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

to students as regards the use of the words Jesus and Christ; Jesus denotes specifically the man, the living man, the Master, who is still in possession of a physical body, and in close relation to the physical earth; the Christ, in a higher sense, is an indwelling spiritual being, who can be reached by the Spirit, but not seen as such by the eyes in any phenomenal world. So again there is the yet loftier Being to whom the name of Christ is applied amongst the Christians, when they are speaking of One we call the Second LOGOS; these are Beings of different grades, and in different relations to mankind; but the Master, as Master, is a man, and the manhood must never be forgotten. It was on that point that H.P.B. laid so much stress in speaking of those Beings with whom she had come into physical contact, whom she knew in their physical bodies; and one thing, as you know, which she protested against in relation to this type of Being was the putting Them too far away from human love and sympathy, making Them belong to a class of beings to whom at present They do not belong, and hence making a gulf between Them and humanity which ought not to be made, because the making of it destroys Their value to the people who make it. A phrase she once used, that I have quoted to you before, is the complaint that "they have turned our Masters into cold far-off stars, instead of living men," and on the fact that They are living men she continually insisted; for it is by virtue of that living manhood that They are able to play the part that They play in the evolution of the race. Others have other work to do as regards humanity, as regards the destinies of the nations, and so on, but these particular people are still in close touch with the humanity to which They belong, and They deliberately refuse to go on away from it, remaining with it until humanity, at least with regard to very, very large numbers of its members, has reached the position in which They stand to-day, as the promise of what humanity shall be, the first-fruits of humanity as it is. They are specially concerned with the direct teaching, training, and helping of man, in the quickening of his evolution; and the reason the body is retained is in order that this close personal touch may be kept, primarily with Their disciples, and then through Their disciples with comparatively large numbers of people. And it is a marked and significant fact, that just in proportion as a religion has lost touch with this aspect of the Divine Life which we call the Life of the Master, so has it tended to become more formal, less highly vitalised, less spiritual, with less of the mystic element in it, and more of the literal; so that it becomes necessary in the efflux of time that every now and again a Master should come forth from the Great White Lodge, and testify again upon earth to the reality of the tie between the Elder Brothers of the race and the younger brothers who are living constantly in the physical world.

Now one distinguishing mark of a Master, His chief function, we may say, is to perform the greatest act of sacrifice which is known in the Occult Hierarchy, save the act of the One who is called The Great Sacrifice, the Silent Watcher, whose sacrificial act is still greater than the sacrificial acts performed by Those who are spoken of as Masters. This particular act of sacrifice, occurring from time to time at the beginning of a new epoch in religion and civilisation, is performed by one of the Body, who volunteers to start a further spiritual impulse in the world, and to bear the karma of the impulse that He generates. That may not appear to you at first glance, unless you have gone into the subject carefully, to be such a transcendent act of sacrifice as it really is. It may seem a comparatively small thing to start such an impulse, and very vague probably are the ideas of many of you as to what is implied in the statement "bearing the karma," which the generation of the impulse implies. The great act of sacrifice lies not only in the truth that He is wearing a physical body of coarse matter, which hampers Him from time to time, but that He cannot lay that body aside, once He has used it for giving this great spiritual impulse, until that impulse is entirely exhausted, and the religion, or the association, to which it has given birth has vanished out of the physical world. Take, for instance, the case of the Master, Jesus: He--by His own voluntary act of course, in the beginning, for it is always a volunteer who comes forward; such a sacrifice cannot be imposed--He, voluntarily, giving up His body, and later taking from the Boḍhisaṭṭva the guarding of the infant plant of which the Boḍhisaṭṭva had sown the seed which was to grow into the great tree of Christianity, taking that from Him, He bound Himself by the acceptance of that work to remain in the bonds of the physical body until the Christian Church had completed its work, and until the last Christian had passed away, either into liberation, or re-birth into some other faith. It is the same with the other great religions, so many of which are now dead--the religion of Egypt, of Chaldea, and many another. The Masters who had to do with those have long since cast away Their physical bodies, and thereby ceased to be what we call Masters, because the religion that each gave to the world had done its work, and no souls remained who could be further helped by passing through the teaching and the training of that particular religion. This is the central idea of the act of sacrifice, and it becomes the more a sacrificial act because the One who undertakes this tremendous task cannot tell how the impulse will flow in all its details, cannot even estimate the amount of difficulty, of delay, nay, of mischief, that may grow out of the impulse that He has given. In the first place, He Himself is limited by these bodies that He has assumed. He cannot use the whole of His vast consciousness within the limitations of a physical brain and a physical body. Thus, although He has unified His bodies and is able, so to speak, to run up and down the ladder of the planes as He will, He is still largely limited in His activities where He is working in the unplastic matter of the physical plane; and so, when He undertakes a work like this, He generates causes whose effects He cannot thoroughly calculate, He takes the risk which surrounds every great undertaking, He submits Himself to the conditions of this task upon which He enters, and He is obliged, having once taken it, to bear it until success or failure has crowned the effort that He makes.

Those of you who have carefully thought on these subjects will realise that while the knowledge of a Master is, as regards you or me, practical omniscience, it is by no means omniscience on His own plane, relative to the problems with which He has to deal and which He has to solve. A Master amongst Masters, a Master within the Great White Lodge, He is amongst His peers, in the presence of His Superiors, and the problems with which that Lodge has to deal, the questions on which that Lodge has to decide, are, if I may use the phrase, as difficult and as puzzling on that plane of being as the problems that we have to decide down here are on our plane. Hence the possibility of miscalculation, the possibility of error, the possibility of mistake; and you can well understand that these beings are subject to such limitations when you remember the startling assertion that even the Lord Buḍḍha Himself, high above the Masters, that even He committed an error in His work on the physical plane. When, then, a Master volunteers to serve as what may literally be called the scapegoat of a new spiritual movement, He takes up a karma whose whole course He is unable to see. And it need not, therefore, be a matter of surprise that when the time was approaching when another great spiritual impulse might again be given, according to cyclic law, when the two who volunteered to undertake the task, to make the sacrifice, offered Themselves in the Great White Lodge, differences of opinion arose as to whether it was desirable or not that what we now call the Theosophical Society should be founded.

The time came, as most of you know, I suppose, for an effort of some sort to be made. It had been so since the fourteenth century, for it was in the thirteenth century that in Tibet a mighty personage then living in that land, promulgated His order to the Lodge that at the close of every century an effort should be made to enlighten the "white barbarians of the West." That order having gone forth, it became necessary, of course, to obey it; for in those regions disobedience is unknown. Hence at the close of each century--as you may verify for yourselves if you choose to go through history carefully, beginning from the time when Christian Rosenkreuz founded the Rosicrucian Society late in the fourteenth century--you will find on every occasion, towards the close of the century, a new ray of light is shed forth. Towards the close of the last century--I do not mean the one to which we belong, but the century before, the eighteenth--a mighty effort was made, of which the burden fell upon two great personages closely connected with the Lodge, though neither of them, I believe, at that time was a Master--he who was then known as the Comte de St. Germain, who is now one of the Masters, and his colleague in that great task, closely allied to him, of a noble Austrian family, known to us in later days as H.P.B. When those made their attempt to change the face of Europe, they failed, the time not being ripe; the misery and the wretchedness of the epoch, the degradation of the masses of the population, the horrible poverty, the shameful starvation, all these were the rocks on which split, and was broken up into foam, the spiritual wave of which those two personages were the crest. The karma of that, for the one whom we know of as H.P.B., was the trying and suffering incarnation that she spent amongst us, when she founded, under the order of her Master, the Theosophical Society, and gave her life to it that it might live. And it was that fact, that the last great spiritual effort had been drowned in bloodshed, it was that which gave her her marked horror of mixing up the spiritual movement with a political effort, which made her realise that before a spiritual movement could be successful in the outer world it must shape, raise, remodel the conscience of those who were affected by it, that it must not dare to put its hand as a whole to any great political or social movement before it was strong enough to control the forces which it evoked. Hence her shrinking from all idea of this Society plunging, as a Society, into political work or social reform. Not that individuals of the Society might not do it, not that members of it might not use their best thought and energy in order to bring forward and strengthen any movement which was really for the benefit of mankind; but