Annie Besant · 2

Perceiving that alone of all his treasure,

Rest, in the bottom, lay.

“For if I should (said He)

Bestow this jewel also on my creature,

He would adore my gifts instead of me,

And rest in nature, not the God of nature;

So both should losers be.”

“Yet let him keep the rest;

But keep them with repining restlessness

Let him be rich and weary, that, at least,

If goodness lead him not, yet weariness

May toss him to my breast.”

There is the great truth of at once the value and the worthlessness of human life: valuable, because it brings out the faculties without which no progress is possible; worthless, because everything breaks into pieces, and leaves the hands empty till at last they grasp the feet of God.

There then is the worth of the ordinary life, [13] and our man of the world has begun to realise that nut in seeking pleasure, wealth, and honour for himself can permanent joy be found; but in the service of his fellow-men, in the helping of the miserable, the teaching of the ignorant, the uplifting of the oppressed, the lightening of the sorrow of the poor. And many there are among you today who are well off and comfortable, whose hearts are heavy for the sorrow of the world, and who cannot rest in your comfort, in your luxury, while others are starving, miserable, crushed under the burden of life. Oh! the waking of the social conscience amongst us, the recognition of social duty, of social responsi­bility, is the noblest sign of the evolution of man, a proof of the coming of a new Race that shall have sympathy instead of indifference, co-operation instead of competition, as its rule in the outer life of man. And as that spreads and grows, more and more men of the world will tread these early steps. But it must be strenuous: not the passing feeling of compassion that makes you out of your superfluity give what you never miss to some good cause or some unhappy family; not the throwing aside of some luxuries you have in order that others may have more of the necessaries of life. Much more than that is demanded from you, O you who would tread towards the entrance to the Path. You must give yourself, and not only what you possess - and in that there is an immensity of difference. You must feel the [14] sorrow of others as you feel your own pain; you must feel the grief of others as you feel the piercing of your own heart. It must come to you as an intolerable goad to action, that presses you along the Way of Service, which you cannot deny nor resist. You find people amongst you like that, people who cannot rest. It is not making sacrifices. That lies behind them. The things the world calls sacrifices are their delights; they joy to give themselves; it is only a sacrifice in the sense that the Life­-Spirit is ever flowing out to others; but that is joy and not sorrow, delight and not pain, involuntary, almost a necessity of life. And where you see that passion of Service, where you see that willingness to give everything up that others may be happier, where you see people ever thinking what they can do to help, whom they can find to serve, who there is near them to whom they can render help - it may be within the circle of the family or in the larger circle of public life, but it must be the constant resolute endeavour to give everything away that others may profit - there you have made manifest the inner Spirit, who only lives to pour himself out, and finds his satisfaction in the Service of man.

There, then, is the first great step. And wherever you see that, the person is approaching the Path, though he may never have heard of it. He is coming towards the Masters, though he knows not that They exist. There [15] are some who are still in the twilight of unbelief in the spiritual life, who are nearer the entrance to the Path than many so-called religious men, who know the theory of religion but do not follow its practice. And there is one thing true of the value of the training of passing through a period of materialism - that in that there is absolutely no reward, no talking about the joys of heaven, nothing about “he that hath pity on the poor lendeth to the Lord, and lo, what he layeth out it shall be paid him again”. In the life of the unbeliever, he sacrifices him­self for man, and has no reward to look to, no return of outpoured riches to expect, and, in that, he gains a perfection of the sacrifice of the lower self that many an earnest Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu might envy him, in his depth and reality of life. There is an old friend of mine, twenty-one years passed away, whom some of the elder ones among you remember under the name of Charles Bradlaugh. There you have a man who had no belief in the life of the other side of death, who, dying, remained with the idea that death for him ended every­thing, that nothing was left save any work he might have done for men. And I know of no more spiritual statement - aggressive Atheist as he was - than a passage that he uttered when he spoke of the citadel of human liberty and happiness that in the future he hoped humanity might reach, though he believed he would never see it for himself. “Enough for me,” he said, [16] “if my body, falling into the ditch that keeps humanity from its future, may act as a bridge over which others may tread to the happiness that I shall never see”. The man who could say such words, with the depth of belief that distinguished all which was his, was a man who was taking the first steps to the Path, which, in another life, most surely he shall find.

Learn, then, that the service demanded is that unselfish service that gives everything and asks for nothing in return; and if you find that in you it is a necessity of your nature, not a choice but an overmastering impulse, then you may be sure that you are one of the men of the world who are taking the first steps towards the Path. (I need hardly say that when I say men I mean women too, but I cannot keep on saying “man and woman” each time, as it makes such difficulty with the pronouns!)

Take that, then, as the first and the most vital step. And there is another that may strike you as a little strange, and yet it is true. The man who can become possessed by an idea, so that no argument, no personal advantage, none of the reasons which influence ordinary men can turn him away from the following of that idea, that man is coming near to the Path. The great Indian psychologist Patanjali, who wrote certain axioms of Yoga, described in these the stages of the life of man through which the mind of man passed. And he said there was the butterfly stage, the stage of the [17] child, in which the mind ran from one thing to another as the butterfly hovers over the flowers, taking a little honey here and there, ever changing the objects it turns to, seeking pleasure, amusement, delights, everywhere. That butterfly mind, he said, is far from Yoga. And then there was the mind of youth, as he considered it, the mind that is impulsive, under the sway of the emotions, rushing everywhere, possessed as it were for a moment with an idea but then possessed with another, more steady than the butterfly mind, but still varying in direction although holding strongly for the time. That, he said, is far from Yoga. There was then the stage when the mind became possessed by an idea, obsessed if you like, but so gripped and held that nothing could turn aside the man from its following. Now, if that idea be a true idea, turning to the Service of man, consonant with natural law, such an idea­ possessed man is near to the entrance to the Path. I am not forgetting that the fixed idea may be the fixed idea of the maniac; but then it is a false idea, not a true one; then it dis­regards the laws of nature, is not in accord and in harmony with the law of evolution, which is the law of progress. But in studying the maniac with his fixed idea, you may gain some light on what it means when we say a man is possessed by an idea. You see it in enthusiasts, in heroes, in martyrs. When a man like Arnold von Winkelried rushed upon [18] the pikes of the enemy and drew as many as he could into his arms and turned the points into his own bosom, in order that a gap might be made in the opposing force through which his comrades might pass when he lay dead on the ground, he was possessed with the idea of helping his country, and - when it was a question of his country’s liberty - love of life, fear of pain, that influence ordinary men, had no power to change him. And so with the martyr, the man who dies rather than tell what he believes to be a lie. It does not so much matter whether he is right or wrong. Many men have been martyred for what they believed to be true, but which was error. That matters not so far as this possession is concerned. When a man so believes a thing to be true that it is easier for him to die than to deny his truth, the man deserves the name of martyr; and the crown of martyrdom is knowledge afterwards of the truth. It is the attitude of the man that matters. I will take another point which will show you that I am not putting this merely as thinking of things with which I thoroughly agree myself.

One of the burning questions of the day is the policy which is being followed now by the extreme party in Women’s Suffrage. On that policy it is no duty of mine to express an opinion; when I am not taking part in a thing, I never judge those who are facing a danger that I do not share. But I say it does not matter whether the people concerned honestly [19] in that are right or wrong. It does not matter whether they succeed or fail. It does not matter whether their judgment is accurate or foolish. These questions do not touch the character, the life, that is being builded by the heroic sacrifice and the splendid devotion which are sending gentle, refined, and cultured women into the hell of the police court and the prison.

I have taken that case because in any audience you will find much difference of opinion as to the wisdom or the folly of the action, and I want you to realise that from the occult stand­point the outer action is as the husk which is broken and cast away, and within the husk the fruit of the motive is seen: nobility of character, heroism and courage, perfection of self-devotion. And when you find people thus possessed by an idea, so that no worldly argument suffices to shake them, then I tell you, by that great occult rule which many of us know to be the truth, they are approaching the gateway of the Path. For the errors of the brain may be corrected rapidly, almost in a moment, but the building of heroism, devotion, and self-sacrifice is the work of many lives of strenuous endeavour. And it is in that way that Occultism judges of all these things in the world. The outer action is the expression of some past thought, some past emotion; the motive for the action is what is all-important. And so, looking around over the world, we do not judge the place of men by action, but by thought, by will and by [20] emotion. Those are the things that last, while actions rapidly pass away.

I do not know if, without seeming for a moment to be too personal, I might tell you one incident in my own life which, as Madame Blavatsky told me, brought me in this special life to the Portal of Initiation. As a matter of fact, it did, and it was a great blunder, a great mistake; and I mention it the more willingly because it was a mistake and not a thing that as an action was wisely thought or wisely done - the defence of the Knowlton Pamphlet, backing up a wretched little pamphlet whose author died before I was born, which no one could be proud of, no one could like, merely because I thought the suffering of the poor would last longer, unless the question of population was allowed to be discussed. I know that in these days thousands of people are on that side. Then they were not. It meant social disgrace, apparently social ruin, especially for a woman; and it was about as wrong-headed a thing as anybody could have done, looked at from the standpoint of the world; and that is why I mention it. Everything was wrong, except the desire to lessen the sufferings of the poor and the willingness to suffer for that object; but because that was the motive, because, for the sake of the poor, I flung aside everything that a woman values, therefore it brought me to the Gateway of Initiation in this life. You could not have a more extreme case. [21]

You see then why I say that the occult rule judges of the motive, and not of the outer action in which that motive materialises itself in the world of men. And it did not matter one bit that one of my earliest actions after coming into the Theosophical Society was to repudiate utterly the whole of that theory­ - logical from the standpoint of materialism, but impossible from the standpoint of spirituality. That was my test.

Realise, then, friends, that what you have to study is your motive more than your action. Make your actions as wise as you can; use your best thought and your best endeavours to judge what is right before you do it; but know, for your comfort, that the eyes that scrutinise not the outer face but the heart of man, judge by a better judgment than the judgment of the world. Give yourself wholly to Service, keeping nothing back; help, wherever help is possible; work, wherever opportunity of work is seen; give yourself to some great ideal; follow it through cloud and sunshine; walk by it in storm and in peace. And when the lives that lie behind you have flowered in this life into such blossoms of service, of heroism, of devotion, then, man of the world as you may be, knowing nothing of the things of which we have been speaking, knowing nothing of the existence of the Masters and the glories of the occult world, you are beginning to tread those first steps which will bring you up to the [22] begin­ning of the pathway, which inevitably will make you begin to seek the Master; but He will have found you long ere you begin to seek. Though seeking be necessary in the lower world, although the consent of brain and heart down here be necessary, and must be directed to the seeking of Him whose pupil one desires to become, know for your helping that the Master is there long ere you seek Him, that the Master is watching whilst still your eyes are holden; and while you think you are only serving man, while you think you are only helping the downtrodden, the miserable, the ignorant, and the suffering, in the higher world where the judgment of the great Ones is made, Their sentence is pro­nounced, although you know it not: “Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me”. [23]

SEEKING THE MASTER

THE Sufis, who are the Mystics of Islam, have one exquisite saying that bears on that Seeking the Master which is our subject today. The Sufi Mystic says: “The ways to God are as many as the breaths of the children of men”. That is true. Many are the different temperaments of men, many their different needs, and the cravings of men’s hearts are as various as the satisfactions they desire. If we look at those many ways, those multifarious searchings for the true life, the life of the Spirit, for the Master who embodies that life, we find that the many ways practically classify themselves into three great divisions, and along the one or the other of these we find the searchers, as they begin to realise the fact that they are really searching.

One is moved by an intense desire for knowledge, by the longing to understand, by the intellectual impossibility of happiness for him as long as the world remains an unintelligible puzzle, as long as the problems of life remain unanswered and apparently [24] unanswerable. Then another great class approaches the seeking by an intense love for some person who embodies an ideal, by loyalty and devotion to a leader in whom such a one sees embodied all that he most desires to realise in life. A third great type has the will aroused in them by a realisation of the intolerable anguish of the world, the terrible sufferings that press on so many of our race, the resolute determination to alter all that is alterable, and to refuse to believe that anything which man suffers is beyond the reach of man’s remedy by the application of thought, of love, of activity. Those who are moved to the seeking by this realisation of the sorrows of the world form the somewhat rebellious element in the great band of those who are engaged in the search for the highest. And that way is perhaps the most familiar to myself, because it is along that way I sought and by that way I found. And that which oneself has experienced, the road that oneself has trodden, must always remain the most real, the plainest, the one which it is easiest to explain to others.

In the past I have stood in the slums of this vast city at the moment when the closing hour had struck, and when the gin-palaces belched out their flood of drunken, miserable humanity, the men raving, violent and cursing, the women sodden and miserable, clasping to their bosoms babes already poisoned with the curse of drink. I used to go down into the hells of the sweaters, [25] where miserable men and yet more miserable women strive to win the right to starve alive­ - you cannot call it to live. I have heard from the mouths of men a statement which is the sad explanation why economically women’s wages are lower than the wages of men, when against the plea: “We cannot live on this,” there has been reference made to that last sad resource of which none can deprive the woman - the selling of herself for bread. I have tramped through mud and slush at midnight to the meetings of omnibus drivers and tram drivers, the only hour they could find to consult with each other about some remedy for their poor wages. And out of all that there arose so keen a realisation of human suffering, so passionate a desire to find a way in which that suffering might be cured, and finally such a despair of human effort, because these, the results of the misery, were scarcely fit to be builded into any better social state, that out of that there came the intensity of search for some way of redemption that might be found.

And so along one or other of these ways a man may come, and truly has it been declared in an eastern Scripture: “By whatever road a man approaches me, on that road do I welcome him, for all roads are mine”.

We find coming out in the poets, especially of the closing part of the nineteenth century, the different attitudes of those who seek in some way to remedy the sorrows of the world. [26] You find the robust and cheery optimism of Robert Browning, who sings: “God’s in His heaven; all’s right with the world,” forgetting, it seemed to some of us, that it is not the God in heaven that is so much needed, as to find the God in the hell of human misery. The words of the old Jewish psalmist strike there a better note of hope when he declares: “If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there also”. And that view that the responsibility is on God may tend to indolence, and then it is evil. But on the other hand one must not forget that there are thousands of the good and the earnest and the devoted, like the men and women in the Church Army and the Salvation Army, and in many another organisation for the helping of the desperately poor, who find in that a source of encouragement and of inspira­tion. One cannot sometimes but wonder at the splendour of the faith that wells up against all reason, as it seems, from the unconquerable depths of the Spirit in the human heart, which is able to believe and work against all difficulty, and to believe in a God of love where the world bears such multitudinous testimony on the other side.

And then we find another class, who do not take that view that I called a cheery and robust optimism, a gentler view, the view that Tennyson expresses in his famous In Memoriam, the view which hopes against all seeming and [27] resigns itself to ignorance as the inevitable lot of man. You remember how he voices that which seems to be his own position, and which would scarcely perhaps stimulate to the Seeking the Master:

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good