Chapter
XI
Theosophy
(Another word for "Islam/Wisdom/Philosophy/Religion"- SLD)
References
Isis Unveiled by Helena P. Blavatsky. [1877]
The Secret Doctrine by Helena P. Blavatsky. [1888]
A Textbook of Theosophy by C.W. Leadbeater. [1912]
(May 1925)
I remember the occasion when I first began to learn to swim. There was a deep end and a shallow end. The deeper looked more satisfying, so I jumped in while the teacher was not looking. The indignity of having to be fished out was humiliating, but the worst part was the distaste that it gave me for the whole business of swimming, with the result that younger boys, who had approached the problem reasonably, left me far behind and it was several years before I began to acquire much confidence in the water or any genuine liking for it.
Then there was school. We studied Shakespeare in the English class; but not once, during four years of instruction, were we encouraged to enjoy the poet's plays or to appreciate their beauty. We were set to parsing and analysis, to definition of the obsolete and rare words, and to memorizing drily written footnotes -- with the consequence that poetry, particularly Shakespeare's poetry, became a synonym for drudgery. I believe I was thirty years old before it ever really occurred to me that poetry was something that a man might blend into his life and breathe into his efforts, thus ennobling any task he touched.
The simplest means opponents of Theosophy could use in order to delay and to obscure its message to humanity, would be to encourage all beginners to plunge into it heads foremost at the deeper end and swamp their intellects with Sanskrit definitions. If they could be kept thereafter struggling to possess Theosophy in a bewilderment of words, Theosophy would die out from beneath as certainly as poetry has vanished from the schools, since there would be no natural responsiveness in which the love of it could flourish.
Love is the life of the Ancient Wisdom, and unless we love it ardently -- unless it comforts and convinces by the flow of confidence outwelling from within -- we may be sure we are but grasping at, or arguing against, the printed word; its spirit has escaped us. We cannot absorb Theosophy like patent medicine, and the attempt to masticate it all and crowd it into one gray brain is madness. It is infinite, with no beginning and no end. It would be easier to swallow all earth's air and drink up all the rivers than to possess Theosophy, in the sense that we possess degrees from universities or stock certificates.
A hundred years before the birth of Christianity Shu Kuang wrote: "The genius of men who possess is stunted by possession. Wealth only aggravates the imbecility of fools." (From Gems of Chinese Literature, translated by H. A. Giles.) No wiser summary of the futility of all possession ever dripped from a satiric pen, and if the epigram were printed on the front page of all text-books and engraved on every dollar-bill in circulation there might be some hope of civilizing earth within a hundred years. It is an axiom for all beginners in Theosophy.
Meanwhile, we struggle to possess, beginners just as keenly as the older hands who have accumulated what are euphemistically termed resources. Public education is designed to cultivate a memory for facts, as if a crowded brain were an essential to living. And a number of us, having been so educated, try to 'cram' Theosophy as if we had to pass examinations in it and be judged according to an arbitrary scale of marks.
It is true indeed that we must pass examinations in it, but their incidence is hourly. We receive marks, and are judged. But the impersonal Judge, Karma, utterly ignores the feats of memory and all unproved claims, examining the progress of the heart's integrity as demonstrated by experience. Examination questions are the incidents of daily life. We act and react, do and leave undone, think and refuse to think, stand firm or are seduced, while Karma -- incorruptible and inescapable -- inscrribes our spiritual progress on the rolls of destiny.
"The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on."
I write as one who has but recently become a member of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society: that is, as a beginner, who had never seen a copy of The Secret Doctrine until about three years ago, nor ever read a copy of The Theosophical Path or any of the Theosophical Manuals until the magic of Blavatsky's pen stirred in me something deeper and more challenging than I had known was there and capable of being stirred. And I remember the bewilderment of all the knowledge crowded into her immortal book; and what thoughts first occurred to me when I had laughed a while (for there is humor in all logic, and the logic of the Law of Karma is complete).
For days on end I wrestled with the Sanskrit technicalities and tried to memorize them, caught in the enthusiasm of the universal theme but blinded by the habit of attributing all knowledge to the brain-mind. I would master this magnificent philosophy and make it mine! Then, failing to remember more than half-a-dozen Sanskrit words or to recall, for more than half-a-day, to which Root-race and Sub-race I belong, I scrambled out of that deep water and proposed to myself to try the shallow end. It looked, and was, much easier, but there was mystery enough.
I studied the significance of Karma, as applied to me, and found it not so easy or amusing as the thought of its retributive effect on others. There was too much justice in it. I began to be aware that there were incidents which, had I known of Karma at the time, might not have happened; and it irked me to discover that a more or less meticulous observance of convention during forty years or so, a reasonably decent reputation, and a habit of avoiding what is known as lawlessness, were not masks that could affect the final outcome. Theoretically, having had parents who hired somebody to teach me morals, I had never quite forgotten the necessity to play safe with a watchful Providence; but there was something in the Catechism I remembered about the forgiveness of sins, and it came as something of a shock to realize that all that I had done, for good or evil, must produce inevitable consequences, for me or against me, as the case might be.
I daresay all beginners, when they think a while, face that predicament.
It seemed, to state it mildly, not quite just that a man should have to face the consequences of an act he did in ignorance of the Law of Retribution. Nevertheless, exactly like a landlord pocketing his rents, I felt the justice of receiving compensation for investments on the side of virtue, whether made in this life and in ignorance of Karma, or in past lives utterly forgotten. We enjoy our income. It is outgo that obliges us to think.
Reincarnation, logical though it might be, began to lose that roseate, romantic lure that first appealed to my inquiring mind. I started there and then to reconsider it, and much more critically.
But that was where a little understanding entered in. I had been looking forward to possess Theosophy -- to make of it a tool with which to tickle self-esteem and cut a nice wide swath along contenting aeons of eternity. The first glimpse makes the brain reel! It was the humor of my own imagination that upset that view of things. Some spark of Theosophical illumination made me wonder just how long the universe would last if each of us might manage his own destiny unguided by experience and by Intelligences higher than our own?
That thought began to lead me somewhere. Who, or what, is this that shall be guided by experience? Our bodies? Possibly, to some extent; but the experience of past lives hardly could be said to educate a body that developed from an embryo in this one; neither could a body destined to be burned to ashes be supposed to have much influence on future lives. Though atoms, or the subdivisions of which atoms are composed, are indestructible; and though our bodies are an aggregate of atoms, purposely assembled in accordance with a law beyond our comprehension; though the atoms so assembled undergo a change and are dispersed for other uses -- so that you, or I, or anyone may have the dust of Alexander in our veins and Caesar's clay may stop a bung-hole; nevertheless, the education of those atoms comes a long way short of answering the riddle of the universe.
The brain? Another congeries of atoms, grouped within a section of a skull and destined to disperse at death. The brain of Socrates, of Plato, and of Shakespeare was returned into the common storehouse of disintegrated matter when the change took place that we call death. And unimaginable though it may be that the particles of matter they employed to clothe their bones were not affected by the thinking that they did, and not enriched by the association, none the less those scattered particles are not, and never can have been, the man.
Who is the man? What is he? We all identify ourselves with blood and bones, and we undoubtedly provide our blood and bones with mixed experience. The most conservative of scientists admit that evolution seems to be a fact in nature, and that all things are in process of becoming something else. The brain-chambers of skulls discovered in the prehistoric drifts are differently shaped from those we humans use today, which would suggest, at any rate, that men knew other limitations than our own when those skulls had employment. Yet, the owners of the skulls could think -- if not exactly as we think, still thoughtfully and to a purpose.
Has all the thinking that they did died with them? Were the atoms of their vanished flesh the only beneficiaries of the lives they lived? Who were they? Is this all of them, or even the important part of them, that lies in a museum-case or in the gravel of a prehistoric river-bed?
Theosophy does not withhold the answer, though the brain-mind may reject it and keep on rejecting it, until it has exhausted all the arguments of habit, all its prejudices, and the stored-up miscellany of remembered speciocity acquired at second-hand.
The brain-mind clings to what it thinks it knows, and dreads enlightenment. I know mine did, and does, and I believe myself not different, except in relatively unimportant details, from the rank and file of ordinary men. As we identify ourselves with flesh and blood, that flesh and blood in turn identifies itself with us and it grows very difficult, in consequence, at times to differentiate. But surely it is evident, that if we are that flesh and blood and bone and brain that, at our death, is buried and decays, then there is not much hope for us as individuals and such experiences as we suffer or enjoy can be, at best, a school for atoms.
And we know, though we are clothed in atoms , that ourselves are something vastly more. The very atheist, who says he disbelieves in anything but what his senses indicate, himself is proof upstanding of Intelligence so subtil and pervading that the atoms he assures us are himself took shape and grew into the thing he thinks he is.
Theosophy unfolds to us two natures, spiritual and material, the one immortal and the other governed by the alternating law of life and death. That stuff that we discard, and that they burn or bury (brain and all), when we have "shuffled off this mortal coil," has been subjected to the alchemy of use and we have changed its nature -- possibly not much, but we have changed it for the better or the worse. Who then are we?
It dawns after a while; and all the words in all the bibles and the dictionaries ever written lack ability to tell the wonder of it when it wakes into the consciousness. That knowledge comes to us in silence, though the world may yell with passion, and there rises in us from within a dignity beyond all measure -- hope that is whole and deathless -- an illimitable patience -- and, like gentle rain on dry earth, the assurance of our own essential divinity.
Then, actually for the first time, we begin to understand the teachings of Blavatsky and appreciate why, with the alternative of wealth at her disposal, she preferred a life of hardship and the task of bringing the Masters' message of the Ancient Wisdom to humanity.
To understand that message is impossible, unless we do as she did: that is, let the lures of selfish ambition go. The love of reputation and of easy short cuts to a brain-mind Utopia, just as surely as resentment of injustice, and as subtilly as contempt for others' seemingly less spiritual efforts, lead astray.
There must be thousands who have read The Secret Doctrine and have leaped to the conclusion that the simplest, surest way to follow in its author's footsteps is to make the desperately toilsome journey into Tibet and there learn the doctrines from the Great Teachers, just as she did. There are some who have rejected the whole teaching of Theosophy because, to them, that journey is impossible. And there are others who, for other reasons, have assailed the mountain-passes and by dint of almost superhuman energy have reached what maps declare to be the heart of the forbidden land and then, returning, have announced in lectures and on printed page that Tibet is the home of superstition, so engrossed in ritual and devil-worship as to harbor no conceivable philosophy worth study.
Notwithstanding which, there is no doubt even in the minds of her most prejudiced accusers, who, for the sake of organized opinions that are tottering, and for their own emoluments that must cease when the world wakes up and thinks, would leap at another chance to vilify her -- there is no doubt, even in the minds of those men, who have done their utmost to destroy her and her work, that H. P. Blavatsky did receive her teaching in the land, so inaccessible, that lies beyond the Himalayan range.
There lies exposed the inconsistence of human argument. The man who fights his way against the wind and snow across the passes into Tibet may be -- we may say undoubtedly he is -- a marvel of endurance. He may be a good geographer, a linguist, an intelligent observer of barometers, and an exact recorder of the things he sees. But he is no more likely to unearth Tibetan secrets, or to recognise a Master if he met one face to face, than is a memorizer of The Secret Doctrine likely to become a true Theosophist without, in every deed of daily life, expressing -- living -- what he learns.
It will be time enough to meet the Great Teachers when we know enough to make it possible to understand them; and there is no way of attaining to that state except by putting into practice daily, hourly, and with vigilance, such rudiments of wisdom as we now know, taught to us in elementary Theosophy. It is not book-learning only, it is deed-doing, that establishes Theosophy in human hearts. And no deed may be measured by the clamor that it makes, or by the number of the men who see it done, or by the market-price of its immediate result. Dimensions, weight, and price all vanish in the scales of Karma, leaving nothing to be judged but quality.
The consciousness of our essential divinity includes a sense of the indignity of work not nobly done, no matter what the work is. There are no ranks in Theosophy, and no soft sinecures; who works well finds more work to do; our Leader is the busiest of us all.
Now, as I said before, I write as a beginner, with the first impressions of Theosophy still easily remembered. I am sure of this: that we are all beginners, always. If we vigilantly guard ourselves against the idiotic thought that we are separate from others, favored more than others, capable of being or becoming greater than others; if we keep in mind that any virtue, any knowledge that we have, however individual it may seem to ourselves, is something we receive in trust for others' use and cannot be of benefit to us until we use it in behalf of others; and if, above all, we refuse to be deluded by the dream of occult powers that shall make us privileged magicians with authority to govern others by expedients unknown to them: then I am confident that each advancing step of spiritual evolution will reveal to us horizons that expand precisely in proportion to our merit, and the more we know from having done, not talked, the more there will appear for us to learn. And there is only one school actual experience.
Thus the apparent paradox resolves itself into a plain fact: personality -- the flesh and bones and intellect in which we temporarily appear on life's stage is, of itself, the least important part of us, being hardly more than mask and buskins; yet, that personality is all important in the sense that we must govern it, and that by our use or misuse of it we are judged.
New dignity is thrust on us the moment we begin to let Theosophy emerge into our minds. As we identify ourselves with what is spiritual in us -- with the incarnating ego, rather than with that in which it clothes itself for one appearance on the stage of evolution -- we assume responsibility and are ennobled. No more whining at the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"! No more crawling on our knees to an imagined God to beg for favors or implore forgiveness! The remission of our sins becomes our own affair! We wipe them out, henceforth, by standing up and facing consequences, proving, by the way we meet those consequences, that a portion of life's lesson has been learned.
So, less and ever less resentment; less unwillingness to bear our own blame for our own shortcomings. More sympathy for others (since we know the sting of criticism); greater, and forever greater tolerance. No more regret than is enough to help us recognise our own remissness; courage then, and faith, and hope, with now and then a little laughter at our own mistakes (since humor is the music of enlightenment).
The means of the pursuit of happiness is changed. Wealth, fame, amusement, appetite, by gradual, unnoticed stages lose their charm, and boredom ceases because minutes become laden with new interest, new views of life. Reviving energy attacks life's problems in a new direction. Poetry and music -- all the arts -- assume new values; and the knowledge that the quality of work done is the measure of its value elevates into an art the very sweeping of a work-room floor.
The grandeur that Theosophy reveals is like the sunrise. Shadows fade, and change, and cease, until a golden light gleams on a world worth working in. And at our feet -- exactly at our feet -- the Path lies, leading straight ahead. There is no need to look too far ahead. Each step rich with opportunity to think thoughts and to do deeds that shall lessen the sum total of earth's agony and add to the increasing harmony of nature.
Silence is the best way to learn courage of conviction. It is easy to bewilder the beginner with confusing argument. Debate is best avoided. But I know this: once Theosophy has dawned into the consciousness, although a man's own weakness may betray him into lapses from the Path, and though he wreck himself beyond recovery in one earth-life; though cowardice should cause him to deny his faith, and death should find him neither brave nor ready, nothing -- "neither death nor life nor angels, nor principalities nor powers" can deprive him of the knowledge that he has another chance awaiting him, and that the sins of this life may be faced again, and overcome, and used as stepping-stones to progress in the lives that follow.
There is nothing purposeless, nor any set of circumstances that cannot be turned into enlightening experience. And death, that most religions have regarded as an enemy to be endured with dread, to the Theosophist becomes the friend that draws the curtain after one act of life's royal drama, while we rest a while in preparation for the next.
Look about you, O pupil, observe this infinite, boundless
Creation -- and now -- look into yourself: "You are it."
The Eternal Parent wrapped in her ever invisible robes had slumbered once again for seven eternities.
Darkness alone filled the Boundless All, for Father, Mother, and Son were once more one, and the son had not yet awakened for the new wheel, and his pilgrimage thereon. . . .
Alone the one form of existence stretched boundless, infinite, causeless, in dreamless sleep; and life pulsated unconscious in universal space, . . .
. . . the Universe was still concealed in the Divine thought . . .
Darkness radiates light, and light drops one solitary ray into the Mother-deep. The ray shoots through the virgin egg; the ray causes the eternal egg to thrill, and drop the non-eternal germ, which condenses into the world-egg. . . .
Behold, oh Lanoo! The radiant child of the two, the unparalleled refulgent glory: Bright Space Son of Dark Space, which emerges from the depths of the great dark waters. . . .
The one ray multiplies the smaller rays. Life precedes form, and life survives the last atom of form. . . .
This is thy present wheel, said the Flame to the Spark. Thou art myself, my image, and my shadow.
Book of Dzyan
THE APPEAL TO THE HIGHER SELF
(Verses 35 - 40)
"I submit myself to thee, Master, friend of the bowed-down world and river of selfless kindness."
"Raise me by thy guiding light that pours forth the nectar of truth and mercy, for I am sunk in the ocean of the world."
"I am burned by the hot flame of relentless life and torn by the winds of misery: save me from death, for I take refuge in thee, finding no other rest."
The great good ones dwell in peace, bringing joy to the world like the return of spring. Having crossed the ocean of the world, they ever help others to cross over."
For this is the very nature of the great-souled ones -- their swiftness to take away the weariness of others. So the soft-rayed moon of itself soothes the earth, burned by the fierce sun's heat."
"Sprinkle me with thy nectar voice that brings the joy of eternal bliss, pure and cooling, falling on me as from a cup, like the joy of inspiration; for I am burnt by the hot, scorching flames of the world's fire."
"Happy are they on whom thy light rests, even for a moment, and who reach harmony with thee."
"How shall I cross the ocean of the world? Where is the path?
What way must I follow? I know not, Master. Save me from the wound of the
world's pain."
The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom
VIVEKACHUDAMANI
By Sankaracharya
Translated by Charles Johnston
"The genius of men who possess is stunted by possession. Wealth ony aggravates the imbecility of fools."
Shu Kuang
"Seek ye Science...even unto China..."
- Prophet Mohammed (PBUH)
According to the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), one of Jesus'
statements was: "This world is a bridge. Pass over
it, but build no house on it."
"Let a man be true in his intentions and his efforts to fulfil them, and the point is gained whether he succeed or not"
- Prophet Mohammed (PBUH)
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
WHAT IS THEOSOPHY AND WHO ARE THE THEOSOPHISTS
By
W. Emmett Small
All words are, of course, labels, conveying relative sense and enlightenment to the mind that hears or reads them. And so "Theosophy" is a label, a name – though a noble one. But one must get behind the word to what it represents. That is what people want – meaning. They want the universe to make sense – to them and about them. And so we say, getting as far away from labels as we can, that Theosophy is a representation, report or statement of the truths of Being. It is the way the universe is, or behaves or works or operates. It is also a description of the intricate (and, may we say, infinite?) being that man is – who, what and why he is. It also tells the story of evolution, not an end-on Darwinian product, not a God-made-out-of-nothing "creation", but a beginingless and endless unfolding from the Divine of that very divine which is inherent in every particle of space.
From this great store of wisdom each takes what he can, depending on his own essential self, his own awakening; and it will be colored by the individual's way of viewing life, either through the flow of religion, or philosophy, or science, or a combination of all three. And, let us say in passing, essentially religion is no better – or worse – than science, and science or philosophy than religion: they are all ways towards an "end". Where they meet, their apex, that is the real thing, for which we can give no exact name other than being or law or truth. It is the search for that, the study of that, that is Theosophy.
And that is what we would have the world respect and understand as Theosophy, not psychic extravaganzas, mostly fantasy with perhaps a modicum of truth; not individual pet theories, no matter how sincere their proponents; but that which can be tested by the strength and quality of its very universality.
Helena Blavatsky stated in "What are the Theosophists":
..."All original thinkers and investigators of the hidden side of nature, were and are, properly, Theosophists ... Be what he may, once that a student abandons the old and trodden highway of routine, and enters upon the solitary path of independent thought – Godward – he is a Theosophist; an original thinker, a seeker after the eternal truth with 'an inspiration of his own' to solve the universal problems."
Those quoted words, 'an inspiration of his own,' refer to a definition of a Thesophist given by the English medieval philosopher and true Rosicrucian, Henry Vaughan. "A Theosophist," he says, "is one who gives you a theory of God or the works of God, which has not revelation, but an inspiration of his own for its basis. "And in the article "What is Theosophy?", Blavatsky declares: "In this view every great thinker and philosopher, especially every founder of a new religion, school or philosophy, or sect, is necessarily a Theosophist ..." "With every man (she says in "What are the Theosophists?") "that is searching in his own way after a knowledge of the Divine Principle, of man's relations to it, and nature's manifestations of it, Theosophy is allied. It is likewise the ally of honest science... And it is also the ally of every honest religion ..."
Let this broad statement encourage in us a
truer global view... Let us take heart that, as in the past so today, there
are those that form this wider brotherhood, who labor in their own fields
inspired by thier own inner vision. And let us remind ourselves that their
thought, when lifted to and so to say drawn from that plane of Ideation which
is the storehouse of Great ideas, filters through for the general benefit
of humankind. ... – W.Emmett Small (extracts from article in The Eclectic
Theosophist, Winter 1995 issue.)
For us consists the Universal sphere as a single, all overspreading, infinite, immovable continuum, in which numberless spheres or particular worlds exist. There is but one sky, only one immeasurable world's space, one matrix, one universal connective, one either region through which the whole world moves. In this become visible innumerable starts, constellations, world bodies, and suns, and this gives us a right to reason that there are numberless others. These immeasurable and unnumbered moving bodies are the necessary media, through which the formless glory of God endeavors to manifest itself, in a form, or corporeal manner.
Of these great constellations our earth is one, yet not a single one is the center for the universe is in all directions equally immeasurable. For neither the sun nor in the sun, the earth nor in the earth, nor in any region is the center of the universe. To every living being the center is the middle round which it revolves, so there are as many centers as worlds swung by their own weight; they move freely in the ether, attracting each other by the mind forces which dwell in each.
--Giordano Bruno
(1548-1600)
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
-- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
EVOLUTION
Tides in the ocean of stars and the infinite rhythm of space;
Cycles on cycles of aeons adrone on an infinite beach;
Pause and recession and flow, and each atom of dust in its place
In the pulse of eternal becoming; no error, no breach
But the calm and the sweep and the swing of the leisurely, measureless roll
Of the absolute cause, the unthwarted effect -- and no haste,
And no discord, and nothing untimed in a calculus ruling the whole;
Unfolding; evolving; accretion; attrition; no waste.
Planet on planet a course that it keeps, and each swallow its flight;
Comet's ellipse and grace-note of the sudden firefly glow;
Jewels of Perseid splendor sprayed on summer's purple night;
Blossom adrift on the breath of spring; the whirl of snow;
Grit on the grinding beaches, spume of the storm-ridden wave
Hurled on the north wind's ice-born blast to blend with the tropic rain;
Hail and the hissing of torrents; song where sapphire ripples lave
The crest of thousand-fathom reefs upbuilt beneath the main.
Silt of the ceaseless rivers from the mountain summits worn,
Rolled along gorge and meadow till the salt, inflowing tide
Heaps it in shoals at harbor-mouth for continents unborn;
Earth where the naked rocks were reared; pine where the birches died;
Season on season proceeding, and birth in the shadow of death;
Dawning of luminous day in the dying of night; and a Plan
In no whit, in no particle changing; each phase of becoming a breath
Of the infinite, Karma of all things; its goal, evolution of MAN.
Talbot Mundy
Om
-- The Secret of Abhor Valley by Talbot MMundy
One can know a thing - correctly, accurately, intellectually - and yet be too stupid to know what to do with or about it. An intellectual fool, of whom there are very many in world, is never aware that it is possible to know too much but be too clever to have any wisdom at all.
Talbot Mundy - "I
say Sunrise"
THE MEANING OF THE NAME
The Key
to Theosophy by H. P. Blavatsky
ENQUIRER. Theosophy and its doctrines are often referred to as a new-fangled religion. Is it a religion?
THEOSOPHIST. It is not. Theosophy is Divine Knowledge or Science.
ENQUIRER. What is the real meaning of the term?
THEOSOPHIST. "Divine Wisdom," (Theosophia) or Wisdom of the gods, as (theogonia), genealogy of the gods. The word theos means a god in Greek, one of the divine beings, certainly not "God" in the sense attached in our day to the term. Therefore, it is not "Wisdom of God," as translated by some, but Divine Wisdom such as that possessed by the gods. The term is many thousand years old.
ENQUIRER. What is the origin of the name?
THEOSOPHIST. It comes to us from the Alexandrian philosophers, called lovers of truth, Philaletheians, from phil "loving," and aletheia "truth." The name Theosophy dates from the third century of our era, and began with Ammonius Saccas and his disciples (1), who started the Eclectic Theosophical system.
ENQUIRER. What was the object of this system?
THEOSOPHIST. First of all to inculcate certain great moral truths upon its disciples, and all those who were "lovers of the truth." Hence the motto adopted by the Theosophical Society: "There is no religion higher than truth." (2) The chief aim of the Founders of the Eclectic Theosophical School was one of the three objects of its modern successor, the Theosophical Society, namely, to reconcile all religions, sects and nations under a common system of ethics, based on eternal verities.
ENQUIRER. What have you to show that this is not an impossible dream; and that all the world's religions are based on the one and the same truth?
THEOSOPHIST. Their comparative study and analysis. The "Wisdom-religion" was one in antiquity; and the sameness of primitive religious philosophy is proven to us by the identical doctrines taught to the Initiates during the MYSTERIES, an institution once universally diffused. "All the old worships indicate the existence of a single Theosophy anterior to them. The key that is to open one must open all; otherwise it cannot be the right key." (Eclect. Philo.)
The First Principles of Theosophy (of Life)
The proper business of living is to enjoy life. To enjoy is to charge with joy - to put joy into, not to take it out from. To increase joy and not to reduce it.
Life is the evolution of consciousness, not of things. Things don't evolve, they only decay. But consciousness does evolve, and things change their meaning as consciousness grows. Enjoyment and evolution are simultaneous experiences. But it is necessary to distinguish between enjoyment and pleasure. Pleasure is sensual. Enjoyment is spiritual. Spiritual enjoyment can produce, and often does produce, sensual pleasure. But sensual pleasure never did, nor ever can, produce spiritual enjoyment. Pleasure, unenjoyed, produces pain.
Things and conditions are products of consciousness, mainly of mass-consciousness. Enjoyment is a use of consciousness that irresistibly changes conditions and things. Therefore the experience to aim at is a change of consciousness.
The evolution of consciousness is toward Wisdom. Increasing consciousness of Wisdom seems to be and very likely is inseparable from a sense of humor. It follows that a sense of humor is a sign or symptom of evolution. Bitter humor is a symptom of awakening consciousness, not yet well awake but still more than half convinced by habit of believing that things and conditions are what they seem to be.
Progress is evolution, and there is no other real progress. The only genuine evolution takes place in consciousness, and it goes on forever.
Misery is solely, without any exception, caused by each person's resistance to evolution of consciousness. There is no other cause of misery.
Health is overwhelmingly more contagious than disease, joy than sorrow, love than hatred, faith than unfaith, hope and despair, energy then sloth, good than evil.
In the outcome, it will be discovered that you yourself are your only judge, your only benefactor, creditor, debtor and enemy. You are all these at one and the same time.
In the entire universe, no one and nothing whatever is more important than you are - you; nor less important. Greater, smaller, higher, lower, yes. But no more, nor less important. No more, nor less interesting.
Talbot Mundy - "I
say Sunrise"
Amiel's Journal
June 17, 1852
Every despotism has a specially keen and hostile instinct for whatever keeps up human dignity, and independence. And it is curious to see scientific and realist teaching used everywhere as a means of stifling all freedom of investigation as addressed to moral questions under a dead weight of facts. Materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny, whether of the one or of the masses. To crush what is spiritual, moral, human so to speak, in man, by specializing him; to form mere wheels of the great social machine, instead of perfect individuals; to make society and not conscience the center of life, to enslave the soul to things, to de-personalize man, this it the dominant drift of our epoch. Everywhere you may see a tendency to substitute the laws of dead matter (number, mass) for the laws of the moral nature (persuasion, adhesion, faith) equality, the principle of mediocrity, becoming a dogma; unity aimed at uniformity; numbers doing duty for argument; negative liberty, which has no law in itself, and recognizes no limit except in force, everywhere taking the place of positive liberty, which means action guided by an inner law and curbed by a moral authority. Socialism versus individualism. This is how Vinet put the dilemma. I should say rather that it is only the eternal antagonism between letter and spirit, between form and matter, between the outward and the inward, appearance and reality, which is always present in every conception and in all ideas.
Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything; makes everything vulgar and every truth false. And there is a religious and political materialism which spoils all that it touches, liberty, equality, individuality. So that there are two ways of understanding democracy.
What is threatened today is moral liberty, conscience, respect for the soul, the very nobility of man. To defend the soul, its interests, it rights, its dignity, is the most pressing duty for whoever sees the danger. What the writer, the teacher, the pastor, the philosopher, has to do, is defend humanity in man. Man! the true man, the ideal man! Such should be their motto, their rallying cry. War to all that debases, diminishes, hinders, and degrades him; protection for all that fortifies, ennobles, and raises him. The test of every religious political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal.
Injustice and ignorance go hand-in-hand invariably, and their result is a degenerating and self-propagating state of selfishness that descends from bad to worse, until it becomes so unsupportable that nations wilt as from disease. As far back as we have any historical records, the invariable rule has been that nations which ignored the principle of justice have reaped want, revolution, and dishonor. No nation has ever become great, or sustained its greatness, except by adhering to the highest standards of justice of which it was capable. No armies and no fleets since history began have availed for long to enforce injustice; nor have all the votes of all the electors of any country succeeded in advancing the common prosperity one step when the majority opinion has been unjust.
March 1924
3 "Fundamental (Islamic) Truths" of Human Existence.
However great and glorious human power and grandeur may be, it is only for a time, and it may fade away even before people know of its decline.
The most remarkable events may be brought to light, not by the flourish of trumpets, but by a humble individual, unknown and unsure, who works imperceptably and undermines even so strong a thing as a staff, on which a great man may lean.
Work done by man (men) merely on the basis of brute
strength or fear, will not endure.
"Seek Wisdom. With all thy understanding and all
thy sincerity! seek Wisdom. Thou shalt have no other God than
Wisdom. The thou shalt need no other."
Talbot Mundy - "I
say Sunrise" (Chap. 6)
THE LAMA'S LAW
O ye who look to enter in through Discipline to Bliss,
Ye shall not stray from out the way, if ye remember this:
Ye shall not waste a weary hour, nor hope for Hope in vain,
If ye persist with will until self-righteousness is slain.
If through the mist of mortal eyes, deluded, ye discern
That ye are holier than these, ye have the whole to learn!
If ye are tied with tangled pride because ye learn the Law,
Know then, your purest thoughts deny the Truth ye never saw!
If ye resent in discontent the searchlight of reproof,
Preferring praise, ye waste your days at sin's not Soul's behoof!
Each gain for self denies the Self that knows the self is vain.
Who crowns accomplishment with pride must build the whole again!
But if, at each ascending step, more clearly ye perceive
That he must kill the lower will, who would the world relieve
And they are last who would be first, their effort thrown away;
Be patient then and persevere. Ye tread the Middle
Way!
The price which life demands of those who are immersed in selfishness and desire is unrest and sorrow.
People who are only absorbed in every day life have forgotten their divine parentage and have no vision of their sublime future; they are dead people. The cords of their consciousness vibrate only to the gross tones of their lower emotions, the divine harp-player within them is heard no longer.
It is the tragedy in the lives of many people that they live on, consumed with unrest, driven by a desire which is never satisfied, while they possess everything and do not realize it.
When a man is born, the light of his higher consciousness
is extinguished, his spiritual world closes itself to the trials of their
being which has to orient itself in this underworld.
And when a man dies he gets back the splendor of his higher consciousness, unhampered by the restrictions of the earthly existence. When a man dies, he looks back on the life he has passed through. This narrow existence, full of disappointments and uncertainties, this blindfold groping was "his life," his home; and without understanding the great miracle which is about to happen in himself now that he gets back the light of a higher consciousness, he leaves this life which only at a few definite moments was enlightened by the heavenly splendor of the spirit. Let us not fear death. Owing to a Fear of death many people hardly live.
Life is a magic art; we conjure up our fate and it leads us to wisdom and
insight. In this way the forces of the soul drive man through experiences
that are necessary to his growth. He who sees life thus, does not grumble
at fate, neither does he allow himself to be cast down. He accepts life as
willed by himself, in the conviction that nobody can wrong him, and he follows
the path that leads to perfection, knowing that he takes an active part in
a great plan of life.
Money
Money is not wealth. Money does not create wealth. Money is not a measurement of wealth. Consciousness is wealth. Wealth creates money or its equivalent. The money consciousness; that is to say, the belief that money is the measure of values, is a THIEF. If it can't rob other people it will rob its possessor-or, rather, him whom it possesses. You can't possess that kind of conscousness; you are possessed by it. In the long run it robs everybody. It is chaos, it doesn't need to create it.
...The "love" of money lies (in both meanings of the word) at the root of every social evil and of almost every personal evil. That, of course is not love, it is fear.
Talbot Mundy - "I say Sunrise"
Books / Publications
Talbot
Mundy - The Theosophical Path
Spirit
in Crisis
Om -- The Secret
of Ahbor Valley
(The Opening Chapter)
"AMEEN"
"...To be Continued..." --
SLD (21 Jan 99)
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