The Field of Work of the Theosophical Society
_The Presidential Address delivered to the Convention of the British
Section of the Theosophical Society, held in Essex Hall, London, 7th
July 1907._
The Field of Work of the Theosophical Society.
It is my duty now to bring to a close this Convention, and to bid you
all farewell, to scatter to your various places and to do, let us
hope, with fresh courage and deeper knowledge, the varied works which
you are called upon to perform. And let me, before I take up the
subject upon which I am to speak--"The Field of Work of the
Theosophical Society"--let me, ere beginning that subject, say one
word of gratitude to her without whom the Theosophical Society could
not till any field, nor sow any seed--to H.P.B., our Teacher and our
Helper, let us offer our heart's gratitude; for without her we could
not have met together, without her we could not have learned the
Theosophical teaching. It may be that many of us have learned much
since she first taught us, but she was the first Teacher, and the
Bringer of the Light. It may be that some, since they met her, have
known their Master face to face; but it was she who led them to His
presence, she to whom the possibility in this life was due. It may
well be that had she not come some other might have come to do the
work, but that matters not to us; that she did it is her claim to our
homage, and we, who live in the light she brought, may well pay
tribute of gratitude to her.
What is the Field of our Society's work? It is sketched in our Three
Objects; and those of you who have looked upon the Objects with care,
in the various recensions through which they have passed, may have
noticed that each one of them covers one of the aspects of human
consciousness. In the first, that which declares the truth of the
Universal Brotherhood, we have the field of work of the Activity
aspect, the active principle of the consciousness, of the Spirit,
which seeks expression in service to the race. In the second, the
study of the religions and the philosophies of the world, we have the
field of work for the Cognition aspect of consciousness, that which
gathers together the fruit of knowledge; it is the Knower gathering
the food by which he unfolds his powers. And in the third we have the
field of work of the Will, the Power aspect of the consciousness, the
deepest root of our being, that by which the worlds exist, as they are
supported by the Wisdom, as they are created by the Activity. So that
when we thus look at the objects of the Society and realise the
relation that they bear to our conscious selves, we see that the field
of the work of the Theosophical Society is wide as the world, and
knows no limit where Will and Knowledge and Activity can make their
way. And it is true, now and always, that everything which helps and
benefits man is Theosophical work, and that nothing can be excluded
from the sphere of our work which includes every aspect of
consciousness. So let us take this natural, this scientific division
of our work, and see what we may do in each field which offers itself
to the appropriate power in our nature.
The first will naturally cover all active working for humanity, all
service which one can offer to another; and it will be well, in the
days that lie before us, if we realise that there is no scheme for
human helping, no possible effort for human uplifting, which is
outside the field of work of the First Object of our Society. Every
Lodge of the Society should make it one of its activities to serve
humanity in the place where the Lodge is founded; and the value of the
Lodge should be in the knowledge that is there gathered with the
object of spreading it. For Theosophy should be your touch-stone as to
the value of every scheme, as to the tendency of every proposition. In
all the countless schemes around us in these active times, some work
only for the moment; others, based on sound principle, are preparing
the world for a better and happier future. By your Theosophical
knowledge you can judge the value of every such scheme, and throw
yourselves into those alone which work on lines beneficial to the
future, which are laying the foundations of a civilisation greater
than our own. For among the many schemes and many methods there are
ways in which each man inspired by the Spirit of Brotherhood may find
work that satisfies his reason and is justified by his conscience. And
there is no one particular method, no one special road, along which
the Society, as Society, can go. It lays down the principle of
Brotherhood as an active working spirit in the life of every member,
and then it leaves the member free to use his own judgment and his own
conscience as to which among the many methods recommends itself most
to him as an individual. So that in speaking of that field of work, it
is not for me to say: "This plan, that method, the other means, that
is what you ought to follow"; but only that you are not carrying out
the First Object of the Society, unless you are engaging your activity
in some task which in your intelligence and conscience is working for
the benefit of your fellow-men. That is a point I want to put to your
Lodges; for when I see questions discussed as to giving new life to
Lodges, vivifying Lodges, and so on, I know well that the only cause
for the need of such discussion is because men allow the life to
stagnate within the Lodge, instead of sending it forth a living stream
to fertilise the place in which the Lodge is built. There would be no
lack of life were it not that you keep it bottled up for your own
advantage, for your own needs. The source of life is inexhaustible,
and it only ceases to flow where there is stagnation, because it is
not allowed to run out to the people who have need of it, but is kept
within the narrow limits of a Lodge. If you worked as well as talked,
if you labored as well as discussed, if you served as well as praised
service, there would be no time and no need to discuss how the Lodges
of the Theosophical Society shall be vivified.
Your Lodge should be your place of inspiration, the place where you
learn how you are to serve, the place where you find the bread of
life. But the bread of life is meant to feed the hungry, and not to
surfeit those already filled, to feed the hungry crowds around you
starving for knowledge, that life may be made intelligible and thus
tolerable to them; and it is yours to feed the flock of the Great
Shepherd, and to help those who, without this Wisdom, are helpless.
And all need it; not the poor alone, nor the rich alone, but every
child of man. For the one thing that presses upon all alike, the
bitterness of life, is the sense of wrong, the want of intelligibility
in life, and therefore a feeling of the lack of justice upon earth;
that is the sting which pierces every heart; whether the heart belong
to the rich or the poor, it matters not. When you understand life,
life becomes bearable; and never till you understand it will it cease
to be a burden grievous to be borne; but when you understand it,
everything changes. When you realise its meaning, its value, you can
put up with the difficulties. And our work with regard to those around
us is to bring that knowledge, and by that knowledge to lift them to a
place of peace. That is the work which demands to be done, and which
your Lodges have the duty of doing. For there ought not to be one
scheme for human helping, in any place where a Lodge of the
Theosophical Society is established, where in that Lodge workers may
not be found ready and eager to give labor to the helping of their
brothers amongst whom they live. What is the use of prattling about
Universal Brotherhood, if you do not live it? Sometimes, in
discussions on Brotherhood, it is spoken of as though it only meant
soft words and well-turned phrases, sentimentality and not reality. It
means work, constant, steadfast, unwearied work, for those who require
service at our hands; not soft words to each other, but work for the
world, that is the true meaning of Brotherhood.
Pass from that to our next field of work, sketched out by our Second
Object. Without that you cannot rightly work for Brotherhood, for you
will not understand the knowledge already garnered. You must learn in
order to teach, you must study in order to understand, and this Object
is not carried on in our Lodges as effectively as it ought to be; for
it is translated into one man studying, and pouring out the fruits of
his study into the open mouths round him on every side. That is all
very well in the beginning when the young bird comes out of the egg.
It is necessary that the father and mother bird should pour food into
the wide open beak; but some of you ought to have gone beyond that in
the thirty-two years of life of the Society: you ought to be ready to
help, and not only to be helped. And the life of the Society will not
be healthy while so few are students, and therefore so few are fit to
teach. Every Lodge should have its classes for study under this
object. There are other ways in which you must learn as well as by the
teaching of brother Theosophists, and there is a plan they are just
adopting in the Paris Lodge for the work of the coming winter, which
is a very good one; instead of Theosophists studying the books of
scholars, and then giving out what they have learned, the French Lodge
is inviting leading representatives of the various branches of
thought, those specially interesting to us, in order that they may put
their knowledge from their own standpoint, and that the Theosophist
may have the advantage of listening to them at first hand. That seems
to me a very admirable plan, and I know not why in some of the London
Lodges you should not try to take a leaf out of our French neighbor's
book, and why one Lodge at least should not try, if only for one six
months, to bring to that Lodge some leader in the world of thought,
who shall tell it what he believes, and explain the lines of his work.
If you could persuade specialists along the many lines of study,
religious and philosophical, to give you the fruits of their work, you
would learn more rapidly, you would learn the spirit of a school in a
more satisfactory manner, than when you are only studying books, and
then giving out the books you have read. You value, and rightly value,
the knowledge that Mr. Mead brings you along his special lines of
study, but why should you not have that same advantage similarly from
others who follow other lines of thought, and would speak similarly
from first-hand knowledge? There is a life in it that there never is
in second-hand knowledge, a vigor and strength in it that you can
never get when it has only been learned second-hand, and then poured
forth. Men who study deeply are glad to find audiences who are willing
to listen to the results of their study, and who will give them glad
hearing when they come out into the world from the study to tell what
by labor and toil they have learned. And so I suggest that some of you
should see whether you might not make your Lodges more valuable if,
instead of always going round the same wheel of a few local lecturers,
you tried to win to each locality now and again a really learned and
well-trained man, and then, with your own Lodge as a nucleus of
hearers, gather round them others also who would be only too glad of
the opportunity that your Lodge would give in the place where it
happens to be. You have Lodges in the suburbs, Lodges in the towns
outside the area of London, and how glad many of these would be, if
you made yourselves the channels for knowledge of that sort to be
poured out amongst them. There is one line of work you might well take
up, and the country Lodges might do the same, winning down from London
now and again some thinker who would come and give the benefit of his
study; and if you were known all over England as the places where such
knowledge might be gained, and the bringers of such within the reach
of your fellow-townsmen, the Society would profit by your labor as
well as those who immediately benefit by the effort. And wherever you
deal with the study of a religion, learn it from the lips of one who
believes it rather than by the exposition of one who does not; for
only so will you catch the spirit of the different religions. If you
would learn about Roman Catholicism, win a Roman Catholic student or
priest to come and tell you how his Church appeals to him; or if you
want to learn about the Church of England, win some clergyman who will
come and tell you what that Church means to him; or about
Buddhism, win a Buddhist to come and tell you what his own
religion is to him; and so with the Hindu, and on and on, all round
the different religions. For none can really tell what a religion is
to its followers who does not believe in it, and no one can give you
its spirit who does not feel it. And it is in that way that your
Theosophy should lead you into sympathy with every form of religious
thought, learning it as it comes from the mouth of a believer, and not
in the sort of warmed-up fashion in which one who does not believe it
re-cooks it for his fellow Theosophists. There, it seems to me, is
your field of work under the Second Object; and out of this study
would grow literature, illuminating these various religions and
philosophies, and from your classes should be evolved teachers, to
carry to the different communities the results of their study on
different lines, thus bringing the Second Object to the helping of the
First.
I had a letter the other day from a good member of the Theosophical
Society, and the writer said, being a Christian, that Christian lines
of work attracted her, and she thought she ought to leave the Society
in order to help people along those lines. But what sort of Theosophy
is that? You who are Christians, or believers in any other faith, you
should become Theosophists to help your own religions, and to bring
them the life, not by leaving the Society, but by learning in the
Society to help them; that is the duty of every believer in whatever
religion you may happen to believe. For you should be messengers to
the various religions, helping them to understand more deeply than
many of them do to-day; and if you would understand that that is part
of your duty, to help your own faiths, to enlighten those who will not
come to the Theosophical Lodge but yet will listen to the fellow
believer offering them the knowledge that in the Lodge he has gained,
then the spread of our doctrines, rapid as it is, would be far more
rapid and along healthy lines. For we do not exist as a Society simply
to study, but to spread the light, and every religion should be the
richer and the fuller in proportion to the number of Theosophists that
it enrolls amongst its followers.
Pass to the Third Object. There also we have work to do, and we cannot
work for Brotherhood effectively without understanding the nature of
man. And I feel that one or two who criticised the Society this
afternoon on that point had the right to make the criticism that they
did; for, while in the earlier days that Third Object was so carried
out in the Society that it was the leader in the fields of all such
research, it certainly now has fallen into the background, and is only
a gleaner in the fields where others are reaping, and that is not
right. The knowledge that you have in theory as to the constitution of
man and nature, should be a guide to you in researches, and not simply
remain theoretical knowledge. That which was said this afternoon about
the Psychical Research Society is true. It goes into everything
unusual with a prejudice against it, rather than with a feeling that
there is something to be learned; but on the other hand, one is bound
to say that during the last ten or twelve years that Society has done
more to familiarise the public with these facts of the hidden powers
of man than our own has done in practice, though we have done much
more in theory. Now I am not in favor of much experiment preceding a
study of theory; I believe that we need the theory in order to
experiment wisely; but I also believe that having a true theory we
should use it to guide our investigations, and thus to add to the
knowledge of the world. A part of our work, it seems to me, that lies
before us in the coming time, is to help the world to walk wisely
along those roads of research on which it has entered now. You cannot
prevent it going forward along them, knowledge is already too widely
spread for that; but what you can do is to help men to walk wisely,
and to avoid many a pitfall into which otherwise they would be very
likely to fall. And along those lines there is very much to be done:
plans to be worked out, methods of research to be planned and tested;
and I hope before very long to see some groups in our Society that
will take up this special line of work as part of their activities,
and, headed by someone who knows practically something of that with
which he is dealing, will then help the younger students to learn
wisely and to experiment carefully. And in these matters it is well,
so far as you can, to bring the more scientific members of the Society
into touch with this work; for one of the reasons that Spiritualism
fell into discredit for a time was because the scientific and the
thoughtful abstained from it, and left it in the hands of the
credulous and the unwise. The leaders of the scientific world who
ought to have joined in the work which Sir William Crookes, Alfred
Wallace, and others began, instead of following them and strengthening
their hands, turned their backs on it all, leaving it to be carried on
by those who knew far less than they, and who were not accustomed to
accurate observation and careful recording of phenomena. Now leading
scientific men are beginning to work at it. Along all lines of
psychical research work should be done by us, if we do not mean to
cancel the Third Object in our Society.
Thus, then, a great field of work opens out before us, so wide a
field, so great, that you would have no need to ask for work if you
would only begin to labor along these lines. And take that other line
about which Mrs. Cooper Oakley spoke--the line of Historical Research
into Mysticism. Has it ever struck you how much of the work of our
forerunners remains unknown, because their work is not scanned by
sympathetic eyes? How many of the pioneers in the past centuries lie
under a heap of calumny, because none has tried to understand, none
has tried to realise, the nature of their work? Men like Paracelsus,
Cagliostro, and many another whose name I might mention, who are
crying out, as it were, for research, and thought, and labor on
mystical and occult lines. There again I have good hope that some
really efficient work will be going on; for to my mind one of the
purposes for which our Presidency should exist is to act as a centre
round which every country may gather together, and thus communicate
with each other, and form bodies scattered all over the world for
mutual aid. The strength of our Society is in that unity of thought,
which can only be brought about as one part of the Society realises
that other parts are linked with it, as it ought to be, by the
President of the whole. For the Presidency would be an idle show, if
it is not to be a centre for inspiration and labor. The great work
done by the late President is, as I have said elsewhere, practically
complete; he has given the Theosophical Society an organisation by
which it can work and live; ours to use the organisation that he made,
ours to employ this splendid instrument which is now in our hands for
world-wide labor and for world-wide helping. That is the work to which
I would summon you now, and pray your help. Let us not stand apart one
from the other, and work always along isolated lines; in addition to
the isolated work, we should have the combined work; for many often
can bring about a result which one cannot do. Take, for instance, the
great libraries of Europe, far, far apart. It is very laborious for a
person to travel all over Europe and labor alone in them all; but if
we had students working in every great library, we should have feeders
who would send in to a common centre the result of their work, which
could then be shed over the world.
Along those lines the Society will become respected, when it is known
for honest and useful work in all departments of human activity. There
is no good in glorifying it by words and saying what a splendid thing
it is, unless we justify ourselves to the world by the work which we
contribute for the world's helping.
In this way, then, I would ask you to look at our great field of work.
Laborers are wanted. There is more than work enough for all, and in
this work the principle that must guide us is, as we have so often
said, freedom of thought, freedom of expression. But let it be
understood in the Society, for there is danger of this being
forgotten, that there is freedom for those who assert as well as for
those who deny; that all alike are free. Those who know have a right
to speak, and there should be no outcry against them; those who do not
believe have a right to say they do not believe, and there should be
no outcry against them because they believe not But there is a danger
lest those who believe not should think that they have the only right
of speech, and that those who experience have no right to say out that
which they know to be true. It is the danger which dogs the steps of
Freethought everywhere. You can see it in France at the present time,
where the Freethinker, smarting against the oppression of the Church,
tries to silence the Church, as he has been silenced in the past; but
it is a bad reaction, and we cannot have that within the
Society--there must be liberty for all. I do not wish to impose my own
beliefs on any man or woman in the Society, but I claim the right
amongst you to speak the truth I know, and to bear witness to the
reality of my Master whom for eighteen years I have served, without
being attacked vehemently by those who deny my experience. I know
whereof I speak. I ask you not to believe; that is your own choice. I
ask you not to accept; that is for you to decide. But you have no
right to try to stop my lips, nor to say that the assertion of my
belief is outside the liberty allowed in the Theosophical Society. I,
as President, will defend to the utmost the right of each to speak his
thought--believers and non-believers of every type; but I will not
recognise the right of any to impose upon the Society a dogma of
unbelief, any more than a dogma of belief. Only by that liberty of all
can we live and grow; only by the perfect freedom, and the recognition
of every man's right to speak, no matter what he says, can the health
of the Society be secured. For in the years that lie before us there
is much new knowledge to be gained, many new facts to be discovered,
many new experiences to go through, and we must not discourage the
seekers and investigators by making it difficult for them to speak
amongst us. We need every fact that any human being can bring to us.
We have the right to challenge the fact and investigate it, and either
to say: "It is fact"; or: "To me it is not fact"; but we have no right
to say to any human being: "You shall not search nor speak," for that
would be the death-knell of our liberty, that the denial of the
foundation on which we stand.
And so let us go forward to a future, I hope, fairer than anything we
have in our past. Let us welcome all thought, all refusal of thought,
all investigation, all speech, however different it may be from our
own speech and thought, and doing this with full respect of each for
each, full recognition that minds are different, and that each mind
has its own sphere in which it can do useful work for all, let us
encourage in our Society every school of thought, every form of
opinion, every expression of thought which is in a man's mind. And out
of all that clash of opinion, out of all that discussion, Truth should
come out stronger, richer, larger than ever. And never mind if
sometimes falsehoods are spoken; never mind if sometimes mistakes are
made. An old scripture says: "Truth conquers, not falsehood"; for God
is Truth, and nothing that is not drawn from His Life can live,
nothing that is drawn from His life can die; and realising that, we
can go forward fearlessly into the unknown future, sure that to brave
hearts and true lives every experience, every failure, every mistake,
is only another rung of the ladder by which we climb from ignorance
into knowledge, from the bondage of matter into the liberty of
Spirit.
* * * * *
End of Project Gutenberg's London Lectures of 1907, by Annie Besant