Some Problems of Life
By
Annie Besant
LONDON
THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY
161, NEW BOND STREET, W.
FIRST EDITION 1900, REPRINTED 1912.
CONTENTS |
Page |
FOREWORD |
5 |
PROBLEMS OF ETHICS |
9 |
PROBLEMS OF SOCIOLOGY |
32 |
PROBLEMS OF RELIGION |
72 |
SOME DIFFICULTIES OF THE INNER
LIFE |
117 |
FOREWORD
AN attempt is made in the following pages to discuss some of the Problems of
Life and Mind that exercise the brains and wring the hearts of thoughtful
people. These problems will be studied with the aid of the light thrown upon
them by Theosophy, that Divine Wisdom which enlightens us just so far as we are
able to receive it. There is no idea in my mind so ambitious as that of solving
these problems: I only seek to offer to my fellow students some thoughts that
have been helpful to myself and may also be serviceable to others.
Theosophy, from its very nature, cannot form a new religion, a new church, or
even a sect separate and apart. It is a unifier, not a divider; an explainer,
not an antagonist. Whenever a Theosophist is aggressive, combative,
denunciatory, he is failing in his high mission, for the “wisdom that cometh
from above is first pure then [Page 5]
peaceable." He is bound to be tolerant even with the intolerant, knowing that
no evil can be destroyed save by its opposite good. Hence in seeking solutions
for life's problems he does not vehemently assail the solutions already
suggested, but seeks to distil from each any trace of truth it may contain. In
all the schools of thought around us, ethical, sociological, scientific, and
religious, some aspect of the truth is being set forth, and the fact that its
exponents regard it as the whole truth does not lessen the intrinsic value of
the particular fragment they present. Any view which has been held by large
numbers of people, for long periods, over wide areas, recurring time after time,
showing a perennial life, has in it some truth which preserves it; it is the
duty of the Theosophist to seek for this truth and to bring it to light, freeing
it from the errors which have enveloped it. Whenever human hearts and lives
attach themselves to any view, they are not attracted by the errors which
compose its form but to the truth which is its life. The failure to appreciate
this distinction between the life and the form which temporarily envelops it has
given rise to the bitterness of controversy, to the extremes of intolerance that
we find in the history of thought. The Divine Wisdom which includes all truth
cannot be hostile to any fragment of itself, whatever may be the transitory form
in which it is set. The student of the Divine Wisdom, then, must recognise and
revere it under every veiling form, as Isis recognised and reverently gathered
[6] up the torn fragments of the body of Osiris
the beloved. Thus may the errors which belong to Time fall away, while the
Eternal Truth endures, manifesting itself with ever-increasing fullness.
In our study, then, of the problems which surround us, we must search
diligently in each school of thought for the truths which it is seeking to
express, for the facts in nature which underlie its teachings. If this search be
conducted successfully, the various schools will to a great extent be unified,
Theosophy synthesising their different fragments. Quarrels arise because each
school regards its partial truth as the whole, denying the truths of its
neighbours while affirming its own. Peace will brood over the world when all
schools concern themselves with the duty of outlining as perfectly as possible
the aspects of truth which they perceive, and refrain from censuring as
falsehoods those aspects which are invisible from the standpoints they severally
occupy. "Men are usually right in that which they affirm, wrong in that which
they deny," once quoth a philosopher, and his remark might be printed in golden
letters over the desk of every student.
ANNIE BESANT.
LONDON,
July, 1899. [7]
PROBLEMS OF ETHICS.
THE problems of Ethics are concerned with the relations which exist between
man and man, between nation and nation, and between man and the non-human world.
Ethics has been called the Science of Conduct, therefore the Science of
Relations, and its aim is to regularise and render harmonious the relations
between an individual and his fellows, human and non-human. A man is not an
isolated unit, but a part of an organic whole; Ethics considers him as such a
part, and lays down the laws by which that whole may accomplish its orderly
evolution.
Every system of Ethics, if incomplete, may be brought in a final analysis
under one or other of three heads - authority, intuition, utility. Anyone of
these three offers itself as a separate foundation on which a system of Ethics
may be erected, and only a complete system [9]
recognises the value of each of the three, and sets each in its place as a
corner-stone in the pyramid of conduct.
Those who base Ethics on authority appeal to some revelation given by a
divine Being, or to some teachings of highly developed men, sages of the past,
whose knowledge was greater than that of their contemporaries or of subsequent
generations, and who spoke with the authority derived from that knowledge. These
teachers - Prophets, Rishis, Magi, call them by what name we may - were men who
knew the worlds beyond the physical, and laid down definite precepts out of
their wide experience; these precepts were submissively accepted by the nations
among whom they lived, they themselves being regarded either as directly
inspired by God, or as sharing the divine nature. All the Scriptures of the
world, the Bibles of our race, serve, each to the believers in it, as the
foundation of morality, each laying down a certain code of ethics; this code is
regarded as of direct and binding authority, not depending on reason but on the
possession by the teacher of higher knowledge, whether that knowledge were due
to his inspiration by some divine Being or to his own evolution into Deity.
The second great ethical school declines to submit itself to any external
authority, and founds itself on the existence in man of an interior faculty akin
to Deity - intuition. Intuition is variously defined; some identify it with
conscience, and declare that conscience is the voice of God speaking in the
human soul; others, [10] shrinking from so
extreme a position, and admitting that conscience is liable to error, and varies
with the evolution of the individual, regard intuition as a faculty belonging to
the spiritual nature, thus as being inherently superior to the physical,
emotional, and intellectual natures, and therefore the proper guide of conduct.
The third school of Ethics bases morality on utility, appealing to reason as
the authority which judges the facts and tendencies of life, traces the results
of actions, and deduces from them a moral code, seeking to found its precepts on
the generalised experience of the race. This school has many divisions, but they
all found themselves ultimately on experience, and regard conscience as the
product of evolution, as the moral instinct.* [ * Instinct has been defined as
accumulated racial experience, and this is a true definition, whether we
consider it, with the materialists, as transmitted by the modification of the
organism, or with the Theosophists, as stored in the group-soul, the over-soul
of a group.]
However various may be the ethical opinions found among men, they may all, in
the final analysis, be reduced to these three: the authority appealed to is (a)
divine, of the nature of a revelation; (b) spiritual-human, depending on
intuition; (c) rational-human, based on the recording of experience and
the logical deduction of rules of conduct therefrom.
In studying these three great ethical systems it is necessary to consider the
attacks made on each of them by their opponents, as well as the principles
relied on by [11] those who accept them. We
shall seek in each for an aspect of Truth, which will contribute to the
elucidation of ethical problems, seeing in each a value which may not rightly be
overlooked or discredited. Each affords a partial guide for conduct and treating
them theosophically we can unify them, antagonistic as they have been held to
be, and as their supporters believe them to be.
( a ) What is revelation? It is a teaching generally given in the
early days of a race, in order to mark out a path for humanity not yet
sufficiently evolved and trained to rely safely for guidance on either its
intuition or its reason. The object of this authoritative declaration is the
rendering of progress more rapid than it would be were the race left to make
experiments unaided in matters of right and wrong. Many blunders would be made,
many blind alleys entered, in the vague gropings of primitive man, driven by the
imperious instincts of his animal nature, without experience to guide or reason
to restrain. We may put aside all the aspects of revelation which deal with the
inner constitution of man, with the relation of Deity to the universe, and with
other weighty matters - aspects found in the great Scriptures of the world; we
will confine ourselves to those parts of revelation which deal with morals, for
it is against these that attacks are levelled by those who assail revelation as
a foundation for an ethical system, and who refuse to the world's Scriptures any
place in building up a sane morality. Every student is struck,
[12] when he considers any of the earlier codes
of morality - nay, it is not necessary to be a student to be startled by it - by
the presence of precepts which to him are immoral, not moral. Yet, if he accept
occult teaching, he believes that the Scriptures containing these precepts were
given by men who possessed very lofty and wide knowledge, men of the noblest
morality, of very high spiritual development. Further, he comes across such
precepts in books that contain hints as to God and man fragrant with pure and
sublime spirituality, so that they give a painful jar to the mind intent on
higher things. True, some of them might, nay would, be ejected by the analytic
hand of critical scholarship, and would stand confessed as interpolations of
later date. But however far historical criticism may go, that criticism, guided
by occult knowledge and not merely by scholarship, must confess the salient fact
that these ancient Scriptures contain teachings from men who were giants,
spiritually and morally, above the men of the present as they were far above the
men of the past. Fragments at least of their teachings have come down to us in
these Scriptures, no matter how much of alien matter may have crept into them in
the efflux of time and by the ignorance of successive generations. And among
these teachings are some of the precepts which jar on us as unsuitable to their
noble surroundings and as unworthy of the great instructors from whose lips they
fell.
To solve this problem aright we must grasp the necessary corollaries of
evolution, and place clearly [13] before the
mind some of the conditions inevitably bound up with the growth of a race from
moral nescience to moral perfection. In far-off antiquity we see an infant
humanity strong in its passions, but weak in its reasoning powers, plunging
wildly at the entrance to the path of morality. It begins in blind ignorance of
all distinctions between right and wrong. The first training could be but in
broad principles, and withal these very principles must not press too harshly on
the hitherto uncurbed animal nature. Many an action that would be a step
backwards for us now was a step forwards for it then. On the infinite ladder of
progress each rung is trodden in its turn, and we call the rungs below us “evil"
and the rungs above us “good." Evil and good are relative: they appertain to
progress, to growth. Our good of yesterday is our evil of to-day, and our good
of to-day will be our evil of to-morrow. In the world there is a steady purpose
that may be seen in the light of the history of human evolution. Souls in their
infancy, ignorant of right and wrong as we now recognise them, gradually learn
by experience, and looking backwards over the growth of humanity, we see that
saints and sages have trodden the path up which these souls in their turn are
climbing. We perceive that men are living in the world and are treading this
long ascent in order that the soul may evolve. This soul is to be a
self-conscious and self-moving intelligence; it is to develop a will that is
free, which shall learn to choose the highest. This will is never to be coerced
into choosing the best, but is to be [14] left
free to take what it will, under the sole condition that having taken it shall
keep, having chosen it shall abide by its choice. As we watch the evolution of
this growing intelligence we find that it is learning to choose between that
which makes for progress, and that which makes for retardation. We perceive that
the very things which at one stage helped it on its way upwards at a later stage
pull it backwards, and, persisted in, would hold it in a lower state of being.
When a soul is at a very low stage of evolution there is many an action that is
right for it, because it carries it a step onwards, that becomes wrong for it
after that step has been taken. Lifting forces are right, down-dragging forces
are wrong. This study leads us to the conclusion that what is “right" at any
period of the world's history is that which aids in lifting the soul into a
higher condition than that in which it is at the time, and thus works in harmony
with the divine will for the growth of the soul, helping it to become nobler,
purer, wiser, more rational. That which is “wrong," on the other hand, is
anything which goes against the current of evolution, anything which keeps the
soul stationary or drives it backward against the upward tendency of the whole.
“Evil" is the setting of the will of a part against the will of the whole, the
separating oneself from the purpose of the world and going against it instead of
helping it on. The kosmos is evolving from the inorganic to the organic, from
nescience to omniscience, and any part of it which dislocates itself from its
connections, which puts itself into antagonism [15]
to that movement, which for its separate purposes strives to delay the
coming of that
Far off divine event
To which the whole creation moves,
commits sin, embraces evil, weds itself to death.
Let us take a few cases in which commands were given which jar on modern
thought. We may imagine a race given to cannibalism, commanded to take the flesh
of animals as food; assuredly a step forward would be taken by the substitution
of animal for human flesh. As soon as the nation had entirely outgrown the
eating of men and slaughtered animals only for food, the teacher would try to
gradually lead it away from that barbarous custom by allowing the use of flesh
only in connection with religious services, permitting to be used as food only
the flesh of animals offered as sacrifices, and encompassing these sacrifices
with burdensome conditions so as to restrict their number. To put together the
slaughter of animals in sacrifice respectively to certain deities and to man's
palate may strike many as a strange and incongruous juxtaposition. Yet some, not
all, of the commands with respect to animal sacrifices were given for this very
purpose. Among people who slaughtered all kinds of living things for food, it
was an advance to restrain their killing to certain times and seasons, to
surround it with rigidly enforced ceremonies. If, as in some cases, a man was
not allowed to kill an animal without a year of preparation during which no
flesh might be taken, if he might only eat flesh which had been offered
[16] in sacrifice, it is easy to see that such
a man was being weaned from flesh-eating, and was learning to break off an evil
habit. During his year of preparation the habit of living on flesh would be
conquered, and the very restrictions surrounding the final ceremony would tend
to make him reverence sentient life and regard its sacrifice as a solemn act,
not lightly to be performed. Although to the modern mind the sacrifice of
animals as a religious act appears to be brutal and degrading, one cannot but
ask oneself whether it marks a lower stage of national immorality to slay
animals only for sacrifice than to slay them wholesale for the gratification of
the palate; whether the rare holocausts in Solomon's temple, for instance, were
more degrading to the public conscience than the daily slaughterings in Chicago.
The restrictions which in some civilisations of the past surrounded the slaying
of the brute would press heavily on our modern western civilisations, and those
ancient nations were at least learning that recklessness of animal life was a
sin. People who disfigure their streets with the bleeding carcass of animals
hung up to attract buyers should not look down too contemptuously on the ancient
temple.
So with other points of conduct, which, rightly condemned to-day, were yet in
the past sanctioned, even commanded by ethical teachers. Polygamy, for instance,
introduced relations between the sexes far better than the promiscuity which
preceded it. Among people at the lowest stage of sexual relations polygamy
[17] was a step upwards and therefore was
right, not wrong. When the soul evolves, polygamy gives place to monogamy. As a
rising from promiscuity polygamy was an advance; as a sinking from monogamy
polygamy would be a degradation.
Such cases show us in what sense morality is, and must be, relative for
evolving souls, and we see that any teacher who understands human nature, and
who is more anxious to help his younger brothers than to express his own full
thought, may rightly, in training a people, give ethical precepts that would now
be degrading in practice. Looking at ancient ethical codes in this way, we can
solve many of the difficulties that press on believers in their own Scriptures;
the recognition of the principle of relativity in morals makes the way clear,
and we understand that ethics is an advancing science, evolving with the
evolution of the soul. We see that we must not swathe the limbs of the present
with many of the bands useful in the past; that while the sublime spiritual
truths contained in them give the world's Scriptures an eternal value, many of
their precepts belong to a stage now outgrown. We must not dwarf the conscience
and drug the moral sense by defending as perfect, because within the limits of a
“revelation," precepts which were good for their own age but would be
mischievous in ours. We make the Bibles of our race clogs instead of wings if we
treat past commands as now binding, or if we explain them in a non-natural sense
because they shock the more highly developed [18]
moral instinct which is the very result of that moral training through
which our souls have passed. Enough if such precepts were ahead of the moral
practice of their time, if they struck notes higher than the people could
themselves utter, if they put before them an ideal not so lofty as to be
impossible to strive after, though sufficiently lofty to exercise over them an
elevating power. Unless we can thus throw ourselves backward in thought into
those times of ignorance, we shall fail to grasp the meaning and the wisdom of
the teachers, and may cast aside other teachings of inestimable value because
they are mingled with instructions suitable for their own age, though not for
ours. For let it never be forgotten that the very books which contain passages
that now jar on us contain also ethical precepts of a character so sublime that
while we are now able to recognise their exalted beauty we stumble feebly along
the lower stages of the road of which they are the goal. The use of a revelation
is to set before a race knowledge it is as yet unable to compass for itself,
knowledge of dangers from which it warns, of possibilities which it holds out as
encouragement. A revelation is the knowledge of the elder brothers placed at the
service of the younger, one of the most effective means of lifting the world, of
hastening the evolution of the soul.
( b ) Repelled by these moral difficulties which surround revelation
and may even be said to be inseparable from all revelations given to a primitive
people, many of the [19] most thoughtful and
cultured people of our day reject it altogether as of authority, and regard
conscience as the direct arbiter in morals; some go so far as to declare that it
is the voice of God in man, and ought to be obeyed as a divine authority. This
ethical school has been effectively attacked by the blunt pointing out of the
fact that conscience is a very variable quantity - varying with civilisation,
with intellectual development, with public opinion, with the general tradition
and training of a nation. Further, that conscience in one man contradicts
conscience in another, so that a person acting conscientiously may do things
which another person as conscientiously condemns. Thus conscience speaks with
many voices, yet always preserves the note of authority, of imperious command,
and tortures with remorse the man who disobeys. When a man listens to conscience
he feels himself to be listening to something that comes from outside or beyond
himself, something that does not argue but asserts, that does not plead but
commands. This voice, with its imperious "Do this," “Avoid that," seems by this
very imperiousness to claim unquestioning obedience, and this has led to the
ascription to it of divine authority. Yet if - as is clear from a study of the
facts of human history - it sometimes commands crimes, we cannot rightly
describe it as the voice of God. The inquisitor was sometimes conscientious when
he racked and burned his brother man for the glory of God and the salvation of
the souls of others who might be inclined to follow that heretical
[20] brother; he acted with a clear conscience,
honestly believing himself to be doing service both to God and to man. Yet we
can scarcely admit that in his case conscience was an infallible guide, or
regard it as the voice of God speaking in the human soul.
The question, then, arises: What is this conscience which arrogates to itself
such supreme authority, speaking as though it ought to be obeyed without
challenge? Here Theosophy steps in and explains the genesis of conscience, and
hence the limitations that surround it in the evolving - the not yet evolved -
man. According to theosophical teaching the human soul, or intelligence, is a
growing and developing quality, evolving by the experience gathered in life
after life. Born into the world utterly ignorant and therefore without knowledge
of good or evil, the soul at first could not recognise any difference between
right and wrong. At that early period every experience was useful simply as
experience, and everything encountered in life had some new lesson to impart to
the infant soul. Whether an action were right or wrong, in our sense of the
terms, it was equally useful to the soul, for only by the results which followed
could knowledge of law be obtained. It was found that happiness followed some
actions - those that were in harmony with the laws of nature - and that misery
followed others - those that were in contravention with these laws; by these
results the soul slowly learned to distinguish between the actions that made for
progress and those which made for retardation. As the soul
[21] passed through incarnation after
incarnation, it gathered a large store of these experiences of actions and their
results: these experiences were increased by those reaped in the intermediate
world, wherein the soul sojourned for awhile after leaving the earth, and found
that suffering followed on the heels of the physical yielding to the impulses of
the animal nature. Continuing its pilgrimage and arriving in the heavenly world,
the soul rested and looked back over these varied experiences, and cast up the
ledger of the concluded life-cycle. Certain classes of actions had led to
happiness and growth, other classes to unhappiness and delay. The first classes,
it decided, were those which it was desirable to repeat, while the latter should
be entirely avoided. When the time had arrived for the return to earth, and the
soul was employed in making for itself a new mind, it wove into this new mind
the conclusions on desirable and undesirable actions to which it had come when
reviewing its previous earth-life. Some of these were clear and definite: “That
course of action led to sorrow, this course to joy; performing that deed I
reaped misery, performing this I found content and peace. In the future I will
avoid that, and I will do this." These decisions it implants in the mind it is
forming, to be utilised in the coming life, and when it comes into the world in
a new body these conclusions appear as innate ideas. The events from which the
conclusions were drawn remain in the memory of the soul but are not imprinted on
the mind; for the latter [22] the conclusions
themselves are enough, and they form a summary sufficient for guidance,
unencumbered with a mass of unnecessary and burdensome detail. These conclusions
form what we call conscience, or moral instinct, which responds at once to
external impacts; when the parents or the teacher tells the child, “This is
right, that is wrong," the mind of the child promptly acquiesces in the
statement, if it fall within the limit of the registered results of its own
experience; if it do not, the mind of the child remains bewildered and
unconvinced, and withholds the inner assent although it may yield an outer
obedience. Here comes in the value of education; the innate ideas may lie
latent, if not aroused and brought out by external stimulus, however promptly
they may respond to that stimulus when it is applied. Further, the weaker among
them are strengthened when a statement of results is made externally beforehand,
and the results follow the course of action described.
Regarding the nature of conscience in this way, we arrive at an understanding
of its limitations. When anything comes before the soul similar to its past
experiences, the registered decision asserts itself and the “voice of
conscience" is heard; but when new circumstances arise, and no registered
decision is available, conscience is dumb, and the man is compelled to rely
wholly on the judgment then formed by the reason. Such a judgment will be
largely influenced by the atmosphere in which he lives, by the customs and
[23] traditions of his time, by the
prepossessions arising from racial and religious prejudices and from his own
personal idiosyncrasies.
As the soul develops and gains fuller and fuller control over its vehicles,
it is able to utilise more fully the experiences of the past, and to draw upon
its memory for help beyond the well-digested conclusions registered in the mind
as innate ideas of right and wrong. When it seeks to influence the lower
vehicles, its communications must always have in them the note of authority, for
the mind-consciousness can only know that some thought or impulse comes to it
from a hidden and unexplained source, and there is nothing to approve to the
reason that which is yet felt to possess compelling power.
When we study the subject from this standpoint it is easy to see why
conscience, lacking experience, should make wrong decisions and give wrong
commands, and we can accept the fact with equanimity, since the very experience
of the sorrowful results that accrue from the mistake will give the soul wider
knowledge, and thus ensure a wiser decision under similar circumstances in the
future. Further, we see that the saying that a man should follow conscience is
true, for even supposing the dictate of conscience be mistaken in any given
case, it is none the less the best available judgment possessed by the
individual, and its faultiness being due to insufficiency of experience it will
be partly corrected by the results of the obedience rendered. The soul grows
[24] in the dark hours when a problem of action
is presented to it that it is unable to solve. For the fairly moral person no
difficulty arises in making the choice between the clearly wrong and the clearly
right; to see is to decide. The problems which rack our brains and wring our
hearts are those which arise when, standing before two courses of action, both
seem right or both seem wrong, so that duty appears to be divided. The
theosophist, finding himself in such straits, understands why he is thus groping
in the darkness, and sets to work to do his best with a calm and steady mind-the
result of knowledge. He puts before himself as fully and clearly as possible the
two courses of action and their probable results, and brings to bear upon them
his best powers of reason and judgment; he tries to eliminate as far as possible
"the personal equation," to ignore the bearing of the alternative courses on his
own wishes or fears, likes or dislikes, and to free himself from bias and
prejudice; he then, with the whole force of his heart, wills to do the better of
the two, seeking the illumination of spiritual intelligence; having thus done
his best, he chooses, and fearlessly advances along the selected path. He may
have chosen amiss, but even then, his intention being pure, that good intent
will prevent the arising of any very serious harm; he will suffer for his
mistake, and will thus increase his knowledge and be able to choose more wisely
in the future, but the powers which "make for righteousness” will use his pure
will to neutralise the [25] results of his
intellectual blunder. Results are guided more by motives than by actions, for
the force liberated by a high motive is more potent than that generated by
action, and will produce more good than the mistaken method will produce harm.
Further, the motive works upon character, while the action only brings results
on the physical plane. Thus, trusting to the Law, relying on the Law, we may act
fearlessly even when darkness enshrouds us, for we know that the Law to which we
commit ourselves will break in pieces our mistakes, while conscience will grow
wiser through the exercise of our highest faculties, and will become stronger by
the very conflicts through which it passes.
Conscience then - or moral intuition, as it is sometimes called - is not an
infallible guide, but it has a place in directing our conduct; it does not
decide between right and wrong without experience, but yields at any time the
decisions arrived at by the study of experience by the soul. Thus understanding
it we can use it, without being greatly troubled when it fails us at the hour of
our sorest need, and in these cases of failure we must fall back on our best
judgment to form a decision, abiding contentedly by the results.
( c ) Let us consider utility as affording the basis for ethics, and
see how far this ground commends itself to our reason. The formula often given,
"the greatest happiness of the greatest number," needs, as every thoughtful
utilitarian declares, some explanation for its due application. The nature of
the happiness meant [26] must be defined, both
as to quality and quantity of duration; the higher must not be sacrificed to the
lower; nor the lasting to the transient. Utilitarianism stated partially and
without due discrimination lays itself open to effective attack as selfish and
calculating, but put as the theosophist might put it, in the deep and wide
sense, it is sound and philosophical. It should mean that if we act in
accordance with law we must be acting for ultimate happiness; that ultimate
happiness and ultimate right are inseparable, since we live in a world of law;
that in this world, where every law is an expression of the divine nature,
obedience to law in bringing about harmony must necessarily bring about
happiness, and must at the same time be identical with the highest good. When we
see that the law of the world is a law of progress, that we are evolving towards
a more perfect condition, that the divine will is bringing about the perfection
of all, that in perfection there can be no disharmony and therefore no
suffering; when this is seen, we see also the underlying truth of utilitarianism
beneath the partial expression, and that in the ultimate analysis there is no
distinction between virtue and happiness. We are often blinded to this important
truth by the fact that in the process of evolution the following of virtue
repeatedly brings pain; and this must be until the lower nature is wholly
transcended, until we have wholly outgrown the brute in us, and let “the ape and
tiger die." We gradually learn that nature incessantly demands pleasure - i.e.,
harmonious and adapted co-operation - but that when the
[27] pleasure is attached to the possession of
a form that breaks into pieces, such pleasure is followed by pain; we learn that
in following the lower pleasures we are grasping at things which pierce us in
the grasping, that such pleasures are delusive, and that all that is against the
law - and therefore “wrong" - must inevitably lead to pain. We learn that we are
the higher, not the lower, nature, and must transfer our centre of consciousness
from the animal self to the divine Self; that we are not the body, as many
think, nor the mind, as more highly developed people imagine, but the Self which
is unity, in which all live and move. Evolution emphasises, strengthens, makes
strong and defined the individual in order that he may become a centre of
consciousness able to endure as a centre amid the keenest and strongest
vibrations after the protective scaffolding of the individuality has been
removed. The progress of man is from consciousness to self-consciousness through
all the stages of selfishness and self-assertion, until self-consciousness can
persist without losing memory and identity and all that is valuable as giving
stability, while casting aside the limits that prevent interpenetration of
numberless self-consciousnesses; nay, it is to expand to all-consciousness
without losing its centre, expanding and contracting at will. In the course of
this progress each man learns by sad and bitter experience the intangible unity
of all beings, finding that nothing that injures one can be good for any, that
that which brings happiness to all can alone bring happiness to each. Not the
happiness of the [28] greater number but the
happiness of all is necessary for the happiness of one.
Oneship is not in the lower but in the higher, not in the body or the mind
but in the spirit, the divine, the eternal life. Virtue and happiness are
ultimately the same, because virtue is that which serves the life of all, not
the separated life, and it is virtue merely because it aids evolution and is
lifting the many towards the One. If in utilitarianism anything less than unity
be postulated, if any point be set up short of that eternal oneness which is
hidden in us and is being brought into manifestation, then the system is
incomplete. No system can be really rational unless it be spiritual in its
foundation and recognise the one Spirit as the life in all.
These three systems then, of authority, of intuition, of utility, contain
truth and should be mutually helpful; they are complementary, not antagonistic,
and each brings its useful lesson for the teaching of man. No system of ethics
can be sound if it do not recognise the evolving life of the soul as its
foundation and inviolable law as the condition of evolution. These two
fundamental principles, so familiar to us as reincarnation and karma, are the
basis of ethics, and without these no ethical problem can be solved.
One divine Life, given as a seed for the life of man; that seed growing by
reincarnation, the infolded powers of the Spirit becoming the unfolded powers of
the man made God - such is the secret of evolution. Those who in the early days
of humanity gave to it revelation dealt [29]
with the early stages of the human soul, stimulating its growth; those who
appealed to intuition recognised the growing soul which possessed a harvest of
experience; those who spoke of happiness and virtue as one - if they knew the
inner truth of their teaching - were grasping after the oneness of all things
and the perfect happiness that lies only in the development of all. Thus the
human soul develops out of ignorance into partial knowledge, out of partial
knowledge into divine life, where the highest good is the highest bliss. On one
or other stage of that ladder everyone of us, readers mine, is standing; the
problems we meet in daily life belong to our stage of growth, and we solve them
by knowing and by living. Sometimes a wiser and an older soul brings its
experience to the helping of the younger, and by speaking out its knowledge for
the guidance of the less advanced makes their evolution more rapid; the very
proclamation of a law makes the recognition of that law the easier. Such souls
are the Revealers, and all such teachings are of the nature of revelation. For
such helping divine Teachers, liberated souls, remain among us, bearing the
burden of the flesh; by their spoken words they quicken our nascent intuition,
and by this revelation of truth aid us to climb more swiftly towards the light.
From that Brotherhood has ever come revelation, the revelation of fragments of
the Divine Wisdom. They send out their disciples as messengers, who repeat the
truths they in humbleness have learned, in order that the world may evolve more
rapidly. But never let it be forgotten [30]
that we progress more by living than by studying. As we destroy separateness and
live compassion our eyes will be opened to the visions of ideal beauty. Now, as
ever, is it true that only those who do the will shall know of the doctrine, and
in no age of the world more than in the present has it been possible for man to
be truly "taught of God." [31]
PROBLEMS OF SOCIOLOGY.
Few questions, perhaps only those that are connected with religion, rouse as
much hot feeling as those of sociology. Enthusiasts of any school can see no
good, can scarcely admit common honesty, in enthusiasts of another. Folly or
knavery, deliberate or invincible ignorance, is held to be the only conceivable
explanation of views in antagonism to those cherished by the speaker. "Of
course, no decent person can be a socialist," says one. "Of course, no humane
person can be anything but a socialist," says another. And so on, with all the
pairs of opposites into which sociology is divided.
Needless to say that here, as everywhere, the extremist is in the wrong, and
truth lies in the golden mean. The great schools of sociological thought are
none of them based on a fundamental error, but each on a partial
[32] truth; each manifests an aspect of the
truth, necessary for social well-being, and denies other aspects of the truth
because of the limitations of its exponents. The heat shown by the combatants
may very well be excused in view of the importance of the issues at stake; for
sociology is concerned with the external happiness of people everywhere, with
their condition, their welfare, their comfort, their daily lives. Some, moved
strongly by sympathy with the suffering before their eyes, will plunge headlong
along any road that promises immediate relief; others, further-sighted and
recognising hidden dangers, oppose vehemently all reform, lest while bringing a
transient good it should result in deeper ill. These two tendencies lie deep in
human nature, and by their interplay work for gradual evolution. Separated, as
they generally are in action, they are wont to precipitate social catastrophes.
Looking at human history, we often find it difficult to say which of these two
classes-those who would have change at all hazards, or those who would stand on
the old paths at all hazards - have most contributed to revolutions; whether
these have been brought about mostly by the violent advocacy of those desiring
change, or by the stubborn obstinacy of those who refused in any fashion to
alter with the changing circumstances of man. If the two forces could be united
in harmonious co-operation, progress would be at once rapid and safe, but while
our limitations remain as narrow as they are at present, the hasty action
followed by reaction, the forward rush [33] and
hasty retreat, are likely still to alternate in social affairs.
No person in whom heart and brain are developed can look at modem social
conditions without recognising the intellectual ineptitude and the moral
obliquity that have brought modem nations to their present pass. Not order but
disorder, not government but anarchy, face us on every side, and we find
everywhere unrest and discontent, the eloquent witnesses to the failure of
modern civilisation. The air is full of confused murmurs, of inarticulate
complainings, and despite the efforts of the unselfish and the growing
sensitiveness of the social conscience, the hatred bred of a dull sense of
injustice faces the repression bred of suspicion. The brotherhood which is a
fact in nature is daily contradicted and defied in social life, and the friction
generated by disregard of natural law threatens to burst into flames which will
consume society, and leave the ground clear for another attempt to build a
civilisation, or possibly, if men be sufficiently evolved, for the construction
of a system ordered in accordance with facts.
All are agreed that the present state of things is unsatisfactory, and the
century has been rife with proposals for change. These may be classified under
three heads: political, dealing with the external organisation of society;
economic, dealing with the production and distribution of wealth, and hence with
ownership of the means of production; and at the close of the century,
Theosophical, dealing with the broad principles [34]
under-lying all human relations. The politicians deal with the fabric of
society, and political remedies can but concern themselves with externals that
can be dealt with by legislation; none the less there must arise under this head
a question of vast importance - the root of the authority swaying national
affairs. A very large and increasing party, comprising many of the
broadest-minded among the young thinkers of our time, entirely turns its back on
politics, declaring that political arrangements are not at the root of the
troubles of the day. These thinkers say that we shall never get rid of our
troubles - poverty, ignorance, class antagonisms, recurrent strife between
capital and labour - by working from the political standpoint; that below the
political basis is the economic, and that politics can only deal with the
surface of things. Let political arrangements be as good as the wit of man can
devise, nevertheless with an unsound economic system misery must continue. A
third party, small in numbers at present, says that even when we have reached
the economic basis we have not yet touched the social bed-rock. They admit that
economics go deeper than the questions which agitate the political world, but
they allege that there is something that underlies both politics and economics,
and that is human nature. They say that until human nature is understood, with
its fundamental, ineradicable tendencies; until a study is made of man as man,
both as an individual and in his social relations with his fellows, man in the
past, the present, and the future, with [35]
his weaknesses and his powers; until this be done, we shall never be able to
build a society which will endure. The people who talk in this strain are
usually called Theosophists. All Theosophists certainly would agree in this,
however much they may differ as regards present-day politics and economics.
Whether or not they take part in political or social questions, they always hold
these to be subsidiary to that which they regard as basic - a wide view of
humanity as composed of souls evolving through vast ages of time under a
definite law of growth. Hence they recognise the necessity for understanding the
constitution of human nature and the conditions necessary for its evolution.
Yet theosophical teachings lend themselves with peculiar force to the
elucidation of the very problems that politics and economics propound. The
theosophical view of life must profoundly modify the atmosphere through which
these problems are seen, since it presents men as evolving souls - under
whatever political and economic condition they may at anyone time be born coming
back to this world over and over again, inheriting their past and building their
future while living in their present. Looking further backwards and further
forwards than any political or economic system, theosophical teachings deal with
man as an evolving entity, creating his future environment by his present
activities, and modifying his present surroundings according to his place in the
scheme of evolution. Theosophy applies the principle of evolution to society in
a more radical [36] fashion than does any
school of thinkers, seeing in society not only an evolving organism - as do many
others - but an evolving organism made up of souls, each one of which is also
evolving. Those who see each man evolving during millions of years must
necessarily look on all political and economic schemes as partial and temporary
- as local and parochial, if the phrase may be permitted. Any political and
economic system can but represent a passing phase in the vast evolution of
humanity. Hence the Theosophist tends to a peaceful attitude of mind towards the
different conflicting parties in the State; he is not inclined to rush wildly
with one or the other, but sees that each embodies a principle necessary for the
well-being of the whole, serving as a temporary vehicle for a fundamental
tendency in human nature. He sees that the solution of problems will lie in the
wise blending of principles and methods that are now in antagonism to each
other, so that the total experience of humanity may be utilised in the social
structure.
It may be well to remark, in order to avoid mistake, that theosophical
teachings with reference to sociology have not yet been clearly formulated, and
that any attempt to state them will certainly be coloured by the idiosyncrasies
of the particular thinker concerned. The most that can just now be done is to
indicate certain salient points and to make a tentative effort to apply these
broad principles to present-day problems; with the help afforded by the history
of the past, as we [37] learn it from
theosophical teachings, and the revelation of the occult side of nature in those
same teachings, it should be possible to shed some light on the conditions
necessary for a satisfactory solution, and to see the place and working of the
tendencies now in collision that should be brought into harmony. The
conservative and the liberal in politics, the socialist and the individualist in
economics, severally represent necessary factors in social evolution, and the
man who could utilise them all, putting each into his own place and holding all
in balanced stability, would be a veritable saviour of society. This was done of
old, we have learned, by the King-Initiates, who in far-off ages gave to
humanity its earliest lessons in social construction, and it may be - nay, the
time shall surely come - that in another Golden Age it will again be done, in a
fashion suited to more highly evolved souls and to a humanity grown out of
infancy into manhood. Society must again be based on a recognition of the
fundamental laws of brotherhood, reincarnation, and karma, for these alone can
unite progress with order, assign social functions with justice, and ensure
abundance of material goods with propriety of distribution. Ignorance of these
facts has brought about anarchy; knowledge will give right government, and the
content that springs from justice.
Let us consider, first, the political problem: What should be the government
of a nation, what its external organisation? A large body of thoughtful people,
though far less in number now than in the early days
[38] of the century, concern themselves mainly with politics, regarding
political order as the chief factor in national happiness. In considering the
political aspect we will exclude the economic from view for a time, for the sake
of clearness, and confine ourselves to the fashion of the instrument with which
the law works in the nation. We are not here concerned with details, such as the
political parties of any given time, or the way in which two or more sets of
people may struggle for the direction of the government of a country; our study
lies with the fundamental question of national organisation: "Where is the root
of government, the source of authority?" This question must be answered in
principle in one of two ways; however much the answer may be hedged about with
qualifications, it can be ultimately reduced to a basic idea - that of monarchy
or of democracy. At present among ourselves authority is supposed to grow from
two roots, a limited monarchy and a limited democracy - a manifest compromise, a
transitional state. Under monarchy comes all the varieties of personal rule,
wherein the ruler is ruler by virtue of some quality pertaining to himself, some
inherent natural qualification acknowledged by the ruled as giving him
sovereignty over them. Under democracy come all the varieties of national
organisation based on some system of the election of the government by the
governed, those in which the root of power lies in the ruled, not in the ruler.
The executive may be called a monarch, a president, a dictator, a council, or
anything [39] else, but he or it wields merely
a delegated authority derived from the subjects, and resumable in the last
resort by those who gave it.
Most people would probably say, at this point, that no discussion can arise
in the present day between the principles of monarchy and democracy thus
defined, and certainly very few persons would now accept the basic idea of
monarchy, and frankly say that they believed in the "Divine Right of Kings."
Yet, considering the part played by this idea in the history of the world, its
endorsement by religion, and its acceptance by the wisest and best of our race
in the past, its origin cannot be without interest. It comes down to us from the
days of Lemuria and Atlantis, when perfected men belonging to an earlier
humanity dwelt among our infant races and guided their earliest steps. They
ruled the nations without question, in virtue of their manifest and unchallenged
superiority, as a father rules his children; by their wisdom, compassion, and
justice they enthroned the idea of monarchy in the hearts of men, and knit
together in their minds religion and royalty, being in very truth to their
peoples the representatives of God upon earth, embodying in their rule so much
of the divine order as was suitable to the place and the time. There was no
doubt in the minds of any as to the innate difference between the primitive
kings and the nations that they ruled; they gave to the people their arts, their
sciences, and their polity; they were at once their teachers and their guides;
they built the outer fabric of [40]
the nation, and nursed its dawning life. From those heroic figures of antiquity,
encircled still with the magic of their deeds, enshrined in myth and poem, there
has come down an ideal of kingship in which the king was greater, wiser, nobler,
diviner, than the people over whom he ruled, when his valour was their buckler
and his wisdom their enlightener, where selfishness played no part, self-seeking
held no place, when he gave himself and his life to the people, toiled that they
might rest, waked that they might sleep, fasted that they might eat, when
kingship meant supreme self-surrender in order that the nation might be guarded,
taught, and raised.
When our own Aryan race was segregated, its Manu was naturally its king, and
in his direct line were incarnated the mighty souls who carried on his work
under his immediate supervision. The purest physical heredity, maintained by
these great souls, afforded suitable encasement of flesh for these early
monarchs, and the physical heredity remained when, in process of time, Initiates
of lower rank incarnated in his family to continue the royal duties. Thus the
divine right of kings became wedded to the idea of hereditary birthright, and
for tens of thousands of years the connection of the two was maintained - a view
quite intelligible as a tradition from these earlier times. The King-Initiate
did not become possessed of "divine right" because he was born in a given
family; but having in himself the necessary qualities, he took birth in that
given family as [41] the recognised and
convenient method of obtaining the fealty of the nation, and the conditions
suitable for training the new body and mind in which he was to function during
that incarnation. An experienced and highly developed soul was chosen as a ruler
of a nation by the great spiritual hierarchy that guides the evolution of
humanity; there lay the recognised root of supreme authority, that
hierarchy being the vehicle of the LOGOS in the department of His realm we call
our world. Hence such a soul came as ruler, dowered with the right divine to
rule, delegated by the hierarchy that was the expression of the ruling life of
the LOGOS, chosen for his fitness, his capacity, developed through hundreds of
incarnations in all the ascending grades of a past humanity. The taking birth in
a particular family was merely a convenient way of publicly designating the
chosen ruler, so that the kingship might pass from one personality to another
without confusion, jar, or strife. To the people for many ages that birth gave
the right to rule them, they knowing not the facts behind the veil; only a
tradition was handed down of a golden age when kings were gods, and the
hereditary kings of later millenniums traced their ancestry back to some divine
King; Son of the Sun, Son of Heaven - some such name was the proudest of their
royal titles, until in the efflux of time the title was regarded as a
superstition, the fact on which it was based being lost in the night of the
past. As the soul that incarnated in the Aryan race to finish their human
evolution passed on into loftier [42] regions,
less developed souls stood at the head of humanity, and gradually, as the karma
of the race accumulated, there was less and less direct interference by the
Great Ones. The nursling had become the child on his own feet.
Less removed from their subjects in development, and not having yet outgrown
the human weaknesses of selfishness, ambition, and pride, the kings began to use
their unrestricted powers for their own advantage instead of for their people's
good. Losing touch with their superiors in the invisible world, they lost the
sense of responsibility to them, and gradually came to regard themselves as
independent, and as arbitrary "lords over God's heritage." Then the people,
misruled, began first to rebel against and later to limit the authority of their
kings - feeling, truly enough, that monarchs who used their unbounded power to
ensure enjoyment for themselves instead of welfare for their people, were no
longer true incarnations of divine right. In Europe, the disappearance of the
idea of reincarnation and karma intellectually involved the disappearance of the
idea of hereditary divine right, while its practical destruction was brought
about by the wickedness or mediocrity of the kings themselves. And yet if the
idea of monarchy be admitted at all, we are brought logically to the view that
the king must derive his authority from some invisible spiritual superior, who
delegates to him the administration of a department in the divine
world-government, and to that end invests him with the authority necessary for
the [43] effective carrying on of the
administration. There is an impassable gulf between the hereditary being ruling
a nation for life and the minister elected by the nation to a certain post, with
power revocable at will. A monarch who is not a monarch; a ruler who does not
rule; a supreme head (in name) of a nation who at every point of activity is
precluded from action; such a personage may be a most useful and admirable
functionary, worthy of all respect, but his office is in a transitional
condition and cannot permanently exist. He is too great not to be greater; too
small not to be smaller. If he be "king by the grace of God" he should have the
power and the responsibility of kingship as well as its name; if he be “king by
the will of the people," holding his office by virtue of an election by the
nation - an election declared and revocable by some assembly representing the
nation - and deprived of all reality of power, the title of king is somewhat too
splendid for the limited reality.
If we look back some thirty years, we shall find in England a fairly strong
party representing the republican ideal. Anyone who took a share in the
political movements of that time will remember that a definite feeling in favour
of republicanism was very widely spread, more especially among the manual
workers, who displayed distinctly anti-monarchical sentiments. That feeling - as
popular waves of feeling often are - was due to causes that had not in them the
elements of permanency, and that have for the most part disappeared during the
last [44] twenty years. Philosophic republicans
there have always been, and they will continue to be, but we are concerned here
with practical problems rather than with academical debates. The popular feeling
which showed itself against the heir to the crown was chiefly due to what we are
bound to admit was the lamentable example of reckless extravagance and
carelessness of life shown by the then young man who stood highest on the steps
of the throne. This feeling has subsided as years have brought dignity and
sobriety in public life. Another thing that has contributed to make
republicanism in England a practically dead issue is the obvious failure of that
system alike in France and in the United States. In the latter country the
failure is the most marked. The interference with private life, greater there
than here; the increasing wars between capital and labour, waged with a terrible
bitterness unknown in older lands, and with a violence on both sides that shocks
humanity; the poverty which holds in its grip a huge population surrounded by
natural advantages; the corruption and police oppression that are rotting
municipal government; the withdrawal from public life of the most thoughtful and
refined people, in consequence of the intolerable conditions connected with it,
conditions such that the very name of "politician" has become a reproach; all
these and other causes have brought about a complete disillusion as to
republicanism in action, whatever arguments may be adduced for it theoretically
by those who believe in human equality. [45]
Men who twenty years ago were concerned in questions of government have now for
the most part passed on into questions of economics, and declare that whatever
may be the form of government, it is a sound economic system which is needed to
make a nation prosperous, contented, and happy.
We may then put aside the issue as between monarchy and republicanism, as not
coming within practical purview. And as though to mark its unreality there
stands the wonderful celebration of the year 1897, acclaiming the conclusion of
the sixty years of rule by our present monarch. Everyone admits - no matter what
may be his personal opinions or prejudices - that we witnessed an unexampled
uprising of sentiment in every part of the English-speaking world, an uprising
that submerged for the time every other feeling. England and all her colonies
were swept by one wave of enthusiastic devotion to the sovereign who sits on the
throne of this vast empire, and all observers were struck by the strength and
the passion of the sentiment, the hold it had on the popular heart, the
transfiguring effect on the object of that devotion. The truth is that, deep in
the heart of nations, despite all the crimes that evil kings have wrought, there
lives a passionate desire to look up and see as the Head of the nation one human
being who incarnates all it has of greatness, of glory, and of power, who stands
as its symbol to the world. This tendency in human nature seems to be
ineradicable, and its strength is witnessed by its survival through all strain
[46] of royal crimes. History testifies to the
fact that extremity of misery and despair has ever been needed to goad a nation
into revolt.
Rebellion is not the natural tendency of the human brain and heart. Man
desires with a passionate longing to be taught, to be guided, to be ruled, as is
shown by the pathetic inextinguishable loyalty of the masses to one man after
another who rises into power on their shoulders. But man also demands that the
one who claims to teach shall be able to teach; that the one who stands as guide
shall be able to guide; that the one who is crowned as ruler should be able to
rule. In this country, amid our political parties, there is no one man who
stands out as leader, whom all would unitedly acclaim as great, who incarnates
the ideal of a nation's Head. Were it possible that in a royal House a man
should be born with the genius of a Ruler, with the power to awaken popular
enthusiasm, with the brain to guide the nation, and the heart to love the people
with a wise and all-embracing tenderness, seeing their sufferings, understanding
the causes, and applying with a firm unflinching hand the sufficient remedies,
then should we see what loyalty means in the heart of a nation, and the power
that such a one would wield, amid glad assent, to eradicate wrongs and establish
better conditions, with all the concentrated force and directness of an
individual will, guided by a keen intellect and a noble heart. Government would
no longer be a series of compromises arrived at by decisions depending on the
varying strength of parties, but a [47] clear
rational application of definite principles to definite ends.
In our own days the study of economics is leading many into various forms of
Socialism. These forms are all democratic, and are based, explicitly or
implicitly, on the assumption of the basic rights of man, and the counting of
heads. The majority of heads is to fix the form of government, no matter what
the contents of the heads may be. Empty ones, if the hands connected with them
can scratch a cross on a ballot-paper, are to count as much as full ones, the
drunken profligate is to balance the noblest sage. Truly it is said that under a
proper system there would be no empty heads and no drunken profligates; but the
proper system is yet to be established, and social derelicts are meantime to
have an equal hand in making it, and to form part of the materials out of which
it is to be constructed. "The sovereign people" cannot logically exclude any.
This is the rock on which democratic socialism must split. It is the condition
of success in all compulsory or voluntary groupings of men for the attainment of
an object, that the head of the association shall be superior in faculty
knowledge, and grip of the whole situation to those who compose the active
constituents of the working body; if he cannot rule and they cannot obey,
disaster is certain. Hence the manifold failures in co-operative production. The
head of a business, the captain of a ship, the general of an army, the principal
of a college, the father of a family - each of these must be superior to his
subordinates in the [48] matter in hand else
chaos results. Only in a democratic State are the ruled supposed to elect the
ruler, an equal to govern equals.
It is argued that a man might be elected to a position of authority and be
vested with full power during the period of his official status; it is, however,
very difficult for the official superior to impose a strict discipline on and to
control effectually those to whom he is ultimately responsible, and by whom he
may be ejected; the prompt obedience necessary to success is also not easily
yielded by those in whose hands is the power of throwing off their chief. Even
were these difficulties overcome, greater ones remain behind; in voluntary
associations trust must be given to the elected officer, while he must be ruled
by a sense of keenest honour to do his duty to the full; these qualities are
lacking both in men and their chosen leaders for the most part, as is evidenced
by the bitter suspicions of his fellows, that have broken many a labour leader's
heart after fettering his energies for years, and by the failures in integrity
among officials that have so hampered trade organisations. Trust and high honour
are among the noblest and rarest of human qualities at the present stage of
evolution, yet without the general diffusion of these democratic Socialism must
fail.
If we look at governing bodies belonging to the State - such as socialistic
communities would organise - we see staring us in the face the hideous
difficulty of corruption. Men elected to office are continually found using
their office for personal gain. In democratic [49]
America municipal and other public bodies are sinks of corruption, and
there is scarcely any attempt to hide the fact that officials must be bribed
when any undertaking is in question with which they are able to interfere. Where
are we to find the men who may be trusted with office and will not turn it to
their own ends? Such men are found where office is accepted for love of country
and from traditional sense of obligation to the public service, but - until
human nature be changed - such qualities are not to be found often in those who
seek elective office as a means of livelihood.
That a noble form of Society is possible in which all the forces of the State
shall be organised to subserve the general good, and in which all the plenty and
happiness for which Socialists are rightly yearning shall be realised, is indeed
a truth, as we shall presently see. But it will not be what we now call
democratic, for democracy runs counter to the all-compelling laws of nature.
The fundamental error on which this system is based is the idea that "men are
born equal," the keynote of the "declaration of the rights of man," which was
the legacy of the last century to the present. Truly if men were born into this
world but once, this fundamental error ought in justice to be a natural truth,
and each man should be as good as anyone else, and have equal rights in the
community. If the soul be newly created when it comes into the world in a new
body, or if, as some think, man is only a body; if everyone now living in
England was born for the first time during the present century
[50] and will pass away from earth for ever
when the grave closes over his head or the fire consumes his body; if our only
experience of earthly life lies in this brief space which stretches from the
cradle behind us to the grave in front of us; then we might expect that one man
should not be innately wiser or better than another, one fitted to rule, another
only fitted to obey.
As we know by observation, men are not born equal but very unequal; some with
tendencies to virtue, others to vice; some with genius, others with narrowest
intellect. Never can a stable society be built if we start by disregarding
nature, and treat as having right to equal power the ignorant and the wise, the
intellectual and the stupid, the criminal and the saintly; on that uneven ground
no edifice that will endure can ever be based. Yet if man be born but once, it
would be unjust to build on any other foundation; for it would be a shocking
injustice to subordinate one man to another, save by his own free choice, if
both come freshly to the world, neither having learned anything, nor struggled,
nor experienced, in former lives. In such case it would seem as though everyone
had an equal right to everything, and should have his equal turn at governing
among the rest; ignorance should have as great a voice in the guiding of a
nation as wisdom, and a free fight and free scramble should give each man his
chance in so irrational a world.
Nor are matters mended if "equal" be translated to mean "should have equal
opportunities," for to give [51] equal
opportunities to the unequally equipped is to condemn the weaker to perish in
the struggle for existence. We have, in our selfishness, left the weaker as a
prey to the stronger, instead of training the stronger to regard his strength as
imposing on him heavier responsibilities - among which are the helping and
protecting of the weaker. Our economic system is one of free combat, with the
inevitable "Woe to the vanquished." In former days it was a battle of bodies,
now it is chiefly a battle of minds, but a battle none the less. We have learned
that a man must not use his muscles to plunder his neighbour; we have yet to
learn that he must not use his brains to the same end. It is no more right to
trample on others because we are cleverer, smarter, shrewder than they, than in
the days that are called barbarous it was right for a man to use his strength to
rob, to crush, to enslave. The free combat that we call “civilisation" is not a
state that can endure. I am not denying the necessity of passing through this
stage in evolution, in order that the individual may be developed, but am
looking to the next stage, for which we may rightly begin to work.
No one with a human heart in him can go through one of our great cities,
seeing the condition of thousands of our people, realising the hopelessness of
them for those who are born into them, without feeling a bitter pain, even if he
think the state of things to be without remedy. To see into what surroundings
children are born, how they grow up, how their parents live and die -
[52] these things are enough to break the heart
if it be not wise enough to understand, and strong enough to labour. And I, for
one, cannot have harsh condemnation for words, however wild, and schemes,
however ill-considered, that spring from suffering, misery, and starvation,
embittered by ignorance alike of causes and of ends. I have seen too much of the
life of the poor, of the wearing anxiety and blinding pain, of the brutalisation
and crushing out of hope and energy, to feel aught but tenderest compassion for
their woes and sympathy with the motive that underlies all honest efforts for
their relief. The wildest words are often but cries of pain, half-inarticulate,
born of the blind feeling that something is wrong and of ignorance how to
change, of the despair that grows out of patience long outworn and breaking
hearts that find no help in man or God.
The worst of all is that this is of modern development and belongs especially
to western lands; it is not of more than a century and a quarter's growth, and
dates from the substitution in general use of machinery for handicrafts. The
huge aggregations of population brought about by the methods of production are
the superficial cause of much of the degradation; another of these causes is the
crushing out of individual faculty. In the older days those who were employed in
supplying objects needed by the community were men who, to a great extent, had
joy in their work, the joy of the creator in his finished product. The craftsman
of days not long gone by was an artist in a humble way, and his faculties
[53] were drawn out by the effort to invent, to
improve, to adorn his work. Looking back even a couple of hundred years to the
things in common use amongst us, we find everywhere traces of the individual
hand and fancy. Farmhouses are still found where treasures of oaken tables,
dressers, chests, &c., have come down in the family for generations, and these
things in common use are eagerly bought up by connoisseurs, though but the work
of ordinary craftsmen, often of "farm-hands," who in the long winter's evenings
- as still in Norway and Sweden - would carve rough copies of flowers and
twisted stems, adding a leaf or a bud or a tendril as the whim suggested itself,
or some onlooker put in his word.
It is not, of course, possible to turn back the wheels of time and bring back
the era of handicraft, even though it was more conducive to widespread comfort
and development than the era of machinery in which we live. Machinery is here,
and is here to stay, and we must adapt our society to the new conditions. As yet
we have taken no steps to meet the difficulties caused by it, nor to make up for
the deprivations imposed by it on manual workers employed on it. More and more
in our modern life the man who tends a machine is becoming a machine himself, a
flesh and blood lever of the things of steel and iron. He is deprived of the joy
of the artist and becomes an automaton, turning out millions of fragments, say
the heads of pins, but never an entire thing in which he can take delight or
pride, into which he can put himself, which makes him feel himself to be a
living man [54] and not a mere hand to produce.
The brains of a large number of those from whom the bulk of the nation is born
are thus being partially atrophied and the physical development of the workers
is injured.
Not without incurring a national Nemesis may a nation allow millions of its
workers to be thus arrested in their growth. Into the lower physical types born
of parents thus stunted can only come souls of low development, for nations,
like individuals, reap that which they sow. If men's faculties are no longer,
under modern conditions, cultivated in their labour as they used to be, then the
enormous increase of the powers of production due to machinery must be utilised
to give more leisure to the machine-workers, so that their faculties may be
cultivated outside their labour. The English workman of the past was more of a
man than is his compeer of to-day, and if we would not see the nation composed
of souls of lower types it is necessary to redress the balance. The stunting of
the mind in mechanical work is the justification of the cry for shorter hours of
labour, and should be met by the co-operation of all classes of the commonwealth
in bringing them about. It is not labour that takes the heart out of a man, but
the dwarfing, stunting, deadening labour to which so many myriads are now
condemned. Where such labour is necessary it should be brief, and should be
balanced by the cultivation of faculties at other times. Otherwise our system
tends to the dissolution instead of to the evolution of society.
The Theosophist, believing in reincarnation and
[55] karma, is able to see the roots of our social troubles and their
remedy, and to work patiently in sure dependence on the law. He sees that the
ideals of society must be changed, and that the Socialists are aiming at a right
end - the general happiness - by mistaken methods. And he finds in the history
of the past social conditions brought about, and for a time superintended, by
Adepts, that they realised the most beautiful dreams of the idealist Socialist,
while the basis and the methods were entirely different from those of the modern
schools. Ere considering these, let us see the ideals which are created by a
belief in reincarnation and karma.
Reincarnation implies the evolution of the soul, and when evolution is
recognised equality is seen to be a delusion. Evolution is as a ladder up the
steps of which humanity is climbing, and all men do not stand on the same rung.
As evolution is a matter in which time plays the greatest part - at any rate
until a late stage of growth - difference of stage in evolution implies
difference of time during which the evolving entity has been climbing up the
ladder. In other words souls, while eternal in their essence, are of different
ages in their individuality, and herein lies the fundamental natural truth on
which a stable human society must be based. For the ideal then of organisation
based on the mutual contracts of individuals of equal age, each born with equal
rights, we must substitute the ideal of a family, the members of which are of
different ages, each born into duties dependent on the faculties they bring with
them. The [56] family, not the chartered
company, is to be the ideal of the State; the discharge of duties, not the
enforcing of rights, is to be the keynote of the individual life.
As evolution of the soul comes to be recognised as a factor which must enter
into the organisation of society, the corollary that evolution is by law will
also be accepted - karma will accompany reincarnation. Then the faculties with
which a man is born will mark his stage in evolution, and will therefore
determine his position in the State. And as the law guides the soul into the
environment it has rendered necessary by its past actions, so in a State that
was a living natural organism instead of a legal machine, souls would be as
normally guided to the social grade fitted for the working out of the results of
their past and their own further evolution, as in the building of the human
frame the necessary materials are guided to where nerve or bone is required.
Abnormal cases would appear, owing to the complexity of the causes generated by
the past, but could be met, as we shall see, by special methods.
From this way of regarding the State, as an organisation based on natural
laws and intended to aid and further the progress in evolution of every soul
entering into it, certain principles of conduct will flow. In the family the
heaviest burdens are borne by the elders and not by the children; the youngest
are carefully trained, tenderly guarded, shielded from trouble, anxiety, and
undue strain. If food run short, it is not the children who are first stinted;
if anything be lacking, the elders [57] bear
the suffering and strive to let the children feel no want. Their greater
strength is regarded as imposing on them responsibilities and duties, not as
giving the right to plunder and oppress. These principles are to be worked out
in the solution of social problems, and we may now turn to the question of their
practical application in sociology.
In the early systems of sociology, imposed by authority on infant races by
their initiate Rulers, all that modern Socialism aims at for the benefit of the
masses - and far more - was definitely secured. Provision was made for the
abundant production of all the necessaries of life, for the training of varied
types of mind to the best advantage, for the full evolution of all the faculties
brought by each with him into the world, and for the direction of the energies
of each into the channel best fitted for their utilisation and development. The
conception of the social scheme was due to the divinely illuminated wisdom of
perfected men, and its administration was confided to the most advanced souls of
our own humanity, working in graduated order under the immediate direction of
the King-Initiate. The basic principles of this scheme may be thus stated:
government is a task demanding the highest human qualities, spiritual and
intellectual, and to be rightly carried on must be undertaken in the spirit of
entire self-abnegation and of devotion to the common weal, the highest being
most completely the servant of all; the more highly developed the man the more
highly placed [58] should he be in the social
order, and the heavier therefore his responsibilities; further, the smaller will
be his personal demand on material resources, his nature expanding itself
chiefly in the mental and spiritual worlds, and being related to the material
for service rather than for enjoyment; the governing class should therefore
consist of the wisest, the purest, the most self-denying of the nation, those
who can see the farthest and who ask for themselves the least, who have their
hearts set on the common good, who count no labour heavy that promotes the
general growth and happiness, who seek nothing but give everything, who are wise
by ages of experience, and who having learned the lessons of the world are able
to apply them to the circumstances of the day. The first duty of the government
is to maintain in comfort, prosperity, and suitable conditions for progress, the
less developed types, needing for their happiness abundance of material goods;
these things are requisite alike for their evolution and their contentment, and
the smaller their resources within themselves the larger are necessarily their
demands on the outer world. Abundance can only be provided by labour, and to
avoid waste of energy the labour must be carefully organised, directed into the
most fruitful channels, and guided to the most efficient co-operation. This can
only be done by those who have the whole field under their eyes, and can thus
dispose of the available energies to the best advantage. The undeveloped must
yield labour and obedience in exchange for comfort and absence of
[59] material care; by this labour and
obedience their mental and moral qualities are evolved and trained, fitting them
in later birth to take a higher position in the State.
Avoiding details, which varied at different times and places, the general
scheme placed the responsibility for the organisation and direction of labour
within a given area on the officials administering the area; each governmental
unit formed part of a larger unit, and training in the smaller units prepared
for the administration of the larger; famine or any scarcity of the comforts of
life, discontent, uneasiness, crime, ignorance - these things being regarded as
due to the fault of the administrators, each ruler was called to account by his
immediate superior for the prevalence in his district of any of these evils,
rightly regarded as evitable. The ruler was there to direct labour, to ensure
education, to equalise distribution, to repress violence, to decide disputes, to
keep order, to promote happiness; if he could not do these things he was unfit
to rule and must give place to a better man. He might be the ruler of a village,
of a town, of villages and towns aggregated into a province, of provinces
grouped into a viceroyalty, but whatever the size of his district, he was
responsible for its good government; and all were thus held responsible, from
the pettiest village official up to the highest governors holding directly from
the monarch, the monarch answering to the occult hierarchy only. He appointed
some as his viceroys over grouped provinces, these in turn appointed the rulers
of provinces, and these again the [60]
subordinate officials, and so on to the end of the ladder; thus was ensured a
graduated and orderly administration, which served at once as a government
machinery and a training ground for the evolving souls who constituted it, its
highest and most responsible members being Initiates. It will be observed that
this whole system made the lower and less evolved subordinate to the higher and
more evolved throughout; each rendered obedient to his superiors and received it
from his inferiors, and the responsibility of each was to those above him, never
to those below. Hence "rights" had no place, "duties" only were recognised, but
these duties imposed on the more evolved the obligation to provide for the less
evolved everything that could conduce to their growth, their happiness, and
their improvement. All was given, nothing was snatched, and consequently there
was order and contentment instead of struggle. The land belonged to the monarch,
but was divided as to control into definite portions, assigned to the different
classes. One half was set aside for the producers engaged in active work and for
their families; the second half was again divided, one portion of it going to
the monarch, and supporting the whole governing class, and such imperial charges
as the defence of the nation, the keeping up of internal communications, and
similar necessaries for the people as a whole; the administration of justice,
like the rest of the work of this governing class, entailed no direct charges,
all the officials being supported from this land. The second portion of the
[61] half of the land went to the priesthood,
who formed a class apart, side by side with the governing class, and were
charged with the public education; the whole of this education, again, for
children and youths, entailed no direct charges, the priests being the teaching
class of the nation; this land further supported all sick and incapable persons,
and all - outside the governing class - who had passed middle age, generally
fixed at about forty-five. The period of labour extended over only about
twenty-five years; before it, the youth was educated, and after it his time was
given to the leisurely development of whatever faculties he had evolved. The
admirable organisation of labour rendered it so productive that this ample
leisure could be secured to all the producing class, thus ensuring their
definite evolution in each life-period. The half of the land used for the
governing and priestly classes was cultivated by the manual workers, this labour
being their contribution to the State. Among the institutions maintained by the
land of the priesthood in each province were central agricultural colleges and
experimental farms, where professors and students were constantly engaged in the
scientific study of agriculture; it was their duty to improve the methods of
cultivation, to make experiments in cross-breeding plants and animals, to search
for new ways of utilising natural forces, of enriching the soil, &c. Any
discovery was tested on these government farms, and all the information gathered
was circulated among the cultivators by popular teachers; improved breeds of
cattle, grains and [62] seeds were distributed
through the province, and all that science and trained intelligence could devise
was placed at the general service, being freely imparted to the workers.
Agricultural work was further assisted by the publication throughout the year of
the best times for the various field and garden operations, astronomy and
astrology being utilised for the prediction of the changes of the weather, early
and late seasons, favourable and unfavourable magnetic conditions, &c. All this
work was demanded from the official class as their contribution to the State,
even more rigidly than labour was exacted from the manual workers, for the
pressure of opinion and the accepted code of honour prevented dereliction of
public duty. One principle of administration was significant of the spirit in
which the business of the nation was carried on: in times of scarcity of grain,
the land of the priests was first sown, then that of the people; lastly that of
the king and officials; if irrigation failed, the water was supplied in the same
order. The children, sick, aged, and superannuated, considered as the weakest
members of the national household, were those whose needs were the first to be
supplied; burdens must fall on the elder and the stronger, not on the feeblest.
The products of a district were gathered into central granaries and
storehouses for distribution as needed, the methods of distribution varying much
with time and place. In good seasons the surplus products were stored for use in
times of scarcity - a custom we find [63]
surviving in Egypt in historical times. This centralising of the products of a
district and their careful distribution enabled the results of improved
cultivation and of mineral discoveries to be shared among all, the whole family,
as it were, profiting by any advance. Further, a competence was assured to each
and harassing anxiety as to the means of subsistence was unknown - that anxiety
which breeds desperation in the undeveloped soul, and renders impossible the
evolution of higher qualities.
Education was universal, but was adapted to the life that was to be led;
reading and writing were not, as now, considered indispensable, but all who
showed capacity for study were instructed in these instruments of learning and
were then sent on from the primary to the secondary schools; thus children born
into any class could rise out of it if they brought with them into the world
capacities fitting them to rise, but not otherwise. The bulk of the
population were trained in technical schools for agriculture or handicrafts,
according to their tendencies, the capacities of the child deciding his walk in
life, but a sound knowledge of his work was always imparted to him, so that he
might perform his duties intelligently and with pleasure. The children of the
governing and priestly classes, together with the pick of the working
population, boys and girls, received a careful educational training, specialised
to meet individual tendencies after the broad and deep foundation had been laid.
Religious, moral, and physical education was universal, varying in
[64] character according to the capacities and
future work of the pupil, and no pains were spared to develop to the utmost the
intellectual, moral, and spiritual faculties of those destined to guide and rule
the community; above all were they trained to regard duty as all-compelling, and
self-abnegation and hard work as the inevitable accompaniments of high station;
this austere training and this rigorous exaction of duty from the young who were
to be highly placed may be found recounted both in fourth and fifth race
literature, and those who fancy that ancient rulers were mere luxurious idlers
might well correct their ideas from the extant accounts. The hours of work for
the labourer were short, his life was free from anxiety, and he was discharged
from hard work ere old age overtook him; but the ruler must work as long as any
needed him, all the responsibility of the welfare of the community weighed on
him, and death alone lifted from his shoulders the burden of duty to his people.
Looking back to that ancient time and comparing it with the present, we
naturally ask why so noble a system faded away, and why man passed into a state
of struggle. As souls less highly evolved succeeded to the post originally held
by the Divine Kings and the Initiates of various grades, the powers wielded by
the rulers were prostituted to selfish purposes instead of being devoted to the
common good. Rulers failing in their duties, discontent took birth among the
peoples, tyranny bred hatred, and oppression begot rebellion.
[65] Was this a necessary stage in human
evolution? It would seem so. Man in his early days was child, not man; he was in
the nursery and the school, and the troubles of his manhood lay in the future.
Between the stage when humanity was an infant, guided, taught, and trained by
divine Teachers and their immediate pupils, and the stage of divine Manhood when
each shall have the law within him instead of without him, there stretches a
long and weary struggle, a time of hopes disappointed, of efforts continually
frustrated, of attempts breaking down, of experiments and failures. This is a
time of transition, like that of early manhood, and humanity is like the young
man or woman who thinks that he can set everything right in a moment, that the
wisdom of the ages is as nothing beside his keen insight, that only the sloth
and stupidity of his elders stand in the way of the abolition of every abuse and
the righting of every wrong. Everybody else has failed, but he will succeed; he
will solve in a moment the problems of ages, and in a few years the world will
be happy. So the surging democracies of modem days are very young; one moment
all will be right if we get rid of a king; next moment all is saved if an
Established Church be crushed; yet again, happiness is secured if capitalists be
destroyed. All superficial enough truly, as we see as experience ripens and we
recognise that our difficulties are rooted in the lack of development in our own
natures. Yet may it not be that through these very struggles, these shiftings of
power, these [66] experiments in government,
these failures of the ignorant, the experience may be gained which shall again
place the hand of the wisest on the helm of the state, and make virtue,
self-sacrifice, and high intelligence indispensable conditions for rule?
Passengers do not take turns on the bridge of the ship to navigate the ocean;
the skilled workman does not entrust his delicate machine to the loafer; the
crossing-sweeper is not called in to perform a delicate surgical operation. And
it may be that by failure and by social revolutions, if by no other way, we may
learn that the guiding of a nation, politically and economically, is not best
done by the ignorant or even by amateurs, but demands the highest qualities of
head and heart.
In economics also it is probable that this stage of competition and misery
was necessary for the evolution of individuality, and that man needed to grow
first by combat of bodies and then by combat of brains, by the constant claim of
the individual to plunder according to his powers and his opportunities. None
the less it is true that this stage shall be outgrown, and we shall learn to
substitute co-operation for competition, brotherhood for strife. But we can only
outgrow it by cultivating unselfishness, trust, high character, and sense of
duty, for we must improve ourselves ere the body politic of which we are
constituent parts can be healthy.
But how to find a motor power to bring about such changes? While steadily
disciplining and training ourselves, we can place before our fellows ideals
which shall [67] be so wise, so well
considered, that they shall win the allegiance of the intellect as well as
satisfy the cravings of the heart. We must change our estimate of the relative
value of things, and substitute intellectual and spiritual wealth for material
riches as a standard of social consideration. May it not be possible to
influence public opinion to value men and women for greatness in intellect and
virtue, in self-surrender and devotion, and not for wealth or luxury? - making
the multiplicity of material wants the recognised mark of inferior development,
and simple and pure living hand in hand with richness of the higher nature the
title to honour. May not the wealthy learn that it is an essentially infantile
view of man to value him by his show instead of by his worth, by the number of
his material wants rather than by the grandeur of his spiritual aspirations?
Wherever the ideal is the possession of material goods combat must be the social
condition, since material goods perish in the using, and possession by one
excludes possession by another. Intellectual, artistic, spiritual wealth
increase in the sharing, each who shares adding to the store. This is the
fundamental reason why progress towards peace and contentment must be towards
intellectuality, artistic development, and spiritual life, and not towards
material splendour and the vulgarity of outer ostentation. These are for the
undeveloped, the others for the developed. And inasmuch as the ignorant will
copy the more advanced and the lowly the highly placed, the example must be set
by those who lead the social and intellectual [68]
world. Moreover they would themselves gain by the change in so far as
they lead luxurious lives, for the pampering of the body is even more fatal to
the growth of the higher nature than is the stern discipline of poverty. Man
need demand from the outer world no more than absence of harassing anxiety;
sufficiency, not luxury; beauty and harmony, not ostentation; leisure, not
exhausting toil; time and opportunity to develop the God in him, not the
overfeeding of the animal.
Further, we must have faith in humanity and appeal to what is best in man,
not to what is worst. It is not true that it is necessary to build society on
selfishness and to rely on selfish instincts. That which is deepest in man is
not the animal, and to mould society for the brute that man is outgrowing is to
build on a sinking foundation. It is a curious illustration of this that even
with men of poor moral development honour is more compelling than law, and
social opinion than legislation. A man will ruin himself to pay a "debt of
honour" while he seeks to evade a debt enforceable by law - a perverted sense of
duty, truly, but still eloquent of the important truth that more can be done by
appealing to a sense of obligation imposed by the social opinion surrounding a
man than by compulsion of an impersonal law. If the sense of honour, of duty to
a class, can be expanded to include the nation, we shall have at work in our
midst the most binding form of obligation. Duty will become the keynote of life,
each asking “What do I owe?" instead of “What can I successfully demand?"
[69]
It seems possible that in the future we may arrive, even by the slow method
of failure, at some scheme of government in which the wisest shall hold the
reins of power, and obedience shall be gladly rendered to recognised superiors;
and at some economic system in which wealth shall be distributed according to
needs. Then the maxim will be acted upon - noblest of all maxims when given by
love, not grasped by hate - "From every man according to his capacities; to
every man according to his needs." That which has been the battle-cry of men
maddened by suffering shall become the axiom of distribution in the rational
human family.
Most certainly the putting forward of such ideas as are here suggested will
not change social conditions in a moment, but no permanent improvement can be
wrought in sudden fashion. Yet are they on the line of progress, of the upward
evolution of man. The majority of men on the earth to-day are men of the fourth
race, but the fifth race - the keynote of which is individualism - is leading
human development. The dawn of the sixth race is yet afar in the future, and of
that the keynote will be unity not individualism, brotherhood not combat,
service not oppression, spirit not intellect. And the birthmark of the spirit
is the longing to pour itself out in sacrifice, never asking what it can take
but only what it can give. The fundamental unity of mankind is the central truth
of the coming race, and the nation which first grasps and practises that great
conception will lead the future, humanity falling into line behind it. Those
[70] who see it, who teach it, may fail for the
moment, but in their failure is the seed of inevitable success.
It is for us who are Theosophists, who hold as truth the spiritual unity of
mankind, to put our belief into practice by teaching peace, brotherhood, the
drawing together of classes, the removing of antipathies, the recognition of
mutual duty; let the strongest do the best service, the wisest the loftiest
teaching; let us all be willing to learn and ready to share; so shall we hasten
the dawn of a better day, and prepare the earth to receive the coming race.
[71]
PROBLEMS OF RELIGION.
To the true Theosophist every man's religion is a sacred thing, and he would
not consciously jar on the feelings of any; for whether a statement of religious
truth be adequate or inadequate, crude or well-considered, it is sacred for the
one who accepts it as embodying his special ideal. We may rightly use our
keenest intelligence and our most patient thought in searching for the wisest
and most adequate presentations of things spiritual; but on the other hand we do
well to remember that spiritual truths are so many-sided that the utmost the
intellect can do at one time, is to present a single aspect of such a truth.
Even when that aspect is given in a crude form, it but shares the crudity of all
intellectual statements of spiritual truths, the difference between the crude
and the polished being but a difference of degree, not of kind. We might put
side by [72] side, for instance, the crudest
idea of God that might be obtained from the most ignorant costermonger and the
subtlest conception formed by the loftiest philosopher, and might be struck by
the wide discrepancy; yet if that same subtle conception could be compared with
the adoring thought of a lofty spiritual Intelligence, able to live consciously
in the splendour of the LOGOS, we might realise that any thoughts of God that
can express themselves through the physical brain can only represent degrees of
inaccuracy, grotesque in their inadequacy. Even the greatest of spiritual Seers
must fail when he seeks to lisp in mortal numbers the glory of the Vision that
blinds his raptured gaze; much more then, when we are dealing with the ideas of
Deity formulated by half-developed men and women like ourselves, may we learn
humility and charity in criticising - if we must criticise our brother's faith.
It is wiser to seek, even in the strangest view, for a faint suggestion of an
aspect that we may have missed, than to use our critical fangs to rend in pieces
an ideal which is helping some human soul to rise, and is evolving in some
undeveloped intelligence the germs of aspiration and worship.
Therefore in dealing with some of the Problems of Religion, I shall seek at
least to deal with them reverently, careful to avoid jarring on human feelings,
and mindful of the maxim, “Nothing that is human is alien to me." In indicating
the lines along which, in the light of Theosophy, solutions seem possible, I
would not force on any reader ideas which are unacceptable to
[73] his own reason and intuition, for the
thought on religion which a man originates is far more helpful to him than the
parrot-repetition of words that do not represent his individual conception of
truth.
There are five problems of religion which stand out as of perennial and
universal interest, and while each might well demand a volume for itself for
adequate treatment, it may not prove useless to present them with brevity,
showing how the theosophic method is at once suggestive and illuminative; for
very often in religion, as in ethics and sociology, it reconciles the adherents
of opposing schools by harmonising concepts that are superficially discordant,
proving them to be facets of the same truth when their mutual relations are
seen. These five are as follows: the nature of God in manifestation; the
existence and growth of the human soul; freewill and necessity; the place of
prayer in the religious life; the atonement.
First let us take up the problem of problems, that of the existence of God
and the conceptions of Divinity formulated by man. There is one fundamental
principle that must be recognised in approaching this problem - the unity of
existence. If God and man be regarded as basically different, a mighty unspanned
gulf stretching between them, then the problem of the divine existence and of
man's relation thereto seems to frown upon us as defying solution. But if God
and man be seen as of one essence, humanity as an offshoot of the one Tree of
Life, and as one of myriad offshoots, sub-human and
[74] super-human - one radiant arch of beings, each instinct with divine
life - then the question as it affects man appears as by no means a hopeless
one. The West, tending to the former conception - that of a fundamental
difference of nature between "the Creator and the created" - has swung between
the unacceptable extremes of crude, anthropomorphic Monotheism and philosophic
Agnosticism; the East, founding its religions on the second conception - that of
unity - has contentedly accepted a religious Pantheism as intellectually
necessary and as emotionally satisfying. Pantheism in the West has hitherto been
an exotic, and has appealed strongly only to the highly intellectual; its God
has remained a cold abstraction, intellectually sublime but emotionally chill.
In the East, Pantheism, while asserting as clearly as possible the One
Existence, meeting all intellectual difficulties by the affirmation of the
universality of that Existence - God is everything and everything is God - yet
passed naturally into the recognition of endless gradations of Beings expressing
very various measures of the divine Life, some so lofty in their nature, so vast
in their power, so far-reaching in the range of their consciousness, that they
include every element that Christian Monotheism has found necessary for the
satisfaction alike of the intellect and of the heart.
It is apparent in reviewing Christian Monotheism that anyone who approaches
the study of the divine Existence from the standpoint of the intelligence is
sure ultimately to land himself in Pantheism; if he does not openly
[75] reach it, it is because he shrinks from
formulating the logical conclusion from his premises. No better example of the
inevitableness of this conclusion can be found than the Bampton Lectures of the
late Dean Mansel; following purely metaphysical lines, he saw himself led more
than once into the “dreary desolation of a pantheistic wilderness," and so
passionately did his heart revolt against a view that robbed him - as he
misconceived Pantheism - of his Father in heaven, that he flung aside the
irresistible conclusions of his logic and took refuge in the dicta of
revelation, as a shelter from the arid glare of an empty sky and a barren land.
The Eastern Pantheism - which, as already said, posits a universal existence in
which all beings are rooted, and accepts to the fullest the belief that in God
“we live and move and have our being" - recognises also that the divine Life
manifests itself in modes of existence which bridge over the gulf between man
and God manifesting as God. It acknowledges mighty Intelligences who rule the
invisible and visible worlds, the presiding Gods who guide the order of nature
and watch over the destinies of men, the agents of the supreme Will in every
department of life, the fitting objects of reverence and of worship. Just in
proportion as the existence of these great Beings is recognised and enters
practically into human life - whatever may be the name given to them - is
religion strong against the attacks of Agnosticism and unbelief. For these ranks
of spiritual Beings, rising in ascending hierarchies till they culminate in the
supreme God of the [76] system to which they
belong, give to men intelligible ideals of divinity, which rise as they rise,
expand with the expansion of their consciousness, and meet at every stage of
evolution the craving of the human heart for some superior Being far above
itself, whom it can love, trust, reverence, worship, appeal to for aid when
human help is far. It makes possible and real the “Father in heaven" for the
child and the peasant as well as for the philosopher, presenting for adoration
the concrete Being with enlarged faculties and powers that the heart is ever
seeking. The just arguments of the metaphysician and the logician, against the
existence of a God at once infinite and personal, have shattered themselves time
after time against the immovable conviction of the spirit in man that it is akin
to, is the offspring of, some mighty divine Being, and man has doggedly refused
to surrender his conception of such a Being - however illogical it might be -
until a higher conception was offered including everything he was seeking in the
lower.
This view of the life-side of the cosmos is one that in no way outrages
reason or transcends possibility; on this the statement of an avowed Agnostic
may help us; “Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of
view, the assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through
endless space, there can be no intelligence, as much greater than man's as his
is greater than a black beetle's; no being endowed with powers of influencing
the course of nature as much greater than his, as his is greater than a snail's,
seems [77] to me not merely baseless, but
impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is
easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach
something practically indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence, and
omniscience. If our intelligence can, in some matters, surely reproduce the past
of thousands of years ago, and anticipate the future, thousands of years hence,
it is clearly within the limits of possibility that some greater intellect, even
of the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past and the whole future; if
the universe is penetrated by a medium of such a nature that a magnetic needle
on the earth answers to a commotion in the sun, an omnipresent agent is also
conceivable; if our insignificant knowledge gives us some influence over events,
practical omniscience may confer indefinably greater power."* [ * ‘Essays
upon some Controverted Questions’, by T. H. Huxley, p. 36, ed. 1892. It is
not pretended that Dr. Huxley believed that things are so; wise men, he thought,
would say "not proven," and be agnostics." ] This possibility of the learned
Agnostic is known as truth by the Seer, and moreover it represents the life-side
as corresponding with the form-side delineated by science. For the worlds around
us are at various stages of evolution and are grouped in an ascending order. Our
own planet is part of a group of planets, having their common centre in the sun;
our solar system is part of a group of systems, having their common centre in a
distant star; probably [78] that group of
systems, again, has a common centre with other similar groups of systems, and so
on and on. Thus the universe is seen as made up of departments, each successive
unit forming a section in a wider department - graded hierarchies of forms. The
analogy of nature thus leads us to look for similarly graded hierarchies of
living Intelligences, guiding the forms, and we are thus brought face to face
with the Gods.
Occultism teaches us that over each department in nature there presides a
spiritual Intelligence; to put the matter in a more concrete form, over our
solar system presides a mighty Being, the LOGOS, the manifested God of that
system. He would be called the Father by the Christian, Ishvara by the Hindu,
Allah by the Mohammedan. His consciousness is active at every point in His
cosmos; His life sustains it, His power guides it, everywhere within it He is
present, strong to help, mighty to save. Dimly we know that beyond Him there are
yet greater Ones, but for us it is easier to conceive of the Power that
maintains our system, to whom we are definitely related, than of the vaster
Consciousness which includes myriad systems within His realm. Each LOGOS is to
His own universe the central object of adoration, and His radiant ministers are
rightly worshipped by those who cannot rise to the conception of this central
Deity. As the intelligent beings within His kingdom rise higher on the ladder of
evolution, their ideal of God enlarges, deepens, and expands; at each point of
their growth their ideal shines alluringly [79]
above them - narrow enough at the lowest point to meet the needs of the most
limited intelligence, vast enough at a higher to task the intellect of the
profoundest thinker. Thus a conception of Deity may be found which is
intelligible to the child, to the ignorant, to the undeveloped, and which is to
them inspiring, consoling, and sublime. If a lofty conception were offered to
them, they would merely be dazzled by it, and they would be left without
anything to which their hearts could cling. The idea that satisfies the
philosopher would convey nothing to the ignorant, the words that express it
would to him be meaningless; he is told of a Being in terms that convey to him
the chill void of an immeasurable space, and he is practically forced into
Atheism; he is given nothing under pretence of giving him everything, for a
thought that he cannot grasp is to him no thought at all.
What is needful to man in his conception of God? A Being that satisfies his
heart and compels the homage of his intelligence, that gives him an ideal that
he can love and worship, and towards which he may aspire. It is more important
that a man should realise some One before whom his heart can expand in loving
adoration than that his concept should be philosophically satisfactory and
metaphysically correct. The spiritual nature is to be stimulated into activity;
the soul is to be helped in its growth; the spark, which is the essence of the
divine Fire on the altar of the heart, must bum up into the Flame whence it came
forth and towards which it [80] endlessly
aspires. The attitude of love, of worship, of aspiration, is necessary for the
growth of the soul, and if the lips falter, if the words be halting, if the
infant soul can only utter the broken lispings of its infancy, does the Supreme
Love despise its offspring because the expression of the filial love is clumsy
and the thought inarticulate? “As one whom his mother comforteth" does the
young soul feel the clasping of the everlasting Arms, and while the form in
which Deity is clothed may be that of a subordinate God, the life that thrills
through is a manifestation of the one Life, the one Love.
The Roman Catholic Church has met the varieties of human need by presenting
for the worship of her children not only the “Blessed and glorious Trinity," but
the mighty Archangels and Angels - the “Gods" of the Ancient Wisdom and of
Eastern Faiths - and the sweet human familiar image of Mother Mary and her
infant Son. Hence the vast power wielded by the Church over the ignorant, who
are comforted in their daily struggles and homely lives by the vision of these
celestial visitants; the humble country-woman can whisper her troubles into the
ear of the gentle nursing Mother, and feel assured of womanly sympathy; the
child can smile up into the face of his Guardian Angel and sink peacefully to
sleep beneath his veiling wings. It is noteworthy that the Roman Catholic Church
holds the learned while attracting the ignorant, satisfies the philosopher while
consoling the peasant. And this is because she adapts her teaching to her pupil,
and does not offer the stone of [81] an
abstract idea to those who crave the bread of a concrete presence. Moreover, by
thus giving intelligible objects for the worship of the unevolved she guards
from degradation the sublime concepts of Deity that the advancing soul demands.
The all-pervading mighty presence of God omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient,
and the gracious divine Motherhood of the Virgin immaculate, remain as deep
spiritual verities in nature, unvulgarised by the cramping materialising of the
undeveloped mind. The Holy of Holies is kept unpolluted, while the thronging
multitudes find all they need in the outer courts. Only those who have been
anointed with the chrism of spirituality may pass within the veil, and see the
dazzling glory of the Shekinah lightening the most holy Place.
THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL.
LET us next consider the problem concerning the existence of the soul,
entering a region where the pinions of thought flag less than in that where they
essayed to soar into the existence of God. Men ask, "Is there a soul?" "I am a
soul," answers the spiritually enlightened philosopher. But how can we make this
answer effective for the thousands of educated men and women who to-day doubt
the very existence of the soul?
Let it be clearly understood from the outset that their doubt is not the
outcome of a wish to doubt, still less of [82]
a desire to live licentiously - as some bigoted folks imagine; it arises from
the play of the mind on facts around them, and from the exigencies of an
intellect that they cannot honestly escape; they cannot accept ideas about the
soul that appear to them to be illogical and imbecile, and prefer to grope in
the twilight of Agnosticism rather than be false to their conception of truth.
And verily such scepticism is nearer the kingdom of God than the easy-going
repetition of a formula that is not the expression of the speaker's thought. It
is the fashion among many religious people to speak harshly of unbelief; they
have never faced the problems which the unbeliever has faced and has tried to
solve. They have never endured the bitterness of despair that overwhelms the
mind and heart ere the man who has once believed can say that he believes no
longer, and that in the deeper loyalty to truth he must surrender loyalty to
creed. No one who has passed through that storm, who has entered into that
darkness, can ever again feel aught but keenest sympathy with those who are
enveloped in it and who prefer the nakedness of unbelief to the soiled garments
of dishonesty. To every such soul, loyal to truth in this life or in any other,
the sun shall arise in the darkness; to every soul that refuses a light it knows
to be false, and would rather live in the darkness than accept it, shall come
the light of knowledge and faith conjoined; it matters little whether in this
brief span of life it come or not, provided that under all stress of unbelief
the soul remains loyal to truth and to [83]
righteousness and keeps unstained its faith in virtue and its love to man.
In seeking to help such as these to solve the problem of the existence of the
soul, it is useless to adduce metaphysical arguments, for these have been tried
and rejected; it is useless to appeal to an intuition which for the time is
clouded, and the voice of which has been disregarded as likely to be mistaken.
We must meet the sceptic on the only ground that for the time being he
recognises as secure, and submit certain elementary arguments based on
experiment; these while they will not prove the existence of the soul - that
will come at a later stage - will carry the student into the position of
acknowledging a super-physical consciousness, a consciousness not dependent for
its activity on the normal physical conditions, but in direct conflict with
them. The first difficulty that we have to surmount is the idea that the
consciousness normally working in the brain is dependent upon that brain for its
existence, that thought is the result of nervous activity and cannot work apart
from it. To overcome this difficulty we need not prove the existence of the
soul, with all the wide connotations of that word; by leaving the student to
prove for himself that consciousness can function despite the paralysis of its
physical organ and outside physical limitations of time and space, we enable him
to reach a position where other lines of proof will lie open before him, and he
can take these up one after the other till he [84]
finds himself face to face with the knowledge of the soul.
The first step is to see that the consciousness of a man includes much that
is not normally present in his waking hours, and that there are many “layers of
consciousness" that emerge from obscurity when the avenues of the senses are
closed and the outer world is excluded. Further, that the more complete the
exclusion, the larger appears to be the content of consciousness. The action of
consciousness when the body is sleeping may form the first object of study. A
first idea of the range of this study may be gathered from such works as Du
Prel's ‘Philosophy of Mysticism’, and Sully's ‘Illusions, Delusions,
and Hallucinations’. Dreams should be classified (see Leadbeater's
‘Dreams’), and special note should be taken of cases where author's obtain
suggestions and plots in dream, as R. L. Stevenson with ‘The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, his own account of his “Brownies" may be read with
advantage. Many people can solve problems asleep that baffle them awake, and the
student might on this head experiment on himself. The extreme rapidity of
dream-consciousness should be studied, the succession of states of consciousness
enormously exceeding in speed any rate of vibration of which physical nervous
matter is capable. The curious results of suggestion during sleep may be tried,
resulting in the proof that conduct may be controlled by a part of the
consciousness which does not show itself during waking hours.
[85]
From sleep the student may pass to the consideration of abnormal conditions
resembling it in the exclusion of the outer world, such as trance, delirium, and
the excitation of consciousness sometimes preceding death. Mozart and Tennyson
bear witness to a state familiar to each of them, transcending the normal and
setting at naught its limits of time; from this state Mozart brought back some
of his noblest inspirations. Drowning men, brought back to waking consciousness,
have testified to having seen, as in a picture, the whole of their past lives.
Dying men have been recorded as speaking languages forgotten since childhood,
and babbling of minute incidents of the past long sponged from the slate of
waking memory. As we come face to face with these facts consciousness insensibly
changes its aspect, and we see a vast ocean surrounding us, only a little of
which trickles through our brains. Nothing seems to be lost; it is pushed out of
the brain by a stream of fresh impressions, but is not allowed to drift out of
reach. It is somewhere in that ocean of consciousness that is ours, and yet not
ours, that we must explore.
The trance condition may be most closely studied through mesmerism and
hypnotism, and it is not necessary to enter here into a detailed examination of
the experiments which may be studied in standard works and reverified by
personal observation. Richet's ‘Etudes sur la Grande Hysterie’, Binet and
Fere's ‘Animal Magnetism’, and Sinnett's ‘Rationale of Mesmerism’,
may serve as a commencement, the last-named book giving
[86] plentiful references to other works. It
will suffice here to summarise the facts: suggestion can cause and prevent
physical lesions, as burns and blisters; it can make the senses respond to
objects that exist only in thought, and dead to objects that normally stimulate
them - as seeing and feeling an object where none is physically present, and
seeing only empty space where a physical body is standing; it can transfer a
disease from one side of the body to the other, and from one person to another,
and can heal it altogether; it can impose at will the feeling of pleasure, pain,
horror, wrath, love, hatred; it can make an honest person steal, a kind person
cruel; it can wipe out memory, and do a myriad other things beside. That is, an
outside consciousness can take possession of a brain and work it for its own
ends, the real owner being meanwhile ejected. Further, in trance the real owner
may show himself far more fully than he does when normally working through the
brain; memory is intensified both as to past events and present adhesive
capacity; reason becomes keener and subtler; imagination takes flights it cannot
reach when clogged in nervous matter; power of expression appears and the
halting tongue is eloquent; latent faculty awakens and a factory girl rivals
Jenny Lind. Nay, physical boundaries are transcended, and the entranced person
diagnoses internal disease, the diagnosis being later confirmed by
post-mortem investigation; or he sees what is occurring hundreds of miles
away, he reports a conversation held at a far distance. Space fails me even
[87] to summarise the facts, but this matters
not, for the student must read, must investigate for himself, in order that the
force of the ever-accumulating evidence may play on his own mind, forcing him to
the conclusion that but a small part of consciousness expresses itself through
the brain.
Very important - but also very scanty - are the results obtained by
hypnotising lunatics. Cases are on record in which, in the trance condition, the
lunatic became sane, returning to his normal lunacy when he emerged from trance
- or, as I should say, when he again began to try to function through the
imperfect instrument of his brain. It is difficult to imagine more definite
evidence that the brain is but the instrument of the waking consciousness than
that obtained along this line, and it is much to be desired that doctors in
charge of lunatics should collect facts in relation to them under the influence
of mesmerism or hypnotism.
The student should next study the evidence for the appearance of "the double"
apart from the physical body, the “phantasms of the living" as they have been
called. Messrs. Gurney and Myers' work on this subject will serve as
starting-point, and each may collect evidence on this head for himself from his
own circle of acquaintances. A few will find that they can themselves reach
distant friends in this way by an effort of the will, but the experience will be
rare. But if human evidence is to be held as worth anything, the fact that
phantasms of the living do appear can be put beyond doubt, and this
[88] means that consciousness can function far
away from the physical body which it normally uses as its instrument.
The next stage is to show that the individual consciousness, thus found able
to work outside the body during "life" survives "death." Here the phenomena
classed as "spiritualistic" have their place as evidence, and no better work can
be first studied than that in which Sir William Crookes records his own
investigations. Any sincere and patient investigator may convince himself by
personal experiment of the fact of individual survival, and apart from all
seances and formal seekings there is evidence and to spare of volunteered
communications, visible and audible, from those who had passed "beyond the veil"
but for some reason strove to reach again their friends in the flesh.
When in this way a strong prima facie case, to say the least, has been
established for the separability of consciousness from its physical organ and
for its survival after the death of that organ, the student may be willing to
submit himself to the training and the discipline necessary to obtain a true
knowledge of the soul's existence. The way of meditation, reaching the higher
consciousness, is the path he must now tread, and he cannot be expected to enter
on it until he thinks that there is a possibility of gaining the knowledge he
seeks. The process is toilsome and laborious, and demands long perseverance ere
much apparent progress is made; but scores upon scores, nay, hundreds upon
hundreds, of men and women have pursued it both in the past and in
[89] the present, and they bear witness to the
results obtained by it. If complete control be gained over the mind, so that it
can be directed unswervingly on a single point, and then, dropping that point,
can remain poised and steady, the brain still, the senses asleep, then there
arises above the horizon of the mind another kind of consciousness, recognised
by the thinker as himself, but as himself in a higher condition of being. As he
rises into this condition his powers suddenly enlarge, limitations vanish, a new
and keener, subtler life pulses through him, he seems thought rather than
thinker. Problems that puzzled him offer their solutions; questions that were
unanswerable are answered simply and clearly; difficulties have vanished; all is
luminous.
Does anyone say that this state is a mere day-dream, in which the dreamer is
at the mercy of his imagination? Surely the evidence of those who have
experienced it is more valuable than the assertions of those who have never
reached it, and their testimony is unvarying and covers thousands of years. This
is one of the methods that has been pursued in the East for uncounted
generations, and this practice has developed not mere dreamers, not mere poets -
if poets are to be despised by scientists - but some of the keenest
metaphysicians, the profoundest philosophers, that humanity has yet produced.
The mighty literature of India - to say nothing of the sacred books of other
lands - bears witness to its efficacy, for the writers of the noblest Indian
works were men of meditation. It is not the [90]
view of the enthusiast only, but the view of many of the keenest minds in
Europe, that Indian thinkers offer solutions of psychological problems and
theories of man and thought that deserve the most respectful consideration and
the most careful study. Meditation, as the way to transcending mere brain
consciousness, is recommended not only by the mystic but by the metaphysician,
by intellects that plunge into the Ocean of Existence and swim where the
majority drown. By it may be obtained the knowledge that man is a consciousness
transcending physical conditions, and only when that consciousness is reached
can the existence of the soul be proved by way of the intellect.
There is another way, the way of devotion, that reaches the goal attained by
way of the intellect, and for many of us that way is more attractive, that road
is more readily trodden. In that our meditation is directed to an Object adored
and loved, and the passion of the soul for that high spiritual Being burns away
every sheath that separates it from the object of its worship, until in union
with Him it finds the certainty of its own immortality, knowing itself as
self-existent since one with the One who is life. Then knowledge replaces faith,
and the devotee, like the philosopher, knows himself eternal.
FREEWILL AND NECESSITY.
WHEN a problem has been under discussion for hundreds of years, and when it
has been debated by the keenest [91] intellects
with varied results, it seems arrogant to say that it may be solved by grasping
three main factors in human evolution. Nevertheless, the Theosophist cannot well
avoid this statement when he envisages the problem of freewill and necessity,
for in the light of the identity of the divine and human natures, reincarnation,
and karma, the difficulties will away and the solution presents itself as
obvious. Without these three truths the problem can never be solved. There is a
necessity which compels and guides us; there is a freewill which decides and
selects. Thus stated, a paradox appears. How can a soul at once be free and yet
compelled by an inexorable destiny?
“Man is made in the image of God." In one form or another this allegation
appears in every world-religion. It has been believed everywhere, at all times,
and by all. It bears the hall mark of catholicity. In this truth lies hidden the
reconciliation of necessity and freewill.
When we seek to study some of the attributes of the manifested God, we
recognise among them that of Will. In fact, Will seems as though it were the
supreme attribute of the LOGOS, and it represents to us the ultimate of force,
all-pervading, all-directing, irresistible. Majestically free, Self-determined,
it appears to us, moving all things to harmony and order but moved by none. We
rest upon it in perfect confidence as on a rock that cannot be shaken, and the
exquisite order and invariableness of nature are for us rooted in that steadfast
all-compelling Will. [92]
When we think of a man as containing within himself the germs of all divine
potencies, as the acorn contains within itself the potentiality of becoming the
perfect oak-tree, we naturally seek in him the germ of this imperial will, since
he must be in the divine image in the power of will as much as in anything else.
We find in him the attribute of will, and see him exercising a power of choice;
but when we analyse this attribute and go below the surface of the apparently
free choice, we find that the will is continually limited and hampered, and that
the choice: is pressed from every side by pre-determining forces which push it
in one direction. The freedom is seen to be but apparent, the choice is
perceived to be determined. And yet there remains an obstinate conviction that
no argument, however logical and irresistible, is wholly able to dispel, that
the activity of the will contains a factor not accounted for in the rigorous
analysis of determinism, a subtle element that has escaped recognition by the
keen scrutiny of the metaphysical chemist.
This conviction is strengthened by the observation that what we call will in
man is a power in process of evolution, and is indeed still rudimentary in the
majority.
We cannot trace such a power at all in the mineral kingdom; there the affinities
and repulsions are fixed and stable, the preferences can be measured and their
recurrence can be depended upon. In even the highest members of the vegetable
kingdom selective action is exceedingly feeble, and can scarcely be said to show
any [93] spontaneity. Given similar conditions,
similar plants act in a similar way. So again in the animal kingdom there is a
marked absence of spontaneity; for the most part the actions of an animal can be
calculated beforehand by anyone who has made a study of the species to which it
belongs, and experienced hunters utilise this regularity of action in pursuing
and trapping their prey. Nevertheless we do observe occasional aberrations,
especially in the higher animals, and in those, most of all, who have been much
under the stimulating influence of man. When we come to study the less evolved
members of the human family, we find that in them also there is comparatively
little deviation from lines that can be laid down beforehand. They are played
upon by forces the existence of which they do not recognise, and to which they
unconsciously yield. They are moved to activity chiefly by the attractions and
repulsions exercised over their desires by external objects; hopes and fears
pull and drive them, and since they are mainly moved by these pullings and
pushings from outside, their lines of action can be predicted with a fair amount
of certainty. None the less we observe that as we ascend in the scale of
humanity, spontaneity of action becomes a less and less negligible factor, and
that while with a very highly developed man we can prophesy with certainty as to
a number of things that he will not do, it is practically impossible to
predict what his action will be. And this becomes more and more apparent the
more highly the man is evolved. The will of the saint, of the hero, shows
[94] something of the imperial character of
self-motion that we think of as characteristically divine.
For by “will” we mean the determination of force from the inmost centre of
life, while by desire - which stands as the illusive reflection of will in the
majority - we mean the determination of force from that which is outside that
inmost centre, outside the inner immortal Man. In the lower types of mankind the
motor energy is in the desires of the animal nature, imperiously demanding
satisfaction and urging the man along the road leading to the objects which
gratify those desires. For this reason the actions of the majority can be
predicted with certainty, the objects which yield gratification being known and
the desires which seek gratification being similar. The result of our study of
evolution in general, then, leads us to the conclusion that this part of the
divine image in us is one of the later outcomes of our growth, and that the
characteristic of spontaneity is found to be marked in proportion to the degree
of development.
If we turn our attention especially to the order of evolution of mental
qualities, we shall arrive at a similar conclusion. Will does not manifest
itself until after memory, comparison, reason, judgment, imagination, have
reached a considerable amount of development. For a long period these growing
mental faculties are yoked to the service of the desire-nature. They are the
handmaids of kāma, and fly to obey the commands of desire. But at length a new
figure rises slowly in the [95] dim background
of the mind, and after the mental faculties have completed their work on a given
subject an authoritative voice comes forth from the mists which form the
boundaries of the waking consciousness, and commands that a particular line of
action should be followed. The council of mental faculties finds its premier,
and authority silences dispute. Reason may sometimes challenge the orders of the
will, but it finds itself compelled to yield, and there is in the will some
strange energy welling out from the very fount of being which enthrones it as
monarch over the realm of mind. Latest born, it yet asserts its pre-eminence,
and all else bows down under its sceptre. But being yet in its childhood, it
shows but little of its true majesty; only we can recognise in it the
spontaneity of the Parent Will, the Will that rules the worlds.
If we betake ourselves to introspection, the will is the faculty which most
resists our analysis. We cannot reach its root, which seems to pierce deeply
into our life's centre. It appears to arise in a region veiled from our waking
consciousness; to call all else to account, but to render account to none. We
see that it is moving in chains, yet sense beneath those chains a living energy;
the chains are not the generation of that living force, the determining causes
are not the generator of the will.
So far, then, we see in will the directive energy which arises above or
beyond the mind rather than in it, appearing at a late stage of human evolution,
and being [96] in its essence identical with
that majestic divine and self-moved Will which guides the universe.
So far we find ourselves coming to the conclusion that the will, in its
essential nature, is free, being an offshoot in each man of the universal Will.
How then has it come to be bound, and how are its chains forged? To these
questions reincarnation and karma supply the answer.
It is not necessary here to deal with reincarnation in its details. It will
suffice us to regard man as an evolving individual, in whose life-career births
and deaths are recurring incidents. Birth is not the beginning of a life nor is
death its ending; birth and death begin and end only a single chapter in the
life-story; the story runs through many chapters and the plot is continuous
throughout. As a man lives through a day, falls asleep for a night, and wakes
again the next morning for a new day, so does the evolving individual experience
again and again the morning of birth and the night-time of death, remaining the
same continuing life, passing in unbroken continuity through births and deaths.
If to-day I incur a debt, and sleep unconscious of it, my debt faces me in
the morning on my awakening. It is not cancelled by the passing of the night.
Many days may pass, and the remembrance of the debt may fade away from my mind,
but the day of reckoning arrives, and the creditor presents himself for payment,
his claim being rendered none the less valid for my lapse of memory. Such debts
are contracted by each evolving [97]
individual, and they are rigidly collected when the payment falls due.
Inexorable Destiny is at our door, and we cannot evade his claims. When we come
to consider these debts of the past we find that we come into the world with the
greater part of our destiny already fixed. We are born with a mentality and a
desire-nature that have been built by us in the past, formed by the activities
of the same individual who must inhabit his own past building in the present.
Our character, our powers and our limitations, our faculties and our
deficiencies, our virtues and our vices, these are the most potent factors in
our destiny and they condition the whole of our present life. The same kind of
life cannot be led by a man of narrow intelligence and vicious propensities,
born in a miserable environment, and by a man of broad intelligence and virtuous
inclinations, born amid the happiest surroundings. Each is compelled by
necessity; the same output cannot fairly be demanded from each, nor can the one
be blamed for being utterly inferior to the other. Necessity imposes lines of
thinking, lines of acting, and the developing will is hampered by these at every
turn. We are compelled by our past, by our thinkings and longings and desires in
the lives that lie behind us, and only a very small part of our present is
fashioned by our present will. Just as we may make a habit and that habit
becomes a compelling force, so that we follow it unconsciously and have to exert
much energy to change it; so are we pushed into thoughts and actions by the
habits we have formed in the past and brought [98]
with us into our present life. We call this heritage of the past our
karma, and it is the determining force in our lives. I think in certain ways
because I have made a habit of thus thinking; I act in certain ways because my
thoughts have dug the channel along which my energies run. On every side
necessity compels me, my will moves in self-forged chains.
Where then is freedom? Within the limits of these self-drawn obligations the
captive will moves wearily; but still it is the living force, with its power of
spontaneity, of initiative. He who made the present in his past is still here in
the midst of his makings, no puppet but a living soul; he can change and modify
that which of yore he formed, he can file the chains which he riveted on himself
long ago. The products of his past thoughts are there, but he is still
the Thinker, and even within the narrowest of limits he can still work, and
widen, and modify, and break. The evolving God is there, albeit encased in the
web woven by ignorance; he is still in the centre and there is free, while
constrained without by the results of past follies and mistakes. Just in
proportion as he grows, and by effort breaks his chains, will his freedom
extend, until at last his past is outworn and he reaches divine liberty.
In ourselves, as in external nature, knowledge of law means power to achieve.
The ignorant man is driven hither and thither by the laws of nature, a helpless
piece of drift-wood on the stream of life. But the learned man, subject to the
same laws, exercises his selective [99] power,
balances one against another, and obtains his chosen object; he works by fixed
laws, but he throws his life-force with the law-forces that help his purpose,
and neutralises those that antagonise him by the activity of other energies. In
every part of nature we live and move amid fixed laws, fettered by our past and
blinded by our ignorance; in proportion as we outwear our past and change
ignorance into knowledge, we become free. Power grows as vision clears, as we
climb higher liberty increases, until finally we shall reach the centre where
self-motion abides. We are constrained by necessity, but we are outgrowing it;
we are not yet free, but we are evolving towards freedom. The more nearly we
approach the realisation of our divinity the freer we become, and when our
separated wills, evolved and self-moved, merge harmoniously in the Parent Will,
we shall experience that reality of freedom the dim presage of which made us
cling to the belief in freewill. Here again the teachings of Theosophy prove to
be our light-bearer, our Lucifer, star of the morning.
PRAYER.
THE question is continually asked: "Do you Theosophists believe in prayer?"
and it may be helpful to some to study the subject of prayer in the light of
occult knowledge, prefacing the study with the remark that the belief of
Theosophists will vary according to their knowledge, and that no Theosophist
save the writer is [100] committed to the
statements that follow. The public does not yet realise that a Theosophist is
not fitted with a ready-made suit of beliefs when he enters the Society, but is
only supplied with materials from among which he may choose those which suit
him, and must then proceed to fashion his garments for himself. The views that
are here submitted are given simply as the views of a particular student, as
materials for study.
The first thing necessary in considering the utility of prayer is to analyse
prayer itself, for the word is used to cover various activities of
consciousness, and they cannot be dealt with as though they formed a simple
whole. We find prayers that are petitions for definite worldly advantages, for
the supply of physical needs - prayers for food, clothing, money, employment,
success in business, recovery from illness, &c. These we will group together as
Class A. Then we have prayers for help in moral and intellectual difficulties
and for spiritual growth - for the overcoming of temptations, for strength, for
insight, for enlightenment. These can be grouped as Class B. Lastly there are
the prayers that ask for nothing, that consist in contemplation and adoration of
the Divine Perfection, in intense aspiration for union with God - the ecstasy of
the mystic, the meditation of the sage, the soaring rapture of the saint. These
we will call Class C.
The next thing that we must realise is the great ladder of living beings from
the sub-human elemental to the LOGOS Himself, a ladder in which no rung is
wanting. This occult side of nature is a fact, not a dream.
A [101] [* ?
Note: Original typo-printing error at page break / improper-incomplete
sentence. – Scanner/Proof-readers Added Comment.]
the world is filled with living things, invisible to
fleshly eyes. The astral world interpenetrates the physical, and crowds
of intelligent conscious creatures throng round us at every step. Some are below
man in intelligence and some soar high above him. Some are easily influenced by
his will, others are accessible to his requests. In addition to these
independent entities, the elemental essence of the three kingdoms is responsive
to his emotions and his thoughts, and is swiftly shaped into forms whose very
life is to carry out the feeling or the thought that ensouls them; thus he can
create at will an army of obedient servants who will range the astral world to
do his pleasure. Yet again there are available human though invisible helpers,
whose attentive ear may catch a cry for aid, and who gladly serve as veritable
"ministering angels" to the soul in need. And to crown all there is the
ever-present, ever-conscious life of the LOGOS Himself, potent and responsive at
every point in His realm, of Him without whose knowledge not a sparrow falleth
to the ground, not a dumb creature thrills in joy or pain, not a child laughs or
sobs - that all-pervading, all-embracing, all-sustaining Life and Love, in which
all live and move. As nought that can give pleasure or pain can touch the human
body without the sensory nerves carrying the message of its impact to the
brain-centres, and as there thrills down from those centres through the motor
nerves the answer that welcomes or withdraws, so does every vibration in the
universe, which is His body, reach His consciousness and draw thence responsive
[102] action. Nerve-cells, nerve-threads, and
muscular fibres may be the agents of feeling and motion, but it is the man
that feels and acts; so may myriads of intelligences be the agents, but it is
the LOGOS that knows and answers. Nothing can be so small as not to affect that
delicate omnipresent consciousness, nothing so vast as to transcend it. We are
so limited that the very idea of such an all-embracing consciousness staggers
and confounds us; yet perhaps the gnat might be as hard bestead if he tried to
measure the consciousness of Pythagoras.
It is impossible to deny the fact that prayers are answered, and that
many can give out of their own experience clear and decisive cases of "answers
to prayer." Moreover, many of these do not refer to what are termed subjective
experiences, but to hard facts of the so-called objective world. A man has
prayed for money, and the post has brought him the needed amount; a woman has
prayed for food, and food has arrived at her door. In connection with charitable
undertakings, there is plenty of evidence of help prayed for in direct need, and
of speedy and liberal response. On the other hand, there is also plenty of
evidence of prayers left unanswered, of the hungry starving to death, of the
child snatched from its mother's arms by death, despite the most passionate
appeals to God. Any reasonable view of prayer must take into consideration these
conflicting facts, must neither refuse to admit the answers nor evade the
recognition of the failures to [103] obtain
any. All facts must fall into their place in any true theory of prayer.
We will take separately our three classes of prayers, and we shall find that
the occult lives in nature are the agents which bring about answers to prayer,
the particular agents at work being those suitable to the kind of prayer put
forth.
When a man utters a prayer of Class A, he may obtain an answer through one of
several agencies. His concentrated thought and earnest will affect the elemental
essence of the astral plane, and he creates a powerful artificial elemental,
whose one idea is to bring about what its creator desires. This elemental, where
the prayer is for money, food, clothing, employment, for anything that can be
given by one man to another, will seek out a person able to give, and will
impress on that person's brain the image of its creator and of his special need,
this impression giving rise to the thought of sending the man help. "I thought
of George Muller and his orphanages this morning," a rich man will say, “I may
as well send him a cheque." George Muller's prayer is here the motor power, the
artificial elemental is the agent concerned in bringing about the desired
result, and the cheque, unasked for of man on the physical plane, comes as the
“answer to prayer." The result could have been obtained as readily by a
deliberate effort of the will, without any prayer, by a person who understood
the mechanism concerned and the way to put it into motion. But in the case of
most [104] people, ignorant of the forces of
the invisible world and unaccustomed to exercise their wills, the concentration
of the mind and the earnest desire necessary for success are far more easily
reached by prayer than by a deliberate mental effort to put forth their own
strength. They would doubt their own power, even if they understood the theory,
and doubt is fatal in all exercise of the will. That the person who prays does
not understand the machinery he sets going in no wise affects the result; a
child who stretches out his hand and grasps an object need not understand
anything of the working of the extensor muscles, nor of the chemical and
electrical changes set up by his movement in muscles and nerves, nor need he
elaborately calculate the distance of the object by measuring the angle made by
the optic axes; he wills to take hold of the thing he wants, and the various
parts of his body obey his will although he does not even know of their
existence. So also is it with the man who prays, unknowing of the creative force
of his thought or of the proceedings of the creature he has sent forth to do his
bidding; he acts as unconsciously as the child, and like the child grasps what
he wants.
A prayer of Class A may also be answered in other ways than by the action of
an artificial elemental. A passing disciple, or other helper at work on the
astral plane, may hear his prayer and bring about the desired result. Especially
is this likely to be the case when the utterer of the prayer is a philanthropist
in need of aid for the carrying on of some beneficent work. The
[105] helper will throw the thought of sending
him the assistance he needs into the fertile soil of a charitable brain, and the
result will follow as before. Sometimes, but I think more rarely, the will of
the praying person affects a nature spirit, or elemental proper, and he actively
exerts himself to bring about the wished for effect; some people exercise a
peculiar power over nature spirits of various kinds, and the “little people"
will take much trouble in order to supply the needs of their favourites.
The failure of earnest and strongly-willed prayers to bring about the object
aimed at seems to be due to the fact that they dash themselves against some
karmic cause too strong for them to turn aside or to modify to any appreciable
extent. A man condemned by his own action in the past to die of starvation may
hurl his prayers against that destiny in vain. The artificial elemental he has
created by such prayers will find all its efforts futile; no helper will come in
his way to cause the desired relief to be sent to him; no nature spirit will pay
any attention to his cry. Where the relations that had existed in the past
between the souls of parents and of a dying child necessitate in the present
life the breaking of the tie at a particular period, the current of force set
free by prayer will not avail to prolong the thread of the young life. Here, as
everywhere, we are living in a realm of law, and forces may be modified or
entirely frustrated by the play of other forces with which they come in contact.
Two exactly similar forces might be applied to set in motion two exactly similar
balls; but [106] in one case no other force
might be applied to the ball and it might fly to the mark aimed at, in the other
a second force might strike the ball and send it entirely out of its course. And
so with two similar prayers; one may be karmically unopposed, or even aided on
its way by a karmic force, while the second may be flung aside by a karmic force
far more energetic than the original impulsion. One prayer is answered, the
other falls to the ground apparently unheeded; in both cases the result follows
the law.
Let us consider Class B. Prayers for help in moral and intellectual
difficulties are efficacious both in action and reaction. They draw the
attention of those servants of humanity who are ever-seeking to help the
bewildered soul, and counsel, encouragement, illumination, are thrown into the
brain consciousness, thus giving the answer to prayer in the most direct way.
Ideas are often suggested which clear away an intellectual difficulty, or throw
light on an obscure problem, and the sweetest comfort is poured into the
distressed heart, soothing its perturbations and calming its anxieties. This may
be called the objective answer to such prayers, where the help of stronger and
more advanced souls - of a disciple, an angel, a Master - is readily given in
response to the cry for aid. But there is also a subjective answer, not so
readily recognised, as a rule, by those who pray, that may be regarded as the
reaction of the prayer itself on the one who offers it. His prayer truly places
his heart and mind in the receptive [107]
attitude, which makes it easy to render him objective aid but it also opens the
channel of communication between his higher and lower natures, and thus allows
the strength and illuminative power of the higher to pour downwards into the
brain-consciousness. The currents of energy which normally flow downwards, or
outwards, from the Inner Man are as a rule directed to the external world, and
are utilised in the ordinary affairs of life by the brain-consciousness for the
carrying on of its daily activities. But when this brain-consciousness turns
away from the outer world, and, shutting its outward-going doors, directs its
gaze inwards; when it deliberately opens itself to the inner and closes itself
to the outer; then it becomes a vessel able to receive and to hold instead of a
mere conduit-pipe between the interior and exterior worlds. In the silence
obtained by the cessation of the noises of external activities, the quiet voice
of the soul can make itself heard, and the concentrated attention of the
expectant mind enables it to catch the soft whisper from the Inner Self.
Even more markedly is this the case when the prayer is for spiritual
enlightenment, for spiritual growth. Not only do all helpers most eagerly seek
to forward spiritual progress, seizing on every opportunity offered by the
upward aspiring heart, but the longing for such growth liberates energy of a
higher kind, the spiritual longing calling forth an answer from the spiritual
realm. Once more the law of sympathetic vibrations asserts itself, and the note
of lofty aspiration is answered by a note of its [108]
own order, by a liberation of energy of its own kind, by a vibration
synchronous with itself. The divine life is ever pressing against the limits
which bind it, and when the upward-rising force strikes against those limits,
the separating wall is broken through, and the life floods the soul.
When a man, becoming strong in spiritual aspiration, no longer seeks for gain
nor looks to God for gift; when his sole longing is to resemble That which he
adores, and his prayer becomes an act of contemplation and worship; then the
result of the prayer is to draw an answer from the high spiritual region to
which the thought of the suppliant aspires. The subtle vibrations of the
spiritual realm play on the up-reaching soul, awakening the corresponding divine
elements that lie latent within it, and these, thrilling into answer, flood the
man with a new sense of power and make him realise something of the nature of
divinity. Inasmuch as the Divine is everywhere, as in Him we live and move, that
appeal to the Divine without us causes an activity which reacts on us, awakening
the Divine within us, and this “God-with-us" imparts to the mind and heart the
energy of the spiritual nature, making us conscious of our own divine power.
Thus we pass from the spiritual aspirations almost imperceptibly into the
prayer which is pure worship, pure adoration, from which all petition is absent,
and which seeks only to pour itself forth in sheer love of the Perfect, dimly
sensed. Such prayers, grouped as [109] Class
C, are the means of union between man and God, drawing the worshipper
into the Being he adores. In these, the consciousness limited by the brain
contemplates in mute ecstasy the Image it creates of Him whom it knows to be in
truth beyond all imagining, and oft, rapt by the intensity of its love beyond
those concrete limits imposed by the intellect, it soars upwards into the realm
where limits are not, and feels and knows far more than on its return it can
tell in words or clothe in intellectual form. Then in prayer the mystic gazes on
the Beatific Vision, then the sage rests in the infinite calm of the wisdom that
is beyond knowledge, then the saint is penetrated with the radiant purity in
which God is seen. Such prayer irradiates the worshipper, and from the mount of
such high communion descending to the plains of earth, the very face of flesh
shines with supernal glory, translucent to the flame which burns within. Happy
they who know the reality which no words may convey to those who know it not;
those whose eyes have seen the King in His beauty will remember, and they will
understand.
THE ATONEMENT.
There is a profound spiritual truth underlying the various doctrines of
atonement that have been put forth from time to time by Christian churches. In
all of them Jesus the Christ has been the central figure, and the atonement has
been wrought by him. [110]
In the early days of the Christian Church the death of Jesus was regarded as
a payment made to Satan for the ransoming of mankind from his power. Mankind was
in thrall to the devil in consequence of the Fall, and man was the "bondsman of
the devil." To redeem that unhappy bondsman God gave His own Son, the ransom
paid being his agonising death. The debt of man being thus discharged, he was
liberated from the kingdom of darkness, and became the free-man of him who had
paid his debt.
In later phases of Christian thought on this subject, a far darker doctrine
arose. The sacrifice of suffering and death offered up by God the Son,
incarnated as man, was declared to be offered to God the Father to appease his
wrath and to expiate vicariously the sins of men. Human ingenuity devised the
idea of a contract entered into in heavenly places between two Persons in the
Godhead for the redemption of fallen men, and then followed all the painful
presentations of divine wrath on one side and divine agony on the other, against
which the conscience of more spiritually minded Christians has revolted in our
own day. Many of the noblest Christian clergy have headed an ever-increasing
school of thinkers which indignantly repudiates this harsh form of medieval
doctrine as at once blasphemous towards God, dishonouring to justice, and
profoundly erroneous as to the relation between God and man. Men such as Mr.
McLeod Campbell of the Scottish Church, as F. D. Maurice and F. Robertson of the
English, are exponents [111] of a purer and
truer teaching; they see that the office of a Divine Man is not to create a new
relationship between God and man, but to make manifest and vindicate a
relationship already existing. Many devout persons have been so disgusted with
these legal quibblings, in which one divine Person is angry and another
propitiatory, one demanding and another paying - have felt it all to be so
unreal, so unspiritual, that they have flung aside the whole doctrine of
atonement with impatience, forgetting that even under the veil of repellent
errors a truth may lie hidden that we cannot afford to lose. Such a truth there
is in this doctrine of atonement, and it is this truth which has given the
doctrine its hold over the hearts of men. Is it not strange, when we come to
think of it, that a doctrine so narrow, unfair, and mistaken, has yet afforded
an impulse to noble living to some of the purest and most self-denying among the
children of men? In this very doctrine, that seems to us so repellent, many
loving and gentle Christian souls have found their strongest stimulus to
self-sacrifice, their surest foundation for saintly lives of wide-spreading
beneficence. Where we find such incongruity between the verbal statement and the
effect produced by it on high types of soul, we may be sure that such souls, by
spiritual insight, have caught a glimpse of a truth which is veiled by the crude
and erroneous presentation. What is this Truth?
As the human soul evolves, it continually enlarges its limits, the limits of
the individualised consciousness, [112]
embracing more and more within its bounds. The narrow and unevolved soul shows a
lack of embracing sympathy, and this lack proves that the spiritual evolution
has not yet begun. As we study human evolution we see the consciousness
expanding and taking more within its scope; first limited to the physical, it
expands to include the astral; expanding further, it includes the mental. In
process of time the man passes through the first great initiation, and in
Christian phrase “the Christ is born in him;" in theosophical terminology, the
consciousness begins to function on the buddhic plane, the plane of love, and
bliss, and unity, the lower spiritual plane. Slowly "the Christ" grows, the
consciousness works more and more in the spiritual world, and a new attitude
becomes habitual. The man feels himself to be one with all around him, one with
all that lives. He no longer feels himself to be separate, but to be one with
all the lives amid which he moves. He does not lose hold of his own centre of
consciousness, but in some strange, subtle way he interpenetrates all other
consciousnesses and feels them as his own. He expands to contain all others, and
makes no difference between "himself" and "them." In that spiritual realm he
feels as others feel, thinks as they think, suffers as they suffer, joys as they
joy; verily, there are no "others," but all is himself. Every child of man is
part of the life of this man; they do not stand outside him to be sympathised
with; they are forms of him; he is living, sinning, fearing, hoping, struggling,
in everyone of them. When that consciousness [113]
is definitely established, the Christ has grown to manhood, and the
consecration of the true baptism marks him as a manifested Son of God. Then he
comes to the knowledge of his place in the world, his function in nature - to be
a Saviour and to make atonement for the sins of the people. He stands in the
inner heart of the world, the sanctuary of Buddhi, as a High Priest of humanity.
He is one with all his brethren, not by a vicarious substitution, but by the
unity of a common life. Are any sinful? he is sinful in them that his purity may
purge them. Are any sorrowful? in them he is the man of sorrows; every broken
heart is broken in his, every pierced heart in his heart is pierced. Are any
glad? in them he is joyous and pours out his bliss. Are any craving? in them he
is feeling want that he may fill them with his utter satisfaction. He has
everything, and because it is his it is theirs. He is perfect; then they are
perfect with him. He is strong; who then can be weak, since he is in them? He
climbed to his high place that he might pour out to all below him, and he lives
in order that all may share his life. He lifts the whole world with him as he
rises; the path is easier for all men because he has trodden it.
Every Son of man may become such a manifested Son of God, such a Saviour of
the world. In each such Son is “God manifest in the flesh," the atonement which
aids all mankind, the living power that makes all things new. Only one thing is
needed to bring that power into manifest activity in any individual soul; the
soul must [114] open the door and let him in.
Even he, all-permeating, cannot force his way against his brother's will; the
human will can hold its own alike against God and man, and by the law of
evolution it must voluntarily associate itself with divine action and not be
broken into sullen submission. Let the will throw open the door, and the life
will flood the soul, While the door is closed it will only gently breathe
through it its unutterable fragrance, that the sweetness of that fragrance may
win where the barrier may not be forced by strength.
This it is, in part, to be a Christ; but how can mortal pen depict the
immortal, or mortal words tell of that which is beyond the power of speech?
Tongue may not utter, the unillumined mind may not grasp, that mystery of the
Son who has become one with the Father carrying in His bosom the sons of men.
That is part of the glorious truth that is travestied in the doctrine of the
atonement as it has been taught for many a century; that the secret of the
influence that, even in its erroneous forms, has proved so great an inspiration
to many noble hearts. Even when error blinds the intellect, the vivifying power
of that supernal love is felt, and souls, sensitive to spiritual influences,
answer to its sweet compulsion, and, in their small measure, also, they begin to
share the joy of giving, of living the life that is love. A spiritual religion
has no separated reward to offer, has no separated penalty to threaten. It can
but say: “In so far as you love and serve, the Divine Life is finding a channel
for expression [115] in you, and when you reach
the higher world, expand to the wider consciousness, then also you will know
what every saint has yearned for, what every Master has accomplished; you will
feel in you the Divine Life as your life; you will thus enter into the joy of
your Lord." [116]
SOME DIFFICULTIES OF THE INNER LIFE.
EVERY one who sets himself in earnest to the living of the Inner Life
encounters certain obstacles at the very beginning of the pathway thereto,
obstacles which repeat themselves in the experience of each, having their basis
in the common nature of men. To each wayfarer they seem new and peculiar to
himself, and hence give rise to a feeling of personal discouragement which
undermines the strength needed for their surmounting. If it were understood that
they form part of the common experience of aspirants, that they are always
encountered and constantly over-climbed, it may be that some cheer would be
brought to the cast-down neophyte by the knowledge. The grasp of a hand in the
darkness, the sound of a voice that says: "Fellow-traveller, I have trodden
where you tread and the road is practicable" - these things bring help in the
night-time, and such a help-bringer this article would fain be.
[117]
One of these difficulties was put to me some time ago by a friend and
fellow-wayfarer in connection with some counsel given as to the purification of
the body. He did not in any way traverse the statement made, but said with much
truth and insight that for most of us the difficulty lay more with the Inner Man
than with his instruments; that for the most of us the bodies we had were quite
sufficiently good, or, at the worst, needed a little tuning, but that there was
a desperate need for the improvement of the man himself. For the lack of sweet
music, the musician was more to blame than his instrument, and if he could be
reached and improved his instrument might pass muster. It was capable of
yielding much better tones than those produced from it at present, but those
tones depended on the fingers that pressed the keys. Said my friend pithily and
somewhat pathetically: "I can make my body do what I want; the difficulty is
that I do not want."
Here is a difficulty that every serious aspirant feels. The improving of the
man himself is the chief thing that is needed, and the obstacle of his weakness,
his lack of will and of tenacity of purpose, is a far more obstructive one than
can be placed in our way by the body. There are many methods known to all of us
by which we can build up bodies of a better type if we want to do so, but it is
the "wanting" in which we are deficient. We have the knowledge, we recognise the
expediency of putting it into practice, but the impulse to do so is lacking. Our
root-difficulty lies in our inner nature; it is inert, the
[118] wish to move is absent; it is not that
the external obstacles are insurmountable, but that the man himself lies supine
and has no mind to climb over them. This experience is being continually
repeated by us; there seems to be a want of attractiveness in our ideal; it
fails to draw us; we do not wish to realise it, even though we may have
intellectually decided that its realisation is desirable. It stands before us
like food before a man who is not hungry; it is certainly very good food and he
may be glad of it to-morrow, but just now he has no craving for it, and prefers
to lie basking in the sunshine rather than to get up and take possession of it.
The problem resolves itself into two questions; Why do I not want that which
I see, as a rational being, is desirable, productive of happiness? What can I do
to make myself want that which I know to be best for myself and for the world?
The spiritual teacher who could answer these questions effectively would do a
far greater service to many than one who is only reiterating constantly the
abstract desirability of ideals that we all acknowledge, and the imperative
nature of obligations that we all admit - and disregard. The machine is here,
not wholly ill-made; who can place his finger on the lever, and make
it go?
The first question must be answered by such an analysis of self-consciousness
as may explain this puzzling duality, the not desiring that which we yet see to
be desirable. We are wont to say that self-consciousness is a unit, and yet,
when we turn our attention [119] inwards, we
see a bewildering multiplicity of “I's," and are stunned by the clamour of
opposing voices, all coming apparently from ourselves. Now consciousness - and
self-consciousness is only consciousness drawn into a definite centre which
receives and sends out - is a unit, and if it appears in the outer world
as many, it is not because it has lost its unity, but because it presents itself
there through different media. We speak glibly of the vehicles of consciousness,
but perhaps do not always bear in mind what is implied in the phrase. If a
current from a galvanic battery be led through several series of different
materials, its appearance in the outer world will vary with each wire. In a
platinum wire it may appear as light, in an iron one as heat, round a bar of
soft iron as magnetic energy, led into a solution as a power that decomposes and
recombines. One single energy is present, yet many modes of it appear, for the
manifestation of life is always conditioned by its forms, and as consciousness
works in the causal, mental, astral, or physical body, the resulting “I"
presents very different characteristics. According to the vehicle which, for the
time being, it is vitalising, so will be the conscious “I." If it is working in
the astral body, it will be the “I" of the senses; if in the mental, it will be
the “I" of the intellect. By illusion, blinded by the material that enwraps it,
it identifies itself with the craving of the senses, the reasoning of the
intellect, and cries, "I want," "I think." The nature which is developing the
germs of bliss and knowledge is the eternal Man, and is the root
[120] of sensations and thoughts; but these
sensations and thoughts themselves are only the transitory activities in his
outer bodies, set up by the contact of his life with the outer life, of the Self
with the not-self. He makes temporary centres for his life in one or other of
these bodies, lured by the touches from without that awaken his activity, and
working in these he identifies himself with them. As his evolution proceeds, as
he himself develops, he gradually discovers that these physical, astral, mental
centres are his instruments, not himself; he sees them as parts of the
“not-self" that he has temporarily attracted into union with himself - as he
might take up a pen or a chisel - he draws himself away from them, recognising
and using them as the tools they are, knows himself to be life, not form; bliss,
not desire; knowledge, not thought; and then first is conscious of unity, then
alone finds peace. While the consciousness identifies itself with forms, it
appears to be multiple; when it identifies itself as life it stands forth as
one.
The next important fact for us is that, as Blavatsky pointed out,
consciousness, at the present stage of evolution, has its centre normally in the
astral body. Consciousness learns to know by its capacity of sensation, and
sensation belongs to the astral body. We sensate; that is, we recognise contact
with something which is not ourselves, something which arouses in us pleasure,
or pain, or the neutral point between. The life of sensation is the greater part
of the life of the majority. For those below the average, the life of sensation
is the whole life. [121] For a few advanced
beings the life of sensation is transcended. The vast majority occupy the
various stages which stretch between the life of sensation, of mixed sensation
and emotion and thought in diverse proportions, of emotion and thought also in
diverse proportions. In the life that is wholly of sensation there is no
multiplicity of "I's" and therefore no conflict; in the life that has
transcended sensation there in an Inner Ruler, Immortal, and there is no
conflict; but in all the ranges between there are manifold "I's" and between
them conflict.
Let us consider the life of sensation as found in the savage of low
development. There is an "I," passionate, craving, fierce, grasping, when
aroused to activity. But there is no conflict, save with the world outside his
physical body. With that he may war, but inner war he knows not. He does what he
wants, without questionings beforehand or remorse afterwards; the actions of the
body follow the promptings of desire, and the mind does not challenge, nor
criticise, nor condemn. It merely pictures and records, storing up materials for
future elaboration. Its evolution is forwarded by the demands made upon it by
the "I" of sensations to exert its energies for the gratification of that
imperious "I." It is driven into activity by these promptings of desire, and
begins to work on its store of observations and remembrances, thus evolving a
little reasoning faculty and planning beforehand for the gratification of its
waster. In this way it develops intelligence, but the
[122] intelligence is wholly subordinated to desire, moves under its
orders, is the slave of passion. It shows no separate individuality, but is
merely the willing tool of the tyrannous desire "I."
Contest only begins when, after a long series of experiences, the Eternal Man
has developed sufficient mind to review and balance up, during his life in the
lower mental world between death and birth, the results of his earthly
activities. He then marks off certain experiences as resulting in more pain than
pleasure, and comes to the conclusion that he will do well to avoid their
repetition; he regards them with repulsion and engraves that repulsion on his
mental tablets while he similarly engraves attraction on other experiences that
have resulted in more pleasure than pain. When he returns to earth, he brings
this record with him, as an inner tendency of his mind, and when the desire "I"
rushes towards an attractive object, recommencing a course of experiences that
have led to suffering, he interposes a feeble protest, and another "I" -
consciousness working as mind - makes itself felt and heard as regarding these
experiences with repulsion, and objecting to being dragged through them. The
protest is so weak and the desire so strong that we can scarcely speak of a
contest; the desire "I," long enthroned, rushes over the weakly-protesting
rebel, but when the pleasure is over and the painful results follow, the ignored
rebel lifts his voice again in a querulous "I told you so," and this is the
first sting of remorse. As life succeeds life the mind
[123] asserts itself more and more, and the contest between the desire
"I" and the thought "I" grows fiercer and fiercer, and the agonised cry of the
Christian mystic: "I find another law in my members warring against the law of
my mind," is repeated in the experience of every evolving Man. The war grows
hotter and hotter as, during the devachanic life, the decisions of the Man are
more and more strongly impressed on the mind, appearing as innate ideas in the
subsequent birth, and lending strength to the thought "I," which, withdrawing
itself from the passions and emotions, regards them as outside itself, and
repudiates their claim to control it. But the long inheritance of the past is on
the side of the monarch it would discrown, and bitter and many-fortuned is the
war. Consciousness, in its out-going activities, runs easily into the worn
channels of the habits of many lives; on the other hand, it is diverted by the
efforts of the Man to take control and to turn it into the channels hewn out by
his reflections. His will determines the line of the consciousness-forces
working in his higher vehicles, while habit largely determines the direction of
those working in the desire-body. The will, guided by the clear-eyed
intelligence, points to the lofty ideal that is seen as a fit object of
attainment; the desire-nature does not want to reach it, is lethargic before it,
seeing no beauty that it should desire it, nay, is often repelled by the austere
outlines of its grave and chastened dignity. "The difficulty is that I do not
want." We [124] do not want to do that
which, in our higher moments, we have resolved to do. The lower "I" is moved by
the attraction of the moment rather than by the recorded results of the past
that sway the higher, and the real difficulty is to make ourselves feel that the
lethargic, or the clamorous, "I" of the lower nature is not the true "I."
How is this difficulty to be overcome? How is it possible to make that which
we know to be the higher to be the habitual self-conscious "I"?
Let no one be discouraged if here it be said that this change is a matter of
growth, and cannot be accomplished in a moment. The human Self cannot, by a
single effort, rise to manhood from childhood, any more than a body can change
from infancy to maturity in a night. If the statement of the law of growth bring
a sense of chill when we regard it as an obstacle in the way of our wish for
sudden perfection, let us remember that the other side of the statement is that
growth is certain, that it cannot be ultimately prevented, and that if law
refuses a miracle it on the other hand gives security. Moreover, we can quicken
growth, we can afford the best possible conditions for it, and then rely on the
law for our result. Let us then consider the means we can employ for hastening
the growth we see to be needed, for transferring the activity of consciousness
from the lower to the higher.
The first thing to realise is that the desire-nature is not our Self, but an
instrument fashioned by the Self [125]
for its own using; and next that it is a most valuable instrument, and is
merely being badly used. Desire, emotion, is the motive power in us, and stands
ever between the thought and the action. Intellect sees but it does not move,
and a man without desires and emotions would be a mere spectator of life. The
Self must have evolved some of its loftiest powers ere it can forego the use of
the desires and emotions; for aspirants the question is how to use them instead
of being used by them, how to discipline them, not how to destroy. We would fain
"want" to reach the highest, since without this wanting we shall make no
progress at all. We are held back by wanting to unite ourselves with objects
transitory, mean, and narrow; cannot we push ourselves forward by wanting to
unite ourselves with the permanent, the noble, and the wide? Thus musing, we see
that what we need is to cultivate the emotions, and direct them in a way that
will purify and ennoble the character. The basis of all emotions on the side of
progress is love, and this is the power which we must cultivate. George Eliot
well said: "The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the
second, something to reverence." Now reverence is only love directed to a
superior, and the aspirant should seek one more advanced than himself to whom he
can direct his love and reverence. Happy the man who can find such a one when he
seeks, for such finding gives him the most important condition for turning
emotion from a retarding force into a lifting [126]
one, and for gaining the needed power to "want" that which he knows to be
the best. We cannot love without seeking to please, and we cannot reverence
without taking joy in the approval of the one we revere. Hence comes a constant
stimulus to improve ourselves, to build up character, to purify the nature, to
conquer all in us that is base, to strive after all that is worthy. We find
ourselves quite spontaneously "wanting" to reach a high ideal, and the great
motive power is sent along the channels hewn out for it by the mind. There is no
way of utilising the desire-nature more certain and more effective than the
making of such a tie, the reflection in the lower world of that perfect bond
which links the disciple to the Master.
Another useful way of stimulating the desire-nature as a lifting force is to
seek the company of any who are more advanced in the spiritual life than we are
ourselves. It is not necessary that they should teach us orally, or indeed talk
to us at all. Their very presence is a benediction, harmonising, raising,
inspiring. To breathe their atmosphere, to be encircled by their magnetism, to
be played on by their thoughts - these things ennoble us, unconsciously to
ourselves. We value words too highly, and depreciate unduly the subtler silent
forces of the Self, which, "sweetly and mightily ordering all things," create
within the turbulent chaos of our personality the sure bases of peace and truth.
Less potent, but still sure, is the help that may be gained by reading any
book that strikes a noble note [127] of life
whether by lifting up a great ideal, or presenting an inspiring character for
our study. Such books as the ‘Bhagavad Gītā’, ‘The Voice of the
Silence’, ‘Light on the Path’, ‘The Imitation of Christ’, are
among the most powerful of such aids to the desire-nature. We are apt to read
too exclusively for knowledge, and lose the moulding force that lofty thought on
great ideals may exercise over our emotions. It is a useful habit to read every
morning a few sentences from some such book as those named above, and to carry
these sentences with us through the day, thus creating around us an atmosphere
that is protective to ourselves and beneficial to all with whom we come into
contact.
Another absolutely essential thing is daily meditation - a quiet half-hour in
the morning, ere the turmoil of the day begins, during which we deliberately
draw ourselves away from the lower nature, recognise it as an instrument and not
our self, centre ourselves in the highest consciousness we can reach, and feel
it as our real self. "That which is Being, Bliss, and Knowledge, that am I.
Life, Love, and Light, that am I." For our essential nature is divine, and the
effort to realise it helps its growth and manifestation. Pure, passionless,
peaceful, it is "the Star that shines within," and that Star is our Self. We
cannot yet steadily dwell in the Star, but as we try daily to rise to it, some
gleam of its radiance illumes the illusory "I" made of the shadows amid which we
live. To this ennobling and peace-giving contemplation of our divine destiny we
may fitly rise [128] by worshipping with the
most fervent devotion of which we are capable - if we are fortunate enough to
feel such devotion - the Father of the worlds and the divine Man whom we
reverence as Master. Resting on that Divine Man as the Helper and Lover of all
who seek to rise - call Him Buddha, Christ, Shri Krishna, Master, what we will -
we may dare to raise our eyes to the ONE, from Whom we come, to Whom we go, and
in the confidence of realised sonship murmur, “I and the Father are One," “I am
That."
One of the most distressing of the difficulties which the aspirant has to
face arises from the ebb and flow of his feelings, the changes in the emotional
atmosphere through which he sees the external world as well as his own character
with its powers and its weaknesses, He finds that his life consists of a series
of ever-varying states of consciousness, of alternating conditions of thought
and feeling. At one time he is vividly alive, at another quiescently dead; now
he is cheerful, then morbid; now overflowing, then dry; now earnest, then
indifferent; now devoted, then cold; now aspiring, then lethargic. He is
constant only in his changeableness, persistent only in his variety. And the
worst of it is that he is unable to trace these effects to any very definite
causes; they “come and go, impermanent," and are as little predicable as the
summer winds. Why was meditation easy, smooth, fruitful, yesterday? why is it
hard, irregular, barren, to-day? Why should that noble idea have fired him with
enthusiasm a week ago, yet leave [129] him
chill now? Why was he full of love and devotion but a few days since, but finds
himself empty now, gazing at his ideal with cold, lack-lustre eyes? The facts
are obvious, but the explanation escapes him; he seems to be at the mercy of
chance, to have slipped out of the realm of law.
It is this very uncertainty which gives the poignancy to his distress. The
understood is always the manageable, and when we have traced an effect to its
cause we have gone far on the way to its control. All our keenest sufferings
have in them this constituent of uncertainty; we are helpless because we are
ignorant. It is the uncertainty of our emotional moods that terrifies us, for we
cannot guard against that which we are unable to foresee. How then may we reach
a place where these moods shall not plague us, a rock on which we can stand
while the waves surge around us?
The first step towards the place of balance is taken when we recognise the
fact - though the statement of it may sound a little brutal - that our moods do
not matter. There is no constant relation between our progress and our feelings;
we are not necessarily advancing when the flow of emotion rejoices us, nor
retrograding when its ebb distresses us. These changing moods are among the
lessons that life brings to us, that we may learn to distinguish between the
Self and the not-Self, and to realise ourselves as the Self. The Self changes
not, and that which changes is not our Self, but is part of the transitory
surroundings in which the Self is clothed and [130]
amid which it moves. This wave that sweeps over us is not the Self, but
is only a passing manifestation of the not-Self. "Let it toss and swirl and
foam, It is not I." Let consciousness realise this, if only for a moment, and
the force of the wave is spent, and the firm rock is felt under the feet.
Withdrawing from the emotion, we no longer feel it as a part of ourselves, and
thus ceasing to pour our life into it as a self-expression, we break off the
connection which enabled it to become a channel of pain. This withdrawal of
consciousness may be much facilitated if, in our quiet times, we try to
understand and to assign to their true causes, these distressing emotional
alternations. We shall thus at least get rid of some of the helplessness and
perplexity which, as we have already seen are due to ignorance.
These alternations of happiness and depression are primarily manifestations
of that law of periodicity, or law of rhythm, which guides the universe. Night
and day alternate in the physical life of man as do happiness and depression in
his emotional life. As the ebb and flow in the ocean, so are the ebb and flow in
human feelings. There are tides in the human heart as in the affairs of men and
as in the sea. Joy follows sorrow and sorrow follows joy, as surely as death
follows birth and birth death. That this is so is not only a theory of a law,
but it is also a fact to which witness is borne by all who have gained
experience in the spiritual life. In the famous ‘Imitation of Christ’ it
is said that comfort and sorrow thus alternate, and “this is nothing new nor
strange unto [131] them that have experience in
the way of God; for the great saints and ancient prophets had oftentimes
experience of such kind of vicissitudes. . . . If great saints were so dealt
with, we that are weak and poor ought not to despair if we be sometimes hot and
sometimes cold. . . . I never found any so religious and devout, that he had not
sometimes a withdrawing of grace or felt not some decrease of zeal." (Bk. II.
ix. 4, 5, 7.) This alternation of states being recognised as the result of a
general law, a special manifestation of a universal principle, it becomes
possible for us to utilise this knowledge both as a warning and an
encouragement. We may be passing through a period of great spiritual
illumination, when all seems to be easy of accomplishment, when the glow of
devotion sheds its glory over life, and when the peace of sure insight is ours.
Such a condition is often one of considerable danger, its very happiness lulling
us into a careless security, and forcing into growth any remaining germs of the
lower nature. At such moments the recalling of past periods of gloom is often
useful, so that happiness may not become elation, nor enjoyment lead to
attachment to pleasure; balancing the present joy by the memory of past trouble
and the calm prevision of trouble yet to come, we reach equilibrium and find a
middle point of rest; we can then gain all the advantages that accrue from
seizing a favourable opportunity for progress without risking a slip backwards
from premature triumph. When the night comes down
[132] and all the life has ebbed away, when we find ourselves cold and
indifferent, caring for nothing that had erst attracted us, then, knowing the
law, We can quietly say: "This also will pass in its turn, light and life must
come back, and the old love will again glow warmly forth." We refuse to be
unduly depressed in the gloom, as we refused to be unduly elated in the light;
we balance one experience against the other, removing the thorn of present pain
by the memory of past joy and the foretaste of joy in the future; we learn in
happiness to remember sorrow and in sorrow to remember happiness, till neither
the one nor the other can shake the steady foothold of the soul. Thus we begin
to rise above the lower stages of consciousness in which we are flung from one
extreme to the other, and to gain the equilibrium which is called yoga. Thus the
existence of the law becomes to us not a theory but a conviction, and we
gradually learn something of the peace of the Self.
It may be well also for us to realise that the way in which we face and live
through this trial of inner darkness and deadness is one of the surest tests of
spiritual evolution. “What worldly man is there that would not willingly receive
spiritual joy and comfort if he could always have it? For spiritual comforts
exceed all the delights of the world and the pleasures of the flesh. . . . But
no man can always enjoy these divine comforts according to his desire; for the
time of trial is never far away. . . . Are not all those to be called mercenary
who are ever seeking consolations? . . . [133]
Where shall one be found who is willing to serve God for nought? Rarely is one
found so spiritual as to have suffered the loss of all-things." (Bk. II. x. I;
xi. 3, 4.) The subtle germs of selfishness persist far on into the life of
discipleship, though they then ape in their growth the semblance of virtues, and
hide the serpent of desire under the fair blossom of beneficence or of devotion.
Few indeed are they who serve for nothing, who have eradicated the root of
desire, and have not merely cut off the branches that spread above ground. Many
a one who has tasted the subtle joys of spiritual experience finds therein his
reward for the grosser delights he has renounced, and when the keen ordeal of
spiritual darkness bars his way, and he has to enter into that darkness
unbefriended and apparently alone, then he learns by the bitter and humiliating
lesson of disillusion that he has been serving his ideal for wages and not for
love. Well for us if we can be glad in the darkness as well as in the light, by
the sure faith in - though not yet by the vision of - that Flame which burns
evermore within, THAT from the light of which we can never be separated, for it
is in truth our very Self. Bankrupt in Time must we be ere ours is the wealth of
the Eternal, and only when the living have abandoned us does the Vision of Life
appear.
Another difficulty that sorely bewilders and distresses the aspirant is the
unbidden presence of thoughts and desires that are incongruous with his life and
aims. When he would fain contemplate the Holy, the presence
[134] of the unholy thrusts itself upon him;
when he would see the radiant face of the Divine Man, the mask of the satyr
leers at him in its stead. Whence these thronging forms of evil that crowd round
him? whence these mutterings and whisperings as of devils in his ear? They fill
him with shuddering repulsion, yet they seem to be his; can he really be the
father of this foul swarm?
Once again an understanding of the cause at work may rob the effect of its
sharp poison-tooth, and deliver us from the impotence due to ignorance. It is a
commonplace of theosophical teaching that life embodies itself in forms, and
that the life-energy which comes forth from that aspect of the Self which is
knowledge moulds the matter of the mental plane into thought forms. The
vibrations that affect the mental body determine the materials that are built
into its composition, and these materials are slowly changed in accordance with
the changes in the vibrations sent forth. If the consciousness cease to work in
a particular way, the materials which answered to those previous workings
gradually lose their activity, finally become effete matter and are shaken out
of the mental body. A considerable number of stages, however, intervene between
the full activity of the matter constantly answering to mental impulses and its
final deadness when ready for expulsion. Until the last stage is reached it is
capable of being thrown into renewed activity by mental impulses either from
within or from without, and long after the man has ceased to energise
[135] it, having outgrown the stage it
represents, it may be thrown into active vibration, made to start up as a living
thought, by a wholly external influence. For example: a man has succeeded in
purifying his thoughts from sensuality, and his mind no longer generates impure
ideas nor takes pleasure in contemplating impure images. The coarse matter,
which in the mental and astral bodies vibrates under such impulses, is no longer
being vivified by him, and the thought-forms erst created by him are dying or
dead. But he meets some one in whom these things are active, and the vibrations
sent out by him revivify the dying thought-forms, lending them a temporary and
artificial life; they start up as the aspirant's own thoughts, presenting
themselves as the children of his mind, and he knows not that they are but
corpses from his past, re-animated by the evil magic of impure propinquity. The
very contrast they afford to his purified mind adds to the harassing torture of
their presence, as though a dead body were fettered to a living man. But when he
learns their true nature, they lose their power to torment. He can look at them
calmly as remnants of his past, so that they cease to be poisoners of his
present. He knows that the life in them is an alien one and is not drawn from
him, and he can wait with the patience of confidence for the hour when they
shall affect him no longer.
Sometimes in the case of a person who is making rapid progress, this
temporary revivification is caused deliberately by those who are seeking to
retard evolution, [136] those who set
themselves against the Good Law. They may send a thought-force calculated to
stir the dying ghosts into weird activity, with the set purpose of causing
distress even when the aspirant has passed beyond the reach of temptation along
these lines. Once again the difficulty ceases when the thoughts are known to
draw their energy from outside and not from inside, when the man can calmly say
to the surging crowd of impish tormentors: "You are not mine, you are no part of
me, your life is not drawn from my thought. Ere long you will be dead beyond
possibility of resurrection, and meanwhile you are but phantoms, shades that
were once my foes."
Another fruitful source of trouble is the great magician Time, past-master of
illusion. He imposes on us a sense of hurry, of unrest, by masking the oneness
of our life with the veils of births and deaths. The aspirant cries out eagerly:
"How much can I do, what progress can I make, during my present life?" There is
no such thing as a "present life"; there is but one life-past and future, with
the ever-changing moment that is their meeting-place; on one side of it we see
the past, on the other side the future, and it is itself as invisible as the
little piece of ground on which we stand. There is but one life, without
beginning and without ending, the ageless, timeless life, and our arbitrary
divisions of it by the ever-recurring incidents of births and deaths delude us
and ensnare. These are some of the traps set for the Self by the lower nature,
which would fain keep its hold [137] on the
winged Immortal that is straying through its miry paths. This bird of paradise
is so fair a thing as its plumes begin to grow, that all the powers of nature
fall to loving it, and set snares to hold it prisoner; and of all the snares the
illusion of Time is the most subtle.
When a vision of truth has come late in a physical life, this discouragement
as to time is apt to be most keenly felt. "I am too old to begin; if I had only
known this in youth," is the cry. Yet truly the path is one as the life is one,
and all the path must be trodden in the life; what matters it then whether one
stage of the path be trodden or not during a particular part of a physical life?
If A and B are both going to catch their first glimpse of the Reality two years
hence, what matters it that A will then be seventy years of age while B will be
a lad of twenty? A will return and begin anew his work on earth while B is
ageing, and each will pass many times through the childhood, youth, and old age
of the body, while travelling along the higher stages of the path of life. The
old man who "late in life," as we say, begins to learn the truths of the Ancient
Wisdom, instead of lamenting over his age and saying: "How little can I do in
the short time that remains to me," should say: "How good a foundation I can lay
for my next incarnation, thanks to this learning of the truth." We are not
slaves of Time, save as we bow to his imperious tyranny, and let him bind over
our eyes his bandages of birth and death. We are always ourselves, and can pace
steadfastly onwards through the [138] changing
lights and shadows cast by his magic lantern on the life he cannot age. Why are
the Gods figured as ever-young, save to remind us that the true life lives
untouched by Time? We borrow some of the strength and calm of Eternity when we
try to live in it, escaping from the meshes of the great Enchanter.
Many another difficulty will stretch itself across the upward path as the
aspirant essays to tread it, but a resolute will and a devoted heart, lighted by
knowledge, will conquer all in the end and will reach the Supreme Goal. To rest
on the Law is one of the secrets of peace, to trust it utterly at all times, not
least when the gloom descends. No soul that aspires can ever fail to rise; no
heart that loves can ever be abandoned. Difficulties exist only that in
overcoming them we may grow strong, and they only who have suffered are able to
save.
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