Lecture VIII
The Place of Theosophy in the
Coming Civilisation
A Public Lecture delivered in the Queen’s Hall, London, at the British Convention, July 2nd, 1909.
It has been my lot now for many years to visit England either every year or every other year, in order to try to spread throughout the country the truths of the ancient wisdom which in these days we call by its Greek name of Theosophy. This year it has been my special duty to place on record in the capital of the empire a certain line of teaching with regard to the changing conditions of the times, to draw the attention of the thoughtful to the signs all around us of a changing civilisation—signs of an age that is passing—signs of a dawning civilisation that may be seen on the far horizon of our day. And I had thought that I should only reach as to this the few thousands that may be gathered together Sunday after Sunday in a London hall, but by the generous kindness of the Christian Commonwealth these lectures have been spread far and wide. To-night I am taking up something of the thought that there has been more fully expressed, with the special intention of showing you the part that Theosophy will play in that coming civilisation, the nature of the work that it is doing in preparation for the civilisation on the threshold. I have worked out in those lectures in some detail what here I must only state, that just as you can find in watching the evolution of a man that at different ages of his life he is dominated by different parts, as we may say, of his consciousness—as we find emotion dominating him in youth, mind dominating him in his maturity, the wisdom of the Spirit in his age—so we may see, in glancing abroad over the civilisations and the races of men, that a similar succession may be observed, and that hence an indication of the future may be obtained. For we can see in the race that preceded our own, and still is living and active, the great Keltic race, how high emotion is the dominant note, and how the expression of that emotion finds itself best in poetry and in art. We can see that in the Teutonic race intellect is the dominant note, and that mind in all the spheres of its triumph shows itself out among the peoples who grow from that stock, of which our own nation is a branch. That being of the past and the present, it is not irrational to look now in the unfolding humanity for the growth of the next principle, the next mark in the opening consciousness, the development of the spiritual nature in man, which succeeds the intellectual as inevitably as that succeeds the emotional, and places the crown of wisdom and all-embracing love on the brow of the humanity which has passed through youth, is passing through its manhood, is going onwards to the full maturity of its evolution. So in the coming civilisation we shall expect to find spirituality the prevailing mark, dominating religion, dominating science, art, and society, and we may rationally look, as spirituality grows, and shapes and moulds the coming civilisation, that in the sphere of religion we shall see ever-increasing unity; in the sphere of science we shall find new methods of investigation, new powers to use in thought; that in the sphere of mind we shall find nobler ideals, more inspiring power; and in society we shall find spirituality showing itself, laying the foundation of society in self-sacrifice, building it up by self-control, and marking Brotherhood as its ultimate goal and achievement.
Such, very roughly, are the signs that we think will mark the coming civilisation. What has Theosophy to do with that civilisation: what its place, its part, its duty? That is the question that I am to try to answer to-night. And fairly the questions might be asked in speaking of Theosophy by those who know little of it save the name—and how little of it is known we can often see in the allusions we find to it in our daily Press—naturally the questions might arise: What is Theosophy? Whence does it come? Briefly, those preliminary questions, then, should be answered. Theosophy, in the first place, as its name implies, is the declaration that man as a spiritual being can directly know God who is Spirit. It is the proclamation of the ancient Gnosis as against the agnosticism of the closing years of the nineteenth century. Secondly, it is a body of doctrines which are common to all the great religions of the world; doctrines which we find explained, more or less perfectly and fully, in every great religion of the past as well as in every great religion of the present; a collection of teachings, spiritual in their nature, universal in their spread, endeavouring to guide man along the way to perfection, training him in life, illuminating him in the hour of death. It does not deal with any special rites, any special ceremonies, any special part of the teaching of religion which is not universal, which is not everywhere to be found. So far as those are concerned, the specialties of every religion, it studies them, it explains them, it shows the occult meanings which often lie behind the outer garment of ceremony, behind the ordinary rites of worship, behind the symbols that you find in every faith; but while it explains them, illuminates them, enforces their real value, it does not strive to persuade people to adopt one religion rather than another, but, instead of giving up their own religion for another, it counsels them to find in that religion the deep truths that all faiths have in common. Hence it endeavours, where religion is concerned, to bring peace instead of war, to make religion a healer rather than a divider, a peacemaker rather than a battle-cry among men. And in searching out these essentials of every religion, and drawing these out and setting them before the minds of men, it justifies its claim to its name of the Ancient Wisdom, of that Divine Wisdom in which all the great religions have their root.
Such, very roughly and briefly again, is Theosophy in its essence: a Gnosis as regards the relation of man to God, a statement of fundamental spiritual truths common to the great religions of the world. In a moment, in dealing with its work in the religion of the future, I will mention those doctrines one by one, so that you may see for yourselves how they may be traced in all the scriptures, living and dead, and in all the religions of the world. I put first the blunt statement of what Theosophy is, in order, if possible, to clear away the clouds which ignorance and prejudice have spread around it.
Taking it, then, that the coming civilisation is to be spiritual, that this Theosophy is to have a definite place and work therein, let me try to point out to you the nature of the work, the lines along which Theosophy labours to prepare the way for, as well as to influence, that coming civilisation for which we look; and when I say to prepare the way for, it is because we believe that every great religion has a civilisation attached to it, and according to the nature of the religion the civilisation that it moulds will be; and because we also believe that at the beginning of every civilisation a great Teacher appears in the world to give the impulse to that civilisation and to shape the religion that will mould it. Hence, with our looking for a coming civilisation, we look also for the manifestation of a great, a divine Teacher.
But I said, people might ask not only what is Theosophy, but—Whence does it come? It is the latest—I do not say the last—of the great impulses which, one after another, in the long past of history, have founded the great religions of the world. Those impulses ever come from a mighty Brotherhood of Teachers made up of the past Founders of religion, presided over by the Supreme Teacher who rules and guides and inspires them all—a mighty Brotherhood of Teachers of the world, coming from time to time to found a religion, to shape a civilisation. Such impulses were often repeated in the past, to be again repeated in the century which now is running its course amongst us, history in very truth repeating itself, and bringing at the appointed time a new civilisation, preceded by a new spiritual impulse.
That impulse on this occasion has differed from all that went before it in that it founds no new religion, builds no new barrier, does not mark out believers and unbelievers, does not try to proselytise, but only to inspire. For, as I just said, Theosophy goes to all religions as a peacemaker, and does not strive to draw away from any faith those whom the law has brought to birth beneath its shelter. So its first work in preparation for the coming civilisation is to try to bring about a brotherhood of religions, not destroying any, not trying to make any less potent than they were before, but endeavouring to transform them from rivals to brothers, so that each religion may recognise its kinship with other religions, and they may become one mighty family, instead of warring and separate creeds. Now, to that high end it brings the knowledge of facts which have largely been used against religion, but ought really to be used in its service. Those of you who have reached even middle age will remember how in the latter part of the nineteenth century there grew up among the sciences of the time a science which was named Comparative Mythology. You will remember how that science grew; the oldest among you may remember its very beginnings. It sought out of the past religions, as well as out of the present religions, to prove that religion grew up out of ignorance, and only became refined as it grew older and spread among more cultivated people. It used the researches of the archæologist, the discoveries of the antiquarian, as weapons against the religion which dominated Christendom, where science was most powerful and most active. It took up doctrine after doctrine of the Christian faith, and pointed to the existence of those doctrines in other times, in other civilisations, among the religions of the past, both living and dead. It brought information from the open tombs of Egypt, and gathered together the fragments of Egyptian knowledge as they were traced on the papyrus, on the leaf that was put on the bosom of the mummy. It gathered them together, and out of those scattered fragments it made what we know well as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It did the same with Chaldæa, the same with Nineveh, the same with those replicas of Egyptian temples that were unburied in far-off Mexico—temples thousands of years older than the Aztecs, who slew their worshippers and destroyed their civilisation, the Aztecs, who themselves were thousands of years old when Cortez and his Spaniards treated them as they had treated their forerunners. It brought from those unburied temples similar teachings and similar ideas. It gathered, again, similar teachings from the books of China, with its immemorial traditions; from the scriptures of India, from the fragments of the Zoroastrian tradition, from the books of the Buddhist nations, from Greek and Roman. Piling up all the evidence it had gathered, it made out of that the science of Comparative Mythology. It was the deadliest weapon that was ever forged against dogmatic Christianity, because founded on knowledge of facts that none could deny. Then it was that it became the duty of Theosophy, just then born into the world, to come forward to acknowledge the truth of the facts, and to add many others to the store, but to point out that instead of Comparative Mythology there should be built a science of Comparative Religion, showing that that which had been universally taught was truth, and not lies; was verity, and not delusion. It defended every religion by the universality of religious beliefs; and it pointed out that a truth did not cease to be a truth because it was ancient, did not cease to be a truth because it ruled in ancient times as well as now; it justified religion by the very arguments that were used to discredit it, and traced it to a universal Ancient Wisdom, instead of to the ignorance of the savage, refined in modern days. It brought to that contention many an argument on which I have not time to dwell, but that you can very easily read for yourselves, if it be unknown to you, in the many publications that have been written along these lines. And now, in order to utilise that for the coming time in the building of the Brotherhood of Religions, we proclaim in every country, to every faith, among the people of every religion, the common heritage, the spiritual verity, the primary doctrines that are found in every faith. What are they? They are but few, although far-reaching. They could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and even than that, so few are they.
The first great doctrine that every religion teaches is the unity of God; the second, that God in manifestation is ever triple. In philosophy they speak of three qualities or attributes; in religion they mostly personify, and speak of a Trinity or a triple form. But whether philosophical, or personified in religion, you have ever Power or Will, Wisdom, Activity, and you can find those in the Trinity of every nation, whether you take in the Christian creed the Father, the embodiment of Power, of Will, the Son, the Wisdom everlasting; the Spirit, the creative Activity by which the worlds are made. Or you might take it equally well in Hindūism, and there you would see the order reversed: the Creator, who is the embodiment of Activity; the Preserver, the embodiment of Wisdom; the Regenerator, the embodiment of Power. And so might I take you to ancient and dead religions, and to ancient and living religions, and show you ever the same. For those primary truths of God are everywhere proclaimed, one in His nature, triple in His manifestation. And then, after those first two truths, you come to the third: the vast family of the Sons of God, the great hierarchy of spiritual intelligences—archangels, angels, shining ones; call them what you will—that mighty family of Sons of God, amongst which humanity finds its own place in process of evolution. Then you come to the fourth great teaching: that you have the unfolding of consciousness going on continually, and shaping ever finer and finer bodies for its own expression; that which science calls evolution, but which religion has ever called reincarnation, the method of perfecting the germinal seed of divinity into the divine man, when the human evolution is complete. Then, fifthly, the worlds in which these changes go on: our earth, the intermediate world, and the heavenly; and man, with bodies of matter belonging to all the worlds, so that he may be in contact with each. And then the sixth great teaching of universal law—law in the world of mind as well as in the world of matter; law which builds character as well as builds the outer world; law unchanging and inviolable, which, because we can know, we can utilise to the building up of ourselves into noblest ideals. And then, closing these doctrines that are common to every religion, we find the idea of the Teachers who preside over human evolution, who inspire religions, who guard the spiritual progress of mankind. Those are the truths universal, those are the teachings which every religion has had and has; and so we find in these religions, by their unity of teaching, the reality of Brotherhood that we seek everywhere to spread. For of what avail to change from one faith to another if in the new religion you only find the same old truths, though ceremonies and rites may differ? And we see in this Brotherhood of Religions one value to mankind which one religion only could never have given to us. Just as you see the light of the sun broken up into many colours, and those colours giving all the beauty to earth which you see in the nature around you; just as you know that those colours that constitute white light can be recombined again into the white light whence they sprung, so is it with religions. The great truths, the great virtues are as one—the great white light of truth; they are broken up by the prism of the intellect, and the many religions ray out, each with its own colour; they are recombined by the prism of the Spirit, and once again are blended into the unity of truth.
If you look at religions you will see how true that is. Every religion has a note of its own, a colour of its own, that it gives for the helping of the world. Go back to ancient Egypt, and you find the note of the Egyptian religion is knowledge, so that Egyptian religion became the mother of Egyptian science, and science spread from Egypt westwards over Europe. Go to the Far East, and you will find in India that the special note of Hindūism is the all-pervading nature of Deity, and the all-compelling duty which is the law for every individual. Go to Persia in her ancient days, and there the note of purity was struck—purity of thought, of word, of act. Go to Greece, and you will find her note was beauty—beauty in architecture, beauty in sculpture, beauty in painting, beauty in the perfection of her philosophy, which made the Beautiful of equal rank with the True and the Good. And in Rome you find the note of law, law all-compelling; and in Christianity the note of self-sacrifice, which has in it the promise of the future; and in Islām the proclamation again of the divine unity. And so every religion with its own note, every religion with its own colour; blended together they give the whiteness of truth, blended together they give a mighty chord of perfection.
Now that you could not have had with one faith and one creed. Human thought is too narrow, human brain cannot grasp at once this many-noted chord of perfection; and so many religions, each with its own characteristic, as though the Divine Name were to be spelt out by the religions, and each gave a single letter, all the letters together making the name of the Blessed One. When you look on religion in that way you realise how mighty a thing it is, how its strength is in unity expressed in diversity; how each religion should learn from others and share with others that which is its own specialty. And surely that does not lower religion, but makes it greater; surely it does not make it less compelling, but more attractive. Is Christ less when He taught “Love your enemies,” because we know that the Buddha said, six hundred years before Him, “Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love”? Or is it not more beautiful to see in the Buddha and the Christ proclaimers of the one eternal law, coming at different times to different nations, but ever with a single truth, ever with one code to teach to men?
Now in trying to do this work—which, of course, is taken in detail when one is dealing only with that side of thought—Theosophy is preparing for that common spiritual religion, the one Divine Wisdom, of which all the religions of the world shall see themselves as branches, while the trunk and root of truth are one. That is the great work, then, in the coming civilisation, which it is the duty of Theosophy to labour at; and hence, in one of its early teachings, it was said it was to be the corner-stone of the religion of humanity. For the religion of humanity will be the Brotherhood of Religions that I have been describing, where no religion can be spared, for each has something special, but where all religions will be seen as one, because they give similar truths in different forms.
Let us pass from that, and ask what Theosophy is to do in the coming civilisation, in the science of that time. Science in the coming days will pass into subtler worlds, or subtler matter. It has practically conquered the grosser, denser forms of matter; it is now going onward to the subtler and the finer. And there lies its difficulty: that the methods which did for the grosser, the apparatus that measured the grosser, are not applicable for the subtler. And when I say “the gross,” think how fine even its apparatus is, for quite lately I had sent to me an article in a scientific journal which spoke of an apparatus that could measure the forty-millionth of an inch, and yet that is coarse compared with the subtleties of the matter that lies beyond that, which science must conquer in the coming days. Now of what value can Theosophy be there? It is bringing, by training, the possibility to man in our modern days of quickening his own evolution, and running ahead of the slow working of the laws of nature unguided by human intelligence. It is bringing, and proclaiming everywhere, a system by which man can more rapidly unfold the powers of his consciousness, and also may more rapidly develop the organs of finer matter that are related to those worlds of finer matter which science will soon enter and begin to conquer. It is telling people how to develop the finer senses, and showing them the line along which the very few have gone in the past, but along which myriads shall tread in the future, the next great stage of human evolution, the organising of the finer body in man. It is bringing that to the help of science in order that by the evolution of the finer body the finer world may become the object of observation, exactly on the same lines, exactly by the same laws, that your grosser physical bodies to-day enable you to investigate the grosser physical world around you. There are eyes that are keener than these organs evolved from the pigment spots of the medusa; there are ears finer and subtler than those of our body, exquisite as they are in their mechanism and in their delicacy; there are organs of sense transcending the physical. Within the physical brain is an organ evolving which shall be the connecting link between those finer senses of the finer body and the grosser senses of the body of flesh that we wear; an organ that many of our scientists think is an organ that is passing away, because it is larger in the earlier stages of evolution than in the highly developed man; it is the pituitary body. It is not a question of size, but of inner complexity of organisation; and that organ is not simply what science calls it, a vestigial organ—that is, one belonging to the evolution of the past—it is truly a rudimentary organ, one belonging to the evolution of the future. And the fact of that has been proved by bringing life-currents, electric currents, to bear on that particular organ, so that the results of the finer senses are communicated to the brain, and we bridge what some people think the gulf between the world of physical matter and the world that is called that of astral matter.
Those experiments are now so familiar to some of us that it is impossible for us to agree with the notion that that organ in the brain has no future, as we find it can be stimulated and organised more finely, and used in this definite fashion; we know that what a few are doing now many shall do to-morrow, and those who have done it are only a step in front; others are treading on their heels, and may outstrip them soon in evolution. But here comes the difficulty, especially for the nations of western Europe, who, from climatic and other reasons, have taken so very largely to a diet of flesh, in which also alcohol plays a large part. Now flesh and alcohol are not suitable materials for building up the body of our ordinary life, which is to be made sensitive enough to receive the vibrations from the finer matter of which I have been speaking. Doctors have just discovered what was published by Madame Blavatsky many years ago—that alcohol has a direct effect on the pituitary body, and poisons that body, tending to cause inflammation. Have you ever wondered why it is that alcoholic excess leads to what is called delirium tremens, in which people see things that do not exist to the ordinary people around them? It is because they have poisoned that very organ by which vibrations come from other worlds; and although what they see is largely abnormal and irrational, it is none the less the result of action on these irregular and poisoned bodies, which vibrate under the stress of poison instead of under the stress of thought, as they should do. And that which doctors now have discovered and are publishing as a warning to people, that has ever been known in occult science, and one of the conditions of giving the details of the methods whereby that body may be rendered active, has been abstinence from alcohol, and for the simplest reason. So long as you are not using any of these methods, it does not so very much matter whether that body be poisoned or not. You may live long with a poisoned pituitary body; but the very moment that you begin to work upon it, to make it active, to throw into it new currents of life and energy, then the poison and the energy together bring about inflammation of the most intractable kind, causing severe pain, as well as brain mischief. And it is for that reason that the methods have not been publicly given, and are only given to those who are pure from the taint of alcohol. Along those lines, then, you will very likely come up against rules that many of you will not care to adopt. We do not say adopt them; we only say they are the conditions of the finer organisation. Natural laws do not change for people’s wishes and whims. If you want electric sparks from a machine you must make the conditions; you must have dry air, not air full of moisture. It is no good saying that dry air is not so comfortable to breathe as moist air. You are not obliged to have electric sparks, but if you want them you must conform to the conditions laid down by nature, and not follow your own whims. And that is true everywhere. Presently people will find that it is true when they want to investigate some of the spiritualistic phenomena; they have not discovered that yet. They think they can lay down the laws, and then get the results which can only be gained by obedience. The other day I was reading a rather curious report of investigation into spiritualistic photographs; and when I saw they had not obtained any, I could not help wondering how many physical photographs they would be able to get if they made it a rule that they should not put a dark cloth over the camera, and that, above all, they should not take the photographs away into the dark room, because that gives all possibilities of cheating and of fraud. Presently you will find out that finer nature has her laws quite as much as grosser nature, and that you can no more get results without obedience to those laws than you could get your photograph if your plates were exposed to the light. When that is learned, progress may be more rapid.
Along that line, where these rules are laid down for the organisation of the finer bodies, there is another matter that comes in: it is of no use to develop the finer bodies, unless the consciousness of the higher worlds is unfolded, and the only way to do that is by the old way of strenuous and regular meditation. Theosophy brings to the Western world the yoga of the East, by which the man who practises so trains and refines his brain that he makes it sensitive without making it diseased. There is where the difficulty is found in the West. Sometimes, when a great rush comes down from the higher worlds into the body of some great saint or some great genius, there is brain trouble and brain disturbance; hysteria is found. Naturally, because you are overstraining your instrument. And if you want to be able to receive those great downflows from the higher world, then you must begin to tune your instrument to vibrate to the swifter vibrations that come down. You can do it, and there is no danger unless you go to excess. If day by day you would give even ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, to strenuous thought and careful concentration, you would gradually make your brain constitution more complex and finer than it is. Thought is really the creator of the brain. As you think, your brain grows; just as if you exercise your muscles, your muscles grow and develop. It is all law, and thought is the force which renders the brain more complex in its organisation. The Indian yogi practises that, and by practise year after year, builds up the brain of the coming race out of the brain of the race that is. He makes it finer, subtler, more responsive, and he does it without the sacrifice of physical health; and that is a thing that any one of you may begin, if only you will be moderate and not excessive. Never concentrate to the point of making a feeling of dulness and heaviness of the brain; never concentrate to the point of pain; dulness and pain are the danger-signals of nature, that you are trying to change matter more rapidly in its arrangement than is possibly consistent with health. Therefore you need moderation; but, given moderation, nothing but good can come out of the practise of meditation and concentration; and by that you will not only make your brain more sensitive, but also keep it sane and healthy, and you will have none of those miserable hysterical symptoms which have so blurred the value of the knowledge that has come through the seer or the saint. Along those lines, then, Theosophy works with science to show the road of development of science in the coming civilisation.
What has Theosophy to do with regard to art in that civilisation? Glance at the results of your civilisation to-day on the beauty of the land. Go to Sheffield, which is built in what was one of the loveliest valleys of the Midlands; notice, as you come near it, the beauty of the countryside, the wooding of the undulating land, the exquisite beauty of rivulet, of forest, and of grass; and then, out of all that beauty of Nature, you plunge suddenly into the hideousness of Sheffield. You find the atmosphere thick with black smoke. No tree will grow in many of the districts, no flowers even on the sills of the houses of the poor. The atmosphere poisons vegetation; what do you think it does to the men, women, and children who breathe it? And Sheffield is not alone. Go to Glasgow; see the hideousness of that, the second metropolis of Scotland. Go to Birmingham, to Manchester, to any of these great cities that so largely make the wealth of England. But sometimes it seems to me that what you pay in beauty is too heavy a price even for your wealth, and that England was happier as well as healthier when she had fewer millionaires, but also fewer stunted and deformed specimens of humanity in her slums. Look at the faces of the men, women, and children of one or two of those cities I have mentioned. Look at the faces of the Glasgow crowd as it tramps back from its labour to the slum. Those faces are not civilised; they are brutal, many of them—animal, more than human. Oh, you who think that beauty is only a luxury, look at the humanity you breed, where ugliness is the mark of the cities, instead of the beauty that has been destroyed. You must learn to understand what beauty means. It moulds the body, and ugliness does the same. Out of your hideous cities a hideous humanity grows up. The restoration of art is a matter of life and death, not a matter of luxury and of enjoyment. Artists are wanted in our towns much more than on the walls of our galleries. Only a few go into the gallery, but men, women, and children live in the town. Until the town is beautiful, as in Greece it was beautiful, the coming civilisation will lack one mark of the civilised man. And Theosophy teaches reverence for beauty, whether it be natural beauty or beauty formed by the skilful fingers and keen brains of men—reverence for the human body. No nation has a right to breed the bodies that we see in the population of the slums. It is all very well that in the richer, the upper classes you find men and women healthy, strong, magnificent to look at; but if they can be what they are, all ought to be able to share in the conditions that create that beauty. And art will not do its duty until it holds up for all to see the power that resides in beauty, and its moulding influence on civilisation; art should be ever painting and holding up to us the ideal in its beauty, for it is the ideal that makes the real. The artist should show the ideal, and the craftsman should reproduce it; and until your craftsmen honour their labour, there will be very little hope for art to thrive amongst us. Art is no art when it only paints the commonplace and the ugly. Sometimes, on the walls of a gallery, you come across a picture made up perhaps of a piece of cheese, and a boiled lobster, and a string of onions, and one or two corpses of birds thrown in for the sake of their plumage. That is not art. Art is beauty, and to paint things like that is to degrade art, no matter how well they may be reproduced. “Oh,” I have heard a person say, “how beautiful that cheese is. I could cut it!” You can cut cheese anywhere; and you don’t want to go to a gallery, and an art gallery, so-called, in order to see it. Put this beside the pictures of the ancient masters, and see what art means and what the travesty of art. Theosophy has to try to breathe into the artist the idea of the splendour of his calling, the divinity of his power. He can see what we cannot see, and hear what we cannot hear; let him give us what we cannot reach for ourselves, and be again the priest of the Beautiful for men. Then shall the civilisation grow into beauty, human as well as inanimate, and the right place of beauty shall come into our civilisation, the place it held in ancient Greece.
And what shall Theosophy do in the coming civilisation for society?—society as we see it to-day, which is a battle, not a social order; which is an anarchy, not an organism. I know it is often thought that changes will only be brought about by the menace of the starving, by the dread of revolution. Oh, it is not thus that Theosophy looks on man, in whom it sees the growth of a spiritual, a divine nature. You will think me a dreamer, perhaps; and yet I tell you a truth when I say that not by the uprising of the miserable, but by the self-sacrifice of the comfortable will the future society be realised on earth. I know that that is not the idea of to-day. I know that, amongst those who suffer, such a sentiment would be met with ridicule and scoff; but it is not those who suffer misery who can build a wise and happy social system. It wants the best brains and the best hearts; it wants leisure to think out and to plan, and love to carry into effect. You can make a riot, you can make a revolution by starving desperate people, but there is no stability in that which follows revolution. You cannot take, but you can give; and the spirit lives by giving, and knows the joy of sacrifice. Do you imagine that sacrifice is painful, that sacrifice means sadness and gloom? I tell you there is no joy on earth like the sacrifice of the lower nature to the higher, and the giving to others of the higher, that asks nothing for itself. Along those lines our Social Redemption will come, along the lines of those who are willing to give and willing to sacrifice, for the gift that is compelled by law or force is always resented, and is resisted as much as possible. Outer compulsion is met by violent resistance, but the inner compulsion that is the compulsion of love, that meets with no violence in resistance; it pours itself out in joy. And there lies the future, there the basis of the coming civilisation.
I said, in the beginning, it would be built on self-sacrifice, and that was the thought that lay behind the words. I see, spreading through the comfortable, through the rich, those who are well dowered with the goods of earth, a spirit of noble discontent, not for themselves but for others, not for themselves but for the poor. I come across the rich and highly-placed who ask, “What can we do to relieve the misery we see?”—who suffer by sympathy, not by compulsion; and it is from them the redemption of society will come. It seems, perhaps, to-day a far-off dream, but man grows faster than we are apt to realise. There is nothing too noble, nothing too beautiful, nothing too divine for man to achieve; for man is growing godlike, however slowly, and the seed of Deity within him is beginning to flower in some hearts. Wherever one who does not suffer is unhappy for those who do; wherever a human brain that might amuse itself finds joy in labour for the helping of the nation; wherever a human heart which has all that love can give it cannot be happy, but goes out in love to the outcast—there lies the promise of the future. Such brains and hearts were counted by units, perhaps, even a century ago, by tens a little later; they are beginning to be counted by hundreds now, and to be found in places where none may dream that there are those who are longing to give and strive for a better social state. In those who are growing into the spiritual life; in those who cannot be happy while others are miserable; in those whose meals are rendered bitter by the starvation of the poor; in those whose luxury is a burden because of the want of the miserable—in those will you find the builders of the new civilisation, those who shall sacrifice that others may be happy. That is the future to which we look, that the future for which we labour, proclaiming everywhere the ancient words that “joy lives in giving, and not in taking”; repeating again the old message, “It is more blessed to give than to receive”; saying once again the old truth, that only where self-sacrifice is found, there is also found a religion and a civilisation that can endure.
Part II
Lectures to Theosophical Students
Lecture I
The Sixth Sub-Race
I have chosen for the subject of my lecture to-night one which I think is important—the Sixth Sub-Race. Both outside and inside the Theosophical Society a certain amount of good-humoured ridicule has been cast on the way in which Theosophists talk about Races, Sub-Races, Root-Races, Cycles, Rounds, and so on, some people condemning such talk as exceedingly unpractical. Really that is not so. When our great teacher H. P. Blavatsky traced for us The Secret Doctrine, that wonderful panorama of the past evolution of the Races on our globe, she was not only giving us the story of the past, but also presenting us with the key to the future. And I propose to-night to try to show you how it is possible for the Theosophist who has carefully studied the principles underlying past evolution, to apply these to the evolution of the future, and so learn how he may best co-operate with the divine plan which is slowly working itself out. The advantage of Theosophical teaching is that it gives us a definite scheme into which the evolution of mankind, stage by stage, fits without difficulty and without blunder.
Now, if we think for a moment of what we call the larger and the smaller cycles, we can realise that the large scheme of the Races, the smaller scheme of the sub-races, and the evolution of man himself, all go along parallel lines. Understanding one, we can understand all. I will pause on the evolution of the Races, in order to remind you of the repetition, within the limit of each race, of the smaller sub-races. We need not go very far back. It will be enough to consider the Race that preceded our own, the great fourth Root Race, and our own. The fourth Root Race was the Atlantean. I only allude to it in order to remind you that from the midst of that race the Fifth Race, in its turn, arose. Now the choosing out of a new Race is the task of a particular Personage in the Occult Hierarchy, whose only name, so far as we know it, is that which has been borrowed from the Hindū, the Manu, the Man, or the Thinker, the ideal or typical man. The Manu forms in His own mind, after the master conception of the Planetary Logos, the plan of the man that is to be, which He will gradually realise along the lines of natural evolution. These laws of evolution are used by the Manu with scientific knowledge, and therefore with certainty. In the same way that a scientific breeder, dealing with the animal kingdom, can breed towards a desired type, so, on a higher plane, does the Manu of the Race mould by the same laws of evolution the physical form of the Race He desires to evolve. And always the type is formed in the matter of the higher planes before it is reproduced in the matter of the lower, the mental and emotional characteristics being first conceived, and then a physical body which will best express them. The Manu chooses the type according to the particular qualities which are to be evolved, which are marked out for Him by the basic plan of the constitution of man himself. Looking at your own nature, you have certain distinct departments: the physical body; the astral body; the mental body; the body of the higher mind, the causal; and then that of the pure, compassionate Reason, the buddhic. Now if we take those three types, the emotional, mental, and buddhic, we have the three with which we are immediately concerned. Desire, or emotion, was the great characteristic of the fourth Race. The mind was the slave of the lower feelings; that race had as its motive power the development of the desire nature. But in the sub-races of the fourth Race the other principles had also to be evolved, but to a very poor degree; and as time went on, the fifth sub-race of that began to develop the lower mind. Out of that fifth sub-race the selection of the Manu of the time was made, and He chose out certain families that He thought He could shape into the required type. The first choice was not successful, the people proving too stiff-necked and too little plastic to be moulded into the Race that was to be; but it left behind it, in the history of the world, that marvellously interesting people, the Hebrew, and that idea of being a “chosen people” survives even to this day. The second and successful selection had as its issue our own fifth Root Race. Now, side by side with the evolution of the sub-race, came the evolution of the Root Race which was to succeed, and that is why I have referred to the past. As the fifth sub-race of the fourth Root Race was developed, the beginnings of the fifth Root Race, the great Aryan Race, appeared one million years ago.
We can leave our fourth Race with its sub-races, having only regarded it for the purpose of throwing light on the present. The evolution of the fifth Race went on, and sub-race after sub-race was born. The earliest of all settled in Northern India, and gradually conquered that great peninsula, the first sub-race of the stock of the Aryans. There came out after that the second sub-race, which wandered westward, as all the later sub-races did; then came the third, the Irānian; then the fourth, the Keltic; and the fifth, the Teutonic. So far we have come in the history of the sub-races of our own fifth Root Race. Now, notice that these overlap each other as they develop. The first of these sub-races is still a mighty power in Asia, showing signs that its day is by no means done, and that the Indians, if they have behind them a civilisation of hundreds of thousands of years, have also before them a mighty future, the first signs of which are being seen in the India of to-day. Signs, some encouraging, some disturbing for a time, are being seen on every hand that new life is being poured into its veins, signs of the birth of a new Indian nation. Of the second sub-race we have not any nation at the present time. Along the Mediterranean Basin it has left many traces of its civilisation, which are being unburied by our archæologists; but so little mark, so to speak, did it leave on history that a large number of its wonders were deemed to be legends and myths. The next sub-race, the great Persian race, is almost outworn. The Persians of to-day have little in common with the Irānian of the past. The chief traces of them, in fact, are on the Indian continent, the Parsīs, a race which has dwindled and is gradually passing away. But when we come to the fourth sub-race, the Keltic, we see great possibilities in that still. It gave birth to the older Greece, the country of Beauty and Philosophy. It gave birth also to Rome, with her remarkable ruling powers. It spread over Europe, founding one nation after another from itself, and spreading into Ireland and Scotland, made there possibilities that have not yet all flowered into effect. In Ireland you have a strange mingling of the remains of the fourth Root Race with the fourth sub-race of the fifth; a great deal of the Atlantean influence still exists, many of the tutelary deities of Ireland, the gods of the mountains, being largely they who mingled with Atlantean life and thought, and are still exercising their potent influences over the younger though still ancient Keltic sub-race. There, again, we have great possibilities of revival and of growth, for the fourth sub-race and the sixth sub-race are necessarily interlinked. Just as the emotional nature stretches upwards and causes sympathetic action in the spiritual nature, so with the Races and sub-races that represent these principles upon earth; the fourth and the sixth Races, like the fourth and sixth sub-races, are closely intertwined. Ireland has not been kept apart for nothing; the separation between the Kelt and the Teuton is not without its meaning. We shall find among that Keltic people possibilities of spiritual power, and we may look possibly for some mighty influence to flow thence into the great Christian organisation of Rome, who is now on the balance as to whether she is to sink down along the line that the Papal Encyclical seems to trace for her and become the enemy of the Spirit of the Age, or whether the Modernist party in the Roman Church is to rise into power, purify and vivify that ancient Communion, and make her again what she ought to be, the Church of Saints, the type and symbol of the purest and loftiest form of Christian thought. It may be that Ireland will co-operate also in the great purification which I pray may come to the Roman Communion, and make its revival possible. And that is closely connected with the sixth Root Race, and therefore partly with the sixth sub-race.
Now, after the fourth sub-race came our own; and when we find that this fifth sub-race, the Teutonic, is carrying on so rapidly the development of the concrete and scientific mind, when we notice that it is beginning its last conquest, the conquest of the air, then, if we have learned the lesson of the past, we may learn to see the signs of the sub-race which is to succeed it. But these sub-races overlap each other, and it is at the moment of the zenith of the one that the next is born. Go back to the zenith of the fourth sub-race, when the fifth was beginning to develop, when Rome was mighty, then it was that the Goths in German forests were beginning to be born into Europe; and to draw together into tribes, which were to grow into nations. Quietly and silently the new sub-race was being born while its predecessor was reaching the highest point of the civilised world of its time. Slowly it began to develop its own peculiarities and powers, and from that day the Teutonic sub-race has grown stronger and stronger, more and more dominant, and, though a small minority compared with the population of the world, is dominating that world by the force of its scientific mind, spreading everywhere, and making itself the very crest of the advancing wave.
But let us turn away our eyes from the dazzling glow of the present to look for the quiet places where the birth of the future is beginning to appear. Just because the fifth sub-race is so strong and dominant, we look over the world for the beginnings of its successor, which shall rule the world not by the force of the concrete mind, but by the force of the pure and compassionate Reason, which will conquer not by power but by love, not by competition but by co-operation, and found, therefore, an Empire that will long endure. For it is true now as ever that “They that take the sword shall perish by the sword,” and the Empire that is to live will be the Empire that wins its way by love and benediction, that is a teacher and a defender, and not only a ruler. The sixth sub-race, the Coming Race, will be born with the sixth Root Race in it, which is to grow so much more slowly. The coming of the sixth sub-race you may almost begin to see around you. It is not to be born in a single place, not to belong to a single nation, for it is the type of humanity, of the unifying Wisdom, and out of all nations and all peoples and all tongues it will gather together its chosen for the new type of thought which is to be born. And what that type will be we can easily outline by thinking of the characteristics of the buddhic principle in man. What are those characteristics? First of all, union, and hence in the outer world co-operation. The very essence of all action in the sixth sub-race will be the union of many to achieve a single object, and not the dominance of one who compels others to his will. The work of the future will not be, “Do so-and-so and follow me,” but, “Let us advance together to a goal that we all realise as desirable of attainment.” If you are looking for the sign of anyone who is beginning to show the marks of that sixth sub-race to-day, you will find it in those who lead by love, sympathy, and comprehension, and not by dominance of an imperious will; for the qualities of that sub-race will be found scattered here and there through the sub-race which it is gradually to supplant. You may trace out the coming of the sixth sub-race in the scattered people found in our fifth sub-race, in whom tenderness is the mark of power. Anyone who desires to take part in the building of that race needs to develop now the power to work with others rather than against them, and so, by a continual common effort, to replace the spirit of antagonism and competition. It is a synthesising spirit which we shall find in the forerunners of our sixth sub-race—those who are able to unite diversity of opinion and of character, who are able to gather round them the most unlike elements and blend them into a common whole, who have that capacity for taking into themselves diversities and sending out again unities, and utilising the most different capacities, finding each its place, and welding all together into a strong whole. That is one of the characteristics which marks the type of being out of whom this sixth sub-race will gradually develop. A strongly marked characteristic will be compassion. That virtue is comparatively rare in the energetic, strongly individualised West. Compassion is that quality which is at once affected by the presence of weakness, answering to it with patience, with tenderness, and with protection. You may notice how very often amongst ourselves, taking the ordinary fifth sub-race type, the presence of weakness is provocative. It does not call out compassion, but impatience—very characteristic of the fifth sub-race. Quick to understand and grasp a fact, it is impatient with the weakness and mental dulness which cannot easily appreciate the differences which seem to it so clear. The typical fifth sub-race civilisation is a civilisation that sees in weakness a field to exploit, a thing to enslave, something to trample under foot, in order to rise on it, and not to help to exist for itself. “Inevitable,” you say, “in a bustling civilisation like this, that the weak should go to the wall.” I do not deny that it has been inevitable in the development of the strong individualism of the present. That individualism is a priceless result, cheaply bought even by the suffering it has caused. Without that strong individualism you would not have the foundation on which the great co-operative civilisation could be built. For you cannot synthesise weaknesses, and it was necessary to make the strong and patient individuality in order that you might have something to blend together into a harmony in the future that is yet to be born. It is a very shortsighted view of human nature which sees in the growth of a particular quality a thing which is wholly undesirable; for there is nothing which is wholly undesirable in the evolution which is guided by perfect Wisdom and perfect Love. The most unlovely product of the fifth sub-race civilisation will be one of the bricks that will be built into the foundation of the sixth sub-race and of the sixth Root Race. For out of the strong individuality the strong virtues can be built, and compassion is a virtue of the strong, and not of the weak. The feeble, sentimental sympathy that comes with the poor and undeveloped nature is not compassion. It has no power of healing in it, and no power of protection. The person who, seeing a suffering or wrong, or even a physical accident, goes into hysterics over it, is not the strong helper who heals and protects. It is not the skilful nurse who goes into hysterics over the agony of the patient in pain, leaving that patient to suffer while she is having the cheap luxury of sentimental tears. It is only out of the strong natures you can build up real compassion. The compassion which does not help is useless, and help can only be given where knowledge guides feeling, and understanding shapes the remedy. Hence out of these strong individualities, when their object has been changed and the greater Self has taken the place of the smaller self, out of those the sixth sub-race, which has pure Reason for its dominating principle, will gradually appear. When in yourselves you find the germs of compassion, and know that that is to be part of the dominating characteristic of the coming sub-race, then cherish these germs to the utmost. But remember that they must grow out of the germinal feeling of sympathy into the strong power to uplift and to save; for compassion is the great mark of the Saviour. And the Saviour is never weak, but strong, and out of his strength grows his compassion. You can test it for yourself. Having to deal with someone who is very slow, you are impatient. Why? Because you are weak. You are not strong enough to make a question clear with slow and deliberate intent, not strong enough to bear with the stupidity and feebleness.
The next great thing you want is the sense of unity, and that you can never have unless you are strong. There is nothing harder in the world than to pierce through a man’s weakness and his poor qualities, which are on the surface, and to see within the growing power of the God. Yet that is what you have to do if you would be truly wise. You see in the people around you to-day a large number of faults. How far do you see behind every fault the seed of divinity which will develop into a virtue? Has the old Platonic idea ever struck you, that there is no strong dividing line between the vice and virtue except the quantity which is present? The undeveloped virtue is a vice; the virtue in excess is also a vice. The golden mean between the two is the virtue. Take a common illustration—cowardice on one side, recklessness on the other. Courage is the mean between the two. And so in everything excess is vice, whether a defect or a surplusage, and the perfect equilibrium between them alone is virtue. If you would realise that for yourselves, wherever you see a vice in your neighbour, you will look through the vice to the virtue that shall be, and in the greatest faults of the present you learn to see the promise of the future. You find a person intolerant. He thinks you are a fool because you cannot see the same way as he. This is apt to wake in you a similar intolerance. But if you saw through the intolerance the growing though undeveloped love of virtue, if you saw through the intolerance the passionate desire to find the right and do it, the passionate hatred of all that does not seem right, you would be very patient; for presently the flower of the virtue will blossom out and show the beauty which all the time was within. You hear abuse, or slander, or calumny. You think it is hateful. But the person who is doing it in his ignorance is mistaken, and that is a reason for compassion, and not for anger. The more cruel the ignorance may make a person, the greater the demand for the compassion, which, because it understands all, overcomes all; nay, does not even overcome, because to overcome would mean separation; but realises the unity between oneself and another, and takes the weakness of another as one’s own. Now these things are well enough known in principle. Why not practise them? Why, in difficulties like those we have been passing through, should there be angry words on both sides? The Theosophist who understands has no room for anger, but only room for compassion. These are the things that in the sixth sub-race we shall want. All these must begin to grow now, and germinate in the heart of every one of you who would take part in the building of that coming sub-race. And hardest of all to develop, in a race where separateness has been the type of greatness, is the sense of unity. This sense of unity and of compassion will be a strength and power which is only one for service, which makes the measure of strength the measure of responsibility and of duty. And so your character will be marked—if you are a candidate for the sixth sub-race—will be marked by a great sense of duty, and a great indifference to what are called “rights.” There is a splendid word of Mazzini that “every right grows out of a duty discharged.” That is utterly true. It is the discharge of duty out of which inevitably the right grows, and then the right comes not by combat, but by the inevitable necessity of nature. Because where everyone discharges his duty, everyone enjoys his rights without conflict and without demand. The mark of our own sub-race is the demanding of our rights. But to those who know the law of karma there is nothing that need be claimed, because you possess all which is yours. The karma brings to you everything to which you have a right; and if what is called an injustice is done you, it is only the balancing up of an ancient wrong. You think people can hurt you. Then you do not believe in the law of karma. It is your own hand that strikes you, and no one else’s. No one can injure you or wrong you, no one can commit any injustice against you. The whole of that which you suffer comes out of your past. These people are mere puppets who come forward to claim the debt that you have to pay. If you really believed that, then the man who demands a debt from you would be your friend whom you would welcome; for karma’s debts are never demanded twice. There is no error in her account. But, as a matter of fact, hardly any of you believe it in actual life. What you profess does not make one scrap of difference. You do not believe unless you live what you say you believe. And if you believed it, you would know that no slander could wrong you, no injury hurt you, and that the words of the Christ on His way to His Passion were absolutely true: “You could do nothing at all against me except it were given you from above.” That is the secret of the patience of the Christs; they know the law, they live by it and accept it. And that utter belief in Law, and therefore the recognition of duty, that is another of the great marks of the race that is to be. Every one of you who works that out now in life, who, in face of an apparent wrong, is calm and receptive, who takes an injustice as a debt that is paid and cancelled, that man or woman is a candidate for the coming sub-race, and for the Root Race that shall be gathered out of its midst. For the sixth Root Race is to be taken out of the sixth sub-race that is now being born, and according to the qualities you make in yourselves will be the effectiveness of your candidature for both.
And now look at another side of that growing sub-race. I have laid most stress on qualities, because qualities shape form; but it is also true that the bodies of that sub-race will show a different type from the bodies of the present—will be far more sensitive to all the finer vibrations of matter, built up within the finer aggregations. And side by side with the development of the finer and more nervous physical body will be inevitably the greater organisation of the body that comes next, the astral, with its corresponding senses. Now notice how in the difference between the fourth and fifth Root Races it is the nervous system which is the greatest physical difference. Compare the nervous system of a Chinaman, or Japanese, with the nervous system of an Aryan, and you will see the enormous gulf that separates the two Races. A fourth Race man will recover easily from a tremendous laceration that would have killed a fifth Race man by mere nervous shock, and it is in your nervous system that there will be the great difference between the fifth and sixth Root Races, and the change will show in the sixth sub-race. You have to solve one of the hardest physical problems; to have a sensitive, delicate, complicated nervous system hand in hand with complete health. You can easily strain your system into sensitiveness, but that is different to refining it into sensitiveness, making it responsive to the most delicate vibrations from without, but with a perfect sanity and health. On that you can also work. By the deliberate use of meditation for the refining of the brain you can gradually build up—if you do not carry it to excess—an extreme sensitiveness, and at the same time perfect balance and sanity and health. You must not think that with fifth Race bodies you can bring about at once sixth Race characteristics; but within the limitations imposed upon you by your fifth Race bodies you can gradually develop an increasing sensitiveness which will react on the astral body, and organise and develop that at the same time. And you will find, if you will notice the people round you, that there are being born at the present time more and more children who show this delicate sensitiveness, hand in hand with generosity, with tenderness, with broadness of mind, with quick and keen intelligence. These are children who will gradually develop into the type of the new sub-race. When they become numerous, and become fathers and mothers in their turn, then they will gradually prepare for the birth of the children who will belong to the sixth Root Race. Within the one the other will be born. Hence all of you who are parents will do rightly and wisely to study carefully the characters and types of the children whom karma places in your hands for training. If you see in them the dawning powers of the coming sub-race, this greater sensitiveness, this tendency to see where many are blind, do not force it by unwise admiration, do not check it by equally unwise unbelief. Let the children of to-day grow up among the healthiest possible conditions, but also amongst the most refined that you can give them. Remember that in the training of the higher emotions beauty is an essential factor, and that without the bringing of beauty into home and daily life the birth and growth of the coming sub-race will be hindered. You have to war against the ugliness of the present-day civilisation. You have to strengthen the tendencies which are beginning to show themselves, and which make for beauty. You must realise that beauty is an essential part of utility; and that it is the most narrow-minded utility which thinks that beauty can be left on one side, and that the ugliness in daily life is not a retarding factor in the growth of the more refined sub-race that will partially take birth amongst us. These are very practical things. They deal with your daily life, with the home of every one of you, and the duties that fall upon you there. You must not let your Theosophy be outside your daily life. If Theosophy is to be the moulding force of the race that is to be born, it must show itself out in your lives, in your thought and action. It is the great privilege of the Theosophical Society to be the nucleus of that coming Root Race, and amongst our members there should be some at least ready to take part in the building of the sixth sub-race. You would not be amongst us if you had not had in you something to draw you along the lines of this swifter evolution. You hardly appreciate the forces of the past which have brought you into the Society. Some come in and drop out again. They are those who are coming in touch with it for the first time. Others come in and stay in for years, and then drop out. They are in a stage a little further on, and have been in it before, and will return to it in lives to come. There are some who, gripped by it from the beginning, never move again in their utter fealty to its ideals, whom no personalities can throw out of it, who belong to Theosophy rather than have Theosophy belonging to them. These are they who have been in it many a time before, and will come into it again, to live and die in it over and over again, life after life. Well for you who are here to-day that in the trials of the last few years you have not allowed personalities to blind you to principles, nor real or imaginary faults in persons to make you shrink in your loyalty to Theosophy itself. Persons die; principles live. Men and women pass away with their virtues and faults, but the Theosophical Society will endure generation after generation. Well for you if in the storm you have been able to stand firm; great the benediction that comes upon you that in the day of trial you have not denied your Master, in the day of suffering you have not forsaken and fled away.
Lecture II
The Immediate Future
You may remember that when we last met I spoke to you about the sixth sub-race, and my speech this evening turns on the same set of ideas, although from a different standpoint, rather more special to the Society than to the world at large. In this lecture I am concerned rather with the view of the nature of the Theosophical Society which was held in its earliest days, dropped a little out of sight, and is now being very generally recalled, so that the Society should rise to the height of its opportunity and do the work that lies before it in the immediate future. If you will turn back to the days of H. P. Blavatsky in India you will find she was fond of dwelling on a particular relation held by two of the Masters, primarily to the Society, and secondarily to the coming civilisation of which the Society is the herald. She used to refer her Hindū friends to the statements in their own Purānas, in which it was said that two Kings would come at the end of the Age, and that to them would be given the kingdom of the new and opening Age. These statements, which are often repeated, raised in the hearers the inquiry, “Who are the two Kings?” and then she gave them a hint that the two Kings of the Purānas were the two Masters who were the real Founders of the Theosophical Society. That set the keen brains of the students to work. They promptly began to try and find out what were the names of the two Kings. One of these students found it, wrote a paper, which was published with H. P. Blavatsky’s approval, giving the names of the two Kings—Moru and Devāpi—two names mentioned in many of the Purānas in relation to the past history of the Hindūs, one of them, Moru, belonging to the Solar Dynasty, descending directly from Rāma, one of the Avatāras—that before Shrī Krshna—a great King, said to have retired from his throne and to have gone to Shamballa, there to wait until he was recalled to lead the human race; the other, whose name was given as Devāpi, was the elder brother of the famous King of the Lunar Dynasty, to which the next Avatāra belonged. He was the elder brother of the father of Bhīshma, and he similarly gave up his right to the crown, retired to the same place, and the same phrase is used with regard to him, that he was to wait there the coming age. Now H. P. Blavatsky was very much delighted at the ingenuity of her students, and said that the outline was correct, and it was published. H. P. Blavatsky often referred to this function of the two Masters who were responsible for the founding of the Society. As in these latter days that idea of the Masters as the Founders of the Society has been challenged, I may perhaps say I have myself seen that fact stated in the writing of the Master “M.” I have read the letter in which He says that He and His fellow Adept “K. H.” had taken on themselves the responsibility of a new spiritual movement in the world; that there was some doubt in the Lodge as to the wisdom of the movement at that time; and that they were allowed to take that step only on the condition that they should found and work the Society through others whom they could direct and control. Then He went on to say that He had chosen a disciple of his own, H. P. Blavatsky, and that He had sent her to America to look for another disciple, H. S. Olcott, and that these were the outer founders of the Society. Hence to me and to many others who believe that these letters are genuine the nature of the origin of the Society cannot be a matter of doubt.
Starting, then, from that standpoint, we find certain things were said by H. P. Blavatsky as regards the nature of the Society, and certain things by the Masters themselves. Both are very important for us in consideration of the immediate future. The first of these things was indicated by hints which the more advanced students could understand—that the inner purpose of the Society was to prepare the world for the coming of a new Race, and to be itself the nucleus of that Race; that one of the Teachers was to be the Manu of the race, the other the Bodhisattva. Now those exact facts were unpublished at the time, but they passed from one to the other among the more advanced students of that period. Coming into the Society in 1889, this particular fact did not come within my knowledge until 1895. After the Coulomb struggle the Society for a time dropped away from the occult path on which H. P. Blavatsky had started it, and these ideas fell out of sight and were forgotten except by a limited number. In 1895 they were re-communicated to myself by my own Master, and have since been passed on to the older members of the Theosophical Society.
Let us pause for a moment on the statement with regard to the Manu and Bodhisattva. Every Root Race has for its guide a great Adept, much higher than the great ones we call the Masters, and that office filled by a mighty Being is an office the name of which indicates simply the man, the thinker. The connotation is the ideal, typical man, making rather the emphasis on the article “the.” The name is peculiarly suitable, because each of these Manus at the head of the Root Race is the type of the Race over which he is to preside. The types of the seven Races are part of the plan of the Planetary Logos, and that plan is worked out, stage after stage, by the Manus of the races. It is left to the Manu Himself how He shall proceed with His work. He takes the responsibility of the method He chooses. When the time comes to plan out the new Race, then the coming Manu begins to take up His office, and always in connection with another great Brother of His own rank, who is called the Bodhisattva. The Manu of the Fifth Race, as you know, collected His people together out of the fifth sub-race of the Fourth Root Race, sent out messengers to call them together, brought them together, moulded them generation after generation, and at last evolved them to the necessary physical type. For the work of the Manu is double: to choose out those who show in consciousness the germs of the new stage which is to evolve in the coming Race; then, having chosen them out and stimulated that germ within them, to set to work to shape the necessary bodies. Now in that far-off time our own Manu of the fifth Root Race had to choose materials out of the fifth sub-race, and He did not choose at all those who were regarded as the best specimens of the day. Remember that the fourth sub-race, like the fourth Root Race as a whole, showed out very powerfully all the passional characteristics and the psychic qualities which accompanied them. It was the fourth sub-race, the Toltec, which made the great Empire, with the city of the Golden Gate as metropolis, that whose armies spread over the known world, conquering everywhere, and in that sub-race psychic qualities naturally played a great part. You will remember that at the earlier stage of great emotional and passional manifestation, psychic qualities are very largely developed before the development of the lower mind. That evolution belongs to the astral body as a whole, working not through the astral chakras, but through the astral centres connected with our physical senses. The fourth sub-race carried all that to the highest point. Children in the schools were picked out for their paths in life by clairvoyance; and in all matters of policy, statecraft, etc., clairvoyants were consulted, so that by the exercise of the psychic qualities they might get the best possible knowledge to be had at the time. Now the characteristics of the fifth sub-race were the diminution of psychic power and the germinating of the seed of mind, and these two things necessarily went together, so that, as that fifth sub-race developed, the people of it were rather looked down upon by the highly evolved psychic sub-race which preceded it. These people seemed to be inferior; they could not use the powers which put their predecessors in the very forefront of civilisation, and made this world and the astral world almost one and the same. The children born with very little of these psychic powers, the men and women who showed still less of it, were by no means thought to have within them the promise of the future. Yet out of these the Manu chose His material, because they showed the germ of the mind which was specially wanted as the characteristic of the coming Race. It did not matter that it was only a germ, or that they were much less effective than the people of the mighty civilisation in which they appeared. He was looking to the future, and so these people were by no means the people whom the Atlanteans of the day would have chosen if consulted in the matter. But the great people do not always consult with the smaller people, who are so very sure of the rightness of their own judgment. They have an uncomfortable way of following their own ideas; and, as the Master “M” once said of some people who remarked that He did not come up to their idea of an Adept, “The mark of the Adept is not kept at Simla.” And that sentence is rather a good one to remember. So also the mark of the disciple is not kept in London or in Chicago, but in a very different part of the world, and to that those who know something about it try to conform. So the choice of the Manu of the day would have been regarded as a very poor one by the wise folk of the time. Nevertheless he carried away his people and built them up into a great Race.