(Lecture delivered May 11, 1930)
CONTENTS: Mother's Day. Thoughts of Mother guide and protect. — The excellent psychology of fraternity among all theosophists. The irresistible power of almighty love. — Causes and cure for the present depression of humanity. The beast theory and the god theory contrasted. Our scientists are becoming mystics. — Astounding questions that children ask. Intuitions from the inner god. — What is the music of the spheres? — Interplanetary communication has existed for ages. — To those whose loved ones have passed on. — Rhys Davids on Buddhism.
As I was coming to our Temple of Peace this afternoon, I was stopped by a friend and reminded that this is Mother's Day. Now, I confess that I don't know exactly just what Mother's Day is, but I have a notion that it is a day set apart by common good feeling in reverence for the women who brought us into the world. We owe much to our fathers; but we men in especial, I think, in an especial degree, owe something to the women of whom we are the children. I have a notion of my own that a boy is nearer to his mother than a girl is. I don't know that a more beautiful word exists in any tongue than that which the human heart gives utterance to in the various languages, when it speaks in terms of affection, and in this one word: mother.
I believe that if men and women, when at the crossroads of temptation, thought at the time of the days passed at home: thought of the tender solicitude, the almost too personal affection, of the mother — these reflections would be a restraining force like none else that human beings wit of.
I know that I myself would be incapable of a mean or an ugly or an evil thought when I picture to myself — when my mind goes back along the galleries of memory and I figure to myself — those days when, as a little boy, I studied at my mother's knee, when she taught me my alphabet. Beautiful, cherished, memories!
I think that from our mothers we men gain in larger degree even than from our fathers the impulses to noble manhood and manly action. The father to the right-minded boy is an ideal: he is somewhat of a terrific ideal sometimes, but an ideal nevertheless which is to be followed when we grow up and become a man like daddy is. But when we are in trouble, when our little hearts ache, when we don't know what to do or what to say, and seek someone to whom to turn for counsel or advice, to whom does the boy go as a rule? To his mother.
Now, friends, I turn to the questions that have been sent in to me for answer.
I was asked this morning by a friend: "How are you coming along in your attempts to unite the various Theosophical Societies into one spiritual brotherhood?" I answered: Things are looking good, very good indeed. I have received word from the most prominent officer of one of the largest of the other theosophical organizations which is very favorable, very kindly and wise, in its general spirit and in its vision; and I have received hopeful and optimistic communications from other parts of the world; all which shows that the Theosophical Movement at least is ripe for reunion and for the fuller realization that theosophists are banded together or should be banded together as a single corporate body of workers for humanity.
It is for that purpose that originally the great-hearted H. P. Blavatsky was sent into the world; and we as Theosophists shall fail unless we follow the path that she laid down. It is futile, it is childish, to stand with your faces to the past. That past is indeed passed. Let us look to the Mystic East; and unless we can be Theosophists not only by the mind and in the mind, but with the heart, we are hypocrites and whited sepulchers, containing naught but the dead bones of the past.
From only one individual have I received an unfavorable reply. This individual is the President of a local Lodge in a certain country, and his comment to the invitation issued to him by the President of our own Lodge there was the following in substance: "I don't agree at all with the effort of Dr. de Purucker, your Leader. I think that is wholly bad psychology."
I wonder what that man has in his mind? What is he thinking about? Does he enjoy hate; does he like disunion; does he think that separateness and diverse interests are the way in which to accomplish our common theosophic duty? Why cannot he see that spiritual brotherhood is far above all matters of official organization whatsoever; and that in order to do our sublime work we should band together heart to heart, and stand shoulder to shoulder, and walk forward together hand in hand. Whether one belongs to this society, and someone else belongs to that society, matters not at all. It is principles upon which I take my stand; and I appeal to the common human heart and to our theosophic teachings; and, furthermore, I appeal to the power of almighty love, which will steal into all hearts and overleap all barriers. Its power is irresistible.
That is my psychology, and I allude to this in explanation but not in condemnation of this brother of mistaken views, and also simply in order to show what my own attitude will be if any other such remark or observation upon the work which I have to do should be made by anybody else.
I have received from the highest possible source, the source of our theosophic light and inspiration, directions to work for unity, for common kindly feeling, for brotherhood, for peace, for harmony, for union. Those are the things that I am striving for. It matters not to me to what other societies the other theosophists may belong — not at all. They can retain their membership in their own societies. I simply call for help in carrying forward the theosophical work.
Is that good psychology? Is the appeal to brotherhood, to fraternity, to kindly feeling, to reunion — is that bad psychology? On the contrary, I believe that the force of these is irresistible.
In our own Society, friends, which I have the high honor to lead and the heavy responsibility to conduct, I am not a dictator, I am not a tyrant. We have no dogmas in The Theosophical Society. Our members can believe what they please. They can believe anything that they please. All they have to subscribe to in applying for fellowship in The Theosophical Society is: I believe in universal brotherhood.
I tell you that the Masters of Wisdom and Compassion founded the modern Theosophical Movement for one sole purpose, which has two aspects to it: in order, first, to found a spiritual brotherhood among men, worldwide, without qualifications, without frontiers or barriers, to which any honest heart might belong; and the other aspect of it is a diffusion into the intelligence of the Occidental world of the principles of the age-old wisdom-religion of mankind, bringing men hope, bringing men peace, bringing men consolation; and, above all else, destroying the fear of death, showing men that the universe is a vast organism, of which every entity anywhere, on earth or on Sirius or wherever you will, is an integral and inseparable part.
We theosophists must do our destined work. We cannot pause. My orders came to me to act and I have acted. I am quite indifferent to criticism of any kind. I am going ahead; and I thank the immortal gods that in the other societies, as a rule, I have met with most sympathetic, indeed wonderful, response.
Do you ask — some of you perhaps belonging to other Theosophical Societies: "Do you then expect to win over everybody to your (my) Society?" Do you want to know what my answer is? It is: I hope so, yes! But only through the power of almighty love and the conviction that here with us lies truth — on no other ground. We don't convert anybody in The T.S. I have truth to give; I have been sent to give that truth; I am ready to give that truth to those who come and come in the right spirit.
But in order to bring about what is my dream and my ideal — one common Theosophical Society of the world — never would I say to any other theosophist: "Abandon your own teacher, your own president, abandon your own society; cast stones at the helping hand which first fed you Theosophical food; cast stones at the Theosophical Society wherein you first saw the glimpses of theosophic splendor." Never! My message will be: "Remain true to the teacher whom you follow and love. I want no hypocrites in The T.S. I want no traitors in The T.S. But the people who come into The Theosophical Society, I want them to come to work with me for the establishment of one Theosophical Society of the world."
I am not seeking the points of quarrel, the points of dissension, the points of disagreement. Let them pass. Let them be as water that has flowed under the bridge of the present into the ocean of oblivion. I seek the points of contact; the points wherein all theosophists must necessarily meet. I want brotherhood, common feeling, kindliness; and I should not be at all astonished, when I am really understood, if the presidents of these other Theosophical Societies, the chief officers — I should not be astonished, I say, if they sought for admission into The Theosophical Society, once I am understood.
I seek the destruction of no other society. I want to help them all. I want to work with them. But just as I expect them to remain true to the colors under which they have enlisted, so I shall remain true to mine. But my dream is, my hope is, and I see it on the horizon of the future, a union — a reunion — in order to carry on Masters' work, of all true-hearted theosophists everywhere, under one banner, in one common corporate body. It is coming.
This is my first question, that is, the first of the questions that I have before me.
In an article entitled "Modernism in Science and Philosophy" in the April number of The Journal of Philosophic Studies, Professor Wilbur M. Urban says: "The present depression of humanity has its origin largely, if not solely, in man's degraded sense of his own origin. . . . We need new definitions of life and mind. . . . We moderns have got beyond our depth."
Question: Is not the above an indication (among many others which might be adduced) that there is in the world today a widespread vaguely-felt need for just such knowledge as is now being given out in Questions We All Ask
This is exceedingly kind of this questioner. Well, my answer to this question is, Yes; and I can tell you that because the teachings which I give out are not mine. My message is not my own. I am simply the messenger of those for whom I stand, and for whom I came, as my great predecessor Katherine Tingley did. I have originated naught, not one word; and could I add one word of my own to the holy message which I bring, I were not worthy to stand before you on this platform.
This essage is the ancient wisdom-religion of archaic times, from the earliest races of mankind given by great seers and sages to the human race; and all I do is to give it out anew as best I can. If there is anything unsatisfactory about it, the fault is not in the teachings, it is in me in so far as I have not been able to pass it over to you in a satisfactory manner.
Nevertheless, I have been trained to do what I can do, and I know that I have, in doing my best, done enough to show you where you can find more light, if light it is that you seek.
Now, I think that this Professor Urban is right also. Two men stand before me. One man says: "You (that is I) and I (that is he) are nothing but grownup apes. Let us act like apes. What is the use? We cannot be very much higher than apes, try as hard as we will. Only, don't let's get caught!" That is the gospel of the modern — forsooth — philosophy of life, the resultant of materialistic biological teachings. Tell a man that he is a beast, and make him believe it, and he will act like a beast, and he will utter snorts and sounds and groans like a beast.
But the other man looks at me, and I look at him, and I see shining in his face, sparkling in his eyes, recognition: I see the fire of a spiritual self there. I see intelligence; I sense self-control; I see wisdom; I feel the power of almighty love; and that man says to me: "Brother, have you the thoughts that I have? Do you feel what I feel?" and I say, Yes. Sons of the gods, we recognize each other.
Tell a man, therefore, that he is the descendant of spiritual beings, of the gods, and you fire his mind and heart with enthusiasm for high living and noble thinking; and that is the teaching of the seers and sages of all humanity for unnumbered ages.
Only some eighty or ninety years ago a newfangled modern scientific theory was brought out, in an attempt to explain the resemblances between man's physical body and the beasts beneath us. And the result: Look at the literature that was in vogue forty years ago. Look at the greatest catastrophe in Occidental history that overwhelmed us in 1914. Get became the popular doctrine; get, and hold if you can. But the doctrine of the gods always is, Give: give yourself first of all. This latter is the pathway of manhood. Give all that is in you, heart and mind. Give yourself. I now ask you: Which is the more manly of the two? Ask yourself which is the nobler, the Beast or the Man?
Now, within recent years the old materialism of our fathers has gone by the board. It is defunct, it is moribund, it is dying; and new and brighter ideals are coming into the minds of the scientific researchers, so that they are actually proclaiming in many instances the teachings and doctrines that theosophists have been giving out for fifty years. Our scientists are becoming mystics. They are beginning to see a vision. Thank the immortal gods that it is so! Men like Professor Eddington talk openly, in a manner that would have ostracized them from all scientific circles fifty years ago, about mind-stuff being the fundamental of the Universe, thus reverting to our theosophical teachings; and indeed, that is the same as saying the esoteric religious and philosophical teachings of the entire world, and of every part of it, until the karma of our race, the destiny of the race, wrote across the portals of the beginning of the Christian era the fatal legend: The karma of Israel.
Yes, the degraded sense of man's origin is the cause of the moral depression of which this farsighted professor speaks. This arose as the resultant of the teachings of certain scientific biologists that men are but overgrown beasts, and that all that is in men is bestial, or has risen but a little out of beasthood; that there is in men no inner and divine light, no illumination, no spiritual power, nothing in short of permanent value; and that when men die, they go to the dust, and that that is the end forever.
This is monstrous; particularly so when one recollects that there was not an atom of solid scientific foundation for those old materialistic theories. They were simply speculations, theories, evolved, doubtless, by honest men, but theories nevertheless, because the scientific researchers had revolted against blind belief, dogmatism, churchly obscurantism, and other similar things; and they did not know whither to look for truth.
Times have now changed. A new age is dawning. Scientists are becoming visionaries in the noble sense of the word, that is to say seers: they are becoming mystical. I certainly believe that this Professor Urban is right. We do indeed need new definitions of life and mind, and wetheosophists have been trying to give them to humanity for fifty years, more or less, last past, and we will keep on trying.
My little niece, about three years old, stood looking with wide eyes at her grandma doing the cooking. Presently she said: "Grandma, when I was a big woman like you, I used to do the cooking!" Not a word had ever been said to her about living before. Why don't we get busy and teach children theosophical philosophy, when they already have the sound basis of it in their normal consciousness?
Yes, I ask just the same question. Why don't we? So far as theosophists are concerned, we are doing it. But just as long as you have the notion that your child is nothing but a little beast, a lump of soulless flesh, a chemical product, you won't understand the wisdom of the child's soul, memories out of the past, that it itself cannot fully express or adequately explain, but which nevertheless manifest themselves in the strange utterances and sayings of children, and in their interesting questions. And I can tell you, friends, that some of the questions that I have heard children ask and that have been sent in to me as having been asked by children, have astounded me, for they touch, in some instances, upon the profoundest questions of the occult philosophy; they are intuitions in the child's mind. The child does not mentally understand them, however. These ideas just pass through its brain, so to speak, from its own inner god, the latter trying to express itself through the as yet imperfect brain, and hence the child utters these often wise and deep sayings, these strange questions.
The divine Plato was right. It is all reminiscences out of the past from former lives. Why don't we remember our past lives? I have a question before me on that very subject which I will answer in due time. I will now simply say, at the present instant, that we do remember our past lives, but don't know that we do remember them; and we remember them because we express them as our character, as our instincts, as our impulses, our biases, our trends, our penchants, our tendencies. That is the way in which the memory comes streaming in to us from the past. The old physical brain was dissipated into dust, and most of our daily recollections belong to the brain, as for instance, what happened today — and therefore when the brain is gone, you don't expect to remember those feeble impressions of the daily life; but all the recollections and memories that you have innate in you, that express themselves as genius, as capacity to do, as power to think, as character, are deeply implanted memories out of the past when you thought and strived and acted and aspired.
Yes, that little child of which the questioner speaks probably had an intuition that in some other day it did the cooking for the family. And I suppose that Granny looked at the child and said: "My, I wonder what is the matter with little Susan!"
"Is not all life the mystic dance of atoms to the Music of the Spheres?" — From the Science Wonder Quarterly
That sounds just like the beginning of a poem, and the rhythm in it is poetic too. Well, I hesitated when I first read this question. Offhand my answer was: Absolutely yes. And then I thought: if I say that, and do not qualify it, then my audience will have in their mind the idea that I am alluding to nothing but this physical world. Life they will understand to be nothing but this physical universe.
And then, may I ask, what does this scientific writer mean by speaking of the Music of the Spheres? Eh? What? Was he just throwing in word-padding? What kind of scientific writer is he then? If he used these words sincerely, if he were, if he is, if he be, a true scientific thinker, he must have meant them; therefore he believes in the Music of the Spheres. So do I.
But what is this music? What produces it? What is the originating cause? And is not this Music of the Spheres a part of the cosmic life? Now, if you understand this question to mean, as a theosophist would, that the cosmic soul, to use an easily understood term, expresses itself throughout the immensity of space in all the complex aggregates of differentiation, in all the complexities of manifested cosmic being as one driving urge or energy: manifesting in one place as the Music of the Spheres, and in another spot as a dancing atom, dancing to the Music of the Spheres — if the idea briefly is that this cosmic life is one life and therefore one law through all and everywhere, then I say Yes.
But I am not satisfied with such a brief answer as that. I will tell you a little more about our theosophical teachings in this respect. The universe is filled with gods, divine beings, cosmic spirits, call them by what name you will, because the name matters not at all. These entities exist in the spiritual and invisible realms of being, and all our physical universe, all our physical cosmos, is but the veil or garment covering this vast complexity of invisible planes, worlds, realms, spheres. Consequently, every cosmic or celestial body is the expression of an indwelling essence, composed essentially of consciousness-life and of spiritual substance, just as man is in his own limited sphere.
The usual fashion in the Occident is to divide man into a trichotomy, a division of three: spirit, soul, body. That division is good enough for ordinary purposes. Theosophists can accept that division as a usual way of dividing the constitution of man; which inner constitution expresses itself through man's physical being, and produces the man as you see him.
Now, these celestial bodies, said the ancient Pythagoreans, as they move, sing, because every movement in and of material substance makes a sound. The physical scientist will also tell you that. Had we the ears to hear, sensitive enough to catch the harmonious vibrations emanating from moving bodies on all the planes, we should be deafened with the harmony.
As an ancient Welsh mystic put it: "We should hear the growing of the grass"; also we should hear the atoms of our own bodies sing their composite hymn, each atom holding its own note. We should hear the tremendous outburst of melody of the celestial spheres singing as they swing along in their orbits.
Everything that is, is in movement of some kind, and therefore it expresses its life in a song. Every tiniest atom sings its own note; every electron in the atom sings its own note; and I wonder if some of you have never heard the harmony produced by a tree, the harmony inaudible to our physical ears. Have you never studied a flower on your desk and sensed at least some adumbration of the hymn that that flower is chanting? This is not mere poetry, to use a common expression; it is a fact. Every atom of that flower, of that tree, is in incessant movement, therefore producing a sound; and because the flower is beautiful, because the tree is symmetrical, the combined sounds of all the atoms and electrons composing any one or each of these bodies, produce a sublime harmony; but more truly expressed because the atoms and electrons of these bodies produce the sublime harmony. Therefore is the tree symmetrical and graceful and is the flower beautiful and harmonious in outline.
It sometimes seems to me that I can hear the bodies of my fellow human beings sing. Consider what a universe we live in when every little pebble on the road, when every blade of grass, when every brook, when every building, when every flower by the roadside, when your own body, is singing each one a hymn — the dancing atoms singing in tune to the Music of the Spheres. Oh, think! Let your imaginations soar! Free yourselves from old crystallized ideas of a dead universe, and thus live, truly live! Know something of the universe in which you live and move and have your being.
Why has not interplanetary communication been consummated ere this? Shall we eventually establish communication?
What makes this kind questioner think that interplanetary communication has not been established? Simply because disbelievers in the possibility of such intercommunication have not invented machines to do it with? That is the only reason. I can tell you that there has been interplanetary communication for unnumbered ages. Do you desire me to explain that statement? The explanation is the simplest thing in the world. The great seers and sages, and every one of their higher disciples — those who have lived the life and have trained their inner faculties which they possess as men — undergo at least once in their life during one of the periods of initiation — must undergo — a journey into the interplanetary realms, where they are bound to experience, individually, personally, just what the conditions are on the various planets, or on the moon, and on the sun. They cannot really know life, and things as they are elsewhere than on earth, otherwise.
Talking and teaching about these things is good, because they make you think. They give you ideas. They suggest thoughts. But you cannot know anything until you experience it yourself. I mean really know.
Interplanetary communication has been going on among the great sages and seers and their higher disciples for ages and ages in the past; and some of our theosophical teachings, those given to good men and true — those who can be relied upon and who can be depended upon to put self behind and to live a real man's life — these teachings are given to them. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Ask, and ye shall receive. But you must know how to knock, and you must know how to ask. It is as simple as anything. The How is as follows: Be true, be honest, be sincere. Aspire. Try to ally yourself with the inner god which is the core of the core of your being. Strive unceasingly to do this. Thereby you gain everything because you lose the petty circumscribing personality; but in losing the personality you gain the universe. You thus give up your petty wishes and circumscribing whims, and thus you become an incarnate god.
However, shall we eventually establish public interplanetary communication? My answer is, Yes, if this question means: Shall the scientists some day in the future find material instrumental means with which to establish communication with other planets? My answer is, Yes, in the distant future that will come, and many other amazing things will come too.
Furthermore, I can remind you of a prophecy that was made by one of our great teachers many years ago, and that is that some hitherto undiscovered planets will be heard before they are seen. I wonder if what is called static in radio, and other things like that, have been ascribed to the proper cause? I throw this out merely as a thought for your consideration.
Someone I know, not a theosophist, but one whose intuition is awakened enough to feel there is something worth while in the theosophical teachings and ideals, has lost a dearly beloved and close relative. What message would you give to such a person, concerning death and the hereafter? What words of encouragement and consolation would you send?
It is not so easy to answer this question, because people have such wrong ideas about death; and what most people want when they lose a loved one is consolation for their own bereaved personality. They really don't think so much about what is happening to the one who was loved and who has passed on, but they want consolation for "me." Now, isn't that true! And I don't like to feed the lower personal part of a human being. I don't want to strengthen it, to fatten it. Doing so makes things harder for the sufferers. I always feel like telling them the truth, and I do so.
But nevertheless, you cannot wholly turn from the cry of an aching heart even if that cry have a strong element of selfishness in it. It is a duty to give some answer; and so I think that I would say this: The one whom you loved came into this life out of the past, in strict accordance with one of nature's fundamental operations: the chain of causation, the law of consequences. You are here, and the loved one who has gone was also here, because both you and the loved one were placed here by nature's law, nature's operations, because of a chain of cause and effect, reaching back into the interminable past, into many former lives on earth; and that chain of causation cannot be interrupted, nor broken, but will continue into the future. The same chain of causation producing other earth-lives, other reincarnations, will bring your loved one back to you — or more accurately will bring you both back more or less at the same time.
Love is mighty; it is magnetic; it is powerful; it unites loving hearts; its call overleaps all space; nothing can stay or bar its way. So far as your loved one is concerned, its destiny, for the time being, is a sublime one. It is released from the body. All pains and aches have ended. It goes into unutterable peace, into bliss which you, with your brain of flesh, cannot understand, for even your own human mind finds it difficult to put into that brain of flesh vibrations sufficiently keen to convey to you the message of the inner life arising in the core of your own being.
Have no fear for your loved one. There is neither heaven nor hell, but there is unutterable peace and rest and bliss beyond human understanding; and then, when this long night's sleep is ended, it returns — the soul, the ego — returns to a new body, to a new incarnation: then a little child is born anew on earth. There is your loved one. Death is but a sleep and a forgetting of all the sorrows and pains and trials and troubles of earth-life; and I tell you, friends, that sleep and death are one thing. I mean by that, that sleep is a minor death, and death is a major sleep.
A theosophist of many years ago, the American poetess Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who was a member of the Society when I was a boy, wrote a beautiful poem called "The Law"; and I copied out an extract from it and laid it on my desk for some future use, and I will now read this extract to you:
From body to body your spirit speeds on;
It seeks a new form when the old one has gone,
And the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought
On the loom of the mind with the fabric of thought.
As dew is drawn upwards, in rain to descend,
Or thoughts drift away and in destiny blend.
You cannot escape them, or petty or great,
Or evil or noble, they fashion your fate.
The reincarnating ego cannot but return; it cannot remain away.
Why are true simplicity and sincerity invariably closely allied? Are they affinities?
I do not think that they are affinities. I think that they are closer still. I think that they are two sides of the same thing. A person who is sincere is always simple and direct, straightforward and honest; and a person who is simple and direct is always sincere and honest; and a person who is honest is always sincere and simple. Invariably, it cannot be otherwise. Hence simplicity and sincerity are two sides of the same thing, like the two sides of a coin, or the two sides of a hand.
All great and beautiful characters are simple and sincere, and all evil characters and weak characters are complex, roundabout in thought and action, circuitous in operation, always hiding either themselves or trying to hide themselves — and such people hate themselves. They cannot remain with their own souls even for a short quarter of an hour. They must seek diversions, bright lights, excitements, excitements always, anything that will bring about the oblivion of the hated lower self.
What a life! Such people do not know themselves, do not know the divine powers within, have no real knowledge of the splendid capacities and energies locked up within themselves.
But take the contrary kind of person, the person who is calm, quiet, peaceful. He or she stands like a tower of strength and attracts other people, and they feel his power, they feel his strength, they feel that there is something in him that they can trust. Such men and women have come into some recognition, however small, of the divine powers of the inner god, who or which is the core of the core of the being of each one of you.
Each one of you is an expression of such a divine entity. "Be ye gods," said in substance the Christian scripture, telling, teaching, advocating truth. Each one of you within is an unmanifest Christ — as the modern mystical Christians say, an immanent Christ; and in the Orient in referring to the same fact they speak of the inner Buddha. Why not therefore be the god within, with all the power, the increase in faculty, the strength, the wisdom, to be derived from so being; for by becoming that inner god you become consciously at one with the universe of which you are a child, an inseparable part; and just fancy what that means: drawing upon strength inexhaustible, wisdom without compass, drinking at the fountains of inspiration which flow from the heart of the universe. What a sublime picture!
Do you know what it is that prevents this thing from happening more frequently than it does? It is the sense of personal separateness that people are psychologized with in the Occident, imagining that they are utterly separate from all others, utterly different: instead of being all rooted, every one of us, in the common fountain of the cosmic life-intelligence-substance. It is this sense of separateness which is to us theosophists, as it is to the Buddhists, the Great Heresy, for it is the cause and root of all evil. It brings forth the craving for Me: I want, I am, Mine. And since every human being is filled with that feeling, as it is presently in the West, in the Occident, you can see for yourselves what the Occidental world is.
On the contrary, now comes from theosophists the beautiful teaching of spiritual brotherhood, that men come most into their own when they live for others. Thus do they best grow. Thus do they develop their own faculties; thus do they grow strong and wise and really knowing. It is the way even to succeed in material life. A business conducted according to a shortsighted view, only for the merchant who has no care for his customers and whose mind dwells on the idea of "doing" his customers if he can — how long would such a business last and thrive? But give good value, live for others, give yourselves, and you receive in turn the universe, which in the core of each one of us is fundamentally you, I, every one of you.
Professor Rhys Davids, a famous Welsh scholar, in his book Buddhism wrote, many years ago, the following, as briefly outlining a teaching of the Buddhist religion; and as it is the same as the teaching of the Occult philosophy, in other words of theosophy, I will read this extract to you:
It is not separateness you should hope and long for, it is union, the sense of oneness with all that now is, that ever has been, that ever can be — the sense that shall enlarge the horizon of your being to the limits of the universe, to the boundaries of space and time, that shall lift you up into a new plane far beyond, outside, all mean and miserable care for self. Give up the fool's paradise of "This is I" and "This is mine." Leap forward without fear! You shall find yourself in the ambrosial waters of Nirvana.
Unspeakable bliss, boundless wisdom, unencompassed love — perfect, pure, and unadulterated consciousness.