^alifornis
igional THE
,cility
IDEALS OF THEOSOPHY
ANNIE BESANT
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
UNIVERSITY of AT
LOS ANGELES LIBRARY
THE
IDEALS OF THEOSOPHY
BY
ANNIE BESANT
Four Lectures delivered at the Thirty -sixth Annual
Convention of the Theosophical Society, held
at Benares, on December 27th, 28th,
29th and 30th, 1911
THE THEOSOPHIST OFFICE, ADYAR, MADRAS, INDIA
1912
110571
5 G, 3'
J
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. (a) INTRODUCTION. , 1 (6) BROTHERHOOD APPLIED TO GOVERNMENT ,.
II. BROTHERHOOD IN EDUCATION AND
CRIMINOLOGY . . . .35
111. (a) TOLERANCE . . . 69
(6) KNOWLEDGE . . . . „
THE PERFECT MAN . . 105
i
THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY'S CONVENTION LECTURES
1886 The Philosophy of the Bhagavad-
Gita T. Subba Rao
1893 The Building of the Kosmos Annie Besant
1894 The Self and Its Sheaths do.
1895 The Path of Discipleship do.
1896 Three Paths to Union with God do.
1896 Four Great Religions do.
1897 Theosophy Applied Lilian Edger
1898 Dharnia Annie Besant
1898 The Evolution of Life and Form do.
1899 Avatanis do.
1900 Ancient Ideals in Modern Life do. 1!'01 The Religious Problem in India do.
1902 The Laws of the Higher Life do.
1903 The Pedigree of Man do.
1904 Theosophy in Relation to Human Life do.
1905 Hints on the Study of the Bhagavad-
Gita do.
1906 The Wisdom of the Upanishats do. 19071 An Introduction to Yoga do.
1908 Gleanings from Light on the Path Lilian Edger
1909 The Science of Social Organisation Bhagavan Das
1910 The Growth of National Consciousness
in the Light of Theosophy G.S. Arundale
1911 The Ideals of Theosophy Annie Besant
All the above are obtainable at THE THEOSOPHIST OFFICE, Adyar, Madras, India
Copyright Registered All Rights Reserved
Permission for translation will be given
BY
THE THEOSOPHIST OFFICE Adyar, Madras, India
THE IDEALS OF THEOSOPHY LECTURE I
(a) INTRODUCTION. (6) BROTHERHOOD APPLIED TO GOVERNMENT
MY FRIENDS :
Thirty-six years of life lie behind the Theosophical Society, thirty-six years of varied sun and storm. Not unnaturally the questions now arise : " What value is that Society to the world ? What can it do for humanity ? What has it already done for it ''. " I do not propose in these four lectures on the Ideals of Theosophy to say anything save a few passing words on Theosophy as a great spiritual movement, as a helper of the religions of the world. You know what it has done in rolling back the wave of
materialism, and what on those lines it continues to do. You know also the work it has done in the revival of religions., in %\ the liberalising of the orthodoxies of the world, the help it has brought to one country after another in arriving at a more spiritual conception of religion. On every side we hear it frankly acknowledged that in the revival of religion, seen in East and West alike, Theosophy has played a promi- nent, a leading part. Those who are against all religions naturally attack it for what it has done on this line. But those who love religion have become more and more con- vinced of its utility in the world.
But on that side of our work — so well- known, so often described — I do not now propose to dwell. I rather want to answer the question : " What has your Theosophy to add to the general inspiration which flows from every great religion ? What does it bring to the world of special value ? What illumination does it throw, what light does it cast, on the problems of life ? What practical inspiration does it give, stirring the minds of men and women to real service of their fellow-men ? "
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I am going to try in these lectures to show you that the Ideals, which are specifi- cally the Ideals of the Theosophical Society, have a real value even on the physical plane. I atn going to show you that we are not mere dreamers, as some people think us to be. That we do not live al- ways in the skies — though we rise there sometimes to bring down thence inspiration, in order that we may better serve on earth. I am going to try to show you that even from the utilitarian standpoint, Theosophy can justify itself to a sceptical world by the Ideals that it lifts up, and by the value of their practical application to the work of life.
What do we mean, first, by an Ideal ? Obviously, first of all, an Ideal is an idea, a concept, constructed by the mind. That is the first part of the definition of an Ideal. But it is not only a concept or idea ; for many passing, changing, frivolous ideas flow in and out constantly from the busy human mind, and these cannot be called Ideals. Something more than an idea is wanted to make an Ideal. The next point, then, of the definition is that an Ideal is
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a fixed idea, not a passing thought. It is an idea which does not change, which does not vary, which is fixed and stable, which exercises strong influence over the mind. That is the second part of the definition of the word Ideal — an Ideal is a fixed idea.
And then, further, an Ideal is a construc- tive idea, one which radiates life, and there- by affects the character. An Ideal is not a dead but a living idea, exercising a potent influence on life. So we come to see an Ideal, as an idea or concept marked by fixity and constructive power over character. But we must add a little more yet to our definition, thoroughly to understand what an Ideal means. A wrong idea may be a fixed idea — a fixed idea which is not in
fy harmony with facts and with the nature of things. Such a fixed idea makes the maniac, but not the Hero or the Saint. So
<^ we must prefix an adjective to the word idea. It must be a right idea, a true idea, one which is in harmony with facts and at one with truth.
The fixed idea, as known to psychology, has certain characteristics. I said that it might make a maniac ; - for it is a characteristic
of a fixed idea, in the ordinary sense of the term, that it dominates the mind, and excludes opposing influences. Argu- ment is practically useless against it. The ordinary influences of life that play on human minds roll back from the fixed idea, as the waves of the sea roll back broken from the steadfast rock. There- fore such an idea may be a danger and not a help, a curse and not a blessing. But even when the fixed idea is good and true, something more is wanted to make it fully a Theosophical Ideal. The idea which is good and true makes the Hero, makes the Saint ; but that which makes a man the useful servant of humanity is a fixed idea which is good and true, but which he possesses and which does not possess him. This is no mere subtlety, nor playing with words. There is a profound difference in evolution between a fixed idea possessing a man, and a man possessing a fixed idea. •You may remember that Patanjali in his
Yoya Sutras, tracing out the stages of in- tellectual evolution, remarks that the man who is possessed by a fixed idea is near
to the gateway of Yoga. Yes, that is true.
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It is a mark of evolution higher than the ordinary that an idea which is a noble and true inspiration can so possess a man that none of the usual worldly arguments can
^ move him from his place ; but it is a mark of yet greater evolution when the noble idea is possessed by him as his tool and not as his master. An idea should be the servant of the Spirit, to dominate the lower , nature and bend it to the service of the higher. So Patanjali wisely makes the distinction, and points out that the fixed idea possessing a man brings him near toJ the gateway of the Path ; but that it is only when the man possesses the idea, and is not possessed by it, that his feet are able to enter through the doorway.
An Ideal, therefore, is a right or true fixed idea possessed by the man, and so living that it shall influence his character. That last point must never be forgotten.
"$• For an Ideal not lived becomes an idol, and 'is very often a hindrance rather than, a help. To mould the character, to inspire the heart, to illuminate the mind, that is the value of an Ideal. We must meditate on such an Ideal in order to reproduce it
in ourselves. For man, as the Upanishat says, is created by thought, and what he - thinks upon that he becomes. Thought shapes the character, and living makes the thought productive.
So much, then, for the definition of an Ideal.
What now are the Ideals of Theosophy ?
There are two root-ideas which seem to ine to lie at the very basis of our Society. Each of these ideas when rightly grasped and lived has an elevating power over the life. Mis- conceived, or not accepted, they dwarf our growth and hinder our progress. The first of these two ideas on which the Society is built is the idea of Intellectual Liberty. It is impossible to overvalue the priceless power of reason — the reflexion of Divine Wisdom which lives in the brain of man. The liberty to think, to use our reason to the very utmost, to challenge every proposition, to question every fact — by that the reason - grows, by that the intellect expands. Only when the intellect is left absolutely un- fettered, can man rise to his true greatness as a living spiritual intelligence, plumb the depths of being, and realise his divine possibilities.
Why is that so necessary ? You may re- member it has been said lately by some one — who must have written before he thought instead of afterwards — that Hinduism was against liberty of thought. Most surely is that a wrong idea, a mistaken idea, against history and fact alike. In Hinduism you have schools of philosophy as various as schools can be, which are none the less regarded as ( orthodox/ which are all open to the study of the enquiring mind, and which on many points contradict each other. Hinduism has allowed and encouraged the fullest liberty of thought, and it has never tried to clip the wings of the Divine Bird that soars upwards into the light of the Sun of Truth. The intellect is like an eagle which rises to the sun, and so may man's intellect rise as far as it can; there is nothing that has the right to check it, save its own incapacity to rise further in its flight. There are things which the reason cannot grasp, but what it can grasp it may.
You may see why it is that I said that one of the foundation stones of our Society is intellectual liberty ; man's nature is such
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that his very being is knowledge, and the more he investigates, the nearer he comes to truth. A man's mind, in the highest sense of the term, is only satisfied when it has grasped and assimilated the truth. Therefore also are they wrong who think of truth as a thing to be proved. Truth is not a thing to be proved to a mind whose nature is knowledge. It only needs to be seen in order to be accepted. Those who do not believe do not see the truth, and no creeds can open the eyes of a man who is blind.
All that you need for the finding of truth is a pure heart, an eager intellect, a clean life. These are the conditions which must be fulfilled by all who would know the truth, the truth which is Brahman, the Eternal. No one has a right to impose any other conditions for the search after truth, save those which lie in the nature of the thing, are the natural and inevitable conditions of the finding. Moreover, by imposing a creed you may make hypocrites, but never knowers of truth. For the child-souls, instruction is necessary to be given, and they must be taught by the elders — for them such
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teaching is needed. Here is the place of dogmatic religion. But such instruction given to the child-soul is not knowledge until it is assimilated. In our Society therefore, we leave free the search for truth, and our common bond, as we say in one of our circulars, is not a common belief, but a common desire to find the truth and live it.
The second great idea upon which our Society is based is that the emotions of an evolved man are best guided by inspiring Ideals, rather than by legal codes. That is the second great foundation stone of our Society. There are two ways of teaching morality. One says: "Thou shalt do this, and thou shalt not do that." It enforces commands and prohibitions, and imposes obedience to its dicta by penalties. The other holds up the Ideal of noble love and self-sacrifice, of purity and service, and leaves these, by their internal power, to win men to imitation and to the leading of a noble life. The first is the necessary way of the State and of all secular Governments; while the other is the way of every true Religion which inspires a man to lead a spiritual
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life. Because our Society is a spiritual Society and because it believes that man is fundamentally divine and not devilish, that reason is a precious possession and not a snare, that intellect needs freedom to investigate every subject, that the Beauti- ful, the Good, the True, have only to be seen in order to be loved, therefore we trust our Society to the inspiration of great Ideals, rather than to any narrow creed or code of laws. If a brother fails, we would rather lift him out of the mire by helping him to rise, than exclude him from the Society as unworthy to be with us.
Those are the foundation stones of our Society, and so long as the Society is built on those it will endure.
Let us now turn to the Ideals which I have chosen out for our studies in these lectures. Three of them are enshrined in our three objects. The first object offers us the Ideal of the Brotherhood of Humanity; on this inevitably follow, as corollaries, Reincarnation and Karma, for these two are, as I shall show later on, implied in the idea of the Brotherhood of Humanity. The second object of the Society unfolds the
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Ideal of Tolerance. By tolerance is not meant that arrogant attitude which says : "You may think as you may like," all the while despising the thought of the other man ; but that right kind of tolerance is meant which grows out of a recognition of the value of another man's faith and belief, which studies the various messages of the Divine to the world as shown in the world's religions, a tolerance which grows from the study of comparative religions, by which we learn their unity as well as their diversities, and by which we learn to respect the Self in every man, and see him as finding his own way to truth, with which none has any right to interfere. The thii-d Ideal is Science, Right Knowledge, and the search for it is embodied in the third object of our Society. It is a Science which includes the super- physical as well as the physical side of nature, which includes the study of the latent powers in man and the hidden side of nature, as well as that which ordinary modern science has discovered. Thus three of the Ideals of our Society, three with which I shall deal are: (1) Brotherhood; (2) Tolerance; (3) Knowledge.
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These are three of our great Ideals, be- longing to the whole of the Society. And there is a fourth Ideal, with which I shall also deal, followed by some of the members: They endeavour to find the Perfect Men who are the types of Divine Humanity. They have a sure conviction of Their existence, and are determined to tread the Path that leads to Them. This Ideal is the assertion of the spiritual nature, and therefore of the perfectibility of man. That appeals in some way to many hearts, and is perhaps the most attractive of our Ideals to some ; its study is apart from the outer organisation of the Theosophical Society ; but it is also the mission of our Society to teach those who volunteer to be taught in the inner circles of our movement, the treading of the narrow ancient Way which leads to the Feet of the Masters.
Those are, then, four of the great Ideals of our Society, and I will trace them one by one in these lectures. But it must be remembered that none of these save the first is binding on all our members. There is no condition for coming within the Society save the acceptance of the first
Ideal, namely the Brotherhood of man, with- out distinction of creed, race, sex, caste or colour. That is our only condition of member- ship. The belief even in the doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma and in the existence of Masters is not a condition of entrance. But the Society exists to spread these teach- ings through all those who by study have learnt to accept them. We are sure that the truth convinces, and so long as we strive to follow the truth, the Society is safe ; all is well, and shall be well, if only its members study the great truths of life. And the Society lives to spread and teach these Ideals to those who are willing to learn, or who accept them. But if a man should say : " I do not accept these doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma/' his place is as secure amongst us as is that of those who by knowledge have reached a stage where these truths are facts to them.
As a matter of fact, the great majority of those who join the Society accept these truths sooner or later. And then they be- come ready to accept also the Ideals based on them. But there is a great difference between accepting an Ideal, and applying that
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Ideal to the circumstances of a man's daily life. Yon must thoroughly understand that, in applying our Ideals to practice, I am speaking only of what I myself believe to be true. But my words bind none of my fellow-members. People are so accustomed to echo a speaker, to reliect the opinions of others or of their favourite newspaper or author, that they find it difficult to believe that, in a Society like ours, members are able to hear one who is called its leader speak, and yet to exercise their own judgment in accepting or rejecting what that leader says. They think it is not possible. It is because people forget this, and because even some of our members forget it, that I warn you again, that, while the Ideal of Brotherhood is binding on us all, what I say as to the application of that Ideal to life is my view of the right application, and this view may, and will, be traversed by many of my fellow- members. I am here to give you the best that I have to give; but I must leave you to judge of its value and to follow it or not, as you see best.
With Brotherhood is often linked the idea of human equality. And there is a sense in
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which that equality exists. For what is the root of true human equality ? It is" the fact that the one Divine life is in each and all of us. That fact is not limited to man alone. It is true also of the animal, the vege- table,, the mineral. There is no grain of dust in which God's life is not immanent. There is no loftiest Deva in whom that same life is not manifest. There is no other life than His ; there is no other consciousness than His; there is no other Will than His; nor is there any Actor save He. There is only one life, one consciousness, and one power, and that is the life, consciousnes, and power of Ishvara (God), that are in all that He has emanated. There lies the root of human equality, and that is the only kind of equality which exists. As the brothers in a "family are all of one father and mother, so is the Brotherhood of man, and of all that lives in a universe where there is naught that is dead. Human life is a portion of that one Father-life, whereof we all are offspring. There then lies the only true equality, namely, that God lives equally in all that exists. All have hidden within them the possibility of rising to the highest perfection ;
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all have the certainty of ultimate perfection. But in the course of evolution, in the long evolutionary chain of life, there the inequali- ties come in. That is a fact which is too often forgotten by those who speak of equality. Yet look around you ; place your- self in imagination at the gateway of birth, as the thronging souls press in to embody themselves in new forms. One goes into a form healthy and strong ; another goes into a form polluted with the germs of hereditary disease. One goes into a form nobly planned and splendidly executed; another into a form crippled and misshapen. One shows the quali- ties of a saint ; another the qualities of a criminal. One is born a philanthropist; and another is born a barbarian. Are these equal ? These from their very birth itself are marked unequal. Oh ! what is the use of deluding ourselves with words that have no meaning ? what is the use of saying that men are born equal, and talking about a universal equality which nature denies ? Of social inequality there is indeed much that you may remove. But that is far less serious. It is natural inequality which is a more serious matter. And that people forget,
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when they are talking about both nations and individuals. It is the difference of in- born capacity that matters far more than the difference of social position ; it is this which separates one nation from another, one man from another. You find one man to whom an opportunity comes, and he goes by it blindly and sees it not. Another man, when a similar opportunity comes, leaps for- ward and grasps it, or, if it does not come near enough to him for grasping, he cuts his way to it until he holds it in his hands. Oh ! there lies the inequality which no human laws can touch, which no social con- ditions may avert. Equal opportunity for all — that perchance you may make in a far future ; but equality of capacity to use it — that you cannot make. That does not lie with the men of any generation. And so we have to face the fact, that Brotherhood does not mean equality, but a real Brother- hood of elders and youngers, a great human family in which some are much older than others, . and some are very young, very ignorant, very foolish.
Theosophy tells us to try to understand that many schools are given by the great
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Teacher for the evolution of the souls that we call men. Races and sub-races are classes in these schools ; and so we notice, as was well said by a speaker at one of our previous meetings, that national differences and racial differences are valuable, and are not to be regretted. There is a good deal of talk now-a-days about internationalism, about being cosmopolitan and the rest. But you can only be truly and usefully cosmo- politan, after you have learnt all the lessons of the different nations in the world. Only the Master is really cosmopolitan, because He has nothing more to learn that earth can teach. Your national peculiarities, your racial peculiai'ities, these are the lessons by which souls learn, and become more and more evolved as time goes on. We cannot spare them, we cannot do without them. Get rid of the notion that one sub-race must neces- sarily be superior to another, because it appears later in time. We hear some people say : " Well, but the Teutonic sub-race must be much higher than the Aryan root- stock, because it is much later in time." This is not quite true, because the older has also been evolving while the vounger
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sub-races have been developing. They have all the same time behind them. But the sub-races are different in qualities, and that is their value — not simply that they are later in time. Who will venture to say that the Turanian was a nobler sub-race than the Toltec, simply because it was the fourth sub-race and the Toltec the third ? Differences there certainly are, but superiority and inferiority not necessarily. It is, there- fore, fallacious to try to claim superiority on the ground of lateness in time. Simi- larly, the fourth sub-race of the Aryan Race, namely the Greek, is not inferior to the fifth sub-race. Has it not its idea of Beauty to give to the world ? The differ- ence between the fourth and fifth sub-races is that while the fourth sub-race developed the emotion of beauty, in the Teutonic sub- race we find evolved the concrete scientific mind. Who shall say which is the higher ? Is Art inferior to Science, or is the reverse the case ? The truth is that all the leading characteristics of the sub-races go to the making of the Perfect Man, and the sub- races form the school through which all of us must pass, in order to develop all sides
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of our nature equally. All these races and sub-races are classes in which we must all learn our lessons. So there is nothing in the differences of these races and sub- races to prevent Brotherhood. Some have developed one side of human nature and some another. And only in the union of the whole is human perfection to be found. But to understand Brotherhood, we must remember that evolution proceeds by re- incarnation under the law of karma. The individual must pass through all the classes assimilating their specialities, else he will be a very lop-sided product ; when we have all learned all our lessons we shall have become worthy of immortality. Now most of you believe these two great teachings and in your individual lives they play a mighty part. Why do you not apply them to nations as well as to individuals, to social problems as well as to the helping of your own personal development ? As the ideas of reincarnation and karma make their way in the western world, which has the habit of applying principles to practice, I think we shall find that this Ideal of Brotherhood under the law of reincarnation and karma
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will solve many of the problems under which the western world is groaning, in our time.
I am going to try to apply it to three of those problems — the problem of Govern- ment, the problem of Education, and the problem of Criminology. I do not think I shall be able to do more this afternoon than to apply it to the first-named, the problem of Government. Remember, once more, that the application is my own, the result of my own view of life, which seems to me to arise from the study of evolu- tion along the lines of Occultism. And I will ask you for a moment to recall the old ideal of Government in India, largely fashioned as it was by the great Vaivasvata Manu. A King, a council, certain governors, and the people. And the fashion of finding the King was not quite what even some Indians think to-day, when they speak bitterly against old ideas of the autocracy of the King. You must remember that a King in India, ere he could sit upon the throne, had to pass through the ordeal of approval by the people. When Dasharatha, the father of Shri Rama, desired to place
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his son upon the throne, he called his council around him, and asked their opinion first : " Are you willing that my son should take my place ? " When the council gave assent, then the people were consulted, and, gathered together in a huge meeting, they were asked whom they would accept. It was after the wish of the King had been endorsed by his council and acclaimed by his people, that Shri Ramachandra was held fit to ascend the throne. That was the cus- tom in the East. And in England, traces of it are still preserved in the Coronation Service. You find there the same idea of the popular acclaim. The Archbishop of Canterbury, representing the power of re- ligion, takes the King and presents him to the four quarters of the globe, to the crowd assembled within the Abbey for the Coronation, presents him as the King, and their cry comes back in acclamation : " God save the King." And that is the old idea, by no means arbitrary, but wisely arranged. It is said : " But the word of the King was law, and that was arbitrary." But how was his word to be found and spoken ? He had a council round him, not only consisting of
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the twice-born, the higher castes, but of the Shudra caste also. All the castes were re- presented, the best men picked out for the council of the King. Every village was perfectly free to administer its local affairs by its own village council, or Panchayat, a system which it is attempted to revive to- day. And the King appointed governors over ten villages, over one hundred villages, and so on. I do not know any system of Government more perfect in theory than that. It began with the elders of the village community dealing with questions they under- stood and could decide; above a group of them a governor of a higher class, chosen to guide, shape and direct larger matters. So in grade above grade, up to the King, obedience ever rendered by those below and account always rendered to those above, until at last, in that graded system of Government, you came to the one Avho em- bodied the sovereignty of the nation, who was the apex of the social pyramid, and was firmly fixed in his authority.
Now I do not say that you can bring back that ancient system in its entirety. History does not run backwards; but it repeats itself
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on higher levels, and the main principles may reappear. The problem of the moment is how to find the best man, and then to place him in the seat of power. If you say : " What do you mean by ' best ' ? " I answer : " I mean the wisest, the most strong-willed, the most resolute, the most unselfish." Those are the qualifications of the Ruler, and with- out those qualifications in the Ruler, no happiness is possible for the State. And in order to give all a share in guiding the matters which most immediately concern them, it seems necessary to begin with a small unit, and to make these small self- governing units the broad base of the wider rule. A peasant may be wise in the concerns of his village, but his opinion on the complex situation in Persia is not likely to be illuminative. He should have a voice on the one, not on the other.
Take just for a moment some of the practical problems confronting England to- day, and what is confronting England is confronting other lands as well. Here in India you are recognising the rationality of the proposition that only those who understand the problems to be decided
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shall be allowed to share in power. I have not heard one reformer in India suggest that power should be given to the illiterate millions of this country. When they talk of ' democracy/ they mean the rule of the educated class. It is not democracy which they want, though they talk of democracy, but a far more rational system of Govern- ment. Whither is real democracy leading the West to-day ? I will take the labour troubles. Now in England we have house- hold suffrage, and shall soon have manhood suffrage. The result of this is that every man, however uneducated, however vicious he may be, provided he is not actually in jail, has a right to vote for members of Parliament, who are to make the laws. The bulk of our voters are, of coui-se, merely ignorant, though crime does not disfranchise. But the men who reduced England to industrial anarchy last summer are the same men who elect our members of Parliament. And you saw the chaos which resulted from their methods of dealing with economic questions. What can the peasant on the English farm, the small shopkeeper, the unskilled and illiterate labourer, any more
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than the ryot on the Indian field, know about international relations, about the causes of depression and expansion of trade and other intricate problems, that tax the best brains of the most highly educated in our land ? They can only see their own needs, and feel the pinch of their own suffering, while they see others rolling in wealth they have not earned. I am not blaming them, these unhappy people who made all the miseries of the last summer, causing food to rot while their wives and children starved more than ever in consequence of the rise of prices, leading to more bitter misery in the winter that is now upon them. I have no word of blame for them, but only for those who ought to have known their ignorance, and have guarded Society, instead of placing swords in the hands of economic children, with which they cut themselves more than others. Last summer I was in England when the railway workers struck, when the food supply driven along the streets of Liverpool was protected by soldiers, protected by bayonet and bullet. The railway system was paralysed and everything thrown out of joint, until the
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'Government stopped the mischief by the strong hand of military force. The net result of the whole struggle is that you have another strike six months later, with the increased misery of a winter before them. They suffer, these poor helpless people. Women starve, children starve, and no remedy is found. In the strike that is now going on in Scotland, the winter's misery is added to the bitter pang of insufficient food. In frost, in fog, in bitter piercing wind, men, women and children are starving, while striking for higher wages for their work. Is it aught but chaos ? Is it aught but ignorance ? Triumphant numbers having their foolish way, till unorganised force is crushed by organised force. There you see the fruit of making ignorance strong and wisdom weak ; of counting heads, however empty ; of thinking that multiplication of nothing makes something. The nations are trying democracy in the West; beware how you try it here. That is not the way of progress ; it is not the way of prosperity.
Now our ideal of Brotherhood applied to Government claims power for the wise and not for the ignorant ; places law-making in
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the hands of those who understand the complex problems of industry, and not in the hands of those who only know the needs of the household, or perhaps the needs of the town. The people have a right to happiness, but they can never get it for themselves by physical force, by legal violence,, and by competition ; they must be guided to it by knowledge, by those who under- stand. If you want to know what labour can do, when wisely guided, or rather, I should say when skilfully guided — for wisdom is hardly concerned here, since it implies love — look at the Trusts in America, which,, though selfish, brutal and unfeeling, have yet organised labour. Brains have been used to organise labour, to get rid of competition, to decrease the waste of over-production and unnecessary advertisement, and the result i& that millions are piled upon millions, until they reach so vast a number, that a man scarce knows what is his wealth. Bad asr at present, the Trusts are, they are better than the anarchy that we find in England; on that line there is hope, while on the other there is none. They show the way to better methods of production. All that is needed is to keep
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the organisation, not to break it but to change the recipient, to spread the wealth over the great mass of Society whose labour has created it, whose industry has made it. And along that line the future industry will go; not madness of over-production and then starvation because you cannot distribute what is produced, but wisdom and knowledge calculating results, instead of reckless com- petition among the ignorant. And that great lesson is being taught in England to-day. England and America between them perhaps may solve this labour problem ; one by demonstrating the suffering brought about by ignorance, the other by showing how wealth may be gathered by ability in organi- sation, and then may be used to help the producers and not to starve them. When organisation is unselfish, instead of selfish, then this labour problem will be solved — and not till then.
Now how to find the best ? The Ideal is that the best should rule ; but how to find them, that is the problem. Every one of us who studies must try to solve this pro- blem, and the suggestions I am here making may perhaps give some hints for the solving.
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But you will not try to solve it, until you realise the hopelessness of the present line of ruling — or not ruling — and accept the Ideal that the best should govern. When that is agreed on, then we shall bring our brains together to devise a means to find and choose the best, and to place them where they may serve the nation. And this must be done for the sake of the people, for the people who " perish for lack of knowledge, " and who can never, in their ignorance, save themselves.
There lies much of the work of Theosophy where it is dealing with the problems of Government. Oppose all that would level down, but help all that would level up. Do not allow the culture and refinement of ages, gathered by toil and pain, by the long struggles of generations, to be overwhelmed in one mass of ruin by the ignorant and the foolish, as has happened so many times before. We have had in the past civilisa- tions as wealthy and as powerful as the present, empires almost as widely spread; yet all passed away, and barbarism again supervened.
Here is where Theosophy may help by bringing in that Ideal of Self-sacrifice which
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is the only alternative to revolution in the western world to-day. Let us teach and re- alise that rule means duty, that power means responsibility, that strength means service. Those are the old Ideals, and if we spread them among the people to-day, and show the example in ourselves, if we share instead of hoarding, if we spread our knowledge instead of keeping it for ourselves, if every power we gain we use for service, and if the more we know the more we serve; if we realise in our lives the truth of that great saying of the Christ, when last He was here : " The greatest amongst you is as he that doth serve ; " if to that great Ideal we add our knowledge of reincarnation, which tells us of the younger and older souls and their mutual relations ; if we realise the law of karma, and see the life evolve onwards through generations after generations yet to come; if we contribute our own service, our own self -sacrifice, our own realisation of duty and bearing of responsibility; then to these problems of Government we shall bring the power of a great Ideal, and the application of a long past of experience as well as of present knowledge.
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So our Ideal of Government shall work into the life of the nations wherein we live ; for it is thought that builds nations as well as individuals ; that which the thinker con- ceives, that which the prophet declares, that which the poet sings, that becomes the life of a nation, and is worked out in social organisation.
LECTURE II
BROTHERHOOD IN EDUCATION AND CRIMINOLOGY
You will remember that, yesterday, in speaking of the application of Brotherhood to the problems of life, of Brotherhood carried on under the laws of reincarnation and karma, I specified three particular subjects with which I proposed to deal. The first, the problem of Government. The second, the problem of Education. The third, the problem of Crimi- nology. But I spoke only of the first, the problem of Government.
I propose to-day to take the other two, Education and Criminology. I do not think I shall be able to do more than that this afternoon. And in dealing with Educa- tion, I can deal only with the large gener- al principles, the subject being, as you know, so vast a one, that many lectures
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might be given upon its details, that should in no way overlap each other.
1 am not so much concerned with those particular questions that are arising to-day in educational details, as with the way in which we should regard the child, the way in which we should think of the duties of the elder to the child. Clearly the Theosophical Ideal of Education is that each child who comes into the world should receive an education suit- ed to develop his particular faculties, and also such an education as will make him useful in his future life to his community and to his country. It includes then, obviously, universal education, and that has long been, of course, the Ideal of all educationalists. There is one point in passing that I should like to allude to, although, under the pres- ent condition of things, elementary edu- cation, as it is called, must necessarily include reading and writing. If we take a large part of the population which in India is regarded as ' illiterate,' there is one curious circumstance that arises in respect to many of them. Under the old system of oral teaching, in the days in which, under the old system, Sannyasis travelled from village to village,
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gathering the elders and the youngers around them under the village tree, telling them the stories of the past, reciting to them the Itihnsas and the Puranas, there was a line of real education, though it will not he regarded to-day as creating 'literates;' none the less, as a matter of fact, it gave to large numbers of people an education which was both religious and intellectual. I have found traces of that sometimes going about in India. In one case, a boy at an examination in Tamil was asked a question as to some Tamil poet, and was requested to write down certain verses written by the poet. He failed to do it, and on his return home he spoke to his ' illiterate ' aunt about his difficulty, and she at once recited the poem, and told him how he ought to have answered the question. I venture to suggest that the ' illiterate ' lady, to use an Irishism, was better read than her ' literate ' nephew. And there is still very, very much of that in India to-day. The census reports can take no account of it. None the less it raises the level of1 the community, and gives a form of education which was largely sufficient in the past. In the altered modern
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conditions, you must bring in reading and writing. For now people have to learn through the eye what once they learnt through the ear, and with the decay of the older systems, it is necessary to substitute a new. While that is being done, there are still the broad underlying questions which remain the same in all time.
First, the child. Now what is a child ? From the standpoint of reincarnation and karma, he is not a new-born intelligence, that has come into a body by the laws of physical heredity, offering either a clean page, as some imagine, or a page blotted by the bad heredity of the past, on which the educationalist has to write according to his own ideas. That is not the child, as seen from the higher standpoint. The child is a living spiritual intelligence, who has come into a body, fitted for the stage of evolution at which he has tirrived by the progress made in the past, in which he is to pursue the path of evolution in the pres- ent. He brings with him the capacities which he has ' made. He brings with him the powers which he has woven into his nature, the faculties that need to be drawn
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out. He is an ego, sometimes older than that inhabiting the body of his teachers. He is sometimes a highly developed entity, who only needs a helping hand in order that he may be able to get ready for his work in the world.
Looking then at the child from the Theo- sophic standpoint we see a living and possibly highly evolved ego, in a feeble body. Our duty is to study the child, and not to coerce him ; to understand him and help him to grow and to find himself. The education of the child should be very largely one that seeks to give him opportunities of manifesta- tion, rather than to impose on him methods of development. And until it is realised that the child is an eternal Spirit, with powers and capacities of his own, not running into a mould but to an individual growth, that the duty of the teacher is to aid the growth and not to try to change it; until that is understood, the whole educational system is going along a wrong road and is based on a false idea. No child naturally needs co- ercion. When he does, it is the fault of the early training, when he was a feeble help- less creature in the hand of his elders. 1
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admit the difficulty you may have with a boy or a girl who has been spoiled, when you try to bring them round again. But even then, you will only bring them round again by love and not by fear. One of the worst features of some of the present methods is the idea that the child is to be ruled by terror where he ought to be ruled by love; by punishment, where he ought to be attracted to learn. For the child desires knowledge, if you will only present it to him in the right way. Do you not know that the child spends more than half of his young life in questions regarding the world around him ? There is no lack of desire for knowledge. In fact, his continual questions are often rather troublesome and trying to the patience of unsympathetic elders. Utilise this longing to know, and give him know- ledge in a form which he is able to assimi- late. If the child evades the school and fears his lessons, blame the teacher and not the child, the teacher who does not know how to give knowledge in an attractive form, and, therefore, is not able to guide the pupil aright by awaking his intelligence and his interest. The attention of the ego must be
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aroused, in order that he may be induced to put himself down into his new vehicle. And he must be allured down by love ana by presenting objects of interest, for blows only drive him back to his own region.
Let me give an illustration. We have schools for children of the depressed classes down at Adyar, that were founded by Colonel Olcott. We are dealing there with a class which has been trodden down for ages. One of those schools is set apart for the children of the very lowest type in the social system, the scavengers, leading a life unclean and miserable in every respect. When that school for scavengers was opened, on the first day the children came in, and behind them a crowd of parents, with sticks and all kinds of things. They came up behind. The astonished teacher asked them why had they come, and received the reply : " We have come to drive the children into the school, because they are sure to run away." " Kindly go home," said the teacher, " leave the children to us." And truly enough, after a few days of the teaching, the children came running to the school of their own accord, and
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found it to be a much happier place than thf*r homes.
Ordinary children have the desire to under- stand and acquire knowledge. You only have to guide. There lies the duty of the elder. His experience of the objects of the world enables the elder to help the untrained, scarcely -used, body of the child. The diffi- culties are with the body rather than with the ego. Sometimes only the training of the brain is necessary to enable the ego to lay hold of his property and use it, and he eagerly seizes the opportunity. At other times he is indifferent, and remains deaf to the voices of the world. And then remem- ber that your success in teaching is going to be very largely proportionate to the amount of the ego that you are able to draw down to work in the brain. You cannot drive him down, you can only allure him down. And only by making your teach- ing attractive, will you be able to win the ego to attention, and so ensure the progress of the child.
But that is not all. Looking at the child with a keener vision, at the subtler bodies which he brings with him, you find that
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everything there is in germ. The child does not bring into the world well-grown and well-developed capacities, as a rule. He brings the germs of faculties that he is going to develop during life. Now some of those are mental faculties, others of course emotional. Some of the emotions make for happiness, others for misery. You might call them germs of virtues and vices — which are permanent modes built into the character of the master-emotions of Love and Hate.
Now those have to grow, and have begun growing from the early days of infancy. If the child be surrounded with good in- fluences, if all Avho come near him are pure in thought, loving in emotion, then those influences playing on the germs of good emotions draw them out, without the child knowing anything about it, and the virtuous seed is developed under those influences, while the seeds of evil are starved out. Under those influences the seeds of vices have 110 opportunity of growth. Now the early education of the child is very largely, and at first entirely, not by books or words, but by the silent influences of the thoughts
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and the emotions of his elders, that are playing upon him continually, as the sun shines and the rain falls on the growing seed buried in the earth. Oh ! there lies your responsibility. The child is naughty. Have you been irritable, impatient, have you been anxious or worried ? Then you have sent out a stream of influences that has stimulated in him the germs of anger and of evil. These are things that are not thought of by the ordinary father or mother; the child's little naughtinesses are reflex- ions of the more serious faults of the elders who surround him, the very elders who punish in him what they have caused. The child's bodies are a precious gift from nature, the shrine of a living Spirit, placed in your hands to help, to guide, to protect. You have no right to allow to play upon them anything from your own lower nature, no right to make the future life of the child more difficult and less noble, because you yield to ignoble passions and desires. You make the whole future life of that child less noble than it should be, because you are not living your highest and your best. And those elders who realise what
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the child is, and the tremendous responsi- bility of using aright the power which -they wield over him, will improve themselves for the sake of their children ; so that the child becomes a stimulus to parental nobil- ity, and the father and the mother grow better and purer, as they try to guard, to help, and to guide the child.
Now it is in this way that the Theosophic Ideal of Education should mould the home and the school. But you may say to me : " Have you not something to say as to the problem pressing upon us oiow of universal and compulsory education ? " Most surely every child in the country has a claim upon the nation for sufficient and suitable education. But on this I would say, that if you want to carry that out practically in this country, you must realise that it is a task for the nation to accomplish, though the Government may and should assent. It is too big a task for any Government to carry out, and you will have to achieve it more by local self-sacrifice and service, than by the costly and clumsy machinery of Government or of District and Municipal Boards. For the expense through them is
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crushing. Fifty lakhs were promised the other day, and more to follow. But you want thousands of lakhs, in order to teach the immense population of this land. How to do it then ? Again, by the village, the village community, which is the unit of your own ancient communal and self-govern- ing life. You must have your village council once again, your Panchayat, to see to your village school. The Government must always build a pukkha school, and fit it up with apparatus at a high cost. But the school you want for the village child may be raised so easily — a few bamboos as pillars, a few palm-leaves as roof, trays of sand for learning arithmetic and writing, and a willing elder to teach the little child. How did Colonel Olcott, our late President- Founder, make elementary education possible in Ceylon ? By exhorting the village elders to build the school ; and the villages raised them by scores. Now universal compulsory education has become possible there. Such a school costs little to build and to support. In order to do this effectively, what we need is a band of young men and women, will- ing to sacrifice themselves for the helping
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of the children of the nation, and to give their lives for the teaching and training of the poor : they must give them an education that will fit them for their future lives in the world, a training that will make them better peasants or artisans, not clerks, and fit for taking up any other of the many manual labour lines of life.
We want Sannyasis. Not the thousands of idle beggars of to-day, burdening the householder and draining his resources, while giving nothing in return ; but young men and women, Brahmacharis, who will give their five or six years of young life, when their own education is finished, and before they go out into the household life and the larger life of the world; who will work for love, for service, and who will wander from village to village, settling in each village for a time, training an element- ary teacher there, supervising him, and then passing on to the next village, pilgrims of true service, teaching as they go. We want a new caste of real Brahmanas, teachers and servants of the Nation, filled with young men willing to serve for the sake of the progress of their people.
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It is there that I see the redemption of India from ignorance. I do not believe you can do it in any other way. But there is one place where our difficulty lies, and it is the home. Our difficulty is with the fathers and mothers. There are plenty of young men ready to serve, and there will be hundreds more, when the cry for service goes out. The difficulty lies in the home. There are thousands of Sannyasis, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and I presume they all had fathers and mothers. Yet, somehow, the fathers and mothers have given them up, have allowed them to go out into the world as Sannyasis. If they can go out to wander through India, often useless and idle, supposed to "be seeking their own liberation, surely they might go out to teach the children of India, seeking the welfare of the people. I do not desire to tear away from a home, against the consent of father and mother, a son on whom their hopes are fixed. Often have I bidden an eager youth go home, and find his self-sacrifice by yielding to the wishes of his parents; though I have felt sad at the checking of the noble impulse,.
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and have grieved to see the selfishness of the parents marring the future of the son. And I do say that I would try to win the father and mother to take pride in their son who entered this new Order of Sannyasis. I do not ask for a vow for life, like those who wander from village to village in yellow robes : but a vow for five or six years of young manhood. They would be none the worse husbands and fathers, because other children had been guided by them, because they had served awhile through love, the families of their poorer brethren. Can we not find young men who shall have enthusiasm for service, instead of the enthusiasm which makes men wander about, seeking liberation for themselves ? Oh ! what matters it whether you and I be free or bound, if only we can lift our brethren out of the mire and mud of ignorance and sin ? If you want to be free, understand that freedom is of the Spirit, and not of the body. The true freedom belongs to the inner man, and not to the outer. If you do not want to be bound by action, re- member what Shri Krshna has told you, that every action binds, " save that which is
4
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done for the sake of sacrifice ". You will win freedom better by such action, than by going into the jungle and seeking liberation only for yourself.
Pass now from that problem of Educa- tion— I always come back to the old thing, Self-sacrifice, the one solution of our social problems — and let us take the sadder prob- lems of what is called Criminology. Xow the criminal is obviously a man who has broken the law, who has come into the grip of the law, and the old idea of the proper way to treat him was that of vengeance and punishment : " an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth ; " in more modern days, when people do not like to be quite so out-spoken, they say that they punish the criminal for what they call the protection of Society; and uncommonly badly they manage their work of protection. When you find a criminal, as you do specially in the West, come back for new crime year after year, and then decade after decade, for new imprisonment and new punishment, the system stands self- condemned. But we shall never understand how to deal with what is called a criminal, till we study what the criminal is.
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Now I would divide criminals into two large classes : first, the undeveloped, the young egos; secondly, older egos whose lower mani- festation is distorted, and who, however clever they may be, have a twist in their lower nature, that makes them use their ability in gaining what they desire by means which the law has forbidden. The treatment of these two classes should be different.
Let us take first the young egos. There again we notice that they fall into two divisions, one containing those who,, for this life, are practically irredeemable and ir- remediable, and the other capable of some development. The congenital criminal, as he is called, is practically incapable of cure — an ego coming out of a life of brutal savagery guided for his next life into a body suitable for his evolution, and therefore defective in the brain and nervous system, a body througli which he has to work among higher types ; who has scarcely emerged from the animal, and has developed along the animal line rather than along the human. He would make — he is — a brutal savage, and, for his swifter evolution is thrown down into a higher civilisation. You can tell them at sight.
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The front part of the head deficient; there is no portion of the instrument there neces- sary for the exercise of the higher functions of the mind ; the hinder half of the brain, from the middle backward, heavy, largely developed, plenty of material through which animal passions can play, and the brutal instincts express themselves; the jaws heavy, and three quarters of the head below the eyes. Now there are types like that, who come into our civilisation in the West. I have not seen them here at all to the same extent. In fact I have not seen one. They come obviously out of the ranks of brutal animal savages. How can Theosophy deal with these ? Then you have the morally undeveloped egos, who, however young, are not really \ wicked but are quite ignorant. And remember that ignorance is the only ' original sin/ to use a Christian phrase. A man is not de- liberately wicked ; I would almost say he is never deliberately wicked. In the heart of the lowest, the most brutal, there dwells the unmanifested Deity, and where God is, there cannot be complete evil. Ignorance and passion — yes, and ignorance and passion together lead into what we call crime.
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Now how should Society deal with these young egos, whether of the brutal, probably irremediable, type for this life, or with the undeveloped ego who may grow into better human semblance ? It must defend itself against such beings. It must protect itself against violence and brutality. And looking at the question from the standpoint of Brotherhood, Reincarnation and Karma, it seems to me that in every such case the duty of Society is to educate, to restrain, to train, and not to let the man loose again on Society, until he has gained habits of industry, sobriety, and care for others, which he had not, so far, shown out. People talk a great deal about personal liberty. But liberty is no blessing to the man who has not learnt to control himself, to guide himself, to dis- cipline himself. He is not free who is a slave to his vices, a slave to his passions, a slave to his impulses; and until he has learnt to rein them in, the liberty of the body is only a danger to Society and a source of misery to himself.
How, then, from this standpoint — I am speaking for myself — would I deal with these two classes of the congenital criminal
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and the undeveloped ego ? First of all, I would hand them over to education. Separate them oft' from the rest of Society to some extent ? Yes. But with certain re- strictions on their personal liberty, I would make their surroundings healthy, clean, pleas- ant, not penitential, as we say, but educa- tional. I would give them amusement, give them pleasure, use happiness to make the little seeds of good in them to grow and flower, surround them with encouragement, while not setting them free. I believe that it would be possible to deal with these people in a kind of labour colony into which they should be drafted, after they had been educated and trained in some form of trade, which would enable them to earn a decent living, and not be a burden on the community. I would use restraint, and a certain steady pressure, which should gradually teach them industry, for they will not work of their own accord at first, until there is pressure on them towards work. And I would even go so far that I should be willing to make the rule that you find in the Christian Testament, that : " If any man will not work, neither shall he eat." If he refused to work, I
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would support him on the plainest and barest nourishment which would keep him in health, increasing his comforts and enjoyments as he won them by industry. Not too much work, not uninteresting drudgery of labour, but an industry which he would gradually take a pleasure in following, thus winning him, as 1 would win a child, into the ways of pure life that go with discipline and happi- ness. And so I should strive to place the undeveloped in these labour colonies, where they would be treated kindly and respect- fully— for you will never have self-respect in a man, unless a man is treated respectfully. Only bit by bit, the human egos would awaken, and the sense of mutual human dependence bring them into discharge of right obligations ; then they would be n't to go out into the freedom of civic life. There is no use of punishment at all in such a colony ; but rather I would attract them onward by reward. The undeveloped would develop more rapidly under that stimulus ; and under love and brotherly treatment, even the congenital criminal would at least have such influences playing upon him as would enable him to utilise these in the after-death
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existence, and enable him to get a better body when he comes back.
It may be asked : " When would you send the congenital criminal into restraint ? " From a very early school age, to separate schools reserved for this class. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and a rough trade — if possible — should be taught. Mining, scavengering, digging, navvy's labour, and the like, these are the best employments for the savage and brutal type, and the men of higher possibil- ities would be relieved from these. The congenital criminal would not earn freedom in this life, for he needs a change of body. But he would have gained evolutionary by his contact with civilisation, and by the training and discipline to which he has a right.
The merely undeveloped egos would simi- larly pass at an early age into schools, but would not be mixed with the congenital criminals. They would receive, like the others, a very elementary education, and would be trained for the work for which they showed some capacity. Agriculture would absorb many. Every chance of quicker development would be put in their way, and many
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would pass out of the labour colonies into ordinary life. I am trying here to indicate general methods ; there is no time for fuller details.
One thing more in relation to this. The nation that is careless of its honest poor, the nation that is indifferent to the way in which they live, the nation that allows slums in its great cities to grow up, making the most horrible conditions for human life, that nation draws into its midst the lowest type of egos, savages of the lower and more brutal type. The slums of London and Glasgow, of Edinburgh, of Chicago and of New York, draw like magnets the lowest types of egos who are seeking incarnation ; the selfishness of the living brings into their civilisation these unborn of the most undesii-- able kinds. So that even from a selfish motive you ought not to remain indifferent to the misery and degradation of the poor. A nation attracts the egos for whom it provides fitting environment.
Now in India I have not seen any of that lowest type ; it seems to me that — in this happier climate, in these simpler con- ditions of life, save in places like Bombay
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where west3rn conditions are growing up, to be followed by the results I have mentioned — you have here very undeveloped egos, but they are not of the congenital criminal type, but rather of a more gentle and docile kind, coming up from the friendlier sorts of savages. Take those millions of human beings that are called ( untouchables,' largely from the physical standpoint, descended from old civilisations. How gentle, for the most part, they are; how simple, how easy to attract, how easy to guide. If, in the West, you had the misery that you have here in the famine years, if you had millions starving — • dropping of starvation on the roads as we have them here — you would have riots in every town and country district, you would have plundering of shops, and firing of the houses of those who were better off. You hardly estimate the difference of your popula- tion, the marvellous pathetic patience of your poor. I have been through districts in famine times, where I have seen men, women and little children, who were mere bones with a skin to cover them. I have seen them holding out their skeleton hands without anger, only weeping and pleading to be fed.
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Oh ! it is heart-breaking to see, but in a way heart-inspiring1 also. It is in cases of such patience that the result of the teach- ings of reincarnation and karma is realised, teachings which have given patience where otherwise revolution would have ensued. Such people will not be violent criminals, will not be brutal in the western way. I am putting oat of consideration the tribes of savages who are hereditarily thieves or mur- derers. I am thinking of that vast popula- tion of the lowest type here, that we find so responsive to appeal, so easy to raise.
But while we may treat the first class of criminals in the kindly, friendly, brotherly way described, keeping them under discipline and training; how should we deal with the second class, those distorted natures of whom I spoke, those who are clever and able, but who have a moral twist in their nature ? They come into our hands only when they have committed crime, and they ought not to be let loose on Society at all, until by long years of useful work they have made good any loss inflicted by them on others, and thus regained the right to move freely among their fellow-countrymen. They are far
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more dangerous and perilous than the lower type of criminal ; and if you want to get rid of these, then do not venture to drop religion out of your education, for the educated selfish man is far more dangerous to the Commonwealth than the same man unedu- cated. If you sharpen the intelligence with- out training the character, you run the chance of making a dangerous criminal, who is more mischievous to the Commonwealth than the brutal or ignorant type.
There is one line of criminal reform which you should consider, and which is gradually spreading in the West. It should be dili- gently followed by Theosophists, while we try to bring about the above-mentioned reforms. It is preventive and tries to save the child, the moment he falls into the grip of the law. America is here leading the way, probably because western nations have poured into America a large amount of the scum of their population, and Ameri- cans have to deal with it. They have established Children's Courts, into which the lad is not brought as a criminal, but rather as a mischievous waif and stray. The judge perhaps puts the child on his knee, chats
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to him, asks him how he got into the trouble, and advises him how he had better behave. And then some elder person conies forward, and offers to keep an eye on the child, to try to save him by friendliness instead of by punishment. Judge Lindsey of Denver has done splendid work on these lines, and is the father of the system. And gradually the idea is spreading, that when- ever a person falls for the first time into the grip of the law, then is the time for the good citizen to step in and save him. On this, in England and in Europe, we owe much to Miss Bartlett — now Mrs. Re- Bartlett — whom some of you may probably remember as a late member of the T.S., and who has been working hard for many many years, in dealing with first offences. Reputable citizens come out and answer for one who has fallen into the grip of the law, and some young man will make a friend of him, treating him as a younger brother, taking him out for walks, pointing out the beauties of nature to him if he has sufficient intelligence, taking him to the theatre, and showing to him the happiness of a more ordered and regular life. There lies the true
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way of reform — the willingness of the good to share with the evil, and to lift them up instead of trampling them down.
Thus we come back to the great word — Brotherhood. What the brother would do for a brother, that is the duty of the refined and the cultured to the rougher and less educated of their fellow-men. In Brotherhood is really the key of all true reforms. In our Sons of India Order we have a clause in the pledge, that every son or daughter must do "at least one act of service every day". It does not matter what it is. The merest trine, the guiding of a blind man across the road, the saving of an animal from cruelty, the lifting of a little child who has fallen down, the carrying of a burden or a parcel for a woman. You can hardly realise, unless you have seen it, the edu- cative effect of this daily discipline, especial- ly upon the young, making them alert to render acts of service, so that it gradually becomes a part of their nature and is woven into their life. The boy who begins by doing one act of service every day will presently be doing half a dozen and then a dozen, until his whole life becomes an
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act of service, consecrated alike to (rod and to man.
And that is what Brotherhood means. You cannot have Brotherhood here, until you yourselves are brotherly. You cannot build a Brotherhood without brothers, and that is a matter for each individual man and woman ; and unless you can learn in your every-day life to live in a brotherly way, to look upon every one around you as a brother — whether older, equal or younger, matters not, you have relations with them and therefore there are obligations and du- ties towards them — unless we all thus live, we cannot make a Brotherhood. For duty is not a thing of contract, as too many people think : " He does not help me, why should I help him ? " Because he does not help you, you ought to help him, for thus you show him the way. If he is rough to you, you should not be rough to him, but teach him gentleness by being gentle ; goodness is as ' catching ' as disease. " Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time ; hatred ceases by love." And yet, five and twenty cen- turies after the Lord Buddha spoke those exquisite words, men are still trying to cure
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crime by cruelty, to get rid of offences by blows. To be brotherly is the noblest thing on earth ; and if your heart is sometimes sad, or life is sometimes lonely, it need never be sad while there is one broken heart to bind, it need never be lonely while there are men, women, and children who want your help. A beautiful phrase was once used to me by my daughter. You know my children were taken away from me, because I would not teach them Christian- ity. And during their minority they were away from me. But the moment they were free they came to me — both boy and girl ; and my daughter, who was then only eighteen, said one day : " Mother, I think I was taken away from you when I was little, so that you might be a mother to thousands of other children. I am glad it was so." Now that is true. But you do not need to have your beloved taken from you in order that you may be a mother or a father to the children around you who need your help. And every one who is more ignorant than you are is really your child ; every one who has less power than you have, every one who is sadder than
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you are, is really your child. It is the heart of love we want. That love, beginning in the family, spreads outward to the com- munity, to the nation, and finally beyond the nation to humanity. The heart of love, which is the God within us, pulses within the Spirit in each of us, and is his very life. The heart of love flowing out in all directions, sending out floods of beneficent affection, answering every cry for help, making one spring forward to the aid of the sad and the down-trodden. Oh ! if your sister were down-trodden and miserable, you would not sleep until you had brought her home. But there are our sister-women everywhere, downcast, miserable, and trampled on, and while they are as they are, no nation can rise to its full greatness, nor fulfil its purpose in the world. Do yon fear that touching the impure will make yon impure ? The touch of love can never bring you pollution, nor can evil come through that to soil you.
There is a lovely story told by Olive
Schreiner. I can only tell it as I partly
remember it, for I read it very long ago.
The gates of Heaven were open and many
5
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were pressing in, and their garments were shin- ing and pure, and angels were standing round, all clad in white raiment, wondrous, lucent. And a woman came in, in very white robes and clean white feet, and as she walked along the golden paths the angels cried out : " See how dirty is her raiment with the mud of earth, and her feet are sprinkled with blood ; " and when she came near to the throne of the Christ, He asked her : " How came thy garments to be white ? " And she answered : " Lord, I kept them very white and clean on earth. I saw a woman lying in the gutter, and I trod on her that I might keep my garments white. No mud soiled me, for I saved my feet from being soiled by treading on her body." And the face of the Christ was sad, and all the angels veiled their faces, and the heavenly city disappeared. And the woman went back to earth, and she toiled among the misera- ble and the poor ; she never thought about her garments or her feet, she only thought of helping the miserable and the degraded ; until one day she saw, fallen down, a poor .woman of the street, and she raised her, muddying her own robe, and clasped her
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close, and bore her to the heavenly gate ; and as they passed in, the angels cried : " See how her garments are shining, and how her feet are covered with pearls ; " and the Lord Christ asked her : " How come you here, with feet that are stained, and garments that are impure ? " And she whispered gently : " Lord, my sister was in the mire, and I lifted her up and I have brought her home, but the mud soiled my raiment and her tears fell on my feet." And the face of the Christ was glad, and from her garments shone out the light of heaven, and the angels laughed with delight at the lustre •of the pearls up on her feet. For purity does not come from lack of contact with the im- pure, but from the love that stoops to redeem .and to uplift, and only when, with heart of love, we embrace the miserable and the degraded, only then shall we learn to under- stand the glory of God in every human form, and realise that the love which redeems is the characteristic of the Saviours of the world, who, being Themselves free, <jan alone break the bonds that hold others in misery.
LECTURE III
(a) TOLERANCE. (6) KNOWLEDGE
In tracing out, or rather naming, in my first lecture, the special Ideals with which I proposed to deal, you may remember that the second was Tolerance. And the oppo- site of that, intolerance, has, I suppose, caused more human misery than any other of the many weaknesses of humanity. It would be impossible to measure or fully to estimate the bitter prejudices that have arisen, the tears that have been shed, the hearts that have been broken, the blood that has been poured out, the starvation and hatred that have been caused by religious perse- cution, by religious war. All over the western world, in Europe, in America, during the last two thousand years, we have seen this intolerance everywhere pursuing its baleful
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way ; and if we could substitute Tolerance for intolerance, if we could win the earnest and the devoted to remember that they are safe while they affirm, but run into danger when they deny, then perhaps the course of religion would be on a smoother path, and men would find that the way to serve God is not to cause suffering to man. The only way, I think, by which the great Ideal of Tolerance can be substituted for intoler- ance is by knowledge. As we know and understand, we see the value of variety, the necessity for variety, and our second object in the Theosophical Society, the study of comparative religion and science, is specially intended to evoke Tolerance and to give us a firm ground on which that Tolerance may be based. The meaning of Tolerance for a moment we may recall. It does not mean the contemptuous permission to those whom we think wrong, to go their own way to destruction without hindrance. It does not mean the proud assumption which says : " Yes, I tolerate you, I allow you to express your views." It means the definite recognition that each individual should be free' to choose his own way without dicta-
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tion from another, without interference from another in the road that is selected. Toler- ance does not claim to judge and criticise the Ideals of another, with a view either to, dictate to him the opinions he should hold, or to grant to him the permission to hold them ; it understands and bows to the truth of that great Sufi saying: "The ways to God are as many as the breaths of the children of men." It realises the deep mean- ing of Shrl Krshna's words : " On whatever road a man approaches me, on that road do I welcome him, for all roads are mine." True Tolerance wholly renounces any attempt to lay down a road which all must tread. It sees that wherever a human Spirit is seeking after God, wherever a human in- telligence is trying to rise to the Divine, wherever a human heart is thirsting for contact with its source, there a road to God is being trodden, and the treading will inevitably lead to the goal.
The ways are different because men's minds are different, because their heai-ts are different, because they have grown up along different lines of thinking, and have been accustomed in the immemorial past which lies behind each of
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us, which stretches backwards into the dawn of time, to a variety of religious beliefs, a variety of standpoints and of views. These are desirable, be it remembered, not undesira- ble. They are useful, and not mischievous. For truth is so many-faced, truth may be seen from so many points of view, that each new vision of it is an addition and not a hindrance, and to study the views of one different from ourselves, to patiently try to learn from his standpoint and to see as lie sees, that is the developing in us of the vision which shall ultimately see the whole of truth and not only a fragment of it; the more we study, the more we realise the unity while studying the diversity, the more, the better, we know its greatness.
The men who would only have one religion, one philosophy, one view of life, they are like men who would demand that as the light of the sun is white, therefore there should be no colours in the world. For colours do not grow out of the light, but out of the different constitutions of the bodies on which the one white light is ever falling. The varieties of constitutions, the ways in which flowers and grass and ani-
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mals are made up, it is those differences that give us different colours although the light is one; each takes out of the white light that which it requires, and throws back out of the white light that which it does not want, and we speak of the colour of the flower, of the animal, of the sky. So also the great white Sun of Truth, shining on the differently constituted minds of men, gives to each of them what it wants for its nutriment, and its unused portions are ever flowing back as colours to the eyes of others. Unless you want a white universe of matter, why want a white universe of thought, and why not rejoice in the difference of constitu- tions that paints the world of thought with many colours, as it paints the world of matter with innumerable hues? Looking then at all the different views around us, we see the value of their variety in the added richness and beauty of our views of truth. But there is another reason why we should be tolerant, and that is because each fragment of Deity that we speak of as the human Spirit, alone knows his own necessities, alone can comprehend his own love of research. You remember the Egyptian saying, when
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the Self is spoken of ; " He who makes his own road according to the Word ; " and what is the Word ? It is the sound which is given out by each individual Spirit, which shows out his quality and his na- ture, and only the Spirit knows the road by which , he can best express himself. Only the Spirit can judge of the Tightness of the path, which he selects in order to find his source. And to interfere with that choice of the Spirit, to dictate to another fragment of Divinity how he shall make his way to God, that is insolence un- warrantable, that is verily blasphemy against individuality. The very thing that we have become manifested in order that we may learn is multiplicity in unity, and in order to understand the value of this variety, we study the religions of the world.
Now you can only study effectively when you sympathise. To study without sympathy is to see the blemishes ; to study with sympathy is to see the lovelinesses. And you can never understand the beauty of a faith and its hold upon the minds of its adher- ents, until you study it with the eyes of love and sympathy, and feel in yourself the
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vibrations which it arouses in those to whom it appeals. Hence if you would be true lover of the Divine Wisdom, rise above the intolerance that would dictate to another into that liberty of the Spirit in which alone truth is found. Study what you do not agree with more than that with which you agree. Day by day familiarise yourself with, the standpoints of others, rather than ever keeping your eyes fixed on an object from exactly the same spot ; learn from those with whom you disagree more than from those with whom you agree ; and in that way you shall become many-sided as the many aspects of the truth itself ; and finally, when you rise to the magnificence of perfect knowledge, you shall find that every frag- ment has its place in the perfect whole, and that every religion that man has follow- ed is one note in the mighty chord which speaks of God to man.
But since I believe that most of you are at one with me on this, it is not necessary that I should dwell longer on that great Ideal, Tolerance. I would only ask you to carry it out in life as well as to admire it in theory, to try to correct the natural
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intolerance of mankind by looking in every person and in every opinion for the good, rather than for the bad. Let your first impression of a book be the favourable one rather than the hostile ; let the first impression of a man be of his virtues, rather than of his vices. For the better he seems to you, the more you are seeing of the Self that is trying to manifest through his mind and body, and the errors are only the clouds that shut out the sun ; as the sun rises higher it becomes clearer, and, as it shines, the •cloud shall vanish and the true Self be seen. From that, let us pass on to our next Ideal, the Ideal of Knowledge. And here, 1 am afraid, we differ very much, perhaps, from the majority of the people of the present day. To us, knowledge is not in any sense com- plete, which is confined to the physical world, nor even to the other physical worlds that roll around us in the immensity of space. Science for us is not only science of our physical «arth, but a science that includes the super- physical as well as the physical, in the worlds immediately related to our own ; that is the subject that man should set himself to master. Our third object holds that up,
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as the Ideal of Knowledge. And I want now, if I can, to show you why that Ideal is more life-giving, more uplifting, more use- ful, to us in this life as well as in another, than the knowledge and science that con- fines itself only to the globe on which we are living, and the surrounding globes of physical matter. I want, if I can, to justify su pel-physical research in the eyes of the- uian of the world, to show him how much may be gained by it, though he deems it to be dreamy and useless : to show him that a wider knowledge bears to the narrow knowledge of present-day science just the same relation that the scientific knowledge of the physical world bears to ignorance thereof ;. that we cannot safely, in a world of facts,, ignore a large portion of the conditions which surround us and the greater part of the facts we have to do Avith, i.e., the superphysical as well as the physical. We spend a comparatively short life in the physical world and a compara- tively long life in the other worlds, on the other side of death ; and to know nothing of them,, to understand nothing of them, is as though a man who was going to travel in a far country refused all information of the geo~
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graphy ot' the country, of the manners and customs of the people of the country, of the laws that rule them, of the climate, of all that the man wants to know when .he has prepared himself for travel in that far- off land. Moreover our case is stronger, for the influences of the superphysical are con- tinually playing upon us here and now, and we cannot live aright if we ignore them,1 I want then to justify our third object, by declaring that the true Ideal of Science must not neglect the superphysical any more than the physical.
For why have we a body ? As fragments of divinity, why should we encumber our-
1 In The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 380, Professor William James remarks : " One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of conscieusness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence ; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation . No account of the universe in its totality can be filial which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question — for they are so discontin- uous with ordinary consciousness." Only by a super- physical science can the " universe in its totality " be investigated and gradually become known.
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selves with this clumsy envelope of matter ? What need have we to put on garment after garment of matter ? We find a man like Huxley declaring that our senses hinder our perceptions, that they check the powers of our consciousness. Why then should we have a body at all ? There is only one answer to that question, I think, in order that we may know the world which shares, is made up of, the matter of which that body is composed. If then there are more worlds than one, if we have more bodies than one, the same reasoning applies to the subtler bodies and the subtler worlds that applies to the denser bodies and the denser worlds. Everything which justifies physical science justifies superphysical science — if it be possi- ble; and that is the point on which we have to convince those who blame what they call psychism, without ever experimenting in it to see whither it will lead.
Now science is simply co-ordinated and inter-related, knowledge, and, from the study of that knowledge and by induction from it, the discovery of principles which embody themselves as laws. First, it is based on observation of facts by the senses, without
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that no science. Then, it is built up by the discovery of relations between those facts by the reason ; without the discovery of relations between facts there is no science possible. And lastly, it is crowned by inductions made by the reasoning on related facts, by which the principles are discovered, which, as I said, embody themselves in laws. Those are the three things that are necessary : observation of the facts by the senses ; dis- covery of the relations between them, partly by observation and partly by reasoning; and then the final exercise of the reason on the mass of related phenomena, so that the under- lying principles are found, and man is able to forecast as well as to record.1 Science makes a man master of the forces of nature, of which, while ignorant, he was the plaything and ' the toy ; and only as man masters the powers of nature by knowledge can he move serenely and securely amid the turbulent forces and bend them to his will, use them for his security and his happiness.
1 I have omitted the formation of hypotheses and the verification of them by experiment, as details in the establishing of principles.
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We come then to the question whether a knowledge of superphysical worlds is possible, whether such worlds exist; for it will hardly be denied that if superphysical science be attainable, man's security and happiness will be seen to be more increased by it, than his physical security and happiness have been increased by physical science.
Now supposing you were dealing with a physical fact, and the scientific man said to you : " A diamond is composed of carbon." He makes an assertion. You look at the diamond, and cannot see that it is made o£ carbon, a black amorphous mass. What has that to do with the brilliant crystal, reflect- ing back the light in many-coloured radiance ? Nothing is there in common at the first sight ; but, unlikely as it may seem to be, he has discovered the fact by experiment, by repeated experiments, and these experi- ments you can repeat, if you have the necessary apparatus, and will learn by his science how to use it — not otherwise. If you have not the time, and will not take the ti'ouble necessary to learn chemistry, and will not submit to the conditions of study, then your discovering of this fact is impossible ; in that 6
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case you will accept his statement for the moment only as a hypothesis, if you are cautious, and may even take action on the result of his experiment; later, if you choose to learn from him how to repeat his experi- ment, you may convince yourself of the accuracy of his statement of the fact. People forget all these stages in physical science when they are talking about superphysical science. They expect that as they walk along the streets, their motives being good, they will be able to see astral and mental bodies without study, without effort, without following any rules, without any help from the experts who have mastered the science. Science is not mastered in that way. Nature does not yield herself, but withholds her secrets from those who are not industrious and laborious. If the inves- tigator needs patience to master the physical world, what of the patience of one who has to learn to manufacture every frag- ment of apparatus before it can be used, and who has to give long years of in- vestigation, of study, to discover and syste- matise the facts of the subtler and finer worlds ?
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Look then for a moment at the overwhelm- ing evidences that have been patiently gathered together, for all to read who will, from far-off times down to to-day, proving the fact that there are worlds other than this, and other bodies related to those worlds. Read these evidences at leisure and weigh them. And then understand that the conditions of verify- ing these investigations are the same as in physical science ; the methods of the investigation are the same. You can no more work by guess-work in subtler worlds than in the dense world. You can no more give an answer to the inquirer without in- vestigation in the subtler, than you can give it without investigation in the denser. If you are able to see the shape of a chemical atom, it is supposed by the outside world that you are able to see the form and lustre of the Logos, and to answer every question that may be asked you as to monadic conditions ! Every successive world has its own science ; every successive world has to be investigated by itself, and under the working of its own laws. And only with the help of the codified knowledge of the past, can we make rapid progress in
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the present. I know that some people think that they can find their own way in the science of the superphysical. Do so, as much as you can. But it will take many lives to find your way, and in one life you will scarcely have learned the alphabet of it, before death strikes you down. Any man may find out how to make gunpowder, if he has time enough, without learning from any book. But the discoverers of it partly blew themselves to pieces before they found out how to make it. And so people may blow themselves superphysically to pieces, to a very great extent, if they will noc take advantage of the knowledge of others, and of the records of superphysical science verified by other students. I do not say you cannot discover everything for your- self. But you may look at Roger Bacon who blew off a finger, and blew out an eye, and knocked himself many times senseless on the floor of his cell, as he carried on his chemical investigations. What would you say of the folly of the man who should insist on throwing away all the knowledge gathered in danger, and on making new experiments for himself from the beginning
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in a chemical laboratory ? There would not be much left of the laboratory and the investigator in a week or two. Similar dan- gers front the ignorant investigator in other worlds. For the conditions are similar. I am not dealing with revelations. I am deal- ing with science. And you have to observe and understand facts in superphysical as well as in physical science.
Can I prove to you at once that you have subtler bodies ? No, no more than chemistry can prove to you at once in this hall that a diamond is only a fragment of carbon. But if you will give the time and the trouble and obey the rules which are necessary — as every science bas its rules — Yes ; then you can develop the power to know, as many of us have done. Every educated man has now reached a stage of general evolution that brings him to the very threshold of the superphysical world. Let me give you one illustration. For a long time we Theosophists have been talk- ing about the aura and its composition as seen by the clairvoyant. Many of you have seen a book called Man Visible and Invisible.) written by my friend Mr. Charles Leadbeater.
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You may now, if you like, go and buy a book called The Human Atmosphere, by a London physician, and in that book you will find pictures of the aura, as he has succeeded in seeing it by the help of glass screens, con- taining certain liquids. Through those screens, under the conditions laid down as the re- sult of experiment, you can any one of you see for yourself the densest part of the aura, that which we call the etheric double with the health aura. That is a question of fact not of theory, and of fact as seen by the physical eye, aided by a special apparatus, instead of by a more highly developed power of vision. There are pictures of this aura . in both books. Take the picture which is given by Dr. Kilner, drawn from what he has seen through his screens. Compare that picture with the picture in Man Visible and Invisible, drawn from what was seen by clairvoyant vision, and you find yourself looking at the same thing. The details are not quite as clear in Dr. Kilner's book as in the Theosophical book. You also find in both books that disease alters the constitution of part of that aura, and you may see in both another picture — of what
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we call the health aura — in physical weak- ness, disease. When that was put forward as the result of clairvoyance, many people laughed at it. What are they going to say now when as the result of modern scientific research they are able to see ? they can hardly deny that the clairvoyant was right, and they cannot say that the Theo- sophist copied a scientific discovery, or that our book was written after Dr. Kilner's, because the dates are there, showing priority by many years. And that is going to be repeated over and over and over again with regard to clairvoyant investigation, and the further advances of modern science.
Take another point. Mr. Leadbeater and myself together some time ago made a number of investigations into chemical atoms, and we drew them, more or less badly, and published the whole thing. It was a laborious piece of work, but there it stands; and I have heard from moi'e than one person that the chemists are now trying to discover in their own way the forms of chemical atoms, and are within a measurable distance of success. When they have succeeded, it will be very interesting to compare their records
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obtained by physical means, coloured screens and the like, with our records obtained by clairvoyant sight.
I only mention this slower method of modern science, because I want you to see that physical science is groping its way into subtler regions of the world, and the etheric is only the first to be investigated. But what is the difference of the methods ? No difference in observation, no difference in labour, no difference in reasoning on the observation. A difference of apparatus, that is all. The scientist makes his apparatus out of glass, or metal, or coloured liquids, and the rest. We make our apparatus by developing in ourselves a sense which is in process of evolution, in the ordinary course of nature, and we develop it a little more rapidly than unassisted nature can do. Now is that outside the analogy of nature ? Nature produces in the ordinary course of evo- lution certain differences. They are called variations. Consider these in the vegetable world. Century after century, millennium after millennium pass in the slow course of evolution that changes the form of a plant, of a flower, of a fruit. Man studies the
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laws of nature, chooses out his flowers, mixes their male and female elements arti- ficially, selects the best results and re -mates them, and in the course of a few years makes the difference in the flowers, which nature, unassisted, would take centuries to achieve, and might never achieve at all. Luther Burbank in California took some cactus covered with prickles, prickles that made it useless for the food of cattle or of man ; he experimented on it, worked at it, until he produced the cactus that has no prickles, and that is useful as fodder and fruit. What has he done ? He has used his knowledge of the laws of nature, and in a few years has produced what nature would take centuries to do, and per- haps might never do at all, because the prickles are useful for the protection of the plant, and nature works for the benefit of the plant, and not for the benefit of the cattle who might feed on it and destroy it. Why then should we not do with our- selves and our bodies, what every scientific breeder does with cattle and vegetables, using the laws of nature to bring about what we want ? It is the same forces with
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which we work, the same laws we are able to apply ; and what in this country we call the science of yoga is nothing more than an application of the laws of mind to the swifter evolution of the indi- vidual consciousness, moving with as sure steps in the realm of consciousness as the scientific breeder moves with in the physical world of matter. Thus we get at least a prima facie case for the possibility of developing sight, keener, more acute, than the phys- ical ; and when a man develops that sight and begins to use it, he sees the subtler bodies just as you see the denser bodies around you, and for the same reason. There is nothing more marvellous in it, nothing more supernatural in it, nothing more wonderful in it, than the eye-sight of ordinary matter and of objects, which only seems to you not wonderful, because it is so universal. If it were rare, all persons would be magnifying it and calling it wonderful. The common loses its wonder, it becomes every-day, and ordinary, yet it is per- haps the more wonderful because it is general. That you can all see me is to you nothing wonderful, you think it common ; but if I
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say to you : " Yes, you can see me with your physical eyes, and I can see you too in the same way, and can also see a great deal more, a great deal of the matter in which your thoughts are showing themselves," then you are all agape. Yet this is as natural as the sight of the physical, and there is nothing more wonderful about it, nor is it supernatural at all. It is all a question of evolution, natural or artificially hastened, and not a question of miracle.
Now we have large number of statements available from people who have used and use this sight. I have mentioned some, and there are others, and will be many more in days to come. Let me for a moment speak to you descriptively, as a scientific man would speak, if he were telling you of some discovery he had made in chemistry. I say to you that you have different envelopes of matter forming your bodies, and belonging to the different worlds in which you are living all the time. The worlds that you say you go to after death, you are living in now, if you would only realise them. You do not ' go ' any- where of necessity, when you pass out of your body. You are just where you were,
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but are using an organ of vision different from that which you use in the physical world ; an organ which you are using every night, when you leave your physical body in sleep. And if, in spite of the critical spirit of our modern time, you have a little of the humility of the older days, and are willing to learn from superphysical experts as you are ready to learn from physical experts, then your whole life will increase and become richer and more intelligible by the increased knowledge that you will gain.
Let us see what the result is of investi- gation by senses higher, but not more wonderful, than the physical. I leave the etheric double — that has become ordinarily scientific now. Let us take the next body, the astral body, in which the emotions show themselves, that which the Vedantins speak of as the lower part of the ' manomayakosha ; ' that body in which your emotions work is the body in which you live at night when you are asleep, in which you will live after you pass through death. By that body you come into touch with the phenomena of that after-death world, are able to examine it, to observe it, to remember it when you
awake, and compare the observations that you have made with those of others, to travel through it in order to observe, to gather facts, and to try to understand their meaning ; you can also come into contact with the inhabitants of that world, make acquaintance with them, observe them, see their manners and customs, learn to converse with them, see their ways and how they look on their world, and shape their surroundings to match the physical world they remember; thus you may gather a first-hand knowledge of the phenomena and conditions which characterise that other world. Now surely the knowledge of that world will be valuable to you, since you must inevitably go there after death. Another value you will find, when you have developed this astral vision as it is called, is the difference it makes in the world around you in your daily life. I spoke to you the other day about the education of children and the germinating qualities in the children. If you develop this higher sight, you will be able to evolve those germs, or starve them, watching the effect on the child's aura of your own virtues and failings, your irritation, your anger, your love ; the whole
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of your feelings will be more easily guided aright if you see by your astral vision the effects of them on the child, and by studying it by this vision, as well as by your physical eyes and your reason, you will find out the education that will be needed for each particular child ; then you will not run down so many blind alleys in the educa- tion of the young. Then think of the advantage of astral vision in disease. How many doctors are already utilising that keener vision in the diagnosis of disease. For they have found out a way to utilise it by mesmerism. They throw a person into a mesmeric or hypnotic trance — for, remem- ber, most people in the trance condition, when the physical senses are blinded for the time, are able to see astrally. Now these European scientists have found out, by observation of facts, that a person in a mesmeric trance can use a power of sight which enables him to see the interior of the human body, and they use that power of sight for the diagnosis of diseases. I admit that they do not call it clairvoyance. They call it internal autoscopy, when the mesmerised patient looks at his own interior.
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But names do not matter. They are only describing the same old common sense that we call clairvoyance, the astral vision. It is the same thing that is being used in order to diagnose obscure diseases, and some- times what may be done by Routgen rays is done by such sight. Then consider not the examination of the diseased person, but the emotions that are found in every one of us. Those emotions show themselves in the astral body by different colours. There is nothing strange in that, for in fine matter vibrations must produce colour. There is nothing wonderful in the fact that the vibra- tions shine out as an exquisite blue, and so on. But when you are able to see that, it guides you in your dealing with the man, and enables you to help him better than otherwise you could. You see a man coming along the street, and from the flashing scarlet of his aura you know that he is in a bad temper ; when you meet him you are ready to send against his scarlet the soft rose-coloured vibrations of affec- tion and goodwill, thus counteracting his violent vibrations by your vibrations of patience and forbearance; and so you gradu-
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ally smooth out the anger, instead of inten- sifying it by allowing those vibrations to be reproduced in your own astral body. Examine this matter for yourselves. You know that sometimes when you are in a very good temper and a man in irritable mood comes to you, you get cross without reason, without anything — so far as you know — to make you cross. You are in a very good temper. Why then become irritable be- cause he comes near you ? It is because of your astral body ; that body is thrown into violent vibrations corresponding to those caused by his irritability. Those vibrations produce what are called sympathetic vibrations in your own astral body, and those give rise to the mood of irritability in you. The moment you understand this reaction, you are able to prevent it, and to use your knowledge to promote peace and harmony ; many a quarrel would be hindered, many an estrangement would be prevented, if you possessed clairvoyance and used it for such purposes. I know that many of you accept and utilise this teaching from those who can see ; but you would move with a surer tread if you could see for yourselves those emotional
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disturbances, and also see how to stop, how to counteract, how to prevent, them.
Now consider the advantages in other worlds, the advantages of being able to see the astral world and the friends snatched away from you by death. How would that affect your life ? There are two ways, it seems to me, in which astral vision is ser- viceable, in view of death. First, the results of evil here are seen, and you can teach people on this side of death to avoid the evils that will cause misery 011 the other side. If you see a drunkard suffering in the astral world from the frightful craving for drink, is it nothing to be able to tell the man before death : " This is what you are making for yourself on the other side ; you must give up this vice in the long run, and you can do it much more easily now, than when you find yourself in the condition I describe, in which you must find yourself afterwards, unless you conquer the craving here." Is it nothing to say to a religious man who has heard of the ghastly horrors of an everlasting hell: "There is no such thing on the other side of death ; your terror is unnecessary ; your fear is like a child's 7
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fear of the darkness. There is no devil watching to catch hold of you, no bottomless pit into which you will fall." You may say : " Why mind about all that misapprehension ? He will find out his mistake when he is there." Because the thoughts of fear and the thoughts of horror that are made part of his religion enclose him in horrible clouds of fear on the other side of death, and though there is no reason for fear, though there is no actual devil, he is terrified with the doubt as to what he is going to see, whether in* the next moment he may not find himself in that bottomless hell into which he is said to go, according to the physical description given in his religious scriptures. You do not know the harm that is done by the horrible blasphemies of the preachers, who paint these gruesome pictures of the other side. Speak the truth by all means ; say that a man's vices hold him in a grip that causes pain and trouble to him on the other side. That is reasonable, rational, according to law. Just as a drunkard has shattered nerves in the physical body, so he has the equivalent of shattered nerves in the astral body on the other side, and this
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real hell he has created for himself. If that were known, were generally admitted, men would not make a hell here in which to suffer there. How can men imagine that the Heart of Love which breathes out a universe tortures out of revenge or out of desire of punishing ? if that Heart of Love were realised the whole horror of the misunder- stood sufferings on the other side would be uplifted from the eyes and mind of man. If you learn how to live on this side of death, you may escape suffering and find joy on the other side. Again, astral vision convinces you that there is no death in the sense in which the word is used, and no separation ; you would see that you had not lost your friends, that you could speak with them, feel with them, live with them, since for you the barrier of death would have fallen away.
That is indeed a happier world into which nature by evolution is gradually guid- ing us. For when all men can see, death will be put a stage further off.
At least yon might remember the words of those who see, that you must not, for love's sake, follow your dead with grief, with
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passionate regret ; that they are around you, near you, feeling, sympathising, and that you wring their hearts with pain when you lament their loss with anguish ; it is selfish, cruel, thoughtless, to make them unhappy ; for they are not dead, they are living and near you. There is death of the body, but no death of the emotions and the mind, and for love's sake you must make their path happy on the other side of death.
And there is a higher vision yet, a vision of the mind. To that there opens out another world. There open before you immense vistas of life, of power, of glory ; and then when that vision is yours, you can follow your living dead into the realms of the heavenly world, of svarga, beyond the 'land of desire ' (kamaloka), which is the intermediate dwelling of men. And there, again, when you understand it and its conditions, your life down here is changed ; for you are thinking — more or less — all the time, making continual thought-forms ; and these forms you carry with you to the other side of death. By them you know in that higher world of heaven, by them you see, by them you receive, by them you understand, and: your power of
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gaining knowledge in heaven is limited and conditioned by the forms you are creating in your mind every day and all day long. When you know and realise that, then you begin to set your thought-house in order while you are still in the body ; then you cultivate body and mind, study Art and Literature, so that your mind may be many- sided and have many senses, as it were, by which your consciousness may be able to work in the heaven-world. For you are creating now by your thoughts the body which you must wear there.
The whole world is changed by knowing more of the invisible worlds and objects, and we limit ourselves, deprive ourselves of our own rightful birth-right, when we refuse to open our eyes and see, and thus to quicken our evolution. I cannot tell you, one by one, the many almost incredible advantages that come to us by organising the subtler bodies, and by them coming into touch with the higher worlds to which they belong. But I may perhaps close by one image which you may think over, and which may perhaps help you to realise something of the difference between a man who is
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blind outside the physical world, in comparison Avith the man who sees. Throw back your thought two hundred years, and see how men were living then their lives. See how a man scarcely ever left his town, his country, and how other countries were unknown to him ; how, if he \eit his own home to cross the sea, he went for life, and was separated from the rest of his family ; how posts took long in coming, how telegraphy and steamships were unknown, how it took many months to travel over distances that are now traversed in a few weeks. How narrow was then the out- look, how curious the misapprehensions of other nations, how limited the understanding of the world. Compare that with the present wide outlook on the world; see the swift and ever swifter means of communication with distant friends, the post, the telegraph, the telephone, that all link men together, until your son may travel round the world and you need never be out of touch with him, even for a single day. That is what science has done for the physical world; it has brought you into touch with the whole of your heritage and enabled you to live a wider larger life. So is it also with super-
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physical science. It opens up other worlds to us, as this world is now open to you ; and the ordinary man compared with an Occultist is like the man of two hundred years ago in his narrow, limited, contracted, world, compared with the man of to-day; the Occult- ist is as that man, looking over the whole world and knowing it ; he regards the three worlds as the home of the body, having conquered them in a brief space of time, ahead of evolution. Such is your birth-right, if you will only claim it; but remember that progress is only made by whole-hearted endeavour, and that without effort nothing can be done.
LECTURE IV THE PERFECT MAN
Many many thousand years ago in India there rang out a sentence as applicable to-day as in those older days, as much demanding answer now as in that past of long ago : " Awake, arise, seek the great Teachers and attend." That is the message repeated by the Theosophical Society, such has been its duty — to open again the ancient Path, to open again the way to the ancient Portal, to tell men how they may reach the stature of the Perfect Man, and grow to the fulness of the measure of the sta- ture of the Lord. For many centuries the world was left without any sign-post that pointed to the way that led to that ancient Path. " Narrow is the Path," it was de- clared of old, " as the edge of a razor."
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" Straight is the gate and narrow is the way," again proclaimed the Christ, " that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." During all these centuries the way was not really closed ; the Portal of Ini- tiation ever remained open before those who know how to knock ; and it has ever been true : " Knock and it shall be opened unto you, seek and ye shall find." But in the older days, when the spirit of the pupil was more widely spread among men, when, as in ancient India, the great Teachers came and lived from time to time in the land, visit- ing the Courts of Kings, treading the highways of the simple, abiding for a while in forests where their disciples gathered around Them and were taught, in those days when the spirit of the pupil was widely spread, men realised that while earth had its claims, ' while too our earth-life had its duties and obligations, while men had to pass through the stages of the student and the householder, that human life was not complete when those stages had been wisely lived, had been trodden, and trodden well. The old system of Ashramas here, as in other lands, pointed viviiily to the fact that
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the later years of a man's life skould be passed away from the home, coming to the highei' life and its duties when the lower had paid its debt, and that the life should be closed in that perfect renunciation which left a man able and free to serve his race, be- cause he asked from earth nothing more for himself. And although it may veil be that the ideal was not thoroughly carried out it remained as an ideal.
So, too, in the western world, and in the middle East, in Egypt, in Greece, in Rome, there also was the abiding reference to the higher and nobler life, the life of service and of" Initiation; for in what were called the Mysteries, men learnt the secrets of life and death, learnt the reality of immortality, learnt that man was a spiritual intelligence dwelling in an earthly body, and that per- fection was within the reach of the one able enough to know, strong enough to do, bold enough to dare, discreet enough to keep silence. In those days the Mysteries had their pupils, perfection was aimed at, perfection was gained. When we look back to the stages of pupilhood in Egypt, to the similar stages in Greece, we find there
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the Path distinctly marked, the Portal of Initiation distinctly pointed out. Was it not written that after the man had learnt the civic virtues, after he had purified himself from evil and learnt to tread the way of righteousness — having become the good man, which was the necessary preliminary step — then was it not declared that the good man be- came a God, God manifested, as He had ever before been present in bodily life in latency. It was only some few hundred years ago that the last of the outer Mysteries was withdrawn from the eyes of men — quite in historical time, within the Christian era ; and the reason for the withdrawal was simply the want of pupils. That is always the reason for the lack of real knowledge. Never the grudging of the Teachers, but always the unwillingness to be taught. And in that there is nothing surprising, nothing distressing, nothing that should disturb us. For human evolution is a very long path, and the mass of men must tread the whole length of it, evolving one faculty after another ; probably the concrete mind of man could not have reached its complete evolu- tion, unless for a time the veil had been
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allowed to drop over the eternal verities, and only the outer forms and doctrines of religion had been left for the teaching of the western world.
I said that the Path was not closed, be- cause single people trod it, and an individual here and there found his way ; but with the withdrawal of the Mysteries as acknow- ledged institutions, there passed away the last public sign-post, pointing, as it were, to that great Path of Holiness which leads to human perfection. Here, in the East, the tradition of the true Guru survived, and here and there earnest students found their Teachers, sought after Them with patient service, with persevering effort, until one here and one there found again the ancient Path, trod it and reached perfection.
But it was not until the Theosophical Society was founded, that again in the care- less ears of the world WHS sounded out the cry with which I began : " Awake, arise, seek the great Teachers and attend." There had been secret societies through the whole of this time, both in the East and in the West. They had the lower forms of Initiation, and from them one after
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another went onwards along the higher Path. But those secret societies Avere hard to find, they were difficult to enter. And although we come across traces of them from time to time, although we see now and again a name which whispers to us of a reality, of the value of service, still the masses of the people know nothing of them. But one outer tradition remained, an outer shell of dramatic appearance and symbolism without the underlying reality, that Brother- hood of Masonry which stretches down through the centuries, and is the last survival of the Mysteries of old. it is in symbol though not in knowledge, it is in outer forms though not in inner essence, a wit- ness ever remaining of the reality of the great Mysteries of the past, whispering sentences scarcely understood by those who speak them, but which, to the ear of knowledge, reveal its origin, and show what it is intended to preserve.
But when the White Brotherhood sent its messenger, the great disciple, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who had laboured so long, so nobly, in the service of her Master; when she in turn found another of the
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ancient group, Henry Steele Olcott, and linked her hands with him in the great work of founding in the world a Society, which stood out as a messenger from the White Brotherhood and re-proclaimed the Gnosis in face of the triumphant agnosticism of the latter days of the nineteenth century; when in Europe it pointed to the ancient Hermetic Mysteries : when in India it point- ed to the ancient Brahmavidya ; when within itself it founded its Esoteric Section ; then again that ci*y went out : " Awake, arise, seek the great Teachers and attend." For again the reality of the Teachers was pro- claimed ; again the fact that They could be found was announced; again the outer gate- way was shown beyond which stretches the path that leads to the inner; so that once more the narrow ancient Way was pointed to, without doubt, without hesitation. Since that day some have entered the outer Court, have passed onwards to the inner Court of the Temple, onwards still until they have entered the Holy of Holies, where the Teachers stand to give the old Initiation ; and now again, clearly and definitely, there are witnesses to the reality of those Mys-
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teries amongst us, because they have been initiated into them, and know where they are celebrated ; we have been there, and we speak, in no faltering voice, with clear and definite accent ; we say to you : " The Mysteries are, and we know that they are, we can tell you about them. They do not exist because we know that they exist, but because the Masters ever are, and are willing to accept pupils ; we speak to you not by hearsay but by knowledge, not by rumour but by personal experience." And that is the testimony that H.P.B. bade me bear in the face of the sceptical world : " Go out," she said to me, " and declare that you are an initiated disciple, though you be disbelieved, so that you may bear witness to the eternal verities we know." And because of that, I have not ever hesitated to speak, though scoffed at and derided ; it is necessary for some to speak and to bear the scoffing, in order that those who are born into the world to-day, who have known the truths in the past, may hear articulately spoken the summons which,, in their new bodies, will awaken them to the knowledge of that past ; which is
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necessary in order that the way may be made straight for the Great Teacher, whose foot is on the threshold of the opening door. Therefore it is that the way to the Mysteries has been again opened up, there- fore again the summons lias gone out, and IIONV, as of old, the entrance to the path- uay is seen in the outer world. It is only the entrance which leads to the outer Court that is open before the eyes of men.
What are the credentials for coming through that outer (irate ? What the object with which one may seek to enter ? For this pathway offers nothing of all the prizes that men seek for and crave. It does not offer praise in the eyes of men, but rather ridicule and scoffing. It does not offer wealth, nor rank, nor fame, but rather contains failure, difficulties and trouble. Why then should men be willing to throw aside earth's prizes, and strive afteu a goal unattractive in the eyes of the world ? You may know the reason, if you turn to those words of Shri Krshna, in which He has recommended abstinence as one of the preparations for the higher life. For He declares that " the objects of the senses 8
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turn away from the abstemious dweller in the body/' and that even the desire for them disappears when once the Supreme, the Eternal, is seen. There lies the reason. The glory of the Self, the majesty of the Self, when one glimpse of that has been caught, however fleeting, everything that the world can offer becomes as a mere bubble that a child blows for amusement ; happi- ness is a mere trifle, as a little girl may deck herself with glittering dross.
But why, if there be no value in those things, should men continue to strive for and grasp them ? When you have gained wealth, you are weary in the midst of your gold ; when you have gained fame, you are lonely, and your heart is unsatisfied ; when you have gained power, you are an object of envy and jealousy, and those whom you would fain help are suspicious and distrustful ; behind every flower of earth, there is indeed "a serpent coiled," and as the flower withers, the hands are empty that dreamt they held a prize. Because of the overwhelming beauty of the One, because of the splendour of the Eternal, the temporal loses its attraction, and the great illusion no longer has power to blind.
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Suppose then, that one of you still living in the world has gained that passing glimpse of the gloiy of the Self, suppose that you feel somewhat weary of those earthly prizes, suppose that this life has become empty, with that blessed emptiness as seen from the higher side, though so trying before that higher side is known. What must you •do to enter the outer Gateway, to become .a candidate for treading the narrow ancient Path ? The way to knock at that outer door is the knock of Service to your fellows. That is the knock which arouses the guardian of that Portal ; that is the word which is the Word of Power which makes him unlock the Gate. Y^ou say : " But what of prayer, what of meditation, what of all the rites and ceremonies of religion, what of with- drawal from the outer world, what of the jungle, and the cave, and the life of re- nunciation ? You talk of service, but that must be carried on in the outer world ; that takes up time and thought and energy. How should service be the way, when it must be carried on in the haunts of men ? " Quite true, and yet it is the way. Those whom we call Masters do not lie supine
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in idleness and sloth, because They have gained liberation. They are ever at work for the world They have left behind. They are ever labouring for the good of the masses of mankind. They are endeavouring to lighten the heavy burden that presses on the nations, and to guide their feet into the way of peace. Why should They take pupils, why should They trouble themselves with pupils, so fickle, so feeble, so indifferent, and so petty as we are ? Because They see in us the possibility of helping others, of serving our race. Again I recall a verse from The Song of the Lord : " Our forefathers seeking liberation, Avere intent on the welfare of the people/' That has become too much forgotten in all the exoteric religions of the world. It is the care for the welfare of the people, the bringing of strength to the weak, and help to the helpless — that is the knock which sounds through the Courts of the Temple, and makes the dwellers therein say : " Behold, there is someone who knocketh at the door."
And that old lesson, so much forgot- ten, has proved itself to be true in our Theosophical Society. We have many mem-
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bers who are very good. Their lives are gentle, patient, self-controlled and thought- ful; they are people who daily bow in hom- age before the Supreme, and spend hours in meditation, seeking to raise the mind to the Eternal. And yet, year after year, they seem to make but little progress; year after year, they seem to take no further step along the difficult road ; they resist the temptings of the flesh, they do not care for the trifles of the world, but, to use the soldier's phrase, they ' mark time ' instead of marching forward. I know them by the dozen and the score. And others, who do often very little of prayer and very little of meditation, but who have forgotten them- selves in Service, those go onwards and reach the feet of the Master. And that is the lesson that all of you must learn, who would fain come up to the door of the Portal, and knock thereat so that it may be opened; ask yourself every night: "What have I done for others to-day ? " Do not ask : " Am I making progress ? " Do not ask : " Am I better than I was a few years, or a year or two, ago ? " Do not be contin- ually pulling up the plant of your life to
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see if it is growing, as does the little child when he has stuck a seed into the soil ; that means that you are running round and round the circumference of a circle with yourself in the middle, and you will never become free in that way. You may run round and run round until you are weary and exhausted, but you will not have gone onwards ; while you put yourself in the middle, and run round it in a circle, you are not running onwards. Begin then to forget yourself, every one of you who would fain enter on the Path. Look around your ordin- ary surroundings in life and ask : " What can I do for the service of others ? " There is the question which will awaken in you the spirit of Service, which will find its way to the Gateway. In our Sons of India, those who enter it have to pledge themselves to do at least one act of service every day, and the result is that, after some time, the whole mind is set naturally to Service, and all life becomes a single act of Service to your race. There lies the entrance to the Path. In self- forgetfulness, in endeavouring to serve, in the continual attempt to improve your sur- roundings, and to share what you have of
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knowledge and of goodness with all who come into touch with you during the day. A simple, common truth, but the heart of liberation is there. For when the Master looks over the great desert of the world's dark- ness, looking for a light on which His eyes may rest, when he sees the flame of Service lit in one human heart, His eye rests on that little flame, and He sees the possibility of increase ; then He pours into that lamp the oil of help, and the flame grows stronger, more luminous, until it lights the way to His feet. And if you would reach the Masters, who ever serve Their Masters, who, while They are the elder Brothers, are also the Servants of Humanity, then realise the truth of the great sentence : " Let him that is chiefest among you be as he that doth serve." For only along that path of Service will you come to the outer Court. If you still say : " Why ? " my answer is : " Because the work of the Masters is very heavy, and They need help ; because They have bene- dictions to pour out, and They need channels along which these may flow; when They find a man of Service, seeking to cheer up others by his thought and strength, then
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They pour these into him, and from him these flow onwards to become more service- able to the race." Throw away then your dreamings ; throw away that empty useless living which leaves the world exactly as you found it, and makes 110 mark thereon. Awake to the need of Service ; strengthen yourself for the helping of your fellows; and then your eyes shall be opened and you shall find the Master beside you. And perchance in the poor man to whom you have given help, perchance in the sad one to whom you have extended protection, you may see shining out the face of the eternal Master, for did not the Christ once say to those who had fed and clothed His poor : " Forasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me " ? That is the first step.
You have reached then by Service the outer Portal, you have knocked on the outer Gate ; it swings open to you, and the earlier part of the Path which is appointed, which leads to the first of the great Initiations, stretches before your willing feet. Would you tread it ? Ah ! then for the treading I can give you no better advice, than to
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take, and read, and live that wonderful little book that my younger Brother Krishna- murti gave to you at the last Convention. Through twenty-seven editions in the various parts of the world it has passed in a single year, showing how hungry men are for knowledge that .will enable them to live the higher life. So simple it is that a child can understand it, so profound that, if it be lived, it leads to the Portal of Initiation. But you must live it. And there lies your difficulty. So few people are really in earnest. So few people, when they see a thing they want, have strength enough to will, so that they shall gain it. You wish for it ? Yes, you wish for it now, and when you go out, you will wish for some- thing else. That kind of wish will take you nowhere. You think of attaining a beautiful Ideal. Yes, it is a beautiful Ideal, but an Ideal will n.ot transform you into its own image unless it is assimilated and reproduced. A strong will is what you want. The flickering wishes that pass across the mind, the flickering thoughts that dance in the brain, these can never take any human being anywhere. If you cannot live
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that life, if you do not become a little better than you were, it is because you have not learnt to think in the way that can create whatever you choose. You have not learnt that. And so you must strengthen your thought-power and your will-power, and you must desire well. For ripe thought and ripe desire — these are the two wings by which you may fly upwards, and reach the goal you seek; and no book will help you, no words will inspire you, no thinker, no orator, can uplift you, unless you have in you the will of steel and the brain of creative thought. Then only, by thought and by will, you may realise that to which you aspire.
Let us suppose then that, having served nobly and entered on the earlier stages, having thought, willed, and acted wisely, you have come up to the first great PortaL Ere you reach it, a Master will have found you, will have taken your guidance in hand.
People sometimes say : " But can I not achieve without a Master ? " Certainly you can gain liberation without a Master, if that is all you want. But you cannot tread
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the narrow ancient Path without a Teacher. You remember that in quoting that old direction, I ended with the words : " Seek the great Teachers and attend, for the Path is narrow, even as the edge of a razor. " You may build up the whole science of Mathematics for yourself from the very foundation, if you have the ability; but you will not have done very much even in the mere foundation of the science, before death strikes away your body. You have not time. Why are you born over and over again, save that you may have the benefit of previous experience and the results of the studies of the wisest of our race ? Foolish and arrogant as the boy who would refuse a teacher, who would refuse to read a book, who would say : " I will build up Mathe- matics and Biology and Botany for myself. Why cannot I learn everything alone ? " — foolish and arrogant as that boy is he who, in the Science of sciences, the building of human perfection, rejects the hands stretch- ed out to aid him, and insists on treading the razer Path with no help to guide his footsteps rightly, no father's hand to steady his tottering steps. And so when, the man
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has lived the little book, wrought it into his own character, interwoven, as it were, the great Qualifications that you know so well into his very being, when, clothed in that white garment of the Qualifications, he comes to the great marriage feast, as it has been called in allegory, then as he approaches the Portal, a Master steps forth from the Great White Brotherhood, and extends to him a hand of benediction, and takes the young disciple into His charge. Only a Master can do that. We ourselves, who are disciples, can but show the road which we have trodden, give the hints which we have heard and try to carry out; but only One who has Himself achieved perfection can take into His hands the perfecting of His brother man. We are but younger helpers, labouring in the outer and inner Courts at the work of preparation ; the entrance to the Holy of Holies is in Their hands alone.
But do not fear that a Master will not find you. They are more eager to find a pupil than a pupil is to find a Teacher. For They know the world's great need, They know the pressing necessity of help
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to the woeful striving earth, and ever}" one who comes to Them with the sacrificial fuel of Service in his hand, and says to one of Them : " J am thy disciple, teach me," he is wel- comed with the joy that is the joy of the Master, that most perfect joy on earth. Humanity knoAvs the joy of a mother over her first-born son, and calls it earth's most perfect delight. That is the faint reproduction on our earth of the joy of the Master, who has found a pupil willing to be taught, a son worth}' of the family.
And so such a great Teacher comes forth,, and to your surprise and wonder and delight,. you find that you have known Him for ages past, that He is no stranger, no new- comer, no one of whom you are ignorant,, but your nearest, your greatest friend along the line of hundreds of lives. And that recognition by the pupil of his Master, that blazes out, as it were, when the veil falls from the eyes and the beloved face is seen — that joy of the disciple is only known by the disciple. There is nothing that can be said of it ; it must be felt to be understood.
The last steps on that probationary path- way are trodden under the guardianship
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-and the guidance of the Master ; and then He who is the guide, He who is the helper, strikes on the great Portal with His dis- ciple behind Him, and from within and from above there shines out the signal before which the Gate swings open, and the Master and His pupil step together across the threshold. Then conies the wonder of the first great Initiation, then the opening of the eyes that before were blind, then the entrusting with the key of knowledge, with which the disciple has to unlock some of the great treasures that none know save the Initiate, in order that he may there find the gifts which he has to take out to the waiting world. Through every disciple who crosses the threshold, through every one who becomes an Initiate, there Hows out a torrent of blessing to the world; for it Hows through the door that he has opened into the Holy of Holies of the Temple. And then before him stretches the higher Way, but now of deeper fuller Service than ever before. For now his larger power is consecrated to the helping of humanity; he has fresh knowledge to utilise for the teaching of the ignorant ; for with the increase of power he has
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increase of ability. For more brilliant light — a light for them that stood in darkness and in the shadow of death — is seen by him ; the second great Portal stands before him ; and the second is passed and lies behind, and onwards still he strives ; and the third Portal swings open its doors and he passes onwards. And then across a mighty gulf he sees glimmering the fourth Portal, and he must cross the gulf ere he can become the Arhat ; that Portal marks the ending of compulsory reincarnation; to pass it gives him the right to choose his further pathway, either by finishing his course in the higher world, or by reaching perfection still on our physical earth. He who would become a Master of Compassion chooses the latter course, and takes again rebirth. When he faces that mighty Portal, I have said that a great gulf is between him and the Portal. And what is that gulf ? It is the gulf typified in the Christian drama by the Passion and the Crucifixion of the Christ. It is the gulf of pain and of suffering, of shame and obloquy, of the breaking away of every earthly tie, of that moment of heart- breaking loneliness, when " all forsook Him
and fled". Then alone, clothed only in the might of the Spirit, naked of all that earth can give or hold, he goes forward lonely, apparently unhelped, across that mighty gulf ; and unless he can cross it on that narrow bridge typified in many of the religions, he may not reach the Portal, he must strive again and again. And some have crossed it, some have gone that way ; for beyond the Pas- sion and beyond the Crucifixion there is the Res- urrection and the Ascension, that made Them Masters of Life and of Death. Hard the sorrow and bitter the pain, wide the gulf and sore the passage; but it can be crossed by the man who realises the Eternal, and who knows that nothing that earth can do can shake the serenity that is fixed on the rock of the Eternal. And so he passes through that Portal, and remains on earth to help and serve and bless. Not quite perfect yet; the memories of the past still cling around him, for he has to cast off five fetters that bind even the Arhat to earth. And one after another he breaks their links ; one after another he flings them off, the links becoming weaker, until he stands before the fifth great Portal, that passage which
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makes the Master, that which is typified by the risen and ascended Christ, who died to all earthly things. And then the last swings open ; then death is conquered ; then life is His own; and He rises in the plenitude of the eternal Spirit, Master of matter which has become his servant, in order that He may help. He does not leave our earth, He does not throw aside His body, but bears the burden of the flesh for our helping. He is the Master of Com- passion and of Wisdom on whom our eyes are fixed. He remains to bless His waiting world ; He remains to labour in that higher service ; He remains to gather out of humanity those who are willing to tread the path that He has trodden, and to join their hands with His in the redemption of the world. That is the Perfect Man, humanity deified, made one with God, and therefore more fully one with man. For we can only reach the highest while we reach the lowest too. One hand on the God who is glorified, and the other stretched in help to the lowest beneath our feet. That is the only true Brother- hood, the only complete and perfect Brother- hood. If we are to be one with the highest, we must be one with the lowest too, that
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the God in us may cry oat to fche Grodi in him : " Brother, come with me, and I will help you on your way ; what you are to- day, I have been ; what I am to-day, you shall be hereafter." For perfection is not the prize in a race where men compete for the winning ; it is a prize that belongs to every one of us sooner or later, earlier or afterwards, according to our will and our effort ; but sure alike for you and for me is that perfection that shines above our heads to-day. We also shall accomplish it, we also shall share it ; and then to a younger, an infant humanity, we shall bring the strength of conscious divinity, and feed it with the bread of life.
FEINTED BY ANNIE BESANT AT THE VASANTA PRESS, ADYAR
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