Adyar Pamphlet No.
19
Occultism, Semi-Occultism, and Pseudo-Occultism
by
Annie Besant
First printed: September 1912
Reprinted: January 1920
A lecture delivered to the Blavatsky Lodge, London, on 30th June, 1898
1.
Speaking to the Lodge for the first time after
returning from India, it will not seem to you, I think, either strange or
inappropriate that I should take for my subject one which is largely drawn from
Indian history; not the history of the outside nation, but the history of that
inner line of thought which is of the deepest interest to us as students and as
Theosophists. And inasmuch as history continually repeats itself, such a study
may offer points of instruction to us in our own time. For I am going to ask
you to consider with me what I may perhaps define - although definition is a
little difficult - as, first, occultism, then what may be called
semi-occultism, and, thirdly, the outgrowths which follow and surround these
and which are specially marked and active at any time when true occultism is
working in the world.
2.
It is a very common blunder made by many people, to
suppose that spiritual forces have in them something which they are pleased to
call unpractical, and we continually notice an assumption, which is taken for
granted without argument, that if a nation, for instance, should turn itself
towards a spiritual ideal, or if individuals should devote themselves to the
spiritual life, that then such a nation is likely to be undistinguished along
other more evident and visible walks in life, and such an individual is likely
to lose much of what is called his practical value in the world. Such a view of
life is a blunder, and a blunder of the most complete kind. The liberation of
spiritual forces, the setting free of energies on the spiritual plane, has a
far greater effect both on the individual than can be produced by any of the
forces that are started on the lower planes of life. When a spiritual energy is
set free, it works down through the other planes of being, giving rise on each
plane to a liberation of energy, and bringing about results great in proportion
to the nature of the spiritual force. So that it is true in history, as you may
find by study, that where spiritual forces are liberated, the intellectual life
of the nation will also leap forward with tremendous energy, the emotional life
of the nation will show fresh development, and even on the lowest plane of all
- the physical, results will be brought about entirely beyond anything that could
have been achieved by the energies of the physical plane which are set to work
and which apparently cause these results. That is a principle, a law, which I
will ask you to bear in mind through all that I have to say to you - that every
force initiated on the higher planes, as it passes down to the lower, brings
about results proportionate to itself; so that it is the shortest-sighted view
of human life and of human activity which imagines that devotion to the
spiritual life, the evolution of the individual in the spiritual world, is
anything but an immense addition to all the forces of progress that work on the
earth, anything but a lifting up of the world on the great ladder up which it
is climbing.
3.
But there is another principle that we must also bear
in mind in our study, and it is this; that as forces are liberated on any
plane, the results brought about by those forces will vary in their character
according to those who utilise the energies after their liberation. As we have
often pointed out to you here, energies on the different planes of nature are
not what we call good or bad in themselves. Force is a force: energy is an
energy. When we bring in the idea of good and evil, of right and wrong, of
morality and immorality, these ideas are connected with the results brought
about by individuals in the utilisation of the forces. A time, then, of great
spiritual energy, of great liberation of forces from the spiritual plane, will
be marked to a great extent by activities of opposed characters on the lower
planes of being, and those energies which are liberated on each plane may be
taken up and used by individuals for what we should call either good or evil.
The great mark of good or evil, looking at it from this standpoint, is the use
that the individual is making of these forces, or such part of them as he is
able to control; whether he is using them for the uplifting of humanity,
whether he is regarding them as the Divine energy which he may use to forward
the Divine purposes, or whether he is simply trying to grasp them for his own
separate ends, striving to apply them to that which he desires to grasp and to
hold, serving his own purposes without regard to the Divine economy. This,
then, as I said, we will bear in mind in following out, first, as a lesson,
something of the past in India, and then in applying the lesson that thus we
learn to the movement which we know amongst ourselves at the present day, that
great spiritual movement which is manifesting itself in the world and of which
the Theosophical Society is one of the potent expressions.
4.
To begin with, what is occultism? The word is used and
misused in the most extraordinary ways. H.P. Blavatsky once defined it as the
study of mind in nature, meaning by the word mind, in that connection, the
study of the Universal Mind, the Divine Mind, the study of the workings of God
in the Universe, the study therefore of all the energies which, coming forth
from the spiritual centre, work themselves out in the worlds around us. It is
the study of the life side of the Universe, the side from which everything
proceeds and from which everything is moulded, the looking through the illusory
form to the reality which animates it; it is the study which underlies all
phenomena; it is the ceasing to be wholly blinded by these appearances in which
we so continually move and by which we are so continually deluded; it is the
piercing through the veil of maya and perceiving the reality, the one Self, the
one Life, the one Force, that which is in everything and all things in it. So
that, really, occultism, in the true sense of the word, may be said to be
identical with that vision which, as you know, is spoken of in the
Bhagavad-Gita, where Shri Krishna declares that "He who sees Me,"
that is, who sees the One Self, "in everything and everything in Me,
verily he seeth". Such a study, if you understand at all what is implied
in it, must necessarily mean the development in the one who sees of the highest
spiritual faculties, for only by the Spirit can the Spirit be known. We speak
continually of proving this, that, or the other spiritual thing. There is no
real proof possible of Spirit, save through Spirit; there is no proof of the
intellect, no proof of the emotion, no proof of the senses, which is proof when
you come to deal with the reality of the Spirit. Nothing of the nature of proof
along those lines, whether sensuous, emotional, or intellectual, can be
anything more than a suggestion, a reflection of the truth, an analogy which
may lead us on the right path, but proof in the true sense of the word it never
can be. And it has been written truly in one of the great Indian scriptures,
and repeated over and over again in the other scriptures of the world, that
there is in the full sense of the word no proof of God save the belief in the
Spirit, for only the Spirit that is akin to Him, and that is Himself, is able
to know, is able to touch.
5.
Now looking at real occultism as thus defined,
realising that no one can be in the full sense of the word an occultist save
one in whom the spiritual nature is developed and active, we should, in our
next step, be able to separate off from this true occultism very much that goes
by its name both in the past and the present, amongst those who went before us
and amongst ourselves today. But we should need, in separating off all these
forms of so-called occultism, to distinguish between those which may be said,
in a sense, to be stepping stones to the real, which were intended as
stepping-stones by those who gave them to the world and which may be used as
stepping-stones and utilised for progress, and other forms which are not really
included under the name of occultism in any true sense of the term, those
things which H.P. Blavatsky once spoke of as occult arts and which for many
people seem to include everything they regard as occultism - arts in which
certain forces of nature are utilised and in which faculties are developed on
various planes in nature below the spiritual; for there are worlds above what
we call the physical, but still below the spiritual regions, with which the
development of certain faculties brings man into touch, enabling him to control
and utilise their forces. There are almost a myriad arts and lines of study of
this kind which ought never by any real student, by anyone who is seeking the
higher truth, to be included in his thought when that thought is turned towards
occultism. And some of you might clear up much confused thinking on this
subject if you would refer to the writing of H.P. Blavatsky on Occultism versus the Occult Arts, where
she draws the dividing line extremely clearly and shows the position that these
occult arts hold, and should be recognised as holding, when we are dealing with
human evolution.
6.
True occultism, then, is that to which at first I would
ask you to turn your thoughts, and its pursuit implies, as I have said, the
development of the spiritual nature. Now the moment we speak of the development
of the spiritual nature we must at once recognise that for the larger number of
us that development must necessarily lie in the future, but that we may begin
to work towards it today; that it is of enormous import to our true progress
that we should recognise it and work towards it, and not, by misunderstanding
the nature of that development, waste our time, waste possibly many lives, by
following blind alleys and mistaken roads. The development of the spiritual
nature must succeed - and this is one of the most important points that we can
realise - must succeed the purification of the lower parts of our nature. We
must be pure emotionally and intellectually, we must have reached a certain
stage, at least, of the elimination of the personality before anything that can
rightly be called spiritual progress is within our reach. No amount of mere
intellectual development - and I will come back to that point, for I do not
wish in any way to depreciate that most necessary line of human growth - but no
amount of mere intellectual development will of itself bring about the growth
of the spiritual nature. With the fundamental reason for that I shall deal more
fully in a future lecture, but I must say in passing that the development of
the spiritual nature and of the intellectual nature are on one vital point in
direct opposition. The principle that we call the intellect is the analysing,
the dividing, the separative principle. The very purpose of its evolution is
the building up of the individual, its root lies in the ahankara, or the
"I"-making faculty, it is that which limits, which defines, which separates,
which marks off the man from every other man, which makes what we may call that
coating of selfishness which is absolutely necessary as one stage in evolution,
which is one part of our growth in this world. It is a stage through which all
humanity must pass, but which, regarded by itself, makes all those illusions
which the Spirit transcends, and gives the touch of apparent reality to the
separated self, the antagonistic self, the self that covets and grasps and
holds and sets itself against all others. So that what we might call the very
principle of illusion is represented by this intellectual faculty.
7.
Necessary as its evolution is, none the less it is on
this point in antagonism to spiritual evolution; for spiritual evolution means
the recognition and the growth of the One Self into manifested activity, first
within that sheath which has been formed by the intellect, and then by
transcending it and bringing about that realised unity which is the object of
our human evolution. It is for this that we place the unity of mankind in the
spiritual regions, it is for this that we proclaim the brotherhood of man as a
spiritual reality; for the Spirit is one, and it is only as that unity is
recognised, consciously known - not simply intellectually seen, but consciously
realised - it is only as that is done that the spiritual nature is in course of
evolution. Inasmuch as the intellect is separative and the Spirit unifying,
inasmuch as the one gives rise to illusion while the other transcends it, as
the one is the source both of individuality and of personality, whereas the
other is the source of that Oneship which we seek and shall realise - you will
readily see how in the course of evolution these two parts of the nature cannot
be regarded as causally related in the strict sense of the term, and we cannot
say that by the evolution of the intellectual nature the spiritual nature will
inevitably develop. On the contrary, we have to learn that we are not the
intellect, but are to use the intellect as an instrument; that we are not the
separated self, but the One Self living in all. That is the object of our
evolution, that the goal of our pilgrimage; and therefore occultism, which
means the study and the development of the spiritual nature, must transcend completely
the intellectual evolution. It may even in many of its earlier stages find, and
does find, its bitterest antagonist, its most dangerous enemy, in that very
maker of illusions that you may remember we are warned against in The Voice of the Silence, that most
spiritual book which so many of us have found as opening up the path to us to
the spiritual life. Recognising this, we shall naturally look forward to the
spiritual evolution as a thing to be worked for rather than to be accomplished,
from the stage at which we are at present. We should also be prepared to
realise the immense difficulty of such an achievement, to understand how much
will have to be done with the character and with the nature, how tremendous are
the demands that we shall have to meet, before anything which in the strict
sense of the term can be called occultism will be at all within our reach.
8.
In the history of the past, where true occultism was
the life of the world, where that great fount of spiritual life flowed from the
Beings in whom the spiritual nature was wholly developed, when the world was
drawing its light and its life from such Beings, it was obviously not possible
that their knowledge, their powers, their work could be largely shared by
undeveloped humanity, or even by the comparatively advanced humanity that
surrounded them. Still less was it possible that any great part of their
teaching or any true comprehension of their work and their methods could be
known to the people at large; and yet it was necessary that links should be
made, that steps, as it were, should be created. The result of this necessity
was that men who were advanced - although in them the spiritual nature was not
yet wholly evolved - men of great powers, who stand out in history as giants of
humanity, strove to make possible for the advancing ranks of mankind some
understanding of the upward path that should be trodden, some realisation of
the methods that might be adopted whereby approach might be made to the
spiritual regions.
9.
These men, great as they were, were not, as I have
said, men in whom the spiritual nature was wholly developed, supreme, complete.
Their evolution in many cases - and I speak with all reverence of those so much
greater than ourselves - may even be said to have gone along one line in excess
of other lines of their growth; so that one man might have enormously developed
intellectual power but less perfection perhaps of moral character; another
might have made great advance in devotion and might not have developed so much
of intellectual force; another might be keenly alive to the religious
necessities of man and not so much interested in his philosophical evolution;
another, again, might have turned his attention towards the development of
certain sides of man's nature which would touch the physical regions of
existence, and even to the forcing of faculties in man, which, when built up
from below, would bring him into touch with parts of the astral or the lower
mental world, and might force those faculties and the part of his nature to
which they belong in advance alike of mental and moral evolution. Along these
various lines you will readily see that individuals might have progressed, and
that each man would be characterised in his thinking and in his endeavour to
serve mankind, by his own qualities, the attributes which he had specially
evolved. So that, looking back into the ancient history of India, we find
great teachers, Rishis as they were called, of many different types, each
giving to the nation some great gift from his thought or from his knowledge,
intended to help the more advanced souls of that nation towards progress which
should end in spiritual evolution. Hence, to take one line of growth, the great
philosophical system which we find in Indian thought, such a system, for instance,
as the Vedanta. Regarded as an intellectual system of pure philosophy it puts
in a magnificent intellectual form a view of the Universe, of the One Self, of
the One Life, and of its manifestations, as illusory in the deepest
philosophical sense, that serves as an intellectual training, as a step which
men must take in learning something of the mysteries of the Universe. This
system, when studied apart from the Yoga that alone can make it practical, may
be classed under the head of semi-occultism. It is a system true within its own
realm, a system intended to help forward the progress of mankind, only capable
of being grasped, of being followed, of being studied, by souls already
advanced in mentality; but none the less it is not the spiritual truth; it is
only an intellectual presentment of one aspect of it, an intellectual showing
forth of one side of it.
10.
It is a thing that must always be remembered, that the
Spirit can never be expressed in terms of the intellect, that the One can never
be grasped in the terms of the many, and that any intellectual presentment of
spiritual truths must necessarily be partial, must necessarily be imperfect,
must be, as has often been said, a coloured glass through which the white light
is seen; a ray is passed through the prism of the intellect which breaks up the
white light of the Spirit, showing it in varied colours as these scattered
beams, each one of which is imperfect in itself. One, then, of the great gifts
to ancient India coming in this way as the result of true occultism, as the
result of the mighty spiritual life, was the philosophy of the Vedanta and all
those intellectual systems intended for the training of man, and giving, so far
as the intellect could give it, a view of the spiritual reality. But remember
the saving clause, "as far as the intellect could give it". The
intellectual view is only a partial view; and such a view, however much it may
help man to see intellectually something of the possibilities of the higher
life, can never make him realise it in consciousness, or give the true
knowledge which comes alone through the evolution of the spiritual nature
itself.
11.
Along another line of activity would come the many
schools of Yoga. These schools, as you well know, were exceedingly various in
their nature. Some of them were designed to develop the higher intellectual
consciousness in man by means of concentration, by means of meditation, and
thus to bring him into touch with the higher regions of his being; they were
intended to lead him, stage by stage, to get free from the body, to pass
consciously into higher worlds, so that his consciousness might function in
those more extended realms of being. And we find many of the teachings of Yoga
- you may read many of these systems at your leisure, those which come under
the great classification Raja Yoga - carefully adapted to aid the growth of the
mind, the evolution of the loftier mental faculties, the rising on to the
higher intellectual planes, the passing into states of consciousness far beyond
the reach of ordinary humanity. They are again, a stepping-stone offered, but
still coming under this heading that I have called semi-occultism. Other
schools were founded which dealt with man in different fashion, which strove to
force his faculties from below, to force the evolution and the training of the
astral faculties, to bring him first into touch with the astral world, to make
him familiar with a part of the phenomenal universe closely allied to the
material. These have generally been classed as the schools of Hatha Yoga, and
in them various methods were employed dealing with the lower vehicles of man.
By these methods the body was trained, was to a great extent purified and
rendered an obedient instrument. The power of the will was also enormously developed,
the man was taught to be master of his lower nature and so to take what in very
many cases was a real step upwards, although we cannot include it in any sense
of the term under the heading of true occultism.
12.
It must be remembered when dealing with all these
schools, when looking at them and striving to learn alike their use and their
abuse, that it is a great thing for a man to become master of his passions, it
is a great thing to subject the animal nature, to be able to stand unshaken, no
matter what temptations may assail the lower man. And very, very many of these
schools, which it is often the fashion in the West to scoff at and despise,
have yet in them this element, that they at least recognise that man's
intellectual nature should be master of his sensuous nature and that he should
learn complete control over the body, complete control over the passions. And
even along many of the darker lines of evolution, even in the schools that
tread the path which all those who would reach the highest should most
carefully avoid, it is none the less true that the subjugation of the lower
nature is most rigorously insisted upon. It is only the ignorant who suppose
that those darker schools are all given over to sensuous practices. Many of the
followers of those schools lead lives which, so far as that side of the nature
is concerned, might be taken as examples by an enormous majority of the men of
the western world.
13.
Now the whole of these different schools rose and
flourished in ancient India as the result of the great downpouring from the
spiritual regions on to the lower planes, and naturally they were used both for
selfish and for unselfish purposes. But in dealing with all those schools of
Yoga which train the intellect and develop the high forms of intellectual
consciousness, it is well to remember that they are real stepping stones to the
higher, and that it is a necessary stage of our progress that we should
practice concentration, that we should use meditation, that we should be
accustomed to contemplate intellectually and emotionally the ideals which
appeal to us by their grandeur and their nobility. Those are stages in our
upward path, and stages that very many of us might well be utilising now, with
a view to the higher growth, the deeper wisdom of the future. Men took up these
varying lines of evolution, stirred fundamentally by the prompting of the
Divine Life within them, ever seeking to raise them and to help their upward
growth; stirred, so far as they themselves were conscious, by the natural and
rightful desire for higher evolution, for further progress, for growth in life.
For, as we have often seen when we have been studying progress, we cannot leap
at a bound to the heights of the spiritual life; we have to climb step by step,
we have to utilise the higher thoughts in us for the subjugation of the lower,
and then in turn to outgrow that higher when a greater height comes within our
sight and without our reach. We have learnt, as we know well, in our studies,
that we may constantly eliminate lower ambitions by nourishing a higher
ambition, and that, though that higher ambition be still attached to the
personality, or even transcending the personality, be attached still to the
individual, it is none the less a stepping-stone, it is one of the ways by
which we climb. It is well continually to kill out our lower by our higher
desires, though even those higher in their turn seem lower as we are rising
above them and greater perfection comes slowly within our gaze. So that this
longing for a higher life, this desire to develop, this yearning for progress,
had, and have, their rightful place in evolution; and it is out of the ranks of
those who feel these, out of the ranks of those who use the methods which make
progress possible, that are taken those who are capable of further evolution.
They learn gradually to transcend the hope for individual progress, and learn
that that also, in the fullest sense of the term, is illusion and cannot exist
as life which is spent as part of the Divine Life, pouring itself out for
others; and no life is true, no life real, no life spiritual, save when the
very idea of the separated life is entirely transcended, and all the thought of
the being, all the energies of the life, are poured forth as part of the One
Self and no distinction is recognised. Service is then the natural expression
of the life, helping is that in which the true existence is felt. But ere it is
possible that this ideal can be even intellectually realised, some progress, at
least, must have been made in transcending what we recognise as the
personality; and it was in order to make that possible to every man immersed in
illusion, as all men have been and are, that the various methods were suggested
by those who would fain help their fellows forward, as steps on the upward
path.
14.
Others, seeing in the religious instinct in man - in
that side of his nature allied to the emotions, in which devotion finds its
root and the possibilities of its growth - seeing in that his easiest upward
path, gave to the world the various forms of religion in all their variety of
adaptation to human needs, thus making the path upwards suitable for those
whose constitution attracted them chiefly in the direction of love and of
service. Seeing, then, that all these methods of growth were most active at the
time when the real life was working at the heart of things, it will not be
difficult to understand how, as that life found fewer channels for its
expression in the world, fewer who were ready to transcend their own
limitations and to give themselves wholly as channels of the Divine Life, all
these methods lost their vitality and a great part of their usefulness. And so
we find, in looking around the India of today, that many of those things that
were living are now dead, that many of the systems that were vital are now mere
shells, forming subjects for intellectual controversy or for individual pride,
but no longer stepping stones to the higher life. Here and there, still some
gleam of the true life survives, some real use is being made of these stepping
stones upward; but so far as the great masses of the people are concerned, mere
shells and forms remain - evidences of what existed in the past, evidences, may
we dare to hope, of what may be in the future.
15.
It is hardly worth while to remind you that while
semi-occultism may serve as a stepping-stone to real occultism,
pseudo-occultism is generally a distinct obstacle and hindrance. Under this
heading may be classed as the "occult arts", in the study of which
many promising beginners have lost their way and wasted their lives. Geomancy,
palmistry, the use of the tarot, etc., all these things are well enough for
those who want to tread the by-ways of nature and to gather knowledge of her
obscurer workings. They may be harmless, interesting, even useful in a small
way, but they are not occultism and their professors are not occultists. A
little success in their pursuit - and success does not demand high qualities of
either head or heart - is apt to breed the most absurd vanity and pretentiousness,
as though this dalliance with the apsaras of the kingdom of occultism converted
a commonplace man into one of its rulers, a mage. A man may be past-master of
all these arts, and yet be further away from occultism than is a pure and
selfless woman seeking only to love and to serve, or a generous, clean-souled
man, devoted to helping his fellows. And if these arts be turned to selfish
purposes, or if they nourish vanity, their professor may find himself
approaching perilously near to the gateway of the left-hand path.
16.
Looking for the application of this to our present
movement, the lesson springs easily enough to our gaze. Again, in our own days,
a great outpouring of real life has occurred, again an effort has been made by
those who are the guardians, the Reservoirs, of that life for our humanity, to
pour out the true spiritual energies for the helping and the uplifting of man
in every region of his being, the manifesting again of the possibility of the
real life. This has been marked by certain definite statements made from time
to time, by hints thrown out here and there by her who was the special
messenger in our own day of this possibility opening up for our own race. And
there is one passage in that paper to which I referred at the beginning, which
gives us in a phrase the reality of life: we are told that when a man becomes a
real occultist he becomes only a force for good in the world. Here is a
sentence that people read without realising at all its meaning, a sentence that
comes in the middle of many other statements, and does not strike with its full
force on the unprepared mind and heart. For many things may be said which are
missed for want of receptivity, and many truths are proclaimed which remain
dark and silent, save to those whose eyes are beginning to be opened to see,
and whose ears are beginning to be opened to hear. And that statement, which
really puts the occult life in a few words, is one that most readers pass by
without realising its significance. There is no true spiritual life, there is
no real occultism, until the man at least recognises that the goal of his
living is to become a force for good, and that only, in the world. He is no
longer to seek his own progress, no longer to seek his own life, no longer to
seek his own development - no longer to ask aught that heaven or earth or any
of the other worlds can give him for himself. There is only one thing left
within him, the longing to be of service: only one thing the motive of his
being, to be a channel for the great life of God, to enable that life to be
scattered more effectively over the world of man, and over all worlds where
that life exists.
17.
When that is recognised, even afar off, when that ideal
first dimly dawns upon the human heart - come it by way of intellectual apprehension
of its sublimity, or by way of devotional recognition of its truth - then for
the first time the spiritual life stirs within the man, the first germ of the
spiritual nature begins to quicken into life. And so we begin to realise that
if true occultism would be reached and understood by any of us, we should have
to begin the preparation for it by working at character in the way that every
religion has taught. How often do we hear it said amongst ourselves:
18.
"We know all these moral truths, there is nothing
new in Theosophy when it simply reiterates the old morality. When we are told
to be unselfish, to seek to help others forward, to eliminate the personality,
to kill out our faults, it is all an old story that we have heard to weariness.
We want something new, we want some fresh knowledge, some facts of the astral
world, some strange things of the mental region - that is what we demand from
Theosophy, that is what we are seeking, and we do not desire to have pressed
upon us these ethical maxims, these continual repetitions, these old-world
stories which every religion has made familiar, and which we can hear from any
pulpit."
19.
And yet the truth of the matter is that along that path
only the spiritual life has been and is possible for man; that the Divine
Teachers who gave the religions to the world with their perpetual insistence on
morality, gave them knowing the spiritual life, and knowing that only along
that line the real progress of man into unity with God was possible. And when
it was again declared by the lips of the Christ that only he might gain his
life who lost it, that those who would be perfect must sacrifice all that they
had, when he again reiterated the ancient teaching that narrow was the path and
straight was the gateway, he was only repeating what all true occultists have
taught as to the necessity of the training for the spiritual life.
20.
As progress is made, all those methods of Yoga which
tend to help forward the individual, which are followed in order to gain
progress, practised in order to evolve faculties, and used in order that the
individual may faster forward himself - all these are dropped, and Yoga is
regarded, not as the means of self-evolution, as we are accustomed to regard it
here, but as the using of great forces for the lifting and the helping of
humanity, with utter disregard for the going forward of him who is using them,
with no thought of progress on the part of him who is wielding them for the
helping of man. For in truth all control of higher forces, all utilisation of
these vast energies, ought to come only within the grasp of man when he has
transcended the personality and has learnt to use them only for the helping of
all. We readily admit this in the common things of life, and recognise the
difference between learning the use of an instrument and mere holding an
instrument without knowing how to use it. A pen, for example is one of the most
useful of instruments, but its utility depends upon the brain and the heart
behind it, upon the knowledge and the skill that wield it; and a pen in the
hands of a child is of no more use than any fragment of wood that the same
child might pick up to use as a toy in its play. Very much the same is the
grasping of the forces of the superphysical world by those who have not yet conquered
the lower nature, eliminated personal desires and consecrated themselves wholly
to the divine service. They are, truly, picking up an instrument which may be
used for the highest and noblest ends; they are, truly, placing their hands
upon a tool, which in hands that know how to use it, may serve for the
salvation of the race; but unless the spiritual nature be developed, that tool
fails in its highest purposes, that instrument fails in all its noblest
possibilities. And it has this peculiarity, that whereas the pen that I used as
a symbol might be comparatively harmless in the hands of the child, the
grasping of those forces by one in whom the personality is not eliminated may
become a source of danger alike to himself and others, and may tend to retard
the progress of the race instead of lifting it upwards. That is why some of us
who have learnt but the mere alphabet of these great truths, lay so much stress
- stress to weariness, as I know some of you think when I am speaking to you -
on the moral training which must precede all attempt at occult study. H.P.
Blavatsky gave us the same lesson when she herself said that she had blundered
in teaching part of the alphabet of occult knowledge without insisting upon
that old precept that the moral growth must come before the occult training,
and that the character must be purified, raised and spiritualised before anyone
should dare to lay his hand upon the latch of the occult gateway. Hence it is
that those qualifications that we have so often studied are made qualifications
for initiation; hence it is that there has even been the demand that only the
pure should enter, that only the selfless should come in.
21.
If I have spoken of the past to you tonight, if I have
reminded you that amongst us today the very outburst of the new spiritual life
will cause activity on all the lower planes, it is because I would bring the
experience of the past to reinforce a lesson so often given from this platform,
it is because I would warn you of the dangers that surround us on every side -
dangers that some of us are beginning keenly to recognise, and to recognise
just because they have to some extent struck us, and have therefore made
progress the more difficult. So that it is our duty as Theosophists, as would
be students of the science of the soul, to be careful that in all things
character precedes any attempt at the gaining of power, that purity,
selflessness, devotion, utter self surrender, be found in us ere we touch the
Ark of occultism - for without these any success is a defeat, without these any
attempt is doomed to failure. And surely it is better for us to learn from the
experience of the past than by the bitter suffering that grows out of the
personal experience of today; better to learn by the authority of the Great
Teachers who have proclaimed the lesson over and over again, than to have to
learn it by the suffering that follows from grasping powers ere we are ready to
use them, from plucking the fruit of knowledge ere it is ripe for our
consumption, from striving to rule ere yet we have learnt to obey, and from
endeavouring to snatch at the mighty forces of the spiritual realm until we
have learnt that great lesson of the Spirit - that only by giving is the Spirit
shown, that only by utter abnegation is the true life realised. As the very
life of God in manifestation is a life that gives everything and asks nothing
back, so those who would reach unity with Him and realise what the spiritual
life means, must learn to give and not to take, to help and not to hold, to
pour out without seeking or looking for return. Only as we learn that, do we
become fit candidates for the higher knowledge, only as the heart is thus
rendered absolutely pure may we dare to face the presence of the Master, hoping
that when "He looks at that heart He may find no stain therein."
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