G. de P. — Will the meeting please come to order. I am ready to answer any questions that may be asked.
Student — I understand that in the case of an ordinary, normal individual, the avesa is only possible at death.
G. de P. — Just what do you mean by that term?
Student — Well, when the individual has reached a high degree of training, such as that of a high chela or Master, he is able to enter into the body of another person, and I believe the term is called avesa.
G. de P. — I was wondering where you found that term. It is a Sanskrit compound word, from the root vis meaning "to enter," or "to penetrate," and the particle a.
I asked the question in order to clarify the word for others who might not understand it. Now go on. Pardon me.
Student — The first question is: is that possible only at the death of the normal individual?
G. de P. — You mean the actual transference of the consciousness and will?
Student — Yes.
G. de P. — No, it can be done during life — that is to say, the person whose consciousness and will are so transferred does not need to die.
Student — I did not make the point clear. I mean the person who had died, the ordinary normal person. In other words, the intermediate consciousness must be absent from the body in order that avesa may take place. Is that right?
G. de P. — I am afraid that I do not understand you. Of course if the person has died the intermediate consciousness is not there.
Student — I was thinking of the case of a messenger like HPB, for instance. The intermediate consciousness is there; but that may occur, may it not?
G. de P. — What may occur?
Student — The avesa of a Master into a messenger.
G. de P. — Yes, but a moment ago you spoke of such occurring when a person died.
Student — That was my first question. My second question is about the case of a messenger.
G. de P. — I think that I am beginning to catch the drift of your thought now. The first question was answered satisfactorily then, was it?
Student — Yes.
G. de P. — Now repeat your second question.
Student — What becomes of the intermediate consciousness of the messenger when the avesa takes place? A part of it, you told us, is under akasic guard.
G. de P. — You are probing rather closely, and I really don't know just how far to answer that question. You have asked in all sincerity and with a desire for greater light, but I warn you that what I am going to say is not all that could be said. You understand me?
Student — Yes.
G. de P. — A certain portion of his own intermediate nature remains in the body of the messenger, otherwise there would be no living messenger — there would be only a corpse. That remaining intermediate part is not the higher part of the intermediate nature itself. I mean to say that the part removed and held under akasic guard is the higher part of the intermediate nature. In other words, the person of the messenger remains practically intact, but almost the entirety of the individuality of the messenger is removed; with this reservation, however, that the removal is not absolute, and the monad, which is superior to and higher than the intermediate part, of course is not removed. The monad is not removable in the same sense. The monad is a spiritual entity. Does this brief explanation throw a little more light on the question that you have in your mind?
Student — Yes, thank you. Of course it is not complete, but it is sufficient.
G. de P. — It is not complete. I am very sorry indeed to find myself so often in a position which makes me appear to do what the Lord Buddha said he himself did not do: "Holding back as in the fist, knowledge that should be given out." But I cannot do otherwise sometimes, because I have no right to tell the whole truth about everything on every occasion when I speak.
Student — On November 28th, in the Temple, speaking of light, you said: light is an aspect or form of the vitality of a god. Will you explain how striking a match or lighting the wick of a lamp can bring into manifestation, so that we can see and feel, this vitality of a god?
G. de P. — This is the first time that I have ever heard divine vitality connected with the striking of a match! But the analogy, or rather I should say the example, is quite permissible, analogically speaking. Light is the manifestation of the vitality of a god, as is illustrated in the case of the sun. The sun pours forth continuously without an instant's cessation forces of many kinds: spiritual forces, intellectual forces, astral forces, electrical forces, magnetic forces; and the striking of a match is an example of an electromagnetic phenomenon. I do not mean the act of striking, but I presume that you refer to the light which comes from the striking of a match.
Now the entire solar system is flooded — using this one example that you have presented — with electromagnetic energies ultimately derived from the sun. All manifestations of light are manifestations, fundamentally, derivatively, of and from these electromagnetic forces, or solar forces. Light, physically speaking, is an electromagnetic phenomenon. The life of a human body, as another instance, is ultimately derived from the sun. Human life is in part electromagnetic, but this phase is only its grossest manifestation. In its higher part it is the lower part — in its higher part, I repeat, it is the lower part — of the psychical forces flowing forth from the sun. Also these forces flow forth from the human being. The life of any human being is thus ultimately derived from the sun, but immediately derived from the inner constitution of the human being himself. I hope that this statement is clear to you.
Student — Not quite. What I want to get at is this: I realize that fire or light is all about us, invisible, but if you take some pieces of soft iron and steel, and put them together in a certain way and thus make a dynamo, you bring into manifestation a power that is either light or heat, in the same way as striking a match. I want an explanation, if I could have it, of how we bring those invisible forces all about us into visible manifestation?
G. de P. — Your question reminds me a little of a story that I once read about a savage who asked a question when he first saw a locomotive, as to what made the locomotive move. He had an idea that as nothing was visibly pulling it or pushing it, there must necessarily be something within it that made it go. But what was that thing within it? He finally came to the conclusion that it must be a number of horses inside. One horse would not make it go, and there was not room enough for many horses, so he thought that there might be three.
Now you ask me what is the method by which the electromagnetic force produces its physical manifestation; or rather what is the link, or the series of links, between the originating cause and the visible light or heat. I think that I can answer that question only by referring you to our theosophical philosophy, because there is no scientific theory about it at all, that I am acquainted with, that gives any satisfactory explanation. Hence your question is perfectly proper, and I will try to answer it briefly as follows: the psychoelectromagnetic force expresses itself through intermediate astral stages, and when the proper conditions are present on the physical plane, such as those brought about by the striking of a match or the building and working of a dynamo, then the psychoelectromagnetic force can express itself. But this electromagnetic force expressing itself according to the mechanism or phenomenon which is engineered, is itself but a phenomenon of a more recondite and still more interior force — a psychical force.
For instance, a flash of lightning, a thunderbolt, is fundamentally a psychical phenomenon. It is also a physical one too, obviously. By calling it a psychical phenomenon at its root, I do not mean that it is not a physical phenomenon in its physical expression. It is. Life is everywhere all about us. It pervades everything; and when conditions are right, then it expresses itself on the physical plane in what you call a phenomenon — the phenomenon of light, the phenomena of movements of various kinds, sound, color, heat, what not. You must have even the proper physical arrangement before you can get the horrible noises which you hear from a victrola.
Is the answer responsive, at all, to your question?
Student — Yes, very. I understand now. Thank you, very much.
Student — Would it not be right to think of an atom, a man, or a solar system, as being, or containing, systems of circulatory systems?
G. de P. — Yes, it is certainly so. Every atom has its own system of forces, and even the modern theory of atomic structure is, in the minds of most physicists, representative in the infinitesimal of what the solar system is in the great — a matter of circulations. The solar system in its turn is but a representation of a circulatory system of a still larger sweep, existing in some still greater sphere. By this I mean the interior and causal realms — and do not forget this.
Just so in a man. The circulation of his blood, and the circulation of his vitality also, are inextricably interconnected, and are two aspects of the same thing. Both originate in his interior constitution, and more particularly are manifestations of circulations having their locus in the Auric Egg. The blood and the vitality are very closely connected, and manifest in the human form the same ultimate or fundamental laws that manifest in the sun, or in an atom, or what not. Nature moves, and moves continuously; and most of her movements, when regarded freed from any physical range or mechanism, are circulatory.
Is the answer responsive to your question?
Student — Thank you.
Student — Sometimes in the performance of duty one does something that helps somebody else and brings joy to that person. And there is a joy that comes to the performer of his duty, a very great joy. Is that joy derived from the personality taking the form of satisfaction, or does it come from a different part of his nature?
G. de P. — The joy itself lies in the personality. You can hardly say that a man has joy in winking, or in the necessary movements of his hands or feet. They are natural to him. They are unconscious. The movements of the spiritual part of the human being similarly do not take conscious pleasure or have conscious joy in their automatic movements. Such movements are native to it, belong to it, are natural functions of his being. Joy is automatically natural in the personality which strives high and which attains, which feels the sense of glorious achievement; and hence very naturally the reaction expresses itself as joy in the percipient personality. Such other gross pleasures as human beings understand, are explainable along exactly the same lines, but in the case of gross physical pleasures they are mere gratifications, and the part which is gratified is on a low plane.
Student — My question has to do with what you have been telling us tonight about the action of the divine monad in withdrawing the upper parts of the human being to itself when the evil choice is made, and when the bridge or tie between the lower and the higher natures is broken. Somewhere I have read, and then you also told us of course, that the spiritual monad then evolves another lower nature, or sends out its ray, which ray begins the long journey upwards; and, if I am not mistaken, in such a case, when it reaches the human stage is in the unfortunate position of being haunted by this dweller, its lower self that was lost, this lower human monad. Is that correct? Or have I remembered it incorrectly?
G. de P. — It is not correctly stated. You are referring to the case which HPB warned her students about and against, and which warning she illustrated by speaking of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — having a Mr. Hyde (the kama-rupa of a previous incarnation) haunting the new man. It is impossible for a new human monad which has grown to the stature of a human being to be haunted by another formerly lost human monad, which latter had been dissipated ages previously as a black magician.
Student — That is what seemed to me to be true, and my memory was incorrect. I was thinking of the case of a just previous incarnation, the case of one who had then lived so evilly that the kama-rupic shadow still haunts this earth plane.
G. de P. — That is correct.
Student — Until after the new incarnation?
G. de P. — Yes, and I am glad you spoke of it. This horrible event happens in the cases of black magicians always. Sometimes the reincarnations of one following the downward path succeed each other so quickly, with so short an interval between one and the other, that cases have been known when not only one kama-rupa remains to haunt the new man, but two or even three. It is a perfect siege of horrible astral forces held together as kama-rupic haunters in a state of slow dissolution. Of course the result of this vital haunting of the new man, due to the continuous and unceasing evil impulses flowing into the new man's vitality from these haunters, is a continuously increasing speed downwards, morally and intellectually speaking.
I tell you that nature indeed has its dark side, and it is just as well for the sanity of the average man that this dark side of nature is kept closely veiled from their students by the teachers. The average human being is not strong enough morally or intellectually fully to know these things, but those of you who win out and attain chelaship, if any of you do, must in time know these things. The time will come when you will be taught them more or less fully; and I tell you now to prepare against the day when you will have to meet these teachings and understand them. You will have to meet these conditions, this knowledge, these circumstances — and conquer yourself! If you conquer, the result is masterhood; and if you fail, as HPB has nobly said: "There will be other chances in other lives."
Student — Is not this fact of the entity being besieged by one or more Dwellers responsible for many cases of insanity? I have seen insane people who acted as if they were in a constant state of withstanding an inner siege of something horrible.
G. de P. — I should not say that it is responsible for many cases of insanity, because the case of the black magicians who have two or more Dwellers is a very, very rare event, exceedingly rare. In the case of a normal or subnormal human being who may be haunted by a Dweller, I am inclined to think that your question touches very closely upon the truth. The influence of such a Dweller is a constant suggestion to evildoing.
The Dweller must not be looked upon so much as hanging around in the atmosphere of the new man, but as permeating his vitality, as being a part of his life, a part of his brain-mind, a part of his passions. The Dweller oozes into the astral fabric and vitality of the new man, sucks that vitality continuously, and constantly injects evil thoughts. Do you grasp that idea?
Student — Yes. May I follow it with just one more question? And that is — not asking you to speak more of the dark side of nature, but merely asking if it is true that the darkness and relative darkness of this dark side of nature is due to karma, and is the result of human mistakes, or is it inevitably dark, no matter how successful and spiritual a humanity might be?
G. de P. — A spiritual humanity will have raised itself out of the dark side of nature; and for them there is no dark side in the same sense that there is with the average humanity. The dark side of nature is very largely, but by no means wholly, the product of human wills, human passions, human thoughts, continuously throwing out energies which take the form of entities. Thoughts are things indeed.
When you ask if the passing through the dark side of nature is an inevitable karma of the race, I am inclined to answer you, yes. But I do so with great hesitation, because if your intellect, if your mind is not alert and on guard, you would be apt to receive a wrong impression from what may be said, and to imagine therefore that you must do evil, must sin, it being a necessary part of your evolution. Baldly stated, it is necessary because you grow through that imperfect side of nature but ultimately raise yourself out of it. You grow from imperfection to a less imperfect stage, and then to a still less imperfect stage, eventually reaching a more perfect stage and then finally a still more perfect stage, thus ever marching steadily forwards towards the spiritual.
But remember this: that the human race at its present stage of evolution need not sin in order to learn, need not be selfish in order to grow. The human race at its present stage of evolution has ascended quite sufficiently far along the luminous arc of ascent, however small its progress may yet have been, comparatively speaking, to have taken the necessity of sin and evil doing entirely out of the picture, entirely out of the purpose and plan of evolutionary growth. Sin and evildoing and selfishness and wickedness today are wrong all through. Acting evilly and selfishly and wickedly today means going backwards, following the downward path. Do you understand what I am trying to say?
Many Voices — Yes.
Student — In reading about the third eye, I found this passage in The Secret Doctrine, vol. II, page 302:
Now that which the students of Occultism ought to know is that the "third eye" is indissolubly connected with Karma. The tenet is so mysterious that very few have heard of it.
May we have a further illustration of those two statements?
G. de P. — Yes. If you will recollect that all karma originates in the actor and not outside of the actor in environment, and if you will recollect also that all your acts of choice, all your choosings of right or wrong — the right path or the left path — originate in your will and in your understanding, which basically are rooted in the third eye, you will immediately get the key to my statement. The third eye is necessarily connected with karma, because in what is called the third eye resides your spiritual vision, which leads to the choices that you make. If that vision be imperfect, your choice will be imperfect. If that vision be clear and strong, your choice will be correspondingly high.
Therefore strictly in ratio with the exercise of the third eye faculty in the human being is his better and nobler karma chosen, followed. If the third eye is active in a human being, his karma will be a good one. If the third eye is slightly active in a human being, slightly functioning, his karma will be complex, partly bad, partly good; because the choice of what the man thinks, and what he chooses to do, will make such a complex karma. If the third eye is functioning very slightly or not at all, the karma as a rule, will be heavy and bad. Do you understand the answer?
Student — Yes, thank you.
Student — From what has been given out at a number of meetings our ideas as to the constitution of the sun have been very radically changed. The status of the sun, the absence of flaming fires as is indicated by the astronomers, the very constitution of it, is so different from what we supposed. How do the observations of astronomers, particularly with the spectroscope, harmonize with that idea? That is, what would be the explanation of the elements revealed by the spectroscope as being constituents of the sun? How would that harmonize with what we have been told about the real constitution of the sun?
G. de P. — In a general way, they harmonize quite well. The spectroscope merely reveals the presence or absence of certain chemical elements in a star, or in the sun, depending upon the light of such or another physical character which reaches us from the star or from the sun.
Take our own sun, which is a star of course, as an example. Every sun is surrounded with its auras, its veils. These veils are its bodies. Collectively they compose the physical body of the sun; and just as the human constitution which is a bundle of energies manifests through the physical body which has its own lees and dregs, just so the bundle of energies which composes any sun or star manifests through these stellar or solar veils surrounding it, and which in their aggregate form its body. As the body of a human being contains the chemical elements, so these veils surrounding any sun contain the chemical elements also.
Every sun has of necessity every chemical element that the solar system of which it is the heart contains, because it is from such a sun or star that are sent throughout that particular solar system of which it is the heart all the chemical elements that are found in the solar system. As a matter of fact, there are chemical elements in some parts of the universe — and I use the popular expression chemical elements — which are not present in our solar system at all. We have in our solar system, contrariwise, certain chemical elements required for its growth, which are not present in other solar systems. Nevertheless as a general rule, throughout our own home-universe — which, please remember, is all that is comprised within the encircling bounds of the Milky Way — the elements of matter, of material substance, which we call the chemical elements, are more or less universally diffused or found everywhere within that home-universe.
I believe that one of the latest estimates of the number of stars in our own home-universe is something like thirty billions, but thirty billions of atoms in a human body is a very small number indeed, relatively speaking. I would not venture even to guess at how large a part of the human body thirty billion chemical atoms would make, but I fancy that it would be a very small part; and recollect in this connection that every sun or star is the heart of a cosmic atom.
Student — Is there any connection between what you have told us about the haunting of the new man by the kama-rupa and that of obsession?
G. de P. — It is indeed a case of obsession. There are many kinds of obsession, but the haunting by a Dweller is one of these, and is one of the worst. As a matter of fact, the haunting by the Dweller sometimes is more than an obsession, it is a possession. The unfortunate new human is not merely haunted by the old kama-rupa, but the kama-rupa actually takes astral and physical possession of the man and dominates the life. Obsession means besieging. Possession means taking control of the entity, possessing it. Do you understand?
Student — Of course in the case of obsession, it may be merely temporary?
G. de P. — Obsession is usually temporary.
Student — But the other case would be practically for life?
G. de P. — Yes, for a lifetime. The difference between the two is rather a difference of quality and degree than of time. An obsession may last only a minute or two, or it may last a lifetime. Similarly possession may last only a moment or two, and it may last a lifetime. Obsession is the thing in minor degree and quality; possession is the thing in complete degree and quality. Obsession is besieging which has not yet reached the stage of absolute mastery or control. Possession is absolute mastery or control, whether for a moment or for a lifetime.
Student — Could this obsessing entity be driven out by someone who understood the case?
G. de P. — Yes, it could be. The very presence of a great and good man is not only a protection, but it aids in causing such cases of obsession to cease. The obsessing entity is repelled by the aura highly charged with spirit, of some highly evolved and spiritual human being.
Student — When you spoke a little while ago about not being able to give the teachings out to many minds that would feel the attraction of black magic — that is not quoting your words of course, it is the way I understood your statement — this remark made me wonder if that was one of the reasons the Masters allowed the Society to break up into so many factions, because formerly so many minds were attracted by black magic and they were safer away from the strong influence of the light of the Lodge than within it, and perhaps for that reason KT stopped easy entrance to our esoteric studies. I had the idea when she did it that it was perhaps to protect those of us who stayed within the ranks. If that is so, the thought came to me that now that the world has awakened to the deadly danger of psychism — as we see plainly set forth more and more in print and more or less in an awakening consciousness in that direction — the time is now ripe when they can be gathered home again, because they have to a certain extent learned their lesson, and thus they can be in line with the Masters again to fight against the dark forces. Is that true?
G. de P. — I would hardly change a phrase that you have said. Generally speaking you have stated the case, but I must add that it was not the light of the Lodge as you phrase it, which was the danger to those former would-be-esotericists, but simply that they could not at the time see that light, and misunderstood the fantasmal gleams of the lower psychical nature for the blessed light of the Lodge. Do you understand my answer?
Student — I think so.
G. de P. — In a general way, what you have said is very true indeed. But it is something upon which I do not wish to weigh heavily at present for reasons which are so obvious that I think all the companions here will understand them. Someday the members, not only of the ES but of the higher grades of our Oriental School, will know and understand at least something of the magnificent work that Katherine Tingley did in the service of the Masters of Wisdom and Compassion. Never has there been a messenger so misunderstood. Never has there been a greater martyr to their cause, to the cause of the teachers, than she was.
Student — This is a subject in which we are all deeply interested. Is it then just not the time now to ask for more information about that matter?
G. de P. — No. Ask your question, and I will try to answer.
Student — I have wondered at times if you would give us an evening when we could all ask questions about KT, just along this line?
G. de P. — Yes, I will, I promise it. But pray wait a while.
Student — Yes, that is just what I wanted to know. It is not quite the time?
G. de P. — No, not quite the time.
Student — All the teachers have told us of and hinted at great troubles coming upon humanity, and that if we did our duty, we could very much mitigate or possibly prevent them.
G. de P. — That is true.
Student — Can you tell us more about that, because humanity has suffered so hideously? We must help them.
G. de P. — That is true. I can say this, that humanity is passing out of one cycle and entering into another one. Such periods of transition are always very dangerous to the spiritual and intellectual, social and political, welfare of mankind. They are always times of crisis.
At present we are not far distant in time from a social and political upheaval which will shake the very foundations of present civilizations. It will unquestionably be accompanied with bloody revolutions in different countries, and with wars; and I do not care to go farther into it. I think that I had better not. One of the efforts of the teachers, or rather perhaps, the main effort of the teachers, in founding the theosophical movement was to provide an international body of men and women who by the power of their thought expressed in words, in teachings, whether oral or written, and by their acts, would tend to alleviate the evils that are coming, that are about to fall upon humanity.
It is amazing how much a few determined and doggedly-willed men and women can do. History has shown it repeatedly. That is why I say preach theosophy from the housetops, teach it, declare it. Neglect no opportunity to pass the good tidings on. Our main duty is not so much to propagate the Theosophical Movement, although that is the way by which our main duty is done. In itself it is a secondary thing. Our main work is to change men's hearts, men's minds, to soften the horrors when they come, to alleviate the distress by preparing for it before it comes.
There is no humanitarian work so lofty as this. There will be an unloosening of human passions when these things come about which will be more terrible than anything history has known of, and while the Theosophical Society, our theosophical movement, will probably be quite unable to stop it entirely by the influence of theosophical thought, and theosophical thinking, and by its refining and alleviating power, nevertheless all this will greatly help in diminishing the evil that might otherwise be done.
Teach men brotherhood, teach men that they are inseparably bound together, that what one does all are responsible for, that what all do everyone is responsible for; that there is no fundamental separation of interests at all in any line — spiritual, religious, political, what not. Those are the thoughts that must go out into the world's consciousness.
Teach men the nature and characteristics and function of the proud and selfish brain-mind in which most men live today, and which in their ignorance they are proud of. Teach men its limitations, and also its value as the instrument for spiritual wisdom, when it is properly trained and directed by the spiritual will. These are also some thoughts that will help. These are the teachings that will raise men's ideals and ideas. Furthermore, but by no means last, teach men the philosophy of the ancient religion of mankind, showing to men their common origin, their common destiny, on the one hand; and the interlocking and interwoven spiritual, psychical, and physical forces, energies, and powers of nature on the other hand.
Do you think, for instance, that this recent Great War would or could have come about, if for the last eighteen or nineteen hundred years men had had theosophy in their minds? If the psychic and mental atmosphere in European countries had been filled with theosophical thoughts and ideals and truths? No! The Great War arose out of centuries of wrong thinking and wrong doing, out of selfishness, out of a lack of knowledge of the nature of man and of his being rooted in the universe; and that the universe is essentially a spiritual being; that man fundamentally and intrinsically is a god; and that his main and noblest duty is so to live — to live divinely, to live godlike. Deprivation and loss of possessions are as nothing at all in comparison with knowing and possessing and living these sublime truths. They could have made a civilization which would have held in chains the passions, the selfish impulses, the grasping, acquisitive spirit, which have dominated all European civilization up to the present, and which still dominate it.
It is the duty of the theosophical movement to loosen into the world a new spiritual energy, an illumination — to change men's hearts and to give light to their minds.
Are there any more questions?
Student — I wonder if you would like to tell us a little about the Mystery-schools that have existed throughout the ages?
G. de P. — The Mystery-schools? Such schools have existed in every country and in every age. Every real and great Mystery-school has always had its succession of teachers who followed each other in orderly sequence. No such school could have existed very long if this succession of esoteric teachers had not been. The forms of the schools varied, of course, according to the time and according to the country, according to the race; but the fundamental doctrines, the essential principles of thought, the truths taught were identic in all of them.
Our own holy school is a Mystery-school. It is a strictly esoteric one; and therefore rites, ceremonials, and rituals, are conspicuous by their absence. In the exoteric-esoteric, or esoteric-exoteric, Mystery-schools of Greece, for instance, a great deal was made, both in Samothrace and Eleusis, of ritual and ceremonial, and these rituals and ceremonials were very happily conceived and successfully carried out for ages. The difficulty and danger of course were that they distracted the attention of the neophyte away from the essential truths, from the heart-light behind the ritual and the ceremonial. What were these rituals and ceremonials? Representations in dramatic form of the teachings given orally and in secret in the higher degrees, and without ritual and ceremonial.
Some of these Mystery-schools of ancient times actually degenerated so low before they died out that they became societies of unconscious black magicians. The practices of voodoo, for instance, are such instances of degenerated teachings and associations — pure sorcery of which practically all the power is gone because all the knowledge is gone. They are mere ritualistic black magic practices.
You know that what distinguishes the white magician from the black is the motive and the use made of the knowledge and of the forces employed. Nothing but that: the motive and the use. Nature's forces act equally and without choice upon and in both good and evil. The rain falls upon the just and the unjust. Electricity can be handled for purposes of benevolent work just as well as it can be used for evildoing; and so forth. It is not the force per se employed that distinguishes the black magician from the white, but the motive governing the use of the force, and the use to which the force is put.
There is much in the Christian Church that is fine. It is fine because there are fine people in the Christian Church. The dead-letter dogmas and doctrines derived from the books take away the sense of the individual human, ethical, and spiritual responsibility for thoughts had and actions done, and places that ultimate responsibility outside of the individual. The importation into this psychological equation of the factor of free will simply introduces an unsolvable puzzle. Instead of men being taught the truths about the universe, and about men's own origin, their destiny, their nature, their inherent and ineluctable responsibility for what they think and do, they are taught that they can escape the consequences, the results, of evildoing, by believing certain things.
The Christian Church originally was a Mystery-school, a Theosophical Society, and it lived as such probably for some sixty or seventy years after the death of its founder — or the "passing" of its founder is a more correct word.
There is no single, unique, cosmic, individual, and eternal God; but on the contrary the universe is filled full with bright and flaming intelligences, who are truly gods. There are vast hierarchies of them in all grades of evolution, some so high that not even the most developed human understanding can have even an adumbration of comprehension of their spiritual-divine state, status, condition; and there are others only little greater than men. And even this evolutionary range of these divine beings is as nothing in comparison with the frontierless spaces of space, invisible and visible.
The utmost that an enlightened human being can say, the utmost that a Master of Wisdom can teach, the utmost that a dhyan-chohan of the highest grade belonging to our universe can conceive, is this universal life, and this universal consciousness, which are both divisible into innumerable hierarchies of entities, all evolving, from the less to the more perfect.
These Mystery-schools of ancient times were of various types. Some taught what would be called today the scientific aspect of nature. Others specialized more in what would today be called the religious side of man's outlook and understanding. Others again were of a philosophic type. Samothrace in Greece would have been called a scientific school. Eleusis would have been called a religious and mystical school. But in all these schools, wherever they were, and in whatever time they existed, there was a succession of teacher following teacher. In some cases these teachers were messengers from the same Great Lodge which sent H. P. Blavatsky into the world in our own age in order to bring to men once again some elementary teachings of the wisdom-religion of mankind.
It is absurd, it is preposterous, to suppose that she brought all the truth in the universe, all that ever could be said. Such an idea violates not only all her own statements, but even common sense.
Student — The difference in the enlightenment of human beings during the Christian era and during antiquity is so marked that one wonders if there was a malicious attempt made to blind the human mind, or simply if humanity had entered an era of obscuration of spiritual truths?
G. de P. — The latter was so. And of course that entering of an era of spiritual obscuration carried in its natural karmic train the consequences — the coming into existence of churchly organizations possessing great political and social power, whose interest it was to cultivate ecclesiastical interests, rather than pure spirituality and also the teaching to men of their own responsibility, spiritually and ethically.
Student — Have there been any periods of history that we have no record of, other cycles, when everything was so dark, when mankind had lost so utterly the true teachings?
G. de P. — Yes, there was such a time some four hundred thousand years before the downfall of the Atlantean race, but it was much worse then even than now. You must remember that we are now beginning the kali-yuga of the Aryan race, so called — I am employing the terms used by HPB in The Secret Doctrine — and this kali-yuga is not altogether black. It is a time when great progress can be made because the currents of life are running strong; but naturally more willpower, and greater concentration of it, are required than in times when the spiritual forces are more easily attained. But as we have only begun the kali-yuga period we have by no means seen the worst.
But here is the consoling part: the seeds of the succeeding race — the succeeding subrace I am now speaking of — have already been sown. That subrace is in the making, even today. Those whose hearts burn with the pure light of spirituality, in however faint a degree, will be attracted to safety and peace. Do you understand me?
Student — Yes, thank you. There is something else I would like to ask about that. One reads in the Upanishads about the "world-food," that one must not refuse the world-food; as if it means that spirit must conquer and permeate the densest matter and in that way take the world-food. And I wondered if a period of darkness like this that we have passed through was an opportunity for the spirit to permeate deeper into the world-food, and in that way accomplish the destiny of the human race.
G. de P. — I think so. I do indeed. I might also say, perhaps, that referring to the change of cycles to which I adverted when answering a question some time ago, the cycle upon which the race is now entering is a rising one. Humanity, so far as the European stocks of peoples go, was on the downgrade progressively since the fall of the Greco-Roman civilization. The lowest point was reached about the time when Christopher Columbus is stated to have made his Atlantic journey, his Atlantic voyage. Since then, slowly in the beginning, very slowly, but gradually increasing its speed, the stream of life flowing along has been generally rising.
The cycle we are entering upon — and it sometimes takes a number of centuries really to enter upon a cycle, really to begin to show its own qualities — the cycle we are now entering upon, or have been entering upon, is a rising one. Kali-yuga does not mean a steady run downhill without any upgrades at all. The general tendency is down, downwards. But there will occur a large number of relative rises; and we are at the foot of one such small rise. Fortunately!