foreword. "It is
not enough to say that they [the Master's words]
are true and beautiful; a man who wishes to succeed
must do exactly what is said". Again: "You must do
what He says, attending to every word, taking every
hint. . . . He does not speak twice". How many of us are ready to sit at the Master's
feet under conditions such as these ? How often
we hear Mrs. Besant, or Mr. Leadbeater,
or other elders, tell us the same thing over and
over again. Do we not often think that our lecturers
are constantly repeating themselves, that they
continually
reiterate the same truths over and over again, until
we are almost tired of hearing them ? Such, however,
is the task of the disciple in the outer
world — to recapitulate over and over again the same
truths until at last we begin to live within the
truths instead of outside them. The Master could
not
spare the time to do this, but, because the
world must learn, He permits a pupil to take His
teachings to the outer world and to win for them
an acceptance,
overcoming indifference, hostility, ridicule;
gaining for them enquiry and finally understanding.
On very important occasions a Master has been
known to repeat directions which have not been
properly carried out, [Page 27] but the circumstances were very exceptional and of
vital importance. If, therefore, you desire to become
a pupil of one of the Masters, ask yourselves whether,
for
example, you persevere in trying to make your daily
life conform to the wisdom of
At the Feet of the Master. This little book ought always to be at hand, so that
you may constantly refer to it, and test in the
light of its precepts that which for the
moment may be occupying you. I may perhaps be allowed
to bear personal testimony to the fact that any
progress I may have made or any increased power
of usefulness I may have acquired has been very largely
due to my continual
reference to At the Feet of the Master when in difficulty or doubt. The book is a
kind of modern commentary on the Ancient Scriptures,
and our gratitude goes to Alcyone for enabling us
to refer many times to advice which we are not yet
enough in earnest to hear direct from the Master's
lips. One of the privileges of a
disciple, as I have said, is to be able to repeat
many times that which his Master will only utter
once. But do not forget that you who have this priceless
teaching
always at hand, are worse off, not more fortunate,
than people who have never had it at all, if you
do not at least try to follow its advice. It is sad to receive no gift
at all, but it is positively harmful to receive a
gift from such a source and to treat it with indifference,
for the result will be that in a future life you
will long in vain for
that which you now neglect. You are not asked to
accomplish. You are asked to try not to be downcast
at failure. [Page 28] The effort to attend to what the Master says may bring you within the circle
of His pupils, for above all He asks for earnestness and perseverance. He
does not
count as failures mistakes from which springs a still stronger determination
to
succeed.
Remember
that the Master's teaching applies everywhere and
to all. It applies as much in the Parliament as
in the home, as much to those whom the world counts
greatest as to the humblest toiler living as an unknown
and uncared for unit in
our midst. The teaching is indeed a counsel of perfection,
but has its teaching and its value at every stage
of the upward climb; and one of the greatest
mistakes we make is to imagine that perfection cannot
be reached, Utopia is not unattainable, for some
have reached it, and if you will try your best
to fashion
every thought, word and deed according to the Master's
advice, you will find yourselves much nearer your
goal than you ever imagined in your rosiest
dreams. Whatever is of noble purpose in you — ambition, love, hope,
endeavour — will come to you the more certainly for the attention
you pay to the Master's words, and one day you too
will say, with the conviction of experience
behind these words, "without Him I could have done nothing; but through
His
help I have set my feet upon the Path". [Page 29]
NOTE
IF
you are seriously taking up the study of At The Feet of the Master you
will find that much of the Master's advice conflicts
with conventional attitudes and opinions, and I
have known people doubt the Master's capacity to
understand worldly conditions, "being so far removed from the troubles and
turmoils amidst which we live". Certain students, for example, who
have wished to translate At the Feet of the Master into the language of
their country have sometimes desired to omit
or modify so-called "inapplicable" suggestions — imagining
that their limited knowledge is of greater practical
value than the Master's wisdom. For example, the
passage: "If you see anyone breaking the law of the country,
you should inform the authorities", is
thought by some to be in direct opposition to conventional
ideas as to loyalty and honour. The Master, it
is urged, tells us to betray a comrade if we notice
him breaking a law of the country in which we live
!
Now
I do not wish at this stage of our study to consider
the important duty underlying the advice contained
in the sentence I have quoted. We will consider
it when it comes before us in its regular order.
But I think it necessary to point out
the great principle underlying the whole of the teaching
[Page 30] given
us. The Master is emphasising the real, and it
is our business to test all that we are, and all
that surrounds us, in the light of the reality
as presented to
us by a Master of Wisdom — One who has, through ages of hard struggle, gained
the power at once to discriminate between the real
and the unreal.
In taking up the study of this book we are sitting at the feet of One who
knows, not of one who only thinks and judges. Take any ordinary ethical book
written by the deepest thinker the world has seen, and you will merely be
reading the thoughts of someone in the world like yourself, though
perhaps of greater ability and deeper intuition. His line of thought need
not necessarily be yours, and it is your duty to be respectfully critical though,
of course, modestly enquiring. But in At the Feet of the Master, you have the
wisdom of One who has learned all the world can teach, who has in the past
faced in essence all the troubles and sorrows through which you have passed,
are passing, and have yet to pass. He has conquered the world, and not
one single difficulty the world can produce could perplex Him for an instant. He
has mastered the principles of life, and whether He be living in the world
of the 20th century or in that of the 50th or of the 5th, all that surrounds Him is
but an aspect of these great principles, an application of the laws they enforce.
He
states in very simple language certain of these
general principles and does not at all limit His
teaching to any particular country or to any special
religion.
True, he is addressing those who desire [Page 31] admission to a Master's school, but such candidates are people who know more
than most others and who are expected to live in stricter honour than the
majority. So all the advice He gives must be of a tone infinitely finer than that to
which conventional morality vibrates.
What you have to do, therefore, is to try to understand what is the matter
with your point of view when it conflicts with the Master's, rather than to
think that either the Master is not conversant with the world's affairs or that
His teaching does not apply to you and to your country. The Master does not
ask you to accept His teaching and to follow it blindly, neither would He
recommend you to reject it because it does not fit in with your scheme of
life. That which you do not understand, try to understand. That which
you cannot understand, leave to the enlightening power of time and of
experience. If you reject the truth it will only return to you after infinite
wooing, while if you merely leave it for future consideration when opportunity
offers, you will find that in the meantime you have been unconsciously
growing towards its understanding.
Use
the world's conventions while truer attitudes are
hidden from you, for the wisdom of the world is
the standard for the average man and woman. But
when a
Master condescends to speak — listen. Come to no hasty conclusions in your
eagerness to follow His precepts, for while He seeks
to shatter outworn superstitions He will not undermine
beliefs still necessary for the world's growth.
Think over [Page 32] carefully what He says and try to understand its application to ordinary, everyday
life, remembering that in far-off Shigatse He knows infinitely more of the world
than our greatest statesman, our wisest philosopher, our most beneficent
philanthropist, our cleverest man of business.
When
you doubt — reflect; where you would oppose — suspend judgment; but
when you realise — follow unflinchingly, however much convention may be
against you, provided you are willing to take courage
into your own hands, asking help from none, acting
gently and tolerantly towards all. [Page 33]
CHAPTER III
THE QUALIFICATIONS FOR DISCIPLESHIP
WE
must now consider the qualifications to be practised
if we would gain that special power of service
which is conferred upon all who are admitted to
the
great White Brotherhood — through passing the first of the great Initiations.
I might just remark here that the Mysteries of Greece
and Rome, of which you will
find much written in ancient books, as well as modern
Freemasonry, are faint imitations of the real ceremony
itself and of the tests which the candidate
undergoes. The Ancient Mysteries, especially in their
purer form, did indeed demand from their votaries
very definite qualifications not unlike those with
which we are about to deal. Freemasonry
in modern times has so
little spiritual life that one can
only honour it for its far-off origin and for its
charity; but even Freemasonry admits to membership
those alone who
are deemed to be of unblemished reputation.
And in the insistence everywhere on qualifications,
in the existence of a ceremonial, and in the
conferment of certain powers, you have the endeavour
on the part of men to remember that there are real
ceremonies, to which real powers are attached, through which entry is sought into a
Brotherhood which is the nucleus on [Page 34] the spiritual plane of a brotherhood which some day shall exist in the outer
world.
THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF LIFE
The
Qualifications as given by the Master are: (1)
Discrimination, (2) Desirelessness, (3) Good Conduct,
and (4) Love; and He adopts here the
Eastern classification, probably because it would
specially appeal to the understanding of His Indian
pupil. Remember that in each religion mention is
made of the great Path on which the successive Initiations
are stages, and in
each religion may be found enumerated the qualifications
which alone will enable men to tread it. In Esoteric Christianity Mrs. Besant has traced for us the
Christian terminology for the various Initiations
and for the qualifications leading thereto, and
I recommend you to read what she has to tell us
on this subject.
Similarly, other religions yield identical information,
but we will adopt the Hindu classification as given
by the Master, partly because it is so clear that
we can
easily understand it, no matter to what religion
we belong, and partly because its' practical value
has been demonstrated by the fact that others have
followed
Alcyone through the Portal, basing their endeavours
on the counsel they have received from At the Feet of the Master. Do not think, therefore, that you are
studying something of no practical application. The
precepts of this little book have been brought
down into practice in everyday life in the present
day by
comparatively ordinary [Page 35] people, and they have found their way to the Path. Remember, again, that
perfection in the practice of these precepts may only be obtained by one who has
passed that great Initiation which confers on Him the rank of Masterhood.
You
are trying but to enter the Courtyard of the Temple
itself — the Master's
school; so it would be foolish to expect to
accomplish now that which can only come after many
lives. Keep on trying, and remember that an
achievement far, far short of perfection
will bring you to your Master's feet. When Mrs.
Besant says in the Preface that we must live the
teaching, I think she means we must take it seriously
and concentrate
ourselves on it. All our living is imperfect,
but the more we are in earnest the less imperfect
it becomes. Many people write to Alcyone telling
him what
beautiful teaching He has given to the world, but
all the use most people make of it is to wish that others would pay more attention to it than they do.
Living according to a certain standard, we are
not easily shaken out of it, and when
valuable advice is put before us we imagine that
we are already doing our best to follow it. More
vigorous effort is expected from you, my dear young
friends, and you should try to realise that
you have been given a higher
standard towards which to strive, and that
you have accordingly to revise your ideas, attitudes
and actions in the clear light which has come to
you.
Be positive in your study of the book,
and follow Alcyone's own method of "living" his Master's teaching by taking the [Page
36] various points one by one and practising them for
definite periods of time.
DISCRIMINATION
The
first two or three pages of the book itself are
occupied in laying stress on the importance of
the distinction between people who have real knowledge
and those
who have not. Some of you may wonder why the Master
should have insisted upon so very obvious a fact.
Of course " there are only two kinds of people, those
who know and those who do not know". It is a simple matter of logic. As a matter
of fact, however, this obvious truth is by no means
generally applied, even by those who ought to know
it, and unless you begin to apply it in your relations
with
the outside world you will not make much progress
towards the Path on which you desire to set your
feet.
The
people who know have the power of discrimination.
What is this discrimination ? The knowledge which
enables a man to distinguish between that
which is fleeting, impermanent, and that which lasts,
is eternal. "Men who do not
know work to gain wealth and power, but these are
at most for one life only, .and therefore unreal", says the Master. And later on He amplifies this definition
by stating that "discrimination must ... be made between the right
and the wrong, the important and the unimportant,
the useful and the useless, the true and the
false, the selfish and the unselfish". So you see that [Page 37] this quality of discrimination enters into the ordinary life of each one of us.
Do
not think that the Master is blaming those who
do not know. Ignorance is not a crime, it is an
episode of growth; and you yourself become one
of those
who do not know when you are impatient with ignorance.
But while you do not blame, nor even pity, you
must at least be able to distinguish between that
which is ignorance and that which is knowledge,
so that you may
yourself abstain from error and may help
those who know less. All knowledge is relative,
and you must bear in mind the Master's
words: "However wise you may be already, on
this Path you have much to learn". Those who know more than you do are quite
patient with the knowledge you have, but which
is ignorance compared with their wisdom. They know
that the blend of knowledge and ignorance
which you possess is the blend appropriate to
your stage of evolution, and that you can help efficiently
many people who are at a lower level. But
however certain you may be of your own infallibility,
people wiser than yourself will never allow you to
influence them as to their own thoughts and
actions, except in special matters on
which you have acquired information more accurate
than their own. Similarly, you must be careful not
to fall into the illusion that because any one speaks
with conviction, therefore he
is right. You must use your discrimination. Many
people are very lazy, and subsist on thoughts which
come to them from the outside without caring to
exercise their own [Page 38] powers
in determining what to accept and what to reject. "Orthodoxy" is
one name for this laziness; "custom", "conventionality", are other names.
I gather these under the heading "laziness", because you would be lazy were
you to allow yourself to follow the smooth and
beaten road trodden by the majority of mankind. If
the Master speaks of a "Path" it is because it is a "Path" and not a road; because few there
be that tread it. On the other hand, while using
your discrimination, you will remember that the more
limited
knowledge of those who do not know may be adequate
for the instruction of people less evolved than themselves.
For example, the Master tells us that no
ceremonies are necessary. Therefore we
may do without them. But to some ceremonies may
be necessary, and it would be very
undiscriminative to think contemptuously of people
who find much value in ceremonial, or of priests
who inculcate it. Let others grow as suits them,
only neither imagine that because "everybody" thinks in one particular way,
therefore you must think in that way also, nor
be so lazy in thought that because some people are
positive that they are right and express themselves
emphatically, therefore you allow yourself to be
influenced by a nature more
positive than your own. Keen and independent
thinking is an essential feature in the character
of one who would tread the Path, for, however
much the Master may help him, in the long run his
rock of certainty must be based on the God within
himself, and a time comes for students who are treading
the Path when all external help seems to fail, [Page
39] and
strength must perforce be drawn from within. Let
me finally observe that you should not rush to
the conclusion that you must forswear completely
all that
to you is no longer necessary. It may be your
duty to take part in ceremonies for the sake of
others who still need them. It may be your duty
to surround
yourself with, many customs, conventionalities
and orthodoxies, but only for the sake of others.
Your primary duty is service, and you will not
be a
successful teacher unless you modify your teaching
to suit the intelligence of your class. Neither
will you be a successful teacher, however, unless
your
knowledge is far in advance of that of your class,
and while you may yourself use crutches to show
a lame man how to support himself, you will not
therefore
use them at other times as well. If you confine
yourself within outgrown forms, except in order
to help, you are indeed lazy; but there is no
laziness on the part of those for whom such forms exist. So, while avoiding
laziness yourself, you will remember that others
find a temporary salvation in that which to you would
be stagnation, and you will minister to their needs
by giving them that which will help them best.
THE REAL KNOWLEDGE
Now
what is this knowledge, which should mark you off
from those who do not know ? I have already told
you that it partly consists in being able to distinguish
between that which is fleeting and that which endures.
Indeed, throughout this
little book [Page 40] the
Master is continually explaining to us by way of
contrast how the real differs from the unreal.
For example: "You must discriminate between the selfish and
the unselfish", "feel no anger or impatience”, "never allow yourself to feel sad or
depressed". Why ? Because if you do feel anger or impatience
or depression you are for the time living in something
which will pass away, while in the long run
serenity and cheerfulness will carry you to your
goal. So the answer to my question is partly to be
found in the study of these contrasts. But the Master
also
points out that the really " important thing is .... the knowledge of God's plan
for men". All the qualities which you have to acquire are,
of course, part of God's plan for men. But the qualities
are to be acquired for a purpose. "For God has a
plan and that plan is evolution", and the qualities you are slowly building into your
nature are intended so to purify it that it may be "in tune with the Infinite", in
harmony with the working of God's own nature. The
laws of nature are the rules of evolution, the signs
of God becoming self-conscious in every spark of
His
Being, and you must understand these laws so as to
be "on God's side, standing
for good and resisting evil, working for evolution
and not for selfishness". Certain
of these laws are already known to the world. We
speak of the laws of science, the laws of art, the
laws of literature : we know of the law of gravitation
and of
other laws relating to matter. These you must study
sooner or later, if not in this life then in another;
for you cannot help [Page 41] perfectly unless you know God's laws for His unfoldment. But we are not
concerned with these particular laws at present, for the Master guides us
to begin from within rather than from without. First learn something about
the laws of the
spirit, and the laws of matter are seen to be but their reflection in grosser
form. Understand the basis of the spiritual life and you will the more easily
familiarise
yourselves with the principles of the arts and sciences as at present known.
Moreover, the world will give you the latter, while, except perhaps in Hindu
philosophy, there is as yet little science of the soul worthy of the name.
THE LAWS OF THE HIGHER LIFE
We
younger souls can know but little of these higher
laws — "laws of the
higher life", as Mrs. Besant has called them — and I cannot, therefore, hope
to enumerate even a very few. But the Master gives
us several hints as to where to look for them, and
His suggestions will help us to gain a general idea
of the kind of laws we may expect to find. He
says: "All are one, and . .
. only what the One wills can really be
pleasant for anyone". Here is
a law of unity. "All are one". Therefore "only what the One wills can ever
be really pleasant for anyone" — the law of a common purpose. We
share a common brotherhood and are moving
towards a common goal. If your discrimination has
led you to this you are on the right road, for,
says the Master, [Page 42] "this discrimination is the first step". These two laws of our being give the key to
the statement that "those who are on His side know why they are here and
what they should do". They are here because the God within them wills to
be here, and they know that what they have to do
is to combine with others in the effort to
reach the common goal. I do not suggest that our
knowledge of these two laws is clear and definite.
We but dimly sense them, and the object of developing
qualifications is that we may gain a clearer understanding.
Nevertheless, when
we are nearest to our higher natures, nearest to
that part of the One which dwells within us, we are
sure of these laws, however much we may sometimes "act
foolishly and try to invent ways" for ourselves which we think will be pleasant for
ourselves.
Now
what evidences have we of the working of these
two laws ? First, the ever-growing appreciation
of the value of brotherhood as conducive to peace
and happiness. I need not give examples from the
outer world, for you can think of
many yourselves. The world is taking slow but unmistakable
steps on the road towards the goal of brotherhood,
and because life is all the better for these steps
we know that the One is willing us to take them.
Then again, we know from the
statements of philanthropists, mystics, seers, founders
of movements intended to spread the spirit of brotherhood,
that the moments of real and therefore abiding
joy come when they share what they are and have with
others. There comes the sense of a larger life,
of a freer spirit, when we share with [Page 43] others
and when we live for them. The selfish man gains
no lasting pleasure from acts of selfishness, though
he may doubtless experience temporary thrills
at each successful self-seeking. But these thrills
are followed by reaction, and the more the selfish
man gains the less he is satisfied, until in despair
at
the impossibility of satisfying his increasing
cravings he seeks some other road. The joy of sharing
is far different from the fleeting exultation at
having
gained at another's expense. The joy of
sharing has no reaction, is followed by no unhappiness,
brings an ever-increasing peace and an
ever-growing power of giving more. Unselfishness — that is to say,
working for the larger self instead of for the smaller — is its own
reward, while selfishness must ever seek outside itself for a reward, which
becomes more and more, elusive as time goes on. Are theses facts not
evidence of the truth of the statement "that only what the One wills
can ever be really pleasant for anyone", since the more we live for an
increasing number of others, not only do we grow
the happier, but we are thereby expressing more of
the One who is in us all ? The more we identify the
One with ourselves the happier we become.
SERVICE IS THE HEART OF SACRIFICE
Let
us try now to see a little more clearly the nature
of that Will which governs the world. We see at
once that the Will of the One is a perpetual sacrifice,
for our
own sacrifices lead us nearer to Him. [Page 44]
Not
a sacrifice involving regret, but a joyful sacrifice,
though doubtless involving pain, for without the
contrast of pain the beauty of the joy would
be the less. It is all sacrifice — willing or unwilling. The servant who
ministers to the needs of the household, the tradesmen
who supply us with food, the officers of government
who administer the State, the teacher who
teaches and the scholar who learns — all perform daily acts of sacrifice, and the
degree of happiness in the sacrifice determines the
nearness of the doer to the One whose great sacrifice
is in training each one of us — parts of Him — to
become self-conscious of His and our divinity. In
the East, great stress is laid on sacrifice — and part of the regular daily duty consists in offering
sacrifice to the Ancestors, to the Angels (Devas),
to the animals, and so forth. Of
course, we do not go through life thinking of each
act as a sacrifice, for we have acquired the evil
habit of imagining that a sacrifice involves denying
ourselves some pleasure, and thus many
try to avoid sacrifice for fear lest the joy of
life be lost, when in fact the true spirit of
sacrifice secures to us abiding peace. "We must make some sacrifices
for our son's education" — "You must sacrifice something, if you want
this or that". A sacrifice only involves the giving
up of something lower, never of something higher,
and if our servants, our
officials, our teachers, our students, our tradesmen,
above all ourselves, lived lives in which the
dominating purpose was sacrifice — the sacrifice of the lower
on the altar of the higher — our work would be far better done, [Page 45] and
the world would be a far happier place to live
in. There is no trade, no profession, no calling
of any kind, no act, however trivial, which does
not gain
beauty if performed in a true spirit of sacrifice — as an offering to the
Lord. This is indeed a difficult task for
us all, but we must make a beginning, and the best
way is to perform every day a conscious act of
sacrifice — an act deliberately performed in the name
of, and in homage to, the Great Sacrificer through
whose own act of sacrifice we live and move and
have our being. The Boy Scouts speak of
a "good turn", the Sons and
Daughters of the Empire enjoin “a daily act of service" — these are true
sacrifices, for service is the heart of sacrifice.
THE HIGHER AND THE LOWER SELF
All sacrifice, if of value, must be ordered sacrifice, and the more we learn of the
laws under which it acts the more effective our sacrifice will be. Many volumes
might, indeed, be written by a competent authority on the principles of sacrifice,
and most fascinating volumes they would be. But within the limits of these talks I
must confine myself to one or two special laws of the higher life which it is
essential for you to know.
In
the first place, your principal duty is to realize
that the individual you call "I" is
only a portion of that real "I" which is a spark in the flame of God. In other words
there is the eternal "I" which sends forth a feeler into this outer world to
gain all that the outer world can give. The feeler
is not the " I," any [Page 46] more
than the root is the whole tree. There is more
of you than ensouls your waking consciousness in
your physical body, and it is this bigger "you" which
guides you to those experiences in which your life
is passed. You may call this bigger "you" your higher self if you wish, but do not identify
it with the lower vehicles in which it has to
live. The higher self desires only the purest form
of life,
has no leanings in the direction of your weaknesses,
is not cast down by your failures, and above all
knows on its own plane of existence all that the
lower "you" has to learn down here. Many young people think that
the higher self ought to have been content with its
knowledge. But the sacrifice is not complete until
knowledge is everywhere, until divinity is self-conscious
in all its parts. God is all-knowing on His own plane,
but He desires that His own self-consciousness shall
awaken on all the planes of His being so that we — the cells of His
Body — becoming awake to the divinity in which we share, may
by the very act of awakening become Gods ourselves.
First, however, we must master the various
grades of matter from the highest, which is hardly
matter at all but rather spirit, down to the matter
of which our physical bodies are composed, and perhaps
lower still.
THE FLOWERING OF OUR DIVINITY
Having
mastered them, we may one by one cast them aside,
until we live on the highest plane of spiritual
existence, on the plane of Divinity, only to come
forth when the time approaches for an act of sacrifice
like unto that which God Himself is making now.
This lies in the infinite future, but it is certain — so
certain that even at this stage of our growth we
can notice that the God within us, our higher nature,
is gradually acquiring mastery over the lower
vehicles through which He comes into
definite contact with the lower planes. Daily He
works, and while self-control takes long to practice,
and the instruments do not always function
as they should, nevertheless every day sees some
advance for each one of us, and there is none so
low or so
degraded that he is not rising according to the
measure of his possibility. I want you, if you
will, to remember this overwhelmingly strengthening
fact as
often as you can — that within you is perfection undeveloped, a
bud to become a flower. But the bud is there, and
in your worst moments, when you
feel that you have failed utterly and, perhaps, irretrievably,
the perfection-to-be still remains within you and
is the constant source from which fresh effort to
lead the higher life must keep on coming, no matter
what you do. Immersed in
matter as we are, surrounded by the objects of the
senses, we become confused, imagine that we are
lost within their whirl. But the
matter which surrounds us, of which our lower bodies
are constituted, and the objects of the senses — whether mental, astral or physical — are themselves only
waiting to be controlled. Master them, ray upon
them your divinity, and they become powers for use
instead of forces to be fought, and of which,
perhaps, to be afraid.
CHAPTER IV
THERE IS TIME TO ACHIEVE PERFECTION
I THINK that the truth I have endeavored to express in the preceding talk is of
vital importance, for the more we meditate on it the more real it becomes, and we
begin to realize that however far off we may be from the successful practice of
the qualifications as given in At the Feet of the Master, perfection must some
day come, and with it the happiness of perfect service.
Time
for accomplishment is, indeed, necessary, but if
one law of our being is that there is a divinity
within us gradually unfolding into its perfect
flower, another law
tells us that the unfoldment takes place slowly but
surely (I) in accordance with the principle of
action and reaction, or cause and effect, (ii)
through a continuous
series of dippings down into and withdrawal from
the matter of the lower planes, in other words — reincarnation. Let us glance at this law of time which,
within itself, involves the opportunity as well,
since time would be valueless without the
possibility of making use of it. Expressing the law
in other terms, we might say that the unfoldment
of the divinity within us takes place under the
coercion of
experience — experience which is ever sifting the real [Page 49] from the unreal, the permanent from the temporary.
In Christian phraseology we are told that as we sow
so shall we reap, Hinduism speaks of Karma, a
Theosophist might talk of the law of cause and effect.
Put plainly, the law states that, as we think and
act so shall we become, and, as time is needed if
we are to
think and act perfectly, we are continually being
immersed in the densest matter of our globes in order
by degrees to understand its nature and therefore
to
become its master. The life you are leading now,
the body in which this latest immersion has taken
place, are only incidents in a long series of lives,
You have
had , many lives before, and you have used many bodies
before. Between each life you have, as it were, made
up your debit and; credit accounts incurred during
the lifetime on earth; and then, with an ever-increasing
spiritual balance, using
this word in its financial sense, you go into physical
plane business again, both to pay off old debts and
to acquire new ones, and thus to amass an increasing
spiritual fortune, as by degrees the new debts become
less and less and your
wisdom grows more and more. You keep on doing this
for hundreds of
thousands of years, for millions of years if you
take into consideration the sleep-life, the dream-life,
and the dawning wakefulness in the mineral, vegetable
and animal kingdoms respectively. God gave you the
capital to start with — your
spiritual possibilities; and though from time to
time your capital may seem to have become very much
tied up, it can never be utterly unreachable, [Page
50] since He will temporarily withdraw you from active partnership in the business
in which He is engaged if you act so recklessly that you cannot be trusted
to
manage your (and His) affairs properly. Indeed, you might conceivably be
required to make a fresh start, not, perhaps, at the beginning, but some
little way back from the place at which you began to grow improvident. This
is probably
a
comparatively rare event, for most of us are developing our capital by slow
but
sure degrees.
THE TWO LAWS OF THE HIGHER LIFE
The
knowledge of the way in which each one of us ultimately
attains perfection is of the utmost value and importance,
since not only can we never be completely
overwhelmed by despair or reduce the power of drawing
on our capital almost to the vanishing point through
an insensate accumulation of debts, but we are
able
to give the most strengthening assistance to those
who see nothing before them but debts due and only
the generosity of the great Creditor — however certain — to
depend upon, if even that. And as it is so important
to grasp as clearly as we can the essential features
of the laws of the higher life, let me recapitulate
briefly the
truths so far stated. First, the unity of all. If I may be allowed to use the simile of a
banking establishment, I would say that the Ruler
of our world [I distinguish between the terms “God” and “the Ruler of our world”. By the word “God” I mean
the divine principle animating all life everywhere — God the Father. “ The Ruler of
our world, "on the other hand, is the official who
is at the head of the Great White Lodge, the highest
of its members, alone in His rank. Mightier than
all others, not
a member of our own humanity at all, He is God’s Regent upon this earth. In
Hindu scriptures He is mentioned under the name of
SANAT KUMARA.] is the [Page 51] supreme
Director of a great family spiritual banking concern.
He Himself started with capital He had developed
through experience in countless previous ages,
capital which originally came from God, as does all
capital. His function is to enable all the members
of His family to develop their capital as He has
developed His. He is, as it were, pledged so to arrange
His business that sooner
or later every member of His family must, even though
failure come time after time, eventually develop
his capital to its utmost value. Herein lies both
the unity
and the statement of the second law — the existence of a common goal. Indeed
the first law involves the second, for unity would
not be complete unless our destinies were common,
unless the future involves the same unity as did
the past
to which we trace our common source. I have called
this common destiny perfection, and, using words
to express the simile of the banking concern, I might
say that the object of the firm is to develop for
each of its partners a substantial
spiritual capital, so that each partner may, in course
of time, set up in business on his own account. Then
comes the question: How does each partner reach
this level ? The answer is as clear in the spiritual
world as it is in the actual business industry on
the physical plane. Through experience; in course
of time;
by setting up in business in a very [Page 52] small
way to start with, after going through a certain
amount of preliminary training; by accumulating
a large number of debts which are not only hard
to pay
off but take time to pay off too. What was the first
stage which I mentioned in the very beginning of
this series of talks ? Individualisation —- the passing from the
animal to the human kingdom. Before this, the partner
was only a sleeping partner. He was learning the
rudiments of subjects whose deeper study would
come later on. He was hardly in the business at all — a shareholder, truly, but with
no more conscious share in the business than has
a bank manager's baby an active share in his father's
affairs. But the baby grows and become a young boy
with a vague idea as to what his father is. The newly
individualised man has a
vague idea as to the existence of a purpose in life
around him, but he cares nothing for it as yet, save
as it affects his personal and immediate well-being.
But
in time comes the second stage — the awakening of conscience. The youth
becomes a clerk in his father's firm, begins at the
lowest rank, has very little responsibility. By degrees
he is entrusted with small portions of his capital
on
which to experiment, he is sent out into the world
to see what he can do with the capital (conscience)
of whose existence lie has been hitherto unaware. "I have a
conscience, I have the power to distinguish between
right and wrong. Hitherto I have shared unthinkingly
in the universal conscience of which my own is a
part,
but now I know that I have a conscience of my own,
I must use it and make as much of it as I can, so
that [Page 53] it
may grow big and strong". So the shareholder, now increasingly conscious of
being not only a shareholder to receive dividends
but a partner to produce them, goes out into the
world — the lower planes — as an active agent and builder of his
own fortunes.
Just
as a business man goes home, after office hours
are over, to rest from the day's labours, to think
over what good and what bad business he has done
during the day, and to enjoy happiness with
those dear to him, so each
one of us, after one life is over, rests in other
worlds and gathers fresh energy — born of striving in lives gone by — for the life to come, for the new "day" of business on the physical plane.
We cannot in one day develop all the capital required.
We have to learn how to employ it, what transactions
to avoid,
what transactions are profitable, and the time
taken is the expression of the law of reincarnation.
But not only do we need time, we need also
experience. We must suffer from the bad transactions
and reap happiness from the good ones. Unless we
see results, we shall not
know how to compare the relative values of various
transactions, of whose nature we know for the time
being nothing. It is the result far more than the
cause that tells us the nature of the cause itself.
The law of cause and effect
states that as the cause is, so the result will be,
but in actual experience we first learn that as the
result is, so the cause must have been also. It is
only after experiencing many results that we either
avoid their cause or set it in
motion, according as to [Page 54]
whether
it brings happiness or pain. Even then we are temporarily
satisfied with causes which produce results whose
pleasure-producing power is but
very limited. We are, in other words,
content with the immediate however fleeting, provided
it satisfies for the moment. This is the case with
most people,
and places them within the ranks of those
who do not know. You will remember, however, that
there is a third stage — the stage at which the individual
definitely pledges himself to a certain line of conduct,
at which he shows himself as among those who are
at least learning to know, by passing
through Initiation into the wider life beyond.
He is the partner who, having shown himself capable
of wisely managing his capital within comparatively
narrow limits, is not only given opportunities
of developing it much more rapidly and widely than
would normally be possible, but is allowed to share
the responsibilities devolving upon the directors
of the firm itself, those
whose business it is, under the guidance
of the Ruler, to help the junior partners to gain
the necessary experience. A young director, truly,
but none the less a director, though there are those
above him with still greater responsibilities
upon their shoulders— those who belong to the ranks of the
higher Initiates.
THE ROAD OF EVOLUTION
In
this way are the various stages passed, and the
individual gradually learns how to develop his
spiritual capital so as one day, in the far-off
distant [Page 55] future,
to become the head of a firm himself, a Ruler in
a universe. We already know that the one class
of transactions which is profitable, using this
word in its
best sense, is the class involving the service which
is the heart of sacrifice, God is the great Sacrificer,
for, instead of living on His capital, He not only
shares it
among us all, but trains us, through the Ruler of
our world, to develop our capital to the utmost.
Without irreverence may I say that even our mighty
Ruler Himself
is the greater for the sacrifice He makes in guiding
our evolution, and grows at His exalted level into
still further spiritual splendour. When we reach
the level at
which He made the great and supreme Sacrifice of
remaining to toil when He might have passed on
to enjoy, at which the development of our spiritual
capital
has been such as to enable us to make this stupendous
outlay, we too shall make the sacrifice and win
its reward. To do so, we must pass through all
the
intervening sacrifices step by step, the less leading to the greater; and only
as we serve and sacrifice in proportion to the capital
we have, can we hope to develop the capital and so
increase the service. The art of service — should I not rather
call it the "science" — is not, however, to be learnt in a day, or within the
brief space of one lifetime. First comes the service
of the smaller self. The whole
tendency in modern times, as far as the West is concerned,
and increasingly so in the East, has been to force
the individual to emphasise himself. He has been
learning through competition of all kinds, through
strife, through the [Page 56] dictates
of personal ambition, to consider his own welfare
and that, perhaps, of those immediately dependent
upon him. Personal wealth, personal power,
personal influence, personal ability — all have been pursued, and the
futility of all, save as used for wider service
is the lesson learned. Often at the close of a life
devoted to such pursuits, a man has at last seen
how little
true happiness they have given him through life,
and hurriedly he strives to tread the other path
by lavishing his gains upon a world from which erstwhile
he took them. If there were no other lives, the
act would be too late, for you
cannot atone in a year for a lifetime of selfishness.
But the future is before him, and perhaps the lesson
has so been learned that in the period of rest
between that life and the next he will have
had the leisure (and the clearer vision the inner
planes allow) to decide upon a life less circumscribed
than that
which he devoted to the interests of his own small
self. Payment will indeed be exacted for all harm
done, the debts on the mistaken transactions must
be
paid in full, but not only has he time in which
to pay them, but also time and
opportunity in which to plan fresh schemes to
harmonise with the wider vision he has gained. [ Compare the growth of the soul to a house with a
large number
of windows and doors, most of which are closed. Outside,
the sun is shining, but into one or two rooms only
do the rays at first enter. Gradually, the occupier
of
the house — the soul — begins to appreciate the life-giving warmth from the
sun, though he still lives partly in the darkness
and imagines it to be all he needs. But
when he goes into the rooms whose windows and doors
he has opened to the sunlight, the contrast between
the darkness and the light begins to strike him.
Going back into the darkness, he remembers the light
and looks for the windows and doors so that he may
open them too. Room after room is brightened, until
the house is hardly a house at all — only a number of walls between the doors
and windows — and serves but the purpose of concentrating the sunlight
within its limits. The house is the lower part of
man — his mental, emotional and physical
bodies. Each room is a power or faculty, and the
owner of the house is the higher self — the ego, the soul. The darker the house, the greater
the unhealthiness, the greater the dirt, the greater
the sordidness. But the Masters’ “houses” are merely
passage ways for the sunlight, and Their bodies are
but lenses — to use another
simile — from which the rays of life spread outward with concentrated
intensity. Think this over and follow its symbolism
if such be your temperament.] [Page 57]
Much more might be written on these great and dominant
truths. Many other laws might have been mentioned,
and innumerable are the ways of their application.
But I can only hope that you will think over these
things and fill in for yourselves
the gaps I have been forced to leave unfilled. In At the Feet of the Master we are
taught to discriminate between transactions which
are profitable and those which are not. We are shown,
as it were, how to invest our capital so that it
may
multiply. Invest in a kind thought, feeling, word
or action, and much will come to you in return — above all, an increased power to think, feel, speak
and act kindly. Invest in selfishness, and your capital — your power — diminishes. As your capital
diminishes — perhaps it would be more accurate to say is increasingly
neglected" —.your own happiness, as well as that of others, proportionately
diminishes, until you become so barren of happiness
that in despair you seek another road
than that of selfishness. [Page 58]
NOTE
The
whole question as to the purpose of the world,
as to the existence of God, as to the origin of
being, is most intricate, and a fruitful source
of mental confusion.
A young friend of my acquaintance, hearing that God
made the world, wanted to know who made God, and
his question was most reasonable. On the other
hand
it would be better policy on the part of parents
and elders to realize that they cannot expect to
be able to answer every question put to them by
children; it
would be more honest, too. Personally I take the
position that as an insignificant unit in this
complex world I can only hope to understand a very
limited portion of
God's plan for men. All that I can hope to acquire
is a comparatively imperfect working hypothesis
adequate to my temperament and destiny, and though
the
hypothesis may be illuminative to others, they must
nevertheless think out their own hypotheses for
themselves — building in such features in the hypotheses of
others as may harmonise with the general plan of
their structure. The keystone of my hypothesis
centres round the fact that there is sorrow and
unhappiness in the
world, and that while I may bring a certain amount
of physical and emotional consolation and strength
to those who are susceptible to my influence, I
must
also bring mental consolation and [Page 59] strength — first
by trying to understand the purpose of existence
myself and then by applying such understanding
as I may have acquired to the helping of my
fellow-creatures, both practically and in striving
to assist them, too, to see more clearly the splendour
of their future, however it may be hidden by the
intervening
clouds of ignorance and discouragement.
Let me just restate in other language the ideas that help me in establishing
my hypothesis.
A
God-Soul — conscious of Himself as Divine — lives only on the plane of
pure divinity, is limited by no matter grosser than
that of the plane or level on which He lives. In
the infinite past He has been as we ourselves are
now,
a spark heating itself into flame through the
friction of matter in all its forms and densities.
Now a Flame, He showers out sparks — potential
flames — and encloses them in layer after layer of denser
and denser matter — itself the substance of which the flame is made. In
course of time the spark burns through the layers
one by one and in the process — we call it
experience — gains increasing brilliance, at last bursting into
a glorious Flame. A spark from a fire may, appropriately
placed, become itself a fire similar to
the one from which it came. The fanning of the
spark is accomplished through the laws of nature,
by means of karma, reincarnation, and all the innumerable
actions, and reactions, connected with the world
outside us, which we undergo
incessantly. The very matter in which we are embedded
is itself so growing that out of it shall come sparks,
similar to those which are ourselves. The difference
between [Page 60] the matter around me, the trees, the sea, the animals, the minerals, is that
within me is concentrated sufficient of God's divine heat to make a spark capable
of
expansion into a separate flame, while the divinity ensouling the trees and
the animals and the minerals is spread over a wider area, has not been narrowed
down and focused to a point. A number of animals, a larger number of trees,
a
still greater mass of metals, share the heat of divinity between them, and
ages must pass before any individual form shall, through the experiences of its
class,
have concentrated within itself such heat as may burst into a spark; and metals
must enter the vegetable kingdom for further subdivision and thence pass to
the animal kingdom for further subdivision still, until the human kingdom is
reached,
in which each unit is in itself a spark.
To reach God, therefore, we must become Gods ourselves, and no greater
reverence can be offered Him, no more convincing testimony to His omniscience
and omnipotence, than to ascribe to Him the will of making each one of us
perfections in His own image. For He can do no more than make us as Himself. I
might write much more on this, even that which I have set down itself bristles with
difficulties and doubts and possibilities, but perhaps if my readers think it over
they may find themselves started on a line of thought which may bring order into
a world of apparent chaos and purposelessness.
CHAPTER V
THE LIVING OF THE LIFE
THE
Master proceeds to point out " that of the real and the unreal there
are many varieties and He has previously mentioned
one variety when He observed that "it does not matter in the least whether
[a man] calls himself a Hindu or a Buddhist, a
Christian or a Muhammadan, whether he
is an Indian or an Englishman, a Chinaman or a Russian". For " if he is on
God's side he is one of us". Now you must not conclude from this
statement that religion does not matter, has very
little value; although we
are told further on that ceremonies do not matter
for those who are at a certain stage of growth. Religion
matters considerably, but truth matters infinitely
more, and those who know — while using some special form of the truth as
displayed in a particular religion — seek the truth within the form, and know
that God — who is Truth Incarnate — manifests Himself in many ways. In
reality, a special form of religion is of the
utmost value to those who do not yet know that all
religions spring from one source— the great Head of the world's
teaching department, who is even now waiting for
the world to be ready to receive Him once more. Religion
makes truth [Page 62] tangible
to those who have still to realize that there are
many roads to the One, on each of which He welcomes
His devotee — to quote a Hindu scripture. Most
people need rules of life to be imposed from without
before they learn to evolve them from within,
and great Teachers come from time to time
either to frame special rules for the special
circumstances under which a race is being trained,
or to modify the old rules in the light of progress
made.
Christianity was given to the western world as a
statement of the special set of ideals towards
which it was to work its way. Hinduism strikes
an entirely
different note, but one none the less needed for
the fulfilment of the universal harmony. Unfortunately,
people tend to imagine not only that their own
rules
express the whole of the truth for all the
world, but that they are appointed by God to declare
the valuelessness of all other rules and to
induce the followers of these to come into the
true and only fold. Obviously this is a case of
pride, self-righteousness. In the days of the Inquisition
violent means were employed to force those who
gripped another form of truth either to recant
or to be destroyed. In modern times we have the
missionary movements to the so-called "heathen" — admirable in their purely
medical and educational work, and when directed
towards aboriginal tribes, but marred by an intolerable
egoism and self-complacency which imagines that
God has made them His elect. If missionaries
would continue to do all they are now doing along
secular lines and were to combine this with an
enquiring reverence for the [Page 63] religion
in the midst of which their work has placed them,
they would be among those who know instead of among
'the ignorant who say: "What I believe is true,
what I do not believe is false".
ALL RELIGIONS HAVE ONE SOURCE
We
learn from the Master's statement that the form
of religion into which a man is born does not matter.
In other words, we are born into a special
religion either because its peculiar influences
are needed for the development of our natures or
to learn to break through its binding form
without losing reverence for the ennobling truth.
Most Christians, for example, are best advised
to follow the general principles of their own religion,
without, however, paying more attention to
form than is helpful. Christian
rites and ceremonies will probably be valuable
to them, but they should gradually, through the
practice of the form, find their way to the spirit
within, so
that ultimately the form drops away because
its work is done. Look around you, at people, at
animals, at trees, at flowers, at the sea in its
various
moods, at the towering rocks. The divine spirit
is indeed pervading all, but it is the form which leads you to seek the
occupier within, and small wonder that for the time the form suffices.
You know that God is within the form,
but God and the form are so much one to you
that you cling to the form you can touch and feel,
and you take God for granted. So it is with
religious ceremonies — they [Page 64] appeal
to the senses, and their inner significance is
so much taken for granted that in course of time
it becomes ignored altogether, perhaps even lost
to outer
view. Sooner or later, however, God can no longer
be taken for granted, and it is time to begin learning
the lesson that forms are but temporary sparks
thrown out
by God to draw attention to His nature. Play with
the sparks and learn to love them —that is inevitable, for even the sparks are part of
God. But sooner or later the sparks will flicker
and vanish and new sparks will be showered forth,
new
forms will take the place of old; and in the hopelessness
of clinging to forms which must inevitably die
is born the desire to find something which endures
behind all passing manifestations. Then do we begin
to realize that the Hindu,
the Buddhist, the Christian the Muhammadan, are all
living within their respective portions of the
truth. They are like people living in different
rooms within the same
house. Some are proud of their own rooms and do not
know that there are other rooms as beautiful as
theirs. Seeing people in other rooms, they say
to them: "Come into my room. It is so much more beautiful than
yours. Your room is bare and ill-furnished. See how
much more habitable my room is !" And
the answer is:
"My room suits me. I am used to it. It is furnished
in the manner most helpful to the work I have to do.
It contains conveniences which yours lacks, just as
yours
contains conveniences for you which mine lacks". We all live in the same house.
Until we can move from room to room uncritically, [Page
65] and in reverent appreciation of the arrangements of the rooms of others, each
had better keep to his own room. But the time comes when it is no longer
pleasant to live in one room only, and the true inhabitant of the house is
he who makes himself equally at home and appreciative in all the rooms to
the delight of
their respective occupants, though no doubt preferring the room which is
specially his own.
RACES ARE CLASSES IN GOD'S SCHOOL
Similarly,
it does not matter to what race a man or woman
belongs— " whether he
is an Indian or an Englishman, a Chinaman or a Russian". Each race has its
work to do, as has each religion, and those who know
are not only without race-prejudice, able to appreciate
the qualities in all races, but are thankful to help
in any land to which the Master's service calls them.
Respecting the customs and
beliefs of those among whom their work for the time
being finds them, they seek to discover the purpose
for which the race exists and strive to forward this
to the
utmost of their power. Each race has its own note
to sound in the universal harmony, as has each religion,
and if we dislike a religion or a race it is probable
that we shall have one day to be born within their
ranks to overcome our
ignorance as to the part they play in the growth
of us all.
We
then come to a variety of general principles on
which certain kinds of discrimination are based — discrimination "between the right and the wrong, [Page 66] the
important and the unimportant, the useful and the
useless, the true and the false, the selfish and
the unselfish".
THE MASTERS AND OURSELVES
"Between
right and wrong", says the Master, "it should not be difficult to
choose, for those who wish to follow the Master have
already decided to take the right at all costs". Here is a great truth put in a somewhat peculiar
way. Probably you wonder whether the Master was speaking
of Himself.
Personally, I imagine He was speaking of Those greater
even than Himself, Alcyon translating the Master's
thought about His own superiors into terms
expressing his own relationship to the Master.
The point is unimportant; but we do learn the very
significant fact that the individual who seeks a
Master
of the Wisdom to be his guide has made the great
decision which separates him from those who do not
know. Truth is, indeed, our ultimate goal; but
sooner or later we must inevitably unite with
Those who are nearer the goal than ourselves. You
will find people at various intermediate stages,
and it is
well to bear in mind what some of these stages
are. Some people, for example, are devoted to abstract
ideals, and do not for the time feel the need
of a Master's guidance. Others, engaged in work
involving the utmost self-sacrifice, do not in their lower bodies
know of the existence of Masters and even, perhaps,
deny Their existence. Some, again, desire to follow
a Master [Page
67] but
do not know whom to follow. Remember that whatever
the attitude of anyone may be to the Masters, the
Masters Themselves know each and every one of us
and guide us to our destiny along the road we have
chosen to tread. How could it
be otherwise ? In what family, worthy of the name,
does not the father, the mother, the elder brother
or sister, love, protect and guide the younger
members
? The purer the love, the more perfect the guidance; and in the world-family
the Perfect Men — our Elder Brethren — give perfect guidance. People may wish to
reject the help or rebel against an apparent interference; but they can no
more avoid the Masters' care than they can escape from the unity which binds
us all in
one; while the Masters know full well that no man
can grow into perfection save through perfect freedom.
But the very brotherhood of all mankind makes Them
one with us, and the guidance They give us is the
outward symbol of the unity we
share. If unity is a restriction on freedom, then
indeed we are not free; but unity gives power
to freedom and is the living witness of our divinity.
Each
individual is for the time satisfied with his ideals,
and people will often tell you that the idea of
discipleship to a Master does not help them, or
that their
temperament precludes any idea of dependence or reliance
on aught save the God within. If they are content,
it is not your task to attempt to disturb them.
They are learning the lessons their stage teaches,
and, when they have really
found the God within they will awaken to the fact that
they cannot dissociate [Page 68] themselves
from other parts of the one great whole. Then they
will know the Masters as Elder Brethren and will
realize that just as they themselves
owe guidance to those more ignorant, so must the
Masters give to them the help that greater wisdom
ever owes to less. The God within is conscious
of the
guidance, and it matters not for the time that
the lower self remains unconscious or denies. The
babe sleeps safely in its mother's arms;
the youth, growing into self-consciousness, seeks
to gauge his power by standing alone; the man,
knowing his power and limitations, begins to appreciate
his mother's brooding tenderness and reverences her
now as perhaps he has
never done before. Looking back over his life
he sees the part she played in guiding him through
the troubles of the world, and he notices how in
times of
apparently greatest freedom her watchfulness
and care were none the less active, though unrecognised
and unnoticed. As with the mother,
imperfectly, so with the Master perfectly, and we
have all to pass through the stages from babyhood
to manhood. Like little children we must learn
to think
we walk alone, but the happiest walks are in
reality those in which we may gaze at loved Elders
in front, with our friends at our side, and those
younger in
knowledge than ourselves treading in places made
smooth by our footsteps.
"THE BODY AND THE MAN ARE TWO"
We
now come to the Master's lucid summing up of the
conflict through which we all must go. "The [Page 69] body
and the man are two, and the man's will is not
always what the body wishes". Remember that "those who wish to follow the Master have
already decided to take the right at all costs". At all costs. But this decision is
taken by the highest in us, and while the lower bodies
are influenced by the decision, they do not always
want to carry it out within their respective spheres. "At all costs" means, therefore, at whatever cost to the bodies
in which the highest in us is gaining control over
matter of various densities.
That which is highest in us cannot help taking
the decision, the decision belongs to its very essence,
but ages have had to pass before the lower
bodies can be taught to respond to their
master's wishes, just as it takes a long time to
train an animal perfectly. So the efficacy of the
decision only
begins when, after ages of slow evolution,
the God-to-be within us at last begins to receive
a conscious response from its lower nature. The response
must for a long time, however, be of a very intermittent
nature, for the two poles have not as yet been adjusted
to produce a constant spark. So the
Master explains to us various ways in which these
lower bodies refrain from responding as they should.
He warns us: "When your body wishes
something, stop and think whether you really wish it. For you are God, and you
will only what God wills; but you must dig
deep down into yourself to find the God within you,
and listen to His voice, which is your voice". In explanation
of this He reminds us that we must not mistake
our bodies for our real
selves — "neither the physical body, nor [Page 70] the
astral, nor the mental". "Each one of them will pretend to be the Self, in order
to gain what it wants. But you must know them all,
and know yourself as their master".
The
difficulty consists in knowing at the moment. After
some time we can look back upon the various ways
in which our lower bodies have pretended to be
the Self, and we say: "How stupid I was", or "what a fuss I made over
nothing", or "I thought there was nothing else but that at
the time." But
why should these bodies pretend to be the Self
? Because it is to their interest to make evolution
as slow as possible. In them the life and the form
seem bound up together so that if the
form perishes the life appears to
have no further value or even existence. Form
is their world — the world of the
physical, astral, and mental bodies — and any process which tends to do away
with form is an attack upon their world's existence.
Think how many people there are who still believe
that with death comes annihilation. Does the
God within think this ? The God within knows
Himself eternal, and yet the vehicles down here "pretend" that the destruction of the vehicle means the
destruction of the life. It is not true, but in
his lower bodies the man knows no better. The bodies
are anxious, therefore, to preserve themselves for
as long a
period as possible, and imagine that their preservation
depends upon self-seeking rather than upon self-sacrifice.
Much
of the competition in modern life, much of the
oppression of the weak by the strong, of the poor
by the rich, of animals by mankind,
has its [Page 71] origin
in the very successful pretence on the part of
our lower bodies to be the Self. Indeed we are
all living more or less under the shadow
of this pretence, for much that is luxurious in 20th
century civilisation is produced by the inevitable
selfishness of our lower selves. The vivisector
maintains,
for example, that we are justified in experimenting
on animals so as to increase our own power to resist
disease and thus to prolong the life of the lower
bodies. I am not one to condemn the vivisector — he expresses a pretence
of the lower self; and we all are victims of its
cunning in one way or another. Again, we consider
ourselves entitled to kill animals for
food; and most of us would not hesitate
to eat meat, even supposing that we have hitherto
been vegetarians, if we were assured by our doctor
that we had to choose between eating meat
and dying. But let me for a
moment disclose to you the attitude of one who no
longer yields to the snare. Mrs. Besant has often
told me that she would rather die than eat meat,
partly
as a matter of principle and partly because
the introduction of coarse meat particles would
hinder some of her special work. Such a
declaration is no heroic outburst, it
is simply the statement that while the body must
be properly looked after, it cannot expect to be
humoured at
every turn. If it says : "Since you don't give me meat I shall die", the answer
must be: "My friend, you are not my only hope. I can
get another body, and though it is my duty to keep
you alive as long as possible, I cannot
preserve you at the expense of [Page 72] work
I have determined to do. Therefore you must go". Whether any particular
individual has the duty of disciplining his bodies
as Mrs. Besant does hers, whether under all circumstances
we must never give way to them, is not for me
to say. Each person must judge his own duty for himself.
Let the body have its pleasures and amusements
as well as its discipline and its exercises, but
see
that it does not try to draw its master away from
that which is the link between him and God — his principles of life. You must know your bodies "and know
yourself as their master".
THE OBJECTS OF THE SENSES
I
think I ought to lay stress on the fact, that we
are not told to shun the objects of the senses — all that makes our physical, our emotional, our mental
worlds. To possess beautiful objects and to desire
them, to submit to the influence of an
uplifting emotion and to seek it, to take pleasure
in the things of the intellect and to strive for
knowledge — all this is not only useful but essential to our growth.
We have in these three lower worlds to become familiar
with the objects of the
senses, but we must not identify ourselves with them
if we wish to qualify for admission to a Master's
school. People at a certain stage of evolution do
identify
themselves with the world in which they live, are
its slaves; were they not they could not be ready
for the further stage of being its masters. Unless
they have [Page 73] experienced
its clutch they will be unable to sympathise usefully
with those who still remain victims of their bodies
pretence. But you and I must hope we have
passed the earlier stage, though the
young will doubtless recapitulate it as they once
again grow accustomed in their new bodies to a
world full
of objects of the senses new since last they
visited it. We must know what the objects of the
senses are, with what thoughts and feelings and
objects the mental, astral and physical worlds
are respectively filled. And
this is the true basis of the "pretence" of the various bodies concerned. The
Self is indeed in each of these bodies, and
so far each body may rightly claim that it is animated
by a portion of the Self. To this extent in each
of
these bodies we must seek the objects of the
senses, for in such seeking lies our growth. Unfortunately,
the bodies take themselves too
seriously, imagine they are indispensable,
ignore the law of reincarnation which dismisses
that pretence at once, and then claim that they
are the Self. “I am angry", "I am jealous", "I believe this; I disbelieve that", "I am fond of such and such amusements", "I
enjoy food, or special kinds of food" — these are a few of the many statements our bodies
are making day after day. The real Self is never
angry; the real Self is never
jealous; the real Self knows; the real Self tolerates
amusements but could hardly be said to be fond of
them; the real Self looks upon food as a means
to preserve the physical body so long as
the body is needed, and cares for the purity of the
food and not [Page 74] for
its power of exciting the astral vehicle. Use these
conventional phrases if you will, but see to it
that you are able to distinguish all the time
between your Self and its bodies. At least
know in theory that the real "you" is not at the mercy of the objects of the senses,
and you will have begun to be their master in reality.
At least know in theory that the real "you" is
never angry, arid you have begun to lay the
foundations of a calm that can never be ruffled.
How
to begin ? " When your body wishes something,, stop and think
whether you really wish it." A very hard task to be continually stopping
and thinking all day long. But Mrs, Besant told her
hearers on the day when
she first began a series of talks on At the Feet of the Master — November 27th,
1910 — that however irksome the task, it had to be
faced. It is part of the preparation, she said,
and only those achieve who do not get tired of trying.
It means no hasty speech, no hasty action, no
hasty thinking even: all must
be under control. Do not feel appalled at
the prospect, young friends. To gain the immense
privilege of membership of a Master's school we
must expect to work hard, and if you will but
try you are bound to succeed. By stopping even only
one hasty word, or thought or action
during the week you are far nearer to your Master
than those who are content to say: "I wish I could do all this, but I can't, so it is
useless to try". The
Master acknowledges effort; He knows us too
well to expect success. [Page 75]
THE WORD "PRETEND"
The
word "pretend" as used by the Master in the phrase "each one of them, [the physical, astral and mental bodies] will pretend
to be the Self", seems to
suggest a deception on the part of the lower bodies,
something of an underhand nature, against which
we ought to be on our guard. I think the word was
deliberately used to emphasise the fact that the
pupil to whom the teachings
were being given was expected to live in his higher
self rather than to allow himself to be at the
mercy of his lower bodies. The desires of the physical,
astral
and mental bodies had to be labelled as unreal with
respect to one who was learning to live from above,
and to whom the lower bodies were but as
instruments in the service of an awakened higher
consciousness. The Alcyone of the inner worlds
would fully know how to distinguish between their
realities and
the fleeting circumstances of the worlds without.
But in each outgoing into denser matter — through the mental to the physical — the higher self must needs undergo
a limitation, so that its powers will be correspondingly
weakened. In addition, while the soul of Alcyone
was old, its new bodies were young and untrained.
These two circumstances, I think, caused the choice
of the word "pretend", so
that in the lower worlds Alcyone might remember that
however real their objects might temporarily seem,
however much his bodies, still young, might long
for
them, yet their reality was but a pretence compared
with the realities of the Masters' world. [Page 76]
From
a certain standpoint, there can be no pretence
in that which God has created. Nothing is without
its value in evolution, and even the most fleeting
of the objects of the senses has its part to play
in helping us to grow. At every
stage of our growth objects of the senses surround
us, and, according to our stage we ignore some,
reject others, long for these, are repelled by
those.
We grow by experiencing objects of the senses,
thus learning to reach the realities of which
they are the shadows in this world of ours. Until
we know
the realities, as I have already said, their
shadows must suffice. And the shadow's pretence
to be the reality is not an unreasonable one, for
after all
it is a shadow of a reality and depends for its
existence on the reality it represents. But you
and I ought, at least so far as regards most objects
of the senses in the lower worlds, to have reached the realities of
which they are the expressions, and still to accept
the shadow as the reality would be a pretence,
an imagination, since the reality is known
apart. We — in our bodies — would be pretending, and to make our position
clear the Master dissociates us from our bodies and
explains that only in a lower body could we imagine
the part to be the whole. [Page 77]
CHAPTER VI
TRAINING THE BODY
THE
next few pages of At the Feet of the Master contain
commentaries on the central fact that "the body is your animal — the horse upon which you ride". It
may be the physical body, or the astral body, or
the body in which lives the mind — all are your animals, and a very hard team to drive
they are too ! The Master makes this perfectly
clear in the common everyday instances in which
the
animals refuse to be ridden and throw their rider. "When there is work that must
be done, the physical body wants to rest, to go out
walking, to eat and drink; and the man who does not
know says to himself: 'I want to do these things
and I
must do them', But the man who knows says: This
that wants is not I, and it
must wait awhile'. "You shall not hinder me in doing good work", says the rider to
the particular steed he is specially using at the
time or to the particular steed which for the moment
is inclined to be restive. Now you will find that
many
excellent people think it their duty to drive their
bodies all they possibly can. Monks and nuns who
inflict self-torture upon themselves, so-called ascetics
in
India who hope to obtain liberation by making the
body do [Page 78] that
for which it is not intended — these are examples of such people. Many
people in our own country think it wrong to do various
really harmless actions, so that they may have
the morbid, unnatural satisfaction of mortifying
or starving the
lower bodies that the higher may shine through more
clearly because of their emaciation and weakness.
The higher self asks for beauty and not for ugliness,
asks for joyousness and not for gloom, asks for a
well-nourished, contented
instrument and not for a half-starved body beaten
into submission instead of evolved into co-operation.
As
the Master says: "You must treat it well, and take good care of it;
you must not overwork it, you must feed it properly
on pure food and drink only,
and keep it strictly clean always, even
from the minutest speck of dirt. For without a
perfectly clean and healthy body you cannot do
the
arduous work of preparation, you cannot bear
its ceaseless strain". We who
are learning to fit ourselves for admission to
a Master's school must bear these points in mind
all the time. Notice that the Master nowhere
condemns healthy and harmless amusements, provided,
of course, that they neither injure you nor cause
injury to those connected with their production.
But
your lower bodies must not be allowed to indulge
in such pleasures at the expense of doing good
work. Periodical amusements, even those
which have no specially beneficent effect — are amusements pure and
simple, help, I think, to keep our lower
bodies in fit condition; but we must be [Page 79] careful
not to lose sight of the goal before us, lest by
indulging our bodies too freely we wake some day
to find that we have become their slaves instead
of
being their masters. "But it must always be you who control that body, not
it that controls you".
AMUSEMENTS
"You
must not overwork it", says the Master. For active temperaments this
seems a somewhat hard injunction. There come
times of special stress, we think, when the physical
body ought not to be spared in any way. Perhaps
in
rare instances this may be true, especially if you
have to choose between sparing your body and standing
firm to your principles. But most of us are not
confronted by such a situation, and it may be safely
taken for granted that whenever we overwork — whatever the cause — we are doing injury to
ourselves and to others as well. Over-exercise,
over-study, over-eating, over-sleeping, denying
the body that which it needs for perfect health — all
these are forbidden because they hinder your
utility in the Master's service. Especially while
you are young, the body, so glad to be in existence,
tends to
conceal from you the mischief you may be doing.
You feel quite well, even though your elders tell
you that the body is being over-strained, and it
is not
until later that the body is forced into the confession
that having at the time insufficient force to meet
your demands it drew upon the future, and now there
is barely enough force left to keep it alive.
Nothing is [Page 80] more important than to know our limitations, for, knowing them, we not only
realize where the points of strain are, but we learn how to replace with
strength weaknesses which in later years may give us much trouble. Apart from
the
obvious absurdity of competitive examinations as indications of real worth,
see how much wear and tear they cause to the body, especially to the brain,
and
remember that though the few may be able to stand the drain on their physical
resources, most of those who have taken part in competitions have definitely
lowered their vitality, if they have not impaired it altogether. So it is
with many features of modern life, and you must make up your minds whether
you are going
to fit yourselves for the world's appreciation or for the Master's.
Note
that I write "appreciation", and not "service". The world is always
best served by those who make themselves fit
instruments for the Master's work, and though
the world may ignore them, it is better for their
unrecognised efforts than for the work of most
of those who stand high
in worldly favour. But I freely admit that young
people are encouraged by the approval of those
whose opinions weigh with them, and it is natural
that they
should find in the world an infinite number of fleeting
satisfactions. Still, the glamour of the external
must never be allowed to blind us to the fact that
the
only appreciation worth having comes from
the Master, and that the approval of the world
often encourages us along wrong lines. By all means
enjoy life, provided [Page 81] that
no one suffers through your enjoyment and that
you do not allow the enjoyments of the lower bodies
to interfere with the real enjoyments, if I may
use the word in this connection, of the higher self.
The lower needs its
enjoyments as well as the higher, but most of us
lives so much in the lower worlds that there is
a danger of our being — in our lower selves — cruel to the
higher. You are often impatient with people who say you ought not
to have this, that or the other pleasure on which you have counted, but
do not
forget
that you yourselves often deny your higher selves pleasures which
they too would be glad to enjoy — pleasures of an infinitely more lasting kind than
those which, in your lower selves, you have been
pursuing with so much, eagerness. The greatest happiness
you can give your higher self is to
adapt your lower vehicles to the Master's needs,
but the higher self is not unreasonable, is quite
willing that the lower should enjoy itself, and only
suggests that the more the lower and the higher
pleasures can be harmonised
and made lasting, the happier for both parties
concerned. In the long run, everything will proceed
so much more smoothly if both pull together and in
the
same direction.
FOOD FOR THE BODY
The
Master continues: "You must feed it properly on pure food and drink
only, and keep it strictly clean always, even from
the minutest speck of dirt". The
word "properly" means at regular intervals, at [Page 82] such
times as may conduce to the best health, the right
quantity, and the right kind — "pure food and drink only ".
Now
I am not going to furnish you with a complete table
of all the kinds of food you ought to eat, how
you ought to eat them, and when you ought to eat
them. You must find this out for yourselves,
since each body reacts
differently to different kinds of foodstuffs.
But I must lay the very greatest stress on the
necessity for vegetarianism, not because I happen
to be
a vegetarian, but because the Master speaks, towards
the end of the book, on the "cruel superstition that man needs flesh for food". Doubtless we are all
under the influence of certain kinds of superstition,
but at least we must try to avoid cruel superstitions,
and as meat-eating is a cruel superstition — the
Master says so — we must get rid of it. I want you to look
at the matter from the standpoint of reason. We
inflict suffering on animals in order to
provide ourselves with unnecessary food.
This is the bare statement of the fact as the Master
sees it. Innumerable difficulties in the way of carrying
out the Master's hint will, of course, present
themselves. Your body cannot
stand vegetarian food. Your parents would
disapprove of your becoming a vegetarian. "Are we to give up the use of all leather
articles, including boots, railway trunks, etc. ?
Are we to inconvenience our friends by eating practically
nothing when we take meals with them ? "
Don't
you think that your animals are becoming somewhat
restive when you allow them thus [Page 83] to
argue ? For all these difficulties should be thought
of afterwards, if at all, and not at first. So
many people are eager to see the Masters, to receive
instructions from Them, and envy those who
have the privilege. But
remember that one of the conditions of
receiving direct guidance is to pay prompt attention
to what the Master says. "You must do what He
says", observes Alcyone in the Foreword, " attending to every word, taking every hint". The Master tells us to be vegetarians.
Are we trying to become vegetarians, or are we suffering
our lower bodies to dictate to the
higher ? Are we deceived by the "pretendings" of the bodies which ought to
be subservient to us ? I do not wish to
suggest that it is easy to change from meat-eating
to vegetarianism all at once, partly because the
physical and
astral bodies suddenly lose a food which has been
stimulating them and intensifying their lower aspects,
and partly because relatives and friends, who
have not been as fortunate as ourselves, will
be unable to see any method in, to them, an apparent
madness. But in the Master's service we need to
start at once when a hint is given and do the best we can with the
difficulties as they come along. In other words,
we do not think of building bridges until
we actually come to rivers which have to be crossed.
Cautious people will exclaim against me here — "but surely we must see where we are going
before we start. Perhaps the difficulties will be
insuperable. Perhaps our
relatives and friends, for example, will be unable
to tolerate our new
departure". To which I reply: [Page 84] "A hint from a Master involves a practicable course
of action. He does not suggest impossibilities, nor
is He unaware — though you may find it difficult to
believe this — of the individual circumstances of us all. If At the Feet of the Master has come to us, we may take it that He knows it has
come. So His words become a message to us through
His young brother Alcyone."No doubt you will
fail. Many lapses into meat-eating will occur, unless
your nature is particularly wiry. But were serious
efforts made before the failures, and will serious
efforts be
made again after the failures ? This is what the
Master wants. Let me repeat here emphatically that
He looks for effort, not expecting success until
many failures
and many efforts have taken place. "Rome was not built in a day".
The
moment you know that the Master has condemned meat-eating
as a cruel superstition and that He wishes the
body to be fed on pure food and drink, you
immediately begin to stop eating meat and any other
form of food you think included in the condemnation.
Do not quibble as to whether fish or eggs or
cheese or milk are to be considered vegetarian or
otherwise. Use your judgment, for the Master as
a perfect Teacher merely lays down the principle
and leaves
you to apply it in everyday life. Personally I have
very little patience with people so hypnotised
by the letter that they fail to observe the spirit.
They tell me that if
we are to be consistent we must avoid this and that
and the other article of food we use. I do not
pretend to be perfectly consistent, but I am [Page
85] trying to be as consistent as I can; and if in my effort to be consistent
I make the mistake of including in my articles of diet some which ought
to be
left out, I do not feel that I have vitally disregarded the spirit of
the principles under which I have been acting, though no doubt I have violated
the letter.
Some day I shall do all things perfectly, in the meantime I am not going
to sit idle or be unhappy because I cannot now be what I can only be later
on. If you
cannot be a vegetarian, be as much of a vegetarian as you can, and ignore
those who do nothing because they cannot do everything.
PRINCIPLES OF LIFE
You
are expected, however, to use tact and discretion — neither
obtruding your principles nor concealing them.
Be restrained and quiet in your actions, and above
all avoid aggressiveness and feelings of
superiority because you think you possess a truth
not yet shared by others. Indeed, you do not possess
a truth until its effect on your nature is to produce
a greater understanding and sympathy than you had
without it. Every
additional truth you know should make you
so much the more tolerant and appreciative, for
you are by that truth the nearer to a knowledge
of the unity
which makes us one with all. If knowledge brings
pride and shuts you off from your fellow-creatures
you are only in possession of its intellectual
aspect.
You have not yet reached its spiritual essence.
So, when you begin to take [Page 86] the
Master's hint as regards vegetarianism, I want
you to show that you have a new truth in your possession,
first by manifesting a little more of the
spirit of goodwill than you have previously been
able to show, second by holding fast to your new
truth gently and unobtrusively. I think you ought
not to give
way. No parent or friend with understanding
would ask you to give up a matter of principle,
if you show by your conduct that the principle
has an
ennobling effect upon you. But you cannot
expect them to regard as a principle something
which makes you more fussy and troublesome than
before. If, on the other hand your principle
is not respected, then the course
of action you should take depends upon the amount
of strength you possess. In India young men often
write to Mrs. Besant asking her advice as
to various courses of action which would
involve conflict with established custom and would
consequently place the individual
concerned in great difficulty. So far as I
remember her general position is that if advice
is asked it often means that the applicant, not
being
strong enough to decide for himself and take
the responsibility, wishes to have behind him some
one who will share whatever difficulties come.
Also, the advice to be given depends upon
the power of the individual to carry it out, and
it is useless to recommend heroic measures to a
well-meaning
but negative personality. People who give advice
must to some extent become involved in its results,
and by far the best plan is, knowing
the ideal, to get as near to it as you can on [Page
87] your
own account alone. By all means learn from your
elders the principles of right action — you have them in At the Feet of the Master — but work them out in
your own way according to circumstance and capacity,
ever striving to act as truly as you can, combining
thoroughness with deference to the wishes of others
in all matters not involving principle.
Reading
this, young people will often object that they
have hardly any definite principles, and hesitate
to act on those for the moment swaying them lest
they
make themselves a nuisance, not to say ridiculous,
by upsetting the household with a zeal which may
last but a very short time. I grant that this
is a difficulty, but it seems to me that, first,
all reasonable parents would be willing to submit
to such family disturbances as might occur in the
course of efforts made by young people to
find their moral footing;
secondly, it is better to have a temporary principle
and to have lost it, than never to have had a principle
at all ! Young people must inevitably feel their
way. The higher self must take some time to
settle down in its new
surroundings; and it is most natural to expect
a forceful ego to throw itself headlong into innumerable
attitudes of mind and feeling, rushing from
one to another until sufficient, experiences are gained to enable the choice
to be made of outlooks upon life which, will last
for some time. We are growing incessantly, and even
the most cherished principles of the wisest
among us undergo much modification as the years
pass, may even in course of time be totally abandoned.
So it [Page 88] is
after all a matter of growth, and youth must not
be blamed if it grow jerkily and spasmodically.
Be as true to the reigning principle as you can,
and though people
may laugh at your bubbling enthusiasms, you will
never in after-life regret them, for their influence
is all for good. On the other hand train yourselves
by degrees
to approach a new principle cautiously and to discard
it reluctantly, for it must be a matter of honour
with you to treat it reverently — neither accepting it unless you
feel sure that you can profitably follow it, nor
relinquishing it without a sense of gratitude for
the good it has done you. We may at least say with
truth that
whatever other effect a principle has had on you
its temporary place in your heart will have given
you the power of understanding, and of sympathising
with, those
who are under an influence which you yourself may
long ago have passed beyond.
BE TRUE TO YOUR OWN SELF
Let
me conclude this portion of our subject by warning
you against people who argue that because a leader
is or is not a vegetarian, therefore we ought to
follow
his or her example. A common line of argument is
that there can be no particular harm in eating
meat or smoking since the great founder of the
Theosophical
Society — Madame H. P. Blavatsky herself — both ate meat and smoked
cigarettes. Or, to take the opposite standpoint,
if Mrs. Besant and Mr. C. W Leadbeater are both rigid
vegetarians and [Page 89] non-smokers, we should do well to follow them. Which is it to be, then, H. P.
Blavatsky or Annie Besant? Clearly we cannot follow both !
The
fact is that we are not at all concerned with the
special circumstances under which all great people
necessarily live. To be great, an individual
must possess a peculiar temperament, and to
be an occultist requires conditions quite outside
the understanding of ordinary human beings.
Greatness is always out of the ordinary, and rules
appropriate to mediocrity are often fetters to
genius. Then, again there are varying types of
greatness with widely differing functions; and
it is illogical to argue that because some one
whom we recognise as great acts in a particular
way,
therefore no one is great who does not behave similarly.
Further, it is quite conceivable that a pupil's
work in the world is so necessary to his Master's
plans that He has to submit to a special piece
of karma, belonging to the
pupil, which prevents the pupil's body from bearing
the strain of the service required unless it be
coarsened with animal food. In fact, we may
reasonably imagine numberless circumstances
in which rules quite suitable for us at our level,
and perhaps of general suitability at all levels,
have to be waived for special reasons. Emphatically
this is not our business.
It is a matter between Master and pupil, and, in
the case of Madame Blavatsky or of Mrs. Besant
or of Mr. Leadbeater, it is more seemly in us
to be grateful for the beauty of their
teachings than to intrude upon the conditions under
which the teachings [Page 90] were
given. My reply to people who want to probe into
the private lives of those who teach us is that
if I find their teaching inspiring I shall have
enough to
do in translating the inspiration into action,
without wasting precious time in ascertaining whether
the teacher lives perfectly — according, that is, to
my own idea of perfection — the words he utters. I might add that
we smaller people commit a great mistake if we venture
to judge those
greater than ourselves by standards which,
perhaps, they have long outgrown. One of the greatest
obstacles in the way of the average man or
woman recognising the great World-Teacher when
He comes will be that of expecting Him to limit Himself
to their own conception of spiritual greatness.
Each little narrow sect of Christianity or
Hinduism or Buddhism or Islam or Zoroastrianism
will expect Him to be its special champion as
against all other little sects. Every
faddist will expect Him to be an ardent disciple
of the special fad from which he derives his spiritual
livelihood.
He must surely wear such and such clothes, eat
such and such foods, proclaim such and such truths,
live in such and such a way. He will live as the
world needs Him to live, not as individuals
want Him to live. He comes to help all mankind to live better lives, not to
flatter the spiritual pride of a few. You and I know
that He is the Teacher of the world, and instead
of asking Him
so to live when He comes that we shall recognise
Him without difficulty, we should rather ask that we may so live now as to become worthy to recognise Him
when He is [Page 91] in
our midst. How the Greatest shall live and what
He shall teach is for the Greatest to decide — -else we ourselves were greater than He, if our own
standard could guide Him. What concerns us is how
we shall live and what we shall teach so that He
may recognise us as His servants. The world has
not
made so conspicuous a success of its affairs that
it can afford to point out to the great World-Teacher
Himself the lines along which reform and teaching
are
needed. He comes because we need His help, and what
the world needs just now is to develop sufficient
humility to receive guidance which may be
diametrically opposed to all existing conventional
theories of life. Devotion, Steadfastness and Gentleness — all these the world needs, but pride has in the
past been the outstanding barrier between the Teacher
and His generation. May it not be so in the 20th
century.
CLEANLINESS
The
Master proceeds to lay stress on the fact that "without a perfectly clean and
healthy body you cannot do the arduous work of preparation,
yon cannot bear its ceaseless strain". No one who is not undergoing the discipline of preparation
for a more thorough service of the Masters can have
the slightest conception of the
strain it involves. Every individual who deliberately
places himself at a Master's disposal by that very
act begins to tune his various bodies to respond
to the finer
vibrations of [Page 92] the
Master's worlds, and to become infinitely more
sensitive to the life of the world in which he
lives. The disciple must not only hear the Master's "faintest
whisper above earth's loudest song", he must automatically sense the
misery and trouble and need of those who people
the world in which he lives, and he must send out
to them the Master's force in terms of courage and
compassion. This means that the body must be
pure, as free as possible from all coarseness, must
gradually substitute particles for its composition
purer
than those in use among the majority
of mankind. The disciple is in advance of his generation — what he now is, the world as a whole will
become after many years. He must embody in
his daily life a new ideal or principle of living:
in other words, he must be a living example to those
around
him of the stage immediately in front of them,
the stage towards which they now are passing.
THE CEASELESS STRAIN
In At the Feet of the Master we
are given a model on which to build our various
bodies, and we must expect that people who do not
realise the necessity for the efforts we are making,
will laugh at us, will regard us as tiresome disturbers
of
the soporific policy of drifting with the stream.
I am often told that reformers are so unsociable
that it is almost a nuisance to live with them; certainly it is almost
impossible to treat them as ordinary, conventional
mortals. I quite agree, and I heartily sympathise
with those [Page 93] who,
content with life as it is, find themselves forced
to have to do with people who clash with conventional
codes, the observance of which makes life so much
more negative and, therefore, easy. But if you mean
business, you are bound to
set yourself against the majority of accepted modes
of living, and herein lies part of the "ceaseless strain" of which the Master speaks. The force of habit, the
pressure of public opinion, a natural tendency to
comparative inertia, all combine to keep you within
the narrow limits of conventional life. But then
you are not
fulfilling your rôle as a leader, as a forerunner, as an active force in
the direction of bringing about a better mode of
living than that to which for the present we are
content to conform. You must stand outside the pale
of "society" to a very
considerable extent. You are required to guide your
life by principles which do not yet appeal to the
majority, and you cannot expect people as a whole
to
accept you for what you try to be.
You
are continually warring against the lower self
in yourself as well as against the lower self in
the world outside. You are continually setting
up a standard of
living higher than that to which the world for the
time being conforms, and you have to strain every
nerve to live up to it yourself; for only as you
yourself
approach the standard will you be able effectively
to champion it among your surroundings. The world
is ever pressing against you and your efforts,
while on
your part you have ever to be striving to carry the
world with you as you tune
your lower [Page 94] vehicles to co-operate more harmoniously with the realities
to which they are to be attuned. You are one with the
world, and such unity tends to keep you within
the limits of the world's average progress. On the
other hand, you are trying to make that unity more
living by yourself becoming an example of what the
world
may hope to be at no distant date, thus stimulating
the whole to increase its lustre by harmonising with
the special brightness of a part.
Indeed
is the strain "ceaseless". Vigilance cannot for a moment be relaxed.
There is every temptation from the lower to give
up the struggle and to resume the far easier path
of being led. Innumerable actions which the world
approves
are denied to you. Many pleasures in which the world
indulges must be foresworn by you if you would
give the world what it needs rather than what it
asks. As I write these words, I can hear some of
my readers exclaim: "What is
the use of it all, then ? It seems so lonely a struggle,
so grey a life. Are there no compensations ? When
all goes well and there is no trouble, I admit that
the
compensations seem as if they were non-existent.
When life is easy for the world or for the individual,
it seems almost absurd to go out of one's way to
keep up a
strain for which there is apparently no call. But
life is never easy for long, nor is life easy for
most people; and the value of the disciple who trains
all his bodies
as the athlete trains only the physical, is that
he is able not only to bear trouble which overwhelms
the ordinary individual, but he has accumulated a
reserve of
courage from [Page 95] which those in trouble may draw the strength to meet disasters which otherwise
might render them hopeless and crushed.
Remember
that however much you and your friends may be living
a life of ease and happiness, there are others
near you who are struggling with care, with
want, with sickness, with sorrow. Remember that no
individual happiness lasts long from which the
world is excluded. Who are you that you should
enjoy
comfort, luxury, the satiety of your desires, while
others, in the moments of your supremest joy, are
weighed down by the seeming hopelessness of everything.
Joy which is shared endures according to the number
who share it, and the
disciple strives to ascertain the conditions of true
joy so that, through leading others to the knowledge,
peace and happiness may begin to become permanent
instead of being fleeting because restricted to the
few. In reality, therefore, while
the strain of discipleship is great, there is an
ever-increasing tendency to peace and joy because
the would-be disciple is always engaged in trying
to emphasise
these aspects in those around him. He is learning
to be a peace-bringer and a joy-bringer, and he
must not complain if the process of education sometimes
shuts him off from many of
the fleeting joys on which his fellows set such
store. A
child practising a musical instrument may often long
to leave his lesson and join in the happy laughter
of his young companions in the garden outside,
but if he
can persevere in the training of his body to reproduce,
however feebly, God's message through music, he
will [Page 96] some day bring peace to thousands, and to himself a joy well worth the little
sacrifice of the temporary happiness which at the time seemed so enticing.
It
would sometimes be so much simpler to eat meat,
to follow conventional habits of thought, to accept
the conventional dicta of one's class, but one would
be giving up the permanent for the temporary.
A bird in the hand is by no means worth two in the
bush, provided you know that if you try hard enough
you
are bound in course of time to catch those in the bush. People sometimes
think that they can have the bird in the hand as
well as those in the bush, but
we have been clearly told we cannot serve both
God and Mammon; and so far as I know the experience
of most earnest students is that the search after
the
peace of God is only fruitful in proportion to
the exclusion of all pleasures which make for selfishness
and self-indulgence at an expense to others. I admit
that to a certain extent it
is possible to combine the two, and,
as I said before, there is no reason why one
should not enjoy innocent and harmless amusements.
But selfishness must ever be a drag on one's efforts
to lead the disciple's life, and the less selfishness
one shows, the quicker the
progress. Most of us are more or less selfish,
and the result is that we are only more or less successful
in our search for truth. It behoves us, therefore,
so
to order our lives, that we are continually planning for the greater
welfare of our surroundings, partly by active help and
partly by self-training. All such preparation [Page
97] involves
strain, for we are in effect all day long, and
all night long too, striving to transmute into
finer forces all coarse vibrations that come to
us from without.
Hate, dislike, ill-feeling, suspicion, doubt — all come to us, and in return we have
to train ourselves to send out goodwill. At first
we cannot always do it, we cannot even often do it;
but those who once have been able to return good
for evil know
the peace it brings to all one's bodies and the feeling
of fire and vigour it imparts to one's whole being.
I feel very strongly that just at present any efforts
I may
have made in the past are more than repaid by the
strength of which I am conscious in these difficult
times, and by the eagerness I experience to be of
service to the many to whom the War has brought misery
and trouble. The War
has brought us all nearer to each other. Above all
it has brought the Masters
nearer to us than we have ever allowed Them to come
before, and it has given some of us the happiness
of knowing that Theosophy is the one great source
from which it is possible to draw courage and cheer
for the use of the afflicted.
Such times as these are abundant evidence that the "ceaseless strain" is well
worth while bearing for the power it generates to
serve mankind. When life is smooth the strain may
sometimes seem an unnecessary torture, but when times
are hard it is known to have been the basis for a
confidence which otherwise
could not have existed. [Page 98]
THE "I" OUTSIDE THE BODY
The
Master then shows us how the training is to proceed. "It must always
be you who control that body, not it that controls
you". With regard to this Mrs.
Besant gave the following instruction — the words are not hers: "What you
have to do is to judge for your body as
you would for an animal in your charge; you must
not overwork it because if you do it has not sufficient
physical energy left for efforts in other parts
of your work. You must give it as
much sleep and food as it requires to keep it in
the highest state of efficiency — not necessarily all that it wants. Many of you
still give the body too much food, and this is incompatible
with the highest point of efficiency, at
which we should always be aiming. Young
bodies, of course, need considerably more food than
do elderly ones; the body must have enough, but
you must not let it have more than that. Plenty
of kind-hearted people make that very mistake with
their animals, with the result that the animals have
imperfect health and suffer when they have to walk.
You must judge for your
body. You ought to have such complete control
over your body that you can make it wait without
trouble, saying: ' This that wants it is not I.
I have
something more important to do at present, you
must wait till I can attend to you.'
"This
is the point that I should advise you to think
over and to work upon . . . pull yourselves up
constantly and ask: is it I, or my body, that
is [Page 99] wanting this or that ? This will gradually lead you
to that state of self-recollectedness which is so essential,
and which is a thing that untrained people never have
. . . whenever you wish something, examine if it is
really you who
wish it. It is one great lesson that has to be learned,
this identifying of oneself with the God who is Oneself,
instead of with the animal which is one's
instrument".
Let
me lay stress on the word "self-recollectedness". We have to remember
ourselves, we have to remember to distinguish between
the machine and the motive power, between the instrument
and the user. In the next couple of pages
the Master explains to us how we may recollect ourselves,
by showing us what the astral and mental bodies respectively
desire on
their own account.
He has already told us how the physical body tries
to bring into submission the self
within —" the physical body wants to rest, to go out walking,
to eat and drink; and the man who does not know says
to himself: 'I want to do these things'. "But we
must say to all three bodies — physical, astral, mental — "You shall not hinder me
in doing good work". In other words, we must recollect our higher self,
however much our lower vehicles — its instruments — may strive to make themselves heard
for their much speaking. People who do not know are
so much occupied with their lower bodies that they
identify themselves with them almost entirely, and
it
is only under some great moral pressure that they
realise too late that the indulgence of the lower
selves has meant the withdrawal of the [Page 100]
higher
self from the position it might have taken, from the power with which it
might have endowed
its instruments. The value of the lower bodies
consists in their capacity to glean the necessary experiences
of the plane to which the matter composing them
belongs. If they simply immerse themselves in the activities of their
own plane, instead of allowing the higher plane bodies to select as far as
possible
such experiences as may help the growth of the
individual; as a whole, the result will be
that the bodies will become more and more entangled
in increasingly lower strata of their respective
planes
and will finally with great suffering be discarded
by the Self whose bidding they have scorned. The
law of Karma is very rigid, and a body degraded
to base uses in one life when it might have listened
to the God within, becomes unable to serve its owner
at some future time, and in the
misery of a longing to help, united
to instruments through which no work can be done,
is gradually learned the lesson that true
happiness and progress are alone possible when
the lower acts in perfect deference to the will
of the higher. How often is not the spirit willing
while
the flesh is weak — the result of not having yet learned the relative
values of the various bodies through which we contact
the many depths of God's
manifested universe ? The flesh is weak when it
tries to depend on itself alone, but it becomes infinitely
strong when serving but as the reflection
of its spiritual counterpart.[Page 101]
CHAPTER VII
THE ASTRAL AND MENTAL BODIES
"THE
astral body", says the Master, "has its desires — dozens
of them; it wants you to be angry, to say sharp,
words, to feel jealous, to be greedy for money,
to
envy other people their possessions, to yield yourself
to depression . . . not because it wishes to
harm you, but because it likes violent vibrations,
and likes to
change them constantly. But you want none of these things, and therefore you
must discriminate between your wants and your body's".
Let
me quote again from notes taken of Mrs. Besant's
instructions on this paragraph: "You must exercise continual watchfulness, constant
care, because it is more difficult to realize that
you are not your astral body, than to realize that
you are not your physical body. But if you look at
the examples which the Master
gives, you will see how continually you identify
yourselves with your astral body. 'I am angry or
irritable,' you will say. Probably you will not
say 'I am jealous' if you are conscious of the
feeling of jealousy; for though we may identify
ourselves with our feelings, we try to veil the lower
ones — so you might call this
feeling, not jealousy,
[Page
102] but love. ‘I am hurt because so and so whom I love 'loves some one better than me ! '
Love is such a far reaching, all-embracing virtue, that we like to
shelter under it and attribute to it all sorts of things with which
it has nothing whatever to do. Far better is it to examine honestly
our feelings and not to play with ourselves and deceive ourselves with
pretty words. In the case under consideration, you are not hurt because
you love your friend, but because you desire to appropriate that friend
to yourself. Wherever there is this feeling of being hurt, it springs
from selfishness, which is at the opposite pole to love. You — the Self — cannot feel jealous, but your astral body can; neither are You angry or irritable:
these are all moods of the astral body".
I
wish to lay stress on this fact that when we feel hurt or offended we
are as a matter of fact giving way to selfishness. People will tell you that
it is only natural sometimes to feel hurt or offended, and I entirely
agree
if by the word "natural" they mean "inevitable at a certain stage of growth". We could not feel sympathy with people who feel hurt or offended had we not
experienced the feeling ourselves. On the other hand we cannot show them
the way to overcome the feeling unless we ourselves have more or less
overcome it; and the Master emphasises the fact that the real "I" in each one of us, the "I" we express so loosely in words in daily life — continually identifying it with bodies which only last a short time — can never feel these fleeting moods. From my own experience, although I have
only just begun real [Page 103] work, I can bear emphatic testimony to the fact that the more I pay attention
to the "I" within, the more clearly do I realise that my moods and feelings of the lower
kind are obnoxious to it. I often give way to temptations of various
kinds, to moods and feelings, but I am growing increasingly conscious
of a sense
of strong discomfort whenever the lower has its way unchecked. Not being
yet sufficiently master of my lower bodies, they often carry all before
them, but I am not happy in their victory, and even while they are temporarily
triumphant I know full well that I am not well — that the real "I" is, as it were, ailing. We know much about physical ill-health, but as soon
as we begin to place our feet upon the path we learn the meaning of spiritual
ill-health, the remedies for which are to be found within the covers
of At the Feet of he Master. Spiritual ill-health is as painful as physical ill-health — I think more so; for with the eagerness to serve comes the lack of power, a
lack due to giving way to the fleeting moods of vehicles which ought
to have been servants and not masters. And there is nothing more racking
than
an inability to make the bodies obey the behests of the spirit.
I
wish to lay stress on the Master's statement that the astral body wants
things, "not because it wishes to harm you but because it likes violent vibrations and
likes to change them constantly".
You
must remember that our various bodies are made up of matter which is
still on the downward arc of evolution, and the result is that this matter [Page 104] evolves by violent and constantly changing vibrations. Mrs. Besant remarks : "Students have sometimes put to me a curious question: ' Ought we not to give
it the opportunity of evolving?“ No ! You can, without any fear of being selfish, refuse to give these vibrations.
It can find them in savages, in animals; they need them as experiences to bring out moods of consciousness, and you must not sacrifice
your higher evolution for this. The constant desire of the astral body
for violent changes is a thing which should help you to realise that
it is not you. Moods come over you for no apparent cause, and not approved
by your reason; they have nothing to do with you, but are the independent
activities of the astral body. You must realise this, and not allow yourself
to be made the playground of all these changing moods".
The
Master emphasises the fact that you want none of these things, and, therefore, you must discriminate between your wants and your body's. I think it is well to remember that the more we make
progress the greater the force which pours through our various bodies.
The result is that while our higher emotions are infinitely more powerful
than they were before, our lower emotions also gain in strength. Each one
of us, who has set himself deliberately to tread the path of Service, experiences
the difficulty that, while he can do much better work than before, he seems
to have many more obstacles than he has hitherto known of; in fact all
his bodies become more highly vitalised, and the force flowing through
them affects the lower as well as the [Page 105] higher. So it is only safe to make special effort when one feels sure that, however
much the lower may gain in vitality, the higher will always be able to
dominate.
Every
one who deliberately places himself on the side of evolution, on the
side of self-sacrifice rather than on that of self-seeking, must be prepared
to pay the price of the deeper sympathies he will inevitably experience,
by laying himself open to greater temptations than those which have hitherto
come his way. If he is really in earnest, success is bound to come sooner
or later, and when he feels that troubles are overwhelming him he may
well
say to himself: "These added difficulties are the price I am paying for the greater power of
service which I have gained". Whatever happens, it is at least unwise to brood over your failures, or to imagine
that a past mistake can never be rectified. It is one of the most ancient
of maxims that we should not look behind. If we do look behind we feel
despair, repentance, remorse. All of these moods, as Mrs. Besant tells
us, are a waste of strength. The energy you put into repentance would
be better spent on cultivating the emotion opposite to that which causes
the
repentance. "Do not look back; . . . pick out all the opposite moods and practise them all
day long. If your astral body wants you to be impatient, set your mind
on patience; think of patience in your morning meditation and practise
it throughout the whole day. If your astral body wants you to feel jealous,
do not think any more about jealousy, think [Page 106] of unselfishness and practise it hard, there will be no room for jealousy then.
Your mind cannot be filled with two opposing things at the same time". In other words we must strive to be as positive as we can, as long as we can.
We must strive to emphasise our better natures rather than to feel grieved
at the mistakes we have made.
Personally,
I believe most strongly that the past can be modified, both by the present
and by the future. I think that our attitude in the present can so modify
the past that we may transmute a mistake into a force for good. Similarly,
by being careful in the present, the future will be made secure, and
will, in its turn, react upon the past. From a certain standpoint of consciousness
everything is in the "ETERNAL NOW". And all that we have done, all that we are doing, all that we shall do, is
summed up in the "Now". The mischief I may have done to my friend last year, I may considerably repair
by striving to be of special service to him today. The jealous thought
I may have had some time ago, I may render comparatively impotent by
surrounding my friend with strong thoughts of unselfish goodwill at every
possible
opportunity. I do not wish to suggest that every action is not followed
by its appropriate karma. But who shall say where an action begins and
where it ends ? Down here we see things separated off into compartments:
the Master is able to see much more of the unity than we can in this
world of separated existences. [Page 107]
THE MENTAL BODY
The
Master proceeds to point out in what ways the mental body strives through
lower thought-forms to minister to the needs of the matter of which it
is composed. Pride seems to be one of the most common conditions of our
mental bodies. "Your mental body wishes to think itself proudly separate, to think much of itself
and little of others. Even when you have turned it away from worldly
things, it still tries to calculate for self, to make you think of your
own progress,
instead of thinking of the Master's work and of helping others". Mrs. Besant remarks that probably the mind-body is the most difficult of all
to control. In my own experience, the mind-body seems able to deceive
us more successfully than the other bodies, for the mind associates itself
with each individual's personal progress, and makes him think how he
is
getting on. "How near am I to the next definite stage on life's pathway?" is a thought which often comes to those who are striving to lead the spiritual
life, and it is undoubtedly a very natural thought. On the other hand,
spiritual progress depends on service to others and not upon individual growth, except in so far as it is undoubtedly true that the
more you grow the greater becomes your capacity to be of use.
We
must not forget the essential unity of all, and this means that no individual
growth is possible save as others grow too, while the growth of those around
us inevitably stimulates our own. In other words, it [Page 108] is no use thinking in terms of ourselves alone or of the few, we have to think
in terms of the many, so as gradually to reach the Master's position of
thinking in terms of all.
Undoubtedly
the mind-body depends for the completeness of its lower aspect upon the
development of its special capacities and powers, and such development
begins by making these capacities and powers grow under the forcing impulse
of competition and individualism. But all who read these pages should
have passed this stage of growth, and should have come to the point of realising
that there is no value in any power save as it is used to help the one
whole. And so when the mental body wishes to think it is proudly separate,
we must look upon this condition as a survival of the past, as something
we have, in reality, outgrown and to which we should no longer pay attention.
In my own experience, the quickest way of developing the mental faculties
at our stage of growth is to use them in the service of others. A boy
who
is weak in any special subject of study can best stimulate what he lacks
by trying to find someone even weaker than himself, so that he may find it possible usefully to employ even
the little power he possesses.
Each
one of us has the germ of perfection in him, and we are only weak in
any special direction by comparison with others who are strong. Compared
with
those who are weaker, we ourselves are strong. Remember, always, that
behind the apparent imperfections are the germs of perfection, enshrined
within [Page
109] the God within us. We are Gods in the making, and however negligible our capacities
may seem when compared with those of our elder Brethren, they have a very appreciable
value towards those who know less than we do ourselves. And by helping those
to whom our weakness is as strength we gradually emphasise that strength and
so develop faculties hitherto
apparently of little
force.
So
you see that, in the long run, the great fact of unity is the assurance
to each one of us that we have it in our power, in course of time, to become
even as the Masters are. We all depend upon each other, we all grow through
failures, and every weakness is but an undeveloped strength.
TEMPTATIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Mrs.
Besant has often told us that the true server and occultist sees in all
surrounding life opportunities rather than temptations. To the ordinary
individual temptations must be avoided or at least guarded against. A temptation
is something we may succumb to, on account of which we may stumble. But
to an earnest worker who is beginning to understand the true value of life,
a temptation is an occasion for the fortifying of a weak place, for the
building up of a virtue, of a strength in place of a weakness. He does
not try to avoid temptations, but rather to stand firm in their midst and
to put forth that very strength whose absence made the temptation possible
at all. I quite admit that certain people would do well to run away
[Page 110] from
temptations, but anyone who means business must endeavour to gain strength to
surmount them from the reserve force of earnestness which will carry him through
most troubles if he will only let it. Let me emphasise once more in this connection
the need for self-recollectedness. Remember who you are and for what you are
striving, and remember this especially when a difficulty or temptation threatens
to distract an all too willing mind from its Self. The mere endeavour to remember,
still more the act of memory, brings its own strength and makes you master of
the
difficulty or temptation instead of its slave. "You
must watch unceasingly", says the Master, "or you will fail", Habit is everything in these matters, and you will either fall into the habit
of succumbing to temptations or you will fall into the habit of transmuting them
into added capacity. Set up a good habit and it will carry you through troubles
you would never have thought it possible to endure. Set up a bad habit and it
will take you a long time to
unravel
the knot into which you have twisted yourself — it cannot be cut! Self-recollectedness means "thinking of the Master's work
and
of helping others", and when you think in this way you are learning to become the alchemist of
your
temptations.
RIGHT AND WRONG.
We
now come to a most important statement by the Master: "Between Right and Wrong Occultism knows no compromise. At whatever apparent
cost that [Page 111] which is right you must do, that which is wrong you must not do, no matter what
the ignorant may think or say". Who is an occultist ? To this question we have an answer in an earlier portion
of At the Feet of the Master : "What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs — these things are not important; the really important thing is . . . the knowledge of God's plan for men". I have italicised the last sentence because I believe the occultist to be one
who is at least beginning to know God's plan in part; no one can know
it in its entirety. An occultist has begun to use his discrimination
to distinguish
between the real and the unreal, between darkness and light, and knows
that death, is but the instrument of immortality. You who are servants
of the Star, perhaps members of the Theosophical Society, are occultists
in the becoming, because you know some of the truths at present hidden
from the majority of mankind. So it is you whom the Master addresses
when He declares that at whatever apparent cost the right must be chosen. Note the word "apparent". There is no real cost to yourself or to others when you choose the right and
turn away from the wrong. Great indeed is the truth and it shall prevail,
however much error may seem for the time to triumph. Pain comes because
of wrong-doing, and though it is true that a right action often causes
considerable pain to us in the doing, it is because we are breaking through
habits of wrong-doing, and the lower nature is still striving to keep us within its grasp. The pain of the lower is but the inevitable prelude
to the joy of the [Page 112] higher self beginning to feel free and unfettered. Soon the lower no longer binds,
and then pain ceases — "the Master is always serene and joyous", not because He is indifferent to suffering but because He knows all that suffering
can teach, because He lives in the Self liberated from a bondage the
meaning of which it has grown to understand. There is only an "apparent" cost when we look at the conditions from the point of view of those more ignorant
than ourselves, of those who do not understand the motive for our action.
In other words, the "cost" is the effort to purify the lower nature, and this effort can only be looked
on as "cost" when we identify ourselves with a lower which is losing its dominance. People
are very apt to judge others and to judge them much more harshly than
they judge themselves. We depend far too much upon the opinion of others
with
regard to ourselves; and the result is that we often act against the
dictates of our consciences in the hope of shielding ourselves from the
judgment
of our fellows. This is what, I think, is meant by the word "compromise". Listen to Mrs. Besant's words: "You will find, if you look honestly at it, that ordinary life is a series of
compromises in the outer world; people are always doing a little less
than that which they know to be right, in order to make things smoother
for
themselves, in order to meet that deadliest of questions: ' What will
people say ? ' That fear of other people's opinions is partly due to
a weakness which is amiable at its root —the desire to please. . . . Plenty of people see [Page 113] what is wanted in religious and social questions, but how many will lead in reform.
... I know you cannot carry out your highest ideals immediately, any
more than you can get from the bottom of a mountain to the top by taking
one
leap. But if you mean to scale your mountain, every step must be taken
with the view of reaching the summit, every step must bring you nearer
to it. Never lower your ideal. That is fatal. ' One thing is right, while
the pleasant is another says a Hindu scripture, 'right unto pleasant
the wise man preferreth’ "
I
grant you that the path thus shown to us is hard, because we have hitherto
been living in a world of compromises. But the less we compromise the more
real joy life brings to us and the more definite consciousness we gain
of the Master's world to which we all belong. Later I shall take up the
latter portion of the whole question as to right and wrong in the light
of the Master's direction as to how we reach the right, and how we may
distinguish our whims, prejudices and fancies from that which is really
right. [Page 114]
CHAPTER VIII
THE HIDDEN LAWS OF NATURE
I
DO not want to trouble you much about the hidden laws of nature, because
as you grow you will begin to find out for yourselves what these hidden
laws are. Briefly, you must try to understand that the world's laws, those
which we call "conventions" and "customs", are by no means necessarily binding upon you. People are far too apt to accept
the world as it is, and to allow themselves to drift with it rather than
to take the trouble of trying to guide. Each one of us must try to find
his own footing, and take his stand on principles he has tested for himself
before accepting. To do this you must not rest satisfied with things as
they are, nor with the ordinary interpretation of life as accepted by the
average individual. Your conscience and your reason are the God within
you, and you must ever seek to give these two forces all possible opportunities
to guide you to right thought, right speech and right action. If you do
this, you will find that they will tell you much about nature that the
ordinary person does not know simply because he regulates his conduct in
life more according to that which is outside him than to the God within.
You will thus come into contact with laws of [Page 115 ] nature, hidden from the gaze of most people, which will powerfully aid you in
establishing yourself upon right lines of growth. For example, most people
have thought that the greatest good of the greatest number should be the
aim and object of all legislation and statecraft, but the law of nature
is that only that which is pleasant for all can really be pleasant for
any single individual, to quote the Master's statement. Under modern conditions
we tend to ignore minorities, because we do not yet know how to deal with
them; but to the One, minorities are of equal importance with majorities.
And you and I have to learn how. to bring this as yet hidden law into operation,
so as to do only those things which God wills — these being the only things really useful for all. Our hidden law, is, then,
that we are concerned neither with majorities nor with minorities, but
with the will of God, and if we can only understand His will we shall see
how all the various modes of life — however opposed on the surface — are but aspects of Him seen from a certain angle. This will give us tolerance,
while at the same time we may feel it our duty strongly to press any particular
aspect of His will, seen from some special standpoint, which our conscience
and our reason tell us to be of dominant value for the moment. When we
come later on to deal with tolerance, I shall have much to say on the need
for virility in tolerance. I content myself here with asking you to remember
that however tolerant you may be of others' views and attitudes, never
forget that you, too, have your message to give to [Page 116] the world — you, too, have your angle of vision to emphasise, and you need be no less tolerant
of other angles of vision because you pour your whole soul through your
own.
Then
again, to take up other as yet hidden laws of nature, there is the knowledge
as to the various bodies which each one of us possesses, knowledge as
to portions of God's plan for men which the world has yet to discover, knowledge
as to the existence of Elder Brethren, knowledge as to laws of health
and
magnetism. Much of such knowledge is at present veiled from the gaze
of most of us. But you will gradually learn, as some of us have learned,
and
then you will be much more careful, more deliberate, more thoughtful,
because you will know that, though nothing matters much and most things do
not
matter at all, yet the motive behind the "things", the attitude of mind and feeling towards them — these matter considerably. And you can only serve the Master truly when you
think before you speak or act, or, as the phrase goes, when you "look before you leap". Hastiness and impulsiveness, however common, must not be looked upon as natural,
and so excused. Hastiness is carelessness, carelessness is slovenliness,
and slovenliness, from this standpoint, is spiritual dirtiness. We need
spiritual cleanliness, and to obtain it we must take care to reflect
beforehand on the result of the proposed feeling or action or thought.
So you see
how a knowledge of some of these hidden laws strikes at the root of your
very being, and carries you along lines often far removed [Page 117] from the road on which the world at present travels.
THE
IMPORTANT AND THE UNIMPORTANT
The
Master now teaches us as to the relative importance of various courses
of action, from His standpoint and not from that of the world. "Firm as a rock where right and wrong are concerned, yield always to others in
things which do not matter". Or, as He has put it in another way: "Between right and wrong, Occultism knows no compromise".
The
sentence I quoted just before this one acts as a commentary on it, and
shows how firmness must always be preceded by discrimination — a quality which, as Mrs. Besant has pointed out, is translated in the outer
world as "tact". The difficulty for most people is to decide as to what is really right and
as to what is really wrong. They say: "If only we knew that, there would be no difficulty at all, and we could quite easily let all else
go". Now the Master has been telling us in an earlier part of the book that we must
try to realise that our bodies are not ourselves. "You must dig deep down into yourself to find the God within you, and listen
to His voice, which is your voice. Do not mistake your bodies for yourself, neither the physical body, nor
the astral, nor the mental. Each one of them will pretend to be the Self,
in order to gain what it wants". What you have to do then is to try to be as sure as you can that any idea you
may for the moment have as to right and [Page 118] wrong is not one of your bodies pretending to be the God within you so as to
get something it wants for itself. If you avoid acting hastily, if you
will give yourself time to do a little of that digging deep down of which
the Master speaks, you will be almost certain to know whether what is
wanted is really right or not. It is all a matter of practice, for, the
more you
practise, the bigger the channel leading to the real "you," the more quickly you can at any time travel into yourself and know the will
of the God within you. Then, again, the more you reach the God within
you, the more you become the master of your various bodies, instead of
allowing
them in turn to dominate you. Their various desires, therefore, will
grow feebler and feebler, until you will at once be able to distinguish
between
that which they want and that which you — the real you — want. Do not expect to be able at once unerringly to discriminate between right
and wrong, between the fictitious "right" of your bodies and the real "right" of yourself. At first, just try to stop, when you are about to do something
apparently "right", and dig a little, that is to say, make a little appeal to the best in you. If
you allow yourself to be carried away at once, the chances are that you
are allowing one of your bodies to put its own interpretation on "right" and "wrong", and you begin to juggle with conscience by saying: " Well, at any rate there is no harm in doing this". Remember that nothing matters much, most things not at all; so that ninety-nine
out of the hundred occasions on which you [Page 119] think you are following a principle, you are, as a matter of actual fact, simply
being led by bodies which ought to be your servants and not your masters.
No man can serve two masters, still less the three — astral, physical and mental. We can only serve one master — the God within us.
Mrs.
Besant puts the same idea in another way when she tells us: " Give way in everything, save in matters of principle". And the fact is that while you must be as firm as a rock as far as regards
the general line or principle of conduct on which your life is based,
in
almost every act of daily life, in almost all your relations with other
people,
you will be able to give way. "You must be always gentle, and kindly, reasonable and accommodating, leaving
to others the same full liberty which you need for yourself". To do this is to exercise true discrimination, or, to employ the worldly phrase, "tact". But remember that tact in this sense does not mean what it is so often supposed
to mean — making things pleasant at the expense of truth. It means sympathy and sweet
reasonableness, "leaving to others the same full liberty which you need for yourself". You could have no truer definition of tact than that.
Listen
to Mrs. Besant's words on this important point:
"You
see what is important in a certain thing that has to be done, and look
after that; in all the rest you let the people do exactly what they like,
and you point your will to the one thing in the middle that matters.
They will think what a delightfully [Page 120] yielding person you are and follow you quite happily on the important point,
hardly conscious that they are following at all. You have used discrimination;
you have thrown with both hands to people all the other things — the things which they think matter, and have gone steadily on to the one thing
you wanted. This is the thing which the fanatic forgets, and therefore
he does not succeed, while the occultist always succeeds. Yoga, you remember,
is ‘skill in action'. The fanatic will not yield on things which do not matter; he
does not discriminate between the important and the unimportant, so he
rubs people's fur all up the wrong way, and then they will not follow
him, however right he may be, and however important his main object.
If, instead,
you smooth the fur down, they purr and come along after you. This fact
is based on an important fact in nature. In both men and animals it is
an instinct to pull in opposition to anyone who is trying to pull them.
Do not pull and do not push people, then they will come with you willingly.
I saw a little instance of this fact here the other day. A man was trying
to pull a calf along and, of course, the calf had planted its four feet
into the ground, stuck its tail out, and was pulling against the man
for all it was worth. If the man had been sensible he would have stopped
pulling,
and then the animal would have stopped pulling against him, and with a little patting he would have
got it to follow him willingly. Take a lesson from that. If people will
not do what you want, look for the fault
in yourself. You will [Page 121] generally find that it is something in your way of acting that indisposes them.
I follow this plan myself. When there is friction and trouble in a place,
I sit down and think what it is I am doing that produces these, and find
another way. It is no use trying to force people. You can force them
to a certain extent, no doubt, but you only create opposition and trouble
by doing so. But put a considerable attraction before them, and they
will
all come round it of their own accord. This implies a faculty of leadership,
and it is a faculty which the Masters will want of you in the future,
so try to develop it. The Masters will want you to know how to lead,
so that
you may help people along, instead of hammering them along." [Page 122]
CHAPTER
IX
A
SMALL THING
THE
Master proceeds to draw a very important distinction between that which
is worth doing and that which is not. He says: "Try to see what is worth doing: and remember that you must not judge by the size of thing. A small thing
which is directly useful in the Master's work is far better worth doing
than a large thing which the world would call good".
In
the course of a varied experience I have come across many people who wish
to take part in some kind of activity, many of whom come and offer themselves
for service. I have always been in a difficulty with regard to these people,
for I never can tell whether they are in earnest or not. One does not want
to put them off in any way, nor, on the other-hand, does one desire to
have round one a number of people for whom special kinds of work have to
be found. If a person really wishes to serve the Master he does not mind
in the least what he does. But most people are not content to do whatever
comes to hand. Either there is some special kind of work which they want
to do, and they do not care about doing any other kind, or they expect
that some activity shall be created for them. Again, many [Page 123] people are quite unwilling to begin at the beginning. They want to do work which
shall draw to them the favourable notice of their fellows, and they desire,
therefore, to begin in the middle rather than plod through the early stages
through which all good work must inevitably be built up.
THE
SPIRIT OF SERVICE
Now
I want you who read these lines to look to see in what spirit you offer
yourself for service. The Master makes the matter quite clear. "A small thing which is directly useful in the Master's work is far better worth
doing than a large thing which the world would call good". Try to see, therefore, whether there is a piece of work being done which may
be called the Master's work: it is for you, individually, to judge what
the Master's work is. The Theosophical Society, the Order of the Star
in the East, and all activities subsidiary to these are obviously the
Master's
work, and if you can find a little place which enables you definitely
to be occupied in the service of such organisations, you are doing something
which is far better worth doing than some other piece of work — perhaps more showy, but less connected directly with the Master's service. If
I might be allowed to indulge in a little personal reminiscence, I began
my own service to the Masters by putting postage stamps on envelopes,
and writing out addresses for the Theosophical Society when its Headquarters
were at 28, Albemarle Street. [Page 124] I remember being thoroughly determined to get a footing in the Office, and while
of course my occupation was not very inspiring, I felt that I had put
in the thin edge of the wedge, and that it rested with me to hammer that
wedge
firmly home. I knew that I could do that work, and that probably I should
not be turned away, provided I did not show any discontent or desire
for other work which might not, at the moment, be available for me. On
the
other hand, I was on the spot, and if any work should turn up I would
be there ready to take it if no one better could be found.
One
must, of course, be willing to go on with a special piece of work for
an indefinite period. We ought to believe that the Master directly guides
the affairs of our Theosophical Society and of the Order of the Star
in
the East, just as He guides many other movements in the world, and we
should be able to realise that He knows who are working for Him, in however
humble
a capacity, and that when the opportunity offers He will give them more
suitable work. As a Master-Organiser you can trust Him to make the best
use of such capacities as you possess. Let me lay stress on the desirability
of being on the spot. To me, in the early days, it proved invaluable,
for when Mr. Keightley had to leave for India the Theosophical Society authorities
had to look round for someone temporarily to take his place, and there
I was at hand. I did not ask to take his place, but they knew — at least I hope they did — that I meant business, and I was not going to be turned away from the Master's
service by the fact that there was not [Page 125] much for me to do. The result was that while there may have been many other better
candidates for the temporary post, I was selected because they had not
far to go to look for me.
Try
to think how glad you are to render even the slightest little service
to those whom you love. You do not want necessarily to do big things for
them.
It is not always possible to render big acts of service, but those whom
you love are as happy with the small, kindly deeds as they would be with
the big ones. Indeed I cannot help thinking it is the little things that
make life go smoothly, and though big pieces of work have to be done,
they generally affect people in the mass rather than individuals. So if you
can bring yourself to realise that the Master is one of those whom you
love with all reverence, you will then find out more clearly the meaning
of the phrase, "a small thing directly useful in the Master's work is far better worth doing
than a large thing which the world would call good".
BEGIN
AT THE BEGINNING
It
is all a question of quiet determination. If you wish to become an engineer
you must begin at the beginning. Many people are able to drive motorcars,
but most of those who can drive are helpless on the occasion of a breakdown.
They then have to engage the services of some one who has been for years
learning all about engines, and how to construct and repair them. The
same applies equally to the [Page 126] Master's service. When everything goes quite smoothly we all of us can do quite
well, but every now and then something goes wrong. It may be in the Office;
it may be in the attitude of people either towards the work or towards
ourselves; it may be there is some friction between our fellow-workers.
To put things straight, you must have had experience of the way in which
things work, whether they be office things, or human temperaments. Ella
Wheeler Wilcox said once in one of her poems: "Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone". We can all laugh together, but Theosophists and members of the Order of the
Star in the East have to train themselves to stand helpfully beside those
who weep. To do this, you must try to learn wisdom through the small
things before you can hope to achieve wisdom in the larger issues of
the outside
world.
I
repeat once more, the great thing is willingness to do anything that comes to hand. During this present War many people who never used to put
their hands to anything, feel they scrub floors, wash utensils, do all
kinds of so-called dirty jobs, because they now must help, and because
they know help is needed. It is sad that we should have needed a war to
teach us this very obvious lesson. As a matter of fact, help is always
being needed, and we want people who will do all kinds of simple things,
which, however trivial they may appear in the eyes of the world, are little
bright sparks of light illuminating the nobility of the soul who is doing
them. Such actions [Page 127] immediately attract the Master's attention, and thenceforth His blessing plays
upon that individual, and so from the doing simple things will come the
power to be of greater service.
Remember
that when we are reading At the Feet of the Master we have come out of our world into the Master's world, and in His world things
seem so very different from what they appear down here in the ordinary
world by which we are normally surrounded. Never think of the world's judgment
about what you do or about what you want to do. Try to remember that the
Master looks into your heart to see the spirit in which you are doing the work, and pays much less attention than does the
outside world to the actual work in which you are engaged. Your circle
of influence may be at first very much restricted, but if you do your duty
within that limited sphere, the Master will take upon Himself to enlarge
the circle and will give you an opportunity of doing His work in a wider
field. To sum it all up: begin at the beginning, and go on at the beginning
as long as you may be needed.
DISCRIMINATION
IN SERVICE
The
Master then tells us to try and distinguish between the more useful and
the less useful. "To feed the poor" He says, "is a good and noble and useful work; yet to feed their souls is nobler and
more useful than to feed their bodies. Any rich man can feed the body,
but only those who know can feed the soul. If you know, it is your duty
to help others to know". [Page 128]
These
words contain a very important truth. We, who are members of the Order
of the Star in the East and of the Theosophical Society, are supposed to
be in possession of truths which will help the world to grow stronger,
more useful, and more able to cope with its difficulties. There are not
many of us who possess these truths consciously, and the greatest blessing
we can offer the world is to spread abroad that which means so much to
us. As the Master says, any rich man can feed the body. We expect a man who has wealth to give his first attention to the right distribution of
his wealth — that is his business. Those of us who may have riches belonging to the spiritual
world have, as our first care, the duty of distributing these spiritual
riches as wisely as we can. We are so apt to become slaves to the world's
attitude toward things, and to forget that, though the world may not
recognise the value of our riches, we, at least, have for ourselves and
for many
of our friends, proved their worth. Few Theosophists may have worldly
wealth, but all Theosophists have a little spiritual knowledge. If they cannot spread their
spiritual knowledge far and wide, they probably would not, were they wealthy
people, give of their riches generously.
SPREAD
YOUR TRUTH
People
sometimes say to me: "I can do so little. You see I have no influence. Money seems to be everything". My reply to them is: "What do [Page 129] you know that has helped you in life's difficulties?" The knowledge that has helped you is certain to help others. Many people may
not he ready for that knowledge. For such, the voice of the Theosophist
will fall on unheeding ears. But there are always some, somewhere, who
need the truths we possess, and it behoves us so to spread these truths
that they may reach the ears of those to whom they are necessary.
I
quite grant that we can do but little without a certain amount of material
prosperity. Money certainly does help, and without it life is indeed more difficult. On the other hand, we must
give what we can. If we do this, then will the Master add to our work
the power that money gives. Money is always ready to the hand of those
who
will use it in the Master's service. And while we all of us have, from
time to time, to know what it is to struggle without the help of money,
while we have often to see many of our schemes fail for want of money,
in the long run perseverance with the little we have will bring to us
all kinds of help, including financial. The run may be a long one; the
length
of it depends, to a very large extent, upon the training which the individual
has to receive. It may be necessary that he shall go through a long course
of poverty to see how far the truths he knows sustain him in trouble.
But, as I have said before, he wins through his experience, and no great
truth for which some part of the world
is ready can ever fail to reach its object because of lack of money.
It may fail to [Page 130] reach its object from lack of capacity, from lack of enthusiasm, from lack of
perseverance, of the messenger. But once these qualities are present,
all other things shall be added.
So
take care of that which you already possess, and invest it according to
your best knowledge. No possession is of greater value than the spiritual
knowledge which gives us stability, peace, confidence, strength. All these
things come to us by building into our characters the truths for which
the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Star in the East stand. Let
us, therefore, make use of these truths in our own daily life, and employ
them in service among all who surround us. Life is always more or less
hard and difficult. It should be less hard and less difficult to those of us who know. And we should be able to give of that which
helps us to courage, to all who have a less sure source from which to draw.
At
the present time, when the whole world is in the throes of war, we must
be careful to see that the knowledge we possess is spread far and wide,
we must be careful to see that we live it more truly than we have ever
lived it before, and we must be careful to see that through our example
the preaching of this knowledge may be made more insistent and attention-compelling.
Personally, speaking as a General Secretary of the Theosophical Society
in England and Wales, I feel it to be a special duty to do all I can
to make Theosophy widely known, so that those whom the War has caused to
seek
help and peace, may be able to [Page 131] find something which shall give them courage to endure. I might have joined the
army, had my physical health been equal to the strain. But the truths
of Theosophy are everything to me, and have pulled me through many hard
times.
I could have given my body to my country, but I feel — I do not think I shall be accused of cowardice in saying so — that I would far rather give my soul. That which has given me strength I must give to those around me who are in need of strength. The world
may call this conceit, but it is the principle of my life, and I should
feel untrue to my higher self were I not, in such a crisis as this, to
spread in the most helpful manner possible, truths for which the world
is looking, and without which the world can make but little progress.
I quite agree that the majority of the youth of the country owe their
bodies
to the nation, for the war is being partly fought with bodies, but I
am equally convinced of the truth underlying the letter of Lord Derby
to the
Archbishop of Canterbury, in which he agreed as to the need of the service
to the country of the ministers of religion. If a man shirk the gift
of his body, how shall he offer the gift of his soul. For the soul is
a far
greater gift than ever the body could be. Yet, if a man feels himself
to be a channel for the Master's force, and every minister of the Church
should feel this, then he can ordinarily do his best work by leading
a life of special purity so as to become an ever-deepening channel through
which
the Master's strength and blessing may pass untainted. [Page 132]
HOW SHALL WE SERVE ?
The
question as to what we ought to do depends, therefore, upon the position
which we occupy. It is, indeed, the duty of most to set an example to
those around them, and this often involves the putting aside of occupations
we
like for the sake of duties we owe. I have often and often thought over
this question with regard to my own special circumstances, and I have
come to the very definite conclusion that so long as I can give the best
of
myself to my fellow-countrymen, and so long as I can maintain the highest
standard of living within my power, for so long is it my duty to make
as many useful channels as I can through which our Theosophical movement
may
spread its message. The world may not agree with me, but when I am making
big decisions I strive for the time to live in the Master's world, and
to make my decisions from that standpoint. With the pressure of public opinion around one, and with the strong
thought-forms which press upon one from all sides, it is not always easy
to keep clear the memory of that temporary life in the Master's world.
But I strongly feel the truth of those words of Shakespeare’s: " To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst
not then be false to any man". Men may think you false; but that is a far different matter from actually being so. I quite
admit that people often suffer their own inclinations, their own weaknesses,
to enter into their judgments. They try to reconcile desire with duty,
and then seek [Page 133] to persuade themselves that it is duty which is moving them and not desire. The
question is one between a man and his conscience, and when once one's
conscience is clear, one is bound to have adequate strength to meet any
difficulties
which such a judgment may entail. [Page 134]
CHAPTER X
SERVICE
AS EDUCATION
THE
Master remarks that: "However wise you may be already, on this Path you have much to learn; so much
that here also there must be discrimination, and you must think carefully
what is worth learning". He answers the thought by telling us that we must study, because "God is Wisdom as well as Love", and that we must study especially that which will most help us to help others.
This
statement of the Master seems to me to be at the basis of all true education,
for I hold strongly that no education can be regarded as satisfactory
which does not include within it the service of other people. It is sometimes
said that the great object of education is first to make a child happy
in his child-life, and then to give him useful knowledge. As a matter
of
fact, happiness, knowledge and service are, in reality, so far as the
Master's world is concerned, interchangeable terms. No boy or girl is truly
happy
unless he begins, even while young, to transmute his knowledge into service.
In many of the more advanced schools this truth is well understood, but,
on the whole, educational authorities are far too much occupied with
conventional [Page 135] method and subject-matter, and pay far too little attention to the choice of
method and subject from the point of view of the way in which the child
may easily make use of the knowledge he daily gains in school for the
helping of those less advanced than himself. In the Central Hindu College
at Benares
it was always our habit to encourage every single student not only to
study but to serve, and, indeed, we found it to be true that any boy who
lacked
capacity along any special line could very considerably decrease his
ignorance by trying to help along that line some one who knew even less than
he did.
There is no better way of growing oneself than endeavouring to make oneself
useful to one's surroundings; and in helping other people we increase
our own capacity to learn.
Unfortunately
under modern conditions we are very often face to face with the statement
that young people must not be distracted from their studies; that their
time for service is not yet; that they have enough to do in learning without
going into the outside world. With such statements I entirely disagree.
I do not think that children are nearly as happy as they ought to be, nor
is the world nearly as joyous a place to live in as it should be. There
may be many reasons for this, but at least one of the reasons is that the
child does not bring into the outer world the joyous childish nature that
the world needs, and I long for the time when part of a child's school
life shall consist in moving among his surroundings, bringing to them the
song that children alone can [Page 136] sing. I do not, for a moment, suggest that children should take an active part
in politics, or in the discussion of social questions. But I do say, most
emphatically, that there are very definite acts of service which children
alone can perform, and which are very much needed both by the elder generation,
and by the young themselves.
TWO
KINDS OF STUDY
The
child, therefore, has two kinds of study to undertake: (1) that which
vitalises and makes sensitive his mind, and (2) that which enables him to
be immediately
of use in his own way. There are many subjects to study; much he needs
to know; partly because these things will be definitely useful to him
in after life, partly because they give the mind a certain tone, partly because
they give the mind a certain discipline, and partly because they bring
him, through the mind, into touch with the world, past, present and future.
And, on the same lines, training must be given both to the physical and
emotional bodies. With these, for the moment, we are not concerned. He
must also be taught to study his actual place in the world in which he
lives — that which the world brings to him, and that which he exists, even as a child,
to offer to the world. He has his definite note to strike in the world's
harmony, as much when a child as when he as grown up. The child, therefore,
who is not encouraged to turn his study into service cannot be [Page 137] truly happy. For one of the conditions of growth is that we gradually find that
the less our selfishness is narrow, the more our happiness grows permanent.
Children soon get tired of most of their toys, and many parents are distracted
at the thought of how they are going to occupy their young people from
day to day when studies are over. It is part of a child's nature that
he should, from time to time, get into "mischief "— this is but the result of that groping which leads us all to covet experience
of one kind or another. The child would get into mischief much less,
however, if he could be made to realise that he has a power in himself
which he
can make use of if he likes — the power to join himself to others, and so to gain a more satisfying kind of
happiness than if he were to live for himself alone. I consider, therefore,
that every boy and girl who goes to school, or who goes to a University,
should combine study with service of one kind or, another. I consider
all education one-sided which does not provide for each student an appropriate
service.
THE
PRIMARY PRINCIPLE
The
Master lays down the primary principle upon which all study and service
must be based. He says: "You must learn to be true all through, in thought and word, and deed". He thus emphasises that the world is built upon a foundation of truth, and He
shows us that this is the first lesson every one of us has to learn, [Page 138] whether in school or out of it. Truth, indeed, is the basis of all growth, and
the rate at which we grow depends upon the extent to which we allow truth
to permeate our thoughts, our words, our actions. All in the world that
is bad, impure, wrong, unhappy, is in reality, untrue. That is to say,
it is all a distortion of the true — the force of truth has been misapplied. Absence of knowledge is the cause of
all the trouble in the world, and the world needs, above all things,
that truth — which is the same as knowledge — should be spread far and wide, in forms suited to the varying understandings
of the different stages of evolution to which the peoples of the world
belong. The Master tells us how we are to arrive at the truth, and He
says that we must not believe that a thing is true because many other
people
hold it to be true, nor because it has been believed for centuries, nor
because it is written in some book which man thinks sacred. He tells
us that we must think things out for ourselves, and judge for ourselves. "He who would walk upon the Path must learn to think for himself, for superstition
is one of the greatest evils in the world, one of the fetters from which
you must utterly free yourself".
FORM
IS NOT REALITY
That
is why it is so important to have as teachers people who have a certain
amount of real knowledge, and who are as free from prejudice as possible.
I do not for a moment suggest that forms are not valuable, [Page 139] and during childhood there are many forms with which children are to be associated.
But the teacher should never lose sight of the fact that forms are but
forms, no matter how beautiful the forms may be, and that the existence
of the form depends upon the reality within. Young people are so much brought
up to believe that the forms which surround them are the only forms of
any real value that, either they rebel against them, or become dwarfed
by them. In either case mischief has been done, and suffering inevitably
follows any belief that form is reality. We must try, therefore, to consider all forms as signposts pointing
to the reality which they enclose. In the early stages of child-life,
the form attracts most, and we cannot expect any considerable effort
to look
through the form into the reality beyond. But, as education proceeds,
forms become increasingly insignificant, and should serve but to emphasise
the
beauty of an underlying unity which can find expression in so much apparent
diversity. All of us, therefore, have to see how much we are at the mercy
of conventional habits of thought. It is, of course, the reverse of sensible
to disbelieve simply because a large number of people believe, though
that is the attitude of many otherwise independent thinkers. But we must
be
continually on the alert to see that we do not unconsciously drift, either
with our surroundings or with the general current of thought along which
our nation, or the world as a whole, is drifting. Those who would serve
the Master must learn to think for [Page 140] themselves, and this involves a very searching analysis of the motives which
precede our thoughts, our words, our deeds.
CAUSES
OF MISUNDERSTANDING
The
Master then remarks that we must not think of other people that which we
do not know. This is, of course, one of the most difficult lessons to learn,
and one of the most valuable acts of service which both young and old can
offer in helpfulness to others. We are all of us far too prone to imagine, and then to treat the imagination as if it were knowledge. Much of the ill-feeling
which exists among people is simply because they often think that which
they do not know, and which frequently turns out to be untrue, A personal talk with someone,
whom one imagines to be in opposition to one, frequently removes the misunderstanding. Indeed,
most people are much more antagonistic away from their objects of disapproval than when they come face to face. As a general
rule, when two people come together, a very slight effort is always made
by the underlying Unity to assert itself, and with goodwill this little
effort often overcomes the misunderstanding which has been largely born
of distance and ignorance.
Then,
again, there is in most people a very definite tendency to exaggeration,
and this also causes much misunderstanding and difficulty. As the Master
observes, we often imagine that people are thinking ill of [Page 141] us: "If a man does something which you think will harm you, or says something which
you think applies to you, do not think at once, 'he meant to injure me'. "Nothing is more true than the fact that each soul has its own troubles, and that
its thoughts turn chiefly around itself. Our attitude towards others very
largely depends on the way we ourselves are getting on in the world at
the moment — on the state of our physical health, on the hopes we have for the future, on
our memories of the past. Generally speaking, it is not so much what
someone else does that matters, as the relation of that action to the
little world
in which we live. A little matter which I thought nothing of yesterday,
I may to-day regard as of essential importance because toothache has
entered my little world, and has upset my nerves. All kinds of apparently
trivial
conditions may combine to make us take a very uncharitable view of the
actions of other people. Mrs. Besant has often told us that to feel hurt
is a condition of selfishness, because our business is what we ourselves do, and not the attitude of others towards us.
This
is a hard lesson to learn, because in the past we have so much depended
upon the world outside us. If we would become pupils of a Master we must
become far more positive in character, and make our condition depend upon
what we give out rather than upon what we take in, I often think that the
lives of clerks in the City depend far more upon what happens .to their
employers in the domesticity of home than upon the carelessness or cleverness
with [Page 142] which they attend to their employers' business. An employer finds that his morning
egg is bad, has a few words with his wife, is disturbed by the boisterousness
of his children, could not find his collar stud while dressing, lost his
favorite train, found his favorite seat occupied by some one else, and
the result is that the office becomes unbearable, and everything his subordinates
do is wrong. The subordinates may imagine that their employer dislikes
them, or has some grudge against them, whereas the fact of the matter is
that the whole mischief began with the loss of that collar stud ! I do
not, for a moment, wish to suggest that this is always the case, but it
very often is. As the Master observes: "Probably some one or something else has made him angry, and because he happens
to meet you he turns his anger upon you. He is acting foolishly, for all
anger is foolish, but you must not therefore think untruly of him". [Page 143]
Continues on Part 2 [in preparation] |