The Theosophical Society,
Writings of Ernest Egerton
Wood
Natural Theosophy
Ernest
Egerton Wood
First Published December 1930
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE
PART I
Life and Its PurposeThe
Greatness of Life
The Value of Experience
The Great Active Principle
The Human Life-Cycle
The Function of Desire
The Goal of Life
The Way to the Goal
Bondage and Freedom
Progress and People
Brothers and Friends
Masters and Men
PART II
Happenings by The Way
The Meaning of Theosophy
Life After Death
Reincarnation
The Real Meaning of Karma
The Ego
Progress and Initiation
Gurus and Teachers
Religion
Are there Two Theosophies?
PREFACE
A friend, having looked over the proofs of
this volume, cried out, “Good heavens! Why have you put the word theosophy on
this beautiful book?” He did not see why any label should be attached to the
views expressed herein. They could be held by anybody, he said, without his
belonging to any sect; Emerson, for example, had this outlook. “Precisely”, I agreed,but this understanding of life should have a name
which indicates the opposite of every kind of materialism, both scientific and
religious, and theosophy is the old word for that, honored by centuries of
use”. It indicates the direct study of the status and source of life, without
any acceptance of dogma or tradition. Emerson experimented with the word
“transcendentalist”; “theosophist” would have been a more comprehensive term.
This book is divided into
two parts. It brings together the material of The New Theosophy, a small volume
published in
The world
thinks of theosophy as belief in
(1) Reincarnation, or rebirth on earth.
(2) Karma, or the repayment in such rebirth of all good and ill; and
(3) Evolution, or the progress of the soul through experience in the
course of these rebirths.
The implications
in connection with these are
(1) That a man is not his body, which is only an instrument; that he
survives death unchanged, and lives on in finer forms or “higher planes”
between death and rebirth.
(2) That a man reaps as he sows; there is nothing gained without
effort, but nothing once gained can be lost or taken away.
(3) That the world is a school for man, wherein he can develop to
his perfection, on the attainment of
which he need reincarnate no more; nevertheless, there are some who have
reached this liberation who do reincarnate in order to help others, and these
are Adepts or Masters.
There are very sound
arguments in support of all these ideas. They may be found in many books.
Coupling with these the great amount of solid evidence that exists in favor of
belief in subtle bodies, higher planes, clairvoyant powers, and Adepts, this
outlook upon life has unquestionably great weight of both reason and testimony
on its side. See such books as Clairvoyance and Materialization by G Geley, The Occult World by A P Sinnett, Old Diary Leaves by H S Olcott, Some New
Evidence of Human Survival by Drayton Thomas, Psychic Structures by J Crawford.
In addition it provides the scope that men feel that they need — relieving the
mind of the bondage of chance, the heart of the pains of separation, and the
will of the incubus of servitude to circumstances or to a superior will.
Yet these ideas are
often held materialistically, and thus they miss the real point and the virtue
of theosophy. Theosophy is the deeper belief that we are all in touch directly
with the heart of life. It is the antithesis to materialism, whether in science
or in religion. Theosophy is not a religion, or if it is, it is the one
religion in the world. In it every man is his own priest, and intermediaries
between him and God are impossible.
This is easy to prove, for if we ask a true Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu,
whether he would follow Christ, or Buddha, or
I have called the new
theosophy that which makes clear at every point that all forms are in the life
and are less than the life, and that never is the life held or supported or
carried in or by the forms. In the light of this essential truth, so often
neglected, reincarnation, karma and evolution take on an entirely new
appearance, and knowledge of their true effects in our lives invests us with
new power and freedom.
This is what may be
called metaphysical or beyond form, but that is what life is. It is not a
material condition that we are considering, but life lived as such in the midst of forms which
are less, not more, than itself. Madame
Blavatsky expressed the need of this outlook when she wrote in The Secret
Doctrine (.), referring to the doctrine of the evolution of the monads and the
worlds: “Unfortunately, there are few who are inclined to handle these
doctrines only metaphysically. Even the best of the Western writers upon our
doctrine declares in his work, when speaking of the evolution of the monads,
that on pure metaphysics of that sort we are not now engaged. And in such case,
as the Teacher remarks in a letter to him: Why this preaching of our doctrines,
all this up-hill work and swimming in adversum flumen ? Why should the West ..........learn.........from
the East............that which can never meet the requirements of the special tastes
of the aesthetics ? And he draws his correspondent’s attention ‘to the
formidable difficulties encountered by us (the Adepts) in every attempt we make
to explain our metaphysics to the Western mind’.
“And well he may; for
outside of metaphysics, no occult philosophy, no esotericism is possible. It is
like trying to explain the aspirations and affections, love and hatred, the
most private and sacred workings in the soul and mind of a living man, by an
anatomical description of the thorax and brain of his dead body.”
Ernest Wood - Adyar
Nov
LIFE AND ITS
PURPOSE
THE GREATNESS OF LIFE
THE USE OF
REASON
ONCE upon a time it may
have been that most people took it for granted that the earth was flat, and
that the sun got up in the morning and went to bed at night very much like a
human being. After a time, no doubt, thinking persons wondered why he did not
get up in the place where he went to sleep, and then some of them said that the
obvious thing was that he must have crept through a tunnel under the earth.
Some more advanced theorists propounded the idea that perhaps a new sun was
born every morning and died every evening!
How simple and obvious to those
ignorant people, the majority, who assumed without thought that things are what
they seem! And what difficulty those few people who were open-minded must have
had, to make the idea that the earth is a spinning ball a living reality in
their own minds ! They would have had to
use reason to convince themselves, and then imagination to familiarize
themselves with the fact presented by reason.
An ounce of accurate or
scrupulously honest observation and a pound of reasoning were the ingredients
necessary for the attainment of this item of true knowledge.
This preamble is not
unnecessary. Things are still not what they seem. Common opinion, resulting
from a pound of careless observation and scarcely an ounce of reasoning
declares that life is little and the world is great, that we are tiny specks or
sparks of life in the midst of a vast material existence.
By this guileless
assumption every discussion as to the nature and destiny of man, as to the
relation between mind and matter, as to whether men and animals and plants have
or have not souls, and as to a hundred other questions, is poisoned at the
beginning.
When we opened our eyes to
this material light each one of us found himself surrounded by a vast variety
of things. As we grew up we imbibed the theory that all these things were made
out of some substance called matter - just as a house is made with brick,
cement, or other materials. And so people say that there is a material
world.
FORMS ARE NOT
MATTER
But whatever this material
may be, it is not the world we know. It cannot be seen, heard, tasted, smelt,
or felt. What we do hear, see, feel, taste, or smell are forms, what some of
the ancients used to call appearances or phenomena. It is necessary to
distinguish between matter and forms, and to realize that matter has no
sensible qualities or properties.
This is no mere academic
discussion, for although we may not know the origin and nature of matter, we do
know the origin of forms. Let us consider in this connection the environment of
the average modern human being, the many objects which are modifying his
character all the time. It consists mainly of man-made things — houses and
furniture, clothing and prepared foods, streets and automobiles, books and
musical instruments, and a thousand other things which have less relation to
the matter in which they are formed than a brick house has to the clay taken
out of the brickfield. Even the human body is a gradually produced instrument
of mind.
Of course, not all forms
are man-made. Some are animal-made, some are plant-made, and we are justified
in saying, in the light of the latest
knowledge, some are made by mineral life.
The forms with which we are
surrounded are not material. They represent, on the contrary, a little of the
life, because people make forms according to what they themselves are. As a bad
carpenter makes a bad table and a good carpenter a good table, so are all these
man-made objects portraits of the life that made them. The world of forms in which we are living is
really a world of life. Every man has made the whole of his life or world,
through direct action or in relation or combination with others.
So, in all this world, the
life is everything. What have we to do with matter ? We have to do with forms, and we know these
forms. They belong to the life that is living everywhere, not to any matter of
which we have any conception. We are in a world consisting solely of
expressions of life. See then, the importance of life. The life is everything
and everywhere; the matter is nothing or at least no thing. Understanding this,
we shall not make the mistake of thinking of life as an abstraction, which
could be only part of reality — that, without this. Life contains more, not less than what we see.
INCARNATION IS
LIMITATION
Life in this world — what
is usually called incarnation or embodiment — is essentially a mind-process, in
which concentration and meditation alternate, like the contraction and
expansion of a heart, Imagine yourself coming to a great city and wishing to
understand its life. You could not do so all at once. You would first concentrate, or narrow the
field of your attention. You might say: “Let me see first the post-office, then
the shops, then the hospital” — and so on. You would limit yourself to one part
of it at a time, within the measure of your present capacity. When you had
fixed your attention upon one such object, and thus marked out the boundaries
of your present activity, you would proceed to “meditate” upon it, by which I
mean to say that you would observe it carefully and give your full flow of
thought to the understanding of everything within that boundary drawn by your
act of concentration.
That is what we are doing
when we “incarnate”. It is a kind of active or practical meditation. There are
always three steps in a complete act of meditation — first concentration then
meditation, which goes on until we have
known the thing concentrated upon as fully as we can with our present ability,
and then contemplation of that full thing. It is the meditation that gives
knowledge, which is power, and contemplation causes us to reject the object and
take away the power for use elsewhere, like the bee that takes the honey from a
flower.
All our life is thus
meditation. We are seeing our own thoughts. But it is a very real meditation,
in which thoughts become things, in contact with which our capacity constantly
increases.
THE UNITY OF
LIFE
There is a character of
unity about all this collection of mind-made things, so that it presents apparent
order and system, but that is because there is a fundamental unity of the life.
Just as the five fingertips, if moved into different positions on a sheet of
paper, will always make groups of little circular marks which have some
constant relation to one another, because they are rooted in one hand and are
energized from that source, so the collection of mind-made things presents a
coherent world because there is one life. The
world is one world, and its parts are not flying about disconnectedly, simply
because the lives which are the makers of its forms are parts of one life.
Human beings acknowledge that unity when they take the thoughts and feelings
and the happiness of others into consideration. All the objects or forms or
things which are evident to sense are expressions of the life, and the more its
unity is recognized the more harmony will be observed among those expressions.
Now consider the
expressions of life of any one man. He has great capacity. He can do many
things. At any given time he may be digging in; the garden, playing the piano,
writing a letter, or doing any one of, shall we say, a thousand things which
are within his power. He is then expressing only a thousandth part of himself.
When he is digging one cannot tell by looking at that expression that he is
also able to play the piano.
If any one being thus makes
forms which show only a small part of himself, and this is true of all beings,
it follows that the entire world, which is only a collection of such temporary
expressions is a very much smaller thing than the world of the life which gives
rise to it.
Therefore it is the life
which is the big thing and the world which is the small thing, and the world is
in the life, not the life in the world. As Shri
Krishna says in the Gita: “All beings are rooted in me, not I in them.” So the
popular conception that the world is a big place in which tiny specks or sparks
of life are moving about is contrary to fact, just as the appearance of the
earth as flat is not the truth.
And as to relative reality.
If the world of expressed forms has such vivid reality, and it is only in a
sense a dream world, a temporary mind-creation, what must be the quality of
reality in the world of life, whence alone these lesser realities are derived ?
THE VALUE OF EXPERIENCE
THE PURPOSE OF
INCARNATION
IN the fact that all forms
are in the life we see the reply to the question why a man should dig in a
garden, or write a letter, or play the piano, if he belongs to the world of
full life. It is because he wants to awaken himself to a full recognition of it
all. In the same way, if we play a simple melody there is a succession of
notes. But suppose each note died away from our consciousness (as it mostly
dies out of the air and the ear) before the next was sounded, there would be no
music. The melody is in the life, not in the world. Similarly, in a book there
are many words, sentences, and pages. We read one page after another to get the
clear idea; but that meaning is in the mind, not in the book. If we have it fully and clearly in mind, we
do not need the book any more; it would only be a boredom to read it again.
As there is no evolution in
a piece of music, but the whole of it reveals itself, so that to him who has
musical capacity, or “an ear for music”, there is no superfluous note, so for
the life in each one of us the whole will ultimately reveal its music, its
integrity. The past will not then be something that we have outgrown and left
behind, but will still play its necessary part in the music. One reads that a
great composer heard a grand oratorio in one moment, and then laboriously
worked it out into a material composition, He had the capacity.
So there is no material
evolution, I prefer the word “evolution” to “progress”, because it more clearly
implies the unfoldment of our own powers, like a bud opening into flower, while
“progress” suggests a movement forward towards something which is not already
in seed within us but only the unfolding of capacity, as a bud opens into
flower. And that puts an end to the question why a “monad” should “leave the
perfection of the one life and come down to this world, only to return at last
whence he came”. There is evolution, but it is not a sequence. The monad by its
own concentration makes its time limitation. The time is of the material world;
it is made with the form and shares its impermanence.
I remember to have heard an
interesting story about a painter, which happens to illustrate the purpose of
all experience. When he was still young he went one day to a woodland with his
teacher, arid when asked what he would paint indicated a certain tree. “But”,
said the elder, “you have painted that tree twenty times already; are you not
tired of it?”. “No”, said the young man, “I have not got it right yet’.’ When
he did “get it right” he would not want to paint it any more. What it could
teach him he would have absorbed, and he would now become interested in
something else, which would be interesting because it would awaken some part of
his life which had not yet awakened. What a bore when a person persists in
repeating to us the same joke or story or experience; however good it may have
seemed when we first heard it!
Thus we are all painters living
in the gallery of the paintings we have already done, but which we have not yet
set entirely aside, because we have not yet “got them right”, and obtained the
internal satisfaction which comes from the feeling of unfoldment or expansion
of some part of our life.
EXPERIENCE IS
EXPERIMENT
Once more we see that the
life is everything, because the forms are all experimental. There is no world
of material form, having a system, a plan, an order of its own, which stands
there in its own strength, awaiting us, to teach us lessons from the outside.
We are not explorers in a foreign land. All these forms, with their qualities
or properties, are the expressions of our life within the delimitation of our
acts of concentration. In other words, all experience is experimental. We have
made these things, and we are looking at them and seeing what they are like.
We are discovering their unsatisfactoriness, their inadequacy, their inequality to
the intent of our being.
The rich clearness of
reality with which they stand before us makes us eager to have that rich
clearness of reality in the full extent of the life which we have not yet
expressed to ourselves in full strength and clearness. It is all experiment —
like that of a man who has made a motor-car and now tries it out on the road,
and finds many ways in which it is incomplete and unsatisfactory, It rattles,
it smokes, it runs crooked, it is too slow. Such are the things that we are constantly saying
to ourselves. The wise man, learning through experience, does not separate
himself from the world, but says to himself; “I rattle, I smoke, I run crooked,
I am too slow”.
PAINTER AND
PICTURE
This is the essential
meaning of what in
In connection with this
there is often too much thought about the pleasure and the pain, and about what
is sometimes called the opportunity and the lack of opportunity which these
things give. The fact is that at every moment there is the very fullness of
opportunity, because we have made our own environment.
The painter painted a picture
yesterday. Is not that picture, whatever it may
be, his opportunity for today
? Will he not look at it this morning and see some
of its imperfections, which
are his own imperfections that he would
never have felt or seen if he
had not painted that picture yesterday ? And now,
when he tries again, setting
aside those imperfections, will he not paint a
better picture today, because
he has had before him his work of yesterday ? He
must be a better painter at
the end of a piece of work than he was at the
beginning of it, because
his powers have grown in the process. So the picture helps him to develop his
capacity and to enlarge or improve his vision at the same time [ All the world
is eager to do creative work. As opportunities of education, leisure and
freedom from set forms in every department of life increase, the life so freed
burgeons delightedly into creative activity of innumerable kinds. There are
thousands of students and inventors where there were tens, and probably
thousands also of good writers, singers, speakers, painters, etc, where there
were tens. This does not reduce the audience or the market, as might at first
appear, because capacity to receive is increasing at the same time. But in any
case an audience of one is sufficient for the unselfish man. Not only man shows
this inner law — no two horses, no two flowers, no two atoms are alike, as they
would be if they were stamped from the die of another’s thought. “The dead king
may next see the light in a cooly’s tent” - by his
own doing. But that will be his opportunity for experience that he needs, not a
punishment, nor a delay.
OUR WORLD OUR
WORK
Our world is our work; it
is nothing else. It calls us to new self-expression, which is greater
realization of ourselves. It is not more than we are, but less. This is a world of life engaged in building
forms, not a world of forms which become vehicles of life. You cannot put life
inside a form as you can put water in a cup. Water rests in the cup because it
is of the same nature as the cup. But
the relation between the life and the form is that the life handles the form as
a gardener handles a spade. While he is handling the spade he cannot very well
write a letter with a pen. He concentrates upon one thing at a time, but in
each case it is the life that is everything. The garden does not compel him to
dig; the letter does not compel him to write.
Because life is everything,
and even the forms are life (though they are only a bit of the life) he who
would travel swiftly along the road of life must understand that living is the
traveling of that road. This means that you do what you can with what you have
— that you do not wait for anything, that you do not imagine that you need
opportunity, or that any karmas can stand in your way. The literal
meaning of the word karma is work, and it is to be taken in the way in
which a carpenter would use it if he said; “This table is my work; this chair
is my work”. These objects which we call our environment, our world, are our
work. This world is the world of karmas, of things that persist while the life
is interested in them. It is also the world of maya,
which means not directly illusion, but creation. The illusion comes in when
this world is mistaken for the world of basic reality, and is not taken for
what it really is — a temporary creation.
There can be no injustice
in a world of such forms. There cannot be the dreadful injustice of stark
retribution, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But there is the
marvellous justice that we live in our own world, and so learn. If, for
example, I have been cruel in the past, that expresses my character, with such
completeness as it has, and also with such incompleteness — in this case with
some completeness of power but great incompleteness of love. And now I meet
with cruelty. It is my own cruelty facing myself and it shows me the unsatisfactoriness of a life of cruelty. It helps to awaken
my understanding and sympathy.
THE BENEFIT OF
EXPERIENCE
There is immeasurable
benefit to be drawn from our experiences, whatever they may be. A good example
of this truth was given to me many years ago by an old paradeshi
of
He told me one day that in
addition to his “clairvoyant” powers he had the capacity to look back in memory
into past lives, and thereby he explained to me the cause of his blindness and
poverty. It was due, he said, to the fact that when he had been living some
eight hundred years before as a rich man, in the neighbourhood
of
So this world is worthy of
all respect, because our experience is peculiarly appropriate to our
development of character, having been formed for ourselves by ourselves, and
also because it displays to us the nature of reality, which is not vague or
abstract, but concrete. As a lamp which casts only a dim light all around, on
all the objects in a room, could vividly illuminate one object in that room, if
it were surrounded by suitable reflectors, so is our consciousness made aware
of the full quality of its own reality by the concentrative process of
form-making, which is called karma and reincarnation.
But we are living lamps.
What is achieved is not lost. The notes
of life that, we sound one after another have perpetuity in our being. We are
gaining the power to grasp the whole music, the full song of life. And when
that music is heard, fully and clearly, we shall no longer want to play the
separate notes, to limit ourselves to the temporary forms. We shall have
finished our schooling, and shall live in the world of life, which is nothing
but the being of life itself, knowing its own full reality.
THE GREAT ACTIVE PRINCIPLE
LIVING FORMS
DEFINED
IT is impossible to define
life. But then it is also impossible to define “green”. We can only refer to
our experience. Only the living can know life, and even then only as living,
for it cannot resemble any static or dynamic form.
By life I mean what we all
mean when we say, “I am alive”. This cannot be taken a priori as the function
of the brain. That would be to assume the natural development of a function
performing no useful act, but churning out in materially fruitless varieties
many forms of the idea “I am alive”. The useful function of the brain is to
move the body. If it can thus perform all that is required for bodily
adjustment and adaptation to circumstances, why should it bring in
consciousness as an unnatural and useless by-product ? Or if this mechanism has
two simultaneous functions, one useful,
the other merely conscious, why should not the flame of a burning candle be
also conscious, as well as a giver of light and heat ?
We are coming to know life
better and better as we experience the consequences of its activities in
relation to objects. All these objects are resistances or obstacles; for
example, objects seen are obstacles to our vision, and the earth resists the
rotary movement of our leg-system. When there is no resistance we move
unconsciously; in this manner we are traveling with the earth round the sun at the
rate of eighteen and a half miles per second, and at the same time whirling
round with it at anything up to a thousand miles an hour. Were objects not
resistances our life would be nothing but a futile dream, for we should merely
create a shadow-world according to our whims, containing nothing but our
fleeting pleasure.
We know something about
life in activity in relation to these forms or resistances. It has six
distinguishable activities, in three-pairs. The first three are will (purpose),
love (interest) and thought (method or planning). These are expressive, form-building in their
effects. In thought, for example, we have
action, for what we do with our hands we do with our thought, since our
thought moves our hands. The second three are receptive forms of knowledge,
mind-building in their effects. They are knowledge of self (the essence of all
will), knowledge of life (the source of love) and knowledge of objects.
Forms are of two kinds — those
which are made from outside, and those made from inside. A tree grows and takes
its form from the power in the seed. Not all the earth, water, air, sunshine
and gardeners’ care in the world can produce it. That form is made from within. It is a living
form. All human and animal bodies are also of this kind. A house, a motorcar, a
cloud-castle — these are non-living forms, because made from the outside. The
nonliving forms, are, again, of two classes, as being produced either
intentionally or casually, like, for instance, (I) a chair and () an ant-hill,
a heap of stones, a cloud-form, or a dead body.
Many attempts have been
made to distinguish between living and non-living objects or forms. Probably
the best is that which declares that every living being shows the instinct of
self-preservation. This is no doubt true as far as it goes, but
self-preservation implies something more — namely, the enjoyment of life, and the instinct of self-expansion, the
desire for more life.
This fact is seen very clearly
in human life, where those are accounted the best who show most the tendency
and the capacity to increase human interests and knowledge and power. There is
no one who does not strive for more enjoyment of life in some form. We do not
wait for an external stimulus to awaken us, but with thought and will and
through affectionate relationships we constantly aim at increased life.
It has been thought that
among inferior creatures we might find one which awakens or comes to life only
when acted upon by an external stimulus, but this missing link between the
positive living being and the passive nonliving form has not been discovered.
On the contrary, among the more elementary forms of life we often see
intelligence and adaptiveness which might put many
men to shame.
THE POSITIVITY
OF LIFE
As an example of the positivity of life, let us consider for a moment the
amoeba. For the benefit of those who have not yet had occasion to learn
anything about the amoeba, I may
briefly state that it is one of the very simplest of the protozoa, or
unicellular living beings, and when at rest is a tiny globular mass living in
sea or pond water, or in the blood or body fluid of higher animals. It changes
shape so as to engulf or ingest any nutrient matter which may come in its
vicinity, digests what it can of this, and then ejects or egests the waste
matter. Because these operations are all performed without special organs, it
has been taken as an example of the principle that “function precedes organ” in
the evolution of living forms.
If such function were
awakened and exercised always in the same way, or if the presence of nutrient
matter always produced the same effect in the amoeba, it might be argued that
the life was aroused by some obscure chemical properties of its mass. But this
is not so, as was well shown in the case of the relations between two of these
small creatures observed by a distinguished scientist.
It happened that these two
— one very small, the other larger — came near together. The larger apparently
thought: “Here is nutrient matter”, and immediately went towards the smaller.
Now, on exactly the same grounds one would have expected the smaller to run towards the larger, for who
ever heard of a mouse being afraid of a piece of cheese because it was twice as
big as himself ? However, the small amoeba, instead of responding to the call
of nutrient matter, represented by the larger one, simply fled for its life,
with the larger in hot pursuit. It was captured, struggled, and escaped, was
captured again, and finally engulfed.
As a result of such
observations, many and varied, Mr. Jennings, perhaps the greatest authority in
this field, wrote: “If amoeba were a large animal, so as to come within
everyday experience of human beings, its behaviour
would at once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and pain,
of hunger, desire and the like, on precisely the same basis as we attribute
these things to a dog.”[Behaviour of the Lower
Organisms by
The fact is that as a dog
jumps with delight at the prospect of being taken for a walk, with all the
varied experience and movement, or increase of life, involved in that, so the
amoeba is not merely a responsive chemical mass, but a positive living being,
full of adaptiveness. It comes within Professor
McDougall’s description: “The activity of an animal is aroused by a stimulus,
is directed towards an end, and does
not cease until either the end has been attained or the animal is exhausted. If
the end cannot be gained by one means, the animal will attempt to gain it by
another.”
I will give two more
examples, out of the thousands possible — one from my own experience, the other
from Fabre the great observer of insect life. In my
travels I had picked up in
One day, while I was
writing, a wasp came, inspected the coral, selected one of the cylindrical
holes, proceeded to prepare it for its young by lining it with brown clay and
tiny bits of leaves, and finally put in some eggs and some paralyzed
caterpillars, and stopped up the entrance with the same kind of brown clay.
After all this was done she went away for a time, but at length returned with
some white substance of a limy character, with which she painted over the brown
clay entrance, making it exactly the
same color as the rest of the coral. And finally she engraved on that white
surface corrugations similar to those of the coral! It was a striking case of adaptiveness.
My second example, taken
from Fabre, shows that though the more lowly
creatures, like men, are willing to follow an example or a leader, and so save
themselves some trouble of adaptation, the time comes when they are thrown back
upon themselves, and then individual initiative appears. The scientist was
observing a procession of caterpillars of a certain kind (which I have also
frequently watched in
ENVIRONMENT
AND MIND
Now a question arises:
“Does environmental selection produce this capacity for adaptation, and the
mind that goes with it ?” Modern evidence shows that certainly that is not the
case. But first let me describe environmental or “natural” selection, so that
the reader who has not yet carefully informed himself on the point may have its
meaning clearly in view.
In a family or herd of
zebras or antelope, some will be born with less capacity for speed or for
endurance than others. As lions, which chase these herds, always take the weakest
or the slowest, the others, which are superior in those qualities, survive and
tend to propagate their kind. So the qualities of speed and endurance are
“selected” and “preserved” by the environment (that is, the lions), and they
tend to “develop” or increase because the unfavorable varieties are destroyed,
if the same process goes on, on account of the continuance of similar
experience or environment.
Another example that I may
take is the gannet, a sea bird which lives on fish.
By flying at a height of
fifty or sixty feet above the. water, it can see into
the depths and observe the fish, which it then catches by the
simple
process of dropping like a
stone into the water. Thus it differs from the
sea-gull, which scoops its
fish from the surface. Now, the gannet cannot see the
fish in a storm. Therefore
in stormy weather it must fly away to a calmer region, sometimes many miles
distant. In this case, the weaker die on the way.
Thus natural selection
operates to specialize some natural instinct to strive to enjoy or increase
life, which natural selection could never implant. No environment will affect a
being that is not interested. Further, the intelligent adaptations are very
often transmitted from generation to generation, and qualities or characteristics
thus have origin in the intelligence, not in the environment.
Such transmission was in
doubt for some years (following Weismann’s theory
that acquired characters are not inherited) but has now been proved beyond
question. For example, Prof. Pavlov’s
experiments with white mice showed that they handed on the capacity to
understand. He fed some of these animals daily, after ringing a bell. After
three hundred times, they realized a connection between the bell and the food.
He bred them together, and the next generation learned the same lesson in one hundred trials. The third generation
learned it in thirty lessons, and the fourth required only five. Thus life
does, through its own efforts, mould the forms it inhabits.
In further proof of this
instinct of self-expansion or capacity to strive, there are many cases of the
possession of qualities which could not be developed by natural selection. For
example, there is a blister-beetle that lays its eggs near the burrows of
certain mining-bees, and then dies. The little one comes out of the ground,
finds its way onto a flower, and from there hops to a bee’s back, where it
lives until the bee has provided her cell with honey and pollen. But as soon as
the bee has laid her eggs there, this little creature jumps off her back onto
one of them, and later eats it and grows into a blister-beetle. That one leap
from the bee to the egg is not a character that could be gradually encouraged
by the slow process of natural selection. Some enterprising blister-beetle must
have invented the idea and passed it on to her descendants.
THE POWER OF
LITTLE LIVES
Not only is the life in all
beings a positive form-building cause, but it is immensely powerful Consider a little seed planted in the
ground. How small, this, that may grow into a mighty tree! We know that the
material of the tree is taken from the air, and water, and a little from the
ground, and that the sunshine has played its part in making possible that
growth; but it is the life in the seed which has taken hold of the materials
and forces outside itself, and built them up into that splendid and powerful
form. Even the detailed form of the leaf of an oak tree is determined from
within that seed. It sets up the unknown machinery which can lift great volumes
of water to the top of a tall tree.
It is of great significance
that such an eminent biologist as Sir Arthur Keith has recently emphasized the
fact that the embryo does not merely run over the history of the race to which
it belongs, as is usually supposed. The new idea is that the embryo reproduces
only those characters which are needed as scaffolding for the new form, and
that there are apparently purposeful modifications in preparation for
variations in form even at that early stage.[ “There is a recapitulation of
ancestral history as the human embryo passes through its ripening stages, but
this recapitulation is masked by the display of characters which are wholly of
recent origin. Nor need this surprise us. What should we think of a builder who
in the erection of a palace insisted on ‘recapitulating’ all the evolutionary
stages which lie between a hut and a palace? In the development of the human
body, as of that of every other living thing, we find a strict observance of
the principle of economy. If an ancient feature is reproduced, it is because it
is a necessary part of the scaffolding for the new.” Concerning Man’s Origin,
by Professor Sir Arthur Keith, page
There is one general
principle to be remembered in connection with all these forms. We are viewing
time-realities. The static moment is an unknown thing, an imaginary figment of
erroneous thought. Everything is dynamic, kinetic; its properties are
teleological. The cause and effect which are implied in the qualities or
properties with which one form acts upon another simply show that they are all
matters of mind, that mind is the great active principle which whirls the torch
that looks like a ring of fire, which finds melody in a succession of notes
which do not themselves combine to form that melody, since each dies away
before most of the others are born, or is born after they are dead.
Round us are life and the
evidences of life. Matter has no form.
THE HUMAN LIFE CYCLE
STAGES OF LIFE
I HAVE already explained that
all living is essentially of the nature of meditation, which consists of three
stages — concentration, meditation and contemplation. This psychological
process reflects itself into the world of forms and produces cyclic changes —
wheels within wheels — in individual and collective life. Thus we have first
childhood, in which there is much searching about among the forms, so that
presently among them a selection may be made for the life’s activity; then
there is manhood or womanhood, with its special work in each individual case,
and thirdly there is ripe age, with its tendency to contemplate the experience
already garnered and to let the forms go. The child has finished with his
particular toys. He has filled himself to present capacity with feelings and
thoughts about them.
POSTHUMOUS
LIFE
Tradition and occult
research both lend support to the theory that after the death of the body the
life cycle continues in quite a natural and rational way. The after-death life is almost always
described as the immediate outcome of the feelings and thoughts stored in the
mind. As the Vana Parva of
the Mahâbhârata puts it: “This is the world of
actions, and that is the world of their effects. In ‘ heaven’ the results of actions already
done are enjoyed, and these must be carried out completely, but no other
actions can be performed.”
Among Christians also the
same idea obtains, that purgatory and heaven result from the desires and
thoughts of a man, which must be dealt with in those conditions. Even death-bed
repentance, if absolutely honest, is held to produce new conditions, in
accordance with the character which the man now has, The two successive parts
of the after-death life consist firstly in getting rid of the unintelligent
attachment to the forms no longer needed, and secondly in confirming and
perfecting the good qualities of character which have already been partially
developed.
So the form or world is a
temporary self-created obstruction, by means of which the wandering mind is
arrested and caused to pay attention to what it would otherwise avoid. At death
that is removed. No longer will things from outside force themselves upon our
attention. We can now follow out our own immediate thoughts, go where we
please, do what we please, have what we please.
These traditions and
observations are very rational. They suggest a natural sequence, because we
came into the world to learn, and we leave it without having completed that
work. We have gathered much material for thought, but when we die we have still
to do most of our thinking. That may well take place in the relatively
subjective planes of the subtle bodies, where thoughts are things and each man
furnishes and peoples his own “heaven”.
I will discuss this subject
in . Here I want only to show how natural
and logical such a state would be, completing the cyclic method of a life. Afterwards, the impulse of feeling and idea
being exhausted, the subjective period comes to an end, and the life cycle
begins again with a new incarnation, with reference to other experience which
the man still needs, varieties of experience incompatible with the former, and a removal of old
prejudices and fears.
CYCLES
EVERYWHERE
The same cyclic law will be
seen in the case of nations. These groups of people take to themselves certain
group ideas, which cast a color over all the activities of the group, but when
the idea has been lived by those who need it the race weakens and dies away. It
applies also to animal, vegetable and mineral forms, to atoms, globes and
systems. Everywhere is the same cyclic change, produced by the same
psychological cause.
The apparent system of
races, etc., is due to the fact that the monads evolve in a certain way, not
that this scheme is fixed for them by someone else. It the “Third Logos” planned
the worlds in which we live, we planned them. The Logos is not other than the
collectivity of monads, which is the unity of monads.[As indicated in The
Secret Doctrine, Stanza i , “Universal mind was not,
for there were no Ah-hi to contain it. So there is no Being working upon us
externally, that is, through forms which he has made and we have not made. A
scheme made for us by somebody else
would destroy our freedom (and thus negate the fundamental postulate of theosophy
as to the positivity of life) as effectually as would
interference with our wills, if that were possible.
THE CAUSE OF
DEATH
So in the course of a
lifetime (or rather a body time) a man makes and uses his forms, as though a
pianist should make his piano, play upon it, wear it out and cast it aside. It
is only a matter of time before even that which is called death will be seen to
have a psychological cause. Even now no scientist can tell us what is the cause
of death or when comes the moment of death. That is because the moment of death
is decided not physiologically but psychologically, by the man or by the life,
which can leave the body when it determines, at various stages of its
decrepitude. Animals die easily, but men die with difficulty, or reluctantly,
because they have more purpose.
Once I was sitting with a
friend who had been lying abed at death’s door for many days, suffering from an
incurable disease. There was present a man who was somewhat clairvoyant or
thought himself to be so. He said that
he could see our sick friend standing outside his body, looking at it very
dolefully. Our friend had been greatly unwilling to die. There was some eager
desire of his which was unfulfilled, and though it was quite clear to the rest
of us that that body was so far broken that even if it got better he would
never be able to do with it what he wanted to do, he was still hanging on to it
in suffering and sorrow.
Then I said: “Let us reason
with him. Let us advise him to break the link from his side and let the body go.”
The advice was given to the man standing outside his body. He accepted it, and
within two or three minutes the body was dead. And then the man who was, or
thought he was, clairvoyant saw an amused smile come over the face of the man
who was “dead”, as he said; “Listen here, Wood, and I’ll tell you something.
Death is nothing, just nothing at all”.
This passing away of forms
will not trouble those who understand the fundamentally of life. On the
contrary, it will be seen that death has its uses. The form ought to be temporary. A poet may
use pencil and paper to help himself to form his poem, but when it is finished
he has it by heart and can throw his writing
away. A musical composer forms a piece of music in his mind, and then
clarifies and perfects it by playing it to himself on the piano. The form is a
means to aid the concentration of his mind on the part of his life which that
music represents. A painter painted a picture yesterday. Today he looks at it
studiously and sees its imperfections, that is, its inadequacy to the fulfilment of his life. So today he tries again. The goal
of life is never in the form, but only in the full awakening of life itself.
THE MAKING OF
FUTURE LIVES
I have spoken of the past
and the present — now the future. We see that it is the creative attitude that
marks out our life, and when that is clearly seen our purpose in life becomes
rational. We are interested in the unfoldment of our powers, the development of
our capacity, through the exercise of our thought, love and will.
It is only such efforts
that make for progress. Obviously, then, the road is long in proportion to our
failure to make such efforts. I am not proposing that anyone should live in a
state of strain. There is a certain wise
degree of effort which each of us can find if he measures his own
strength. The question is; “Are we quietly turning our attention to the goal of
life and to the meaning of experience in the light of that goal, or are we
instead passing our time, or even our “spare time”, in the indulgence of idle,
sensual, or selfish thought ? It must be one or the other. There is no question
of strain, but there is a question as to which way our faces are turned.
Let us suppose that a
waking week consists of a hundred hours. Are we spending ninety nine hours each
week in idleness, selfishness or carelessness, and only one hour with our faces
turned towards the goal ? If that is so, is it not obvious that we are making
future time for ourselves, that we are carrying forward to another week those
ninety nine ill-spent hours ?
Let me put this in terms of
reincarnation. Some of my friends have an idea that many people require about
seven hundred and seventy seven lives in which to complete their human
evolution, from start to finish. This implies that if they had not on the
average spent seven hundred and seventy six out of every seven hundred and
seventy seven minutes of the day in non-essentials, that is, with their faces not turned towards the goal, but had
made full use of every minute, they would have completed the task in one life!
Most people have probably already had many more than seven hundred and seventy
seven lives, and still they go on learning with ninety nine per cent, of
experience and one per cent, of thought, instead of one per cent, of experience
and ninety nine per cent, of thought. What is required is more wisdom, and less
trial and error. Ultimately each one
must reach the goal in one life.
Time ill-spent is time
created for the future, for the living which might be done now is simply being
put off into the future. In such ways men are making a long, long road for
themselves, and dooming themselves to wander in comparative misery for many
incarnations. Our future incarnations are not a necessity, but they mark our
failure.[ Reincarnation is the perfect opposite of the hell-fire theory. Many
who hold that view state that we deserve to be punished for not taking the
opportunity put before us by Christ! The Orientals are kinder, because the
hells they propose are temporary, and are very literal punishments for
particular sins, as when the lascivious man is doomed to embrace a red-hot
statue of a woman, or a dealer in meat is pecked by crows with iron beaks. But
reincarnation is a kind theory, for it announces that men will have their
opportunity again and again, until at last they take it. There is, however, no need to worry about waste of
time, for we can make all that we want.
One should go on living, without thinking about time or death. There
will come a time when we shall live one life without turning our faces away
from the goal. It will be a very perfect
life on earth. Though it may deal with vary little things, as the world counts
littleness, in those things we shall never be shaken from understanding, love
and purpose, all of which spring from the vision of the goal.
NO MATERIAL
EVOLUTION
Evolution is traveling the
road to the goal of life. It is the unfoldment of the powers of the life. There
is no material evolution. If it appears to be so, that is only because the life
is producing in some particulars a better form today than it produced
yesterday. If we were to keep a gallery of the pictures painted by an artist,
all arranged in chronological order, we should see quite clearly that number
one had not evolved into number two, or number two into number three. There is
an evolution of the pictures, but only because there is an evolution of the
painter.
There is not even material
causality among the forms. They are
merely objects in space, defined by their dimensions in space, and they have no
power to step out of the space in which they are. The changes that occur in
time are brought about by a superior reality, which is the power of the life
expressing itself in these forms.
There is then only one
royal road to the fullness of life. It is the natural road of positive living.
Men are busy making it long, because they are afraid of life. We are familiar
with the simile of a broad road winding round a mountain and rising spirally to
the top, and the idea that on this the millions toil, while but a few take a
steep path which goes straight up the mountain side. But the straight path is
the natural path. The winding path is the unnatural, for men make messes of
their lives, just as they make messes of their food. We have man-made health,
which is disease, man-made clothing, which is ugly, uncomfortable and
unhygienic, man-made religion, which separates us from the good or God. This is
so because men are afraid to trust themselves to the wings of life, and cling
too closely to the forms by the wayside. But this is not in itself their
natural life, which could be simple, true, beautiful, and strong.
THE FUNCTION OF DESIRE
INSATIABLE MAN
DESIRE is the manifestation
in consciousness of the instinct of self-expansion. In man it knows no limits. All men want to be
God, that is to say, they want to have omnipotence, omnipresence and
omniscience. How often have I wished that I could be in two places at once, and
if that desire were granted I should want to be in a hundred! It may appear for
some little time that a man is contented with smaller things, such as a home
and happy wife and children. But that is only a smooth harbor following a
troubled voyage, and very soon dissatisfaction (I do not like the word
discontent) will raise its head, and he will yearn — not for storms, as some
believers in the “old Adam” seem to think, but for something a little nearer to
omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence. And ever and anon new fuel is added
to the fire of his dissatisfaction whenever he thinks of power or knowledge or
ubiquity greater than his own.
Consider this and you will
see that desire is expression in feeling of the instinct of self-expansion, and
is therefore the mainspring of our evolution.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but desire is the mother of
our necessities. The world, would make no impression on a man who had no desire
to seek pleasures or to avoid pains. Therefore desire is something to be
cherished, to be encouraged, but at the same time to be studied and understood.
It is the opposite of sleep, and its degree marks the presence of life.
Study the effects of desire
in your own character and environment, and you will find that it is constantly
introducing us to new experience.
All human desires, good and
bad, have the same essential nature and always refer
to the man himself. He may
say “I want to possess money, jewels, friends”, but he means “I want to be rich
and popular”. Many men feel themselves expanded by the addition of these
things. Others live for the sake of sensations — to heighten these is to
increase their sense of being. Others seek learning and knowledge — for the
same reason. And others again work for
the welfare of mankind. ln the last case it is in no
way derogatory to the man or his work that he cannot leave himself out. It is
surely an additional merit that ha takes pleasure in doing good.
Fundamentally, all desires
are good. They lead to the experience which the man specifically needs, and
from which he will obtain a part of his evolution. And because a man always
acts according to his strongest desire, he obtains first the experience which
he needs most.
All experiences bring in a
painful element, as soon as the limitation is felt. As long as there is the feeling of expansion
— in body, emotions or thought — there is pleasure, but when that piece of
expansion is gained the limitation is felt, and then there is pain. Whenever
the instinct of expansion is thwarted there is pain. Life has made pain, along
with the body. There is no need to chafe against it, for it is always a warning
friend, without which we should be dead within a week. When there is pain we
know that there is something wrong with us. What a mistake to live to avoid
pains and for pleasure, when all pleasures, if taken over and over again, find
their end in pain! Better the joy of life, like a bird on the wing.
INTELLIGENT
DESIRE
But learning through desire
and experience may be less or more intelligent. The more intelligence there is,
the less is the need for repetition of experience.
This is the chief value of
thought, or rather “meditation”, which needs no
ritual of posture and
prescription, but is best done in immediate association or
alternation with actual
experience. I may look at my watch a thousand times and
not know the form of its
numerals, but if I think about it I shall soon know,
The world is drenched with
beauty and meaning which few people see, for lack of
meditation, or concentrated
thought,
Therefore some evolve
quickly and others slowly, according as their desire is intelligent or
unintelligent.
In addition to intelligence
there must be the will. The will is the whole of the self turning its attention
to a part of itself. It is a superior knowledge — not about things, but about what
things concern us at any given time. It operates to unfold or evolve that part
or quality of our being which is still asleep, and so determines our interest,
when that is not spoiled from the outside by fear or pride
We have our individual
predilections — marking our desires. In college one student takes to geology,
another to mathematics, another to zoology and natural history, and a fourth to
history and philosophy. I knew one man who for no visible reason took a great
interest in human beings and minerals. In college he took to geology,
mathematics, physics and chemistry, with philosophy as a hobby by the way, and
had decidedly less interest in animals, and still less in plant life.
A man cannot do everything.
Indeed, he ought not to wish to do so, since the world is mainly a collection
of other people’s experiments. What have I to do with a knowledge of all the
streets in
It is possible for a man to
learn to feel quickly within himself for the root of his immediate desires.
Putting his trust in that quiet inward admonition (and not permitting pride and
fear to sway him about) he soon finds the greatest possible guide in his
outward life — which is the intuition of the will. [For a full discussion of
this subject, see my Intuition of the Will.
Intelligence is spoiled by
fear, and the will by pride. On account
of fear and pride, people do not live fully, but entrench themselves like
soldiers hiding from the enemy’s fire. The man of fear does not face the
adventure of life, when he lets fear affect his desires. Fear should be a
purely mental thing with us, an intelligent watchfulness. On account of pride a
man goes on displaying what he has already gained, and carries it on far beyond
what is necessary for the learning of the lesson of experience, He thus
prevents the ground from being cleared by intelligence for the operation of the
will, so that it may make that self-change which is necessary for starting a
new section of experience. Pride should be only in the will, the dignity of
life true to itself. That is why worldly greatness sometimes shows that a man
has kept at one job too long. It is artificial and unnecessary, like the biceps
of a professional athlete, or immense learning, which are not required for the
reaching of our goal. Our greatness lies not here; the mouse is as wonderful as
the elephant, the grass as the tree.
It ought not to be too much
trouble to dwell in moments of leisure upon the
meaning and use of desire.
I know that many people will say “It is difficult,
and our stupid minds see nothing”. But go on trying, and not
caring
whether you succeed or not,
and within a week you will see the nature of your desire and whither it is
tending. And you will see also that knowledge of this fact is the first step on
a swifter road of evolution, that with this knowledge you can save yourself
from wandering miserably in the old paths, from carrying the dark part of your
past into what ought to be a brighter future. It makes the difference between
rowing a boat and putting up a sail.
LONG AND SHORT
VISION
Desire awakens thought,
which is its handmaiden. It is therefore of two kinds, according as it is with
or without vision. Thus there are desires for the goal and desires by the
wayside. And desires by the wayside are of two kinds — attractions and
aversions. For example, a man lives in a country place, and he wants to go
quickly to a distant city in his car, because that city holds for him the fulfilment of his desire. As he proceeds on his journey
there will be two kinds of desires in his mind — desire for the city, to have
all that it holds for him, to be all that it can stimulate him into being, but
at the same time he wants to avoid as
much as possible the deep ruts, the potholes and the thorns with which the road
is strewn.
From his desires-to-avoid
are born by revulsion temporary forms of contentment, which are the desires by
the wayside. He will say (I) “Let me enjoy some sensations, that life may pass
tolerably”, or () “Let me have possessions, so that I may feel some power”, or
() “Let me have the entertainment and support of friends, for there is gaiety,
if nothing else.” But nobody really wants these things, that is, nobody wants
them for ever.
None of the objects of the
wayside are attractive as compared with what the goal has to offer. But many of
them appear so to a man harassed by the roughness of the way. So, after much
complaining about the rough condition of the road, the traveler will often
settle for a while in the peaceful harbor of a wayside hostelry, and say,
“There is pleasure here”.“ I will be satisfied with this.”
But that satisfaction is
only apparent, not real. It is born of his desire-to-avoid. The man still wants
the city, but he does not want it more than he fears the road, All pleasure
by-the-way is therefore short-lived. As soon as it has been fully tasted, its
incapacity to satisfy is known. It is
inevitably compared with the vision of the goal, so, though fear and pride may
cause serious delay, there is always some progress on the road of life.
Our dissatisfaction is a
precious thing. It is caused by our vision of the goal, however dim that may
be. Therefore it is a first point of wisdom to be content to be dissatisfied.
The vision of the goal gives happiness that runs along with the
dissatisfaction, and entirely changes the taste of it.
Even the best of the
desires by the wayside is an aversion. All personal desires, for the excitement
or the comfort of sensation, mild or strong, or for possessions and friends,
are only refuges. They are sought out and clung to through fear of the open
road, as Hamlet preferred the ills he had to others that he knew not of but
feared.
HUMAN
STALACTITES AND STALAGMITES
I see then two kinds of people
about me — those who have the vision of the goal and those who have not. Or
rather, as this is a relative matter, those who have a great vision of the goal
and those who have so little that they do not know that they have any at all. All these people look to me like the
contents of a great limestone cave hollowed out by carbonized water — there are
many stalactites hanging from the ceiling, and many stalagmites standing upon
the floor. Some people have their broad base above, others their broad base
below. Of those who perceive only the things by the wayside the desires become
attached to those things, and their divine energy (for there is no other
energy) builds a kind of stalagmite, which, however, cannot help but rise
upwards even from that base.
Thousands of people try to
get to heaven keeping their feet on the earth. But the man who is stalactitic is he who is broad-based in his vision of the
goal, and puts down from above his finger of consciousness, concentrated,
purposeful, vigorous, clear-sighted, to deal with this thing or that thing in
the light of his vision of the goal. He has to do with many things, but they
are all linked together by his one purpose. Think, for example, of an artist,
who is filled with the desire to paint a beautiful picture — many things have
something to do with that one purpose. He rests at night — in order to paint
that picture. He gets up in the morning — in order to paint that picture. He
washes, dresses, eats his breakfast ,
buys pencils and colors and canvas, and goes to the forest — all in order to
paint that picture.
Such a man does not depend
for his interest on external stimulus or excitement. He has purpose. But the man who has no desire
to understand, but only curiosity (which is desire for sensation), who has no
desire for the largeness of life that shows itself by love, who has no purpose,
has no concentration. All his divine energy has dripped onto the floor.
THE GOAL OF LIFE
THE FULFILMENT
OF DESIRE
IT is sometimes thought
that desire is a prolific and misleading impulse, which requires to be checked
and severely pruned by intelligence. On the contrary, desire provides motive,
while thought studies ways and means. But there is such a thing as intelligent
desire, which means not desire restrained by intellect, but desire educated
through experience accompanied by thought.
There is nothing to replace
desire. It will alter with experience, but it should never be diminished, for
that would mean slowing up our evolution, of which it is the mainspring. Less
desire, less living.
Desire points to the goal
of life. Since men want to become “God”, and nothing less than that can
ultimately satisfy them, it means that there is an element of divine vision in
desire, so that man can never be entirely
untrue to himself or to the purpose of his existence. He will become
God. It is the height of intelligence to see that goal, and to learn the
passing nature of mere forms. So when
the goal is seen intelligently desire has its greatest power and most direct purpose.
THE GOAL NOT
FAR AWAY
Do not say at the outset;
“This goal is too remote for me. This vision is too fantastic. It is concerned
with the whole universe, and I am only a very tiny part.” But consult your
deepest desire. Ask yourself what you want. Do you want that goal or do you not
want it ? If you do want it, you will have it, though it is universal. It is
only ignorance that keeps you from it, and experience with thought will remove
that. Do not let false humility keep you back from your birthright. You are a
king of creation, not a scavenger living on the leavings of others.
Do you not see that there
is a false distinction between the small and the great, the part and the whole,
the finite and the infinite ? For the small things of life are marvellously united with the great whole of life, as the
sun may shine into every drop of water.
If you examine some small
object and study it carefully, with concentrated attention and full thought,
giving your time to it ungrudgingly, you will come to understand it, and soon
understanding will be easy. Or if you do the same thing with regard to a person
you will come to love him, and love will become easy. Or, if you similarly
devote yourself to some work of art, you will become skilled to draw a straight
line with your unguided hand, for nothing else develops the will like art.
You may think, “Yes, these
are the little things with which we have to fill our lives; far removed from
the goal of full freedom or power, and full love and understanding, which you
call omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence”. What a mistake! By
understanding one little thing you gain the power to understand other things;
by learning to love one person you gain the power to love other people; by
acquiring one accomplishment you develop the will with which you can achieve
other things.
THE BODY A
LIMITATION
Truly the body is a small
thing, but it is concerned with great things. What is the use of the body? I find that even people who
consider the body to be not themselves nevertheless believe that it enables
them to do things, and that they walk about and see the world with the aid of
this body, that it is a vehicle. But I have seen for many years that on the
contrary it is a limiting instrument. I see with my eyes the contents of a
room, and that vision is limited by the surrounding walls. Suppose that
suddenly my power of sight went through the walls, and extended itself into
every hall and room and street in a big city. The sight would be too much for
me. I should stagger with the immensity and the complexity of it all.
Thanks, then, for the
limitations of the body, which assist me to focus my
attention upon a scene within
the measure of my capacity, my individual
experiment, instead of
leaving me wide open to the world, with all the
indefiniteness of that state.
I cannot pay full attention to many things at once
or in a short time, but I can
bring the full power of my will, my affection and
my thought to hear upon
something small enough for the capacity of my powers of
consciousness. Then that
capacity grows. The will that has learned to hold its own in one thing will
hold it in many things; the love which
has won a triumph of unity between two persons will win the unity of many persons,
and the understanding which has grasped the small things will grasp great
things.
At last the will, the love
and the understanding will no longer need the limitation provided by this body,
but the life of which they are the conscious powers will stand in its own
strength open to the world, to life its own great world-life, in which freedom,
unity and understanding blend in one glorious state of conscious being — or I
think I must call it super conscious being, since the consciousness that we
commonly know is the broken consciousness connected with the sequence of little
things.
Do not, then, tell me that
our goal is a distant thing. My life has the character of the whole even while
it is directed to the part. Many people have a dim vision, which may be called
an intuition, of this fact. I knew a lady who used to travel for months and
sometimes even for years from her home, and when she came back she always said:
“I have a curious feeling that I have been here all the time; I cannot realize
that I have been away”. I told her that I was quite sure that she had not
been entirely away. The same lady when
at a distance would sometimes receive a letter from home, and then say: “I have
that curious feeling again; I cannot realize that all the people there are
going on with their usual activities without me”. The same answer applied, of
course.
PERCEPTION OF
THE GOAL
So do not be shy of your
vision of the goal. But watch your perception of it, and take care that the
casual perception of things by the wayside does not cause you to forget your vision
of the goal. This is important, because on the road of life this perception all
the time governs the desires, which are the energy of life. As desires are of
two kinds — to achieve and to avoid, so perception is of two kinds — the casual
perception of the things by the wayside, and the reaching out perception which
knows something about the city to which you want to come. The vision of the city whose minarets and
domes you can see in the distance determines the direction of your steering,
but more than that, and at the same time, it reflects itself into the present,
so that the ruts and pot-holes in the road cannot trouble you as they do those whose vision of the city is
almost lost.
Picture yourself as an adept life, not an adept form, for forms are only organs, and the function or power of the life produces the organs. The adept life is the constant seer of purpose and beauty, the constant feeler of love and unity, the constant understander of the use of things to the permanent life. Too often “adepts” are thought of as external forms, as though one should see a beautiful spade digging in a garden and