Leave that aside for a moment, and take another great type that shines

out. There is no name for the next type I am just thinking of except

in Eastern lands, where they call him “The Enlightened,” the Buddha.

In the West that name is constantly connected with the last of those

manifestations, with the great Being born into the world nearly six

hundred years before the Christian era. He is called the Buddha. But

among the people of the faith that He gave to the world the belief is

that there were many before Him, that there shall be many after Him; that

He is only one among the great host of revealers of the divine, and that

one of those is born in every world, in every Root Race. So that in every

world there are seven of such Beings, one manifesting in every Race; but

when He has appeared, then He passes away from earth, having finished

even the superhuman evolution, and passes on, as those that I mentioned

passed in other worlds, in other times, in order to unite Himself as

the Son with the Eternal Father, so that in a world later than our own

such a one may return as an Avatāra, one who descends. But note that the

Buddha, mighty as He was, climbed to His greatness through the humanity

of our own globe. Climbing step by step up the long ladder of human life,

of superhuman unfolding, He touched the last rung of that ladder when

He was born as Gautama into India some twenty-five centuries ago, and

then, having finished His work, passed onward into what is there called

Nirvāna, the highest condition available for the superhuman, that of

union with the divine, though without loss of the centre of which I spoke.

Considering that great Teacher, let us ask what He was before He became

the Buddha, and then passed away from earth, His teaching work being

over. Before He took that last and greatest of the Initiations along the

line He followed, He had manifested several times before on earth, and

manifested in the same great Root Race, the Aryan Race, to which we all

and so many others belong. For before that last step was taken there was

another high office that He filled for thousands and tens of thousands

of years. I do not want in any way to confuse you with unfamiliar names,

and yet it is a little difficult to avoid them, because I want a name

that stretches back to manifestation after manifestation; and our own

fifth sub-race, the Teutonic, has been on earth so brief a time, living

in the western world, that it has not yet created the general name which

we can use with regard to these past manifestations. The eastern name

is a word which translated means “the Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva;

the name matters little provided that you take it for the moment that

it signifies an office, and the office is that of the Supreme Teacher,

not only teacher of men, but teacher, as they would say, of Gods, as

you would say, of Angels and Archangels. For you must remember that the

Shining Ones of the East are the same as those to whom over here you

give the names of Angels and Archangels. The East calls them by a name

which merely means “the shining”; and though it is often translated over

here as “God,” much confusion of thought thereby is made as regards the

great eastern faiths. For they, like Christianity, proclaim the unity of

God, the one all-pervading life; and those whom they call the Shining

Ones, the Devas, are but manifestations of that light, the Angels and

Archangels of Christianity or of Islām. And He who is the Supreme Teacher

has for His pupils Archangels and Angels as well as men; He is the one

who is the Teacher of all, whether in the body of flesh or outside of it

as spiritual intelligences; there is no other Teacher in earth or heaven

above that mightiest One who fills this supreme office.

Now, such a Teacher, the Supreme Teacher of the worlds, makes Himself

manifest as man at the beginning of every sub-race. I have talked to you

so much of Races and sub-races that the terms will not be unfamiliar;

and if I remind you that we are all of one great Root Race, the Aryan,

whether you take the first sub-race in India; or the second along

the basin of the Mediterranean in the ancient days; or the third in

ancient Persia; or the fourth giving birth to the ancient Greeks and the

Romans, and then spreading westwards through Spain, France, Britain,

up to the North of Scotland, and then across to Ireland, the mighty

Keltic sub-race; or the fifth, the Teutonic, now peopling Germany,

Britain, America, and their offshoots—if you think of those, the one

Race including all the divisions, you will be able readily enough to

follow the manifestations of the Supreme Teacher. Just as in the larger

cycles there are manifestations of great Beings, so has every successive

sub-race the appearance of this great Teacher as man, to give it the

religion under which the civilisation shall develop, to give it the

benediction which starts it on its evolution in the world.

Looking backwards to the sub-races that preceded the fifth, the Teutonic,

to which the greater part of you who are present here belong, we can mark

in each the appearance of the Supreme Teacher, taking a different name,

but ever the same immortal Individuality under the veil of that name.

One name that is known to all of you who are students of the past was

the name He took when He led forth from Central Asia the second of the

great emigrations that passed westward, which āryanised large numbers of

the people dwelling in Arabia, in Northern Africa, in the whole great

basin of the Mediterranean. He then bore the name of Hermes, a name

familiar to every student of antiquity, especially to the students of

Egyptian thought, for it was largely in relation to that that this mighty

manifestation was made, and in much of the so-called Hermetic literature

the name of Hermes, the Thrice Greatest, is preserved. It was a name

first worn in Lemuria, but in this case was used by the Supreme Teacher

manifesting for the second sub-race.

Let me pause a moment to say one word of explanation, to meet a

difficulty that may readily rise in the minds of the more scholarly

amongst you who have looked back to these past tales. You find the same

name appearing from time to time along the same tradition. That has ever

been so in the past. The name of the great teacher himself has been

taken up by his successors, who renewed his teaching and carried on the

tradition that he left; and so in the vast spaces of time that have

elapsed since that Hermes first appeared in the second root-race of the

Aryans, others took up the tradition, carried on the teaching, and the

name was ever repeated. It is the eastern way. No disciple dreams of

teaching there under his own name; it is under the name of his Master

that he gives his wisdom to the world; and that not to conceal, but

because it is held that to the teacher the credit belongs of that which

the pupil may be able to expound, and so, in humility, in veneration, in

gratitude to the mightiest, those who follow Him write under the name

that they worship, and so hand on His wisdom, although in generations

much later than Himself. It causes much of confusion, much of difficulty

when the people with the western historical sense go turning over these

ancient writings and applying their own canons of interpretation to

people who were ancient long before those canons were invented. What is

called the historical sense is a very different thing in the East from

that in the West. Historical sense here means a sequence of names, dates,

persons, and that is what is regarded as important; in the East it means

the God unfolding in the various types of humanity that may appear; and

that which they are interested in is not a special individual who has

written this, that, or the other, but the teaching, the tradition, handed

on from age to age, and ever marked out from the first Revealer, the name

of Him who gave the knowledge to mankind. I do not want to dispute which

is the better way. I only mark the difference that you may realise that

in the likeness of the name there is no attempt to deceive the reader,

but only to mark the line of the tradition.

In the second sub-race, then, appeared Hermes. Ages rolled on. The third

sub-race was to be born; the emigration to found that sub-race rolled

westwards into Persia. Once more the “Wisdom-Truth” led the emigration.

To that people he was known as Zarathustra, more often called among us

Zoroaster. Fourteen of those are known in the old story of Persia, but

the first, the eldest of them all, He alone was that one Supreme Teacher,

coming down to His disciples, building the policy of Persia, handing down

to those who came after Him the tradition that went by His name; and

every great high-priest of that religion worthy to bear the mantle of the

great One, he also is known in history as Zoroaster; and, as I have just

said, some fourteen of those are named.

The time came for the fourth sub-race, the Keltic; the same great Being

came forth again under another name, the name known to every student

of Greek thought as that of Orpheus. The Orphic Mysteries, the Orphic

tradition—these are phrases familiar to every student of the mighty past

of Greece. But the scholars, as a rule, with regard to him will say,

as was said in regard to Hermes: This is not an individual; it is only

a name for a succession of individuals. There is a truth in that, for

there was such a succession. The blunder lies in not realising that such

a succession must have an originator, and that the first and mightiest

of the teachers, to whom everything ran back, is not necessarily a myth

merely because He is so great. Those who started the Sun Myth have done

a great deal of harm in clouding the story of the past, and it is only

as the buried remains of that past are brought up and studied by the

scholars of the time that people find that many of the so-called Sun

Myths were mighty Teachers and mighty Kings in the childhood of our race.

That has become more and more palpable as the excavations go into deeper

and deeper strata, uncover more and more ancient civilisations; so that

those who have been made into myths are now taking on again a semblance

of humanity, but humanity so great, so divine, that it seems scarcely

possible to believe that such Beings lived in the guise of men on earth.

But you can trace down that Orphic tradition through all that was

mightiest and most beautiful in Greece; you can trace in by the Mysteries

I mentioned, by the names of the great Greeks who declared that they took

their inspiration from that tradition. So we come to the last of the

incarnations of that great Being until He appeared as Gautama, became the

Buddha, passed away as teacher from the worlds.

Now I have mentioned those mighty ones of the past because without that

it might seem only a dream when I speak of such possibilities in modern

times as well. I have traced the four latest appearances of Him who is

the “Wisdom-Truth,” the last of the four manifestations before, appearing

to take His last Initiation as the Buddha, He passed away and became the

Son united with the Father, no longer Teacher, no longer Guide of our

humanity. But there is never a break in the great succession; in that

mighty succession of religious Teachers the chair of the Teacher never

remains unfilled; there is ever a wise one to fill it, the wisest who is

living upon earth; and when one lays down the sceptre of the Teacher,

which is the symbol of His rule, another is waiting by the steps of the

Chair of Wisdom to take that seat of Supreme Teacher as His predecessor

passes away from earth. For never is the world left without its Teacher;

never is mankind left orphaned, without the mighty One to guard and save;

as one passes away, His function over, another steps in to fill the seat

and carry on the teaching of mankind.

When Gautama was initiated as the Buddha, another then became what I

have called the “Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva. His first manifestation

upon earth was at the beginning of the next sub-race. That you will very

readily see, and for that reason I have been tracing down those names,

sub-race after sub-race, that you might realise the relation between the

new departure of mankind and the manifestation of the Supreme Teacher. So

when the fifth sub-race was being born, when there was the slow growth

of the Teuton in the forests of Germany, when the germs, the seeds of

that new sub-race were being sown over Northern Europe, then was made

manifest again the Supreme Teacher, and He came to the world once more

to found a new religion, once more to bless a dawning civilisation. The

religion that He founded, the civilisation that He blessed, gave to him

the Greek name, the Christ. Let us pause for a moment on that western

name—name, again, of an office. For it was not the name of the Buddha

that He wore; it was not the name of an individual. As we look at the

dominant Greek thought of the time we find that that thought embodied its

highest triumph in a certain institution known as the Mysteries. There

were Mysteries in ancient Egypt, in ancient Persia, in ancient India, in

all the countries of that elder past; and among the Greeks also there

were Mysteries—the Orphic Mysteries, to which I alluded, and many others

known to the students of Grecian history under many names of Grecian Gods

and Goddesses, as we call them, of the Teachers of the past. In those

Mysteries there was a certain grade marked with the name Christos; these

Mysteries the reflexion on our earth and in our poor worldly mirror of

the great Initiations that belong to the Occult Hierarchy that guides the

religious destinies of men, a shadow of those supreme Initiations thrown

down upon the mirror of earth for the helping of ordinary humanity. This

kind of reflexion is indicated, for instance, in the Christian Testament

when it is said that Moses, the great leader of the Jews, made all things

according to the pattern shown to him in the mount—a well-known ancient

phrase, the Mount of Initiation—an indication to the people who followed

him as lawgiver that the temple which he outlined, which for a time

was seen in the tabernacle that accompanied the Jews in the wilderness,

and then received its more gorgeous presentment in the Temple of King

Solomon, was formed after the pattern of the heavenly things. So the

heavenly and the earthly are thus related as object and image, and the

object, which is the great Initiations of the Hierarchy, was imaged here

in the civilisations of the past in the Mysteries, by which, by many

ordeals and in many difficult ways of training and of discipline, the

best men and women of the older civilisations were guided upwards from

the human to the superhuman path. In those Mysteries there was this

grade, the Christos, the anointed one. It was the grade of the Initiate

who had triumphed over suffering, the grade of the Initiate who had

carried the cross, the grade of the Initiate who was to know no more

compulsory death or compulsory birth, that which marked him as having

crossed the threshold of the superhuman, and being ready to enter on that

higher grade of manifested life. Natural, inevitable, that in a time

when Greek thought was marking the highest point of human attainment and

dominating Europe, the Greek name should be taken to describe the mighty

One revealed as Teacher upon earth. What nobler name could be chosen,

what title more significant, what symbol more instructive, than to call

the teacher who appeared and was slain by the name of the Christ?

In the early days of Christianity, as most of you probably know, a

difference, which is being revived in our own day, was drawn between

Jesus the Hebrew and Christ the anointed Teacher. Look back to all

those schools of philosophic and learned teachers in the early days of

Christianity, who, when ignorance triumphed after the fall of Rome and

Constantinople, were branded with the name of heretics—those who were

called the Gnostics, the knowers. A significant name. If you turn over

the pages of Origen, one of the greatest teachers, remember, in the early

Church, you will find many passages in his exposition of Christianity in

which he says that it is necessary for the Christian Church to have in it

many Gnostics, who should serve as the foundation on which it should be

built, as the pillars on which it should be reared. He used the word in

the sense of knowers, not alluding to the many schools classed together

under that name. In a famous passage Origen points out that, while it is

true that Christianity is for the unlearned, while he says it is medicine

for the sinner, it is not out of the sinners and the unlearned that the

great Christian Church could be builded; and he goes on to say that,

while that is true, and there is medicine for the sinner, the Church

must be buttressed by the Gnostic, not by the sinner, by those who know,

not by those who are ignorant. That was well provided for in those early

centuries of Christendom, for they also had their Mysteries, just as

had the older religions around them. Turn over the pages of those early

Christian bishops and doctors of the Church, the pages of S. Clement of

Alexandria—canonised as saint for his learning and his holiness—turn over

almost any of the pages you will of those earlier Christian teachers,

who learned from the lips of those who had received their teaching again

from the lips of the followers of the Christ Himself, and you will

find continual references to the Mysteries of Jesus. You will find the

rules laid down by which alone admission to those Mysteries could be

won; you will read in the pages of S. Clement the proclamation of the

hierophant to whom the candidates presented themselves, he who had in

his hands the key of that kingdom of heaven, and you will find that as

they stood before him he told them that only those who for a long time

had been conscious of no transgression might come and learn the teaching

which Jesus gave secretly to His disciples. Those were the old words of

challenge ere the door of that kingdom of heaven was flung open, and only

to such men and women was admission to the Mysteries possible. There

they learned the inner secret teachings, those that are indicated in the

Gospel story; for you remember how it was written of the Christ: “For

without a parable spake He not unto them”; you remember how, when the

disciples asked for explanation, His answer was: “To you it is given to

know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to others in parables.” You

may remember, again, how it was said that when His disciples were with

Him in the house, then He told them things which to the multitude without

He refused to reveal; and you may remember the further promise that He

left, when He knew that His own earthly life was drawing to a close:

“I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now.” The

Christian tradition of the Mysteries declared that those many things were

told afterwards, when the disciples were more ready to receive, when the

pupils were fitter to be taught. Origen tells us that all those teachings

were kept in the Christian Mysteries, and made the secret teachings of

the Church, given only to those who were worthy.

In those days when many knew, when many understood, a distinction was

drawn between Jesus and Christ. I alluded to it, you remember, in the

first of this course of lectures; and I did so deliberately, intending

to return to it when, having dealt with the many intermediate questions,

I should arrive at the lecture on the Coming Christ. For there was a

difference between the human body of the mighty disciple Jesus, born in

Bethlehem, and the divine Power that came down upon that body at the

point of time marked as the Baptism, when it is written, the Spirit of

God came down upon Him and abode with Him; there you have marked the

Coming of the Christ, the consecration of the Supreme Teacher. That

distinction you find recognised in the Epistles, though no attention is

drawn to it further in the Gospels after that startling and suggestive

statement; but if you take the Pauline epistles you find yourself in

quite a different atmosphere from that of the history as told in the

Gospels; you find there the name of Christ in a new meaning, a mystical

meaning of profoundest import; you find S. Paul declaring that he does

not ask to know Him after the flesh, it is the inner Christ he seeks;

you find him saying of that mystic Christ that He has to be born in the

believer—a statement that could never have been made of the physical body

of Jesus. You find him declaring that that mystic birth of the Christ in

human souls is to be followed by a growth of the mystic Christ within

the believer, until at last he has reached the measure of the stature

of the fulness of the Christ. That is the mystic Christian life, the

Christ born in the soul, unfolding His divine powers as the Christian

grows in wisdom and in love, showing Himself more and more manifest

as the human life unfolds to the divine, until the perfect Christ is

manifest and the Son of God is seen again on earth. But that old mystical

idea slipped out of the Church teachings, and only remained in the

Testament, marked but not understood. And so He who was the inspiring

Spirit, the Supreme Teacher, the all-pervading life of His Church, became

the outside Saviour, who by a physical sacrifice was said to have made

atonement between God and man; and you had a vicarious atonement, a

legal substitution, instead of that identity of nature which made the

Christ and the believer one. That is the change which came over Christian

teaching in those long ages of darkness that followed the vanishing of

the Mysteries that had kept the flame of knowledge alive, until there

were no longer pupils willing to be taught, and by the absence of the

pupils the teachings of the Masters were withdrawn.

So we realise that with the revival in our own days of the mystic

teaching and the realisation that there is a life in Christianity which

is rightly marked out by that holiest of names, we begin to see in that

spreading new life in Christian churches, in the revival of that idea

of the possibility of the divine growth in humanity, we see one of the

signs of the coming of the Christ, preparatory to His next manifestation

upon earth. For it would scarcely have been worth while merely to amuse

you for an hour with the story of the past if it did not bear on the

present and the future, on the repetition of the old-world tale, of the

remanifestation of that mighty Son of God. For that reason, to make, as

it were, the gulf less wide between the ordinary thought and the thought

of the Occultist, I spoke about the earlier manifestations, marking each

successive sub-race of man; and if you have followed along the line of

what I have been putting to you Sunday after Sunday of the stage at which

the world is standing now, of the transition age in which we are, of the

closing age that is passing, of the opening age that is coming, of all

the signs which show the ending of the one, of all the signs which show

the beginning of the other, then without shock or jar should come to you

the present idea that we may well be looking again for a manifestation of

the Teacher, the Supreme Teacher of the worlds, who was last manifest as

the Christ in Palestine. Let us see what that would mean.

Unless all that I have been telling you during the past five weeks is a

mere dream; unless the very facts that I have pointed you to are utterly

without significance, you ought almost to have thought yourselves into

the point to which I fain would lead you now—that we are on the threshold

of a new manifestation, and that the mighty Teacher again will appear as

man among men. Now, to say that to any people may only make them think:

“But why for us?” So might the Jew have questioned when last He came on

earth. That a thing so great, so transcendent, and so rare, should come

to earth at any particular time, to be measured by only a few years of

mortal time—that that should be now seems too strange, too beautiful, to

be true. And yet He came before; why not again? If at the birth of the

fifth sub-race, why not at the birth of the sixth? Some must be on earth

when any such manifestation takes place; some generation of men and women

must be born around the coming of a Christ; and there is no valid reason

that any one of you can give why this age should not be such a time, and

the people of this age the recipients of the new flood of spiritual life.

Strange, because it happens seldom, but sure, because it happened at

similar crises in the story of the world; and the strangeness of it does

not mark it as untrue when you see the signs of the coming all around

you, if your eyes should be open to recognise what they mean. For an

expectation is spreading everywhere of the coming of some mighty Teacher,

and here and there on earth the expectation has taken voice, nay, has

even had a human messenger and herald to proclaim it. In Persia such a

messenger came in the one who was called the Bāb, who declared the coming

of a mighty one, followed by another said to be yet greater than himself,

and yet a third, the Abbas Effendi of the present time, certainly a great

spiritual teacher, but one who still declares that the mightiest is yet

to come, who is to bind together the eastern and the western worlds.

Not only along that line has this expectation shown itself, but among the

people of Islām in a strange combative form, natural to their fighting

races, showing itself, therefore, as leader in battle to be ruler in the

future; and through Africa you see it in this expectation of the Mahdi,

which has given so much trouble during our own time.

I only mention these to show you that the thought is spreading and

the expectation growing; for ever the world grows expectant before the

mighty One returns to reveal Himself on earth. Such a coming of the

Christ the occult world is looking for—for the same great Being who

appeared in Palestine, for He is still the Supreme Teacher, the same

individual. Who may say what name He will bear? But what is of import to

all of us is: Shall we recognise Him when He comes, or shall we be as

blind of vision, as hard of heart, as were the Jews among whom His last

manifestation occurred? It is so easy for us looking back through the

glamour of the centuries in which the great Christian Master has been

the head of Christendom, and seen as perfect man with the irradiation

also of the Christ upon Him—for the Church has made no distinction

between the two all these later years—it is so easy for us to look back

through all those centuries and say we should have known Him had we

been there. But that has happened so often. Was it not His reproach to

the people of His day: “Your fathers slew the prophets, and ye build

their sepulchres”? There are always plenty of people ready to rear the

sepulchre of honour to the name of the prophet of the past; how few in

any age of the world have recognised the prophet of their own day! That

is not only true of the Supreme Teacher, but of others a little beyond

the knowledge and the power of their own day; ever they have been met

with hatred, ever the world has cast them out, has tortured or has slain

them. Why should we in our own day, then, be any wiser? Why should the

fifth sub-race, the most combative of all the nations, the most critical,

the most sceptical, the most unwilling to recognise the higher, the

most self-assertive—why should we have eyes open to see a greatness that

has never been recognised in the past? That is the problem that may well

exercise our minds, in order that we may try to develop in ourselves the

power to recognise should He come in our own day. For one great rule

runs all through nature: that you can only recognise that to which you

can respond. It is true of the outer nature and our physical eyes. We

can only see each other because in the retina of the eye there is the

ether that answers to the external waves of light. Similarly in moral

characteristics, and, above all, in the spiritual nature, we can only

recognise in proportion as we reproduce. If in ourselves there is some

opening up of the spiritual nature, if in ourselves there are some of the

qualities which shine out so gloriously in Him, if in us there is some

touch of that nature which in Him has risen to divinity, ah! then it is

possible that we may throb responsive to Him when He comes, hidden, as He

ever has been, beneath the veil of flesh. But that that may be so we must

go outside the thought of our time to that of the time that is coming;

not the combativeness of the fifth, but the compassion of the sixth

sub-race must find its home in our hearts. And if one may judge from the

past, when He comes He may again be despised and rejected of men, for the

spiritual ideal is not an ideal to which the heart of our own age quickly

responds. You can see it in the characteristics of the Christ: “when He

was reviled He reviled not again; when He suffered He threatened not.”

But amongst you that would show great poverty of spirit. Not to revile

back when you are reviled, in the mind of the modern day, is to mark the

reviling as true. That is the spirit of the time. If you are slandered,

libelled, abused, go into court and drag the slanderer there; if not, you

are guilty. That is the common opinion of the time. One who has learned

the lesson of the Christ, who before His accusers answered nothing,

that man is condemned by the popular mind of the day. He would answer

if he could, because they would answer if they could; but the measure

of the Christ is not the measure of those who bear His name in the

combative civilisation of the time. And so when He comes again, reviled

and slandered as He must be if He be far beyond our knowledge and our

understanding, the common verdict will go against Him as it went against

Him before. We may not murder; that is too merciful in these modern days.

We prefer rather that the victim shall live to be tortured than to give

him the mercy of a swift, a ready death.

And so, looking over the world at the moment, there seems little

likelihood that when He comes He will be welcome. A few will recognise

Him as they ever have done, and maybe, as the characteristics of the

coming race are those of spirituality, there will be more to welcome

Him, for the spiritual life is spreading to-day, and those who are of

the Spirit will know the law of the Spirit; and I would fain leave you

with the thought to-night that that is a truth, that the Supreme Teacher

will again ere very long be incarnate upon earth, again made manifest

as Teacher, again walking and living amongst us as last He walked in

Palestine. Splendid as is the hope, mighty as is the inspiration, there

is nothing too glorious to be possible for the ever-unfolding Spirit in

man, and the hope of to-day is that that spirit is spreading, despite

the characteristics of our time; that men are becoming more liberal,

more tolerant, more ready to recognise that which is true and just. And

it may well be that we have reached such a time of evolution that the

popular mind of the day will be transcended by large numbers of the more

spiritually minded, and that when He comes again He will be able to stay

amongst us more than the three brief years that marked His last ministry.

That, then, is the word, the thought I leave with you: to develop in

yourselves the Spirit of the Christ, and then at His coming you shall

recognise His beauty. Learn compassion, learn tenderness, learn good

thoughts of others rather than evil, learn to be tender with the weak,

learn to be reverent to the great; and if you can develop those qualities

in you, then the coming Christ may be able to number you among His

disciples, and the welcome that the earth shall give Him shall not again

be a cross.

Lecture VII

The Larger Consciousness and its Value

Friends: During the whole of the lectures, of which the discourse of

to-night is the last, I have taken for granted the existence of a larger

consciousness in man than that which we know at the present time as our

physical or waking consciousness. Over and over again I have had occasion

to allude to it, once or twice I dwelt for a few moments upon it, but I

could not interrupt the course of what I had been putting to you by any

detailed description of the larger consciousness, or of the instruments

of that consciousness, the body or bodies of man. It seemed to me that

the work I had been trying to do would remain somewhat imperfect unless

I tried to place before you, ere quitting the subjects I had been

dealing with, something with regard to this larger consciousness in

man; a consciousness which exists in every one of us; which functions

intermittently in all of us; which is in course of unfolding in humanity

at the present time. And side by side with the unfolding of the

consciousness there goes a continual evolution of the bodies in which

that consciousness expresses itself, and it is that subject that I want

to deal with to-night, trying to put before you clearly and definitely

the theory which is studied by Theosophists with regard to this matter, a

theory which some of us have proved to be true by our own investigations,

and—which is a far more important thing—confirmed by the great Scriptures

of the world’s religions, the testimony which has been given to man by

seers, by prophets of the highest, the most inspired, order. Sometimes

we are inclined to lay more stress on contemporary evidence than on the

evidence that comes from the great Scriptures of the world. It seems

to me as though that were a little along the line of hiding the sun by

holding a plate quite close to the eyes. For it is quite clear, when

you come to think of it, that testimony which may be given nowadays by

half-developed students cannot in the nature of things be nearly as

valuable as that of the great prophets and seers of humanity, embodied,

however mystically and allegorically, in the great Bibles of humanity.

In fact, the testimony of the modern-day investigator should be checked

and governed by those mightier and wider revelations, and it is always

a point of satisfaction, a point of confirmation to the modern and

partially developed seer when he finds that his own investigations

throw light on some of the statements of these Scriptures, and that the

Bibles of the race become more illuminating in some of their obscurer

passages by the light that he may have been able to gain by his own

investigations. I am not, then, pretending for one moment that anything

I put to you now is comparable in value with what you might find out

for yourselves, if spiritually illuminated, in these great Bibles of

religions. But I do think that the investigations of to-day help us to

understand those great revelations, though much that is there said is

necessarily obscure to us because of the immense difference in knowledge

between the speaker and the student; therefore, though we may call our

knowledge to-day a farthing light, it may be of value in the deciphering

of these great manuscripts of the past, so that even a little knowledge

of our own may enable us to go more deeply into those great wells of

truth which have come down to us from antiquity, which have been given to

us by the Saviours of the world.

In order to make what I have to say clear to you, I shall have to ask

you to pardon me if I go in the beginning a little into definition and

detail. If you want to study your own body, comparatively simple as that

is, you must be willing to learn the difference between a bone and a

nerve, between an artery and a vein, and so on through the whole of the

more or less familiar terms which the physiologist uses in explaining

the anatomy and the physiology of the body. No person can have clear and

definite ideas if he is not willing to study the mere nomenclature of

that which he wishes to understand; and while it is quite possible to

avoid using words of other languages, it is not possible to avoid some

demand on the consecutive thought-power of the student if he desires to

be anything more than a mere superficial hearer, without any definite

understanding of the subjects which he supposes himself to be studying.

There is a very good and simple description of man’s constitution in

one of the Pauline epistles, where a triple division is given, and a

perfectly accurate division, although subdivisions again are possible

and practicable; but for my purposes now that division into three, and

then certain subdivisions of each, will be sufficient to give you a very

clear and definite idea of consciousness in man; and then by your own

experience you can decide how much of the larger consciousness comes into

your waking consciousness, or how much of you is still without vehicle of

expression, still without the power of manifesting in worlds related to

our own.

That division, as all of you will at once know, is Spirit, Soul, Body. It

is curious how indefinite the mass of Christian people are with regard to

the meaning of the first two terms, Spirit and Soul. I am not quarreling

with the fact that different definitions may sometimes be given; I am

quarrelling with the fact that most Christians have no definition at all;

that they use the words interchangeably; that they constantly talk of

man as a duality, always using the word body; sometimes using the word

Spirit, and sometimes soul, for all that which they exclude from the

body. Thus you hear people talking about spirits manifesting in various

ways; sometimes you hear about the human soul and its immortality, and so

on. But a clear, distinct definition of what is Spirit, what is soul—that

for the most part is wanting among even the students of theology. Let

us see if it be not possible to define them in a way which may at least

be clear. You may, of course, differ with the division for the reason

that you may think some other dividing line is better; I am concerned

chiefly, for the moment, with giving you a clear definition, and then

you may correct or amend it according to your own thought or your own

knowledge. The definition will, of course, govern me in all that I

say to-night. First of all, then: What is Spirit? Spirit is a germ of

Divinity unfolding itself gradually in human evolution, appropriating

certain kinds of matter which it gradually organises into an instrument

for self-expression—we may shorten that by saying a germ of Divinity

encased in matter. That germ of Divinity, as you might naturally expect,

shows out in itself the triple division of its Divine parent. Just as

you find God, manifesting in a universe, ever manifesting three supreme

attributes, sometimes personified into what is called a Trinity, so you

would naturally expect to find in the germ that which you find in the

parent—that the triple nature of Divinity should show itself out in the

triple nature of the Spirit which is man. And that is so. You find Spirit

showing itself forth in full Divinity, taking for a moment the Christian

names as most familiar, in the form of Power in the Father, in the form

of Wisdom in the Son, in the form of creative Activity in the Holy

Spirit. If you will take those names for the time as being most familiar

to your own thought, and therefore introducing nothing of difficulty to

you—if you will remember those accepted ideas for the time, and translate

them into terms of consciousness, limited, because these are not all

fully unfolded in man, you will be able readily to distinguish in man’s

spiritual nature, and even more distinctly for the moment in the lower

reflexion of that with which I will deal presently—you will be able to

distinguish the threefold division, and so to obtain, as it were, a

clear picture of your own spiritual nature. That which in Divinity we

call Power, the Will by which the worlds exist, shows itself out in our

own spiritual nature as Will. The Wisdom which upholds the worlds shows

itself out in the human Spirit also as the pure and compassionate Reason,

which is the Wisdom, the Christ, in man. The third, creative Activity,

shows itself in intellect, the highest, the noblest form of creative

Activity—the intellect, the pure intellect in man is the third reflexion

in man of the creative Activity of God. And if you link what may be less

familiar with the familiar, it will be very easy for you to keep the

thread of that which I desire to put before you. Think first of all,

then, that the Spirit, the germ of Divinity in man, has to show out in

the gradual unfolding of its hidden powers these three supreme attributes

with which you are familiar in the thought of Divinity itself.

Then, passing from that highest part of our nature to what S. Paul calls

the soul, what is the Soul in relation to the Spirit? It is the temporary

reflexion in grosser matter of the eternal Spirit; the image of that

which is the eternal object; the reflexion in the mirror of a world of

that eternal life which passes from world to world, unfolding, but is

never subject to the transitoriness which marks the ever-changing worlds.

The soul in man is the Spirit working in grosser matter; and hence in

our own natures, so familiar to us—for now we come into a region that

psychological science deals with and tries to define and understand—we

have, when we look at our own consciousness, the soul, the reflexion

of the Spirit in grosser matter. We have the mind reflecting the pure

intellect with all its activities—imagination, judgement, reason—all

these powers of the mind. Then we find a part of our nature that we call

the emotional; there we have the reflexion of that pure and compassionate

Wisdom that I spoke of which shows itself in the lower worlds by Love,

the highest and loftiest of the emotions, the root whence all virtues

spring. For the same principle of unity which expresses itself as

Wisdom in the spiritual world expresses itself as Love, which draws the

separated lives together in the world where matter has overcome Spirit,

where Spirit is blinded by matter. The unity that the Spirit knows the

soul seeks by Love, which is the attribute that draws toward unity,

and that which in the spiritual world is known, in the lower world is

sought by this exquisite attribute of the soul. And that which in the

higher world we call Will becomes Desire in the lower. For the difference

between Will and Desire is that Will is self-determined, whereas Desire

is determined by the attractiveness of objects outside the consciousness.

You are moved by Desire when some pleasure attracts you, some pain

repels you, when your activity goes along the road that is determined

by an outer attraction, an outer repulsion; you are moved by Will, the

spiritual attribute, when the whole of your inner nature, drawn up to

a single point, self-determined, sends that nature along the road that

within yourself you have chosen, whether it leads to pleasure or pain,

whether it leads to gain or loss in the lower world. Will is determined

from the spiritual Self; Desire is guided and stimulated by objects in

the lower world. Hence that which is Will in the Spirit is Desire in the

soul. And so you find the soul represented by these three well-known

attributes: Mind, with all its powers; Emotion, the root emotion being

love; Desire, the reflexion of the determining power in this lower world.

When you come down into everyday life you find the whole of these make

up your waking consciousness, showing itself out in the denser matter

of the brain; in your waking consciousness you know the working of the

mind; in your waking consciousness you know the working of the emotions;

in your waking consciousness you know the working of desire; so that

the waking consciousness, the limited, the conditioned, the smaller

consciousness, is that which is within the limitations of your brain or

physical body, but is none other than the larger consciousness which

shows itself in the subtler worlds as soul, in the spiritual world as

Spirit. If you realise clearly that outlining, with its subdivisions,

you will find that consciousness is a unit, and the differences are

differences of the material in which it is working rather than in itself.

The triple division is the only one, whether you look at it in the brain,

in the subtle body, in the matter of the world where the Spirit rules.

Everywhere consciousness is one, expressing itself in three modes, by

three qualities, but everywhere a unit, yourself, the reality within you.

What is Body? For there is a third factor in S. Paul’s definition of

man. Naturally the body also has in it the same triple differentiation

as the consciousness. And so we find a spiritual body, the clothing of

the Spirit in the highest worlds of consciousness. We find also what S.

Paul, again, calls a natural body. There is a natural body, he says, and

there is a spiritual body. But that natural body divides itself into

two—the subtle body in which the soul is working; the dense body in

which the waking consciousness is working, the reflexion of the highest.

Those two naturally go together, and might well be classed roughly as

the single natural body, for it is transitory, impermanent, belongs to

the three worlds of change—the physical world, the intermediate, and the

heavenly; has a certain life through which it passes in the three worlds,

and then gives back its elements to the worlds to which they respectively

belong. Whereas the spiritual body is a relatively permanent thing, lasts

through the whole of the long life of the individual, passes through

birth after birth, death after death, knows neither birth nor death in

its own nature, passes through them, but is not affected by them—the

spiritual individuality, the real man, is eternal in his own nature,

and has a permanent clothing of the matter of the spiritual world,

unfolding his powers, organising his matter, but remaining ever the same

in essence, the consciousness ever living in those worlds, the matter

the same, only becoming more and more definitely organised. In that

spiritual body remains the memory of all the experiences through which

you have passed; in that spiritual body resides your true individuality,

that knows neither birth nor death; in that spiritual body which is ever

yours all the experiences of the past are gathered up, and part of those

experiences is put forth, birth after birth, in order that the soul may

clothe itself in new bodies for new experiences and new developments. So

that the part of you that lasts is the Spirit in the spiritual body; the

part of you that changes, the soul in the temporary body, whether you

take the subtler or the denser parts.

Supposing you accept that definition of man in his triple division, it

will be easy enough then to follow out step by step what the higher

consciousness is as apart from the lower, the larger as apart from the

smaller. You will start with the great conception of a living Spirit

coming down into denser and denser matter, with the object of acquiring

that matter and subduing it to his own purposes, appropriating it,

wrapping himself up in it, and temporarily blinded by the veil, but a

veil that he is going to turn into an instrument, so that by it he may

know all the worlds, and come into contact with every portion of the

universe. For that he appropriates the matter of every world; for that

he wraps himself round in these material garments; and working upon

these, he turns them to his own purposes, shapes them by his own will,

moulds them in order that he may use them for that which he desires to

effect—contact with matter, the condition of his becoming master of the

worlds; and by making matter his servant and his instrument, all the

worlds become open before him, and he can function in any one of them.

That the pure spiritual being cannot do. He can only function in worlds

of the Spirit, those lofty eternal regions where Divinity itself resides

and manifests without the blinding effect of the denser matter that we

wear. But just as Divinity emanates these coarser forms of matter in

order that the spiritual germs may be sown therein, and therein gain the

experience by which their powers will be unfolded from within; just as

Deity is manifest in matter, so must the germs of Deity grow therein,

until matter is subject to them as it is to the Father of light, whence

they come.

So, in looking at this consciousness unfolding and these bodies becoming

organised, we can trace throughout the purpose of that long unfolding—to

make the Spirit master of matter, to enable him to act in every world;

and when we catch a glimpse of that great purpose, we realise how perfect

is the plan, how complete our triumph will be. First we notice, when we

are looking at the lower forms of consciousness in ourselves, that we

can understand a certain relation between matter and Spirit which we are

told exists all the way up to the highest spiritual world. And so far as

investigation has been carried by the students of to-day, they find that

relation in each successive world that they enter and finally subdue.

It is a relation, then, that runs right through between consciousness

and form, between Spirit and matter; it is this: that every change in

consciousness has a corresponding vibration in matter, and that every

vibration in matter has a corresponding change in consciousness. We are

told that that relation is imposed by the Logos Himself in His first

shaping of the matter side of His universe; that all the vibrations of

which He makes the atoms capable answer one by one to changes in His own

consciousness, and that throughout the whole of His universe, in all

the mighty realm of spirit-matter that He rules, this correspondence

is universally, unchangeably found—for every change in consciousness

a corresponding change in vibration, for every change in vibration a

corresponding change in consciousness.

Let us see how that would work if anyone whose eyes are a little opened

looks at the aura of a person—the lowest part of that aura, if you will,

in etheric or astral matter: let us say, astral. You will notice a large

number of colours continually flashing through it and changing; and if

you examine those colours, every one, as you know from your ordinary

study, representing a certain definite vibration in matter—every colour

is nothing more than a certain vibration in matter, a vibration with a

definite wave-length—if you watch those changing colours in the aura you

will find that they are either generated by a state of consciousness or

give rise to it. Suppose, for instance, you find a person in a mood of

devotion, engaged perhaps in prayer—you can see them by the score in any

Christian church. Watch the astral aura of that person, and you will find

that the whole of it is vibrating in a way that gives you the colour of

blue, blue everywhere predominating, the whole of the aura suffused with

that colour. But you will also find, if there is in that congregation

a quiet person who was not feeling devotional when he came into that

congregation, that gradually his astral body will be affected by the

vibrations in the astral bodies near him, and that those vibrations

imposed upon him from without will produce a devotional mood within him.

You can start it, then, at either end: either the mood producing the

appearance, the vibration, or the vibration producing the mood. Take it

in another form: have you never felt when you yourself were perfectly

good-tempered and some very irritable person came up to you, have you

never felt that you yourself were becoming irritable?—not that you had

anything to be irritable about, but merely because the other man was, and

it needs considerable control, control over the astral body, to prevent

the irritation of the person who comes near you from affecting your own

previously placid mood. If you have not observed this, keep watch over

yourself during the coming week, and you will find how continually you

reproduce the emotions of the people with whom you come into contact.

What is the mechanism of it? Very simple. That person’s astral body is

vibrating in consonance with the emotion he is feeling. Those vibrations

of his astral body set up vibrations in your astral body, a perfectly

mechanical thing. But because it is your astral body, the matter you have

appropriated, those vibrations in it produce in you the corresponding

mood of irritation. Hence the common ethical precept given by every

great teacher, to return good for evil. That is by a deliberate effort

of the consciousness to throw yourself into the mood which is opposite

to the evil mood of the person with whom you come into contact. If

you do that, then your own mood will overbear in your astral body the

vibrations imposed upon it from without, and your astral body will begin

to vibrate in correspondence with your own good emotion instead of with

the evil emotion imposed from outside. The further result of that, if

you be strong enough, will be to correct the bad vibration in the astral

body of the man who is near you, and so, by correcting that vibration

into harmony with your own, to produce in him your own good emotion,

instead of having your emotion controlled by his. That is the ordinary

science of the emotions that every aspirant for the higher life is set to

practise in his daily life. He is first told the theory, so that he may

understand what he is doing, and then he is set to the practise, so that

by the practise he may realise the truth of the law that his teacher has

explained. Sometimes the ethical teacher only says: “Love your enemies,

do good to them that hate you.” With the unspiritual hearer the question

will very readily arise, “Why should I give love when hatred is given

to me?” Only knowledge will enable you to understand the wisdom that

underlies this precept of all the great teachers of the past. Speaking in

an age when authority was valid, and when people were willing to accept

the precept from one whom they recognised as greater than themselves,

they only proclaimed the law, and the docile hearer tried to obey. In our

own more critical and combative age it is necessary to justify wisdom to

a more critical and carping generation, and so the full explanation is

given which shows you the scientific truth which underlies the ethical

precept.

That runs through the whole of the working of our bodies, the whole of

the changes in our consciousness. You can work it out step by step,

or you can read the working out which has been made by a thoughtful

student,[3] and so you will have a veritable science of the emotions, and

you will go out into the world a source of peace, a source of blessing, a

source of all good emotions, helping the weaker by your own knowledge and

your own strength, and so enabling them to climb more quickly by giving

this helping hand out of the knowledge that you have learned.

By that fact, then, we have power over matter, we can throw it into the

vibrations we desire. We can do more than that: we can shape it into

organs of expression for the consciousness that is unfolded within us.

Understanding these laws, we begin to realise that by these bodies we may

come into touch with the various worlds around us. Let us see, again, the

method. When first the spiritual germ descends into matter, gathering

round itself the matter that it needs, that matter is like a mere cloud.

It is still so in the highest regions for most; it is becoming organised

into definite instruments of consciousness in the three lower worlds

in all the more advanced members of our present race, to a very large

extent in all of you. If you pause for a moment on the physical body,

you will see exactly what is meant by the phrase: the organising of the

body. You have here now in your physical body a valuable instrument,

first for acquiring knowledge of the outer world, and then for acting on

that world, carrying out the knowledge you have gained. You have, as you

know, in your body two sets of nerves, called sensory and motor: by the

sensory you gather knowledge from without; by the motor you act upon the

outer world, utilising the knowledge you have gathered to bring about

the results that you desire; and your physical body is well organised

for its work. By the evolution of the senses, by the gradual growth of

the whole nervous system, by the development of your brains, you have

largely become master of this densest world, the physical world, to which

your body is related. All that is needed further is a comparatively small

evolution—the development of the other two senses, the conquest of the

realm of ether, that which science is now investigating. So far, then,

you have one instrument, the instrument of your waking consciousness.

Through that, spirit and soul alike are working, the powers of the soul

showing out as far as the density of the matter will permit. Coming into

denser matter is very much the same as if you brought a light through

thicker and thicker glass. The light would remain the light, but that

which would show out through the glass would be less and less according

to the opacity of that glass. So with the light of the spirit shining

through the soul and the body. Your next work is the organisation of the

next finer body of matter, that which I called the subtle. In that your

emotions are working, in that your thoughts are working, and to a very

large extent your mental and emotional bodies—we call the emotional the

astral—are organised at the present time. But here more variety comes in.

Some of you will have your astral body so well developed that it is fit

for separate working in the intermediate world. Some of you will have it

well developed so far as consciousness is concerned, but not so far as

the reception of impressions from the outer intermediate world. That is,

your consciousness will be working there in that finer matter that has

not yet sufficiently organised the astral body to receive impressions

from without.

Gradually, as evolution goes on the organisation of the astral body

will go on in everybody, but it is possible, as I suggested to you a

few Sundays ago, very largely to quicken that evolution, and gradually

to make the astral body what it ought to be, as perfect an instrument

for contact with the astral world as the physical body is for contact

with the physical world. That is, of course, what a very considerable

number of people have done, and they are able to act either in or out

of the physical body. We will take both cases in a moment. Take the

finer part first of the subtle body—the mental body. In most of you

that also is fairly organised, but, again, it is organised for working

within yourself, but not receiving from the outer mental world all that

hereafter it will be able to receive and utilise, and only a few of you,

comparatively, would be able to leave the denser and the astral body

behind, and live in the heavenly world, in full consciousness, working

there as thoroughly as you can work in the physical world.

What signs are there by which you can judge how far the organisation of

the astral and the mental bodies is going on, so that if you work to

quicken their organisation you will be able partly to judge how far your

work is effective? Let us take the working in the body, the physical

body, first. As these other higher forms of consciousness begin to become

co-ordinated with the physical, and to hand on to it the impressions

that they receive, the mental body is becoming highly organised; when

the person possessing it is strong in science, physical science, above

all in the grasping of principles, in the power of observation, in the

ability to draw conclusions from the observations that have been made,

organisation is improving. Among the scientific men of our own time

that mental body will be very highly developed, chiefly for use in the

waking consciousness, very imperfectly as yet for direct reception on

the higher planes. The higher development of the astral body will show

itself in forms of art and of high emotion, and just in proportion as

those are transmissible to the waking consciousness may you realise

that the astral body is becoming more definitely organised. When the

body of the intellect, the lasting body, part of the spiritual body, is

becoming organised, then it is that you find fine metaphysical ability,

great philosophical profundity of thought, the highest conceptions of

idealistic art, the highest achievements in idealistic literature. Those

are the faculties that belong to the beginning of the spiritual body

in man, transcending the transitory, beginning to shape the permanent

instrument of the Spirit. Where you have great talent, where the mental

body is highly organised, where you have the highest genius, there the

spiritual body is beginning its organisation. For that highest genius is

the flashing down from the organised spiritual body into the lower nature

of knowledge which in those regions alone can be gained; and when art and

literature become illuminated by the Spirit, then you have the mighty

geniuses of history that outlast the passing generations and shine out in

the world of thought.

What signs may we find other than those of the organisation of these

bodies through which the larger consciousness will work? Genius is the

highest of all, save that which I spoke of as the manifestation of

the Christ, the Wisdom Spirit in man. But if we leave those loftiest

manifestations of the larger consciousness alone, what signs may we find

amongst ourselves of the growing organisation of those higher bodies and

the unfolding of the larger consciousness? There are very many signs

to-day of the organising of the astral body, and it is in the lack of

discriminating these from genius that we find a great absence in power in

the new psychology. You find the organisation of the astral body showing

itself forth in the power to receive impressions directly from the astral

plane, and the power to translate them into the waking consciousness.

In the body those first signs are seen in telepathy where it is well

developed, where people are able to communicate with one another without

the ordinary physical means of communication, and that is not so very

infrequent a thing among the more thoughtful of our own time. That is a

power you can develop, if you like, by definite and regular practice;

only remember that all development of power means regular practice and

patient and reiterated experiment. One finds, for the most part, that

after a few weeks or months of practice people are apt to drop the whole

thing if they have not in that time gained startling results. That

is not the way that powers grow. The law is sure, that if you choose

to concentrate your mind so as to make a clear image, that will be

reproduced in astral matter. Then by an effort of the self-determined

will you can send that astral thought-form to whomsoever you choose; and

if you practise that day after day, week after week, nay, even month

after month and year after year, you will find that you will ultimately

develop the power of sending thought clearly and definitely, so that

you will be able to communicate with the absent as surely, as certainly

as any physical-plane communication can be sure and certain. Practice

along these lines can do you nothing but good. It increases the power

of the will, it increases the concentration of thought; but remember

that without concentrated thought and fairly strong will you are bound

to have a very long practice before you will have results tangible in

the outer world. The person who cannot keep his mind steady for a couple

of minutes at a time, the person who cannot concentrate definitely on

one thought, such a person certainly cannot transfer that which he is

unable to create; and for a very considerable time people will have to

practise by creating the thought-image before they will have anything

to be definitely sent to another. But that is one of the means of

organising the astral and the mental body as an instrument of the larger

consciousness. Some people, of course, have it by nature, as you say, but

what does that mean? Only that they have practised it in previous life.

No one gets anything for nothing from nature. On the other hand, nature

is a good paymaster, and pays the exact wages that we have earned, never

withholding anything. If you can do it easily, it is because you have

done it before; if you find it difficult, it is because you are beginning

that definite kind of work. But no one obtains it without labour, no one

can develop it without long and continued practice. But there is one form

in which the astral body shows its organisation when you are out of the

dense body and not in it, in the form of dream. Whenever you go to sleep

you leave your dense body behind. Some dreams belong only to the brain;

it is because people do not distinguish dream from dream that so much

foolish ridicule is sometimes cast on the dream-state altogether. It

is perfectly true that there are dreams which grow out of conditions of

the physical body, where a little change in the circulation, a momentary

block in some vessel of the brain, will cause a dream, incoherent,

senseless, without meaning or illumination. That is the physical dream;

it may be caused by any disturbance of the body—indigestion, a hundred

other things. The dream that shows that the astral body is becoming

organised is a dream in which some definite knowledge is conveyed, in

which some definite warning is given, in which something is added to you

that you had not before, or in which you come into contact with someone

who has passed out of the physical conditions through the gateway of

death, and whom you may meet in the astral world when you yourself have

temporarily dropped the dense body. Those dreams are coherent, rational,

sometimes illuminative. Remember how many dreams have now been put on

record in which a man has gained in the dream-state knowledge that he

had not in the waking state. How often that knowledge gained in the

dream-state has enabled him in the waking state to cover over some

gap that he was before unable to bridge. You will find in Myers’ book

on _Human Personality_ some of these dreams given, although not very

definitely explained, and if you find in your experience that those are

becoming more frequent, then you may be sure that your astral body is

becoming a vehicle of consciousness, an instrument by which consciousness

can work in the other world. It is true that in some dreams, especially

of warning, the thought may be thrown into your mind from without when

you have not found it out for yourself, but have been informed of it

by another. Such a warning may come through, given you by some friend,

some helper, someone whom you love, who may have passed onwards, and so

has the advantage of the astral vision. But in all those cases there

comes into the waking consciousness something from the larger, and as you

perfect the astral body all those come more and more within your control.

As it becomes organised there is less and less need to leave it in order

to exercise its powers. You will find yourself seeing, hearing, while the

physical senses are active, while the consciousness is working normally,

the waking consciousness in the brain; so that slowly and gradually

you will unify the physical and the astral bodies and live in the two

worlds continuously at one and the same time, finding those worlds

intermingling and interworking; and so you will gain that much of the

larger consciousness which belongs to the expression of the soul through

the subtle astral body.

Exactly on the same lines with the heavenly worlds, the mental world,

your evolution will go on, and for this there is one condition regarding

the consciousness, there is one condition regarding the instrument for

the unfolding of consciousness—regular and steady meditation. There is no

other way. If you find anybody telling you that by any physical means you

can really unfold your consciousness, tell them that they do not realise

what they are talking about. You can start a little astral consciousness

on the lowest parts of the astral world by causing vibrations in matter

in the physical that affect the astral, and so bring about a change in

consciousness in that lowest part of the astral world, but you can

go no further. I have seen in India men who, by the use of difficult

physical means that none of you would care to use—for they bring about

the gradual spoiling of the physical body—I have known them able to leave

the physical body and live for the time being in the astral, but in that

astral body they were unconscious, not conscious; they were not coming

into touch with the astral world, nor using the larger consciousness

at all. They had only forced themselves into that world in the astral

body where it was not organised enough for the reception of impressions,

nor the consciousness unfolded to understand them, and they had injured

the physical brain and rendered that practically useless for physical

utility; so that they had lost both worlds instead of gaining the higher

that they sought. When one has seen that happen in India one realises

that those methods are not methods that it is desirable to spread in

the West; and it is along that line that so many of those pseudo-occult

books are going which come to us from America, promising that if we

follow those practices we shall be able to get the better of other people

in business transactions, and hypnotise them for our own advantage and

our own gain. Wherever you find that the method of working and that the

object aimed at, be sure that you are dealing with a form of unfolding

and of evolution that can only injure; it cannot really serve. The worst

of it is that those forms tend to atrophy the parts of the brain that

you want to bring things through after a higher consciousness is active

and the higher body is organised. By this means you injure the brain,

and with the brain the connecting link between this world and the next,

so that you injure yourself along that line as well as along the other,

and make yourself incapable, until you have a new body, of that higher

unfolding at which you aim. There you have the danger of people picking

up fragments of an ancient science of the East, without realising all

the protection with which in the East that science is surrounded; and

if even there one finds occasionally such cases as I have mentioned, of

the ruined physical frame and the undeveloped astral body, then how much

more dangerous it is when given to people of different physical heredity,

without the conditions which in the East are ever imposed! Meditation,

then, is the one safe way of unfolding the consciousness, and thus

organising the vehicle; and the other condition is purity of thought,

purity of desire, purity of physical life. That is the matter side of the

training. Your thoughts must be pure, otherwise your mental body will be

unfit for higher development; your desires must be pure, or your astral

body will not be fit for that unfolding at which you aim; your physical

body must be pure, otherwise when the developed mental and astral pour

down their power on the physical, the physical will be unable to answer,

and you will have hysteria instead of the wider consciousness you seek.

Those, roughly, then, are the conditions: meditation for the

consciousness, purity for the evolution of the instrument. If you are

willing to accept those conditions, then the path of the higher evolution

opens before you, and according to your courage, your perseverance, and

your ability will be the rapidity with which you can tread that path.

The object before you should be the helping of others, the gaining of

these powers in order that you may be more useful, not in order that you

may be greater than your fellow-men. Of the purity of your motive there

is only one test: are you using the powers you have now for the helping

of your race? If you are not, then no profession that you will use the

higher powers for good will be effective in bringing you help in their

unfolding. I have met many a man, many a woman, who is anxious to be

an invisible helper—that is, a worker on the astral plane—but I do not

always find that those people are visible helpers as far as their present

powers go. And I do not understand why people should want to go about in

astral slums when they keep carefully away from the physical slums which

are already within their reach. So far as you can go by your own power

you have the right to go, but if you ask for help from those more highly

developed—from the great Teachers of the race—then you have to bring

in your hands the proof—and that proof is life, and not words—that as

you are using well the talent you have you deserve to be helped in the

gaining of others. There is the underlying meaning of those strange words

ascribed to the Christ, that he who has much, to him shall be given.

Those who have used well that which they have, those alone have claim to

be helped in gaining more; for by their life they have shown that they

do the best with what they possess, and that is the guarantee that with

more they will utilise that also for the race. And so in the old rules of

discipleship it was said that when the disciple came to the Teacher he

must bring with him in his hands the fuel for the fire; it was the fire

of sacrifice, and the fuel was everything that the pupil possessed in

mind, body, and estate; and he brought that in his hands as offering to

the Teacher, and then alone was he accepted by the one who knew. And so

in these days also that higher evolution, quickened by the power of the

great Ones, can only be opened up to those who bring in their hands the

fuel for the fire of sacrifice; you must be willing to give up everything

you have, and own nothing, material or immaterial; you must hold

everything you have and everything you are at the service of the great

One from whom you ask the gift of knowledge. When that is brought the

gift is never refused; when that door is thus knocked at it never remains

closed. True it is that the gateway is narrow; true it is, now as of old,

“Strait is the gate, narrow is the way, and few there be that find it.”

But the fewness does not depend on the grudging of the Teacher—it depends

on the want of self-surrender by the disciple. Bring all you have and all

you are, lay it at the feet of the Master of the Wisdom; He will open the

gateway, He will guide you along the path. But dream not that words are

heard in that high atmosphere where the Master lives and breathes: only

high thoughts can reach Him, only noble acts can speak the thoughts you

have conceived; for voice there is the life that is lived, and only the

life that speaks of sacrifice can claim the teaching at His hands.

Lecture VIII

The Place of Theosophy in the Coming Civilisation

_A Public Lecture delivered in the Queen’s Hall, London, at the British

Convention, July 2nd, 1909._

It has been my lot now for many years to visit England either every

year or every other year, in order to try to spread throughout the

country the truths of the ancient wisdom which in these days we call

by its Greek name of Theosophy. This year it has been my special

duty to place on record in the capital of the empire a certain line

of teaching with regard to the changing conditions of the times, to

draw the attention of the thoughtful to the signs all around us of a

changing civilisation—signs of an age that is passing—signs of a dawning

civilisation that may be seen on the far horizon of our day. And I had

thought that I should only reach as to this the few thousands that

may be gathered together Sunday after Sunday in a London hall, but by

the generous kindness of the _Christian Commonwealth_ these lectures

have been spread far and wide. To-night I am taking up something

of the thought that there has been more fully expressed, with the

special intention of showing you the part that Theosophy will play in

that coming civilisation, the nature of the work that it is doing in

preparation for the civilisation on the threshold. I have worked out in

those lectures in some detail what here I must only state, that just

as you can find in watching the evolution of a man that at different

ages of his life he is dominated by different parts, as we may say,

of his consciousness—as we find emotion dominating him in youth, mind

dominating him in his maturity, the wisdom of the Spirit in his age—so

we may see, in glancing abroad over the civilisations and the races

of men, that a similar succession may be observed, and that hence an

indication of the future may be obtained. For we can see in the race

that preceded our own, and still is living and active, the great Keltic

race, how high emotion is the dominant note, and how the expression of

that emotion finds itself best in poetry and in art. We can see that

in the Teutonic race intellect is the dominant note, and that mind in

all the spheres of its triumph shows itself out among the peoples who

grow from that stock, of which our own nation is a branch. That being

of the past and the present, it is not irrational to look now in the

unfolding humanity for the growth of the next principle, the next mark

in the opening consciousness, the development of the spiritual nature in

man, which succeeds the intellectual as inevitably as that succeeds the

emotional, and places the crown of wisdom and all-embracing love on the

brow of the humanity which has passed through youth, is passing through

its manhood, is going onwards to the full maturity of its evolution.

So in the coming civilisation we shall expect to find spirituality the

prevailing mark, dominating religion, dominating science, art, and

society, and we may rationally look, as spirituality grows, and shapes

and moulds the coming civilisation, that in the sphere of religion we

shall see ever-increasing unity; in the sphere of science we shall find

new methods of investigation, new powers to use in thought; that in the

sphere of mind we shall find nobler ideals, more inspiring power; and in

society we shall find spirituality showing itself, laying the foundation

of society in self-sacrifice, building it up by self-control, and marking

Brotherhood as its ultimate goal and achievement.

Such, very roughly, are the signs that we think will mark the coming

civilisation. What has Theosophy to do with that civilisation: what its

place, its part, its duty? That is the question that I am to try to

answer to-night. And fairly the questions might be asked in speaking of

Theosophy by those who know little of it save the name—and how little

of it is known we can often see in the allusions we find to it in our

daily Press—naturally the questions might arise: What is Theosophy?

Whence does it come? Briefly, those preliminary questions, then, should

be answered. Theosophy, in the first place, as its name implies, is the

declaration that man as a spiritual being can directly know God who is

Spirit. It is the proclamation of the ancient Gnosis as against the

agnosticism of the closing years of the nineteenth century. Secondly,

it is a body of doctrines which are common to all the great religions

of the world; doctrines which we find explained, more or less perfectly

and fully, in every great religion of the past as well as in every great

religion of the present; a collection of teachings, spiritual in their

nature, universal in their spread, endeavouring to guide man along the

way to perfection, training him in life, illuminating him in the hour of

death. It does not deal with any special rites, any special ceremonies,

any special part of the teaching of religion which is not universal,

which is not everywhere to be found. So far as those are concerned, the

specialties of every religion, it studies them, it explains them, it

shows the occult meanings which often lie behind the outer garment of

ceremony, behind the ordinary rites of worship, behind the symbols that

you find in every faith; but while it explains them, illuminates them,

enforces their real value, it does not strive to persuade people to

adopt one religion rather than another, but, instead of giving up their

own religion for another, it counsels them to find in that religion the

deep truths that all faiths have in common. Hence it endeavours, where

religion is concerned, to bring peace instead of war, to make religion a

healer rather than a divider, a peacemaker rather than a battle-cry among

men. And in searching out these essentials of every religion, and drawing

these out and setting them before the minds of men, it justifies its

claim to its name of the Ancient Wisdom, of that Divine Wisdom in which

all the great religions have their root.

Such, very roughly and briefly again, is Theosophy in its essence: a

Gnosis as regards the relation of man to God, a statement of fundamental

spiritual truths common to the great religions of the world. In a moment,

in dealing with its work in the religion of the future, I will mention

those doctrines one by one, so that you may see for yourselves how they

may be traced in all the scriptures, living and dead, and in all the

religions of the world. I put first the blunt statement of what Theosophy

is, in order, if possible, to clear away the clouds which ignorance and

prejudice have spread around it.

Taking it, then, that the coming civilisation is to be spiritual, that

this Theosophy is to have a definite place and work therein, let me

try to point out to you the nature of the work, the lines along which

Theosophy labours to prepare the way for, as well as to influence,

that coming civilisation for which we look; and when I say to prepare

the way for, it is because we believe that every great religion has a

civilisation attached to it, and according to the nature of the religion

the civilisation that it moulds will be; and because we also believe that

at the beginning of every civilisation a great Teacher appears in the

world to give the impulse to that civilisation and to shape the religion

that will mould it. Hence, with our looking for a coming civilisation, we

look also for the manifestation of a great, a divine Teacher.

But I said, people might ask not only what is Theosophy, but—Whence does

it come? It is the latest—I do not say the last—of the great impulses

which, one after another, in the long past of history, have founded the

great religions of the world. Those impulses ever come from a mighty

Brotherhood of Teachers made up of the past Founders of religion,

presided over by the Supreme Teacher who rules and guides and inspires

them all—a mighty Brotherhood of Teachers of the world, coming from time

to time to found a religion, to shape a civilisation. Such impulses were

often repeated in the past, to be again repeated in the century which now

is running its course amongst us, history in very truth repeating itself,

and bringing at the appointed time a new civilisation, preceded by a new

spiritual impulse.

That impulse on this occasion has differed from all that went before

it in that it founds no new religion, builds no new barrier, does not

mark out believers and unbelievers, does not try to proselytise, but

only to inspire. For, as I just said, Theosophy goes to all religions

as a peacemaker, and does not strive to draw away from any faith those

whom the law has brought to birth beneath its shelter. So its first work

in preparation for the coming civilisation is to try to bring about a

brotherhood of religions, not destroying any, not trying to make any

less potent than they were before, but endeavouring to transform them

from rivals to brothers, so that each religion may recognise its kinship

with other religions, and they may become one mighty family, instead

of warring and separate creeds. Now, to that high end it brings the

knowledge of facts which have largely been used against religion, but

ought really to be used in its service. Those of you who have reached

even middle age will remember how in the latter part of the nineteenth

century there grew up among the sciences of the time a science which

was named Comparative Mythology. You will remember how that science

grew; the oldest among you may remember its very beginnings. It sought

out of the past religions, as well as out of the present religions, to

prove that religion grew up out of ignorance, and only became refined

as it grew older and spread among more cultivated people. It used the

researches of the archæologist, the discoveries of the antiquarian,

as weapons against the religion which dominated Christendom, where

science was most powerful and most active. It took up doctrine after

doctrine of the Christian faith, and pointed to the existence of those

doctrines in other times, in other civilisations, among the religions

of the past, both living and dead. It brought information from the

open tombs of Egypt, and gathered together the fragments of Egyptian

knowledge as they were traced on the papyrus, on the leaf that was put

on the bosom of the mummy. It gathered them together, and out of those

scattered fragments it made what we know well as the Egyptian _Book of

the Dead_. It did the same with Chaldæa, the same with Nineveh, the same

with those replicas of Egyptian temples that were unburied in far-off

Mexico—temples thousands of years older than the Aztecs, who slew their

worshippers and destroyed their civilisation, the Aztecs, who themselves

were thousands of years old when Cortez and his Spaniards treated them

as they had treated their forerunners. It brought from those unburied

temples similar teachings and similar ideas. It gathered, again, similar

teachings from the books of China, with its immemorial traditions; from

the scriptures of India, from the fragments of the Zoroastrian tradition,

from the books of the Buddhist nations, from Greek and Roman. Piling up

all the evidence it had gathered, it made out of that the science of

Comparative Mythology. It was the deadliest weapon that was ever forged

against dogmatic Christianity, because founded on knowledge of facts

that none could deny. Then it was that it became the duty of Theosophy,

just then born into the world, to come forward to acknowledge the truth

of the facts, and to add many others to the store, but to point out

that instead of Comparative Mythology there should be built a science of

Comparative Religion, showing that that which had been universally taught

was truth, and not lies; was verity, and not delusion. It defended every

religion by the universality of religious beliefs; and it pointed out

that a truth did not cease to be a truth because it was ancient, did not

cease to be a truth because it ruled in ancient times as well as now; it

justified religion by the very arguments that were used to discredit it,

and traced it to a universal Ancient Wisdom, instead of to the ignorance

of the savage, refined in modern days. It brought to that contention

many an argument on which I have not time to dwell, but that you can

very easily read for yourselves, if it be unknown to you, in the many

publications that have been written along these lines. And now, in order

to utilise that for the coming time in the building of the Brotherhood of

Religions, we proclaim in every country, to every faith, among the people

of every religion, the common heritage, the spiritual verity, the primary

doctrines that are found in every faith. What are they? They are but few,

although far-reaching. They could be counted on the fingers of two hands,

and even than that, so few are they.

The first great doctrine that every religion teaches is the unity

of God; the second, that God in manifestation is ever triple. In

philosophy they speak of three qualities or attributes; in religion

they mostly personify, and speak of a Trinity or a triple form. But

whether philosophical, or personified in religion, you have ever Power

or Will, Wisdom, Activity, and you can find those in the Trinity of

every nation, whether you take in the Christian creed the Father, the

embodiment of Power, of Will, the Son, the Wisdom everlasting; the

Spirit, the creative Activity by which the worlds are made. Or you

might take it equally well in Hindūism, and there you would see the

order reversed: the Creator, who is the embodiment of Activity; the

Preserver, the embodiment of Wisdom; the Regenerator, the embodiment

of Power. And so might I take you to ancient and dead religions, and

to ancient and living religions, and show you ever the same. For those

primary truths of God are everywhere proclaimed, one in His nature,

triple in His manifestation. And then, after those first two truths,

you come to the third: the vast family of the Sons of God, the great

hierarchy of spiritual intelligences—archangels, angels, shining ones;

call them what you will—that mighty family of Sons of God, amongst which

humanity finds its own place in process of evolution. Then you come to

the fourth great teaching: that you have the unfolding of consciousness

going on continually, and shaping ever finer and finer bodies for its own

expression; that which science calls evolution, but which religion has

ever called reincarnation, the method of perfecting the germinal seed

of divinity into the divine man, when the human evolution is complete.

Then, fifthly, the worlds in which these changes go on: our earth, the

intermediate world, and the heavenly; and man, with bodies of matter

belonging to all the worlds, so that he may be in contact with each.

And then the sixth great teaching of universal law—law in the world of

mind as well as in the world of matter; law which builds character as

well as builds the outer world; law unchanging and inviolable, which,

because we can know, we can utilise to the building up of ourselves into

noblest ideals. And then, closing these doctrines that are common to

every religion, we find the idea of the Teachers who preside over human

evolution, who inspire religions, who guard the spiritual progress of

mankind. Those are the truths universal, those are the teachings which

every religion has had and has; and so we find in these religions,

by their unity of teaching, the reality of Brotherhood that we seek

everywhere to spread. For of what avail to change from one faith to

another if in the new religion you only find the same old truths,

though ceremonies and rites may differ? And we see in this Brotherhood

of Religions one value to mankind which one religion only could never

have given to us. Just as you see the light of the sun broken up into

many colours, and those colours giving all the beauty to earth which

you see in the nature around you; just as you know that those colours

that constitute white light can be recombined again into the white light

whence they sprung, so is it with religions. The great truths, the great

virtues are as one—the great white light of truth; they are broken up by

the prism of the intellect, and the many religions ray out, each with

its own colour; they are recombined by the prism of the Spirit, and once

again are blended into the unity of truth.

If you look at religions you will see how true that is. Every religion

has a note of its own, a colour of its own, that it gives for the helping

of the world. Go back to ancient Egypt, and you find the note of the

Egyptian religion is knowledge, so that Egyptian religion became the

mother of Egyptian science, and science spread from Egypt westwards

over Europe. Go to the Far East, and you will find in India that the

special note of Hindūism is the all-pervading nature of Deity, and the

all-compelling duty which is the law for every individual. Go to Persia

in her ancient days, and there the note of purity was struck—purity of

thought, of word, of act. Go to Greece, and you will find her note was

beauty—beauty in architecture, beauty in sculpture, beauty in painting,

beauty in the perfection of her philosophy, which made the Beautiful of

equal rank with the True and the Good. And in Rome you find the note of

law, law all-compelling; and in Christianity the note of self-sacrifice,

which has in it the promise of the future; and in Islām the proclamation

again of the divine unity. And so every religion with its own note, every

religion with its own colour; blended together they give the whiteness of

truth, blended together they give a mighty chord of perfection.

Now that you could not have had with one faith and one creed.

Human thought is too narrow, human brain cannot grasp at once this

many-noted chord of perfection; and so many religions, each with its

own characteristic, as though the Divine Name were to be spelt out by

the religions, and each gave a single letter, all the letters together

making the name of the Blessed One. When you look on religion in that

way you realise how mighty a thing it is, how its strength is in unity

expressed in diversity; how each religion should learn from others and

share with others that which is its own specialty. And surely that does

not lower religion, but makes it greater; surely it does not make it less

compelling, but more attractive. Is Christ less when He taught “Love your

enemies,” because we know that the Buddha said, six hundred years before

Him, “Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love”? Or

is it not more beautiful to see in the Buddha and the Christ proclaimers

of the one eternal law, coming at different times to different nations,

but ever with a single truth, ever with one code to teach to men?

Now in trying to do this work—which, of course, is taken in detail when

one is dealing only with that side of thought—Theosophy is preparing for

that common spiritual religion, the one Divine Wisdom, of which all the

religions of the world shall see themselves as branches, while the trunk

and root of truth are one. That is the great work, then, in the coming

civilisation, which it is the duty of Theosophy to labour at; and hence,

in one of its early teachings, it was said it was to be the corner-stone

of the religion of humanity. For the religion of humanity will be the

Brotherhood of Religions that I have been describing, where no religion

can be spared, for each has something special, but where all religions

will be seen as one, because they give similar truths in different forms.

Let us pass from that, and ask what Theosophy is to do in the coming

civilisation, in the science of that time. Science in the coming days

will pass into subtler worlds, or subtler matter. It has practically

conquered the grosser, denser forms of matter; it is now going onward

to the subtler and the finer. And there lies its difficulty: that the

methods which did for the grosser, the apparatus that measured the

grosser, are not applicable for the subtler. And when I say “the gross,”

think how fine even its apparatus is, for quite lately I had sent to

me an article in a scientific journal which spoke of an apparatus that

could measure the forty-millionth of an inch, and yet that is coarse

compared with the subtleties of the matter that lies beyond that, which

science must conquer in the coming days. Now of what value can Theosophy

be there? It is bringing, by training, the possibility to man in our

modern days of quickening his own evolution, and running ahead of the

slow working of the laws of nature unguided by human intelligence. It

is bringing, and proclaiming everywhere, a system by which man can more

rapidly unfold the powers of his consciousness, and also may more rapidly

develop the organs of finer matter that are related to those worlds of

finer matter which science will soon enter and begin to conquer. It is

telling people how to develop the finer senses, and showing them the line

along which the very few have gone in the past, but along which myriads

shall tread in the future, the next great stage of human evolution, the

organising of the finer body in man. It is bringing that to the help of

science in order that by the evolution of the finer body the finer world

may become the object of observation, exactly on the same lines, exactly

by the same laws, that your grosser physical bodies to-day enable you

to investigate the grosser physical world around you. There are eyes

that are keener than these organs evolved from the pigment spots of

the medusa; there are ears finer and subtler than those of our body,

exquisite as they are in their mechanism and in their delicacy; there are

organs of sense transcending the physical. Within the physical brain is

an organ evolving which shall be the connecting link between those finer

senses of the finer body and the grosser senses of the body of flesh that

we wear; an organ that many of our scientists think is an organ that is

passing away, because it is larger in the earlier stages of evolution

than in the highly developed man; it is the pituitary body. It is not

a question of size, but of inner complexity of organisation; and that

organ is not simply what science calls it, a vestigial organ—that is,

one belonging to the evolution of the past—it is truly a rudimentary

organ, one belonging to the evolution of the future. And the fact of that

has been proved by bringing life-currents, electric currents, to bear

on that particular organ, so that the results of the finer senses are

communicated to the brain, and we bridge what some people think the gulf

between the world of physical matter and the world that is called that of

astral matter.

Those experiments are now so familiar to some of us that it is impossible

for us to agree with the notion that that organ in the brain has no

future, as we find it can be stimulated and organised more finely, and

used in this definite fashion; we know that what a few are doing now

many shall do to-morrow, and those who have done it are only a step in

front; others are treading on their heels, and may outstrip them soon in

evolution. But here comes the difficulty, especially for the nations of

western Europe, who, from climatic and other reasons, have taken so very

largely to a diet of flesh, in which also alcohol plays a large part.

Now flesh and alcohol are not suitable materials for building up the body

of our ordinary life, which is to be made sensitive enough to receive the

vibrations from the finer matter of which I have been speaking. Doctors

have just discovered what was published by Madame Blavatsky many years

ago—that alcohol has a direct effect on the pituitary body, and poisons

that body, tending to cause inflammation. Have you ever wondered why

it is that alcoholic excess leads to what is called delirium tremens,

in which people see things that do not exist to the ordinary people

around them? It is because they have poisoned that very organ by which

vibrations come from other worlds; and although what they see is largely

abnormal and irrational, it is none the less the result of action on

these irregular and poisoned bodies, which vibrate under the stress of

poison instead of under the stress of thought, as they should do. And

that which doctors now have discovered and are publishing as a warning

to people, that has ever been known in occult science, and one of the

conditions of giving the details of the methods whereby that body may be

rendered active, has been abstinence from alcohol, and for the simplest

reason. So long as you are not using any of these methods, it does not

so very much matter whether that body be poisoned or not. You may live

long with a poisoned pituitary body; but the very moment that you begin

to work upon it, to make it active, to throw into it new currents of

life and energy, then the poison and the energy together bring about

inflammation of the most intractable kind, causing severe pain, as well

as brain mischief. And it is for that reason that the methods have

not been publicly given, and are only given to those who are pure from

the taint of alcohol. Along those lines, then, you will very likely

come up against rules that many of you will not care to adopt. We do

not say adopt them; we only say they are the conditions of the finer

organisation. Natural laws do not change for people’s wishes and whims.

If you want electric sparks from a machine you must make the conditions;

you must have dry air, not air full of moisture. It is no good saying

that dry air is not so comfortable to breathe as moist air. You are not

obliged to have electric sparks, but if you want them you must conform to

the conditions laid down by nature, and not follow your own whims. And

that is true everywhere. Presently people will find that it is true when

they want to investigate some of the spiritualistic phenomena; they have

not discovered that yet. They think they can lay down the laws, and then

get the results which can only be gained by obedience. The other day I

was reading a rather curious report of investigation into spiritualistic

photographs; and when I saw they had not obtained any, I could not help

wondering how many physical photographs they would be able to get if they

made it a rule that they should not put a dark cloth over the camera,

and that, above all, they should not take the photographs away into the

dark room, because that gives all possibilities of cheating and of fraud.

Presently you will find out that finer nature has her laws quite as much

as grosser nature, and that you can no more get results without obedience

to those laws than you could get your photograph if your plates were

exposed to the light. When that is learned, progress may be more rapid.

Along that line, where these rules are laid down for the organisation

of the finer bodies, there is another matter that comes in: it is of no

use to develop the finer bodies, unless the consciousness of the higher

worlds is unfolded, and the only way to do that is by the old way of

strenuous and regular meditation. Theosophy brings to the Western world

the yoga of the East, by which the man who practises so trains and

refines his brain that he makes it sensitive without making it diseased.

There is where the difficulty is found in the West. Sometimes, when a

great rush comes down from the higher worlds into the body of some great

saint or some great genius, there is brain trouble and brain disturbance;

hysteria is found. Naturally, because you are overstraining your

instrument. And if you want to be able to receive those great downflows

from the higher world, then you must begin to tune your instrument to

vibrate to the swifter vibrations that come down. You can do it, and

there is no danger unless you go to excess. If day by day you would give

even ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, to strenuous thought and

careful concentration, you would gradually make your brain constitution

more complex and finer than it is. Thought is really the creator of the

brain. As you think, your brain grows; just as if you exercise your

muscles, your muscles grow and develop. It is all law, and thought is

the force which renders the brain more complex in its organisation. The

Indian yogi practises that, and by practise year after year, builds up

the brain of the coming race out of the brain of the race that is.

He makes it finer, subtler, more responsive, and he does it without

the sacrifice of physical health; and that is a thing that any one of

you may begin, if only you will be moderate and not excessive. Never

concentrate to the point of making a feeling of dulness and heaviness

of the brain; never concentrate to the point of pain; dulness and pain

are the danger-signals of nature, that you are trying to change matter

more rapidly in its arrangement than is possibly consistent with health.

Therefore you need moderation; but, given moderation, nothing but good

can come out of the practise of meditation and concentration; and by

that you will not only make your brain more sensitive, but also keep it

sane and healthy, and you will have none of those miserable hysterical

symptoms which have so blurred the value of the knowledge that has come

through the seer or the saint. Along those lines, then, Theosophy works

with science to show the road of development of science in the coming

civilisation.

What has Theosophy to do with regard to art in that civilisation?

Glance at the results of your civilisation to-day on the beauty of the

land. Go to Sheffield, which is built in what was one of the loveliest

valleys of the Midlands; notice, as you come near it, the beauty of the

countryside, the wooding of the undulating land, the exquisite beauty

of rivulet, of forest, and of grass; and then, out of all that beauty

of Nature, you plunge suddenly into the hideousness of Sheffield. You

find the atmosphere thick with black smoke. No tree will grow in many of

the districts, no flowers even on the sills of the houses of the poor.

The atmosphere poisons vegetation; what do you think it does to the

men, women, and children who breathe it? And Sheffield is not alone.

Go to Glasgow; see the hideousness of that, the second metropolis of

Scotland. Go to Birmingham, to Manchester, to any of these great cities

that so largely make the wealth of England. But sometimes it seems to me

that what you pay in beauty is too heavy a price even for your wealth,

and that England was happier as well as healthier when she had fewer

millionaires, but also fewer stunted and deformed specimens of humanity

in her slums. Look at the faces of the men, women, and children of one or

two of those cities I have mentioned. Look at the faces of the Glasgow

crowd as it tramps back from its labour to the slum. Those faces are not

civilised; they are brutal, many of them—animal, more than human. Oh, you

who think that beauty is only a luxury, look at the humanity you breed,

where ugliness is the mark of the cities, instead of the beauty that

has been destroyed. You must learn to understand what beauty means. It

moulds the body, and ugliness does the same. Out of your hideous cities a

hideous humanity grows up. The restoration of art is a matter of life and

death, not a matter of luxury and of enjoyment. Artists are wanted in our

towns much more than on the walls of our galleries. Only a few go into

the gallery, but men, women, and children live in the town. Until the

town is beautiful, as in Greece it was beautiful, the coming civilisation

will lack one mark of the civilised man. And Theosophy teaches reverence

for beauty, whether it be natural beauty or beauty formed by the skilful

fingers and keen brains of men—reverence for the human body. No nation

has a right to breed the bodies that we see in the population of the

slums. It is all very well that in the richer, the upper classes you

find men and women healthy, strong, magnificent to look at; but if they

can be what they are, all ought to be able to share in the conditions

that create that beauty. And art will not do its duty until it holds

up for all to see the power that resides in beauty, and its moulding

influence on civilisation; art should be ever painting and holding up

to us the ideal in its beauty, for it is the ideal that makes the real.

The artist should show the ideal, and the craftsman should reproduce it;

and until your craftsmen honour their labour, there will be very little

hope for art to thrive amongst us. Art is no art when it only paints

the commonplace and the ugly. Sometimes, on the walls of a gallery, you

come across a picture made up perhaps of a piece of cheese, and a boiled

lobster, and a string of onions, and one or two corpses of birds thrown

in for the sake of their plumage. That is not art. Art is beauty, and to

paint things like that is to degrade art, no matter how well they may be

reproduced. “Oh,” I have heard a person say, “how beautiful that cheese

is. I could cut it!” You can cut cheese anywhere; and you don’t want to

go to a gallery, and an art gallery, so-called, in order to see it. Put

this beside the pictures of the ancient masters, and see what art means

and what the travesty of art. Theosophy has to try to breathe into the

artist the idea of the splendour of his calling, the divinity of his

power. He can see what we cannot see, and hear what we cannot hear; let

him give us what we cannot reach for ourselves, and be again the priest

of the Beautiful for men. Then shall the civilisation grow into beauty,

human as well as inanimate, and the right place of beauty shall come into

our civilisation, the place it held in ancient Greece.

And what shall Theosophy do in the coming civilisation for

society?—society as we see it to-day, which is a battle, not a social

order; which is an anarchy, not an organism. I know it is often thought

that changes will only be brought about by the menace of the starving,

by the dread of revolution. Oh, it is not thus that Theosophy looks on

man, in whom it sees the growth of a spiritual, a divine nature. You will

think me a dreamer, perhaps; and yet I tell you a truth when I say that

not by the uprising of the miserable, but by the self-sacrifice of the

comfortable will the future society be realised on earth. I know that

that is not the idea of to-day. I know that, amongst those who suffer,

such a sentiment would be met with ridicule and scoff; but it is not

those who suffer misery who can build a wise and happy social system.

It wants the best brains and the best hearts; it wants leisure to think

out and to plan, and love to carry into effect. You can make a riot,

you can make a revolution by starving desperate people, but there is no

stability in that which follows revolution. You cannot take, but you can

give; and the spirit lives by giving, and knows the joy of sacrifice.

Do you imagine that sacrifice is painful, that sacrifice means sadness

and gloom? I tell you there is no joy on earth like the sacrifice of

the lower nature to the higher, and the giving to others of the higher,

that asks nothing for itself. Along those lines our Social Redemption

will come, along the lines of those who are willing to give and willing

to sacrifice, for the gift that is compelled by law or force is always

resented, and is resisted as much as possible. Outer compulsion is met

by violent resistance, but the inner compulsion that is the compulsion

of love, that meets with no violence in resistance; it pours itself

out in joy. And there lies the future, there the basis of the coming

civilisation.

I said, in the beginning, it would be built on self-sacrifice, and that

was the thought that lay behind the words. I see, spreading through

the comfortable, through the rich, those who are well dowered with the

goods of earth, a spirit of noble discontent, not for themselves but

for others, not for themselves but for the poor. I come across the

rich and highly-placed who ask, “What can we do to relieve the misery

we see?”—who suffer by sympathy, not by compulsion; and it is from

them the redemption of society will come. It seems, perhaps, to-day a

far-off dream, but man grows faster than we are apt to realise. There

is nothing too noble, nothing too beautiful, nothing too divine for man

to achieve; for man is growing godlike, however slowly, and the seed of

Deity within him is beginning to flower in some hearts. Wherever one who

does not suffer is unhappy for those who do; wherever a human brain that

might amuse itself finds joy in labour for the helping of the nation;

wherever a human heart which has all that love can give it cannot be

happy, but goes out in love to the outcast—there lies the promise of the

future. Such brains and hearts were counted by units, perhaps, even a

century ago, by tens a little later; they are beginning to be counted by

hundreds now, and to be found in places where none may dream that there

are those who are longing to give and strive for a better social state.

In those who are growing into the spiritual life; in those who cannot

be happy while others are miserable; in those whose meals are rendered

bitter by the starvation of the poor; in those whose luxury is a burden

because of the want of the miserable—in those will you find the builders

of the new civilisation, those who shall sacrifice that others may be

happy. That is the future to which we look, that the future for which

we labour, proclaiming everywhere the ancient words that “joy lives in

giving, and not in taking”; repeating again the old message, “It is more

blessed to give than to receive”; saying once again the old truth, that

only where self-sacrifice is found, there is also found a religion and a

civilisation that can endure.