London Lectures of 1907 by Annie Besant (books to read for beginners txt) 📖

carry on a definite study of the Not-Self in the physical world. The claim has never been given up; the practice never wholly disappeared. So also with the Roman Catholic communion. There has been there a succession of saints and of seers who have always claimed to be in direct touch with other worlds, and who have claimed and exercised the powers of those worlds manifestly on the physical plane. To-day in the Roman Catholic Church similar phenomena are said to occur, and certainly the evidence offered for these phenomena is far more easily verifiable than the evidence offered for such phenomena in the earlier centuries of the Christian story. So also among the Hinḍus it is more easy to prove nowadays the powers possessed by a yogî, than it is to prove the possession of those powers thousands of years ago in the obscurity of the earlier days of Hinḍuism. Consequently you find amongst Roman Catholics and Hinḍus a definite belief that these things are still possible; and the only thing that either will say with regard to their happening is that the greater descent of the people as a whole into materiality has made the possession of these powers a far rarer qualification of a believer in one or other of the religions, than was the case in the early days of enthusiasm, and of a greater outpouring of spiritual life. There is no doubt, so far as Christianity is concerned, that the sacred books of the Christians entirely support the Roman Catholic contention. I am not going into the question of the authenticity of particular phrases; I simply take the New Testament, as it is admitted to be a sacred book. There you have placed in the mouth of Jesus the distinct declaration that those who believe on Him should do greater works than He did; and in one passage--rejected, I know, as not in the original manuscripts by many scholars, but still coming down from a great Christian antiquity--you have the distinct statement that they shall be able to drink poison, and so on. So it is clearly a part of the definite Christian teaching and tradition, that these so-called abnormal powers are within the reach of believers in Christianity. And so also with regard to Hinḍuism.

Now another thing is to be observed in this connection: that as the religion has gone on generation after generation, century after century, there has been a diminution of the powers, and a much less frequent happening of these so-called miracles. Side by side with the weakening of these powers and the lessening in number of the phenomena has been also the gradual lessening of the power of the religion over the minds and lives of men. The inroads of other forms of thought, the slackening of the grasp of the believer on the realities of the unseen worlds, have diminished religious authority, and the power of those unseen realities has weakened as time has gone on. So if we take the case of Hinḍuism or Christianity we find them giving back before the inroads of a more materialistic philosophy, before the inroads of a self-assertive science. We find among cultured and thoughtful people in the East and West there has been a great slackening of hold on the teachings of religion, and that the power exercised over the lives of believers has become much less real than in earlier days. That is inevitable, the result of the efflux of time, and the need for the recurrence of spiritual impulses lies in that fact, which is ever repeating itself. Just in the same way in which we read in the _Bhagavaḍ-Gîṭâ_ that by the efflux of time this yoga disappears, and then some teacher comes in order to restore vividness to the life, so it is over and over again in the case of every great spiritual movement.

Now when we apply these manifest principles and facts to the latest spiritual movement, that which gave birth to the Theosophical Society, we find that we are running through, in a very short time, the same series of facts as characterised the religions of the past. Here also, as with them, a great outburst of phenomena in the earlier days; H.P.B. living in a cloud of phenomena and those who came in touch with her bathed in phenomena of all kinds. You can see the result of that early training in our late President, Colonel Olcott, to whom phenomena in connection with the Theosophical Society were the most natural things in the world. He had no hesitation in talking of them, was always bubbling over with his experiences of them in the past. You must remember, when he was over here, how much he thought about them, the pleasure he took in recalling his earlier experiences, and of showing the material articles produced phenomenally in those earlier days; and you cannot take up _Old Diary Leaves_ without finding yourself face to face with every-day happenings of phenomena. Life then seemed to be made up of the abnormal, in the sense in which that word is used. The normal for the time being had disappeared. If a duster had to be hemmed, an elemental did it. If pencils were needed, a hand was put forward, twisted the pencils about, and there were twelve in place of the one, and so on. Much greater people than H.P.B. were concerned in producing these phenomena. Colonel Olcott tells us how H.P.B. on one occasion drank some lukewarm water which a Master drew from a water-skin on a camel, and magnetised, and made her believe it to be coffee. On his removing the magnetism before she had finished drinking, she found to her disgust that she had been drinking this lukewarm water. The present-day Theosophist would probably have objected to such playfulness, but such things were continually happening in the early days. When Colonel Olcott came into the Society he came straight from the investigation of spiritualistic phenomena--a thoroughly well-trained observer, beginning with a good deal of scepticism, and beaten out of it by his own observations in innumerable spiritualistic séances. So that when he came in touch with H.P.B. he was no credulous, unobservant person, overborne by a number of wonderful happenings, but a thoroughly equipped and cold-blooded and well-trained observer of the super-physical, and he naturally brought his powers of observation to bear on these wonderful happenings. He has left on record the full stories of these earlier days. You may find similar stories, not to the same extent indeed, in Mr. Sinnett's book, _The Occult World_. There we find similar instances, similar marvels worked by H.P.B. in order to arouse his attention, and to prove to him the existence of certain laws; which otherwise would have remained, so to speak, in the air. So there were also there a large number of unusual happenings--letters in pillow-cases, letters on branches of trees, and so on. You would all do well to re-read the _Old Diary Leaves_ or _The Occult World_. Each one of you should deliberately ask himself: "Why do I believe these things to be true?" Because it seems to me that most members of the Theosophical Society are rather slipping into the position of the modern Christian, that in order that a miracle may be true it must be old, and if it happens nowadays it must immediately be discredited. That is not rational. But it is a perfectly rational position to take up with all phenomena to say: "I shall not accept one of them unless thoroughly satisfied with the evidence on which it rests"; that is a perfectly reasonable attitude; but what seems to me a little less reasonable is to swallow wholesale the phenomena of the early days, and to look very much askance at anything that happens now; to glance back proudly to the past, and to regard anything which might happen now as wrong, as undesirable. Because if that is the right position, then it ought to be applied all round; it ought to be applied to the early phenomena of the Society as much as to anything that may occur now; and the same rigid demand for evidence should be made as is made at the present time. But, on the other hand, if the evidence be as full and as satisfactory now as that which supported the earlier phenomena, then it does not seem quite reasonable to accept the earlier and deny the later.

Let us for a moment see how far the Society has been going along the same line as that along which the other religions have gone--the gradual disappearance of phenomena and the substitution for them of teaching appealing to the reason only, and not to the senses, claiming its authority on grounds which appeal to the consciousness in man, as far as is practicable divorced from matter, or to that consciousness working through comparatively thick and gross veils of matter. After the Coulomb difficulty there was a cessation almost entirely of these phenomena in the Theosophical Society. Two reasons led up to that: first, the utter disinclination of H.P.B. herself to continue to expose herself to the attacks of people with regard to her good faith. She was so maligned and slandered, so many friends turned against her and spoke of the powers she possessed as fraudulent and as tricks, that when her Master raised her from the bed that might have been her death-bed, and would have been, save for His coming to her at Aḍyar, she made the condition that she should not be forced to produce phenomena in the way she had been forced before; that she should be allowed to put that aside. The consent was given. Lion-hearted as she was, she shrank from the storm of slander that broke on her. The other reason was that people belonging to the Society took fright. The pressure of public reprobation was so strong, the force of unbelief so crushing, that the members of the Society itself shrank back and were afraid to face public opinion, ignorant and persecuting as it was; and it is pathetic and interesting to read the letters she wrote in the years immediately succeeding the Coulomb difficulty, in which she pointed out that those to whom she had brought the light were ashamed to stand beside her under the conditions to which she was then exposed. She complained that the writings in the Society were changing their character; that they were no longer occult and full of teaching of the unseen, but had become purely philosophical and metaphysical; that her own journal had turned aside from its earlier occultism, and confined itself to articles addressed only to the intellect; and she says in one of these letters: "Say what you may, it was my phenomena on which the Theosophical Society was founded. It is my phenomena by which that Society has been built up." It was a natural feeling of half resentment against the policy of the time, that had left her in the lurch, and put the Society upon a different footing. It was in connection with that terrible time, in the turmoil and whirl of conflicting opinions, that those words recorded of her Master, spoken to herself, in one of the records left to the Society, occurred, in which He said: "The Society has liberated itself from our grasp and influence ... it is no longer ... a body over the face of which broods the Spirit from beyond the Great Range." Along those newer lines the Society went, and there are many who will say: "They are better lines. It is better that these abnormal happenings should fall into the background, that they should not be presented to a scornful and sceptical world, that we should rely on the literature that we have, without desiring to increase it by new knowledge, in which much can only be gained