Riddle of
Life
And how Theosophy answers it
by
Annie
Besant
THE THEOSOPHICAL PUBLISHING HOUSE ADYAR
First Edition 1911
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
THE following chapters appeared in serial form in The Theosophist, under the
heading 'Elementary Theosophy'. They are published in this small book in answer
to the great demand for clear statements of the answers which Theosophy gives to
the Riddle of Life. The illustrations are reproduced on a smaller scale from
Man, Visible and Invisible, by C.W. Leadbeater.
CONTENTS
|
CHAPTER |
PAGE |
I |
Meaning of Theosophy
|
1
|
II |
The Solar System
|
4
|
III |
Man and His Worlds
|
8
|
IV |
Man and His Mortal Bodies
|
13
|
The Physical Body
|
14
|
The Astral Body
|
15
|
The Mental Body
|
18
|
V |
Man's Immortal Bodies
|
20
|
VI |
The Law of Re-Birth
|
23
|
Reincarnation in the Past
|
23
|
Reincarnation and its Necessity
|
25
|
Why our Past Lives are Forgotten
|
29
|
VII |
The Riddle of Love and Hate
|
33
|
VIII |
Karma—Law of Action and Re-Action
|
43
|
IX |
The Three Threads of the Cord of Fate
|
46
|
X |
Thought-Power and its Use
|
50
|
XI |
Steps on the Path
|
53
|
XII |
Our Elder Brothers
|
57
|
ILLUSTRATIONS
|
|
|
Plate I
Astral Body in Intense Anger |
Plate II
Astral Body of the Savage |
Plate III
Astral Body of Man in Love |
|
Plate IV
Astral Body of Developed Man |
Plate
I. THE ASTRAL BODY IN INTENSE
ANGER - Frontispiece
II. THE ASTRAL BODY OF THE SAVAGE
III. THE ASTRAL BODY OF MAN IN LOVE
IV. THE ASTRAL BODY OF DEVELOPED MAN
CHAPTER I
THE MEANING OF THEOSOPHY
THE word Theosophy' is now on the lips of many, and as M. Jourdain spoke prose
without knowing it, so many are theosophists who do not realise it. For
Theosophy is Divine Wisdom, and that Wisdom is the Light which lighteth every
man who cometh into the world. It belongs to none exclusively; it belongs to
each inclusively; the power to receive it is the right to possess it; the fact
of possession makes the duty of sharing. Every religion, every philosophy, every
science, every activity, draws what it has of truth and beauty from the Divine
Wisdom, but cannot claim it as its own against others. Theosophy does not belong
to the Theosophical Society; the Theosophical Society belongs to Theosophy.
What is the essence of Theosophy? It is the fact that man, being himself divine,
can know the Divinity whose life he shares. As an inevitable corollary to this
supreme truth comes the fact of the brotherhood of man. The divine Life is the
spirit in everything that exists, from the atom to the archangel; the grain of
dust could not be were God absent from it; the loftiest seraph is but a spark
from the eternal Fire, which is God. Sharers in one Life, all form one
brotherhood. The immanence of God, the solidarity of man, such are the basic
truths of Theosophy.
Its secondary teachings are those which are the common teachings of all
religions, living or dead; the
2
unity of God; the triplicity of His nature; the descent of spirit into matter,
and hence the hierarchies of intelligences, whereof humanity is one; the growth
of humanity by the unfoldment of consciousness and the evolution of bodies—i.e.,
reincarnation; the progress of this growth under inviolable law, the law of
causality—i.e., karma; the environment to this growth, the three worlds,
physical, astral, and mental, or earth, the intermediate world and heaven; the
existence of divine Teachers, superhuman men.
All religions teach or have taught these, though from time to time one or
another of these teachings may temporarily fall into the background; ever they
reappear—as the doctrine of reincarnation fell out of ecclesiastical
Christianity, but is now returning to it, was submerged, but is again emerging.
It is the mission of the Theosophical Society as a whole to spread these truths
in every land, though no individual member is bound to accept any one of them;
every member is left absolutely free, to study as he pleases, to accept or to
reject; but if the Society, as a collectivity, ceased to accept and to spread
them, it would also cease to exist.
This unity of teachings among the world-religions is due to the fact that they
are all founded by members of the Brotherhood of divine Teachers, the custodians
of the Divine Wisdom, of Theosophy. From this Brotherhood come out, from time to
time, the Founders of new religions, who ever bring with them the same
teachings, but shape the form of those teachings to suit the conditions of the
time, such as the intellectual stage of the people to whom They come, their
type, their needs, their
3
capacities. The essentials are ever the same; the non-essentials vary. This
identity is shown in the symbols which appear in ail faiths, for symbols form
the common language of religions. The circle, the triangle, the cross, the eye,
the sun, the star, with many another, ever bear their silent testimony to the
fundamental unity of the religions of the world. Understanding this, the
Theosophical Society serves every religion within its own domain, and draws them
together into a Brotherhood.
In morals, Theosophy builds its teachings on the unity, seeing in each form the
expression of a common life, and therefore the fact that what injures one
injures all. To do evil—i.e., to throw poison into the life-blood of humanity—is
a crime against the unity. Theosophy has no code of morals, being itself the
embodiment of the highest morality; it presents to its students the highest
moral teachings of all religions, gathering the most fragrant blossoms from the
gardens of the world-faiths. Its Society has no code, for any code that could be
generally imposed would be at the average low level of the day, and the Society
seeks to raise its members above the ordinary' level by ever presenting to them
the highest ideals, and infusing into them the loftiest aspirations. It leaves
aside the law of Moses to walk in the spirit of the Buddha, of the Christ. It
seeks to evolve the inner law, not to impose an outer. Its method with its least
evolved members is not expulsion, but reformation.
The embodiment of the Divine Wisdom in an organisation gives a nucleus from
which its life-forces may radiate. A new and strong link is thus made between
the spiritual and the material worlds; it is in very truth a sacrament, 'the
outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace', a witness of the
life of God in man.
CHAPTER II
THE SOLAR SYSTEM
A SOLAR system is a group of worlds circling round a central sun, from which
they draw light, life and energy. On this all theosophists and non-theosophists
are agreed. But the theosophist sees much more than this in a solar system. It
is to him a vast field of evolution, presided over by a divine LORD, who has
created its matter out of the ether of space, permeating this matter with His
Life, organising it into His Body, and from His Heart, the Sun, pouring out the
energy which circulates through the system as its life-blood—life-blood which
returns to the heart when its nutrient properties are exhausted, to be recharged
and sent forth again on its life-sustaining work. Hence a solar system is, to
the theosophist, not merely a splendid mechanism of physical matter, but the
expression of a life, and the nursery of lives derived therefrom, instinct in
every part with latent or active intelligence, desire and activity. It 'exists
for the sake of the self, in order that the germs of divinity, the embryonic
Selves emanated from the supreme Self, may unfold into the likeness of the
parent-God, whose nature they share, being truly 'partakers of the divine
Nature'. Its globes are 'man-bearing', and not men alone but also sub-human
beings, are its inhabitants. In worlds subtler than the physical dwell beings
more highly evolved than men, as also beings less evolved; beings clothed in
bodies of
5
matter finer than the physical, and therefore invisible to physical eyes, but
none the less active and intelligent; beings among whose hosts myriads of men
are found, men who have, for the time, discarded their fleshly raiment, but who,
none the less, are thinking, loving, active men. And even during life on our
physical earth, encased in the garment of the flesh, men are in touch with these
other worlds and other-world beings, and may be in conscious relation with them,
as the founders, prophets, mystics and seers of ail the faiths have witnessed.
The divine LORD manifests Himself in His system in three Aspects, or 'Persons',
the Creator, the Preserver, the Regenerator; these are the Holy Spirit, Son and
Father of the Christian; the Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva of the Hindu; the
Chochmah, Binah and Kether of the Hebrew Kabbalist; the Third, Second and First
Logos of the theosophist, who uses the old Greek term,'the WORD', for the
manifested God.
The matter of the system is built up by the Third Logos, seven types of atoms
being formed by Him; aggregations composed of these yield the seven fundamental
kinds of matter found in the system, each denser than its predecessor, each kind
being correlated with a distinct stage of consciousness. We call/the matter
composed of a particular type of atom, a plane, or world, and hence recognise
seven such planes in the solar system; the two highest are the divine, or
super-spiritual planes, the planes of the Logoi, and the lower of these two is
the birthplace and habitat of the human self, the Monad, the God in man; the two
succeeding are the spiritual planes, reaching which man realises himself as
divine; the fifth, still densifying, is the intellectual plane; the sixth, the
emotional and passional, the seat of sensations and
6
desires, is generally called the astral plane; the seventh, the physical plane.
The matter of the spiritual planes is correlated with the spiritual stage of
consciousness, and is so subtle and so plastic that it yields to every impulse
of the spirit, and the sense of separateness is lost in that of unity. The
matter of the intellectual plane is correlated with the intellectual stage of
consciousness, with thought, cognition, and every change in thought is
accompanied with a vibration of its matter. The late W.K. Clifford seems to have
recognised 'mind-stuff as a constituent of the cosmos, for, as every force
needed its medium, thought, regarded as a force, needed a special kind of matter
for its working. The matter of the astral plane is correlated with the desire
stage of consciousness, every change of emotion, passion, desire and sensation
being accompanied with a vibration of its matter. The matter of the physical
plane is the coarsest or densest, and is the first to be organised for the
active expression of human consciousness.
These seven kinds of matter, interpenetrating each other—as physical solids,
liquids, gases and ethers interpenetrate each other in the objects round us—are
not all spread evenly over the whole area occupied by a solar system, but are
partly aggregated into planets, worlds or globes; the three finest kinds of
matter do spread over the whole, and are thus common to the system, but the four
denser kinds compose and surround the globes, and the fields occupied by these
are not in mutual touch.
We read in various scriptures of 'Seven Spirits'; Christianity and Islam have
seven Archangels; Zoroastrianism, seven Amshaspends; Hebraism has seven
Sephiroth; Theosophy calls them the seven planetary
7
Logoi; and they are the rulers of the planets Vulcan, Venus, Earth, Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Each of these seven planets is the turning-point in a chain of interlinked
worlds, presided over by the planetary Logos, and each chain is a separate field
of evolution from its earliest beginnings up to man. There are thus seven such
subsidiary fields of evolution In a solar system, and they are, naturally, at
different stages of progress. The chain consists of seven globes, of which
generally one is of physical and six of finer matter; in our own chain, however,
our earth has two sister globes visible to physical sight — Mars and Mercury—and
four invisible companions. The wave of evolutionary life, bearing the evolving
beings, occupies one globe at a time—with certain special exceptions which need
not be mentioned here—passing on to the next in order when the lessons on the
earlier have been learned. Thus our humanity has travelled from globe 1, on the
mental plane, to globe 2, on the astral; from that to globe 3, Mars, and to
globe 4, our Earth; it will pass on to globe 5, Mercury, and from that to globe
6, again on the astral, and thence to globe 7, on the mental. This completes a
great evolutionary Round, as it is aptly called.
This huge scheme of evolution cannot be readily grasped by the ignorant, any
more than can the corresponding scheme of the astronomer, which deals only with
the physical plane. Nor is it necessary that it should be understood by those of
small intelligence, since it has no immediate bearing on life. It is interesting
only to the man who, desiring to understand, is ready to grapple with the deeper
problems of nature, and does not grudge strenuous intellectual exertion.
CHAPTER III
MAN AND HIS WORLDS
MAN is a spiritual intelligence, who has taken flesh with the object of gaining
experience in worlds below the spiritual, in order that he may be able to master
and to rule them, and in later ages take his place in the creative and directing
Hierarchies of the universe.
There is a universal law that a consciousness can only know th Jt which it can
reproduce; one consciousness can know another in proportion as it is able to
reproduce within itself the changes in that other. If a man feels pain when
another man feels it, happiness when the other feels it, anxiety, confidence,
etc., with the other, at once reproducing his moods, that man knows the other.
Sympathy—feeling together—is the condition of knowledge. But consciousness works
in bodies; we are clothed, not naked; and these bodies are composed of matter.
Consciousness may affect consciousness, but how can consciousness affect these
bodies?
There is another law, that a change in consciousness is at once accompanied with
a vibration in the matter near it, and each change has its own answering
vibration, as a musical sound and a particular length and thickness of string
invariably go together. In a solar system all the separated consciousnesses are
part of the consciousness of the divine LORD of the system, and all the matter
of the system is His Body—'in Him we live and move and have
9
our being'. He has formed this matter and related it to Himself, so that it
answers everywhere by innumerable kinds of vibrations to the innumerable changes
in His consciousness, each to each. Over His whole vast kingdom his
consciousness and His matter answer each other in perfect and perpetual harmony
and inviolable relation.
Man shares with the divine LORD this relation, but in an elementary and feeble
way; to the changes in his consciousness answer vibrations in the matter around
him, but this is only perfect and complete, at first, in the super-spiritual
worlds, where he exists as an emanation from the LORD; there—every vibration of
matter is answered by a change in his consciousness, and he knows that world,
his birthplace and his home. But in worlds of matter denser than that lofty
region he is as yet a stranger; the vibrations of that denser matter, though all
around him, do not affect him, are to him non-existent, as the waves which carry
messages by wireless telegraphy do not affect us in this world, and are to our
senses non-existent. How then can he grow to the likeness of his divine Parent,
to whom every vibration has a message, who can set up any willing vibration in
matter by a change in consciousness, who is conscious and active at every point
of His system?
The answer comes in the words: involution and evolution. He must involve himself
in matter, attract to himself an encasement of matter, draw round himself
materials from all the worlds—spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical;
this is the involving of spirit in matter—involution—sometimes called the
descent of spirit into matter, sometimes the fall of man. Then, having
10
acquired this encasement, he must slowly try to understand the changes in
himself—in his own consciousness—the surging, confusing, bewildering changes
that come and go without any will of his, due to the vibrations set up in this
material encasement of his by vibrations in the larger world around him, and
that force upon his consciousness unsought changes and moods. He has to
disentangle these, to refer them to their proper origins, to learn through these
the existence and the details of the surrounding worlds, to organise his own
appropriated matter—his bodies—into more and more complex, receptive and
discriminative agents, to admit to or shut out from these bodies at will the
vibrations that hurtle round them outside, and at last, through them, to impress
the changes in his consciousness on external nature, and thus to become its
ruler instead of its slave. This is evolution, the ascent of the spirit through
matter, its unfolding within a material encasement, drawn from the various
worlds which form its environment, the permeation with its own life of the
matter it appropriates, thus rendering it the docile servant of spirit, and
redeeming it from its cruder uses to the service of the liberated Sons of God.
This material encasement, drawn from the different worlds, must be gradually
organised, by impacts from without and answers from within, into a 'body', or a
vehicle of consciousness. It is organised from below upwards, or from denser to
finer, the materials from each world being organised separately, as a means of
receiving communications from, and acting upon its own world. The physical
material is first drawn into a fairly compact mass, and the organs which carry
on life-processes, and
11
those of the senses, are first slowly evolved; the wonderful and complicated
physical body is evolved through millions of years, and is still evolving; it
puts man into touch with the physical world around him, which he can see, hear,
touch, taste and smell, and in which he can bring about changes by the use of
his brain and nerves, directing and controlling his muscles, hands and feet.
This body is not perfect, for there is still much in the physical world around
it to which it cannot answer—forms, like atoms, which it cannot see, sounds
which it cannot hear, and forces which it cannot perceive, till they have
brought about effects by moving large masses of matter big enough for it to see.
He has made delicate instruments to help his senses and to increase their
perceptive range—telescopes and microscopes to help the eye, microphones to help
the ear, galvanometers to find out forces which escape his senses. But presently
the evolution of his .own body will bring all his physical world within his ken.
Now that the physical body is highly organised, the next finer material, the
astral, is being similarly evolved, and is bringing man gradually into touch
with the astral—the emotional, passional, desire—world around him. Most of the
people of the advanced races are becoming slightly conscious of astral impacts,
while some are distinguishing them clearly. Premonitions, warnings, conscious
touch with the 'dead', etc., all are affections of the astral body from the
astral world. They are vague and dim because of the poor organisation possessed
by this body at present, but those who have forced its evolution are free of the
astral world, as everyone is of the physical.
12
The third state of matter, the mental, is also in course of organisation, and is
putting man into touch with the intellectual world around him. As the mental
body evolves the man comes into conscious relation with mental currents, with
the minds of others near and distant 'living' and 'dead'.
The spiritual worlds still remain after this for man to conquer, and they have
their appropriate body, the 'spiritual body' of which St Paul speaks. This
organisation of matter to be the servant of spirit is the part assigned to man
in the great workshop of the worlds, and when the human stage is over there is
nothing in the solar system which he is incapable of knowing and affecting. He
came forth from the divine LORD pure indeed, but ignorant and useless outside
the subtle region of his birth; he returns, after his long pilgrimage, a wise
and strong Son of God, ready to bear his part throughout the ages of the future
as a minister of the divine Will in ever-widening fields of service.
CHAPTER IV
MAN AND HIS MORTAL BODIES
THE worlds in which man is evolving as he treads the circle of births and deaths
are three: the physical world, the astral or intermediate world and the mental
or heavenly world. In these three he lives from birth to death in his waking
day-life; in the two latter he lives from birth to death in his sleeping
night-life, and for a while after death; into the last he occasionally, but
rarely, enters in his sleeping night-life, in high trance, and in it he spends
the most important part of his life after death, the period spent there
lengthening as he evolves.
The three bodies in which he functions in these worlds are all mortal; they are
born and they die. They improve life after life, becoming more and more worthy
to serve as the instruments of the unfolding spirit. They are copies in denser
matter of the undying spiritual bodies, which are unaffected by birth and death,
and from the clothing of the spirit in the higher worlds, wherein he lives as
the spiritual man, while he lives here as the man of flesh, the 'carnal' man.
These undying spiritual bodies are that of which St Paul speaks: 'We know that
if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved we have a building of
God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan,
earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven' (2
Cor., V. 1, 2). These are the immortal bodies, and they will be dealt with in
another chapter of this series.
14
The three mortal bodies are: the physical, the astral and the mental, and they
are related severally to the three worlds above-named.
THE PHYSICAL BODY
This is at present the most highly-developed body of man, and the one with which
we are all familiar. It consists of solid, liquid, gaseous and etheric matter,
the first three exquisitely organised into cells and tissues, these being built
into organs which enable the consciousness to become aware of the outside world,
and the latter possessing vortices through which forces pour. As the etheric
part of the body separates at death from the solid, liquid and gaseous parts,
the physical body is often subdivided into dense and etheric; the former is
composed of the organs which receive and act; the latter is the medium of the
life-forces and their transmitter to its dense comrade. Any tearing of the
etheric part from the dense body during physical life is unwholesome; it is torn
out by anaesthetics, and slips out, undriven, in some peculiar organisations,
generally termed 'mediumistic'; apart from its denser comrade it is helpless and
unconsious, a drifting cloud with force-centres, useless when there is nothing
to which it can transmit the forces playing through it, and subject to
manipulation by outside entities, who can use it as a matrix for
materialisation. It cannot go far from the dense part of the body, since the
latter would perish if disconnected from it; when disconnection occurs the dense
part 'dies'—i.e., loses the inpouring of the vital forces which sustain its
activities—even then the etheric part, or etheric double, hovers near its
life-partner, and is the 'wraith', or 'shade', sometimes seen after death,
15
drifting over graves. The physical body as a whole is man's medium for
communication with the physical world, and it is sometimes called, for this
reason, the 'body of action'. It receives also vibrations from the subtler
worlds, and when it is able to reproduce these it 'feels' and 'thinks', its
nervous system being organised to reproduce these in physical matter. As the
viewless air, strongly vibrating, throws the denser water into ripples, as the
viewless light throws the rods and cones of the retina into activity, so does
the viewless matter of the subtler worlds throw into responsive vibrations the
denser matter of our physical body, both etheric and dense. As evolution
proceeds, and the physical body evolves—i.e., appropriates finer and finer
combinations of matter from the outside world—it becomes responsive to more and
more rapid vibratory waves, and the man becomes more and more 'sensitive'.
Racial evolution largely consists in this ever-increasing sensitiveness of the
nervous system to outside impacts; for health, the sensitiveness must remain
within limits of elasticity—i.e., the system must immediately regain its normal
condition after distortion—if this condition be present, such sensitiveness is
on the crest of the evolutionary wave, and makes possible the manifestation of
genius; if it be not present, if equilibrium be-not swiftly and spontaneously
restored, then the sensitiveness is unhealthy and mischievous, leading to
degeneration, and finally, if unchecked, to madness.
THE ASTRAL BODY
The development of this body differs enormously in different persons, but in all
it is the body which yields the
16 -
experience of pleasure and pain, which is thrown into action by passion, desire
and emotion, and in which reside the centres of our sense-organs—of sight,
hearing, taste, smell and touch. If the passion, desire and emotion are low,
sensual, animal, then its matter is coarse, its vibrations consequently are
comparatively slow, and its colours are dark and unattractive—browns, dark reds
and greens, and their combinations, lit from time to time with flashes of
scarlet.1 (See Plate II, which illustrates the astral body of a savage:
brown-red indicates sensuality and greed; grey-green indicates deceit and
cunning; brown indicates selfishness; scarlet on left of head indicates anger;
yellow round head indicates intelligence; grey-blue above head indicates
primitive religious feeling—fetish worship, etc.; touches of deep rose colour
indicate beginning of love.) As evolution goes on the matter becomes finer, and
the colours clearer, purer and more brilliant. (See Plate IV, the developed
astral body: green indicates sympathy and adaptability; rose indicates love;
blue indicates religious feelings; yellow indicates intelligence; violet above
head indicates spirituality. These plates are not fanciful, but were drawn by an
artist to the descriptions given by clairvoyant investigators.)
We are using this body throughout our waking hours, and in educated and refined
people it has reached a fairly high stage of evolution. Its finer matter is
closely in touch with the coarser matter of the mental body, and the two are
constantly working together, acting and reacting on
1 These illustrations are produced from Man,Visible and Invisible, by C.W.
Leadbeater. The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar.
17
each other. To gain a definite idea of these changes in the astral body the
reader should turn to Plates I and III, which depict the influence of love and
hate. Plate III illustrates some of the effects seen in the astral body of the
man in love: the ordinary appearance of the astral body is transformed inasmuch
as another human being has, for the time, become the centre of his world.
Selfishness, deceit and anger have vanished, and an immense increase in the
crimson colour of love is observable. Other undesirable changes there are, but
it is an opening of the golden gates for the one who experiences it, and it is
his fault if they close again. Plate I shows the terrible effects upon the
astral body of intense anger: the whole organism is suffused by the black hue of
malice and ill-will, which expresses itself in coils or vortices of thunderous
blackness, from which fiery arrows of anger dart out, seeking to injure the one
for whom the anger is felt—a tremendous and truly awful spectacle.
In sleep the astral body slips out of the physical, in company with the mental
and higher bodies, and in the class of people just mentioned the consciousness
functions in it during the hours of sleep of the physical body. We learn much
during our sleep, and the knowledge' thus gained slowly filters into the
physical brain, and is occasionally impressed upon it as a vivid and
illuminative dream. For the most part the consciousness in the astral world
concerns itself little with the happiness there, being chiefly interested in its
own exercise in thought and feeling; but it is possible to turn it outwards, and
to gain knowledge of the astral world. Communication with friends who have lost
their physical bodies by death is constantly carried on there, and the memory
may be
18
brought back into waking consciousness, thus bridging the gulf otherwise made by
death.
Premonitions, presentiments, the sensing of unseen presences and many allied
experiences are due to the activity of the astral body and its reaction on the
physical; their ever-increasing frequency is merely the result of its evolution
among educated people. In a few generations it will be so generally developed
that it will become as familiar as the physical body. After death we live for
some time in the astral world in the astral body used during our life on earth,
and the more we learn to control and use it wisely now the better for us after
death.
THE MENTAL BODY
This body, of finer material than the astral as the astral is finer than the
physical, is the body which answers by its vibrations to our changes of thought.
Every change in thought makes a vibration in our mental body, and this,
transmitted by the astral to the physical, causes activity in the nervous matter
of our brains. This activity in the nervous cells causes many electrical and
chemical changes in them, but it is the thought activity which causes these, and
not the changes which produce thought, as the materialists of the nineteenth
century imagined.
The mental body, like the astral, varies much in different people; it is
composed of coarser or of finer matter, according to the needs of the more or
less unfolded consciousness connected with it. In the educated it is active and
well-defined; in the undeveloped it is cloudy and inchoate. Its matter, drawn
from the mental plane, is that of the heaven-world, and it is continuously
19
active, for man thinks in his waking consciousness when out of the physical body
in sleep, and after death, and lives wholly in thought and emotion when he
leaves the astral world behind him, and passes into heaven. As this is the body
in which long centuries will be passed in the heaven-world, it is only rational
to try to improve it as much as possible here. The means are study, thought, the
exercise of good emotions, aspiration (prayer) and beneficent endeavours, and,
above all, regular and strenuous meditation. The using of these will mean a
rapid evolution of the mental body, and an immense enrichment of the heavenly
life. Evil thoughts of all kinds befoul and injure it, and, if persisted in,
will become veritable diseases and maimings of the mental body, incurable during
its period of life.
Such are man's three mortal bodies: he casts off the physical at death, the
astral when ready to enter the heaven-world. When he has finished his heaven
life his mental body also disintegrates, and he is a spirit clad in his immortal
bodies. And descending for rebirth a new mental body is formed and a new astral,
conformable to his character, and these attach themselves to his physical body,
and he enters by birth on a new period of mortal life.
CHAPTER V
MAN'S IMMORTAL BODIES
'WE have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens', said the great Christian Initiate St Paul, 'for in this [body] we
groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from
heaven'.1 This heavenly house it is which is built of man's immortal bodies, the
habitation of the spirit through unending ages, the dwelling-place of man
himself, through births and deaths, through the measureless period of his
immortal life in manifestation.
The spirit which is 'the offspring of God'2 abides ever in the bosom of the
Father, in very truth a Son of God, sharer in His eternal life. God made man 'to
be the image of His own eternity'.3 This spirit we call the Monad, because it is
a unit, the very essence of Selfhood. The Monad, when he descends into matter in
order to conquer and spiritualise it, appropriates to himself an atom of each of
the three higher worlds, to make the nucleus of his three higher bodies—the
super-spiritual, the spiritual and the intellectual. To these, by a thread of
spiritual (buddhic) matter, he attaches also a particle from each of the three
lower worlds, the nucleus of the three lower bodies.
1 Corinthians, V. 1,2.
2 Acts, XVII. 29
3 The Wisdom of Solomon, II. 23.
21
For long, long ages he broods over these, as his future mortal bodies, just
touched with his life, climb slowly upwards through the mineral, vegetable and
animal kingdoms; meanwhile little aggregations of the matter of the three higher
worlds, the 'building of God...in the heavens' form a channel for his life,
beginning to manifest in those worlds; and when the animal form has reached the
point at which the upclimbing life makes strong appeal to the higher, he sends
down through these an answering pulse of his life, and the intellectual body is
suddenly completed, as light flashes out between the carbons of an electric arc.
The man has individualised for life in the lower worlds.
The super-spiritual (atmic) body is but an atom of its lofty world, finest film
of matter, embodiment of spirit, 'God made flesh' in a very real sense, divinity
dipping down into the ocean of matter, not less divine because embodied.
Gradually into this super-spiritual body will pass the pure result of all
experiences, stored up in eternity, the two lower immortal bodies gradually
merging themselves in it, blending with it, the glorious vesture of a man
consciously divine, made perfect.
The spiritual (buddhic) body is of the second manifested world, the world of
pure spiritual wisdom, knowledge and love in one, sometimes called the
'Christ-body', as it is this which is born into activity at the first great
Initiation, and which develops to the 'fulness of the measure of the stature of
Christ'1 on the path of holiness. It is fed by all lofty and loving aspirations,
by pure compassion and all-embracing tenderness and pity.
'Ephesians. IV. 13.
22
The intellectual (causal) body is the higher mind, by which the man deals with
abstractions, which is 'of the nature of knowledge',1 in which he knows truth by
intuition, not reasoning, borrowing from the lower mind ratiocinative methods
only to establish in the lower world abstract truths which he himself knows
directly. The man in this body is called the ego, and when this body blends with
the next above it, he is called the spiritual ego, and begins to realise his own
divinity. It is fed and developed by abstract thinking, by strenuous meditation,
by dispassion, by the yoking of intellect to service. It is by nature
separative, being the instrument of individualisation, and must grow strong and
self-sustaining in order to give the necessary stability to the subtle spiritual
body with which it is to blend.
These are man's immortal bodies, subject neither to birth nor death; they give
the continuous memory which is the essence of individuality; they are the
treasure-house of all that deserves immortality; into them can enter 'nothing
that defileth'2; they are the everlasting dwelling-place of the spirit. In these
the promise is realised: 'I will dwell in them and walk in them.'3 These fulfil
the prayer of the Christ: That they also may be one in Us.'4 These make good the
triumphant cry of the Hindu: 'I am Thou.'
1 Prashna Upanishad, IV. 9.
2 Revelation, XXI. 27.
3 2 Corinthians, VI. 16. 4Sf John, XVII. 21.
CHAPTER VI
THE LAW OF RE-BIRTH
REINCARNATION IN THE PAST
THERE is, perhaps, no philosophical doctrine in the world that has so
magnificent an intellectual ancestry as that of reincarnation—the unfolding of
the human spirit through recurring lives on earth, experience being gathered
during the earth life and worked up into intellectual faculty and conscience
during the heaven-life, so that a child is born with his past experiences
transmuted into mental and moral tendencies and powers. As Max Muller truly
remarked, the greatest minds humanity has produced have accepted reincarnation.
Reincarnation is taught and illustrated in the great epics of the Hindus as an
undoubted fact on which morality is based, and the splendid Hindu literature,
which is the admiration of European scholars, is permeated with it. The Buddha
taught it and constantly spoke of his past births. Pythagoras did the same, and
Plato included it in his philosophical writings. Josephus states that it was
accepted among the Jews, and relates the story of a captain who encouraged his
soldiers to fight to the death by reminding them of their return to earth. In
The Wisdom of Solomon it is stated that coming into an undefiled body wins the
reward of 'being good'. The Christ accepted it, telling His disciples that John
the Baptist was Elijah. Virgil and Ovid take it for granted. The ritual composed
by the
24
learning of Egypt inculcated it. The Neo-Platonic schools accepted it, and
Origen, the most learned of the Christian Fathers, declared that 'every man
received a body according to his deserts and his former action'. Though
condemned by a Roman Catholic Council, the heretical sects preserved the old
tradition. And it comes to us in the Middle Ages from a learned son of Islam: '1
died out of the stone and I became a plant; I died out of the plant and 1 became
an animal; 1 died out of the animal and I became a man; why should I fear to
die? When did I grow less by " dying? I shall die out of the man and shall
become an angel.' In later time we find it taught by Goethe, Fichte, Schelling,
Lessing, to name but some among the German philosophers. Goethe in his old age
looked joyfully forward to his return; Hume declared that it was the only
doctrine of immortality a philosopher could look at, a view somewhat similar to
that of our British Professor McTaggart, who, lately reviewing the various
theories of immortality, came to the conclusion that reincarnation was the most
rational. I need not remind anyone of literary culture that Wordsworth,
Browning, Rossetti and other poets believed it. The reappearance of the belief
in reincarnation is not, therefore, an emergence of a belief of savages among
civilised nations, but a sign of recovery from a temporary mental aberration in
Christendom, from the de-rationalisation of religion which has wrought so much
evil and has given rise to so much scepticism and materialism. To assert the
special creation of a soul for every fresh body, implying that the coming into
existence of a soul depends on the formation of a body, inevitably leads to the
conclusion that with the death of the body the soul will pass out of existence;
that a soul with no past
THE LAW OF RE-BIRTH 25
should have an everlasting future is as incredible as that a stick should exist
with only one end. Only a soul which is unborn can hope to be undying. The loss
of the teaching of reincarnation—with its temporary purgatory for working out
evil passions and its temporary heaven for the transmutation of experience into
faculty—gave rise to the idea of a never-ending heaven for which no one is good
enough, and a never-ending hell for which no one is wicked enough, confined
human evolution to an inappreciable fragment of existence, hung an everlasting
future on the contents of a few years, and made life an unintelligible tangle of
injustices and partialities, of unearned genius and unmerited criminality, an
intolerable problem to the thoughtful, tolerable only to blind and
foundationless faith.
REINCARNATION AND ITS NECESSITY
There are but three explanations of human inequalities, whether of faculties, of
opportunities, of circumstances: 1. Special creation by God, implying that man
is helpless, his destiny being controlled by an arbitrary and incalculable will.
II. Heredity, as suggested by science, implying an equal helplessness on man's
part, he being the result of a past, over which he had no control. III.
Reincarnation, implying that man can become master of his destiny, he being the
result of his own individual past, being what he has made himself.
Special creation is rejected by all thoughtful people as an explanation of the
conditions round us, save in the most important conditions of all, the character
with which and the environment into which an infant is born
26
Evolution is taken for granted in everything except in the life of spiritual
intelligence called man; he has no individual past, although he has an
individual endless future. The character he brings with him—on which more than
on anything else his destiny on earth depends—is, on this hypothesis, specially
created for him by God, and imposed on him without any choice of his own; out of
the lucky bag of creation he may draw a prize or a blank, the blank being a'doom
of misery; such as it is, he must take it.
If he draw a good disposition, fine capacities, a noble nature, so much the
better for him; he has done nothing to deserve them. If he draw congenital
criminality, congenital idiocy, congenital disease, congenital drunkenness, so
much the worse for him; he has done nothing to deserve them. If everlasting
bliss be tacked on to the one and everlasting torment to the other the
unfortunate one must accept his ill fate as he may. Hath not the potter power
over the clay? Only it seems sad if the clay be sentient.
In another respect special creation is grotesque. A spirit is specially created
for a small body which dies a few hours after birth. If life on earth has any
educational or experimental value that spirit will be the poorer forever by
missing such a life, and the lost opportunity can never be made good. If, on the
other hand, human life on earth is of no essential importance and carries with
it the certainty of many ill doings and sufferings and the possibility of
everlasting suffering at the end of it, the spirit that comes into a body that
endures to old age is hardly dealt with, as it must endure innumerable ills
escaped by the other without any equivalent advantage, and may be damned
forever.
THE LAW OF RE-BIRTH 27
The list of injustices brought about by special creation might be extended
indefinitely, for it includes all inequalities, it has made myriads of atheists,
as incredible by the intelligence and revolting to the conscience. It places man
in the position of the inexorable creditor of God, stridently demanding: 'Why
has thou made me thus?'
The hypothesis of science is not as blasphemous as that of special creation, but
heredity only explains bodies; it throws no light on the evolution of
intelligence and conscience. The Darwinian theory tried to include these, but
failed lamentably to explain how the social virtues could be evolved in the
struggle for existence. Moreover, by the time the parents had acquired their
ripest fruition of high qualities the period of reproduction was over; children
are for the most part born in the hey-day of physical vigour while the
intellectual and moral qualities of their parents are immature. Later studies
have, however, shown that acquired qualities are not transmissible, and that the
higher the type the fewer the offspring.
'Genius is sterile', says science, and thus sounds the knell of human progress
if heredity be its motive power. Intelligence and reproductive power vary
inversely; the lower the parents the more prolific are they. With the discovery
that acquired qualities are not transmissible science has come up against a dead
wall. It can offer no explanation of the facts of high intelligence and saintly
life. The child of a saint may be a profligate; the child of a genius may be a
dolt. Genius 'comes out of the blue'
This glory of humanity, from the scientific standpoint, seems outside the law of
causation. Science does not tel1
28
us how to build strong minds and pure hearts for the future. She does not
threaten us with an arbitrary will, but she leaves us without explanation of
human inequalities. She tells us that the drunkard bequeaths to his children
bodies prone to disease, but she does not explain why some unhappy children are
the recipients of the hideous legacy.
Reincarnation restores justice to God and power to man. Every human spirit
enters into human life a germ, without knowledge, without conscience, without
discrimination. By experience, pleasant and painful, man gathers materials, and
as before explained, builds them into mental and moral faculties. Thus the
character he is born with is self-made, and marks the stage he has reached in
his long evolution. The good disposition, the fine capacities, the noble nature
are the spoils of many a hard-fought fight, the wages of heavy and arduous toil.
The reverse marks an early stage of growth, the small development of the
spiritual germ.
The savage of today is the saint of the future; all tread a similar road; all
are destined to ultimate human perfection. Pain follows on mistakes and is ever
remedial; strength is developed by struggle; we reap, after every sowing, the
inevitable result; happiness growing out of the right, sorrow out of the wrong.
The babe dying shortly after birth pays in the death a debt owing from the past,
and returns swiftly to earth, delayed but for brief space and free of his debt
to gather the experience necessary for his growth. Social virtues, though
placing a man at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence, perhaps even
leading to the sacrifice of his physical life, build a noble character for his
future lives and shape him to become a servant of the nation.
THE LAW OF RE-BIRTH 29
Genius inheres in the individual as the result of many lives of effort, and the
sterility of the body it wears does not rob the future of its services, as it
returns greater on every re-birth. The body poisoned by a father's drunkenness
is taken by a spirit learning by a lesson of suffering to guide its earthly life
on lines better than those followed in the past.
And so in every case the individual past explains the individual present, and
when the laws of growth are known and obeyed a man can build with a sure hand
his future destiny, shaping his growth on lines of ever-increasing beauty until
he reaches the stature of the Perfect Man.
WHY OUR PAST LIVES ARE FORGOTTEN
No question is more often heard when reincarnation is spoken of than: 'If I were
here before, why do I not remember it?' A little consideration of facts will
answer the question.
First of all, let us note the fact that we forget more of our present lives than
we remember. Many people cannot remember learning to read; yet the fact that
they can read proves the learning. Incidents of childhood and youth have faded
from our memory, yet they have left traces on our character. A fall in babyhood
is forgotten, yet the victim is none the less a cripple. And this, although we
are using the same body in which the forgotten events were experienced.
These events, however, are not wholly lost by us; if a person be thrown into a
mesmeric trance, they may be drawn from the depths of memory; they are
submerged, not destroyed. Fever patients have been known to use in delirium a
language known in childhood and forgotten in
30
maturity. Much of our subconsciousness consists of these submerged experiences,
memories thrown into the background but recoverable.
If this be true of experiences encountered in the present body, how much more
must it be true of experiences encountered in former bodies, which died and
decayed many centuries ago. Our present body and brain have had no share in
those far-off happenings; how should memory assert itself through them? Our
permanent body, which remains with us throughout the cycle of reincarnation, is
the spiritual body; the lower garments fall away and return to their elements
ere we can become reincarnated.
The new mental, astral and physical matter in which we are reclothed for a new
life on earth receives from the spiritual intelligence, garbed only in the
spiritual body, not the experiences of the past, but the qualities, tendencies
and capacities which have bee"n made out of those experiences. Our conscience,
our instinctive response to emotional and intellectual appeals, our recognition
of the force of a logical argument, our assent to fundamental principles of
right and wrong, these are the traces of past experience. A man of a low
intellectual type cannot 'see' a logical or mathematical proof; a man of low
moral type cannot 'feel' the compelling force of a high moral ideal.
When a philosophy or a science is quickly grasped and applied, when an art is
mastered without study, memory is there in power, though past facts of learning
are forgotten; as Plato said, it is reminiscence. When we feel intimate with a
stranger on first meeting, memory is there, the spirit's recognition of a friend
of ages past; when we shrink back with strong repulsion from another stranger,
31
memory is there, the spirit's recognition of an ancient foe.
These affinities, these warnings, come from the undying spiritual intelligence
which is ourself; we remember, though working in the brain we cannot impress on
it our memory. The mind-body, the brain, are new; the spirit furnishes the mind
with the results of the past, not with the memory of its events. As a merchant,
closing the year's ledger and opening a new one, does not enter in the new one
all the items of the old, but only its balances, so does the spirit hand on to
the new brain his judgments on the experiences of a life that is closed, the
conclusions to which he has come, the decisions at which he has arrived. This is
the stock handed on to the new life, the mental furniture for the new dwelling—a
real memory.
Rich and varied are these in the highly evolved man; if these are compared with
the possessions of the savage, the value of such a memory of a long past is
patent. No brain could store the memory of the events of numerous lives; when
they are concreted into mental and moral judgments they are available for use;
hundreds of murders have led up to the decision 'I must not kill'; the memory of
each murder would be a useless burden, but the judgment based on their results,
the instinct of the sanctity of human life, is the effective memory of them in
the civilised man.
Memory of past events, however, is sometimes found; children have occasional
fleeting glimpses of their past, recalled by some event of the present; an
English boy who had been a sculptor recalled it when he first saw some statues;
an Indian child recognised a stream in which he had been drowned as a little
child in a preceding life, and the mother of that earlier body. Many cases are
on record of such memory of past events.
32
Moreover, such memory can be gained. But the gaining is a matter of steady
effort, of prolonged meditation, whereby the restless mind, ever running
outwards, may be controlled and rendered quiescent, so that it may be sensitive
and responsive to the spirit and receive from him the memory of the past. Only
as we can hear the still small voice of the spirit may the story of the past be
unrolled, for the spirit alone can remember and cast down the rays of his memory
to enlighten the darkness of the fleeting lower nature to which he is
temporarily attached.
Cinder such conditions memory is possible, links of the past are seen, old
friends are recognised, old scenes recalled, and a subtle inner strength and
calm grows out of the practical experience of immortality. Present troubles grow
light when seen in their true proportions as trivial and transient events in an
unending life; present joys lose their brilliant colours when seen as
repetitions of past delights; and both alike are equally accepted as useful
experiences, enriching mind and heart and contributing to the growth of the
unfolding life.
Not until pleasure and pain, however, have been seen in the light of eternity
can the crowding memories of the past be safely confronted; when they have thus
been seen, then those memories calm the emotions of the present, and that which
would otherwise have crushed becomes a support and consolation. Goethe rejoiced
that on his return to earth-life he would be washed clean of his memories, and
lesser men may be content with the wisdom which starts each new life on its way,
enriched with the results, but unburdened with the recollections of its past.
CHAPTER VII
THE RIDDLE OF LOVE AND HATE
To the great majority of us life presents a series of tangles and
puzzles—tangles we cannot unravel, puzzles we cannot solve. Why are people born
differing so widely in mental and in moral capacity? Why has one infant a brain
denoting great intellectual and moral power, while another has a brain which
marks him out as one who will be an idiot or a criminal? Why has one child good
and loving parents and favourable circumstances, while another has profligate
parents who detest him, and is reared amid the foulest surroundings? Why is one
'lucky' and another 'unlucky'? Why does one die old and another die young? Why
is one person prevented by 'accidents' from catching a steamer or a train that
is wrecked, while scores or hundreds of others perish unaided? Why do we like
one person the moment we see him, while we as promptly dislike another?
Questions like these are continually arising, and are as continually left
unanswered, and yet answers are within reach; for all these seeming
incongruities and injustices, these apparently fortuitous events, are merely the
results of the working out of a few simple and fundamental natural laws. An
understanding of these underlying laws makes life intelligible, thereby
restoring our confidence in the divine order and endowing us with strength and
courage to meet the vicissitudes of fortune. Troubles which strike us like
34
'bolts from the blue" are hard to bear, but troubles which arise from causes we
can understand, and can therefore control, can be faced with patience and
resignation.
The first principle that must be firmly grasped ere we can begin to apply it to
the solving of life's problems is that of reincarnation. Man is essentially a
spirit, a living and self-conscious individual, consisting of this
self-conscious life in a body of very subtle matter; life cannot work without a
body of some kind; that is, without a form of matter, however fine and subtle
the matter may be, which gives it separate existence in this universe; bodies
are often therefore spoken of as vehicles, that which carries the life, making
it individual. This spirit, when he comes into the physical world by the gateway
of birth, puts on a physical body as a man puts on an overcoat and hat to go out
into the world beyond his own home; but the physical body is no more the man
than the overcoat and hat are the body which wears them. As a man throws away
worn-out garments and puts on new ones, so does the spirit cast off a worn-out
body and take to himself another (Bhagavad-Gitd). When the physical body is
outworn the man passes through the gateway of death, dropping the physical
vesture and entering the 'unseen' world. After a long period of rest and
refreshment, during which the experiences of the past life on earth are
assimilated, and thus increase the powers of the man, he returns again to the
physical world through the gateway of birth and takes on a new physical body,
adapted for the expression of his increased capacities. When spirits which were
to become human came into the world millennia ago, they were but embryos, like
seeds, knowing neither good nor evil, with infinite possibilities of
development—as being the
35
offspring of God—but without any actual powers save that of thrilling feebly in
response to external stimuli. All the powers latent within them had to be roused
into active manifestation by experiences undergone in the physical world. By
pleasure and pain, by joy and suffering, by success and failure, by fruition and
disappointment, by successive choices well and badly made, the spirit learns his
lessons of laws that cannot be broken, and manifests slowly one by one his
capacities for mental and moral life. After each brief plunge into the ocean of
physical life—that period generally spoken of as 'a life'—he returns to the
invisible world laden with the experiences he has gathered, as a diver rises
from the sea with the pearls he has riven from the oyster-bed. In that invisible
world he transmutes into moral and mental powers all the moral and mental
materials he has gathered in the earth-life just closed, changing aspirations
into capacity to achieve, changing the results of efforts that failed into
forces for future success, changing the lessons of mistakes into prudence and
foresight, changing past sufferings into endurances, changing errors into
repulsions from wrong doings, and the sum of experience into wisdom. As Edward
Carpenter well wrote: 'All the pains that I suffered in one body became powers
that 1 wielded in the next.'
When all that was gathered has been assimilated—the length of the heavenly life
depending on the amount of mental and moral material that had been collected—the
man returns to earth; he is guided, under conditions to be explained in a
moment, to the race, the nation, the family, which is to provide him with his
next physical body, and that body is moulded in accordance with his
requirements, so as to serve as a fit instrument for his
36
powers, as a limitation which expresses his deficiencies. In the new physical
body, and in the life in the invisible world that follows its off-throwing at
the death which destroys it, he re-treads on a higher level a similar cycle, and
so again and again for hundreds of lives, until all his possibilities as a human
being have become active powers, and he has learned every lesson that this human
life can teach. Thus the spirit unfolds from infancy to youth, from youth to
maturity, becoming an individualised life of immortal strength and of boundless
utility for divine service. The struggling and unfolding spirits of one humanity
become the guardians of the next humanity, the spiritual intelligences that
guide the evolution of worlds posterior to their own in time. We are protected,
helped and taught by spiritual intelligences who were men in worlds older than
our own, as well as by the most highly evolved men of our own humanity; we shall
repay the debt by protecting, helping and teaching human races in worlds that
are now in the early stages of their growth, preparing to become, untold ages
hence, the homes of future men. If we find around us many who are ignorant,
stupid and even brutal, limited in both mental and moral powers, it is because
they are younger men than we are, younger brothers, and hence their errors
should be met with love and helpfulness instead of with bitterness and hatred.
As they are, so were we in the past; as we are, so shall they be in the future;
and both they and we shall go onward and onward through the everlasting ages.
This then is the first fundamental principle which renders life intelligible
when applied to the conditions of the present; I can only work out from it in
detail here the answer to one of the questions propounded
37
above—namely, why we like one person and dislike another at sight—but all the
other questions might be answered in similar fashion. For the complete
answering, however, we need to grasp also the twin principle of
reincarnation—that of Karma, or the law of causation.
This may be stated in words familiar to all: 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap.' Amplifying this brief axiom, we understand by it that a man
forms his own character, becoming that which he thinks; that he makes the
circumstances of his future life by the effects of his actions upon others.
Thus: if 1 think nobly I shall gradually make for myself a noble character, but
if 1 think basely, a base character will be formed. 'Man is created by thought;
that which he thinks upon in one life he becomes in another', as a Hindu
scripture has it. If the mind dwells continually on one train of thought, a
groove is formed into which the thought-force runs automatically, and such a
habit of thought survives death, and, since it belongs to the ego, is carried
over to the subsequent earth-life as a thought-tendency and capacity. Habitual
study of abstract problems, to take a very high instance, will result, in
another earth-life, in a well-developed power for abstract thinking, while
flippant, hasty thinking, flying from one subject to another, will bequeath a
restless, ill-regulated mind to the following birth into this world. Selfish
coveting of the possessions of others, though never carried out into active
cheating in the present, makes the thief of a later earth-life, while hatred and
revenge, secretly cherished, are the seeds from which the murderer springs. So
again, unselfish loving yields as harvest the philanthropist and the saint, and
every thought of compassion helps to build the tender and pitiful nature
38
which belongs to one who is 'a friend to all creatures'. The knowledge of this
law of changeless justice, of the exact response of nature to every demand,
enables a man to build his character with all the certainty of science, and to
look forward with courageous patience to the noble type he is gradually but
surely evolving.
The effects of our actions upon others mould the external circumstances of a
subsequent earth-life. If we have caused widespread happiness we are born into
very favourable physical surroundings or come into them during life, while the
causing of widespread misery results in an unhappy environment. We make
relationships with others by coming into contact with them individually, and
bonds are forged by benefits and injuries, golden links of love or iron chains
of hate. This is Karma. With these complementary ideas clearly in the mind, we
can answer our question very easily.
Links between egos, between individualised spirits, cannot antedate the first
separation of those spirits from the Logos, as drops may be separated from the
ocean. In the mineral and vegetable kingdoms the life that expresses itself in
stones and plants has not yet evolved into continued individualised existence.
The word 'group-soul' has been used to express the idea of this evolving life as
it animates a number of similar physical organisms. Thus a whole order, say of
plants, like grasses, umbelliferous or rosaceous plants, is animated by a single
group-soul, which evolves by virtue of the simple experiences gathered through
its countless physical embodiments. The experiences of each plant flow into the
life that informs its whole order, and aid and hasten its evolution. As the
physical embodiments become more
39
complex, subdivisions are set up in the group-soul, and each subdivision slowly
and gradually separates off, the number of embodiments belonging to each
subdivisional group-soul thus formed diminishing as these subdivisions increase.
In the animal kingdom this process of specialisation of the group-souls
continues, and in the higher mammalia a comparatively small number of creatures
is animated by a single group-soul, for nature is working toward
individualisation. The experiences gathered by each are preserved in the
group-soul, and from it affect each newly-born animal that it informs; these
appear as what we call instincts, and are found in the newly-born creature. Such
is the instinct which makes a newly-hatched chicken fly to seek protection from
danger under the brooding wing of the hen, or that whicn impels the beaver to
build its dam. The accumulated experiences of its race, preserved in the
group-soui, inform every member of the group. When the animal kingdom reaches
its highest expressions, the final subdivisions of the group-soul animate but a
single creature, until finally the divine life pours out anew into this vehicle
now ready for its reception, and the human ego takes birth and the evolution of
the self-conscious intelligence begins.
From the time that a separated life animates a single body, links may be set up
with other separated lives, each likewise dwelling in a single tabernacle of
flesh. Egos, dwelling in physical bodies, come into touch with each other;
perhaps a mere physical attraction draws together two egos dwelling respectively
in male and female bodies. They live together, have common interests, and thus
links are set up. If the phrase may be allowed, they contract debts to each
other, and there are no bankruptcy courts in
40
nature where such liabilities may be cancelled. Death strikes away one body,
then the other, and the two have passed into the invisible world; but debts
contracted on the physical plane must be discharged in the world to which they
belong, and those two must meet each other again in earth-life and renew the
intercourse that was broken off. The great spiritual Intelligences who
administer the law of Karma guide these two into rebirth at the same period of
time, so that their earthly lifetime may overlap, and in due course they meet.
If the debt contracted be a debt of love and of mutual service, they will feel
attracted to each other; the egos recognise each other, as two friends recognise
each other, though each be wearing a new dress, and they clasp hands, not as
strangers but as friends. If the debt be one of hatred and of injury, they
shrink apart with a feeling of repulsion, each recognising an ancient enemy,
eyeing each other across the gulf of wrongs given and received. Cases of these
types must be known to every reader, although the underlying cause has not been
known; and indeed these sudden likings and dislikings have often foolishly been
spoken of as 'causeless', as though, in a world of law, anything could be
without a cause. It by no means follows that egos thus linked together
necessarily re-knit the exact relationship broken off down here by the hand of
death. The husband and wife of one earth-life might be born into the same family
as brother and sister, as father and son, as father and daughter, or in any
other blood relationship. Or they might be born as strangers and meet for the
first time in youth or in maturity, to feel for each other an overmastering
attraction. In how brief a time we become closely intimate with one who was a
stranger, while we live
41
beside another for years and remain aliens in heart! Whence these strange
affinities, if they are not the remembrances in the egos of the loves of their
past? '1 feel as if I had known you all my life', we say to a friend of a few
weeks, while others whom we have known all our lives are to us as sealed books.
The egos know each other, though the bodies be strangers, and the old friends
clasp hands in perfect confidence and understand each other; and this, although
the physical brains have not yet learned to receive those impressions of memory
that exist in the subtle bodies, but that are too fine to cause vibrations in
the gross matter of the brain, and thus to awaken responsive thrills of
consciousness in the physical body.
Sometimes, alas! the links, being of hatred and wrongdoing, draw together
ancient enemies into one family, there to work out in misery the evil results of
the common past. Ghastly family tragedies have their roots deep down in the
past, and many of the awful facts recorded by such agencies as the Society for
the Protection of Children, the torture of helpless children even by their own
mothers, the malignant ferocity which inflicts pain in order to exult in the
sight of agony—all this becomes intelligible when we know that the soul in that
young body has in the past inflicted some horror on the one who now torments it,
and is learning by terrible experience how hard are the ways of wrong.
The question may arise in the mind of some: 'If this be true, ought we to rescue
the children?' Most surely, yes. It is our duty to relieve suffering wherever we
meet it, rejoicing that the Good Law uses us as the almoners of mercy.
Another question may come: 'How can these links of
42
evil be broken? Will not the torture inflicted forge a new bond, by which the
cruel parent will hereafter be the victim, and the tortured child become the
oppressor?' Aye! 'Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time', quoth the Lord
Buddha, knowing the law. But He breathed the secret of release when He
continued: 'Hatred ceases by love. When the ego who has paid his debt of the
past by the suffering of inflicted wrong is wise enough, brave enough, great
enough to say, amid the agony of body or of mind: '1 forgive!' then he cancels
the debt he might have wrung from his ancient foe, and the bond forged by hate
melts away forever in the fire of love.
The links of love grow strong in every successive earth-life in which the linked
two clasp hands, and they have the added advantage of growing stronger during
the life in heaven, whereinto the links of hate cannot be carried. Egos that
have debts of hate between them do not touch each other in the heavenly land,
but each works out such good as he may have in him without contact with his foe.
When the ego succeeds in impressing on the brain of his physical body his own
memory of his past, then these memories draw the egos yet closer, and the tie
gains a sense of security and strength such as no bond of a single life can
give; very deep and strong is the happy confidence of such egos, knowing by
their own experiences that love does not die.
Such is the explanation of affinities and repulsions, seen in the light of
reincarnation and Karma.
CHAPTER VIII
KARMA-LAW OF ACTION AMD RE-ACTION
THE word Karma simply means action. But the connotation of the word is
far-reaching, for much more goes to the making of an action than the ordinary
person might think. Every action has a past which leads up to it; every action
has a future which proceeds from it; an action implies a desire which prompted
it and a thought which shaped it, as well as a visible movement to which the
name of 'act' is usually confined. Each act is a link in an endless chain of
causes and effects, each effect becoming a cause, and each cause having been an
effect; and each link in this endless chain is welded out of three components,
desire, thought and activity. A desire stimulates a thought; a thought embodies
itself in an act. Sometimes it is a thought, in the form of a memory, that
arouses a desire, and the desire bursts into an act. But ever the three
components—two invisible and belonging to consciousness, one visible and
belonging to the body—are there; to speak with perfect accuracy, the act is also
in consciousness as an image before it is extruded as a physical movement.
Desire—or Will—Thought, Activity, are the three modes of consciousness.
This relation of desire, thought and activity as 'action', and the endless
interlinkings of such actions as causes and effects, are all included under the
word Karma. It is a
44
recognised succession in nature—i.e., a law. Hence Karma may be Englished into
causation, or the Law of causation. Its scientific statement is: 'Action and
reaction are equal and opposite.' Its religious statement cannot be better put
than in the well-known verse of a Christian scripture: 'As a man soweth, so
shall he also reap.' Sometimes it is called the law of equilibrium, because
whenever equilibrium is disturbed, there is a tendency in nature to restore the
condition of equilibrium.
Karma is thus the expression of the divine nature in its aspect of law. It is
written: 'In whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.' The
inviolableness of natural order; the exactitude of natural law; the utter
trustworthiness of nature—these are the strong foundations of the universe.
Without these there could be no science, no certitude, no reasoning from the
past, no presaging of the future. Human experience would become useless, and
life would be a chaotic irrationality.
What a man sows, he reaps. That is Karma. If he wants rice, he must sow rice.
Useless to plant vines and to expect roses; idle to sow thistle-down and hope
for wheat. In the moral and the mental worlds, law is equally changeless;
useless to sow idleness, and hope to reap learning; to sow carelessness, and
look for discretion; to sow selfishness, and expect love; to sow fear, and hope
for courage. This sane and true teaching bids man study the causes he is setting
up by his daily desires, thoughts and actions, and realise their inevitable
fruiting. It bids him surrender all the fallacious ideas of 'forgiveness',
'vicarious atonement', 'divine mercy', and the rest of the opiates which
superstition offers to the sinner. It cries out as with a trumpet-blast to all
those who thus seek to drug
45
themselves into peace: 'Be not deceived; God is not mocked: whatsoever a man
soweth that shall he also reap.' That is the warning side of the law. But note
the encouraging. If there is law in the mental and moral world we can build our
character; thought makes quality; quality makes character. 'As a man thinks, so
he is.' 'Man is created by thought; what a man thinks upon, that he becomes.' If
we meditate on courage, we shall work courage into our character. So with
purity, patience, unselfishness, self-control. Steady persevering thought sets
up a definite habit of the mind, and that habit manifests itself as a quality in
the character. We can build our character as surely as a mason can build a wall,
working with and through the law. Character is the most powerful factor in
destiny, and by building a noble character, we can ensure a destiny of
usefulness, of service to mankind. As by law we suffer, so by law do we triumph.
Ignorance of law leaves us as the rudderless boat drifting on the current.
Knowledge of law gives us a helm by which we can steer our ship whithersoever we
will.
CHAPTER IX
THE THREE THREADS OF THE CORD OF FATE
TO the Greek there were three Fates who spun the cord of life. To the knower of
the Wisdom there are three Fates also, each of them ever spinning a thread, and
the three threads they spin are twisted into one, and form the strong cord of
destiny which binds or loosens man's life on earth. These three Fates are not
the women of the Greek legend; they are the three powers of the human
consciousness; the power to will, the power to think, the power to act. These
are the Fates which spin the threads of human destiny, and they are within the
man, not outside him. Man's destiny is self-made, not imposed upon him
arbitrarily from without; his own powers, blinded by ignorance, spin and twist
the cord that fetters him, as his own powers, directed by knowledge, liberate
his limbs from the self-imposed shackles, and set him free from bondage.
The most important of these three powers is his power to think; man means
thinker; it is a Sanskrit root, and from this are derived the English
man—identical with the Sanskrit root—the German mann, the French homme, the
Italian uomo, etc. The thread of thought is woven into mental and moral
qualities, and these qualities in their totality form what we call character.
This connection of
1 Reprinted, with permission, from Bibby's Annual, 1910.
47
thought and character is recognised in the scriptures of nations. In the Bible
we read: 'As a man thinks, so is he.' This is the general law. More
particularly: 'He that looketh upon a woman to lust after her, hath committed
adultery already with her in his heart.' Or: 'He that hateth his brother is a
murderer.' On the same lines declares an Indian scripture: 'Man is created by
thought; as a man thinks, so he becomes.' Or: 'A man consists of his belief; as
he believes, so is he.' The rationale of these facts is that when the mind is
turned to a particular thought and dwells on it, a definite vibration of matter
is set up. and the oftener this vibration is caused the more does it tend to
repeat itself, to become a habit, to become automatic. The body follows the mind
and imitates its changes; if we concentrate our thought, the eyes become fixed,
the muscles tense; an effort to remember is accompanied with a frown; the eyes
rove hither and thither, as we seek to recover a lost impression; anxiety,
anger, love, impatience, have all their appropriate muscular accompaniments; the
feeling which makes a man inclined to throw himself from a height is the
inclination of the body to act out the thought of falling. The first step
towards a deliberate creation of character lies, then, in the deliberate
choosing of what we will think, and then of thinking persistently on the quality
chosen. Ere long there will be a tendency to show that quality; a little longer,
and its exercise will have become habitual. We spin the thread of thought into
our destiny, and find ourselves with a character bent to all noble and useful
ends. As we have thought, we have become. Thought makes character.
The power to will is the second Fate, and spins a strong thread for the cord of
destiny. Will shows itself as desire;
48
desire to possess, which is love, attraction, in innumerable forms; desire to
repel, which is hate, repulsion, driving away that which is to us undesirable As
truly as the magnet attracts and holds soft iron, so does our desire to attract
draw to us that which we wish to possess and hold as ours. The strong desire for
wealth and success brings them into our grasp; what we will to have, steadily
and persistently, that comes to us sooner or later. Fleeting, indeterminate,
changing fancies, these have but little attractive force; but the man of strong
will obtains that which he wills. This thread of will brings us objects of
desire and opportunities for gaining them. Will makes opportunities and attracts
objects.
The third thread is spun by the power to act, and this is the thread which
brings into our destiny outward happiness or outward misery. As we act towards
those around us. so do thev re-act upon us. The man who spreads happiness round
him feels happiness flowing in upon himself; he who makes others unhappy feels
the reaction of unhappiness upon himself. Smiles beget smiles, frowns frowns; an
irritable person arouses irritability in others. The law of the spinning of this
thread is: Our actions affecting others cause a re-action of a similar nature on
ourselves.
These are the threads which make destiny, for they make character, opportunity
and environment; they are not cut short by death, but stretch onwards into other
lives; the thread of thought gives us the character with which we are born into
the world; the thread of will brings or withholds opportunities, makes us
'lucky' or 'unlucky'; the thread of act brings us favourable or unfavourable
physical conditions. As we are sowing, so shall we reap; as
49
we are spinning, so shall be destiny's cord in the future. Man is the creator of
his future; man is the maker of his destiny; man is his own Fate.
CHAPTER X
THOUGHT-POWER AMD ITS (JSE
ONE of the most striking features of the present day is the recognition on all
hands of the power of thought, the belief that a man can mould his character,
and therefore his destiny, by the exercise of this power which makes him man. In
this our modern ideas are coming into line with the religious teachings of the
past. 'Man is created by thought', was written in a Hindu scripture. 'What a man
thinks on that he becomes; therefore think on the Eternal.' 'As he thinketh in
his heart, so is he', said the wise King of Israel, giving warning against
association with an evil man. 'All that we are is made up of our thoughts', said
the Buddha. 'Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart', declared the Christ. Thought is the
parent of action; our nature sets itself to embody that which is generated by
thought. Modern psychology states that the body tends to follow out the thought,
and traces the inclination felt by some to throw themselves down from a height
to the imagination picturing a fall, and the body acting out the picture.
There being, then, a practically general appreciation of the power of thought,
it becomes a matter of great moment to know how to use this power in the highest
possible way and to the greatest possible effect. This can best be done by the
practice of meditation, and one of the
51
simplest methods—which has also the advantage that its value can be tested by
each person for himself—is as follows.
Examining your own character, you pick some distinct defect in it. You then ask
yourself, what is its exact opposite, the virtue which is its antithesis. Let us
say that you suffer from irritability; you select patience. Then, regularly
every morning, before going out into the world, you sit down for from three to
five minutes and think on patience—its value, its beauty, its practice under
provocation, taking one point one day, another another, and thinking as steadily
as you can, recalling the mind when it wanders; think of yourself as perfectly
patient, a model of patience, and end with a vow, This patience, which is my
true self, 1 will feel and show today.'
For a few days, proDably, there will be no change perceptible; you will still
feel and show irritability. Go on steadily every morning. Presently, as you say
an irritable thing, the thought will flash into your mind unbidden, 'I should
have been patient'. Still go on. Soon the thought of patience will arise with
the irritable impulse, and the outer manifestation will be checked. Still go on.
The irritable impulse will grow feebler and feebler, until you find that
irritability has disappeared, and that patience has become your normal attitude
towards annoyances.
Here is an experiment that anyone can try, and prove the law for himself. Once
proven, he can use it, and build virtue after virtue in a similar way, until he
has created an ideal character by the power of thought.
Another use for this power is to help any good cause by sending to it good
thoughts: to aid a friend in trouble by sending thoughts of comfort; a friend in
search of truth by
52
thoughts, clear and definite, of the truths you know. You can send out into the
mental atmosphere thoughts which will raise, purify, inspire, all who are
sensitive to them; thoughts of protection, to be guardian angels of those you
love. Right thought is a continual benediction which each can radiate, like a
fountain spraying forth sweet waters.
Yet must we not forget the reverse of this fair picture. Wrong thought is as
swift for evil as is right thought for good. Thought can wound as well as heal,
distress as well as comfort. Ill thoughts thrown into the mental atmosphere
poison receptive minds; thoughts of anger and revenge lend strength to the
murderous blow; thoughts which wrong others barb the tongue of slander, wing the
arrows loosed at the unjustly assailed. The mind tenanted by evil thoughts acts
as a magnet to attract like thoughts from others, and thus intensifies the
original ill. To think on evil is a step towards doing evil, and a polluted
imagination prompts the realisation of its own foul creations. 'As a man thinks
so he becomes', is the law for evil thoughts as well as for good. Moreover, to
dwell on an evil thought gradually deprives it of its repulsiveness, and impels
the thinker to perform an action which embodies it.
Such is the law of thought, such its power. 'If ye know these things, happy are
ye if ye do them.'
CHAPTER XI
STEPS ON THE PATH
THE normal course of human evolution leads man upwards, stage by stage. But an
immense distance separates even the genius and the saint from the man who
'stands on the threshold of divinity'—still more from him who has fulfilled the
Christ's command: 'Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect Are there
any steps which lead up to the gateway of which it is written: 'Strait is the
gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find
it'? Who are 'the perfect', of whom Paul the Apostle speaks?
Truly are there steps which lead up to that Portal, and there are few which
tread that narrow way. The Gate is the Gate of Initiation, the second birth, the
baptism of the Holy Ghost and of Fire; the Way leads to the knowledge of God,
which is life in the Eternal.
In the western world the stages, or steps, have been called: Purgation,
Illumination, Union; by those stages the mystic—who is rapt to the beatific
vision by devotion—denotes the Path. In the eastern world the Occultist—the
Knower, or Gnostic—sees the steps in somewhat other fashion, and divides the
path into two great stages, the Probationary and the Path Proper; the
Probationary represents the Purgation of the Mystic; the Path itself the
Mystic's Illumination and Union. He further seeks to develop in himself on the
Probationary Path
54
certain definite 'qualifications', fitting him to pass through the Portal which
ends it; while on the Path itself he must wholly cast away ten 'fetters', which
hold him back from attaining liberation, or final salvation, and must pass
through four other Portals, or Initiations.
The qualifications must each be developed to some extent, though not completely,
ere the first Portal can be passed. They are:
(1) Discrimination: the power to distinguish between the real and the unreal,
the eternal and the fleeting—the piercing vision which sees the true and
recognises the false under all disguises. (2) Dispassion or Desirelessness: the
rising above the wish to possess objects which give pleasure or to drive away
objects which give pain, by utter mastery of the lower nature, and transcending
of the personality. (3) The Six Endowments, or Good Conduct: control of the
mind, control of the body—speech and actions—tolerance, endurance or
cheerfulness, balance or one-pointedness, confidence. (4) Desire for Union, or
Love. These are the qualifications, the development of which is the preparation
for the first Portal of Initiation. To these should the man address himself with
resolution, who has made up his mind to travel forward swiftly, so that he may
become a helper of humanity.
When he has acquired sufficient of these so to knock at the door that it shall
be opened unto him, he is ready to pass over its threshold and to tread the
Path. He is initiated, or receives the 'second birth'. He is called among the
Hindus the Wanderer (Parivrajaka), among the Buddhists 'he who has entered the
stream' Srotapanna or Sotapanna: and before he can reach the second Initiation
he must cast off wholly the 'fetters' of Separateness — he
55
must realise that all selves are one; Doubt—he must know and not merely believe
the great truths of Karma, Reincarnation and the perfection to be reached by the
treading of the Path; Superstition —the dependence on rites and ceremonies.
These three fetters wholly cast off, the Initiate is ready for the second
Portal, and becomes the Builder (Kutichaka), or 'he who returns but once'.
Sakadagamin; he must now develop the powers of the subtle bodies, that he may be
useful in the three worlds, fitted for service. The passing through the third
Portal makes him the United (Hamsa, 'I am He'), or 'he who does not return'—save
with his own consent—the Anagamin. For the fourth Gate should be passed in the
same life, and for him who has passed that, compulsory rebirth is over. Now he
must throw off the fetters of Desire—such rarefied desire as may be left in
him—and of Repulsion—nothing must repel him for in all he must see the Unity.
This done, he passes through the fourth Portal, and becomes the Super-individual
(Paramahamsa, 'beyond the I') or 'the Venerable' (Arhat). Five are the filmy
fetters that yet hold him, and yet so hard is it to break their cobweb subtlety
that seven lives are often used in treading the space that separates the Arhat
from the Master, the Free, the Immortal, the Super-Man, 'He who has no more to
learn' in this system, but may know what He will by turning on it His attention.
The fetters are: desire for life in form, desire for life in formless worlds,
pride—in the greatness of the task achieved, possibility of being disturbed by
aught that may happen, illusion—the last film which can distort the Reality.
When all these are cast away forever, then the triumphant Son of Man has
finished His human course, and He has become 'a Pillar in the Temple of my God
who
56
shall go out no more'; He is the Man made perfect, one of the First-born, an
Elder Brother of our race. .
CHAPTER XII
OUR ELDER BROTHERS
WE have traced the steps by which a man may climb to the status of the
super-man. Let us now consider the relation to the world of Those who stand at
that great height, and who yet are of the human family, our Elder Brothers.
All religions look back to a founder, who rose high above humanity; all ancient
history tells of lofty Beings, who laid the foundations of nations, and guided
them during their infancy and youth. We hear of divine Kings, of divine
Dynasties, of divine Teachers; the testimony of the past is so unanimous, and
the ruins remaining of past civilisations are so mighty, that we canot
reasonably declare the testimony to be worthless, nor the civilisations to be
the unaided product of an infant humanity.
It is also noteworthy that the most ancient scriptures are the noblest and most
inspiring. The Classic of Purity of China, the Upanishads of India, the Gathas—fragmentary
as they are—of Persia, are far above the level of the later religious writings
of the same countries; the ethics found in such ancient books are all
authoritative, not hortative, they teach 'as having authority and not as the
scribes.
No religion denies or ignores these facts, as regards its own Teachers and its
own scriptures; but, unhappily, most are apt to deny or ignore them where the
Teachers and scriptures of other religions are concerned. Students of the Wisdom
realise that all these claims must be
58
impartially recognised or impartially rejected; and occultists know that while
many legends and tables may have gathered round these mighty Beings, none the
less They, of a verity, have existed in the past and exist in the present.
The Occult Hierarchy which rules, teaches and guides the worlds is a graded
Order, each rank having its own multifarious duties and carrying them out in
perfect harmony, working out a portion of the plan of the Supreme Lord, the
Logos of the system, in a service which is 'perfect freedom'. Two leading
departments of our section of this Hierarchy are concerned, the one with the
ruling, the other with the teaching of our worlds.
Those whom the Hindus call the four Kumaras1 are the Chiefs of the ruling
department, and the Manus of Rounds and Races are Their Lieutenants, with, below
Them, the grade of Adepts, which numbers among its members Those called Masters,
to carry out the details of Their work. Theirs to guide evolution, to shape
races, to guide them to continents builded for their dwelling, to administer the
laws which cause the rise and fall of peoples, of empires, of civilisations.
At the head of the teaching department stands the 'Enlightened', the Buddha,
who, when He passes away from earth, hands the Teacher's staff to Him who is to
become a Buddha in His turn, the Bodhisattva, the actual Teacher of the worlds.
This Supreme Teacher is the ever-living Presence who over-shadows and inspires
the world-faiths, who founds them, as they are needed for human
1 The Ancient Four. Bhagavad Gita, X, 6. Says H.P. Blavatsky: 'Higher than the
Four is only One.'
59
guidance, and who, through His Helpers among the ranks of Adepts, guides each
religion so far as is permitted by the stubbornness and ignorance of men. Every
great spiritual wave flows from this department of the White Brotherhood, and
irrigates our earth with the water of life.
In the grade of Adepts alluded to above are Those to whom the name 'Masters'
more peculiarly belongs, in that They accept as Chelas, or disciples, those who
have reached a point of evolution fitting them to approach the Portal of
Initiation, and are resolutely striving to develop in themselves the
qualifications before described. There are many of this rank in the
Hierarchy—Those who have passed the fifth Initiation—who do not take pupils, but
are engaged in other work for the helping of the world. Even beyond this rank
some will still keep under Their charge chelas who have long been devoted to
Them, the tie formed being too sacred and too strong to break.
The Theosophical Society is an open road whereby these great Teachers may be
sought and found. We have amongst us those who know Them face to face; and I,
who write, add my humble testimony to that which has echoed down the ages, for I
too have seen, and know.
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