Anand Gholap
Theosophy
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Anand Gholap Theosophy
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by
Madras: The Theosophist
Office
1913
In addition to the large number of volumes which stand in the name of Annie Besant in the catalogue of the British Museum, there is a great quantity of literature for which she is responsible, that has appeared in more fugitive form as articles, pamphlets and published lectures, issued not only in Great Britain but in America, India and Australia. Much of this work is of great interest, but is quite out of reach of the general reader as it is no longer in print, and inquiries for many such items have frequently to be answered in the negative. Under these circumstances the T.P.S. decided to issue an edition of Mrs. Besant's collected writings under the title "Essays and Addresses." It was originally intended to arrange the matter in chronological order, commencing with the writer's first introduction to Theosophy as reviewer of Mme. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, but several considerations determined the abandonment of this plan in favour of the scheme now adopted, which is the classification of subject-matter independent of chronological order. The Publishers feel sure that this arrangement will especially commend itself to students who desire to know what the Author has written on various important aspects of Theosophy in its several ramifications, and for purposes of study and reference the plan chosen should more effectively serve. The dates and sources of articles are given in nearly all cases, and they are printed without any revision beyond the correction of obvious typographical efforts.
The importance and interest of such a collection of essays, both as supplementing treatment of many of the topics in larger works and as affording expression of the Author's views on many subjects not otherwise dealt with, will be obvious, and it only remains to express the Publisher's hope that the convenience and moderate cost of the series may insure its thorough circulation among the wide range of Mrs. Besant's readers.
T.P.S.
London, May, 1913
Introduction to the New Edition
Title Page and Original Preface
These two lectures might better perhaps be described as one lecture in two parts, for I am really going to try and give you in the two a connected tracing of the progress of the soul. There is so much confusion in thought as to the origin of the individual, as to what the individual really means, as to how he is developed, and what is to be his ultimate destiny, that I thought I could take no better subject for a Lodge, which ought to be a Lodge of students, than to trace out somewhat in detail this most important matter in the light of Theosophy. Important, because on it turns your whole view of the purpose of the Universe; and if the growth of the Soul were better understood than it is, we should not hear the continual questions asked as to why there should be a Universe at all, and why there should be manifestation; why, if everything comes out of One and goes back to One again, why this intermediate condition of multiplicity should occur. The whole of these questions really turn on misunderstanding, or on lack of accurate knowledge, and it is to the clearing up of that misunderstanding that I am going to address myself to-night and this night week.
In order to make the origin of the individual clear, I must ask you to come back with me to the time when the human race was evolving, but when, as yet, the individual had not come into existence. Come back to what you know, in Theosophical literature, as the first Race of man. You may remember that--according to the teachings which you find in The Secret Doctrine and in the great Scriptures of the world--you may remember that the first Race had its bodies built up, as it were, round a form that is said to have been derived from the Moon. The Pitris, or ancestors, who afforded the first matrix for humanity, who gave the first ethereal form through and by the help of which the physical in man was to evolve--those are spoken of as the Lunar Pitris, because of their connection with the Moon. Into that connection I have not time to go in detail, but the traces of it are around you on every side at the present time. You must be perfectly well aware that the effect of the Moon upon the earth is marked and constant, and above all you may notice that it is the measure in time of all great physiological periods. The fact that you still find that to be the case after so many millions of years should make it at least not surprising to you when you read in ancient books that there is a causal relation between the Moon and the Earth, and between the ancestors of humanity and forms of living beings who existed on the lunar globe in ages gone by.
Now these Lunar Pitris that came and projected their astral forms, as it is said, in order that the first Race of man might develop, came to the Earth, this Earth on which we are now, which is the central globe in the ring of globes, and they came to it--so far as we need trouble about it to-night--for the Fourth Round; of course not for the first time, but 1 am ignoring the first three Rounds. When they arrived at this globe for the Fourth Round, they threw out these shadows--ethereal bodies, as they are called. The reason--and 1 may as well mention it in passing--why an ethereal body, or body of astral matter, should in point of time come before the physical body that we know, is that you cannot have any vital energies at work, you cannot have any electrical or magnetic currents, or any of those currents which have to do with the various phenomena of life and of chemical action, without the presence of ether. So that it is not possible to draw together physical molecules for the making of a dense body unless you have what we may call a matrix of ether through which these forces are able to act, and so to draw together, and hold together after they are drawn, the physical molecules. In fact, every physical molecule has its envelope of ether, and is permeated therewith, and it is by means of this ethereal envelope of the molecule that these life-forces are able to draw and hold the physical body together.
During the first and second Races of man, this physical body was built up by the action of what are called Nature-Spirits, who made this outer clothing of man, the tabernacle of flesh, as it is sometimes entitled. Out of the first Race evolved the second; and of the second evolved the third. No break; nothing that would be called a new creation, but definite and sequential evolution. The materials used in these bodies had been worked up in previous ages through mineral and vegetable and animal, and so had taken on, as far as their atoms were concerned, an internal differentiation, which is of enormous importance when they enter into the body of the higher animals and of man.
Man again is nearly the first being that appears on this globe at the stage of evolution that we are considering. Pass, then, from the first and second Races to the third. When the third Race was evolving, slowly and gradually through almost incalculable periods of time, the animal development took place; that is, the development of the physical and astral bodies went on during the first and second Races, and in the third that of the body of sensation, as you know it in yourselves and in the lower animals, the body which receives and translates into feeling all impressions from without. Your outside body receives contacts from the external universe, and certain parts of it are modified to answer to those contacts; these modified parts we call the sense-organs, but you are aware that the sense-organ in the body, while it answers by way of vibration to any vibration of its own particular class that comes to it from without, is not that which feels or perceives. This vibration has to be transmitted inwards in a very real sense, and not only inwards to the sense-centres, as they are called, in the brain; but inwards from this again, by way of the astral body--and this action shows itself always by the passing of electrical and magnetic currents--into this third body that I am now speaking of, the body of sensation. You may have a break between the outer impact and what we call feeling, between the outer vibrations of the ether on the retina of the eye and what we called sight. The power of sight, the power to tasting, of smelling, of hearing, of feeling, all these powers reside in this body of sensation, and that is, of course, why it has that particular name. Now, the lower animals have this body as well as we. You find it in the animals with which you are familiar around you. They feel, and not only do they feel, but they show emotions, passions, and appetites. You will see the passion of anger in some animals; you will see sex passion; you will find hunger, thirst--all these things are present in the lower animals, and we may group them all together, in order that a single phrase may describe these activities, as the "body of sensation," or, as it is often called, the "body of desire."
As you are a Lodge of students, I many venture to use a Sanskrit word, the word Kama. This body is spoken of as the Kama body, Kama Rupa, which is only the Sanskrit for "desire-body"; and I use the name because I want in a moment to quote a phrase in which that word Kama occurs. In the animal it is developed. Now, it is part of the truth of evolution that every stage of an evolving organism contains within itself in germ the next stage by which evolution is to proceed. Take what stage of evolution you like in the outer world, and you will always find that at any stage there is a germ which, if it proceeds, will develop into a new individual. This is characteristic of all forms of living things, and by the improvement from the germ evolution proceeds. You may take vegetable, you may take animal, you may take man, take what you like: always you will find that, if an individual is to be produced, a germ will be present which is to form part-helper of his grown. Part helper only; and this is always present in what is called the passiveside of Nature.
You remember that if you go right back almost to the beginning of things you find what are called the "pairs of opposites," and the first appearance of these in the Second Logos is often spoken of as being Spirit-Matter, in order to give the two great poles of existence between which all organisation takes place. Two characteristics mark those two poles. One of them is active, and the other is passive; one of them is positive, the other is negative; one of them is that which gives impulse, the other is that which gives form; and these two are present everywhere, inseparable in Nature. Right through Nature, not only in physical Nature but through all realms of Nature, you will find this diversity; and without the union of these two together you will find nowhere fresh growth, progress in evolution. There must always be the stimulating force, and there must be the form that develops. You may call them, if you like, male and female, as in physical Nature; you may call them, if you like, Father and Mother; but keep the idea plainly in mind, because on this the understanding of the origin of the individual soul depends.
Now, let me remind you of the line of evolution, which is the line of form, which comes from the Moon originally, and evolves downwards to Kama. This, I say, is found in the animal just as it is in man, and you need to keep that in mind. In that Kama, or desire--which builds a body with the power of sensation, the power of not only answering to outside impact of translating it into feeling--lies the root of self-consciousness. Consciousness in germ is simply the power to respond to a vibration that comes from outside; and when to that power of response there is added feeling, then you get what we may call the "germ of mind"--not mind, but its germ, the negative side of mind .in which and by means of which mind may evolve.
If for a moment you will look at the lower animals you will see a startling difference between the wild and the domesticated. You will find in the domesticated animal very much more of what you would call mind than you find in the wild animal; and for a very simple reason, that you will see as we go on. If you take the wild animal that has never come across man at all, you will find in it plenty of response to the impacts of the external world; but you will find in it comparatively little reasoning, little judgment, little linking together of inner sensation and outer object, unless the object be present, or unless some craving of the organism gives an impulse to action. Food, for instance, being within the sight of an animal, even if it is not very hungry, will cause movement towards the food; or the craving of the organism for sustenance will make it seek for food. .But you do not get in the wild animal much of what may call "ideal action," action without an impulse which comes from bodily necessities, or from the presence of an external object: that is, you have not there present much of what we know as mind, of which the lowest and earliest manifestations are the connection between an outer object and an inner sensation, and the power of recalling that connection and acting upon it without the object being present--the qualities which technically are called perception and recollection.
At this stage, then, of this single line that I have brought down thus, we have got as far as the development of Kama, in which is the germ of mind, the stage in which, if there is to be a higher evolution, some impulse from without must be given. The passive side of Nature, brooded over by the Divine Spirit, could not by itself get any further than this stage--the development of a germ; and when you have the body of desire present, that contains in it this germ of mind; think of it now, if you like, as the female or mother side of Nature.
Now, for a moment leaving this altogether, take an analogy from lower Nature. Let me ask any of you who happen to be botanists--and probably all of you know enough of botany to follow the illustration--to take what is called the ovule of a plant, that which develops into a seed; left to itself that ovule which is in the female organ will never be anything more than an ovule: it will simply wither up and perish But it contains within it all the nourishment by means of which a new plant will grow; it has stored up, as it were, a stock of food, if any new life, an individual, should there begin But an individual cannot begin there simply by the action of the ovule itself; it needs a stimulus which comes from the contents of the male organ of the plant, the pollen, and if that pollen throws out a minute cell which enters the ovule and comes into contact with the germ cell within the ovule, then there will be an interaction between these two microscopic cells, and by the union of the two a new impulse will be given, and an individual will result which will develop for a time within this ovule which has now become the seed, and after a time will show marks characteristic of its parents; but it will separate itself from the parents and carry on life on its own account, having its own root, its own stem, and its own leaves. The starting-point of that is the junction of the two microscopic cells, differing in their nature, the one positive, impulse-giving, fertilizing, the other receptive, passive, nutrient, showing the characteristics of the two sides of Nature. Now we have here got the passive nutrient side developed along this line which I characterized as lunar--coming from the moon. It is the side of form, and it may perhaps interest you to notice that it is the side that receives from outside, the passive side again, and that all these emotions and everything else in it are set up in answer to this impulse from without, thus showing its characteristic as the receptive or female side.
Now, in past Universes a process of development has gone on similar to that which is going on in the present world to-day; in those past Universes minds were developed as we develop minds now, and their process of development will be clearer when you follow the process of development amongst ourselves. The minds that developed in those preceding Universes, that passed into Nirvana, that passed out of Nirvana again at the beginning of the present age, have many names both in The Secret Doctrine and in other books. Let us take the name of "Sons of Mind" because it describes their most salient characteristic. They are sometimes spoken of under the name of Kwanaras, which means "youths," sometimes they are called Solar Pitris; but I prefer to take the name most often used in The Secret Doctrine, where of course you get it in the Sanskrit form, Manasa Putra; we will take it in English, as "Sons of Mind." They have developed Intelligence. Now what is Intelligence? Intelligence is the result of vital activity working in a particular form of matter and developing connecting links between the external Universe and itself. It is a thing of slow growth; it is made by experience; it is evolved, it does not come into existence suddenly. Intelligence is the outcome of these repeated contacts, and of the working of life on the contacts; so that you never can get Intelligence apart from organism. You have something which may be called the Supreme Life; but it is a mistake to speak of It then as Intelligence; it is higher and deeper and sublimer than anything we know as Intelligence, and Its processes are far beyond and above everything that we call thought. Thought always consists in this linking together of the external and the internal, of making ideal links between the two, and hence images--ideas, as we call them; and Intelligence is only developed by the Supreme Life manifesting Itself, as what we for want of a better word, are obliged to call Spirit in the English tongue--Atma is the familiar name in our own philosophy--by thus manifesting Itself in the subtlest form; and then gradually working through matter and thereby evolving what we call Intelligence. That is, all these connecting links that go to build mental faculties.
This process then had gone on in a past age, so far as these great Sons of Mind are concerned; these mighty Spiritual Intelligences had accomplished what we are aiming at now. They are the successful men of past ages, who have developed into perfect men, perfect Intelligences, and now are, so to speak, co-operating in the building of a new race, co-operating in the production of a new humanity. But up to the point at which we are, they had taken no part in this evolution that had been going on--the physical side, the evolution of form. Now from These is to come a second line, from the Sons of Mind, Lords of Light, They are called sometimes Pillars of Light, and so on; These coming down to the Earth, when the Tabernacles were ready to receive Them came to give the necessary impulse in order that at this point of junction a new individual might arise, and afforded the active, impelling positive energy.
You remember at the beginning of the second volume of The Secret Doctrine, those Stanzas called the Stanzas of Dzyan, which deal with the Evolution of Man. They have been said lately by Mr. Coleman to be purely modern productions; but they were never found out in modern writings until Madame Blavatsky found them. But leave that to return to this. You will find it said that when these Sons of Mind came down, "from their own Rupa they filled the Kama." That is why I was obliged to trouble you with this word, because I wanted to quote that particular Stanza: "From their own Rupa they filled the Kama." Coming down to animal-man they threw part of Their own nature into him, filling the Kama wherein the germ of sensation and feeling had been evolved, and They contributed to that the spark of intelligence. And so again in one of those same Stanzas it is said: "Some projected a spark."' The more careful readers amongst you may remember it is said: "Some entered. . . . Those who entered became Arhats." Those are the great Teachers of Humanity in the earlier days of our Race--the fourth and the fifth Races, and the third and a half. The Great Teachers---Those who took this infant Humanity under Their care, and trained it, Those who absolutely entered into these bodies that were prepared, with Their highly developed Intelligences--were the mighty Adepts of the past; They formed what were called the nurseries of Adepts for the present age; the Great Teachers who came in order that this infant Humanity might be guarded and protected and helped in its earlier stages. With Them, so far as ordinary Humanity is concerned, we need not deal; They entered in and took these bodies as Their vehicles. But They also, some of Them, projected the spark which fell into the kamic receptacle: Their essence filled it. Now the individual begins where that union takes place. Before that there is no Ego in man; before that there is no Soul in man in the full sense of the term, although the word Animal Soul is occasionally used for the feelings, emotions, and so on. The lower Soul this is often called, or the Animal Soul; but the true Ego, that which is capable of achieving immortality, is not there. Remember how that phrase is used sometimes; it has not necessarily immortality in itself, although it has in it the power of achieving immortality, by virtue of its connection with these immoral Sons of Mind, Who have already achieved. Man may become immortal "if he will." That was a phrase used, you may remember, in one of the letters from Master K. H. to Mr. Sinnett, published in The Occult World; part of the : work of the Society was there said to be to teach man that he may become immortal if he will, not that he necessarily is immortal, but that he may achieve immortality. Immortal in the essence of the Soul? Yes; but not in its developed self-conscious intelligence. For intelligence has to be worked out and built up by slow degrees; intelligence has to be evolved by this spark, working through the matter into which it has come, and unless it works successfully, acquires experience slowly, and gradually builds it up into faculty in the course of that pilgrimage of the Soul that lies in front of our thought, immortality will not be achieved. For it is necessary, in order that immortality may be achieved, that this which is to acquire experience and build up accumulated experiences shall regain unity. That which is compounded does not last; that which is compounded will be at some time disintegrated; only the unit persists. The individual begins at this point, and he is a compound. He will weave into his own existence all these endless experiences, and will become so to speak, more and more compound--a more and more complex combination. But this has in itself the seed of destruction; everything that thus goes on combining has in it the conditions of disintegration, and the compound disintegrates. How, then, can this compound achieve immortality? By a process of unification that will form the last stages of its pilgrimage; by that Yoga, or union, which will make it again the One. Having achieved individuality by many, many incarnations, through which this individuality will be built up, it then unifies all these experiences, and by a subtle alchemy extracts as it were a unit experience out of the multiplicity, and in a way beyond words--beyond words because it is beyond brain experience and thought, but which is not beyond the "sensing " of some who have at least begun the process--this individual evolves into a unity higher than its own combined nature; and while it may be said to lose individuality as we know it, it gains something which is far greater. Without losing the essence of individuality it re-becomes a unit consciousness, and by that becomes incapable of disintegration and achieves its final immortality. But here is the beginning point--and on that I want to lay a good deal of stress--that it begins then, that before that the Ego which is now in each of you was not in existence as Ego, any more than the plant which will develop from a germ, if the germ be fertilised, is in existence before that fertilisation takes place. True, that which will form it exists, because there is no increase either of energy or of matter; but the combination which makes the new individual does not exist until the junction has taken place, and the Ego does not exist before this union has taken place. It is there that originates the individual. You will forgive me for repeating that so often. But this is the point where the mistake comes in, and where there is so much confusion in thought; and it is because of that that I am laying stress upon it, in order that you may have clearly in your minds this fact: that individuals begin in each Manvantara or Age, that the purpose of each Universe is the evolution of individuals, that the Universe comes into existence in order that individuals may be born, that it is maintained in existence in order that individuals may be evolved, that when it passes out of manifestation its harvest is the perfected individuals who regain unity and outlast the Universe, passing into what is called Nirvana, to re-emerge for a new Universe as Sons of Mind, if in the former Universe they have been completely successful. There are other intermediate stages, points where failure may come in--and where evolution may have to be taken up again as it were midway, points of failure in one Universe that do not throw back the fallen, as Master K. H. pointed out, to the beginning of things again, but are such as to allow them to take up their evolution at the point where it ceased. The failures of one age become, so to speak; the pioneers of another. But leaving those complications out of consideration, the harvest of every Universe is these triumphant individuals, who have evolved unity out of diversity, and thus have achieved their immortality.
Realising that, then, let us take our individual and see what kind of an entity this is at its origin. And I think I will throw in here a very, very brief digression, which will make it a more living thing to you. Take one of the lower animals. Now we will come to the domesticated. I mentioned that with regard to the wild animal there is the germof mind, but very little that you can really call mind. Suppose you take an animal and domesticate it, and suppose you domesticate it for generations, you will have handed on in the three bodies of that animal--the physical, the astral, and the kamic--you will have handed on a very definite heredity; and if these individuals are domesticated time after time you will find greater and greater intelligence, as it may be called, evolving.
Now, supposing that you take a puppy, and supposing that from that puppy's birth you keep it continually with yourselves, and you do not permit it to associate with the lower creatures, but you keep it with yourselves. Some lonely person, for instance, takes a puppy, and it is always with him or her; what is the result? The result is that in that puppy, as it grows up, there is developed a startling amount of some quality that you are forced to call Intelligence. You will develop in it a limited reason; you will develop in it a limited memory; you will develop in it a limited judgment. Now, these are qualities of the mind, not qualities of Kama. How is it that in this lower animal these qualities are developed? They are developed artificially by the playing upon it of the human intelligence. To that animal the mind in you to some extent plays the part which the Son of Mind plays to Humanity; and thrown out from the comparatively developed Intelligence in man, these rays, these energetic rays of mental influence, vitalize the germ in the Kama of the animal and so produce artificially, as it were, an infant mind.
Now I say that, in order that you may realise more clearly perhaps than otherwise you would, the first slow stages of the growth of mind. Let me say that this process is not good of the animal, and it is not good for the human being who does it. Neither the one nor the other is the better for the process, in fact very often both are exceedingly the worse, and it is not a wholesome practice--this over stimulation of the domesticated animal and this artificial forcing of a mental life for which the animal body is not yet fitted, for which the animal nervous system has not yet developed he proper natural basis, and in which it is really forced, in a kind of artificial hot-house, to the detriment of the creature, and probably to its retardation in a later stage of its existence.
But it is well to remember that there is no such thing as a break in nature; every evolution is sequential, and it is therefor possible to force evolution in this way, although it be unwise. *1
Coming back from that little digression, let me take up again my infant Soul, to whom I will give the name of the baby Ego, and he is very much, as regards his metal capacities, what the new-born baby is as regards his power of manifesting these faculties. Of course, the new-form baby has mental faculties which very soon force the brain to prepare itself for their manifestation, so that there is not a real analogy between the two. The want of knowledge, so to speak, in the new-born baby is simply due to the clumsiness of the instrument; the brain is new, and it takes some little time for the links to be set up between the instrument and the player. But the player is there, when you are dealing with our race at the present time, and therefore we have not really the condition in which the Ego itself is in the state of baby-hood.
Now this entity which has thus been formed at this junction of the two lines, and which I call the baby Ego, is absolutely ignorant. It has no mind, it has no thought, it has nothing more than the sensation it gets from Kama at present, except the power of evolving which it has received from the stimulating spark of the Son of Mind. Sensations are there; it has to make the link which we call perception. How will that link be made? The sensation will be
caused by way of the body through which it has come into contact with some external object. Let us say that the body, by the mouth, comes upon an external object which gives rise to a pleasantsensation of taste--something which is sweet. The animal of course has developed this already, and in the body it will be a habit that when it sees this thing, or feels hunger, it will go towards it. The baby Ego will experience the sensation which is pleasurable, but it will only be a momentary sensation, and at first apparently nothing more--a little impact on this germ of mind; over and over again such an impact will take place. At last there is set up in this baby Ego by this repetition a connecting link between the external object that gives rise to a pleasant sensation and the pleasant sensation, and it will thus make its first thought. This connecting link between the external and the internal, between the contact which comes from an outside object and the pleasure which that contact gives, will be what is called a "percept," and you have in perception the first activity of the mind; when this perception has been repeated over and over and over and over again, it will be remembered, and conscious memory begins.
Built up in this baby by these repeated contacts, and repeated pleasurable sensations, and repeated connections between the object and the sensation, at last memory will develop which is the ideal contact; the idea is built out of a number of these sensations. And that faculty of memory will be a faculty of the baby Ego which will be evolved by these constant experiences; and it will take a long time evolving--perhaps a whole life, or part of a life. I cannot measure it off; but I want you to realise that it is a thing which will take a considerable time, that the memory will be a thing which will need much experience at this early stage, before it will really become recognisable and workable.
There are human beings even at the present time in which this faculty of the Soul is so little developed, that it will not last over even twelve hours, and in which heir view of the world is quite different in the morning and in the evening. Some of the lowest aborigines in Australia in whom the spark has burned very low, in whom it has not developed and grown, are on record as having so little memory that they cannot remember through the course of a whole day, and blankets given away in the evening will be clung to because the night has begun and the night is cold. But when the next morning comes round and the immediate use for the blanket is over, and while they do not want the blanket they do want food--the food is an immediate want, but the blanket won't be wanted till evening--some of them have not sufficiently developed what we should call the idea of invariable sequence in their minds to remember that night will come back again after the day is over, and that the blanket which they do not want while the sun is out they will want when the sun has set. The sunset of yesterday is, so to speak, a past incarnation to them, and they do not carry on the memory through the night; therefore, they will part with their blanket for a mere trifle in the morning, although they will not part with it in the evening--a most striking illustration of the baby sense, if I may so call it, of the Ego which is incarnated in these aborigines. They are dying off very fast, and no English government will be able to keep them alive, because their work is done. A race dies when it is of no more use to the Soul; it becomes sterile when its purpose in the evolution of the Soul is over. For as the Universe only exists for the sake of the Soul, so all these stages in the Universe exist for the Soul, and when there are no more Souls so little developed that such a race is of any use to them, it becomes sterile and gradually disappears. I do not mean when it is helped to disappear by the superior races, though that is often the case; but even if they do not help it to disappear rapidly, it will inevitably disappear slowly on its own account, by the barrenness which falls upon it. It is of no more use, therefore it does not continue
That illustration may give you some idea of what the spark is like in its early stages, as youfind it in these sparks that have burned low and not developed. Memory will be very, very slowly developed, but when it is developed, even in a limited way, you will at once see that an element is present conducing to more rapid growth, because the moment that this baby remembers past experiences it is then beginning to accumulate a little store which will impel it to action without impulse from without. It will have an impulse beginning from within which will lead it to seek experiences. Farther, not until it has memory can it distinguish, in their absence, between pleasurable and painful experiences, good and evil, as it will call them, and so begin to develop in itself a power of comparison and selection, i.e., of judgment, which will serve as a guide for action. Let me take the case of taste, which I chose before. It was pleasurable. Of course, some tastes will be unpleasant, and those will be marked off as painful, to be avoided. So that the Ego will get, as it begins to remember, two classes of things in the outer world; one labelled in its own mind--if I may call it mind at this stage: "pleasure; to be sought, to be followed;" and the other labelled: "painful; to be avoided, to be run away from, to be escaped." And at this stage, the Universe, so to speak, will divide itself into two for this baby Ego, things to be run after and things to be run away from. It will not have gone any further than that. Going out into an unknown world where it comes into contact with objects, the first great division will be things that it wants, and things that it does not want; and the wanting or the not wanting will depend on whether it meets something which it desires to repeat because it gives it pleasure, or something which it desires to avoid repeating because it gives it pain. This is the beginning of experience. In this way it will begin, as it accumulates these experiences of pleasure and of pain, to learn something more; it will begin to learn that this world that it has come into is a very definite kind of thing, and that it has got to accommodate itself to it; it will find some things in it that do not give way, and that if it runs up against those things certain unpleasant results always follow. Memory of course is wanted for this, to notice that always the same thing comes from the same object under the same circumstances; and when sufficient of these sensations have been accumulated to give rise to the definite idea that doing a particular thing will cause pain, there is the first glimpse of law, of something external to itself which it cannot overcome, which throws it back, as it were, and gives what it feels as pain, something repellent when it comes against it. So the idea begins to arise that not only are some things to followed and others to be avoided, but that the things which are to be followed, and which are pleasure-giving, are things which are good--which only means at first harmonious--and that others are inharmonious and unpleasant and therefore "evil"; that there is a law of pleasure and of pain to which it must adapt itself if it wants to live in comfort, that nothing that it can do will break this law, and that therefore it will be wise to accommodate itself to the law. This observation of sequence will be made by our baby Ego and will give rise to the idea of Law, and of the need to adapt itself to these laws if it is to live at all comfortably. And then a little more will come as the experience goes on; that sometimes a thing begins by giving pleasure and goes on by giving pain--a most confusing experience. Let us cling to our taste. The body of our baby Ego eats and pleasure is felt; because of this it makes the body go on eating till it eats too much. It then finds that by repeating this gratification pain has come where there was pleasure. It makes its body ill, and it gets a new view of the outside Universe--that the gratification of this which began by being pleasurable works out into pain, and that the pleasure which began in flavour may end in most uncomfortable aches; and not only so, but, persisted in, may cause perennial aches which later on it will know as disease. This very much emphasises its idea of law, and it begins to accumulate now a sequential experience of different pleasures and pains, and to realise that it bears a certain relationship to these outside contacts; it learns that it is not the outside object in itself that is pleasure-giving or pain-giving, but some relation that arises between itself and the outside object--a great advance--and that these outside objects are neither pleasure-giving nor pain-giving in themselves, but only in relation to itself, the same thing sometimes giving the one and sometimes giving the other. So that the idea of pleasure and pain, in this further experience of our baby Ego, will go on into the relationships that itself sets up with the outer world, and that change the character of the outside impact from pleasurable to painful. And then the law will begin to take on, as it were, a compelling power, and it will realise that it can adapt itself to this strange external apparent change, and that by adapting itself it can persist in pleasure or persist in pain, and that the pleasure and pain will depend on its attitude to the outer world. And so this next lesson of experience will be learned. And there I must leave my baby Ego for to-night, having reached as far as the recognition of an outer world, the receiving of pleasure and of pain, the recognition of relations, therefrom evolution of memory, evolution of judgment--which recognises the relationship as having in itself this difference of pleasure and pain--so that we have the beginnings of perception, memory, judgment--three things that are wanting for what we call reason of an elementary kind. Reason only exists certainly in the baby Ego as a mere germ; and we will leave him as he passes through death, carrying with him these germinal mental faculties which he has evolved. We cannot say how much progress would be made in one of these early lives; probably many lives would be needed to arrive at the stage just described. In order to make our study complete in outline, let us take him at the end of his first life, to see the principle underlying post-mortem evolution. Let us see him having begun his pilgrimage and passing for the first time through the gate of death. On the other side of that we will leave him to take him up again next week.
*1 It is with much inner pleasure that I find that a statement current in Theosophical circles, and repeated by me above, is incorrect in fact. It seems, with regard to some animals at least--as the dog and the cat--that the development caused "by the playing upon it of human intelligence" is well caused, and lifts the animal forward, so that the germinating individuality does not return to animal incarnation, but awaits elsewhere the period at which its further development shall become possible. The "forcing" is therefore helpful and beneficial, not harmful, and we may rid ourselves of the incongruous idea that, in a universe built on and permeated by Love, the out-welling of compassion and love to our younger relatives is injurious to them. There are a good many Theosophists, I think, who will share my pleasure in getting rid of a view against which one's instinct secretly rebelled.
You will remember that last week we left what I called the baby Ego having passed through the gateway of death. Now I spoke of his passing for the first time through the gateway of death, because I wanted to take up for a few moments the post-mortem states in order that we might have as it were before us for the rest of the study of the pilgrimage this complete cycle: the life upon earth, the life in the transition state beyond death, the life in the Devachanic state--the life of the Soul properly so-called, the intellectual and intelligent life. Those three stages, being the three divisions of the pilgrimage completing a single period, are repeated over and over again, succeeding each other in this definite way, all bearing to each other a definite relation, so that unless we understand each of the three we shall not be able to follow with any intelligence the pilgrimage of the Soul or the growth of the Ego.
When, however, this germinal Ego that I spoke of last week passes for the first time through the gateway of death, it has exceedingly little material for these stages that lie on the other side of that gateway. The first stage is that which may be called--translating the term--the Land of Desire. You will remember that desire is Kama, and Loka is place; so that this land or place of desire is called, in Theosophical books, Kama Loka; that is, a place inhabited by Souls still clad in the desire or sensation body that we studied last week. The Ego in this body dwells there for a time--but not only the Ego of man. It is the place where these bodies of sensation and desire survive the physical and the astral bodies; so that you have there these desire or sensation bodies of the lower animals as well as those which are inhabited by the Human Soul.
Now, when our baby Ego is at this very early stage of his life there will be in him a great deal of the lower element of Kama or desire, and scarcely anything at all of the higher element of Mind. His stay then in this Kama Loka will be for a considerable period, and all that he will do there is to experience pleasant or painful results according as the life which has been led on the physical plane--which has been led upon earth--has been in accordance with law or discordant with law. The life there is exceedingly limited, and is simply a result from the life upon earth. Nothing new is introduced into it; it is a life in which there is a great deal of repetition, in which an experience is repeated over and over and over again. And this automatic action, as we may call it, is one of the great characteristics of this Kamic body, or body of sensation. You know how easily habits are set up--habits of the physical body, especially habits which are connected with the passions and with the emotions. The great root of these habits lies in the body of sensation with its peculiarly strong automatic tendencies. Those are impressed on the outer body, although, of course, the habit of repetition in the physical body will also come in to some extent.
When the Soul has passed out of this transitional state it leaves behind it this body of desire, just as in leaving the earth it left the physical body. The bodies belong to certain definite stages in the Universe, and the Soul cannot carry on any body with which it has been clothed further than the stage in the Universe to which that body belongs. It cannot carry the physical body away from the physical plane; it cannot carry the astral body out of the lower astral world; it cannot carry this body of sensation out of the transitional state, known as the land of sensation or desire. And when it has worn it out sufficiently to allow it to escape, when it has exhausted, so to speak, this body of desire, which has been nourished in the sensational life of earth, then it passes on into a higher condition, into a higher sphere, where the whole of its work is the work of the mind, all higher aspirations, all thoughts which are devoid of passion and of appetite, everything which is intellectual as distinguished from what is passional, all the higher emotions which have in them this element of mind as well as the lower element of passion--these, purified from passion, will be carried on into this higher world. And the length of the stay of the Soul in that world depends on the amount which during its earth-life it has accumulated of mental experiences, and of experiences of the higher emotions, of the artistic faculties, and so on, everything in fact which has to do with the mind. Understanding that, you will see at once that when the Soul first passes through the gateway of death there will be scarcely anything for it to carry on into this higher condition, hardly any experiences which it can use for the development, as it were, of mental faculty. Still, the very few experiences that it has acquired during its first life in the body, which are not kamic, will be carried on. What will be its work then in this higher world? It will be to extract from these separated mental experiences their essence, and to transmute that essence by working upon it with this energy of the Soul, transmute that essence into mental faculty, or mental ability. The work that the Soul accomplishes when it is out of the body, when it can no longer gather fresh experiences, when it has lost the three bodies through which experiences can alone be collected, the work of the Soul is then to take up the mental images remaining from these experiences, and, working on them, to take out of them their essence. Just in the same way that a chemist might take a number of chemical elements, might throw them into a crucible, and then purifying them from dross might extract the elements themselves and combine them in the crucible; so does this chemist, as it were--the Soul--by the alchemy of its own mental ability, the thought power which it has developed, working on these accumulated and separated experiences, throwing them into the crucible of the mind, extract from them their essence, and then taking that essence it assimilates it, makes it part of itself, works it into its own nature, or--to use the phrase that I used two or three times last week--weaves these separated experiences into itself, and so begins to make a real garment of the Soul, which is the character of the Soul, and which will reappear as character when it comes back to earth. Everything that the Soul brings with it of mental faculty, everything that is born, as we say, with the child, the powers of the mind which the child shows--the whole of these are brought back by the Soul as the result of its workings on past experiences while it is living in the world of the Soul, the world that we call Devachan in our Theosophical literature, which simply means the land of bliss. As I say then, in these early experiences there will be very little for the Soul to work upon in this blissful land; but when it comes back even after this first period is completed, and comes to be born for the second time upon earth, it will have what it did not have at the beginning--a little germ of mental faculty. That is the small result in faculty which it has brought back by working on the few experiences that it accumulated during its previous life. It will start then at a certain advantage in this second period of its pilgrimage; it will start with certain tools, as it were, ready made to its hand, which it has fashioned for itself during this interlude in the world of the Soul; it will come back with a nascent memory, with a nascent power of comparison, very, very small certainly, but still, so to speak, better than none; and it will work through that on the new experiences that come to it by way of sensation from the outer world.
Through this life, then, again it will pass, having this advantage now, that it has a little mental faculty to go upon which it can increase. As it goes on experiences increase, its power to receive the experiences being greater, and this mental element mixing itself up with the emotional and the passional nature. So that wenow speak of the mind, or as we call it, Manas--the word from which our own word man is derived, and which really means the thinker: the great characteristic of the man being that he thinks. This Manas, then, now coming back, small as its powers are, will modify and change the whole of the kamic nature, the passional nature; and all that this Ego now experiences will have in it the two elements--the element of passion which belongs to its passional nature, and the element which comes from this mind which is developing, which tends gradually more and more to observe, and to compare, and to make record of its experiences, and to store them up in order that it may direct its action by them. At first all the actions will grow from outer attraction; presently against the outer attraction there will be working the images of past experiences. So that, to take up the illustration that I used last week of taste, when there is a strong attraction from without of a taste which it knows will be pleasurable, excess will be guarded against by the mental image which has been preserved of the pains that in previous experiences were the result of over-gratification of taste. So that now you will have this double element. And remember that the element of the mind is increasing, while the other element is more or less stationary. As the Soul passes from life to life, and in each life accumulates experiences, in each transitional stage after death suffers from the animal appetites which hold it prisoner from going on into the happier world, and then in that happier world works upon experiences and changes them into faculties, it will always have an accumulating stock of faculty, an accumulating store of memories, while the outer attractions will remain comparatively the same, and action will be more and more directed by reason and less and less directed by appetite.
Now, understanding that you will be fairly able, I think, to trace, so to speak, the stages of this pilgrimage of the Soul: you see the elements that enter into the pilgrimage; you see the tools with which the Soul will have to work improvements, if it uses its experiences well in the successive incarnations; and you will also understand that on the accumulation of these experiences, and the working upon those experiences in the blissful land, will depend the more rapid or the slower growth of the faculties of the Soul--that is, whether it will grow rapidly, or will grow slowly, or moderately, whether the pilgrimage shall be comparatively swift or very much delayed. You will see also how the Soul may often be thrown back, how a very strong attraction from without may overbear, say, a comparatively small store of accumulated experiences; and then the Soul will make a mistake, will go against the law, and will suffer.
How should we regard such an experience when we are studying this pilgrimage of the Soul? Is it a matter for very great regret? Is it a matter for extreme grief and sorrow?
Think it out for yourselves and you will see the way in which this wider view of life will regard any mistake, any blunder, any fall, any sin. Sin is disharmony with law. So long as the law is not understood, desire will constantly be drawing the Soul outward without regard to this law of which it knows nothing, and striking on the law it will feel pain. Suppose then that it has not accumulated a sufficient store of these painful experiences to make it realize the presence of the law; or suppose that having accumulated sufficient experience to recognize the presence of the law, it has not accumulated sufficient to overbear the strong drawing of attraction to the external object; then the very experience of wrong-doing is a necessary stage in its education. For the pain that results from the wrong-doing will add to the store of experience that the Soul is gradually accumulating, and will make it stronger against the temptation in the future by this new suffering which it has found must inevitably result from coming into conflict with the law. So that instead of being heart-broken over a failure, those who see from life to life and look on the pilgrimage of the Soul as a great whole, and not simply in the fragments that ordinary persons see in looking at it, they can see with calmness these blunders that the Soul makes, knowing that they are the result of insufficient experience, and that the very fall will supply an added experience which will help the Soul to stand when it comes into a similar position in the future. And there is no more reason for extreme sorrow over these blunders of the growing Soul than, to use a simile that I have often used before, there is reason for the mother to break her heart because the child may stumble when it is learning to walk. If the child is hurt she may feel sorrow for the child's pain, but she certainly will not go into a state of frantic despair about it. She will know that these tumbles are a necessary part of the education of the child in gaining equilibrium, and will know that every tumble it has will make the tumbles of the future less likely to occur.
Now, that is not a callous way of looking at things; it is a wise way; and as knowledge grows wisdom gives balance to contemplate calmly many things that otherwise would be distressing and disturbing in the very highest degree. Calmness, which is a characteristic of wisdom, comes from this wider vision which is able to understand causes as well as see effects, and which understands how that which to-day seems sad will work out for good in days to come.
One other distinction that we want to realize as to the principles at work in this pilgrimage of the Soul, is that the kamic element with which the Ego is encircled, constantly giving rise to desire, is that which is always making links which bring it back to birth. Every desire that you have for something down here survives death, remains behind you in the transition state until you return for reincarnation, and draws you back to rebirth as soon as you have exhausted in the blissful land the accumulated experiences of the mind which you work upon in that region of the Universe. So to speak, when the body drops from it, the Ego, having accumulated sufficient materials for its work, has the tendency to leave the Earth and assimilate what it has gained through these agencies which exist in the desire body. It leaves earth behind, being drawn by the stronger mental forces onward, where it has to work in the region of ideas. When its store is exhausted, then the desire links re-assert their power, and the Ego having finished, having got through all the mental experiences in the blissful land, feels again these links of desire reasserting their power, and it is drawn back by them to re-incarnation, and attached by those links of desire to all the objects of desire, with which they are connected.
Now the especial reason that I mention this is that I hear so many people when they are dealing with reincarnation say, "I don't want to come back." It is of no use having a theory that you do not want to come back, if you are making these desire links to things on the physical and on the kamic planes. So long as you want anything which the world can give you, your Ego does want to come back, and must come back whether you think you want it or not. The fact that it desires something here shows this fundamental craving for return, and the mere feeling of weariness, which is the outcome of a tired brain, and of a consciousness working in that tired brain, has absolutely nothing to do with the inevitable destiny of the Ego. The brain which is tired certainly will not come back; it will go to pieces on the earth to which it belongs, and the tiredness which makes people say, "I don't want to come back," is the tiredness of this outside body, the desire to escape from the painful things that have made an impression upon it, and so on. The real desire is shown by the attachment to the things of earth, by the wish for one thing or another, the wish for ease, the wish for pleasure, the wish for social consideration, the wish for the praise of men, the wish for everything with which men's and women's lives are filled well-nigh to the brim at the present time. For persons who are full of desire in this way, to say: "I don't want to come back," is simply to show a lack of understanding. They must come back until there is nothing here which has the slightest attraction for them. When nothing here attracts them, when praise and blame are exactly the same to them, when they do not mind whether in the outside world they are rich or poor, when they do not mind whether they are what people call happy or unhappy, when the whole outside life is an absolute matter of indifference, when nothing can shake their peace or bring the slightest ruffle of any kind over the emotional nature, then that Soul is ready to go on; but so long as any of these things have the slightest influence, so long these links are being made and must draw the Soul back to fresh experiences of earth.
Manas itself does not make these links, it makes them through Kama, and makes them where the desire even for intellectual things comes in, but not by pure abstract thinking, which is its own special work. That is to say, it is not Manas pure and simple which makes links bringing us back to rebirth, it is Kama-Manas, which is the form of Manas working amongst the great masses of people to-day. Manas itself, which comes out now and again in absolutely abstract thinking, does not make links which draw to rebirth. But inasmuch as almost all intellectual effort here is very largely carried on with the kamic element, and has worked through the brain, which is the vehicle of Kama-Manas, most intellectual effort will have in it the desire element, and so will bring the Soul back for fresh experiences upon the earth.
As to the way in which it works: it works by what we may call the creative power of thought. The whole world is the outcome of the Divine Thought. Everything which we know as phenomenal is the mere outside appearance which has in it the inner and living reality of thought. All outside appearance is but the form which the thought takes for expression on these lower planes; and the whole Universe is nothing more than a Divine Thought in manifestation. That Divine, that God-like element is in man, and it works through Manas, and is the creative element. The more of that there is in the activity of a person, the more is he a creative energy in the world
Every thought makes to itself a form. Every time that you think, a form is made in your mental atmosphere. A passing thought will only have a very transitory form, a thought which is constantly repeated will have a form which by these repetitions becomes stronger and stronger, and more and more permanent, so that according to the fixity and the motives of your thoughts will be the life of the thought forms that you are continually generating around you.
If you refer to a letter in The Occult World, written by Master K. H. to Mr. Sinnett, you will see that He points out that when a thought goes out and takes form, it is vivified or entered into by an Elemental, and the character of the Elemental will be according to the character of the thought, and according to the motive that has inspired the thought. If the thought be a good one, for instance directed to human service with a desire to serve, then it will be helped from outside by this Elemental which is of a good and a pure type, and the thought will be a force for good, reacting on the person who has thought it, and reacting on all those who come within the sphere of his influence. So that every thought which is loving and helpful lives in the world of thought as a useful influence. And supposing that these good thoughts are directed towards people, then they go to the people to whom the will directs them and, so to speak, encircle them with a protective and aiding power. And it is a real thing that every good and kind thought that you have of a person, every wish for their benefit, every desire for their happiness, is an actual living thing that goes to that person as a living entity, and lives as it were in connection with the person towards whom you have directed it as a protective agency, warding off danger and drawing good towards that person to whom you have sent this angel of your thought.
So again, with all evil thoughts, thoughts which have in them the element of hate, of revenge, of passion--those draw to themselves from the outer world Elementals which increase this energy. So that an evil thought directed against a person is an absolutely mischievous agent, which may injure him either in physical health, in the astral body, or in any part of his body or mind. Suppose the person has nothing in him which in any sense forms a link with this thought of yours, then the thought will be thrown back, and will return to yourself and strike you to your own injury. Suppose, however, that the person has, what most people have, some little fault in himself, which may make a link with this thought of yours, then the evil thought attaches itself to the person and injures that person in some part of his nature. Therefore is it that everything which is of the nature of evil thought consciously directed towards a person has been called, and rightly called, Black Magic. A thought of revenge or of anger which is directed towards any person with a view to injure him is essentially of the nature of Black Magic. And the greater the power of the person who does it, and the greater the knowledge of the person who does it, the greater is their crime for which they have to answer to the Law. In this way, then, the Soul works by these thought-forms. First these thought-forms, then their Elementals, working back upon the Soul that generates them, as well as working in the outer world; these go on with the Soul into Devachan, so far as they are pure in their nature, and make the faculty of which I spoke, being as it were moulded into faculty; and then coming back, the physical body is moulded by way of the astral to manifest this character, which has taken to itself, by means of these thought-forms, certain definite shapes. So that it is perfectly true that the outer body of a person will show something of its character. That body is physically built on the aggregated thought-forms which have been transformed, by the alchemy that I spoke of, into definite faculties, and these having their characteristic forms will mould the shaping of the outer body. And it is perfectly true that when you are dealing with the general shape of the brain, you will have that brain developed in certain regions, according to the character of the Ego that inhabits it. The mistake is to suppose that it is the tabernacle which makes the tenant; it is the tenant who builds the tabernacle. So that while you have the two correlated the one to the other, we must not begin at the wrong end, and believe that the master-builder is made by his house; he builds himself the dwelling in which, in his coming incarnation, he will have to live.
One other point as regards our back-coming Ego. You will notice I am not tracing him life by life. I am giving you general principles which will work through large numbers of lives. These stages being passed through, what circumstances will our Ego come back into ? That will depend upon the circumstances that during his past life he caused upon earth; according to the happiness or misery he causes upon earth in a past incarnation, so will be the circumstances in which he will find himself when he comes back to earth.
Suppose, for instance, that a man whose influence extends over large numbers of people spreads happiness around him on every side. That is a distinct effect that he has worked and it will govern the condition in which he will be born in his next life. This happiness that he spreads amongst large numbers of his fellows is a seed which will spring up as happy circumstances for his next incarnation. Sowing happiness he will reap happiness. Sowing pain he will reap pain. If he causes a great deal of physical suffering in his life, he will reap much physical misery in some following incarnation. If he spreads around himmuch mental distress and trouble he will reap mental distress and trouble in the circumstances that come in his way. Mind, these are things he cannot alter They are fixed future events, so to speak; when he leaves the earth. These are the things that can be predicted of him. with fair certainty, because these are seeds that are left which have to grow up each after its own kind. Over these he has no power; they are there and he has got to live amongst them.
Now you may have a man who is not a good man morally, but who has yet spread a very large amount of happiness amongst people, say of a physical kind; he will reap physical happiness in his next incarnation. You may find a good man who by lack of knowledge has spread a great deal of misery, and he will reap physical suffering in his next incarnation. You have to distinguish, if you want to understand, between these different agencies of the Soul. According to his desires and his will, so will be his faculties--his own personal possessions, or individual possessions rather, if I may call them so; according to what he has sown upon earth will be his harvest upon earth when he returns. So that all these circumstances of happiness or of misery will be the result of the happiness or the misery that he has spread in previous incarnations: they will come back to him as environment, as circumstances.
Now I come to my next point. You must remember the pilgrimage of the Soul is very long, and a lecture is very short, so that I am obliged to run somewhat rapidly from one subject to another. The next point at which I must make a moment's pause is on our Ego when he has become more experienced. He is no longer a baby, nor even a child, or even a youth; he is a mature Ego, and he is becoming wise. With this wisdom of his he is bringing back more and more faculty, he is bringing back more and more memory, he will make for himself instruments which will be able to express greater and greater capacity, and a time will come in this pilgrimage of his in which his constant efforts to impress on these lower tabernacles his own ever-lengthening memory of past experiences will become more and more successful. His will having grown very strong, will tell considerably upon his lower nature. What we call the voice of conscience will begin to make itself heard with more imperative force. Now conscience is this memory of the soul expressing itself in the lower nature; it comes with authority, and the lower nature feels the authoritative sound in it: " You ought to do this, you ought not to do that." And sometimes the lower nature will challenge it, not being able to understand where this authority comes from. The authority lies in the Soul, which is trying to make the lower nature go its way; it is using its own past experience to prevent the lower nature being led astray by the outside objects, by its mistaken deductions, by its very incomplete experiences. And it is speaking constantly to this lower nature, and constantly the lower nature does not hear. In all the clatter and jangle of the body in which it is living, it finds it is very difficult to make its voice heard coming from the higher planes. But the voice of the conscience is always this voice of the Soul, speaking out of its memory. And if you think that out at your leisure you will see how it is that conscience will sometimes speak wrongly as to choice of action, but always with the sense of: "You ought to do." The reason that it sometimes speaks wrongly as to action is because the experience is still a limited experience. The reason why it is always imperative is because that limited experience is the only guide which Manas has, and it is the best guide even though it be imperfect. A man therefore does wisely always to obey his conscience. It is the best decision which experience enables the Soul to make, and if it be guilty, it is faulty because of the want of experience. If you obey it, when it blunders you will gain the lacking experience; and you will suffer more if you do not obey it. By following some other rule whichis not the rule of your own inner Self, speaking from its own experience, you will be obeying an external law, which, speaking from without, is not to be relied upon to develop your Soul. The Soul is developed by experience, not by compulsion, and an outer law, however good it may be, does not, being a compulsory power, add to the inner forces of the Soul; therefore is it of comparatively small value in evolution, far less than the voice of conscience, even when the conscience is faulty.
Now taking that, let us come back from that slight digression to our Ego. It has become comparatively mature, it is getting wiser. Getting wiser it wants to escape from this constant succession of births and of deaths of which it is beginning to get a little tired. It has gone through it so often that it has accumulated a great deal of experience, and many things in the world no longer attract it. Everything they can give it, it has gathered; why should it want to repeat its experience of them? The taste has disappeared because the experience has been obtained; and as this Soul comes back there will be a number of things in the outer world that will no longer attract, and that it will turn aside from with a sense of weariness and disgust. These things will first be the things of the senses, which are the soonest worn out, and it will go more and more towards the things of the mind, more and more towards the things of the intellect, accumulating a larger and larger store for its Devachanic life, a greater and greater accumulation on which it is going to work. So that the life in Devachan will be longer and longer, the Soul working out these greater stores which it carries with it from this earthly life. Coming back then again, having had these long Devachanic interludes, it comes back with this ever increasing distaste for the lower desires, and the links with objects of the sense become feebler and feebler. Its knowledge enables it to recognize the transitory and illusory character of earthly things, and it breaks the links of desire by knowledge; knowing that they pass, it refuses to be attached to them, and so exhausts these links which inevitably draw it back to earth so long as they last. Instead of setting up great numbers of these, it creates only thought-forms of the pure intellect, and the pure reason, and the pure thought, which do not tie it to these transitory things of the earth. And it may break these links in two ways--by knowledge in the way that I described; or also it may break them by catching glimpses of higher and greater realities--the spiritual realities as we say--and that mightier attraction, overbearing the attraction to earth, will draw the desires upwards, purifying them as they ascend. So that at last all the lower element of desire which is for the lower self will be gotten rid of, and there will be present only the desire to work because the work is useful, to work because the work is duty, to work because others need the service, and so on.
You may thus get rid of the personal element in desire, which is the binding element for return, and in one of two ways; either by a distinctly intellectual recognition of the transitory character of the objects and the exhausting of desire by knowledge, or by the burning up of desire by devotion, and the deliberate sacrifice of everything to the higher ideal of life which is to become its compelling power.
The time will come in this growth of the Ego when it will realize then that the lower earth has nothing which is worth having. By knowledge, by devotion, or by both, it has broken these links. What then will be the nature of the life to be lived, when it is establishing no new links to bring it back to birth? It may be a very active life, employed constantly in working amongst men; for it is not action that binds men to birth, but the desire which causes action. In desire, and not in act, lies this link which draws the Ego back to birth. Suppose then that during a life of very great activity there is no desire; suppose every action that is performed, is performed because it is right to be done; suppose that when it is performed, the Ego concerns itself no more about it; suppose it has no wish for the result of that action, either good, or bad, or indifferent; suppose that when the action is performed there is no link which binds the Soul to it in any way, that it remains absolutely indifferent to the fruit of action, as it is technically called, and works, not because it wants to gain anything, but because it wants to serve and because it recognizes that it is one with the All, and therefore must discharge perfectly everything which the law demands of it in the particular place in the world in which it may be. Freedom of the Soul, then, depends on whether you want to bring about a result by your action, because the result is desirable, or merely because you want to be in harmony with law, because you recognize yourself as part of the All, because you recognize yourself as a channel of the law. If you are nothing more than that, if everything that you do is done because it is duty, if you act neither for pleasure nor pain, neither from love nor hatred, neither from attraction nor repulsion, neither for gain nor loss, then, there being no desire, no link is made; in the doing of the action you are part of the One and the All, and that cannot be bound by these links to rebirth, so that the question of outer activity does not affect in itself the freedom of the Soul. I grant, of course, to the full that people need the stimulus of desire in order to make them act, until they have reached this higher stage where action is perfectly performed for duty's sake. It cannot be reached at a bound, it cannot be reached by its intellectual recognition, it cannot be reached even by saying that it is desirable; it can only be reached by the inner growth of the Ego, which makes it really fundamentally indifferent to all the things which attract the masses of mankind. So long as there is attraction, that is needed for the performance of duty. It is only when the lower nature is entirely the instrument of the higher that a man will lead a life of great activity without the smallest wish to see anything which may flow from his acts; and when that point is reached, he has achieved his freedom, when that is done, Karma for him--save the great Karma of the Universe--is at an end. Individual Karma for him is burnt up, burnt up in these fires of knowledge and of devotion which prevent him establishing any links with the earth, and he therefore makes no fetters which bind him to the wheel of birth and of death. The burning up of Karma in this fire of devotion means that you throw into the fire every action of your life, and like a sacrifice it is burnt up and changed.
Let me give you one illustration only to show you how this change may occur in the higher spiritual life.
There may be a thing which will bring suffering. The Soul which is nearing its liberation is willing to accept that suffering which still it feels; it throws the suffering on to the altar of devotion; the fire of devotion burns up the suffering, and the Soul feels joy in its gift. But that suffering is not lost; it is changed in the fire, and it becomes spiritual energy, which the Great Lodge can use for the helping of man--the voluntary acceptance of pain as a sacrifice to the Masters is changed by that fire of devotion into spiritual energy for the helping of the world. There is the underlying truth of the doctrine of what is called vicarious atonement: not the legal thing that the Churches have sometimes taught, but the sacrifice of a great Soul, which bears suffering and offers it for the spiritual life of the world, so that it shall be changed in the fire of love and come back as spiritual energy to be spread over the whole of the world for the raising and the helping of man.
The Soul, then, thus achieving liberation, comes to the period of choice of which you hear so much. Being free it has a right to choose, and it may either pass onwards into higher types of life, or it may elect to remain within the sphere of earth in order that it may directly help in the freeing of other Souls. That is, of course, the Great Renunciation of which every now and then you catch glimpses in the Theosophical writings; that is the choice of the liberated Soul; it is free, but it remains within the sphere of earth in order to help. It may choose that, by renunciation of its right to go on. It is not bound to earth, but by a voluntary renunciation it remains there with some of the disadvantages, so to speak, which belong to the material existence, for the sake of helping others and carrying on this evolution of the Race.
Where a Soul has thus accomplished its pilgrimage, where stage after stage it has developed mind, where stage after stage it has purified intellect, when it has gotten rid of desire, when it has become a liberated Soul, when it has renounced the going onward for the sake of humanity, when it has remained within this sphere of earth for helping man until the cycle of humanity is completed, then, entering into Nirvana, there comes the state of All-consciousness, of bliss which no words are able to describe. And then when the time comes for a new manifestation, when the beginning of a new Manvantara approaches, then this Soul which had achieved its liberation comes forth as a Son of Mind, in order in due time to generate mind in a new humanity, to be the Teacher of that humanity in its infancy, its guide in its maturity, rising Manvantara after Manvantara higher and higher. For the pilgrim Soul which began in the germ-union that I described, which went on by accumulating experiences, which then from these experiences extracted their essence, which then got rid of the desires which made it separate, and which unified itself once more, becoming a unit consciousness in a mysterious way which can not even be sensed until at least the lower grades of the higher consciousness have been experienced during earth-life by rising out of the body and learning what it is to be an Intelligence working without the shackles of the brain--such a Soul thus having worked through its pilgrimage and regained unity shakes off the compound individually, retaining the essence of it which it extracts; being a unit it is incapable of disintegration, it is for ever immortal--the Soul has achieved its immortality, and through all Universes to come it is one of the Workers, one of the Builders, one with God in work for the worlds.
In the lecture that I propose to deliver here to-night, I shall try to put before you as plainly and as clearly as possible the leading ideas that go under the name of Theosophy. I shall not, bearing in mind the audience that I am addressing, try to win you by mere skill of tongue, because I know there are too many here connected with the Press to make it worth while to try to get round them by words which do not convey any meaning. I shall make the lecture as terse as I can, for I want to get a good deal into the space of time that I have at my disposal, and I shall endeavour to put those ideas in at least a coherent fashion, which will lay them open to attack and discussion on the part of those who do not agree with them.
Theosophy is an extremely old theory of the Universe and of Man. It starts with the idea that the Universe and Man are primarily spiritual existences; that what we call spirit and matter are not really two and in antagonism, but are one substance in different stages of evolution. If you go back to the beginning of our present Universe you will find as you go backward that life becomes more and more spiritual in its manifestations, that is to say, the denser forms of manifestation are later in time than the more subtle and ethereal forms. But the principle of the Universe is Life, and not lifeless matter or energy; primarily life and consciousness are at the core of the Universe, but this body issues forth in various forms of matter, the forms becoming denser and grosser as evolution proceeds, and that finally when this first stage, the plane so to speak of the Universe, is complete, the whole is ready to start along the plane of further evolution. You have a Universe manifested in seven different forms of matter, subtle at the beginning, denser at the end, and, so to speak, arranged in seven different stages or, as we say, seven different planes of manifestation. To take a very rough image, to put to you by physical analogy what I mean, you might have in a chemical experiment a receiver that appeared to be empty, you might subject that receiver to constantly increasing cold. As you lowered the temperature the apparently empty receiver would soon be filled with a delicate mist; as you continued to lower the temperature, that mist would gradually assume the form of definite vapour, then of definite liquid, and further on of solid. You would have but the one substance right through, but you would have had it manifested at different degrees of density according to the conditions under which it was manifested, and so we say that the Universe is but of one substance essentially, but is manifested in different forms according to the conditions in which this substance has been bodied forth. I am simply putting to you the statement without for a moment giving the arguments with which it is supported. I will ask you simply to have clearly before your mind this conception of the Universe in seven different stages or planes of various degrees of density, so far as what we call matter is concerned. Each of these planes has life manifestations suitable to the plane on which they are manifested; whether or not the organisms of one plane are conscious of the organisms of the other will depend on the power of sensation possessed by those organisms. If you take Man as you have him now he comes by is physical sense into contact with the physical plane of the Universe. He is able to see because the molecules of the eye can vibrate in unison with those waves of ether that impinge on the mechanism of the eye, he is able to hear because the organ of hearing is so disposed that it vibrates in unison with the waves of air. He becomes sensible of the material universe without him because his body is able to vibrate in unison or in response to the various physical vibrations of the physical universe with which it is surrounded.
Let me now take the next stage. Man, like the Universe, consists of seven principles in seven different stages of this manifesting spirit-matter or substance. We say that these seven principles existent in man are correlated to the corresponding plane of existence in the Universe, and that just because he has in himself these seven different stages of existence he is able to investigate the whole Universe around him, becoming conscious of each plane in the Universe by virtue of the corresponding principle in himself. So that in the theosophical conception of Man and the Universe you have two images, so to speak, that respond the one to he other, as the image of Man's physical body might be reflected in the mirror before which he stands. He can know the Universe because he is himself the Universe in miniature, and as he develops in himself each different principle of his nature he is able to investigate the plane of the Universe to which that principle in himself responds. Now, it is by virtue of this fact of man's nature that knowledge becomes possible of these different planes. Take for a moment again the body: you can investigate the physical plane of existence by your physical body, but beyond that physical plane you cannot go with your bodily senses. Now, for a moment, as an hypothesis, suppose that there is a subtler form of matter than the matter that composes your bodies, it is not at least an impossible hypothesis, science is always discovering rarer and rarer forms of energy, and the latest discovery is not susceptible to the ordinary senses. There are light waves which are too rapid for the molecules of the eye to vibrate in response to when they strike upon them. The eye is, therefore, unconscious of their existence. It is idle to say that these light waves do not exist; their existence has been proved by scientific men, partly by observing them as they affect other forms of life and chemical combinations, and partly by subjecting them to experiments which, by changing the rate of vibration, render them susceptible to our senses; therefore, they do exist, as a matter of fact. Now, the Theosophist says that the next set of vibrations, too subtle and too rapid to make any impression on the physical body of man, are on the Astral Plane. It is possible to develop in Man a form of nervous sensitiveness which will enable him to respond to those vibrations, just as a physical body responds to the air. You can throw Man into a special nervous condition which will render him far more sensitive than he is normally; when he is thrown into that condition you will have evolved a sensitiveness that responds to those more rapid and ethereal vibrations, and then those vibrations become as real to him as light is to ourselves. That condition is the condition variously known as hypnotic trance, or mesmeric trance, or condition of conscious clairvoyance. In America, where the climatic conditions are different, people are evolving normally this increased sensitiveness to peculiar external conditions. In England, what is called the "psychic" is comparatively rare; they are not unknown, but they are regarded as "cranks." In America, where the air is brighter and drier, where the conditions of life are more rapid and the nervous system has become more tense, you have the psychic development carried on to a much greater extent and developed among a much larger number of people than in Europe at the present time. When we want to obtain these conditions here, we mostly do it by shutting the ordinary senses and by making the body impervious to the impressions of the physical universe outside. You render the person blind, deaf, and insensible to touch from without When a person is thrown into the mesmeric trance, you may beat a gong in his ear without his hearing it, you may flash the electric light into his eyes without his seeing it, you may run needles into him or subject him to shocks from an electric battery, and the most delicate apparatus of the investigator will not indicate any response to these conditions of stimulus from without. I am putting a matter of knowledge; this is a fact testified to over and over again by every scientific man who has investigated hypnotic phenomena.
When the body is in this condition, closed to every ordinary stimulus from without, you obtain a completely new set of results--the patient is more keenly alive to the person who has hypnotised him than he is normally alive to the persons who surround him in ordinary life. That one person can communicate with him and produce extraordinary results. He can make him describe objects that have no existence outside the thought power of the hypnotiser. He will place an imaginary object in his hands, so that the man cannot put his hands together, thinking they are stopped by the object he is holding; he will describe elaborate pictures on a blank sheet of paper, those pictures hang no sort of existence so far as the ordinary eyes of the unhypnotised person can discover. These facts point us to a whole plane of existence of which we are normally unconscious, and the theosophist will tell you you have transferred the consciousness of this person on to the Astral Plane, where you are dealing with matter invisible to the normal senses and with vibrations of matter too rapid for the ordinary senses to perceive or respond to. When you have passed into this Astral condition, you are able to see with fresh sense of sight and to hear with fresh organs of hearing, and these organs of sight and of hearing function under laws which are very different from the ordinary law under which matter works in its grosser manifestations. You can see to a distance which otherwise would be impossible, and you can see through objects impervious to the ordinary eye. You can take a board an inch and a half thick, you can place this in front of the eyes of the hypnotised person, and on the far side of the board you can place ribbons of different colours, the hypnotised person will see the ribbons and tell you the colour of each ribbon. Under these conditions, the sight that you have evolved in your patient is a sight which is not trammelled by the ordinary material conditions under which you are accustomed to let your organ of sight function. There is nothing in that particularly remarkable, because, if you are dealing with vibrations so subtle that they can pass through interstices of gross matter, then you have the conditions of eyesight present under the responsiveness of more delicate sense, so that you are still within at least the analogy of science when you are dealing with this second plane. When you go a step further you come to the plane of the emotions and the feelings, and you can transfer man's consciousness to that plane of existence, so as to render him unconscious of an injury received to the body. Take the case of a soldier wounded in battle. Any soldier thus wounded will tell you that it is not until the rush of the fight is over that he becomes conscious of bodily pain, but, if the consciousness were then in his physical body, he would know then the pain; but consciousness has passed from the physical plane to the plane of emotion, and not till the passion is stilled will he recognise the pain.
Beyond this, there is the plane of the mind. The plane of the mind is still a plane of matter, for I will ask you to remember that there is no essential difference between mind and matter; they are one substance manifesting under different conditions or planes. Mind is still far subtler, far more ethereal, but it is as real, and we say that the mind functions on that plane; that, when you think, your intelligence is a force or an energy that is working on this mental plane and that its workings there are as perceptible to the mental organism as any workings on the physical plane are perceptible to material eyesight; that, when you think, you create a thought image and that that image may be rendered visible under certain conditions of enormously increased sensitiveness and that it is possible and has been done to so develop the mind element in Man that you can separate it fromthe brain organism through which it normally functions, and free it from its restraint. You can make it more active and more potent, just as your limbs are more active if you take off them a weight of chains. People can develop the power of transmitting thought through this thought-medium from intelligence to intelligence without the ordinary material mechanism that you normally employ for that purpose.
But I am still only dealing with things that Science is beginning to dream about. Twenty years ago, to talk about conveying ideas without the use of written messages would have been to render yourself a candidate for the nearest lunatic asylum; but only a few weeks ago, before that eminently respectable body the British Association, it was confessed that here there was room for investigation, showing that such communication was likely to be possible, and Professor Lodge even said that it might be taken as almost having been proved possible. It has been proved over and over again, and, just as your scientific men scoffed at Mesmer and fifty years later invented the new name of Hypnotism, so your science to-day is beginning to recognise the necessity of investigation into this new means of communication and this working of the intelligence in subtler realms than hitherto it has admitted.
All the fuss made during the last week about the possibility of communication in various fashions is nothing more than a mere outcry, but people imagine they have got hold of a miracle. If you installed an electric wire across the Desert of Sahara, you might very much astonish some of the natives by communicating across the desert in a way that they would not understand, or you might even flash a message by utilising the sunbeam as the method. It is only going a few steps farther to be able to control other forces without your physical apparatus, and even without the sunbeam to help you. How people would have laughed a century ago to hear scientific men say they would be able to converse by means of a wire! It is further, I admit, along the analogy of scientific thought when you are able to deal with subtler currents, but no more miraculous than any other form of dealing with natural forces, and it is only ignorance that cries out "miracle" or "fraud"--miracle where there is the superstitious to account for the unknown--fraud where there is the gross ignorance that denies the possibility of further advance, and because the nineteenth century is so wise and thinks that none can be wiser.
Let me here allude to one phrase which will show you at least in the thought of those who believe in the existence and the control of those forces how thoroughly natural they are. Some years ago in India, when H. P. Blavatsky was there, she was utilising a number of those forces in connection with her Teachers. On one occasion she was asked to bring about a certain. result. I forget whether it was the conveyance of a letter or some other object. She was asked to convey that object to a particular spot within a particular cushion, and she said she would try to do it. Later on in the same day, talking over this matter, she was asked, "Will you change the place that we have already asked you to deal with and put it in another place?" She asked, and the answer came, "We have set the currents to the place where we were asked to set them, and it is easier therefore to send the object to that spot." You set those forces going and, unless you are a miracle-worker, which the Theosophist does not believe in, you must work under natural conditions. If you have started your forces along a line, that is the line along which you must follow; if you want to alter your result, you must alter the cause by which your result is to be brought about. When you begin to learn anything about these forces, you find you are in a world of law as strict as that of a chemist; you can no more produce a result which is not within the law than your electrician can produce an effective spark from the machine if the atmosphere is charged with moisture. It is this side of Theosophy which tends to prove most attractive to those who are simply curious for a new sensation. .They don't care twopence about the philosophy, they care even less about the Theosophy, they want something that will sell their papers; something they don't understand is the one thing that they want. In the Daily Chronicle all that I told them about the Mahatmas was put down.*1 They carefully cut out what I said about the results ethically of the teaching of these same Mahatmas. (Shame!) I don't say it is a shame; I am very glad to get half of it in; the great difficulty that every new theory has is to get a hearing at all; when they came to the end of the column, there was a battle or a murder or something, so my other half had to be omitted. As far as the Chronicle is concerned, it has acted in a most fair and just fashion and has given a fair hearing to both sides. I am not putting that in any spirit of complaint, but as showing you one of the disadvantages under which really serious people labour when they are dealing with a philosophy that has a side that appeals to curiosity and the desire for experiment and what is known as phenomenal, but which has to us a far more serious side in its bearing on the progress of the race.
Let me show you how this view of Man and the view of the Universe passes onward into our philosophy. These discoveries about mind--the power of mind to make thought images, to transfer by the subtle forces under its control ideas from place to place--we say that these show that every man has in him the same power of creation as that universal mind of which we say the Universe at large is the manifestation. I don t mean by creation making something out of nothing--I mean by creation utilising the various forms of matter around you to produce a new result, just as you say the artist creates a statue, just as you say the musician creates the harmony when he by the efforts of his genius gives some great opera to the world, so I speak of creation when by the subtle forces of the mind you utilise the forces and the material around you to bring about certain results that you have made up your mind to effect.
Man is essentially a thinker, and that thinker is imperishable and eternal. We say that the thinker is the real man, and that the body is the instrument the thinker uses: a more or less good instrument as may happen, so that the brain, through which the intelligence or the thinker normal functions, may be a better or worse instrument for the expression of that thinker's thoughts, but always an instrument by which he must work on the material plane, and only as he is able to transcend that plane can he work in the subtler media of which I have been speaking.
We say that the speaker passes from incarnation to incarnation, moulding and building as he goes his own future and the future of the world. We say that in every thought that you think you create a thought image on the mental plane and that the whole of your life is a constant action of creation of these thought images, that these images persist, and that during life you are constantly adding to them, that they act and re-act on each other like any other forces, and that they build up the human character; that your character is made by your thinking, and the modus operandi of making it is that every thought creates a form on the plane of thought, and that the aggregate of these forms working upon each other makes the character of the man at the end of his life-experience. We say that that mental thought image, that is the outcome of the life thinking, persists after the death of the body, that it does not depend on the form of matter you call physical , it depends on the subtler form of matter I have been speaking of, and of which Science is beginning to get evidence in thought transference. When the time comes for the thinking principle or the thinker to again clothe itself in material body, this thought image, which is the outcome of the previous experience, is the mould or the matrix in which that physical body will be built, so that what you call the character with which a man is born, the tendencies that every child has when it comes into the world, the tendencies to act one way rather than the other, to be quick or to be slow, that all these tendencies that you speak of as inborn character are the natural and inevitable results of the thinkings of past incarnations which have made a mould of subtle matter into which the grosser matter of the material body is builded.
If this is true, then its bearing on life and conduct is enormous, because it means that everyone of you is creating at the present time his own future and the future of the world. If you are thinking selfish and evil thoughts you are making a form of matter that outlives your physical body that keeps the form that you imprint upon it and into which the physical molecules of your future life will indisputably be moulded so that those who think selfish thoughts habitually will in their next incarnation be born with a selfish character, so that what a man is now is the record of what he has been in his past, and the true life of the man is in the thought and not in the act. Whether a man is a thief or a murderer depends on opportunity. It is not every thief that gets put into jail. The thief is the man whose tendencies are thievish and who tries to get that which he has no right to; whether that thievish tendency works out in act depends upon the opportunity, if he has the chance he will be a thief in act; but his moral value depends on the thought. He is judged by the thought and not by the act. Many a thief in Holloway Jail is not as deep-dyed a robber as the man who poses through life as a splendid character. This bearing on our theory of right is to us the most important part; that is what we call Theosophy: the great central truth of the Universe and Man. And this doctrine of Reincarnation is not only the basis of our ethics as regards the individual man, but the foundation of our belief in Universal Brotherhood: it implies the essential equality of Man.
The differences in material condition are mere outward accidents and do not touch the inner self, whether a man be prince or pauper, whether sage or sinner, the essential unity of humanity remains, and makes them brothers in fact, whatever the dissimilitude of the outer garb, and this is the basis of human brotherhood. What matters it to you and to me that in this particular life there may be an apparent difference between us? We are one in that we are human, and the intelligent thinker is the same for all, although in different stages of evolution, and it is quite possible that the man whom you despise as stupid, as profligate, as vile, may be a human being further in evolution than yourself; although for the moment he may be under passing disadvantages. The progress may be clogged for a moment, although he may be advanced in the whole evolutionary cycle. The passing nature through which he has to work may be some gross tendencies inherited from a past that he has not conquered. It might well be that such a person is only under temporary obscuration, and is really a far nobler type than the man who judges and despises him, and who may not have travelled as far along the road as the one for whom he feels contempt. Theosophy teaches you o be careful in your judgment of your fellows: you may say a person is repulsive, covered over with some horrid skin disease, better so than have the disease driven in so that he becomes a source of infection; so many a man in the outer vices may be working off the symptoms of evil in him, and may come out the nobler. I say that because sometimes you find acts of the utmost heroism in those who have seemed even the most degraded. We tell you that no man is wholly evil, that at the root of things man is good, and not evil, that he will work through the evil to the light; though he is bad to-day, do not make his road rougher by putting your hatred to keep him down, give him the hand of help to lift him upward and so live through the vice which makes him hateful to the many to-day; and that is the ethical side of our teaching, but it depends upon the philosophy. You cannot work it out in that fashion unless you accept the central doctrine of reincarnation, and you have no reason to accept that unless you can work it from plane to plane. When you can prove intelligence working apart from your material organism you have taken the great step which makes the whole of our theory intelligible.
We, who are Theosophists, do not encourage people to rush hastily into a mass of experiments in which they are very likely to lose their heads and destroy their nerves. I am not what is normally called a Spiritualist, because I think that Spiritualists make a mistake in the deductions from their phenomena. A large number of the results they get are genuine, though there is a large amount of fraud as well. But, unless you study the subject with knowledge, you are likely to ruin your brain and your nerves. The attitude of reception to all outside influences which is necessary for mediumship--because you must render yourself specially susceptible--that study persisted in month after month brings about an abnormal condition which is likely to ruin the health of the person who subjects himself to it. And so with hypnotic experiments: you may very easily destroy both nervous system and moral character by playing with forces whose management you do not understand. Now, what is necessary before you begin to experiment is study: study the theory before you practise. You would not let a young lad loose in a laboratory to put together whatever compounds he might choose; you would say, "You must not try these compounds until your knowledge of them and the laws under which they work is such that you can make your experiments without laying the laboratory and the houses all around in fragments." When a person comes and says, "I want to know this experiment," we say, "No; if you want to know you won't mind the trouble of studying." The curiosity which runs out to see the Queen, or a jumping flea, or a fat woman, is not the kind we want for this work. We quite admit that you can get knowledge of many of the occult arts without moral character, you can become a mesmerist without the slightest attempt to control your passions, but we say that those of us who are studying the matter seriously won't help you to do it. Find out what you can, but don't ask us--who have pledged ourselves to serve the race before everything else, who have pledged ourselves to utter subjugation of self before we place our hands on one of these forces, who have proved the truth of the pledge by living lives of self-denying labour for the people for years before we tried to study these things at all--don't ask us to take you into the occult laboratory and enable you to experiment with the most explosive substances before we know you will use them for service and not for self.
Take the ordinary man: he loves his wife and his children more than the children in the gutter, but he must not be an occultist while he has one love for a human being which will make him unjust to anyone else. As long as he would rather serve his own child than the child in the gutter, so long he has no right to use these occult powers: he night use them to serve his own child to the destruction of others. The claim on you is the claim of want, and not the claim of personal affection; and if the gutter child is starving, that child has first claim upon you because his need is greater. I don't say that this is the view that the mass of the people should take--it is not. But you cannot enter into the occult school until your love for the race has become as pure, as passionate and as self-denying as your present love for wife or child, and until that be so, take the evolution of the race as it goes but do not claim to climb the mountain up which only those can climb who have thrown every personal desire aside. All the race will come to these powers in due time; every son of man will be born into this heritage of absolute royalty over Nature, but he has got to evolve into it, and if he wants to evolve much faster than the race, he must pay the price; and the price is, to live the impersonal life, so that he may be a safe custodian of those tremendous powers of Nature. That is the school through which everyone has to go, and I know no reason why a curious person should escape it more than anyone else. It won't do him any good to escape it, for if he happens to be a person of psychic development, you will have given him the clue to get mastery of that power and he can use it, not for a harmless purpose, but for the mischievous purpose of slaying an enemy. Already you are beginning to learn something of the doctrines of hypnotism, that is the very lowest of those powers possessed by the occultist; yet hypnotism has been used for criminal suggestion, and the true criminal has escaped, because there is no law which can touch him. Is it altogether so foolish then, this secrecy?
People say they will not believe me. I don't mind whether you believe me or not. A fact of Nature does not alter whether you believe it or not. My only reason for ever mentioning the letters from Mahatmas in public was, not to show that letters could be precipitated, but to show that my friend was not the forger she was stated to be. I have had letters from the same person, and it proves that she did not write them. If the writing was the same, it was not the hand of H. P. Blavatsky, therefore she did not forge that writing. It was a perfectly fair point to make in defence of a woman who has made my life all that is worth living.
I have had letter after letter from good people, saying, "You are deserting the poor." I deserting the poor? I am learning to serve them better tha