"_Seeking for freedom I go to that God who is the light of his own
thoughts. A man who knows him truly passes over death; there is no
other path to go_"
--UPANISHADS.
In the _Path_ for May, 1887, we find these words: "We need a
literature, not solely for highly intellectual persons, but of a more
simple character, which attempts to appeal to ordinary common-sense
minds who are really fainting for such moral and mental assistance as
is not reached by the more pretentious works."
The experience of one student is, on the whole, the experience of all.
Details differ, however. Some are made more instantly rich than others:
they are those who put forth more vigorous and generous effort; or they
have a Karmic store which brings aid. What Theosophists know as Karma,
or the law of spiritual action and reaction, decides this, as it works
on all the planes, physical, moral, mental, psychical, and spiritual
alike. Our Karma may be worked out on any one of these planes when our
life is chiefly concentrated upon it, no matter upon what other plane
any special initiative impulse or branch of it originated.
The writer, when first he became a Theosophical student, had the aid
of an advanced occultist in his studies. This friend sent him, among
others, the letters which, in the hope that they may assist others as
they have the original recipient, are here published. They are not
exhaustive treatises; they are hints given by one who knew that the
first need of a student is to learn _how to think_. The true direction
is pointed out, and the student is left to clarify his own perceptions,
to draw upon and enlarge his own intuitions, and to develop, as every
created thing must at last develop, by his own inward exertions. Such
students have passed the point where their external environment can
affect their growth favorably. They may learn from it, but the time has
also come to resist it and turn to the internal adjustment to higher
relations only.
The brevity of these letters should not mislead the reader. Every
statement in them is a statement of law. They point to causes of which
life is an effect; that life arising from the action of Spirit in
Nature, and which we must understand as it is manifested within us
before we can advance on the Path. There is a scientific meaning within
all these devotional or ethical injunctions, for the Wisdom-Religion
never relaxes her hold upon Science or attempts to dissever an effect
from its cause. Most of these admonitions have their base in the
constitution of the Archæus, or World-Soul, and the correlation of its
energies; others, still, adhere in the Eternal.
No less should the reader guard himself against a slight estimate
arising from the exquisite modesty of Z. An occultist is never so truly
a man of power as when he has wholly learned and exhibits this truth:
"And the power the disciple shall desire is that which shall make him
appear as nothing _in the eyes of men_."
The inner eye, the _power of seeing_, looks deeper into the source
of a man's knowledge and takes it at its true value. Those men who
are sharers in the Divine, whose first office is to give, are often
protected from the demands and curiosity of the careless by a simple
exterior which deceives the worldly sense. Some men are great because
of the Power which stands behind them, the divine energies which flow
through them; they are great through having learned how to receive this
celestial influx from higher spheres of Being; they are the appointed
ministrants, the true servitors of the Law and pupils of Masters whose
office is humanitarian and universal.
Such aid is never volunteered; it follows the Karmic behest, and, when
given, leaves the student free to follow it or not, as his intuitions
may direct. There is not a shadow or vestige of _authority_ in the
matter, as the world understands the word _authority_. Those who travel
the unknown way send messages back, and he who can receives them. Only
a few of the first steps are here recorded and the first impediments
surmounted. No hints of magic lore are to be found; no formulas
of creed or occult powers; the questions of an awakening soul are
answered, and the pilgrim is shown where lies the entrance to the Path.
The world at large seeks the facts of occult science, but the student
who has resolved to attain desires to find the true road. What may seem
to others as mere ethics is to him practical instruction, for as he
follows it he soon perceives its relation to facts and laws which he
is enabled to verify, and what seemed to him the language of devotion
merely, is found to be that of science; but the science is spiritual,
for the Great Cause is pure Spirit.
Many students must at some time stand where the writer then stood, at
the beginning of the way. For all these this correspondence is made
public, and they are urged to look within the printed words for their
imperishable meaning. They may be cheered to find the footprints of
a comrade upon the rugged Path, above which the light of Truth ever
shines. Yet even this light is not always a clear splendor. It may
seem "in the daytime a cloud, and by night a pillar of fire." We must
question every external aspect, even that of Faith itself, for the
secret and germ of things lies at their core. Let us purify even our
Faith; let us seek Truth herself, and not our preconceptions of Truth.
In her mirror we shall never see our own familiar face: that which we
see is still ourselves, because our real self is truth.
As the Theosophical movement gathers new momentum, fresh recruits may
be aided by those letters which so greatly sustained me, or encouraged
by some copartnership of thought, and that, too, in the real issue
confronting them. We first take this issue to be the acquirement of
occult knowledge. Soon we find that the meaning of all really informed
occult writers eludes us. We find that books only serve to remind us of
what we knew in the long past, perhaps when "journeying with Deity",
and the echoes awakened within us are so faint that they are rarely to
be caught. Whether we study philosophies, metaphysics, physics, ethics,
harmony, astrology, natural sciences, astralism, magnetism or what not,
we meet with endless contradiction and differentiation; we forever
require to strike the balance of our own intuition. We discover that
the final word has not yet been _written down_ upon any of the higher
subjects (unless it be on mathematics, and scarcely on that), and that
all our learning is but a finger-post to that supreme knowledge of
Truth which is only found and closely guarded within the human heart.
Thrown back upon our inner perceptions for continual readjustment, on
every side of experience this warning confronts us: _Stand ready to
abandon all thou hast learned!_ Not knowing the one center, we cannot
thoroughly know any sub-center. The cause unknown, effects mislead us.
Then we turn to that mysterious center whereby the One is manifest in
man, and we begin the study of the heart, both in itself and in the
life it has instituted about us.
To be put into more direct communication with the world of cause
is now the student's most pressing need. One thing alone prevents
this,--himself. He is of such gross fibre that he cannot be "porous
to thought, bibulous of the sea of light". To the refinement and
dispersal of this lower self--of the man he now takes himself to be--he
then directs his will. Each man has a different mode of doing this, but
each who advances at all finds that with every new period of his inner
life a new self rises before him. Looking back over a group of weeks or
months, he is amazed to see what manner of man he was then, and smiles
that pitying smile which we bestow upon the faded letters of our youth.
Yet some there be who ossify there in their rut; let them struggle
mightily to break up the mass which has resisted all environment, all
change, all the conditions of progressive life. They have done for
themselves what the enemy strives to do for others; they are the rock
in their own path.
What our Eastern brothers call "the sheaths of the heart" fall away
one by one; when the last bursts open there is a silence, the silence
of the mystic death. But "the dead shall arise," and from that death
springs up the first tender growth of eternal life.
Up to this point we shall not travel in the ensuing pages. Yet having
realized the real issue so forcibly that his whole strength was at the
start directed towards self-knowledge and the right use of Thought, the
writer offers a part of his first instructions to those of his comrades
who, single-hearted and of royal Faith, hold Truth to be dearer than
all material life and seek it on the hidden way. There is no tie in
the universe equal to that which binds such comrades together. It has
been forged in the fires of unspeakable anguish; it has been rivetted
by a dauntless purpose and a unique, because Divine, Love. The fierce
hatred of seen and unseen worlds cannot tamper with it so long as a
man remains true to himself, for this larger life is himself, and as
he grows towards it his self-imposed fetters fall away and he stands,
at last, a free soul, in the celestial Light which is Freedom itself,
obedient only to the Law of its own divine Being. To reach it, let us
obey the law of our own Being, for, truly, _Being is One_.
My comrades, wherever you are, I salute you.