C. W. LEADBEATER

Adyar, July, 1910.
CONTENTS
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The Great Ones and the Way to Them
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The Great Ones 3
The Work of the Christ 19
The Work of the Masters 22
Masters and Pupils 26
The Path of Progress 46
The Ancient Mysteries 73
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Religion
The Logos 93
Buddhism 97
Christianity 114
Sin 120
The Pope 121
Ceremonial 123
Prayer 124
The Devil 126
xi
xii CONTENTS
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Hinduism 129
Castes 133
Spiritualism 134
Symbology 137
Fire 142
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The Theosophical Attitude
Common-sense 147
Brotherhood 147
Helping the World 157
Criticism 159
Prejudice 162
Curiosity 167
Know Thyself 169
Asceticism 176
Small Worries 181
Killing out Desire 189
The Centre of my Circle 191
Our Duty to Animals 196
Sympathy 199
Our Attitude Towards Children . . . . . 201
The Fear of Death 201
Co-operation 203
A Day of Life 204
Meditation 206
CONTENTS xiii
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The Higher Planes
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Nirvana 219
The Triple Spirit 222
Buddhic Consciousness 226
Experience 227
The Spheres 227
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The Ego and his Vehicles
The Ego and the Personality 241
Counterparts 253
Colours in the Astral Body 259
The Causal Body 260
The Deske-Elemental 260
Lost Souls 265
The Focus of Consciousness 285
Force-Centres 286
The Serpent-Fire 298
Obsession and Insanity 309
Sleep 315
Somnambulism 318
The Physical Body 319
Tobacco and Alcohol 321
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THE INNER LIFE
FIRST SECTION
The Great Ones
1TUDENTS OF OCCULTISM— even those who have been students for many years — sometimes seem to fail to realise the Mas- ters as They truly are. I have often found people thinking of Them as some kind of angels or devas, or, at any rate, as so far removed from us by Their greatness that it is scarcely possible for us to derive much help from Them. Thier greatness is in- disputable, and from that point of view the gulf be- tween Them and ourselves may well seem incalculable in its extent ; and yet from another point of view They are very close to us, so that Their sympathy and help are very near and very real. That our thought on the subject may be clear, let us first of all try to define exactly what we mean by the term "Master."
We mean by it always one who is a member of the Great White Brotherhood — a member at such a level that He is able to take pupils. Now the Great White Brotherhood is an organization unlike any other in the world, and for that reason it has often been misunder- stood. It has sometimes been described as the Hima- layan or the Tibetan Brotherhood, and the idea has been conveyed of a body of Indian ascetics residing
3
4 THE INNER LIFE
together in a monastery in some inaccessible mountain fastness. Perhaps this has risen largely from the knowledge of the facts that the two Brothers princi- pally concerned in the foundation and work of the Theosophical Society happen at the moment to be liv- ing in Tibet, and to be wearing Indian bodies. To comprehend the facts of the case it may be better to approach its consideration from another point of view.
Most of our students are familiar with the thought of the four stages of the Path of Holiness, and are aware that a man who has passed through them and attained to the level of the Asekha has achieved the task set before humanity during this chain-period, and is consequently free from the necessity of reincarna- tion on this planet or on any other. Before him then open seven ways among which he must choose. Most of them take him away from this earth into wider spheres of activity, probably connected with the solar system as a whole, so that the great majority of those members of our humanity who had already reached this goal have passed entirely out of our ken.
The limited number who are still working directly for us may be divided into two classes — those who re- tain physical bodies, and those who do not. The latter are frequently spoken of under the name of Nirmana- kayas. They hold themselves suspended as it were be- tween this world and nirvana, and They devote the whole of Their time and energy to the generation of spiritual force for the benefit of mankind. This force They pour into what may be described as a reservoir, upon which the Masters and their pupils can draw for the assistance of Their work with humanity. The Nirmanakaya, because He remains to this extent in touch with the lower planes, has been called 'a candi- date for woe/ but that is misleading. What is meant
THE GREAT ONES 5
is that He has not the joy of the higher work, or of the nirvanic levels. He has chosen to remain upon lower planes in order to help those who still suffer. It is quite true that to come back from the higher life into this world is like going down from the fresh air and glorious sunlight into a dark and evil-smelling dungeon ; but the man who does this to help some one out of that dungeon is not miserable and wretched while there, but full of the joy of helping, notwith- standing the greatness of the contrast and the terrible feeling of bondage and compression. Indeed, a man who refused such an opportunity of giving aid when it came to him would certainly feel far more woe after- wards, in the shape of remorse. When we have once really seen the spiritual misery of the world, and the condition of those who need such help, we can never again be careless or indifferent about it, as are those who have not seen.
Fortunately those of us who have seen and realized this have ever at our command a means whereby we can quite really and definitely help. Tiny though our efforts may be as compared with the splendid outpour- ing of force of the Nirmanakaya, we also can add our little drops to the great store of force in that reser- voir. Every outpouring of affection or devotion pro- duces a double result — one upon the being to whom it is sent, and another upon ourselves, who sent it forth. But if the devotion or affection be utterly without the slightest thought of self, it brings in its train a third result also. Ordinary affection or devotion, even of a high kind, moves in a closed curve, however large that curve may be, and the result of it comes back upon the sender. But the devotion or affection of the truly un- selfish man moves in an open curve, and though some of its affects inevitably react upon the sender, the
6 THE INNER LIFE
grandest and noblest part of its force ascends to the Logos Himself, and the response, the magnificent re- sponse of benediction which instantly pours forth from Him, falls into that reservoir for the helping of man- kind. So that it is within the power of every one of us, even the weakest and the poorest, to help the world in this most beautiful manner. It is this adding to the reservoir of spiritual force which is really the truth that lies at the back of the Catholic idea of works of supererogation.
The still more limited number of adepts who retain physical bodies remain in even closer touch with us, in order to fill certain offices, and to do certain work neces- sary for our evolution ; and it is to the latter that the names of the Great White Brotherhood and the Occult Hierarchy have sometimes been given. They are, then, a very small number of highly advanced men belong- ing not to any one nation, but to the world as a whole. On the physical plane They do not live together, though They are of course in continual communication on higher planes. Since They are beyond the necessity of rebirth, when one body wears out They can choose an- other wherever it may be most convenient for the work They wish to do, so that we need not attach any special importance to the nationality of the bodies which They happen to be wearing at any particular time. Just now, several of those bodies are Indian, one is Tibetan, one is Chinese, two at least are English, one is Italian, one Hungarian, and one Syrian, while one was born in the island of Cyprus. As I have said, the nation- ality of these bodies is not a matter of importance, but I mention these in order to show that it would be a mistake to think of the ruling Hierarchy as belonging exclusively to one race.
Reverence restrains us from saying much of the
THE GREAT ONES 7
great Head of this Hierarchy, in Whose hands is the fate of the continents, in Whose name all initiations are given. He is one of the very few now remaining upon earth of the Lords of the Flame, the Children of the Fire-mist, the great beings who came down from Venus nearly eighteen million years ago to help and to lead the evolution of humanity on our chain. These Great Ones did not take bodies from our then entirely undeveloped humanity, but made for themselves bodies in appearance resembling ours by the force of Their will, a kind of permanent materialization. At that period, and for long after it, no members of our human- ity were sufficiently developed to fill any of the higher offices in this Hierarchy, and consequently we needed and received this help from without. Gradually, as humanity has evolved, it has become more and more able to provide for itself, and the great Lords of the Flame have been set free to go to the help of yet other evolutions. But one of Them still holds this, the high- est office of all — the position of the King Who guides and controls all evolution taking place upon this planet — not only that of humanity and of the animal, vege- table, mineral and elemental kingdoms below it, but also of the great non-human kingdoms of the nature-spirits and the devas, some of which rise so far above it.
Under Him are various Heads of Departments, the broad outlines of whose work are more within our com- prehension than His. Though the details are far be- yond us, we can form some slight idea of what must be the manifold responsibilities and activities of the Manu of a Root-race ; and perhaps we can to some ex- tent image to ourselves the duties of Him who is Min- ister of Religion in this world-kingdom — who sends forth religion after religion, suiting each to the needs of a particular type of people and to the period of the
8 THE INNER LIFE
world's history in which it is launched, sometimes de- puting one of His subordinates to found it, sometimes even incarnating Himself for that purpose, as He may- see fit. This Minister of Religion is often called in the East the Bodhisattva — one who is about to become a Buddha. The previous holder of that high office was He whom we call the Lord Gautama Buddha. The attainment of Buddhahood is not simply the gaining of enlightenment ; it is also the taking of a great and definite initiation, and the man who has taken that step cannot again incarnate upon earth, but hands over His work to His successor, and usually passes away alto- gether from any connection with earth.
The Lord Gautama, however, still remains to a cer- tain extent within touch of the world, in order that He may still be able to help it. Once in each year He still shows Himself to the brotherhood of adepts, and pours down His blessing upon them, to be passed through them to the world at large ; and He may still be reached in certain ways by those who know how. Mrs. Besant has told us, in some of her recent writings, how He incarnated over and over again as the great teacher of the earlier sub-races of the Aryan race, how he was Hermes — the founder of the Egyptian Mys- teries— also the first and greatest Zoroaster, the orig- inal founder of the worship of the sun and fire, and again He was Orpheus, the founder of the Greek Mys- teries. Those mentioned of course were not His only births, for in the course of our researches into the past we have seen Him as founder of other religions than these.
The statement made in some of the earlier Theo- sophical works that He was reborn as Shankaracharya is an error, for from an occult point of view the two great teachers were on entirely different lines. There
THE GREAT ONES 9
was, however, a certain reason at the back of the state- ment in the fact that some of the vehicles prepared by one of them were also utilized by the other, as Mad- ame Blavatsky has explained in the third volume of The Secret Doctrine.
The deep reverence and the strong affection felt for the Lord Gautama all over the East are due to two facts. One of these is that He was the first of our humanity to attain to the stupendous height of Buddha- hood, and so He may be very truly described as the first-fruits and the leader of our race. (All previous Buddhas had belonged to other humanities, which had matured upon earlier chains.) The second fact is that for the sake of hastening the progress of humanity, He took upon Himself certain additional labours of the most stupendous character, the nature of which, it is impossible to comprehend. It is stated that when the time came at which it was expected that humanity would be able to provide for itself some one who was ready to fill this important office, no one could be found who was fully capable of doing so. But few of our earthly race had then reached the higher stages of adeptship, and the foremost of these were two friends and brothers whose development was equal. These two were the mighty Egos now known to us as the Lord Gautama and the Lord Maitreya, and in His great love for mankind the former at once volunteered to make the tremendous additional exertion necessary to qualify Him to do the work required, while His friend and brother decided to follow Him as the next holder of that office thousands of years later.
In those far-off times it was the Lord Gautama who ruled the world of religion and education ; but now He has yielded that high office to the Lord Maitreya, whom western people call the Christ — who took the body of
10 THE INNER LIFE
the disciple Jesus during the last three years of its life on the physical plane ; and those who know tell us that it will not be long before He descends among us once again, to found another faith. Anyone whose mind is broad enough to grasp this magnificent conception of the splendid reality of things will see instantly how worse than futile it is to set up in one's mind one re- ligion as in opposition to another, to try to convert any person from one to another, or to compare depreciat- ingly the founder of one with the founder of another. In the last case indeed it is especially ridiculous, be- cause the two founders are either two pupils of the same school, or two incarnations of the same person, and so are entirely in accord as to principles, though They may for the time be putting forward different aspects of the truth to suit the needs of those to whom They speak. The teaching is always fundamentally the same, though its presentation may vary widely. The Lord Maitreya had taken various births before He came into the office which He now holds, but even in these earlier days He seems always to have been a teacher or high-priest.
It is now generally known that the two Masters who have been most intimately concerned with the founda- tion and the work of the Theosophical Society have taken respectively the offices of temporal and spiritual leader of the new sixth root-race, which is to come in- to existence in seven hundred years' time. The Manu, or temporal leader, is practically an autocratic mon- arch who arranges everything connected with the phys- ical-plane life of the new race, and endeavours in every way to make it as perfect an expression as possible of the idea which the Logos has set before Him for realization. The spiritual teacher will be in charge of all the various aspects of religion in the new race, and
THE GREAT ONES 11
also of the education of its children. It is clear that one of the main objects of the foundation of the Theo- sophical Society was that these two Masters might gather round Them a number of men who would be in- telligent and willing co-operators in this mighty work. Round Them will be grouped others who are now Their pupils, but will by that time have attained the level of adeptship.
We may then set before ourselves as a goal the privi- lege of being chosen to serve Them in this wonderful work for the world which lies before Them. There will be ample opportunity for the display of all possible varieties of talent, for the work will be of the most varied character. Some of us will no doubt be at- tracted to one side of it and some to the other, largely according to the predominance of our affection for one or other of its great Leaders. It has often been said that the characteristic of one is power, and of the other love and compassion, and this is perfectly true, though, if it is not rightly understood, it may very easily prove misleading. One of the Masters concerned has been a ruler in many incarnations, and was so even in the earlier part of this one, and unquestionably royal power shows forth in His every gesture and in the very look of His eyes, just as surely as the face of His brother adept beams ever with overflowing love and compassion. They are of different rays or types, having risen to Their present level along different lines, and this fact cannot but show itself ; yet we should mistake sadly if we thought of the first as in any degree less loving and compassionate than His brother, or of the second as lacking anything of the power possessed by the first. Other Masters also will be engaged in this work, and it may well be that some of us may have made our link through one of Them.
12 THE INNER LIFE
It is probable that even the Masters who are by name best known to you are not so real, not so clear, not so well-denned to you as They are to those of us who have had the privilege of meeting Them face to face and see- ing Them constantly in the course of our work. Yet you should endeavour by reading and thinking of Them to gain this realization, so that the Masters shall be- come to you not vague ideals but living men — men exactly as we are, though so enormously more advanced in every respect. They are men most emphatically, but men without failings, and so to us They seem like gods on account of the power, love and compassion radiating from Them. It is most significant that, in spite of the awe necessarily produced by the sense of this tremendous power, in Their presence one never feels in the least afraid or embarrassed, but always uplifted.
The man who stands before one of Them cannot but feel the deepest humility, because of the greatness of the contrast between himself and the Master. Yet with all this humility he yet feels a firm confidence in himself, for since the Master, who is also man, has achieved, that achievement is clearly possible even for him. In His presence everything seems possible and even easy, and one looks back with wonder on the troubles of yesterday, unable now to comprehend why they should have caused agitation or dismay. Now at least, the man feels, there can never again be trouble, since he has seen the right proportion of things. Now he will never again forget that, however dark the clouds may be, the sun is ever shining behind them. The vibrations of the Masters are so strong that only those qualities in you which harmonize with them are called out, so that you will feel the uttermost confi- dence and love, and the desire to be always in His
THE GREAT ONES 13
presence. It is not that you forget that you have un- desirable qualities in you, but you feel that now you can conquer them, and you do not in the least mind His knowing all about them, because you are so certain that He understands perfectly, and to understand all is to pardon all.
It may perhaps help us to realize the human side of our Masters if we remember that many of Them in comparatively recent times have been known as his- torical characters. The Master K. H., for example, appeared in Europe as the philosopher Pythagoras. Before that He was the Egyptian priest Sarthon, and on yet another occasion chief-priest of a temple at Agade, in Asia Minor, where He was killed in a gen- eral massacre of the inhabitants by a host of invad- ing barbarians who swooped down upon them from the hills. On that occasion He took immediately the body of a Greek fisherman, which had been drowned in his attempt to escape, and in that body the Master jour- neyed on to Persia, where he rendered great assistance to the last of the Zoroasters in the founding of the mod- ern form of the Mazdayaznian religion. Later He was the flamen of the Temple of Jupiter in Rome, and later still Nagarjuna, the great Buddhist teacher. We have found Him many times in our researches into the past lives of some members of our group, but almost always as a priest or teacher.
Again, in these researches into the remote past we have frequently found the disciple Jesus, who in Pales- tine had the privilege of yielding up His body to the Christ. As a result of that act He received the incar- nation of Apollonius of Tyana, and in the eleventh century He appeared in India as the teacher Ramanu- jacharya, who revived the devotional element in Hin- duism, and raised it to so high a level.
14 THE INNER LIFE
No doubt some of you have heard a good deal about other Masters besides the two who principally take charge of Theosophical work. Another Master, for example, dictated for us Light on the Path and The Idyll of the White Lotus, while yet another has taken charge of a great deal of the work in Europe, and has written for us some of the most splendid works in the whole realm of literary activity. Then the one who was once the disciple Jesus stands ready especially to guide the various activities of the Christian Churches. Yet another looks especially after the work here in India.
Thus it may be seen that the evolution of the world is by no means left to itself, to get along as best it may, as people so often rashly suppose; on the contrary, it is being directed. For this Hierarchy of adepts is actu- ally managing it, as far as it is possible to manage it while leaving its inhabitants their own free-will. The members of the Brotherhood, through Their agents, are constantly trying to work with the important people of the world, putting advice and suggestions into their minds, endeavouring to move them onwards towards the great future of Universal Brotherhood when war shall have disappeared. But we must re- member that the karma of all the people concerned has to be considered and respected. It would no doubt be easy to force the world along at a far more rapid rate, but that would not be for the real advantage of the people concerned. The Master K. H. once said in a letter which I received from Him : "Of course I could easily tell you exactly what to do, and of course you would do it, but then the karma of the act would be mine and not yours, and you would gain only the karma of prompt obedience."
Men have to learn to be not merely intelligent serv-
THE GREAT ONES 15
ants ; they have to learn to be co-workers, because they themselves will have the same work to do some day, and if they are to be fit for greater responsibilities in the future they must be willing to take up the smaller responsibilities now. Sometimes, it is true, a really great opportunity or responsibility of world- wide importance comes to one of us, but that may per- haps be once in many hundreds of lives. When it comes we shall take it or miss it, according as we have or have not been in the habit of taking the smaller oppor- tunities of daily life, so that we have got into the habit of doing the right thing, and shall do it automatically at the critical moment. Our opportunities of doing good or harm are usually but small as regards the world as a whole ; but when we have learnt invariably and automatically to choose the right in these smaller matters, the Great Brotherhood will feel it safe to trust us in larger matters.
It is indeed well that we should try to understand these Great Ones, not as a mere matter of curiosity and interest, but in order that we may realise Them as They are, and comprehend that They are men just as we are, varying among Themselves just as we vary, although at so much higher a level. Wisdom, power and love are present in all of Them equally, yet They are by no means all alike. They are individuals just as we are. They are at the top of the ladder of human- ity, but let us not forget that we are somewhere on its lower rungs, and that one day we also shall reach Their level and stand where They stand.
One important fact about Them is Their all-round development. If we examine ourselves we shall be sure to find that we are to some extent disproportionate in our development — one-sided in certain respects. Some of us are full of scientific faculty and intellectual
16 THE INNER LIFE
development, but sadly lacking in devotion and com- passion; others are full of whole-souled devotion, but defective on the intellectual side. A Master is perfect along both these lines, as may easily be seen when we think of the splendid intellect of Pythagoras along with the love and compassion of the Master K. H.
We must not misunderstand Their wonderful knowl- edge. In order to attain the level of adeptship They must have cast off among others the fetter of avidya or ignorance, and it is often said that to cast off ignor- ance one must attain all-knowledge. Yet we know from personal acquaintance with Them that this is not so in the mere literal sense ; for example, there are Masters who do not know all languages, others who are not artists and musicians, and so on. I think that what is really meant by casting off the fetter of ignorance is the acquisition of a power by which They can at any moment command any knowledge upon any subject which They happen to require. They certainly have not all facts stored within Their physical brains, but equally certainly They can very quickly obtain any knowledge of which They have need. As to the ques- tion of languages, for example, if a Master wishes to write a letter in a language which He does not know, He very frequently employs the brain of a pupil who is acquainted with that language, throwing the ideas into that pupil's brain, and then employing the words in which He sees them clothe themselves. If a man speaks to Them in a language which They do not under- stand, They can instantly grasp on the mental plane the thought that lies behind the incomprehensible words.
It is often asked whether an ordinary man who met a Master on the physical plane would instantly recog- nize Him as such. I do not see any reason why he
THE GREAT ONES 17
should. He would certainly find the Adept impressive, noble, dignified, holy and serene. He could hardly fail to recognize that he was in the presence of a remark- able man; but to know certainly that that man was an adept it would be necessary to see His causal body, which of course the ordinary man could not do. In that causal body the development would show by its greatly increased size, and by a special arrangement of the colours, which would differ for each of the seven great types. But all this would be quite out of the reach of the ordinary man whom we are postulating.
Adepts have no definite external peculiarities by which They may be recognized, though there is a great calmness and benevolence common to Them all; Their faces are stamped always with a joyous serenity, the peace which passeth all understanding. Most of Them are distinctly handsome men, because Their physical bodies are perfect, for They live in an absolutely hy- gienic way, and above all They never worry about any- thing. In the case of most of us there is still a great deal of karma of various kinds to be worked out and among other things this modifies the appearance of our physical bodies. In Their case all karma is long ago exhausted, and consequently the physical body is a perfect expression on the physical plane of the Augoeides or glorified body of the Ego. Not only therefore is the body of a Master usually splendidly handsome, but also any new body that He may take in a subsequent incarnation will be an almost exact re- production of the old one, because there is nothing to modify it.
Another remarkable fact is that They are able to preserve Their physical bodies very much longer than we can — owing no doubt to the perfect health and ab- sence of worry which we have already mentioned. Al-
18 THE INNER LIFE
most all of the Masters whom we know appear as men in the prime of life, yet in many cases there is testi- mony to prove that Their physical bodies must have long passed the ordinary age of man. I have heard Madame Blavatsky say that her Master as He appears now does not look a day older than when she first saw Him in her childhood sixty years before. In one case only, that of a Master who has recently attained adept- ship in the body which He is still wearing, there is a certain ruggedness in the face, which is doubtless the result of some remainder of past karma brought over into this incarnation, but I think we may feel sure that when He chooses to take another body that char- acteristic will not persist.
Probably They are more silent than most men ; busy people have not much time for casual talk, and They are out of all proportion the busiest people in the world. Their pupil Madame Blavatsky was the most brilliant conversationalist that I have ever met, but she never made talk for the sake of making it. So with Them; a Master never speaks without a definite object in view, and His object is always to encourage, to help or to warn. He speaks always gently and with the greatest kindness, though He often betrays a very keen sense of humour; yet the humour itself is al- ways of the kindly order, and is used never to wound, but always to lighten the troubles of the way, or to soften some necessary rebuke. Certainly a man who has no sense of humour would not be likely to make much progress in occult matters.
The number of adepts who retain physical bodies in order to help the evolution of the world is but small — perhaps some fifty or sixty in all. But it must be remembered that the great majority of these do not take pupils, as They are engaged in quite other work.
THE WORK OF THE CHRIST 19
Madame Blavatsky employed the term adept very loosely, for in one place she actually speaks of adepts who have been initiated, and adepts who have not been initiated. In all later writings we have reserved the word "initiate" for those who have passed at least the first of the four great stages upon the Path of Holi- ness, and the word adept we have restricted to those who have attained the Asekha level, and so have fin- ished the evolution required of them in this chain of worlds. The consciousness of the Asekha rests nor- mally upon the nirvanic or atmic plane while his phy- sical body is awake. But out of the number who have already attained adeptship only the very small pro- portion above-mentioned retain physical bodies, and remain in touch with the earth in order to help it ; and out of this a still smaller proportion are willing under certain conditions to accept men as pupils or apprentices ; and it is to these last (the smallest num- ber) only that we give the name of Masters. Yet few though They be Their office is of incalculable impor- tance, since without Their aid it would be impossible for man to enter the portals of initiation.
The Work of the Christ
You ask about the Great One whom we call the Christ, the Lord Maitreya, and about His work in the past and in the future. The subject is a wide one — one also about which it is somewhat difficult for us to speak with freedom, on account of the restrictions with which we are hedged round. Possibly the suggestion may be of use to you that there is what we may call
20 THE INNER LIFE
a department of the inner government of the world which is devoted to religious instruction — the found- ing and inspiring of religions, and so on. It is the Christ who is in charge of that department; some- times He Himself appears on earth to found a great religion and sometimes He entrusts such work to one of His more advanced assistants. We must regard Him as exercising a kind of steady pressure from be- hind all the time, so that the power employed will flow as though automatically into every channel anywhere and of any sort which is open to its passage; so that He is working simultaneously through every religion, and utilizing all that is good in the way of devotion and self-sacrifice in each.
The fact that these religions may be wasting their strength in abusing one another upon the physical plane is of course lamentable, but it does not make much difference to the fact that whatever is good in each of them is being simultaneously utilized from behind by the same great Power. This is true of course of all movements in the world ; every ounce of the good in them is being used as a channel, while the evil in them is in each case just so much regrettable waste of force which might have been utilized if the people had been more sensible. The section in The Secret Doctrine entitled The Mystery of Buddha gives a good deal of information as to the relations between the Heads of this department of Religion, and it may give some useful hints as to the Christ also. This is a sub- ject of paramount interest to the members of our So- ciety, since one of our Masters has a specially close relation with that department.
As to the approaching advent of the Christ and the work which He has to do, you cannot do better than read Mrs. Besant's book on The Changing World. The
THE WORK OF THE CHRIST 21
time of His advent is not far distant, and the very body which He will take is even already born among us.
All this was decided many thousands of years ago — some of it decided apparently in minute details, though it would seem that there is a good deal of flexibility with regard to other points. The utter certainty with which these Great Ones lay Their plans many thou- sands of years ahead is one of the most wonderful fea- tures of this stupendous work that They do. Sometimes it is open to those of us who have been able to develop the faculties of the higher planes to be allowed a glimpse of Their mighty schemes, to witness the lifting of a tiny corner of the veil which shrouds the future. Sometimes also we have glimpsed Their plans in an- other way, for in looking back into the records of the distant past we have found Them making prophecies, the fulfilment of which is even now passing before our eyes.
I know of nothing more stirring, more absorbingly interesting, than such a glimpse. The splendour, the colossal magnitude, of Their plans takes away one's breath, yet even more impressive is the calm dignity, the utter certainty, of it all. Not individuals only, but even nations are the pieces in this game; but neither nation nor individual is compelled to play any given part. The opportunity to play that part is given to it or to him ; if he or it will not take it there is invariably an under-study ready to step in and fill the gap. But, whoever may be the instrument, this one thing at least is utterly certain, that the intended end will be achieved ; through whose agency this will be done mat- ters very much to the agent but nothing at all to the total progress of the world. Nineteen hundred years ago Appollonius of Tyana was sent out by the Brother- hood upon a mission, one feature of which was that he
22 THE INNER LIFE
was to found, in various countries, certain magnetic centres. Objects of the nature of talismans were given to him, which he was to bury at these chosen spots, in order that the force which they radiated might prepare these places to be the centres of great events in the future. Some of those centres have already been util- ized, but some have not, and all these latter are to be employed in the immediate future in connection with the work of the coming Christ. So that much of the detail of His work was already definitely planned nearly two thousand years ago, and arrangements even on the physical plane were being made to prepare for it. When once we realize this utter certainty, doubt and hesitation, anxiety and worry, all fade away and we gain a perfect peace and content, and the most abso- lute confidence in the Powers who are governing the world.
The Work of the Masters
The work of the Masters on Their own planes is not easy for us to comprehend, though we can readily see that Their activity must be tremendous. The number of adepts still retaining physical bodies is but small, and yet in Their hands is the care of all the evolutions which are taking place on this globe. As far as human- ity is concerned They seem to divide the world into parishes, but Their parishes are continents, and an adept is appointed to look after each. The Theosoph- ical Society appears to be rather of the nature of a mis- sion sent out from Headquarters, so that those who take part in its activities are working not for any par- ticular parish or any particular form of religion, but
THE WORK OF THE MASTERS 23
for humanity as a whole ; and it is upon humanity as a whole, or at least upon humanity in the mass, that the Masters chiefly act. They have a department which devotes itself to endeavouring to influence in the right direction the important people of the world — to affect kings and statesmen in the direction of peace, to im- press more liberal ideas upon great preachers and teachers, to uplift the conceptions of artists, so that through them the whole world may be made a little happier and a little better.
But the working of such departments as these is mainly entrusted to Their pupils, They themselves dealing rather with the egos in their causal bodies; They devote themselves to pouring spiritual influence upon them — raying out upon them as the sunlight radi- ates upon the flowers, and thereby evoking from them all that is noblest and best in them, and so promoting their growth. Many people are sometimes conscious of helpful influences of this description, but are quite unable to trace them to their source. The causal body of the average man has as yet almost no consciousness of anything external to itself on its own plane. It is very much in the condition of the chicken within the egg, which is entirely unconscious of the source of the heat which nevertheless stimulates its growth. When any person reaches the stage where he breaks through his shell, and becomes capable of some sort of response, the whole process takes on a different form, and is enormously quickened. Even the group-souls of ani- mals on the lower part of the mental plane are greatly affected and assisted by such influence, for like sun- light the force floods the entire plane and affects to some extent everything which is within its radius. In pouring out this force the Masters frequently take advantage of special occasions and of places where
24 THE INNER LIFE
there is some strong magnetic centre. Where some holy man has lived and died, or where some relics of such a person create a suitable atmosphere, They take advantage of such conditions and cause Their own force to radiate along the channels which are already prepared. When some vast assemblage of pilgrims comes together in a receptive attitude, again They take advantage of the occasion by pouring Their forces out upon the people through the channels by means of which they have been taught to expect help and blessing.
It is owing to assistance of this nature given to us from above that humanity has progressed even to its present position. We are still in the fourth round, which should naturally be devoted to the development of desire and emotion, and yet we are already engaged in the unfolding of the intellect, which is to be the spe- cial characteristic of the fifth round. That this is so is due to the immense stimulus given to our evolution by the descent of the Lords of the Flame from Venus, and by the work of the adepts who have preserved for us that influence and steadily sacrificed Themselves in order that we might make the better progress.
Those who understand anything of this work, and most especially those of us who have been privileged to see the Masters doing it, would never for a moment think of interrupting Them in such altruistic labour as this by propounding any personal requests. The vast importance of the work which They are doing, and the enormous amount of it, make it obviously im- possible that They should take up personal work with individuals. In the cases where such work has to be done it is always delegated to pupils or performed by means of elementals and nature-spirits. Therefore it becomes emphatically the duty of the student to fit him-
THE WORK OF THE MASTERS 25
self to do some of this lower work, for the very good reason that if he does not do so, the work will for the present be left undone, since it would be obviously impossible for the Masters to turn aside from Their far greater work for the whole world to attend to individ- ual cases. The work of the invisible helpers on the astral plane would simply not be done unless there were pupils at the stage where that is the best work that they can do ; for so soon as they pass beyond that stage and can do higher work, the higher work will certainly be given to them.
People sometimes ask why the Masters so often work through imperfect instruments; the answer is obviously because They have not time to do the work themselves, and They must therefore employ such in- struments as They have, or the work will not be done at all. Take for example the writing of books for the helping of humanity. It is obvious that the Masters could do this very far better than any of Their pupils can, and by doing it They could entirely avoid any possibility of erroneous or imperfect statements. But They have absolutely no time to devote to such work, and therefore if it were not done by pupils it would remain undone. Besides, if the Masters did it They would take away the opportunity of making good karma from those who can do it — certainly not as well as They, but yet after all well enough for the use of those who know so very much less.
We must remember that every Master has at His command only a certain amount of force which, enor- mous as it seems to us, is still a limited quantity, and it is His duty to employ this force to the best possible advantage for the helping of humanity. Therefore it would, if we may say so without irreverence, be abso- lutely wrong for Him to waste that force upon any-
26 THE INNER LIFE
thing lower than the very highest that it can reach, or to spend upon individual cases, however deserving, that which can be so much better employed for the wel- fare of all.
Masters and Pupils
It has already been said that out of the compara- tively small number of adepts who retain Their phys- ical bodies and fill the offices connected with the admin- istration of the world under the Great Hierarchy, there is a still smaller number who accept pupils, and to whom therefore we give the name of Masters. Let us see then what it means to be a pupil of one of these Masters, what is expected of one who aspires to this position and what is the work which he has to do.
First let us have it clearly in our minds that the Masters have absolutely dedicated themselves to the service of humanity, and that They are utterly absorbed in the work to the entire exclusion of every other con- sideration. In speaking to you on this subject before, I have mentioned that a Master has only a certain defi- nite amount of force to expend, and that though the amount of that force seems to us almost incalculable, He is nevertheless exceedingly careful to use every ounce of it to the best possible advantage. Obviously to take in hand and instruct a pupil will make some demand upon His time and upon this store of energy, and since He regards everything from the standpoint of its use in regard to the promotion of evolution He will not expend this time and energy upon any man unless He can see that it is a good investment.
He will take a man as a pupil, or perhaps we should
MASTERS AND PUPILS 27
rather say as an apprentice, when He sees that the amount of time and strength spent in training him will produce more result eventually than any other way of expending the same amount — but not otherwise. For example, a man might have many qualifications which would make him useful as an assistant, but at the same time some one great fault which would be a constant obstacle in his way, which would nullify much of the good that he might otherwise do. No Master would accept such a man as a pupil ; but he might say to him : "Go to work and conquer that special fault of yours, and when you have succeeded I will take you as my assistant, and will train you further."
So many of our earnest students are full of the most benevolent and altruistic feeling, and, knowing them- selves to be in this way very different from the ma- jority of mankind, they sometimes say to themselves, "I am so deeply anxious to work for humanity; why will not the Master take me in hand and train me?"
Let us face the facts boldly. The Master will not train you because you are still full of all sorts of minor imperfections. It is quite true, as you no doubt feel within yourselves, that your benevolence, your kind- liness, your earnest wish to be helpful, are far greater things on the credit side of the account than are all these small faults on the debit side. But try to realize that there are thousands of people in the world who are benevolent and well-meaning, and that you differ from them only in the fact that you happen to have a little more knowledge, and so you are able to direct your benevolence into more definitely useful channels than those others. If these were all the qualifications re- quired for discipleship, each Master might have thou- sands of pupils, and His whole time would be taken up in endeavouring to bring into shape those few thou-
28 THE INNER LIFE
sands of people, with all their petty little faults on the astral and physical planes, and in the meantime the Master's splendid work with the egos on the higher levels would have to be entirely neglected.
First of all then, to be a pupil of a Master means that one must look upon life as the Master looks upon it, solely from the point of view of what is best for the progress of the world. The pupil must be prepared ab- solutely to forget himself, to sink his personality en- tirely, and he must understand that this is not a mere poetical figure or a fashion of speech, but that it means just exactly what it says — that he must have no per- sonal desires whatsoever, and must be willing to order the whole of his life according to the work that he has to do. How many of us are there who are whole- heartedly willing to take even this first step towards accepted discipleship?
Think what it means to become a disciple. When any man offers himself for such a position the Master will at once say whether or not He considers him fit to enter upon the stage of the probationary pupil. If the candidate appears to be reasonably near the possession of the necessary qualifications the Master may take him upon probation, which means that he will remain for a period of some years under very close observation. Seven years is the average time of this probation, but it may be indefinitely lengthened if the candidate should prove unsatisfactory, or on the other hand it may be much shortened if it is seen that he has really taken himself in hand. I have known it to be extended to thirty years ; I have known it to be reduced to five years, and even to three, and in one quite exceptional case it was only five months. During this period of probation the pupil is not in any sense in any kind of direct communication with the Master ; he is little likely
MASTERS AND PUPILS 29
to hear or to see anything of Him. Nor as a general rule are any special trials or difficulties put in his way; he is simply carefully watched in his attitude towards all the little daily troubles of life. For convenience of observation the Master makes what is called a "living image" of each such probationary pupil — that is to say, an exact duplicate of the man's astral and mental bodies. This image He keeps in a place where He can easily reach it, and He places it in magnetic rapport with the man himself, so that every modification of thought or of feeling in the man's own vehicles is faith- fully reproduced in the image. These images are ex- amined daily by the Master, who in this way obtains with the least possible trouble a perfectly accurate record of his prospective pupil's thoughts and feel- ings, and from this He is able to decide when He can take him into the far closer relationship of the second stage — that of the accepted pupil.
Remember that the Master is a channel for the dis- tribution of the forces of the Logos, and not indeed a mere unconscious channel but a keenly intelligent co- operator; and He is this because He is himself con- sciously a part of the Logos. Just in the same way at a lower level the accepted pupil is a channel of the forces of the Master, but he, too, must be not an uncon- scious channel but an intelligent co-operator, and in order to be this he must also become virtually part of the consciousness of the Master.
An accepted pupil is taken into his Master's con- sciousness to so great an extent that whatever he sees or hears is within the knowledge of his Master — not that the Master necessarily sees or hears it at the same moment (though that often happens) but that it lies within the Master's memory exactly as it does within the memory of the pupil. Whatever the pupil feels or
30 THE INNER LIFE
thinks is within the astral and mental bodies of his Master. When we realize all that this means, we see very clearly why it would be utterly impossible for the Master to accept any pupil until the pupil's thoughts and feelings were such as the Master would wish to harbour within himself.
It unfortunately sometimes happens that there comes into the mind of the pupil some thought which is not fit to be harboured by the Master, and as soon as the Master feels that, He at once erects a barrier and shuts off from himself that vibration, but to do this diverts His attention for a moment from His other work, and takes a certain amount of energy. Once more we see clearly that it would be impossible for a Master to take into such a relation with himself one who often in- dulged in thoughts unfit for the Master's mind ; to have to be continually or even frequently turned aside from His work in order to shut off undesirable thoughts or feelings would clearly be a quite intolerable tax upon the Master's time and strength.
It is not because of any lack of compassion or pa- tience that a Master could not take such a man ; it is simply that it would not be a good use either of His time or His energy, and to make the best possible use of both of them is His simple duty. If a man feels him- self worthy to be accepted as a pupil, and wonders why this privilege has not already been extended to him, let him watch himself closely for even a single day, and ask himself whether during that day there has been in him any single thought or feeling which would have been unworthy of the Master. Remember that not only definitely evil or unkind thoughts are unworthy of Him, but also trifling thoughts, critical thoughts, irri- tated thoughts — above all, thoughts of self. Who of us is sufficient for these things?
MASTERS AND PUPILS 31
The effect which the Master seeks to produce by this wonderfully close association is the harmonizing and attuning of the pupil's vehicles — the same result which an Indian teacher tries to gain by keeping his disciples always in the neighborhood physically. Whatever may be the special kind of exercises of the special course of study prescribed, in all cases the principal effect upon the pupil is that produced not by either exercises or study, but by being constantly in the presence of the teacher. The various vehicles of the pupil are vibrat- ing at their accustomed rates — probably each of them at various rates, due to the constant presence of pass- ing emotions and wandering thoughts of all kinds. The first and most difficult task of the pupil is to reduce all this chaos to order — to eliminate the host of minor interests, and control the wandering thoughts, and this must be achieved by a steady pressure of the will exer- cised upon all his vehicles through a long period of years.
While he still lives in the world the difficulty of this undertaking is multiplied a hundredfold by the cease- less pressure of disturbing waves of thought and emo- tion, which give him no moment of rest, no oppor- tunity to collect his forces in order to make a real effort. This is why in India the man who wishes to live the higher life retires to the jungle — why, in all countries and in all ages, there have been men willing to adopt the contemplative life of the hermit. The hermit at least has breathing-space, has rest from the endless conflict, so that he can find time to think co- herently. He has little to hinder him in his struggle, and the calm influences of nature are even to a certain extent helpful.
But the man who lives perpetually in the presence of one already upon the Path has a still greater advan-
32 THE INNER LIFE
tage. Such a teacher has by the hypothesis already calmed his vehicles and accustomed them to vibrate at a few carefully selected rates instead of in a hundred promiscuous frenzies. These few rates of vibration are very strong and steady, and day and night, whether he is sleeping or waking, they are playing unceasingly upon the vehicles of the pupil, and gradually raising him to his teacher's key. Nothing but time and close association will produce this effect; and even then not with every one, but only with those capable of being attuned. Many teachers require to see a reasonable proportion of this result before they will impart their special methods of occult development ; in other words, before teaching a pupil something which may easily do him much harm if wrongfully used, they wish to be certain by ocular demonstration that he is a man of the type to which this instruction is appropriate, and is sufficiently amenable to their influence to be held in the right way by it when the strain comes. A thou- sand times greater are the advantages gained by those whom the Master selects — who thus have the oppor- tunity of such close and intimate contact with Him.
This then is what is meant by being an accepted pupil of the Master — that the man becomes a kind of outpost of that Master's consciousness, so that the strength of the Great Ones may be poured out through him, and the world may be definitely the better for his presence in it. The pupil is so closely in touch with the Master's thought that he can at any time see what that thought is upon any given subject, and in that way he is often saved from error. The Master can at any moment send a thought through that pupil either in the form of a suggestion or a message. If, for example, the pupil is writing a letter or giving a lecture, the Mas- ter is subconsciously aware of that fact, and may at
MASTERS AND PUPILS 33
any moment throw into the mind of the pupil a sen- tence to be included in that letter or a useful illustra- tion for that lecture. In earlier stages the pupil is often unconscious of this, and supposes these ideas to have arisen spontaneously in his own mind, but he very soon learns to recognize the thought of the Master. Indeed, it is eminently necessary that he should learn to recognize it, because there are many other entities on the astral and mental planes who are very ready in the most friendly way and with the best intentions to make similar suggestions, and it is assuredly well that the pupil should learn to distinguish from whom they come.
We must not, however, confuse such use by a Master of his pupil's body with the mediumship which we have so often characterized as objectionable. For example, there have been some occasions on which one or other of our Masters has spoken through our President, and it has been stated that on such occasions sometimes her very voice and manner and even her features have been changed. But it must be remembered that in all such cases she has retained the fullest consciousness and has known exactly who was speaking and why. That is a condition so different from what is ordinarily under- stood by mediumship that it would be quite unfair to call it by the same name. There can be no objection to such use of a pupil's body, but it is only in the case of a very few pupils that the Masters have ever done this.
When it happens, the President's consciousness is just as fully active in her physical brain as ever, but instead of directing her organs of speech herself she listens while the Master makes use of them. He form- ulates the sentences in His own brain and then trans- fers them to hers. While this is being done she can
34 THE INNER LIFE
use her own brain-power, as it were passively, to lis- ten, to understand, and to admire ; but I conceive that it would hardly be possible for her at absolutely the same moment to compose a sentence upon some quite differ- ent subject. I suppose that the highest form of spirit- ualistic control may more or less approximate to this, but probably very rarely, and hardly ever com- pletely.
The influence of a Master is so powerful that it may well shine through to almost any extent, and any one of the audience who is really impressible might be con- scious of His presence even to the extent of seeing His features or hearing His voice, instead of those of His pupil. It is not very probable that any actual physical change takes place, such as would be visible to non- sensitive spectators. In spiritualism I have indeed seen cases in which the medium's voice and manner, and even his very features, were actually physically entirely changed, but that always means a complete suppression of his ego by the entity speaking through him, and this would be quite foreign to the system of training adopted by our Masters.
There is yet a third stage of even more intimate union, when the pupil becomes what is called the "son" of the Master. This is accorded only after the Master has had considerable experience of the man as an ac- cepted pupil, when He is quite certain that nothing can arise in the mind or astral body of the pupil which will ever need to be shut off. For that is perhaps the prin- cipal difference which can be readily explained on the physical plane between the position of the accepted disciple and of the "son" — that the accepted disciple, though truly a part of the Master's consciousness, can still be shut off when it seems desirable, whereas the "son" is drawn into a union so close and so sacred that
MASTERS AND PUPILS 35
even the power of the Master cannot undo what has been done to the extent of separating these conscious- nesses even for a moment.
These then are the three stages of the relation of a pupil to his Master ; first, the probationary period, dur- ing which he is not in any real sense a pupil at all; second, the period of accepted discipleship ; third, the period of "sonship." It must be clearly understood that these relations have nothing whatever to do with initiations or steps on the Path, which belong to an entirely different category, and are tokens of the man's relation not to his Master but to the Great White Brotherhood and to its august Head. One may find a not inapt symbol of these respective relationships in the position in which an undergraduate stands with regard to the head of his college and to the university as a whole. The university as such requires the man to pass certain examinations, and the precise methods in which he prepares himself for this, are, compara- tively speaking, matters of indifference to it. It is the university, and not the head of the college, that ar- ranges the examination and confers the various degrees ; the work of the head of the college is simply to see that the candidate is duly prepared. In the process of such preparation he may, as a private gentleman, enter into whatever social or other relations he may think proper with his pupil ; but all that is not the busi- ness of the university.
Just in the same way the Great White Brotherhood has nothing to do with the relations between the Master and His pupil ; that is a matter solely for the private consideration of the Master himself. Whenever the Master considers that the pupil is fit for the first initi- ation, He gives notice of that fact and presents him for it, and ttie Brotherhood asks only whether he is ready
36 THE INNER LIFE
for the initiation, and not what is the relationship between him and any Master. At the same time it is true that a candidate for initiation must be proposed and seconded by two of the higher members of the Brotherhood — that is to say, by two who have reached the level of adeptship ; and it is certain that the Master would not propose a man for the tests of initiation unless He had with regard to him the certainty of his fitness, which could only come from such close identifi- cation with his consciousness as that of which I have already spoken.
When a student hears all this there naturally arises in his mind the question, "How can I become the pupil of a Master? What can I do that will attract His atten- tion?" As a matter of fact it is quite unnecessary that we should try to attract His attention, for the Masters are ever watching for those whom They can help to be of use to Them in the great work which They have to do, and we need not have the slightest fear that we shall be overlooked.
I remember very well an incident of the early days of my own connection with the Great Ones a quarter of a century ago. I met on the physical plane a man of great enthusiasm and of the most saintly character, one who believed thoroughly in the existence of the Masters, and devoted his life to the one object of quali- fying himself for Their service. He seemed to me a man in every way so entirely suitable for discipleship, so obviously better than myself in many ways, that I could not understand how it was that he was not already accepted ; and so, being young in the work and ignorant, one day when a good opportunity offered itself I very humbly and as it were apologetically men- tioned his name to the Master with the suggestion that he might perhaps prove a good instrument. A smile
MASTERS AND PUPILS 37
of kindly amusement broke out upon the Master's face, as He said :
"Ah, you need not fear that your friend is being overlooked ; no one can ever be overlooked ; but in this case there still remains a certain karma to be worked out, which makes it impossible at the moment to accept your suggestion. Soon your friend will pass away from the physical plane, and soon he will return to it again, and then the expiation will be complete and what you desire for him will have become possible."
And then, with the gentle kindness which is always so prominent a characteristic in Him, He blended my consciousness with His in an even more intimate man- ner, and raised it to a plane far higher than I could then reach, and from that elevation He showed me how the Masters look out upon the world. The whole earth lay before us with all its millions of souls, undeveloped most of them, and therefore inconspicuous ; but wher- ever amidst all that mighty multitude there was one who was approaching even at a great distance the point at which definite use could be made of him, he stood out among the rest just as the flame of a light-house stands out in the darkness of the night.
"Now you see," said the Master, "how utterly impos- sible it would be that any one should be overlooked who is even within measurable distance of the possibility of acceptance as a probationer."
We can do nothing on our side but steadily work at the improvement of our own character and endeavour in every possible way, by the study of Theosophical works, by self-development, and by the unselfishness of our devotion to the interests of others, to fit ourselves for the honour which we desire, having within our minds the utter certainty that as soon as we are ready the acceptance will assuredly come. We can do nothing
38 THE INNER LIFE
but fit ourselves, and we have the certainty that as soon as we are ready we shall be accepted, because we know how great is the need of helpers. But until we can be utilized economically — until, that is to say, the force spent upon us will bring forth, through our action, more result than it would if spent in any other way, it would be a violation of duty on the part of the Master to draw us into close relations with Him.
We may be quite sure that there are in reality no exceptions to this rule, even though we may sometimes think that we have seen some. A man may become a probationary pupil of the Master while he has still some obvious faults, but we may be very sure that in such a case there are good qualities under the surface which far more than counterbalance the superficial evils. An- other thing that must be remembered is that, like the rest of us, the Great Masters of Wisdom have a long line of lives behind Them, and in those lives, like others, They have made certain karmic ties, and so sometimes it happens that a particular individual has a claim on Them for some service rendered long ago in the remote past. In the lines of past lives which we have exam- ined we sometimes come across instances of such a karmic link.
One well-known case is that of a certain member who, when a powerful noble in Egypt six thousand years ago, used his influence with the authorities of one of the great temples to introduce into it as a favoured student a young man who displayed the keenest inter- est in occult matters. That young student took up occultism with the greatest eagerness and made the most astonishing progress in it, so that in every life thereafter he continued the studies begun in ancient Khem. Between then and now that young student has attained adeptship, and thus passed on far in advance
MASTERS AND PUPILS 39
of the friend who then introduced him to the temple. In the work which He has had to do in these later days He needed some one to put before the world certain truths which had to be published, because the time for such unfoldment was fully ripe. He looked round for an instrument whom He could use, and He found His old friend and helper of six thousand years ago in a position in which it was possible to employ him in this work. At once He remembered His ancient debt and repaid it by giving to His friend this wonderful priv- ilege of being the channel of the truth to the world.
Such cases indeed are fairly numerous. We all know how at a period still far earlier one of the founders of the Theosophical Society saved the life of the other, who was at that time the eldest son of Him who is now the Master and teacher of both, and thus established a karmic claim which has drawn those three into close relationship ever since. Again, on another occasion in the remote past our President saved the life of her present teacher when there was a conspiracy to assas- sinate Him ; and in yet another instance one who has but just passed the portals of initiation saved the life of the Bodhisattva, the great Lord Maitreya himself.
Now all these are unquestionably karmic links, and they constitute debts which will be fully repaid. So it may happen to any of us that in some past life we have come into touch with One who is now a Master, or done Him some slight service, and if so, that may well prove to have been the commencement of an association which will ripen into discipleship on our side. It fre- quently happens that people are drawn together by a strong common interest in occultism, and in later lives, when some of these have out-distanced the others, those who were once friends and fellow-students often fall naturally into the relation of teacher and pupil.
40 THE INNER LIFE
No doubt a man may attract Their attention in many ways ; he may bring himself to the portals of the Path by association with those in advance of him, by the force of sheer hard thinking, by devotion, or by ear- nest endeavour in good works; but all these are after all merely so many divisions of the one Way, because they all of them mean that he is making himself fit for one or other department of the work that is to be done. And so when by any of these methods he reaches a cer- tain level, he inevitably attracts the attention of the Masters of the Wisdom and comes in some way into connection with Them, though probably not upon the physical plane. The Master's usual plan is that he is brought into connection with one or other of Their more prominent pupils, and this is very much the safest way, since it is impossible for any ordinary person to assure himself of the good faith of astral communica- tions.
Unless a man has had very wide experience in con- nection with mediumship, he would find it very diffi- cult to realize how many quite ordinary people there are upon the astral plane who are burning with the desire to pose as great world-teachers. They are gen- erally quite honest in their intentions, and really think that they have teaching to give which will save the world. Now that they are dead they have fully real- ized the worthlessness of mere worldly objects, and they feel (quite rightly) that if they could only impress upon mankind in general the ideas which they have now acquired, the whole world would immediately be- come a very different place. They are also fully per- suaded that they have only to publish their discoveries upon the physical plane in order at once to convince everybody of their inherent reasonableness, and so they select some impressionable lady and tell her that they
MASTERS AND PUPILS 41
have chosen her out of all the world to be the medium of a magnificent revelation.
Now it is rather flattering to the average person to be told that he or she is the sole medium in all the world for some mighty entity, the only channel for some exclusive and transcendent teaching; and even though the communicating entity should disclaim any special greatness (which he usually does not) this is put down to praiseworthy modesty on his part, and he is described as at least an archangel, even if not a still more direct manifestation of the Deity. What such a communicating entity forgets is that when he was alive on the physical plane other people were making similar communications through various mediums, and that then he never paid the slightest attention to them, nor was in any way affected by what they said, and so he does not realise that precisely as he, when immersed in the affairs of this world, declined to be moved by those very communications, so will all the world now go on contentedly with its own business and pay no attention to him.
Often such entities assume distinguished names from what may almost be called a pardonable motive, for they know human nature well enough to be aware that if John Smith or Thomas Brown comes back from the dead and enunciates a certain doctrine it will have very little chance of acceptance, no matter how excel- lent and how entirely true it may be; whereas the same words uttered by George Washington, Julius Csesar or the Archangel Michael would be at least re- spectfully considered and very probably blindly ac- cepted.
Any man functioning on the astral plane has a cer- tain amount of insight into the thoughts and feelings of those with whom he is dealing, and therefore it is
42 THE INNER LIFE
not wonderful that when such people come into contact with the Theosophists, and see their minds to be full of reverence for the Masters of Wisdom, they should sometimes personate those very Masters of Wisdom in order to command more ready acceptance for what- ever ideas they wish to promulgate. Also it must not be forgotten that there are those who bear no good will to our Masters, and desire to do Them any injury which lies within their power. They cannot of course harm Them directly, and therefore they sometimes try to do so through the pupils whom They love. One of the easiest ways in which they can produce difficulties is by assuming the form of the Master who is so strongly revered by their victim, and in many cases such an imitation is quite perfect, so far as the phy- sical appearance is concerned, except that it always seems to me that they can never quite get the right expression into the eyes. One who has developed the sight of the higher planes cannot be thus deluded, as it is quite impossible for any of these entities to imi- tate the causal body of the Master.
Most assuredly we shall do well to heed diligently the wise precept in The Voice of the Silence, "Seek not thy Guru in those mayavic regions." Accept no teaching from some self-appointed preceptor on the astral plane, but receive all communications and advice which come thence precisely as you would receive similar advice or remarks made by a stranger on the physical plane. Take them for what they are worth, and accept the ad- vice or reject it as your own conscience dictates, with- out paying attention to its alleged source. Seek rather for teaching which satisfies the intellect, and apply the test of intellect and conscience to any claims which are put forward.
Let it never be forgotten that ours are not the only
MASTERS AND PUPILS 43
lines. The two Masters who are most intimately asso- ciated with the work of the Theosophical Society repre- sent two different rays or methods of teaching; but there are others besides these. All schools of the higher teaching give a preliminary training to purify the character, but the particular teachings given and practices recommended differ according to the type of the teacher. But all teachers who belong to the Great White Lodge insist upon the attainment of the highest only by means of the Path of Holiness, and the quench- ing of desire by conquering it and not by gratifying it. The pupil will be employed by his Master in many different ways. Some are set to take up the lines of work indicated in the book Invisible Helpers; others are employed specifically in assisting the Masters per- sonally in some piece of work which They happen to have undertaken ; some are set astrally to deliver lec- tures to audiences of less developed souls, or to help and teach others who are free temporarily during sleep, or are permanently after death denizens of the astral world. When a pupil falls asleep at night he usually reports himself to his Master, and he is then told if there is any definite piece of work which he can do. If there happens to be nothing special he will take up his usual nocturnal work, whatever that may be. Every invisible helper acquires a number of regular cases or patients who are put under his charge just exactly as are those of a doctor on the physical plane ; and whenever there is no unusual work for him to do he simply goes on his ordinary rounds, visits these cases and does his best for them. So that he has al- ways plenty of work of this kind to fill up his time when he is not especially needed, as for some sudden catastrophe which throws out a large number of souls simultaneously into the astral plane in a condition of
44 THE INNER LIFE
terror. Most of such training in astral work as the pupil needs is usually given by one of the older pupils of the Master.
If it is necessary that the pupil should undertake any special system of psychic development on the phy- sical plane, the Master will indicate it to him either directly or through one of His recognized pupils. What is prescribed in this way differs according to the char- acter and need of the pupil, and it is usually best for us to wait until we are definitely told before attempt- ing any practices of this kind. Even when we are told of them it is best that we should keep them to our- selves, and not discuss them with others, as it is more than probable that they would be unsuited to anyone else. Here in India among the hosts of minor teachers each man has his own methods, the difference depend- ing partly on the different schools of philosophy to which they belong, and partly upon their different ways of looking at the same thing. But whatever their methods are, they usually keep them very secret in order to avoid the responsibility of their being wrongly used.
The harm that may be done by the indiscriminate publication of any of these half-physical systems has been very clearly exemplified in America, where a book by an Indian teacher has obtained a large circulation. This teacher guardedly mentioned certain practices, prefacing his teaching with a carefully expressed warn- ing as to the necessity of preparation by the training of character. But nevertheless what he has written has caused a great deal of suffering, because people have uniformly disregarded his warning as to training and have recklessly tried to carry out the practices which he described. In a tour a few years ago in that country I met quite a number of people who through
MASTERS AND PUPILS 45
attempting to follow his directions had made them- selves physical wrecks. Some had become insane, some were subject to fits, and others had fallen under the spell of various obsessing entities. In order that such practices as these may be attempted with safety it is absolutely necessary that they be undertaken (as they always are undertaken in India) in the actual presence of a teacher who watches the results and at once inter- feres when he sees that anything is going wrong. In- deed, in this country it is usual for the pupil to remain in physical proximity to his teacher, because here people understand what I mentioned some time ago — that the first and greatest work which a teacher has to do is to attune the aura of the pupil to his own — to annul the effect of the ordinary disturbed conditions which prevail in the world, to show him how to aban- don all that and to live in a world of absolute calm. One of our own Masters said in one of the earlier let- ters, "Come out of your world into ours," and this of course refers not to a place but to a condition of mind. Remember that everyone who meditates upon the Master makes a definite link with Him, which shows itself to clairvoyant vision as a kind of line of light. The Master always subconsciously feels the impinging of such a line, and sends out along it in response a steady stream of magnetism which continues to play long after the meditation is over. The regular prac- tice of such meditation and concentration is of the utmost help to the aspirant, and the regularity is one of the most important factors in producing the result. It should be undertaken daily at the same hour, and we should steadily persevere with it, even though no ob- vious effect may be produced. When no effect appears we must be especially careful to avoid depression, be- cause depression makes it more difficult for a Master's
46 THE INNER LIFE
influence to act upon us, and it also shows that we are thinking more of ourselves than of the Master.
The Path of Progress
When we state the great truth that all evolution came forth from the Divine, and that we ourselves are but sparks of the divine flame and one day to be re- united to it, people often ask us two not unnatural questions. First they say, "Why should the divine Being have sent us forth, since after all we are part of Him, and so were divine from the beginning? Why in fact did the Logos manifest Himself in matter at all, seeing that He was perfect and glorious and all-wise in the beginning? Secondly, if we emanate from the divine Spirit, why were we sent forth into wickedness, and how can man, coming forth from so pure a source, enter into such degradation as we constantly see around us?" Since these questions recur so often, it is worth while for us to consider how they may be answered.
Why the Logos manifested Himself is scarcely our business. It is enough for us to know that He has chosen to do so, that we are part of His scheme, and that it is therefore our duty to try to understand that scheme so far as we can, and to adapt ourselves to it. But if there be any who desire to speculate upon this mystery, perhaps no better suggestion can be found for them than that which was given by the Gnostic Doctors :
"God is Love, but Love itself cannot be perfect un- less it has those upon whom it can be lavished and by whom it can be returned. Therefore He put forth of Himself into matter, and He limited His glory, in order that through this natural and slow process of
THE PATH OF PROGRESS 47
evolution we might come into being; and we in turn according to His will are to develop until we reach even His own level, and then the very Love of God itself will become more perfect, because it will then be lavished on those, His own children, who will fully understand and return it, and so His great scheme will be realised and His Will will be done."
As to the further consideration why the emanation should have taken place in this particular way, that again is not our affair, for we are concerned only with the fact s of evolution, not the reasons for it ; yet there seems little difficulty in at least indicating the lines along which an answer may be found. It is quite true that man is an emanation from the substance of the Divine, but it must be remembered that the substance, when it issues forth, is undifferentiated, and from our point of view unconscious; that is, it has within it rather the potentiality of consciousness than anything to which we are in the habit of applying that term.
In its descent into matter it is simply gathering round it the matter of the different planes through which it passes, and it is not until, having reached the lowest point of its evolution in the mineral kingdom, it turns upwards and begins its return to the level whence it came, that it commences to develop what we call consciousness at all. It is for that reason that man began first of all to unfold his consciousness on the physical plane, and it is only after fully attaining that that he begins to be conscious upon the astral and mental planes in turn.
No doubt God might have made man perfect and obedient to the law by one act of His will, but is it not obvious that such a man would have been a mere au- tomaton— that the will working in him would have been God's will, not his own? What the LOGOS desired was
48 THE INNER LIFE
to call into existence, from His own substance, those who should be like unto Him in power and glory, abso- lutely free to choose and yet absolutely certain to choose the right and not the wrong, because in addition to perfect power they would have perfect knowledge and perfect love.
It is not easy to imagine any other way in which this result could be achieved but that which has been adopted — the plan of leaving man free and therefore capable of making mistakes. From those mistakes he learns and gains experience, and although in such a scheme as this it is inevitable that there should be evil, and therefore sorrow and suffering, yet when the part these play as factors in man's evolution is properly un- derstood we shall see that the Chinese proverb is true which tells us that evil is but the dark shadow of good. Most emphatically it is true that, however black the clouds may look from below, those clouds are by their very nature transient, and above and behind them all the mighty sun, which will at last dissipate them, is always shining, so that the old saying is justified that all things, even the most unlikely-looking, are in reality working together for good.
This much at least all who have made any real prog- ress knoiv for themselves as an absolute certainty; while they cannot hope to prove it to those who have not as yet had the experience, at least they can bear testimony to it with no uncertain voice, and that testi- mony is surely not without its value for souls who are still struggling towards the light.
As to the second question, we may fairly point out that it assumes too much. It is not true to say that we are sent forth into wickedness and degradation. In fact, strictly speaking, we are not sent forth at all. What happens is something quite different. The LOGOS
THE PATH OF PROGRESS 49
pours forth into manifestation the stream of force which we may describe as part of Himself or of His vesture. This stream contains in potentiality the vast hosts of monads, each of which, when fully developed, may itself become a Logos. But for such development it is necessary that it should manifest itself through matter of various grades, that the individuality should very slowly and gradually be built up, and then that certain latent qualities should be brought out. This is the process of evolution, and all the great laws of the universe are arranged to facilitate this process. In its earlier stages the manifestation of the monad is entirely controlled by these laws, not having yet developed any sort of individuality or soul of its own.
But there comes a stage in which individuality is attained, and will is beginning to be developed. The plan of the Logos is to allow a man a certain amount of freedom (at first a very small amount) in the use of this dawning will, and naturally enough by the law of averages this primitive individual uses his will about as often wrongly as rightly, although he has almost always teachers belonging to earlier evolutions, who tell him the way in which he should walk. When he uses his will wrongly (that is to say, in a direction opposed to the current of evolution) the mechanical working of nature's laws brings suffering as the result of such action. Since this happens over and over again, the primitive ego at last learns by experience that he must obey the wiser teaching given to him, and as soon as the determination to do so has become actually a part of himself a wider field of freedom of action opens before him.
In this new field in turn he is sure to act wrongly sometimes as well as rightly, so that the same process is repeated again and again, always involving suffer-
50 THE INNER LIFE
ing where mistakes have been made. Whatever of "wickedness and degradation" may exist is always the result of the action of men who have used their free- will wrongly, and are in process of learning how to use it rightly, and as soon as that lesson shall have been universally learned all these evil effects will pass away. It is therefore obvious that whatever of evil exists in the world is entirely the doing of its inhabitants, and is in its nature temporary. However terrible and deeply rooted it may seem to us, it cannot possibly be permanent, for it is of the essence of things that it must pass away when its causes are removed. For its exist- ence while it lasts we must blame, not the great First Cause, but ourselves, because we are failing to carry out His plan.
We often exhort people to follow the higher course rather than the lower, but I think that the truth is that a man always follows the highest about which he is really certain. The difficulty is that in so many cases the higher teaching seems vague and unreal to many people, and so although they profess to believe it, and really think that they do believe it, when it comes to the point of action they find it too vague to trust their lives to it.
For example, many people who think themselves re- ligious are yet to be found seeking position and wealth. That attitude would be entirely reasonable if they were materialists and if they did not pretend to be- lieve, in anything higher ; but when we find a religious man devoted to the pursuit of worldly objects there is clearly something wrong, something illogical. The fact is that he does not really believe in his religion ; he is not thoroughly convinced of its truth, for if he were he could not be following after other things. He is following that about which he is really sure; he is
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quite certain, without the slightest mental reservation, about the desirability of money and power. He knows that he wants these things, and he thinks he knows that if he gets them they will make him happy. There- fore he devotes all his energy and time to their acquisi- tion, and we must remember that in doing that he is at least developing will and perseverance.
Now if you can in any way manage to make him as sure of the value of the higher things as he is now about the value of pounds, shillings and pence, he will at once turn that will and that perseverance to the service of the higher development, and he will seek after realities with just the same intensity that he is now devoting to the pursuit of shadows. This is pre- cisely what the study of Theosophy will do for him. A man who thoroughly understands Theosophy knows that he is here for a certain purpose, and that it is most emphatically his business to devote himself entirely to the working out of that purpose. He realizes thor- oughly that there are things worth doing and aims worth pursuing, and he devotes himself to them with the same avidity which he previously displayed in fol- lowing the acquisition of money or position.
But in order to do this it is not sufficient merely to be vaguely interested, merely to read a few books. The man must really believe it, must be thoroughly and utterly convinced of its truth. Now the only way in which this utter conviction can come to a man is by means of realizing some part of it, however small, for himself and at first-hand. Without going so far as that, of course, a man may be intellectually convinced of the truth of the doctrine, and may see that nothing else is logically possible; but there are very few of us who have the strength to act upon such a logical conviction about things entirely beyond our ken; for
52 THE INNER LIFE
most of us it is really necessary that at least some small portion of the doctrine, some sample of it, as it were, should be definitely seen and known.
We who were the earlier students felt all this just as keenly as do the students of to-day, and when in those early days of twenty-five or twenty-seven years ago we asked Madame Blavatsky whether it was in any way possible that we could verify any of these things for ourselves she at once replied in the affirma- tive. She told us that if we chose to take the trouble to develop the requisite faculties we might unquestion- ably experience for ourselves the truth of a great deal of the teaching. She warned us that the way was long and arduous, and that no one could tell beforehand how long it would take for a man to tread it. But on the other hand she consoled us by saying that the end was absolutely certain, and that it was impossible that any man who started to reach it should fail to attain, though in many cases such attainment might lie, not in this life, but in some other in the future.
This was encouraging in one way, and yet somewhat daunting in another way; but at any rate a certain number of us took her at her word and threw ourselves heart and soul into the endeavour to live the life which was prescribed for us, and to do the work that lay be- fore us. The degrees of our success were very varied, but of all of those who made this effort and persevered with it I think I may say that there was not one who did not obtain some result — enough at any rate to show him that what he had been told was true, and that if the progress which he made was smaller than he had hoped, the fault lay clearly with himself and not with the teachers.
There were those among us, however, who succeeded in verifying for ourselves a large number of the state-
THE PATH OF PROGRESS 53
ments made by the Masters — first of all only in a small way, with regard to ourselves, our vehicles, our possi- bilities, and with regard to the astral life which im- mediately surrounds us. Then later on by long contin- ued and more strenuous effort we developed the facul- ties of the mental body, and began for the first time really to understand what had been written for us about the life of the heaven-world. All this at first we had hopelessly misunderstood, because with the facul- ties then at our disposal we were actually incapable of comprehending it. By a strenuous further effort we reached the faculties of the causal body, and then the world of comparative realities began really to open before us.
We were able then to read the records of the past, and to see from them with absolute certainty how the great scheme of the Logos is slowly unfolding itself and working itself out by means of successive births under the guidance of the great laws of evolution and cause and effect. We could see clearly then that we were unquestionably ourselves a part of this great scheme, and therefore it followed that it was alike our duty, our advantage, our privilege, to throw ourselves into the scheme and co-operate intelligently in its fulfill- ment. There was then no doubt for us about the fact of the great evolution and the future of humanity, for it was clear to us that we had risen through the lower kingdoms, and we could see many stages both below us and above us ; all the various stages of human life ar- ranged themselves for us as steps upon a ladder; we could see these steps stretching up and down from the point which we ourselves occupied, and there were be- ings upon every rung of that ladder, beings who were clearly engaged in climbing it.
The Masters who seemed to us to stand at its sum-
54 THE INNER LIFE
mit assured us that They were men like ourselves, and that They had passed through the stage where we were now standing; between us and Them there was no break in the continuity, for every step of the ladder was occupied, and we ourselves watched the progress of some of those higher than we from one of these steps to another. When through custom the wonderful light of the higher planes grew less dazzling to us, we were able to see that even beyond the stupendous level occu- pied by the Masters there arose still greater heights. Above Them stood Manus, Christs, Buddhas, Lipika, great Devas, Dhyan Chohans, and many others of whom we can know nothing except that They exist, and that They, even at Their ineffable elevation, form part of the same mighty chain.
The whole of the past lies before us; we know the halting-places on the road, and the side-paths that branch off from it, and therefore we are justified in our confidence that where these great ones now stand we also shall one day stand. Seeing and understand- ing the inevitableness of our destiny, we also realize that it will be quite useless to endeavour to resist it. Progress is the law marked out for us. In progress only is our happiness and our safety. As regards the progress that lies before us in this particular chain of worlds the great majority of us are by no means yet what is technically called "safe" or "saved." We reach that desirable position only when we have be- come members of the Great Brotherhood which lasts from eternity to eternity, by passing the first of the great initiations, that of the Sotapatti or Srotapanna, the man who enters upon the stream.
To have taken that step is to have achieved the most important result, to have passed the most critical point in the whole of human evolution. For in the course
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of that evolution three points stand out beyond all others. The first is the entrance upon humanity, the attainment of individuality, the gaining of a causal body, the becoming a definite and apparently separate ego. To gain this individuality was the aim of the animal evolution, and its development serves a very definite purpose. The object is to make a strong in- dividual centre, through which eventually the force of the Logos can be poured out. When this centre is first formed it is only a baby ego, still but weak and un- certain ; in order that it may become strong and defin- ite it has to be fenced round by the intense selfishness of the savage. For many lives a strong wall of sel- fishness has to be maintained, in order that within it the centre may grow more and more definite.
We may regard this selfishness as a kind of scaffold- ing, which is absolutely necessary for the erection of the building, but must be destroyed as soon as the building is completed, in order that it may be able to subserve the purpose for which it was erected. The scaffolding is unbeautiful, and if it were left after the building is finished it would make it uninhabitable, and yet without it the building could not have been achieved. The object of the creation of the centre is that through it the force of the Logos should radiate out upon the world, and such radiation would be quite impossible if the selfishness persisted, and yet without that selfishness a strong centre could never have been made. We see therefore that this most unlovely of qualities has its place in evolution. Now for us its work is over, and we ought to have got rid of it. But it is useless to be angry with the ordinary man for his selfishness, since it simply means that what was in the savage a necessary virtue is still persisting into the civilized condition. In point of fact the selfish man
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is an anachronism, a survival of prehistoric savagery. He is hopelessly behind the times.
How then is such a man to make himself unselfish, to bring himself abreast of the advancing current of evolution? The methods adopted by nature to secure this end are many and various, but they are all funda- mentally one. For what is necessary is that the man shall realize the unity of all. And often he does this by gradually enlarging the self of which he thinks. Instead of thinking of himself as the unit he begins to regard the family as the unit for which he is work- ing, and within its limits he gradually becomes unsel- fish. Presently he expands his ideas to include the tribe or clan to which he belongs, and he learns to be unselfish within its limits, while still absolutely selfish and even predatory to all who are outside it, whom he usually regards as natural enemies. Later on in his history he extends his ideas so as to include, in cer- tain respects at least, the nation to which he belongs.
It is somewhere in the course of that stage of tran- sition that the majority of humanity stand at the pres- ent moment. In almost all minor matters the ordinary man is still fighting for his family against the interests of all other families, but in a few wider matters he recognizes that his interests are identical with those of those other families, and so in those matters he de- velops what he calls patriotism and national feeling; but even in those matters he is still absolutely selfish as regards all those other families who happen to speak different languages and to be born in different climes. At some time in the future the average man will ex- tend his ideas of self to include the whole of humanity, and then at last we may say that he has become by slow degrees unselfish.
While he is thus learning to take a wider view of his
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relation to others, he is also learning something with regard to himself. First he realizes that he is not his physical body, later that he is not his feelings, and fur- ther on still that he is not even his mind. This brings him eventually to the realization that he is the ego or soul, and still later on he realizes that even that ego is only apparently separate, and that there is in reality but one transcendant unity.
Thus the man treads the weary round of the seven hundred and seventy-seven incarnations, a time of slow and painful progress and of harrowing uncertainty, but at last after all those struggles the uncertainty ends with that plunge into the stream that makes the man safe forever, and so that is the second and still more important point in his evolution. But before he can take this step the man must have learned con- sciously to co-operate with nature, he must definitely have taken his own evolution in hand. The knowledge of the unity which makes him unselfish also makes him desire to be useful, for it gives him an incentive to study and to perfect himself — a reason for his ac- tions and a criterion by which he can judge the feel- ings and thoughts within him, and also the value of all with which he comes into contact.
How then must he begin this work of perfecting himself? Obviously he must first pull up the weeds, that is to say he must eliminate one by one the un- desirable qualities which he finds in himself; then he must seek the good qualities and cultivate them. He must definitely set himself to practise helpfulness, even although at first he may be very clumsy in the unac- customed work. The formation of character is very slow and tedious for him, for there are many forces arrayed against his efforts, forces which he himself has made in the past. He has for many years been
58 THE INNER LIFE
yielding himself to the sway of certain undesirable qualities, and so they have gained a great momentum.
Take the case of such a vice as irritability, for ex- ample. He has in the past been in the habit of yield- ing himself to outbursts of anger, and every such out- burst makes it more difficult for him to control him- self on the next occasion; so a strong habit has been set up, a vast amount of energy moving in that direc- tion has been accumulated. This is stored up, not in the ego as an inherent quality, but in the permanent astral atom; and when he realizes the inadvisability of anger and sets himself against it he has to meet this store of force which he himself has generated during many past lives. Naturally he finds his task a diffi- cult one, and he meets with many failures and dis- couragements ; but the important thing for him to bear in mind is that however many times he may fail, vic- tory is absolutely a scientific certainty, if only he will persevere.
However great the amount of force may be which he has stored up, it must be a finite amount, and every effort which he makes against it reduces it by just so much. But on his side there is a force which is infin- ite; if only his will is strong enough he can go on, if necessary through many lives, steadily renewing the force for good with which he combats the evil, and behind him in that effort is the infinite force of the Logos Himself, because that evolution is in accordance with His will. Until the man grasps the idea of unity he has no adequate motive for undertaking the hard and distasteful work of character-building, but when he has seen the necessity of this, the reason for try- ing is just as valid even though he has failed a thou- sand times as it was in the beginning. No number of failures can daunt the man who understands the
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scheme, just because he knows that however great the struggle may be the forces of infinity are on his side, and therefore in the end he cannot fail.
To be certain of remembering this purpose of his from life to life he should raise his consciousness to the ego; but during the stages when he is as yet in- capable of this he will nevertheless impress that pur- pose upon the permanent atoms, and so it will be car- ried over with them from life to life. If the ego can be reached, the man will be born with the knowledge inherent in him; if he can only impress the perma- nent atoms, the knowledge will not actually be born with him as part of his stock-in-trade, but the moment that it comes before him in any form in his next in- carnation he will immediately recognize its truth, seize upon it, and act accordingly. This steady practice of virtue and this persistent increase of knowledge will certainly lead him to the gate of the probationary path, and through that to the great initiation of which we have spoken.
After that initiation the third point is sure to fol- low— the gaining of the further shore of that stream, in the attainment of adeptship, when the man leaves the merely human evolution and enters upon that which is superhuman. We are told that after a man has en- tered upon the stream it takes him an average of seven incarnations to reach the fourth step, that of the arhat, the noble, the venerable, the perfect. That period is more often lengthened than shortened, and the lives are usually taken without an intervening stage in the heaven-world. Ordinarily it is only men of this stage who are able thus to dispense with or renounce the life of the heaven-world.
At the same time those who are so happy as to be chosen to take part in the noble task for which the
60 THE INNER LIFE
great Masters are preparing us, that of working under the Manu in charge of the development of the sixth root-race, will certainly need many successive incarna- tions without any intervening periods of celestial rest. The possibility of this is however conditioned by the rule that a man must have experienced celestial con- sciousness before he can renounce the heaven-life ; and furthermore it is not in the least merely a question of voluntarily renouncing a reward, but of being suffi- ciently advanced to dispense for a time with that part of evolution which for the majority comes most usually in the heaven-life.
When he stands upon the step of arhatship half his path from the first initiation to adeptship may be said to have been trodden, for he has then cast off five of the ten great fetters which hold men back from nir- vana. Before him lies the task of casting off the re- maining five, and for that also an average of seven in- carnations is allowed, but it must be understood that this average is in no sense a rule, for many men take much longer than this, whereas others with greater de- termination and perseverance move through these in- itiations in very much less time. A case has been known in which, by beginning very early in life, and by working very hard, a man has been able to take all four of the great initiations in one incarnation, but this is excessively rare, and not one in ten thousand candidates could do it.
It will be remembered that to stand at the level of the arhat involves the power fully to use the buddhic vehicle, and it will also be remembered that when a man raises himself into his buddhic body the causal body vanishes, and he is under no compulsion whatever ever to re-form it. Clearly therefore the seven lives which remain to him before he reaches the level of
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adeptship need not involve a descent to the physical plane at all, and therefore they may not be what we ordinarily mean by incarnations. Nevertheless in the great majority of cases they are taken upon the physi- cal plane, because the man has work to do upon that plane for the Great Brotherhood.
The candidate spends these fourteen lives in pass- ing through the different stages of the Path of Holi- ness, and in acquiring all the qualifications which are described in detail in the concluding chapters of Invis- ible Helpers. One who becomes a disciple of one of our Masters takes always, not the path to selfish libera- tion— the mere balancing of good and evil karma and the vanishing of all desire, so that the man is no longer forced back into rebirth — but the path of renunciation in which, having seen the scheme of the Logos, the man throws himself into it and lives only to promote the advancement of his fellow-men.
This has been called "The Path of Woe" because of the constant self-sacrifice which it involves, but in truth this title is somewhat of a misnomer, because although it is true that there is suffering, it is always a suffer- ing of the lower and not of the higher, and if the man should avoid such suffering by supineness or idleness, and leave undone the work which he might have done, there would assuredly be much greater suffering for him at a far higher level, in the shape of remorse. Such suffering as is inevitable in this path arises from the fact that the student is striving to do here and now in the fourth round what will be natural and easy in the seventh round. All our vehicles then will be much more developed, and even the very material of which they are built will be in an entirely different condi- tion, because the physical atom will then have all its seven spirillae active instead of only four of them.
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Therefore to force our present undeveloped vehicles to do work which will be comparatively easy for those which in millions of years will be fully developed, in- volves a great deal of strain, and this strain is neces- sarily productive of a certain amount of suffering.
It is analogous to the suffering and privation which is cheerfully undergone by an athlete when he puts himself in training. If he wishes to compete in some great race or trial of strength, he must make his phy- sical body do more than it would naturally do, and deny it many things which it greatly likes, the absence of which unquestionably causes it considerable discom- fort, and perhaps even somewhat of positive suffering. Yet for the purpose which he has in view the athlete quite cheerfully undergoes this ; indeed if, for the sake of avoiding these comparatively slight temporary dis- comforts, he should put aside the opportunity of tak- ing part in the race or contest, it is quite likely that afterwards when he saw his comrades passing onward to victory he would feel a remorse for that self-indul- gence, which would involve keener suffering on a higher plane. The analogy holds good in reference to the efforts necessary to progress along the path of renun- ciation ; the man who fell aside from that path because of its difficulties and hardships would undoubtedly suf- fer far more in the long run from remorse when he saw those of his fellow-creatures going unhelped whom he might have aided, when he saw misery among them which he knew that he might have relieved if he had been less self-indulgent.
There is never any pain to the Self, but only to these lower vehicles, when they are being prematurely adapted. A good analogy may be taken from the growth of crabs and other crustaceans. These creatures have their bones outside for protection, in the form of a
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shell, while our bones are inside, in the form of a skele- ton. A fatal objection to the crustacean scheme is that when the creature grows it has to burst the shell "and then wait for another one to grow, which must be both a painful and inconvenient process. So in the process of our growth do we make about ourselves shells of thought, as though we were mental crusta- ceans. Presently the shell becomes too small, and then we make a long series of efforts to crowd the new growth inside it and make it do somehow; but in the end this always proves impossible, and we have pain- fully to burst it. This however is inevitable, so chafe not at karma and at nature's changeless laws, for you made the shell yourself in the past, and now you your- self must break it. But if you did not go to the incon- venience of breaking it, you would suffer far more in the unsatisfied feeling that no progress had been made.
Many people are afraid of change, especially of a change of faith, and this arises not only from inherited prejudice, but also from actual fear of doubt — fear that if one once lets go one may be unable to find men- tal anchorage anywhere. Many a man is quite unable to make rational defence of his belief, or to answer the problems which inevitably arise in connection with it, and yet he is afraid to let it go. Sooner or later he will have to let go, though the widening out of his faith is sure to be accompanied by pain. Truly there would be no suffering for us if we never broke our shells, but then on the other hand there would be no progress.
The life of the disciple is full of joy — never doubt it for an instant. But it is not a life of ease. The work which he has to do is very hard, the struggle is a very real one. To compress into a few short lives the evo- lution of millions of years — the evolution for which the
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ordinary process of nature allows three rounds and a half — is not a mere holiday task. Our President has written : "Disciples are the crucibles of nature, where- in compounds that are mischievous are dissociated and are recombined into compounds that promote the gen- eral good."
It is not necessary for any one to become such a crucible; perhaps it would be nearer the fact to say that to become one is a distinction eagerly sought after ; nearer still to say that when once a man has seen the great sacrifice of the Logos there is no other possibility for him but to throw himself into it — to do his tiny best to share in it and to help it at whatever cost to his lower nature. And this is no child's play; it does indeed involve often a terrible strain. But an earn- est student will be able to realize that a man may so love his work, and may be so full of joy in it, that out- side of it there can be no pleasure worth considering, even though that work may tax almost beyond bearing every faculty and every vehicle — physical, astral or mental — which he possesses.
It must be remembered that when humanity in gen- eral has this work to do and this evolution to accom- plish, it will be far better fitted for the effort than is the man who is trying now to take a shorter and steeper road. Many of his difficulties are due to the fact that he is attempting with a set of fourth-round bodies to achieve the result for the attainment of which nature will prepare her less adventurous children by supply- ing them in the course of the ages with the splendid vehicles of the seventh round. Of course even to gain those glorified vehicles these weaker souls will have to do the same work ; but when it is spread over thou- sands of incarnations it naturally looks less formidable.
Yet beyond and above all his struggle the pupil has
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ever an abiding joy, a peace and serenity that nothing on earth can disturb. If he had not, he would indeed be a faithless servant of his Master, for he would be allowing the temporary strain on the vehicles to over- bear his perception of the Self within; he would be identifying himself with the lower instead of with the higher.
There is therefore a certain element of the ridicu- lous in describing this Path as one of woe, when it is clearly evident that there would be much greater woe for the candidate if this Path were not taken. Indeed, to the man who is really doing his duty true sorrow is unknown : "Never doth any who worketh righteous- ness, 0 beloved, tread the path of woe." (Bhagavad- Gita, vi. 40.)
This is as regards the inner life of the disciple, but if one is to consider the treatment which he is likely to receive on the physical plane, the name of the path of woe is by no means inappropriate, at least if he has to do any sort of public work in which he tries to help the world. Ruysbroek, the Flemish mystic of the four- teenth century, writes of those who enter upon the Path: "Sometimes these unhappy ones are deprived of the good things of earth, of their friends and rela- tions, and are deserted by all creatures ; their holiness is mistrusted and despised, men put a bad construction on all the works of their life, and they are rejected and disdained by all those who surround them; and sometimes they are afflicted with divers diseases." Re- member, too, how Madame Blavatsky writes : "Where do we find in history that 'Messenger' grand or humble, an Initiate or Neophyte, who, when he was made the bearer of some hitherto concealed truth or truths, was not crucified and rent to shreds by the 'dogs' of envy, malice and ignorance? Such is the terrible Occult law ;
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and he who does not feel in himself the heart of a lion to scorn the savage barking, and the soul of a dove to forgive the poor ignorant fools, let him give up the Sacred Science." {The Secret Doctrine, iii. 90.)
The way in which the world usually treats a new truth is first to ridicule it, then to grow angry about it, and then to adopt it and pretend that it has always held that view. In the meantime the first exponent of the new truth has probably been put to death or died of a broken heart.
It is in the course of the training on this Path that the consciousness of the candidate passes through the three halls mentioned in The Voice of the Silence. This term is used there to indicate the three lower planes. The first, that of ignorance, is the physical plane, upon which we are born to live and die, and it is very truly described as a Hall of Ignorance, for all that we know in it is the merest outside of things. The second, the Hall of learning, is the astral plane, which is very truly the place of probationary learning, for when the astral centres are opened we see so much more of everything than we do on the physical plane that at first it seems to us that we must indeed be seeing the whole, though further development soon shows us that this is not so.
But The Voice of the Silence warns us that beneath each flower in this region, however beautiful it may be, lies coiled the serpent of desire — that lower desire which the aspirant must stifle in order that he may de- velop in its place the higher desire which we call as- piration. In the case of affection, for example, the lower, the selfish, the grasping affection must be alto- gether transcended, but the high, pure, and unselfish affection can never be transcended, since that is a char- acteristic of the Logos Himself, and a necessary quali- fication for progress upon the Path. What men should
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cast aside is such love as thinks always "How much love can I gain? How much does so and so love me? Does he love me as he loves some one else?" The love which we need is that which forgets itself altogether, and seeks only the occasion to pour itself out at the feet of the loved one.
The astral plane is often called the world of illusion, yet it is at least one stage, and a very long stage, nearer to the truth of things than what we see on the physical plane. It often happens that men are easily deluded upon the astral plane, because they are as yet much in the position of babies there, new-born infants with no sense of distance and no developed capacity for locomotion. We must not forget that in the normal course of things people very slowly awaken to the reali- ties of the astral plane, just as a baby awakens to the realities of the physical plane. But those of us who are deliberately and, as it were, prematurely entering upon the Path are developing such knowledge abnor- mally, and are consequently more liable to error.
Danger and injury might easily come in the course of our experiments but for the fact that all pupils who under proper training are endeavouring to open these faculties are assisted and guided by those who are al- ready accustomed to the plane. That is the reason for the various tests which are always applied to one who wishes to become a worker on the higher planes ; that is why also all sorts of horrible sights are shown to the neophyte, in order that he may understand them and be- come accustomed to them. If this were not done, and if he came across such a thing suddenly, he might re- ceive a shock which would drive him back into his phy- sical body, and this would not only prevent his doing any useful work, but might also be a positive danger to that body. Where the neophyte is deluded on the
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astral plane it is his own fault, and not that of the plane, because error is due only to his unfamiliarity with the surroundings.
The third hall is the mental plane — the Hall of Wis- dom. As soon as a man is free from attachment to astral things he can pass beyond the probationary stage of his learning, and begin to acquire knowledge which is real and definite. Beyond that in turn lies the im- perishable world of the buddhic plane, in which for the first time the man learns the true unity of all that to the lower vision seems to be separate.
It has been said, "Thou canst not travel on the Path before thou hast become that Path itself." As long as it is but a Path to us, and we are following it ac- cording to directions received, or because we have seen it and chosen it with the intellect only, we have not truly entered it at all. This is only a stage, leading on to the condition when you have become yourself the Law and the Path, and you fulfil its requirements, in- stinctively doing the right merely because it is the right, and because it is inconceivable that you could do anything else. Then only you have become the Path.
A man cannot climb if he does not try; though if he does not climb it is true that he will not fall far. The strong man often makes serious errors; but the very force which enables him to make them also en- ables him to make great progress when he turns his energies in the right direction. Rapid progress affects the whole organism and is a great strain upon it, and this inevitably finds out whatever weak spots there are in the man. The plans of the Hierarchy will be car- ried out whatever we may or may not do, for we are but as pawns in the mighty game which is being played ; but if we are intelligent pawns, and are will-
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ing to co-operate, it gives much less trouble to the au- thorities, and incidentally to ourselves.
And what will be the end of it all? The attainment of perfection. Yet even that is only relatively and not absolutely the end, for when we have reached in fullest consciousness the Logos of our system and have unified our consciousness with His, there still re- mains the further Path which leads us to union with still higher Powers. A great authority has told us that at the end of one of the stages of evolution far beyond adeptship the perfect man will be a decad, having a body upon each of the sub-planes of the lowest cosmic plane, the triple Logos outside of time and space constituting his Self, and thus completing the ten. But this con- summation can only be reached when the man has power to create a body for himself upon each of these planes.
We have been led to understand that of the total number of egos which are engaged in this evolution about one-fifth will fully succeed — that is to say will succeed in attaining the asekha level before the end of the seventh round. Another fifth will by that time, have gained the arhat level, and about an equal num- ber will be on the lower stages of the Path, while a number roughly stated as the remaining two-fifths will have dropped out of this evolution altogether at the critical period at the middle of the fifth round.
All those who have not fully attained the goal, and completed their evolution, will have to resume it upon the next chain of globes, and even those who are the failures of the fifth round will be successes in the next chain. In the same way it is not improbable that some of those who are adepts and Masters now may have been among the failures of the moon-chain — that is to
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say, that They belonged to the humanity of that chain, but were somewhat backward upon it, and so dropped out there, and came on in the fore-front of this later evolution, exactly as a boy who failed to pass an exam- ination one year would be likely to be among the first of his class when he tries the same examination again twelve months later.
Remember that we are now only just past the mid- dle of an evolutionary period, and that is why so very few people comparatively have as yet attained adept- ship, just as very few boys in a class would be already fit to pass the final examination of the year after only six months of study. In precisely the same way very few animals are as yet attaining individuality, for the animal who attains individuality is as far in advance of his fellows as is the human being who attains adept- ship in advance of the average man. Both are doing at the middle point of evolution what they are ex- pected to be able to do only at the end of it. Those who achieve only at the normal time, at the end of the sev- enth round, will approach their goal so gradually that there will be little or no struggle.
Undoubtedly to attain in that way is very far easier for the candidate. But that method has the tremen- dous drawback that the man who attains by it will not have been able to give any help to others, but will on the contrary have required assistance himself. I re- member from the days of my childhood a Christian hymn which gave this idea very beautifully. It de- scribed how a certain soul went to heaven and enjoyed its bliss, and wandered about there very happily for a time, but at last he noticed that the crown which he wore differed much in splendor from many of the others, and for a long time he wondered why this was so. At last he met the Christ Himself and mustered
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up courage to ask Him the reason of this peculiarity; and the answer given ran thus:
I know thou hast believed on Me,
And Life through Me is thine ; But where are all those glorious gems
That in thy crown should shine? Thou seest yonder glorious throng
With stars on every brow, For every soul they led to Me
They wear a jewel now.
"They that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, but they that turn many to righteous- ness as the stars for ever and ever."
When we are struggling onwards ourselves we can help others, and we should do all that we can in this direction, not because of the result to ourselves (though that is inevitable) but for the sake of helping the world. The man who drifts with the stream has to be carried along, but when he begins to swim himself he sets free the force that would otherwise have been spent in help- ing him. That can then be used for the helping of others, quite independently of what he himself may do in that line.
Adeptship sets the man free from the necessity of rebirth, and its achievement also involves the libera- tion of forces for the aid of others. The man who seeks liberation only for himself may balance his karma per- fectly and may kill out desire, so that the law of karma will not longer compel him to rebirth. But though he thus avoids the action of the law of karma he does not escape from the law of evolution. It may be long before he comes under the influence of that law, be- cause by the hypothesis a man who has already at this stage set himself free from all desire must be consid-
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erably in advance of the average. There will however inevitably come a time when the slow and steady ad- vance of the law of evolution will overtake him, and then its resistless pressure will force him out of his selfish bliss into rebirth once more, and so he will find himself again upon the wheel from which he had hoped to escape.
It has often been asked how the secrets revealed at initiation are protected from those who are able to read thoughts. There is not the slightest danger that any of these secrets will ever be disclosed in this manner, for at the same time that the secret is told to the in- itiate the means by which he can guard it is also ex- plained to him. If it could be possible that an initiate could ever be so false as to think of betraying what has been confided to him, even then there would be no danger, for he is in such close touch with the Brother- hood of which he is a part that they would at once know of his foul intention, and before he could speak the treacherous words he would have forgotten utterly that there was anything to betray. There is nothing that is in any way terrible about these secrets, except that the power which goes with them might well be ter- rible if wrongly used. Initiates always know one an- other, much in the same way as free-masons do; and, just as with the latter, any initiate could hide his status from those below him, but not from those above him.
However sorely the Brotherhood may be in need of helpers no man can receive initiation until his char- acter is developed to a stage when he is ready for it, and in exactly the same way if a man has raised him- self to the level of initiation there is no power which can withhold it from him. It may very often happen, however, that a man is ready in every respect, save for a lack of some one quality ; and that lack may hold
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him back for a very long time, which would probably mean that by the time he acquired the missing quality he would in all other respects be developed in advance of the requirements. So it must not be supposed that all initiates standing upon the same level are invari- ably equal in all respects. What the world calls a great man is not necessarily developed all round and fit for initiation. Anything in the nature of favour- itism or neglect is utterly inconceivable. In this mat- ter no man can give to another that which he has not earned, nor can any man withhold the due recognition of development won.
The Ancient Mysteries
What I can tell you with regard to the ancient mys- teries is not derived from any special study of old manuscripts, or of the history of this subject. It hap- pened to me in another life to be born in ancient Greece, and to become initiated there into some of the mysteries. Now a man who was initiated in this way in Greece gave a pledge not to reveal what he had seen, and this pledge is binding, even though it was given in a former incarnation ; but Those who stood behind those mysteries have since thought fit to give out to the world much of what was then taught only under the vow of secrecy, and so They have relieved us from our promise as far as those teachings go. Therefore I break no pledge when I tell you something about the instructions which were given in those ancient mys- teries. Other subjects were taught, however, which I am not at liberty to name, because they have not yet been made public by the Great Ones.
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In the first place, I should like to ask you to notice that all peoples and all religions have had their mys- teries, including the Christian religion. I have often heard people say that in the Christian religion, at least, nothing was hidden : that everything was open for the study of the poor and the unlearned. Any one who says that does not know the history of the Christian Church. Now, indeed, everything the Church knows is given out, but that is only because it has forgotten the mysteries which it used to keep hidden. If you study the earliest history of the Church, you will find that old writers speak very distinctly of the mysteries, which were taught only to those who were full mem- bers of the Church. There were many points on which nothing was said to those who were only "katechou- menoi," who had just entered the Church, but were still candidates for full membership.
Traces of this we can find still earlier, for you will remember that it is said in the Gospels that the Christ made known to His disciples many things which He gave to the multitude only in parables.
But one of the reasons of the failure of the Christian Church to control her more intellectual sons, as she should have done, is the fact that she has forgotten and lost the supernatural and philosophical mysteries which were the basis of her dogma. To see something of this hidden side of her teachings you have only to read the works of the great Gnostic writers. Then you will find that when we take this side as the inner doc- trine for the scholars, and the present form of the Christian religion as the outer doctrine for the illiter- ate, we get in the two combined a perfect expression of the ancient Wisdom. But to take either of these teachings by itself, and to condemn the other as heresy, gives us only a one-sided view. So every religion has
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instruction for those who do not get beyond its outer form, but has always also higher instruction for those who penetrate to the inner.
However, when we speak of the ancient mysteries, we generally mean those which were connected with the great religion of ancient Greece. Only a few books exist on this subject. There is a book of Iamblichus, who was himself initiated into the mysteries, and there is a book written by a countryman of mine, Thomas Taylor, a Platonist, and also one by a Frenchman, Mon- sieur P. Foucart. Although they are very interest- ing, you will find that they give but little real informa- tion. Much that we think we know about the mys- teries (I mean from an external point of view) comes to us through the writings of their exponents.
The Christian Church has had the habit — probably justifiable from her point of view — of destroying all books which stood for teachings other than her own, and we must not forget that almost all of our knowl- edge with regard to early Christian times comes to us through the hands of the monks of the middle ages. They were practically the only educated people of that time, and it was they who copied all the manuscripts. They had very pronounced opinions about what was useful and what was not; so very naturally only that part survived which agreed with their views, this be- ing reported with emphasis, while anything of oppo- site character wTas discarded. Above all, the greater part of the knowledge which is accessible to the general wrorld about the mysteries is found in the works of the Church Fathers, who were opposed to them. Without wishing to accuse the Fathers of having purposely mis- represented, we may certainly conclude that they tried to put forward their own view in the best and strong- est light. Even at the present day if you wished to
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know the whole truth concerning the doctrine of some Protestant sect, you would not go to Catholic priests for information; nor, if you wanted good and just ex- planations concerning Catholicism, would you go to the Salvation Army to get them.
In regard to the mysteries we are in a similar situa- tion, only much worse, because of the many and bitter disputes between the followers of the old religion and its mysteries and the Fathers of the Christian Church. Therefore we may accept only with considerable re- serve and with great prudence what the Fathers say in regard to this subject. For example, you will find that they often maintain that the ancient mysteries contain much that is indecent and immoral.
Because I have carefully searched clairvoyantly through the mysteries of Greece, and in a former in- carnation was myself an initiate of them, I can say with perfect certainty that there is not even a shadow of truth in those statements. There did exist certain mysteries with which were festivities and a form of Bacchus-worship, which degenerated later on into something very objectionable; but this was only in later times, and those mysteries belonged to quite an- other branch. They were not in the least related to the mysteries of Eleusis, but were only an imitation of them on a small scale, entirely exoteric.
I have, this evening, to treat a very extensive sub- ject in a short time. I must try to give you a rough sketch of what those Greek mysteries were and what was taught to the initiates.
The fact will be known to you that two divisions are always mentioned : the lesser and the greater mys- teries. Everybody knew that those existed, and the number of persons who were initiated was indeed quite a large proportion of the whole population. I think
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you may read in exoteric books of thirty thousand in- itiates gathering at one time, and this also shows that the fact that a man was initiated need not be kept se- cret, but that the outer world knew him as belonging to this numerous class. I mean that, although cer- tain teachings given in the mysteries were always kept secret, the whole Greek and Roman world knew that the greater and lesser mysteries existed, and more or less who belonged to each of them.
But behind those two degrees, the existence of which was generally known, there were all the time the real secret mysteries ; and the existence of the third degree, as one might call it, was unknown to the public. If one thinks of the conditions of that time one can readily understand the reason for this. Most of the Roman Emperors, for example, knew of the existence of the lesser and greater mysteries, and insisted upon being initiated. Now we know very well from history that many of the Roman Emperors were hardly of the char- acter to be allowed to play a leading role in a religious body. But, all the same, it would have been very diffi- cult for the leaders of the mysteries to refuse entrance to an Emperor of Rome. As was once said, one cannot argue with the master of thirty legions. The emperors would certainly have killed anyone who stood in the way of anything they wished. Thus it was desirable that the existence of the third degree should not be known, and nobody knew that there was such a degree before he was deemed, by those who could judge, worthy to be admitted to it.
The teachings of this third degree were never given to the public and never will be. But in the common mysteries, lesser and greater, are many things which can be told. In the first place, then, we were taught certain pithy sayings, or apophthegms, and if I quote
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you some of those you will understand the nature of the teaching. One of the best known was "Death is life, and life is death." This shows us that the higher life on the other side of death was well known. An- other saying was "He who seeks realities in this life shall also seek realities after death; and he who seeks unrealities in this life shall also seek unrealities after death." A great principle of their teaching was that the soul had descended . from the higher spheres to the material. The principles of reincarnation were also contained in their instruction. You will remem- ber that this did not appear in the external doctrine of the religions either of Greece or of Rome — that is to say, it was not taught publicly and in so many words — but you will find that this idea of the descent of the soul into matter is imparted in classic mythology. You will remember the myth of Proserpina, who was car- ried to the under-world while picking the flower of the narcissus.
Let us recall the myth of Narcissus. He was a youth of great beauty who fell in love with his own image reflected in the water, and was therefore changed into a flower and bound to earth. You need not have studied much Theosophy to see what that means. We learn in The Secret Doctrine how the Ego looks down upon the waters of the astral plane and the lower world, how it reflects itself in the personality, how it identi- fies itself with the personality and, falling in love with its image, is bound to earth. So Proserpina, while picking the narcissus, is dragged away to the under- world, and afterwards passes half her life under the earth and half on the earth; that is, as you will see, half in a material body and half out of it.
In the same way, there are numbers of other myths of which it is very interesting to hear the Theosophical
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explanation. For example, in this old mystery-teach- ing the minotaur was held to signify the lower nature in man — the personality which is half man and half animal. This was eventually slain by Theseus, who typifies the higher self or the individuality, which has been gradually growing and gathering strength until at last it can wield the sword of its Divine Father, the Spirit. Guided through the labyrinth of illusion which constitutes these lower planes by the thread of occult knowledge given him by Ariadne (who represents in- tuition) the higher self is enabled to slay the lower, and to escape safely from the web of illusion ; yet there still remains for him the danger that, developing in- tellectual pride, he may neglect intuition, even as The- seus neglected Ariadne, and so fail for this time to real- ize his highest possibilities.
In ancient Greece the lesser mysteries were espe- cially celebrated in a little place called Agrae, and the initiates were called "mystae." Perhaps you know that their official dress, the token of their dignity, was the skin of a fawn, which in the old symbology represented the astral body.
Its spotted appearance was thought to be emblematic of the many colours in an ordinary astral body. The reason why this was considered a fitting dress for those initiated into the lesser mysteries was because the prin- cipal teachings given in them concerned the astral plane. Those who were admitted learned what the astral life of man would be after death.
Much time was spent in making clear by example as well as by teaching what would be the effect in the astral world of a certain mode of life on earth. In the first place they taught by illustrations, on an extensive scale by representations in the temples, by a kind of play or drama in which was shown what, in the astral
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world, would be the condition of a man who had been, let us say, avaricious or full of sensual desires. In the old days of the mysteries, when the leaders were adepts or pupils of adepts, these representations were some- thing like materializations. That is to say, the teacher, whoever he was, produced them by his own power out of astral or etheric matter, and created a real image for his pupils. But as time advanced, and later teachers were unable to bring about this phenomenon, they tried to represent these teachings in other ways — in some cases by what we should call acting. Members of the priesthood took the roles of different persons, while in other cases puppets were moved by machinery.
In addition to the teaching concerning the astral plane, instructions were also given in the same way as to the system of world-evolution. Among other things, pupils were taught how our solar system and its dif- ferent parts came into existence. You can easily see how that could be represented, first by materialized nebulae and globes, and how, when this materialization was no longer possible, the arrangement of different globes could be made clear by the use of what we now call an orrery — that is, a model of the solar system.
One of the most important things connected with the mysteries was that they explained the outer religion of the people in quite another way than that given to the general public. If you know anything about the religion of ancient Greece, you will understand that there were many things which badly needed some inner explanation, for certainly their religion does not ap- pear to be very elevated or very reasonable when looked at from the ordinary standpoint. It seems to have been the object that all the stories which made up the outer teaching, many of which seem very extraor- dinary, should be learnt by the people and retained in
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their minds — just a few simple, clear conceptions, and nothing more. But all earnestminded people joined the mysteries, and learnt there the real meaning of the stories, which gave the whole thing quite another aspect.
Let me give you an idea of what I mean, by two or three very simple and short examples. I told you that, for the most part, the aim of those lesser mysteries was to inform the pupils about the effects on the astral plane of a certain mode of life here on earth. You probably know the myth of Tantalus. He was a man condemned to suffer in hell eternal thirst, while water surrounded him on all sides, but receded from his lips as soon as he tried to drink. The meaning of this is not difficult to see, when once we know what the astral life is. Every one who leaves this world of ours full of sensual desires of any kind — as, for example, a drunkard, or some one who has given himself up to sensual living in the ordinary meaning of the word — such a man finds himself on the astral plane in the position of Tantalus.
He has built up for himself this terrible desire which governs his whole being. You know how powerful the desire can be in the case of a drunkard ; it conquers his feelings of honor, his love of his family, and all the better inclinations of his character. He will take money from his wife and children, will even take their clothes to sell them and obtain money to drink.
Remember that when a man dies he does not change at all. His desire is still as powerful as ever. But it is impossible to gratify it, because his physical body, through which only he could drink, is gone. There you have your Tantalus, as you see, full of that terrible desire, always finding that the gratification recedes as soon as he thinks he has it.
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Recall also the story of Tityus, the man who was tied to a rock, his liver being gnawed by vultures, and growing again as fast as it was eaten. There you have an illustration of the effect of yielding to desire: an image of the man who is always tortured by remorse for sins committed on earth.
As perhaps a higher example of the same we can take the story of Sisyphus. You know how he was con- demned always to roll a stone up a hill, and how, when he reached the top, the stone would always roll down again. That is the condition of an ambitious man after death, a man who has spent his life in making plans for selfish ends, for attaining glory or honor. In his case also death brings no change. He goes on making plans just as he did during life. He works out his plans, he executes them, as he thinks, till the point of culmina- tion, and then he suddenly perceives that he has no longer a physical body, and that all was but a dream. Then he begins again and again, till he has learnt at last that these desires are useless and that ambition must be killed. So Sisyphus goes on uselessly rolling the stone up the hill, till at last he learns not to roll it any more. To have learnt that is to have conquered that desire, and he will come back in his next life with- out it; without the desire, but of course not without the weakness of character which made that desire possible.
So you see that conditions that seem terrible are but the effects in the other world of a wrong life here on earth. That is nature's method of turning wrong into good. Man does suffer, but what he suffers is only the effect of his own action and nothing else ; it is not pun- ishment inflicted upon him from outside, but entirely of his own making. And that is not all. The suffering he has to bear is the only means by which his qualities
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can be directed in the right way for his evolution and progress in another life. This was a point much em- phasized in the teaching of the mysteries.
Now in regard to the greater mysteries. Those were celebrated principally in the great temple of Eleusis, not far from Athens. The initiates were named "epoptai," that is, "they whose eyes are opened." Their emblem was the golden fleece of Jason which is the symbol of the mind-body; for the yellow colour in the human aura indicates the intelligence, as every clair- voyant knows. In this degree of initiation the teach- ings of the former degree were continued. In the first, as you remember, were taught the effects in the astral world of various ways of living. In the greater mys- teries the pupil was shown what would be the effect in the heaven-world of a certain line of life, study and aspiration on earth. The whole history of the evolu- tion of the world and of man, in its deeper aspect, v/as expounded in the greater mysteries. The same method of representation as in the other case was used here ; although it was much more difficult to represent on the physical plane what belonged to the mental.
In each of these divisions of the mysteries, the lesser and the greater, there was an inner school which taught practical development to those who were seen to be ready for it. In the lesser mysteries theoretical knowledge about the astral plane was given, but the teachers carefully watched their pupils, and when they noticed one of whose character they felt sure, who showed that he was capable of psychic development, they invited him into the inner circle in which instruc- tion was given as to the method of using the astral body and consciously functioning in it. When such a man passed on to the greater mysteries he received not only the ordinary teaching about the conditions of the
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mental plane, but also private instruction as to the development of the mental body as a vehicle.
Those who were thus received, not only into the recognized stages of the mysteries but into their inner schools, were also taught at the end of their course that all of this was in truth but exoteric — that all which they had learnt, incalculable as had been its value, was really only a preparation for the true mysteries of initi- ation which would lead them to the feet of the Masters of Wisdom, and admit them to the Great Brotherhood which rules the world.
I may explain still further the meaning of some of those symbols which were used in connection with the mysteries. First, we will take what was called the thyrsus — that is, a staff with a pine-cone on its top. In India the same symbol is found, but instead of the staff a stick of bamboo with seven knots is used. In some modifications of the mysteries, a hollow iron rod, said to contain fire, was used instead of the thyrsus. Here again it is not difficult for the student of occultism to see the meaning. The staff or the stick with seven knots represents the spinal cord, with its seven centres, of which we read in the Hindu books. The hidden fire is the serpent-fire, kundalini, of which you may read in The Secret Doctrine. But the thyrsus was not only a symbol ; it was also an object of practical use. It was a very strong magnetic instrument, used by initiates to free the astral body from the physical when they passed in full consciousness to this higher life. The priest who had magnetized it laid it against the spinal cord of the candidate and gave him in that way some of his own magnetism, to help him in that difficult life and in the efforts which lay before him. In connection with these mysteries, a certain set of objects called the toys of Bacchus are spoken of. When you go over those
THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES 85
lists of the toys of Bacchus you will find them very remarkable.
Whilst the child Bacchus (the Logos) plays with his toys he is seized by the Titans and torn to pieces. Later these pieces are put together and built into a whole. You will understand that this, however clumsy it may seem to us, is without doubt an allegory, which repre- sents the descending of the One to become the many, and the re-union of the many in the One, through suf- fering and sacrifice. What, then, are the toys of the child Bacchus when he falls into matter and becomes the many? In the first place we find him playing with dice. Those dice are not common dice, but the five platonic solids; a set of five regular figures, the only regular polygons possible in geometry. They are given in a fixed series, and this series agrees with the differ- ent planes of the solar system. Each of them indicates, not the form of the atoms of the different planes, but the lines along which the power works which surrounds those atoms. These polygons are the tetrahedron, the cube, the octohedron, the dodecahedron, and the icosa- hedron. If we put the point at one end and the sphere at the other we get a set of seven figures, corresponding to the number of planes of our solar system.
You know that in some of the older schools of phi- losophy it was said : "No one can enter who does not know mathematics." What do you think is meant by that? Not what we now call mathematics, but the mathematics which embraced the knowledge of the higher planes, of their mutual relations and the way in which the whole is built by the will of God. Plato said, "God geometrizes," and it is perfectly true. Those forms are not conceptions of the human brain ; they are truths of the higher planes. We have formed the habit of studying the books of Euclid, but we study them now
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for themselves, and not as a guide to something higher. The old philosophers pondered upon them because they led to the understanding of the true science of life. We have lost sight of the true teaching, and grasp in many- cases only the lifeless form.
Another toy with which Bacchus played was a top, the symbol of the whirling atom of which you will find a picture in Occult Chemistry. He also plays with a ball which represents the earth, that particular part of the planetary chain to which the thought of the Logos is specially directed at the moment. Also he plays with a mirror. The mirror has always been a symbol of astral light, in which the archetypal ideas are reflected and then materialized. So you see that each of those toys indicates an essential part in the evolution of a solar system.
A few words may be said about the way in which people were prepared for the study of those mysteries by the different schools ; for instance, the Pythagorean school, to which I belonged. In the Pythagorean schools, the pupils were divided into three classes. The first was called that of the akoustikoi or hearers. This means that they were learners, but it is also true that one of the rules was that they were to keep absolutely silent for two years.
I think this rule would be regarded as a serious drawback by many who join our Society at the present time, but in those olden times a great many people, not only men but women too, submitted to this stipula- tion. The rule had also another meaning, but it is a fact that during two years the members of the first class were compelled to keep silence. The other mean- ing was that during all the time, however long, that a man stayed in this class of the akoustikoi, he might not give out any teaching, but continued to learn. I have
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wished that we had some such arrangement in the Theosophical Society, for it sometimes happens that members who do not yet know much themselves want to teach others, and the teaching is not always recog- nizable as Theosophy.
The second class of Pythagoreans was called that of the mathematikoi. They passed their time in studying geometry, numbers and music. They brought these different subjects into relation to one another and worked out the relations between colour and sound, which are very remarkable.
Let us take an example, which shows how our world is a coherent whole and how we can take facts from dif- ferent parts which do not seem to have any connection whatever, and bring them into relation with each other. I just spoke about the five platonic polygons. Every one who knows anything about music knows that there is a fixed proportion between the length of the strings which produce certain tones. You know that you can tune a piano according to a certain system of fifths, and you can express the relation of the different tones to one another by the number of vibrations of each tone ; so you can express an harmonious chord in mathemat- ical numbers. This was first discovered simply by experiment; later the mathematicians found out what the proportions should be, and again by experiment they were found to be exact. But the peculiarity is that the set of numbers which produces an harmonious chord have the same relation to one another as that which exists between certain parts of these platonic solids. I believe that this point was worked out some time ago in an article in the Theosophical Review by one of the English cathedral organists.
It is very remarkable that our scale, so different from the old Greek scale, which consisted of five tones, can
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still be deduced from the proportion of those five pla- tonic figures, which were studied some thousands of years ago in Greece. One is apt to think that there cannot be much relation between mathematics and music, but you see that they are both parts of one great whole.
The third class of the Pythagorean school was formed of the physikoi — those who studied physics, the inner connection between phenomena, world-building and metaphysics. They learnt the truth about man and nature and, as far as they could learn it, about Him who made both.
There is still one point in the mysteries which we should not forget to consider — the life of the disciples. A life of perfect purity was strictly required. It is a remarkable coincidence that the life in the Pythagorean school is divided into five periods, almost similar to the five steps of the preparatory path of the Hindus, as described by me in Invisible Helpers, and by Mrs. Besant in The Path of Discipleship. Almost all the forms and symbols of the present Christian religion are derived from the Egyptian mysteries. All the symbol- ism, for example, that is related to the Latin cross, and to the descent and sacrifice of the Logos, is taken from the Egyptian mysteries. I have written about this in The Christian Creed.
Though the mysteries of Greece and Rome, of Egypt and Chaldaea, are long ago defunct, the world has never been left without avenues of approach to the inner shrine. Even in the gross darkness of the middle ages the Rosicrucians and some other secret societies were ready to teach the truth to those who were ready to learn; and now in these modern days of hurry and materialism the Theosophical Society still upholds the banner of true knowledge, and acts as a gateway by
THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES 89
means of which those who are really in earnest may reach the feet of the Masters of the Wisdom. We have our grades in the Esoteric Section, just as the mys- teries had ; and behind us, as behind them, stand always the officials of the Great White Brotherhood, who keep in their hands the key to the true initiations.
You must also remember that many things given in those old days only under the seal of secrecy are now made public, and through our Society are given to the world. Many of the greatest and noblest characters of history have passed years in study and work to try to find what is now given us so easily and simply in a few books. Of us is perfectly true what is said in the Bible : "Many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them." (Luke, x. 24.) Because this honour is reserved for us and this opportunity is given us, it seems to me that a great responsibility rests upon us, and that we should try to be worthy of the gift. It is good karma which allows this possibility to open before us. If we let it pass, we shall not deserve to have an- other offered us for thousands of years. If you knew, as I know, with what difficulties we had to contend in former days to learn all those things which are laid before us now, perhaps you would appreciate more the opportunity offered you. Let us try to make use of it to the utmost of our power, and show ourselves worthy of the privilege given us by Theosophy.
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SECOND SECTION
The Logos
E have in the Logos of our solar system as near an approach to a personal (or rather, perhaps, individual) God as any reasonable man can desire, for of Him is true every- thing good that has ever been predicated of a personal deity. We cannot ascribe to Him partiality, injustice, jealousy, cruelty; those who desire these attributes in their deity must go elsewhere. But so far as His sys- tem is concerned He possesses omniscience, omnipres- ence, omnipotence ; the love, the power, the wisdom, the glory, all are there in fullest measure. Yet He is a mighty Individual — a trinity in unity, and God in very truth, though removed by we know not how many stages from the Absolute, the Unknowable before which even solar systems are but as specks of cosmic dust. I do not think that we can image Him at all. The sun is His chief manifestation on the physical plane, and that may help us a little to realize some of His qualities, and to see how everything comes from Him. The sun may be considered as a sort of force-centre in Him, corresponding to the heart of man, the outer manifesta- tion of the principal centre in His body.
Although the whole solar system is His physical body, yet His activities outside of it are enormously greater than those within it. I have myself preferred not even to try to make any image of Him, but simply
93
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to contemplate Him as pervading all things, so that even I myself am also He, so that all other men too are He, and in truth there is nothing but God. Yet at the same time, although this that we can see is a manifesta- tion of Him, this solar system that seems so stupendous to us is to Him but a little thing, for, though He is all this, yet outside it and above it all He exists in a glory and a splendour of which we know nothing as yet. Thus though we agree with the pantheist that all is God, we yet go very much further than he does, because we realize that He has a far greater existence above and beyond His universe. "Having pervaded this whole universe with one fragment of Myself, I remain." (Bhagavad Gita, x. 42.)
I do not think that we can find any form of words that will at all express the method of our union with Him. We may in one sense be cells in his Body, but we are certainly very much more than that, for His life and power are manifested through us in a way which is out of all proportion to any such manifestation of our spiritual life as could be supposed to be given through the cells of our bodies. In His manifestation on the lowest cosmic plane we may take it that His first aspect is on the highest level, the second on that below it, and the third in the higher part of the nirvanic plane, so that when an adept gradually raises his con- sciousness plane by plane as he developes, he comes first to the third aspect and realizes his unity with that, moving on only after long intervals to full union with the second and the first.
I myself who speak to you have once seen Him in a form which is not the form of His system. This is something which utterly transcends all ordinary expe- rience, which has nothing to do with any of the lower planes. The thing became possible for me only through
THE LOGOS 95
a very daring experiment — the utter blending for a moment of two distinct rays or types, so that by means of this blending a level could for a moment be touched enormously higher than any to which either of the egos concerned could have attained alone. He exists far above His system ; He sits upon it as on a lotus throne. He is as it were the apotheosis of humanity, yet infi- nitely greater than humanity. We might think of the Augoeides carried up higher and higher, and to infin- ity. I do not know whether that form is permanent or whether it can be seen at a certain level only — who shall say? But that this thing is a tremendous reality — that I know; and, once seen, such a manifestation can never be forgotten.
One little touch of higher experience I may mention, though it is one which is exceedingly difficult to de- scribe adequately. When a man raises his conscious- ness to the highest subdivision of his causal body, and focuses it exclusively in the atomic matter of the men- tal plane, he has before him three possibilities of mov- ing that consciousness, which correspond to some extent with the three dimensions of space. Obviously a way is open to him to move it downwards into the second subplane of the mental, or upward into the lowest sub- plane of the buddhic, if he has developed that suffi- ciently to be able to utilize it as vehicle.
A second line of movement open to him is the short cut which exists from the atomic subdivision of one plane to the corresponding atomic subdivisions of the planes above and below, so that without touching any intermediate sub-plane the consciousness may pass from that atomic mental downwards to the atomic astral or upwards to the atomic buddhic, again of course supposing the development of this latter to be already achieved. In order to image to oneself this
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short cut, one may think of the atomic subplanes as being side by side along a rod, the other sub-divisions of each plane hanging from the rod in loops, as though a piece of string were wound loosely round the rod. Obviously then to pass from one atomic sub-division to another one could move by the short cut straight along the rod, or down and up again through the hanging loop of string which symbolizes the lower sub-planes. But there is yet a third possibility — a possibility not so much yet of movement along another line at right angles to both of these others, but rather a possibility of looking up such a line — looking up as a man at the bottom of a well might look up at a star in the sky above him.
For there is a direct line of communication between the atomic sub-plane of the mental in this lowest cos- mic plane and the corresponding atomic mental in the cosmic plane. We are infinitely far as yet from being able to climb upwards by that line, but once at least the experience came of being able to look up it for a moment. What is seen then it is hopeless to try to describe, for no human words can give the least idea of it ; but at least this much emerges, with a certitude that can never be shaken, that what we have hitherto sup- posed to be our consciousness, our intellect, is simply not ours at all, but His; not even a reflection of His, but literally and truly a part of His consciousness, a part of His intellect. Incomprehensible, yet literally true ! It is a commonplace of our meditation to say, "I am that Self ; that Self am I," but to see it, to know it, to feel it, to realize it in this way, is something very different from that verbal recitation.
From Him comes forth all life in the successive out- pourings which are described in our books — the first outpouring from His third aspect, which gives to pre-
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viously existing atoms the power to aggregate them- selves into the chemical elements — the action which is described in the Christian Scriptures as the spirit of God moving over the waters of space. When, at a later stage, the kingdoms of nature are definitely estab- lished, there comes the second outpouring, from His second aspect, which forms group-souls for the min- erals, the plants, the animals, and this is the descent of the Christ principle into matter, which alone renders possible our very existence. But when we think of the human kingdom we remember that the ego itself is a manifestation of the third outpouring which comes from His first aspect, the eternal and all-loving Father. Every fixed star is a sun like our own, and each one is a partial expression of a Logos.
Buddhism
In thinking of the Lord Buddha we must not forget that He is very much more than merely the founder of a religion. He is a great official of the Occult Hier- archy, the greatest of all save one, and the founder in previous incarnations of many religions before this one which now bears His title. For He was the Vyasa who has done so much for the Indian religion; He was Hermes, the great founder of the Egyptian mysteries ; He was the original Zoroaster, from whom came the sun and fire worship; and he was also Orpheus, the great bard of the Greeks.
In this last of His many births, when He came as the Lord Gautama, it does not appear that He had origi- nally any intention of founding a new religion. He
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appeared simply as a reformer of Hinduism — a faith which was already of hoary antiquity, and had therefore departed much from its original form, as all religions have. It had become hardened in many ways, and appears to have been very far less elastic even than it is now. Even now we all know how strictly drawn are the lines between the castes, what an iron rigidity there is as to forms and ceremonies. We know that even now no man can be converted to Hinduism; the only way to enter that faith is to be born into it.
Imagine a condition in which all this was even far more rigid, in which the feeling was much more in- tense, in which all the ideas of life had been very much changed from what they were in the days of the orig- inal Aryan immigrants, when it was a religion full of joy, and holding out hope for everybody. A little be- fore the time of the Buddha the general opinion seems to have been that practically no one but a brahman had any chance of salvation at all. Now as the num- ber of the brahmans was always small, and even now is only something like thirteen millions out of the three hundred million inhabitants of India, it was clearly not a very hopeful religion for the majority of the people, since it indicated to them that they had to work on through very many lives, until they could earn ad- mission into the small and exclusive brahman caste, before they could possibly escape from the wheel of birth and death.
Then came Lord Buddha, and by His teaching flung open wide the gates of the sweet law of justice, for He taught that men had departed entirely from the old form of religion. He repeatedly asserted that a man who, though born a brahman, did not live the life which a brahman should, was neither worthy of respect nor in the way of salvation, and that a man of any other
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caste who did live the true brahman life, should be treated as a brahman, and had in every way the same possibilities before him as though he had been born into the sacred caste.
Naturally enough in the face of teachings which placed all hope of final salvation so indefinitely far away in the future, the ordinary man of the world had become hopeless and consequently careless ; on the other hand, the austerity of the brahman, who spent the whole of his life in ceremonies and in meditation, was not to their taste, and indeed was obviously im- possible for them. But the Buddha preached to them what He called the middle way; He told them that although the life of austerity and of entire devotion to religion was not for them, there was no reason why, because of that, they should relapse into carelessness and evil living. He showed them that a higher life is possible for the man still in the world, and that, though they might not be able to devote themselves to meta- physics and to hairsplitting arguments, they could still obtain sufficient grasp of the great facts of evolution to form a satisfactory guide to them in their lives.
He declared that extremes in either direction are equally irrational ; that on the one hand the life of the ordinary man of the world, wrapped up entirely in his business, pursuing dreams of wealth and power, is foolish and defective because it leaves out of account all that is really worthy of consideration ; but that on the other hand the extreme asceticism that teaches each man to turn his back upon the world altogether, and to devote himself exclusively and selfishly to the endeavour to shut himself away from it and escape from it, is also foolish. He held that the middle path of truth and beauty is the best and safest, and that while certainly the life devoted entirely to spirituality
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is the highest of all for those who are ready for it, there is also a good and true and spiritual life possible for the man who yet holds his place and does his work in the world.
He based His doctrines solely on reason and com- mon-sense; He asked no man to believe anything blindly, but rather told him to open his eyes and look around him. He declared that in spite of all the sor- row and misery of the world, the great scheme of which man is a part is a scheme of eternal justice, and that the law under which we are living is a good law, and needs only that we should understand it and adapt our- selves to it. He taught that all life is suffering, but that man causes his own trouble for himself, because he yields himself perpetually to desire for that which he has not, and He said that happiness and content- ment can be gained better by limiting desires than by increasing possessions.
To this end He tabulated His teaching in the most marvellous manner, arranging everything under cer- tain headings which could be readily memorized. This constitutes in reality a carefully graded system of mnemonics. It is so simple in its broad outline that any child can remember and understand its four noble truths, its noble eightfold path, and the principles of life which they suggest ; yet it is carried out so elabor- ately that it constitutes a system of philosophy which the wisest man may study all his life through, and yet find in it ever more and more light upon the problems of life.
He analyzed everything to an almost incredible ex- tent, as may be seen by a study of the twelve nidanas, or by His enumeration of the steps which intervene between thought and action. Each of His four noble truths is represented by a single word, and yet to any
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one who has ever heard the exposition of the system each of those words inevitably calls up a great range of ideas. The same thing is true of the words signi- fying the steps of the noble eightfold path, and of the "great perfections" which are spoken of in The Voice of the Silence. All of these perfections are simply wisdom, power and love appearing in different forms. They are sometimes reckoned as six, but more com- monly as ten. The six are given as perfect charity, perfect morality, perfect patience, perfect energy, per- fect truth and perfect wisdom ; and the other four which are sometimes added are perfect resignation, perfect resolution, perfect kindness and perfect abne- gation.
The religion of Buddhism has practically disap- peared from India, yet it has left behind it lasting results, and the country bears everywhere the strong impress of His teachings. Before His coming blood- sacrifices appear to have been universal ; even now they still exist, but are comparatively rare, for He taught that such things were not pleasing to any noble diety, but that the Gods desired rather the sacrifice of a holy life.
In looking back upon the record of those times we see that He preached mostly in the open air, and nearly always sitting at the foot of a tree, with the listeners sitting on the ground about Him, or standing leaning against the trees, men and women intermingling, and little children running about and playing upon the out- skirts of the crowd. The great teacher had a most wonderful voice, gloriously full and sonorous, and a personality which instantly commanded the attention of all who heard Him, and invariably won their hearts, even in the rare cases where they did not agree with what he said. The audiences were stirred up to great
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religious fervor ; we find them constantly raising cries of "Sadhu, Sadhu," by way of applause, when any- thing was said which especially moved them, and at the same time raising their joined hands in an attitude of salutation.
Part at least of this influence was due to the tremen- dously strong vibrations of His aura, which was of very great size, so that the audience were actually sit- ting within it and being attuned to it while they lis- tened to His discourse. Its magnetic effect was al- most indescribable, and while His hearers were within its influence even the most stupid of them could under- stand to the full whatever He said, though often after- wards when they had passed away from that influ- ence they found it difficult to comprehend it at all in the same way. To this marvellous influence also is due the phenomenon so often described in the Buddhist books — the attainment of the arhat level by such large numbers of His hearers. It is quite a common thing to read in the accounts given in the Buddhist scrip- tures that after a sermon of the Buddha hundreds of men, even thousands, reached the arhat level. Know- ing what a very high degree of attainment this means, this seemed to us, when we read it, almost incredible, and we supposed it to be simply a case of oriental ex- aggeration; but later and closer study has shown us that the accounts are actually true. So remarkable a result seemed to call for further investigation into its causes, and we found that in order to understand all this it was necessary to take into account not this one life only, but the work of many previous incarna- tions.
We must remember that the Lord Gautama is the Buddha of the fourth root-race, even though this last incarnation of His was taken in the fifth. He had been
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born many times in various Atlantean races, and al- ways as a great teacher. In each of those lives He had drawn around Him many pupils, who had grad- ually been raised to higher levels of thought and of life, and when He came in India for this last culmi- nating birth He arranged that all those whom at many different times and in many different lands He had in- fluenced should be brought together into incarnation at the same time. Thus His audiences were to a large extent composed of fully prepared and, as it were, highly specialized souls, and when these came under the influence of the extraordinarily powerful mag- netism of a Buddha, they understood and followed every word which He said, and the action upon them as egos was of the most wonderfully stimulating na- ture. Therefore it was that they so readily responded ; therefore it was that so large a number of them could be and were raised so rapidly to such dizzy heights.
In the third volume of The Secret Doctrine we shall find an exceedingly interesting and suggestive section called The Mystery of Buddha, which refers to the fact that the Buddha prepared His own inner bodies of very high grades of matter, with the fullest develop- ment of the spirillae. His buddhic, causal and mental bodies are kept together for other Great Ones to use, because of the exceeding difficulty of producing others equal to them. The Christ used them along with the physical body of Jesus, while the latter waited on higher planes in his own vehicles. Shankaracharya also used these "remains." Hence arose the incorrect idea that He was a reincarnation of the Buddha. The coming Christ will also use these vehicles, wedding them to another physical body which is even now be- ing prepared for Him.
Buddhism still claims a larger number of adherents
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than any other religion in the world, and is a living influence in the lives of millions of our fellow-men. It would be quite unfair to judge it by what is written about it by European orientalists. When I was in Ceylon and Burma I compared these accounts with the interpretation given to the doctrines by the liv- ing followers of His religion. Learned monks in these countries approach the subject with an accuracy of knowledge at least equal to that of the most advanced orientalists, but their interpretation of the doctrines is very far less wooden and lifeless. By far the best