Annie Besant · 5

Not only do we desire results; not only do we desire psychic powers; but still subtler desires assail us - the desire to be looked up to, to be recognised as shining, the desire to speak and show our knowledge wherever we can. Let that go, the Master bids us, for silence is the mark of the Occultist. Speak when you have something to say that is true, helpful, kind, but otherwise speech is a snare and a trap. Half the harm in the world is done by idle speech. Not without knowledge did the Christ say: “For every idle word a man shall speak, he shall give account thereof in the day of judgment”. Not evil words, nor wicked words, but idle words, He warned the disciple against. And to know, to do, to dare, and to be silent, that is one of the marks of the Occultist. So these subtler desires must also be weeded out and thrown on the rubbish heap, till only one strong will shall remain, the will to serve and [60] to serve along the lines laid down in the divine Plan. So is the desirelessness accomplished, which the Buddhist wisely calls the “preparation for action”.

Then come the six jewels I ran over to you last week - Control of the Mind, keeping the mind away from all that is evil and using it for all that is good. And that control of the mind is needed on the Path, for we must so shape our mind that it shall not be in any way shaken or disturbed by anything that the outer world knows as trouble: loss of friends, loss of fortune, evil speaking, slander, anything that causes trouble in the world. These, the Master says, do not matter. How far are most from recognis­ing that great truth. These are the fruits of past thoughts and desires and actions, the karma of the past working out in the action of the present. There is nothing in these to disturb you, but rather to encourage; for it shows that you are wearing out the evil karma of the past, and until it is outworn you are of little use in the Master’s work. You must so control the mind that you shall think no evil, that you shall keep bright and cheerful as well as calm. You have no right to be depressed; it spreads a fog around you, causing suffering to others; and it is your work to increase the happiness of the world, and not to add your own contribution to its misery. If you are depressed, the Master cannot use you to send His life through you to the helping of His [61] brethren. Depression is like a dam built across the stream, preventing the waters from right flowing. And you must not build obstacles in the way of the Master’s life that flows through the disciple, and so hinder His blessing from cheering the hearts of men. Right Control of Thought and then of Action, doing as well as thinking the right, the kind, the loving.

Then you must build up that great virtue of Tolerance, which is so rare amongst us. You must study, the Master says, the religions of others in order that you may be able to help them as otherwise you cannot. And yet the judgment of the world on that is condemnatory and not approving. How often have I seen the criticism directed against myself: “Oh, Mrs. Besant talks like a Hindu in India, and like a Christian in England”. Of course Mrs. Besant does! How else should she talk? Talk Hinduism to Christians? But that would not help them. Talk Christianity to Hindus and Buddhists? But that would veil the great truths from their eyes. Our duty is to learn in order to help, and you can only reach the hearts of men by sympathy when you can speak from their standpoint instead of standing obstinately on your own. That is the great mark of one who is truly tolerant, that he can see a thing from the standpoint of another, and speak from that standpoint in order to help.

Then you must learn Endurance, because of those trials that I have spoken of that will come [62] raining down upon you in order that your past karma may work itself out in brief space, that you may be ready to serve. Take trouble as an honour, not as a penalty; as the sign that the great Lords of Karma have heard your cry for swifter progress, and are giving you the bad karma of the past that you may exhaust it, and so are answering your cry. Then you may endure cheerfully, and not with a face of un­happiness and discontent; as it is said of old that a martyr smiled in the fire, regarding it as a chariot of flame that took him to his Lord.

Then you must learn One-pointedness, or Balance, as the Hindu and Buddhist call it. One-pointedness in the Master’s work, such balance that nothing can turn you aside from it. As the needle points to the Pole and returns if forcibly dragged away, so must your will point unswervingly to that goal of the divine Will for human perfection, that you are endeavouring to reach.

The last of the six jewels is Faith or Con­fidence, confidence in your Teacher and confidence in yourself. But, says the Master, perhaps the man will answer: “Trust in my­self? I know myself too well to trust it”. No, is His answer, you do not know your Self; you only know the outer husk that hides it, for in the Self is strength unconquerable, that never can be frustrated or destroyed. And so the six jewels of the mind are gradually cut into shape, to be cut more perfectly in later years, [63] but at least enough that they may be recognised in the character.

And then, ah, then, remains the last of the great Qualifications, the hardest of all, the one most likely to arouse opposition in the mind of many. The Hindu and the Buddhist call it Desire for Liberation; the Master calls it Union with the Supreme; and because the Supreme is Love, He brings it down to Love lived out among men. And as He deals with that great virtue of love, love which is the fulfilling of the law, He brands three vices as crimes against love, that must be utterly thrown aside by the disciple. The first is gossip, the second cruelty, and the third superstition. These, He says, are the worst crimes against love. And then He goes on to explain how it is so. He takes up gossip first, and points out how, in thinking evil of another, you are committing a threefold injury on man; first, on the neighbourhood in which you live, which you fill with evil thoughts instead of good thoughts, and so, He says pathetically, you increase the sorrow of the world. Then the evil thought about the fault of another, for if that fault be in the man your evil thought makes it stronger, and harder for the man to overcome; your thought makes the evil in him greater every time that in thought you ascribe that fault to him, and you are thus making your brother’s path more difficult, making his struggle harder; perhaps your evil thought will be the last determining push which makes him fall, [64] where otherwise he might have stood upright. If the thought be false and not true, even then in him you may plant an evil which as yet does not exist in his character. Hence the wickedness of thinking evil, let alone of talking it, for where an evil story is passed on to another, there the same cycle of evil is trodden by the one who was spoken to, and so you become a fountain of evil, careless as the words have been.

Cruelty He brands as another great crime against love, and He gives certain forms of it, so that the disciple may realise what he must avoid. Religious cruelty shone out certainly in days gone by in the murders and the tortures of the Inquisition; but the same spirit shows itself now in all harsh religious controversy, and in bitter words directed against those who are trying to think rightly, but apart from the thought of their fellows. Is it not the fact that the partial but lamentable withdrawal of our much-reverenced friend, Mr Campbell, from so much of his work is due to the suffering inflicted on him by his ministerial brethren in the early days of his struggle for the right to speak the truth he knew? For the spirit of religious cruelty is not dead, although it no longer speaks in fire or in manacle.

And then He brands as another form of cruelty, vivisection. On vivisection Occultism speaks with a single voice, no matter what may be said in the name of science, no matter what Commissions may sit thereon and express [65] their views; for cruelty is to do needless hurt to living things. The very Report issued by those pledged in defence of it admits that much of the cruelty has been useless, fal­lacious in its results, even while they say that where cruelty is not inflicted experiments may go on.

After the Inquisition and religious bigotry, after vivisection, a third great class He speaks of are those teachers who are cruel to the children that fall into their hands. Teaching is one of the noblest professions into which a man can go, but it offers also opportunities of wrong into which too many fall; the use of corporal chas­tisement, where a big, strong man ill-uses a weak and helpless child, that is branded by a Master of Compassion as one of the forms of cruelty that bar the way.

And the fourth class He mentions, I fear will have a difficulty in finding acceptance here­ - sport, where living creatures are sacrificed. Granted it is customary, that social opinion does not condemn it, that a man may slay thousands of living birds and not be called a butcher but merely a good sportsman, none the less that cruelty of sport is regarded as an obstacle for those who would tread the Path. And the Master points out that thoughtless cruelty, brings about its work in misery and suffering as much as deliberate cruelty, which is comparatively rare. He points out that the law of Karma does not forget, although man may fail [66] to remember, and inevitably every pain inflicted on a sentient creature brings the reaction of pain on the one who inflicted it.

And then He marks superstition as the last of the crimes against love that He taught his young disciple must be utterly avoided.

But there was one point in connection with cruelty that although I left it out for a moment I must go back to, as it bears so much on the lives of you who are wealthier than those who work for you. He pointed out as cruelty - this has most bearing on India - the not paying of wage where wage had been earned. Though you will very seldom find it here, where the pay-day has become practically obligatory in all big industrial undertakings, Indian teachers have always spoken of it. The Prophet Muhammad said: “Pay your labourer before the sweat on his body is dry”. The suffering wrought by that thoughtlessness is bitter and far-reaching. But a very common fault in the West, which comes under the same condem­nation, is the leaving of bills unpaid for things by which others have to earn a livelihood. The women who labour with their needle, the men who are employed for men’s clothing - these are sometimes driven well-nigh to starvation, because people of high rank, in great social position, forget the suffering they are inflicting, and the trouble they cause by the long taking of credit. That is one of the faults of society that the would-be disciple must turn aside from. [67] Sometimes it spells bankruptcy to the trader, as well as starvation to those he employs.

The last, I said, was Superstition. The Master speaks of two forms specially, one which still prevails, though much more limited than before, in the shape of animal sacrifice offered in some of the Indian temples - mostly among the very poor and uneducated in the villages more than in the towns. But there are a few temples still left, I am ashamed to say, where educated and thoughtful people offer up the blood of animals to the divine Forms they worship. And the Master speaks of that, and you will all join Him in the condemnation. But your missionaries will never persuade the Indians who still use animal sacrifice - a minority as they are - that animal sacrifice is evil, as long as far more animals are sacrificed to the human palate than are ever sacrificed in the temples. That also is marked as superstition by the Master, the cruel superstition, He says, that man needs flesh for food. And it is a superstition, as those know who have resolutely faced it, and have learned that health and not disease is the result of following the law of love. If you think of that sometimes as superstition, it may help you to put it aside. And at least remember that in sending out preachers of your faith to India, they will never move the Indian heart where the kid offered to Durga is blamed, and the kid sacrificed to the sahab and the memsahab in the bungalow is thought to be [68] harmless; for they are a logical people, and they say: “If we may not offer to God, why should we offer to man? If the animal’s life is precious in the sight of God, as you tell us, why do you take it away to put it on your own tables, instead of on the altar of the God?”

And so this great Teacher has traced out for us the (qualifications demanded for passing through the first portal of Initiation, for that firth of the Christ in the human Spirit, which is the passing of that doorway. I have run over, roughly and inadequately I know, the wonderful teaching which comes from Him to illuminate us, but none the less you can see it is an exacting demand, none the less you will see how you must shake yourself free from many prejudices, customs, thoughtless ways of life, if you would find the Master and be reckoned by Him among His disciples.

May you be able to overclimb the obstacles custom, tradition, thoughtlessness, and habit have built up; may even such poor words as mine win you to the realisation that there is no joy in life like the joy of discipleship, no so-­called sacrifice that can be made which is not as the dross cast into the fire where gold comes out instead; oh! that in the hearts of even a few of you - one here and there scattered through this vast audience - the feeble words may light the eternal flame, and the passing movement caused by speech may grow into resolute will and a determined endeavour. Oh, then for you, [69] too, in the near future there awaits the Finding of the Master, for you also who seek shall find; if you knock with the hammer of these Qualifi­cations, surely the door shall swing open before you, that you may find Him, as I have been blessed enough to find Him, that you may know that service which is perfect freedom, that joy which is in the presence of the Master. That is the hope with which I would leave you today, that the aspiration that I fain would syllable for you. And let not, I pray, any imperfection in the speaker, any weakness in the disciple, dim in any way your view of that which shines with undying lustre, perfect with superhuman beauty - the figure of the Master whom you may find if you will, so that you, too, shall say: “Having sought, I found”. [70]

THE CHRIST LIFE

WE have seen our man of the world taking his first steps deliberately towards the higher life; we have followed him as he sought for a Teacher; we have seen him succeed in the search, when the Teacher was found. Today we have to follow him through the first of the great Initiations, onward along the Path until he reaches the entrance to the fifth. It is that life spoken of by S. Paul, of which the beginning is marked by the Birth of the Christ within the man. You remember how he wished for his converts that they should have the sublime experience that the Christ should be born in them. And then you may remember how he spoke of another stage: “Until,” he said, “we all come unto a perfect man, the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ”. Thus did the great apostle of the Christian Church measure out the two limits of the study that we are to follow this morning - one the Birth of the Christ, the other the attainment of His full stature, the reaching of the Perfection of Manhood. [71]

Such was S. Paul’s idea of the meaning, the greatness, of the Path shown by Christianity. In modern days, I know, Christian ambition has not risen so high, and to be saved by another, to be clothed in the imputed righteous­ness of another, has been regarded as the Christian life. But the great Apostle saw otherwise what he called “your calling and election”. Not to be saved by another, but to become a Saviour; that was the old and great ideal in the Christian Church; to be oneself a Christ; to lead the Christ-life; to pass through the great stages of experience marked out in the Gospel story, which, rightly read, is less the history of a Person, than a mighty drama of the Initiation of the Spirit. Looked at in that light, this high Path lies open, as that which should be trodden by all who would fulfil in their own persons the great hope of the Apostle for his spiritual children. That, and nothing less than that, is the possibility of all who will. It is this part of human life which is sometimes called quite simply “the Path”; sometimes, as among the Buddhists, “the Path of Holiness”; sometimes, as among the Roman Catholics, “the Path of Illumination”, the Path on which the light of the Spirit is shining more and more unto the perfect day, that life which was led by the Christ as “the First-born among many brethren”, and not as a unique proof of that to which divine humanity might attain. I grant to the full that this path is one which [72] demands from the one who would tread it a total renunciation of all that in past lives he has held to be valuable and desirable. Hence it has been truly said: “Strait is the Gate and narrow is the Way, and few there be that find it”. In ages to come many shall tread it; in ages far off all human beings shall know it; but humanity has scarce passed the middle point of its evolution, and hence few are they who at present are willing to tread the Path.

I used the word Initiation. I must pause on that for a moment, that it may convey to you some clear meaning; and I will ask you to recall what you all know from your own studies in the history of the past; that in all ancient nations there were certain great institutions known as Mysteries, with many other names to describe them, but all with that one word in common. Eleusinian, Orphic, Bacchic, what­ever they might be, they were Mysteries, into which certain people were initiated. We are told that in the early days all those who were purest and noblest participated in these Mysteries; that they destroyed all fear of death, and gave to man the certainty of Immortality; that those who entered into them gained wisdom which others did not possess, and were marked out not only by the development of their intelligences, but even more by the nobility and the purity of their lives. They are recognised not only as existing in Greece, in Egypt, but also in Persia, in India, in China. [73] And the two greatest of the Indian Teachers of religion were known as special expounders of the Mysteries, of the Path which led through them to the goal to which that Path conducted those who trod it. We have the great Teacher, the Lord Buddha on the one side, and the Buddhists still retain the details of the path that He expounded. We have Shri Shankara­charya, the great Hindu Teacher, on the other, who also expounded the Path and marked out its stages in identical fashion. Then, turning aside for the moment from those great pre­-Christian faiths, we find that in the early days of the Christian Church these Mysteries also existed. You may read about them in the writings of Origen and of S. Clement of Alexandria. You may learn from S. Clement how he cannot speak publicly of that which he learned in the Mysteries, but that some of his readers will understand his allusions. You may read of that famous declaration which used to be heard in the Christian Church, when those who were worthy were summoned for admission to the Mysteries: “He who has for a long time been conscious of no transgression, let him draw near and learn the teachings which Jesus delivered in secret to His own disciples”. And you may learn from other patristic writings how, in those Mysteries, Angels were some­times the Teachers, and how they revealed the invisible world to those who were held worthy to become Initiates therein. [74]

Although it be true that in our modern world the re-proclamation of the continued existence of Masters, of Initiates, of the Mysteries that have never disappeared, has been made specifi­cally by the Theosophical Society (that being part of the work for which it was sent into the world), it does not pretend that in that re­-proclamation it is bringing anything that is new to any great faith, but is only recalling to each great religion its own earlier knowledge and possibilities. If we say that the Mysteries still exist; if we declare that the Gateway of Initiation is still open; if we proclaim in the old words that those who seek shall find, that to those who knock the door shall be opened, it is not as making a new proclamation, but only as repeating a forgotten message-giving to a world that had been sunk in materialism the knowledge it had forgotten, on which it had turned its back.

Hence, to remind you that this is no specifi­cally eastern teaching, but a universal teaching, I have spoken of the life of the Initiate in its Christian form, as the Christ-life. That is the name by which it was known long before the great Founder of Christianity came out into the world, for it is the life of the Anointed, of those who have been consecrated by the chrism of the Spirit, and have begun to tread the Path that makes them Priests and Kings unto God.

That is the ancient pathway called from very long ago the Way of the Cross; for the Cross [75] is the symbol of life, of life triumphant over death, of Spirit triumphant over matter. And there is no difference in this Path between East and West; there is only one occult teaching and one great White Lodge, the Guardians of the spiritual treasures of our race. They know no difference between East and West; They know no difference between white and coloured; They recognise only Qualifications fitting for Initiation; and They open the Gateway in the old, the ancient, fashion, which allows a man to tread the narrow ancient Path.

Now what does this Initiation in the Mysteries mean? Quite frankly, it means an expansion of consciousness. Initiation itself is a certain series of events through which the man passes; actual events and experiences taking a certain amount of time, not a vague indefinite series of feelings, but actual communications and thoughts and actions gone through by a man out of the physical body, in the presence of a great assembly of the Masters. The result is that the man becomes conscious of a new world, as though some great new sense had been given to him which opened to him a new world surrounding him. As a man born blind might know the world by hearing, taste, touch, but if his eyes were opened would see a new world he had not dreamed of stretching around him on every side, so is it with the man who, having passed through the great ceremony of Initiation, comes back into Iris body, into the mortal world [76] of men. Another world is around him, a new phase of consciousness belongs to him. He sees, where before he was blind. He knows, where before he only hoped or guessed.

Of those great ceremonials on this Path there are five. The fifth is that of the Master, with which I do not deal today. Four are the Portals on the Path leading to that final divine Perfection of Manhood. It is to the study of those, then, that we turn. We can take four great events in the Christ-story related in the Gospels which, in the Christian symbolism, exactly represent that which has other names, but not other realities, in the Hindu and Buddhist descriptions of the Path. The first, as I have said, is the Birth of the Christ; the second, the Baptism; the third, the Trans­figuration; the fourth, the Passion. Let us take them one by one, showing what lies under the names, and seeing how they are expressed among our eastern brethren. He in whom the Christ is born, thy new Initiate, is ever spoken of, all the world over, as the “little child”. You remember the phrases you meet with in the Gospel: “Unless ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven”. The kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God, is the old name for the Path, and only the “little child” is able to enter there. The new Initiate, the Christ-­child, then, is born into this new life of the Spirit, and the expansion of consciousness he [77] attains consists in his having opened to him, for the first time, that great spiritual world in which all truths are known by Intuition, not by reason­ing; in which the eyes of the Spirit are opened, and direct knowledge of spiritual truths is gained; knowledge becomes intuitive, instead of rational.

When the great ceremonial is over, then it is that, either by his own Teacher or by some high disciple to whom the work is delegated, the new Initiate finds open within him that new consciousness which is gradually to grow, so that he may master the knowledge which at first is only presented to him in a dazzling panorama. Because of that new world into which he is born, the first of the great Initiations is spoken of as “the second birth”, the “birth of the Spirit”. He has become now the twice­-born - born on earth indeed many times, but always born into the life of matter; horn now into the life of the Spirit, which becomes his for evermore. That is the key of knowledge which is said figuratively to be given to the new Initiate; it is a new faculty, a new power, a new sense, which has been gradually develop­ing within him through the time of his training, and now bursts open into usefulness and comes under his control.

Then it is that that inner renunciation is made which you find typified in the three great vows that in the Roman Catholic Church, and in parts of the Anglican, are the vows which give admission to that which they call “the [78] supernatural life”. You know the vows of poverty, of chastity, of obedience. They symbolise a great spiritual truth: the inner renunciation by the new Initiate of the whole of the possessions, physical, mental, which hitherto he may have regarded as his own. Not by spoken words, but by inner renunciation, he gives up all sense of property, all sense of ownership in anything which he is supposed to possess. He may have wealth; it is no longer his - it belongs to the Great Lodge into which he is entering. He may have mental ability; it is no longer his - he must use it only for the service of that to which he has now given him­self. And so from his heart departs all sense of ownership, all sense of property. And by a strange paradox, it is in that moment of utter renunciation that the Kings of the earth, the Wise Men, bring their treasures and pour them out at the feet of the helpless Babe; for where a man wants nothing, everything falls into his hands; and hands that are emptied in the service of the world are ever continually filled, although they never retain. So he not only renounces all possessions, and becomes thereby a steward able to administer in the work that lies before him, but he also renounces all pleasures of sense, the inner meaning of the vow of chastity. He surrenders also his own will, the personal will, the separate will, gives himself wholly to the one Will that is divine, and knows nothing save that Will hereafter, [79] as the determinator of all he thinks, and hopes, and does. Such is the inner meaning of the great triple vow; renunciation of ownership, of all the pleasures of sense, of the separate will.

And so he comes out again into the world. The Wanderer, the Hindu calls him, for he has nothing left to own. He wanders about, in the words of the Lord Buddha, “free as air”, only vowed to the one service, and able to go anywhere where he is needed for the work. And the Buddhist calls him: “He who has entered the stream”. He has stepped into the great stream of which the further side is Masterhood. He can never again step out of it, never again leave it; that stream rolls between the other world and this, and he who has once entered upon it must go to the other shore.

And three weaknesses he must get rid of now before the second Portal may be approached, get rid of them entirely, completely, utterly, for he can never again tread this Path. Ever onward lies his way. They are called three fetters, because they hold him back until they are broken. First, thy sense of Separateness. He must see all around him as part of himself, feel with their joys and with their sorrows, look at things from their standpoint, understand their feelings and be able to sympathise with them judge none, criticise none. They are all himself, part of his own life. The sense of separateness must utterly pass away, for a [80] Saviour of the world must feel identity of nature with all. Hence, no feeling against any as lower than himself, no judgment of any as despicable or contemptible. He sees all as fragments of the One Life, and identifies him­self with each in order to help and save.

He must get rid of all sense of Doubt - not that rightful attitude of the mind to be doubtful of that which is doubtful, because at present unproved; that remains ever necessary, else were there danger of credulity and folly - but doubt as to certain great facts in nature. The fact of Reincarnation he cannot doubt - for now he knows his past; the fact of Karma, the great law of action and reaction, he cannot doubt - he can look back and see its working in the past and trace it in the present; the fact of the Existence of the Masters he cannot doubt - he has stood in that wondrous circle when he was initiated; the fact of the Path he cannot doubt - he is treading it. Those make up the doubt that for ever is left behind, the fetter, which might prevent his progress.