Annie Besant · 3

Will be the final goal of ill;

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet,

That not one life shall be destroy’d

Or cast as rubbish to the void

When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain,

That not a moth with vain desire

Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire

Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;

We can but trust that good shall fall

At last, far off, at last, to all,

And every winter change to spring.

But it is not all who can remain contented with such a hope, who are content to say: “We cannot know”; and in those stormier natures, such as was my own, in face of the misery seen in those days to which I have alluded, the more passionate words of Myers seemed rather to express our attitude to life:

Were it not thus, O King of my salvation,

Many would curse to Thee, and I for one,

Fling Thee Thy bliss and snatch at Thy damnation,

Scorn and abhor the rising of Thy sun, [28]

Ring with a reckless shivering of laughter,­

Mad with the woe which Thou hast seen so long;

Question if any recompense hereafter

Vails to atone the inexpiable wrong.

That is one of the ways in which man is awaked in order that he may really search; for there are natures whom very hopelessness of outside help throws back upon themselves to find what help may be, who say, in despair perchance and yet not all despairful: “There is no God, O Son, if thou be none”; who realise the beauty of the words of William Kingdon Clifford: “Is it said, ‘Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die’? Nay, rather, let us take hands and help, for today we are alive together”. That will inspire a searching, that will stimulate to effort. The mental muscles are braced up to struggle, to conquer in the end.

Those who by any of these ways have reached the point where they feel they must know, or perish, where they feel they must find a perfect ideal or lose all heart to live, where they feel they must find a remedy and not only an anodyne for human pain, they have reached the point where something shall come in their way to stimulate a conscious search for a Master, some perhaps apparently insignificant incident, which, none the less, tells them how they are to seek. Sometimes it is a book taken off a friend’s table while they are waiting for the coming of a friend, a book, perchance, like Mr Sinnett’s Occult World, like any one of [29] the Theosophical books that are lying about so widely spread at the present day. And they, picking it up and turning over the pages care­lessly, are caught, and begin to read, and then go on to study, and begin to learn. Sometimes a lecture, the man having strolled in carelessly to get rid of an hour hanging idly on his hands. Sometimes a picture, like the sugges­tive pictures of the great artist Watts. Some­times, where people are not likely to pick up such a book, attend such a lecture, speak to any friends on these great problems, it may even come - as it came to myself - not by book, nor picture, nor lecture, but by a Voice that seemed to ring out within me and yet without me, that was so clearly not my own that, unthinking, I answered in spoken words, as though speaking to one like myself. I was in a City office late one evening, m that strange silence of the City when all the human tide has ebbed away to the suburbs, and you get that utter solitude which only this crowded City knows in the quiet hours of the evening. And in the Voice was something that seemed to me, at the moment, a little stern, clear, firm, exacting: “Are you willing to surrender everything in order that you may know the truth?” And all simply, unquestioningly, I answered “Surely, that is all I need”. But it went on, insistent: “Is there nothing that you hold back? will you let all go?” And again the answer: “There is nothing I will not surrender, [30] if I can only know”. And then the Voice changed into a music, full, as it were, of smiling and benevolent compassion: “Within a very little time the Light shall arise”. And then again the silence fell, and I was left wondering what had occurred. But within one fortnight of that strange happening, Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine was placed in my hands by Mr Stead, then editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, with the request to review it, because it was out of the line of his young men’s writing. I took the two great volumes home and sat down to read them, and read and read, hour after hour, until in very truth the Light had arisen, and I knew that for which I had searched through many weary years in vain. That is three and twenty years ago; and from that hour to this light has been thrown on the path of seek­ing and then of finding; for it is as true in the twentieth century as it was true in the first, and thousands of centuries before, that those “who seek shall find, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened”.

So to many, in one or other of the ways, the knowledge comes, knowledge of the great facts I spoke of last week, of Reincarnation, of Karma, which explain the condition of things today, and which, applied to tomorrow, can remedy our social ills. For these give time and means of change; these offer not only the unriddling of the present, but help the creation of a nobler future; for you can apply them to [31] the problems of education, of the most miserable and the most depraved, of criminology, of government, and understand the methods of change as well as the object to be aimed at. And to the seeker there comes first the theory, showing the truths on which the world is based, and by knowledge of the law giving also the means and possibility of change.

In addition to those two great fundamental truths, the other two I mentioned - the fact of the existence of the Path, and the fact of the existence of those who have trodden the Path, the Masters - answer to the heart and mind of the seeker, the longing not only to understand but to be an instrument of the working out of the Divine plan in human evolution. They tell the earnest seeker how he may tread the Path, how he may find the Master; and truly then does Light arise in the darkness, for you can see the steps before you for the taking, you realise the goal, although the goal be still out of grasp, even out of sight. When that word has gone out, as you find it in an old Hindu Scripture: “Awake, arise, seek the great Teachers, and attend,” then there comes from the mouth of the seeker the joyful answer “I am awake; I have arisen; I seek the Teachers, and will not cease the search until I find”. Then in the knowledge unrolled before him the whole theory of the seeking is laid down how the man must search, what the man must do, the conditions that he must be willing to [32] accept in the seeking, and the surety of the law that the seeker shall be recompensed by the finding. He discovers in his study that there is a science called the Science of Union, or the Science of Yoga, as it is phrased in the East, for Yoga only means joining, and the Science of the Joining leads to the great truth of the Union; and he sees then, stretching before him, the beginning of the Path, and learns the qualifications wanted for its treading.

What is this Yoga? It is neither more nor less than the application of the laws of evolu­tion of the human mind to the individual: the way in which the human mind evolves, clear and definite and under law; then how to apply those laws to the individual case, so as to quicken the evolution of the mind, and enable the man to outstrip his race, in order that thereby he may help it also to quicken its evolution. Yoga, then, means the application of these laws, and it joins to that a Discipline of Life.

Now, that Discipline of Life is necessary for those who would apply the laws of a swifter evolution to themselves, for the ordinary laws of nature with which we are surrounded carry us along ordinary evolution, and if we increase the stress and the strain, we must do something to strengthen all those parts of ourselves which are subjected to the strain in the swifter evolu­tion that we are determined to follow. That is the reason for the Discipline of Life. It is not [33] arbitrary; it is not, as some people think, an attempt on the part of the Masters to build up obstacles on the road that leads to Them, obstacles which people will be unwilling or unable to overclimb. It is a necessary guarding of the would-be disciple against the dangers of his swifter progress, because of the great strain on body and on mind that that swifter progress entails. And unless you are able to realise the common-sense of that, unless you will admit, as every seeker for the Master must admit, that he is demanding to do in brief space of time what his race will take hundreds of thousands of years in the accomplishing, and that therefore, if for no other reason, he must prepare an at present unprepared body, an untrained mind, for the huge task to which he is addressing himself - unless he can realise that, it is better not to go further than the point we have already reached - the merest theoretical knowledge of the fundamental truths, the facts of the Path and of the Masters. When you turn from theory to begin practice, when from learning, as you might learn any science out of text­books, you turn, as it were, to the experiments of the laboratory and begin yourself to handle the chemicals, yourself to build up the com­pounds, yourself even to make new researches, then, as you know well enough, the student needs a guide, a teacher, a helper; otherwise, taking up for himself that which the majority leave aside, unknowing the conditions, he may [34] injure, maim, kill himself, because he is affront­ing dangers that the great majority of the race leave on one side.