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

bewildered by many an assault, half timid before the new truth discovered every day, half scared at the undermining of old foundations, and the tearing by criticism of many documents--points it back to its own inexhaustible source, and bids it fear neither time nor truth, since Spirit is truth and eternity. All that criticism can take from you is the outer form, never the living reality; and well indeed is it for the churches and for the religions of the world that the outworks of documents should be levelled with the ground, in order to show the impregnability of the citadel, which is knowledge and experience.

But in the world of religious thought there are many services, less important, in truth, than the one I have spoken of, but still important and valuable to the faiths of the world; for Theosophy brings back to men, living in tradition, testimony to the reality of knowledge transcending the knowledge of the senses and the reasoning powers of the lower mind. It comes with its hands full of proof, modern proof, proof of to-day, living witnesses, of unseen worlds, of subtler worlds than the physical. It comes, as the Founders and the early Teachers of every religion have come, to testify again by personal experience to the reality of the unseen worlds of which the religions are the continual witnesses in the physical world. Have you ever noticed in the histories of the great religions how they grow feebler in their power over men as faith takes the place of knowledge, and tradition the place of the living testimony of living men? That is one of the values of Theosophy in the religious world, that it teaches men to travel to worlds unseen, and to bring back the evidence of what they have met and studied; that it so teaches men their own nature that it enables them to separate soul and body, and travel without the physical body in worlds long thought unattainable, save through the gateway of death. I say "Long thought unattainable"; but the scriptures of every religion bear witness that they are not unattainable. The Hindu tells us that man should separate himself from his body as you strip the sheath from the stem of the grass. The Buḍḍhist tells us that by deep thought and contemplation mind may know itself as mind apart from the physical brain. Christianity tells us many a story of the personal knowledge of its earlier teachers, of a ministry of angels that remained in the Church, and of angelic teachers training the neophytes in knowledge. Islam tells us that its own great prophet himself passed into higher worlds, and brought back the truths which civilised Arabia, and gave knowledge which lit again the torch of learning in Europe when the Moors came to Spain. And so religion after religion bears testimony to the possibility of human knowledge outside the physical world; we only re-proclaim the ancient truth--with this addition, which some religions now shrink from making: that what man did in the past man may do to-day; that the powers of the Spirit are not shackled, that the knowledge of the other worlds is still attainable to man. And outside that practical knowledge of other worlds it brings by that same method the distinct assertion of the survival of the human Spirit after death. It is only in very modern times that that has been doubted by any large numbers of people. Here and there in the ancient world, like a Lucretius in Rome, perhaps; like a Democritus in Greece; certainly like a Chârvâka in India, you find one here and there who doubts the deathlessness of the Spirit in man; but in modern days that disbelief, or the hopeless cynicism which thinks knowledge impossible, has penetrated far and wide among the cultured, the educated classes, and from them to the masses of the uneducated. That is the phenomenon of modern days alone, that man by hundreds and by thousands despairs of his own immortality. And yet the deepest conviction of humanity, the deepest thought in man, is the persistence of himself, the "I" that cannot die. And with one great generalisation, and one method, Theosophy asserts at once the deathlessness of man and the existence of God; for it says to man, as it was ever said in the ancient days: "The proof of God is not without you but within you." All the greatest teachers have reiterated that message, so full of hope and comfort; for it shuts none out from knowledge. What is the method? Strip away your senses, and you find the mind; strip away the mind, and you find the pure reason; strip away the pure reason, and you find the will-to-live; strip away the will-to-live, and you find Spirit as a unit; strike away the limitations of the Spirit, and you find God. Those are the steps: told in ancient days, repeated now. "Lose your life," said the Christ, "and you shall find it to life eternal." That is true: let go everything that you can let go; you cannot let go yourself, and in the impossibility of losing yourself you find the certainty of the Self Universal, the Universal Life.

Pass again from that to another religious point. I mentioned ceremonies, rites of every faith. Those Theosophy looks at and understands. So many have cast away ceremonies, even if they have found them helpful, because they do not understand them, and fear superstition in their use. Knowledge has two great enemies: Superstition and Scepticism. Knowledge destroys blind superstition by asserting and explaining natural truths of which the superstition has exaggerated the unessentials; and it destroys scepticism by proving the reality of the facts of the unseen world. The ceremony, the rite, is a shadow in the world of sense of the truths in the world of Spirit; and every religion, every creed, has its ceremonies as the outward physical expression of some eternal spiritual truth. Theosophy defends them, justifies them, by explaining them; and when they are understood they cease to be superstitions that blind, and become crutches that help the halting mind to climb to the spiritual life.

Let us pass from the world of religious thought, and pause for a moment on the world of artistic thought. Now to Art, perhaps more than in any other department of the human intelligence, the ideal is necessary for life. All men have wondered from time to time why the architecture--to take one case only--why the architecture of the past is so much more wonderful, so much more beautiful, than the architecture of the present. When you want to build some great national building to-day you have to go back to Greece, or Rome, or the Middle Ages for your model. Why is it that you have no new architecture, expressive of your own time, as that was expressive of the past? The severe order of Egypt found its expression in the mighty temples of Karnak; the beauty and lucidity of Grecian thought bodied itself out in the chaste and simple splendor of Grecian buildings; the sternness of Roman law found its ideal expression in those wondrous buildings whose ruins still survive in Rome; the faith of the Middle Ages found its expression in the upward-springing arch of Gothic architecture, and the exquisite tracery of the ornamented building. But if you go into the Gothic cathedral, what do you find there? That not alone in wondrous arch and splendid pillar, upspringing in its delicate and slender strength from pavement to roof, not there only did the art of the builder find its expression. Go round to any out-of-the-way corner, or climb the roof of those great buildings, and you will find in unnoticed places, in hidden corners, the love of the artist bodying itself forth in delicate tracery, in stone that lives. Men carved for love, not only for fame; men carved for beauty's sake, not only for money; and they built perfectly because they had love and faith, the two divine builders, and embodied both in deathless stone. Before you can be more than copyists you must find your modern ideal, and when you have found it you can build buildings that will defy time. But you have not found it yet; the artist amongst us is too much of a copyist, and too little of an inspirer and a prophet. We do not want the painter only to paint for us the things our own eyes can see. We want the artist eye to see more than the common eye, and to embody what he sees in beauty for the instruction of our blinded sight. We do not want accurate pictures of cabbages and turnips and objects of that sort. However cleverly done, they remain cabbages and turnips still. The man who could paint for us the thought that makes the cabbage, he would be the artist, the man who knows the Life. And so for our new Art we must have a splendid ideal. Do you want to know how low Art may sink when materialism triumphs and vulgarises and degrades? Then see that exhibition of French pictures that was placed in Bond Street some years ago, which attracted those who loved indecency more than those who loved the beautiful, and then you will understand how Art perishes where the breath of the ideal does not inspire and keep alive. And Theosophy to the artist would bring back that ancient reverence which regards the artist of the Beautiful as one of the chief God-revealers to the race of which he is a portion; which sees in the great musical artist, or the sculptor, or the painter, a God-inspired man, bringing down the grace of heaven to illuminate the dull grey planes of earth. The artists should be the prophets of our time, the revealers of the Divine smothered under the material; and were they this, they would be regarded with love and with reverence; for true art needs reverence for its growing, and the artist, of all men--subtle, responsive, sensitive to everything that touches him--needs an atmosphere of love and reverence that he may flower into his highest power, and show the world some glimpse of the Beauty which is God.

And the world of science--perhaps there, after the world of religion, Theosophy has most of value to offer. Take Psychology. What a confusion; what a mass of facts want arrangement; what a chaos of facts out of which no cosmos is built! Theosophy, by its clear and accurate definition of man, of the relation of consciousness to its bodies, of Spirit to its vehicles, arranges into order that vast mass of facts with which psychology is struggling now. It takes into that wonderful "unconscious" or "sub-conscious"--which is now, as it were, the answer to every riddle; but it is not understood--it takes into that the light of direct investigation; divides the "unconscious" which comes from the past from that which is the presage of the future, separates out the inheritance of our long past ancestry which remains as the "sub-conscious" in us; points to the higher "super-conscious," not "sub-conscious," of which the genius is the testimony at the present time; shows that human consciousness transcends the brain; proves that human consciousness is in touch with worlds beyond the physical; and makes sure and certain the hope expressed by science, that it is possible that that which is now unconscious shall become conscious, and that man shall find himself in touch with a universe and not only in touch with one limited world. That which Myers sometimes spoke of as the "cosmic consciousness," as against our own limited consciousness, is a profound truth, and carries with it the prophecy of man's future greatness. Just as the fish is limited to the water, as the bird is limited to the air, so man has been limited to the physical body, and