Miscellaneous Theosophical Writings of G.

de Purucker

Contents - A Spiritual Unity - After-Death States - After the Kali-Yuga - Aham asmi Parabrahma - An Attitude of Balance - At this Time of Year - AUM - Buddhas of Compassion and Pratyeka Buddhas - Buddhas of Compassion - Buddhic Principle - Buddhism and Theosophy - Capturing a World with Ideas - Let Christ-Child Live - Collective Spiritual Flame - Comets and Meteors - Consummatum Est - Cosmic Heart - Cremation - Cyclic Periodicity - Two Questions on Density - Doctrine Concerning the Ego - Easter Thoughts - Every Theosophist a Leader - Fellows of the T.S. - Fidelity to H.P.B. - The Flow of Spiritual Energy - Forgiveness and Karma - Fraternization - Fraternization Conventions - Future Spiritual Brotherhood - On "God" - Good and Evil - The Guardian Angel - Healing - Hierarchical Government - The Hill of Discernment - Hints on Cycles - How the Soul Returns - Hpho-Wa - Hypnotic Practice - Ideas and Ideals

- In Times of Crisis - Initiation and Suffering - Letter on Karman - Lamaic Succession - Laugh at Yourself - Lead Us Not into Temptation - Letter on Cycles - Letter on Spiritual Importance of Pt. Loma - Letter on Work of the Monad - Letter to Pierce Spinks - The Light She Brought - The Mahabharata - Maha-Maya - Monads, Rounds, Astral Molds - Narada - The New Age is Born - The New Year - A Noble and Sublime Field - On Adolescents - Deity and Karman - On the Mahatma Letters - One Life - One Law - Opportunity in the Kali-Yuga - Man in an Ordered Universe - Our Work - Paganism - Pineal and Pituary Glands - Planetary Chains and Principles - The Principle of Success - The Psychic Tide - The Psychic World - Beware - Psychism - Puruckers "Fundamentals" - Review - A.E.S.S. - Pygmies and Races - Questions and Answers - Questions and Answers (2) - Quick Reincarnation - Requisites of Chelahood - Scientific Basis for Ethics - Secret of Human Conflict - The Sense of Reverence - Separation of the Sexes - Seven Human Groups - Six Schools of Ancient Thought - The Story or Jesus - Strength and Balance

- Struggle and Cooperation - Studies in The Mahatma Letters - Note on Technical Theosophy - A Theosophical Super-Society - Theosophy and Universal Brotherhood - Three Aspects of Karman - Three Ways Self Recognizes Truth - Time of the Winter Solstice - Letter to 1936 European Convention - Letter to 1938 Convention - To Those Who Mourn - The Theosophical Society - The T.S. and the Lost Cause of Materialism - Tibetan Doctrine of Tulku - Universality - The Way of Heaven - Weather and Eclipses - What is Truth? - What Lessons Have We Learned? - Where Can Truth Be Found? - Who Are You? - Why Theosophy? - Wind of the Spirit - Wind of the Spirit Excerpts - Winter Solstice - Winter Solstice - Its Meaning - A Word on Chelaship - Work of the T.S. - Work Out Your Own Salvation - The World's Trouble and Cure - Yoga Training - The Yoga We Follow - Quotes Appendix - Gottfried de Purucker: A Biographical Sketch - Boris de Zirkoff - Some Tributes to G. de Purucker -------------------

A SPIRITUAL UNITY - G. de Purucker [Those who today speak slightingly of fraternization or unity among Theosophists of various groups or Societies should study history. We go back 48 years to June 1931.

On the 24th of that month at the headquarters of the English Section of the T.S. (Point Loma) in London, what was called "the H.P.B. Centennial Conference" was held, attended by representatives of the different Theosophical Societies in Europe. This was the outcome of the announcement in late 1929 and early 1930 by Dr. G. de Purucker of the need for the breaking down of barriers among Theosophists worldwide, to unite in the spiritual teachings of H.P.B., and to practice the brotherhood that they preach. The centennial year of the birth of H.P.B. was seized upon to call this gathering together. (Similar meetings, on August 11, 1931, were held at Point Loma, California, attended mainly by those living in the U.S.A. but open to Theosophists of all Societies; and at Adyar, India, for members of the Adyar Society). At the close of the London meeting the following cable was sent by A. Trevor Barker, the convener of the Conference and National President of the English Section T.S. (P.L.), received on June 26 at Point Loma: "Centennial positive success. Leader eminently satisfied. Sixty-five representative Theosophists of nineteen nationalities, four societies, including Arundales, Phoenix Lodge, fourteen executive officers national sections. Yesterday's public meeting splendid. Fine audience. - Barker." It would take far too long to go into the subsequent history of this movement towards friendly theosophical interassociation. The great ideal of One Theosophical Society has not been attained; but beneath the outer flow and movement of events the alchemical process of a spiritual unity has been growing, not with emotional fervor, but steadily, with deepening understanding, friendship, and real brotherly love amongst individual Theosophists and Theosophical groups worldwide. We invite Eclectic readers to go back in thought nearly half a century when Theosophists around the world celebrated with high purpose and deep aspiration the one hundredth anniversary of their great Teacher's birth - and reflect! Following are extracts from Dr. de Purucker's closing address at that particular London H.P.B. Centennial Conference, which we reprint from The Theosophical Forum, Vol. III, No. 1, Sept. 1931. Eds.] What we want is truth. Let us therefore find that truth and follow it, which we can do in the grand original Theosophical teachings of H.P.B.; and let us remember that it was H.P.B. who collected together the first members of the Theosophical Society and gave them the key in the majestic doctrines of the Ancient Wisdom-Religion which she elaborated in her later years among us. In these words lies the reason why I am so heartfaithful to her.... I have always sought truth, and that truth for me is found in the Ancient WisdomReligion of mankind which H.P.B. brought; and when I find individuals teaching that truth, them I call Brothers in this Work. One such was H.P.B. That I know. One such was Judge. That I know. And one such was my great predecessor Katherine Tingley. That I know. Many here did not know her; but am I going to turn my back on those who have not felt what I have felt and known? No indeed. I am going to practice the brotherhood which I preach; and in witness thereof here is my hand in the spirit of genuine fraternity. ... The most important and most practical thing for us Theosophists to do [is] to forget the opinions and to hold to the fundamental Theosophical realities. For me, these realities are in the teachings of the Masters, and they can be found in H.P.B.'s works. Of course they are not found there merely because our beloved H.P.B. wrote them. If any

individual person had written them, the truths would be the same. It so happens, however, that I love H.P.B. because she was H.P.B.; but, after all, that is my own affair. I can easily see that there are many who could not, at any rate who would not, understand H.P.B. as I see her and understand her, but am I going to condemn such because they differ from me in views and in feeling concerning H.P.B.? Another thing: I do not think it a practical method for bringing about our working together, my Brothers, merely to sit together at a table in a brain-mind way and in a brainmind way seek brain-mind points of agreement. That method has been tried so many scores, indeed hundreds, of times, and has always failed, for it invariably leads into discussions which in their turn will lead to argument, which again leads only to wounded feelings and further causes of misunderstandings, concerning what Timothy Dexter or G. de P. or Dr. Besant, or some other prominent Theosophist, thinks to be 'an essential'. I think that such brain-mind methods are worse than futile; I think that they are dangerous. Isn't it much better to be practical than to follow the methods which have proved their impractical and futile and dangerous character? If we Theosophists cannot unite on the basis of the spiritual and intellectual verities which we have from the Teachers, and which we all know that we accept, we cannot unite and remain united merely by subscribing in a brain-mind way to a list of Articles of Belief, which as individual teachings all of us already accept. Why not, instead of doing this, unite in our love of and belief in H.P.B. as the Masters' Messenger. In the future, and I see it clearly - no, not by any psychic vision, I do not indulge in that - but my logic, my instinct, my spiritual feeling, tell me that in the future the Theosophical Movement will be once more a unified organism, somewhat changed it may be from what it was in the days of our beloved H.P.B., but with her teachings as the foundation of its life and its activity, and with the same policy guiding its destiny. I yearn to see this accomplished in my own lifetime, if I can bring it about. This basis of mutual understanding and of a common fellowship I do not want to have written, I do not want to see it set forth in black and white on paper. I want it based on the mutual understanding and tacit acceptance of genuine Theosophists and honest men, and to have it clearly understood that any man, or any one of the component Theosophical Societies, will be free to withdraw from such association at any moment when it should please them to do so. I yearn to see this Spiritual Brotherhood that I speak of composed of all the Theosophical Societies in the world, and all working together for a common end, confessing by their action of unification and by the doctrines which they teach that they believe in the brotherhood which they preach. This is not an unattainable ideal which lies beyond the bounds of possibility. It is easily to be brought about, and by the only way which is practical and practicable: Change men's hearts and minds to forget the opinions which they cherish so dearly, and to consent to work on the basis of the essential spiritual realities of life which we all acknowledge as fundamental, essential Theosophy. That is what I want, and I believe that the members of the Adyar Society and that the members of the United Lodge of Theosophists and that the members of all the various different Theosophical bodies, all have pretty much the same hope and ideal latent in their souls. I know that they all feel that they are working for genuine Theosophical principles, and I hope that I am large-hearted enough and broadminded enough to realize that they have as much right to their opinions and feelings as I have to mine; and I hope that they are broad-minded enough to know that we all are

brothers, fellow-Theosophists, every Society having its own difficulties, its own problems, and its own line of work in the world. Do you know that the Path to the Heart of the Universe is different for every living entity, and yet that all those paths merge into One? Each man must tread his own evolutionary path, which in the world's foolish view means that in his ordinary brain-mind way each man must hold fast to his own opinions. But verily this is a mistaken view. Opinions! It is opinions that separate men in politics, in religion, in all the ordinary affairs and avocations of human life. It is so, alas, even in our own Theosophical Movement; it is so in religious and philosophical societies everywhere. Men worship opinions instead of realities. I know indeed that all these various Theosophical Societies have their respective and differing opinions; but I also know that each one is pursuing its own line of work and is, I believe, trying to do good in the world; and I also know that each one of them, as well as every individual composing their respective fellowships, is following its own pathway to the Heart of the Universe. Let us then remember this great truth. It will bring generosity into our hearts and a kindlier feeling for those who differ from us. I will now close, with the expression of the hope that this will not be the last meeting of its kind. Our gathering is an historic event, believe me, Brothers, in the history of the modern Theosophical Movement. I know that if these thoughts which I have attempted so poorly this afternoon to lay before you, are understood, and accepted in your hearts in other words if your minds and hearts will run parallel with them - we shall have taken a great step forwards towards the accomplishment of that Universal Brotherhood of humanity which the Masters have set before us as the main work of the Theosophical Society; and I remind you of a great truth which I will quote for you in the words of the ancient Vedic sage: Tat savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhimahi Dhiyo yo nah prachodayat. which we may translate and paraphrase as follows: "Oh, thou golden sun of most excellent splendor, illumine our hearts and fill our minds, so that we, recognizing our oneness with the divinity which is the Heart of the Universe, may see the pathway before our feet, and tread it to those distant goals of perfection, stimulated by thine own radiant light." This is a paraphrase of the Savitri, perhaps the most sacred verse in the ancient Hindu scriptures, and it contains a world of truth, for it sets forth the spiritual oneness of all things that are - that all things are rooted in the spiritual Universe, nay, more, in the Boundless: that in THAT we forever move and live and have our being; and that our whole duty is so to live, which means so to feel and so to think and so to act, that day by day and year by year we may recognize this fundamental oneness with the Cosmic Heart, and manifest its supernal glory and strength in our own lives. (The Conference closed with a few moments of Silence after seven strokes on the gong.) - Eclectic Theosophist, July 15, 1979

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AFTER DEATH STATES ....... This may we also learn if we will. For, in the words of Dr. de Purucker, in his first lecture on `The Mysteries of Sleep and Death': When a man while alive on earth can ally himself with his own inner god, with the divine entity at the very root of his being, then he dreams no more but becomes divinely self-conscious - becomes godlike in his consciousness; for then his consciousness takes cosmic sweep, expands to embrace the solar system and even beyond; and though living on earth walks among his fellows as a god-man. This not only can be done but has often been done, and done again and again; and the great titanic Seers and intellects: the great spiritual visionaries of the human race, were just such god-men; the Buddha, Sankaracharya, Jesus the Syrian, Lao-Tse, Krishna, Pythagoras - oh! a host of them - were such god-men; some were greater than others, but all, each me of them, in greater or less degree, had become at one with his own inner god, with what the modern mystical Christian calls his immanent Christ, the Christ dwelling within him; we Theosophists say the inner god .... O my Brothers, why not become at one with this divinity within you? Addendum In order to make clearer certain of the passages quoted from The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, the following questions were asked of Dr. de Purucker, to which he very kindly dictated answers. The spelling of the original in The Mahatma Letters has been followed in the questions. Question 1 - On page 186 of The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, we read: Every just disembodied four-fold entity . . . loses at the instant of death all recollection, it is mentally annihilated; it sleeps it's akasic sleep in the Kama-loka. Please explain the significance of the phrase `every just disembodied four-fold entity.' Answer by G. de P. - The reader should bear in mind in reading The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett that all answers were given to more or less elementary questions asked by individuals who had virtually no idea whatsoever of the Esoteric Wisdom nor of its intricacies, nor again of the very stringent regulations forbidding the divulging of the ancient teachings except to those, who had, at least in some degree, pledged themselves to keep these teachings secret. However, answering this question, the phrase `every just disembodied four-fold entity' refers to the sevenfold constitution of man just after death, who thereafter becomes a four-fold entity, because the physical body, the Linga-sarira or model-body, and the pranic currents belonging to it, have been shed or cast off. Three of the so-called `principles' thus being dropped, the entity remaining is obviously a four-fold entity or double duad. But this four-fold entity is all the best part of the man that was - in fact, all of the man except the outer-most carapace and its vitality and astral pattern. Question 2 - On page 187 of The Mahatma Letters occurs the following: That remembrance will return slowly and gradually toward the end of the gestation (to the entity or Ego), still more slowly but far more imperfectly and incompletely to the

shell, and fully to the Ego at the moment of its entrance into the Devachan. What is the meaning of the words `gestation' and `shell' in the above passage? Answer by G. de P. - The `remembrance' here referred to by the Master K.H. is that panoramic vision or reviewing of the events of the past life which occurs to every normal human being at least twice after death, and in some cases three times; but this is another story. The `gestation' is a word used in those early days of the Theosophical Society to signify the preliminary preparation of the entity entering into its devachanic condition or state of consciousness; just as the gestation of a child precedes its birth on earth into physical life, so is there a gestation of the devachanic entity before it enters into the devachanic state. The `shell' here refers to the kama-rupic entity or `spook' which is cast off at the second death, which second death takes place virtually shortly preceding the entrance of the entity into the devachanic state, and therefore at the end of the gestation-period alluded to. The meaning is that after death the four-fold entity is in a more or less unconscious, semi-conscious, or dreamlike state; and the panoramic vision or remembrance returns slowly to the Ego at the end of the gestation-period, but fully so when the gestation-period is completed and when the entity stands, as it were, on the devachanic threshold. The remembrance returns very imperfectly and incompletely to the kama-rupic shell more or less at the time the kama-rupic shell is dropped; and this remembrance is incomplete and imperfect, because the shell, being a mere garment, although to a certain extent vitalized and therefore as it were quasi-conscious like the physical body, it obviously can retain no complete or full recollection of all the past life, because it is incapable of retaining the spiritual and noble intellectual vistas of the life just lived. The `remembrance' is obviously therefore `imperfect' and `incomplete.' Question 3 - On page 188 of The Mahatma Letters one reads: . . . from the last step of devachan, the Ego will often find itself in Avitcha's faintest state, which, towards the end of the `spiritual selection' of events may become a bona fide "Avitcha." What is meant here by the `spiritual selection' of events? Answer by G. de P. - Before answering the question I must point out that `Avitcha' is of course a miswriting by the chela-amanuensis for Avichi. The `spiritual selection' of events is but a phrase, which rather neatly and graphically describes the selecting by the devachanic entity, as it enters into the devachanic state, of all the spiritual and noble intellectual vistas, events, with his emotions and aspirations, of the life just lived. If these vistas and events, etc., are few to recollect or select, the devachanic state is not high and is probably a rupa-lokic Devachan. Similarly, if these vistas and events are extremely few, then the Devachan is so low or faint that it is practically the same as verging towards the highest part of Avichi; because the highest part of Kama-loka blends insensibly into the very lowest conditions or states of the Devachan, while the Kama-loka's lowest part blends insensibly into the highest conditions of the Avichi. In other words, there is no solution of continuity as between any of these three; for both Devachan and Avichi are states: they blend insensibly into each other. Question 4 - Again on page 188 of The Mahatma Letters one reads: Yes: Love and Hatred are the only immortal feelings; but the gradations of tones along the seven by seven scales of the whole keyboard of life, are numberless. What are `the seven by seven scales' referred to above?

Answer by G. de P. - `The seven by seven scales' referred to above are the fortynine steps or degrees on the ladder or scale of consciousness: i.e., of life as experienced in our hierarchy by a conscious or quasi-conscious entity. Consequently, the gradations of tones along the forty-nine scales are virtually innumerable or `numberless.' We must here understand not only whole tones, to adopt the musical phraseology, but half-tones and even quarter-tones, and perhaps eighth-tones. It is a mistake to suppose that even in the musical diatonic scale the notes are actually distinct, entitative vibrations without intermediate connecting links. The chromatic scale proves this. As a matter of fact any musical scale is only apparent. There is in fact one universal sound divided into seven times seven, or forty-nine, gradations of pitch or scalar differences; but these differences or degrees or steps are more or less illusory and depend upon the receptivity or lack of it of the percipient consciousness. Question 5 - On page 198 of The Mahatma Letters occurs the following: Deva Chan is a state, not a locality. Rupa Loka, Arupa-Loka, and Kama-Loka are the three spheres of ascending spirituality in which the several groups of subjective entities find their attractions. Please explain the three words `Rupa Loka,' `Arupa-Loka,' and Kama-Loka,' and the phrase `three spheres of ascending spirituality.' Answer by G. de P. - `The three spheres of ascending spirituality' are, in their proper order, Kama-loka, Rupa-loka, and Arupa-loka, and are a brief way of expressing the three generalized conditions or states both of matter and of consciousness between the lowest astral and the highest devachanic spheres. Kama-loka is the low-est; the next higher is the Rupa-loka; and the highest of these three is the Arupa-loka. Kama-loka is the astral world, the world of shells, of cast-off kama-rupic entities or spooks; and is itself divided into different steps or stages of ethereality, ascending from the lowest Kama-loka or that which is nearest to earth-condition. The Kama-loka then merges into the Rupa-loka, a Sanskrit phrase which means `Form-world'; and the Rupa-loka is in this connection the lower part or half, so to speak, of the devachanic sphere of being. The Rupa-loka in its turn is divided into ascending grades of ethereality, so that the highest of the Rupa-loka merges insensibly into the lowest of the Arupa-loka or `Formless Sphere.' It is through these three `spheres of ethereality' (rather than spirituality) that the average excarnate entity passes in his post-mortem adventure, beginning at the moment of death in the lowest part of the Kama-loka and ending with the highest part of the Devachan. Please recollect very carefully that, although the Kama-loka, the Rupa-loka, and the Arupaloka may be considered as actual localities or spheres, they are merely so because all the entities inhabiting them must have place or position in space. The Devachan per se is a state of consciousness just as the Avichi is. Question 6 - At the bottom of page 198 of The Mahatma Letters, the words Alaya Vynyana are used in the sense of `hidden knowledge.' Are they synonymous with GuptaVidya? And are these last words, in turn, synonymous with the Guhya-Vidya which Dr. de Purucker refers to in his Occult Glossary (under Vidya) as `the Secret Knowledge' or `the Esoteric Wisdom'? Answer by G. de P. - Alaya-Vijnana is a Sanskrit compound which indeed can be translated metaphorically as `hidden knowledge,' but which more comprehensively means `discernment' (or `recognition') `of the imperishable': i.e., of the Kosmic Soul or Anima Mundi. It is obvious that when an entity is able to vision the Alaya-Vijnana it becomes

instantly percipient of all the `hidden knowledge' that the Kosmic Soul is enabled to pour into its more or less limited capacity. Consequently Alaya-Vijnana is not technically synonymous with Gupta-Vidya,. .because Gupta-Vidya, although literally meaning `hid knowledge' refers rather to the doctrines of the Secret Wisdom today taught in the Esoteric School. Guhya-Vidya is synonymous with Gupta-Vidya, both signifying `the Secret Knowledge' or `the Esoteric Wisdom.' - Canadian Theosophist, March-April, May-June, 1961 ---------------------------

AFTER THE KALI-YUGA - ? - G. de Purucker At one of the meetings of the Point Loma Lodge T.S. in the 1930's a question was asked by Mrs. Frances M. Dadd on the very interesting question to all students of Theosophy of the order of the great Ages or Yugas. We give here the full question and the answer then given by Dr. G. de Purucker. This was first printed in The Theosophical Forum, Sept. 1937, and later in the volume Studies in Occult Philosophy. - Eds. We are told in the Occult Glossary that the four Yugas, with their respective timeperiods of 4, 3, 2, 1, take up just half of the duration of a Root-Race. I have been wondering in what order the Yugas follow after Kali-Yuga, in which we now are, because by analogy it might mean that they would go in the reverse order, so that after Kali-Yuga there would be DwiparaYuga, and then Treti-Yuga, and then Satya; but reasoning from another standpoint, it seems we merge into the Golden Age, at least that is what it seems to say in the Vedas. Then from another standpoint, when a Race is dying out, as some of the primitive Races that we now know of, some of the aboriginal Races, they might be said to be in a Golden Age in one way, because they have no responsibilities, they are childlike, and in that sense might be said to be in the Golden Age to the end. So my question is: In what order do the Yugas in a Root-Race come after the Kali-Yuga? I think I can best answer this very interesting question in a public gathering by pointing to the history of our own present or Fifth Root-Race. We are all at present, as you know, part of the Fifth Root-Race on this Globe D in this Fourth Round. Now then, it was a legend among the Greeks that the childhood of mankind was happy, that it was peaceful, blessed with plenty, with abundance, that there were no wars and harassing anxieties in those halcyon days of the childhood of man. They called it the Saturnian Age, the Age of Saturn, mainly, I think, because there were no real responsibilities, as the questioner has correctly stated. I question very much, however, whether I for one would like to live the life of a babe unborn, in the womb, without responsibilities, a mere human lump. No! About the middle point of the Fourth Root-Race, our Fifth Root-Race began to take form, which merely means that certain individuals who had passed through the Fourth Root-Race incarnations up to that time on the Earth, made among themselves a society, not organized, but the mere fact of their being and having more or less arrived at similar

mental and spiritual outlooks made them in the middle part of the Fourth Root-Race to be as it were a people apart. Do you catch my thought? It was not an organized Society, an organization, a brotherhood, at first. It was simply that at about the middle point of the Fourth Root-Race certain individuals were born, which means that they had reached a time when Fifth Root-Race qualities and attributes were to begin to appear in them; just as in our present Fifth Root-Race we have almost reached its middle point, we are in its fourth Sub-race, and the forerunners of the Sixth Root-Race are just beginning to appear amongst us here and there over the world. Sporadically they appear, forming no definite body, organization, society, or brotherhood; but nevertheless beginning to imbody, to incarnate. Now, as time went on, the Fourth Root-Race, which was then in its Kali-Yuga, began to descend the facilis descensus averno, the easy descent to Hell more and more; but at the same time a greater number of more advanced human monads were incarnating, thus constantly increasing the number of the then Fifth Root-Race in the throes of its birth. These individuals were for the Fourth Root-Race set apart. Nature favored them, which does not mean that they necessarily had a very easy time, but Nature favored them. They were fortune's favored pupils; they were receiving, because they had won all these benefits, special guidance, special help, special instruction, mostly unconscious except for the highest among them. Why? Because they needed it. The balance of the Fourth RootRace was simply running down hill, and with each thousand years going faster down. But these favored individuals, fortune's favored sons, were helped, guided, protected, sheltered - sheltered as far as it could be done because they had merited it on account of their previous evolutionary strivings to ascend; and because they were the seeds of the Fifth Root-Race to come, our present one. They were in their Satya-Yuga, the first and the longest. Thus the yugas begin with the longest, next the next long, third the next long, and finally comes the culmination of wickedness and evil-doing in the Kali-Yuga, which we of the Fifth Root-Race have just begun. How many among us, I ask the question right here, are to be among the 'favored' to form the seed of the Sixth Root-Race now already beginning on this continent and elsewhere, but more particularly perhaps in the Americas? We have reached our Kali-Yuga; it will last more than four hundred thousand years, and we are only some five thousand years gone in it, barely entering upon it! And as the majority in the future days of the Fifth Root-Race will be growing worse and worse, and going steadily faster and faster down the relatively steep descent, the individuals of the forthcoming Sixth Root-Race will contemporaneously grow more numerous and will be in their Satya-Yuga, their highest. I think I have given in Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy a diagram [p. 251] in which the birth of each Race is shown as beginning at about the middle part of the preceding one. There you have the picture. Each Race begins with its Satya-Yuga, its longest; passes from that into the next, the Treta; then into the third, the Dwapara; and then into the fourth and shortest and most intensely individual, the Kali-Yuga. And just about that time the seeds of the Race to follow are in their throes of birth. I might add this - although I hope that it won't complicate your understanding - that these wonderful figures, 4, 3, 2, followed by one or two or more zeroes, are key-numbers in Nature, and they are computed by means of the Six, commonly called the senary, or again the duo-decimal, system of reckoning either by six, or twelve which is twice six; and hence there are the same yugas but with more zeroes added - for globes as well as for

Races; for Chains as well as for globes, and so forth. Thus it is that the hey-day of civilization and progress of a Root-Race lasts through the four yugas from beginning to end; during its Kali-Yuga and towards the beginning of it, the seeds of the new succeeding Race begin to appear, and these seeds are in the beginning of their Satya-Yuga. Aa the centuries and the millennia roll slowly by, the scepter of dominion and of empire, of progress and advancing intelligence and wisdom, slowly passes from the former Race to the latter Race; so that when the former Race is finishing its Kali-Yuga the succeeding Race is already beginning the hey-day of its halcyon times of progress and power and civilization. Meanwhile, even after the Kali-Yuga of the former Race is ended, the more or less degenerate remnants of the former Race continue in existence, but steadily going down hill still, and these degenerate descendants, although slowly through the ages growing constantly fewer and fewer, nevertheless last on until the succeeding Race in its turn has run through its three yugas and is entering its fourth or Kali-Yuga. This is what I meant when I stated that although a Race begins its career at the middle point of the previous Race, it lives on for pretty much the same length as before, although in a state of degeneracy and senile decrepitude; the old waters gradually mix with the new and fresh, because the more advanced and better egos of the previous Race begin to reincarnate in the bodies of the succeeding or newer Race. - Eclectic Theosophist, July 15, 1976 -----------------

Aham Asmi Parabrahma Dr. de Purucker's last public address given in the Temple at the International Theosophical Headquarters, Covina, California, on September 20, 1942, at the time of the Autumnal Equinox, known to Theosophists as the sacred season of the Great Passing. BRILLIANCE like the almighty wings of love knows no barriers, and can and does penetrate everywhere; and this thought was born in my mind this afternoon as I hearkened to our speaker giving us excerpts of great beauty, of great depth, from the archaic Wisdomteachings of mankind, teachings which belong to no race, to no age, and which, since they are essential truth, must be taught in spheres not earthly but divine, as they are taught here on earth to us men. For it struck me that the burthen of his brilliant address was this: that we men, we human beings, as indeed all other things and entities everywhere, are but parts of one vast cosmic whole, intimately united together, despite our failings and our stumblings, in the working out of our common destiny. And therefore in proportion to our own individual understandings, we respond to that cosmic source which the Christian calls God, and which I prefer to call the Divine, from which we came, inseparable from which we are and always shall be, and into which again we are now returning on our ages' long pilgrimage. Oh, just that one thought, if we men could keep it alive in our hearts and allow it to stimulate our minds from day to day, how would it not soften the asperities of human life, how would it not teach us men to treat our brothers like brothers instead of bitter foes!

Don't you see, Brothers and Friends, that this teaching is brilliant because it is a teaching of a genius? It contains everything within it, all the Law and all the Prophets. And what is this teaching? Succinctly phrased it is simply this: that the cosmic life is a cosmic drama in which each entity, be it super-god or god, or demi-god, or man, or beast, or monad or atom, plays his or its proportionate part; and that all these dramatic presentations are welded together, leading up to one vast cosmic climax - to which, by the way, there is no anticlimax. So that with every even human day we are coming closer to that time in the immensely distant future when we all shall, once more reunited, enter into the deep womb of utter cosmic being - call it God, call it Divinity, call it Spirit, call it what you wish. The drama then will have ended. The curtain will fall, and what we Theosophists call Pralaya will begin, the rest-period. But just, as in human affairs, when night is over there comes the day, so when the night of pralaya ends, the manvantara, the cosmic day, dawns again. The curtain on the cosmic stage once more rises. Each entity, each being, then begins its cosmic play, its role, exactly at the metaphysical and mathematical point where it stopped when the bells of pralaya rang down that cosmic curtain on the manvantara or world-period just ended. Everything begins anew precisely like a clock or watch, which, when it has stopped and is rewound, begins to run again at the exact point at which the fingers themselves stopped. Why, this single conception of human identity with the cosmos, together with all the religious and philosophical and scientific and moral implications which it imbodies, is older than thinking man. We are one and yet we know it not, we recognise it not; so that in the drama of life we commit all the follies on the stage, and tragedy becomes comedy and comedy, alas, through our own fault becomes tragedy. I want to quote to you something that I love and have loved from boyhood. I learned it when I was a child and found it again once more in The Secret Doctrine of H.P.B., when in after life as a young man I joined the T.S. It is this: the picture is that of the Hindu guru or teacher. A pupil stands or sits before him, and he is testing the knowledge of this pupil regarding the teaching that this pupil has received, and he says: "Chela, Child, dost thou discern in the lives of those around thee anything different from the life that runs in thy veins?" "There is no difference, O Gurudeva. Their life is the same as my life." "O Child, raise thy head and look at the violet dome of night. Consider those wonderful stars, those beings radiating, irradiating, from the cosmic splendor above our heads. Seest thou that cosmic fire which burns in all things, and shines supremely bright in this and that and that and that yonder brilliant orb? Child, dost thou discern any difference in that cosmic light, in that cosmic life, from that which shines forth from our own day-star, or from that which burns in thine own heart both day and night?" And the child says, "O Gurudeva, I see no difference between life and life, and light and light, and power and power, and mind and mind, except in degrees. The light that burns in my heart is the same as the light that burns in the hearts of all others." "Thou seest well, Child. Now listen to the heart of all this teaching: AHAM ASMI PARABRAHMA." And the child, who has been taught Sanskrit, the Vedic Sanskrit, understands and bows his head, "Pranjali." The meaning is: "I am the Boundless, I myself am Parabrahma, for the life that pulses in me and gives me existence is the life of the divinest of the divine." No wonder the child has understood. Am I a child of God? Essentially it is the only thing I am, and if I fail to realize it, it is not the Divine's fault but mine. I believe, Friends and Brothers, that you will find this sublime teaching with its innumerable deductions - and you will feel bound logically to make deductions for

yourselves as you understand it - I believe that you will find this teaching of Divinity in every one of the great systems to which the genius of mankind has given birth; Religion is it; Philosophy was born from it; Science is now aspiring towards it, and is beginning to get feeble adumbrations of what if means. Think even in our own small human affairs - small when compared with the vast cosmic majesty which holds us around in its sheltering care think, if every man and woman on earth were thoroughly convinced of the utter reality of this cosmic truth! Never again would the hand of man be raised against man. Always it would be the extended hands of succor and brotherhood. For I am my brother - in our inmost we are one. And if we are separate it is because of the smallnesses that make us each one an atom as it were, instead of the spiritual monad which for each one of us is our source. That monad is of the very stuff of divinity. As Jesus the Avatara phrased it in his wonderful saying, "I and my Father are one" - the Father and the divine spark, the spark of divinity which is identic with the cosmic life, with the universal ocean of life, to use another metaphor. This idea of the cosmic ocean of life, of which we are all droplets in our inmost and in our highest, was in the mind of Gautama the Lord Buddha when he spoke of that ultimate end of all beings and things; for, as he said, all beings and things are in their essence Buddha, and some day shall become Buddha themselves, when, as phrased so beautifully by Edwin Arnold, the dewdrop slips into the Shining Sea. CONSUMMATUM EST. - Theosophical Forum, Nov., 1942 -----------------------

AN ATTITUDE OF BALANCE AND VISION IT is true that the world is in a saddened and anxious state. But mark you, I think it unwise and spiritually and psychologically unwholesome to emphasize this, for it raises none to higher things but depresses courage, the courage to meet life and carry on in a higher and nobler way. See the beauty in and behind things, see the beauty in your fellow men; see likewise the ignominy and the ugliness in life, although do not let these latter depress you or discourage you. There is no reason to lose our calm, our inner peace, in order to become like unto them of the mobs, passion driven, governed by prejudice. Such an attitude will not help us or those who suffer. But we can send forth into the world thoughts of courage and hope and an optimistic looking into the future, founded on our own blessed God-Wisdom: that no matter what happens through man's folly or infamy or infidelity to his spiritual inner God, to his spiritual Essence, there are always right and justice which will ultimately triumph over all. The only thing is to be sure we are on the side of right and justice - and we cannot always judge by appearances. An English poet, Browning I think it was, expresses this thought, albeit in the theological language of the time when he said: "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." Those who do not like this optimistic outlook and conviction and who are trying to get down into the arena of hysteria and discouragement, mock at it; and yet every sane man who keeps his mind cool and clear and can think for himself realizes full well that the mightiest forces in this world are cosmic right and cosmic justice, and they in the long run will always prevail. There is no need to be discouraged. Avoid hysterias; or again on the

other hand avoid running at one and the same time with the hares and chasing with the hounds, which is what we all do more or less. Have your own convictions and sometimes hide them if it is not wise to shout them from the housetops; but keep your own heart upright, in love with love, hating hate, always standing up for justice and innate right. Only be sure that when you stand up you are not standing up for the propaganda-atmosphere around you, but for something that you in your own heart know to be right and true. It would be a sorry thing indeed if there were naught to our world but what we see around us today, or have seen at particular intervals during the past; but every time and always the conscience and the sense of justice of mankind have proved supreme over all and risen above human feelings and follies, and marched onwards and upwards to balance and harmony. Don't be down-hearted or discouraged or think the world is going to the devil because you don't like what is going on. You have a right to like it or to dislike it. But be sure that you, as an individual, on your part do not add to the hatred in the world, to its discouragement and unhappiness. That is my point. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, June, 1941 ------------------------------

AT THIS TIME OF THE YEAR - G. de Purucker Extracts from a lecture given April 8, 1930, in the Temple, Point Loma, California. The Mysteries of Antiquity were celebrated at various times of the year: in the spring, in the summer-time, in the autumn, and at the winter solstice. But the greatest was that which was celebrated in the winter-time, when the sun had reached his southernmost point, and, turning, began his return-journey northwards. Beginning with the winter solstice, on December 21st, these most sacred of the ancient Mysteries began. Therein were initiated certain men who had been chosen on account of having perfected a certain preliminary period of training: chosen to go through initiatory trials for the purpose of bringing out into manifestation in the man the divine faculties and powers of the inner god. Two weeks were passed in this cycle of training or of initiation; and on the 6th of January, later called Epiphany (a Greek word which means 'the appearance of a god'), celebrated even today in the Christian Church: on that day came the supreme moment in the ancient crypts of initiation, when the aspirant, having successfully passed through the preliminary trials, was brought face to face with his own inner god. If he withstood successfully the supreme test, he was suddenly suffused with splendor, with light which shone from him, so that he stood there radiating light like the sun. His face shone brilliantly; back of his head was an aureole of splendor, and he was said to be "clothed with the sun". This splendor is the Christ-light, called in the Orient the Buddhic Splendor, and is simply the concentrated spiritual vitality of the human being pouring forth in irradiation. The 'Christ-sun' was born.... At this most sacred time of the initiatory cycle was born the Christ, to use the

mystical phraseology of the primitive Christians; and, using the phraseology of the Greeks and Romans from whom the Christians adopted and, alas! adapted, the idea, on that supreme day was born the mystical Apollo - to give the mystical name given to the man so raised; and in the Orient it was said that a Buddha was born... The Theosophist looks upon this season with reverence and awe, for he knows that in the proper quarter some human being is undergoing the supreme test, and that if successful, if he is 'raised,' if he can raise his own personal being into communion with his inner god and hold it there, so that he becomes suffused with the divine splendor, a new Christ is born to the world, a Teacher of forgiveness, of compassion, of almighty love to all that is. - Eclectic Theosophist, Jan. 15, 1979 -----------------

The Meaning of AUM Will you explain the meaning of the passage in The Voice of the Silence (p. 8, Point Loma Ed. footnote to AUM) referring to Kala-Hansa: "The syllable A is considered to be its (the bird Hansa's) right wing, U, its left, M, its tail, and the Ardha-Matra (half metre) is said to be its head." It is the Ardha-Matra (half metre) which puzzles me. - J. T. G. de P. - Here again you have picked out one of the less important things, which I dare say you realize yourself. Just as in all religions there is always a certain class who are seeing wonderful mystic meaning in this or that or some minor detail, which may be quite interesting and important in a small way, but it does not rank among the fundamental, or topnotch, or through-and-through important, things - such is the case with the simply reams of stuff that have been written not only by Hindus through centuries, but even by Europeans, about the so-called sacred syllable OM or AUM. It is simply amazing how this one word has exercised the ingenuity and mystical feelings of literally centuries and centuries of generations of Hindus belonging to almost all Schools. The word is a sacred name on account of its vibrational quality, and used to be used in ceremonial magic, pronounced aloud, although in most secret privacy. And from this one fact, connected with which is the reverence that used to be paid to the Hebrew and Christian AMEN, arose all this vast literature of guessing and mystical and semi-mystical writing. Now all this talk that H.P.B. has in The Secret Doctrine, The Voice of the Silence, and elsewhere, is merely a kind of appeal to those interested in this kind of thing, in order to attract them to her really deep teachings. That is why she made so much of them. However, now, here comes the point: Kala-Hansa, of course, is the Bird of Time, which means the bird of cycles, and the bird stands as a symbol for the Reincarnating Ego taking its flight across time and space, mostly time. The same can be applied to the Universes and the Cosmic Logos which in the Universe is, so to speak, the Reimbodying Ego. Now then, of course today Hindus consider this word so sacred, whether Om or

AUM, that they themselves rarely or never pronounce it above a whisper, and mostly merely pronounce it in the head as it were, without voicing it. So much for that point. Thus AUM stands for the Kala-Hansa; and from this mystical thought, the mystical saying runs that A stands for one wing, the U stands for the other wing, and the M stands for its tail, and the Ardha-Matra, or short half-syllable, stands for its head. The Ardha-Matra really here does not mean a syllable, or a half-syllable rather, but that connection between the sounds A U, and again between U M, which gives inner direction and one-pointedness to the whole pronunciation of the word, and for that reason is called its head, the head of a bird being the first part of it, and guiding its flight. I wonder if I make my meaning clear. The bird takes its flight on its wings, which support it. The tail serves as a guide to the direction, and the head leads the way. The Ardha-Matra then is the so-called half-syllable, lying in the sound between A U on the one hand, and U M on the other hand, and forming the middle of the body of the bird ending in the head. I wonder if I make this funny thought clear - and that is really all there is to it! Now the mystics say in connexion with this word that it is the symbol, the ArdhaMatra, of the consciousness guiding the pronunciation; or, changing the figure of speech, the Ardha-Matra or half-syllable is the consciousness guiding the karmic forward progress of the mystic flight of the Ego or Bird, as it is the consciousness which gives the tone to the pronunciation of the syllable. Thus a singer singing a song not merely changes from note to note, but it is just in that change between any two notes that there is a kind of consciousness-sound wherein the singer's ability to make an impression, what might be called his vitality, or his individuality, expresses itself. It is called a half-syllable because it is so short. And yet as it is the point where the consciousness enters in, shifting over from note to note, and therefore guiding the sound, it is called the head of the bird. I hope all this is clear. You will see that out of such a little thing has grown all this big literature about the Hindu sacred word. - Theosophical Forum, Oct., 1938 -----------------

The Buddhas of Compassion and the Pratyeka Buddhas - G. de Purucker . . . A Buddha is one who has ascended the rungs of the evolutionary Ladder of Life, rung by rung, one after the other, and who thus has attained Buddhahood, which means human plenitude of spiritual and intellectual glory, and who has done all this by his own self-devised and self-directed exertions along the far past evolutionary pathway. He is an "Awakened One," one who manifests the divinity which is the very core of the core of his own being. The Buddhas of Compassion are the noblest Flowers of the human race. They are men who have raised themselves from humanity into quasi-divinity; and this is done by letting the light imprisoned within, the light of the inner god, pour forth and manifest itself through the humanity of the man, through the human soul of the man . . . Every human being is an unexpressed Buddha. Even now, within you and above

you, it is your Higher Self; and as the ages pass and as you conquer the self in order to become the Greater Self, you approach with every step nearer and nearer to the 'sleeping' Buddha within you. And yet truly it is not the Buddha which is 'asleep'; it is you who are sleeping on the bed of matter, dreaming evil dreams, brought about by your passions, by your false views, by your egoisms, by your selfishness - making thick and heavy veils of personality wrapping around the Buddha within. For here is the secret: The Buddha within you is watching you. Your own inner Buddha has his eye, mystically speaking, on you. His hand is reached compassionately downward toward you, so to speak, but you must reach up and clasp that hand by your own unaided will and aspiration - you, the human part of you - and take the hand of the Buddha within you. A strange figure of speech? Consider then what a human being is: a god in the heart of him, a Buddha enshrining that god, a spiritual soul enshrining the Buddha, a human soul enshrining the spiritual soul, an animal soul enshrining the human soul, and a body enshrining the animal soul. So that Man is at the same time one, and many more than one. When the human being has learned all that earth can teach him, he is then godlike and returns to earth no more - except those whose hearts are so filled with the holy flame of Compassion that they remain in the schoolroom of earth that they have long since advanced beyond and where they themselves can learn nothing more, in order to help their younger, less evolved brothers. These exceptions are the Buddhas of Compassion. There are, on the other hand, very great men, very holy men, very pure men in every way, whose knowledge is wide and vast and deep, whose spiritual stature is great; but when they reach Buddhahood, instead of feeling the call of almighty Love to return and help those who have gone less far, they go ahead into the Supernal Light - pass onwards and enter the unspeakable bliss of Nirvana - and leave mankind behind. Such are the Pratyeka Buddhas. Though exalted, nevertheless they do not rank with the unutterable sublimity of the Buddhas of Compassion . . . . It is a wonderful paradox that is found in the case of the Pratyeka-Buddha. The name 'pratyeka' means 'each for himself'; but this spirit of 'each for himself' is just the opposite of the spirit governing the Order of the Buddhas of Compassion, because in the order of Compassion the spirit is: Give up thy life for all that lives. The 'Solitary One' knows that he cannot advance to spiritual glory unless he lives the spiritual life, unless he cultivates his spiritual nature, but when he does this solely in order to win spiritual rewards, spiritual life, for himself alone, he is a Pratyeka-Buddha. He is for himself, in the last analysis. There is a personal eagerness, a personal wish, to forge ahead, to attain at any cost; whereas he who belongs to the Order of the Buddhas of Compassion, has his eyes set on the same distant objective, but he trains himself from the very beginning to become utterly self-forgetful. This obviously is an enormously greater labor, and of course the rewards are correspondingly great. The time comes when the Pratyeka-Buddha, holy as he is, noble in effort and in ideal as he is, reaches a state of development where he can go no farther on that path. But, contrariwise, the one who allies himself from the very beginning with all Nature, and with Nature's heart, has a constantly expanding field of work as his consciousness expands and fills that field; and this expanding field is simply illimitable because it is boundless Nature herself. He becomes utterly at one with the spiritual Universe; whereas the Pratyeka-Buddha becomes at one with only a particular line or stream of evolution in the

Universe. The Pratyeka-Buddha raises himself to the spiritual realm of his own inner being, enwraps himself therein, and, so to speak, goes to sleep. The Buddha of Compassion raises himself, as does the Pratyeka-Buddha, to the spiritual realms of his own inner being, but does not stop there, because he expands continuously, becomes one with All, or tries to, and in fact does so in time. The Buddha of Compassion is one who having won all, gained all, gained the right to cosmic peace and bliss, renounces it so that he may go back as a Son of Light in order to help humanity, and indeed all that is. The Pratyeka-Buddha passes onwards and enters the unspeakable bliss of Nirvana, and there he remains for an aeon or a million of aeons as the case may be; whereas the Buddha of Compassion, who has renounced all for Compassion's sake, because his heart is so filled with love, continues evolving. Thus the time comes when the Buddha of Compassion, although having renounced everything, will have advanced far beyond the state that the Pratyeka-Buddha has reached; and when the Pratyeka-Buddha in due course emerges from the Nirvanic state in order to take up his evolutionary journey again, he will find himself far in the rear of the Buddha of Compassion. Self, selfhood, self-seeking is the very thing that the Buddhas of Compassion strive to forget, to overcome, to live beyond. The self personal must blend into the Self Individual, which then must lose itself in the Self Universal. The consciousness then blends with the Universe and lives eternally and immortally, because it is at one with the Universe. The dewdrop slips into the shining sea - its origin. Which path will you then take, the path of the Buddhas of Compassion, or the path of Pratyeka-Buddhas? . . . - Extracts from Golden Precepts (Eclectic Theosophist, No. 56) ----------------------

BUDDHAS OF COMPASSION "Diamond-heart" is the term used when speaking of the Mahatmas; and it has a symbolic meaning, signifying the crystal-clear consciousness reflecting the misery of the world, receiving and reflecting the call for help, reflecting the Buddhic Splendor in the heart of every struggling soul on earth; but yet as hard as the diamond for all calls of the personality, the self-personality, and first of all of the Mahatma's own personal nature. Should the Mahatma abandon his physical body and live in his other principles, he becomes de-facto a Nirmanakaya, living in the auric atmosphere of the earth and working for mankind invisibly. The Nirmanakaya is a complete man possessing all the principles of his constitution, except the Linga-sarira and its accompanying physical body. He lives on the plane of being next superior to the physical plane, and his purpose in so doing is to save men from themselves by being with them, and by continuously instilling thoughts of self-sacrifice, of self-forgetfulness, of spiritual and moral beauty, of mutual help, of compassion, of pity. Thus it is that he too forms one of the Stones in the Guardian Wall invisibly surrounding

mankind. Most Mahatmas prepare to become Buddhas of Compassion, and therefore to renounce a Nirvanic state. The real Buddha of Compassion renounces Nirvana for himself in order to help the world, for he is compassion incarnate. He lives through aeons, working for all that is; and it is this utter self-sacrifice of the human being of the most sublime and lofty type conceivable to men, which makes of a Buddha so holy and exalted a being. In the distinction between the Pratyeka-Buddha and the Buddhas of Compassion there enters the element of a deliberate choice which each one must some day make. Which path will you then take, the path of the Buddhas of Compassion, or the path of the Pratyeka-Buddhas? Either is noble; both lead to heights of spiritual sublimity - one the path of compassion, the path divine; the other the path of personal rest, utter peace, bliss, and living in the Divine. Some day you must make that choice. But the results of making that choice, of choosing the road of self-forgetfulness and pity and impersonal love for all others, for all things, while temporarily holding you in the realms of illusion, of matter, will ultimately lead you by a road, straighter than any other, to the very core of the core of the Universal Heart; for you shall have obeyed the impersonal commands of Cosmic Love, and that means allying yourself consciously with divinity. Nirvana if chosen for oneself can be looked upon as a species of sublimated spiritual selfishness: for the attempt of trying to gain Nirvina for oneself alone is a solely individual yearning to free oneself from manifested life, to stand apart in utter peace and utter bliss, in pure consciousness, and without regard for anything else. How different from this is the teaching of our Lord: "Can I remain in utter bliss when one single human heart beats in pain?" Give me rather, is the thought, the suffering of personal existence, so that I may help and comfort others instead of attaining the purely individual selfish bliss of individual Paranishpanna. Compassion is the very nature and fabric of the structure of the Universe itself, the characteristic of its being, for compassion means "feeling with," and the Universe is an Organism, a vast and mighty organism, an organism without bounds, which might otherwise be called Universal Life-consciousness. Compassion is the fundamental law of Nature's own heart. It means becoming at one with the divine Universe, with the universal life and consciousness. It means harmony; it means peace; it means bliss; it means impersonal Love. Having this Vision Sublime, do not shut your eyes to the misery of others, but devote your life like the Buddhas of Compassion to help all things, first by raising yourself impersonally, not personally - so that you may help others to see the Light divine. Is there anything so beautiful, so high, so noble, as bringing comfort to broken hearts, light to obscure minds, the teaching of men how to love, how to love and to forgive? To bring peace to men, to give them hope, to give them light, to show them the way out of the intricate maze of material existence, to bring back to one's fellow-men the knowledge of their own essential divinity as a reality - is not that a sublime work? Peace to all Beings! - G. de Purucker, Golden Precepts, Chapter 8. --------------------------

THE NATURE OF THE BUDDHIC PRINCIPLE - G. de Purucker Comments made at the close of discussion at a Lodge meeting in the Temple at Point Loma. The subject for study for several months in 1933 had been The Mahatma Letters. - Eds. " . . . Once separated from the common influences of Society, nothing draws us to any outsider save his evolving spirituality. He may be a Bacon or an Aristotle in knowledge, and still not even make his current felt a feather's weight by us, if his power is confined to the Manas. The supreme energy resides in the Buddhi; latent - when wedded to Atman alone, active and irresistible when galvanized by the essence of `Manas' and when none of the dross of the latter commingles with that pure essence to weigh it down by its finite nature. Manas, pure and simple, is of a lower degree, and of the earth earthly: and so your greatest men count but as nonentities in the arena where greatness is measured by the standard of spiritual development." - The Mahatma Letters, Letter LIX, p. 341. Passages out of these wonderful communications from our beloved Teachers are so filled with not only truth but beauty, that one's mind is held in the enchantment of the thoughts aroused by reading these communications or by hearing them summarized. It is amazing - and yet why should it be so, but it is to us inferior folk - to sense how the majesty of truth and the greatness of soul accompanying such majesty affect us so deeply as to move the inmost core of our being. And I for one know no experience more exalting, no experience more penetrating than this. How vain some of the things of the world when we discern the glory of Reality. I venture to say that no man or woman living, no matter how simple-minded he or she may be, is unsusceptible, is insensible, to such feelings - dare we call them that? - at any rate to such consequences of having received the touch of supernal beauty. It is an experience which in itself is worth lifetimes of ordinary garnering of life's impressions. I think that this spiritual and intellectual consequence of having these teachings in our inmost must be indeed almighty influences not only on our own characters, but on our future destiny. I am assured from my own observation and from what I feel within myself, that a man's whole future lives can be changed, because of change occurring here and now within him. We see the compelling power of the beauty born within us when studying these great Teachers' communications, for Truth indeed is thus compelling when its exposition is directed by Master Minds; and it is thus compelling not because it is enslaved, but because it gives us freedom, the freedom of brotherhood, the freedom of fellowship, fellowship in understanding, fellowship in fellow-feeling. The statement has been made that Buddhi is negative unless it has the Manas or mind to work through, and of course this is true. But don't imagine for a moment that this means that the Buddhi is negative on its own plane, quite the contrary. It is as active on its own plane as the supreme truth within us, the Atman, is forever active on its own plane. The meaning is that the Buddhi is negative on this our human plane of experience and action, without the transmitting principle to step it down to us, which is the mind and the psychical elements within us. Then, if the mind be pellucid as the mountain lake, crystal clear, so that it cannot transmit the nondivine, then we have indeed a man who for the time being is like unto a god, for he speaks with power, with the voice of authority; and none

who listens unto him, in his heart can say Nay. Our minds are taken captive, mightily persuaded. And why? Because the Buddhi in the Teacher speaks to the Buddhi within us. Voice as it were calls to voice. Thought evokes correspondential thought. Truth awakens, by its impact on our minds, the spark of truth within us; and it compels us, compels us because our own best is awakened, and we know thereafter that that is freedom, that is truth, that is reality; and no man wants aught else than freedom, truth, love, reality. That is why truth is so compatible. That is why its authority over our hearts and minds is supreme, for it awakens within us itself. Strange paradox and yet so simple. What is this Buddhic principle? It is so difficult in our awkward European tongues to give to this almost mystical Sanskrit word a proper translation. It is discrimination. It is intuition, it is the organ of direct knowledge, it is the clothing of the divine spark within us which instantly not only knows truth but communicates it, if indeed the barriers be not too thick and heavy between it and our receptive minds. Ay, reception, that is the point. Can our minds receive? If not, it is our own fault for we have enshrouded ourselves with the veils of the lower selfhood so strongly that the light from above, or from the Master mind, cannot reach our own higher mind and descend into the physical brain and into the physical heart where truth abides for all. For mystical fact it is, that although we know it not, the truth is already within us, here in heart, and here in mind; and we are like those spoken of by the Avatara Jesus in the Christian Bible, having ears they hear not, having eyes they see not, having minds they apprehend and comprehend not. I want to point out one more thought, that the inner God works within its own vehicle, and this vehicle is the Buddhi principle, and it is just as easy to come into sympathetic relationship, into companionship with the Buddhi as it is with the kama-manas within us. In other words, it is just as easy to yearn for the inspiration of the highest within you as it is to look for the heat and fevers of the lower part of our being. Now whereas in the old religions and philosophies the God within has always been called a Divinity or God - masculine; the Consort, the Buddhi of the Atman, has always been looked upon as feminine. The German poet Goethe meant more than mere poetry when he uttered that remarkably telling phrase, Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan. The eternal feminine draweth us ever onward and inward. It does not mean woman, it means that part of our natures to which and in which the god within works. Our own individual Buddhi is that which gives us intuition and insight and sensitiveness and delicacy and the ability in quick response to feel the suffering, the sorrow of others. It is the god within which does this, but it is what in common language we call the feminine side of us which receives it, the sensitized part of us, and carries the thought to the place where dwelleth the Atman. It has naught to do with physical woman or physical man. There is a great and wonderful mystery here, and I may add in closing that one more small and minor phase of this mystery is alluded to by H.P.B. in The Key to Theosophy where she speaks of the Buddhi as being the root and the key itself of individuality. There is the remote source why on this low physical plane some of our lifetimes are passed as men and some as women. By each we learn, if we have the wit. It always vexes me when I hear people talk, as I sometimes hear, about which is greater, man or woman. Which really is greater? It is the uttermost poppycock. Where would you be without your mothers? Where would you be without your fathers? Sex of course is but a passing phase. It did not exist some 18 or 19 million years ago, and some 8 million years from now it will again vanish. Its place will be taken by

kriyasakti. But at present the most complete men are the men who have a healthy dash of the feminine in them; and the most perfect women are they who have a touch of the masculine. The most courageous man is always the man who feels the most tender towards the weak and helpless. If a man has not a touch of the mother-instinct in him, look out, you cannot trust him! If a woman has not a touch of the father-instinct in her, in my judgment she is incomplete. - Reprinted from The Theosophical Forum, Aug. 1945; also Studies in Occult Philosophy, pp 361-64. - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 81 ---------------------

Buddhism and Theosophy Could you give a little explanation of the difference between Theosophy and Buddhism as it is generally taught today amongst the masses? (Question asked at a Public Meeting, Dublin, Ireland, October 5, 1937) G. de P. - That is a good question, and one I like, because if I were not a Theosophist, I most emphatically would have accepted the doctrines of the Lord Gautama, the Buddha, as the most humane, the most philosophic, the most generous, the most princely, not only in their attitude towards men, but in the effect they produce upon men. The difference is that between the mother and a very lovely daughter. The sublime mother is Theosophy, the lovely daughter is Buddhism. I would say that even as Buddhism is practiced today, some 2500 years after the passing of its great Founder, even today it is the most theosophical of all the religions existent, the most generous, the most tender in its understanding of human problems; and in its dealing with them, without a vestige of anything that is harsh, unkind, or colored by hatred in any form. It has no doctrine of arbitrary punishment. Its doctrine of retribution based on cosmic law or karman, is retribution infinitely just. The evil that ye do will live after you, and ye yourselves the doers of it will meet it one day, and until ye undo the evil that ye have wrought it will abide wonderfully logical, satisfying, and comforting. Just see how this takes hold of the human heart. The true Buddhist says of his injurer: "He has injured me terribly. I pity him. I desire no revenge. That would be but adding my might to the evil that is wrought, for some day the evil that he wrought upon me will fall, helpless man, upon him, and in addition he will have the evil that that evil-doing wrought in his own character. A double evil. I, his victim in this life, will receive recompense, double the recompense of the wrong, the injury, done unto me, because I shall have retributive compensation for the wrong, and because I do not in my turn hit back at my injurer, I have the increments of strength of character thus growing out of the injury wrought upon me, which is a double good to myself, who have suffered. I have the recompense in my own soul, that I know how to be patient and strike not, hit not back." Divinity breathes through that. It is the very heart of pity, of compassion. And that is pure Theosophy. In other words, Buddhism is but a lovely daughter of a still more lovely

mother. Christianity is its daughter, Brahmanism is its daughter, Taoism, all the religions of India, Persia, China, Egypt, of ancient Europe, and of the Americas. They all sprang from this one source, our God-Wisdom, as we call it, kept in the Guardianship of the Mahatmans, greatly evolved men. But I think that Buddhism is the loveliest of the daughters, because the truest. Fidelity has crowned her. Justice has followed her footsteps. - Theosophical Forum, July, 1938 -----------------------

Capturing a World with Ideas - G. de Purucker IT takes some courage, I mean the true courage of the Seer, whom naught can daunt and none may stay, to oppose a world's thought-currents, and for this sublime work are called forth the truest heroism, the sublimest intellectual vision, and the deepest spiritual insight. These last prevail always. Sometimes he who runs counter to the world's thought-currents loses what the world esteems highest: reputation, fortune, even perhaps life. But his work - that is never lost! That is what H.P. Blavatsky did. And that is what the Theosophical Society has been doing ever since her time, in certain ways opposing a world's lower thought-currents and prevailing in the end. It is a strange paradox of our life on this earth that the noblest things call for sacrifice, and yet it is one of the most beautiful; so that the Theosophist may say with the proud boast of the Christian Church - and I deem it true, and even truer than in their case - that the blood of its martyrs is the seed of its success, and of its victory. The world is ruled by ideas, and an inescapable truth it is also that the world's lower thoughtcurrents must be opposed by ideas higher than they. It is only a greater idea which will capture and lead captive the less idea, the smaller. Graecia capta Romam victricem captam subducit. "Captured Greece leads conquering Rome captive." What is this Theosophical Movement which was so magnificently voiced in some of its teachings by H.P. Blavatsky, but a series, an aggregate, of grand ideas? Not hers, not collected by her from the different great thinkers of the world; but the god-wisdom of the world; and she brought together the world's human wisdom in order to bulwark, for the weaker minds who needed such bulwarking, the grand verities shining with their stellar light, and bearing the imprint of divinity upon them. Some men cannot see the imprints of divinity. Forsooth, they say, it is to be proved! They must put the finger into the nail-mark, into the hole. Millions are like that, they have not learned to think yet. So the only way to conquer ideas is to lead them captive by grander ones; and that is what Theosophy does: it is a body of divine ideas - not H.P. Blavatsky's, who was but the mouthpiece in this day of them, but the ancient god-wisdom of our earth, belonging to all men, all nations, all peoples, all times; and given to protoplastic mankind in the very dawn of this earth's evolution by beings from higher spheres who had learned it themselves from beings higher still - a primeval revelation from divinities. The echo of this revelation you will find in every land, among every people, in every religion and philosophy that has

ever gained adherents. When H.P. Blavatsky brought our modern Theosophy to this world in our age, she did not bring something new, she brought the cosmic Wisdom, the god-wisdom studied by the Seers, as understood on this earth, which had been stated in all other ages preceding that in which she came. She merely repeated what she had been taught; the same starry Wisdom, divine in origin: Science because voicing nature's facts; Religion because raising man to divinity; Philosophy because explanatory of all the problems that have vexed human intelligence. No vain boast this - aye, no empty words; no vain boast I repeat, but truths which are provable by any thinking man or woman who will study our blessed godwisdom faithfully and honestly. It was an amazing world to which H.P. Blavatsky came, a world held by - the Western world I am now speaking of - held by one slender, yet in a way faithful, link to Spirit, to wit the teachings of the Avatara Jesus called the Christ, nevertheless held to by faith alone and by the efforts of a relative few in the Churches. On the other hand, millions, the major part of the men and women of the west, absolutely psychologized - by what? Facts? No! By theories, postulates, ideas, which had gained currency because they were put forth aggressively and with some few natural facts contained in them. Why, all the science of those days practically now is in the discard, and the scientists themselves have been the discarders, the later generations of scientists have themselves overthrown the overthrower of man's hope in those days. It was in such a time that H.P. Blavatsky came, and almost single-handed in an era when even in the home-life, in society so-called, it was considered exceedingly bad form even to speak of the "soul" in a drawing-room; it was considered a mark of an inferior intelligence. Alone, she wrote her books, challenging the entire thought-current of the western world, backed as it was by authority, backed by so-called psychology, backed by everything that then was leading men astray. And today we Theosophists happen to know that her books are being read, mostly in secret, by some of the most eminent ultra-modern scientific thinkers of our time. What did she do? Mainly she based her attack on that world-psychology on two things: that the facts of nature are the facts of nature and are divine; but that the theories of pretentious thinkers about them are not facts of nature, but are human theorizings, and should be challenged, and if good accepted pro tempore, and if bad, cast aside. She set the example; and other minds who had the wit to catch, to see, to understand, to perceive what she was after, gathered around her. Some of the men eminent in science in her time belonged to the Theosophical Society, although they rarely worked for it. They lent their names to it occasionally. But she captured them by the ideas she enunciated, and these men did their work in their own fields. That indeed already was much. Consider her titanic task: that of changing the shifting and varying ideas of a body of earnest scientific researchers after nature's facts: replacing these shifting ideas, then called science - which had for nearly two hundred years been casting out all that innumerable centuries of human experience had shown to be good and trustworthy replacing these, I say, with thoughts that men could live by and become better by following, thoughts that men could die by with hope and in peace; and bringing these back into human consciousness by the power of her own intellect voicing the immemorial traditions of the god-wisdom which she brought to us!

- Theosophical Forum, Dec., 1938 ---------------------

Let the Christ-child Live Theosophists look upon Christmas in two ways: First as the record of a sublime fact in occult history and life, a sublime fact that every son of man some day in his own spiritual history will repeat, if he climb successfully. And the other way is even more dear to me; for as the cycling days bring the Christmas season around and the Christian world celebrates the supposed birth of the physical body of its Prince, its Chief, its Savior socalled, we Theosophists take the words of the Avatara, the Christ, in their higher sense I do believe; for we feel that we men are the "sons of god," of the Divine that is, and that the spirit of love and consciousness of the most high dwelleth in the sanctuary of every man's heart - which means that there is a Christ-child in my heart, in your heart. There is an unborn Christ in the soul of every one of us, the Christos, the Prince of Peace, the Bringer of Peace, the Prince of Love. Certain Orientals call it the Buddha, the Celestial Buddha in our hearts, but the idea is the same, if the words are not. So when the Christmas season comes around, we realize that it is a good time to let the Christ-child in our hearts speak, to attempt to understand it; nay more, to become at one with it so that with each new Christmas we may become more Christ-like, more Buddha-like, more spiritual, nobler exemplars of the Christ which lives in the heart of each one of us; so that one day, at the proper occult time, the Christ-child may be born as a Christ-man. And then, then the Sun of Healing will have arisen with health, with healing, with wholeness, in its wings, healing our sorrows, healing our troubles, effacing our woes, wiping the tears of grief from our eyes; simply because we as individuals shall have become at one with the spirit of the Universe of which, from which, a Ray, a bright Ray, lives at the heart of each one of us. This is what we Theosophists understand by the true birth of the Christ - quite outside of the other facts of the case. Let the Christ-child live. Do you know, we Occidentals have not ever tried it? We talk about it and dream it and debate it, but how few of us men and women live it, live it, try it, come under its celestial influence? Why, I tell you, Brothers, that the man who does so is ten times the man he was before, keener of intellect, quicker of wit, larger of mind; for he is inspired by the very forces that hold the Universe in order, in proportion as he becomes the Christ-child in his heart. - G. de Purucker - Theosophical Forum, Dec., 1938 ------------------

A COLLECTIVE SPIRITUAL FLAME - G. de Purucker The following is extracted from a Letter written by Dr. G. de Purucker - recipient not

indicated, nor date of writing, though probably to a President of a T.S. Lodge in Europe, and in the 1930's - published in Messages to Conventions (pp. 228 - 30) by Theosophical University Press, Covina, California, in 1943. - Eds. My heart yearns to broadcast throughout the ranks of the fellowship of the T.S., high and low, and everywhere, the sublime verity that any one of you, my Brothers, may become a channel, if you only will to do so and train yourself so to become, for the reception of only the gods know how great an inrushing of the spiritual-psychic energies flowing from these Great Beings who, known or unknown, visible or invisible, presided over the founding of the T.S., and who will have it under their mighty protection and watchful care as long as we prove ourselves worthy and adequate instruments of their mighty strength and loving guidance. Hypocrisy and pretense in these matters on the part of fraudulent claimants to spiritual powers or guidance will not only defeat their own ends, but will infallibly slam the door of communication tight shut between the pretender and the source of Light, for such a pretender is de facto a dissembler whose inner nature is divided against itself, and who therefore, for this very reason, makes himself to be a crooked and therefore an utterly unfit instrument and channel. Union with the high source is in his case stopped and blocked, and therefore is the connection broken. What I am here writing to you about, my beloved Brothers, is to me one of the greatest truths that all the various world-religions or world-philosophies originally taught, and which all, alas, with one possible exception, have now very largely forgotten, except as a theory, all empty possibility, mentally recognized but not followed, because considered to be too abstract and afar off, and therefore virtually impossible of fulfilment. I tell you that it is not impossible; it is not afar off; it is a reality. It is something nearer to you than your own body, nearer to you than your own mind; closer than hands and feet. For if you but realize it, you would know that your own higher consciousness at all times is inseparably linked with this sublime Fountain or Source; and all the vestments of consciousness or sheaths of understanding, or bodies with which the Monad may clothe itself, are less close to the Monad than this inmost of its own essence. What a great, what a truly wonderful, thing it would be if only a hundred members in the T.S. could become such self-consciously trained vehicles or channels for this Wonder-Force or Energy to flow through! Nay, why do I say a hundred? Why not say a thousand; indeed, why not say five thousand - why not include every member of' the T.S. who realizes that as a Theosophist he has a possibility of becoming far more than a man of the world, merely, better than the average? What a picture rises before my mind's eye, as I see an ideal Theosophical Society, whose fellowship is formed of men and women who are inspired, directed, comforted, by the divinity within each one of them, and who are working in self-conscious collaboration with the Nirmanakayas whose holy presence every intuitive Theosophist must at least at times feel the nearness of! With our spirits thus expressing themselves, with our intellects thus enlightened, and with our hearts thus stimulated, the Fellowship of the Theosophical Society, within a relatively short time, would conquer the world, not in a material sense forsooth, but spiritually and intellectually, for they would become like a collective Spiritual Flame in human society, lightening the path of all, and guiding the footsteps of those still in the darkness towards the Great Light. I am not here dreaming of the Seventh Race in the Seventh Remind of this Globe

D of ours, although such indeed will be to a large extent the `human' society of that far distant day. I am thinking of what might happen even today among men, if Theosophists would realise the destiny that is theirs, the mission that it is ours to perform, and the tremendous unspeakably great, spiritual and intellectual energies that we could loose into the world for the world's benefit and help and guidance. (Eclectic Theosophist, No. 76) ------------------------

COMETS AND METEORS - G. de Purucker Because of world-wide interest in the approach of Halley's comet (nearest to the sun around February 9, 1986), the following extracts may be of general interest. They are quoted from G. de Purucker's Studies in Occult Philosophy under the Section "Transactions of the Headquarters Lodge." The student's presentation of the topic for the evening's study (Letter XXIII-B, especially pp. 161-2, of The Mahatma Letters) was followed by general discussion, after which G. de P. spoke as follows: I would never state that meteorites are fragments of disintegrated comets, nor indeed that they are cometary material at all. When you reflect that comets or cometary material are but one stage or degree less ethereal than is a nebula, you will realize that the fundamental idea here is wrong. It is perfectly true, however, that comets gather unto themselves in their peregrinations through cosmic and solar space, the waste-material of the universe. They accrete these to themselves by attraction, and often lose them because when they pass by a sun, the solar attraction for such material things is heavy, much stronger than the very weak attraction that the comets exercise. Reflect that any comet, even the largest known comets, are composed of material so exceedingly fine, so ethereal, that Halley's comet, for instance, one of the largest ever known perhaps, could be packed in a hand-bag and the hand-bag would not be filled; and yet some of these comets stretch for millions and millions and millions of miles, if you include the head and the tail. Returning to meteorites: what then are these bodies? They are the waste-material, the ejecta, of former suns; and hereby hangs another wonderful tale which would take me several hours even to sketch if it were only to make that statement fully comprehensible. Perhaps I should remark that while a sun in its life-time is extremely ethereal, at its heart even spiritual, as it approaches its end, it becomes much more concrete, thick, heavy, dense, and as we Theosophists say, material, until, just before the last flicker of solar life passes out, and the sun dies or becomes extinct, all that remains is a relatively heavy body. Then with the last flicker of the solar life it passes like a shadow over a sunlighted wall, and the living center is dead: "The Sun is dead. Long live the Sun!" At death it leaves behind a body which immediately bursts into innumerable fragments, some atomic and some much larger; and these ejecta are scattered through solar and stellar space to be swept up in later aeons not only by the reimbodiment of the sun which has just died, but by other suns,

and even other planets, as well as occasionally by comets. These meteorites contain many materials found also in our earth: iron, nickel, traces of copper, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and what not. You will remember that H.P.B. has a passage not only in her beautiful Voice of the Silence, but in one of her wonderful articles, stating that every planet was once a glorious sun which became a planet in due course of time; and that before it dies this planet once a sun will become a sun again. You have a key here to a wonderful teaching. I wish I could say more about this, but I have neither the time nor is this the place - except indeed to add that every planetary nebula becoming a planetary comet passes through a sunphase before becoming sufficiently materialized to be a planet or planetary chain. In other words I mean to say that every planet is for a time a small sun when, just before leaving the cometary stage, it passes through a temporary sun-phase before materialized enough or concreted or gross enough to be a planet. Again, I may add that each reimbodiment of a planet, or rather of a planetary chain, passes again or anew through these various phases, to wit: planetary nebula, planetary comet, planetary sun, and planet. What we call the Milky Way is already prepared world-stuff, both the luminous nebulae as well as the dark: different phases of already prepared world stuff. You have an analogy in the human body, but of course this is not a lecture-hall on physiology, so I cannot go into that very easily. Now then, when the time comes for a solar system to reimbody itself in the same way as a man reincarnates, a certain portion of this world-stuff which has ended its pralaya, or rather the pralaya of the former sun, detaches itself from the Milky Way and begins to pursue at first a slow and later a rapid peregrination as a comet into many portions of the galaxy, finally to reach its own destined home in space. Always keep in mind that it does this because drawn by attractions, which is really gravitation: psychic, spiritual, intellectual attractions. This nebula moves slowly at first, but gathers speed. It picks up material as it wanders through the galaxy, traversing the different solar systems: and if it is fortunate and escapes being drawn into the stomach of one or another of the always very hungry suns (strange way to speak of imbodied divinities!) then it finds its place in space, and its movement of translation stops. It has other movements in common with all galactic bodies; but its cometary wanderings, the cometary wanderings of the `long-haired radical' as H.P.B. calls the comet, stops because it has found its home, its locus. It then settles and is now much more concrete, much less spiritual, much less astral, as we say, than it was as a nebula, because time has passed, ages have passed during which it was a comet: and furthermore it has been gathering material, the `refuse of the mother,' the detritus of the cosmic dust, her breath, her refuse, which it has been feeding on and taking into itself. Strange paradox that in all the rupa-worlds entities feed - not so in the arupa. There their food is intellectual ambrosia or nectar, as the Greeks said of their Olympian divinities. Now when it has thus settled in the place which is the locus of the solar system reimbodied, the solar system that was, and more or less in that same place (karman you see), the nebula or comet has become a vast lens or disk-shaped body of astral stuff - call it nebular matter, call it cometary matter if you will - with laya-centers here and there scattered through it, like organs in a body. We may call these laya-centers by the more common name in science and say that they are the nuclei. In the center is the largest such nucleus which grows or develops or evolves into becoming a sun. The smaller nuclei around it in this nebular comet or cometary nebula grow to be the beginnings of the

planets, and this is the beginning of the solar system. In the commencement of its beginning, as it were, the sun is voracious and attempts to swallow his younger brothers the planets, until the laws of nature come into operation, and attraction and repulsion come into play, of which science today knows only one: attraction, and calls it gravity or gravitation, although it seems to me repulsion is just as active in the universe as gravity. To me this gravity theory is one-sided. If you will consider the behavior of the comets which come into the solar system, and how the tail of the comet always points away from the sun, you will see repulsion at work. Scientists think the repulsion is due to the action of light on the very small particles of molecules in the cometary tail. If you like. It is repulsion. As the comet approaches the sun, the head goes first, and tail afterwards; then as it sweeps around, the tail is always heading away from the sun, and when it leaves the sun after circling it, the tail precedes and the head follows. Now the solar system is thus brought into being and finally becomes that solar system as we see it with our eyes. That means a lot, that phrase, with our eyes; and soon the solar system begins its career as a now formed entity. The planets slowly become more material and less ethereal. The divine laws of the celestial mechanism we call the solar system are established as now we see them working. Now we pass over ages and we come to the ending of the life of the sun, which means the ending of the life of the solar system, for the sun is King in his kingdom. The sun feeds on the refuse of interplanetary and inter-solar stuffs which it sucks in with its immense force and rejects as we humans do. This is the body of the sun I am talking about. This refuse, this matter in cosmic space, is the detritus of former dead suns, as you will see in a moment. Now we are approaching the end of the life of the sun. The sun's powers begin to weaken. Actually what is happening is that his manvantara is ending, his pralaya is almost beginning. His life on inner planes is opening, and that takes vitality from this plane. Therefore we say the sun is weakening in his power. That is all it means, and that is all death is: the transference from this plane to interior planes of a large part of the vitality existing on this plane when the body is at full strength. Finally the sun dies. But long before this all the planets have died and have disappeared. I cannot tell you where here, it would take too long. Sufficient to say that the sun knows. The sun when the moment of its death comes bursts, explodes, into simply innumerable fragments of various sizes, sun-stuff, which originally were almost as ethereal as spirit; but as the sun grew older became more and more compacted, more and more materialized, concreted, until when the sun is dying, practically dead, it is not a solid body yet but on the way to becoming solid. But it explodes; there is a tremendous - words just lack to explain this - not flash, a tremendous volume or outburst of light and power spreading throughout our solar system, and far beyond its confines. Every now and then astronomers today will discover what they call novae, a Latin word meaning "new stars." But what they see is just the opposite: a death of a star; and they will see some of these novae expand and then actually dim, some very quickly, some requiring years and years. Now then, all these fragments which were once sun-stuff grow constantly more material. Finally they become the meteors and meteorites of interstellar spaces. Originally spirit-stuff, mulaprakriti, they are now some of the most solid portions of prakriti, iron, nickel, carbon, and all the other things that our scientists have found in the meteorites which have reached this earth. These meteorites wander through space for ages and ages until the imbodiment of the solar system comes again. Thus the cometary nebula picks up

uncounted numbers of these meteorites, thus bringing back as it were its life-atoms of the former body of the solar system into its new body, just as we humans do. But it takes ages and ages for the solar system to gather up all these meteorites; and as a matter of fact all the meteorites that traverse our solar system are not due to the explosion of our former sun. Multitudes and multitudes of them are, but multitudes are not, but are the explosions of other suns in interstellar space which have wandered far and have become caught by our sun in its former state, or by our planets in their former state. And one final thing: We have thus seen what a sun-comet is, or a comet which becomes a sun in the solar system. But a comet may be the pre-birth state either of a sun or of a planet. During the lifetime of a solar system, every one of our planetary chains has its periods of manvantara and pralaya, in other words - every planetary chain dies and is imbodied again, and dies and is imbodied again in our system before the solar system and the sun in that system reach the time of their pralaya. In other words, our planetary chains reimbody themselves many many times during the lifetime or manvantara of our solar system. How is this done? The chains die, their inner principles begin their peregrinations along the circulations of the universe, exactly as a man's ego dies and returns. Remember I am just giving the barest outline, just a touch here and a touch there, leaving out 99 percent of what should and could be said. How does each such planetary chain-ego, as it were, come back to our solar system? By detaching itself where it was resting as part of the already prepared world-stuff of the Milky Way exactly as the sun-comet or cometary sun did when the solar system was reimbodying. In this instance the comet is a planetary comet which wanders through space, comes back to our solar system, is attracted here, becomes a small sun, and dying out of this state because of materializing, becomes a full planetary chain, settles in life as what we call the planet and begins its new Day of Brahma. - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 90 ---------------------

Consummatum Est - GdeP PICKING UP LOOSE THREADS In last Bul., Maja Synge, (Helsingborg, Sweden), commented on G. de P.'s article in "Wind of the Spirit": Aham asmi Parabrahman "with which he consummated this his incarnation". It was indeed his last public utterance, at the Sunday afternoon meeting at Theos. H.Q., Covina, Calif., on 20th Sept., 1942. He died on the following Sunday morning. The meeting had been addressed by Lester Todd (San Francisco, Calif.); and towards the close of the meeting Dr. de Purucker took the platform, and the following are excerpts from his talk: "Brilliance like the almighty wings of love knows no barriers, and can and does penetrate everywhere; and this thought was born in my mind this afternoon as I hearkened to our speaker giving us excerpts of great beauty, of great depth, from the archaic Wisdomteachings of mankind, teachings which belong to no race, to no age, and which, since they

are essential truth, must be taught in spheres not earthly but divine, as they are taught here on earth to us men.... We men, we human beings, as indeed all other things and entities everywhere, are but parts of one vast cosmic whole, intimately united together, despite our failings and our stumblings, in the working out of our common destiny. Therefore in proportion to our own individual understanding, we respond to that cosmic source which the Christian calls God, and which I prefer to call the Divine, from which we came, inseparable from which we are and always shall be, and into which again we are returning on our ages' long pilgrimage. If we men could keep just that one thought alive in our hearts and allow it to stimulate our minds from day to day, how would it not soften the asperities of human life, how would it not teach us men to treat our brothers like brothers instead of bitter foes!.... "This teaching contains everything within it, all the law and all the Prophets. Succinctly phrased it is simply this: that the cosmic life is a cosmic drama in which each entity, be it super-god, or god, or demi-god, or man, or beast, or monad or atom, plays his or its proportionate part; and that all these dramatic presentations are welded together, leading up to one vast cosmic climax - to which, by the way, there is no anticlimax. So that with every even human day we are coming closer to that time in the immensely distant future when we all shall, once more re-united, enter into the deep womb of utter cosmic being - call it God, call it Divinity, call it Spirit, call it what you wish. The drama then will have ended. The curtain will fall, and what we Theosophists call Pralaya will begin, the rest-period. But just as in human affairs, when night is over there comes the day, so when the night of pralaya ends, the manvantara, the cosmic day, dawns again. The curtain on the cosmic stage once more rises. Each entity, each being, then begins its cosmic play, its role, exactly at the metaphysical and mathematical point where it stopped when the bells of pralaya rang down that cosmic curtain on the manvantara or world-period just ended. Everything begins anew precisely like a clock or watch, which, when it has stopped and is rewound, begins to run again at the exact point at which the fingers themselves stopped. "I want to quote to you something that I love and have loved from boyhood. I learned it when I was a child and found it again once more in The Secret Doctrine of H.P.B. when in after life as a young man I joined the T.S. It is this: the picture is that of the Hindu guru or teacher. A pupil stands before him, and he is testing the knowledge of this pupil regarding the teaching that this pupil has received, and he says: 'Chela, Child, dost thou discern in the lives of those around thee anything different from the life that runs in shy veins?' 'There is no difference, O Guru-deva. Their life is the same as my life.' 'Child, raise thy head and look at the violet dome of night. Consider those wonderful stars, those beings radiating, irradiating, from the cosmic splendor above our heads. Seest thou that cosmic fire which burns in all things, and shines supremely bright in this and that and that and that yonder brilliant orb? Dost thou discern any difference in that cosmic light and life from that which shines forth from our own day-star, or from that which burns in thine own heart both day and night?' And the child says: 'O Gurudeva, I see no difference between life and life, and light and light, and power and power, and mind and mind, except in degrees. The light that burns in my heart is the same as the light, that burns in the hearts of all others.' 'Thou seest well, Child. Now listen to the heart of all this teaching: "AHAM ASMI PARABRAHMA". The meaning is: 'I am the Boundless, I myself am Parabrahma, for the life that pulses in me and gives me existence is the life of the divinest of the divine.' No wonder the child has understood. Am I a child of God? Essentially it is the only thing

I am, and if I fail to realize it, it is not the Divines fault but mine..... "...Think even in our own small human affairs - small when compared with the vast cosmic majesty which holds us around in its sheltering care - think, if every man and woman on earth were thoroughly convinced of the utter reality of this cosmic truth? Never again would the hand of man be raised against man. Always it would be the extended hands of succor and brotherhood. For I am my brother - in our inmost we are one. And if we are separate it is because of the smallnesses that make us each one an atom as it were, instead of the spiritual monad which for each one of us is our source. That monad is of the very stuff of divinity. As Jesus the Avatara phrased it in his wonderful saying: 'I and my Father are one' - the Father and the divine spark, the spark of divinity which is identic with the cosmic life, with the universal ocean of life, to use another metaphor. This idea of the cosmic ocean of life, of which we are all droplets in our inmost and in our highest, was in the mind of Gautama the Lord Buddha when he spoke of that ultimate end of all beings and things; for, as he said, all beings and things are in their essence Buddha, and some day shall become Buddha themselves, when, as phrased so beautifully by Edwin Arnold, the dewdrop slips into the Shining Sea. CONSUMMATUM EST.'' - CFL Bulletin, Nov., 1958 --------------

OUR ONENESS WITH THE COSMIC HEART - G. de Purucker The following are Dr. de Purucker's concluding words at the centenary commemoration of the birth of H.P. Blavatsky, afternoon session of June 24, 1931. This was a memorable conference attended by official representatives of the T.S. (Adyar) from 18 countries; by the General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society; by the President, Soc. Divine Wisdom (England); Independents (England); Editor of the Occult Review (England); and by 16 representatives from the T.S. (Point Loma) and Presidents of 5 of its National Sections. - Eds. I know indeed that all these various Theosophical Societies have their respective and differing opinions; but I also know that each one is pursuing its own line of work and is, I believe, trying to do good in the world; and I also know that each one of them, as well as every individual composing their respective fellowships, is following its own pathway to the Heart of the Universe. Let us then remember this great truth. It will bring generosity into our hearts and a kindlier feeling for those who differ from us. I will now close, with the expression of the hope that this will not be the last meeting of its kind. Our gathering is an historic event, believe me, Brothers, in the history of the modern Theosophical Movement. I know that if these thoughts which I have attempted so poorly this afternoon to lay before you, are understood, and accepted in your hearts - in other words if your minds and hearts will run parallel with them - we shall have taken a great step forwards towards the accomplishment of that Universal Brotherhood of humanity

which the Masters have set before us as the main work of the Theosophical Society; and I remind you of a great truth which I will quote for you in the words of the ancient Vedic sage: Tat savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhimahi Dhiyo yo nah prachodayat which we may translate and paraphrase as follows: "Oh, thou golden sun of most excellent splendor, illumine our hearts and fill our minds, so that we, recognizing our oneness with the divinity which is the Heart of the Universe, may see the pathway before our feet, and tread it to those distant goals of perfection, stimulated by thine own radiant light." This is a paraphrase of the Savitri, perhaps the most sacred verse in the ancient Hindu scriptures, and it contains a world of truth, for it sets forth the spiritual oneness of all things that are - that all things are rooted in the spiritual Universe, nay, more, in the Boundless: that in THAT we forever move and live and have our being; and that our whole duty is so to live, which means so to feel and so to think and so to act, that day by day and year by year we may recognize this fundamental oneness with the Cosmic Heart, and manifest its supernal glory and strength in our own lives. (Eclectic Theosophist, No. 77) ----------------

Cremation - GdeP QUESTION 8 - What does a Theosophist have to say about cremation? (The Editors give here an answer from G. de Purucker in talking to a group of students at Point Loma some forty years ago). G. DE P. - It is a great help to the excarnating entity to have its decomposing physical body dissipated into its component atoms. Cremation is a help: it is a quick freeing of otherwise very strongly magnetic attractions to the living body that was. You see, the excarnating entity for a short time after death is almost physical, and all the lower part of the intermediate constitution still is in the atmosphere of the Earth. It is true that the spirit has already joined its parent-sun. It is true that the Reincarnating Ego is very soon to be withdrawn into the bosom of the parent-Monad. But the lower intermediate part, the human soul-part, still is in the atmosphere of the Earth, joined to the Kama-rupa; and if the physical body is allowed to decay, or if it is mummified as the Egyptians did it, there is a strong psychomagnetic attraction to that dead body. It was part of the being you know, part of its life, a deposit of its own essence; and, as I tell you, the attraction is tremendous. Therefore cremation, outside of what you have pointed out, has the added advantage of more quickly freeing the excarnating entity from earthly attractions; nor does the place where the ashes are buried or scattered have any consequence whatever, none at all.

(Editorial note: See also G. de P.'s The Esoteric Tradition, Il, 791: "The fact that the physical body is sometimes after death destroyed by fire, by cremation, has no effect on the life-atoms. Fire has no hold on the life-atoms, not even on the chemical atoms, as we know. Fire sets the chemical atoms free. Fire destroys the molecules composed of atoms, but the atoms themselves are untouched by fire. Fire is an electrical phenomenon. Its influence is usually disruptive, but it is also the great constructive builder of the Universe. This is why some of the ancients worshiped fire. It is in fact a manifestation on the lower planes of pranic electricity, or what we may more commonly call vital electricity." And again: E.T., II, 181: "It might be added here that one of the strongest arguments in favor of cremation of the physical cadaver or corpse of the human being lies in the fact that it aids the dissolution of the model-body, which thus is no longer attracted magnetically to the decaying corpse, and its dissolution is correspondingly hastened. Furthermore, the 'shade' or 'shell' likewise undergoes more speedy dissolution when there is no decaying physical corpse with which it can exchange life-atoms.") - Eclectic Theosophist, May 15, 1973 -------------

CYCLIC PERIODICITY AND THOUGHT-HABITS - G. de Purucker (The following excerpts are taken from personal letters written in 1935 by our late Teacher to the undersigned, and verbal messages transcribed from stenographic notes. B. de Zirkoff.) . . . . Cycles come and go, and precisely because of this periodicity, there are cycles, at least what we term cycles. The cause of this periodicity in Nature is the existence of what might be called thought-habits arising out of thought-deposits, with which men and gods are involved. The Laws of Nature, so-called, are similarly to be explained, and are likewise of a cyclical character. The reason for the latter is the same, but the sweep and timeperiods of Nature's Laws are enormous when envisaged by us, little men. Reincarnation is an example of the human cycle essentially brought about by thought-habits and thoughtdeposits, with affiliate energies, attractions and repulsions, to wit, Empedocles' 'hate' and 'love.' No man need be subjected to enslaving or enslavement by any cycle, if he set his will and spiritual thought on higher things, for thus he rises above the thought-deposits, etc. Then he controls the cycles manifesting in human existence, and working automatically as it were. The Masters and high chelas do this and are to a great extent `superior' or relatively in command of cyclical periods, and not their slaves, as ordinary, unenlightened and passional men are. Psychology is involved in this, individual and mob psychology. Just as civilizations rise and fall cyclically, and evolution proceeds similarly, as evidenced by the teaching regarding root-races and their various sub-races, so do smaller cyclical events in human history sweep multitudes into temporary deliriums, leaving wise ones untouched. War,

peace, civilization, barbarism, are therefore all cyclical - also great outbreaks of pandemic diseases, etc. The way to inaugurate a new cycle is to broadcast grand ideas, giving birth to grand ideals; if these catch on, nobler cycles come into being, and the evil ones die out, because the multitudes react, refuse to be enslaved, no longer follow. Thus wars, psychological outbreaks of mob insanity, can be checked, cured. It is the principle well known by true astrologers, who are first and foremost trained theosophists, or at least ought to be; and it can be expressed in the well known words: the stars impel, They do not compel! Thus we see how even inveterate, age-old cycles, though always dangerous and compelling to the weak, can be surmounted, worked against, and in time brought to a stop. One of the foremost teachings in this respect is that man has free will, reacting against environment, to wit, cyclical conditions, arid having power to surmount them. Thus Fatalism is not taught in Theosophy, but Karman is. Finally, if war cycles should begin to flow upon us - if there are enough men and women to use their higher thought, superior to that of the cycles, and to employ their will for righteousness and brotherhood - such cycles should not touch them, and, although arousing unrest because of the multitudes, and bringing about horrors here and there, - the greater, bigger and nobler human beings lead on and guide human destinies, leaving the tidal wave to flow by, and spend its force. -----------. . . . You are asking what may seem to you to be a very simple question, but you yourself will see, after a moment's reflection, that it is an extremely involved one . . . .The general rule is - and it is a wonderful key - that the small repeats the great, that the little yugas not only are included in the greater yugas, but repeat them on their own little scales. Example: The present Fifth Root-Race, considered as a whole, and including all its minor sub-races, whether great or small, is now in its Kali-Yuga, which began something over five thousand years ago, at the death of Krishna, and will last into the future for about 427,000 years. Keep in mind that this is the Kali-yuga of the entire Root-Race, the great Kali-Yuga. Now, then, all the minor cycles or yugas of this Fifth Root-Race will, some of them, be rising, and some of them be falling, and interworking with each other, and yet will all be subject to the great Kali-Yuga of this Root Race, which has just begun. Thus, a minor yuga or race may be in its youth, and rising to its flowering, but yet, because it is included in the great descending Kali-Yuga, will, although having a sharp rise, be nevertheless subject to the general decline of the great Kali-Yuga. Next, every minor cycle, great or small, included in the Root-Race, in its turn is septenary, and therefore has its own little kali-yuga, and in numerical relations is about the same. Just as the great Kali-Yuga is 432 thousand years long, so a little kali-yuga may be perhaps only 432 years long, or possibly 4,320, or possibly even 43,200. The Hindu or Aryan Race, which was one of the very first sub-races of our own Fifth Race, is now in its own racial kali-yuga, in addition to belonging to the Fifth Root-Race, and there-ore of course belonging to the great Kali-Yuga of the Root-Race. But it is striving to rise into flowering again, and will do so in the future. - From Theosophia, Sept.-Oct., 1945

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Two Questions on Density What is Dr. de Purucker's conception of density? Is it dependent on and measurable by the frequency of the vibrations of the intra-atomic constituents or of the atoms themselves or a combination of both? Is density as Dr. de Purucker uses the word in his answer to Question 304 in the May, 1936, FORUM, pages 361-363, dependent in any sense on the number of electrons or other constituents within the atom? - H.C.M. G. de P. - The querent seems to suppose, or rather perhaps to suggest, that I have used or do use the word `density' with a meaning somewhat different from that commonly employed. I doubt if this is the fact. As far as I can recollect, I always use the word `density' in the manner in which it is commonly used by most educated people, realizing that the word has a general significance as well as many particular applications to different cases; and I find that this somewhat vague manner of employing the term `dense' or `density' is that followed by almost everybody. Density is the closeness of constituent parts, generally speaking, whether we be referring to electrons or atoms or molecular groups. Density has been defined as "the mass or amount of matter per unit of bulk." So I understand the term; and, generally speaking, I suppose that we can measure density by the weight of a unit of bulk or by the specific gravity. In other words, density, therefore, is the amount of matter in or the mass of a material unit. Other somewhat looser definitions of density are compactness, - or the state or quality of being close in constitution. I think some confusion has arisen in the minds of those who have followed my various statements with regard to density, etc., because of the common wide prevalence of the idea in the western world for ages that the greater the activity of the units in a system, the more spiritual it is; whereas the exact contrary is in fact the case; and this is just what I have tried on many occasions to show, realizing full well that I was in conflict with common opinion. Yet it ought to be evident that when particles are vibrating with intense and almost unimaginable frequency or rapidity, and doing so as a unit-entity, the forces involved would be harder to change and harder to move than when the vibrations are weak, diffuse, and more or less dissipate; and it is precisely this compactness of vibrations and the closeness of their interaction which produce mass or amount of matter. Thus if we compare various densities of chemical elements, we shall find, as instances, that platinum can be reckoned as 21.4, gold as 19.3, mercury as 13.6, lead as 11.3, copper as 8.9, iron as 7.8, the earth generally as 5.6, the diamond as 3.5, ordinary rock about 2.7, magnesium 1.7, the human body generally as 1.1, lithium as 0.6, air as 0.0013 - and here we have what we can call molecular densities if we wish; but when we come to the chemical attraction in these various substances, whether chemical elements or chemical compounds, we enter into another sphere of attributes and qualities having their own densities; yet the densities in either group of cases seem to be dependent in each instance upon the number and activities of the constituent parts of the units. Really, I think that the querent has somewhat misunderstood my words as implying

that I use the term `dense' or `density' somewhat arbitrarily and in a different sense from that ordinarily employed; and at the moment of this writing, I am not conscious of ever having done so. - Theosophical Forum, Sept., 1938 ---------------

The Occult Doctrine Concerning the Ego [The letter which is printed hereunder and which is unsigned by the writer reached the editorial office in an envelope bearing an Irish stamp. As its contents are phrased in courteous language and contain certain points of interest, it was referred to the author of the article in THE FORUM which the writer of the letter criticizes. Immediately after the letter hereunder will be found the comments of the FORUM writer. It is always a pleasure to the editorial staff to receive intelligent and gentlemanly communications containing matter of common interest. - Eds,] GENTLEMEN, On behalf of a number of intelligent and up-to-date Christians may I put you wise as regards current opinion in Europe? On page 402 of June FORUM it is implied that in the Xian sense the soul is static throughout eternity in unchanging essential characteristics (?) and it is alleged that our theology makes no distinction between "Immortal" (not dying) and "immutable," (not changing). This is not so; and it is scarcely fair to imply that present-day theologians could be so stupid. Last century there may have been unthinking people who vaguely half supposed that immortal life was a condition without progress or evolution. To argue seriously against such an absurd conception as existing in our own time is surely flogging a dead horse? The actual difference between the theosophical and the Christian view of immortality in progress is rather that the latter tends to conceive of that unending evolution as proceeding in a straight line steadily upwards - while the former probably would envisage it as undulatory or evolution in successive waves? Some additional exposition as to the writer's views on the distinction to be made between 'immortal' and 'immutable' would add to the value of that excellent and illuminating article. THE comment or criticism written by our Irish friend, or courteous opponent, on the reprint in the June, 1938, THEOSOPHICAL FORUM of my chapters on the Esoteric Doctrine of Gautama the Buddha as taken from THE ESOTERIC TRADITION, is both interesting and suggestive, and I welcome the opportunity to elucidate the subtle point in psychological philosophy or philosophical psychology, for I have found that it is precisely this point which the Christian mind is totally ignorant of or completely misunderstands. It is to be regretted that in this matter of the Christian conception of an enduring and unchanging egoity of the soul, our correspondent, in common with most Christians, still

persists - however evolved their ideas may be as compared with the Christian ideas of olden times - still persists, I say, in looking upon the ego as essentially unchanging in its individuality or egoity. Now this is precisely the subtle point mentioned above, and it is what I was alluding to when I spoke of "the imperishable, immortal soul in the Christian sense, static through eternity in unchanging essential characteristics." For this certainly is just what Christianity claims for the soul, to wit, that its individuality is imperishable; and this is just the point at issue. Individuality must evolve as everything else does, otherwise it can never pass from the less to the greater. The occult doctrine claims that this individuality, or its egoity, in other words the ego, at one time-period in eternity must enlarge into something incomparably and vastly grander, thus changing even the characteristics of its egoity, otherwise it will remain always relatively the same limited egoity or individuality. I am well aware that modern-day Christian speculation, theological or other, is quite likely to admit that the soul in the Christian sense enlarges its views, enhances its conceptions of life and of the eternal verities, as the letter above from our Irish friend claims. But this is beside the present argument. The occult doctrine states that it is the ego, the individuality itself, which passes from personal egoity in its lower stages to an enlarging individual egoity in its higher stages, still enlarging into an impersonal individuality in still higher stages, and so forth, virtually ad infinitum. It is obvious, then, to any philosophical mind that this constant changing of individuality not only implies but shows that the ego of the early stages is not the ego of the intermediate stages; and again, that the ego of the intermediate stages changes over into the enlarged ego of the more advanced stages, etc. In other words the occult doctrine postulates and proves, logically and of course philosophically, that the ego not merely experiences an enlarging of conceptions, but itself changes and therefore is not an eternally perduring, unchanging individual entity. Here is just the subtil point which virtually all Christian writers known to me either cannot understand or wilfully misunderstand. To recapitulate: Admitted that modern Christians allow that the soul in their sense undergoes enlarging views, widening conceptions, deepening of consciousness, etc., etc., which is what the above writer seems to claim, and which is the typically modern Christian view, I believe; yet this is precisely the point which the occult doctrine says is utterly insufficient, for it is not merely a changing of attributes and functions of the egoity which the occult doctrine postulates, but that the egoity or individuality itself is constantly changing, evolving always into something greater, the thread of individuality continuing but becoming always something different because grander. As an illustration: the just-born child is not a fully `egofied' entity which merely enlarges its views and gains experiences as it grows through youth to manhood; but it is the actual change of the baby into the youth, and the youth into the adult which takes place. The Theosophist says that this is due to the ever-enlarging increments of spiritual individuality which incarnate pari passu with the growing child, the growing youth. But we add that even this individuality itself on the spiritual planes passes over during cosmic ages into larger things. If not, then we must state that the individuality or ego of the billion years in the past was exactly in the state or condition of consciousness in essentia that it will be in ten billions of years from now, the only difference being that its experiences have grown, and that its outlook is larger; and this conception the occult doctrine rejects as totally insufficient.

This occult conception, which seems too subtle and strange to the Christian theorizer, is elucidated in many other passages of this series of articles on the Secret Doctrine of Gautama the Buddha, and I would refer my kindly critic to these passages. The Christian postulates a created soul - at least this is orthodox Christian theology which in its essence is created an individuality, an ego, different from all other egos, and that this individualized egoity persists unchanging through eternity as that ego. This is what the occult doctrine denies. First it denies the soul's `creation,' and second, it states that every ego in its essence is a spark or Ray from Divinity itself, but that its egoity is as changing on its own planes, i.e., as much subject to evolving growth, only through immense periods of time, as are even the different physical bodies or reincarnations in and through which the evolving ego itself manifests from life to life. Thus, just as the Caius or Marcus of old Rome may be reborn as John Smith or William Brown, two different bodies and two different lower personalities, both due to past karman or actions, to past destiny in other words, so does the ego itself, the spiritual ray from the divine, have its individuality colored because of changing consciousness in evolution through long periods of time; which actually means that the young ego, i.e., when it first appears from the bosom of the Divine in a great cosmic manvantara, is one thing, but that the essence of it will reappear at the end of that cosmic time-period as the same divine spark, but with an entirely modified or sublimated egoic individuality. In fact we can logically call it a different individuality, but the product of the same divine essence. Thus we say one's egoship itself changes character as the cosmic ages roll by, each such change however being like a pearl on the divine thread-self or Sutratman. The immense reach of this occult conception is at once seen when we reflect how it changes our outlook as regards ourselves and the universe around us. We are not unchanging individual egos, for ever separate in eternity from each other because of individually differing egoities, but are individually one divine essence, otherwise Rays from the Cosmic Source, and thus there is a consciousness in all of us which is one and identic, the highest part of us. To this divine source we are journeying back, each evolving ego carrying with itself its accumulated wisdom and experiences; thus in due course, when the time shall arrive, being able to remember all its immense and intricate past and yet evolving continuously forth this utter oneness in essence with all other egos. It should be now clear that the subtle point of this argument is one of the highest importance, for we are not, as the Christians say, merely brothers in the spirit, and sons of Almighty God, but actually are brothers in manifestation, and identities in our highest. The Buddhists say therefore very truly that the soul as an imperishable, unchanging individuality in its egoity is a mere dream, for even the souls change in their egoity, rising from lower to higher things. And yet, wonderful paradox because wonderful truth, the thread of point-consciousness which we call the Monad endures through all these changes carrying with it as treasured experience all the different souls or egos through which it has passed as phases in its aeons-long evolutionary journey. In a few words: Christian theory, whether ancient or modern, postulates an imperishable, albeit perhaps learning, personal ego, which lasts unchanging in its egopersonality for ever; whereas the Esoteric Philosophy rejects this as being both unphilosophical and unscientific, and declares the forever enduring but evolving spiritual individuality manifesting at periodical intervals in and through egoized personalities. I have repeated myself here deliberately endeavoring to state the occult viewpoint

in somewhat varied language. Finally, if it is true, as the writer above seems to imply, that Christian conceptions of the human soul are so changing as to become more and more like unto the archaic idea of the Occult Philosophy, this is indeed good news, and is to be welcomed as an immense advance over mediaeval theologic dreamings. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, Sept., 1938 ---------------------

AN "OLD POND" AND EASTER THOUGHTS - G. de Purucker The Pathway of Beauty, the Pathway of Peace and Strength, the Pathway of the Great Quiet, is within you - not within the material body, but within the inmost focus of your consciousness. This is the Pathway that the great Sages and Seers of all the ages have taught. Follow that Pathway. It will lead you to the heart of the Sun, the Master and Guide of our Solar System; and later, if you follow it, it will conduct you to a destiny still more sublime. Yet that sublime destiny is only the beginning, only the beginning of something grander; for evolution, growth, expansion of consciousness, go on forever. In different countries there are different ways of phrasing these things of inner beauty. I listened two nights ago to a speech by a Japanese lecturer, a thoughtful man, a man of kindly heart, one who had already seen somewhat of the Vision Beautiful and who, during the course of his lecture, illustrated one point of his address by an example - a Japanese poem. I will repeat this poem as I heard it; and in this connection please remember that the essence of poetry is visioning. Poetry is not merely the collocation of words; it is not riming. The noblest poetry often is that which has no rime, but which instead appeals powerfully to the intellect and to the heart, because it gives vision. This Japanese poem consisted of three lines only, nine words: An old pond A frog plunging A great splash. The beauty of this little poem lies in the fact that there is in it no meretricious ornament, no wordy decoration; and because of this fact a thought, a picture, vivid, graphic, real, is presented to the minds of the hearers, and then the magic of thought is woven by the minds of the hearers themselves. And each man interprets the beauty of this thought strictly according to his own development of the understanding and of the poetic sense - which means the sense of beauty and consciousness. Now, what is this `old pond'? asked the lecturer. It is the spiritual life, he replied, the inner life, the Great Peace, called `old' because it has existed from eternity. It is the essence of the spiritual world; and it is called `pond' after the same fashion that made other mystical thinkers of other ancient peoples speak of `the waters of space.' And `a frog plunging' - how graphic in its simplicity! It seems a desecration to color the picture by trying

to explain it. The frog plunging into the water where he feels at home is the man yearning to return into his own - to re-enter the spiritual existence where his soul is native. Is not this the very heart of the idea imbodied in the Easter-Festival? Is it not man rising out of the material and plunging into the spiritual life of his soul? There indeed are the Resurrection and the Life! The spiritually thoughtful man, yearning to be and to grow and to enter into the Light and the Great Peace, such a one may have his own individual `Easter' at any time. His `Easter' comes to him, his `Resurrection' into the spiritual life comes to him, when he breaks the shell of the personal man with all its weaknesses and cloying desires and enshrouding veils, and casts that shell aside. Not by `killing' the body - that is not the essential idea - but by becoming at one with the god within, so that the body is no longer a hindrance but a faithful tool with which to carry out in this our sphere of existence the mandates of the inner god. And the `Crucifixion'? Its meaning is the resignation, painful to most human beings, of the material personal man and exchanging it for a greater light; and it is called a crucifixion because to the personal man with his limited vision it seems like his own death. We must remember that the inner Christ - or the inner Buddha - is fixed to the cross of material existence; but after the `crucifixion' there ensues the `resurrection' of the inner god .... You cannot become one with your own inner god until the personal man, who is the becomer, has become at least to a certain extent godlike. You can not enter into the Great Peace until you yourself have become peaceful. Oh! `Ressurect' the god within you, the inner Christ, the inner Buddha, the inner Brahma - call it by what name you will: that Solar Splendor which is the very core of your being. Be like the frog of the Japanese poet, plunging into the old pond, the ancient pond of your spiritual consciousness. Then you will attain truth, light, peace, love, pity, compassion, strength, discrimination, vision, glory unspeakable . . . May the time soon come for you when the Great Peace, the Boundless Vision, will be yours. - Extracts from a public lecture given at Easter time, April 1931, in the Temple, at Point Loma, California - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 74 ----------------

EVERY THEOSOPHIST A LEADER - G. de Purucker Pertinent excerpts from an address delivered at the New York Lodge, September 16, 1932. ....Every one of you is a Theosophical headquarters, and not only as our beloved Judge explained it: Make each one of you to in yourseIf a center of the Movement, a lodge of one: but I tell you more: each one of you should be and actually is a leader, a leader of men, a Theosophical lender, one more or less trained to guide his fellows. Oh! I pray

that you do not forget this; for if this idea prevail among us, no matter what one may say about the relatively small number of adherents that the Theosophical Society at present has as compared with the many millions of humanity - if this spirit prevails, I repeat, we Theosophists shall be not merely the leaven raising the general average of humanity, but verily you will be leaders, guides, teachers: and that is what each genuine Theosophist should aspire to be. Tell yourselves and tell each other that you are leaders. Your present leader by his position merely exemplifies that fact - the spirit of self-devotion to a grandiose Cause: and every one of you could have that same spirit, and I believe you actually have it. . . It is the duty of every Theosophist to be a leader, to be a guide, to be a teacher, and to give full-handed and in measure overflowing of what he himself has - flowing forth from his heart. Any man who does this is a natural leader of his fellow-men . . . . Nothing can daunt this spirit of self-devotion. It will prevail over everything, because its fountain is love love of mankind, love of all that is. . . . Love is no mere sentimental emotion: love is vision; love is harmony; love is that which flows forth from one to others; and when a man or woman has this in his heart or in her heart, then he or she is a natural leader. I desire you all to be leaders. Don't be ashamed of this lofty calling. Proclaim yourselves as aspiring to be true leaders. No one in the T.S. is too humble to help someone else, to show the way, and the way-shower is the leader, the guide, and the teacher. - From Theosophia, July-August, 1944 --------------------

FELLOWS OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY is formed of Fellows who may be roughly grouped into two general classes, at least I have found it so: the less active workers and the fully active workers. To the first class mentioned belong those who have joined the T.S. indeed because they find in it sublime teachings, the help and comfort and peace that their hearts and minds have been hunting for, it may be half a lifetime, but who are more or less satisfied in receiving because the teachings bring strength to them and happiness and peace and to a certain extent greater vision. This state of things is good, as far as it goes. They are entitled to it as being sons of the Cosmic Spirit, sons of men, human beings. But they have not as yet awakened to the fact that the giving of the Wisdom is more precious than the receiving. On the other hand and belonging to the second class of which I speak, there are those who are not satisfied merely to get, who refuse to continue asking favors, who have caught a gleam of the light celestial from the teachings, and have pledged themselves to become units in what we call the Hierarchy of Compassion. These are they in whom the light celestial begins to come with its holy peace and glory. Now this second class are the real workers in the T.S. Not all of them are publicly known by any means. Those who are publicly known get most of the public credit; according to the Latin proverb, they publicly receive the palm of virtue and merit. But there are, as well, unknown, faithful-hearted workers who are doing their bit, and more than their bit, and I know that the Guardians of the Theosophical Society are grateful to them all.

It is not the faces at the front, it is not the forefront speakers, nor the Leader - and his especial staff of officials, who should have all the credit, and who make up the entirety of the class of active workers in the T.S. It is not only our lecturers and our field-workers. Equally with these do I include the humblest worker in the ranks who stands firm and loyal to that Theosophical flag which H.P.B. put into our hands, and who works for it. These too should receive due meed of grateful recognition. And this unknown service is perhaps the more dignified and the more gracious and the more beautiful in that it is not publicly known to all. I tell you, even here in our beloved Lomaland, when I see some of the workers going about their daily duties, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out, loyal at the task, faithful in the performance of the labor, I say: Well done, ye faithful servants of the Law. They are like the truly great ones of the earth, for they labor without seeking public credit. They work without outward recompense, without public recognition, and without the stimulus of the public's esteem. These are they who have an especial place in my heart, for they represent the great virtues which as Theosophists we teach. And there are also those who are out in the field, those who have the difficult task of facing the public: our lecturers, the officials of the different Sections of our Society in different parts of the world, in many cases men and women having to work for a living, and working hard in these difficult days, yet carrying on, doing their extra work when they come home from their offices, or elsewhere, and loving it; doing their work at night, often without the help even of a stenographer, in some cases, from lack of a typewriter, having to write in longhand, writing letters themselves that will carry help to some hungry soul somewhere, guidance to some Lodge at a distance, information that should be shared with the Section. This also is grand, this also is real devotion. Now of these two classes mentioned in the beginning of this article, it seems clear that the first class mentioned are as yet merely formally in the work. They are willing to receive but not to give. They do not yet realize that the least amongst us can give of his time, of his money, of his work, and, greatest of all, can give of his soul, can give to others what he himself has received. The other class, the really active workers are those who give all they can, in time, money and work, to help the T.S. It is they who find the inspiration of their lives in helping and sharing in the common Theosophic life. These two classes form the membership of the Theosophical Society. I would that all belonged to the really active group. But after all, you cannot drive people. They can be led; they cannot be driven. I would not like to be driven. And again, after all is said, what kind of allegiance is it, what kind of help is it, what kind of fidelity is it, which has to be forced or wrested from unwilling hearts by fear or by some other similar type of motive power? Let people be natural in the sense of being true-hearted. Then they will gradually awaken to an understanding of what true service is, and then they are beginning a truly Theosophical path, ultimately leading to the Great Ones. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, May, 1941 --------------------

FIDELITY TO H. P. B.'s MESSAGE - A WHITE LOTUS DAY ADDRESS. By Dr. G. de Purucker To my Fellow Students in Theosophy, and to our Companions in Theosophical work/ The revolving months have once again brought around the anniversary of the passing to the "Home" which she loved so well, of our great H.P.B. Once a year we meet together, in accordance with her request, to commemorate with due meed of respect and love the life ands labors of our Masters' first public Messenger to the modern world. It was not her request that we should pay homage or reverence to her, nor even to make a demonstration in her memory of the love and respect which we bear towards her in our hearts; these we do solely from the impulse of our own souls; her request rather was that her life and work should be commemorated, solely for their Theosophical value on each anniversary of her passing from the physical plane, and again solely that thereby the delicate spiritual and psychological factors involved in her mission should be kept ever present in our minds and hearts. The writer of these lines receives each year requests from many places to write especial messages for White Lotus Day commemorative services to be held in these different places; and he would gladly do so had he the spare energy and the time to meet these many calls; but with the growing burden of his daily routine-work, which is steadily increasing from year to year, and indeed from month to month, and with his many other official occupations which need not here be mentioned, it has become physically impossible to comply with each such individual request for an especial Message of greeting containing at least a few lines of suggestive and constructive Theosophical thought. He has therefore decided to meet the situation in a manner which seems to him to be both practical and useful; and it is by writing the present Message, which will, he hopes, be read on each White Lotus Day anniversary, as the cycling years bring it around, by those who care so to do. Many indeed are the thoughts which crowd the mind and press for written expression, when one inwardly visions our great H.P.B.'s life and her immortally beautiful labors; but there are two especially salient characteristics of both which to the present writer it seems profitable to us all and spiritually as well as intellectually helpful to emphasize. These two characteristics are, first, her great, her immense, her truly Buddhalike Charity; and second, her inflexible, her strong - her very strong - Fidelity. It is not easy out of such a treasury of great virtues, and brilliant intellectual and psychical endowments such as she had, to choose which ones might be most helpful for us to aspire daily to follow; yet in view of circumstances, both of the past and in the present, and doubtless to be with us in the future, it has seemed to the undersigned that the two virtues above mentioned, while not the only ones needed in our Theosophical work, are the two which, practicing them faithfully, will help our beloved Work most, and fill our hearts and enlighten our minds in the greatest degree. It should be evident do every thoughtful mind, that world history is but repeating itself in the history of the Theosophical Movement since H.P.B.'s passing; and by "history" in this instance is meant the course of events which have characterized every spiritual and intellectual and psychical movement formerly instituted for the betterment of mankind. In

these Movements, always the Teacher comes, sent as a Messenger or Envoy by the Masters of Wisdom and Compassion; the Messenger's life-work is done, success is achieved, and the Teacher passes; and then, because of the faults and weaknesses inherent in human nature, even in the best of us all, and in whatever part of the world, differences of opinion; differences of viewpoint, misunderstanding and intellectual contrarieties, rend the work in twain or in three parts or in four or in more, and each one such division thereafter is all too apt to pursue its own path in haughty isolation, forgetful of its common birth with its fellow portions, and often treating its fellow-fragments of the original Movement or Association with contempt and suspicion and dislike, evil offspring of the stupid but always fecund Mother, Ignorance, and of the prolific but shifty-eyed Father, Fear. Ignorance and Fear, and Hatred their child! It is a saddening historic picture indeed when we see it as we may in our own beloved Theosophical Movement; yet there is something in the picture withal which saves us from foolish pessimism. The present writer is one who not only feels, but may say that he knows, and he says this with due reserve, that the breaking up of the original Theosophical Society into its present fragments was not only foreseen as something that would probably come to pass but, despite its unfortunate features nevertheless has elements in it which give us grounds of genuine hope that the original purposes of the Theosophical Movement have not been lost, but, on the contrary, will be preserved; and wild grow ever stronger as time passes, provided we all do our parts to that end. This objective we should unite and work for with unceasing energy, and with our eyes to the future. However, let this be as it may. The present writer has no wish or intention here to labor the question, nor to elaborate its interesting philosophical and even spiritual factors. What concerns him most at the present time is the preserving of the nucleus such as H.P.B. formed it for us, gave it into our hands to cherish, and to pass on too our successors in the Work. We must remember that no such nucleus of a genuine Theosophical Brotherhood will be fit to endure and to perform its proper work in the world unless it is based on those spiritual qualities which the Masters have pointed out to us as the sine qua non of a successful Theosophical organization; and first among these qualities, and in the front rank, the present writer would place the two grand virtues of universal Charity and perfect Fidelity: Charity not only to those of our own family - our own T.S. - but Charity to all and to everyone without exception; as much to those who differ from us, and who may even go so far as to attempt to injure us, as we are charitable or try to be so to those with whom we feel most spiritual and intellectual sympathy, they of our own Household, of our own Family. Let our record in this respect be so clean, on so high and truly spiritual a plane, that the mere thought of losing it or abandoning it would cause us greater and more poignant grief than any other loss we could possibly incur. Let me remind you, my Brothers and Fellow Students and Companions, of the words of the Christian Initiate Paul, as they are found in his First Letter too the Corinthians given in the Christian New Testament, in chapter xiii, verses 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 13; and whatever Paul at times may have had in his somewhat paradoxical and somewhat devious mind, at other times he wrote some beautiful things, and none perhaps are more beautiful than these verses above mentioned, which run in their common English translation as follows: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am

become a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. Yea, verily, my Brothers, these are true words indeed. Let us, however, turn to a far grander source than that of the Christian Paul to get an inspiring thought of the same kind, to one of our Master's own statements, which runs as follows: Beware then, of an uncharitable spirit, for it will rise up like a hungry wolf in your path, and devour the better qualities of your nature which have been springing into life. Broaden instead of narrowing your sympathies; try to identify yourself with your fellows, rather than to contract your circle of affinity.... It is not the moment for reproaches or vindictive recriminations, but for united struggle. - The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, p. 367 There is at the present time altogether too little of this sublime and truly spiritual Theosophical virtue, Charity, in the general Theosophical Movement; although the present writer will say, because the believes it to be true, that in our beloved T.S. this beautiful virtue is revered and aspired to, thanks be to the immortal gods. The reason is that we are so inwardly sure of our own field of effort, and of the justice of our Cause, and of the purity of our motives, that whatever mistakes we may make, it is precisely because we have malice towards none and good will towards all that we are able to open our hearts and minds to the benign influences of Charity, and thus are able to see good and at times much good, even in those who, because gravely misunderstanding us and our efforts, refuse our proffered hand of fellowship and even, at times may seek to injure us. After all, it is the man who is uncertain of his own ground, who lacks the blessed virtue of Charity; who envieth and who therefore is not kind, and who is easily provoked, who delights in picking flaws or imaginary flaws, in the thoughts and acts and Theosophical labors of Brother Theosophists. Let use strive, I say, always to keep out of our hearts the "uncharitable spirit" of which the Master speaks. There are not a few such uncharitable ones in the Theosophical Movement, in one or other of its different branches, at the present time; but towards these our misunderstanding Brothers, let us preserve unruffled the strong spirit of brotherly kindness and of unceasing Charity; for in this manner we shall be practicing our Masters' precepts, and thereby exercising the equally spiritual virtue of the Fidelity of which H.P.B. was so eminent an exemplar. Among the first of hers and of our Masters' teachings is the statement that in a heart filled with dislike and suspicion and fear and hatred of others, especially of Fellow-Theosophists, the Spirit of Truth dwelleth not; nor are such unfortunate victims of

uncharity, followers in true fidelity either of H.P.B.'s teachings or of the broad platform of universal benevolence and sympathetic understanding which she laid down, and herself fought all her life long firmly to establish for us. We must at all cost to our own feelings keep this spiritual platform secure and safe for the future. It is futile and entirely beside the mark to say, as some may perhaps say, that in pointing out the desperate wickedness of other Theosophists we are doing our Masters work in exposing wrong and fraud to the world. In no case would we be manifesting the true spirit of Charity and Fidelity to our Masters admonitions were we to call a Brother Theosophist by names suggesting ignominy, such as "traitor", "impostor", insincere", etc., etc. Outside of anything else, all this is very bad psychology, if not worse; and it certainly is not the way by which to reform any abuses that may have crept into the Theosophical Movement. Arrogance in criticizing others shows clearly self-righteousness in the notion that the critics views are the only "holy ones," and that all who differ from him are on the "wrong path," or on the "downward path." Let us pursue the contrary course to all this, my Brothers. Utterly true as we strive to be to our Masters' teachings, and to H.P.B.'s noble life, let us exemplify this Fidelity with which we follow them by practicing Charity and forgiveness. This is the quickest and best way by which to bring `wandering sheep' back to the folds; for by throwing mud at them, or stones, or missiles of any kind, we but drive them still farther away from us, and alienate them still more; and we certainly thereby do not exemplify in our lives the noble precepts which we profess. The reference above is to mud-throwing, and the ascribing to Brother-Theosophists of unworthy and possibly evil motives. This is not only wrong, but is utterly contrary to the spirit of Charity. Obviously, however, it does not refer to the perfectly proper and indeed often beneficial results that follow from a candid, frank, generous but always courteous, discussion, or even criticism, of religious, philosophic, or scientific opinions or writings proffered by others. It is one thing too condemn the sin; another thing to condemn the sinner. The evils of orthodoxy can be avoided in our beloved Movement by faithfully retaining the platform of free and open discussion which H.P.B. founded, and which she and all her true followers have cherished; this likewise brings about the birth of keen intellectual and even spiritual interests in our teachings. Such open and frank discussion of doctrines and tenets therefore is not only permissible, but even to be encouraged; but the simplest minded should be able to see that a criticism of doctrines or tenets is quite different from the throwing of mud at those whose views we dislike, or the ascribing to them of motives either unworthy or evil or both. The few cases which have come under the present writer's attention of such unkind aspersions of other Theosophists, seem to arise - and one is glad to state this for it appears to be true - in a mistaken feeling that because Theosophists differ among themselves - aud what can be more natural than that Theosophists should hold different opinions? - there is danger of standard Theosophical teachings being abandoned, and therefore X and Y who differ from, let us say Z, are on the wrong path. It is not right to hold this idea or feeling. As H.P.B. so forcibly points out in her First Message to the American Section of the Theosophical Society, written in 1888: Orthodoxy in Theosophy is a thing neither possible nor desirable. It is diversity of opinion, within certain limits that keeps the Theosophical Society a living and a healthy

body, its many other ugly features notwithstanding. Were it not, also, for the existence of a large amount of uncertainty in the minds of students of Theosophy, such healthy divergences would be impossible, and the Society would degenerate into a sect, in which a narrow and stereotyped creed would take the place of the living and breathing spirit of Truth and an ever growing Knowledge. These are wise words, very wise words indeed! Possibly there is no one in the entire Theosophical Movement who loves more greatly and who holds more strongly to the Original Message which H.P. Blavatsky brought to the modern world from the Masters, than does the writer of these lines. In fact, he is invariable, even rigid on the point; but just precisely because he realizes with intense keenness of conviction that to be utterly true in Fidelity to H.P.B.'s Message means being true all along the line crud throughout, not only in matters of teaching, but likewise in matters of charity of spirit, so does he realize with ethics and in brotherly kindness, and in equal intensity of conviction that healthy divergences of opinion, combined with fidelity to the Original Message, will do away with any possibility of the T.S.'s degenerating into a mere sect in which bigoted and narrow minded views, however much of partial truth they may have, show that while the `word' has been kept, the `spirit,' with its softening and refining and benign influences, has been lost. Those, therefore, who yearn to be alike in quality of life at least, in feeling and in devotion to that part of the character of the Great Theosophist, H.P. Blavatsky, which the writer of the present lines has called her "strong fidelity," will realize that Fidelity means fidelity in whole, and not in part. A Theosophist may know The Secret Doctrine of H.P.B. from cover-page to cover-page; he may be able to rattle off at will incidents innumerable in the history of her life; he may be able to cite volume and page and word, of the thoughts of our great H.P.B.; but if he have not her spirit of Charity living in his heart and enlightening his mind, he does not understand the Fidelity which was so eminently hers, and therefore himself is not faithful either to the Message which she brought, or to the Masters whom she pointed to as our noblest exemplars in life. Let us then remain for ever faithful followers of the complete Fidlelity, and of the immense Charity, which made H.P.B not only the Messenger she truly was, but the chela she became because of them. On these White Lotus Day occasions, in commemoration of her great life, and of her even greater Work, let us once and all strive to become more alike unto her, and as best we can unto those glorious Examples of the Masters - Men whom she served so faithfully. Let these anniversaries which we call White Lotus Day, be unto us times when we enter into the arcanum of our own souls, and communing together, seek to expel from within us all unworthy things which should have no place in the Temple. Let us on each such anniversary-occasion strive to reform our lives each time a little more, taking a step forwards on each such occasion, and through the ensuing year hold fast to the progress thus achieved - at least in our hearts. This is what would please our well-beloved H.P.B. most, and this is certain; for it is a following of the spirit of her wish that the date of her passing be held as a commemorative and inspiring anniversary. With these words the present writer closes this, a heartfelt plea, with a final reminder that as we have been told in perfectly clear teams, the Theosophical Society will live into the future and progress, as it was intended to grow, exactly in proportion as we, its

component elements, keep it where our Masters and our beloved H.P.B. left it when she left this Earth-plane. I am, my Brothers, in trust and affection, Faithfully yours, G. de Purucker. - From Canadian Theosophist, Dec. 15, 1935 --------------------THIS MIGHTY FLOW OF SPIRITUAL ENERGY - G de Purucker Following is an extract from a letter to the general membership off the T.S. (Point Loma) written, probably, in the late 1930's, and here reprinted from Messages to Conventions and Other Writings, published in 1943. It will be seen that what Dr. de Purucker speaks of is an ever present opportunity for all Theosophists, and particularly at this time. - Eds. The Theosophical Society was founded not only with the aid of our Masters, by their Chela and Servant, our be-loved H.P.B., but was an event of historical, spiritual importance foreseen and prepared for though centuries previous to 1875 - foreseen and prepared for, I repeat, by Intelligences loftier, far loftier, even than those high human beings whom we call the Mahatmas. To speak now in plainer and more undisguised phrases, I mean to say that the selfconscious spiritual Centers or Foci who brought about the founding of the T.S. because of the work it was intended to do in the world, are the Nirmanakayas - Beings, some of them, who at rare intervals take an active and individual part in founding and inspiring organizations of this kind, and then only because the need is unusually great, and the work to be done in the future of equal magnitude and importance. Definitely do I wish to point out to you that every member of the Theosophical Society whose mind is washed clean of personal desires and whose heart is true to eternal spiritual principles has the chance of becoming an individual, nay a personal, channel for receiving his portion, so to speak, of this mighty river of Spiritual Energy which I have mentioned before - but only so if he can make of himself an impersonal instrument in the hands of these Great Ones for the world's high good, for the world's spiritual and intellectual betterment. I want you, my beloved Brothers, to realize keenly and to feel intensely that what I am now telling you is not a merely abstract or impractical verity susceptible of being understood and valued by the rare and chosen few; but is a real chance, an actual spiritual opportunity, a possibility of quickened evolutionary unfolding for everyone. To my mind and I think I see aright - it would already be something accomplished of genuine worth if the Theosophical Society were to become merely an organization of decent and lawabiding men and women, who love their fellow-men and who love the grand Philosophy of the gods given to us by the Masters, and who yearn to disseminate, and do disseminate, this Philosophy among their fellow human beings. This alone would be something fine; but

it is not enough - not by any means enough - as I see the situation. Were it only that, I foresee that the T.S. would in time become at mere religio-philosophic association, a sort of excellent church doing a good work in the world, and living along in a more or less crystallized beneficent activity, until innate seeds of decay wrought their work of disintegration in the body corporate of the T.S. We must not allow this to happen. The T.S. must at all costs be kept a living body, a body constantly growing from within, from innate and inherent seeds of life and inspiration; and these seeds of inspiration and life must find their proper soil or residence in human hearts and minds. The situation is precisely and exactly that alluded to by the Avatara Jesus when voicing his profound yet greatly misunderstood parable of the Sowing of the Seeds - some of which fell on stony soil, some of which fell by the wayside, and a few of which fell into receptive and proper ground for fruitage. Do you realize, my beloved Brothers and Companions on the Path - do you realize, I say, and not merely understand it with the brain-mind - that even yet our connection with this mighty flow of spiritual and intellectual energy has not been lost; and that as long as this connection remains, the T.S. will be a body, growing and expanding and doing its intended work in the world, because vitalized with an ever larger current of the inflowing energy? If you so realize it, then you will likewise realize that this connection must not merely not be lost, but must be strengthened, reinforced, and multiplied so to speak, by other connections made by an ever larger number of individual Fellows of the T.S. with these Mighty Beings behind our Cause and our Work, who inspirit it and help it and are ever ready to fill it with newer life and fresher inspiration, provided that the Great Ones find the proper human channels through which to pour the current forth for the great benefit of all beings .... - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 31 ----------------------

FORGIVENESS AND KARMIC ACTION THINK of what the ancients meant when they spoke of men as the kin of the gods, the children of divinities, cooperating with the divinities in the affairs of the Solar Kingdom. It is true; and as time goes on and from manhood we pass into godhood, into becoming gods, our contributory efforts will be much better, much more beautiful, much wider, much richer, in every way grander. We are at present young gods at school, young gods at play. Our home is the Solar System. It is likewise our school-house, our university. This earth is, as it were, our school-room at present until we graduate to a higher school-room; but all our activity takes place in our university of life, which is the Solar System. How wonderful a picture! And I can assure you that every human thought is registered for eternity on the deathless tablets of time. A thought of mine will touch with the most delicate finger of influence the remotest star in the galaxy and will affect that star by so much, just as I am affected by all thoughts around me. Imagine two billion human beings on earth, the human race - that is, the imbodied portion of the human race. Suppose they are thinking, as men do, especially today due to

the rapid improvements of intercommunication; suppose they think all more or less at the same time about the same thing and pretty much in the same way - let us say it is a scare or a war - hysteria or a great hate or a great emotion; do you think that that vast body of loosened psychic energy is not going to strike somewhere? Of course it will. And here is where karman comes in. It is an old, old teaching, taught more often in the earlier days of the Society than now, that the disasters that afflict mankind are mainly brought about by man, his own evil thinking and evil feeling throwing into the astral light or into the earth's atmosphere a simply terrific volume of energy, of force. You know the old English proverb, which is very true: Curses like chickens come home to roost. They do not go and roost in somebody else's farm. Chickens come home. Thoughts of love, thoughts of beauty, thoughts of kindliness, benevolent thoughts and feelings; they likewise come like messengers from the gods winging their way back to us. Someday, somewhen, somewhere, we reap what we sow. If men knew and felt this great law, how differently would they not act towards each other! All feelings of revenge and hatred, and that diabolic fruit of self-seeking materialism that you must protect yourself at any cost against your brother; such things could never again find lodgment in men's minds and hearts. How true is the word of the old Hebrew Prophet: "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord." What a warning! Theosophy shows us why and how. The man who suffers an injury would do infinitely better to accept and forgive, to take it manfully; for his guerdon in recompense someday will be great, an injurer will become his benefactor; and if he stays his own hand, not only does he not add to the fearful weight of evil karman pressing on him, but he raises his enemy. An act like that is godlike. I say unto you, "Love your enemies." So spake the Avatara. "Do good unto those who persecute you. Give not wrong for wrong, nor hate for hate." When will men learn this? - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, March, 1942 ----------------------------

A Greeting to the Fraternization Convention TO ALL THEOSOPHISTS OF WHATEVER AFFILIATION ATTENDING THE SIXTH INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL FRATERNIZATION CONVENTION IN BOSTON ON JUNE 2526-27, 1938. Dear Brothers in Theosophy and Fellow-students: I have been asked rather earnestly by those having charge and duty of organizing these remarkable inter-organizational Fraternization Conventions to write at least a few lines of greeting and brotherly sympathy, and I gladly do this, and address myself to all, irrespective of Theosophical affiliation. It seems to me and has always seemed to me, speaking as an individual Theosophist and student of our blessed God-Wisdom, that there are few individual activities in the Theosophical world or Movement which are more creditable to Theosophists as such than are these Fraternization Conventions, in and during which Theosophists of different shade or color of feeling and conviction may meet on a common basis of amity, comity, and brotherly sympathy, and thus learn to know each

other better and to see the good in each and in all. Personally I have refrained, and very carefully and thoughtfully refrained up to the present, from taking part in these Fraternization Conventions, either by message or otherwise, lest such message or word or action of mine, showing sympathy on my part in these Conventions, be misconstrued into something which when all is said is farthest from my desire, to wit to influence anyone in any direction whatsoever. As a matter of fact I doubt if any word from me would influence anyone; but any such message or action from me could be construed possibly, perhaps, peradventure, as an attempt to influence. Yet I have never failed on every occasion which has offered itself to express my deepest sympathy for these Fraternization Conventions and to urge all who are interested in mutual Theosophical fellowship and who can do so to take part in them. It has been the feeling of the present writer from the inauguration of the Fraternization Movement that candor, frankness in thought and in speech, and honorable dealing, and fidelity to one's own Theosophical principles, should be the basis of mutuality, and the basis of fraternizing intercourse, and it is my prayer that in these splendid Fraternization Conventions this basis which I believe to have existed up to the present may continue. The present writer is one of the few I fear - I wish there were more - who feel that the separation of our beloved H.P.B.'s original Society into the different modern Societies, was a good thing, was furthermore foreseen and predestined to take place; and I can explain this as being my own feeling by making the statement that I think that the existence today of the different Theosophical organizations is not a sign of disintegration nor of decay nor of imminent dissolution of the Theosophical Movement as a whole, but that it is a sign of vitality and individuality and of the exercise of the latter by Theosophically free-thinking men and women; and I for one know no better way by which the Theosophical Movement could have been saved from becoming dogmatically frontiered by its own bounds alone and thus set apart among the world's Movements as but one more organization or body selfsatisfied with its own self-assured perfections. I wonder if I make my meaning clear. As long as the different Theosophical organizations exist, they act to a certain extent as checks on each other, and should be friendly critics of each other - a criticism not degenerating into mud-slinging or enmity, but on the contrary mutually stimulating each other to keep strictly on the now historic lines laid down by the Masters and our beloved H.P.B. There is an old proverb that says that from the shock of ideas springs forth light. And it is good that we Theosophists should interchange ideas, and one of the best ways to do this is by fraternization and Conventions working on the Fraternization basis. It is of course in one sense a tragic historic event that the original Society broke up into the different Organizations that now exist, because theoretically it could have kept utterly clean and true in its fidelity to the Masters' original program; yet the lessons that history teaches us show us on the other hand that differences of viewpoint are wholesome and healthy and that as H.P.B. nobly wrote in her First Message to the American Theosophists in 1888: "Orthodoxy in Theosophy is a thing neither possible nor desirable. It is diversity of opinion, within certain limits, that keeps the Theosophical Society a living and a healthy body, its many other ugly features notwithstanding. Were it not, also, for the existence of a large amount of uncertainty in the minds of students of Theosophy, such healthy divergences would be impossible, and the Society would degenerate into a sect, in which a narrow and stereotyped creed would take the place of the living and breathing

spirit of Truth and an ever growing Knowledge." To my mind these are some of the wisest words that H.P.B. ever wrote, and I believe they were not merely wise but prophetic. Hence it is, as should be clear enough from the dictation of these lines, that the present writer is one of those who consider, as stated above, that the separation of the original T.S. into the different Movements was a good thing - good for the reasons above named, although, as also above stated, because of the weakness of human attributes and the tendency to degenerate into sectarian orthodoxy it was from that standpoint a pitiful thing. Let us, Theosophists all, of whatever affiliation, look at the situation in the Movement as it exists, and by earnestly striving to be brotherly and kindly towards each other, make the world respect us as Theosophists because showing to the world that we can at least meet in friendly conclave upon the basis of the blessed God-Wisdom common to us all. I do not believe and have never believed and have often proclaimed my disbelief in this point, that the breaking up of H.P.B.'s original T.S. into what are now the later Societies, was a bad thing or a sign of impending dissolution; but on the contrary believe, and have always so stated in public, that having in view the weaknesses of human nature and its proclivities to dogmatic orthodoxy, it was a good thing, and that it was foreseen by the Masters, if not actually engineered by them. There are few better checks on the different Theosophical organizations today than the very existence of these different Theosophical organizations watching each other carefully, and, if they have any sense at all and good Theosophical fellowship at all, learning from each other and making each desirous to avoid Theosophical wrong-doing and lapses into the faults against which the Masters and H.P.B. have warned us. Dear Companions in Theosophy all, accept the assurance of my heartiest sympathy, and although I personally very carefully refrain from taking any part in these Fraternization Conventions, any work which tends to bring Theosophical thinkers together on a basis of mutual fellowship for the increase of a better understanding has my instant and profound sympathy. May your deliberations be governed by the spirit of Truth and be along the lines laid down by our beloved H.P.B. I am, dear Brothers all, Fraternally and faithfully yours, G. de Purucker - Theosophical Forum, August, 1938 -----------------------

[[ While the following introductory remarks to a convention address are signed "Eds." - G. de Purucker was the Editor of Theosophical Forum, and thus they no doubt illustrate his own ideas, if not written by him. - Digital Ed.]]

THE CHAIRMAN'S ADDRESS AT THE THEOSOPHICAL FRATERNIZATIONCONVENTION [The Editors of THE THEOSOPHICAL FORUM believe that they will have the

backing of all true Theosophists who are faithful to Theosophical principles rather than to ordinary worldly affairs, in commending the many finely fraternal, thoughtful, and even wise remarks or observations made by the Chairman of the recent Theosophical FraternizationConvention held in Buffalo on June 27th and 28th, as found in the Chairman's Address, which is reproduced here-under. Yet one feels bound to point out as a kindly suggestion, or warning, that in the judgment of the Editors of this magazine, these International Theosophical Fraternization-Conventions will not fulfil the higher purposes for which they exist, and on which so much Theosophical devotion and care have been lavished, if these Conventions to take place in the future become merely meetings of amiable ladies and gentlemen who are more concerned with the forms of amity and comity - excellent as these are in themselves and necessary also - than with the bringing of Theosophists of different bodies together at stated intervals in order that they may learn to understand each other better, and thereby, in degree at least, bring about the much-to-be-desired destruction of suspicion, dislike, and mud-throwing. These International Theosophical Fraternization-Conventions can do really wonderful work in acquainting the members of different Theosophical organizations with each others' good points, and with the virtues, latent or active, that all individual Theosophists have as individuals; and this really, expressed thus succinctly, THE THEOSOPHICAL FORUM feels to be the main purpose of these hitherto very successful fraternization-gatherings. There is always a danger of becoming too diffuse and too vague, and, because of the very fear of stepping on sensitive toes, of becoming so indifferent to Theosophical principles and teachings themselves, as to lose sight of the very purpose for which Fraternization was originally begun. It is indeed not easy nor pleasant to make a single comment which might appear to be critical of efforts of high-minded Theosophists to arrive at a better mutual understanding; but one wonders whether simple geniality and mutual amiability in deportment as amongst Theosophists, good as these things themselves are, can bring about that mutual respect founded upon deep convictions of differing minds, which alone, one submits, will achieve the purpose in view. As our beloved H. P. B. pointed out in one of her Messages to the American Theosophists: "... It is diversity of opinion, within certain limits that keeps the Theosophical Society a living and a healthy body, its many other ugly features notwithstanding. Were it not, also, for the existence of a large amount of uncertainty in the minds of students of Theosophy, such healthy divergencies would be impossible, and the Society would degenerate into a sect, in which a narrow and stereotyped creed would take the place of the living and breathing spirit of Truth and an ever growing Knowledge." These words, written in 1888 by H. P. B., are as true now as they were then; and it does seem to THE THEOSOPHICAL FORUM that Theosophists should understand that it is not differences of honest conviction or of opinion which we should destroy, because these have their great value. We should try to respect each others' convictions; and this can be done only when these convictions are openly and mutually stated, and changed for something better when the better can be shown or proved to exist. In other words, an amiable ignoring of fundamental divergences of conviction, and equally amiable but diffuse and vague ideas of universal brotherhood, may enable kindly men and women to meet together in temporary amity and comity; but will not, one fears,

give birth to that wholesome and vigorous interchange of differing views, which is the very foundation of genuine mutual respect and of lasting friendship. It does seem to THE THEOSOPHICAL FORUM, whose sympathies are entirely with the International Fraternization-Conventions, that these meetings, and the deliberations which then take place, should be specifically and technically Theosophical, with an emphasis on the archaic Wisdom of the Gods throughout, and with only incidental attention paid to other lines of thought, or movements, which, however fine in themselves, are not technically Theosophical. One may sum up the above remarks by stating that THE THEOSOPHICAL FORUM holds with conviction to the original Theosophical platform as laid down by the Masters and H. P. B.; and can see no reason why Theosophists, however much they may differ in individual convictions or in lines of teaching, cannot meet on those grounds of common agreement which derive in unbroken line to all of us from H. P. B.'s work, from her platform, and hence from the Masters and herself. These Theosophical Fraternization-Conventions should be encouraged; and nothing in the foregoing remarks is to be misconstrued as being unfriendly or hypercritical, but solely as the pointing out of one of the dangers which, because of their somewhat intangible character, may insinuate themselves into these fine efforts, and therein strike roots before their dangerous presence is discovered. - EDS.] (Theosophical Forum, October, 1936) ---------------

IN THE FUTURE . . . A SPIRITUAL BROTHERHOOD [Extracts from an address at the afternoon session of the Centennial Conference, London, England, June 21, 1931. This conference was the centenary commemoration of the birth of H.P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and was an endeavor to make the year a memorable one for the Theosophical world by inviting representatives of all the different Theosophical Societies to come together in friendly conference, a rather daring and startling idea at that time. A. Trevor Barker, editor and compiler of The Mahatma Letters, and then President of the English Section, T.S. (Point Loma), was the Conference convener. Among officials of the Theosophical Society (Adyar) were the General Secretaries of the T.S. in England, Ireland, Russia, Hungary, Austria, Spain, as well as representatives from Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Rumania, Germany, Switzerland; also Dr. & Mrs. Arundale, Mr. E.L. Gardner, Mr. J.W. Hamilton-Jones, President, Phoenix Lodge, London; Mr. D.N. Dunlop (Anthroposophical Society, Gen. Sec.); Mr. R.A.V. Morris, Miss Maud Hoffman and Mr. H.J. Strutton (Independent, of England), the latter, Editor of The Occult Review. Representing the T.S. (Point Loma), in addition to its Leader, Dr. de Purucker, and its Secretary General, Dr. J.H. Fussell, and the Leader's secretary Miss Elsie Savage, were Mr. & Mrs. Barker, Dr. Kenneth Morris (President, Welsh-Section), Mr. Arie Goud and Mr. Jan H. Venema (President and Vice-President, Dutch Section); Dr. Osvald Siren, from Sweden, and Mr. and Mrs. H. Norman, from Ireland, and others. - Eds.] In the future, and I see it clearly - no, not by any psychic vision, I do not indulge in

that - but my logic, my instinct, my spiritual feelings, tell me that in the future the Theosophical Movement will be once more a unified organism, somewhat changed it may be from what it was in the days of our beloved H.P.B., but with her teachings as the foundation of its life and its activity, and with the same policy guiding its destiny. I yearn to see this accomplished in my own lifetime, if I can bring it about. This basis of mutual understanding and of a common fellowship I do not want to have written, I do not want to see it set forth in black and white on paper. I want it based on the mutual understanding and tacit acceptance of genuine Theosophists and honest men, and to have it clearly understood that any man, or any one of the component Theosophical Societies will be free to withdraw from such association at any moment when it should please them to do so. I yearn to see this Spiritual Brotherhood that I speak of composed of all the Theosophical Societies in the world, and all working together for a common end, confessing by their action of unification and by the doctrines which they teach that they believe in the brotherhood which they preach. This is not an unattainable ideal which lies beyond the bounds of possibility. It is easily to be brought about, and by the only way which is practical and practicable: Change men's hearts and minds to forget the opinions which they cherish so dearly, and to consent to work on the basis of the essential spiritual realities of life which we all acknowledge as fundamental, essential Theosophy. That is what I want, and I believe that the members of the Adyar Society and that the members of the United Lodge of Theosophists and that the members of all the various different Theosophical bodies, all have pretty much the same hope and ideal latent in their souls. I know that they all feel that they are working for genuine Theosophical principles, and I hope that I am large-hearted enough and broadminded enough to realize that they have as much right to their opinions and feelings as I have to mine; and I hope that they are broad-minded enough to know that we all are brothers, fellow-Theosophists, every Society having its own difficulties, its own problems, and its own line of work in the world. Do you know that the Path to the Heart of the Universe is different for every living entity, and yet that all those paths merge into One? Each man must tread his own evolutionary path, which in the world's foolish view means that in his ordinary brain-mind way each man must hold fast to his own opinions. But verily this is a mistaken view. Opinions! It is opinions that separate men in politics, in religion, in all the ordinary affairs and avocations of human life. It is so, alas, even in our own Theosophical Movement; it is so in religious and philosophical societies everywhere. Men worship opinions instead of realities. I know indeed that all these various Theosophical societies have their respective and differing opinions; but I also know that each one is pursuing its own line of work and is, I believe, trying to do good in the world; and I also know that each one of them, as well as every individual composing their respective fellowships, is following its or his own pathway to the Heart of the Universe. Let us then remember this great truth. - Eclectic Theosophist, Jan. 15, 1974 -------------------

"GOD" - G. de Purucker "The Occultist sees in the manifestation of every force in Nature, the action of the quality, or the special characteristic of its noumenon; which noumenon is a distinct and intelligent Individuality on the other side of the manifested mechanical Universe." [SD]I,493 Further, Esotericists, whether of the Occident or of the Orient, fall into the common error, due to the religious and scientific miseducation hinted at above, of making too radical a distinction between these two parts of the Cosmic Life and Cosmic Structure; and of course this is very understandable, because it is obvious that there is an enormous difference between the automobile and the man who drives it, or between the locomotive engineer and the locomotive itself. But it is just here, and precisely on this point, that arises the difficulty just spoken of. In the Universe, or in any part or portion thereof, it is utterly erroneous to make such a distinction as that just outlined between the driver of an automobile and the machine itself; and here is just where the mistake was made which brought about the birth of materialistic philosophies, and of those particular religions which teach an extra-cosmic God working upon matter as his creature, and all the train of attending intellectual, philosophical, religious, and scientific difficulties that have followed thereupon. All this is too materialistic and too mechanical, and is utterly at variance with the spirit of the Esoteric Philosophy, the archaic Wisdom of the Gods. There is no such sharp distinction in space and in time between the spiritual Mechanicians and the mechanism in which the mechanician lives and works, and which mechanism is the mechanician's vehicle or body of expression. There are no such extra-cosmic gods anywhere - a statement which becomes amply clear when one realizes that whatever inspirits and invigorates a Universe, or any smaller component factor of the said Universe, lives in the said Universe and works through it, precisely as the spirit and mind and Psychical apparatus and other forces and substances and functions of the human being form one complex and composite whole working through the astral-vital-physical bodies. The above point is of such extreme importance, that one should dwell upon it with emphasis, for this teaching in itself is a master-key. - From Esoteric Teachings, Vol. V, p. 4 -------------------

TRANSACTIONS OF THE POINT LOMA LODGE VII Good and Evil [The above subject came up for discussion at several meetings of the Lodge, and as the question of 'Good and Evil' is a very important one, and the teachings concerning it such as should be clear in the minds of all students, it was thought that our readers would

like to have included in one issue the contributions made by Dr. de Purucker on these several occasions. - EDS.] I. G. de P. - In a recent meeting of this Lodge, one of the speakers made the statement that all the forces and substances, energies and attributes, of universal being are in their essence divine. Now this statement, abstractly speaking, or absolutely speaking, if we carry our thought inwards into the very heart of Parabrahman, is true. But the statement as made is not enough. If it were sufficient in statement, then there would be no evil anywhere in infinity. In other words, there could be no division of high and low, good and bad, right and left - in other words, no 'pairs of opposites'- for all would be divine. It would be a corroboration of the unphilosophic chatter of some modern absolute-idealist theorists: "All is good" - which certainly is no truly philosophical statement. Let me tell you that while it is true enough that in the absolute sense of the statement, no particular objection probably can be taken to it - for there is the Divine, utter divinity, Parabrahman, the heart of it, and beyond and more inward still, which is the Rootless Root of all things and beings - but here we are speaking of Parabrahman, infinitude in its inaccessibly highest reaches, unattainable by any human intellect; the reference here is to infinitude, and show me a time when infinity changes itself into 'pairs of opposites' and in consequence undergoes manvantara on the one hand or pralaya on the other hand. Infinity means absolute, frontierless, beginningless and endless immutability in the sense that infinitude, as infinitude, never becomes finitude or limitation; but within infinity there are multitudes of worlds and of systems of worlds endlessly, for ever and for ever throughout eternity moving in evolutionary changes, and characterized by 'pairs of opposites.' So that there never is a time, ever and unto the utmost for ever, when everything, i.e., all infinity, vanishes into the heart of Parabrahman; because that would mean that infinity changes, and sometimes is in manvantara and sometimes is in pralaya. But these changes are predicable only of manifested things, and infinitude, as infinitude, never is subject to manifestation, for only finite things change. As long as infinity is, as long as eternity endures, which means endlessly for ever, 'good' and 'evil,' signifying 'opposites,' shall be the Universe's eternal ways; and right and left, high and low, and the endlessly differing contrasts of manifestation, and hence good and bad, shall equally endlessly offer their contrasts. There is a warning of importance that we must draw from this. Do not be deceived in refusing to accept it. There is good, endless good, but in the manifested states of universal being; and there is likewise evil, endless evil, but in the manifested states of universal being; and these in their complex and intricate combinations are the world's eternally dual ways. What are the Mamo-Chohans, those dread beings who preside at the pralayas, who preside in the material realms now, playing their parts in the Cosmic Drama, just as the divine gods play their opposite parts in the same Cosmic Drama? In this thought you have the truth, the two sides: darkness and light, right and left, good and bad, high and low, for ever and for ever and for ever endlessly in infinitude. Here is a secret that the Christians got partial hold of, a fragment of the occult teachings of the Sanctuary, and twisting it and distorting it, indeed caricaturing it, called one end of the contrast 'God,' and the other end of the contrast the 'Devil.' Such distortion is correct in neither of its aspects!

This contrast is simply the eternal and ever-changing structure of the manifesting Universes in utter infinitude, this infinitude being the playground, the scene, the frontierless theater, of Universes appearing and disappearing, because playing their parts as the Kosmic Sons of Light; including the Mamo-Chohans and their legions playing their own parts in constructing the material universe, and holding it together, guided nevertheless by the Sons of Light, and ascending from darkness into light throughout eternity, continually renewed by fresh influxes into the Kosmic Scenery as the gods pass onwards and upwards, and the Mamo-Chohans trail along behind them in the rear. Do you get the picture? The warning is: don't let your brains ever be twisted with the idea that it is at any time safe to play with evil, in any connection, on any occasion, in any way. Such play means going backwards, degenerating, joining forces with the Mmo-Chohans, the forces of darkness, of evil, of spiritual death. Light is light, and dark is dark - opposites. Good is good and bad is bad - opposites. Right is right and left is left, unto eternity. No wonder the Masters cry, the gods cry: Who is on my side? Make your choice. You are all free agents. You cannot play with the forces of Nature. Occultism is the weighing of your own soul in the balance of destiny. You will either go up, or you will go down. There is no other choice; and I think it is high time that these facts became better known. They are not a bit esoteric in the sense of being secret and told only to a select and chosen few. They are openly stated in all our standard books. These facts of Nature were the basis of the universal duality which formed the substance of the Zoroastrian system of thought, and of others. There is immense comfort and happiness and peace in understanding these great facts properly, because they bring intellectual harmony and spiritual illumination into the mind; and will someone explain to me, if only good is and there is no natural evil, how can evil exist at all? If you say that evil is but illusory, which is true enough when we understand what illusory means, this is not denying that evil exists, albeit it exists as an illusion. We human beings live in a world of maha-maya or cosmic illusion; and merely to call it 'illusion' does not annihilate that form of maya which we men call evil. Do you catch the picture? If infinity is 'good,' it is obviously infinitely 'good,' and then there is therein no room for evil and imperfection, and the cosmos-wide series of pairs of opposites and contrasts; and heaven knows that they exist! Be therefore on the side of the gods, the Sons of Light, of the Spirit. Go onwards and upwards: Excelsior, ever higher! There is our Path. But do not play tricks with your thoughts in this connection, for think what you will and say what you may, you are either on one side, or on the other.

II. G. de P. - After speaking a fortnight ago upon the topic of Good and Evil, I heard misconstructions of what I then said, and I thought it good to seize the first opportunity offered to me in order to say a few words to disabuse the minds of those who misapprehended what it was my intention to say. When I spoke of one side of the Universe as being evil, and of the other side being good, and of the interconnexion of these twain, which contrast each other and thus set each other off, as being the world's eternal ways, these were general statements, abstract statements, and had only an indirect although real enough application to human problems - human good and evil, and so forth. I had no

intention whatsoever to give utterance to the old Christian theological idea that there is an infinite personal God who is 'good'; and an infinite something or somebody which or who is evil, and which or who, if not the Devil, is nevertheless the Devil under another coat! No, that was not my meaning at all. Now, try to follow me in thought, not only in time but into abstract space, which means no particular portion of space like our Earth, or the planets Venus or Mars, or again the Sun, or the Polar Star; but space generally, anywhere, abstract space; and the same with regard to Time: no particular point of time like now, or tomorrow, or yesterday, or a thousand or ten billion years ago, or the same period in the future. But abstract time, any time, anywhere. If change, division, opposites, opposition, contrasts, light and dark, matter and spirit, good and bad, short and long, these and all other eternal contrasts, were to vanish from the infinite Boundless, then every thing, high and low, from spirit to utmost matter, would vanish likewise, because all the Universe in all its infinite manifestations - and I use the word 'Universe' here in the utterly boundless sense - is builded of these contrasts. We call that path or aspect leading upwards, the right hand, often also the side or path of light, of good, of compassion, of harmony; we speak of the other side or contrasting side, the side of imperfection, of constriction, of lack, of not yet un-folded attributes - in fact of every thing that is the opposite of the right hand, as the evil side of Nature, the dark side or the left hand. Now then, are these things which are evil on the one hand and which exist by force of contrast with the things which are good on the other hand - are these same identical things, I ask, eternally evil, eternally unchanged, for ever fixed in essence as evil? Obviously not. There is as it were a constant turning of the Wheel of Kosmic Life, of the minor Wheels of Cosmic Lives; so that the evil rising on the Wheel becomes less evil, less imperfect, for imperfection slowly passes into relative perfection. It is the imperfection that we call 'evil'; the relative perfection we call 'good.' This process has been going on from utter eternity, and it is endless. There never was a beginning; there never will be an end of it, throughout timeless Time, throughout spaceless Space. These two poles of manifested being - of manifested being, please understand - whether spiritually manifested or materially manifested, these twain compose the eternally Kosmic Dual. Wipe them out, and all manifestation would vanish, because then there would be no contrasts. Is, then, imperfection infinite? Where can you show me a place where manifestation - imperfection ends? I know no such place. It is, therefore, endless. Contrariwise, show me a place where light is not, where the other side, the other pole called the good, is not. Where does it end? I know of no such place. Thus the 'good' and the 'bad,' the perfect and imperfect, and all intermediate and relative degrees of both but never an ending to the perfect and never an ending to the imperfect - all exist within and through and because of that utter, ineffable, unthinkable Mystery which we men with our imperfect minds can refer to only in the words of the Vedic sage - THAT. Imperfection and perfection are relative terms, because there are degrees of both; and both are comprised in the encircling, comprehending, bosom of the endless fields of the Boundless. They are all children of the Boundless. Even the imperfect is manifested by the Boundless. This does not mean that the imperfect is eternally good, for it is not. But turn in the other direction, to the right hand. Look at what we call the 'perfect.' The mere fact that there is perfect, and the more perfect, and the still more perfect, throughout infinity, shows us that even what we speak of as the right-hand - if we make distances between

abstract points great enough - is a rising series of grades or stages or steps enlarging ever more to the right, and that these relative stages of increasing perfection we call 'good,' so that even that which is less to the right side we likewise call good. The same rule of thought applies to the left hand. What we call the highest imperfect, or the most perfect of the imperfect, is really divine to beings and entities so far more to the left, to the imperfect side, that by right of contrast, by right of evolutionary unfolding, of growth, of change towards the right, towards betterment, this less imperfect can be called relatively spiritual or divine. Thus there is no absolute dividing line between the right and the left. Now comes a point which is exceedingly important. Matter is not evil per se. What we call concreted matter is simply incomputable armies and hosts of monads aggregated together in compact order; and, as it were, when compared with us relatively wakened human beings these armies and hosts are asleep. Each such monad in its heart is divine, yet it is manifesting as matter. These are elementary thoughts, and yet they are a sublime teaching. One cannot therefore say that matter is essentially evil. It is merely less perfectly evolved or unfolded than is what we call spirit and the spiritual ranges which the gods occupy. The whole truth is really simple enough, but people become perplexed about it because of its simplicity. The ideas of Western minds have been distorted by the teaching that there is an infinite Mind, an Individual, infinite, without body, parts, or passions, without any qualifications whatsoever, and that it is essentially distinct, nevertheless, and separate from the things which this Mind creates - a perfect nightmare of theories illogical and unsustainable throughout. Now then, while it is perfectly true to state that evil, even cosmic evil, as we men speak of it, is imperfection, imperfection in growth - imperfect beings living in an imperfect state because of their imperfect evolutionary unfolding, of their imperfect development while this is so, giving constant hope to imperfect beings to grow better, nevertheless hearken: this does not mean that imperfect things or beings are essentially good. I cannot commit an evil deed, and cheat my brain into saying that the essence of the deed is divine and therefore I have done no wrong because there is no evil in the Universe. What I am trying to point out is that manifestation is the interblending of opposites; otherwise there could be no manifestation, which means limitations of all kinds of unfolding growth. But hearken also carefully to this: It is sheer folly for a man to accept and to believe that one side of the Universe is composed of innumerable hierarchies of bright and shining gods, who are our ancestors, the spiritual roots from which we draw our higher portions; and that all the other side of Nature, because of the law of contrast, does not balance or support the good side. In other words, I mean that there are evil powers in the Universe, evil forces: not absolutely evil, not essentially evil, not outside the womb of the Utterly Divine, but because of their relatively great imperfection they are distinctly evil to the race of men and to other beings more or less occupying our state on the Ladder of Life. Furthermore, for the same reason, there are localities in the Universe which to us are evil; they are true hells, not however in the Christian sense of the word, but globes so densely material that life or living there to us humans would be hell; and hence their influences on men are evil, and urge men to evil, for these influences are in large part the gross and heavy effluvia flowing forth from the dark side of Nature, and they are largely responsible for the temptations to which men too often succumb. Just precisely as it is our duty to ally ourselves with our 'Father in Heaven,' with the

divinities, our guardians and protectors whose strong hands hold us safe if we but follow them: in other words, just as it is our supreme duty to follow the right-hand Path; so on the other hand if we do not, and become negative and subject to the gross effluvia from the densely material spheres, then we shall as surely take the downward path - as otherwise we shall surely follow the path to the gods. It is these thoughts, originally of the Sanctuary of the Mysteries, which were taken over into some of the exoteric religions, such as Christianity, and often grossly distorted, twisted. But there is one point on which the Occult Teaching and Christian theology agree, for a wonder! Christian theology denies that matter is essentially evil. So do we. Even in the most hellish parts of the Galaxy, in its grossest and darkest spheres, and there are some that -well, if you knew about them you would not sleep tonight - even in those places, every mathematical point of the spheres and globes of which these places are builded, is as divine in essence as are the spheres of light in which the gods live in their realms. Hence, do not think that matter is evil per se. That would mean that from eternity evil is evil and cannot ever pass from imperfection into a growing perfection, in other words that beings cannot ever from evil become good. Evil abstractly consists of transitory states or conditions - however long it may last - in which monads pass during certain phases of their endless peregrinations upwards and onwards. Nowhere, therefore, is evil eternal because essentially unchanging; and nowhere is what we men with our imperfect intelligence call 'good,' crystallized in immobility and remaining there in such state eternally. Half of manifested infinity is imperfection, in its innumerably relative degrees; and the other half is perfection in its innumerably relative degrees; and there is no absolute dividing line between the twain. It is obvious, of course, that I speak from the standpoint of a man, and because of my humanity make my own dividing lines between good and evil. A god would make different dividing lines. A MamoChohan again would likewise make different dividing lines; but the rule as stated would be identic for all.

III. G. de P. - I should like once more to say a few words about something which I had occasion to speak of some weeks ago - twice, or it may be thrice. It was with regard to the esoteric teachings concerning the two Ways, the eternal Ways, of the Universe - good and evil. Now I have at different times said a good many things on this matter; but when I ceased speaking on the last occasion, I realized that I did not emphasize sufficiently one point, and this point was that when we look upon the Universe as Boundless Space, without frontiers or limits, then we always find that while in some parts of Boundless Space Universes are appearing and manifestation is going on, in other parts manifestation is disappearing - Universes are passing out of their manvantaric existence. As long as there is manifestation, there is imperfection, which is what we men call evil. Consequently, as we are now dealing with boundless infinity and eternity, it is perfectly correct to say that evil and good are the world's eternal ways; otherwise expressed, perfection and imperfection are in Boundless Space from beginningless duration, and will last unto endless duration, endless eternity. But this does not mean that there are two infinities, to wit, an infinite of perfection and an infinite of imperfection.

Obviously not. If there were an infinite of perfection, there could be no imperfection, no manifestation which is imperfection. Next, and now passing from the boundless spaces, let us take an individual. Outside of and beyond and within the Kosmic infinite duality, our minds oblige us to recognise cosmic unity, and it is out of this unity that the duality springs; the duality has its hey-day of manifestation; and then into the unity it vanishes again. This unity does not mean 'one,' because that would be the beginning of numeration which is the beginning of manifestation, and it would likewise be the same mistake that the Christians made, in imagining their infinite personal God. The 'one' I here use in the sense of the mystical zero, as H. P. B. employs it, signifying all-encompassing infinitude, from which the one, any one of the multitudes of ones, is born. To illustrate: Take any one of us, a human being. We are beings in manifestation, therefore are we imperfect, and throughout beginningless and endless time we shall in various hierarchies and in different degrees of perfection, or of imperfection, on lower or on higher planes, be running the eternal cyclical round of developing and of unfolding ever more and more. But that ineffable Rootless Root within each one of us, is the utterly Boundless. This is a very important point of thought. It is upon this thought of non-duality that was based all the teaching of the great Hindu Avatara Sankarachirya; and his form of the Vedanta - a word which means 'the real meaning of the Vedas,' i.e., of the books of Wisdom - was called Adwaita, which means non-dualistic, because his thought dwelt mainly on this endlessly Divine, the Rootless Root which is the core of the core of the core of every unit in boundless infinitude. Thus, then, strange paradox, so easily understandable and yet so difficult to explain: while the fields of boundless infinitude, or boundless space, are never empty of manifested, manifesting, and disappearing worlds, all of them are born from and return to that ineffable, unthinkable Mystery which we call THAT. THAT is not dual, and this is about all we can say concerning it. Hence it is not imperfect; it cannot even be said to be perfect; because perfection and imperfection are terms of human understanding, which means terms of an imperfectly developed intelligence - the human. It is beyond both perfection and imperfection. It is the ALL, the source and fountain-head of all the hierarchies of the gods, as high as you will; and of the lowest elements of the material worlds, put them as low as you like. It is the ALL - we have no words with which to describe it. The Vedic Sages simply called it THAT. It is not a God; from it all the gods spring. It is not a World; from it all the worlds come; and like the gods, they ultimately return to it. It is not personal, it is not impersonal, for these again are human words signifying attributes of human perfection or imperfection. It is beyond all of them. It does not ever manifest, because infinity does not manifest. Only things and beings manifest. Yet from It all beings and things come. It includes within its all-comprehensive bosom all that ever was in boundless time everlasting, all that now is, and all that ever will be in endless time, or what we men call the limitless future. It neither thinks nor does it not think, because thinking and not-thinking are human terms or expressions, and emphatically it is not human. It is neither intelligent nor nonintelligent, because these again are human attributes - godlike attributes on the one hand, and limited attributes on the other hand. As Lao-Tse said, imbodying the same thought: As long as ye have good men in the State ye will have evil in the State. Why? Not because of the presence of good men; but there can be good men only when we have bad men and their bad actions showing off the

good men by contrast. Do you catch this profound thought? As long as there is light, obviously you will have darkness. These things - light and darkness, are limited, however vast they may be, however small; and they again are not THAT, but are all included within THAT. THAT is beginningless. The gods begin in any one manvantara, and keep cyclically repeating their beginnings. The Universes begin, they end, and they repeat the cycles of manifestation throughout eternity, albeit ever rising on loftier scales. But THAT is without because beyond cycles. It is not an Individual; it contains all individuals. Any individual is limited, otherwise it would not be an individual. An individual is a being or an entity which we know by contrast with other beings and entities against which the entity is set. You could not tell one flower from another flower unless you saw the contrast of flowers. Individuality is a sign of imperfection, of limitation; personality a fortiori even more so. That is why the ancient Books of Wisdom state that THAT is neither good nor bad, neither intelligent nor non-intelligent; neither alive nor dead; neither long nor short nor high nor low. All these are attributes of limited things which we cannot predicate of the Unlimited Boundless. If it were long, however vast the length might be, it would have an ending and a beginning. Similarly with intelligence, kindliness, goodness, compassion, harmony - all these things are attributes of limitation, albeit of spirit. IT is beyond them all, encompasses them all, enwombs them all. From it they all spring; to it they all will return. I would not weigh so frequently and so heavily on these thoughts, were I not keenly sensible of the fact that they comprise questions of high metaphysics, questions of high philosophy, questions of high religious import which some day our Theosophical exponents will have to deal with. They will have to give an account of our sublime Wisdom to the keenest minds of the world. We shall be asked to explain our convictions, no longer to kindly audiences such as we gather in our halls and auditoriums; and we shall then need trained and polished minds, capable and capacious intellects, men and women fully acquainted with our sublime Thought-Wisdom, so that they can make statements in exposition which will have clarity, succinctness, and persuasive power to those who come to us and ask for light. - Theosophical Forum, September, 1936 ------------------------

The Guardian Angel One of the last addresses given by Dr. de Purucker in the Temple at Point Loma, shortly before removal of the Headquarters to Covina, California. I ask your very reverent attention to a profound and beautiful fact of nature. To me this thought is one of the most beautiful of our Theosophical doctrines. It is that of the `angels' guarding us, or what the Christians call the `Guardian Angels'; but this wonderful doctrine, which is such a comfort and help to men in time of stress and trouble, is no longer understood by the Christians of this day, because they have lost the original meaning of it. They seem to think that it is an angel outside of oneself deputed by Almighty God to be a kind of protecting parent over the child; and some Christians seem to think that when the

child attains adulthood the Guardian Angel departs. This doctrine of protective and guiding spiritual influences in the world is a very old doctrine of the Wisdom-Religion. It was taught in Persia, India, Egypt, amongst the Druids, in fact, as far as I know, everywhere. It is simply this: that there is in and over man a spirit or power guiding him, instilling hope and comfort and peace and righteousness into his mind and heart; and that he who is ready to receive this and does receive it will guide himself by the inner mandates, and do so openly. He will be more or less conscious of the companionship of the Guardian Angel, be conscious of this companionship as a helper, with him day and night, never failing, always guiding, teaching him to save himself. But the mind and heart must be ready to receive, otherwise the brain does not catch the guidance and the inspiration. What is this Guardian Angel? You may call it a Dhyani-Chohan. Our own particular technical name for it is the Sanskrit word: Chitkara: thought-worker. You remember it was stated of the great Greek philosopher, Socrates, that he was guided by his inner daimon, his constant companion, which in his case strangely enough never told him what to do, but always warned him what not to do. It is stated of him frequently when he was undecided as to what course to pursue, he would go apart and close his eyes and remain quiet, trying to free his mind from all the debris, claptrap, and noise and hurly burly of tramping thought, in other words cleansing and emptying the brain so that the Guardian Angel inside could penetrate into the brain-stuff. Such in his case was the Guardian Angel. Now what is this Guardian Angel? Is it outside of man? It is a part of man's spirit, pertinent to his pneumatology; not the human part but a part of his spiritual being. You can call it the Higher Self, but I prefer to call it the Spiritual Self, because the phrase `Higher Self' in Theosophy has a meaning containing certain restricted ideas. Thus, man's inmost entity, the Guardian Angel, this spiritual self, is like a god compared with the man of flesh, the man of this brain. Compared with his knowledge it has omniscience; compared with his vision it has vision of the past, the present and the future, which three really are but one eternal NOW in the ever present. This Guardian Angel will always strive and is incessantly striving to guide its wilful errant child, the man of flesh. There is the whole thing in a nutshell, and if you can make your mind pervious to this inner monitor, and follow its mandates, your life will be safe and happy and prosperous. Of course, you have to go through whatever your karman has for you, that is, whatever you have wrought in the past; it will have to work itself out. If you put your finger in the fire, it will be burned. If you catch your foot in the machine it will be crushed. But the inner warrior, the Guardian Angel, once you come into its fellowship, in time will prevent your putting your finger into the fire, or placing your foot where it could be crushed. As for myself, my own life has been saved six times by this, and I know whereof I speak. And I only blame myself for not having begun sooner as a younger man to try to cultivate and to try to bring about an even closer consciousness or self-realization of this wonderful guide, this divine spark, this spiritual self in me: the very stuff of divinity. Compared to me my Guardian is an angel, a god. The only difference between the ordinary man on the one hand and the Christ-man and the Buddha-man on the other is this: that we ordinary men have not succeeded in becoming absolutely at one with the Guardian Angel within, and the Buddhas and the Christs have. The Buddha or Christ is one who has made himself, his whole being, his heart, so pervious to the entrance of the Guardian Angel within him that that Guardian Angel within him has actually imbodied himself, so that the lower man is scarcely any

longer there: it is then the Guardian Angel that speaks with the lips of flesh, it is the Bodhisattva, the inner Christ. These are some of the forgotten values in human life, and I know no values greater than these two things. First: you are one with the universe, one with divinity, inseparable from it. Then it does not much matter what happens to you. Whatever comes is a part of the universal destiny. You become filled with courage and hope and peace. And the other forgotten value is what I have just called the Chitkara. Let that Guardian Angel live in you, and speak through you, and as soon as may be. I speak what I know, not only with regard to saving from trouble and from peril, but from dangers of all kinds. It will instil peace and comfort and happiness and wisdom and love, for all these are its nature. These things are especially needed in the world today by poor mankind, most of humanity feeling today that all the trouble in the world has happened by chance, that there is no way out except by a lucky fluke of fate. That is all tommyrot. This world is a world of law and order, and if we break these rules of law and order we suffer. Oh, that man would realize these simple verities of Universal Nature! They are so helpful. They give meaning to life and inject a marvelous purpose into it. They give incentive to do our jobs and to do them like men. They make us love our fellow-men, and that is ennobling for us, an ennobling feeling in anyone; for it is obvious that the man who loves none but himself is constricting his consciousness into a little knot, and there is no expansion or grandeur in him; whereas the man who loves his fellowmen and thereby begins to love all things, both great and small - his consciousness goes out, begins to embrace, comprehend, to take in all. It becomes finally universal feeling, universal sympathy, universal understanding. This is grand, and this is godlike. - Theosophical Forum, Nov., 1942 -------------------------------

MORE ABOUT HEALING - G. DE PURUCKER BEING whole, and being healed or well - in other words, being whole and in health, or `wholth' - mean the same thing; the two words, health and wholeness, come from the same root. "Thy knowledge hath made thee whole." Pistis, [greek] translated `faith' - a word which has been so badly understood: it means the inner conviction of cosmic verities, knowledge of things unseen; and when a man knows, he needs no further proof. Proof is the bringing of conviction to the mind. When you have it, you look upon proof as superfluous. When a man is whole, he is well, he is healed; and this more than anything else is the work of the Theosophical Society, spiritually, morally, and intellectually speaking: to make men whole, to make every one of the seven principles in the constitution of the normal human being active, so that there shall be a divine fire running through the man, through the spiritual and intellectual and psychical and astral and physical - and best of all for us humans, the moral, the child of the spiritual. Then we are whole, we are in health,

for our whole being is in harmony. Now then, is it not true that the work of the Theosophical Society is so to change the hearts and minds of men that their lives shall be changed, and therefore the lives of the peoples of the earth? What is this but healing at its roots instead of healing the symptoms? The god-wisdom goes to the very root of the disease, and cuts it; and the successful Theosophist is not he who can preach the most and say the most in the most fascinating way, but he who lives his Theosophy. "Theosophist is who Theosophy does." You remember - I speak of the Christian New Testament because it is so familiar to all Westerners - you remember the accounts therein given of acts of healing done by the Avatara Jesus. You will find exactly similar tales in all the different religions or philosophies of the world, ancient and modern. Why, even among the Pagans in the Temples of Aesculapius there were patients who came and slept there for a night, and were healed, healed in the morning. The common report said: "healed by the God." The actual truth was: "healed by the conversion within," not the conversion of the brain-mind thoughts but the conversion of a life: a life turned upwards instead of turned downwards. And the grateful sufferers now healed of their troubles put up ex voto offerings on the walls of the temples of Aesculapius, with carven or engraven images of the part or parts cured: a head, a leg, an arm, a liver, a heart, or what not - an eye, an ear, a nose or mouth, as mute witnesses or testimonials: "I am healed." Why, of course, such things happen, have always happened, and everywhere. But this is the case of those who heal themselves by becoming whole - this one thing. When we speak of the work of healers working upon others, that is different; and that healing which is done by the transference of vitality from a healthy clean body, from a man or woman with a healthy, clean mind, is good and right, and there is no harm in it. As the Christian New Testament has it, the Master Jesus said: "Virtue (the Greek word means strength or power) hath gone out of me." Virtue - the Greek word here is dynamis, [greek script], and the word of the English translators, `virtue,' while etymologically fairly correct as giving the same sense, in its modern connotation utterly fails to convey the notion of strength or power leaving Jesus, i.e., life-force, vitality. From this Greek word dynamis, we have the many words in modern European tongues, like `dynamic,' `dynamo,' `dynamite.' "Virtue hath gone out of me" - the vitality, the sympathy, passed over, and the teacher felt the loss. A healer can only heal by giving of himself; and see how wonderfully the old truth applies even here: by giving of yourself to others. Then another thought - and I speak of it because it is rather important in this connection. I have heard it said by those whose hearts are harder than their heads: "Lo, behold, a Theosophist and ill, sick, ailing, wretched, cannot even do a full man's work in the world. His karman, let him work it out!" Of course, but you are not the person to tell any other person when the karman is worked out. Your duty is to help, and leave to nature the healing processes, and it is an awful cruelty to say of any other - Theosophist or not - that because he is ill and suffering, his sin has found him out. True, but it is not for us to sit in judgment. Let us again remember the words of the Master Jesus, after healing by transferring abundant spiritual vitality: Go thou and sin no more. For thy sin wrought thy disease upon thee. Yes, and because we suffer now is no proof that in this life we have done the sin that has brought it upon us. It may have been ages in the past, and only in this life when the man or woman needs more than ever before the vitality and the strength and the health to

go forwards, his sin hath found him out, and taken this form. Learn the moral in this, for your sin will find you out in this or in some later life; and better to have the disease out at once than to dam it back to come out in some future life when you would wish then that you had suffered from, had got rid of, the poison in the former life, and had done with it. Yes, I for one - I speak for myself - but I for one had liefer die when the disease is coming out, if it cannot be healed, than to dam it back by black magic and store it up for some future day when I shall need every ounce of my power and strength and health to achieve. It is not for us to judge another, and to say his sin hath found him out. We know it, but that is no way to help him. It is not encouraging, it is not kindly, it is not generous, and for all we know from our viewpoint it may not be true. Abstractly it is. A chela does not become a chela because of his body. He becomes a chela because of the rapidly evolving inner man, the emotional, mental, and spiritual parts of him. The genius, an ordinary genius in human life, is not a genius because his body is spiritually evolved, a relatively perfect physical frame. As a matter of fact, look at the annals of history, and you will find the almost astounding fact that the majority of geniuses have been born in enfeebled bodies, often sickly ones, sometimes actually decrepit, cripples and what not. But the flaming fire of genius within, aye! - it was that which actually crippled the body, deprived it of the life-forces which would have builded it up, which were gathered up into the soul to feed the soul. Sometimes gross, robust physical health is actually a deterrent to inner growth because the physical forces of life are so strong, they act as a heavy veil around the soul. [The above remarks by Dr. de Purucker were given on the occasion of a recent meeting of the Point Loma Lodge, during which this topic was discussed. Those interested in its subject are referred also to the editorial in the June THEOSOPHICAL FORUM. As in the case of many other excerpts from the Leader's talks published from time to time, they are given here practically as they were spoken. - EDS.] [Theosophical Forum, July, 1938] -------------------

The Hierarchical Government of the Theosophical Society - J. Emory Clapp Those who were members of the Theosophical Society (Point Loma) during the early days of G. de Purucker's administration will doubtless recall that when he first elaborated on "Hierarchies" as one of the Seven Jewels of Wisdom, students generally found much difficulty in understanding the subject; and it is quite evident that even today our members experience the same difficulty. The reason for this seems to be that most of our members are not deep students and find it hard to get the spiritual point of view, as ordinary life is devoted almost wholly to things of a material nature; whereas Theosophical teachings or doctrines require an understanding of both spirit and matter, for neither one of these can exist without the other, simply because they are not two separate things but merely opposite poles of one and the same thing.

It is not the province of this article to enter into an explanation of the doctrine of Hierarchies as the works of G. de P. have taken up that subject most fully, especially Fundarnentals of the Esoteric Philosophy and, in more condensed form, his Occult Glossary. When we take up the matter of the hierarchical system of government, we need only refer to Messages To Conventions, and more particularly the address to the European Convention of 1932 (pp. 34-42). It is regrettable that more of our members do not make an earnest and sincere study of this remarkable book, for it treats most fully, not only of methods and policies, but also of the principles which underlie the policies and which therefore are really inseparable from the latter. Methods, on the other hand, involve only matters of detail and may be changed to suit the circumstances. Policies, as expressed by G. de P., are necessarily not only of long range, but unvarying in substance and principle, so that the policies of one Leader must be consistent with that of all other Leaders and indeed of the Masters also. That G. de P.'s policies were deeply involved in the matter of principle is seen in his plea to the Cabinet of the T.S.: "I most earnestly beseech the Cabinet, forever to continue the same general policies that I have inaugurated since I took office." We find one particularly illuminating statement on page 34 of Messages: "The very structure of hierarchical government is that the fire of life and of thought, i.e. the delegation of authority, exists from the hierarch or summit through all intermediate stages down to the lowest, and that each individual member throughout the hierarchy is an integral portion of the government of which it forms a part." Here we should note that the term `delegate' means to commit or entrust rather than to exercise authority, as most people seem to think. Committing or entrusting implies an acceptance of obligation of a voluntary nature to fulfil the matter entrusted; nor is there any implication of impelling those who are delegated. By the voluntary acceptance of the authority delegated, the delegate becomes "an integral portion" of the government with authority or power to act. To continue the quotation: "There cannot be a hierarchy without a delegation of authority from top to bottom, which is equivalent to a delegation of responsibility from the head to what men call the lowest integral unit of the hierarchy." Before leaving this particular statement, we would call attention to the reference to "the fire of life and of thought" or the instilling of spiritual inspiration into the delegate, something manifestly impossible by compulsion. Hence, from no standpoint can compulsion have any place in a true hierarchal system. There are some four or five other statements which greatly help to an understanding of this subject and as they need no further comment or clarification, we will let them stand by themselves. "No single individual of the Society is dispossessed of delegated responsibility and the prerogatives of individual initiative." (p. 39.) "In a hierarchy every individual is not merely an integral and component part of the hierarchy, but de facto takes his own individual work and is individually responsible therefor; and in a democracy it is exactly the same - or should be." (p. 35.) "H.P.B. came forth from her Masters into the world to do a great work; she was charged to found a Society, and this Society was originally intended to have as its fundamental principle of government the utmost freedom for every individual member thereof, combined with individual inalienable responsibility; because only in this manner can a true hierarchical government exist." (p. 37.) "We Theosophists are linked with the gods, I repeat it linked with the gods, and with

the hierarchical systematic organization, and it is our duty to recognize this fact and to obey . . . but to `obey' not as slaves obey, but as free men obey the dictates of conscience and the impulses to do noble deeds. Obey the Voice within! This is spiritual hierarchical government." (p. 40. ) "If the day ever come, my Brothers, when you find that the Leader of the Theosophical Society, or any President of any National Section thereof, becomes what the Americans call a `boss,' you will know that structural decay arid degeneration have set in amongst us. The very essence of the hierarchical system of our Masters' work is brotherhood, love, compassion, strong intellect and vigorous and alert discrimination, including the incessant stimulation of the spiritual and intellectual faculties in the individuals composing our body-corporate. Remember these words." (p. 39 - Italics mine - J.E.C.) "The government of the T.S. is this: Every National Section is autonomous under the provisions of the Constitution of the T.S. This means that it runs its own affairs as it will, well or badly. The Leader never interferes with the internal affairs of a National Section . . . Remember, Companions, you will never learn what responsibility is, you will never learn how to stand on your own feet, and do your own job like men, until you are willing to do it." (p. 20-1.) --------------"It is not bibliolatry based on our Theosophical textbooks which marks the genuine Theosophist. It is not shutting ourselves within the narrow and restricted bounds of egoistic and self-sufficient organizations which will prove those doing so to be genuine Theosophists, nor are they true to the teachings of the Masters and of their Messenger H.P. Blavatsky, who preach and teach Theosophy, but refuse to practice it. 'Theosophist is who Theosophy does,' once wrote H.P. Blavatsky, and wiser words were never written, mere brain-mind acquaintance with Theosophic textbooks does not prove the genuine Theosophist. The genuine Theosophist is he who has love for mankind in his heart, combined with a deep knowledge of the Theosophical teachings, and who carries these teachings into actual practice in his daily affairs. It is brotherhood: first, last, and all the time, that should be the guiding principle in life, not only of each Theosophist's own life, but of the policy guiding any Theosophical organization . . . . " - G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, p. 196. - From Theosophia, Sept.-Oct., 1946 ---------------------

"THE HILL OF DISCERNMENT" ALL truths are like diamonds. When cut and polished they have facets, each one such reflecting what is before it. For truth is comprehensive, not exclusive; it is a spiritual thing, and the spirit comprehendeth all. It is only the smaller things of us humans, and of beings lower than the great Cosmic Spirits, which are bounded by frontiers because of the imperfection of the evolutionary vehicles through which these great entities work. And we

men should bear this fact in mind, for it makes us reverent, and humble in the nobler sense, when we realize that others than ourselves may have a vision sublime of Reality. How great and how good and how noble a thing it is for men to dwell together in brotherhood. Each man is a revelation unto all of his fellowmen, for each one is a marvelous mystery, a child of Eternity and of the Infinite; and despite the imperfections of human evolutionary development, when we see the vision from the Hill of Discernment, we penetrate beneath the veils of the merely seemings into wonders ineffable which the human heart contains. In my own life it was a revelation when this great truth came back into my human consciousness of this imbodiment, and from that moment I looked upon my fellow human beings no longer just as men, but as wonder-beings from whom I could learn, learning from the least as from the greatest. And what I learned in brooding over this wonderful thought, taught me to seek truth everywhere; as much indeed, had we the eyes to see it, in the plant or in the stones or in the circling orbs of heaven, as when we look deep into the eyes of a fellow human being and see marvels there. What is this Hill of Discernment? It is one of the oldest thoughts that human genius has ever given birth to. In all the great philosophies and religions of the past, you will always find this wondrous figure of speech, this trope, this metaphor, this climbing the hill of vision; whether it be as the Jews had it, the hill of Zion, or after some other way of speech, the thought is the same. And the noblest expression that comes to my mind, the most graphic and the most profound, is that passage in The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett that Dr. A. Trevor Barker published, in which the Mahatmic writer speaks of that Tower of Infinite Thought from which Truth is seen. What, then, is this Hill of Discernment? Confessedly it is a metaphor; but what is it really so far as we human beings are concerned if not that wonderful organ within man's own constitution which we Theosophists call the Buddhi-principle, which is the organ of understanding, of discernment, of discrimination, of cognition of reality without argumentation. This organ of understanding for a man is that man himself in his highest, his link with the Divine. That is the hill of discernment within the man himself. The burthen of all the teaching of the Archaic Wisdom is simply that: Recognise yourself as an instrument of Reality, as one of its vehicles; ascend out of the miasmas and the fogs and the clouds of these lower planes upwards and inwards to rejoin in consciousness the divinity within, or the Atma-Buddhi as we say; and then all knowledge will be yours, all vision of Reality is yours at will. For this is the organ clothed with novehicle dimming its power. It sees Reality as it were face to face, because itself is the Reality. It is, as said, our link with Divinity, which is Reality, which is Truth, which is all Wisdom and all Love and all Knowledge. So this Hill of Discernment is within man himself. And while it is the same for all of us, for each one it is in a sense different. It is like the pathway to Truth: one for all, and yet differentiated into the wayfarers on that Path, who are themselves both the wayfarer and the Path itself. Man has no other means of attaining Reality except through his own power, through his own organ, through his own being. He can and does receive help from outside, help which is wonderful; and it is our duty to give and receive help. But the receiving is merely as it were the outward stimuli to awaken the inner organ of the receiver. This inner organ is not the deceptive organ of physical vision. Remember the story told in the wondrous Hindu philosophy: A man returning home at night sees a serpent coiled in the

path and jumps aside, and in the morning he sees it was but a coil of rope. So deceptive are all our physical sense-organs! The blind man cannot see the wonders of the dawning east. But even the blind man has an organ within him which if he can reach it needs not the deceptive organs of physical vision to see Reality. This Buddhi principle which is in us and which we may use, if we will, knows no deceits. It cannot be blinded; it cannot be deceived. Its vision is instant and direct; for it is on the same plane as Reality, and by opening up the intermediate channels between this our highest and our mere brain-mind, we inspire, breathe in, receive inspiration, and then we become like the gods. That is the Hill of Discernment, of vision, and therefore of wisdom and knowledge and love, perhaps the three most glorious attributes of human consciousness: to be lost in cosmic love, to be lost in the vision sublime which is wisdom, to be lost in the higher interpretation of the vision which is knowledge; religion, philosophy, science, three in one and one in three; and this is not a theological trinity, but unitary Truth. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, April, 1942 ---------------------------

Esoteric Hints on Cycles - G. de Purucker SOME days ago it was brought to my attention that a comment had been made by a new member of the T.S., to the effect that he could not easily understand from whom came our sacred rules of calculating cycles and time-periods, as for instance, the wellknown and very difficult time-periods used by the Brahmanas of India, and which are likewise ours. So intricate is what I have to say that I hesitate, and yet will do my best. Intricate because of the manifold ramifications into which Nature herself runs or is divided; although her heart is simple, and the rules upon which these very ancient calculations are based are likewise simple. KEY-NUMBERS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM These calculations upon which the Theosophical seer or prophet, as the ancients would have called him, may see the future if he is skilled and clever enough to do so, are not arbitrary. They were invented by nobody. They are based on Nature herself, and mostly on cosmical movements, specifically those of the planets. Here is the key which I will now give you, and attempt to explain in some detail. The secret numbers of these Hindu Yugas, which have puzzled the brains especially of so many mathematical Theosophists, lie in a combination of the year of Saturn and the year of Jupiter`s expressed in Earth-years. There is your key. The mistake constantly has been made by Theosophists of attempting to divide these numbers of the yugas by 7, and that is not possible, because the number 7 does not go into any of these key numbers without leaving a remainder. 7 is the keynote of our

Earth; 10 of the Solar System, and 12 of our Galaxy, which of course includes our Solar System, and the latter includes our Earth. The key-numbers are these: The year of Jupiter expressed in Earth-years is 12, i.e., 12 of our years make one year of the planet Jupiter. The Saturn-year expressed in Earthyears, or our years, is approximately 30. There are your two key-numbers: 12 and 30. Multiply these by each other, you have 360. 30 x 12 = 360. I want to call your attention to one important fact of Nature, suspected by the most intuitive astronomers, but none as yet has succeeded in proving his intuition. It is that our Solar System is an organic entity, an organism, in other words an individual as much an organism as is a man's body. All the planets of the Solar System, with the sun and our moon and other moons, are enmeshed, as it were, forming a celestial machine so that they move in rhythmical or harmonic sequences. It is obvious that if this were not so, there would be no sympathy and no symphony, no harmony, in the movements of the bodies of our Solar System; but these bodies would be moving helter skelter, hither and yon; and we know perfectly well that they are not. Our Theosophical mathematicians who have not yet been given this key have all been thrown off the track because of the fact that while the years of every one of the planets of the Solar System clearly prove that all these planets move synchronously together, as if they were enmeshed, wheels in a machine; yet the orbit of every one of these planets is not a multiple of some other lower orbital revolution or year. In other words, there is always, as it were, a libration, or as the astronomers put it - and this will illustrate - the year of Jupiter is really 11 and I think 88/100 of our Earth-years, not quite 12. (You can see all these figures in any book on astronomy.) The year of Mars is not exactly two Earth-years, but 1.88, as I remember. (I may be a little off on these fractions but they are unimportant to the point we are going to discuss.) Now here is what I want to point out: It is these fractions putting the orbital times of the planets off any exact accordance with each other, which is a proof of the theory; because this shows that while all the planets are enmeshed together as it were, working synchronously and harmonically as a machine does with wheels interlocked, yet each planet itself is an individual, and has a certain liberty of movement. Keeping in mind this essential liberty or freedom we can more clearly grasp the following points: first, that the Solar System is an animate organism guided by intelligence; and yet, second, that each one of the planets, although working together with all the others in harmonic rhythms and in coordinate times, has just a little movement of its own, as it were edging each year a little farther on; so that as time goes on, the pattern of the planets changes; and this introduces the varied fortunes and destinies not only of mankind and of the inhabitants of the other planets, but also brings about the karmic changes and modifications of the Solar System. I weigh heavily on this point, because it most important. I want to call your attention to a few facts to show you what I mean about the rhythms, to prove that all the planets by the annual orbital motions - in other words the lengths of the planetary years expressed in Earth-years - are organically connected together. Let us take the Year of Jupiter: Jupiter-year = 12 Earth-years approximately. Now mark: the Planet Mercury in one Jupiter-year has 48 of its own years, approximately, of course. 48 is 4 x 12. You get your 12 coming in here again. You remember that I spoke of the key-numbers as being 12 and 30 - or 6, if you like. *

Now Venus has 20 years (approximately) to one Jupiter-year. This 20 is not divisible by 12, but if you will take a longer cycle, say the cycle of 360 (18 x 20) years, then 12 goes into that 30 times doesn't it? Yes. Note that 18 equals 12 + 6 or half of 36, which is 3 x 12, and 36 is 1/10 of 360. I want you to see how the key-figures keep coming back, coming back. Every calculation you make in these interlocked planetary movements is divisible by 6 or 12, or 60 or 30 as factors. The Earth of course has 12 of its years while Jupiter has one. The year of Saturn is 30 of our years. Now 12 goes into 30 2 1/2 times. But that is not a very good figure, and we therefore see on working the thing out that we must take the larger cycle which includes both the Saturn-year and the Jupiter-year. This is the famous 60-year cycle known all over China, Mongolia, Tibet, Asia, all of Asia and of ancient Europe. What is this 60-year cycle? 5 years of Jupiter expressed in Earth-years. 5 x 12 is 60. Saturn's year, being 30 of our years, goes into 60 twice. So we then see, that Jupiter makes 5 of its years while Saturn is making 2 of its years. The proportion or relation is 5 to 2, i.e., both enter 60 without leaving a remainder. ------* "In all the old Sanskrit works - Vedic and Tantrik - you find the number 6 mentioned more often than the 7 - this last figure, the central point being implied, for it is the germ of the six and their matrix." - The Mahatma Letters, p. 345. ---------THE IMPORTANT 5040 CYCLE Now then, we come to "a very difficult point," as some of our friends are always saying! The ancients in my judgment knew of the planets Uranus and Neptune, but they did not include them in their astronomical works. We Theosophists know why. It would be extremely interesting, but it would take me a week to explain this why. I will merely add that all these astronomical ages - which is what these Hindu yugas are - all these astronomical cycles and key-figures, are based on the calculated key-numbers of Jupiter and Saturn, 12 and 30, as factors. Yet a very interesting fact comes forth. How many Jupiter-years does the planet Uranus contain? I mean, one year of Uranus comprehends or includes how many Jupiter-years? 7, practically exactly. How many Jupiter-years does the planet Neptune contain, in other words one Neptune-year? 14 Jupiter-years. If you are following these thoughts carefully, the conviction will grow upon you that the periodic times of all the planets are time-connected, connected by time-periods; and my own conviction is, although I never have had time to work this thing out, that some Theosophical mathematical sharp could go ahead and even find that the planets Uranus and Neptune would be included in still larger time-cycles. One of the most important cycles mentioned even by Plato in his Dialog called The Laws is 5040 years. This figure is remarkable for several features, amongst which is that it is divisible by 54 different divisors among which are the key-numbers I have been speaking of this evening, to wit 5, 6, 12, 30, 60, and of course 36, 72, and 360; but what is noteworthy about this cycle of 5040 is that it is likewise divisible by 7, giving us the quotient 720 - in which we see the key-number 72 again, x 10. Furthermore, this figure of 5040 is arrived at by multiplying by each other the simple arithmetical series of the first seven digits taken in order, to wit: 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 =

5040. This remarkable number or cycle, so specifically mentioned by Plato in another connexion, was of course known to the ancient astronomers, astrologers, and mathematicians; and by using this figure or cycle, we find that the year-period of every planet, whether the 7 sacred planets known to the ancients, or those including the others supposedly unknown to the ancients, to wit, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, used as a divisor will divide into 5040 without remainder. In other words, 5040 is a cycle which contains the planetary years of all the planets in the Solar System, and thus links them up through having as one of its factors the number 7 - a most interesting fact, and one worthy of study. THE FAMOUS BABYLONIAN CYCLE I wish to call your attention once more to this 60. Remember that it is 5 times the Jupiter-year, Jupiter-year being 12 of our years, and two times the Saturn-year, the Saturnyear being 30 of our years approximately. It is 1/10 of the Babylonian Neros of 600 years; and take the square of 60 and you will have the famous Chaldean or Babylonian Saros, 3,600 years. This cycle of 60 years is of course the root-figure of the famous so-called Babylonian sexagesimal method of reckoning, to wit reckoning by 60s; but as we know from Berosus, as he is called by certain Greek writers who have written about him and who have left us fragments of these Chaldean writings, the sexagesimal system of reckoning or of counting was an integral part of the same system that we know to have been common in Hindusthan since immemorial time. Berosus in the fragments left to us likewise informs us that the famous Hindu Yuga-figures, based on 4 3 2, were likewise as well known in Babylonia as in India. The sexagesimal root-figure of 60 is of course a factor of 4320 with various ciphers added according to the length of the cycle. One of the commonest timeperiods known in Chinese writings is the mention of the cycle of 60 years: so many cycles of 60 years, and so-and-so lived and taught. In connexion with the number 5, I would also remind you that the Latin lustrum was a period of 5 years observed by the Roman State and held very sacred indeed. They also knew of the cycle of 60 years, i.e., one Jupiter year times five. Furthermore, in India, the cycle of 60 years is constantly used in mathematical, astronomical, astrological and other computations, as they also use 6 and 12. When you look into these matters, the facts are so numerous, so scattered all over the face of the earth, and among all races of people and in all times, that finally as you study you are brought to the conviction that what we Theosophists teach is true, that there was once a Universal Wisdom-Religion of mankind which was universal over the earth. THE CIRCLE OF 360/? It is from Babylonia, but originally from India, that we of the West got our manner of dividing the circle into 360/? - each degree consisting of 60', the latter of 60". Does anyone know the reason why the Babylonians chose the number 360? Why didn't they choose some other number? I will tell you: The number 360 arises from an old Theosophical teaching of the ancient God-Wisdom of mankind, to the effect that the true number of days in a year is 360, the cycle of the seasons. But as the ages passed, and due to the fact that the Earth is an individual with a will of its own, it does things at times, not exactly disobeying the mandates of the system in which it is enmeshed, not disobeying Father-Sun as the Lord and King of his realm, but determined, as are the other planets, to move a little on its own. So that as the ages pass along, the mean of 360 days in a year for our Earth,

the daily rotation of the Earth making the day and night, quickens a little bit for a while, and the days become 361, and then 362, in a year, and then 363, 364, and now at the present time our year consists of 365 days and a fraction, 1/4. Then this libration returns to the normal 360 days in a year; and then the Earth slows down its rotational period, so that for ages - how many ages is a question that does not enter into the picture here - any one of our Earth-years is less than 360 days: 359, 358, 357, 356, until it reaches the end of that libratory cycle. Then it begins to swing back; and thus the Earth continues to follow this libration. That is why the Babylonian initiates, getting their ancient wisdom originally from India, divided the circle into 360 points or degrees; because in their Temple-crypts and Initiation-chambers they were taught that the true Earth-year consists of 360 units or days and it actually does. Thus the circle became adopted in mathematics as divided into 360 points, cogs, degrees - call them what you like. It is a wheel, a wheel of time, but applied to the Earth as it does actually. DAWNS AND TWILIGHTS But notice how the Earth-year divided into days is enmeshed again with the other planetary cycles: Jupiter-year 12 of our years, Saturn-year 30 of our years. 30 x 12 is 360. Marvelous that the number of days in our year is exactly the same as the Saturn-year and the Jupiter-year multiplied by each other. You know in the Jewish Bible there is a passage saying: "And thy year shall be threescore and ten" - 70. Well, actually this is an Oriental way - Jews were Orientals - of using a round figure for 72. You -------YUGAS Dawn Krita-Yuga Twilight DIVINE YEARS 400 4000 400 4800 300 3000 300 3600 200 2000 200 2400 100 1000 100 1200 SOLAR YEARS 144,000 1,440,000 144,000 1,728,000 108,000 1,080,000 108,000 1,296,000 72,000 720,000 72,000 864,000 36,000 360,000 36,000 432,000 SOLAR YEARS: 4,320,000

Dawn Treta-Yuga Twilight

Dawn Dwapara-Yuga Twilight

Dawn Kali-Yuga Twilight

DIVINE YEARS: 12,000;

---------------know how they make 72 out of 60, which is 5 Jupiter-years and two Saturn-years? What is 1/10 of 60? 6. Put down 6 for the Dawn, another 1/10 for the Twilight: 6 + 60 +6 = 72. In the same way you will see in the Diagram that there is a Dawn and a Twilight for every cosmic period; and the dawn and the twilight are in all cases of relative equal length, and in all cases are 1/10 of the cycle period. 1/10 of 4000 is 400 - the Dawn; 1/10 of 4000 is 400 - the Twilight. In the Treta-Yuga there are 3000 Divine Years, please, not our Solar years: 1/10 of 3000 is 300 - the Dawn; 1/10 of 3000 is 300 - the Twilight. The next is Dwapara-Yuga. It is 2000 Divine Years; 1/10 of that is 200; 1/10 of 2000 again is 200 the Twilight. And so for the last of the Yugas, the Kali-Yuga, 1000 Divine Years in length; 1/10 of it, 100 - the Dawn; another 1/10 -100, the Twilight. A shorter way, of course, is to take 2/10 or 1/5 to find the combined length of the Dawn and Twilight. OTHER INTERESTING FACTORS Now a further interesting thing about this 72: a human being is a child of the Universe, and being its child, its laws are his. Its life is his. Its pulsations are his. The rhythmic periods in Nature must therefore work through man. One of the greatest rhythmic pulsations in man is the pulse-beat. Do you know what the average pulse-beat for a human being is? 72. 72 beats of the human pulse every minute, or if you like, it is 60 pulse-beats plus the increment of beginning plus the increment of lapsing into the next pulse-beat. 60 plus 12; 5 x 12 + 12. You see how these numbers recur? 72 is twice 36. Well, now you remember 360 there, and 36 is 6 x 6. You notice how the numbers thus keep coming, whatever you do. 6 goes 12 times into 72 human pulse-beats in a minute. 6 x 12 is 72. Here is a very interesting factor. In enumerating the years of the different planets I intentionally did not speak of the Moon, for your minds are so enwrapped with the astronomical teachings of the West in which the Moon is not considered a true planet, that I did not want to confuse you. Yet so thoroughly does Nature work throughout, after the same laws, the same rhythms, the same principles, the same pulsing, that do you realize that what the astronomers call the minor Saros, that is the eclipse-cycles, the cycle of years in which the eclipses begin again and repeat themselves nearly as they were before, is 18 years and some 10 or 11 days? We can here drop the days. 18 years: 6 x 3, 12 plus 6, 1/2 of 36. I want to call your attention to these key-figures, which keep coming to the fore. Furthermore, this is not all. Do you know how many is the average number of eclipses in this minor Saros of 18 years - Solar eclipses and the eclipses of the moon? The average number is 72. Here is a very interesting fact. The sunspots, according to modern astronomy, come, or the maximum is reached, every 11 years and a fraction, 11 and 1/3 or something like that. But here again we must allow for librations; and taking everything together, all factors included, and the way the Solar System has all its bodies enmeshed together like the cogs of wheels, yet each having a little independent movement of its own, which in time changes the pattern - a very interesting fact is that the sunspots coincide with the perihelion of Jupiter. Now explain that if you like. In other words, Jupiter like all the other planets makes its annual tour or orbit of revolution around the sun, completing it in 12 of our years. But in doing so at one point of its orbit it is closer to the sun, closer than it is at any other point of its orbit. That is what they call perihelion, close to the sun. When the perihelion

of Jupiter takes place, the sunspots reach their maximum, roughly every 12 years, between 11 and 12 years. And it is a remarkable thing - I would wager almost anything upon it - that if we could collect the statistical data we would find that outbreaks of disease and other afflictions of mankind will coincide with these 12-year periods, sunspot maxima or minima. I saw a calculation of that kind some time ago in which it was shown that epidemics of spinal meningitis broke out at every sunspot maximum. In other words when the planet Jupiter was closest to the sun, every 12 years or so. Do you know in modern Western astrology it has been customary to speak of the planet Jupiter as the great benefic, and the planet Saturn as the great malefic. But I think that this is pretty near to being nonsense. I will give you one instance showing how this idea is a distortion of facts. I read some time ago a very interesting statistical discovery made by a French writer who showed that whenever the planet Jupiter was in its nodes as the astronomer phrases it, crimes of violence increased enormously. Whenever the planet Saturn was in its nodes, crimes of violence were noticeably few. Now that is easily explained. Jupiter excites, urges people to do and to move. Saturn calms, brings balance and steadiness, the truth being that every planet has its good side and its bad, every planet can be a benefic or a malefic, according to its action. This is true astrology, and all that we have been talking about is true archaic astrology or Theosophical astrology. THE DIVINE YEAR AND THE YUGAS I want to call your attention to the Diagram again: a Divine year is the name given according to this system of archaic calculating of time-periods to 360 of our years or Solar years. Therefore 12,000 Divine years in Solar years are 4,320,000. Made up thus: the Krita-Yuga of 4000 Divine years - 1,440,000 Solar years, with the Dawn and Twilight thereof - a Krita-Yuga is 1,728,000, (and isn't 1728, the cube of 12?). The Treta-Yuga is 3000 Divine years. Multiply this by 360 to turn it into our ordinary Solar years, and you get 1,080,000 years. Add on the 2/10, the Dawn and Twilight, and you get 1,296,000 years. Here on the Diagram you get this series of 144, (the square of 12). Isn't it in Revelation of the Christian New Testament that it is said that the sealed unto the Lord, or the saved, shall be 144,000 in number? You see here again the mystical figure, 144, that is the main point. You can add and take off ciphers according to the time-period or cycle you are discussing. It is the head of the series of figures that is important - 144. The square of 12, twice 72, 4 x 36, and so forth. So we go down to the Dwapara-Yuga: turn it into Solar Years, with a Dawn and a Twilight, and you have 864,000; then Kali-Yuga, the age we are in now called the Iron Age, adding to it its 2/10 for Dawn and Twilight, you have 432,000 years. This system, or mathematical calculation of adding an opening and a closing of every age-period or cycle which the Hindus call the Dawn and Twilight, is an extremely archaic method of calculating based on Nature herself, for she always introduces everything she does with a preparatory period, whether of time or phenomena, or both, or whatever you may be dealing with. All diseases come with the Dawn of preparation. Then there is the disease. Then there is the Twilight of the disease as it fades out. So to get the full time-period of the cycle you must know not only the length of the cycle itself, but its Dawn and its Twilight, its beginning and its end. You see, Companions, there are just simply so many sides to a study like this, you could go on interminably talking just as long as your recollection will bring back to you facts which you have garnered from Nature.

THE PYTHAGOREAN TETRAKTYS I want to point out to you what is called the Pythagorean Tetraktys. It was so holy amongst the ancient Pythagoreans that they swore oaths by it, and a Pythagorean would no more violate an oath sworn by the Holy Tetraktys than he would - it was an oath that simply could not be violated. Why did they think it so holy? They gave the answer: because it adds up to 10. It was 4 plus 3 plus 2 plus 1 = 10. What is 1/10 of 10? 1. Add 1 as a Dawn; add another 1/10 of 10 as a Twilight, and you will have 12. They sometimes figurated the Pythagorean Tetraktys as thus, one sphere, then two spheres, then three spheres, then four spheres. 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

1 plus 2 = 3, + 3 = 6 + 4 = 10. Don't you see the Pythagorean Tetraktys, 4, 3, 2, 1, in the Yugas in their numerical order of the cycles? The same figures, the same system of counting, the same fundamental idea. No wonder the Pythagorean philosopher swore by the Holy Tetraktys, because it was equivalent to saying, "I swear by Holy Zeus," as if he had said, "Father and Lord of Life, of whom my own life is a spark, truth of truth, and life of life, real of real," - it was an oath that no Pythagorean ever dared to violate. It was like swearing by one's own Higher Self. OTHER CYCLES Now, here is another thought. Have you been examining the night-sky for the last year or so? If so, you will have noticed that the planets Saturn and Jupiter have been in near conjunction for some time, and will soon begin to separate.* It was the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn which the ancients taught always began notable changes and events on our earth. (Elsewhere in the Solar System too, but we are more naturally interested in what is taking place on our Earth). Just when such a happening will come again, with the other planets as now they are, i.e., as they will be on May 11th, of this year 1941, would require intricate calculations. It may be thousands and thousands of years before the planets all return to the positions they now hold in the sky; but the two planets, Saturn and Jupiter, because 5 years of Jupiter equal 2 years of Saturn, will be, so far as those two planets are concerned, again passing each other in the same Zodiacal House, or in conjunction there, in 60 years: 5 years of Jupiter = 2 of Saturn: think it over, do not forget these key-numbers. There are almost innumerable cycles of varying lengths, and of greatly differing importance, which were known to the ancients as well as to the few moderns acquainted with esoteric chronology and cyclical computation. As for instance, there is the cycle wellknown in modern astronomy called the Precessional cycle of 25,920 years, divisible by many if not all of the factors or keys already alluded to, and which in its influence on the destiny of mankind is one of the most important. Then, there is the so-called great Orphic cycle of 120,000 years, which of course is obviously 1/3 of the still greater and immensely important cycle, because dealing with racial periods, to wit, 360,000.

THE KEY-NUMBER 72 With reference to the key-number 72, which itself of course is a cycle of varying length depending upon the ciphers added to it, the following series contains cycles, every item of which on the list --------* Actual conjunction was on May 8-11, 1941. Note that this talk was given in March, 1941. Saturn and Jupiter are now, August, 1942, rather more than one sign apart. Saturn and Uranus are now in conjunction. - Eds. -------is important and well worthy of study by those interested in chronological or cyclical matters: 72 x 10 = 720 720 x 2 = 1440 720 x 3 = 2160 - an extremely important cycle, this because entering into the computations of the precessional cycle mentioned above, for there are 12 such cycles of 2160 in the Precessional cycle of 25,920. 720 x 4 = 2880 720 x 5 = 3600 - a cycle well known to historians and chronologers as the famous Babylonian Saros, which again multiplied by 100 or 102 equals the racial cycle mentioned above of 360,000. 720 x 6 = 4320 - again a most famous cyclical key-number, well known in ancient Hindusthan and in Babylonia and in the esoteric or occult schools of virtually all Asia and ancient Europe, a cycle which with zeros added is an even more important human racial cycle than is the 360,000 above mentioned. 720 x 7 = 5040 - another extremely useful, interesting, and important cyclical period, with or without extra ciphers to define shorter or longer periods, and mentioned even by Plato in his Laws, as already stated. The ancient initiate-astrologer-astronomers rarely failed in their prophecies, for it was a relatively perfect knowledge of the inter-relations of planetary movements and of other cosmic time-periods, both great and small, which enabled them to predict with an accuracy of Nature herself events which they knew would take place because of their knowledge of what had taken place in other preceding cycles of time; and all cycles are repetitive, bringing more or less the same train of events or sequences as happened before, when these cycles begin anew. It should be noted that this is in no sense fatalism; for every cycle, although repeating itself constantly in time, due to what modern astronomy calls the irregularities in planetary and other celestial movements, is never precisely or exactly what the preceding cycle was; for every such cycle beginning anew its course always differs in less or greater degree from its former courses. - Theosophical Forum, September, 1942 ---------------------

HOW THE HUMAN SOUL RETURNS TO EARTH - G. de Purucker Talk given at the close of a study-meeting of the Headquarters Lodge, Point Loma, California, September 10, 1939. This talk taken in shorthand was not transcribed until after Dr. de Purucker's death. It seems especially important today as making clear that ethical and moral responsibility is rooted in the very fabric of universal being; in other words, that there is a scientific basis for ethics. - Eds. I have listened with deepest sympathy to the generosity towards each other's views which you have all shown in your study this evening. Let us all remember that knowledge is marked by modesty, because knowledge knows its own limitations, and therefore is never dogmatic. I have noticed also that you are patient with each other for using words in different ways. Your minds are not water-tight compartments which would not hold ideas of other people. Now in regard to this matter of `rays' or `waves.' We Theosophists of many, many years' study have developed a terminology of our own which younger students do not yet fully grasp. When they do grasp it they will see that it is good. We speak of a `ray' from the sun. The sun has been emanating countless rays through the aeons, and each such ray is a wave, an energy if you want to use the language of modern science, a language which will be changed in thirty years from now when scientists know more. This is one of the difficulties that a Theosophist has to contend with, to remember that he himself is using a highly technical series of terms which he and others like him understand, but which the non-Theosophist who has not studied Theosophy does not grasp; and therefore does not understand what the Theosophical speaker is talking about half the time. We should never forget that; and consequently when you people differ, it is not really about ideas that your minds are at variance. I would wager almost anything that ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is about words. Now I want to say, Companions, that I desire brief speech with you upon two thoughts. The first is about these life-atoms and reproductive germs and so forth. I do not think it is good to think too much about these things and talk about them too much, and I am always amazed to see the intense concentrated attention with which an audience listens to them. They may interest doctors; it is their job; but there are so many more and vastly more interesting things to study. Now in the first place, reimbodiment is not a haphazard thing, as of course every one of you understands. It is all done by the laws of nature, and by nature I do not mean physical nature, I mean it in the old occult way of speech. So that the imbodiment, the reimbodiment, of an ego takes place strictly according to karmic law, and karma means cause and effect, cause and consequences, the y following the x. If you do something, nature will react upon you for that act. That is karma. The reaction may come at once, or it may be thinly spread over millions of years. Who can say? It depends upon the originating cause. The reimbodiment of an ego, therefore, is just as much a fact of nature's laws and nature's actions and reactions as is the physical birth. The ego in the Devachan lives in an auric sphere as it were, an ethereal rupa. Its size may be anything. It may be co-extensive with the solar system. The probability is that it is, as far as mere physical extension goes,

infinitesimal, for magnitude has nothing to do with consciousness. Magnitude is a maya of our plane and of our brain-minds. However, the ego in its devachan enjoys blissful dreams. Then there comes a time at the end of long centuries, or long periods of scores of years, when the forces which had brought about this sleep and rest to the devachanic entity begin to weaken, to work themselves out. The devachanic sleep and bliss is fading gradually. But what is taking place coincidently? A slow awakening to a sense of consciousness of the old human earthattractions. These enter the dream-state of the devachani as dream-recollections of what it had been, and what it had seen and heard and thought and felt - beautiful things, however, because it is still in the devachan. Now these are the recrudescences into the consciousness of the ego of the tanhic elementals held in the ether-body of the ego. Hitherto the dreams of the devachani have been too high or too spiritual for these rather earthly things to have any effect on the ego. But as the devachanic dreams begin to fade, die out, grow darker as it were, these tanhic, these trishnic elementals begin to grow in activity in the ether-body of the ego, as I have already said. What does this mean? It means a thickening or a coarsening of that auric body, that higher ether-body; and slowly as it were the entity drops, is attracted because of his materialized body, downwards towards this sphere. It may take centuries for this to happen, or a few score years, according to the individual karmic case. Now then, to phrase it otherwise, there arises in the ether-body of the devachani a growth in memory of earthly things. Its own past life comes back into its recollection, very feebly at first, stronger as time goes on. In other words there is a thickening, as I have stated, a coarsening, materializing of this vehicle. This is the beginning of the growth of what we call the linga-sarira, the pattern-body around which our gross sthula-sarira, the physical, is builded atom for atom. Thus does the man reproduce himself from the last life consequences, karma. I have already said that magnitude has nothing to do with it. Let us suppose that the ether-body when this takes place is the size of an apple. After all, how large is a human life germ? But in this beginning of the linga-sarira there resides a growth potency - supply your own term if you do not like that, we won't quarrel about words - a growth potency, the same kind of swabhava, as we call it, which makes an apple seed produce an apple and not a rose or a strawberry or a banana or something else; that makes a plum seed always reproduce a plum and not some other kind of plant. In other words there is in this lingasarira the capacity to develop along its own karmic laws into the linga-sarira and the physical body of the man, the child to be born. But before this stage is reached, on account of the attractions of this ray descending from the auric body - call it a ray, call it a wave - on account of the attractions of this back to its familiar fields of life on earth, as it were a magnetic or electric contact is established in exactly the same way in which the thunderbolt will strike this tree and not that one. There is a reason for this. Everything in the universe works by law. There is no chance. The same principle of selective choice works in the case of the thunderbolt and in the case of the human ego selecting its own mother; not consciously in the way we might think it is done, but by a conscious human electricity as it were, sympathy, synchrony of akasic vibration. We call this a projection of the ray; and that is what I have alluded to in The Esoteric Tradition. Now here comes the point: In any human being there are innumerable multitudes

of life-atoms which are strictly his own atoms of life, life-atoms, jivas, originating in his own vital font or fountain, and looking upon him as their parent. Suppose we say, just as a speculation, because no one could say how many life-atoms the human body contains I doubt if the gods could - but suppose that we say a human body contains of these particular life-atoms a hundred billion. And after his death these become distributed among the two billion or so inhabitants of earth; so that when a reimbodying ego thus seeks its physical house or sthula-sarira for its next imbodiment it is sure to find sympathetic attraction to and therefore lodgment in any human body. This contact of the ray from the ego with the life-germ - germ if you please in the body of the two parents - is a contact with life-atoms that that ego used in its former body on earth. The thing seems complicate simply because it is new to most folk. And by the way, this is one of the reasons that explains what we call the fertility of races and the ability of some stocks of beings to cross, miscegenate, and others not. Now of course it is obvious that some family milieu, some families, would give an ego a happier home and a happier physical body than other human couples would. You can understand that, and it is the automatic endeavor, run by nature's laws, of a reimbodying ego always to seek the happiest home it can find. It has the instinct to do so. It does not do it self-consciously. It is nature that does these things, for such happiest home is for the reimbodying ego the line of least resistance. Remember, it is still in the devachan, and its spirit is not in full control. This is the reason why also - and this is a delicate subject, I hope you will forgive it - this is the reason for the moral weight of the teachings given to men and women to be careful in their relations with each other, for egos are attracted to both men and women in the manner that I have endeavored to describe, and they are attracted with tenfold force when a man and a woman feel affection for each other, if that affection be real. In fact a mere flirtation you can see to be wrong, because that sets up a kind of synchrony of vibration between the couple. I wonder if you see what I am trying to drive at. This is the way reimbodiment takes place. It is the reason, as I have endeavored to show in the E.T. and also this evening, why marriage is such a holy thing, and should be such a beautiful one; and why relations of any other kind are not only ethically wrong, but as you can readily see, against nature's laws of harmony. As a matter of fact, it is sufficient for a man and a woman to feel real affection for each other, especially if they have the chance to associate, for egos or these rays to be attracted to such couples. It is a very heavy responsibility that human beings have, and they sin against nature constantly through ignorance largely. The whole thing could be so beautiful and holy, and should be. And mind you, the egos find the best bodies and the happiest homes where the marriage of the parents is a true one. That is where the entities, the beings coming to life on this earth, have the greatest chance. It is the damnable, abominable materialistic science of the last hundred years which has brought such mischief in the world, and has brought about the conditions that exist in the world today everywhere, teaching men that they are no better than beasts, apes, of a slightly higher kind, and that therefore it matters not what they do, that the thing to do is to get and to hold. That is a doctrine out of hell. Once the moral law is lost from the conscience of man, civilization is doomed. - The Theosophical Forum, June 1944

(Eclectic Theosophist, No. 82) -------------

Hpho-Wa and "The Mystery" - G. de Purucker In the case of H.P. Blavatsky, there is one extremely important element of the mystery which surrounded her, and the process which took place in her inner constitution, to which we point only and then pass on. It is connected with a Tibetan teaching of the Mahayana School, which teaching is called the doctrine of 'Hpho-wa,' and has reference in her case to her intimate spiritual and psychological connection with her Tibetan 'Home,' but is of too sacred and esoteric a character to discuss in a published work. Mere genius does not show in any of its phases the extraordinary attributes of the spiritual and intellectual and psychological nature which H.P. Blavatsky possessed in common with all other World-Teachers. How often has she herself not set on record in her letters and in her writings, her own state of mind with regard to these matters, always , expressed by her with the utmost care and prudence, however, and always rather by hint and by allusion than by direct and open speech. Yet no one can collect these scattered references, often humorous, sometimes sad, reminding one of Jesus' cry in the Garden of Gethsemane, without feeling most forcefully that there is behind it all a secret carefully guarded as the most sacred and holiest event in her life. Yes, H.P. Blavatsky was a genius, but she was more, she was a human phenomenon of the most joyful and noblest self-sacrifice that it is possible to conceive of, yet a self-sacrifice withal, which, as she herself taught, brought her a joy and a peace that nothing else in the world ever could have brought to her.... - H.P. Blavatsky the Mystery, p. 26 (Eclectic Theosophist, No. 65) ------------------------

Is Hypnotic Practice Ever Justifiable? - G. de Purucker Question - After having unconditionally condemned some 90% of all hypnotic phenomena and practices, is there any justification whatever in at least some of it, primarily in therapeutics? Such things as local anesthesia by hypnotism, prevention of birth-pains by the same means, seeming cure of small psychological defects and bad habits. This is at present done on a rather large scale, and it seems to be divided in two main categories: (a) under hypnosis and (b) without hypnotic sleep and solely by mental suggestion. My question does not refer to magnetization which, of course, can be of great help when done by clean-minded unselfish people. - The above is one of many similar questions on this subject that have been sent to me. My answer follows hereunder:

Hypnotic practice is almost always bad, even though, somewhat like bloodtransfusion, there are rare successes occasionally. It is just like playing with some dangerous explosive. It is fundamentally and generally bad because it weakens the will of the subject instead of evoking the will from within outwards into action thus building up a structure of inner life and power. Every repetition of hypnosis renders the subject still more flabby, still more negative, still weaker, and subjects the subject more and more to leaning on the outer instead of evoking inner powers. Now of course like everything else, it is conceivable as a theory that an Adept, a Mahatman for instance, knowing nature's laws and all the tricks and oddities and peculiarities of human psychology and the astral body, could as an abstract theory use hypnosis in certain minor cases beneficially. But this is merely a theory, and I can assure you that no Mahatman or Adept ever would do such a thing, because the fundamental idea is wrong. They want to bring out or develop the will-power and inner vital strength of men, and hypnosis sends these last fine things to sleep, weakens them, emasculates the inner powers of reserve. Still as a mere academic theory, by an Adept hypnotism could be used safely. Now of course in some local things, like stroking with the hand on an affected part of the body to relieve pain such as a headache, this is really not so much hypnotic sleep in minor degree as a kind of mesmerism or animal magnetization, soothing the nerves but not weakening the will, the healthy body quieting, soothing the tangled and angry nerves of the invalid. And this is not bad if no attempt is made, as just said, to affect the will of the subject or his body as a whole, if it is purely local; because in the first place it is not hypnotism purely speaking, as this word is popularly understood, and in the second place it is purely local and the benefits are derived from the clean, strong magnetism of the operator. It is in fact animal magnetism in these last cases; and if the animal magnetism is healthy and clean, probably no harm is done and the patient can receive temporary relief, although it is not permanent because the cause is not eliminated. I will say in this connection that even autohypnosis or self-hypnosis, where the subject hypnotizes himself or herself by various means known for ages past, such as staring at a spot or a bright light or a piece of crystal or glass, or even looking at the tip of the nose concentratedly, or at the navel: all those things which are so well known are emphatically not good because they mean using the will by the subject himself to send his higher will upwards and out of the picture, and induce in the lower part of the constitution a false tranquillity or quiet by what is almost mechanical means. In other words the nerves, instead of being roused into clean wholesome healthy activity upon which the inner will can work, are put to sleep, hypnotized, (which means sending to sleep), and the brain and nervous system as stated sink below the threshold of ordinary consciousness into the vibrational rates of the glass, etc. Quiet is induced, but it is the quiet of death, of the Mineral kingdom, etc. Therefore while self-hypnosis is not as bad as hypnosis by others, it again is emphatically not good and is not used by the true Adepts, only by magicians and Shamans and medicine men of barbarous tribes. It is this power exactly which gives the steady unwinking eye of the snake its hypnotic power over a bird or a rabbit or a mouse, popularly called fascination; but it is the process I have just tried to explain. The glittering eye of the human hypnotizer starts hypnotism off with the same process. It is all unfortunate and if not exactly bad in its better side, is certainly not good.

Therefore all these things should be avoided. They are unwholesome. They lower the vibrational level down into the lower kingdom instead of raising the vibrational rate of consciousness upwards into the higher psychical, intellectual and spiritual realms. - Theosophical Forum, May, 1941 --------------------------

IDEAS AND IDEALS - G. de Purucker [Excerpts from a private letter written about 1938] No peace will ever be brought to pass, nor civilization ever endure, unless based upon ideas which originate ideals, and unless these ideals are lived. Once we have ideas and ideals, making for peace, and for a brotherhood of the peoples, leaving to each people absolute freedom and liberty to pursue its own national course as it wishes, politics, like the intermediant of human thought it naturally is, will fall into place as a natural adjunct. To attempt to change people's minds by politics, usually means going down into the arena of strife, without presenting a feasible and philosophic as well as ethical basis for the existence of peace, and is simply like trying to separate two angry and quarreling men by taking physical action against both. You convince neither, and are apt to be hurt yourself, because you descend into the same low arena of ideas based on force on which the two quarreling men live. The point is this: Theosophists as much as any other individuals, are entitled to hold what political opinions they please, or to hold none if they so please. The Theosophical Society as an organization is absolutely non-political, traditionally so, and naturally the probability is, it has in its ranks members who hold many and different political opinions or convictions, quite possibly even greatly differing from each other. But this has nothing to do with the Theosophical Society, nor with its work in the world. Consider, if you please, a political party with neither ideals nor ideas. How long would it exist? Anywhere from half an hour to half a year, possibly longer. The reason that political parties and politics exist, is because they are supposed to be the machinery for expressing ideas and ideals. If the ideas and ideals are high, the politics are correspondingly superior. If the former are low, the politics are correspondingly detestable. The world has been trying the ideas of force, and arrangements of international amity based on political grounds, from time immemorial, and we all know what little success has ever been had. Nothing permanent, nothing enduring, nothing that lasts. Why? Because politics have always been considered more important than ideas and ideals. These run directly counter to all human history, whether religious, philosophic, scientific, governmental, political, social, or what not. A civilization is grand or mean precisely in accordance with the ideas or ideals upon which it is builded. Theosophists have no particular objection to politics, if men want to follow the political line. But politics are always subservient to ideals, which at least they are supposed to be the machinery for carrying out, as stated above. What the world needs today is new ideas and new ideals, not new politics nor more

politics, but a good deal less politics, and a good deal more of honest-to-goodness, practical and practicable thinking in new and wholesome and progressive ideas. People need never bother about politics, and certainly never lose their temper over them, if it is recognized that politics are ruled by ideas and ideals. The point of all this is the following: Which, therefore, in view of human history and what has been said above, is more important - squabbling in politics, or persuading men's hearts and minds that thought rules the world, to wit, ideas and ideals? The question answers itself. The difference between a great man and a mean man, between a genius and an average man, is that the former in either case bases his life on ideas and ideals, and the latter does not, however much he may pretend to do so. Politics without philosophy, to wit, an ethical or idealistic philosophy, is a lot of action and noise without body and substance, and therefore is dangerous, and it is just this one point that the world needs to learn to recognise, to grow to understand. - from Theosophia, Spring 1958 -------------------

IN TIMES OF CRISIS - G. de Purucker 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 he!p. 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 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 god-like. 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. - From a private talk, June 1930 - Eclectic Theosophist, Nov. 15, 1974 ----------------------

INITIATION AND SUFFERING ALL Initiation is really a test or trial, but the preparation for that test or trial is daily life - from January lst to January 2nd, to January 3rd and throughout the days to December 31st. What we call Initiation is simply the showing by the neophyte in the tests then and there laid upon him, whether his daily life's training has been sufficiently strong to make him fit to hitch his chariot to the stars. That is why the Masters have told us that no especial tests whatsoever are put upon chelas, only when initiation comes and they are given a chance to face the trial. The tests come in daily living. Do you see the lesson to be drawn from this? Fit yourselves while the day is yet with us and before the night comes. Do you know what some of these tests are? There have been all kinds of romantic stories written by people about them. These have

been mostly guess-work, but the fundamental idea is often true. The tests are these: Can you face the denizens of other planes and prevail with them in peace? Do you know what that means? Are you absolutely sure of yourself? The man who cannot even face himself and conquer himself when required on this familiar plane where he lives, how can he expect to face with safety the habitants' of other planes, not only the elementals - they are not by any means the worst - but the intelligent creatures, beings, living on other planes? Now then, anyone who has mastered himself, perhaps not completely, but who knows that if he sets his will to it he can control anything in his own character, and knows it by proving it, is ready to go through initiation. When this knowledge comes to him then he is given the chance. So many people seem to think that Initiations are privileges granted to people who pretend to live the holy life and that kind of thing, but I will tell you something more that I myself know because I have seen it in my fellow human beings: there is more chance for the man or the woman who has striven honestly and has fallen and risen again, in other words for one who has eaten the bread of bitterness, who has become softened and strengthened by it, than there is for one who has never passed through the fire. So compassionate and pitiful is universal nature, that it is precisely those who stumble on the path who are often in the end the richer. Holiness comes from the struggles with self fought and lost, and fought and lost, and fought and Won. And then compassion enters the heart, and pity, and understanding. We become gentle with others. You see now why it is that the quick one to judge the faults of others is precisely he who himself has never stumbled on the path and therefore is not fit and ready. Compassion, pity, are marks of character, of strength gained through suffering. "Except the feet be washed in the blood of the heart" - there you have it! Look how compassionate the Christ was and the Buddha. Let us learn and do likewise. I have often been asked or written to as to what my opinion would be concerning one who has been unhappy on life's pathway, has wandered from the straight and narrow path; and I have wondered how any Theosophist could ask me a question like that. Is it not obvious that it is precisely those who have learned through suffering who are stronger than those who have not? - and I here mean those who have suffered and conquered self. "Judge not lest ye be judged." The one who has been through the fire never judges one who is passing through it. He knows what it means. It is the immature, the spiritually undeveloped, those who have never been through the fire of pain, who are quick to criticize and judge others. Judge not, lest ye be judged some day. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, Feb., 1942 ------------------

A LETTER FROM DR. DE PURUCKER [The subjoined letter is one written by Dr. de Purucker to a correspondent who is also an F. T. S., concerning the doctrine of Karman, and explains itself. The name of the correspondent is intentionally omitted for the reason that it is just possible this

correspondent might not like to have his name appear, and also because the correspondent's letter on the subject, written to the Leader, contains private matter to a certain extent which would seem to call for its omission here. - EDS.] 24th July, 1936. Dear Brother: Your undated letter - but postmarked "Jul 20," 1936, - reached me this morning; and naturally I gave to it the attention and thoughtful consideration which it struck me its contents well merited. You are dead right in calling me "a busy man," for, as a matter of fact, my official duties and other routine-work have been increasing since I assumed office so greatly that at the present time I am literally driven to find time to take care of the many things that come under my hand. Therefore, please forgive me for this present letter which may seem to you rather inadequate. I simply cannot find time for a longer chat with you. I turn immediately and without preliminaries to what seems to be the gist of your very brotherly and kind communication to me; but first let me say straight from my heart to yours, that there is not the slightest need of asking my pardon for your "bluntness," nor for your straightforward speech. There is nothing in the world that I respect so highly in a man as intellectual honesty; and if this be coupled with spiritual discernment, I do my best to make such a man my brother, attempting to establish between us bonds that will withstand foolish human folly. How could I, as a Theosophist, and a Theosophical Leader to boot, object to a man's writing to me the convictions of his heart, and on any subject whatsoever, as you do in this letter to me, on the matter of that perhaps most difficult of all our Theosophical tenets, Karman? We might call this wondrous doctrine a hundred-faceted truth, and a hundred men will see, each one, a facet; and in the dazzling brilliance emanating from the source of illumination, be blind to the existence of the other ninety-nine facets, and hear nevertheless of the existence of the other ninety-nine opinions about karman, and perhaps look upon these other ninety-nine opinions as fallacious or "pernicious," as you qualify my understanding of karman, and my teachings on it. Now, I fully agree with you that outside of the difficulty of a fully rounded understanding of the doctrine of karman, it has a most especial application to the human life of us men, and therefore has not merely a metaphysical significance, but a very important, a highly important, moral and ethical one. First, let me disabuse your good and brotherly mind of the fallacy which it is evident you cherish regarding my teaching about karman, which, if I understand you, you seem to think "inculcates unconscious fatalism." In this you are utterly wrong. My understanding of this wondrous doctrine runs diametrically counter to such a conception; for to me karman is the only doctrine which will logically destroy the theory which the West calls Fatalism - whether unconscious, or conscious and explicitly taught. However, here is no place to labor this point, for if you are interested in my conception or teaching of karman, you have but to consult my many books, lectures, and various statements on the subject, and - not making the mistake of taking one statement as the key to all other statements, but taking them all together, you will be able to get a synthetic view of what I mean to say about it when I write about it. That people should misunderstand the doctrine of karman, and that many should have many differing views about it, is not only to be expected, but in my judgment is one

of the very best possible things that could happen in the T. S., for it does away with the dogmatic attitude; it leads us to have charity for the opinions or convictions of others; it introduces freshness and variety of thought in our intercommunications of ideas; and above everything else perhaps it brings about that healthy respect for the convictions of others which can never be obtained by shallow, superficial, and often unconsciously hypocritical adherence to others' opinions merely in order to attain surface unanimity. I do hope you understand what I have in mind, for what I have in mind is exactly, and word for word, and sentence for sentence, what H. P. B. so nobly wrote in her first message to the American Theosophists in 1888, and which, although I doubt not you know it well, I venture to quote here: "Orthodoxy in Theosophy is a thing neither possible nor desirable. It is diversity of opinion, within certain limits that keeps the Theosophical Society a living and a healthy body, its many other ugly features notwithstanding. Were it not, also, for the existence of a large amount of uncertainty in the minds of students of Theosophy, such healthy divergences would be impossible, and the Society would degenerate into a sect, in which a narrow and stereotyped creed would take the place of the living and breathing spirit of Truth and an ever growing Knowledge." Now these words grandly say what I myself feel and believe; and I repeat once more, as I have said a thousand times if once, that one of my first duties is to keep the platform of the T. S. free and,open, exactly as H. P. B., our grand first Teacher, gave it to us as one of our most sacred heritages. This does not mean that the platform of the T. S. should be thrown open to every lunatic or crank or self-seeking place-hunter who wants to air his views, usually for selfish and often for obliquely ethical reasons, for this would be sheer folly, and would at the best make of the platform of the T. S. a mere debating ground of amiable and superficially-minded people, and at the worst cause the T. S. to degenerate into a mere forum so to speak devoted to the airing of opinions of often aggressive and possibly selfish individuals, and a losing of the inner Light and of our first purpose in the T. S., which is the giving of the blessed God-Wisdom of the archaic ages to the hungering hearts of men and women. In my judgment, the T. S. platform should be devoted to Theosophy, and Theosophy alone, first, last, in between, and all the time; but just because of this reason, I believe in healthy divergences of opinion, and the right of every true Theosophist, or indeed of any F. T. S., whatever his private convictions or opinions on Theosophical doctrines may be, to have at least his 'day in court,' as the lawyers say - which does not mean that liberty should degenerate into license, and that the free and full expression of one's inner convictions should degenerate into argumentative and fruitless controversy. This last I am irrevocably opposed to; and I try to set the example myself in never answering attacks made upon me, in invariably refusing to enter into controversial discussions or argumentative exchanges of opinion, or wordy quarrels; for these are not only 'pernicious,' but waste time, misuse energy which is so badly needed for our Theosophical work among men, and indeed in their worst aspects often make Theosophists ridiculous in the sight of normal men and women who are looking for truth, but who know enough of the world and its follies to sheer away in disgust from stormy or argumentative and therefore always fruitless controversial proposition and answer followed by reply and rejoinder succeeded by surrejoinder, etc., etc. The world is not interested in the differences of opinions as among Theosophists, and it is our duty to give them the Theosophical teachings; but it is equally as right for us

Theosophists to preserve a free and open platform as among ourselves, so that we shall have a free and honorable exchange of opinions. Thus X is convinced that his understanding of a doctrine Y is correct; I say, let X freely and fearlessly but always courteously state his convictions, verbally or in writing; if they differ from the convictions of Z, then give Z the same right; but once that Z and X have each had his chance to point out each one's understanding of the doctrine Y, and when each has thus had his say, let him be modest and decent and drop the matter; for if carried into a controversy, it would simply result in both X and Z being firmly convinced that the other is a fool or nearly so, or teaches a pernicious doctrine or an evil one, and neither will convince the other, and the world will laugh at us as a lot of squabbling, quarreling cranks. "See how these Christians love one another!" It is the foregoing general reasons, which I do not think I have ever written before to any single individual, or, indeed, to any group of individuals, which will show to you why I adjudge it both unwise and untimely, as well as contrary to my own convictions, to enter into a controversy on any point of Theosophical teaching, or on any point of fact whatsoever, with anybody whatsoever. My teachings are before the world; let them stand as stated; from time to time I may enlarge them or clarify them; let others accept them or reject them, as these others think well. If some one else likes to write or say his opinion about a Theosophical doctrine such as Karman, let him state it, and then, yield the platform to some other F. T. S., who may be much more interested in some other aspect of Theosophy than he is in the one that might interest me or you or X or Z. I have absolutely no faith whatsoever in controversial argumentations; I think they are mischievous in the last degree. What we want and need, and should cultivate, is independence of thought, independence of judgment, healthy divergences of conviction and of opinion, and retain a free platform for their expression; but should never allow a platform to be the field of wordy argumentation or the bandying of arguments about this, that, or some other facet of teaching which X or Z or A or B may foolishly flatter himself he knows better than some other man. Let each man state his conviction, and then leave the field open to some other man who will then have his chance to give his opinion about some other doctrine which may interest him more greatly. I do hope you understand this. As long as I live, I think I can safely say I shall never be drawn into any controversy, although always willing, as I am at the present moment in writing to you, to state my opinion about things; if you don't like it, drop it, for that is your undoubted right; and I believe that it is by thus learning respect for each other's healthy divergences of feeling and opinion that the T. S. as H. P. B. gave it to us will be best preserved into the future, and do its finest and highest work among men. Never think for a moment that you would ever be ostracized in our T. S., or judged unkindly or wrongly or meanly, because you at any time may express an honest conviction in the courtesy which I know to be an innate attribute of your character. This is your undoubted right in the T. S., and anyone who would call your opinions 'heretical' or a 'heresy' would be looked upon by me as acting or speaking in an untheosophical manner. By the way, wouldn't you like to write an article on karman, giving your opinions about it, which we could print in our THEOSOPHICAL FORUM? I think it might be interesting, and, in fact, I am sure it would be. It is quite possible that it might evoke some other F. T. S.'s opinion about karman, which we would also print, and possibly a third; but if there were ever the first sign of such a healthy exchange of fine divergencies of

conviction verging into a controversy, then I should feel it my duty to suggest to our editors to devote the space given to karman to something else of equal importance in a way. This is following H. P. B.'s tradition. Now, for heaven's sake, get any foolish little bee that may be buzzing around in your bonnet that we of Point Loma dislike healthy divergences of opinion - get such a bee out of your bonnet and kick it over the North Pole. What I do like is healthy divergences of opinion, courteously, candidly, expressed, orally or written. But I will not tolerate any more of the abominable, often insulting, usually bigoted, windy controversies that have so often disgraced the different Theosophical Societies since H. P. B.'s days. I believe in freedom of conscience, in freedom of speech, and in H. P. B.'s principles - "healthy divergences of opinion," for this saves us from orthodoxy, "its other ugly features notwithstanding." Bless you for the good work you have been striving so hard to do for fraternization. It has my deepest sympathy as long as it remains work for fraternization; but should it ever degenerate into mawkish sentimentalism or superficial friendliness covering a mass of festering and ignominious hatreds, I will wash my hands of it. The fraternization-movement was started in a very sincere attempt to bring Theosophists of different Theosophical Societies together, in order that they might know each other somewhat better, and learn to respect the good points that each group of individuals holds as individuals, and also so that we might openly and publicly and honorably and sincerely profess our common alliance on those points of the teaching of the Masters and of H. P. B. which we all accept. Is not this but another instance of putting into action H. P. B.'s clarion call for the retention of healthy divergences of opinion so as to prevent orthodoxy? The best of good wishes to you. I am, as always, my dear Brother, Fraternally and faithfully yours, G. de Purucker PS. I have just got word from Clapp that he has been corresponding with you about the matter of Karman. As I think it would interest him to hear what I have written to you, I am sending to him a copy of this my letter to you, as it does not seem to be private. I hope you will agree with me that I have not done wrong, as there seems to be no violation of any confidence whatsoever. - G. Dr P. LATER. After writing all the above, I felt I must add just a few lines, expressing my emphatic agreement with your good self in the matter of the common need of all Theosophical Societies, our own dear T. S. included, of a fuller and more adequate preparation of and presentation of elementary Theosophy to the public - to the world. This is one thing upon which I have been hammering ever since I took office, and it is extraordinary how difficult it is to find capable presenters of elementary Theosophical teaching. Scholars in Theosophy abound, profound students are everywhere; but those who are capable of stating Theosophy to the public simply and attractively seem very few, and yet it is our greatest common need, I do believe. I am constantly talking, of this. - G. De P. - From Theosophical Forum, September, 1936

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THE LAMAIC SUCCESSION IN TIBET - G. de Purucker [From the very interesting section of "Questions and Answers" in the volume titled Studies in Occult Philosophy (Theosophical University Press, Pasadena), we select the following. (pp. 611-13). It is important to hold in mind as one reads that this was written some 45 years ago. - Ed.] Is there any truth to the current idea that the Tashi Lama in Tibet is always a reincarnation of the Buddha? Is this a real succession, or is it merely a tradition without meaning? The Succession of the Tibetan Lamaic hierarchy since the time of Tsong-kha-pa in the Fourteenth Century is a real one and takes place through different individual men. We must remember that the principle regarding this matter is comprised in that deeper Buddhism which really is Esoteric Buddhism - let our Western scholars say what they like. Neither the Tashi Lama nor the Dalai Lama is a reincarnation or reimbodiment of the Bodhisattva Sakyamuni; but the Succession beginning with Tsongkha-pa is a transmission of a 'Ray' in each individual case of the line of Tashi Lamas derivative from the spiritual Maha-guru whom H.P.B. calls the Silent Watcher of this Globe. There is an important distinction to be drawn between successive reincarnations of Gautama and the successive imbodiments of rays from an identic source in the Hierarchy of Compassion which I have just called the Maha-Guru. It is just here that all Theosophists as well as all esotericists stumble and wander from the facts. It is indeed a transmission in serial line of a ray from the 'Buddha'; but the 'Buddha' in this case is not the Bodhisattva Gautama, even though he attained Buddhahood, which is a state, but the Dhyani-Buddha of whom the Bodhisattva Gautama himself was an incarnated ray and the noblest and most complete and the fullest since the beginning of our Fifth Root-Race. This is why the Exalted One, Gautama, later attained Buddhahood. Even the Tibetans of nearly all classes, with the possible exception of the Tashi and Dalai lamas themselves, look upon this transmission in Succession or serial line through repetitive imbodiments of the 'Buddha' as being repeated incarnations of Gautama the Buddha in the two Head Lamas of the Tibetan Hierarchy. But this is erroneous; and it is just the point where the stumbling hereinbefore referred to occurs. The higher members of the Tibetan Hierarchy, including the Khutuktus, and, I sincerely believe, the Tashi Lama himself and in all probability the Dalai Lama, are as perfectly acquainted with the esoteric facts in this case as H.P.B. was; and they know perfectly well that these reincarnations of 'Living Buddhas,' as Westerners call them, are not, as said above, repetitive reimbodiments of Sakyamuni, but repeated reimbodiments of identic rays or of an identic ray inspiriting and enlightening one Tashi Lama after the other; and a similar ray in repeated imbodiments inspirits and enlightens one Dalai Lama after the other. This has been the case since Tsong-kha-pa's time. It has been so up to the present and there seems no reasonable doubt that the Succession, as above described, will continue unless and until human vehicles are found which are too imperfect

to continue this esoteric line of Succession. If people only understood the true meaning of the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism regarding the Dhyani-Buddhas and their human representatives on earth, then they would have the key to this continuous mystery of the Succession of living Buddhic rays in the higher members of the Tibetan Hierarchy; and it is just this that H.P.B. spoke of when she wrote as openly as she dared then to do. To put the matter in other words which will be consistent with facts and accordant with common-sense: Every Tashi Lama from Tsong-kha-pa's time to the present has been the reimbodiment of an identic Buddhic ray, emanated from Dhyani-Buddha of this Globe, in other words, the mysterious Individual or Personage, whom Esoteric Tradition states as living in Sambhala, concerning which mysterious land every Tibetan, high or low, has heard somewhat; yet these different Tashi Lamas have been men, seven-principled men, and therefore all have been distinct individuals, each different from his Predecessor and from his Successor, yet each has been the vehicle or channel of transmission of an identic Buddha-Force, which I have hereinbefore called the Ray from the Maha-Guru. We have then the Succession of an identic spiritual Buddha-Individuality through a long serial line since Tsong-kha-pa's time of different men who thus become recognized for what they are and who are appointed or raised to the position of Successors in the Hierarchy of the Tashi Lamas. While this wondrous fact continues in Tibet even to this day, in former ages an identic Succession of true Teachers existed in other parts of world and has formed the basis for the mysterious stories commonly current in the ancient literatures of Hierarchies of Initiates continued through the ages because of being linked with the Master-Adept whom H.P.B. in Isis Unveiled and elsewhere at times refers to as 'Maha' or 'Maha-Guru.' (Eclectic Theosophist, April-May, 1988) -----------------

WHY NOT LAUGH AT YOURSELF? MANY people talk about the heroism of self-conquest - something with which we all agree; but do you know, I sometimes wonder if our ideas of heroic battling with ourselves are not just a wee bit hysteric, even foolish! I do not mean the heroism part of it, but this lower self of us, poor little thing! It raises hell with us all the time, simply because we identify ourselves with it and always try to fight it and make it as big as we are. Is it heroic to fight a ghost of our own making? How about wise old Lao-Tse? If you want to conquer your lower self, make it ashamed of itself; make it look ridiculous. Laugh at it; laugh at yourself. So long as you pay attention to something, you dignify it and put it on your own level; and then when you attempt to fight it you are actually fighting another part of yourself which really could be enormously useful. I have heard it said: Kill out the lower self. Well, suppose we could do that? We should be most damnably unfortunate beings; in fact we should not be here. This lower self when kept in order is a good little beastie. It helps us. Our duty is simply to keep it in

order. Now when a man has a `fractious' dog or a horse or a cat, or some other pet, whatever it may be, he does not kick it and beat it and `lam' it on the head in order to make it good. He would be apt to make it rebellious, cowardly, and vicious; he would be degrading it. Thus the lower self should be neither degraded nor clothed with the false dignity of an adversary erroneously raised to the position of the spiritual Self. It should be kept in its place and treated with kindness, consideration, and courtesy, but always with a firm and governing hand. Take a dog. A dog can be made vicious and cowardly by brutal treatment, just as the lower self can, for the dog begins to think it is its master's equal when the master pays too much attention to it. Just so with the human lower self. But when the human lower self, like the dog or any other pet, forgets its place and begins to presume, then put it in its proper position, but neither by brutality nor by dignifying it nor by fighting it. Ridicule your lower self, and you will soon see the lower self reassuming its proper position because full of temporary shame and loss of dignity - `loss of face' as the Chinese say. Just so with the dog. Have you ever seen a dog stick its tail between its legs when you laugh at it? Dogs know when they are laughed at and it is one of the finest ways of handling a beast. I do believe Lao-Tse of China was wise in his statement which runs to the effect that one of the best ways of conquering a foe is to make him look ridiculous. Now that does not work as between man and man, because it is often very harsh and cruel, the two being on the same level. You can hurt a human being horribly and unjustly by placing him in a false position through ridicule. No; but try it on yourself. The next time the lower self begins to hold its head up and wants to tell you what to do, laugh at it; don't dignify it; don't give it position and power and strength by fighting it; nor on the other hand, do not abuse it nor make it weak and vicious and cowardly. Put it in its proper place by ridicule, and, indeed at times a gentle contempt. Learn the greater heroism. Laugh at the thing which bothers you! -------------The role a sense of humor plays in human life, which means in human thought and feeling and consequent conduct, and the role that humor plays in spiritual things is all too often overlooked. We may define a sense of humor as seeing the relations, the harmonious relations, between apparently incongruous things, the congruities as among incongruities, arousing a sense of the funny in us. The ability to see humor in what happens to ourselves is a spiritual attribute. For after all, humor is at the very root of the universe; and I think that one of the greatest tragedies of individual existence has been the lack of the ability to see the funny side of things when troubles come. When disasters befall you, just try to see the funny side, and you not only save yourself in all likelihood a lot of trouble, but likewise you get a great `kick' out of it. I remember the great `kick' I got out of a discussion between myself and my dear old father when I was a boy. My father had read an article in some theological magazine by some eminent Christian clergyman who pleaded for the existence of a sense of humor `in Almighty God.' I said this was simply grand; because although our sense of humor is human, small because we are small, yet, is it possible for a part, a human being, to have something which the almighty whole, which the Divine, lacks? So of course if Divinity has

a sense of humor, I said, it is a sense of divine humor, but it is humor all the same. I think that there is a great deal of sound science and philosophy in the old Hindu idea that Brahman brought forth the Universe in play, in fun. The words are different from those of the Christian clergyman, but the idea is the same. In other words, the bringing forth of all things was not a tragedy; there was beauty in it, there was harmony in it; there was humor in it; and those who are in this Universe can see the humor in it if they will. Look at the religious wars and squabbles that never would have occurred if people had had a sense of humor. If people nowadays would see the funny side of things, then they would begin to live together, to love together, to laugh together, and to take counsel together instead of distrusting each other. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, August, 1938 --------------------

"LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION" "LEAD us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." When the Avatara Jesus made this beautiful statement to his disciples, he made it to help them. If you read the New Testament of the Christians, you will there see that this prayer, as the Christians call it, was given to them for use. And therefore the entire prayer is based on psychology and must be read from the standpoint of psychology. I don't mean the psychology of the present age, which is little more than a kind of - it is hard to describe - a kind of sublimated physiology; but I mean the psychology of the great seers, the titan intellects of all times, in other words, the science of the human soul, the intermediate part of man; not the spirit, not the body, but the soul. The point is a subtil one: do you know that when you wish to avoid doing something that you realize is not good for you, one of the best things is not merely to face the fact, but to state it clearly through your own mind? Often the ugliness of the thought or of the action repels. The temptation is seen in its proper outlines. Thus it is never the Higher Self or the god within, what the Christians call God, which ever leads one into temptation. But the higher parts of our being, the spirit within, the god within us, is exercising upon us constantly the inner urge to do better, to be more, to strike out, to awake, to cast off the slumber and be and do. And often this wonderful brain mind, which is not, however, as yet fully evolved, cannot get the true import of the inspiration from above and it distorts. Remembering these facts which you have been taught, this is the import of the Avatara's speech. The very fact that you will say to yourselves in an uprush of aspiration: Lead me not to follow paths which appear holy or which are veiled in the illusory colors or glory of what I want, lead me not to be tempted to what seems to be high, but deliver me from these things: These very thoughts in the mind make the temptation to lose all its seduction. The outline is seen for what it is. You know the old fable about stripping off the garment which deceived the knight. He sees coming towards him the yearning of his heart; he is on trial, a knightly course of trial. Will he succumb to the temptation which seems to be the very yearning of his heart? Nobody knows. He is on trial, the trial of the knight. He steps up to the seductive illusion,

pulls aside the enchanting veils and sees the death's head. This is the meaning. The very fact that Jesus warned his disciples to take this as their aspiration every day, showed that it had a psychological veritable protection for his disciples; in other words, they were to build up what modern psychologists call a framework or wall of thought around the mind. Modern psychology has struck one truth, and it is that temptations come to us because of what modern psychologists have called schizophrenia, a long, ugly Greek word which simply means the good old-fashioned statement that a man's nature is often divided against itself. Schizophrenia means split mind, split personality. The good old saying was, a mind is often divided against itself, or, we are in two minds about it. That is what they mean today with this horrible Greek word schizophrenia. Now what is the psychology of this thing? It is this: Weld your mind together again into one and you won't succumb. Every decent man knows the truth of this if he examines himself. We fall into temptation because we allow our mind to become split, one part of the mind to demean the other and then we scheme. "Can we not get away with it?" In other words, don't try to ride two horses. Once the god within bathes our mind, our brain, with its holy light, with its love, schizophrenia becomes a horror of the past. Refusing to allow this mental division within ourselves, we become single-minded; we sense the inner divinity; and when this is possessed in extreme degree we have a Christ or a Buddha. These have appeared among us. There is no reason why they should not appear today. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, March, 1941 --------------------------

ON CYCLES GREAT AND SMALL Among valuable letters in our archives are a number from Dr. G. de Purucker bearing on theosophical teaching. Although the subject-matter of Cycles is generally known to students, some additional points may be found in the following letter written to Boris de Zirkoff. It is dated 27th March, 1935, from the Leader's Office, Point Loma, California. - Ed. My dear Boris: You are asking what may seem to you to be a very simple question, but you yourself will see, after a moment's reflection, that it is an extremely involved one, because your question calls for an entire elucidation or explaining of all the intricacies of Nature's cyclical workings, and how the large include the small. This is a tremendous order! It would take a volume just to answer your one question, which is a question that has occurred to many, and precisely because it is so involved is one reason why it has always been side-stepped from H.P.B.'s time to our own, because it would take literally hundreds of pages to give a complete exposition, and days and days of hard work in dictation. However, there are always general rules, and until the gods give me a year or two

of more time, I am afraid you will have to be satisfied. The general rule is - and it is a wonderful key - that the small repeats the great, that the little yugas not only are included in the greater yugas, but repeat them on their own little scales. Example: The present Fifth Root-Race, considered as a whole, and including all its minor sub-races, whether great or small, is now in its Kali-Yuga, which began something over five thousand years ago, at the death of Krishna, and will last into the future for about 427,000 years. Keep in mind that this is the Kali-Yuga of the entire Root-Race, the great Kali-Yuga. Now then, all the minor cycles or yugas of this Fifth Root-Race will, some of them, be rising, and some of them be falling, and inter-working with each other, and yet will all be subject to the great Kali-Yuga of the Root-Race, which has just begun. Thus, a minor yuga or race may be in its youth and rising to its flowering, but yet, because it is included in the great descending Kali-Yuga, will, although having a sharp rise, be nevertheless subject to the general decline of the great Kali-Yuga. Next, every minor cycle, great or small, included in the Root-Race, in its turn is septenary, and therefore has its own little kali-yuga, and in numerical relations are about the same. Just as the great KaliYuga is 432 thousand years long, so a little kali-yuga may be perhaps only 432 years long, or possibly 4,320, or possibly even 43,200. The Hindu or Aryan Race, which was one of the very first sub-races of our own Fifth Race, is now in its own racial kali-yuga, in addition to belonging to the Fifth Root-Race, and therefore of course belonging to the great Kali-Yuga of the Root-Race. But it is striving to rise into flowering again, and will do so in the future. In the small scale, Spain is in its short kali-yuga, as also Portugal. Italy has just ended a short kali-yuga and is striving to rise again. Unfortunately, being a very materialistic Root-Race, these rises are mostly along the lines of materialism. Furthermore, our own European general stock of Races, which we may call the European sub-race or family-race perhaps, has been steadily rising since the downfall of the Roman Empire, and will continue to rise, with various smaller shocks and falls and risings again, for some six or seven or possibly eight thousand years more. And then there will be a rapid descent until their kali-yuga is reached, a small kali-yuga, when there will be a great European catastrophe of nature. This will be some 16 or 18 thousand years from now, possibly 15 or 17 thousand years. I have never had time to get any really exact figures. But you can say about 16,000 years hence. This period will see the submersion of the British Isles. Most of France will be under the water, also Holland, some of Spain, a good deal of Italy, etc., and other places. Of course all this won't take place in a night. There will be premonitory signs, such as slow sinkings of the coast, and great earthquakes, etc. I hope the answer is helpful. If I get your main idea or question, its answer is in the first part of this my reply, to wit: that although the Fifth Root-Race as a whole is in its great Kali-Yuga, which had just begun some five thousand years ago, the smaller races may nevertheless each one be rising or falling, according to its own time-periods; and each such sub-race or smaller race has its own little kali-yuga repeated after the great one, and bearing the same proportion to the entire length of any such small race that the great KaliYuga does to the Root-Race. And this is the same, whether the sub-races are great subraces or small sub-races. Thus we have the hour of sixty minutes; we have the minute of sixty seconds; and we have the second of sixty thirds, although of course this last is almost never used in our days. Yours faithfully, with the hope that this will be helpful,

(sgd) G. de P. - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 86 -------------------

"... OF GREAT SPIRITUAL IMPORTANCE" - G. de Purucker Dr. G. de Purucker's Fifteenth General Letter (of July 11th, 1934) to the membership of The Theosophical Society (Point Loma) of which he was then Leader carries a message to which we can well give the above title. The Letter is too long to be given here in its entirety, but we extract relevant and deeply moving paragraphs to which, we feel, all members of the Theosophical Movement would profit by a thoughtful study. The first several pages of the Letter are given to a review of the "steady progress upward" of the Point Loma Society,* with increase in membership and noteworthy literary activity. With regard to the latter, reference is made to two forthcoming works of G. de P., his The Esoteric Tradition, and "a Theosophical Glossary or Occult Glossary" of "more or less encyclopaedic character." He then states: "I have been so pleased with the increase in understanding of Theosophical principles and doctrines among our membership generally, during the past few years especially, that I have decided to refer in this Letter to a fact of great spiritual importance." We omit several lines from these extracts because of our limited space, and have added some headings to paragraphs. The full Letter can be found in The Theosophical Forum, July 15, 1934, New Series, Vol. V, No. II. - Ed. I doubt not that from the very first years after the founding of the T.S. in 1875, forwards-looking and intuitive Theosophists have understood, and have seen with more or less clarity of vision, that the Theosophical Movement - and let me here venture to speak in particular of our own beloved T.S., for it is the portion of the Movement which most intimately concerns ourselves - was intended to be or to become, the Vehicle or Carrier or Channel of a mighty Spiritual Energy, which would become the more strongly manifest in proportion as the Fellows composing the membership of the T.S. lifted themselves to the spiritual and intellectual planes where they might become not only cognizant of but participators in and therefore channels for this inflow of spiritual-intellectual Force or Energy. Putting the matter thus baldly, of course merely restates once more one of the commonest ideas ---------* Readers unacquainted with the history pertaining strictly to the Point Loma branch of the Theosophical Movement should be reminded that some half century ago, under the leadership of G. de Purucker, it was healthy, vigorous, harmonious, with National Sections and Lodges: English, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Australasian, and U.S.A. It was before WWII, but the shadows of its fateful years were falling across the

horizon, and the effects of the great Depression were still keenly felt. ----------known and bruited among thoughtful men, to wit: that there are spiritual forces in the world which continually seek proper instruments or channels through which they may manifest themselves; and that these instruments or channels are at one and the same time organizations of human beings assembled for spiritual purposes, and also and more particularly individuals belonging as members to such organizations who would make themselves to be especially infilled with such spiritual force .... Every great spiritually religious or spiritually philosophical body which has become known over the world, or world-wide in influence, was founded by some great Sage or Seer for the purpose of pouring forth spiritual-intellectual ideas, and therefore spiritual-intellectual influences, into the minds of men. But, alas, in almost every instance these efforts with the passage of time have sunken below the spiritual-intellectual level where self-conscious union could have been made by individuals with the great spiritual energies presiding, perhaps, at the birth of such organization, association, or union, of human beings .... I desire to direct your attention forcibly to the great fact that the T.S. was indeed so founded; and more particularly that it is possible, and in fact easy, for any individual Theosophist so to raise himself in heart and in spirit, in mind and in feeling, to the higher planes where he may not merely become cognizant of this great inrushing flow of spiritual energy, and thus become a participator therein, but make himself a disseminator thereof among his fellow-men. I do not here allude merely to the fact, recently becoming deservedly popular among religiously minded people in the Occident, that the Over-soul, as Emerson put it, or the Cosmic Spirit, of which or of whom we humans are all children, can be self-consciously united with by individual men as an inexhaustible spiritual Fountain of ineffable Wisdom and Love. This would be merely relating once more the truth that I have already briefly alluded to, and would offer, I fear, but small personal encouragement to the well-meaning but more or less uninstructed Theosophist, who, with the best will in the world, and strive as he might, would find it difficult self-consciously to become `at one' with Alaya's Self, the Anima Mundi or Cosmic Soul .... Intelligences Higher Than the Mahatmas Let me try to explain my meaning a little more clearly. The Theosophical Society was founded not only with the aid of our Masters, by their Chela and Servant, our beloved H.P.B., but was an event of historical, spiritual importance foreseen and prepared for through centuries previous to 1875 - foreseen and prepared for, I repeat, by Intelligences loftier, far loftier, even than those high human beings whom we call the Mahatmans. To speak now in plainer and more undisguised phrases, I mean to say that the selfconscious spiritual Centers or Foci who brought about the founding of the T.S. because of the work it was intended to do in the world, are the Nirmanakayas - some of them Beings who at rare intervals only take an active and individual part in founding and inspiring organizations of this kind, and then only because the need is unusually great, and the work to be done in the future of equal magnitude and importance. Every Member a Center, a Channel

Definitely do I wish to point out to you that every member of the Theosophical Society whose mind is washed clean of personal desires and whose heart is true to eternal spiritual principles has the chance of becoming an individual, nay a personal, channel for receiving his portion, so to speak, of this mighty river of Spiritual Energy - but only so if he can make of himself an impersonal instrument in the hands of these Great Ones for the world's high good, for the world's spiritual and intellectual betterment. I want you, my beloved Brothers, to realize keenly and to feel intensely that what I am now telling you is not a merely abstract or impractical verity susceptible of being understood and valued by the rare and chosen few; but is a real chance, an actual spiritual opportunity, a possibility of quickened evolutionary unfolding for everyone. To my mind and I think I see aright - it would already be something accomplished of genuine worth if the Theosophical Society were to become merely an organization of decent and lawabiding men and women, who love their fellow-men and who love the grand Philosophy of the gods given to us by the Masters, and who yearn to disseminate, and do disseminate, this Philosophy among their fellow human beings. This alone would be something fine; but it is not enough - not by any means enough. Were it only that, I foresee that the T.S. would in time become a mere religio-philosophic association, a sort of excellent church doing a good work in the world, and living along in a more or less crystallized beneficent activity, until innate seeds of decay wrought their work of disintegration in the body corporate of the T.S. The T.S. Must Grow From Within We must not allow this to happen. The T.S. must at all cost be kept a living body, a body constantly growing from within, from innate and inherent seeds of life and inspiration; and these seeds of inspiration and life must find their proper soil or residence in human hearts and minds. The situation is precisely and exactly that alluded to by the Avatara Jesus when voicing his profound yet greatly misunderstood parable of the Sowing of the Seeds - some of which fell on stony soil, some of which fell by the wayside, and a few of which fell into receptive and proper ground for fruitage. Do you realize, my beloved Brothers and Companions on the Path - do you realize, I say, and not merely understand it with the brain-mind - that even yet our connection with this mighty flow of spiritual and intellectual energy has not been lost; and that as long as this connection remains, the T.S. will be a body, growing and expanding and doing its intended work in the world, because vitalized with an ever larger current of the inflowing energy? If you so realize it, then you will likewise realize that this connection must not merely not be lost, but must be strengthened, reinforced, and multiplied so to speak, by other connections made by an ever larger number of individual Fellows of the T.S. with these Mighty Beings behind our Cause and our Work, who inspirit it and help it and are ever ready to fill it with newer life and fresher inspiration, provided that these Great Ones find the proper human channels through which to pour the current forth for the great benefit of all beings. I have been asked many times a question which I will rephrase somewhat as follows: "G. de P., you teach and iterate and reiterate the really noble truth that the individual god within each man is a perennial fount of wisdom and love and knowledge and comfort and peace for him. But you say so little to help us to attain this union with the divinity within. How can it be done?" Ay, indeed, how can it be done, except by doing it! No Teacher in

past ages has ever yet been able to tell us, individual students as we are, how to become at one with his own inner divinity, except by their pointing to certain age-old and indeed infallible rules for attainment which most of us, alas, accept with the mind, but, after a few faint and half-hearted trials, usually lay aside because, forsooth, it seems so difficult to follow them to success. Yet there is no other way. A Few Infallible Rules Now what are these rules? Here are some of them, not here listed in the order of their importance, whether ascending or descending, but merely as they occur to my mind as being most feasible or practicable for the average theosophical student: (1) A yearning to be a better man or women in every sense of the word - a yearning which no discouragement can ever oust from our hearts. (2) A fixed will, which naught can divert into other channels of activity, to crystallize this yearning into an actual inner rising upwards, brought about by (3) (a) a feeling of oneness of being with one's fellows, and, indeed, with all that lives, both great and small; (b) an intense desire at all times to be utter just and utter true towards these our fellow selves whom thus we love; (c) a positive refusal, which naught can shake nor any temptation cause us to lay aside, to benefit ourselves at the cost of others. (4) Conscientious and thoughtful intellectual study of the age-old teachings of Theosophy explaining the universe in which we live - a study which aims at Truth at all costs, and above everything else, irrespective of one's private opinions, prejudices, or feelings, all of which last we hold ourselves in readiness to lay aside at any moment when a grander vision or a nobler truth shows to us the inadequacy of what we formerly may have held so dear as opinions or feelings. (5) Putting into practice the age-old rule of learning to forgive and learning to love; for this perhaps more than anything else, for us ordinary human beings, is a spiritual exercise of paramount importance, for it chastens the mind, quickens the heart, clarifies the intellect, and distills from our own inner nature the magic elixir of sympathy and compassion, thus making us akin with the gods themselves. (6) A strict and glad observance of all the behests of duty of whatever kind, and doing one's duty with a song in the heart, which, it may be, expresses itself on the lips, because of one's recognizing that duty nobly done is a good man's noble work; and (7) a keen realization of one's solidarity with the Universe and all that in it lives; a realization so keen that it transcends the mere feeling of a sense of oneness with one's fellows, as mentioned in 3 (a) above, for it becomes not only a spiritual intuition but also a keen intellectual realization of one's spiritual identity with the Universe, and therefore of one's complete solidarity on all planes of being with Nature's multitudinous hosts of lives and more particularly with our fellow-men, so that their interests become our interests, their joys our joys, their advancement ours, and their sorrows our sorrows, and their distresses become clamant for such remedial action on our part as it is within our power properly and wisely to give .... My heart yearns to broadcast throughout the ranks of the fellowship of the T.S., high and low, and everywhere, the sublime verity that any one of you, my Brothers, may become a channel, if you only will to do so and train yourself so to become, for the reception of only the gods know how great an inrushing of the spiritual-psychic energies flowing from these

Great Beings who, known or unknown, visible or invisible, presided over the founding of the T.S., and who will have it under their mighty protection and watchful care as long as we prove ourselves worthy and adequate instruments of their mighty strength and loving guidance. As to Fraudulent Claims Hypocrisy and pretense in these matters on the part of fraudulent claimants to spiritual powers or guidance will not only defeat their own ends, but will infallibly slam the door of communication tight shut between the pretender and the source of Light, for such a pretender is de facto a dissembler whose inner nature is divided against itself, and who therefore, for this very reason, makes himself to be a crooked and therefore an utterly unfit instrument and channel. Union with the high source is in his case stopped and blocked, and therefore is the connection broken. What I am here writing to you about is to me one of the greatest truths that all the various world-religions or world-philosophies originally taught, and which all, alas, with one possible exception, have now very largely forgotten, except as a theory, an empty possibility, mentally recognized but not followed, because considered to be too abstract and afar off, and therefore virtually impossible of fulfilment. I tell you that it is not impossible; it is not afar off; it is a reality. It is something nearer to you than your own body, nearer to you than your own mind; closer than hands and feet. For if you but realize it, you would know that your own higher consciousness at all times is inseparably linked with this sublime Fountain or Source; and all the vestments of consciousness or sheaths of understanding, or bodies with which the Monad may clothe itself, are less close to the Monad than this inmost of its own essence. This Wonder-Force or Energy What a great, what a truly wonderful, thing it would be if only a hundred members in the T.S. could become such self-consciously trained vehicles or channels for this Wonder-force or Energy to flow through! Nay, why do I say a hundred? Why not say a thousand; indeed, why not say five thousand - why not include every member of the T.S. who realizes that as a Theosophist he has a possibility of becoming far more than a man of the world, merely better than the average? What a picture rises before my mind's eye, as I see an ideal Theosophical Society, whose fellowship is formed of men and women who are inspired, directed, comforted, by the divinity within each one of them, and who are working in self-conscious collaboration with the Nirmanakayas whose holy presence every intuitive Theosophist must at least at times feel the nearness of! With our spirits thus expressing themselves, with our intellects thus enlightened, and with our hearts thus stimulated, the Fellowship of the Theosophical Society, within a relatively short time, would conquer the world, not in a material sense forsooth, but spiritually and intellectually, for they would become like a collective Spiritual Flame in human society, lightening the path of all, and guiding the footsteps of those still in the darkness towards the Great Light. I am not here dreaming of the Seventh Race in the Seventh Round of this Globe D of ours, although such indeed will be to a large extent the `human' society of that far distant day. I am thinking of what might happen even today among men, if Theosophists would realize the destiny that is theirs, the mission that it is ours to perform, and the tremendous, unspeakably great, spiritual and intellectual energies that we could loose into the world for

the world's benefit and help and guidance. The Greater Needs I hear much talk in these days about things which seem to me to be of such small importance in comparison with the real work of the Theosophical Society, I hear talk of Theosophical dissensions, and of the Movement being broken up into different parts, each part, so it is said, more or less jealous of every other part, and each part fighting for its own advantage. While some of all this is undoubtedly true, nevertheless it does all of it seem to me to be so pitifully unimportant by contrast with the greater things and the greater needs. What does it matter, after all, whether one be of Paul and another be of Apollos? If the follower of Paul is an earnest, sincere Theosophist striving to do his best; and if the follower of Apollos is an equally earnest Theosophist doing his best likewise; it will surely be but a very short time before the followers of both Paul and Apollos will recognize that these separating distinctions are superficial and by comparison with the greater realities of little import. The main thing is to be true to the solid realities of Theosophy that the T.S. was founded to teach; and then organizational differences and differences of individual opinion, and the having of different Leaders or Teachers, could be so easily regarded as incidentals of relatively small import, as, indeed, I always consider them to be. The main and sole thing that the Theosophist should consider first is working for Theosophy to the best of his ability and understanding. Work for Theosophy, and try to find the points of union and contact with each other, my Brothers, and the difficulties will vanish away because seen to be what they are - affairs of relatively small importance. Yet let no one think for an instant that I look upon divagations from, or lapses from, or distortions of, the original Theosophy of our Masters as first brought to us by H.P.B., as things of no importance. On the contrary, I hold them as of the very first importance. But this in no wise prevents me from holding a sincere wish to treat all other human beings Theosophists included, even though the latter may utterly reject H.P.B. - as brothers. We of our own beloved T.S. hold true as steel to our own traditional T.S. and the traditional Theosophical philosophy which it teaches; but perhaps just because we do so, and try to live it instead of merely talking about it, we are always ready to be brotherly towards others, to recognize the rights of individual opinions when sincerely held by others, and also we realize with clarity that organizational differences, while having certain ugly features, nevertheless have one advantage at least among several others that I could enumerate: that is, that these organizational distinctions or differences or individual opinions at least keep the Theosophical Movement, or tend so to keep it, from falling into the old and fatal pit of disaster that has always been the fate of every religious organization up to the present day - churchism, dogmatism, spiritual and intellectual crystallization, even perhaps poperies and ritualisms, in which the spirit is lost and is replaced by things of the body matter. I have said enough. I write these lines ... hoping, I believe with justice, that the implications contained in my words will be grasped by our own noble-hearted fellowship and will serve as a new inspiration, a possible new rule of action, in difficult times; and above everything else perhaps serving to open a door upon a new vision of ineffably grand possibilities which any Theosophist at any time, if he will, have he the yearning, have he the noble desire, can grasp and take unto himself for his own and his fellows' great good....

I am, my Brothers, with affectionate greetings, Fraternally and faithfully yours, G. de Purucker - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 91 ------------------

THE WORK AND DESTINY OF THE 'MONAD' Continuing the printing of letters from our archives of responses by Dr. G. de Purucker to questions sent him on theosophical teaching, we include here one on the difficult and esoteric subject of the Monad - what it really is, its duties, its destiny. The addressee in this instance is not given. It could possibly have been Boris de Zirkoff who often sent questions on difficult points of teaching to GdeP. The letter is dated 30th January 1934. - Ed. Dear ---Answering your letter of January 29, 1934: I am not astonished that you find difficulty in the question that you lay before me. The teaching is indeed extremely recondite, but yet simple - recondite only because so strange to Occidental minds. If I understand your question correctly, the gist of it is the following: How is it that the Monad, in essence a spiritual-divine entity, needs to pass through the lower kingdoms, such as the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal, and later the human, when, as just said, being so lofty an entity in spirituality, the supposition is that in far past aeons of evolution it must already have passed through all these kingdoms. Is this the idea? The answer is simple enough, and it is as follows: While it is true that the Monad, per se, is a divine-spiritual entity, it yet, as is obviously the fact, is connected with our planetary chain, and therefore with the solar system, by karmic links out of which it has not yet grown. Now let me try to take an illustration as an analogy, which may help you. The human being essentially is a spiritual Monad. But it nevertheless needs to descend into the realms of matter, i.e., into realms grosser than its own native sphere, in order to gain experience there because of karmic links of destiny. And this is because it has not yet completely learned all the lessons of our present planes in the solar system on which we are working; or rather we have not yet learned fully all the lessons in this present schoolhouse of life. The little child in a school-room is essentially a reincarnating monad, but it is still a child in this life. Its intelligence grows as the years pass. Just so does the unwrapping or unfolding of the deific powers of the Monad proceed as the Rounds pass from the first into the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh. The Monad at the beginning of every reimbodiment of a planetary chain, because it is a part of that planetary chain and will be so unto eternity, although the planetary chain itself is evolving, must pass when the Manvantara of the planetary chain opens through all the lower kingdoms, thus helping to form them, to shape them. Once this is done, on the next Round it passes through these kingdoms much more quickly because it has unfolded some of itself, and the road is ready. The Third Round still more rapidly in the lower kingdoms,

but more slowly in the higher kingdoms. In exactly the same manner does the Reincarnating Ego find itself obliged to enter the human womb as a life-spark; and it must pass through all the phases of gestation, although it itself is essentially a spiritual being. It must do this in order to build up a human body in which it can work, yet it stands apart from the embryo, which it merely enlivens with a portion of itself, like Krishna. In exactly the same manner must the Monad build up for itself vehicles on the different Globes and through the different Rounds. And next, remember that it is not the Monad per se which does this, i.e., as I have often pointed out, the Monad does not itself descend or fall, but gains these lessons through rays from itself in the manner that I have before explained, just exactly as the Reincarnating Ego does not itself physically enter a womb, but builds up its body in the womb by reason of a life-ray from itself. Even in the full-grown human being the Reincarnating Ego is not actually in the body, but is in intimate ray-contact with the brain and nervous system and heart and the other organs. In far distant aeons of the future our whole planetary chain will itself have evolved into a solar system and will then find its Solar Manvantaras, including all its uncounted armies of beings, on a higher plane than the present one. Just so in the far distant future will the human Monad no longer find the need of using bodies of gross matter which we call flesh, but will frame for itself highly ethereal bodies living on highly ethereal planes of the Kosmos. I hope that this explanation will make things clearer. If not, I will try to help you again if you find a difficulty, but I have given you all the teaching in a thumb-nail sketch and your letter shows me that you really understand it. Think of the passage of the Monad through the Globes and during the Rounds as a process of gestation if you like, and then you can look upon the Monad as finally being born into its own ethereal spheres after the end of the seventh Round. Think of the growing entity, of the growing embryo. Embryology is a good illustration. Here we have the case of a spiritual being needing to pass through all the kingdoms of Nature in the human womb: the mineral, vegetable, beast, and finally human, before it can frame for itself a body to work with on this plane. Now this is exact, but on a larger scale, in the Globes and in the Rounds. And furthermore, these bodies or vehicles that it frames for itself are in themselves also evolving entities learning and growing, ultimately in their turn to become Monads. Thus it is a case of helping oneself and helping others also. Yours in haste, G. de P. - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 87 ------------------------

A Letter from the Leader* Pierce Spinks, Esq., 2400 Webster Street, San Francisco, California. Dear Pierce: 15th January, 1942

I have just finished reading President Conger's confidential Letter for Members only, dated 5th January, 1942, of which I desire, by the way, to express most hearty approval; but I am writing to you, dear Pierce, particularly with regard to the last paragraph of Colonel Conger's Letter, page 3, to wit, the second of your two most excellent suggestions; and of these two I will say immediately that in my humble judgment Suggestion No. 2 is incomparably the better. Perhaps I am quite wrong in this. Yet this your suggestion struck me as so feasible, sensible, and practicable in all ways, that for several hours after rereading Colonel Conger's letter twice, I have been debating the advisability of writing to you about this your second suggestion above mentioned. I like this idea immensely; and I am positive that there must be at least one hundred members in the Section who could afford $10.00 a month, and who would be happy to contribute in this manner, provided your suggestion were concretely imbodied in a definite system; and it is this definite system which I venture to submit to you, and which I hope, Pierce, you will approve of. My idea, which I think will be approved of by the National President, Colonel Conger, and the other Officials of the Section, is that you be the Treasurer of what I might perhaps call the "Hundred Members Club", ----------* This letter from Dr. de Purucker, addressed to the President of the San Francisco Lodge, Mr. F.P. Spinks, should interest all F.T.S. throughout the world, as it acquaints them with certain facts regarding the International Headquarters of the T.S. and probable important changes which are in contemplation but not yet decided. Colonel Conger has already acquainted the American members with such contemplated changes through his letter of January 5th, and though very likely the American organ Lucifer may soon be printing the above letter of the Leader, through the FORUM it will reach a still larger number of readers. - Eds. ----------receiving the monthly donations from each of the one hundred members, receipting to each individual F.T.S. for his contribution as it is received, and in general taking charge of this Hundred Members Club, to see that it functions smoothly and effectively. I feel that as you are a practical and unusually capable businessman, and utterly devoted to our blessed Work, and as the idea or suggestion was born in your own mind out of your devotion to the T.S., our Masters' child, you are the logical person to put this plan into operation and to see it through. I would venture, however, very earnestly to make several suggestions, which I beg of you to adopt, and they are as follows: (a) I think it would not be the thing to circularize our members to find out who would like to join the Hundred Members Club. I think the proper way to handle this matter is to have a Notice of the formation of this Club and its purposes printed in the FORUM, in LUCIFER, possibly in THEOSOPHICAL NUGGETS if place can be found there, and in this manner to reach as many members as possible who will thus see that anyone who wants to join the Hundred Members Club can do so by writing directly to yourself, Pierce, at your address: 2400 Webster Street, San Francisco, California, and pledging himself or herself to paying to you, for our International Headquarters, each month the sum of $10.00.

(b) I would earnestly urge that the Hundred Members Club do not exist merely for the "duration of the emergency," as you phrased it, but that it be a Club functioning well into the future, and perhaps in perpetuity. Any member who might be obliged by circumstances to cancel his membership could easily be replaced by what I am convinced would be a waiting list you might have built up during the formation of the Hundred Members Club. (c) I think it is only right and fair that it should be distinctly understood that members who already are contributing to the extent of their ability should not be expected to contribute to the Hundred Members Club, and this would include members of the T.S. who may already have pledged contributions, let us say to the National Section or elsewhere; for it is obviously just as important that the National Section be not utterly crippled for lack of all funds, as it is that our International Headquarters should continue, and to do its work efficiently; and both the one and the other can do efficient work only when at least sufficient means for most economical use are at hand. (d) Each month's accumulation of the Hundred Members Club, when the monthly sum has reached you, should be mailed to the Treasurer-General at our International Headquarters by bank draft, or have it reach the International Headquarters in some other proper manner. The Treasurer-General would then send you his receipt for the monthly contribution from the Hundred Members Club, and this would be filed by you as Treasurer of the Hundred Members Club. (e) It is just possible that you, with your excellent business-head, dear Pierce, might care to make some change in the formation of such a Club, not limiting it to one hundred, but to two hundred, and then it could be called the Two Hundred Members Club, each member's contribution being $5.00 a month, or you could keep your suggested sum of $10.00 a month each. (f) Either one, and especially the latter of these two suggestions of mine, would ease the financial strain of our and your International Headquarters enormously, would probably take care of any deficit that has been the nightmare of our most able Financial Committee at Headquarters, and enable the Leader to take that nose of his from the grindstone and use the resulting saving of energy and time in other badly needed Theosophical efforts. (g) I do not think that I am trespassing upon any rights or privileges that belong to the Section in making my suggestion to you, Pierce, as above outlined, but if so, I hope you and the officials and members of the Section will forgive me; and if my suggestion be found to be unacceptable by you or the officials and members of the Section, I will at once withdraw it, and we can drop the matter. And now, a few paragraphs about our International Headquarters: When I took office on 11th July, 1929, knowing full well what heavy responsibility I was assuming at Masters' command, I found our beloved Headquarters burthened with a very heavy load of indebtedness; but despite the worldwide depression which began in October of the same year, and despite the unrest of the world and the wars which have broken out in later years, at the present time our International Headquarters at Point Loma are almost entirely without debt, we have our land free and clear of any lien or encumbrance, and the very heavy expenses of upkeep, general maintenance, etc., etc., at Headquarters, meaning caring for something more than three hundred people - all this, I say, has likewise been reduced to a much more efficient and business-like system, and we are still hard at work striving in every way possible to reduce expenses, to pay off the last fragments of indebtedness, which are now, thank the Gods, few enough, and even we

have the goal before our eyes of your International Headquarters consisting of a body of utterly devoted Headquarters workers - as indeed they were before when I took office - but much fewer in number even than now, although at the present time the F.T.S. at Headquarters, workers and those whom various obligations bind us to care for, number slightly over one hundred. Even this number of workers at Headquarters in time I hope will be considerably reduced to the point compatible with utmost efficiency, although this last point is one which has to be handled with greatest care, because, as stated above, we have obligations which were assumed before 1929 which we must faithfully fulfill. The above is really an achievement which is little short of marvelous, and I can only express my most heartfelt thanks to the members all over the world and to our devoted workers at Headquarters, Officials and others, who have all cooperated with me along all these lines of reduction of expenses, and attaining maximum efficiency. Yet Lomaland, beloved by us all, when all is said is a spirit rather than a geographical locality, for it is the spirit of utter Theosophical devotion to our Masters' Work and to the dissemination of our God-Wisdom from the Central Heart of the T.S., our International Headquarters, among men; and our members now have come to realize this. Actually Lomaland is not what it was when dear K.T. was alive and gave it the inspiration of her genius. Then it was a fit locality for the Heart of the T.S.; but since her passing, and due to a number of converging causes, and particularly during the last eighteen months or two years, circumstances have become so difficult in certain ways as regards dignity and refinement and quiet, that for months past our officials and myself have been very seriously thinking of doing our best to sell our Point Loma property and transferring our Headquarters Work elsewhere. Much of the above you already know, dear Pierce, but perhaps not all the details that I am now here jotting down. In any case for some months past, certain F.T.S. have been scouting around in Southern California, and finally have located a place about one hundred and thirty miles, roughly speaking, north of Point Loma, between Los Angeles and San Bernardino, which is about eighty percent splendidly adequate to our needs. We are already in business-negotiations with the owners of this property, which so nearly meets our needs; but the price asked for the property is heavy, although I will frankly say that even at this price, this new property is what is colloquially called, in my judgment, a good buy. It contains about forty-one acres, about half of our present Point Loma holdings, a magnificent auditorium seating between five and six hundred people, an Administration building, adequate and comfortable rooms for our various offices, and the different staffs, a place for our immense Headquarters Library, a place for our printing press and for printing machinery, for editorial work, book-binding, as well as for the Publications Department. It contains sufficient number of bedrooms to house even our present Headquarters members, although perhaps a certain amount of pioneering may have to be done for a time in this respect; and it is likewise a property which in dignity, refinement, quiet of situation, and proximity to the great metropolitan centers of Los Angeles, Pasadena, and vicinity, is incomparably superior to what Point Loma is or ever has been. All the buildings except the garages and one old barn, are of reinforced concrete brick structure, therefore fire-proof, are relatively new, no building more than sixteen years old and some only five years old, and one line of the property is contiguous to one of the great transcontinental highways. The taxes are less than what we pay here at Point Loma, and indeed in all ways it is a place for every F.T.S. to be proud of as being the International

Headquarters of his beloved T.S. When I first entered these new grounds on an inspection-tour ten days or so ago, it looked to me to be like a part of the Campus of a University. It is evident from all this that our present heavy Lomaland expenses of constant repair of our old buildings, with their possible fire-danger, etc., would be reduced to a minimum. Please understand this place has not been as yet secured, for we are still negotiating. It may be necessary, if we cannot sell our Lomaland property immediately, to place a small mortgage on the property, which nearly breaks my heart; but if we can sell our Lomaland property, which we are now striving hard to do, such a mortgage would not be required. In any case, such mortgage would be less than twenty-five percent of the purchase price of this new property. It would have been utterly impossible for us even to think of acquiring such a fine new property for our Headquarters had it not been for the magnificent generosity of an F.T.S. and a personal friend of mine, who will donate a very considerable part of the purchase-price if we acquire it. Furthermore, it must be remembered that Point Loma in these sad and troubled times is in the very midst of a heavily fortified area, and therefore in case of bombing or shelling from the sea, our members resident here would be in most imminent and real danger - a fact which we do not anticipate but which is quite possible. The above and many other reasons have combined to persuade not only myself but our Headquarters Staff that a removal of our Headquarters would be a wise and far-sighted proceeding. Of course the expense of such a move would be heavy, which is one more reason why your suggestion of a Hundred Members Club bringing us in an extra income that we could rely upon, and imposing no burden on anyone, strikes me as a really masterly idea, and therefore I am now writing. Indeed, as I think things over, I do not see why, dear Pierce, you might not send this letter on both to Brother Clapp and to Colonel Conger, and I am enclosing extra copies herewith for publication of it in LUCIFER and in NUGGETS. I hope it is not too long. But it is of such importance and great interest to our members, I feel that these two gentlemen would be glad to publish it if they could. If you consent to this, we will also publish it in the FORUM, and in this way our members all over the Section and indeed elsewhere over the world wherever the FORUM goes, will know about this; and although now foreign warconditions and Governmental restrictions of the various countries will prevent their helping with contributions, they have the right to know, and indeed should know the facts. There is much more that I could say, but as this letter has already reached intolerable length, I fear, I close. Let me know if you consent to its publication, if you approve of my various suggestions, and if you will accept the Office of Treasurer of the Hundred Members Club, or the Two Hundred Members Club perhaps, if you like that better. I am, dear Pierce, as always, Faithfully yours, (sgn.) G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, March, 1942 ----------------------

THE LIGHT THAT SHE BROUGHT - H.P. Blavatsky as Intermediary of Great Sages - G. de Purucker The following are extracts from H.P. Blavatsky: The Mystery, Chapter IV of Part I. The "Mystery" is that part of the human constitution which by training can be made so completely still and quiet as to receive the impress or 'message' from a more highly evolved being, a Teacher or Mahatma. This HPB was able to do; and the first part of this book, which invites careful study, explains this with force and clarity not elsewhere found in theosophical literature today. "The Mediator or Intermediary," says the author, "is a highly evolved human entity always possessing a strong and vigorous individuality, and usually a forceful and positive personality, and is the Messenger or Transmitter between others greater than he or than she is, and human beings in general." (p. 32). Part II (13 chapters) of the book is titled "Philosophic and Scientific." - Ed. There is about H.P. Blavatsky a certain grandeur that impels us towards search for the inner meaning of things and an effort to awaken the deepest part of our nature where all truth abides for us to discover. We have not identified ourselves with her work for our own salvation's sake; our aim is at a mark more unusual: to make mankind happy glimpsing the wonderful hope that we cherish, glimpsing the wonderful truths; to unfold in our lives a divine influence to take out into the world and to give to humanity, that the great heart of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky may be understood; and that the doors of the temple of peace and brotherhood may be opened wider and wider, that we may look out beyond and see other and other portals of other and other temples opening and opening to the utmost heights; and that many may see and come forward who now fall back and die, and must, until the light so shines through their lives that without speech or writing it will make itself known. This was the light that she brought into the world; it was for these ends she came, and was heroic, and suffered. Therefore if we would pay right tribute to her we must weigh well every word that we utter and protest against the entry into our minds of any single worthless or personal thought. For she offered her life on the altar of truth, and had little to support her but the power of the great doctrines that she brought with her; for the whole world was against her in the beginning. Through every phase and action of her career that superb courage shone which manifests in the world but here and there, in those whom we call the heroes; and then only when their highest motives are dominant in their minds, and some lofty emergency calls into play that which is greater than the normal self. For this kind of courage is spiritual it is inherent in the Spiritual Will, the noble ruler of the mind; it is a quality that marks the Divine Soul of Man.... She saw how humanity had been drifting through the ages unaware of its birthright and unconscious of its dignity; how the indefiniteness of modern ideas had confused the minds of the people and engendered everywhere uncertainty and helpless doubt; how the essential truths of religion had been honey-combed with falsehood by the tortuous forces that retarded the progress of mankind: and she left for posterity a body of teachings with power in them to change the whole world, and as it were to raise from the dead the Immortal Part of man .... The case of H.P. Blavatsky was identical with what has taken place at other times,

when, for various reasons, a Messenger is sent forth from the glorious Association of the great Sages and Seers, exactly as she was. In all cases of the appearance of these Messengers, their work is based on the combination, briefly speaking, of two facts, or rather the concurrence of two quite distinct and yet closely similar sources of spiritual and intellectual inspiration: first, inspiration from the Messenger's own Spiritual Self or Inner Essential Divinity, . . . and this is in large part the result of previous initiations which the Messenger has passed through; and second, constant and continuous help in an intellectual and psycho-spiritual way from the Messenger's Teacher or Teachers, who have sent the Messenger forth into the world in order to do the work which the civilization of the time, in its cyclic evolution, has made possible .... (Eclectic Theosophist, No. 93) --------------------------

The Status of the `Mahabharata' and the `Ramayana' I am taking up the study of the Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, with my class, and would like to be able to tell them more about the correspondences of many of the characters with the various Cosmic Planes and Principles. It seems evident, for example, that the five Pandava princes in the Mahabharata have a special symbology, and also, in the Ramayana, Rama and Sita and their friends and enemies. Could you throw more light on the subject? - J.T. G. de P. - Answering your questions about the relative places of the five Pandava princes, supposed to have correspondences with the Cosmic Planes, Elements, etc.: If I were you I would not bother my head about any such thing. Let us look at the situation exactly as it is. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are the two great epic poems of India, just as the Iliad and the Odyssey were and still are the two great epic poems of Greece, or the Greater and the Less Edda we may call the two great epic poems of Scandinavia; and there are similar epics, one or two or three, belonging to other countries. Now then, let us turn to and keep in mind the Indian epics only. These are not wholly and solely mystical or occult works. Let us keep that idea perfectly clear. No more so than is the Jewish Bible, no more so than are the Iliad and the Odyssey, etc. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are fundamentally ancient Indian history and legend, with all the mists and glamor of antiquity veiling them, and they contain in addition a great many beautiful, truly mystical and occult, teachings; and a few really splendid minor episodes, like the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Anugita, which have been interspersed in the epic-story, for this is according to Hindu tastes. Thus, really, the Ramayana, for instance, is essentially the struggle of Rama against his enemies, mostly of the south, in Lanka, the Rakshasas, etc., which is but a modern Aryanized legendary version of the history of the struggle of the early Fifth Race in its Indian branch with the Aryanized Atlanteans of Lanka, an island-continent now sunken except its northern headland, which is Ceylon. Similarly, the Mahabharata, as I remember it, is a legendary epic telling in poetic,

and occasionally almost fairy-tale, style, the ... struggles of early Aryan settlements in India, Aryans themselves fighting amongst each other, and also fighting against the aboriginal, so called, inhabitants of the great peninsula. Now, there you have in a thumbnail sketch just what the Mahabharata and Ramayana are, and actually also just what the Iliad and the Odyssey are when applied to Greek legendary story or history. These great epics are part history, part legend, and part religious instruction. When I say religious, I mean philosophical, and mystical, and occult, also. Now it is quite possible for a clever writer to extract from so generally glamorous and mystical a work as the Mahabharata or Ramayana, correspondences between the five Pandava princes on the one hand, or between Rama and Sita on the one hand, and something or somebody else on the other hand, correspondences perhaps with Cosmic Planes or Principles. In the early days of the T.S. this was a favorite pastime or relaxation of Theosophical writers. This finding of correspondences, however, could be applied with good reason to these episodes taken from the Mahabharata like the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Anugita, because these episodes are not so much the historical part, or the legendary part, but are deliberately written, semi-occult, religio-philosophical treatises, interspersed here and there in the legendary, historical material, because this way of doing things is beloved of the Hindu mind. Now I wonder if you get the picture. If I were you I would not bother my head about these things, and I would tell your class the plain reason why. It is something like trying to do the same thing with the Hebrew Testament, or the Christian New Testament. One who is clever in finding, or thinking he finds, occult correspondences, can find lots of correspondences, real or imaginary, between the patriarchs, for instance, of the Old Testament, and the Planes or Principles of Nature, or between Jesus and his disciples and the Planes or Principles of Nature. But such correspondences, while having some reason, are always shaky, and are pleasant rather as a pastime than actual, solid esoteric study. Therefore I repeat, if I were you I would not bother my head about any such correspondences between the five Pandava princes and something in Nature; and you can get a picture of what I am here writing, and get this picture clear-cut in your mind, and then when you are asked questions from people who do not know what the Mahabharata and Ramayana are, you can just explain it to them, pointing out that not any one in any country of these great epics, whether of Asia or ancient Europe, or ancient America, is a thoroughly, or typically, exclusively occult treatise on esoteric correspondences, etc. But all of them are legendary history based on facts now lost in the night of time, but seen through the distorting glass of legend by much later writers who are correct in their facts, but like all legendary writers deliberately embroider their theme, and introduce perfectly sound, religious teaching, as in the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Anugita, in the Hindu epic. - Theosophical Forum, Oct., 1938 ---------------------------

MAHA-MAYA - THE GREAT MYSTERY - G. de Purucker

The following is an extract from the just published Point Loma Publications Study Series No. 2, Word Wisdom in the Esoteric Tradition, stenographic reports of class lectures given by Dr. de Purucker at the Point Loma Theosophical Headquarters in 1913-14. This is from the fifth lecture, given January 11, 1914. Other words expounded then were Karman, Soul, Matter, Person, Ego, and the Virgin Birth. In exposition of this last subject it is pointed out that the most important doctrines of the Christian religion - the Trinity, the Incarnation of the Logos, the Virgin Birth of the Savior of men, the Angelic Governance of the World - are archaic pagan doctrines, later "so modified, so stultified, so strangled in the effort to hold them, to explain them and expound them to critics, sceptics, and religious iconoclasts, that they have lost their true life." - Eds. Maya, Mayika: Maya is from a root ma, and ya is a termination. Ma, like the verbs signifying to make in so many languages, has a thousand and one meanings: to measure, to make, to form, to fashion, to create, to share, etc. It means action exercised upon material. Now this word maya is used in Hindu philosophy (by a development of meaning, a progression of thought from measure, to make) to signify that which is illusory. For instance, a house is a development of an idea; it is an illusory aspect of the spiritual conception. Maya is used signifying magic, deceit, impersonation, and many other words giving the equivalent idea of a cloud covering the truth. Maya is often spoken of as if its meaning were nothingness. This will not be found in Hindu philosophy except in a purely philosophical sense; but it does mean illusion, deceit deception, that which appears but is not. Let me try to give an example of that; it is very important that we get this perfectly clear. We see the universe around us, the stars running their courses, the sun rising and setting regularly. This is an example of maya. The sun does not rise and set; it appears to do so. The earth turns on its axis and produces the phantasmal illusion of the sun rising and setting. The stars do not rise and set; the earth turns on its axis, producing the illusion of the rising and setting of the spheres. Now that too is an example of maya, of magic, of deception, of illusion. Illusion is the meaning usually given to maya, and it is correct, but it does not mean that which is not, nothingnesss. You will sometimes hear the phrase "All is maya." True, all is maya, things are not what they seem. I think it is Longfellow in his Psalm of Life, who says: Tell me not in mournful numbers Life is but an empty dream; For the soul is dead that slumbers And things are not what they seem. But our souls are slumbering most of the time and we do not see things as they are, yet we regulate our lives by them. We seek for facts in the illusory appearances of things, but the facts are behind the phenomena. The sun does not rise and set, the spheres do not rise and set, `heat' and `cold' are sensory illusions and in themselves there is no such absolute thing as 'heat' and `cold', these being impressions on the senses of forces of nature. In this way we understand what maya is: the magic of nature - the goddess of Mahamaya, the great mystery. It is said in the Vedanta, and H.P. Blavatsky frequently speaks of it, that the veil of the Deity is maya, Maha-maya, Great Maya, and we saw when we quoted the inscription on the statue of the goddess Neith that she declared that no mortal had revealed

her, had ever lifted or discovered her veil, her garment. The usual translation of that seems to be "no mortal has ever uncovered my form," but I think a better rendering is "no mortal has ever revealed (or disclosed) my garment" - this garment being Maya, the great magic, the mystery and illusion which covers nature, the dress of nature. - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 60 ---------------------

ON MONADS, ROUNDS, AND ASTRAL MOLDS [A private letter from Dr. de Purucker, in answer to questions submitted to him.) Boldly stated, it is perfectly correct that man, not any one man, but the human kingdom, i.e., the class of human monads, are the parents so to speak of the monads below them. In fact, every such hierarchical class leads every class beneath it, and is in fact not only the inspirer of that lower class, but emits or emanates or throws off the lower class during the unfolding process, and this occurs especially on the downward part of the rounds. Thus a cosmos is brought into being in the same manner, the highest plane unrolling the next lower, and so forth down to the bottom of that hierarchy from the original cosmic plane, and then upwards again. So it is with every Kingdom or Class of Monads, the human included. Most of H.P.B.'s teaching has been concerning the Fourth Round, with only relatively few sidelights on preceding rounds. Thus in this Fourth Round the Human Kingdom preceded the mammals, which came into being shortly after man had developed the animal stage. Please remember next in order that it is the monads that explain the evolutionary processes of these kingdoms, and that the bodies are merely the results of the urges or impulses originating in the evolving monads. It is the monads which make the classes of monads or the kingdoms which evolve. The bodies are merely their vehicles. Please keep this strongly in mind. On the other hand, it is equally true that every individual monad, which means of course every class of monads in the larger scale, must pass through every plane of nature, and every other kingdom, in order to gain universal experience. It is the monads that do this passing through the different kingdoms; and these two rules, the one just described above, and the one I am now referring to, occur even today in the human kingdom, as evidenced by embryology. The human germ is cast off by a human being, and yet that human germ, before it can grow into another human being, must pass through every kingdom, the Mineral Kingdom as a germ, the Vegetable Kingdom, the Animal Kingdom, and then by evolution as a child in the Human Kingdom. The monad is behind the growing embryo, developing its body to become human. Keep this fact of embryology in mind, and you will have a key to the other statement, that all monads must pass through all the kingdoms; and as this embryological illustration shows, even a human being or monad enters incarnation in any life through the lower kingdoms, as just described, indeed from the elemental to the human inclusive. The difficulty here of course is to puzzle out these two processes or procedures; but this can be done by keeping in mind constantly that it is the monads which are the Ariadne's thread,

and not merely the bodies. On the moon, for instance, the human kingdom, or what is now on earth the human kingdom, was then the higher part of the beast kingdom there, and the very lowest part of the then moon human kingdom. The elemental begins its long evolutionary pilgrimage by emanating from the bosom of the Divine its godhood, its own monadship in other words, already in itself, but it must attain self conscious realization of this divine monad ship. This comes through the "descent" or "fall" through all the lower kingdoms of nature already existing from manvantaras. Thus the monad passes slowly through every kingdom according to the Qabbalistic saying: the stone, i.e., the monad in the stone becomes a plant; the plant a beast; the beast a man, the man a god. The reference here is not to bodies, but evolving, ascending, developing monads. So with our own human monads during the first Round on this globe, and in fact on this chain, the highest and lowest, to wit the Dhyani-Chohans and the elementals, were the first to appear, and they gradually laid the foundations, giving bodies for the other intermediate classes to manifest themselves. At the end of the first Round the procedure changes in the respect that beginning with the second Round and thereafter the kingdoms have been established as foundations, and each class thereafter imbodies in its own kingdom. Thus we have both procedures working in a sense, at least for a time, simultaneously and coordinately, rising upwards through the kingdoms; and yet each higher kingdom preceding the kingdom beneath it, or guiding the kingdom beneath it, and throwing off as it evolves the kingdom beneath it .... During the second Round, recapitulation begins an every globe of the chain and for every class. Taking one kingdom: beginning with the second Round, it is a brief recapitulation of its monad's descent through all the lower kingdoms, until they attain their own monadic kingdom or status, our human kidgdom. Thereafter they continue in the human kingdom because they have not yet evolved to become the lowest Dhyani-Chohanic kingdom; but continuing in their own human kingdom in this recapitulation, they throw off and help the lower kingdom beneath them. Indeed, as stated above, every kingdom does just this. Thus, during the fourth Round on globe D, our human kingdom - leaving aside the sishtas here in order not to complicate things - the incoming monads of the human kingdom have a very brief recapitulation of their monad's descent through the lower kingdoms, but rapidly as the human infant does in the womb. But once this recapitulation is ended, and they have attained their own kingdom, then they begin to evolve as human monads on this fourth globe during this fourth Round; and they lead all the other lower kingdoms, helping these lower kingdoms, and throwing out from themselves molds as it were, or germs which are passing through their bodies. If these germs are viable, i.e., fit to live and evolve, they continue as a new branch of the lower kingdom. I am thinking of the mammals as a instance. Man in his kingdom was in this fourth Round before the mammals from his own rapidly changing types of bodies, before man or the human kingdom attained the distinct human form that now he has. There were many early mammals which died out because they proved themselves unfit to continue. These mammals monads will have to wait till the next chain imbodiment. But once the human animal form was established for its own period of evolution, then the human bodies became more or less continuous. But during the 6th and 7th Root-Races ahead of us, the mammal form will change into something else,

I mean of human beings.... 2) The astral molds left behind man are not merely astral pictures in the Astral Light. They are more than pictures. They are, as it were, forms, living entities, vegetating in the Astral Light until they are awakened by animal monads finding them fit vehicles to begin evolution in the lowest part of the human kingdom. If you have never seen or understood an astral mold, I fear it is very difficult to explain just what these astral molds are. They are more than astral pictures, more than mere impressions. They are in fact just what they are called, "astral molds", and I cannot think of a better term. It is these astral molds, abandoned in the Astral Light by humans who have finished with them, which remain for ages before they disintegrate and become, if needed, the vehicles or astral bodies of the monads of the highest animal kingdom, which then seize or possess these human astral molds which thus give them the pattern to follow after the human kingdom, and become as it were the humanized animals of the animal kingdom, to develop into true human beings at a later age. 3) It is, however, not quite true to call the human stock, "the most primitive stock on this planet", because the kingdoms of the Dhyani-Chohans are higher than the human; what is meant is that the human stock is more primitive, during the fourth Round, than the mammals are during the fourth Round on this globe. 4) The globes are not the principles of a chain, but they have a close correspondence, interestingly enough, and this is merely because nature works analogically, having her one set of laws throughout all her being. Indeed, each single globe of any chain is an entity in itself, having its seven principles; and here the analogy of the globes in a human constitution is again seen. Our earth, for instance, globe 4 in our chain, following H.P.B.'s seven-globe chain, has its seven principles. Furthermore, the gross body of our earth which we know, which is the sthula sarira of our globe, following analogy again, has its own corresponding seven principles; and this is alluded to by the Master in The Mahatma Letters [p. 94]. We should not consider the seven classes of evolving life-waves on each globe as being the principles of that globe. The evolving life-waves pass through the globes much as the life-atoms pass through the physical body of a man. They are not the seven principles of man's physical body, although indeed seven classes of life-atoms can and do pass through every human being's constitution. Therefore again I say, the seven classes of life-waves or monads are not the principles of any globe. They are merely entities passing through the globes and evolving on the globes, as the life-atoms on the seven planes of a human constitution pass through those seven planes. -------------". . . A monad means an indivisible center of life-consciousness-substance, a spiritual ego. Therefore man, in addition to being a stream of consciousness as he is as a constitution, has within him a Divinity, a buddha or Christ, a Manasaputra, a human being, an astral entity; and he is housed in the human beast - the astral-vital-physical body. All these collectively constitute man's constitution. Hence I have so often said to you: Remember in all your studies, never forget it, that man is a composite entity, which means an entity formed of other entities, other beings . . . . All through any one such constitution there is the sutratman or thread-self from the inmost of the inmost, the core of the core, the heart of the Universe - through all these different monads, from the highest

till it touches the physical brain of man. Thus man is both legion and unit. - G.de P., Studies in Occult Philosophy, p. 200 From Theosophia, #137, Winter 1973-4 ---------------------------

A NEW AGE IS BORN - G. de Purucker [January 15th marks the anniversary of the birth in 1874 of G. de Purucker. It is sometimes interesting, perhaps salutary, to recall how his years span historical events in The Theosophical Society, and to recall what his contribution has been. In issue No. 18, Sept. 15, 1973, of The Eclectic Theosophist, the editors included the following item. We find it fitting to reprint it today. Forty-six years have passed since that 'moment in history' referred to, and with today's perspective, we recall the time and the fact, and, in thought at least, seek to scan and weigh the events and burden of the intervening years. We leave the editorial introduction unchanged. - Ed.] Members of the once thriving Point Loma T.S., now scattered for the most part around the world in sturdy groups or lonely outposts, will remember that September 27 marks the day of the passing of G. de P. in 1942, just a week after the Autumnal Equinox. So swift, so unexpected the removal. Yet how the memories of those days, and the years before, cling to and indeed keep fresh and invigorate the heart and mind. It is a new world since then. Not that "brave new world" that dazzled the unsophisticated eyes of Miranda looking upon the courtly attired (though shipwrecked) retinue of the Duke of Milan strangely lost on her little island; but surely a new world for our little island Earth in all that has happened since World War II in convulsion - and opportunity. Our thought goes back to some eighteen months before G. de P.'s death. It was what we might call Syzygy Day, May 11, 1941, when the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter were all in line with the Sun. On that occasion, at the close of the evening Temple meeting G. de P. spoke. For some strange reason we do not have a stenographic transcription of his words (a stenographic report was always made of what he said by his secretary, Elsie Savage - Mrs. Harry Benjamin); but below we give what Professor Charles J. Ryan jotted down in note-form. The reader familiar with Dr. de Purucker's style will immediately see what we quote is almost certainly verbatim as far as it goes, and also that it accounts for hiatus and brevity, it being recognized that the complete comment would be too difficult to take down in even a modified shorthand. Readers will give what credence they will to Dr. de Purucker's words of thirty-two years ago - remembering Then and Now. They may also recall his article "Wind of the Spirit," published in the book of the same title, in which he warns of certain tragedy unless the West awakens spiritually and puts its "whole trust in the divine power of Nature and lives in accordance therewith." Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin!: Weighed, Weighed, Wanting - the Persians! That was 1940, when World War II was in its first stages, before America

and Japan and Russia were involved. Before the day of nuclear science. - Eds. ... Today is gravid with destiny. Some may have misunderstood what I have said about this day. Many have had the intellectual curiosity to wonder what it would be like to live at one end of an Age and see the beginning of a new one. Well, we are now at a point where the old cycle dies. Tonight, about midnight or so, a new Age is born. As they say in England and France, The King is dead, long live the King! But the preparation for the New Cycle took place in 1898, February, at the closing of the first 5000 years of Kali Yuga. But this is not the one I am speaking of now. This one (now opening) will affect the whole world, but particularly the Occidental portion. Coming events cast their shadows before, and I pray to the Gods that in the century to come the man of the West will govern himself with peace, with justice, and with honor. If not, his time is run. If he does, if he will collaborate with the cycle that is opening tonight ... How one's heart is wrung by man's folly! So beautiful and blessed are the Pathways of Right; so painful are the ways of wrong ... Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit All! (Eclectic Theosophist, Jan-Feb, 1988) --------------

THE NEW YEAR* This season of the year was chosen for the initiatory ceremonies...; and the greatest of these, the Ancient Mysteries in other words, so far as ancient Greece and Western European countries were concerned, took place at the time of the Winter Solstice and for two weeks thereafter, these two weeks culminating 14 days after the day of the winter solstice in what the Christians called the Epiphany, adopting a term from the ancient Greek Mysteries, for this term means 'the appearance of a god.' And what does this appearance of a god mean? It does not mean exactly that some outside deity showed itself to the postulant, but that man's own inner god brought forth through long months of purification and training, manifested itself in splendor through the physical vehicle or body of the postulant, of the initiant; and this initiatory ceremony culminated in what the earliest Christians, adopting this Greek mystical term, called the Epiphany. This took place on the 6th of January. The winter solstice in the time of Julius Caesar, at the time of the reform of the calendar under his direction, helped by the Alexandrian astronomer, Sosigenes, and by the Roman scribe, M. Fulvius, took place on the night of December 23, and the morning of December 24; and two weeks after that brought it to the 6th of January. Of course the natural astronomical beginning of the year is that day when the sun begins his northern journey; and this is the day of the winter solstice, which in our time, due to changes in the man-made calendar which we still use, falls on December 21; so that fourteen days after that brings us, in our modern period, to January 4. This day, January 4, commemorates the greatest ceremony of the Ancient Mysteries, the greatest event in the life of a great seer and sage, being the manifestation

of his own inner god, clothing him with solar splendor, so that his own inner divinity shone out through his very face and he became 'clothed with the sun,' resplendent with solar light... These greatest Mysteries were connected with astronomical phenomena - straitly connected with the Sun, and the Moon, and the planets Mercury and Venus. And on this last fact reposes the secret meaning of the Christmas Festival, the initiatory period beginning with the winter solstice, and continuing for fourteen days later, when the Moon became full, even as, when the ceremony was first instituted, the Moon stood new at the Christmas-time, as that period is now called... The time of the New Year is a sacred one. Nature helps and aids us. Resolutions formed at this time have a spiritual force greater than at any other time of the Sun's cyclical journey. Through the twelve months all Nature is preparing for the rebirth of the coming year. Man's whole nature likewise sympathetically responds in instinct and inspiration, in desire and in wish, to the preparations that Nature herself is making. So, along these lines, friends, let us form new resolves to make this coming year a better one than the last. - from Eclectic Theosophist, Jan. 15, 1978 --------* Extracts from an address by Dr. G. de Purucker, reported in The San Diego Union, December 31. 1928. ----------------------

A NOBLE AND SUBLIME FIELD Dr. G. de Purucker, Leader of the Point Loma Theosophical Society, has written a letter to the members of the Welsh Section of his Society. The insignificant matters that divide the Societies need not blind us to the identity of teaching and unanimity of spirit that characterizes this message of which we append a few paragraphs: "All that you say about various matters concerning the T.S. has a great deal of truth in it, and perhaps it is all true; but we must remember that conditions in any organization, and the T.S. amongst them can never be perfect as long as we have imperfect human beings carrying on our blessed Work, or any Work. "In a noble and sublime field of labor for mankind, such as ours is, it is an infallible certainty that there will be difficulties, many and various, and problems many and various; and throughout the ages, as you will find even in Christianity if you read the old writings, there is always a complaint that the fields of labor are so big, and the laborers are so few! It is the same in the T.S. as elsewhere; but it is just these few laborers, with their spirit of devotion and dogged will-power, and determination to succeed, that carry the movement through the ages, and ultimately bring success . . . . "As regards the world-situation now, about which you ask so pertinently, I can only say that I write under the greatest reserves, because my words, if not thoroughly understood, could be greatly misconstrued; but I will briefly say this, that the whole world

is passing through a new stage, a new phase of civilization; in other words an old age is dying, and a new age is coming in; and what we see all around us, are but the birth-pangs of a new era; and be assured that the great spiritual forces which control the world are doing what they can to bring to birth in every way possible the finest that human nature is capable of giving birth to for the new age . . . . "Don't worry about world-affairs and other matters. I know they are in the minds of all, and in the hearts of every normal man and woman today, great sorrow and great anxiety, and we have it here also. But we are passing through a changing phase of life, and Karma must be worked out before a new stability and a new order based on right and justice, can again come to unhappy mankind. Keep high courage. Never falter in your devotion. Remember the Masters are guiding and helping as far as man will allow them to do so, and at any rate always are helping individuals who are worthy of the help." - From Canadian Theosophist, Feb. 15, 1940 ------------------

"On Adolescents...." - G. de Purucker [[The following are some comments made concerning some changes to be made in the rules concerning the "Theosophical Clubs" for adolescents age 13-21 at limits in the Point Loma Theosophical Society organization.]] "I am not very well skilled at present in the ways of boys and girls; but as soon as I in my own boyhood began to think things out for myself, I wanted to be treated by grownups as an equal in the sense of being an evolving human being like them. I mean just that. I think that children are immensely interesting and interested if you treat them as equals in this Sense. They never fail to respond to courtesy. They never fail to respond to the gentle demeanor which all well-bred people instinctively follow. It is amazing that the only difference between a child and me or you is that I and you have more brain-mind experience! But the child is as quick to see, to feel, to respond, as ready to learn if the child's interest is aroused, as you or I. I have found it so. And I really believe that the new plan, in connection with the Theosophical Club, and that we are thinking of following, will make the Theosophic work among the young people move forward at a great pace. "I think the mistake we all have made up to the present time has been to hold a patronizing attitude toward the young people, and it is offensive. I don't like to be patronized. But oh! how quickly I respond to a kindly thought, a gentle look, a kind word. The only difference between me and a child is that I, perhaps to my sorrow, have more brain-mind experience; and all the great sages have said that man must recover the unspoiled, receptive mind of the little child. I cannot add anything to that. So I have great hopes, Madam Chairman, for the new idea and plan if we can put it through. "And I want to say that I am simply delighted at the way you all have accepted this change so kindly. I was afraid we would get all tangled up in arguments about difficulties, real and imaginary; but somehow the spirit of enthusiastic understanding is abroad tonight,

and I think it augurs wonderful things for the work among the young people." - From Theosophical Forum, September, 1936 -----------------

DEITY AND KARMAN - Dr. G. de Purucker [Reprinted from The Theosophical Path, Point Loma, Calif., April 1928] QUESTION: I would like to ask where and what is the place of God in the Theosophical scheme of things. Also, is not the behavior of man and the entities beneath him totally ruled by what Theosophists call Karman? My motive in asking is the obtaining of authentic information. ANSWER: This question has often been asked. In order properly to answer it, let us choose the Socratic method, and ask the questioner a question. How can this querent expect to obtain a clear answer to his question until the question itself has more definiteness to it, and a more perfect outline? In the first place, what is meant by 'God'? Is it the God of the Christians which is meant, or the God of the Hebrews? Is it the God of the Brahmans? Is it the God of the native American Indian? Is it the God of the Eskimo? Is it the God of the Druid, or is it the Zeus of the Greek, or the Jupiter of the Roman, and so forth? You ask a question, and tacitly suppose that 'God' conveys an idea sufficiently clear and definite to all men, whereas history shows us that there never was a question on which men differ so greatly as upon the answers they might give as regards the nature of the Divine. We may briefly say first, that for such national or theoretical gods as those above alluded to, be they one or be they many, and which are the offsprings of man's religious imagination, the Theosophical philosophy has absolutely no place. Theosophy deals with realities, and not with men's mere beliefs or imaginings about infinites or supposed infinites. The very heart of the Theosophical Religion-Philosophy-Science, is the Divine, as we call it, because we must call it by some name in order to let others know what we are talking about. Concerning the thing itself, the Theosophical philosophy is likewise extremely precise, definite, and runs straight to the point. Our conception of the Divine is an absolutely limitless Life - for we must give it some name that our human brains can understand. This Universal Life is the source and origin of everything, of all beings, and of all worlds; the best qualification of it that perhaps could be given to it would be comprised in the one word 'Space.' Space comprises everything, because it is everything. There is nothing outside of it, therefore it is the ALL. Space, as Theosophists use the word, does not mean mere extension of matter. It means everything that ever was, that is, or that ever will be, visible and invisible, small and great, on all planes, because all these are comprised in the abstract meaning which we give to the word Space. It is not mere limitless extension; nor is the Divine a stock or a stone; but all these are in the Divine, so to say, and partakers of the Universal Life, which it is. Can you think of anything which is outside of Space? Of course not.

But our God is not a personal God, obviously not. It never was not and it never will cease to be. It neither thinks, nor feels, nor acts, because all these actions are predicates of finite entities such as men. The Zeus of the ancient Greeks, or the Jehovah of the ancient Hebrews, who thundered and lightened, are in either case a conception of the Divine which, in our majestical Theosophical philosophy, seems not merely grotesque to us, but downright blasphemous. May we not say, therefore, that the Divine, Universal Life, Space, is neither conscious nor unconscious, neither active nor inactive? A long string of such hypothetical contraries might be enumerated, all of them expressing human emotional or mental actions; but what good would it do? Assuredly these cannnot be ascribed to the Divine, to That which is at once limitless and endlessly enduring. All such contraries are but descriptions of human imaginings, taking their root and rise in our own limited human consciousness. We are conscious, and in our egoism, we imagine that the stock or the stone is unconscious. Theosophy teaches us better. All entities and things are offsprings of the Universal Life, and each, in its way and manner, and to the fullest extent of its capacity, contains all that we do as enlightened human beings - in other words, each contains all in germ. These differences among entities arise out of the various stages of evolution which they have respectively attained. Some things are more advanced than others, and manifest thereby the more fully the inner potencies, faculties, powers, call them what you like, which are at the heart or core of every human being, and of every other entity or being or thing. Hence, answering the question more directly, in view of the foregoing necessary explanation, it may be said with perfect truth, and said emphatically, that the Theosophical philosophy has no 'God,' as that word is commonly understood by people who do not think, and who therefore imagine that ideas which have become popularized by time, and which throw one's intuitions of the Divine into a chaos of contradictions, must contain some essence of reality, some essential truth. Not so very long ago, men thought that the sun moved around the earth, and that the stars in the splendid, dark-blue vault of midnight were sparkling light-points placed there by a personal God in order to proclaim his own greatness to his erring and sinning children on earth. We know better now. No, such a God, or a God of any such kind, has no place in our Doctrine of Truth. Nevertheless, no one can equal the Theosophist in the unspeakably profound reverence which fills his heart as he endeavors to raise his spirit in awe in contemplation of the Divine. It is our Source whence we came and whither we are journeying on our return pilgrimage to it; we issued forth from the 'Bosom of the Divine' - if we may use easily understood terms - as unselfconscious God-sparks, and shall return to it as fully selfconscious gods, thereafter to take a god-like part in the great Cosmic Labor. We are even now co-operating instruments, or rather co-operating agencies, in the fulfilment of the great Cosmic Work, to the extent of our capacity. Turning now to the second part of the question: with regard to "the behavior of men and things - is it not wholly ruled by Karman?" To this we answer most emphatically, Yes, with a minor exception to be noted in an instant; but when Karnian is understood, it will then be immediately seen that it is not Fate, as the form of the question might suggest. The Theosophist rejects Fate as emphatically as he does Cosmical Anarchy.

Karman is what we ourselves have brought about; Karman is a Sanskrit word meaning Action and Consequence. Karman is what we do, and the consequences that flow back upon us from that doing. We learn the lessons of life through Karman which we ourselves sowed in action. No God outside sets Karman upon us. Karman is an intrinsic factor of Universal Nature. It can be called a Law, if you like to use popular human phraseology; and to that we have no objection, provided Karman be understood to be simply the teaching of act and consequence. If you put your finger in the flame it will be burned. God did not put your finger there; you did it. You put yourself under the operation of the forces and workings of Nature itself, and suffer the consequences. When you say that "men and things are ruled by Karman," I object only to the world 'ruled.' A king rules, or a government rules; but Karman is neither a king nor a government. It is no person; it is an impersonal operation of the universe, inseparable from its working because it is that working itself. Theosophists would rather say that men arouse the operation of the natural laws, in other words of Karman, by their acts, and suffer the consequences. No, there is no place in the Theosophical philosophy for a personal entity, which is at the same time infinite and eternal, nor for the theory that such an entity has created men and things, and rules them as does a king. If the Theosophical philosophy did not reject these fables, how could it explain, as it indeed does explain very beautifully, the manifest evils and imperfections and sufferings and miseries and horrors which exist in the world? As the action of this purely theoretical and supposititious Deity? If so, then such a Deity is a very dreadful God, and no man with a heart in his breast could accept it for a moment, once he has understood the situation. If such a God be all-good, and the creator of all, then how account for these evils? How account for sin and suffering and weaknesses and evil desires, and for such things as natural catastrophes - earthquakes and cyclones and tidal waves - killing their tens of thousands on occasion, with no more apparent compunction than follows the sweeping away of the flotsam and jetsam of the seashore? Does God, supposed by some to be all-good, all-powerful, therefore Create imperfection and evil, and send the latter upon the poor helpless creatures whom lie created? Such a God Theosophy cannot accept, for the majestic and inflexible logic of the Theosophical philosophy, as well as the sense of justice abiding in the human heart, to say nothing of the instinctive reverence which the Theosophist learns to know for the Divine, all combine to render such a conception of the Divine impossible. It might be said in passing, in explanation, that these imperfections and so forth, which have just been spoken of, are not 'God's work,' whether they be great or small, but are of the very nature of the Cosmos itself, which is a vast body of evolving entities and things in a practically infinite scale of differentiated evolution. This accounts for the imperfections and for the contrarieties and so forth. But when the Theosophist turns in contemplation to the Invisible, to the vast realms of the Unseen, and realizes that there is not an atom anywhere, not a point in space anywhere, which is outside of the sweep and action of the Universal Life: when be realizes that the Universe is infilled, and fullfilled, with unselfconscious, and partly self-conscious, and, lastly, god-like, fully self-conscious entities, extending in endless hierarchies, high and low, in all directions so to say, then his heart is filled with that unspeakable reverence for the Divine of which mention has been made.

Yes, as Katherine Tingley so often has said, the Theosophist no more rejects the Divine, or the Divine throughout the Cosmos, than he rejects the sunlight; but the Theosophist does not accept any infinite, eternal, personal God, which things are to him a flagrant contradiction, not merely in terms but in facts. All this is unreasonable. A personal, creative, infinite God of any kind therefore, the Theosophist does not accept nor teach, because, outside of other reasons, such a God would be responsible for the imperfections and evil in the world. If not, then he would not be omnipotent or allpowerful. Together with the ancients, the Theosophist holds that only a perfect work could emanate from Infinite Perfection; yet none more than the Theosophist withal senses a greater spiritual elevation of soul when his whole inner being is raised in reverential aspiration in the ineffable intuition of the Divine which our philosophy teaches us of. -----------------

G. de PURUCKER ON THE MAHATMA LETTERS

QUESTION 321. I have been reading a book only recently issued, 'Who Wrote the Mahatma Letters?' by the brothers H. E. Hare and W. L. Hare. The general line of criticism adopted by the authors appears to me most unfair, and yet I myself have often been puzzled in regard to the fact that certain of these Letters contain expressions similar to H. P. B.'s own expressions. I know of course from what I have read regarding 'The Mahatma Letters' that some of them were transmitted by H. P. B. Would it be Possible, for an explanation to be given of this? [The above question was sent to the Leader. His answer contains so much that is helpful, that the Editors have obtained his consent to include it in these columns.] G. de P. - Among other things which arouse the amazement of the reader of this book by the critical Hares, there are at least two of the first importance which the two authors either pass over without comment, or slur so badly that the average reader is utterly incognizant that these facts exist. The first, then, of the two we find to lie in the amazing assurance with which the authors of this book treat their apparatus criticus, combined with their manner of treatment itself, apparently under the pleasant illusion that they are for the first time in Theosophic history the discoverers of what thoughtful Theosophists have all known since the date of the publication of The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, and The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett, and which certain ones knew even from the days of H. P. B. herself, because she frequently explained these facts. In other words, I mean all the various idiosyncracies of speech and of mannerism, all the various Gallicisms on the other hand, and the various imperfections of punctuation, orthography, grammar, and what not, to which the critical Hares point triumphantly as largely originating in H. P. B.'s mind - all these were well understood since H. P. B.'s days as being due to the mental and psychical idiosyncracies of the amanuenses or chelas, i.e. disciples, through whom most of the Letters of the Mahatmans came. What else could we expect? A ray of sunlight streaming through stained glass will

checker the wall or the floor upon which the ray falls with the colors of the glass through which it passes; nevertheless the original ray is there. Let the following facts be understood, as they have been for some forty years or more by thoughtful Theosophists: (a) The Masters themselves on only the very rarest of occasions wrote with their own hand any letters whatsoever, and consequently those that they did so write, if indeed any, can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand; consequently these letters are the fewest of all; (b) almost equally rare, but more numerous than those classified under (a) are what have been popularly called "precipitations," or communications which were "dropped" or found in unexpected places by the recipients thereof; and consequently these are relatively very few likewise; and (c) the great majority of all the letters received from the Masters by individuals in those early days came through different amanuenses or transmitting chelas (disciples), among the number of whom we know perfectly well are to be counted H. P. B. herself, Damodar, Bavaji, Bhavani-Rao in one or two cases, and one or two others, probably not excepting the well known and erudite Hindu Theosophist and scholar Subba-Rao. Now, the important point to be noticed in this connexion is that all these transmissions of intelligence, in other words all these different letters or communications, including the various notes, chits, etc., etc., passed through the medium of the transmitting minds of the chelas who received them and passed them on to their different destinations, and often by the very prosaic and ordinary means of the postal system. The Messrs. Hare are extraordinarily behind the times in not being aware of the fact that the many experiments of what it is now popular to call telepathy or thoughttransference or mind-reading, conducted by earnest men of unquestionable ability and reputation, have established the fact that such telepathic transmission of intelligence is not only possible but actually of more frequent occurrence than most human beings realize; but in the early days of the Theosophical Society, in the heyday of the materialism of Haeckel and Huxley and Tyndall and Moleschott, and all the other bigwigs of the time, even so common a fact as telaesthesia, or telepathy, or thought-transference or mind-reading, was not only not accepted, but even ridiculed - and this against the common testimony and common experience of mankind for ages; for it is one of the most ordinary facts of human life to experience the wordless or unspoken transmission of human thought. Now then, such transmission of intelligence from Master to pupil or chela, is more or less precisely what today is called thought-transference or telepathy or mind-reading, if you wish, only in vastly more perfect form because the transmitter is a mahatmic intelligence, and the receiving mind of the chela is a highly trained one; and, indeed, telepathy or thought-transference, etc., are merely minor instances of the general rule. The experiments conducted during the last forty or fifty years in mind-reading or thoughttransference have shown clearly that it is ideas which are transmitted and received, but which are almost always distorted or twisted by the untrained mind of the receiver or recipient, and almost invariably more or less colored by the mind or psychological apparatus of the recipient; so that while the essential idea is often received, it is frequently distorted or deformed. Precisely the same thing, but with less degree of distortion or deformation, must by the nature of the case take place when the transmitting chela receives the essential ideas more or less clearly, and occasionally and sometimes even often in the very language of the transmitter's mind and thought; but coming through the psychological apparatus of the

chela, the original ideas are more or less subject to be given forth with marks or with the mental clothing of the chela himself. Thus it would actually have been amazing if there had not been Gallicisms in H. P. B.'s transmission of the essential original idea which was received clearly; but coming through H. P. B.'s mind, with her excellent knowledge of French and her acquaintance with Americanisms, it was almost certain that the message would be transmitted more or less, now and then, here and there, with a French turn of phrase, or with an American spelling to which H. P. B.'s mind had been accustomed. Similarly so with messages received through and passed on by other chelas - each one gave his own particular "atmosphere" or included more or less of his or her own mental characteristics to the message as handed on; yet the original idea, the essential thought, the fundamental language and intelligent conception, were always there, and this fact accounts for the grandeur and profundity found in such transmitted messages. This leads us directly to the second of our points, which the critical Hares utterly ignore. This second point is the matter of the characteristic individuality in literary form or matter commonly called literary style. It is extraordinary that not a word in direct or specific allusion is made by the two authors of this book to the immense differences in the literary styles of M. on the one hand, and K. H. on the other hand, and neither of these two in literary style or in literary quality is at all comparable with H. P. B.'s own style when she wrote directly from her own mind. The stamp of literary style alone is so well recognized by every competent scholar and student as to be one of the very best means of judging the authenticity of documents, that the omission by the Hare brothers of any allusion to these immense differences in style, constitutes a defect of the gravest character in their attempted criticism. The style of M. for instance, is outstanding for its directness, its abrupt masculinity, its pungency in aphorism, etc.; whereas the style of K. H., though equally profound in thought with M.'s, is markedly different: flowing in, character, smooth and easy in narrative, often semi-humorous in relation, and what has been neatly called "gentle" as compared with what has likewise been called the "rough" style of Master M. H. P. B. when writing alone never wrote anything which in profundity could compare with the literary material of the two Masters, nor with its strength, however fine and really wonderful her own writings were; and her style is enormously different from theirs, although possessing undoubted charm and attractiveness of its own. One has but to compare the literary style and atmosphere of the two volumes, (a) The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, with (b) The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett, to see how forcefully telling this argument of literary style and atmosphere is. I turn with a final word again to the matter of the messages received from the Masters through their chelas. As stated above, I have called this relatively perfect telepathy or thought-transference or mind-reading - call it by what name you will. It is most important to keep this in mind, because if it be kept in mind, then if the critic be likewise honest, he will see the absurdity as well as the futility of hammering, as upon something new, upon what has been known to Theosophists for the last forty or fifty years, and what has been at the same time proved to be a fact by the independent researches of scientific and other men - thought-transference - which produced the Mahatman Letters as written documents. The trained mind and will of the Master directed his thought, consisting of clear-cut, sharply defined ideas, to the mind and into it of the receiving but trained amanuensis, who received the ideas more or less clearly in accordance with his training or development, and transmitted those ideas as faithfully as he or she was able to; but

passing through the amanuensis's mind, the transmitted intelligence was bound to be colored by the mental characteristics of the mediator - the disciple's mind - through which it passed. Hence the presence of Gallicisms when H. P. B. was the transmitting chela, and of an occasional Americanism; and similarly so, mutatis mutandis, when chelas other than H. P. B. were the transmitting mediators. ----------------------Note by E. V. S. - Even in ordinary secretarial work, it is easy to distinguish, where several stenographers work for the same person, what letters in the files are typewritten by one stenographer, and which ones by another, etc., by the format, spelling (in cases where alternate forms are permissible), abbreviations (such as Mme. or Mad. or writing it out in full), which each stenographer uses. It is generally only when a stenographer has worked long enough with his employer to become thoroughly acquainted with all his idiosyncracies or habits, likes and dislikes, that the typewritten letters agree in every detail exactly with what the employer himself would use. In other words, each typewritten letter bears the stamp of the stenographer to whom it is dictated. Note by J. H. F. - So also when the idea of an answer to a letter and the points to be covered in it are given to a secretary who is asked to write the letter and who may even take down in shorthand the gist of the notes given to him and who thus prepares the form of the letter, the author of the letter is the one who gives the ideas and the line of thought to be coveted, and not the stenographer or secretary who is merely the transmitter. This is commonly understood, and hundreds of letters which are sent out by business men through the media of their secretaries though necessarily colored by the individual characteristics of the secretaries' style, etc., are nevertheless the letters of such business men. ---------------We see likewise how it was that when conditions of transmission and reception were relatively perfect, and the chela was highly trained, the resultant communication, outside of certain characteristic mental or psychic marks of the amanuensis, contained even the actual mentally pictured words of the Mahatmic transmitter; and also how it was that in such conditions of relatively perfect receptivity, the transmitting amanuensis, because of the force of the impinging idea and will of the transmitter, reproduced even the very forms of handwriting that had been adopted or used by the Mahatmans. If the conditions of receptivity were relatively perfect, i.e. if the strong will of the Mahatmic intelligence and the clear-cut ideas were received by the chela's trained mind more or less perfectly, the resultant was a communication which was very close to being a perfect reproduction of the Mahatman's own words, own hand-writing, own turns of phrase, etc., etc.; but if the conditions of receptivity were in any degree less perfect, the ideas were transmitted but more or less deformed or colored by the psychological apparatus of the transmitting amanuensis, thus reproducing turns of phrase, spelling of words, etc., etc., native to the amanuensis. Note H. P. B.'s own words regarding the transmission of such letters, etc., in her article 'My Books,' which passage can be found on p. 26, of the preliminary pages in The Complete Works of H. P. Blavatsky edition of Isis Unveiled: ".... many a passage in these works has been written by me under their dictation.

In saying this no supernatural claim is urged, for no miracle is performed by such a dictation. Any moderately intelligent person, convinced by this time of the many possibilities of hypnotism (now accepted by science and under full scientific investigation), and of the phenomena of thought-transference, will easily concede that if even a hypnotized subject, a mere irresponsible medium, hears the unexpressed thought of his hypnotizer, who can thus transfer his thought to him - even to repeating the words read by the hypnotizer mentally from a book - then my claim has nothing impossible in it. Space and distance do not exist for thought; and if two persons are in perfect mutual psychomagnetic rapport, and of these two, one is a great Adept in Occult Sciences, then thought-transference and dictation of whole pages become as easy and as comprehensible at the distance of ten thousand miles as the transference of two words across a room." (From Theosophical Forum, October, 1936) --------------------------------

ONE LIFE - ONE LAW HOW marvelously does our Theosophy, the ancient God-Wisdom of mankind, reduce all the phenomena of Nature to a majestic generalization, so that all things fall within the compass of a single law understandable to human beings: for our God-Wisdom shows us that just as we are born and live our little sphere of life and die, so do the worlds likewise, and the suns in those worlds, and the planets and the various kingdoms of the different suns, and the atoms which compose all things, and the electrons in the atoms. All are periodic, not only in the sense of being cyclic but in the sense of having periods: beginnings, culminations, endings, and, rounding out the cycle of the worlds invisible, beginning a new beginning, a second culmination, a subsequent passing merely to vanish again into the worlds invisible, there to experience new and vastly greater adventures than those that our smaller solar system can give to us. All things function alike because Nature has one Law, one fundamental law which is at its source, a divine source, all energy; and habits, courses, procedures, all are governed by the same cosmic powers and intelligence, which simply means that all things follow these same fundamental laws in similar manners, all under the governance of the cosmic life, ringing all the possible changes that Nature so lavishly provides for our admiration and utmost reverence. For while all things, all beings, follow the same fundamental laws and courses; every unit, precisely because it is a unit and an individual, has its own modicum of will - call it free will if you wish - and therefore can more or less change, modify, its own courses, but always within the encompassing energy of the universe. This means that while all beings follow these general rules, or what we Theosophists call analogical procedures - analogy being therefore the master key of life - yet all beings, precisely because they are beings, by their own innate power drawn from the cosmic source, more or less modify the details of the procedures and movements. Thus the sun is born as a child is born, but the details are different. Details are not so important as the

main fact. The birth, the growth, the death, the invisible worlds, the new adventures, the coming again to a new imbodiment, a new culmination on a plane somewhat higher, a new death to be succeeded by the same round on the wheel of life - but always advancing, always growing, always enlarging. Step by step all things progress. Thus actually, as our occultism, our God-Wisdom, points out, if you wish to know the destiny, the birth, the origin, and the temporary ending of a sun, study a man from birth to death. And if you can, study him after death in his adventures, and you will see what the solar divinity undergoes, but of course on enlarged and higher planes in the worlds invisible. Why, this visible world of ours is but a shell, is but the body, the exterior carapace, the skin of things. The life, the individuality, the power, the will the thought, the real entity, is not this outer shell. Whether a man, or sun, or solar system, or galaxy, or an entire universe: the reality is within. And the body more or less expresses, although feebly expresses, what the inner powers produce on this outer plane. Those of you who have followed the experiments undertaken in scientific ways will understand this more clearly than those who have not studied them. But all of you, if you think a moment, will know that you shed your strength from hour to hour, physical strength and mental strength. The man who produces a great thought shakes the foundations of civilization. The man who produces a majestic system of cosmic philosophy and definitely guides mankind - does not his vitality move men? These are facts. The only difference between a sun and a man is in the details, some of them majestic, very admittedly majestic; but it is only in the details that the procedure differs. The main principle of fundamental law is the same for all. Every man in fact is but an embryo sun, a sun in the making for the distant future - not his body, for that is not the man. His body is but the skin of him, the clothing of skins spoken of in the Genesis of the Hebrew Bible. A man is the power within, the spirit or the monad; and it is this energy or power which makes the man be the same from birth till death, which makes the sun retain its form and follow its functions from its birth to its death. An atom, a flower, a tree, or a beast - all are subject to the same cosmic law of similarities if not positive identities. It is but the detail that changes. The wisest and greatest men of antiquity pointed out that Father Sun was indeed Father Sun, but likewise our elder brother; our parent and yet our brother. The beast and the plant are in a sense our children because they look up to us as we look up to the Gods. They are, in a sense, our children and they follow in our footsteps towards mankind, towards the status and stature of humanity. The beasts are slowly crawling up towards us, as we look unto the Gods, our parents and grandparents; and when we find our souls infilled and inspirited with their life-force and a spark of their shining intelligence, then we become on this earth like God - menu because our thoughts are godlike, and our feelings are godlike, and our actions following our thoughts and feelings become godlike too. Thus the atoms of the body and the molecules and protons and electrons that make up the physical stuff of the body, are in a sense its children, and they feel the impact of our thought and of our feeling. They suffer for our sins in proportion, and they are raised by our virtues, so closely are all things knitted together, a web of life of which each strand is a production of spiritual magic. I tell you that we are responsible for the very atoms which compose our bodies, whether we dirty their faces or cleanse them. Some day, if we dirty the faces of the atoms composing us, they will return to us to be washed, washed clean of the sin we put upon them. And so with all the interior realms of man's constitution, the vehicles of his mind and

of his feeling and of his thought. Birth and death: what are these changes? A birth in the body, is a death to the soul, for it leaves its own inner spheres, its own inner arrangements of its life there, and as it were descends or falls like a star to earth, and is born in the physical body of a helpless; human babe, tasting for the time being the karmic retribution for all its past. And when we die, aye, when we die, then are we released, then we spring forth and upwards and onwards on the wings of our soul, those strong pinions carrying us through all the planetary habitations to the very throne of Father Sun. It is rebirth to the soul, as rebirth on this earth is death to the soul. So with the sun, so with the worlds which are born and which die. The sun when he imbodies on this plane is shorn of greatly much of his splendor. When the sun's hour shall strike and he passes from this plane, he springs like a divine thought right into the invisible realms, taking off into grandeurs only very dimly imagined by us. The flower expressing its soul in scent and beauty but repeats the same cosmic law in its birth from the seed. Little brothers of men are the flowers. Some of them are to us venomous. In some way in past time we envenomed them. Now in karmic retribution they envenom us. The birth of a man from ordinary manhood into mahatmahood is an interior birth. The growth of the mahatman into Buddhahood or Bodhisattvahood, or as the Vedantists say, the becoming one with the Atman: this growth is in your hands to achieve, and in the hands of none else. You have it in your power to become god-men on this earth; or you have it in your power, every one of us has it in his power, so to ruin and blast his life that he shall become like the fury-driven victim of Greek legendary story, driven by unspeakable remorse and haunted by the feeling: I have played my play and I have lost. Too late, it is too late! But Theosophy says: Never too late. If you have played your game awry, reassemble your cards and play like a man, play with the devil for the salvation of your own soul, the devil of your lower self, and win! If you win, divinity lies ahead of you. Over the peaks of that mystic East, the East in the heart of every human being, dawns the sun of truth which carries healing in its bosom. The truth shall make you free! - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, July, 1942 -----------------

OPPORTUNITY IN KALI-YUGA - G. de Purucker We live in a very interesting age, Companions, a time when history is in the making. I do not think that in the recorded annals that are open to us at the present time there has ever been an epoch when serious-minded students of the Ancient Wisdom, which we call Theosophy, have the opportunities that now we have. It is precisely the stress and the strain which are opening our hearts and tearing the veils away from our minds. It is the same thought that our Masters have told us applies to Kali-yuga, the Iron Age, a hard, rigid age where everything moves intensely and intensively and where everything is difficult; but precisely the age in which spiritual and intellectual advancement can be made most quickly.

There actually have been ages in the past when chelas or students have longed for conditions to be more difficult than they were, to give them the chance to advance faster. In the Golden Age, which it is beautiful to dream about, in the so-called Age of Saturn, in the age of man's innocence, everything moved smoothly and beautifully and all surrounding being co-operated to make everything beautiful and pleasant; and there is something in our hearts that yearns to return to it; but it is not what the chela longs for. He longs for opportunity; he longs to climb; he longs to test what is in him, to grow from within. Isn't it a strange paradox that the hardest, cruelest, of all the yugas is precisely the one in which the quickest advancement can be gained? I think there is a world of wisdom in this thought; and I speak of it tonight because only a few days ago I received a most pathetic communication from one of "Ours" who wanted to know if there was not something good in the kali-yuga: if mankind had to go under without hope. Why, it is the very time when the chances are the most frequent for progress! It is the opportunity-time. - Closing remarks at a meeting of the Headquarters Lodge Point Loma, California September 29, 1935 - Eclectic Theosophist, Nov. 15, 1976 ------------------------

Man in a Just and Ordered Universe - G. de Purucker THERE is no chance anywhere in Infinitude. Now just apply your reasoning faculty to that statement, and see how far afield it will carry you. The first deduction is this: There being no chance anywhere, therefore no fortuity, everything that happens is a link in a chain of causation - cause, effect - the effect immediately becoming a new cause, producing its effect, which in turn becomes a new cause, producing its effect. This is what we call Karman. Everything that happens is therefore caused by law, which is just another word for cosmic vitality plus intelligence, plus what we call the ethical instinct, order; and these things are precisely what our studies of the universe show that it exhibits to our inquiring gaze. Everywhere we see order, law, procedures acting according to causational and effectual relations. If there were chance in but one atom of Infinitude, there would be chance throughout, for then Infinitude were not Infinitude, but an atom short of Infinitude, which is an absurdity. Now with all you know of the teaching of modern science, and all you know of our beloved God-wisdom, carry your thought on logically a step farther: since whatever happens is causative and effectual, it is therefore justified in Infinitude. We discern, in our investigations or researches into Nature, two things: an allembracing, all-encompassing orderliness, or what we call the laws of Nature; and within this, embraced by this universal law, an infinitude of individuals or individualities, each one an entity, working under the mandate, as it were, of cosmic law - no entity can do otherwise. We have therefore unity, divine unity, working through virtually infinite

multiplicity. Among these multiplicities are we human beings. There are also the gods, angels or Dhyani-Chohans, the plants, the animals, the atoms, etc., etc. They are all individuals working in and under, and as it were, subject to the mandate of this fundamental background of cosmic orderliness. You see how these thoughts are rigidly logical, carrying us step by step from point to point, until we reach not only new conclusions, but conclusions that are always in accord with everything that we know of universal nature. The point is to apply these to our lives, which means likewise to our thoughts and our feelings. When a man realizes that there is no chance in the universe, that he is but one unit in a hierarchy and that these hierarchies are virtually infinite in number, and that so far as we human beings know they are endless, like the bodies in space, children of the Infinite Life as we are - when a man realizes all this, several things happen to him. When he thinks these thoughts and becomes through reflection upon them convinced of their inevitable force, first he loses all fear of death. He realizes secondly that he is responsible for what he does, which means for what he thinks and for what he feels, and that there is no escape from the result of his thinking and feeling and acting; and that just in that impossibility of escaping the retribution or the reward of cosmic law lies mankind's highest and noblest hope. To phrase the thought popularly, in the old-fashioned language of the Christian, he can escape neither heaven nor hell. He cannot escape reward, that will come unto him somewhen, somewhere, for the good that he has done in the world. It will seek him out wherever he may be, and brighten and cheer his life and give him renewed hope and renewed courage. And for the evil that he has wrought, the injustices, the crimes, the unfairnesses that he has committed, equally will these consequences in the chain of causation seek him out; and though he hide in the cleft of the mountain or the deep of the bottomless abyss, he cannot escape a just retribution, for eternal and universal nature is on his track. There is no chance in Infinitude. See the immense weight of these thoughts as moral motors upon us. We see the reason for all the ethical, all the moral teaching of the greatest sages that the human race has ever produced, and we see the reason why their teaching is the greatest hope that mankind has. And a third reflection: We on this little earth of ours, so big to us, so small when compared with the giants of even our own solar system, should remember that each one of us, as an inseparable part of the cosmic structure, is equally weighty in importance to the cosmic law, so to speak, as is the mightiest giant of the stellar host. The Christian New Testament alludes to this in its teaching, strange to so many: Know ye not that the hairs of your head are counted? And that no sparrow droppeth unless it be in accordance with Divine Law? There is the same thought: that we are not merely the children of the gods, but embryo-gods ourselves, for we are the very offsprings of the divine life, the divine stuff in the universe. Otherwise what are we? Can you deny it, and say, "We are not; we don't belong to the universe, we are not in it; we don't come forth from it"? That is absurd. And our divine origin makes us kin with every thing and every being that is. For not only are all mankind kin, but all beings and things that are, are our other selves. All spring from the same universal ocean which holds us around forever - the Mother Eternal, the Father-Mother. It is a wonderful thought. The next time you pluck a flower, remember you are touching a younger brother;

and that perhaps in the way we look upon these buds of beauty, young embryo-souls as it were, or monads in a young state on this plane, expressing their life and beauty and fragrance to us, so do the higher gods look upon us. I have often wondered how often do the gods pluck us because mayhap in their spheres we shed beauty and fragrance and they love us: Those whom the gods love die young. A whole mystery lies just behind that one thought. Death is no accident. Birth none. And yet never think for a moment that this chain of causation is the old scientific dead soulless determinism of the days of our grandfathers, when the idea was that everything moved just like a soulless machine, and never stopped. Did they not forget that to have a machine there had to be a machinist to build it and run it? They just used words then and were happy. It is not of that soulless determinism that I speak. But it is the structure of the universe arising in imbodied hierarchies of consciousnesses providing the cosmic variety, and the innumerable families of beings, and all enclosed in the encompassing, sheltering, protecting, aye, guiding and guarding, vastly great Hierarch, of whom we in common with all other things are the children - that Hierarch, which is not different from our inner self, but we, as it were sparks from it, the Central Flame of our Universe. - Theosophical Forum, Oct, 1942 -------------------------

Our Work in the Present and the Future During the thirteen years of Dr. de Purucker's leadership of the T.S. an enormous mass of correspondence passed through his office. Perhaps it is not so well known throughout our Society, however, how much of important instruction, practical and helpful in daily living and organizational conduct, was given out in this way to students and T.S. officials in all parts of the world. With this thought in mind the Editors have asked Miss Elsie V. Savage, G. de P.'s private secretary since 1929, to select from such letters and instructions a few extracts which stress more significantly some of the duties and needs that lie before us today. These excerpts follow. Ways of Disseminating Theosophy I know there are many ways of disseminating Theosophy, of casting forth the holy seed into the minds and hearts of men. To me all ways are good if they are successful, but in each we must be able to find the God-Wisdom which we are here to teach. If we do not teach it we are negligent of our holiest trust. Greater than showing people how broadminded Theosophists are, greater far than this, although that is most excellent and good in its way, greater still is to give men hope, to instill comfort into weary hearts, courage into their lives, and to give them vision. `Without a vision the people perish,' and if it is not a good vision, so great is the hunger of human hearts for reality, alas, all too often it is replaced by an evil vision. Evil takes the place of good. And yet so wonderful is the web of nature, and so mighty the power of the spirit, that even in an evil web we will find woven through the mesh like golden threads the light of the spirit. No, while all ways of disseminating seeds of truth are excellent, provided the seeds

be disseminated or sown, I myself can find no grander way than that of following the traditional Theosophical habits of thought and of teaching and of living which are, first: the setting the example in your own Self of the truth that is living and burning within you; next, calling our brothers ignorant of Theosophy to the spiritual and intellectual banquet. Those who are searching for light and know not whither to turn, call them to the Master's table! And the food is set forth in our standard Theosophical books, and in all the great literatures of all the ages. I think our best way of teaching our own God-Wisdom - I say `ours'; it is ours only because we are blessed in having received it, it is not ours in any other sense, it is humanity's priceless heritage - the best way is to show its existence in all the ages in the great books that have come down to us, in our standard Theosophical books, and by teaching it technically; for there is no other way of teaching it properly. Learn to Think in Centuries I look to the future, and as dear H.P.B. used to say, a phrase often humorously quoted by K.T.: "I sit by the sea and watch the future through the weather." We must learn to think in centuries, not merely in lustra of five years each; for in this way we obtain a mundial or world-picture, and build intelligently for the future, instead of having our attention absorbed by merely the present or immediately coming events. Don't allow all your thought to be swallowed up in the events and problems of the immediate present. I think it is imperatively necessary to learn to think in centuries. It is likewise extremely comforting and absolutely kills all such things as discouragement, downheartedness, pessimism, etc., etc. Indeed we have much, very much, to be thankful for, and I bless the Masters and the gods for that immensely strong yet always outwardly invisible help which daily I can feel or sense or intuit, and which will be ours as long as we prove worthy, and therefore receptive vessels of its benign influence. Guard your Thought - Processes I have observed my own processes of thought many and many a time, and I notice that many and many a time I have been saved from drawing a false conclusion by being reluctant to accept that conclusion until I have examined it. That is an excellent rule that we all try to follow. But I likewise have observed that if I am cowardly or lazy, and refuse to face a thought or a problem squarely, nobody suffers but me. I am the loser. So I have learned to think, and try to think clearly, to be afraid of thinking no thought whatsoever, but always to strive to see that the thoughts that pass through my mind as the instruments of cogitation shall be high ones; not to give in to snap-judgments, not led astray by emotional volcanic outpourings, nor what is worse I think, led into judging others with injustice. This is an exercise the Hindus would call Yoga. It is an exercise I recommend to anyone who wants to improve himself. Watch your thoughts. Watch your processes as you think those thoughts. Discard the thoughts you do not like. But be careful in so doing - lest you refuse to receive a divinity knocking at the door of your heart when you are at first too blind to perceive its divine character. The Injunction of Pythagoras Do you remember the rule laid down by Pythagoras, a very beautiful one I think. It runs something as follows, often quoted by me; but it is worth quoting again and again.

It loses none of its beauty and profundity by repetition: "Let not the setting sun reach the western horizon, nor close thine eyes in sleep, before thou hast gone over all the events of the day just past, and hast asked thyself this question: What have I done today that has been done amiss? What have I done today that has been done aright? Have I injured anyone? Have I failed in my duty? Let not the setting sun reach the western rim of space, nor let thine eyelids close in sleep ere thou hast asked thyself these questions." If only men and women would follow that simple rule, ninety percent of the world's trouble, heartache, sin, anxiety, would be non-existent, would never happen. And the reason is simple. The world's troubles are from our weaknesses, not from our strength; and if we can increase our strength, do away with our weaknesses, every human being thereafter in proportion to his inner evolution or growth would become a power for good in the world. And you see what that would mean. It cuts at the taproot of most of the thoughts and feelings and acts that bring misery amongst us. Our Work in the Present and the Future In these exceedingly difficult times for all men, one's heart of necessity often aches for the common sorrow and grief, and for the heavy burthen that so many are now carrying; so there is a certain gravity or sobriety of spirit that must of necessity weigh upon us Theosophists also. Yet it is one of our first, indeed one of our elementary Theosophical tenets that it is precisely in times of difficulty and stress that men's hearts open perhaps more than ever before to the reception of spiritual ideas; and it is by means of our Theosophical gatherings, whether great or small, that we can bring a large measure of hope and comfort to weary and stricken souls. You will feel yourselves as members of a great body-corporate of other men and women the world over, who are all united, spiritually and intellectually as well as by the impulses of the heart, in our blessed Theosophic propaganda-work, in order that the Masters' teachings may reach an ever-widening circle of hungry hearts and eager minds, seeking for comfort and the sense that the great realities of life govern men and are behind all things, in spite of the turbulence and storm of human existence. Let us never forget that mighty and strong minds are behind the spiritual government of our world, indeed of our globe; and that sooner or later karman adjusts all things to its majestic purposes, and in the spirit of universal brotherhood, peace on earth, and good will to all men. I repeat, that in my judgment it is precisely in times of difficulty and stress, as has indeed been said by the Masters is the case of kali-yuga, that spiritual progress is more easy to achieve than in other and more quiet times; and a spiritual effort such as that in which the Theosophical Society is engaged is far more likely to be received by human minds and hearts now than in other days when the steady comforts of life and the sense of regular security, fine as these are, often blind men's minds to the reception of higher things. Continue, then, your noble Theosophical Work with unfailing courage, and with the assurance that not only G. de P., but thousands of members all over the world, are with you in spirit; for amongst us Theosophists, national or even local, Theosophical efforts have back of them the tremendous force of united minds, strong intellects, and devoted hearts.

- Theosophical Forum, Nov., 1942 ------------------------

(On Paganism) A NOBLE FAITH We felt readers might enjoy occasional extracts from P.L. Publications' latest "Study": Word-Wisdom in the Esoteric Tradition, just off the press. This is a series of class lectures given by Dr. G. de Purucker at Point Loma in 1913-14. The following, which discusses Paganism, is from the second lecture of December 14, 1913. Other topics brought out in that talk were the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the subjects of transmigration and of hierarchies, and the correct pronunciation of Sanskrit words. - Eds. Paganism was a very noble faith. It was profound, worthy of study, and full of mystery, in the proper sense of the word. Its mystery, or rather its esoteric part, was embodied in one of the institutions of humanity which were ever considered in ancient times as most worthy of reverence - the Mysteries. The ancient philosophers spoke of these Mysteries as those institutions founded by the Gods, which lead humanity from a degraded and brutish life to be near the Gods, and to be one with them; and that those who had been initiated had a greater hope after death and a wider sympathy with their fellows in life. Cicero refers to it in closely similar terms in one of his ethical writings. That, however, is a subject upon which I do not at present wish further to dilate, because we will come to it in time; but when you hear or when you read in the dictionary and the books that have been written by those opposed to the ancient paganism that it was stupid idolatry, or that it was sensual, or that it was foolish, or any similar vice, as Theosophists and men who are seeking the truth, remembering that it is from the ancients that everything good that we have today has come down to us, it is well to go to the original source. Read the ancient literatures, study the ancient histories, try and get at the truth which the ancient writers embodied in those of their dissertations and in their discourses which have come down to us. They are many. The philosophers no more believed in what the Christians attempted to represent as their beliefs, than today any intelligent Christian believes that their Lord God rode on the wings of the wind, or on a cherub, or thundered or lightened his displeasure from the clouds. These are allegorical sayings, as we shall see later on. The people may have believed the things that were said about the ancient gods and goddesses; the educated men, never. Their histories show it. Look, for one thing, at the way they themselves satirized the accepted faith before and after Christianity was born and came into the world, unfortunately. Look at the bitter, biting diatribes of Lucian. Perhaps no more caustic wit was ever born. Look at the way Plato, for instance, treats some of the tales about the gods and goddesses. He said he would not admit Homer, who was considered almost godlike in his genius by the ancient world, into his ideal Republic. Why? On account of the tales he had circulated about the gods and goddesses, their sorrows, their hatreds, their disgraceful acts. All thinking men in the ancient world had a conception of the divinities which was sublime as it was scientific, but in all ages of the

world you will find a vulgar mass of common people, the crowd (and this does not refer to birth, it refers to the vulgar in mind, in intellect) in all ages you will find such men, and they always follow the same course - light, foolish, and flippant speeches against those things which have been considered most holy and most worthy of reverence since the time of historical records; and we know that it must have been so before. I simply wish to add that in explaining the word 'paganism,' I should also have adduced the word heathenism, from another word of precisely similar analogy. When the Christian missionaries entered Northern Europe they found the priesthood of the religions of the different countries dwelling in forests, as the Druids, for instance; and the priests and priestesses of the Germans made their temples of the leafy bowers. Under some spreading oak tree they would render their supplications and perform their devotions to the deities. Later, as the town became more settled and populous and Christianity, under the very vigorous proselytizing and swords of the invaders, increased, the people who dwelt on the heaths of the country, out of the city, were naturally those who last received Christianity, just as those in the countries around the Mediterranean who were the last to become converted were the villagers, the pagani; and as the countryman became synonymous with pagan in the Christian use, so heathen - those who lived on heaths became synonymous with those who were not Christians. The derivation of the two words is rather interesting... - G. de Purucker (Eclectic Theosophist, No. 57) ----------------------

Functions of the Pineal and Pituitary Glands - G. de Purucker THE pineal gland was in earliest mankind an exterior organ of physical vision, and of spiritual and psychic sight. But due to the evolutionary course that the human frame followed, as time passed on and our present two optics began to show themselves, the pineal gland or the third eye, the "Eye of Siva," the "Eye of Dangma," the spiritual eye - call it what you like - began to recede within the skull, which latter finally covered it with bone and hair. It then lost its function as an organ of physical vision, but has never ceased to continue its functions even now as an organ of spiritual sight and insight. When a man has a `hunch,' the pineal gland is commencing to vibrate gently. When a man or a woman has an intuition, or an inspiration, or a sudden flash of understanding, the pineal gland begins to vibrate still more strongly, albeit softly, gently. It functions still, and can be cultivated to function more, if we believe in ourselves, and if we believe in the things we have and demonstrate in our daily lives. Whence comes our ethical sense, whence comes our spiritual insight, whence comes our sense of justice, whence comes the power that makes us men and not mere beasts? Why, these are energies that have to be accounted for. Merely to say they are, is no explanation. These various energies function through the different organs of the brain, some of them arising in the heart and reaching the brain, each such energy through

its own appropriate organ or gland, or what not. The spiritual being works on, plays on, the physical body, as the master musician plays on a wondrous lute or harp. The strings of this instrument, some of them, are coarse catgut and can produce coarse, heavy, sensual sounds. But the strings of this wondrously constructed physical human frame, the body, run from the coarsest catgut to the silver, the gold, and finally to the intangible strings of the spirit; and the master plays on these strings with masterly sweep of will, the master-hand, when we allow it. Mostly we human beings refrain from playing on the nobler and higher strings, and play on the coarse catgut only. Think! Why, as a matter of fact, this body of ours is one of the marvels of the universe. It is marvelously constructed. We human beings at present have no realization of what it contains, of its powers to be developed in the future as evolving time will bring them forth, but which we can hasten in their growth now. For instance: What did the ancient Hindus mean when they spoke of the different chakras of the human body, speaking in language which was hid, as all ancient occult teaching was hid? I will enumerate a few of the human chakras as they rightly are, and I am now going behind the veil of the exoteric teachings of the T.S., a bit. I will speak of seven organs or glands in the human frame, beginning with the lowest (which can be the highest). I will recite them first: the genital, the liver, the spleen, the cardiac, the brain as a whole, and the pineal and pituitary glands; and there are other subordinate centers or ganglia in the body. Every one of these organs or glands has its own appropriate function, activity, purpose, and work in the human frame. By our will, by proper study, by living the life, we can make the higher, the incomparably more powerful ones within us, active far more than they now are active, and thus become gods among men. Most of us do not do that. We live in the world below the human diaphragm as it were. And yet, despite our worst efforts to kill the god within us, I mean to destroy its holy work, the pineal gland and the pituitary gland, and the heart, continue functioning just the same. We are protected as it were against our own foolishness. The lowest of these chakras then can be made one of the noblest by changing its functional direction for creative spirituality. I am now talking of the body. Waste brings loss; that particular organ in the human frame can be made the organ for the production of the mightiest and noblest works of genius. It has a spiritual as well as a physical side, as all these organs and glands have - every one of them. How many men remember the holiness of spiritual creation, so to say? The liver is the seat of the personal man, the kama-manasic individual; and the spleen, the `lieutenant' of the former, is the seat of the astral body, the linga-sarira; and even at seances today - which I would not advise anyone to frequent unless he goes there knowing more than the average man does - even they have shown how the astral body of the medium oozes out, first as a slender thread, and then becomes, when the manifestation is genuine, what is now called `ectoplasm,' really thickened astral stuff. It comes through the spleen, it comes forth from the spleen. The liver, as stated, is the seat of the personal man, and the spleen is its lieutenant or adjutant. Then the heart, the organ of the god within us, of the divine-spiritual: here in the physical heart considered now as a spiritual organ, and not merely as a vital pump which it is also: here in the heart, is the god within; not in person so to speak, but its ray, touches the heart and fills it as it were with its auric presence - a holy of holies. Out of the heart come all the great issues of life. Here is where conscience abides, and love and

peace and perfect self-confidence, and hope, and divine wisdom. Their seat is in the mystic heart of which the physical organ is the physical vital instrument. The brain as a whole is the organ of the brain-mind, as a whole the field of activity of our ordinary reasoning, ratiocinative mentation by which we think ordinary and even higher thoughts, and by which also we go about our daily tasks. This is the function of the brain as a whole. But connected with the brain are two wonderful glands already spoken of, the pineal and the pituitary. The pineal gland is as it were a casement opening out into infinite seas and horizons of light, for it is the organ that in us men receives the direct mahatic ray, the ray direct from the cosmic intellect. It is the organ of inspiration, of intuition, of vision, a casement as it were opening unto infinite horizons. The heart is higher, because it is the organ of the individual's spiritual nature, including the higher manas or spiritual intellect. When the heart inflames the pineal gland and sets it vibrating rapidly, then so strong is the inflow of spiritual force that the man experiencing this has his very body clothed in an aureole of glory; a nimbus is behind his head, for the pineal gland is vibrating rapidly, the inner eye is opened and sees infinity; and the aureole or nimbus is the energic outflow from this activity of the pineal gland. The pituitary gland is the lieutenant of the pineal. It is the organ of will and hence also of automatic growth. Even in another sense, I believe today medical research has discovered that gigantism is due to an unwonted activity and growth of the pituitary. This is just one aspect. It is the organ of will and urge and growth and impulse; but when the pineal sets the pituitary vibrating in synchrony with its own vibration, you have a god-man, for there is the intellect envisaging infinity, the divinity in the heart speaking and vibrating synchronously with the pineal gland, which sees infinity. And the pituitary thus inspired to action of will working through the other chakras or organs or glands, makes all the man a harmony of higher energies -relatively godlike. Strange paradox! To enumerate, then, once more the seven main centers of energies in the body: the genital, one; the liver, two; the spleen, three; the heart, four; the brain as a whole, five; the pituitary, six; and the pineal, seven; and there are others subordinate to those. But I would call these seven organs or glands in this wonderful human frame of ours the chiefs, the most important. And strangely enough, they are as it were paired: the heart and the brain; the pineal and the pituitary; the liver and spleen again a pair; the pair of the lowest couple, as a matter of fact, is the solar plexus - but this is a story by itself. The pineal gland functions but slightly in the average man simply because he does not believe there is anything in him of worth except the body as a unitary whole. Nearly all he lives for is to eat, to drink, to sleep and to breed - all proper things in their places, but not proper things for man to live for. There is an ethical sense which abides in us all, and is as it were the free whisperings of divinity in our hearts. It is worthwhile to cultivate this, to allow it to live and to flourish. Now then, would you like to know how to increase the vibration of your pineal gland in your skull? It is in a sense the easiest thing in the world; you have been told ten billion times! All great spiritual leaders and teachers the world over, the great men-gods and godmen of the human race, have told you: First, live as a true man - it is as simple as that. That is the first rule. Do everything you have to do, and do it in accordance with your best. Your ideas of what is best will grow and improve, but begin. The next thing is to cultivate specifically as units the higher qualities in you which you know perfectly well make you superiorly human as contrasted with inferiorly human. For instance, be just, be gentle, be

forgiving, be compassionate and pitiful. Learn the wondrous beauty of self-sacrifice for others; there is something grandly heroic about it. No wonder the world loves a hero. I sometimes think that there is a divine quality in a human soul which is called hero-worship not worshiping a mere man, but that wonderful divine something that works through certain men so that when the test comes they rise up like gods. Why, every one of us loves it! Keep these things in your heart. Believe that you have intuition. Believe that you have a heart. Try to love others. Try to love all things, great and small. Live in your higher being. What then happens? You will be living above the diaphragm, from the solar plexus upwards; and that wonderful pineal gland will begin to vibrate. You will get intuition, you will see, you will know; and when that can be kept up continuously so that it becomes your life, habitual to you, then the time will come for you to become a glorious Buddha, a man made perfect. You will manifest the Immanent Christ within you, you will imbody it. There is the physiology of it. It is the spiritual physiology of it that I have tried to explain to you. These various organs with their respective functions in the human frame have been known and studied from time immemorial in the Orient, studied both casually as shown in exoteric literature, and definitely and specifically in certain occult schools. In India these organs and their functions are referred to as chakras. Strictly speaking, the chakras are the astral organs or functions which have never yet been properly placed, exoterically at least, or openly, as connected with specific physical organs in the human frame. Hence the chakras as regards specific allocations to organs, are surrounded in the exoteric literature with mystery and uncertainty. Yet, while the chakras as taught in Hindu literature are really invisible or astral organs or functions, their allocations to physical organs are as I have named them and outlined them above. The Sanskrit names for these can be found in our exoteric Theosophical literature dealing with the subject. - Theosophical Forum, Feb., 1941 -------------------------

Planetary Chains and Principles * - G. de Purucker FOR years really I have felt I ought to speak about a difficult matter of doctrine, to try to correct at least a few simple errors which some of our very best students have fallen into, I fear I am not sure, but I have the impression that this is the case. It is with regard to the planetary chains, a very technical teaching, but a beautiful teaching, and most suggestive when properly understood, a teaching having a distinct moral value on human life because of the inferences that the student draws from this doctrine of the planetary chains. Of course there are planetary chains of which we have no physical cognisance whatsoever, because their lowest or fourth globe - following H.P.B.'s septenary enumeration - their fourth respective globes are either above or below our plane of the solar universe. Therefore being outside of the sphere which our eyes can encompass, we do not see these other globes. Nevertheless these higher or lower planetary chains exist.

So much for that point. When the planetary-chain teaching was first given out by H.P.B., shortly before and at the time of and after the printing of her great work The Secret Doctrine, those students who thought they understood the teaching concerning the planetary chains, imagined that the other globes of a planetary chain, such as our Earth Planetary Chain, were but different phases of each chain's fourth-plane globe, as for instance of our Globe Earth, our Globe for our Chain - different levels of consciousness, as it were, of our Globe D, reaching from the grossest or our physical plane up to the spiritual. So strongly did this idea sink into the minds of students of those days, and such vogue did it get, that very unwittingly and utterly wrongly, students spoke of the other globes of our Planetary Chain, or of any other planetary chain, as being the principles of --------------* A talk given by the Leader of the T.S. in the Temple at Point Loma. -Eds. --------------our Globe Earth or of some other fourth-plane globe, with respect to its chain, like Venus or Saturn or Mars or Jupiter. This is all wrong. The reason for such mistake was the very striking and close analogy that exists between the globes of a planetary chain and certain aspects of the septenary human constitution little spoken of in those days, but in our day much more clearly understood, to wit, the monads in the human septenary constitution. For many years over-emphasis has been given to this idea that I have just spoken of, that the other globes of our planetary chain were so to speak the principles of our Globe D, and for that reason I have taken especial pains to change that current of thought; until about a year ago I became suddenly conscious that the swing of thought had gone far too much, far too far, in the other direction; and that our members had lost sight of the very striking and close analogy between the monads in the human constitution and the globes of a planetary chain, and were beginning to look upon the globes of our planetary chain, or of any planetary chain, as almost unrelated individuals, unrelated globes, or at least held together only by delicate and subtle karmic bonds of destiny - a thought which is true enough, but not nearly close enough, or accurate enough. If you can synthesize these two points of view, the older and this latter, fuse them into a new and more comprehensive conception, you probably will have the real facts. Let me try to illustrate. The monads in the human constitution - and I will use the septenary form that H.P.B. gave to us as it is somewhat easier than the duodenary - may be reckoned thus: the divine, the spiritual, the intellectual, the psychical, the animal, the astral-vital, and the vital-physical; for even the vital-physical human body, temporary and imperfect as it is, is nevertheless the expression of a monad working on this plane, whose seat (since your western minds always want very definite brain-mind locations), whose seat is in the human heart. The heart is likewise the seat of the spiritual monad working through this lower. The globes of a planetary chain correspond almost term for term to these monads in the human constitution; and as you know, the human constitution being unitary, one, the principles and monads being in coadunition but not in consubstantiality, so likewise we may speak of the globes of a planetary chain as being in coadunition but not in consubstantiality. Yet these other globes are not the other six principles of our Earth. They are fellow-globes, a septenate, of which our Earth is one. But a septenary unitary fact comes in what I have

just told you; that the globes correspond in that chain to what the monads are in the human constitution, because each globe is itself the expression of what we may call a globemonad. Furthermore, just as the principles in the human constitution are as given from the very first, atman, buddhi, and so forth down the scale, so the same cosmic principles, paramatman, maha-buddhi, mahat, etc., are the principles of a planetary chain. Thus you see right there is the same distinction between globes and the principles of a chain, and the monads and the principles of the human constitution, item for item. Furthermore, just as there is in man a hierarch of his constitution, just exactly so in a planetary chain there is a hierarch of the entire planetary chain, the hierarch for all the seven or twelve globes of that chain, our chain as an example. And this hierarch, who really is a kind of person or individual god for the chain, our chain, is the highest spiritual planetary of our chain, or planetary spirit. Remember that every globe of a chain has its own minor hierarchy of planetaries. You may call them Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, if you like. I am now using the typically Theosophical term, planetaries. But these combined planetaries of the chain simply make the families of the planetaries of the chain, the highest of such planetary being the hierarch of the hierarchy, the king. Furthermore, every such planetary considered as an individual, in some past cosmic age has been a man, or a being corresponding to a man; that is, the monad now a planetary, now blossomed out, evolved forth, into being a planetary, then was passing through the stage where spirit and matter meet, conjoin, and produce man, the midway stage. We in our turn, all of us, if we make the grade, shall some day be planetaries. Furthermore, note that in the human constitution, all the monads of a man's constitution are inseparably linked, which does not mean closely linked, but inseparably (which means cannot be separated, that is torn apart from each other to become strangers unto each other), are inseparably linked for a galactic manvantara; after which evolution will have so parted them through increasing individualization that although they will still be karmically linked, they will no longer be condensed as it were into a relatively closely knit unit, as they are now in a man. Precisely the same rule holds for a planetary chain; and remember that all that I am saying tonight is but brushing the outskirts, sketching an outline, of much deeper and important teaching that does not belong here. All the globes of our planetary chain had a common origin, were born together so to speak, just as the monads in a man's constitution have a common origin and were born together so to speak. When they were thus born in past cosmic time they were much more closely in union, united, than now they are, evolution of each globe through the ages bringing about a stronger individualization of each globe, and for this reason we speak of these as being in coadunition; so that as the ages pass, they will have the tendency to separate, still remaining connected by spiritual and magnetic and all other kinds of bonds. The separation, as stated, comes through constantly increasing individualization. But as each globe becomes more strongly individualized, the constellation as it were of globes in a chain separates farther apart. Thus a child born in a family finds the time come some day when it leaves the family and enters the world to carve its own way, or to follow in the footsteps of the father, no longer as a child but as an individual, as a man `on his own,' to use the slang expression. Furthermore, every globe in a planetary chain, ours for instance, has its own

septenary constitution. The Master in The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, outlines what these principles are for our Earth-Globe, but the Master there gives only the septenate for the physical globe. You remember, every principle in a constitution is itself septenary, so that there is even an atman of the physical so to, speak. Therefore, every globe not only has its own septenary principles, each principle a septenate itself; but you see this means that every globe therefore is a fully equipped entity with divinity at its' heart and manifesting in a gross physical vehicle, veil, frame, body, exactly as a man does. You know that even an atom in your body is a septenary entity. Its heart is divinity. Why should not a globe of a chain be exactly the same? It is. At the present time the globes of a planetary chain, ours for instance, are sufficiently conjoined or coadunated so that they move through space more or less together as a constellation, as it were; so that while they are not inside of each other, the more ethereal inside the more material - that is not so - while they are scattered about in space, but closely together; nevertheless they form a constellation as it were, if you take the twelve of them, or even the seven; and they pursue the same orbit about the sun that the earth does, not because the earth follows this orbit - it is only one of seven or twelve - but it happens to be the orbit that these seven, these twelve, all follow; so that when we move about the sun, we do so, and all the other globes do so, more or less as a constellation, each globe moving and rotating. Follow your thought now: so that actually every globe from this standpoint can be called a planet. It is in itself not only a septenary entity, but if you were on Globe E for instance, or F or G or A or B or C, you would not see the other globes around you. To you it would be an earth, following its orbit around the sun, as does each of the other globes. Therefore the globes from this standpoint can truly be called planets. What has been said with regard to our earth applies equally well to all the other planetary chains, visible or invisible, of our Solar System. And there are scores of planetary chains. Our modern science knows of only a few planets - I think the total number at present is nine, including Pluto, and about these I have not the time nor is it the place to go into here. I am debating now in my mind, and also trying to find words in which to speak of something else. These things are not easy to speak of. The teaching is difficult indeed, because it is so utterly apart from anything that our brain-mind knows. What I have said about planetary chains applies equally well to the Solar Chain, or indeed to any stellar chain, the chain of any star. Furthermore, remember that every planetary chain is headed by its hierarch, which is the chiefest planetary spirit of that chain, the highest; and therefore that planetary spirit is for its chain what we in the West I suppose would call a `personal god.' Now this teaching is a very ancient one, and in its popularization a very exoteric one. It has been known since immemorial time, and was the basis of what the ancients called astrolatry or star-worship. They did not worship the physical globe, they worshiped the life, the light, the intellect, the manifestation of order and beauty and harmony, for which the planet was the symbol and expression. They worshiped, in other words, the regent of the planetary chain. And furthermore, just as a chain has its own chief planetary or hierarch, so every globe has its own subordinate smaller hierarchy of planetaries with its hierarch or chief minor planetary, our Earth as an example; only these are globe-planetaries - at least those on our Earth are. Nevertheless, they are higher than we men, spiritually and intellectually. Thus you see, "to come back to our sheep" as the French say, we must not look

upon a planetary chain as an indissoluble single body or globe, of which what we call the other globes are merely finer planes. In other words, the other globes are not merely finer planes of our own Globe-Earth that we know. Our own globe that we know is only one of seven or twelve, and in some ways the least important of all, because the lowest. Nor should we again on the other hand look upon the planetary chain as composed of a number of globes, whether we reckon on the seven or twelve, which are merely held together in a kind of feeble union, unconnected in origin with each other, which is quite wrong, because they are very closely connected in origin with each other, and they shall be connected thus closely until the end of the Galactic Manvantara; and then when the new Galactic Manvantara opens, they will still be connected, but much less so than at present, obviously, because of what I pointed out a little while ago: that age, evolutionary progress, gives to each globe an increasing increment of individuality. It becomes more independent in spirit, as it were, just as we find among men. It is a very curious paradox that the lowest things are the most closely united, the least individualized, as we see in the unism of the rocks. As we follow the ladder of life upwards, we find that the component parts slowly seem to separate and become more individualized, until we reach men. And here, strangely enough, although it is among men that the sense of disunion is very strong, it is likewise among men that begins to come to birth again, in men's souls, the feeling of their oneness, the ekatwa or ekata in Sanskrit, their oneness with the Divine. Isn't that a marvelous paradox? Unism at the lowest, but unconscious unism as in the rocks, and in the atoms. Unity in the highest, but self-conscious unity with the Divine. Try then to understand, to fuse these two thoughts together. The globes of a planetary chain are in coadunition, but not in consubstantiality, which means that they are karmically united as a unitary group at the present time, closely so, but are not consubstantial. That is, the stuff of which the individual globes are builded differs from one to the other. And now, finally; do not for an instant take the metaphorical symbol used by H.P.B. of the necklace of globes as being a graph, a photograph, as it were, of the actual positions of the globes in space, for that is all wrong. The globes are scattered about the heart of the chain as it were from the central pillar of light, so to speak. And you could write a metaphorical graph of the seven globes, no longer what H.P. Blavatsky on page 92 of her Letters to A. P. Sinnett called a necklace of sausages and protested against it as being a wrong conception; but you could write the way the globes are located towards each other on an ascending line, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. That would be just as accurate as the necklace of sausages; but that straight-line graph has not the advantage of suggesting the descent into matter until the bottom is reached and the rise again, which the necklace of globes does. The straight-line way of describing the positions of the globes however has one enormous advantage. It shows that every globe of the seven or twelve is on a different plane; and that no two, despite the graph in The Secret Doctrine, are on exactly the same subplane. Those are metaphors, that is, diagrams. They suggest things, and the suggestion you must try to understand; and do not take pictures, those metaphorical suggestions, as photographs of the positions of the globes. Now it is true, and I have emphasized this point myself, that precisely because the globes are scattered about in space, although each one is on a different plane, there comes a time when they come opposite each other in their evolution. I wonder now if you catch that thought? So that it is possible, for instance, for an observer on Globe E at a

certain instant in time to catch a glimpse of Globe C, the reason being that the two globes are for the instant in vibratory synchrony. That instant actually may be a million or tens of millions of years. But the globes are in movement. We are speaking now of super-geologic time; but compared with the life of a planetary chain, it is, relatively speaking, an instant. It is in exactly the same way, or a very similar way, that H.P.B. tries to describe the outbreak of psychic disturbances in our time, foreseen and foretold by the Masters. Do you remember in some of her earlier writings she points out that the world is entering upon a period when the plane on which we live and the plane on which the kama-rupas of kamaloka mostly are, come close together, the partition becomes thin, and there is an inrush of kama-rupic spooks into our thought-atmosphere, and into our world. It is, as it were, as if two planes came close to each other. I wonder if I make my thought clear. If you get the idea, that is the main thing. - Theosophical Path, June, 1942 -------------------------

A Great Principle of Success When a man is in difficulties, the thing he must do is to act, to move. Attack is the secret of victory, whether it is a commercial matter, or propagating a philosophy, or answering questions, or whatever else it may be. In anything a man does he has chances of success if he moves, goes out, acts. The great principle of success in anything is to go after your objective, to take the kingdom of heaven with strength, and then the gods are with you. It is really a wonderful psychological secret; and it is better to move and to act, even if you make mistakes, than it is to sit still. You will discover your mistakes as you go along, if you have ordinary prudence, and can modify and change from step to step. Keep pushing forward, instead of remaining always quiet and allowing things to rest - which last all too often degenerates into dormancy. I believe that generally our speakers on the public platform might adopt this principle more than they do, just in a little thing like answering questions from the audience. If they would drop the defensive attitude which some have, and cease imagining that the man on the floor is trying to trip them or to trick them, and would simply attack the question, go right at it, answer it positively, in other words guide the thought, then all Theosophical meetings, interesting as they are, would be much more interesting. This is the way by which to make a meeting really lively and really interesting; and if you combine it with constant courtesy and a little humor, you become almost irresistible. - G. de Purucker - Theosophical Forum, June, 1942 -------------------

THE PSYCHIC TIDE by G. de Purucker We call particular attention to the appositeness of this article, written nearly forty years ago. It is reprinted from Messages to Conventions, pages 111-114 (now out of print), and is a Letter from the then Head of the T.S., Point Loma, addressed to the Officials and Members of the General Council of the English Section of the Society, dated April 21, 1934. - Eds. -------The world is entering upon psychologic conditions far different from what existed in the time when H.P. Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society; and the signs of these changing events are observable everywhere. It were sheer folly to put blinders over our eyes and to suppose that we are still living in the psychological atmosphere which prevailed more or less from 1875 to 1914. Yet it would be equally foolish in my judgment to suppose that the declarations of cause of the founding of the Theosophical Society, which were made by the Masters and their Messenger H.P. Blavatsky, between 1875 and 1891, which was the time of her passing, have been exhausted in their necessary effects, and that these same causes no longer are valid. The exact contrary of this is the case. The Theosophical Society was formed above everything else to keep alive in man his spiritual intuitions, to be a bulwark of spirituality in the world, and perhaps above everything else to bring about at least a nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood which could successfully face and in time prevail over the mistakes of the passing phases in human civilization, such as above said we today see around us on every hand. In other words, the causes for the founding of the Theosophical Society are really stronger today than they were at the time of the birth of the Society. The Masters in their wisdom foresaw what was coming, foresaw the need of introducing into the thought-life of the world ideas, teachings, doctrines which would stem and perhaps divert into harmless flow the inrushing tide of psychism which, it was seen dearly in 1875 and before, the modern world was about to face, and perhaps the Occidental part of the modern world especially so. How wise these warnings were that were given to us soon after H.P. Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, should be by now appreciated by every thoughtful mind. On all sides we see new fantastic, and in some instances crazy, psychical movements springing up; strange and erratic organizations are gathering in adherents by the hundreds and in some cases by the thousands. Eminent men of Science in a few cases are even having their attention drawn to and their imagination captured by phenomenalistic occurrences which make an appeal to them precisely because they have the illusory appearance of being something tangible and real, which they suppose can be subjected to laboratory tests. Examine the many periodicals now in publication, some of them relatively harmless, some of them simply foolish, some of them downright dangerous; and consider the dreams of Cloud Cuckoo-Land which most of these periodicals or magazines publish. Most of them appropriate, with none or at best with little acknowledgment, more or less of the teachings which H.P. Blavatsky brought to the western world, and misuse these teachings by way of making foundations of them upon which are created false claims concerning fraudulent

initiations and equally fraudulent initiates. It is clap-trap of this kind which is always a bait to the uninstructed, because it is these masses of the uninstructed, alas, our unenlightened brothers hungry for truth as they are, who have their attention fascinated and their adherence captured. I tell you, my Brothers, that we shall be held, and indeed are now, responsible for any slackness or failure to emphasize the purposes of the Theosophical Movement, and for our failure to do our utmost to spread abroad the teachings of the Ancient Wisdom-Religion of the gods, as they have been given us. These teachings alone will stem the present psychic tide and divert this vast mass of inchoate human psychical energy into the proper channels. This rushing psychic tide of energy takes many forms. In some it is purely psychical or psychistic, finding its outlet in the various quasi-occult or pseudo-mystical movements which flourish today. In other cases this psychical tide makes its appearance in emotional or quasi-religious forms of a revivalist character. As I ponder the situation, I am with every day that passes more and more reminded of the conditions that prevailed in the Roman Empire just preceding the days of its social disintegration. Writers like Ammianus Marcellinus have transmitted to us descriptions of conditions prevailing in the Roman Empire at the time of its first decline and before its fall strangely, amazingly alike unto what prevails in the world today. Multitudes running after so-called magicians, necromantic practices breaking out sporadically in all parts of that Empire, fortune-telling and other similar fads, and emotional revivalist bodies thronging both town and countryside in semi-religious frenzy! My Brothers, precisely the same outbreaks are observable in all parts of the world today; and I call your attention to it because it is the immediate and most important problem that faces us. I do not mean to suggest that our present civilization is in the same perilous condition as was the Roman Imperium at the time of which I speak. I call your attention to the amazing similarity, and say that the same dangers threaten us now that then threatened imperial Rome. Today the chances are greater for a spiritual reaction towards sanity and safety, and I believe it will come in time... In the Theosophical Society we have little to complain of as regards our fundamental law, to wit our Constitution; still less of the sublime spiritual principles that at least as an ideal govern our Theosophical activities. All studious Theosophists must have come to a realization that the only saving power, the only saving grace, in the world today, is precisely the doctrines contained in our standard Theosophical books, which likewise include the ethic which is the heart of these doctrines. It is only in matters of detail, only in particulars, only in points of administration, that we have need to be watchful and to take care lest our choice of methods be unwise. Nevertheless, if the heart be right and our minds be set to the spiritual Polar Star, as our infallible guide, the mistakes that we may make - and indeed we all make mistakes - become relatively unimportant; for mistakes can be corrected, errors in judgment can be abated; and it at least is comforting to know that we learn from our mistakes, and that our work afterwards becomes only the stronger and the purer because from our eyes the veils have fallen .... We are all human. As the old Latin proverb says, we are all apt to err, sometimes because of enthusiasm, sometimes because of the spirit of over-aggressive propaganda; but, as said above, errors can be repaired; mistakes can be righted. The only thing we must never do is to wander from the Path which lies before us; that age-old Path - quiet, small, holy, which the Seers and Sages of all the ages have pointed to as the path of safety

for the Theosophical worker, and for all mankind. (Eclectic Theosophist, March 15, 1972) ---------------------

THE PSYCHIC WORLD - BEWARE! - G. de Purucker In The Esoteric Tradition, II, p. 889, G. de Purucker is answering the question whether it is possible for a scientist of today artificially to 'construct' a living soul. His answer is that it would indeed be possible "if our scientists had the knowledge and the wisdom and the power enabling them to combine the psycho-vital fluid of the Monadic Ray with latent living matter as composed of the mere chemical elements. But," he adds, "with all respect to the great men working in our chemical laboratories and in biological experimental chambers, one is bound to confess that it is too much to ask of them. The scientists of the far-distant aeons of the future, however, in what in Theosophy are called the Sixth and Seventh great Root-Races to come, will undoubtedly be able to do this; but it is greatly doubtful if before that time any human mind will have the knowledge or the power to accomplish that alchemical feat of real 'creative' magic. If it be ever done within our times, it will happen almost as a 'stroke of luck,' nor is it likely that the feat could be repeated." There follows on this a lengthy, but what we feel is a most necessary, footnote warning the reader of the effects of an inrush of psychic influences upon the world such as H.P. Blavatsky foresaw the 20th century would witness. The psychic conditions are obviously with us. Have we the moral balance not to be engulfed and 'used' by these forces? Are we wise enough to exploit them only constructively? Have we the discrimination to use them only for benign ends? We feel that what Dr. de Purucker says on these questions is of gravest concern and therefore we quote in full the several paragraphs of this particular footnote No. 396. - Eds. ----------Here once more, and with extreme reluctance, one feels, the need of stating that there is a good deal of the teaching of the Esoteric Philosophy which simply cannot be openly stated in a published book, because such teaching belongs to the highly recondite and extremely difficult thought of the esoteric studies reserved for the few. The author of the present work desires to state once for all, and with all the emphasis at his command, that neither this declaration of certain esoteric teachings which are too sacred to be given to the public, nor other similar declarations made in the course of the present work, are in any sense of the word to be considered or looked upon as 'claims' made by him to possessing 'superior' or wonderful knowledge. The author absolutely disavows not only any such intention of 'claiming' anything, but must point out that merely stating that the Esoteric Philosophy contains wide ranges of teaching or doctrine which are incommunicable to the public is making no 'claims' whatsoever, but is

the simple statement of something that ought to be known to every student of the Archaic Wisdom. The writer of these lines has immense and profound sympathy with those who look askance and with suspicion upon any claimants to occult powers or occult knowledge; for he, fully as much as others, is keenly sensible of the mischief and confusion that such claimants have brought about in the Theosophical Movement. There are today abroad in the world associations or societies or organizations of many different kinds, some of them claiming either new and greater revelations than H.P. Blavatsky brought to the Western World, and usually as being from the source from which, she drew her great knowledge, or averring that they and their respective heads draw their alleged 'wisdom' and so-called 'secret teaching' from a source still higher than that upon which H.P. Blavatsky drew. Now with all the charity in the world towards honest students, whether they be Theosophists or not, and with no wish whatsoever to seem or to be inconsiderate or unkind, the author of these lines feels impelled to say that in his considered opinion virtually all of these various claims to special spiritual powers or privileges are fraudulent shams. Such is his own individual and considered judgment in the matter, and he bases this opinion upon two facts which are as follows: (a) the statements, writings, averments, or 'claims' of these especial groups generally wander so far from and contain so little of that Archaic Wisdom which in the present work is called the Esoteric Tradition, and which throughout the ages has been universal over the globe, that they thus lack the primal requisite of truth, both esoteric and esoteric, which is universality, and lack it both in substance and in form. Thus the greater and more important test of true Esotericism, to wit, is its universality in all ages and in all races of men as evidenced in that common DOCTRINE which all the great Religions and Philosophies of the human race imbody as their spiritual substance; and (b) it is virtually impossible to set forth or to publish esoteric truth in any manner, except by pointing to what the great sages and seers of the ages have left behind them as their respective Messages. One must look for the cause of the rising of these various erratic associations to that inrush of psychic influences which H.P. Blavatsky and her great Teachers from the beginning of the modern Theosophical Movement taught was about to take place; and there is no part of the human constitution which is so uncertain, so erratic in its processes, so dangerous to follow as a guide, as the psychical portion of man's being. It is full of dangers and pitfalls to the unwary; and there is a deep pathos in the fact that it is just these things of psychic stamp and character which appeal so to men of our time. Psychism in all its forms, relatively good, downright bad, and indifferent, is something which unfortunately appeals directly to the credulous, the gullible, the unwise, and the foolish; and the earnest Theosophist should never hesitate openly to proclaim that one of the main purposes in founding the modern Theosophical Movement was to do what could be done to stem the then impending inrushing tide or flow of psychism in its various forms. Where psychism is, Spirituality usually flies out at the window - because evicted by man's folly; where Spirituality is allowed to enlighten the mind and refine the heart by its benign and inspiring influence, the psychical in all its forms shrive into the bundle illusions which it actually is. All these various psychical bodies or societies are posterior in time to the founding of the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 by H.P. Blavatsky and others. Some of them broke off from the Theosophical Movement, while others arose outside of its ranks;

although all younger than the Theosophical Society, they rarely if ever acknowledge the debt they owe to it in so far as concerns the teachings which they have one and all taken from it, and which teachings form whatever is worthwhile in them. Without any philosophy that is worthy of the name, save what has been cribbed from the Theosophical Society, with a religious atmosphere which is insignificant and a science which is either mere popular trifling or worse, one turns from an inspection of them with relief. Yet even here in these various movements, some quasi-theosophical without acknowledging it, and some frankly anti-theosophical and vaunting it, there are doubtless numbers of very kindly and good people who in their search for truth have not yet come to our doors. Without question the best way for Theosophists to handle this situation is with great gentleness and with unending kindness both of heart and mind and with an everready desire to extend to truthseekers from whatsoever quarter they may come such portion of the Ancient Wisdom as we ourselves may be privileged to have made our own. As Edwin Markhim (in his poem "Outwitted") said: He drew a circle that shut me out Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in! Finally, the writer of the present work does not here make, nor has he ever made, 'claims' to anything whatsoever; he has given in the present work and in his former books, something of what he himself has been taught; but this statement is made not as a 'claim,' but as a simple averment of fact which the reader is at full liberty to accept or reject, according to his conscience and his best reason. The proof of the body of the truth of any teaching or group of teachings is not and cannot be based on 'claims,' though made by the high gods themselves, but solely on the intrinsic and inherent merits of said teaching or body of teachings; and upon this ground of merit alone, such merit comprising universality, spirituality, mutual coherency, and logical consecution in thought, any teaching whatsoever must rest. It is true enough that great names and brilliant reputations lend splendor to a teaching, and in themselves evoke respect; but even brilliant reputations and great names are no absolute proofs that any teaching coming from such source is true. This is especially true in Esotericism, whose doctrines persuade the mind and sway the heart solely because of their intrinsic value and obvious merit, and on these alone they must stand or fall. - Eclectic Theosophist, Jan. 15, 1973 ---------------------

G. de Purucker on Psychism "... Esoteric discipline precedes the Mysteries, my Brothers. I could stand here and talk to you until the wee small hours of the morning on psychic subjects, and talk to you with much... literary ornament as to how to 'get powers,' and, and, and ---- then you would

go away ----with what? With nothing to the good. My soul's yearning is to do what I can to teach every man and every woman whom I meet to learn to know the divinity within, to find himself for himself, to find herself for herself. "... I will not show you how to cultivate your psychic powers. You are not ready for that. You are not prepared to assume responsibilities and to face the dangers that would occur in such action. Not one man in ten millions today is prepared properly and nobly to wield powers which Nature, great Mother of us all, has not yet brought forth in the normal course of evolution. Only the chosen few, they whose hearts are at rest and whose minds are at peace, and whose moral nature flows forth from the god within, are ready. But what I can show you, and show to every son of man, is how to cultivate the spiritual and intellectual powers within him. These are the things which make a man great. It is not the psychical powers - those of the intermediate part of man's nature which are in his being, evolved in human evolution - which can be meddled with with impunity. But the spiritual and intellectual faculties and powers which actually are the very root of man's being and therefore permeate his entire consciousness can be evolved or evoked at any time and can be done with not only safety to the student but with inevitable benefits accruing to him thereupon. "There are men who have the trick of wiggling the scalp or of twitching the skin of the arm, etc, and, like little boys, they are very proud of their wonderful achievements. But in what way is the man bettered or advanced by such childish play? Similarly in what way is a man bettered or advanced by cultivating psychical faculties which now are in their embryo and just beginning to manifest themselves and therefore need control and discipline and not a forced development, for the time to do that has not yet come. Nor will it come until hundreds of thousands of years shall have passed..." [From the lecture given by GdeP Theosophy, Occultism, and the Mysterious at the Woman's Club Auditorium, Hollywood, Ca., March 8, 1931] --------------------

DR. de PURUCKER'S "FUNDAMENTALS" It may seem rather late in the day to speak of a book published in 1932 and reviewed in our columns in June of that year, but I have felt for some time since reading Dr. G. de Purucker's "Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy" that I would like to say a word of my own impressions. I am so constituted that it is very rare I can swallow a book wholesale without any reservation whatever, and I have no impulse to swallow the Fundamentals in that style. But I am bound to say that I found the book thought-provoking, suggestive, novel in its new emphases, and a valuable adjunct to a student of The Secret Doctrine. Of course students - real students - of the Secret Doctrine, are as critical as any other readers can be, and statements made by whomsoever have to be analyzed and weighed and balanced with experience and reason and intuition. I am a slow reader and on a large book have to take my time, and so have no apology to make about delay, whatever may be due for incapacity. No book is infallible, and if it were it would take an

infallible reader to appreciate its merits. Consequently reviewers may very courteously agree to differ on many points, and yet feel no alarm because they cannot see eye to eye. I am always ready to admit I am wrong, if may error is pointed out, and I never was foolish enough to think I knew more than anyone else. We are told that there are at least seven methods of interpretation, and it is rarely that the proper method is indicated by the author. Indeed, one may feel that many authors are unaware of the correct method of dealing with their own works. When the true key is metaphysical or transcendental, or idealistic or purely Divine or Spiritual, one may be forgiven if he stumbles in his interpretations. In any case a good book, whoever may write it, is one that stirs the imagination ands inner faculties of the student, and inspires him to greater effort of mind and action. I believe this book of Dr. de Purucker's will do this if read in anything like an approach to the true spirit. There have been suggestions that this book has been dictated by a Master. The author himself states that "the Teacher has told me almost nothing" (page 158) . But whether he was told little or much, the book should be read by the student as we were advised to read the Secret Doctrine, without any thought of authority, to question every statement, to judge it from experience and the evidence of others, and to give it the final test of reason and common sense on its value as a guide to Life. I found the book acutely stimulating. Whether one agrees or not with some of its propositions, there can be no doubt that it is on the side of the angels, and those who read it will be compelled to go to The Secret Doctrine to settle any difficulties they may meet. Dr. de Purucker suffers as an author from the form of the book, which really consists of a series of lectures, in which he irritates one reader at least, if one be permitted the liberty, by references to "the Teacher" who had told him almost nothing, as he says, and who, to judge by such early dicta as that the Bhagavad Gita was a book not suited to the Nineteenth Century, or that the clay bank of Point Loma was the oldest part of our Earth, was certainly not capable of instructing as clever and learned a man as Dr. de Purucker undoubtedly is. Now that he is "on his own" so to speak, one feels much more confidence in his own reliability. Much fault was found with his use of the term "absolute" to cover the perfection or completeness of lesser manifestations of Consciousness and Power than The ABSOLUTE. It does not appear that Dr. de Purucker had tried in any way to take away from the Unknown Root any phase of its uniquity, but used it in the Dictionary sense "perfect in itself;" or as we say colloquially in the last few years, Absolutely, when absoluteness is the last thing in our minds. I would more seriously differ with him when he says there is no Law of Karma, but simply the working of various consciousnesses, or to put it as he does, "the various workings of consciousnesses in Nature." I should say that if we are in touch with anything absolute it is the Law of Karma, otherwise, as Walt Whitman says, "Alarum! Then indeed we are betrayed!" Perhaps the new karman which he preaches is different from what H.P.B. had in mind, for Karma gives us a "foothold, tenon'd and mortis'd in granite;" but this idea that Karma may be the "habit" or "will" or mayhap the whim of a being to whom we are subject, is subversive of all standards and principles. The Secret Doctrine teaches that Consciousness and Matter are the two facets or aspects of the Absolute which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective; and that we acquire individuality, first by natural impulse, and then by self-

induced and self-devised efforts, checked by Karma, thus ascending from the lowest to the highest Manas up to the holiest archangel. It is the Law of Karma that guarantees the integrity of the ascending entity and if there be no Law on which it can depend, what are we to think? This theory of Dr. de Purucker's will suit the sacerdotalists and the ecclesiastics generally, but it is not the teaching we had from H.P.B. Still, none of us is infallible, and I am willing to be shown, if that can be. The chief value of Dr. de Purucker's book is the importance he attaches to the revelations regarding the Hierarchies. It is true that little attention has been paid, comparatively, to this subject. We venture to make some quotations from The Secret Doctrine under this head, and commend Dr. de Purucker's remarks about it to the student. It illuminates many aspects of the teaching, but nowhere that I can discover is it suggested that the Hierarchies or their component Beings are in any way exempt from the general Law of Karma that operates up to the Throne of the Invisible itself. For directing attention to this point alone the book is well worth study, but there are many other virtues which we need not dilate upon, and which the student will perceive for himself, while gaining perspicacity in considering the detail and embellishments of the writer's treatment. The volume has a fine Index and runs to 555 pages. (London: Rider & Co.). - A. E. S. S. - From Canadian Theosophist, Jan. 15, 1936 --------------------

Send In Your Questions! Pygmies of Past and Present Of what Race are the Pygmies? - the `dwarfed-races of the Poles.' The Secret Doctrine says: The Third `Race' "having fallen down in godliness, they mixed with animal races, and intermarried among giants and pygmies (the dwarfed-races of the Poles)" - Vol. II, p. 331. Have not the pygmies higher Manas? G. de P. - What a most marvelously confused question - confusion worse confounded! `Pygmies,' in this questioner's mind, seem to be the pygmies of the earth of the present day; and these pygmies of the earth of the present day are simply the degenerate representatives of what were even in Atlantean days degenerate race-stocks. But the Pygmies that the extract from The Secret Doctrine here refers to, were Pygmies some twenty or twenty-five feet tall, and were the latest representatives of the degenerate humanity of the last part of the Third Root-Race. They were called `pygmies' because they had decreased so in size as compared with their ancestors; and they lived in the northern parts of the earth. Even the Atlanteans when they were no longer in their primal period but verging well towards the middle of their Race, were twenty-five or more feet tall - twenty-five of our feet tall and perhaps taller. The humanity of the Third Root-Race were titans in size, even larger.

Of course the Pygmies have a higher Manas, even the Pygmies of Africa today. It is not to these African Pygmies that this extract from The Secret Doctrine refers, but it is to these African and other present-day pygmies that this questioner apparently refers. This question is an excellent illustration of an intuitive mind taking words too literally. `The dwarfed race of the poles' were the degenerate relics, the remnants, of the Third Root-Race, having then become Atlantean. Every Root-Race has its degenerates, its inferior races so-called; and this word `inferior' must not be used absolutely, but only in a relative sense. Every race also has its higher sub-races. Every Root-Race has its savages and its highly civilized nations and peoples. That is to say, every Root-Race after the middle point of the Third Root-Race. The Pygmies of Africa today, for instance, and the Pygmy-tribes of people you will find elsewhere today on the face of the earth, are merely degenerate representatives of what even in Atlantean times were degenerate stocks. Facts About the Root-Races Are the Eskimos descendants of the Pygmy-Races who mixed with the Third Race? G. de P. -The Eskimos are the descendants of northern Atlantean peoples, descendants of some of the very latest of those northern Atlantean stocks which had become stranded or isolated in the far north just as the Pygmies became stranded in Africa. The Eskimos do not go back so far as the Pygmy-race spoken of in the extract from The Secret Doctrine, here, except in the general sense that every human race is the child of the preceding Root-Race. If the Eskimos were the descendants of the Third Root-Race, then we are also. But what we now call the Eskimos are the dying-out remnants of certain minor tribelets of Atlantean date which even then had become worn out. But this is not the case with all the savages or barbarians on the earth today. There are some savage or barbarian tribes which are being held and guarded as the seeds - the seed-humanity - of aeons to come. And I can give you one instance in point which may interest you. It is the Toda-people in India, concerning whom H.P.B. wrote her series of articles entitled, `A Strange Tribe of the Nilghiris.' The Negroes are going to play a prominent role on the face of the earth before their time comes to pass away; but then they will no longer be what we now call Negroes. If we proud Occidentals could see ourselves as we were four or five million years ago, we would not pleasantly acknowledge our own ancestors. And I can tell you that if the Atlanteans could see us - we humans of our present Fifth Root-Race as we are - they would think that we were perfect monsters: puny, tiny Lilliputians, with neither strong intellectual power nor physical strength, afflicted with diseases both hereditary and other; incapable of controlling ourselves either in love or in hate. This is the picture that we would present to them. And we of the Fifth Race look back upon our ancestors of Atlantean days, as monsters of iniquity, black with sin - and so they were. We at least have advanced in spirituality. We have gained something, and it is an enormous gain. And if you could see the Sixth Root-Race to succeed us, you would probably say: "What extraordinary and unpleasant-looking creatures!" This is a fact. We have not developed the proper faculties of proportion yet to enable us to appreciate the beauty of the Sixth Root-Race to come; and even in the Fifth we hardly know what real beauty is. Even in our art, beauty is in discussion as concerns its nature. How would you like to be hairless, with two backbones, one eye, and no teeth? How

would you like to shed your skin and the nails of fingers and toes yearly; to cast your skin as a serpent today does in its own times? How would you like to be no longer either a man or a woman, but a sexless `thing,' as you would probably say today in scorn? Indeed if our modern scientists could catch one of these beings of the coming Sixth Root-Race, they would put him in a glass case, and exhibit him over the civilized world today as a monster, a teratological curiosity. The splendid spiritual and other faculties which such a Sixth RootRace being would manifest would be utterly misunderstood. - Theosophical Forum, July, 1942 -----------------------

Questions and Answers TYPES OF DEVACHANS In The Key to Theosophy H.P.B. says that after death the Methodist will be a Methodist, the Mohammedan a Mohammedan, at least for some time, in a perfect fool's Paradise of each man's creation and making. Will this be in Kama-loka or Devachan? I say the latter, as there is no consciousness in the Kama-loka, and H.P.B. herself has described Devachan as a fool's Paradise. The Mahatma Letters (page 103) speaks of "the pleasures realized by a Red Indian in his `happy hunting grounds' in that Land of Dreams." - M. J. G. de P. - The answer to this question is in general a Yes, an affirmative. H.P.B. certainly meant mainly the devachan, since it is a mere reflection of the spiritual vision, imperfect and poor as it is, of the man who has just died; whatever that man was in a spiritual way he will continue to be in the devachan afterwards. Thus the imperfect vision, when compared with a Buddha, for instance, of a Methodist or a Roman Catholic or a Mohammedan, being a lack of complete inner vision, inner spiritual growth, will continue in the devachan in a sublimated sort of way in the "fool's Paradise," so that the Methodist will be a Methodist, but an improved Methodist, the Roman Catholic ditto, the Mohammedan ditto, and so forth. So much for this part of the question. Yet it is obvious that the kama-loka, being the stage preceding the devachan, will not change the character of the man who has just died; and if he has died filled with the thoughts of Mohammedanism, or of Methodism, or of the Baptist, or of the Roman Catholic, he will still be this or that in the quasi-consciousness of the kama-loka. So we can say he will still remain a Methodist, or a Roman Catholic, or a Mohammedan, through the purging process of the kama-loka; and then the finest part of the man will enter the devachan, the "fool's Paradise," in which he will still have his dreams of a glorified Methodism or Roman Catholicism or Mohammedanism, or Judaism, or whatever his quasi-spiritual thoughts on earth were. So there is a certain truth, when this is understood, in the other statement also, that even in the kama-loka the man's character is not changed. Looking over the above, I might add that of course an ego is not cleared of all impurities thus becoming perfect before entering the devachan, as he would then be of the status of a Buddha. Nor do I mean that it is necessarily an "impurity to be cleared away" to be a Methodist or any other religionist. Of course when a man becomes through

evolution so spiritually evolved that he is a Bodhisattva on earth, or a Buddha, then he will just pass through the kama-loka and devachanic states almost unconsciously, for the man is above them, and he enters a lower or higher Nirvana according to his development. And Nirvana means a vision of Reality. CAN WE HELP THE KAMA-LOKIC ENTITY? Is it possible for the living to give help to the human kama-lokic entity in its struggle to free itself at the time of the second death? Would a living person be likely to feel the influence from that struggle on the part of one who in life had been closely connected with him, especially on inner lines? - N. N. G. de P. - Nature is too merciful to allow but the merest fragments of psychic or emotional contact between the living and those in kama-loka. If it were otherwise, our lives would be a hell. The entities in kama-loka as a rule are semi-conscious or unconscious. It is only the very evil sorcerers, black magicians, or the grossest kind of beings while in body, who have a consciousness which we would call awake-consciousness when they reach the kamaloka. Consequently, all the kama-lokic processes, except in the cases of the few mentioned above, take place automatically and as it were unconsciously or as in a dream, perhaps a nightmare, perhaps perfect unconsciousness in the case of the average person; but a real hell of feeling in the cases of the sorcerer and the tremendously heavily gross person. But, after all, these last are few. It is of course true that a spiritual love on the part of the survivors can reach even to the devachan after the kama-loka is ended; yes, and even as it were help the interim Bardo-period in the kama-loka. But it must be a spiritual love, and the effect itself is to bring an atmosphere of more peace to the kama-rupas in kama-loka; and the same thing after those in kama-loka have shaken off the kama-rupa and have entered the devachan state. 'Yes, a spiritual love, not an emotional one, does help the entities in kama-loka to a certain degree, especially if those entities are nice clean decent average people, and are not sorcerers or gross materialists. The main point to remember is that those in kama-loka should be left absolutely alone. Nature is infinitely the kindliest. The kama-loka experiences for average people are dreamlike or even pure unconsciousness. They are just as it were in unconscious sleep; and any attempt to touch them, even with emotional love or emotional thought, can at times, if the thought and magnetic impulse is strong enough, give them a fictitious temporary awakening, and then they feel unhappy, for they are half awake and surrounded by atmospheres they do not understand, and they feel as if they were in a bad dream. So it is much better to leave the kama-loka entities strictly alone, even if they are our dearest friends. Of course a gentle warm current of impersonal friendship does no harm, and as explained above, may even do a little good in helping to purify the atmosphere around the kama-lokis, if I may invent a term. CATACLYSMS AS WAYS OF ESTABLISHING BALANCE In The Secret Doctrine, Volume II, at the end of the first part, H.P. Blavatsky gives us a description of the terrible catastrophes which will take place during the transitionperiod from the Fifth to the Sixth Root-Races. It seems to me that Nature works in a rather hard way. Is it not possible for

the great spiritual Leaders of evolution on this planet - if not to prevent - at any rate to mitigate the effects of these terrible disasters, during which millions of human beings and animals perish? Is this due not only to cosmic but also to individual karman? - P. R. G. de P. -Yes, to both, to both kinds of karman; and also to racial karman, and planetary karman. The questioner is a highly intelligent man, but there lurks throughout his question the old feeling that `Nature is not just as I think she ought to be.' Presumably the idea is that if someone else had had the shaping or founding of natural law, of natural being, it would have been more shapely and kindly done. I wonder! Nature's heart is compassion absolute, because that compassion is absolute harmony. Nature moves on a cosmic scale, and in comparison therewith our ordinary brain-minds are microcosmic, with small reaches of understanding of the great cosmic issues involved, and, so far as the racial karman is concerned, of any Root-Race or Sub-Race, with small understanding of her sweeping away in catastrophic or cataclysmic activities millions of animals and millions of men. How about the millions of men and millions of animals that die daily, and, yea, that are sometimes, perhaps not in their millions, but in their hundreds and thousands, killed, murdered, wantonly slaughtered? All these things, all these catastrophes and cataclysms, are one of Nature's ways of re-establishing balance, equilibrium; just as disease in a human body is a purgation, a purging the system of poison. Just so, Nature's ways in its own purgations are these cataclysms and catastrophes. The so-called `Leaders of evolution,' of which this querent writes, do indeed strive continuously through the ages to mitigate the sorrow and pain, to stem the heavy hand of destiny, if it is possible, or at least as much as it is possible to stem the tide of intellectual and psychical disintegration. But they never work contrary to Nature's laws. They cannot. They are in very truth the servants of the Law, and therein lies their enormous power. Cataclysms and catastrophes are occurring constantly. How about this horrible war? How many millions have perished so far from direct or indirect causes? Look at the beasts who die daily in almost countless numbers all over the earth - some of them wantonly slain; others slain by accident. The world is full of misery and pain brought about by ignorance and by distorted mental views and by unbridled passion; and the time finally comes when these accumulate so greatly that Nature can tolerate no more; and then the crash comes. Is it not so all through natural being? A human body will stand so much abuse, so much strain, and then it gives way. Nature acts likewise on the greater scales. All of it is karmic. Yet the entities which are swept off the face of the earth, so to speak, which pass out, within an hour, or a day, or a week, or a month, or a thousand years, or ten thousand years, learn by it - learn the karmic lessons. Then pause and look at the other side of the picture. Look at the beauty, look at the sublimity, of the Sons of Light who work through the ages and whose strong hands hold back the accumulated karman from its crushing humanity at one blow; they form the `Guardian Wall' around humanity. Consider that carefully. Consider the light side of Nature as well as its automatic retributive or so-called dark side. Nature is divided into two parts, into two phases, so to say, and these two phases or parts are filled on the one hand with the Sons of Light, and on the other hand with the Brothers of the Shadow: one is the realms of spirit, and the other is the realms of matter.

OUR RELATION TO OUR ATOMS How is it possible that we, who were rulers of a solar system, i.e., in the time when the atoms were our dwelling houses, cannot rule the composing beings of our body today? We are developed from the atoms and we will rule a solar system in the macrocosmos in the future. Is our state of consciousness lower now than in the time of our atom-life? - W. K. G. de P. - The reason that we human beings find it difficult in this stage of our evolutionary pilgrimage to control the lower elements, including the atoms, electrons, etc., of our bodies, is that we are at the midpoint in our evolutionary journey, because we are sunken in the material worlds, although we are now beginning to rise towards Spirit again. This situation means that the matter-parts of our being, including the atoms, of course, are more in their own sphere, and therefore have greater individual power than they have in the higher spheres; and consequently they act more strongly in their own individual ways than they do when they are again in Spirit, or in the spiritual worlds, and more under the divine influence of being in the spiritual worlds. Thus the sun, the divinity in and behind the sun, can control the lower elements and lower atoms much better than we can, because this divinity, being so much ahead of us, attracts more spiritual types of atoms than we do, because we are naturally much less spiritually evolved than is the solar divinity. Thus it is that in the future we shall be able to control perfectly not only our own matter-elements, but the very atoms, etc., which compose these matter-elements of us, because we shall in time gain in spiritual power; and even these matter-elements of us will have risen more towards Spirit, and we and our companion lower elements and atoms then will have become more alike, both more spiritual, than now we are. Hence there will be more harmony, greater ease, in what we may call brotherly cooperation, in our journey back to Spirit. I hope this answer gives the gist of what I desire to say. The main idea can be grasped by stating that the Mahatmans can control their lower elements and atoms much more easily than we can, and this is because of the two main reasons I have just stated: In evolution the Mahatmans are beyond us, and therefore stronger than we are; and they attract to themselves for their bodies, etc., more spiritualized atoms than we do. Hence there is greater harmony there between the higher and the lower than there is with us. KARMAN AND IDIOCY Would it be possible for an average man to be `punished' by an incarnation as a complete idiot, and in the following life to take up afresh from the status he had before the `idiotic' life? In The Esoteric Tradition (p. 974) a footnote states that there may be cases of a lesion or injury, before birth or after, which may cause this state of idiocy. Even in this case his condition must be the result of karman, or it could not have happened? One would think that if a man is his karman such an entity must have had an attraction downwards, from which he will have to work upwards again, or go still farther down and become a lost soul. Is it possible for one who had been very cruel to an idiot to be punished by experiencing that condition himself? Hardly, I imagine, as his intermediate nature being absent, no impression could be made on it, and that life would be punishment pure and simple, and not a lesson learned. - M. J. G. de P. - Certainly the result of karman in all cases. Furthermore, while it is

abstractly possible for a thoroughly normal human being to have to undergo an unpaid karmic debt such as idiocy in the next following life, it is so extremely unlikely that the degree of improbability almost reaches certainty. The reasoning is this: that karman is not haphazard on the one hand, nor are its parts divorced from the general karmic frame or set-up; so that an idiotic incarnation almost certainly is preceded by shadows casting their images before, a general weakness of character, a more or less obvious degeneration, producing finally its culmination in the idiotic state. But of course, while this is logically the rule, and is clearly seen to be such by any thinking person, I would not go so far as to say that a thoroughly normal person could not possibly have a karman, as yet unworked-out from some distant life, which would produce relative simple-mindedness or idiocy. It is possible, but so extremely unlikely that it is almost a certainty that normality is not followed by abnormality. The whole situation depends on the fact that a man is his karman, as the questioner states. As regards the latter part of the question: If I understand the question correctly I would answer in this wise: We must remember that karman is not just brute mechanics. The moral principles back of karman are essentially spiritual. Keeping this in mind we can see how karman might work in the case of one who is cruel to animals, who are relatively mindless when compared with men (which does not mean that they have no mind, however), or in the case of a man who is cruel to an idiot because he despises the poor idiot's lack of mind. We can see that with the spiritual and moral causes of karman back of and working in the constitution of the cruel individual, this very cruelty will slowly close the gates of intellectual and spiritual inspiration in that cruel man; so that little by little the very fact of his having lack of sympathy for the beasts or for the idiot, will tend to make the cruel man himself slowly through incarnations become less and less "minded" as it were, having less and less of the seeing, penetrating manasic faculty. Thus in a sense a man is punished by the way he injures or is cruel to others. But these things do not come suddenly. They are a process of degeneration. Cruelty continued through a life, or two or three, is a degenerative process, a breaking down of the moral fiber, and of spiritual and intellectual insight. And what does this mean but a slow and gradual loss of the mind through indulging in persistent cruelty? So reasoning thus, we can say that after a long time - two, four, six lives, heaven knows how many - one who despises another for being an idiot, or who is cruel to the relatively mindless beasts, slowly brings about incipient idiocy in himself; and we are thus punished by the backwash of the very energies we originally set in motion. This is what is meant by the saying that the man who takes up the sword will perish by the sword. The man who is cruel will perish by his own cruelty, and others will be cruel to him. The learning of the lesson takes place during the process. Of course it is obvious that a complete idiot cannot learn lessons as a man endowed with mind can. But the process of approaching idiocy enables the soul to gather the lessons of suffering and repentance, which may even save the man from final idiocy, if he is sufficiently evolved to take warning in time. Then if he changes his cruelty to kindliness and gentleness, and opens the channels above once more, his suffering and the danger he sees ahead of him, will have been his karmic retribution, what the questioner calls the "punishment," and he may suffer horribly during this process, bringing about a moral and intellectual regeneration. ------------------------

The Luminous Portal of Death THERE is no death, if by that term we mean a perfect and complete, an utter and absolute, cessation of all that is. Death is change, even as birth through reincarnation which is death to the soul, is change; there is no difference between death, so-called, and life, so-called, for they are one. The change is into another phase of life. Death is a phase of life even as life is a phase of death. It is not something to be feared .... Death is as natural, death is as simple, death itself is as painless, death itself is as beautiful, as the growth of a lovely flower. It is the portal through which the pilgrim enters the stage higher. - G. de Purucker, Golden Precepts of Esotericism - Theosophical Forum, Nov., 1942 --------------------------Send In Your Questions! What is the exact state after death of a person who commits suicide to avoid present conditions? Does he remain in a temporary state before entering the rest due to one who has died a natural death? G. DE P. - Yes, a temporary state, and it depends upon the suicide's character as to just what kind of state this temporary state is. As ye sow, ye shall reap. All suicide is wrong, ethically and in every other way, for it is cowardice, it is shirking; and you know what happens to shirkers in life. As I have often said before, every human being is born with a certain magazine and reservoir of vitality; and the composite entity which is man holds together until that reservoir of vitality is exhausted. Then the composition breaks up. The spirit goes to Father-Sun; the reincarnating ego goes into its Devachan or heavenworld of unspeakable peace and bliss; and the lower parts break up and dissolve into their component atoms. But in the case of a suicide, here is one, a human unfortunate, who, it may be harassed and wrung by sorrow and pain, in folly takes his life, thinking, blind man, that he can thwart Nature's purposes. He simply destroys the body, and all the man remains in the astral world in conditions which are at the very best the reverse of pleasant; and in the cases of evil suicides - men who suicide and who have also been extremely evil men - in their cases they are in a condition which is awful, for their whole consciousness is burning with all the unholy passions, hates, loves, fears, terrors, dreads, which caused them to commit suicide. They have no escape; in taking their own life they made the condition a thousandfold worse. But there are suicides and suicides, and the individual case depends upon the individual suicide. That is all there is to it. The mental state in which the suicide was before he committed the act, continues in the astral world, but intensified tremendously. Of course the time will come when the reservoir of vitality will be exhausted; and then whatever of beauty and grandeur and spiritual light there was in the soul of the suicide, all this receives its recompense in the Devachan then. But suicide is cowardice, and this should not be forgotten. What happens to those who are slain in battle?

G. DE P. - I daresay that the questioner thinks there must be some identity in what happens to those who are slain in battle and suicides, merely because the death in each case is quick; but it is not so. It is the motive, in every instance of violent death, whether wilful suicide or murder, or death in battle or accident, which governs the post-mortem state. Those slain in battle sink into utter unconsciousness, for in them there is no stain of cowardice seeking to shirk the duty, as in the case of the suicide, and therefore no harrowing anxiety, no harrowing and corroding fears of life itself. Those slain in battle simply lapse into blissful unconsciousness and so remain until the reservoir of astralphysical vitality is exhausted. Then they enter the Devachan, the heaven-world. Nature is rigidly just in all her rules and actions, because she is rigidly compassionate. Compassion, remember, means law, harmony, regular procedures of cause and effect. The very heart of Nature's being is compassion. The man who dies in battle, and the man who gives his life to save the life of a brother, are very much the same. Unconsciousness, dreamless and inexpressibly sweet, that is what they receive until the reservoir of vitality is exhausted; then they enter the Devachan, or heaven-world, and therein remain in inexpressibly beautiful and blissful rest until the next reimbodiment on earth. I have studied the technical Theosophical literature and understand that man is a composite being. Also, I have read about what happens to the sevenfold hierarchy `Man,' when he dies, but has not Theosophy also an ethical side in regard to death, with love and compassion? My question is: What consolation for the heart, what inspiring hope and courage, does Theosophy give to those who fear death, to the dying, to those who have lost their loved ones? G. DE P. - Theosophy teaches that death per se is not to be feared. It is a change to a better state, but only when death comes naturally. This questioner evidently has not read much of our Theosophical literature, wherein he would have been told that ethics are of the very essence of every doctrine that Theosophy has. Ethics are of the very structure of the Universe, for they mean harmony: that right is right, and that wrong is wrong, and that the correct thing is the correct thing, no matter when and where it is; also that the straight thing is the straight thing no matter where and when it is. The ethics of our teaching regarding death are what I have so often stated: That it is naught to fear; it is inexpressibly sweet, for it means ineffable rest, peace, bliss. When a man dies, he enters into the great Silence, just as happens when a man falls asleep and later awakens. These few words tell you the whole story, although none of the details of the story. Do you remember what Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in his Requiem? He wrote this for his own grave, they say: Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie; Glad did I live and gladly die, And I lay me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: "Here he lies where he longed to be.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill." Ay, very beautiful, for in it the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson spoke; but why did he say: "Dig the grave and let me lie." Don't you see here the old horrible thought that the man is his physical body? I would have written: "Dig the grave and let me go free." I, an incarnate energy of the Universe - can you keep me within a grave? I, a flaming intelligence, an imbodied spirit, can you enchain me within a coffin? Ay, the very bonds of the world are too small for me. My soul is native with the stars, and whether it be Canopus or Sirius, or Stella Polaris, there I dwell on familiar terms. There I belong. Free me! "Glad did I live, and gladly I die, and I lay me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me. Hence he has gone, where he longed to be." Take the case of one who dearly loved someone else on earth, and the one who loves, dies: Does the dead one who loved, continue to love? G. DE P. - A very natural question indeed. The very meaning, the very essence, of the heaven-world state, or Devachan, is bliss and love, because bliss and spiritual yearnings have as their main motive-power that abstract impersonal function or energy of the human spirit which we men call love. The Devachan signifies all that is beautiful and good and sweet and holy and true and clean and pure. Love is immortal; it continues always; and, mark you, the more one loves, of course impersonally, the nobler he becomes. I don't here mean the ordinary gross, passional love, for that can be even of the fires of hell. But I mean that inexpressibly sweet, divine flame which fills life with beauty, which instills thoughts of self-sacrifice for others. Love of that kind, impersonal love, is the very heart of the Universe. Therefore, I say, the one who loved and who died, loves still, for it is of the fabric of his soul. - Theosophical Forum, March, 1941 --------------------------Send In Your Questions! Consciousness After Death I have heard that after-death consciousness in the Kama-loka is really only a dreamconsciousness, however vivid. Is it, then, ever possible to be conscious, while in the Kamaloka, of what takes place on earth? G. DE P. - The matter of the human soul being conscious after death of what passes on earth, or among truly loved friends, is very far from being the simple thing that the spiritists imagine. They do not know the teaching of the god-wisdom, and it is quite natural for them to think that the human consciousness should go on uninterrupted after death with perhaps a slight unconsciousness at the moment of death itself. They utterly fail to take into account the frightful, perfectly ghastly, torture that in nearly every case possible, such consciousness after death would mean, could the dead look back upon earth and see what is happening to the ones left behind, and feel the utter inability to help; see disease, misery, wickedness perhaps, crime perhaps, sin, misfortune, as well as the good things. Nature is infinitely more just and kind than that. And this is the reason why for all normal human beings, that is those neither very high nor very low, in other words, neither

for initiates, nor for great sorcerers, unconsciousness supervenes at death, and the kamaloka is what I have often described it to be. But, here is an interesting point. It has been said regarding the kama-loka and the devachan that the more spiritual the man or woman who dies, the less is the kama-lokic experience. The soul of such a noble spiritual character shoots through the kama-loka like a meteor, and unconscious of it, and therefore unconscious of things on earth. So you see that when we rise above the average of good men and women and begin to enter the class of somewhat nobler souls we have the characters that make for no post-mortem consciousness whatsoever, no consciousness of the kama-loka horrors or dreads or fears, but immediate unconsciousness awakening into a very blissful devachan after the second death. Now then, going still higher, when we have reached the grade of the initiates: they by this time have been taught to remain conscious not only in sleep, but after death also. But they do this self-consciously, and the after-death state in their cases has no terrors or horrors for them, except perhaps the disgust that they feel for astral cesspools. Of course, in the case of sorcerers or extremely malignant and evil characters, they have a long kama-lokic experience, very intense, and just because their consciousness is still so earthly, they can even by magnetic sympathy in many cases come to see as it were, or to feel as it were, as in a sort of day-dream what is passing on earth, not every detail but, depending upon the individual, a more or less clear `getting it.' - Theosophical Forum, April, 1941 -----------------

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS (2) [Readers are invited to send questions, answers to questions, opinions and notes upon Theosophical subjects. In giving direct or indirect quotation the name of the author, article, volume, and page referred to must be stated.] QUESTION 310. Why is it so difficult for us to get authentic records of the lives of the great Teachers and Philosophers of the world? There always seems to be so much obscurity and uncertainty about them. G. de P. - Let me ask whether the very obscurity that surrounds the life and work of these men such as Cagliostro, Apollonius of Tyana, Saint-Germain, and Jesus, of whom no authentic records whatsoever exist, does not itself prove, in view of the tremendous interest, fascination, that their lives have aroused, that they were men beyond the ordinary? They come, no one knows whence. They live and do their work, no one knows how. They succeed, and they disappear from among men, and no one knows when or where they die. The same can be said of all four men I have mentioned. What, after all, is of value in the lives of such great men? The place of their birth or the place of their passing? The record of their lives such as we have it? What makes the story of Jesus so dear to the human heart? It is not the fact that he is supposed to have

been born and to have lived in one place, and supposed to have died elsewhere. It is not even the so-called historic record of his life as we have it - in a most unhistoric way! embroidered with legend - but what he taught, what he did, the life of the man as it appears, as it has made its appeal to human hearts. Personally I think that there is something intentional in all this. You know, among the early Christians there was a sect who were called by their opponents the Docetists, in other words 'believers in appearances,' who taught that it really was not the authentic Jesus who died on the Cross as one crucified, but an appearance. 'Heretics' the orthodox called them. Yet I wonder! Of course it would be perfectly lovely to know all about Saint-Germain and Cagliostro and Jesus and Apollonius of Tyana, but the trouble is that the records are not there. That is the point. I do not mean to say that it is wrong to want to know these personal things, but they do not exist on record; they have been hid or withdrawn. Consequently they cannot be found; and any history purporting to be a record of their lives in my judgment is largely fabrication. QUESTION 311. In the Theosophical philosophy we often read about the Monadic Essence; and on the other hand we often read about Atma-Buddhi. What is the relation between the Monadic Essence and the principles which H. P. B. mentions: Atma-Buddhi? (From The Hague Club) G. de P. - Atman and Buddhi together form what we Theosophists call the Monad. When the Manasic fruitage of past lives is 'added' to it, then we have what is called the Reincarnating Ego. Atman means 'self'; and, as a spark comes from a fire, so likewise is the Atman which inspirits a man, a spark from the Fire of Universal Consciousness - the Paramatman or Brahmatman to use Sanskrit terms; and that Essence which works within the Monad, i.e., Atma-Buddhi, is the Monadic Essence, the heart of the Monad. To put the matter in other words: Atman is the Self; but even though it belongs to the divine part of the constitution of a human being, nevertheless because this human entity is a manifested entity - however great the manifestation is - the Atman is, as it were, limited and therefore is not absolute infinity. But that Essence which is in Atman and which is the essential being of the Atman, is the kosmic Paramatman. The Monadic Essence is, as it were, a divine Atom or divine particle of the Paramatman. Therefore the Monadic Essence is the heart of Atman, the core of it. (Theosophical Forum, July, 1936) ----------------------------QUESTION 316. According to Theosophical doctrines, man is a septenary being, in addition to his physical body having six other principles as a part of his constitution. (a) Is it true then, that in addition to his present physical body manifesting on this our material earth, he would also simultaneously be manifesting on six other material globes or planets in an appropriate physical body or vehicle, all seven physical vehicles on the seven material globes each having its own six other principles functioning in their respective spheres, contributing each and all to the Monadic center? (b) If this is so, would all seven physical vehicles die and reincarnate again at the same time, or each at a different time, depending

upon the karmic energies of each vehicle? - H. W. D. G. de P. - The foregoing question does not lack profound interest; and by the changing of two words - which words because they are esoteric cannot here be stated - the question would deal with a typically esoteric matter, connected with man's septenary constitution. However, and answering with as much brevity as possible in view of the complex factors involved, and having in mind the intuitive thought behind the question, I would reply briefly to the questioner's query (a): No, if by the word 'material' is meant 'physical' bodies on other physical planets - Globes D of their respective chains - of our Solar System. The fact is that man in his septenary constitution has one 'material' or rather 'physical' body only; and as he is now manifesting on our own Planetary Chain, and on Globe D thereof in the Fourth Round, this his physical body is the physical body that we all know - yours, mine, any other man's or woman's physical body on this Earth. Yet there is an intuition in this question which is struggling to find utterance, or rather to find phrasing in which it may clothe itself; and I believe that future study will prove to this querent the accuracy of this observation of mine. Now, the querent's intuition points directly to the fact of man's composite nature, which is divisible after different manners; for instance, our usual exoteric manner which H. P. B. gave to us, and there is none better for its own purposes; then there is another manner which has been more favored by the Vedanta and the Taraka-Raja-Yoga, to which H. P. B. likewise approvingly alludes in her The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, page 157, and which refers more particularly to the different monads forming man's composite constitution. When we remember that these different monads are, each one of them, a growing and evolving entity, each one at some date in the distant future to be an individual of septenary character, we see not only the intuition in the querent's question, but also the profound truth of the famous old statement found in all mystical literature that man is a microcosm or small copy of the Macrocosm or Great Original; and, on exactly similar lines of analogy, every one of the monads in man is an as yet imperfectly evolved microcosm of the Complete man as we recognise him. With regard to the latter question, the querent's (b), it is seen from the foregoing part of my answer that there is not more than one physical body at any one time for man, and that this physical body is now found on our Globe D, Earth; and hence, the answer to this question (b) again is No. Yet just here I must enter a caveat, and point out that the same intuition before noticed is here again struggling to express itself, and it does seem to me as if this questioner had an inkling of a certain esoteric and very difficult teaching concerning the Outer Rounds. Be this as it may, my answer stands correct, that man's septenary constitution at any one time works through one physical body only, and that in the present phase of human evolution this physical body is the one in which we, as individuals, are incarnated on this Earth. [From Theosophical Forum, August, 1936]

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

QUESTION 320. "What is the explanation of the 'invisible companion' which some children speak of constantly as almost part of themselves?" - J. H. G. de P.- An interesting question, and one which likewise shows how greatly we adults have lost the intuitive recognition of spiritual companionship that children - unless spoiled by over-fond and over-doting parents - still retain. It would be quite a mistake, I believe, to suppose that these dear little ones are selfconsciously aware, as adults might be, of any invisible companion; what they have is a distinct 'feeling,' or inner conscious cognisance, of the spiritual presence of the inner Self, to which 'presence' a child will often give a name, and of which, taking individual children as instances, they are the human radiance. Only recently, comparatively speaking, out of the devachanic condition in which this spiritual presence was a living reality, although not there and then understood as something separate - for indeed it is not - the Ray reaching incarnation and imbodying itself, in the manner which I have endeavored to describe in my The Esoteric Tradition and elsewhere, still retains the intuition of the spiritual presence of the inner Self; and the child's mind, instinctively feeling this presence, but not having the developed brain-mind as yet to argue about it or analyse it, recognises the fact, and talks of what we adults call, or might call, 'an invisible companion,' or by some such similar phrase. As a matter of fact, highly developed human beings who are likewise esoterically trained, are self-consciously aware of this spiritual companionship, so much so that Adepts and Initiates know the fact in its proper relations, and speak of this inner Self working through them by various terms, such as 'Father-Flame,' 'Father in Heaven,' 'Father-Fire,' etc., etc. In other words, the adept knows and recognises his inner Self as the 'invisible companion,' and puts himself under its steady and unfailing guidance and inspiration. Little children, still fresh from the spiritual realms, likewise, as said above, feel the fact, though not with the self-conscious analysis of the Adept; but they recognise it unconsciously, so to speak, as a 'feeling'; and the unspoiled child will frequently be so impressed with this invisible companionship that it will speak of it to others. In the case of the Adept-soul, the invisible companion is precisely what was meant by the Avatara-Jesus when referring to his 'Father in Heaven.' QUESTION 321. I have been reading a book only recently issued, 'Who Wrote the Mahatma Letters?' by the brothers H. E. Hare and W. L. Hare. The general line of criticism adopted by the authors appears to me most unfair, and yet I myself have often been puzzled in regard to the fact that certain of these Letters contain expressions similar to H. P. B.'s own expressions. I know of course from what I have read regarding 'The Mahatma Letters' that some of them were transmitted by H. P. B. Would it be Possible, for an explanation to be given of this? [The above question was sent to the Leader. His answer contains so much that is helpful, that the Editors have obtained his consent to include it in these columns.] G. de P. - Among other things which arouse the amazement of the reader of this book by the critical Hares, there are at least two of the first importance which the two authors either pass over without comment, or slur so badly that the average reader is

utterly incognizant that these facts exist. The first, then, of the two we find to lie in the amazing assurance with which the authors of this book treat their apparatus criticus, combined with their manner of treatment itself, apparently under the pleasant illusion that they are for the first time in Theosophic history the discoverers of what thoughtful Theosophists have all known since the date of the publication of The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, and The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett, and which certain ones knew even from the days of H. P. B. herself, because she frequently explained these facts. In other words, I mean all the various idiosyncracies of speech and of mannerism, all the various Gallicisms on the other hand, and the various imperfections of punctuation, orthography, grammar, and what not, to which the critical Hares point triumphantly as largely originating in H. P. B.'s mind - all these were well understood since H. P. B.'s days as being due to the mental and psychical idiosyncracies of the amanuenses or chelas, i.e. disciples, through whom most of the Letters of the Mahatmans came. What else could we expect? A ray of sunlight streaming through stained glass will checker the wall or the floor upon which the ray falls with the colors of the glass through which it passes; nevertheless the original ray is there. Let the following facts be understood, as they have been for some forty years or more by thoughtful Theosophists: (a) The Masters themselves on only the very rarest of occasions wrote with their own hand any letters whatsoever, and consequently those that they did so write, if indeed any, can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand; consequently these letters are the fewest of all; (b) almost equally rare, but more numerous than those classified under (a) are what have been popularly called "precipitations," or communications which were "dropped" or found in unexpected places by the recipients thereof; and consequently these are relatively very few likewise; and (c) the great majority of all the letters received from the Masters by individuals in those early days came through different amanuenses or transmitting chelas (disciples), among the number of whom we know perfectly well are to be counted H. P. B. herself, Damodar, Bavaji, Bhavani-Rao in one or two cases, and one or two others, probably not excepting the well known and erudite Hindu Theosophist and scholar Subba-Rao. Now, the important point to be noticed in this connexion is that all these transmissions of intelligence, in other words all these different letters or communications, including the various notes, chits, etc., etc., passed through the medium of the transmitting minds of the chelas who received them and passed them on to their different destinations, and often by the very prosaic and ordinary means of the postal system. The Messrs. Hare are extraordinarily behind the times in not being aware of the fact that the many experiments of what it is now popular to call telepathy or thoughttransference or mind-reading, conducted by earnest men of unquestionable ability and reputation, have established the fact that such telepathic transmission of intelligence is not only possible but actually of more frequent occurrence than most human beings realize; but in the early days of the Theosophical Society, in the heyday of the materialism of Haeckel and Huxley and Tyndall and Moleschott, and all the other bigwigs of the time, even so common a fact as telaesthesia, or telepathy, or thought-transference or mind-reading, was not only not accepted, but even ridiculed - and this against the common testimony and common experience of mankind for ages; for it is one of the most ordinary facts of human life to experience the wordless or unspoken transmission of human thought. Now then, such transmission of intelligence from Master to pupil or chela, is more

or less precisely what today is called thought-transference or telepathy or mind-reading, if you wish, only in vastly more perfect form because the transmitter is a mahatmic intelligence, and the receiving mind of the chela is a highly trained one; and, indeed, telepathy or thought-transference, etc., are merely minor instances of the general rule. The experiments conducted during the last forty or fifty years in mind-reading or thoughttransference have shown clearly that it is ideas which are transmitted and received, but which are almost always distorted or twisted by the untrained mind of the receiver or recipient, and almost invariably more or less colored by the mind or psychological apparatus of the recipient; so that while the essential idea is often received, it is frequently distorted or deformed. Precisely the same thing, but with less degree of distortion or deformation, must by the nature of the case take place when the transmitting chela receives the essential ideas more or less clearly, and occasionally and sometimes even often in the very language of the transmitter's mind and thought; but coming through the psychological apparatus of the chela, the original ideas are more or less subject to be given forth with marks or with the mental clothing of the chela himself. Thus it would actually have been amazing if there had not been Gallicisms in H. P. B.'s transmission of the essential original idea which was received clearly; but coming through H. P. B.'s mind, with her excellent knowledge of French and her acquaintance with Americanisms, it was almost certain that the message would be transmitted more or less, now and then, here and there, with a French turn of phrase, or with an American spelling to which H. P. B.'s mind had been accustomed. Similarly so with messages received through and passed on by other chelas - each one gave his own particular "atmosphere" or included more or less of his or her own mental characteristics to the message as handed on; yet the original idea, the essential thought, the fundamental language and intelligent conception, were always there, and this fact accounts for the grandeur and profundity found in such transmitted messages. This leads us directly to the second of our points, which the critical Hares utterly ignore. This second point is the matter of the characteristic individuality in literary form or matter commonly called literary style. It is extraordinary that not a word in direct or specific allusion is made by the two authors of this book to the immense differences in the literary styles of M. on the one hand, and K. H. on the other hand, and neither of these two in literary style or in literary quality is at all comparable with H. P. B.'s own style when she wrote directly from her own mind. The stamp of literary style alone is so well recognized by every competent scholar and student as to be one of the very best means of judging the authenticity of documents, that the omission by the Hare brothers of any allusion to these immense differences in style, constitutes a defect of the gravest character in their attempted criticism. The style of M. for instance, is outstanding for its directness, its abrupt masculinity, its pungency in aphorism, etc.; whereas the style of K. H., though equally profound in thought with M.'s, is markedly different: flowing in, character, smooth and easy in narrative, often semi-humorous in relation, and what has been neatly called "gentle" as compared with what has likewise been called the "rough" style of Master M. H. P. B. when writing alone never wrote anything which in profundity could compare with the literary material of the two Masters, nor with its strength, however fine and really wonderful her own writings were; and her style is enormously different from theirs, although possessing undoubted charm and attractiveness of its own. One has but to compare the literary style and atmosphere of the two volumes, (a) The Mahatma Letters

to A. P. Sinnett, with (b) The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett, to see how forcefully telling this argument of literary style and atmosphere is. I turn with a final word again to the matter of the messages received from the Masters through their chelas. As stated above, I have called this relatively perfect telepathy or thought-transference or mind-reading - call it by what name you will. It is most important to keep this in mind, because if it be kept in mind, then if the critic be likewise honest, he will see the absurdity as well as the futility of hammering, as upon something new, upon what has been known to Theosophists for the last forty or fifty years, and what has been at the same time proved to be a fact by the independent researches of scientific and other men - thought-transference - which produced the Mahatman Letters as written documents. The trained mind and will of the Master directed his thought, consisting of clear-cut, sharply defined ideas, to the mind and into it of the receiving but trained amanuensis, who received the ideas more or less clearly in accordance with his training or development, and transmitted those ideas as faithfully as he or she was able to; but passing through the amanuensis's mind, the transmitted intelligence was bound to be colored by the mental characteristics of the mediator - the disciple's mind - through which it passed. Hence the presence of Gallicisms when H. P. B. was the transmitting chela, and of an occasional Americanism; and similarly so, mutatis mutandis, when chelas other than H. P. B. were the transmitting mediators. ----------------------Note by E. V. S. - Even in ordinary secretarial work, it is easy to distinguish, where several stenographers work for the same person, what letters in the files are typewritten by one stenographer, and which ones by another, etc., by the format, spelling (in cases where alternate forms are permissible), abbreviations (such as Mme. or Mad. or writing it out in full), which each stenographer uses. It is generally only when a stenographer has worked long enough with his employer to become thoroughly acquainted with all his idiosyncracies or habits, likes and dislikes, that the typewritten letters agree in every detail exactly with what the employer himself would use. In other words, each typewritten letter bears the stamp of the stenographer to whom it is dictated. Note by J. H. F. - So also when the idea of an answer to a letter and the points to be covered in it are given to a secretary who is asked to write the letter and who may even take down in shorthand the gist of the notes given to him and who thus prepares the form of the letter, the author of the letter is the one who gives the ideas and the line of thought to be coveted, and not the stenographer or secretary who is merely the transmitter. This is commonly understood, and hundreds of letters which are sent out by business men through the media of their secretaries though necessarily colored by the individual characteristics of the secretaries' style, etc., are nevertheless the letters of such business men. ---------------We see likewise how it was that when conditions of transmission and reception were relatively perfect, and the chela was highly trained, the resultant communication, outside of certain characteristic mental or psychic marks of the amanuensis, contained even the actual mentally pictured words of the Mahatmic transmitter; and also how it was that in such conditions of relatively perfect receptivity, the transmitting amanuensis, because of the force of the impinging idea and will of the transmitter, reproduced even the very forms

of handwriting that had been adopted or used by the Mahatmans. If the conditions of receptivity were relatively perfect, i.e. if the strong will of the Mahatmic intelligence and the clear-cut ideas were received by the chela's trained mind more or less perfectly, the resultant was a communication which was very close to being a perfect reproduction of the Mahatman's own words, own hand-writing, own turns of phrase, etc., etc.; but if the conditions of receptivity were in any degree less perfect, the ideas were transmitted but more or less deformed or colored by the psychological apparatus of the transmitting amanuensis, thus reproducing turns of phrase, spelling of words, etc., etc., native to the amanuensis. Note H. P. B.'s own words regarding the transmission of such letters, etc., in her article 'My Books,' which passage can be found on p. 26, of the preliminary pages in The Complete Works of H. P. Blavatsky edition of Isis Unveiled: ".... many a passage in these works has been written by me under their dictation. In saying this no supernatural claim is urged, for no miracle is performed by such a dictation. Any moderately intelligent person, convinced by this time of the many possibilities of hypnotism (now accepted by science and under full scientific investigation), and of the phenomena of thought-transference, will easily concede that if even a hypnotized subject, a mere irresponsible medium, hears the unexpressed thought of his hypnotizer, who can thus transfer his thought to him - even to repeating the words read by the hypnotizer mentally from a book - then my claim has nothing impossible in it. Space and distance do not exist for thought; and if two persons are in perfect mutual psychomagnetic rapport, and of these two, one is a great Adept in Occult Sciences, then thought-transference and dictation of whole pages become as easy and as comprehensible at the distance of ten thousand miles as the transference of two words across a room." (From Theosophical Forum, October, 1936)

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS [Readers are invited to send questions, answers to questions, opinions and notes upon Theosophical subjects. In giving direct or indirect quotation the name of the author, article, volume, and page referred to must be stated.] The following question and answer are taken from correspondence that Dr. de Purucker has recently had with a prominent F. T. S., and are herein printed without change, which will explain the easy epistolary style of the Leader's answer to the question.- EDS. QUESTION 319. May we ask you to give us your opinion about the following matter: In several periodicals and papers people read about a so-called 'definite proof' of reincarnation. It concerns the case of a young Hindu girl whose extraordinary statements about her 'previous incarnation' are described and investigated; and we get questions about it. You will, no doubt, also have read about it. According to the teachings of Theosophy such a quick return to the next rebirth of a human being and such strange 'recollections' would be impossible. Can this be a case of self-delusion, or something of the kind? We shall be grateful for your opinion.

G. de P. - With regard to your question imbodied in the brief note, dated July 7, 1936, about the Hindu girl who is alleged to have remembered her last life, and to have recognised a man as having been her husband in her last life, this man being still alive, etc., etc., I do not particularly care to have this matter answered in the FORUM, because I think it would lead too much into psychic ideas, and distract the attention of our readers from the more philosophical and religious and scientific questions. Therefore, I am answering it briefly myself, dear Jan, although of course you can show it to anyone you please. As far as I have been able to gather from the reports in the papers about this Hindu girl, who is little more than a child, it would seem to me that her case is to be explained on either one of two possibilities; and as I myself do not know all the facts in the case, and also as I have not been really particularly interested, I put the two possibilities before you, and if you are interested, you can make your own selection from the two. (a) It is probably one of those very rare cases of almost immediate reincarnation of a human ego, which, despite their great rarity when compared with the hundreds of millions of normal human beings, nevertheless, taking these rare exceptions as a body, are not so awfully uncommon. In this matter is involved the whole teaching regarding reincarnation, and the stay in the Kama-loka and the Devachan, the details of which teaching every studious Theosophist knows; and these teachings can be briefly summarized by saying that the more spiritual a man or woman is, in life, the longer the Devachan and hence the interval between two successive incarnations. Contrariwise, the more material or the greater the love for the physical world that exists in a man or in a woman, the shorter the Devachan, and therefore the shorter the interval between two incarnations. There are also the cases of congenital idiots, of children dying young, and of lost souls - three very different kinds of human beings, it is true - who, because of having had no chance to evolve spiritually, that is in a fairly long life, reincarnate almost immediately. (See H. P. B. on the matter of immediate reincarnation in Isis Unveiled, Vol. 1, p. 351, and her article 'Theories about Reincarnation and Spirits,' where she throws added light on the matter. This article can be found included at the beginning of Isis Unveiled in The Complete Works of H. P. Blavatsky, edition recently issued, or in the Point Loma edition.) Now, it is quite possible that this Hindu girl belongs to this last general class, which does not mean that she is a lost soul, or that she died as an infant in her last life, or that she is an imbecile; but merely that she is not one of the more spiritual types of human beings, but is probably one who loves, or did love, in her last life the physical spheres, and consequently built up a very slight devachanic potentiality; and also probably being quite a good young woman in her last life - for she says she died very young - there was no long stay in the Kama-loka for purification purposes. She probably was just a young woman or girl in her last life, strongly attached to the physical world and her physical experiences, but not at all bad, simply one in whom the higher intellectual and spiritual powers were not yet awakened; and it is these powers which make the Devachan long or short, in proportion to the strength of these powers in a man's or a woman's life. Thus in her case, her last life might have been some fifteen years or eighteen years, or twenty or twenty-four years long; but having no particular or special spiritual and intellectual yearnings which were ungratified, the Devachan was very short, and the strong attractions to the physical sphere brought her back quickly. But it also would seem that she is not at all a bad woman or an

evil character, but just a negative kind of character, spiritually and intellectually speaking. Such a character would hardly be noticed if you or I met her in ordinary life. She would be just a nonentity, so to speak, with no outstanding qualities or attributes that would mark her, spiritually or intellectually. This is one possibility as an explanation. (b) The other possibility is one which I myself would not select as the true explanation, and I mention it here only because it is a possibility - and it may be true. There are some people who are born at times with unusual clairvoyant power, and with a very strong and vivid imagination; so that this combination of clairvoyance and immensely vivid imagination, makes these individuals actually 'see' things that exist in other places on earth while they are alive; and when they 'see' these things, their vivid imagination and faculty of constructing mental and imaginary pictures, makes them imagine all kinds of possibilities. Thus, then, if this girl is such a natural clairvoyant, at least at times and along a certain line of clairvoyance, she might have had actual visions of this other town where this man and his present wife live in India, and her imaginative mind, with her romantic feelings, may have woven about this picture, or these clairvoyant pictures coming to her, all kinds of feminine imaginary emotional visions about how the man was her husband in a former life, etc., etc., etc. Do you get my meaning? Now, this last class of people is quite common, especially among boys and girls, and particularly, again, among girls. This class is so well known that doctors in their practice frequently come across such cases, and very many of these doctors call them cases of peculiar hysteria. Such individuals are always abnormal; they are excessively imaginative; they are always building 'dreams' and 'visions,' and if they happen to possess a clairvoyant power, whether strong or weak, at the same time, this combination of clairvoyant faculty and power of imagination work together and make these subjects think that they are the heroes or the heroines in all kinds of romantic dreams. Thus you see, dear Jan, you can take your choice between either one of these two possibilities. I repeat that I have not studied the case nor examined it sufficiently to know which possibility would seem to be the truer one, for the facts about this Hindu girl's case are not very voluminous. I do not care to put this matter in our FORUM, as a question and answer, because I think it would distract our members' attention too much away from the greater and more beautiful things of life, into these psychic matters, against which we struggle all the time; because it is just these psychic matters, on account of their apparent mystery and the difficulty of explaining them, which fascinate men and women 'in the street' as the slang expression goes in this country. I hope the above will enable you to answer the question put to you about this Hindu girl's case by your public study-class. Finally, Jan, I think you are wrong when you say that according to the teachings of Theosophy, "such a quick return to the next rebirth of a human being . . . would be impossible." You are almost right, but not quite. As I have explained above, such quick reincarnations are very, very rare when compared with the hundreds of millions of normal human beings; but they do take place; and in the aggregate these very, very rare exceptions, if one could collect them together in a group, would seem to be fairly numerous. But really, when compared with the immense bulk of normal human be-ngs, they are exceedingly rare cases. ------After reading this over, I have decided to follow your suggestion, and print both the

question and answer in our THEOSOPHICAL FORUM, as the subject is of undoubted interest to many who seek the proper explanation. - G. De Purucker - From Theosophical Forum, September, 1936

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS [On Quick Reincarnation] [Readers are invited to send questions, answers to questions, opinions and notes upon Theosophical subjects. In giving direct or indirect quotation the name of the author, article, volume, and page referred to must be stated.] The following question and answer are taken from correspondence that Dr. de Purucker has recently had with a prominent F. T. S., and are herein printed without change, which will explain the easy epistolary style of the Leader's answer to the question.- EDS. QUESTION 319. May we ask you to give us your opinion about the following matter: In several periodicals and papers people read about a so-called 'definite proof' of reincarnation. It concerns the case of a young Hindu girl whose extraordinary statements about her 'previous incarnation' are described and investigated; and we get questions about it. You will, no doubt, also have read about it. According to the teachings of Theosophy such a quick return to the next rebirth of a human being and such strange 'recollections' would be impossible. Can this be a case of self-delusion, or something of the kind? We shall be grateful for your opinion. G. de P. - With regard to your question imbodied in the brief note, dated July 7, 1936, about the Hindu girl who is alleged to have remembered her last life, and to have recognized a man as having been her husband in her last life, this man being still alive, etc., etc., I do not particularly care to have this matter answered in the FORUM, because I think it would lead too much into psychic ideas, and distract the attention of our readers from the more philosophical and religious and scientific questions. Therefore, I am answering it briefly myself, dear Jan, although of course you can show it to anyone you please. As far as I have been able to gather from the reports in the papers about this Hindu girl, who is little more than a child, it would seem to me that her case is to be explained on either one of two possibilities; and as I myself do not know all the facts in the case, and also as I have not been really particularly interested, I put the two possibilities before you, and if you are interested, you can make your own selection from the two. (a) It is probably one of those very rare cases of almost immediate reincarnation of a human ego, which, despite their great rarity when compared with the hundreds of millions of normal human beings, nevertheless, taking these rare exceptions as a body, are not so awfully uncommon. In this matter is involved the whole teaching regarding reincarnation, and the stay in the Kama-loka and the Devachan, the details of which teaching every studious Theosophist knows; and these teachings can be briefly summarized by saying

that the more spiritual a man or woman is, in life, the longer the Devachan and hence the interval between two successive incarnations. Contrariwise, the more material or the greater the love for the physical world that exists in a man or in a woman, the shorter the Devachan, and therefore the shorter the interval between two incarnations. There are also the cases of congenital idiots, of children dying young, and of lost souls - three very different kinds of human beings, it is true - who, because of having had no chance to evolve spiritually, that is in a fairly long life, reincarnate almost immediately. (See H. P. B. on the matter of immediate reincarnation in Isis Unveiled, Vol. 1, p. 351, and her article 'Theories about Reincarnation and Spirits,' where she throws added light on the matter. This article can be found included at the beginning of Isis Unveiled in The Complete Works of H. P. Blavatsky, edition recently issued, or in the Point Loma edition.) Now, it is quite possible that this Hindu girl belongs to this last general class, which does not mean that she is a lost soul, or that she died as an infant in her last life, or that she is an imbecile; but merely that she is not one of the more spiritual types of human beings, but is probably one who loves, or did love, in her last life the physical spheres, and consequently built up a very slight devachanic potentiality; and also probably being quite a good young woman in her last life - for she says she died very young - there was no long stay in the Kama-loka for purification purposes. She probably was just a young woman or girl in her last life, strongly attached to the physical world and her physical experiences, but not at all bad, simply one in whom the higher intellectual and spiritual powers were not yet awakened; and it is these powers which make the Devachan long or short, in proportion to the strength of these powers in a man's or a woman's life. Thus in her case, her last life might have been some fifteen years or eighteen years, or twenty or twenty-four years long; but having no particular or special spiritual and intellectual yearnings which were ungratified, the Devachan was very short, and the strong attractions to the physical sphere brought her back quickly. But it also would seem that she is not at all a bad woman or an evil character, but just a negative kind of character, spiritually and intellectually speaking. Such a character would hardly be noticed if you or I met her in ordinary life. She would be just a nonentity, so to speak, with no outstanding qualities or attributes that would mark her, spiritually or intellectually. This is one possibility as an explanation. (b) The other possibility is one which I myself would not select as the true explanation, and I mention it here only because it is a possibility - and it may be true. There are some people who are born at times with unusual clairvoyant power, and with a very strong and vivid imagination; so that this combination of clairvoyance and immensely vivid imagination, makes these individuals actually 'see' things that exist in other places on earth while they are alive; and when they 'see' these things, their vivid imagination and faculty of constructing mental and imaginary pictures, makes them imagine all kinds of possibilities. Thus, then, if this girl is such a natural clairvoyant, at least at times and along a certain line of clairvoyance, she might have had actual visions of this other town where this man and his present wife live in India, and her imaginative mind, with her romantic feelings, may have woven about this picture, or these clairvoyant pictures coming to her, all kinds of feminine imaginary emotional visions about how the man was her husband in a former life, etc., etc., etc. Do you get my meaning? Now, this last class of people is quite common, especially among boys and girls, and particularly, again, among girls. This class is so well known that doctors in their practice frequently come across such cases, and very many of these

doctors call them cases of peculiar hysteria. Such individuals are always abnormal; they are excessively imaginative; they are always building 'dreams' and 'visions,' and if they happen to possess a clairvoyant power, whether strong or weak, at the same time, this combination of clairvoyant faculty and power of imagination work together and make these subjects think that they are the heroes or the heroines in all kinds of romantic dreams. Thus you see, dear Jan, you can take your choice between either one of these two possibilities. I repeat that I have not studied the case nor examined it sufficiently to know which possibility would seem to be the truer one, for the facts about this Hindu girl's case are not very voluminous. I do not care to put this matter in our FORUM, as a question and answer, because I think it would distract our members' attention too much away from the greater and more beautiful things of life, into these psychic matters, against which we struggle all the time; because it is just these psychic matters, on account of their apparent mystery and the difficulty of explaining them, which fascinate men and women 'in the street' as the slang expression goes in this country. I hope the above will enable you to answer the question put to you about this Hindu girl's case by your public study-class. Finally, Jan, I think you are wrong when you say that according to the teachings of Theosophy, "such a quick return to the next rebirth of a human being . . . would be impossible." You are almost right, but not quite. As I have explained above, such quick reincarnations are very, very rare when compared with the hundreds of millions of normal human beings; but they do take place; and in the aggregate these very, very rare exceptions, if one could collect them together in a group, would seem to be fairly numerous. But really, when compared with the immense bulk of normal human beings, they are exceedingly rare cases. --------------After reading this over, I have decided to follow your suggestion, and print both the question and answer in our THEOSOPHICAL FORUM, as the subject is of undoubted interest to many who seek the proper explanation. - G. De Purucker - From Theosophical Forum, September, 1936 --------------------------------

REQUISITES OF CHELAHOOD [Excerpted From "Transactions of the Point Loma Lodge VIII, in Theosophical Forum, December, 1936] G. de P. - Mr. President, Mr. Chairman, and Companions: I think that my question has been beautifully answered by all who have spoken, and anything that I could say would merely be in addition. Indeed, if we analyze the answers that we have heard, I think we may divide them into two classes: those weighing heavily on what we may call the Life, and those weighing heavily on what we may call the Knowing. It is an interesting study in psychology to me, knowing you all as well as I do, to see how the individual swabhava has come out in your answers. Some are profound and devoted students who are reaching the

Light along the Path of Wisdom. Others, equally profound and devoted students, are marching steadily towards the inner glory by what we describe as living it. Now, if vou will combine these two ways, unify them into one, in which both blend indistinguishably, then I think you will have not only the signs and marks and characteristics of all chelas, who you will remember are of many grades from the supergods downwards to us, but you will likewise know how to become a chela, a greater chela, a still greater chela, yourselves. There are many characteristics and distinguishing marks, if we analyze the chela in his life, and many of them have been pointed out. But do you know, I think if I were asked what is it in and of a man which makes him a chela, I think I should ponder quite a long time, and then I believe I should give this answer: A growing indifference to himself, and an increasing interest in all that is. There we have the path of morals, of ethics, of wisdom; and we have the Life: a man who has completely lost interest in himself, has no pleasure in evil-doing, because all evil-doing is selfish, for personal, selfish ends. It is just as simple as that. Not my will, as the great Syrian Chela and Master said, but Thine, his inner god's, a Ray of the spirit of the Universe, the law of infinite love and compassion and harmony and pity and wisdom and peace. Man, when he thus loses interest in himself, grows progressively greater. It is a strange and interesting paradox. By expanding, his interests enlarge instead of being constricted around his own core of being; he breaks the bonds and expands. His former and present self becomes uninteresting. The world, all mankind, the Universe, he loses himself in, and becomes it; and there is the secret of all initiations, from the greatest to the least. Indeed, no man can pass through an initiation until he can do this in some degree. He cannot simply because he cannot lose himself. He cannot enter into other things. He is all 'I.' The Universe is 'I' and 'thou,' I, and the world - the duality. He never can forget himself and be the other, for his whole understanding, his whole compass of thought and feeling is I. Do you catch the thought? That is all there is to it. The chela is he who is becoming uninterested in himself and accordingly more interested in others, in the world. That is why there are three grades of training. Experience of ages has shown that three are required: training, study, and a growing lack of interest in yourself. And then comes the fourth stage, when you really feel that all other men's interests are infinitely more important than your own. The greatest Buddha, the greatest teacher, the greatest man or woman, is he who is uninterested in himself and loses himself in what we call others. That is chelaship. It is a reversion of feeling, to embrace the Universe and recognise it. The 'I' is no longer 'I,' it is All. And yet how difficult it is for Occidentals to understand that we are all one, and yet for ever individuals. There are as many chelas as there are individuals in the Universe. I sometimes think that everybody is a chela in degree. I sometimes think that even the greatest sinner, as we say, is a chela, because he is learning, poor devil! Of course he is not a great chela, he is a very weak and humble one, a poor, stumbling, weak specimen of mankind. A true chela hence is one who is living the Life and knows the Knowing, and combines the two into one, and thereby loses interest in himself, forgets himself. Self-forgetfulness, love of others: if men could only follow this as a life even in their ordinary intercourse, if we could only realize how uninteresting I am and how awfully interesting the other fellow is. That is all there is to chelaship; and the greatest man is he who can express that the most, the best. That is why, as the Buddha said, we attain Nirvana, we attain the stage of the "samma-sambuddha," when the dew-drop slips into the shining sea, when the little knot and point and focus of I-consciousness expands to be the Universe.

I will add this: I for one have no patience with those who segregate themselves from others and go out, away from others, and think that they are holier than others. That is not chelaship. You can starve till your bones stick through your skin, and you can burn yourself and torture yourself until the body, wracked with pain, dies; and you are no more a chela than a snap of the fingers, because all your searching is upon yourself; you become an imbodiment of self-seeking egoism. That is not the way to attain chelaship. Chelaship is an inner being, an utter self-forgetfulness in its greater reaches, it is an inner change and forgetting yourself; and in proportion as you do it, so much farther will you be on the chelapath, because of an ever-enlarging consciousness and wisdom and love. Thank you. ---------------------

SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR ETHICS - G. de Purucker Excerpts from Questions We All Ask, Second Series, Nos. 18 and 20 Evolution is bringing out what is within, unfolding the latent powers locked up within the deathless center which every human is at the core of the core of himself. Infinitude lies there; deathlessness lies there; and therefore the pathway of growth is endless and beginingless. The way by which to grow is to shed the personal in order to become impersonal . . . . To shed, to cast aside, the limited in order to expand. How can the chick leave the egg without breaking its shell? How can the inner man expand without breaking the shell of the lower selfhood? How can the god within manifest itself - that god in each of you, your own divine consciousness - until the imperfect, the small, the constricted, the personal in other words, has been cast aside? It is in impersonality that lies immortality; in personality lies death. Therefore expand, grow, evolve, become what you are within! The gods call to us constantly - not in human words, but in those soundless symbols transmitted to us along the inner ethers which man's heart and soul interpret as spiritual instinct, aspiration, love, self-forgetfulness; and the whole import of what these voiceless messages are, is: "Come up higher!" Nature is not mocked. Her fundamental essence is consciousness and her fundamental law is reaction - consequences. What you put into the ground of your character, you will reap; what you sow into yourself by thought and will and feeling, makes your character. Thus you build yourself through the ages; and if you do evil to some other, that evil will come back to you. You know the old saying: "Curses come home to roost." They do, indeed. Here is the scientific basis for ethics. Ethics are not mere conventions. There are indeed conventional ethics; but the essence of ethics, the fundamental principle that right is right and wrong is wrong, that dishonor is wrong and that honor is right, that just dealing is right and that unjust dealing is wrong - these fundamental things which I call ethics, are based on Nature's fundamental law. Sow beauty into your character by your thoughts and acts, and you will become beautiful. Sow love by your aspirations and thoughts and acts, and love will build your

character to be lovely, and you will meet the guerdon of love, which is love. Be lovely and you will be loved; be hateful, and the very fact of your thinking and feeling hate, distorts your character, twists it. The torsion is tremendous, because your will and feeling are with it, and you will return with a twisted and distorted character, which may even manifest in a twisted and distorted body, the natural reaction on the physical body of the indwelling energy of your character. Sow love, and reap it; sow hate, and reap it; sow good-will, deeds of kindness and brotherhood - and you will receive good-will, and deeds of kindness and brotherhood. Be peaceful, and you shall receive peace; be kindly, and kindliness will be your guerdon. Forgive, and forgiveness will he yours. Strive, and you will gain; aspire, and what you aspire to you shall reap; for within you dwells an indomitable will springing from the very heart of the Universe; and to a man who uses his will aright andwho uses his will with a will, naught can oppose his progress. If he fails, it is because his will lacks practice; and if he uses that will for evil purposes, if he abuses it, Nature will react upon him exactly according to what he did and gave. Use your divine part, that spiritual will - use it with a will on the side of right, of love, of peace, of brotherhood, of happiness to others. Nature's reaction upon you will bring back to you all that you have sown. Ethics are man's way of expressing his consciousness of the harmony and symmetry and beauty inherent in the Universe. You are gods, my Brothers; every one of you in the core of the core of your being is a god, a divine entity . . . . You are Children of Cosmic Space. For the essence of you is Boundless Infinitude - the All. - From Theosophia, Sept.-Oct., 1944 ---------------------

The Secret of Human Conflict - G. de Purucker FIND it wholly consonant with fact, not only in human life but in the wondrous nature around us, that the secret of conflict not only amongst men, but even in the universe, is in the existing various degrees of ignorance, selfishness, and lack of what we humans call altruism, the last named being the noblest emotion that can possibly enter the human heart. It is only in altruism, in thinking of others, in putting others before ourselves, that we forget, each one of us, himself, and in the forgetting lose the pains and the sorrows and the little happinesses that we hug so close to us and call our selves. Don't you see that the only pathway to wisdom and universal peace and utter happiness, is putting the whole before the insignificant, the many before yourself; and therefore living in the universal life instead of living only in your own small compass of vital comprehension? There is the secret of it all; and it is precisely this secret that the modern world, especially in the Occident, has utterly forgotten. It has forgotten that in selfforgetfulness is greatness, is peace, and is happiness; that our lack of peace and our unhappinesses come from hugging our little pettinesses and worries close to us; for these anxieties and hatreds gnaw the very fiber of our inner being, and then we suffer, we are hurt, and we raise our eyes to divinity or to the gods and exclaim: Why has this happened

unto me, unto us? What have I done? What have we done? Yet the merest cognisance of spiritual and natural law should tell us that everything that happens in the great and in the small - because the small is included in the great - everything that happens, happens according to Law divine; and that misery and unhappiness and conflict and wretchedness and poverty and all the array of accompanying facts, arise out of human negligence to obey the cosmic law. It is just as simple as that. Do you know, the great lost chord of modern civilization is forgetfulness of the fact in nature of universal brotherhood, which means not merely a sentimental or political brotherhood at all; it means that we are all of one common cosmic or spiritual origin, and that what affects one affects all, and therefore that the interests of the unit are insignificant as compared with the interests of the multitudes. But forget not that the multitude is composed of units, so that you cannot be unjust or cruel or do wrong even to a single unit without offending the whole. These are simple laws that have been hammered into the consciousness of mankind from time out of mind, from an age preceding ours so far back in the remote past that what we now call the eternal mountains were not even yet dreamed of and were sleeping in the ooze of archaeozoic slime. Now this lost chord, this forgotten truth, the forgetfulness of human brotherhood, can be expressed otherwise: the loss of the conviction that nature is fundamentally spiritual, and therefore is ruled by law, and therefore has compensation for meritorious conduct, and retribution for unmeritorious; and that these twain, the compensation and the retribution, are as infallible as is that cosmic law itself, for they are but the expressions of it. When a man allows these wondrous and yet so simple thoughts to sink into his consciousness, so that they become a part of the very fiber of his being and of his feeling, no longer would he wilfully injure another. He cannot. It is no longer his character. He has drawn himself out of the mud, and seen the golden sunshine. He then recognises that fundamentally all is one, and that all beings are one, and that the unit is just as important as the whole, and that the whole is just as important as the unit; and that the unit within the whole is infinitely more important than the unit, single, alone. By the units themselves thinking in this way, the cosmic rule of harmony is preserved unto infinity. That is what we have lost in the Occident: the conviction that we shall meet compensation or retribution for our thoughts and for our feelings; that good will infallibly come to us if we sow good and do good and think good, and feel right, and sow seeds of justice and honor and probity and decency in our conduct towards all other men - all other men, not merely `my' friends, all. For the cosmos is a unity and knows no divisions or human separations. That is our sin. That is where we fail. That is the secret of all human conflict. Now mind you, this thought, because of the very complex and stupid character of modern civilization, and because of this fact only, raises a bewildering series of embarrassing questions. But any man with a heart in the right place, can solve any such question because he is illuminated by the god within him, if he will allow his heart to speak. Then his judgment is virtually infallible. And when I say the heart, I do not mean emotion. I mean the man's instinct of upright honor and inner moral and spiritual cleanliness. The fact is, we of the Occident have been cowards entirely too long, always wanting to put the fault on someone else, because we cannot find a sufficient multitude to damn. So in the Occident we have erected a pure figment of our imagination, and we speak of it as Christ Jesus, and on his shoulders lay all our sins; and at the end we shall be washed white in

the blood of the lamb if only we believe it. Ay, but how about those who have suffered under my evil doing? Because I am saved, does that help them? How about those whom I in my stupid, ignorant, and evil past, perhaps have given a shove downwards instead of the brotherly helping upward lift? How about them? Don't you see that those ideas are the complete reversion of a cosmic philosophy? Don't you see that it is all wrong? That it is not so important what happens to the unit; the greater thing is what happens to all others, the endless, toiling, hoping, working, suffering multitudes. That is important, and every weakened unit knows it and feels it. Now this inevitability of retribution, or of lovely compensation, is what we call the doctrine of consequences, the doctrine of karman: that what you sow you shall reap, either now or at a later date, and that there is no escape. You know it perfectly well in the ordinary things of life. It does not require any argument. If you put your hand in a flame, or touch a live wire, the fire is not going to not burn you because you are stupid and ignorant, and the electricity will not refrain from burning you or perhaps killing you because you don't know the laws of electricity, because you are stupid or ignorant. Fortunately there is another and beautiful side to this. Our most wondrous teacher, the greatest friend we poor men have, is our sorrow. At first blush it sounds like a terrible thing to say, but if you just analyse it: what is it that trains the child to become aware and to become prudent and careful and thoughtful, and to avoid dangers in the future? Experience: the suffering of the burnt finger, or the stubbed toe, or the fall from the bough of the tree, or what not. What is it that softens a man's heart so that he can understand the suffering of others and feel with others? Sympathy, feeling together. It is when we suffer ourselves that we grow. Nothing softens the heart like one's own suffering. Strange and beautiful paradox, it puts steel into our character likewise. It makes us stronger. The man who has never suffered is without feeling, is a very `involved' person indeed. Who is the great man? The man who has never suffered, who does not know what suffering is? Or the man whose sufferings have given him strength, inner power, vision, who knows what suffering is, and because of his own recollection of that suffering, never will bring suffering upon others? With him the heart has begun to awaken. Consciousness is once more aroused to these simple cosmic verities. You see then how wonderfully the universe is constructed, so that although we are stupid and ignorant, and lack the noblest feeling possible to human beings, which is altruism, love, and feeling for others, yet by our very sufferings and stupidities and ignorance we learn the better way, and with each step in learning we grow, we grow greater; and after a long period of this very slow and wholesome and painful evolutionary journey, we come to the point when we shall say to ourselves: No more of that. I have had enough. From now on I shall take myself in my own hands, and govern my life by selfdirected evolution. Hereafter I shall choose my path. Naught shall sway my will to this side or that. There is the goal, and that goal is a cosmic one. No longer shall I be a slave of fell circumstance. From now on I rule my own pathway. I choose my own destiny. I have seen the Law. So the secret of human suffering is simply that, I think: the loss of the feeling of human responsibility towards others. And see how this affects our conduct. Who is the better citizen of two men, the one who knows that if he is a true man he will obey the laws of his country and do so gladly even if in his knowledge he may know that some of those laws are unfair, or the man who sets up a conflict in his heart against his own country? The

latter is choosing precisely the wrong path, and is himself becoming a worker, not with the multitude of his fellow human beings, but in opposition to them, and in strife and conflict with them. It is a strange paradox that once the soul begins to awaken and the eyes to open, because of the very complex and really I think disastrous state of modern life, the man who is earnestly trying to do his job, to do his duty in life, to live manly, uprightly, meets a thousand times more difficulties than the man who just goes along because, like the animals, he is too stupid to think. But would you be a mere human animal, not thinking, not reflecting, not having the godlike feeling of choosing your own way in life? Would you? The answer is simple. It is, then, my conviction, and I do believe I am right because I have found myself corroborated by all the greatest thinkers whose teachings I have given a lifetime to study I believe I am right in saying this: that human conflicts would end, and fairly rapidly too, if all men, which means you and me, which means everyone, were to realize his individual responsibility towards his fellow men. I think that just that one rule would run through all the fabric of human life from the highest to the lowest: our solidarity as units in a human hierarchy, so that what affects one affects all, whether for good or for ill. I have often wondered how many men may think of these things in the silent hours of night, or when they are puzzled and anxious as to what course to follow, and are afraid to follow because the multitude does not follow. The multitude likes to follow what it thinks is enlightened selfishness. I cannot conceive a more diabolic or satanic notion than what is covered by that phrase, `enlightened selfishness.' It is a deliberate obscuring of every noble intuition of the human soul. Just ask yourselves. Do they do a thing because the thing is beautiful and because it is right and because it is just, and because it will bring happiness and security and peace to all men? No, these men of enlightened selfishness say "If I do it, it ultimately will be good for me and mine." Now suppose men in different parts of the world followed that gospel, what would you see? What you see today. And it can all be stopped, all human conflict. And mind you, I don't mean stopping differences of opinion, which is one of the most beautiful things about us humans. Differences of opinion, if honestly and courteously and altruistically cultivated, lend spice and enchantment to life, lend charm and beauty. The French have a wonderful proverb which you often hear me quote: Du choc des idees jaillit la lumieye. - From the shock of ideas exchanged among men springs forth light. That is the principle of congresses and parliaments and unions and reunions of men: to exchange ideas and to skim off the best. So I don't refer to differences of ideas. These are natural. I mean conflicts, hatreds, lack of respect for the other man, lack of seeing in him something which is as wonderful as what he can see in you. Have you ever tried just this little simple rule, looking into the eyes of some other man when you are talking with him; not trying to force your idea into his head as we all do; not trying to persuade him and make him believe as you do; but just looking into the eyes of that man. Do you know, you can see marvels, a world of hitherto unexpressed and unknown beauty there. That whole man's soul, if you just give him a chance, is ready to come out and meet you. But of course he may be just as much scared of you as you are scared of him, and just as much afraid of being a man as you are afraid of being a man. I assure you that if men would trust each other, and expect decency from each other, they would get it. I have never known it to fail. I will tell you frankly I have never

been betrayed in a trust I have given, because I have given my trust always without stint and as an appeal. It works, and it is the principle upon which modern business, the highest type, is based: mutual trust, mutual confidence, mutual honor; and when a man does not live up to these things, he very soon gets a rap. Isn't that so? You know it, just as well as I do. Now, there is the whole thing in a nutshell. I have actually heard it said that it is good for the human race to be in continuous conflict because it makes men strong. Yes, I have heard of pugilists, but I have never known any of them who have been especially famous for genius or for setting the world on fire with their brains or for changing the course of destiny or of history. Pachydermatous human beings, thick-skinned human beings, have their value, but they are not exactly the type that we choose when we want a man to handle some very difficult, delicately balanced, and intricate negotiation. We always there need a man not only of brains but a man of heart, because the man of brains who has no heart cannot understand the other man who may have just enough of a heart-touch to give him a very heavy advantage over the heartless man. The man without heart is only half-built in psychology; he is at an enormous disadvantage. The other man will put it all over him. Heart and brain working together make the complete man, because there is the understanding of both the song of the heart and the philosophy of the mind. Shall we continue these interminable conflicts? I think they will pass away. I think that beauty and respect are in the offing even now; and I think the way to begin is with ourselves. I with myself, you with yourself. First I shall be a good citizen to my country, no matter what happens, strictly obeying its laws. I shall be a true follower of the wisdomreligion of the gods, which is man's noblest heritage and his greatest aspiration. Life then becomes too full of interest, too packed with incident, too wonderful, for anything else to satisfy. ------The above was one of the last lectures given at a public meeting by Dr. de Purucker shortly after the removal of the Headquarters of the T.S. from Point Loma to Covina, California. Those who heard this and other of his talks, both public and private, during the last year of his life, and especially those who were privileged to be his regular students, had ample opportunity to note that he remained to the very last day full of strength and vigor, despite the burdens of his office, and all his words carry this atmosphere of inner vitality. In an unforgettable way especially in these last months he seemed definitely to take up one profound teaching after another and bring it to the peak of elucidation in masterly exposition. As all that he said at the Headquarters meetings was taken down in shorthand, there is yet a wealth of material from which to draw for these pages, and it is the hope of the editorial staff to be able regularly to share one or more of these most valuable articles each month with FORUM readers. - Theosophical Forum, December, 1942 ------------------------------

A SENSE OF REVERENCE IN OUR STUDY

[Word-Wisdom in the Esoteric Philosophy, a collection of early class lectures given by Dr. G. de Purucker at the Theosophical Headquarters at Point Loma, is now off the press.* The following are the opening words of the 7th lecture, given on January 5, 1914. The lecture continued with "the study of Jesus the man and Jesus the type-figure, taking up the Jewish historical or semi-historical records of the Syrian sage, and touching lightly upon the Mohammedan teachings regarding him. - Eds.] It seems to me that when we are present together here, in a sense we are on holy ground. In ancient days, when the subjects which we are now studying were taken up, there was observed, as we said in opening this series of studies, an attitude of reverence and devotion not only towards the higher beings in nature, which were called gods or spirits, as the occasion may be, but also by the students towards each other, a sense of reverence towards our very selves, as being incarnations of divine beings, sleeping gods, gods asleep in the flesh, for according to Oriental methods of study the students assembled with a mind filled with thankfulness and a species of joy, by putting themselves in the proper state of mind, come nearer to the beings from whom we draw our higher principles. In ancient days all initiations were held in the temples or groves** or, in the northern countries, under the spreading boughs of some majestic oak; or they might have been held as sometimes in India, for instance, under the sky, the roof of the world, as it was expressed. They saw in that a symbol of the encompassing life, and themselves types or symbols of the hierarchy of beings which move things in nature. And so we, in our way, according to the methods of this century and according to the evolution or rather according to the status of evolution which we have, approach these majestic studies, or at least we should do so, with the same reverence for them and for each other. And these studies do not mean only the Theosophical studies strictly speaking, but also the different religious philosophies of the earth, which contain or enshrine the aspirations of those who have gone before us, who are or rather have been, ourselves; and in studying them we come with the thoughts which we thought and the aspirations which we had, and I dare say that there is no religion and no religious philosophy and no science which in itself could be unfamiliar to us, to our higher natures. Memory, as we shall see later, is the fountain of recollection or remembrance of the things stored in our higher natures. So therefore, in taking up a study apparently, as it may seem to some, so untheosophical as the one we studied last week, we really are studying a branch of the activities of the human mind, and we get back into the ideas and ideals which brought about the fabric which is called Christianity now. - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 58 --------* Word-Wisdom in the Esoteric Philosophy by G. de Purucker, Point Loma Publications, Inc. paper, 160 pp. $5.95 ** Groves in Hebrew is AShR, asher, [See Zohar (Wizards Bookshelf, 1979) p. 211] meaning happy or blessed. See S.D. references thereon. - J.D. -------------------------

The Separation of the Sexes Please may I know what is really meant by the teaching about the separation of the sexes in an early Root-Race. Is this connected in any way with the idea of `twin-souls'? G. de P. - As regards this question concerning the separation of human individuals into distinct sexes which took place more or less during the Third Root-Race: this separation of each individual was brought about by the natural course of early human evolution, and is founded on the dual nature of mind, of the manasic part in us. When mind entered into the previously `mind-less' race, the dual character of mind immediately made itself felt throughout all the lower quaternary, and when I say `immediately,' I mean dating from that time. Thus it was that the androgynous race of the time slowly drew apart into the separate individuals as they now exist, into man and woman in other words; and the animals and indeed some of the plants likewise followed suit because of the strong psychic impression made by the human race on the astral mold of our world. Thus this separation was a purely natural affair, based fundamentally on what you can call the positive and negative sides of mind; or you can otherwise phrase it as being based on the bi-polar character of the manas within us. Thus sex is really very little higher than the lower parts of the manas, and consequently is not a spiritual thing at all, a mere passing phase in evolution. As the human race evolves and rises out of the lower mind into the higher, sex will disappear. In connexion with this, let me utter a word of warning: the idea of some rather sensuous people that the higher nature of human evolution is to be achieved by `the union of twin souls' is altogether wrong. The secret lies in the individual himself or herself, for in each individual there are the two poles. Thus it comes about that a human individual for two or three or more incarnations is a man or a woman; and as karman makes for adjustment in these things and prevents extremes, slowly such an individual begins to lean or have a bias towards the other half of mankind, as I have often explained, and when that reaches a certain point, then the man's incarnations become feminine, and the woman's incarnations, as above explained, become masculine. Thus it is that our destiny swings us from incarnations as a man to incarnations as a woman, then back to a man, then back to a woman; and this will last until sex disappears slowly and inevitably. The twin-soul idea is a very dangerous one, and in fact fundamentally all wrong. What we must strive to do is to rise above sex in both thought and feeling, directing our efforts towards the spiritual within us, in which there is neither sex nor any of its attributes. - Theosophical Forum, August, 1938 ----------------------

THE SEVEN HUMAN GROUPS - G. de Purucker This article, reprinted from The Theosophical Forum, June 1937, is introduced by the following lines: "In The Secret Doctrine, Vol. II, p. 1, it is stated that the Secret Doctrine `teaches the simultaneous evolution of seven human groups on seven portions of our

globe.' The members of the Secret Doctrine Class at Point Loma wishing for further elucidation of this statement, Dr. de Purucker was appealed to, and sent the following most illuminating explanation, which by general request, and with permission duly accorded, is hereby placed on record for future reference and for the information of all readers. H.T.E." The initials stand for Dr. Henry T. Edge, who in his young years was a pupil of H.P. Blavatsky, and who in the 1930s at Point Loma conducted a series of classes in The Secret Doctrine. Readers are also referred to the commentary on the same subject titled "The Seven Embryonic Humanities" in Studies in Occult Philosophy, pp. 260-62. -Editors This passage and other passages appertaining to the same point of the occult teaching, mean just what they say, and are not to be construed metaphorically. These passages do not refer to inner and outer rounds, nor to the other globes of the Earth-Chain, nor to the seven different human principles, as astral, physical, etc., except indirectly; as is shown very clearly by H.P.B's own words, "seven human groups on seven different portions of our globe." Here it is our Globe D or Earth, our planet Terra, which is meant. Thus it is a fact that original mankind, which does not mean any branch of humanity but the very beginnings of what we popularly call the First Root Race on Globe D in this Fourth Round, refers to the matter of the sishtas from the preceding Round. In other words, it means that our human life-wave as a whole or totality, when it again reached our Earth during this Fourth Round on this Globe D, awakened the seven classes of the then living sishtas on this our Globe D, because the forerunners of our Life-wave were themselves composed of the seven different kinds of human monads. In other words they were composed of what, in other connexions, H.P.B. has called the different classes of the Pitris. This is a little intricate but very simple when other teachings about the incoming lifewaves on a globe are properly understood, and must not be confused with other life-waves; and I may add of course that the last word of this teaching is highly esoteric and belongs to higher Degrees even than the E.S. However, mark the following points: the sishtas waiting the incoming septenary human life-wave were themselves sevenfold, i.e., seven different groups of sishtas, each group being composed of individuals who through evolution were more or less alike. The lifewave when it reaches our Globe, is thus composed of the bulk of what we call the First Sub-race of the First Root-Race, intermixed with forerunners, i.e., more advanced monads of six other kinds, representing the other six classes of human monads. Hence it was that all the seven classes of sishtas were more or less contemporaneously awakened, as it were, which means that they became vehicles for the different classes of the incoming monads, and began to increase; and thus it was that in this Round, on this Globe, as H.P.B. says, there was a "simultaneous evolution of seven human groups on seven different portions of our globe." These seven different classes of monads of the incoming life-wave, including the majority and the forerunners of the other six, started the seeds of the different Root-Races, which in time were to develop in this Round on this Globe, and of which Root-Races 1, 2, 3, and 4 have come and gone, and we are now in the 5th, although there are representatives amongst us even today, forerunners, of the 6th and 7th Root-Races to come before our life-wave passes on to Globe E. It is thus clear that The Secret Doctrine teaches not a monogenetic origin of humanity, i.e., the birth of the human race from a single individual, or from a single couple

like the Jewish biblical story; but teaches a polygenetic origin, that is to say an origin of the human race from seven different living foci, which I have hereinbefore called the seven different types or kinds or sub-classes of the sishtas, each one such type or sub-class being awakened by the similar incoming portion of the human life-wave. Of course the portion of the incoming life-wave which was to become specifically the First Root-Race was the most numerous at that earliest period in our humanity, and became the First RootRace. Then when it died out, it was preceded and followed by the growth in numbers of the class of the monads which was to become the Second Root-Race, etc. In this connexion, it must not be forgotten that all these seven types or classes of monads in the incoming life-waves are not separated in water-tight compartments, any more than the different types of men today, advanced and less advanced, are all separated off from each other. But they more or less mingled as time went on, yet the members of each class as it were gravitated to its own particular group and part of the globe. From this teaching we likewise see that there may be, and indeed are, groups of humanity which inhabit portions of a globe, and where these portions of humanity remain almost quiescent for ages, until their time comes to begin to increase and to become the dominant Race or Sub-race. Thus H. P.B.'s words are to be taken literally. I hope these thoughts will be of help to the members of your class who are puzzled, but of course they will require some thinking and study to get a clear picture of the process, because what is here briefly said took scores of millions of years to come about, up to the time of our own Fifth Root-Race. - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 77 --------------------

THE SIX GREAT SCHOOLS OF THE ANCIENTS - G. de Purucker For those who are especially interested in the different Schools of Hindu philosophy, and in order to give a more correct delineation of the main principles of these Schools, the following lines may be found helpful. There are six Darsanas or Schools recognised as being correct exponents of Hindu philosophical thought, and all these six Darsanas - a Sanskrit word literally meaning 'Visions' - may be divided into three pairs. The six Darsanas or Visions or Schools are, respectively, the Nygya founded by Gotama; the Vaiseshika founded by Kananda; the Sankhya founded by Kapila; the Yoga founded by Patanjali; and the Less and the Greater Vendanta founded by Vyasa; and of the Vedanta, the most important school of the Greater, The Adwaita, was due to the teaching of the Hindu Avatara Sankaracharya. This, the Adwaita-Vendanta, is probably the most widely diffused philosophical School in India at the present time. Now these six Darsanas, called in Sanskrit the Shad-darsanas, to the Occultist, contain, all of them, truth, and indeed esoteric truth in no small degree; but again to the Occultist each one is but a single 'Vision' or 'Branch' of the all-unifying Master-School, which thus is the Mother of them all and the container of the master-keys by which each and all of the

other six may be correctly understood and properly elucidated. These six 'Visions' or Schools may be divided into three pairs, each couple being paired because of similarity in systemic formulation and philosophic outlook; so that the six great systems of Hindu philosophy are thus logically reducible to three, corresponding to the Arambha, the Parinama, and the Vivarta, respectively. These pairs are as follows: (a) the Nyaya and Vaiseshika, which one may perhaps briefly call the Atomistic School, corresponding again with the Arambha; (b) the Sankhya and Yoga, which because of their characteristic philosophical principles and system may be called the school of philosophy dealing with emanational evolution combined with practice in aspiration and self-training. This second pair corresponds with the Parinama; (c) the Less and the Greater Vedanta, which, especially the Greater Vendanta, may be called the Idealistic School of Hindu religio-philosophy, and correspond with the Vivarta-vada. From still another standpoint the above-mentioned philosophical pairs may respectively be compared with the three operations of the human spirit and mind which are known in the Occident under the names of Science, Philosophy, Religion - not of course any one sectarian religious faith, but Religion per se. The Arambha is to be classified with the scientific outlook; the Parinama with the philosophical vision; and the third pair, classified with Vivarta, is comparable with the religious manner of visioning truth. All these three couples, as stated above, are, each one, considered to be more or less imperfect from the standpoint of the Philosophy, because each is incomplete. The Esoteric Philosophy unifies all three couples (or all six Darsanas) into one grand comprehensive System - the Esoteric Philosophy itself - which contains and explicates or explains the substance of all. To recapitulate: the Arambha is that view of the Universe and the origins of things, which, qualified as being scientific, envisions the Universe as proceeding forth as a 'new' production of already pre-existent Cosmic Intelligence and pre-existent 'points' of individuality or what the Esoteric Philosophy would term 'Monads' as being a more correct term than 'atoms.' Although such newly produced Universe, from this viewpoint, is recognised as being the karmic resultant or consequence of a preceding Universe, the former 'self' of the present, nevertheless emphasis in this line thought is laid upon beginnings, upon the Universe as a 'new' production, very much as even Occidental science construes the Universe to be. The Parinama, while having many points of contact with the Arambha point of view, nevertheless lays emphasis uypon the fact of the coming forth of the Universe into being, with all it contains, as a production by powers and entities and substance 'unrolling from within,' and thus bringing the Universe into existence by a species of emanational or evolutional conversion or unfolding. The Vivarta-system, finally, penetrates still more deeply into the womb of the Cosmic Mystery and fixes its attention upon the unending duration of the Divine Essence, which it considers as producing 'appearances' of itself through modifications of itself, or portions thereof, brought about by emanational evolution from within, these modifications or 'portions' being the Cosmic Mahamaya - or Cosmic Illusion. The technical name for these 'appearances' is nama-rupa, [[sanscrit lettered word here]] a Sanskrit compound literally meaning: 'name-form,' otherwise understood as nama equaling 'idea' or 'ideas' or 'concepts,' and rupa equaling 'objectivization' or 'images' or 'forms' in which these ideas manifest themselves. Hence it is that in the Vivarta system the entire objective Universe,

visible and invisible, is considered to be illusory because merely a collective modification, or series of modifications, of the productive Divine Essence, which last always remains Itself, yet produces 'appearances' of itself, or shows forth itself by way of ideas or concepts and through objectivization by unfolding procession, i.e., emanational evolution. The above may seem to be rather high metaphysics, but it seems needful to imbody these facts for the benefit of those whose minds ask for scientific or philosophic or religious particularizations and comparisons. (From Theosophical Forum, March, 1939. See also Studies in Occult Philosophy, pp 620-2)) -----------------

THE STORY OF JESUS - A MYSTERY-TALE by G. de Purucker The entire story of Jesus is a Mystery-tale setting forth in dramatic form certain very important events which took place in Initiation-chambers or crypts; and the parables included in this Mystery-tale also referred very definitely, if briefly, to certain of the fundamental teachings given to the neophytes at such times. A study of the lives of the great Seers and Sages of past times will reveal more or less exactly the same entanglements of thought and circumstances that are so easily discernible in the Christian story of Jesus. The very names of most if not all of these great Seers and Sages have been covered around with allegory and symbol; myths have been told about them: in a few cases they are alleged to have been born of a virgin or born in some other mysterious way, and to have lived and taught moving the hearts of men by their works of marvel; and, after finishing their teaching, finally passing away in some mysterious manner. Furthermore, as the Initiatory Cycle in the case of individual men simply copied the grand term of cosmic existence, therefore does the Christian New Testament in its symbolic allegory and imagery, in addition to being a covered and undisclosed tale of the InitiationCrypt, likewise set forth the imbodiment of the Cosmic Spirit in material existence. Every country had its schools of initiation, its schools of the great Mysteries; and these mysteries were closely guarded and kept very secret indeed. It was the habit in those days to choose some great human being who had taught men, and around that individual to weave a web of symbolic teaching, setting forth - so that ordinary men in reading could not understand but yet would be attracted to spiritual things - what actually took place in the initiation-chamber. That is what happened in the case of Jesus called the Christos. Consequently, the sayings of the four books called the Gospels were not written for historical truth but symbolic truth. 'Christos' is a Greek word which means one who has been anointed. This is a direct reference, a direct allusion, to what happened during the celebration of the ancient Mysteries. Unction or anointing was one of the acts performed during the working of the rites of those ancient Mysteries in the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. The

Hebrew word for an anointed one is Mashiahh, meaning exactly the same thing as the Greek word 'Christos' - the 'Anointed.' It is of course well known that the Jews were even then expecting and still expect the coming of their 'Messiah,' which is a common way of misspelling the Hebrew word Mashiahh; and the mystical allusion here in this ancient Jewish belief is identical with the mystical and esoteric meaning that the word Christos contained when employed with an allusion to the rites of initiation. - Extract from The Story of Jesus - Eclectic Theosophist, Dec. 21, 1971 ------------------------

Strength and Balance in Occultism Short address given to his students by G. de P., June 13, 1937, in the Temple, at Point Loma, California, at the conclusion of the usual lodge study-program. The holy mysteries are never publicized: never, never, never. You have to earn them and fit yourselves for them. It is obvious that if you are not fit to receive them, they never come to you. It would be a crime to attempt to do otherwise. It is the easiest thing in the world for a man or a woman to incur loss of the soul by following any other method of occult training than that of the Masters, taught as they themselves in their turn are by the Dhyani-Chohans, the bright and blessed gods. I mean it. If you want truth you must come to the Temple for it, and you must come in the proper spirit; you must work upon yourself so that you will train yourself to be fit to learn, to be receptive. Otherwise you just can't receive it. You won't take it in. You can't take it in until you make an opening in which to put it - to use very plain, simple language. If your mind is set against it, like a closed door, it does not open to receive. You must train yourselves first. But if you do train yourselves, and, as we say, live the life, there is absolutely no barrier which can or will prevent your going indefinitely forwards. It is exactly like a growing child. He cannot take in the world's wisdom even, even the wisdom of this world, until his mind has developed to the point where it can receive it and retain it; until it is trained to do it. Simple! It is exactly the same thing with occultism, with esotericism, with the mysteries. They are indeed in the Theosophical Movement, both the Greater and the Less. They can be had by anyone, but such a one must prepare himself, train himself, must be in deadly earnest. Then he can receive them. The chief or fundamental rule of this training or discipline is the becoming receptive to the inner and higher part of one's own constitution, whose whisperings of truth and intimations of cosmic verities find no lodgment in minds wilfully or ignorantly closed against their entrance. There is the whole, or at least the fundamental, rule of occult teaching and learning in a nutshell, and the reason for all the safeguards that have been thrown around it. I have myself known hapless students of Theosophy who have literally gone crazy, temporarily at least, but nevertheless have gone crazy, have been crazed, from an unwise and unguided study of some of the more recondite teachings. It is pathetic; for the pathos

lies in their yearning to learn and to become greater than their lower selves. The pathos likewise lies in the fact that they tried to scale the peaks before they had disciplined themselves to traverse the foothills of morals, of learning and self-control. It is one of the perils that the Masters and H.P.B. and the Theosophical Leaders have had to watch out for, and to contend with. It is a very difficult situation. I have known men and women barely escaping the loss of health in merely brain-mind overstudy without the healing, saving power of selfless devotion: a most beautiful thing in a way; one's heart warms to them in admiration for their courage, for their insistence on getting truth; but it has been unwisely done. That is why we insist upon the all-round, balanced growth, a wise, shapely growing into knowledge and wisdom, instead of the distortions and ungainly malformations, mentally and even psychically, that come from unwise study of occult things. It is for this reason that in our own T.S. the inner, the secret, the occult, the esoteric, is so very carefully guarded and watched over and never publicized. Our Masters have no desire to have their students incur risks of soul-loss, or mind-loss, or even of physical deterioration, or any other human tragedy. But otherwise, having stated these things, just remember how beautiful and simple the rules of occultism are. Nothing in our deeper and more occult studies will ever interfere with your family duties, never; for those duties are duties; and it is one of the first obligations of a Theosophist to fulfil every duty. He is no occultist if he neglects one, no matter what his temptations are. No matter if he tries to grasp the sun, if he neglects a duty he is a coward by that much. Being a coward and a weakling, he is no occultist. No injury should ever be done to another. If you do it you are beginning to descend, and you may walk into black magic. But there is a way and a chance to rescue yourself and to return to the strait and beautiful path. For it is a truly glorious path, and it brings a sense of the realization that man is akin to the gods and that the gods are present amongst us. Yes, I mean it: the gods even now walk the earth. But few are the sons of men who have trained themselves to realize it. Now, the gods will associate with us, self-consciously to us, when we shall have learned first to know that they are there; then to make their approach to us mutually desirable. Let it, however, suffice for the main thought to carry home that the gods walk amongst us even now, as they did in far past ages, in the childhood of man, when he was still innocent and not so sophisticated that he thought he contained all the knowledge of the universe in his puny, little brain. Let us, then, make ourselves presentable, and let us make our lives so attractive and interesting to the divinities, that they in their turn may be glad and happy to associate with us, self-consciously. I will go this far and then stop: There is a place, a geographical place on this earth, where not only is it common for the highest men that the race has produced to associate with the gods companionably, freely, friendly; but where the same relations of teachers and taught exist between gods and men, that exist today in our schools of learning. I wonder if you grasp what that means. And at the heart - like this omphalos, or navel, or center, in the Temple, this little pillar in the center of this auditorium - in the holiest place there, what we call the sanctum sanctorum, there is an invisible presence, the highest spiritual presence of this earth. Make of it what you can. - Theosophical Forum, Nov., 1942

-----------------------It is an old saying, proved by the ancients, that a man may talk till the crack of doom and make no impression even on the least obdurate material if his words come not from a heart filled with the inspiration of reality; and contrariwise, he who himself vibrates with that interior sense of truth, of reality, will carry conviction even unto those whose minds are clothed against him. - G. de P. ------------------

STRUGGLE AND COOPERATION - G. de Purucker ....biological 'struggle' is more or less purely imaginary so far as Nature's intrinsic laws and processes are concerned; for the entire field of this 'struggle' in the case of human beings is rather the unceasing human effort to grow to unfoldment, which effort, partly because of the complexity of the human constitution, makes the human being seem to be and indeed often actually to be, at war with himself. Thus the effort is in the growing or unfolding individual himself, and only relatively and in small degree, if indeed at all, does any such 'struggle' along these lines of breaking down barriers impeding growth arise from man's relations with the surrounding sphere of circumstances, or Nature - or indeed with his fellows; and the last statement concerning man's struggle with his fellows is repeated despite the apparent contradictions of this statement that seem to be all too observable throughout the course of known human history. The meaning of the author here is that the diversity of interests which arise in human intercourse is largely imaginary and artificial, and in no real or substantial sense is born of an inherent spiritual or biological conflict between man and man. Were men only to realize that their interests are fundamentally common, and that every man is best served when he himself serves the interests of his fellows, then the socalled strife of man with man and in every direction would automatically cease, or ninetynine parts out of a hundred of such situations would disappear, and we should have what would be almost a heaven on earth when compared with the horrible social and other conflicts that in our present era of materialistic selfishness so harass and perplex and plague us all. It is precisely on the lines of thought which fortunately seem to be gaining greater currency in the world today to the effect that even in commercial affairs the man who deliberately sets out to achieve his own ends at the the cost of his fellows is playing a losing game; for the best interest of his fellows is his own best interest; so that this older and really wicked idea is steadily now being more largely replaced by the idea of mutual service. We have just here a proof of the statement made above that antagonisms of 'struggles' or 'conflicts' between man and man are not based in Nature nor even in environing circumstances, but in man's foolishness and selfishness. The author addresses himself here pointedly to the old damnable biological theory of our recent forefathers to the effect that man is 'born' at enmity with his fellowman, and that evolution is attained by conflict, struggle against others, and that the 'survival of the fittest' is brought about by the

predominance of might over right. Today every thinking man is beginning to realize that all this is downright false, is no 'law' of Nature at all, but is a superficiality of deduction arising in a stupid misinterpretation not only of Nature herself, but of man's own constitution and characteristic attributes. Men best serve themselves when they serve each other, for this not only brings about immense inner spiritual and intellectual and moral strength, but likewise brings all cooperating factors into compact unity of common effort, common understanding, and common interest. It should be clear, therefore, that the so-called 'struggle' or 'conflict' is simply the working of many factors in the individual's own constitution, often, alas, working against themselves in struggle or conflict, because many men are too lazy or stupid to think for themselves. Hence the struggle or conflict is in man's own mind; and as all men have this conflict, because all men are more or less evolutionally undeveloped, they imagine that the struggle or conflict exists in Nature, outside of themselves - as if, by the way, men themselves were not inseparable parts of Nature! Once the realization comes home to a man that all Nature is a unity, and that he himself forms but one small cog or wheel in the cosmic macrocosm, which is directed and inspired by a vast unifying Spiritual Force, and by Cosmic Intelligence, man finds his freedom from illusion, sees the so-called 'struggle' for what it really is, his own fatal illusion, and thus attains peace, and liberation from the bonds of ever-hungering desire born of the thraldom of his personal self to the impulses which that personal self perpetually gives birth to. Slavery lies in the fields of 'self,' freedom and strength in common effort. [From The Esoteric Tradition, Vol. II, pp. 935-7] ---------------------

Transactions of the Point Loma Lodge - XVII Comments by Dr. de Purucker at the close of the Sunday evening Lodge program Studies in "The Mahatma Letters" "Now there are - there must be `failures' in the etherial races of the many classes of Dyan Chohans or Devas as well as among men. . ." (et seq., see p. 87, The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett) G. de P. - In the address of tonight a quotation was made from The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett with reference to failures, spiritual failures; and as I know that this word has been greatly misunderstood, or at least apprehended wrongly, I ask your kind attention to what I have to say. What may be failure among the gods, may be a glorious achievement for a human being or for a demi-god. The `failures' amongst the Dhyan-Chohans, or the gods if you wish, is a phrase which refers simply to those high beings, even amongst the DhyanChohans, who have essayed more than they could successfully accomplish. But you see in a way how creditable this effort is. It is one of the divinest things in the consciousness not only of human beings, but of the Dhyan-Chohans, that they aspire forever beyond themselves. Such failures are victories in the long run, for they represent a sublime effort.

And it is far nobler to try to seek the companionship of the gods in this life and fail because we are ourselves not yet gods, than it is to be forever merely human and reck not whether the gods exist or not. So that these failures, all honest failures from the strictly logical meaning of not having done what was envisioned to be accomplished - these failures as beings are among the most glorious even among the Dhyan-Chohanic hosts. Now it is just these failures who were unable to top the last celestial rise and who had to wait until the next Manvantara before they could cross that peak of achievement it is just these failures who headed the hosts of those who returned and built our earth and taught earliest mankind, who laid down the lines of work on which the elementals and the lower Dhyan-Chohanic hosts later labored to construct our world as it is. It was these failures who caught the vision, and, guided by the karman of our past, brought that karman as it were up a little higher. Failures, but saviors of us. So indeed there are failures amongst human beings; and if we just take that word `failures,' and do not know the teaching, how unjust could we be. Far nobler is the man who strives for chelaship and fails because of past weaknesses, past karman -far nobler is he than the man who has no such divine hunger to be more and to be better, higher than he was before. There are failures also in initiation; but all this type of failure is glorious, for it represents noble effort, enlarging vision, increasing strength, and beautiful yearnings. It represents accomplishment. There are failures among the chelas who cannot reach Mahatmaship in this life. But how beautiful is their failure, for they tried and almost won. Fancy, if they had never tried! It is these rare spirits, whether amongst the gods or amongst us men, who see and try, and succeed or fail; but that failure itself is a success; and it is such failures as these that the mahatmic writer alludes to. And what is it that H. P. Blavatsky says in The Voice of the Silence: "Remember, thou that fightest for man's liberation, each failure is success, and each sincere attempt wins its reward in time. The holy germs that sprout and grow unseen in the disciple's soul, their stalks wax strong at each new trial, they bend like reeds but never break, nor can they e'er be lost. But when the hour has struck they blossom forth." - Theosophical Forum, Jan., 1942 ------------------Transactions of the Point Loma Lodge - XVIII Comments by Dr. de Purucker at the close of the Sunday evening Lodge program Studies in "The Mahatma Letters" [The following short items represent points brought up in the discussion of pages 8993, to which Dr. de Purucker added in each case a few words of clarification. Though printed here without the context, they nevertheless in themselves each hold an important key to an understanding of the rather abstruse matters brought out in those pages. - Eds.] THE ONE BECOMES THE MANY AGREE with those who just cannot see how the One could do otherwise than become the multitude. Consider the Universe around us everywhere. It represents the many. Reason tells us that being subservient to one common law, essentially formed of

one common cosmic stuff, originally all the multitudes of beings and entities in this Universe must have come forth from one cosmic fountain of being and life. It is the teaching of Occultism of all the ages that back to that divinity all things are marching now: out from divinity as unself-conscious god-sparks for aeons and aeons of cosmic pilgrimage, undergoing all the various marvelous adventures that life in all its phases brings; then rising on the pathway and re-entering the bosom of the Divine, to issue forth again at the next cosmic Maha-manvantara. It is incomprehensible to me that anything else could take place; and there are so many remarkable illustrations that can be given of this eternal process. SEDIMENTATION ON OUR EARTH When the Masters or H.P.B. speak of the 320 million years since sedimentation on our earth took place, they refer to the beginning of this Round on Globe A; and when the impulse of the three elemental kingdoms, followed by the mineral kingdom, reached our earth, then not only sedimentation but volcanic action began. That is all there is to that. If you will read what I have to say on that in my Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy (and I labored hard in that book to make the process of evolutionary development on the different globes during a Round clear); if you will look to that book, you will have it, I hope, clear enough for comprehension. As a matter of fact, we have so much teaching that our dear people forget most of it! That is the plain truth. Our books are just packed with information; and one of the greatest helps possible to us students is to learn to collate and build up a picture by that collection, bringing together fact after fact and never being satisfied until we have made a proper place for every fact. Then you have a picture, and you won't forget it. CORRESPONDENCES IN THE ROUNDS The Fourth Round is a copy of a more advanced type of everything that took place in the Third Round. Similarly, the Third Round was such of the Second. Remember that, after all, forms and shapes and bodies are all relatively unimportant. There was a time in the Third Round correspondential to the descent of the Manasaputras in this Fourth. There was a time in the Third Round correspondential to the arrival of sex on this earth. There was a time in the Third Round correspondential to what will happen in the future when sex will disappear in this Round. And so with all events through which we have passed and are to pass in this Fourth Round. Indeed, during the First Round, even, there was organized intelligence on this earth, not merely mindless entities. If you think that there was no intelligence of any kind in the First Round, it shows that you keep your thoughts restricted too much to human evolution. But there are the different evolutions of the Dhyan-Chohanic Kingdoms; and even in the First Round there were human beings. Never mind what the bodies were; that is of no importance. There were beings with will-power, who thought and felt. They were few, to be sure, but they did exist; and they were the star-sons, the Sons of the Firemist spoken of by H.P.B., the first grand Adepts on this earth and indeed on the other globes of our chain. There were very few because this was the First Round. There were more in the Second; more in the Third; more in the Fourth. There will be still more in the Fifth, and so forth; because every new Round raises every Kingdom one cosmic sub-sub-plane higher on the evolutionary scale. So much for that comment.

MAN-BEARING GLOBES It is true that globes in a Solar System, or Planetary Chain too - it is the same thing really - can advance so high in their evolutionary or emanational development that they have passed the stage where human beings or the human kingdom can find place on such globes of a chain, because they have passed high above the human kingdom - the whole chain has. But that is only half the picture. The other reason why there are non-manbearing globes, that is chains in our Solar System which are not man-bearing, is that these other, forming the other part of the picture, have not yet reached the point where their lifewaves have risen to the human stage. Do you see? So then, the idea is that every globe in a planetary chain has been, is, or will be, man-bearing some time, some time. Those not yet having reached the stage of manbearing produce the lower kingdoms, or some of them. Those which have evolved beyond or higher than the possibility of bringing the human kingdom on their globes bear the races of the Dhyan-Chohans exclusively, and beings even beyond those last. So there are man-bearing chains or globes in our Solar System, and there are those which are non-man-bearing. As a matter of fact, you can say the same thing about any kingdom. There are globes in our chain which bear Dhyan-Chohans, as an example, and others which do not bear Dhyan-Chohans. - Theosophical Forum, Feb., 1942 -----------------Transactions of the Point Loma Lodge -- XIX Comments by Dr. de Purucker at the close of the Sunday evening Lodge program [See Letters XXIIIA and XXIIIB, Question and Answer No. 8. - Eds] ALL THINGS CONTRIBUTE TO ALL THINGS IT is the teaching of the God-Wisdom that every member of the Solar System is a living entity, a god imbodied. Such is the sun, such is every planet, such is every comet. Furthermore, the Solar System itself as a whole is an entity, precisely as our human body is an entity as a whole, a unit, yet containing within itself different organs, each such organ itself being an individual, a unit, a living entity with a consciousness of its own kind. Do you see what this means? That just as our body, an organic entity itself, is helped in being such by the different organs, the heart, the brain, the kidneys, the liver, the stomach, and so forth, so the Solar System, itself an organic entity, is aided in being such by all the organic units within it: the sun, the planets, the comets, and so forth. They all cooperate to produce a greater thing, i.e., the Solar Kingdom, with the sun as its king or chief. What deduction must we draw from this? That, cooperating as all these units do towards a common end, nothing can be done properly in the Solar System if a single one of these bodies refuses cooperative action and union in effort; and `union' here does not mean two or three organs joining to oppose two or three other organs. It means all organic units without a single exception cooperating for the common universal good. If there is not this cooperation, if, for instance, one single organ were to die, then the whole organism dies, because the harmony and symmetry of the greater unit is interrupted, killed, stopped. It is just the same with the human body. Suppose my heart stopped working, died - my

body would die. If my stomach disintegrated, my body would die; and similarly so with any other organ - even the skin or the tissues or the flesh or the bones; we need all these different things to make a complete and rightly functioning human body. So it is with the Solar System. Thus when we say that all things cooperate to produce all things, we may be referring to all things on this earth; but it may also mean that this earth in its turn cooperates with every other body in the Solar System to produce the proper effects on every other planet and on the sun. How about rain, for instance, and the other meteorological phenomena of this earth? How about storms of any kind; snow-storms, hail-storms, rain-storms, electric storms? Shall we say that only one thing in the Solar System produces these, whether it be sunspots or the planets, or perhaps one planet, as some astrologers quite wrongly say? No. All things work together to produce all things everywhere. Thus, when we come to answering the question: Are the sunspots the cause of the meteorological phenomena on this earth? the answer has to be no, because that would exclude all the other contributing causes and causers. The sunspots play their appropriate part; so does every planet. But what is the most important factor, the greatest cause in the production of these things on our earth? It is the earth itself. But the earth itself could not produce them unless it had the help of all the other cooperating or consentient gods, as the Greeks and Romans phrased it; in other words of the sun, the planets, the comets. What makes heat? What makes rain? What makes cold on this earth? Magnetism, to be sure; electricity, to be sure. But these are the forces. What makes these things fundamentally? The vitality of the earth cooperating with the vitality received from the other planets, and from the sun and the comets. All things cooperate to make all things. A key, a master-key. Actually, if you want the mechanical cause, the immediate cause, that is, the cause just preceding the effect - not the first cause - it is the dilatation of the earth's atmosphere and its contraction. The atmosphere of the earth is one of the most marvelous organs of our Mother-Earth. Look upon the earth as a living being, or as the Latins would say, an animal (from the Latin word anima, meaning life). Animal in Latin means a living being, a human or beast, for instance. Even a plant is an `animal' in this sense, only very feebly so; because anima meant, more particularly, what in Theosophy is called the animal soul - the nephesh of the Qabbalah. The earth is constantly surcharged with vital power. There are times when it is almost bursting, and the inner power must have an escape; it must be discharged, because the pressure of the whole Solar System is behind it. Take the instance of earthquakes; they are my pet horror, they just turn my blood cold because I am always thinking of the damage to human beings, and the wretchedness that they can cause; yet they are one of the greatest blessings, for the earth is releasing energy which could otherwise become devastatingly explosive. Our earth would simply burst; it would blow up, if there were not these periodic discharges. It is like the vitality that a human being is constantly throwing forth - by his walking, by his speaking, by his moving, by the circulation of his blood. Every time he lifts a finger he is throwing off energy. Suppose all the energy that the body produces could by some magic be clamped down and kept in the body, the body would explode, simply blow up; the tissues would be torn apart.

Of course there is the other side of the picture: if the expenditure of energy is too great, then you have the other extreme, and you have disease or death. But why does the human body do this? It is doing in its own small sphere, in its own small line, what the planets are doing, contributing its quota to the vitality of the earth; and this vitality comes into the human body from above, and from what passes in and out in the exchange of the life-atoms amongst us all. All things contribute to all things; they receive and give constantly.* ---------------* So strangely does the human mind wander into vagaries of imagination, that I find it needful to append this footnote lest the words in the text above be misunderstood by thoughtless or careless people as a kind of indirect endorsement in our human life of the dissipation of vital human forces through immorality or in some other way. Such misunderstanding of my meaning would be so utterly monstrous, so utterly contrary to every teaching of Theosophy and Occultism, that on no few occasions have I asked myself just how far I can go in stating even simple occult facts, when, as experience has shown me, one or two or more hearers might wrongly take the sense or the significance of what I was trying to say. I state here without qualification, that any dissipation of the vital powers of the human body or mind in immorality of any form, immediately hastens the approaches of disease and old age, because wearing the body out, and because unnatural. Such dissipation of vitality would be a wilful waste of the life-forces, thus cooperating with the work of the Destroyers. Not only would such waste invite disease and premature senility, but even worse than this would be its effect on the moral stamina and ethical instinct of the human mind, and could in an extreme case result in moral and intellectual degeneration. Let it be stated that self-control, strict moral conduct and self-forgetfulness are the path of Theosophical occultism, and this is stated without any qualifications whatsoever. Any misuse whatsoever or in any manner of vital power, even such as over-eating or gluttony, drunkenness, or anything along any line causing the body extra strain or depletion is a waste of vital power and therefore has a tendency to bring on disease, speedy old age, and as above hinted, even worse things in its train. --------------Do you realize that there is more vitality in the body in old age than there is in youth? Old age is not a cause of deprivation of vitality; it is a case of too much vitality. The body cannot build up fast enough. The intense life of the adult human being is slowly wrecking the body, causing it to age. The body cannot build fast enough. The life-pulsations are quicker than the building power. Consequently you get the greying hair, the failing eyesight, the failing hearing, and all the phenomena that age brings. Health is simply balance; and the longer you can keep in health the longer you live - if you want to! If it is advisable! Some people seem to think that a long life is a mark of sanctity. It is very often not just so. Sometimes the grossest people are the longest-lived. There is an old Latin proverb which says: "The gods love those who die young," meaning the gods take those they love when they are young -not when the gods are young, but when those they take are young. The gods themselves are perennially young. Now to return to the matter of the earth's atmosphere, which is continually dilating

or expanding. We know that when this expansion occurs we have the dropping of the barometer, that sensitive instrument we have learned how to build which registers the airpressure. It is a sign of rain. And we all know the chill in the air that follows a rain-storm even in the summertime. We say "It cooled the air." The opposite effect, heat, is produced when the atmosphere condenses or contracts, and the greater pressure on the barometer causes it to go up. "Fair weather," we say, "and heat," - relative heat according to the season, of course. What causes these contractions and dilatations of the earth's atmosphere? Mainly the periodic, vital pulsations in the earth itself. But these pulsations are intimately connected every instant of time, without a second's interruption, with all the other bodies of the Solar System. All things contribute to all things. The sun and all the planets are connected with the dilatations and contractions of the earth's atmosphere. Thus far the astrologers are perfectly right. But to say that it is the planets which make these things, that the planets are the sole cause, that is all wrong. All things contribute to all things; the sun and planets give me health; they give me disease. But so do I give myself both health and disease. All things contribute to all things. That is the master-key. Now these contractions, or pressures as the modern scientific phraseology has it, of the atmosphere, and these dilatations of the atmosphere, are mainly caused by the actual meteoric continent surrounding our globe like a thick shell. You will say, "But how can it be such a thick shell when we can see right through it; we can see the sun and the stars and the clouds?" Suppose instead of my present eyesight I had an electric eye. Why then I could look right along a copper wire. Such things as copper and iron would be transparent to me. But with my present eyesight I cannot see through a copper wire or along a 5000 mile stretch of copper wire because I have not the electric eye. On the other hand, with the electric eye I could not see things I now see. The fact is that our eyesight has been evolved by Nature, or, if you like, evolved by Karman, so that we can look right through this meteoric mass surrounding our earth like a shell; and all we see of it is what we call the blue of the sky. That is the real explanation of the blue of the sky. The scientific theory that it is very fine dust mostly from earth which intercepts the blue rays of the solar spectrum, might be called a weak, partial explanation. I dare not omit even this, because if I did my explanation would be by so much imperfect. There is some truth in it, but to say that it is the cause of the blue of the sky is not true, because that excludes everything else. All the other planets except Mars are likewise, each one, surrounded with its own meteoric continent. Science knows this and calls them the clouds of the different planets. Call them clouds if you want to. Say that they are clouds of cosmic dust and dust from the respective planets. All right; but they are actually mostly interstellar and interplanetary meteoric dust. Everyone of the planets in our Solar System except Mars, as I have said, is surrounded by such a continent of meteoric dust; and even Mars has a thin gauzy veil of meteoric matter surrounding it. Mars is different from the others because it is in obscuration at present; and on Globe D of the Martian Chain the forces of attraction holding the meteoric continent together have been relaxed, as it were. These magnetic and electric forces surrounding Mars are weak because the meteoric continent around Globe D of Mars has been more or less dissipated throughout space - not quite, but almost. That is the reason we can catch just glimpses of the Martian Globe; but even those glimpses are still uncertain. Our astronomers are not sure that what some see others see. You know the interminable dispute aroused by the discovery of the so-called canals of Mars

which Professor Lowell of Flagstaff, Arizona, and others have quite believed so long; and which others deny. Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer, was the first to speak of these lines years and years ago, and as they seemed to him to resemble canals, he called them canali, the Italian word for canals or channels of any kind; and then people got the idea, because they took the word in the English sense of water-courses, that they must be watercourses. That is still not proved; it may be and it may not be. I do not care to say anything more about that. Please remember this, Companions; The Solar System is a living being, of which the sun is both the brain and the heart. The different planets are the organs of this organic entity. Our earth is one. They all work together to produce the Solar System as an organism, or a group of organs. All things contribute to all things. Nothing happens on this earth, from the waving of a frond of fern in the wind to the most awful earthquake the world has ever known, except by such cooperating cosmic agency. All are produced mainly by the earth, but with the cooperation of the sun and moon, the planets and comets, for this organic entity moves in synchronous measures of destiny. All things contribute to all things. The birth of every baby is produced by the Solar System, by the earth, especially by the mother; yet all things contribute to produce that baby. The stars do have their effect upon us, most undoubtedly so; and the sun and planets and comets, because the Solar System is an organic living being, and therefore everything within it anywhere is affected by everything within it everywhere. Surely this is true; and it is a wonderful picture. - March, 1942 --------------------------------Transactions of the Point Loma Lodge - XX Comments by Dr. de Purucker at the close of the Sunday evening Lodge program Studies in "The Mahatma Letters" "THE TOWER OF INFINITE THOUGHT" For countless generations hath the adept builded a fane of imperishable rocks, a giant's Tower of INFINITE THOUGHT, wherein the Titan dwelt, and will yet, if need be, dwell alone, emerging from it but at the end of every cycle, to invite the elect of mankind to cooperate with him and help in his turn enlighten superstitious man. And we will go on in that periodical work of ours; we will not allow ourselves to be baffled in our philanthropic attempts until that day when the foundations of a new continent of thought are so firmly built that no amount of opposition and ignorant malice guided by the Brethren of the Shadow will be found to prevail. - The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, Letter IX, p. 51. THESE are the words of a Master of Wisdom, and I want you to hearken to them and try to get the inner meaning of them, for they are really godlike. A great intellect composed them. What is this Tower of Infinite Thought? It is the general Cosmic Intelligence, here particularized as the hierarchies of the Dhyani-Chohans, the Cosmic Spirits, the Lords of Meditation and Cosmic Wisdom. We call them the hierarchies of the Sons of Light,

representing the consciousness-side of the universe. They are innumerable, extending from even below man up through countless hierarchies, stretching indeed to Infinity. This is the Tower of Infinite Thought, in which the cosmic Titans dwell and think and live and plan. These cosmic Titans are the aggregate of the cosmic logoi, the cosmic spirits, an army of the suns of light and life. And from this inexhaustible fount of all perfect wisdom and perfect love, from time to time there issue forth great souls who take imbodiment among men, and guide and lead and help and aid and inspire, and raise not only us superstitious and fallible men, but all beings less than they, for Nature is one organic unity. What is above in the highest is shadowed in the lowest, for there is but one cosmic law, because there is but one cosmic intelligence and one cosmic life; and therefore that law, that life, that intelligence, prevails throughout. So that, as you see, what is here below, is but a shadow or a copy from a pattern of what is above; and the whole secret of life, and the whole secret of living, is to become at one in consciousness and in feeling, in spirit and in soul, with that pattern of Infinite Thought. No grander words I should think have ever issued from human lips. No more sublime conceptions have ever been penned, than those contained in the extracts from the Master's communication that have been read to you. They are a new gospel of thought and of love, a new dispensation of human effort; and a man must be blind who fails to sense and to feel the immense import, the grand content, enwrapped in these human words. When the times are not propitious, or the times are not right, then the adepts - never indeed abandon mankind to its hopeless fate; there remain on earth at least the Brotherhood of the Mahatmans or Masters of Wisdom and Compassion. They inspire and instill intimations of wonder and of grandeur in sensitive and receptive human souls. But if the times are not right for a larger spreading of the Wisdom of the Gods, then for the time being they retire upwards and inwards into this Tower of Infinite Thought, and await there until the time is ripening once more so that they may once again work publicly, or semipublicly, among us. We too, even now in our smallness and weakness, inhabit this Tower of Infinite Thought. And precisely as the Masters do when the times are not propitious or not ripe for a new installment of the God-Wisdom of Infinitude, we too, although our hand is always outstretched ready to impart what little we ourselves have taken by strength of the Kingdom of Heaven, when the times are not ripe, precisely like our own Teachers, we retire into the higher consciousness, and to outward appearance may seem to have retired into silence and quiet. But that is only so to the outer seeming. The Masters of Wisdom, the Adepts, simply retire when the times are not ripe for them to do their greatest work among men. They do what they can, and what human karman or destiny will allow them to do; but to a certain extent, they ascend, vanish from the outer seeming, to become only the more active and the grander in works of beneficence on the inner planes. And when the times become ripe, when men through suffering and sorrow, pain and racking care, once more find their hearts yearning for a greater light, and for the comfort which is never gained by egoisms, but given only by the spirit - when men then make the inner call, soundless yet ringing unto the very spheres of light, then Those, hitherto silent but watching and waiting in the Tower of Infinite Thought, from their azure thrones, so to speak, bend a listening ear; and if the call is strong enough, if it be pure enough, impersonal enough, they leave the portals of the inner invisible realms

to enter these portals of our universe, and appear amongst us and guide and teach and comfort and solace and bring peace. How great is the inspiration to be derived from this teaching of the God-Wisdom we today call Theosophy: that the universe is not chaotic nor insane, but is an organism guided and controlled from within outwards, not only by infinite and omniscient cosmic intelligence - intelligences rather - but by cosmic love. For love is the cement of the universe and accounts for the orderliness of the universe, and its harmony and unity that every one who has the seeing eye may discern in all around him. Scientists speak of these orderlinesses as the laws of nature, as manifested in the cosmic bodies and their inhabitants, as manifested in their times and places and regularities. How wonderful likewise is the feeling that the man who trains himself for it may enter into touch, into communication, with these grander ones in evolution above him, above him only now, because some day he shall evolve to become like unto them, divine as they are; and they themselves shall have passed upwards and onwards to divinities still more remote to us. There is a path which is steep, which is thorny, but it leads to the very heart of the universe. Anyone, any child of nature, may climb this path. Anyone who ventures to try to find it may take the first steps upon it; and these first steps may be followed by others. What a blessing to know this! What an inspiration for the future that our destiny lies in our hands! Nought shall stay, nought can prevent, no outer god nor inner, can stem the inspiration welling up from the deepest resources of the human spirit, because that human spirit is but a spark of the cosmic divine. How beautiful, how inspiring, how simply pregnant with as yet undisclosed significance, is this phrase: the Tower of Infinite Thought! It is a god-like phrase, and only a semi-god-man or a god-man could have so worded his sublime conceiving. What magic vistas of inner realms of faery, true faery, do these wonderful words suggest to reverent minds. This Tower of Infinite Thought, is likewise the Tower of Infinite Love, for it is infilled with love, and its inhabitants are the exponents of love. From time to time its portals open and Teachers from these inner realms come amongst us. Such was the Lord Gautama, the Buddha; such was the Avatara Jesus; such was Krishna; such were a multitude of others whose names are known even in the Occident to every educated man. No wonder a grateful humanity has called them Sons of God, or children of the gods - a phrase which I prefer; for such indeed they are, just as we humans likewise are offsprings of the gods, our forebears and forerunners on the evolutionary path, leading upwards and inwards forever to divinity. These Teachers of men have themselves been worshipped as gods by men who forget the injunctions to take the message and worship it, but not to worship the bringer. Therein lies grandeur; for it is, after all, the thought of a man which is powerful, not the mouth through which the thought pours forth. It is the love in a man's heart which makes him sublime, not the mouth which declares it. I think that one of the proofs that these Great Ones who have lived amongst us and who will come again and again and again - I think one of the proofs of their divinity is precisely the fact that they accepted nought for themselves, but called attention to their teachings only. How beautiful to the hearts of men are they who come bringing tidings of great joy. Their faces are suffused with the dawn of a newer, a grander, a more beautiful age. For they are its prophets and its heralds, harbingers of a new time to come, when instead of enlarging quarrel and war, men shall learn that the ways of peace are the ways of strength

and of power and of wisdom and of plenty and of riches. - April, 1942 -----------------------------Transactions of the Point Loma Lodge - XXI Comments by Dr. de Purucker at the close of the Sunday evening Lodge program Studies in "The Mahatma Letters" IS IT NECESSARY TO EXPERIENCE EVIL? [The important teaching given below was called forth after a discussion of pages 7478, during which the question was asked whether the colorless and negative characters we sometimes meet are those who have not yet been awakened by the experiencing of evil in earth-lives. - Eds.] It is no longer necessary for human beings to go down into the intellectual and moral mire and absorb it, for the simple reason that we are now on the upward arc. We have passed the grossest point in human evolution. Up to that point it was necessary for human monads to have every experience that consciousness, slowly evolving, could take unto itself in order to make that consciousness rounded out, full, rich with experience and marked with suffering so greatly that sympathy and pity and compassion have waked in the heart when that heart sees the suffering of others. Hence the gray and feckless characters that we see around us are not they who lack experience in the drinking of the evil cup of filth. We are now on the upward arc. These gray, colorless characters, often weak and with attributes which arouse no admiration in any outstanding human being, are unfortunate cases, or rather cases of unfortunate human beings, who are passing through a resting time psychologically speaking, on this plane. Something in their past destiny has made this present incarnation of theirs one in which they are somnolent, resting, asleep, making no especial mark on the world, "neither hot nor cold, only lukewarm." But mark you: in the past spiritual and intellectual and psychological history of these entities, heaven knows how many times they have shaken the gates of Heaven with their aspirations and their cries of triumph. Heaven knows how many times on earth they have been victors in well fought fights. Let us not forget that. Let us not condemn because to us of a happier destiny in this life, certain fellow human beings are less strong than we are in opposing temptation, and in refusing to be swept along in the easy currents of the world's life. But here is my point: Let it never be said that Theosophists teach that now the human race is in need of deliberate, willful entering into the currents of evil-doing in order to assuage passion, to experience evil and by learning it, to surmount it. All that part of our destiny has been gone through. Our destiny now is to conquer the remaining Atlantean elements of impulse and appetite, no longer to indulge them but to surmount them, and to begin our march up that ladder of life, higher and higher; for we are now on the Ascending Arc! It was very different before the beginning of the Fourth Round, or what comes to the same thing, before the middle of the Fourth Round, or the middle of the Fourth Race. Then

Monads were descending into matter, dropping, attracted by it, drawn into it; and it was necessary for them to gain experience; but they did so automatically, unconsciously, without purposive exercise of will-power, and not with purposeful self-consciousness, but somewhat as little children do through ignorance, learning that if the hand is put in the fire, burning follows, learning that if you put your finger in a closing door, it will be severely pinched or squeezed. They had to learn just as the animals; and little children are learning through experience. But we are adults, and just so with the human monads when they attained the central point of the Fourth Round. Then the descent stopped. Everything after that, by the laws of nature, is on the Ascending Arc, and we should work with nature and be one with her, obey her laws by arising with her. Then we can become not merely the champions of right and the forerunners and heralds of justice, but we shall ourselves be exemplifications of the divinity we teach. It is no longer necessary for any human being ever to think at any time that he must experience evil-doing for the sake of going upwards. All that we have been through in the past. We have had enough of that. Too much. Now our line is upward, ad astra, to the stars. Now we are on the upward path; and these colorless characters are simply they who, just as we occasionally may rise from a night's sleep to face a negative and apparently purposeless day; feeling tired and worn out because we have over-eaten or our health is not of the best, and we do not feel like facing difficulties, and we do not want to argue, we want to be left in peace - we have a day of intellectual colorlessness; so these egos have a life of it. They are resting, they are sleeping. But perhaps in the very last life they rose to occasions like heroes, or it may be two or three lives ago; and perhaps in the life to come heroism will again shine out from their hearts. No one can lay down automatic quantitative durations in things like this, for every individual case is dependent upon the individual destiny or karman of the human ego. - May, 1942 ----------------------Transactions of the Headquarters Lodge - XXII Comments by Dr. de Purucker at the close of the Sunday evening Lodge program Studies in "The Mahatma Letters" AVALOKITESVARA - THE DIVINE PRESENCE (See Letter No. LIX, pages 343-345) MAHAYANA Buddhism, which is mainly the form studied in Tibet today, as it has been for centuries past, recognises three distinct entities or hierarchical Logoi in the Buddhists' hierarchy of spirit. They are the Buddha Amitabha or the Buddha of Boundless Light, then Alaya, then Avalokitesvara. Alaya means the spirit-source of all, the garment or clothing of the boundless light; matter cosmic or infinitesimal in nature. Out of it spring the multitudinous rays, as rays of light leave the sun for instance; and each ray is itself a being. Avalokitesvara does not mean "the Lord looking down," as Rhys Davids translates it, in direct violation of the elementary rules of Sanskrit grammar. Ava means `down,' lokita

is the past participle passive of the Sanskrit verbal root lok, `to see,' hence meaning `seen.' Iswara means `Lord.' So Avalokitesvara means, paraphrased somewhat, "the Lord who is beheld everywhere," the cosmic light, the cosmic spirit, in which we live and move and have our being, whose very essence, whose very light, thrills and burns in every human soul, the spark within every human being. It is the immanence or the constant presence of divinity around us, in everything, seen down here in all its works, pre-eminently for humans in man; the most evolved vehicle of this divine presence. Compare this wonderful Buddhist triad of Tibet, which is likewise our own, with the Christian trinity, degenerated and grossly transmogrified as this latter is through centuries of theologic and scholastic mishandling because of misunderstanding. We find that Amitabha, the Boundless Light, corresponds to the Father in the Christian Trinity, the Cosmic Father or Abstract Spirit, the Pythagorean monad of monads, the source - in silence to us, and darkness to us - of all the monads emanating from it, streaming from it, born from it through the second logos, Alaya, the Spirit, which in original Christian teaching was feminine, the productive and generative power in nature, in spiritual matters as well as material, the mother of all, the fosterer of all, the preserver of all. And Avalokitesvara corresponds to the original third Person of the Christian Trinity, the Son, the cosmic or Third Logos. In Brahmanism the triad runs: Parabrahman or Brahman, Pradhana or Mulaprakriti, Mahat. When manifesting in individual monads such as a human being, the trinity is Amitabha, Atman; Alaya or Mahakasa, Buddhi; Avalokitesvara, Manas; for Manas is a direct ray from the cosmic Alaya, and our Atman, a direct ray from the Paramatman, the cosmic Atman, or Brahman or Parabrahman, or the Father. Thus we have Father, Spirit or Holy Ghost, and Son - the original Christian trinity which the Latin Church finally succeeded in turning around into Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, making the Son or Logos precede the Mother from which it is born! So, as the Masters pointed out in the last part of the letter we have been studying, Avalokitesvara has its temple in the Universe around us. It is the creative Logos, the Third Logos, the one closest to us as it were, from which we all spring as rays from a cosmic sun, which is the divine presence in nature, which is the divine presence in the human manasic part, emanating of course from Atman or Amitabha; for the Son, is he not the Son of his Father? Is not Manas through Buddhi the offspring of Atman? Is not Mahat through Alaya or Mahakasa or Pradhana - all names for the same thing - the offspring of Adi-Buddha, or if you wish Paramatman or Brahman or Parabrahman? So Avalokitesvara is the divine presence around us everywhere, which every sensitive human soul can feel continuously, day and night, even when we are in dreamland or when imbodied on Earth. And that same divine presence is in the human breast, because the human breast, even the human body, is a microcosmical representation on this plane of the universe. No wonder the ancients had their Holy of Holies in every temple - originally a beautiful metaphor and a suggestive one when understood by those who came to the temple to worship the divine in purity of heart and with utmost reverence wherein as in the universe, the divine presence dwells. It was a symbol; so that when one approached the Holy of Holies, shoes were cast from the feet, the garments were wiped, the heart was raised, the mind was elevated; for the worshipers in their reverent raising of their own spirits upwards entered into the Presence, even the Presence Divine. That Presence is Avalokitesvara; and its ray in us through the Atman is the Higher Manas, illuminated by Buddhi, Buddhi in its turn infilled with the divine light of Atman. For

the Father dwelleth in the Mother, and the Mother giveth birth to the Holy Son, and the three are one and yet three, each distinct from the other. Very simple to understand, but amazingly difficult to attain a deeper realization of that marvel! Yet it is wonderful to know and to strive upwards towards. Would that every man and woman realized that every human breast is such a Holy of Holies; for when the man, through his own self-discipline and cultivation of the highest within him by forgetting himself in service to all others, thus sinking the unit into the all, thus becoming even then relatively divine, becomes so overpowerfully strong that nothing less than It will ever satisfy, then he yearns upward, he opens the portals of his holier being, and the light streams in and fills the Holy of Holies within his breast. Then the man is transfigured, he is a Christ, he is a Bodhisattva, for the time being. That was the effect of successful initiation, just that. Sometimes the aura of the event remained with the man for days, it may be weeks, and his very body at the time was surrounded with light. He was spoken of as being clothed with the solar splendor, the sun being a symbol of Atman, as he is in his kingdom; and our own inner God being the sun, the inner God of our own divinity, our Father in Heaven, that ray from the cosmic Avalokitesvara. I think it is just here that we find the reason why the Tibetan esoterics and mystics, Initiates, and the common people - by that I mean the mass of the people, the hard working, kindly, good-natured, loving, aspiring men of the multitude - why they all look upon the Bodhisattvas with deeper reverence and a more fervent love than they do even upon the Buddhas. For the Buddhas have achieved, they have left these spheres. Behind them remains their glory as a spiritual influence. But the Bodhisattvas are still men, not yet Buddhas, men whose life is consecrated to making Avalokitesvara a living power in the world through themselves. This is why it is the Bodhisattvas that the multitudes love. They deeply revere the Buddhas as having gone on and shown the way, but they love with an exalted human devotion the Bodhisattvas who remain behind with arms outstretched to help in pity. No wonder they love the Bodhisattvas, for he who brings Avalokitesvara to live in this Holy of Holies in the human breast, becomes more than man. No wonder he is loved and revered and trusted. I think these thoughts are beautiful beyond description. Their sublimity does not blind us, for it is like divinity clothing itself in human habiliments, in human apparel, and therefore becoming understandable to us humans. It is like seeing humanity clothed with divinity. The Bodhisattvas are not so abstract, so seemingly far away, as are the Buddhas. So true is this psychology that to it is due, to it alone I believe, all the success of early Christianity, that it taught the very ancient doctrine which had become almost forgotten in the so-called pagan world, and it was this: that a man lived who had been infilled with divinity, and that he came amongst us and taught and showed the way and loved us all so greatly that he laid down his life and all that was in him so that others seeing might follow on the path - the typical Bodhisattva, the typical Christ. I think that one thing alone captured for Christianity those who joined the Christian Church. But how very old is this doctrine of beauty and inspiration! The Christians received it from the Orient. It is far older than the so-called enduring mountains, for when they were still sea-slime, not yet having been raised, these doctrines were taught among men in other continents, in other ages, in other Root-Races, these same wondrous teachings of cosmic origin.

See the difference between the Christian theological idea of Avalokitesvara as wrongly translated by Rhys Davids and others as being the "Lord who looks down," something "up there" and apart and away, as compared with the real meaning: The Lord here amongst us, the Lord of pity, human and yet divine, the Divine Presence surrounding us everywhere, which makes the human breast recognising this the human Holy of Holies. Christians too have that intuition. Let me close with a poem that illustrates the point and which I learned when I was a boy. I have several times recited it here. It was written many years ago by a Christian clergyman, and I think I quote accurately: A Parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple To be nearer God, so that he might Hand down God's word to his people. In sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven; And he cast this down on his peoples' heads Twice one day in seven. In his age God cried: "Come down and die." And he cried out from the steeple, Where art thou, Lord? And the Lord replied, "Down here among my people." - August, 1942 -------------------------------Transactions of the Headquarters Lodge - XXIII Comments by Dr. de Purucker at the close of the Sunday evening Lodge program Studies in "The Mahatma Letters" (See Letter No. XV, pages 97-9) ELEMENTALS AND ELEMENTARIES I would like to make a comment upon the statement quoted from The Mahatma Letters concerning the Teacher's observation that there are elementals which never become men. This tells us two things: (1) that elementals become men, and (2), that there is a certain class of elementals in our manvantara which will not have the time to become men during the remainder of the course of this manvantara. They won't have the time to run up the ladder of evolution through the different kingdoms until the human kingdom is reached. They will become men in the next manvantara or perhaps in the manvantara after that. Sometime they will be men. All elementals become men. Man as a kingdom is a goal which all kingdoms below the human look up to and aspire toward; and during the course of evolution every monad beneath the human stage is aspiring to evolve, is unfolding itself finally to become a human. In connexion with this I want to issue a word of warning; it may have struck most of you, perhaps not all. It is with regard to the word elementary and the apparent almost identity of meaning which H.P.B. or the Masters occasionally give to the two words

`elemental' and `elementary.' The reason was this: in the early days - and remember we are going back now to the very early days of the Theosophical Society - our vocabulary had not yet been sufficiently defined nor was it sufficiently extensive. During those early days words were used which were later dropped, such as the word `rings' in connexion with the rounds and races. The word `rings' finally passed out of theosophical use. Now the word `elementary' was taken in those early days by our theosophical writers, the Masters and H.P.B. pre-eminently, from the writings of the Kabbalists and also from the imperfect writings of Eliphas Levi, the French Abbe and Kabbalist. These Kabbalists meant by `elementary' several things, but generally - what we Theosophists now today call `elemental.' An elemental soul they called an elementary soul, or simply elementary for short. So therefore you will sometimes find the two words used indiscriminately. Words which were then used almost synonymously we nowadays do not use in that way. Later on, I think it was mainly due to H.P.B.'s work, `elementary' was set aside and given a specific technical meaning of its own which we now all understand. There is a peculiar meaning which we could even yet use in the word elementary - and by the way, in H.P.B.'s Theosophical Glossary if you will look under this word you will see what she has to say about just this point - there is a certain deeply significant and occult meaning which we could give to `elementary' quite apart from its technical meaning that we now give to it as a rule. We have to go back to the early Fire Philosophers who said that the elements of nature were filled with inhabitants. In other words, to phrase it as we would today, every cosmic plane has its own inhabitants fit for that cosmic plane, utterly unfit for any other cosmic plane; precisely as we men could not live under water as the fishes do or as the whale does. We are not fit for that milieu, that medium, that cosmic plane so to say. So by going back to this original meaning of the Fire Philosophers, which is quite a true meaning, we still today could say that an elementary in this other sense means an elemental soul, thus specifically described because defining it as climbing up the rungs of the ladder of life step by step upwards. At every step upwards it is a master, relatively at least, of what it has left below it, an elementary as to what is above it. That was really the way the Kabbalists and Eliphas Levi and the original Fire Philosophers spoke of what we now call the elementals or the beings or creatures or inhabitants of the seven fundamental cosmic elements, all of them on their way to become men, on their way as we are now to become super-men, and then gods, and then higher still. In this sense we are elementaries so far as the gods are concerned. They are elementaries so far as the super-gods are concerned. A great deal of confusion has arisen, I think, in the minds of some readers of this wonderful book that we are studying here, from not remembering these little facts of history, and that in those days the distinctions we now give to those two words, `elementals' and `elementaries,' had not yet been established. KAMA-RUPAS -THEIR FUTURE If you contrast the kama-rupa, which is our astral body after death, with our physical body, which is our physical body during this earth-life, you will realize that both are vehicles, both are enlivened by monads, or a center of consciousness, both disintegrate shortly after death. But the group of qualities which make my body, my physical me, are my physical skandhas. So my skandhas physically are my physical body as that body is. Just so with

regard to the skandhas of the kama-rupa. The kama-rupa is its own skandhas. Subtract those skandhas, which means qualities, attributes, the life-atoms thereof, and what have you? You have not anything. It is the grouping together of these skandhas and the lifeatoms through which they work, which form on the one hand the physical body in life or the corpse after death; and similarly the astral skandhas and others which inhere in the kamarupa after death, form the kama-rupa. Now then, is it not obvious that just as the life-atoms which made our physical bodies in a former life will return to us when we return to physical imbodiment, similarly and perhaps exactly is it with the kama-rupa. The Dweller on the Threshold is a kama-rupa so dense and heavy with matter that it lasts from one death over to the next rebirth of the entity coming back, and haunts the new, new-old man, the ego coming back to earth. That is an extreme case. But outside of extreme cases the life-atoms which form the kama-rupa are picked up by the human ego or monad as it approaches our earth, and the family into which it is to be born; and those kama-rupa life-atoms are gradually ingathered by the attraction of the ego over them, and them over it, until finally at some indefinite time, it may be in boyhood, it may not be until the boy becomes a man, it may not be even until quite late in life, the old kama-rupa life-atoms, and therefore the skandhas, have been reabsorbed by the new body, the new kama-rupa of the ego after it has come back after death. If you will reflect, you must realize that even our physical body - and the same goes for the kama rupa - could not hold together as a unit, in other words it could not be an entity, unless there were some holding power there. In other words there is even a monad of the physical body, and exactly so there is a monad of the kama-rupa. Remember, the kama-rupa is not a shell until it becomes a shell. Very shortly after death, the kama-rupa which has been built up during the life-time of the man, separates from the dead physical, and thereafter it begins its course in the astral light or in the kama-loka. And the monad is in that kama-rupa until the second death. Then the kama-rupa begins to fall apart because the soul so to speak has withdrawn itself, as the physical body begins to decay from the moment of physical death. And as long as the monad is in the physical body the latter is not a corpse. THE DEATH OF A SUN The Sun, or rather the period of its life referred to by the speaker quoting from the book, refers to the end of a Solar manvantara, or the opening drama of the Solar pralaya or dissolution time. After premonitory symptoms of decay which the Sun and those planets still surviving will experience, symptoms which it would be easy enough to describe to a certain extent if it were worthwhile - after certain premonitory symptoms of decay which may last for millions of years, the time will come when the Sun has reached its last instant of life. And then, like a shadow passing over the wall, like a flick of an eyelid, the extinction of an electric light, the Sun is dead. In exactly the same way a man dies. He may be slowly dying for years before he actually dies, but the moment of death is instant, quick as a snap of the fingers. The man may be on a sick bed for forty years, he may be dying during the last two or three years. Premonitory symptoms are there that any capable doctor can recognise. But when death comes - gone! It is the same with the globe, or in fact anything as far as I know. It is a very wise and pitiful provision of our great Parent, because dying is a very solemn

thing, and by solemn I do not mean anything arousing a sense of the ludicrous in us. It is a very important thing, so important that a weighty warning is issued by one of the Masters somewhere, I do not remember just at the moment where he tells us:* in a chamber of death to be as quiet as possible, for the mind of the dying man is collecting its consciousness, is passing inwards from all over the body, the brain and the heart and other organs, and that process should not be interrupted by noise. No weeping, no moving if possible, the utmost reverence and quiet. Death itself is peaceful. But of an evil person one cannot say the same; death can be hard to one whose whole affection, interest, love and yearning have been knitted into the physical life. And it is hard then simply because the snapping of the psychic bonds of attachment takes time and causes psychic and mental pain. But even then, death comes quickly when it does come. So it is with the Sun, although the premonitory symptoms may last for millions of years. Furthermore in this same wonderful book, ** the Master K.H. also answers in reply to the same question: Do the planets enter the Sun at the end of the Solar manvantara? He side-steps a bit because that is an esoteric doctrine which cannot be told openly, but says this: Yes, you may call the Sun the vertex of all the planets if you wish. The meaning is very clear. The point is here that the Sun, being as it is not only the heart but the mind of the Solar System as long as this Solar System remains a coherent unity, is therefore the governor of all the life-forces in that Solar-System - governor and controller, as well as source and final focus. Now as long as the Solar System lasts, the various planetary chains in the Solar System live and die, and are disimbodied and have their Nirvanic rest and then come back again for a new term, and do this several times; but their dead bodies remain --------------* The Mahatma Letters, p. 171. ** Op. cit., pp. 148, 176. --------------for a while as moons in the Solar spaces, each moon really following its former orbit, although a dead chain; but when the Sun reaches its final term in the Saurya or Solar manvantara, then the Sun draws into itself all the members of the Solar System, i.e., the various planetary chains, which however, before they enter the Sun, have died. The process is an analog of the manner in which a dying man for instance gathers together all the vital forces inwards and upwards before the moment of physical death supervenes and it is this ingathering of all the vital forces which brings about the phenomenon which we may call the death of our bodies. - October, 1942 ----------------------------TRANSACTIONS OF THE HEADQUARTERS LODGE - XXIV Studies in "The Mahatma Letters"

The following very important contribution to this series of Studies in THE MAHATMA LETTERS has been chosen from among several as yet unpublished comments made by Dr. de Purucker at the close of the Sunday evening Lodge programs. On this occasion, the meeting of September 28, 1941, he opened his remarks with some very interesting teaching about the polar magnetism of the earth; but as including this would make the present article too long, the Editors have reserved that portion of the talk for a future issue. The following remarks cover a discussion of Questions 11 and 12, page 146 of THE MAHATMA LETTERS and the Master's comments thereon to be found on pages 167-8. It is significant perhaps that this address fell on the Sunday evening exactly a year before Dr. de Purucker's passing. This and subsequent numbers of this series which may appear in the future in the FORUM had not been edited by Dr. de Purucker. UNFORTUNATELY this question about Jupiter and the Raja-Sun is not one that can be answered outside of esoteric teachings, and I am being perfectly frank about it. I think it would be a shame to deceive any honest and thoughtful student by side-stepping. The explanation of this matter is esoteric and wholly so. Therefore it cannot be touched upon in a gathering of this kind. Let us continue then to the subject of heat and cold on Jupiter. If our dear people would use the vast Theosophical learning which they have - and I am not speaking sarcastically - and apply it to this matter of planetary heat and cold, there would be no question or difficulty about it. They would not question, for instance, whether Jupiter is hotter than the earth or colder. Actually it is enormously hotter than our earth, and the modern scientific theory of its being a thousand or several thousand miles of block ice is simply based on the theory that, being so much farther from the sun than the earth is, it gets a great deal less heat from the sun and therefore de facto must be in a state of arctic chill. But you see our teaching is that the planets do not get their heat from the sun, or very little indeed. The sun is the great beating heart and brain of our system, the ultimate fountain and source of all the energy in the solar system as a whole. But with regard to this particular matter of heat and cold, it is the planets which keep themselves warm by their own vitality just as the human body does. It is not the sun which gives me my vital heat. The body creates its own vital heat. Of course if I go out in the sun and I feel the sun's rays pouring on my bare head, my head will be heated just as a plant will or a stone or anything else that is exposed to the sun's rays. But this is not heat coming from the sun, or very little in any case, perhaps twenty-five percent. What is actually taking place is that an enormous efflux of electric and magnetic power flows from the sun and sets in vibration whatever this electric power falls upon. It is just exactly as every electrician knows: if you pass an electric current through a length of wire filament you create an ohmage, that is a resistance, which makes the particles in the wire through which the electric current passes, and which possesses this high resisting power, to glow with heat. It is not the electricity which carries heat and deposits it there. Electricity is neither hot nor cold. It is the power of the electricity meeting this resistance, which throws the molecules and atoms of this resisting medium into intense vibration, more rapid than that of billions and quadrillions of vibrations in a human second, and therefore heats it. Electricity is not itself hot. Just so with the sun. The sun is neither hot nor cold as we understand heat and cold. It is an enormous body of force, forces, which include electricity and magnetism and consciousness and life and intelligence and other things.

No, what makes Jupiter so hot is its own vital power. What produces this vital power in a heated body? You could ask the same question about our earth. What makes the earth warm or cold? The vital power of the earth - call it magnetism if you wish - interacting and reacting with the magnetic continent above our heads: give and take, electric, electromagnetic or magnetic action and interaction. Just so does my own vital heat make my own body warm. If we had to trust to exterior heat to keep us alive and had no interior natural native vital heat of our own, if we went twenty feet from a fire we would freeze up in half an hour or in quarter of an hour. But such things do not occur. So it is with Jupiter. When planets are young, very young, they are enormously hotter than when they grow old. So it is even with the human being in a small degree. The hottest little dynamo that I have ever known is a baby. When boyhood is reached, your heat diminishes. When you reach manhood it grows still less: you are not then burning up in a constant fevered heat as a baby is. The teaching in the book shows us clearly. The Master says: Imagine if all our oceans were turned into ice and all our atmospheric fluids were turned into liquids; then, he says, just imagine the reverse process, and you will have some idea of what it is like on Jupiter, which means, so hot there that what would be our oceans are turned to gases and what we call metals, stones and such things are turned to fluids. Just the reverse process. And it is strange enough that that was originally the idea of science. The part played by the meteoric veils over every continent which is not in obscuration, as Mars is in obscuration - the part played by these meteoric continents is enormous. Some people don't like to accept this idea, although it is true, because they think it diminishes the dignity of our glorious Father Sun. It does not diminish his dignity. Because I have some vital heat of my own, that does not diminish the dignity of my teacher. Why should he be blamed or praised because I was born with vital heat? It is not a derogation of the dignity of the sun to say that the planets are living bodies also, living organisms. Now Mars is in obscuration, consequently the meteoric veil surrounding Globe D of the Mars-chain is very thin. When the life-waves begin to come into Mars again, as they will before many millions of years have passed, Mars also will begin again to be recovered with what scientists call heavy clouds, which are really veils of meteoric dust. Attracted psycho-vital-magnetically by the tremendously vital power of the planets which they surround, these meteoric continents perform somewhat the same function with regard to the planets that the human aura does for us. The meteoric veils are composed of dust, the effluvia rising up from the earth partly, but mainly and more largely from interplanetary and interstellar cosmic dust: the refuse, the sweat, the detritus, of other manvantaras, karmically drawn back, as life-atoms are drawn back to the reincarnating man. Then there is the matter of the sun's north and south poles spoken of in this letter. Now there is one point here that needs clearing. I do not remember the Master's exact words, but it is much to the effect that the sun does not take anything from anything else, nor does it give away anything of its own. A perfectly true statement when it is understood. But do not forget this other perfectly true statement, infinitely more important: that nothing exists unto itself alone. Everything helps everything else. Everything lives for everything else. No accident anywhere. And this is a cosmic statement of what we Theosophists call our beautiful doctrine of Universal Brotherhood. The Master means this: that the sun is not vampirized - in the sense that the word vampirize has. Nor is it a spendthrift, wasting

and dissipating its vital power by pouring it out needlessly through ages, as our modern science teaches it does, to be wasted in the abysmal deeps of pluperfectly frigid spaces. The solar system is a closed system in the sense that a human body is a closed system. Agreed that every human body is builded by life-atoms from all other human bodies; but so far as itself goes it is an entity, an individual with its own vital power, feeding itself, having naught to spare to give of vital power to other bodies unless given as a gift. And likewise not vampirizing, in the normal cases, other bodies. Vampirizing and giving of gifts happen, but these are not the normal state of things. Every atom is a closed system in that sense. Yet every atom is connected with every other atom in infinite space, feeding infinite space and infinite space feeding it. So then, the sun does not vampirize other suns, nor has it any vitality to spare for other suns. It has all it can do to feed its own orbs, the planets and other bodies within its kingdom. Just so my heart feeds my body and its organs and its molecules. It has nothing to spare for feeding other bodies -unless giving as a gift. Nor does my body vampirize other bodies. It does not steal vitality from other bodies, although in abnormal cases any human body can become vampirized; but we are not talking of exceptions and special cases; we are talking of the norm, the rule. Therefore, what happens is this: the sun follows the same cosmic law that every planet does. It is the heart of its kingdom and likewise the brain of its kingdom. If you look upon it as the heart for an instant, it receives the influxes of the rivers of lives, the circulations of the solar system, in its north pole. They pass through the heart of the sun, are cleansed and washed and leave at the south pole of the sun. Precisely as our earth and every other planet have each its receptor at the north pole, and its ejector or vent at the south pole. Why, even the ancient Greeks taught this. Do you remember Eolus and the cave of the winds? The cave of the winds was the earth, and the winds were the winds of the spirit, the circulations of the universe figurated as winds: a cave of which the north gate was made of horn through which the gods descend - and through which they ascend also, but mainly descend. And the south gate of the earth, or of the cave of the winds, was made of ivory, signifying the elephants of the south, as the horn does the tusks of the animals of the north. And out of the south gate go the horde of men. So said the ancients. Why, the occult teaching is simply expressed here without a veil. In other words, the earth feeds itself physically, magnetically, psychically, spiritually, through the north pole. The currents sweep through the earth - every word here is worth a volume - and leave by the south pole. So it is with the sun. That is the way the sun feeds its family: just as the heart feeds the body. It sends out its blood through the south pole, as it were, and after the circulation around the body has taken place, it receives it in again at the north pole. Fascinating subject! So be careful how you read and construe. Don't let a single statement given by the Master as an answer to a very limited and specific question cover all the horizon of your thought regarding other things. In other words use your common sense. So now, Companions, let me close my own remarks on an expression of pleasure that I always feel after hearkening to the words of those who make really wonderful addresses from the platform and the equally wonderful contributions from the auditorium. It just warms every cockle of my heart to see the progress that you dear fellow-students have made. I think it is beautiful, and it fills me with reverence. I think you deserve to know

what I feel about these things. Remember this, and then I go: All the laws of nature, so called, are but the play of conscious and semi-conscious forces. Therefore by their utter consistency and invariability they are called by us the laws of nature. These forces of nature are fluids emanating from great cosmic hearts beating, hearts sending the life blood, each one of its own especial and particular essence, force, spirit, to the farthest reaches that it can contain. We live not only in the presence of divinities, but are in very truth their children. We are builded of them and from them. Human parents are away, far away and distant when compared with the utterly infinite, infinitely intimate because identical relations and ties that exist between these great parents and us their children. Electricity, or magnetism, its alter ego, for instance, is but the fluid efflux from a cosmic entity, a being - of our own solar system in our case, because we are in this solar system. Heat likewise; all the real forces of nature are such. What is gravity? Just the same. We call it love. Some day when science will have learned that gravity is bipolar as electricity and magnetism are, we may perhaps see returning the wisdom of the old Greek Empedocles who taught in his day that the universe is held in its courses and in its plans of beauty and harmony because of the two great cosmic powers, love and hate as they translate it. It is not a good translation. Attraction and repulsion: better but not good. You might perhaps say love and repulsion; hate is not a good word. Marvelous thoughts! - Good night, Companions! ----------------------All the emotions of your soul, all the movements of your intellect, on a cosmic scale and in spiritual qualities, exist in the gods. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, Nov., 1942 -----------------TRANSACTIONS OF THE HEADQUARTERS LODGE - XXV Studies in "The Mahatma Letters" This series of talks was given by Dr. de Purucker at the close of the Lodge meetings, mainly in 1941, when Headquarters Lodge was studying The Mahatma Letters. Stenographic reports of several more of these are in the hands of the editors and will be transcribed and published in issues of the FORUM early in 1943. COMETS AND METEORS I WOULD never state that meteorites are fragments of disintegrated comets, nor indeed that they are cometary material at all. When you reflect that comets or cometary material are but one stage or degree less ethereal than is a nebula, you will realize that the fundamental idea here is wrong. It is perfectly true, however, that comets gather unto themselves in their peregrinations through cosmic and solar space, the waste-material of the universe. They accrete these to themselves by attraction, and often lose them because when they pass by a sun, the solar attraction for such material things is heavy, much stronger than the very weak attraction that the comets exercise. Reflect that any comet, even the largest known comets, are composed of material

so exceedingly fine, so ethereal, that Halley's comet, for instance, one of the largest ever known perhaps, could be packed in a hand-bag and the hand-bag would not be filled; and yet some of these comets stretch for millions and millions and millions of miles, if you include the head and the tail. Returning to meteorites: what then are these bodies? They are the waste-material, the ejecta, of former suns; and hereby hangs another wonderful tale which would take me several hours even to sketch if it were only to make that statement fully comprehensible. Perhaps I should remark that while a sun in its lifetime is extremely ethereal, at its heart even spiritual, as it approaches its end, it becomes much more concrete, thick, heavy, dense, and as we Theosophists say, material, until, just before the last flicker of solar life passes out, and the sun dies or becomes extinct, all that remains is a relatively heavy body. Then with the last flicker of the solar life it passes like a shadow over a sun-lighted wall, and the living center is dead: "The Sun is dead. Long live the Sun!" At death it leaves behind a body which immediately bursts into innumerable fragments, some atomic and some much larger; and these ejecta are scattered through solar and stellar space to be swept up in later aeons not only by the reimbodiment of the sun which has just died, but by other suns, and even other planets, as well as occasionally by comets. These meteorites contain many materials found also in our earth: iron, nickel, traces of copper, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and what not. You will remember that H.P.B. has a passage not only in her beautiful Voice of the Silence, but in one of her wonderful articles, stating that every planet was once a glorious sun which became a planet in due course of time; and that before it dies this planet once a sun will become a sun again. You have a key here to a wonderful teaching. I wish I could say more about this, but I have neither the time nor is this the place - except indeed to add that every planetary nebula becoming a planetary comet passes through a sunphase before becoming sufficiently materialized to be a planet or planetary chain. In other words I mean to say that every planet is for a time a small sun when, just before leaving the cometary stage, it passes through a temporary sun-phase before materialized enough or concreted or gross enough to be a planet. Again, I may add that each reimbodiment of a planet or rather of a planetary chain passes again or anew through these various phases, to wit: planetary nebula, planetary comet, planetary sun, and planet. What we call the Milky Way is already prepared world-stuff, both the luminous nebulae as well as the dark: different phases of already prepared world-stuff. You have an analogy in the human body, but of course this is not a lecture-hall on physiology, so I cannot go into that very easily. Now then, when the time comes for a solar system to reimbody itself in the same way as a man reincarnates, a certain portion of this world-stuff which has ended its pralaya, or rather the pralaya of the former sun, detaches itself from the Milky Way and begins to pursue at first a slow and later a rapid peregrination as a comet into many portions of the galaxy, finally to reach its own destined home in space. Always keep in mind that it does this because drawn by attractions, which is really gravitation: psychic, spiritual, intellectual attractions. This nebula moves slowly at first, but gathers speed. It picks up material as it wanders through the galaxy, traversing the different solar systems: and if it is fortunate and escapes being drawn into the stomach of one or another of the always very hungry suns (strange way to speak of imbodied divinities!) then it finds its place in space, and its movement of translation stops. It has other movements in common with all galactic bodies;

but its cometary wanderings, the cometary wanderings of the `long-haired radical' as H.P.B. calls the comet, stops because it has found its home, its locus. It then settles and is now much more concrete, much less spiritual, much less astral, as we say, than it was as a nebula, because time has passed, ages have passed during which it was a comet: and furthermore it has been gathering material, the `refuse of the mother,' the detritus of the cosmic dust, her breath, her refuse, which it has been feeding on and taking into itself. Strange paradox that in all the rupa-worlds entities feed - not so in the arupa. There their food is intellectual ambrosia or nectar, as the Greeks said of their Olympian divinities. Now when it has thus settled in the place which is the locus of the solar system reimbodied, the solar system that was, and more or less in that same place (karman you see), the nebula or comet has become a vast lens or disk-shaped body of astral stuff - call it nebular matter, call it cometary matter if you will - with laya-centers here and there scattered through it, like organs in a body. We may call these laya-centers by the more common name in science and say that they are the nuclei. In the center is the largest such nucleus which grows or develops or evolves into becoming a sun. The smaller nuclei around it in this nebular comet or cometary nebula grow to be the beginnings of the planets, and this is the beginning of the solar system. In the commencement of its beginning, as it were, the sun is voracious and attempts to swallow his younger brothers the planets, until the laws of nature come into operation, and attraction and repulsion come into play, of which science today knows only one: attraction, and calls it gravity or gravitation, although it seems to me repulsion is just as active in the universe as gravity. To me this gravity-theory is one-sided. If you will consider the behavior of the comets which come into the solar system, and how the tail of the comet always points away from the sun, you will see repulsion at work. Scientists think the repulsion is due to the action of light on the very small particles of molecules in the cometary tail. If you like. It is repulsion. As the comet approaches the sun, the head goes first, and tail afterwards; then as it sweeps around, the tail is always heading away from the sun, and when it leaves the sun after circuiting it, the tail precedes and the head follows. Now the solar system is thus brought into being and finally becomes that solar system as we see it with our eyes. That means a lot, that phrase, with our eyes; and soon the solar system begins its career as a now formed entity. The planets slowly become more material and less ethereal. The divine laws of the celestial mechanism we call the solar system are established as now we see them working. Now we pass over ages and we come to the ending of the life of the sun, which means the ending of the life of the solar system, for the sun is King in his kingdom. The sun feeds on the refuse of inter-planetary and inter-solar stuffs which it sucks in with its immense force and rejects as we humans do. This is the body of the sun I am talking about. This refuse, this matter in cosmic space, is the detritus of former dead suns, as you will see in a moment. Now we are approaching the end of the life of the sun. The sun's powers begin to weaken. Actually what is happening is that his manvantara is ending, his pralaya is almost beginning. His life on inner planes is opening, and that takes vitality from this plane. Therefore we say the sun is weakening in his power. That is all it means, and that is all death is: the transference from this plane to interior planes of a large part of the vitality existing on this plane when the body is at full strength. Finally the sun dies. But long before this all the planets have died and have disappeared. I cannot tell you where here, it would take too long. Sufficient to say that the

sun knows. The sun when the moment of its death comes bursts, explodes, into simply innumerable fragments of various sizes, sun-stuff, which originally were almost as ethereal as spirit; but as the sun grew older became more and more compacted, more and more materialized, concreted, until when the sun is dying, practically dead, it is not a solid body yet but on the way to becoming solid. But it explodes; there is a tremendous - words just lack to explain this - not flash, a tremendous volume or outburst of light and power spreading throughout our solar system, and far beyond its confines. Every now and then astronomers today will discover what they call novae, a Latin word meaning "new stars." But what they see is just the opposite: a death of a star; and they will see some of these novae expand and then actually dim, some very quickly, some requiring years and years. Now then, all these fragments which were once sun-stuff grow constantly more material. Finally they become the meteors and meteorites of interstellar spaces. Originally spirit-stuff, Mulaprakriti, they are now some of the most solid portions of prakriti, iron, nickel, carbon, and all the other things that our scientists have found in the meteorites which have reached this earth. These meteorites wander through space for ages and ages until the imbodiment of the solar system comes again. Thus the cometary nebula picks up uncounted numbers of these meteorites, thus bringing back as it were its life-atoms of the former body of the solar system into its new body, just as we humans do. But it takes ages and ages for the solar system to gather up all these meteorites; and as a matter of fact all the meteorites that traverse our solar system are not due to the explosion of our former sun. Multitudes and multitudes of them are, but multitudes are not, but are the explosions of other suns in interstellar space which have wandered far and have become caught by our sun in its former state, or by our planets in their former state. And one final thing: We have thus seen what a sun-comet is, or a comet which becomes a sun in the solar system. But a comet may be the pre-birth state either of a sun or of a planet. During the lifetime of a solar system, every one of our planetary chains has its periods of manvantara and pralaya, in other words every planetary chain dies and is imbodied again, and dies and is imbodied again in our system before the solar system and the sun in that system reach the time of their pralaya. In other words, our planetary chains reimbody themselves many many times during the lifetime or manvantara of our solar system. How is this done? The chains die, their inner principles begin their peregrinations along the circulations of the universe, exactly as a man's ego dies and returns. Remember I am just giving the barest outline, just a touch here and a touch there, leaving out 99 percent of what should and could be said. How does each such planetary chain-ego, as it were, come back to our solar system? By detaching itself where it was resting as part of the already prepared world-stuff of the Milky Way exactly as the sun-comet or cometary sun did when the solar system was reimbodying. In this instance the comet is a planetary comet which wanders through space, comes back to our solar system, is attracted here, becomes a small sun, and dying of this state because of materializing, becomes a full planetary chain, settles in life as what we call the planet and begins its new Day of Brahma. -----------Birth into a Greater Life EVERY new spiritual birth takes place through the pangs of coming into a new type of life; and these new births of the chela, of the disciple, take place at constantly recurring and indeed at cyclical intervals. The disciple is a forerunner of the race; he is a pioneer

and hews his way through the jungle of human life, making a Way not for himself alone although indeed his own face is set towards those mountains of the Mystic East - but for the poor and for the less strong who follow after him. Verily, of such stuff are disciples made; and as the chela hews his way along his own self-chosen path, the time comes when he finally achieves the grade or status of spiritual mastery, and then he becomes a Master of Life and of Wisdom. The glory of the Hierarchy of Compassion begins to pour through his being and even shows itself in his body, so that his very presence among his fellows is like a benediction, and brings quiet and peace, and evokes wisdom and love. G. de Purucker: The Esoteric Tradition, II, 1075 --------------[ As stated above, more instalments followed in the series. - dig. ed.]] -------------------------

Purucker Note on Technical Theosophy Helpful Words from the Leader re Public Theosophical Lectures "Many of our members often make what in my judgment is a fatal mistake, when they lecture. In their speeches they are too apt to talk about generalities, glittering generalities, and about art in general, or philosophy in general, or religion in general, all of which is very interesting, but in my judgment not appropriate; for what our members really hunger for and look for is technical Theosophical teachings. We should set the example of bringing the minds of our members back to spreading Theosophy in its technical form. Give them technical Theosophy. It attracts the public especially when the technical Theosophy is simplified and does not consist merely of things that are over the heads of beginners. It really is a most difficult thing to accomplish, but the way to do it must be found and held to, if we are going to be successful in our work, and establish a precedent to follow in the future, which is what I am longing for." - From Theosophical Forum, December, 1936, p. 571 -------------------

A Theosophical Super-Society

". . . NATURALLY AND QUIETLY" The growing interest in "networking" or "fraternization" throughout the Theosophical Movement suggests inclusion here of this extract from G. de Purucker's 12th General Letter, dated March 31, 1932, published in The Theosophical Forum (Point Loma), Vol. III, No. 8, of April of that year. - Ed.

Up to the present I have carefully refrained from stating with fullness and clarity just what my own views are as regards the structure and government of the super-Society that I have in mind and have written and spoken of, because I have felt that it would be better to reserve such statements for a later date when I could set them forth to ears rendered sympathetic by experience. But I will say this, however: I do not care two pins about the structure of such a super-Society as I have proposed, nor how it shall be conducted, although my own feeling is that the less `government' such a super-Society has, the better for it, and the fewer officials the better, and a complete absence of organizational politics would be the best of all. And I might add that I am convinced that such a super-Society will be brought into being not as a result of round-table conferences, nor of oral or written agreements drawn up by leaders and representative members of the various Theosophical Societies, but solely as a natural outgrowth of the preliminary and previous work of Theosophical fraternization, which must precede the coming into being of such a superSociety - be the last called what you will. This fraternizing brotherhood we must have before any such super-Society is founded; it is the feeling of genuinely mutual trust and confidence among Theosophists, i.e., among the various Theosophical Societies, that must exist before it would be safe to undertake the formation even of the super-Society that I have in mind. Theosophists must learn to trust each other, and to believe in each other's honor, and to recognize the sanctity of the pledged word, before any such super-Society could logically and properly and successfully come into being .... Let the Lodges of the different Theosophical Societies learn to meet together in our common Theosophic work; let the Lodges of the different Societies learn to co-operate in Theosophical activities; let the Lodges and let the individuals of the different Theosophical Societies learn to trust each other as honorable men and women, before we undertake the erection of a common spiritual Home - and by these words `common spiritual Home' I mean the super-Society that I hold as an ideal in my heart ... a Temple of Truth, a Temple of Brotherhood, builded of the fabric of human understanding and conscience, a successful and lasting Memorial of those Theosophic principles, based on Nature's own spiritual processes, which have been given to us by the Masters first through H.P.B. I am convinced in every atom of my being that our re-union will some day come about, but it must come naturally and quietly, and be a sure and steady growth, and its roots must strike deep into human hearts; and hence I feel that any political makeshifts or an inopportune structure such as a Federation of Theosophical Societies as they exist at present would not only be futile but dangerous to the cause of being or of becoming, as I see it, a fruitful field of discord, of political wire-pulling, and of new and even greater disharmony than that which unfortunately exists even at present .... . . . the only solid grounds upon which to build for the ultimate reunion of the various Theosophical Societies in the Spiritual Brotherhood of which I have spoken, are spiritual and intellectual - in other words mutual confidence, mutual trust, mutual esteem and respect; and it is fraternization more than anything else which at the present time will work strongly to bring these noble qualities to the fore. It is on spiritual foundations alone, I am fully convinced, that a future reunion of all Theosophists can be achieved, and it is therefore these foundations, as above stated, that we must work for and lay as the preparation for the super-structure of the future. We can always fraternize; we can always work together; we can learn to trust each other and to respect each other and to have common fellow-feeling for each other as

Theosophists. On this ground I stand, and on this ground, for the present at least, I must remain; but let us fraternize! . . . let us be brotherly, let us fraternize! - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 89 -------------------------

THREE ASPECTS OF KARMAN THE Greeks had a most interesting and indeed profound way of describing karman. You will remember that they spoke of Destiny, often called by the Latins the "Fates," sometimes as unitary, and sometimes as threefold, or the Three Moirae; as often we speak of karman as being unitary or as being threefold and separated over the three great time-periods, past, present, and future. So the three Destinies, or the three Spinners of Destiny, were respectively named Atropos which means that which cannot be changed or set aside; Klotho, the spinner; Lachesis, that which happens to us out of the past. These three Destinies, said the ancient Greeks, were three in one, and one in three. Atropos was the Future, that which is inevitably coming. It was connected with the Sun, mystically it was connected with our spiritual-intellectual parts, or as we would say the treasury of destiny imbodied in the Manasaputra. In art, it was expressed as a grave maiden pointing to a sundial - signifying what is waiting in the womb of time as the flowing hours bring it closer to us. Klotho was the Spinner, that which is taking place now; that which we are now spinning or weaving in our minds, and in our feelings. It was called the Present, and was represented in art as a grave maiden holding a spindle, spinning the thread of present destiny to become the Future, and was linked in significance with our psycho-personal nature, what we call our mind, having intimate mystical and historical connection with the Moon, the shadow of the Sun as it were, the reflection, the reflected light. Lachesis was connected with the Earth and represented the Past which we are now working out, and was represented in art as a grave maiden holding a staff pointing to a horoscope; that which you have builded in the past is now yours. Atropos, the Future, the Sun, the Manasaputric intelligence; Klotho, the Spinner, the Present, the Moon, the active present mind; Lachesis, the Past, which we are now working out, in this body, on this Earth. Don't you think this Greek conception is rather a marvelous way of envisioning karman as at once unitary and triple? The more I think of the subtle Greek mind having thought this out, the three in one and the one in three, the more I admire the conception. Karman is divisible by such methods into three paths of destiny: Past, Present, Future, one in three. So a man predestines himself, has done so in the past; what he now is on earth is the fruit: with his mind or lunar part he is now weaving his destiny which will find as it were, when he unravels it, lodgment as garnered knowledge in the solar part of him, in the Sun, in the Manasaputric treasury of destiny, some day to become the Present, and shortly thereafter the Past. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, April, 1941

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THREE WAYS IN WHICH THE SELF RECOGNIZES TRUTH Most people in our Occidental world seem to think that religion is something which exists only for one part or range of life; that philosophy is another branch of human thinking which exists merely for a more or less noble intellectual pastime, consisting of a more or less successful effort, intellectually to penetrate into the causal and effectual structure and relations of the universe around us; and again most people seem to think that science is but an investigation into the physical nature in which we live as physical human beings, and the ensuing classification and recording of the various results of that investigation. The point of objection here to this manner of viewing these three functions of the human mind, is the underlying supposition that religion and philosophy and science are three things inherently distinct from each other and having no inherently natural and co-ordinating relations or points of inseparable union. The Theosophical philosophy says: These three are fundamentally derivatives of human consciousness and, therefore, fundamentally one. They all spring from the human understanding. They are the children of the human spirit. They, are, as it were, but three methods or ways in which the Self, the thinking self, the conscious self, the root of our being endeavors to express what it cognizes and recognizes as truth. Science, Philosophy, Religion, are the offsprings of man himself; and more definitely they are spiritual and, mental children of Great Men: the founders of the various religions and philosophical systems of the ancient world, and historically of our modern world as well. These Great Sages laid down basic or fundamental principles, based on Nature, on natural law - not physical nature alone, but on inner Nature more especially - that is to say on the roots or radicals of things; inner and invisible and to us intangible substances and energies and laws, potencies, powers, dominions, and virtues, which rule the world by action from within outwards, and thus among other things keep the stars in their courses. Thus, religion, philosophy, and science compose one triform method of understanding - what? The nature of Nature, of Universal Nature, and its multiform and multifold workings; and not one of these three activities of the human spirit can be separated from the other two if we wish to gain a true picture of thing AS THEY ARE IN THEMSELVES. For Science is an operation of the human spirit-mind in its endeavor to understand the How of things - not any particular science whatsoever, but the thing in itself, science per se - ordered and classified knowledge, based on research and experimentation. Philosophy is that same striving of the human spirit to understand not merely the How of thing, but the Why of things - why things are as they are. And, lastly Religion is that same striving of the human spirit towards union with the COSMIC ALL, involving an endlessly growing self-conscious identification with the Cosmic Realities therein - commonly and so feebly called by men, 'God' or gods. - G. de Purucker: The Esoteric Tradition, pp. 19-20 - Eclectic Theosophist, May 15, 1974 ------------------------

AT THE TIME OF THE WINTER SOLSTICE It is at certain periods of the year far more than at other times that the currents of intercommunication, which in the wide spaces of the Cosmos are the Circulations of the Universe, are more easily in thought attained to. Men in general may not know the fact, but we humans are surrounded with an atmosphere of akasa whose outer reaches stretch beyond both moon and sun into the abysses of stellar space. Chelas in the Esoteric Schools are taught how to ascend into these higher realms of the lofty spaces of their own inner being, and thus do they realize not only their kinship with the gods, but their fundamental unity with the Silent Watcher of our own HomeUniverse. There is much more pertaining to this season of the year than even our own Theosophical students generally realize. Resolutions made at this time in a proper spirit in the spirit of impersonal devotion to high ideals - and with a heart over-flowing with love for all that is, have a relationship with the divine; and because of this divine relationship they exercise throughout the subsequent months a silent but powerful domination over both mind and heart. It was a knowledge: deep, wide-reaching, mystic: of these and other collateral truths of Nature, that brought about the working of one of the highest degrees of initiation at the time of the Winter-Solstice, and for some two weeks thereafter. Memories of those far bygone days still linger in the hearts of men at this time - memories of a time when Divine Beings were on earth, and taught their Younger Brothers, mankind. This fact was commemorated in later ages in the initiation-ceremonies of the Winter-Solstice, wherein the aspirant passing successfully through the trials, met his own inner god face to face, and being 'raised' to union therewith, became suddenly suffused with splendor, so that, as the phrase passed outwards from the crypts, he was said to be 'clothed with the sun'; and it was true - in a far more real and mystical sense than sincere but unknowing men of later times have ever realized. -G de P.: Fourth General Letter to Members of the T.S. (Point Loma), December 7, 1930 - Eclectic Theosophist, Nov. 15, 1973 -------------------------

THE LEADER'S MESSAGE TO THE CONVENTIONS Point Loma, California The Leader's Private Office 6th July, 1936 To the Officials and Delegates and Visiting Members Assembled in International European Convention at London, on August 2 and 3, 1936: *

Dear Companions and Brothers: It is at the request of Trevor Barker, the President of the English Section of the T. S., that I am writing to you these paragraphs of greeting and good will, during the course of which I shall take occasion to lay before you a number of thoughts which live with me constantly as urgent needs for the larger expansion of our sacred Cause, and which I venture to pass on to you all. The pressure of my official duties here at the International Headquarters does not enable me to come into personal touch with our Fellowship, whether attached or unattached, and whether by personal interview or by writing, as often as my heart would wish it -----------* This same Message was sent by the Leader to the Triennial Convention of the American Section, T.S., held at the Bellevue Hotel, San Francisco, California, August 2930, 1936. -----------to be; and it is therefore just these messages of mine, sent to different Conventions of a national or of an international character, which enable me to present to you problems to be solved, and suggestions for their solution, and other suggestions for expanding our Work. The revolving years, integrating themselves into cycles both large and small, bring with them new conditions which, both as a Society and as individual Theosophists, we have to face, and face successfully if our work is to be carried on into the future in the manner which we all long for; yet the experience of long years passed in work and study of the Theosophical Cause has shown me that on the whole such conditions as arise in the different National Sections from time to time are always adequately met, or very nearly always, by the devoted and efficient, because thoroughly enthusiastic and trained, national Officials who preside over the conduct of the affairs of the different Sections. It is therefore not so much to the internal or national conditions or problems of any particular Section that I wish to direct your attention at the time of the present writing, but to matters which concern the Theosophical Society as an international entity, and which, just because these conditions or problems affect all Sections, will naturally have to be faced by you all. I would, therefore, like to touch first of all upon the matter of propaganda and of increasing our Fellowship. I will say without mincing of words, and with the utmost frankness, that I have very little patience indeed with any Theosophist who says that we should not seek to extend our Theosophic influence by increasing our membership, or by increasing the number of our Lodges, because, forsooth, so might these individuals say, the Theosophical literature already exists, and it is enough that we keep on reprinting our standard Theosophical works, and let them tell their own silent tale to the world! I believe that this is a false reasoning, bad policy, and highly unwise; and outside of anything else, it runs directly counter to the mandate which the Masters gave to H. P. B.: to found the Theosophical Society and to increase its influence in the world by means of a constantly increasing number of Fellows, and a co-ordinate and relatively equal increase in the number of our Lodges. I for one am proud of the Theosophical Society: of its traditions, of its history, of its

record, and in all proper humility let me say, of what it already has achieved sometimes in the face of what appeared to be at the moments almost insuperable difficulties. I look upon it as our first duty not only as an organization, but as individual Theosophists, to increase our membership, which includes of course the increasing of the number of our active Lodges. The basic reason for this policy of working for enlarging the T. S. lies in the wellknown fact that union is strength, that combined efforts tell strongly for achieving an objective; whereas the haphazard and often spasmodic efforts of isolated individuals usually achieve little, and sometimes even nothing at all either of moment or of value. This is why organizations are necessary, very necessary indeed, for it involves just the difference that we find between a well-trained and well-disciplined body of men working for an end, and giving unto their work the best that is in them in subordination to the common good, when compared with the haphazard and spasmodic strivings of individuals who, for one reason or another, are too vain or too egoistic or too indifferent to unite their respective individual work into a common Cause. Let me recall to you in this connection the memorable words of H. P. Blavatsky, written in her First Message to the American Section of the Theosophical Society, and dated 1888, in which, treating of the same matters to which I herein allude, she says that it is the purpose of the Theosophical Society and of its members "to establish on a firm basis an organization which, while promoting feelings of fraternal sympathy, social unity, and solidarity, will leave ample room for individual freedom and exertion in the common cause - that of helping mankind. "The multiplication of local centres should be a foremost consideration in your hands, and each man should strive to be a centre of work in himself. When his inner development has reached a certain point, he will naturally draw those with whom he is in contact under the same influence; a nucleus will be formed, round which other people will gather, forming a centre from which information and spiritual influence will radiate, and towards which higher influences are directed." I ask your earnest consideration, and, indeed, study, of these noteworthy statements from our beloved H. P. B., and particularly do I point to her concluding words: "and towards which higher influences are directed." Her words here are but another way of stating a fact which the materialistic West has lost sight of, but yet which it instinctively as it were follows when Occidentals organize themselves into solitary bodies for a common work. It is that when an organization such as the T. S. is, is formed by men and women who desire to live a better life as individuals, and to give unto their fellow-men the spiritual and intellectual blessings and teachings which they themselves have received, they become both spiritually and astrally - i.e., on inner planes - an organ, a focus, an organic center, through which will stream influences of a spiritual and intellectual character from on high, i.e., from inner worlds, and more specifically from our own blessed Masters. I would like to add, furthermore, - and I state this with an appeal directly to your hearts and minds: as long as the Theosophical Society remains true to its primary spiritual and intellectual influences, and to the higher Powers which directed its organization and which inspired it in its early days, and which I may venture to say still inspire it, then our future destiny is assured, because we have back of us and with us and through us the

spiritual Powers of the World, and more particularly of the Hierarchy of the Masters, whose particular work on our own Globe Earth is with us men. It is of course a commonplace that wherever there is an organization, there is a Head, under whatever name the Head may be known, or whatever functions his fellows may call upon him to fulfil; and I will add the following pregnant thought, that such Head or Leader will be better or less good, higher or lower, more in touch or less in touch with the Masters, almost precisely in proportion as the membership of such organized unit or organic union of men and women themselves prove worthy of the high trust which is placed in their hands - in our case we can make the application of the foregoing perhaps directly to the Theosophical Society. Should, however, the T. S. at any time become degenerate, which means, otherwise phrased, should ever the Fellowship of the T. S. as a body fall spiritually and intellectually beneath a certain standard which we up to the present have retained, then there will always be a danger of our beloved Theosophical Society becoming a merely sectarian body, headed - or not headed as the case may be - by a merely exoteric official, who in the worst of such cases would become a sort of Pope. Let us then see to it that this last spiritual catastrophe never come to pass with ourselves. It is not our duty nor even our privilege to criticize other Theosophical Societies or other bodies calling themselves Theosophical, for we shall have our hands full in attending to our own business, and in keeping our own house in order. Let us strive to see that as individuals we keep on the high level of spiritual and intellectual thought and attainment, thus making the call upon the chief Head of the T. S., and likewise making a similar call to our Masters and Teachers; and I can promise you without qualification that such call never passes unheeded. There is not the slightest danger, therefore, of a popery in the T. S. as long as the members themselves, both collectively and as individuals, hold an attitude of high understanding, which means an attitude of equally high expectancy; for it is obvious if you think a moment, that as long as our members hold this, no mere faker or pretender could ever satisfy the hearts and minds of our members for a single month. Do you not see what I mean? I point to this series of dangers with some emphatic positiveness, because it is an excellent and sufficient answer to any critics we may have - and there are some calling themselves Theosophists who criticize us on this ground, who do not seem to realize what I have hereinbefore tried to set forth. I quote once again from the same Message of 1888, written by H. P. B. to the American Section of the T. S.: "But let no man set up a popery instead of Theosophy, as this would be suicidal and has ever ended most fatally. We are all fellow-students, more or less advanced; but no one belonging to the Theosophical Society ought to count himself as more than, at best, a pupil-teacher - one who has no right to dogmatize." These words of H. P. B., to me are some of the best she has ever written, and I would point out to you that here she does not say, as her words have so frequently been tacitly misconstrued to mean, that all members or fellows of the T. S. are on an equality in intellectual and spiritual, ay even psychical, attainments, but just the contrary, for she

specifically says that although we are all fellow-students, some are more and some less advanced. What are, then, these differences as amongst ourselves, constituting one F. T. S. more advanced than another F. T. S.? It is not the age of the physical body, nor is it merely years passed in intellectual study of our standard Theosophical works alone; but the most and the more advanced amongst us are those who live the life that the Masters teach as being the one we should strive to live, and who coincidently with this living make themselves with an ever-deepening knowledge, more fully acquainted with the sublime God-wisdom which is the Wisdom of the Ages, and who do their utmost to pass on this priceless heritage to their fellow-men. I quote again from the same Message of H. P. B.: "The faint-hearted have asked in all ages for signs and wonders, and when these failed to be granted, they refused to believe. Such are not those who will ever comprehend Theosophy pure and simple. But there are others among us who realize intuitively that the recognition of pure Theosophy - the philosophy of the rational explanation of things and not the tenets - is of the most vital importance in the Society, inasmuch as it alone can furnish the beacon-light needed to guide humanity in its true path." Pray analyze these last phrases of H. P. B., and particularly her reference to "the philosophy of the rational explanation of things and not the tenets" - i.e., the essence of the teaching, and not merely the tenets thereof expressed in words cleverly strung together and recited parrot-fashion by mere book-students. What humanity needs more today than ever before, more even than when H. P. B. wrote her noble works, is a knowledge of this deathless Wisdom of the Ages, with its soothing and healing influence on the minds and hearts of our fellow-men, and its constant reiteration of the age-old ethical mandate that we live not for ourselves but unto others and for others, and that we can never escape responsibility for our actions - no, not even for our thoughts. Now I will say in passing that in my judgment, my dear Companions, one of the very best ways in increasing our membership and thereby increasing the spiritual and intellectual influence of the Theosophical Society in the world, is by a close and careful study of our standard Theosophical books, in other words of what is commonly called 'technical Theosophy.' This fits our members not only to answer any and all questions that within reason will be asked of them, but likewise reacts with inestimable benefit upon themselves. Do, I pray of you all, specialize in technical Theosophical study as found in our standard literature. This will also help our members in propaganda-work, and will enable them to avoid a common fault among Theosophists, which is when on the public platform an indulgence in glittering generalities rather than in definite, clear-cut statements of Theosophical teaching. There are likewise some Theosophists in the world, who, because they have had no new teachings since H. P. B.'s day, make a virtue of their spiritual and intellectual poverty, and proclaim that no new teaching can be or could be or indeed should be given. The pathos in this attitude of mind wrings one's heart. They overlook the words of the Masters themselves, and indeed of H. P. B., who in this same Message of 1888, wrote on this very point as follows:

"According as people are prepared to receive it, so will new Theosophical teachings be given. But no more will be given than the world, on its present level of spirituality, can profit by. It depends on the spread of Theosophy - the assimilation of what has been already given - how much more will be revealed and how soon." This is exactly what I have consistently and at frequent intervals stated and restated, both by pen and by word of mouth, and we are here told that "it depends on the spread of Theosophy," and on its assimilation) as to how much more will be "revealed" and how soon. My beloved Companions, it is precisely because the noble nucleus of tried and loyal hearts whom Katherine Tingley left behind her at her death, true Theosophists in understanding, and in a yearning for more light, however limited in this understanding some of them may have been, made the imperative call that further and deeper teachings be given, that these were therefore forthcoming. It were ridiculous to suppose that any teaching given out at any time in the Theosophical Society is to be accepted on the say-so of the Leader or somebody else, for such an attitude of mind runs directly contrary to the spirit of individual judgment and of freedom of thought and of conscience, which we Theosophists cherish as a part of our noble heritage. Any newer and deeper teaching than that already received, rests on its own merits, on its own depth, on its own reach into the hearts and minds of men, and should be judged on these grounds alone. I therefore come back to the thoughts with which I began this Message to the International European Convention - a Message which I fear is already rather over-long; and I point out to, you once more that our first duty, collectively as a Theosophical Society, and individually as men and women, is to increase our fellowship, which merely means bringing the light that we have received, and its unspeakable blessing, to others who have not yet received it; and to welcome new-comers, if they prove at all worthy of our brotherly love and confidence, into our ranks, and to give them the benefit of our fellowship, and as far as they prove themselves worthy of the trust given unto them, a portion of the labor of propaganda, of official responsibility, and of aiding us in keeping the wheels turning, to adopt a homely phrase. Unity is strength; disunion is weakness; men can do incomparably more when working shoulder to shoulder with united hearts, than when striving as isolated individuals in widely separated parts of the land, and with no common bond of organizational unity. It therefore is a bounden duty unto us to increase our fellowship, and if every member, as President Clapp of the American Section pointed out some time ago, would make it his joyous duty to bring in at least one new fellow a year, can you not see how rapidly the T. S. would grow, and how amazingly strong it would soon become in public influence, which simply means in its influence over the minds and hearts of our fellows? Before concluding this Message to you, my Brothers all, I would fain turn to a matter which, although it has a certain magnitude of importance, I can only touch on briefly. Since I began the Fraternization-Movement in 1930, very strenuous efforts have been made by some misguided Theosophists belonging to other Societies, to denigrate this our effort, to throw mud at it, to cast slurs upon it, and in fact - and I say this with sorrow - to misinterpret it in every way possible. All this was to be expected, and so far as I personally am concerned, I paid absolutely no attention to these attempts. Yet there is one aspect of the criticisms made against the Fraternization-work which it may be as well for me briefly to uncover and expose.

It has been said that the Fraternization-Movement, which so many of our Fellows of the T. S. are sincerely working in, assisted by certain noble hearts of other Societies, like Brother Cecil Williams of the Theosophical Society in Canada, who likewise by the way is one of our own F. T. S.; and like J. W. Hamilton-Jones of the Phoenix Lodge, London, who has given sympathetic co-operation in many fraternization-efforts, - it has been said, I say, that our fraternization-work is insincere and was begun solely for the purpose of stealing members away from other Societies. This statement is a libel, or slander, pure and simple. If members from other Societies come over to us, we certainly are not going to slam the door in their faces, nor turn our backs upon them, and we welcome their co-operation and their help. Nevertheless, the Fraternization-Movement was not started for the purpose of stealing members from other Theosophical bodies, nor was it in fact started with an eye upon the distant future when perhaps Point Loma would sit astride the Theosophical pyramid, with its Leader topping all! This too is an utter misunderstanding. It is a fact that on a few occasions, when pondering over the future of the Fraternization-work, I have even envisaged a possible unity in the distant future, of such ones of the Theosophical bodies as might care to incorporate themselves into an organic unity; but any remarks of mine directed to this last point of thought were merely reflections, speculations, as to the possible effect of the Fraternization-work on other Theosophical bodies, and were certainly never written to lay down a program or a platform that Point Loma was going to work to have its Leader - whoever he might then be at the time - the official chief of such possible union of different Theosophical bodies. In fact it would be fine if it were so, and I do not mind saying so, nor do I hesitate in so stating, so greatly am I convinced of the justice of our Cause, and of the fact that we have malice and hatred towards none, and of the further fact that we are so completely faithful to the original tradition of the Masters and of H. P. B.; yet how preposterous is the idea that I deliberately made such statements as being the objective of the FraternizationMovement; for isn't it obvious that such supposed folly on my part would simply have alienated the members of other Theosophical Societies from us? Indeed, I will even go farther and state quite frankly that I would not envisage with equanimity, in other words I would not like to see, the rushing into our ranks of large numbers of the members of other Theosophical bodies. Why? I will tell you the reason, and this is no slur or casting of mud on others, but simply an honest statement of my own conviction: the history of several other Theosophical Societies for the last thirty years or so, has been partly composed of the introduction into their thought-life of teachings which we, genuine followers of our beloved H. P. B., could not accept as the unadulterate teachings of our Masters; and as these dear and good people of these other Theosophical bodies accepted these later teachings of their own with apparent conviction and sincerity, any such attempt to digest a large influx of them into our own T. S. would bring about a perfectly hopeless and indeed a dangerous situation for us. If members from the other Theosophical Societies care to join us as individuals here and there, of course we gladly accept them as brothers and fellow-workers in our ranks; but I would not like to see too large an influx of them amongst us, if such influx came as a wave; and I probably am speaking only the truth when stating that in my judgment the officials of other Theosophical Societies would not know how to digest a wave of Point Loma members, if such a wave ever deluged some other Theosophical body. They could not digest us! for it would be a mixing of spiritual and intellectual elements too unlike and

too disparate for mutual comfort and successful common or united work. No, our fraternization-labors are an attempt to bring about a kindlier spirit as among the different Theosophical bodies; to learn to respect the better and finer elements which each such body has or may have; and even - I will state it quite frankly - an attempt to reintroduce the Theosophy of the Masters and of H. P. B. in places where it has been forgotten - but never by force, never by dishonorable methods of deceit, but always by utmost frankness and candor, and a plea to all other Theosophists to the effect that if we cannot accept each other's teachings, we can at least respect each other's convictions, find common points of understanding and contact in the teachings of H. P. B. and of our Masters that we all received, and thus learn to live at peace with each other, even if none of us wants organic unity - at least at present - with any other Theosophical body. I take this occasion to express my approval, in view of the immediately foregoing lines concerning fraternization, of what seems to me to be the very admirable work that your National President has undertaken with the co-operation of the officials and members of the Phoenix Lodge (Adyar), London. I do not know much about this effort except what Brother Barker has written to me, and what I have heard from others of the success of the two or three joint meetings already held; but it struck me as being an effort in the right direction, towards diminishing dislike, reducing hatreds, increasing mutual respect, and thus bringing about a clearer and higher atmosphere of thought as amongst the different Theosophical bodies. And now, my Brothers and Comrades, to each one of you and to all of you, go my heart's best wishes, and the assurance to all of you of my trust and deepest affection. I am Faithfully yours, G. de P. (Theosophical Forum, November, 1936) ----------------------

THE LEADER'S LETTER TO THE EUROPEAN CONVENTION 21st June, 1938 To the Officials and Members of the Theosophical Society, including various National Sections thereof, Assembled in Convention on the Island of Visingso, Sweden, July 27 to August 1st, 1938. My beloved Companions and Fellow-Workers: From time to time I feel the impulse, based upon a real need, of communicating thoughts to as many F.T.S. as possible, and for this purpose I seize the opportunity of addressing my Fellow Theosophical Workers on the occasions of the different National or International Conventions held periodically; and in accordance therewith I seize the occasion of addressing to you the present Message or Letter. In the earlier years of my administration, I chose the method of communicating with our F.T.S. by means of General or Circular Letters; but this involved a good deal of time

and energy, as well as expense, in preparation, printing, and mailing, and it has seemed to me a better method to use the opportunities offered by these National or International Conventions in the manner of the present Letter to write on such occasions when I feel a need has arisen, these Messages or Letters often being later printed in one or more of our magazines or periodicals. There is naturally a great deal on my mind and heart that I would like to share with my beloved Fellow Theosophical Workers, which, from lack of personal intercourse with me cannot always be communicated to them. Yet I do my best by means of correspondence or otherwise, either with National Officials or with individuals, to share my thoughts in this manner with them. In the present Message I can but point to the present terribly disturbed and saddening condition of the world in its unrest and anxiety, as showing how greatly needed is the spiritually soothing and intellectually refining influence or power that our beloved Theosophy or God-Wisdom can and does instil into the hearts and minds of men. As I have often pointed out on previous occasions, the Work of the Theosophical Society, as I see it, is above everything else to change the hearts and minds of our fellowmen collectively and as individuals; for in this manner, by affecting a larger number of individuals over the world, we build up a psychology or psychological atmosphere touching or impressing great numbers of our fellow human beings, who in their turn, touched and enlightened by all this, have the opportunity to act and often do act directly upon their own national or local affairs. In other words, it is our sublime hope little by little to theosophize the world, and in this manner to bring about an amelioration of social and even political and other unrest, distress, anxiety, and troubles. Nations after all are made up of men who are individuals, and here is the keynote of what I am striving to say. Naturally this objective of ours is something that cannot be achieved over night, nor indeed even with the lapse of a small number of years, but will, I fear, take lifetimes of study and unremitting labor and aspiration on our part. Yet I believe with all my soul that it will come in time. Of course the T.S. as an organization is absolutely non-political and never meddles in political or so-called social agitations; for our Work is general and not national or local, because knowing as we do that by changing the hearts and minds of men towards a longing for settling all problems on a basis of dispassionate reasoning and impartial and even-handed justice, it is to this general work of instilling into the souls of our fellowmen the principles of magnanimity, universal brotherhood based on kindliness, and mutual understanding, that we give ourselves: our hearts, our labor, and our time. The present lamentable condition of the world which all good men, I doubt not in every country, deeply deplore, is but the result of the consequences of former actions; in other words it is the karman into which the West - and indeed the East - has brought itself, being indeed especially in Europe just that condition or state of affairs to which H.P.B. alluded in The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 646, so graphically and prophetically when she published her magnum opus in 1888. I only point therefore to these matters and turn to the more particular thoughts that I have in mind to communicate to you in the present letter. I believe, indeed I know, that the greatest in importance of all our efforts at the present time should be the increasing of our influence in the world as an Organization or Society; and the best way in which this increase of influence can be achieved is in increasing our own membership by every honorable, upright, and legal means within our power, for it is obvious that the more members we have, the greater will be our chances

to affect strongly an ever larger portion of the public. Now, there are many ways of increasing our membership or fellowship, and I happen to know that such increase in our fellowship is the one thing which every National Section of the T.S., and I believe every individual in every National Section, desires above everything else. But often our members are untrained, in fact usually so, for our Society is still but little more than fifty years old in the modern world; and many of our lodges, perhaps most, and certainly most of our members, hardly know how to work effectively in order to interest others in the blessed God-Wisdom which we so prize. It comes to this: Propaganda. There are numerous ways in which propaganda can be carried on, but fortunes can be spent, an immense amount of labor can be lost, and a great deal of ensuing discouragement to our people incurred, because of lack of knowledge of the best psychological methods of undertaking our propaganda-work. By way of remedying this state of affairs, which is but natural when we consider all sides of the problem, I would recommend most earnestly and with all my heart that the individual F.T.S. should concentrate in the first place upon close and very conscientious study of our technical Theosophical doctrines, so that by such continued and unremitting study of the teachings of the God-Wisdom, our members as individuals, whether members-at-large or members attached to lodges, may become expert in them, perfectly familiar with them, feel them, live them, dream them as it were; and this attitude of mind will without any doubt whatsoever, weigh heavily in bringing to others the convictions that we ourselves hold. A scattering and superficial knowledge of the Theosophical doctrines on the part of our members is altogether insufficient; I repeat that our members must train themselves to become as individuals expert exponents to the public of the glory and sublimity of the faith and knowledge that is in their own hearts. This will strike the fire of enthusiasm and conviction in other hearts. Now it has frequently been said to me that it needs education, refinement, social standing, and other things in order to make a good exponent or teacher of the Theosophical doctrines, and to a great extent this argument is perfectly true; yet I would point out to all that experience has shown to us in the past that it is not always our most educated or learned public exponents of Theosophy, and not always those of the highest social standing, who are the most successful in their work of propaganda. The reason lies in the fact of the varieties of public psychology, for such learned lecturers, or lecturers of high social standing, while very greatly needed indeed in our Theosophical Work, are sometimes looked upon with awe or with suspicion or even with grave questioning doubt on the part of thousands of the public, whose minds are not persuaded by mere learning, and whose hearts are not captured by the fact that one of our lecturers, X or Y or Z, is a lady or gentleman of high social standing in his own country. Therefore you see the value again of what I have just said, of every member in the Theosophical Society becoming himself an expert in Theosophical study, striving to become likewise an expert in the communication of our Theosophical doctrines to others; so that each man or woman thus to become expert through study and devotion in our teachings, may fire the minds and touch the hearts of others who belong to his or her own educational or social status or milieu. Do you see what I mean? Thus: the prince who is likewise a devoted Theosophical student and lecturer, let us say, can talk most easily and readily and with the greatest chance of being understood, by those in his own social sphere - and also, if he have the ability, can be understood and gain the affection of others who

are not members of his own social stratum; but it is probable that there will be tens or even hundreds of thousands who will listen to his message with respect perhaps, with interest perhaps, but who will feel that there is no place for them therein. Hence a beloved companion who may be born a peasant has his great field of work likewise, and through devoted study and self-forgetful application to his work, he might become like a torch of light to tens of thousands of others whose hearts and minds he can reach because of his understanding them and their understanding him. We must remember that Theosophy is for everyone. The prince in this life may have been a peasant in some former life; the peasant in this life may have been a prince in some former life. I do not say that this is usually the case, but it can readily be so; and in fact not infrequently is so, for karman leads us on into strange destinies in the working out of its inscrutable and often amazingly intricate plans. It has occurred to me while dictating the above passages, that they may be thought to be by some as derogatory to those members in the T.S. who enjoy the advantages of high social birth and the training and traditions that go therewith; and if anyone reads into my words any such idea as this, I can only say such reading is absolutely wrong. In fact, what the T.S. needs, as indeed any small and struggling organization needs, is to interest and to obtain as its fellows, those whose social condition, education, and other training, fit them to be the best public exponents, and who, because of such advantages in human life, whether monetary, social, or educational, have the ease, the poise, and the social experience, enabling them to conduct their work with the grace and graciousness, with the tact and courtesy, which their position brings with it. We greatly need more of this class of members, and fortunately they are steadily coming to us. Yet everyone in the T.S., every fellow no matter what his or her position, high or low, rich or poor, can do his or her own invaluable work for our blessed T.S. and our blessed God-Wisdom, each worker in his or her own field, among his or her own friends; for after all Theosophy is for the world and for all men, irrespective of nation, class, caste, or color. And now another point of thought: it was the wish of our beloved H.P.B., of that wonderfully devoted man W.Q.J., and of our own beloved K.T., and it is my own heart's wish, that in time, as the T.S. grows in power and obtains a constantly larger increment of means to do so, to establish Theosophical colleges or universities, or training-schools, in the different parts of the world, where any Theosophist, man or woman, and whatever his status in human life, may embark upon a course of technical Theosophical as well as other studies fitting him or her at the conclusion thereof to become a shining example of knowledge, and of tact in that wonderful diplomacy of the heart, and of devotion which the best Theosophical propagandists exemplify. But this time of establishing Theosophical colleges or training-schools everywhere has not yet arrived, although this hope and plan will certainly be worked out in the future, perhaps not the near future but nevertheless some day it will be so. Meanwhile, my beloved Companions, I again repeat that the best single way of increasing our membership and of increasing our influence correspondentially, is by firing our entire fellowship in the different countries, to undertake a continued and very earnest individual self-training in the study of our Theosophical doctrines; and there should run concurrently with this study the self-training of these devoted students to fit themselves to give to others what they themselves have learned and gained by such training. Nor is it only individuals to whom these words apply. They apply likewise to lodges,

and in the following manner: It is my conviction that every Lodge of the Theosophical Society, no matter where situated, should look upon itelf as a future mother-lodge in its own particular district or neighborhood, whether it be a single lodge in a city or even one of several lodges in a city. There is always an immediate neighborhood or field for work which each such lodge should endeavor to cultivate. Now how is this done? It is done in the manner which has already been found and practised by not a small number of our lodges in different countries, and they do it in the following manner: they send out lecturers into their neighborhood, not only to bring the public and inquirers to the meetings of their own lodge, but to establish affiliated study-groups, local study-centers attracting those immediately around these groups or centers; and in this way these lodges that I have in mind have built up new lodges, daughter-lodges so to speak, and the plan has succeeded wonderfully. The great thing in this work I now mention is to have self-confidence in one's ability to succeed, and where the self-confidence - which is not egoism but is born of enthusiasm and devotion which do away with fear - where this spiritual and intellectual selfconfidence exists, these lodges have invariably been successful in founding daughterlodges around them. I recently received a communication from a very devoted member. It is not necessary here to mention the name or residence of this devoted member who complained, and with great justice in some respects, that too often our Theosophical speakers are insufficiently acquainted with our God-Wisdom, and that we should have training-schools giving these students an opportunity to learn in more technical fashion, and likewise to train themselves to reach the public ear. These comments are perfectly true; yet I must point out that like many other great religious organizations in the past, all things take time to grow. The primitive Christians, for instance, were met with the same difficulties that face us, and yet they prevailed wonderfully for various reasons; and if they succeeded with only a feeble part of what we today have in our God-Wisdom, we should succeed in time even more brilliantly than they did. Thus, upon considering this picture which I have endeavored to lay before you, we note that we must endeavor to follow the middle way between two dangers: the first danger to avoid is the building up of a special class or caste of Theosophical teachers who in time would be looked upon by the majority of our members as spiritually superior or spiritually privileged, and who would thus - and this would be a terribly fatal mistake become a true sacerdotal caste, a priesthood as it were, supposed, and wrongly supposed, by the majority of the members of the T.S. to be of especial spiritual worth or development. In time such a sacerdotal caste would gather into its hands the larger part of the teaching and exposition of Theosophy, and thus become truly a priesthood; and should this happen, this fatal error which came upon the early Christians would make of the T.S. but another sect: broad and generous in its outlook perhaps, teaching still somewhat our blessed GodWisdom perhaps, but yet a sect; and infallibly, as H.P.B. pointed out, its destiny would be to drift to some sandbank in the river of time, and the Masters' effort started in 1875 more or less would be frustrated. The seeds of the danger latent here are the tendencies, both mental and emotional, to look upon such sacerdotal or similar caste of lecturers or teachers, who have become priests or clergymen in the church, as possessing the knowledge necessary to be a good Theosophist: in other words, the introduction of dogmatisms and the crystallized ideas which are the marks always of sectarian and therefore limited beliefs. Above everything

else, Fellows of the Theosophical Society must guard their right to freedom of conscience, freedom of thought and freedom of speech; and while the brain-mind always loves things which are "clear and definite," as the saying goes, and while we certainly should strive for clarity and definiteness, yet we can achieve these without losing our inestimable right and privilege of searching for truth for ourselves in the blessed teachings we have, and finding them from our own efforts in study and self-discipline. We should always keep in mind the very wise words which H.P.B. wrote in her First Message to the American Theosophists in 1888: "Orthodoxy in Theosophy is a thing neither possible nor desirable. It is diversity of opinion, within certain limits that keeps the Theosophical Society a living and a healthy body, its many other ugly features notwithstanding. Were it not, also, for the existence of a large amount of uncertainty in the minds of students of Theosophy, such healthy divergences would be impossible, and the Society would degenerate into a sect, in which a narrow and stereotyped creed would take the place of the living and breathing spirit of Truth and an ever growing Knowledge." These are wise, very wise words; and while we all love clear expositions and definite outlines of thought, and it is right that we should love these because they show clear and masterly thinking, yet it is so easy, and history proves it, to slip into the fatally disastrous grooves of orthodoxy and mental crystallization. Hence let us prize the freedom we have today which gives us individual diversity of opinion in the T.S. and guarantees our freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, and furthermore, and not less important, makes us realize that the opinions of a brother may be well worth listening to, even if they may differ from our own. Thus, to summarize: our ideal is to have every member of the T.S. devoted to deep and earnest study of the Theosophical teachings, and to self-discipline in his daily life, each one being a propagandist and leader in his own sphere; but to have the more public work of the T.S. conducted by those whose greater breadth and depth of study and discipline, through larger opportunity, and whose character and temperament and ability, fit them for it. The other danger is the feeling among no small number of Theosophists, that anybody, learned or unlearned, expert in teaching Theosophy or inexpert, is a proper representative to place before the public as a teacher of our blessed God-Wisdom; it being forgotten that those who stand before the public as exponents of Theosophy should first and foremost have training in the philosophy, and this training, as I repeat above many times, in our present condition can best be achieved by uninterrupted, continuous, and utterly devoted, study of our God-Wisdom. On the other hand, I most emphatically do not argue that only those who are trained students should be given the platform in lodgemeetings. This again would be a psychological mistake, for in the lodge-meeting it is often a part of the training of our Theosophical students to gain experience in speaking from the platform, and this is a good thing, because they themselves feel that in order to speak intelligently and with self-confidence, they must undertake some really conscientious study of the teachings of Theosophy. I do hope I make my meaning clear. On the one hand we must avoid in the future the rising of a sacerdotal or so-called priestly caste; and on the other hand - and this faces us at the present time - our lodges and individual members should all work as individuals to become teachers and leaders in Theosophy. But it is always the best course in our

lodge-work, when public meetings are held, to have those members of the lodge speak to the public who are known by experience to be the best trained. Another thing I consider of real importance: it is to give every opportunity possible to the younger people in the T.S., to take an active part in the work just as soon as they show that they have the devotion and the understanding which fit them to assume responsibility. I say this because in certain Sections of the T.S. there is an undoubted disposition on the part of our beloved older members to discourage at least the entrance of our younger members into active Theosophical work, whether in lodges or otherwise; and I must say that I have little sympathy with this viewpoint. After all it is the younger members who will bear the burthen in the future, and it is our duty to give them every chance in training, and the best training is by learning under actual conditions of work and responsibility. I beg all my beloved members to keep these words in mind. And now, my dear Companions all, I must turn to other duties. I send greetings and good will, with the love of my heart and the hope that our blessed Masters may influence your deliberations as far as possible, and in accordance with the high and aspiring enthusiasm which I know is in your souls. I am, my beloved Companions, Faithfully yours, G. de Purucker - Theosophical Forum, Nov., 1938 ----------------------------

TO THOSE WHO MOURN THE beautiful message that Theosophy has to give to those who mourn, those who sorrow, applies not only to death and those left behind by the passing ones, but just as much to those who are not yet touched by death, to all those who have to live on this earth where there is more of sorrow and trouble and weariness of spirit than of happiness and real peace. For I wonder if any tender-hearted man or woman can really be happy in a world like ours, when we see surrounding us on all sides the most awful proofs of man's inhumanity to his fellowmen. How can we retire into our water-tight or spirit-tight or hearttight compartments of life when we know what is going on around us, not only among men, but among the helpless beasts: suffering and pain and sorrow, and on every side the cry of these martyrs raised to heaven? We talk about those who mourn and restrict it, each one of us, to our individual selves. How then? Do we not love the hand of kindliness extended in sympathy and understanding to others, who suffer lonely, who sorrow in loneliness? Death itself is nothing to grieve at. We have been through death a thousand times and more on this earth. We know it well. It is an old experience; and here we are back again. But we feel for those who mourn while they live: mourn for the loss of beloved ones; mourn for the loss of fortune, so that they are in difficulties to give even the physical bread to the bodies of those they love; mourn over the difficulties to find work so that they may work like men and women and feed the mouths of their hungry children; mourn because they have lost

friendship, lost love, lost hope, and perhaps most awful of all, lost trust in their fellowmen. Every son and daughter of man mourns, or he or she is heartless. The man who cannot mourn and who does not mourn to my mind is inhuman; and so great and wonderfully is nature builded that it is precisely this divine capacity for mourning that gives us sympathy for others, and to the mourners the hearts of understanding; and, strange magic of the human spirit, mourning, sorrow, suffering are our wisest friend. How these enrich our hearts! What priceless treasury is the expansion of consciousness that comes when mourning sets its often burning but always healing hand on our hearts! We sacrifice; but in this sacrifice is purification, is the awakening to the greater life. It is in sorrow, it is in mourning, it is in the evocation by these of pity, of compassion, that we learn truly to live. Even little children know what sorrow is, and how blessed it is for them that they may learn life's greatest thing: to learn and become enlarged by it, made grander by it. How pitiful is the man who cannot feel for others and is enwrapped solely in the small prison of his minuscule self. Where in him is grandeur? You seek for it and find it not. But the man who has suffered feels for all the world. On his heart each cry of mourning falls like a scalding tear, and he is made grand by it. Nature here works a magic, for in this process is born rosy hope, a star-lighted inspiration that comes from the enlarged consciousness. Blessed peace, the most exquisite joy and happiness that human hearts and minds can bear, is the appanage or spiritual heritage of those whose hearts have been softened by suffering. They who never suffer are the hard-hearted ones, unripe in their own restricted consciousness. The man who has never suffered knows not what peace is. He has never entered into it. The man who has never experienced sorrow knows not the surcease nor the blessedness that comes when quiet comes. It is to those who mourn - which comprise really all the human race - that Theosophy brings its own, its ineffable doctrine of hope and peace, and this because it teaches us to understand. The French have a proverb: Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner, the meaning of which is: if you fully understand you forgive all. Isn't it clear to us that inner grandeur comes from enlargement, and that enlargement of our consciousness as we say, of our understanding and of our heart, comes from suffering? Joy too can bring the smile to our lips and the light of happiness to our eyes; but isn't it a mere truism that all of life's ordinary joys turn to ashes in the mouth? Isn't it also true that the joys of life all too often make us selfish? We grab the joys to us, afraid lest we lose them. These commonplace joys often narrow us. But fellow-feeling, sympathy brought about by suffering, make the whole world akin. The man who has known naught but joy in life perhaps does not mind inflicting sorrow upon a fellow. He is not awakened. He does not understand. He is misled. He is ignorant. But the man who has suffered, the woman who has suffered, who has mourned, these are they who are great in their gentleness, who are great in their understanding because they comprehend, take in; they are enlarged, they are magnified. And the extreme of this is glorification in its true original sense. They become glorified, the next thing to god-men on earth. Such simple thoughts! I dare say that every child knows them and understands. So our blessed message to those who mourn is this: Fear not the bright and holy flame. It will make you men and women, not mere males and females. What is the great and outstanding characteristic mark of the god-men who have come among us from time to time? It has been the understanding heart: so that they could speak to the woman in trouble and help; to the man in ignorance and bring him succor and peace; to the little

children and they will understand. For the great man's own simple heart speaks to the simple direct heart of the child before it has been sophisticated, spoiled by the falsities which it all too often learns as it grows up and has to unlearn in order to be truly a man, truly a woman. To those who mourn comes the blessed Gospel: let the holy flame enter into your hearts as a visiting god. Treat it very friendly. Welcome it. Receive it as a guest; and that guest, sorrow-clad, will cast off the habiliments of mourning, and you will realize that you have been entertaining unawares a god. And that god is you. Then you have entered into your own. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, Jan., 1941 --------------------------

THE T. S., A LIVING, GROWING ORGANISM EVEN the most wonderful magician of words leaves his audiences cold unless he have in his mind, and send forth from his heart, something which is intrinsically grand and ever-perduring. Spiritual and intellectual grandeur is what we Theosophists, students of our God-Wisdom, long for: we long to imbody in ever greater fulness the ancient Wisdom which we have received as our holiest possession, so that we may give it, as far as we may and unadulterate, to others who have hungered as we have hungered for it. We of the Theosophical Society are not mere parrots, mere word-repeaters, repeating the grand thoughts of men long dead, or again, merely quoting from certain Theosophical books that we love and revere and that have been written by H.P. Blavatsky, the Envoy of the Masters of Wisdom. We are not mere parrots, I say; and in this we try to follow H.P. Blavatsky's instructions, trying to develop ourselves inwardly so that, as she pointed out in her wonderful Key to Theosophy, we shall become strong men and women, strong spiritually and intellectually, men and women of incorruptible character with independent ideas of our own, born of the Wisdom-Religion if you will, but nevertheless illumined with our own native genius as far as we can evoke and draw upon this last. This is not egoism; it is in fact the exact opposite of egoism; and again, it is not putting oneself forward as an authority in spiritual things. When a man has reached the stage where he will accept truth wherever he finds it, and perhaps at whatever cost to himself, he has indeed grown inwardly, and then it becomes his duty to give of what he has gained to others who know still less than he. Furthermore, and this is a most important thought, it is precisely because he himself, through his studies of Theosophy has grown at least somewhat inwardly, that he comes to appreciate the fact that there are other men who know as much as he does - aye, much more, mayhap. He then understands, and does not merely accept the verbal statement, that we are all students, but students in differing degrees of understanding. This means that we do not stand still, blindly satisfied with the noble work done by those Theosophists who have preceded us in time and work, although none more than we revere these our predecessors in the Cause. The Theosophical Society were a mere farce, an imposition on human hearts, if it were not based on the

principle of essential progress, collectively and for the individual, implying that each individual each day goes a little farther forwards and upwards towards our common and sublime objective. The Theosophical Society, please remember, is composed of all the Theosophists who unite to make it. There is no organization more worthy nor superior to the men who compose it; it is precisely the men who compose it who make it. The standing, spiritual and intellectual, of the Theosophical Society is gaged by the men and women who compose it, and it will be just as low or just as high as we individuals make it, because of what we are ourselves. To the degree that we as individuals follow with fidelity the grand and beautiful instructions which we have received, to the degree that we show in our own lives how much inner growth we have achieved - otherwise, what we ourselves have learned and have grown to, and having learned are prepared to pass on to others: to this degree will our Society be high or low, and will retrograde or march steadily forwards. May the gods in high heaven ever prevent, through our efforts both collectively and individually, the Theosophical Society from becoming a mere sect, depending upon a book or books, however grand this or these may be in themselves; may they prevent our pretending to live alone on the Word received from our predecessors; but may we continue to grow from within ourselves and become independent thinkers and workers steadily raising the level of ourselves and therefore of the Theosophical Society. Let our beloved Society continue for ever to be a living, growing organism through which pulses the inspiration of our blessed God-Wisdom. We can best render our homage of immense reverence and devotion to our Teachers, higher and lower, by striving to improve ourselves as individuals, as individuals to advance ourselves in all things great and good, and as individuals to become independent, strong characters. If we can do this, then we shall for ever be able to retain and to manifest to others those principles of conduct which have ever graced the lives of the noblest of our predecessors, and this likewise will insure that our Theosophical platform shall be ever free, growing, in all the best senses of the word, and therefore becoming ever more truly a nobler platform for the elaboration and dissemination of Theosophy to the world. It is results that the world looks for, and not talk; for it is a mere truism to state once again that the world is weary of talk without action, of professions without their expressions in the lives of the professors. If the Theosophical Society is not to drift on some mere sandbank of thought, however noble that thought may be, and even based on our own Theosophical ideas, - if the Theosophical Society is to grow and to become for future ages what it was destined to be, it is in our hands to make it so by ourselves making ourselves ever truer exponents in our lives, and in our independent but ever loyal thinking, of the Wisdom-Tradition that we have received from our Masters. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, Dec., 1938 -------------------

The T. S. and the Lost Cause of Materialism Last words of Dr. de Purucker to the members of the International Headquarters

Lodge, spoken at the close of their regular study-meeting, held September 13, 1942. THE origin of the Theosophical Movement began not in arbitrary decisions by the powers that be, but because of conditions of cyclic necessity. Thus, when H.P.B. came, she came because of a need to keep alive in men their spiritual intuitions, and by so keeping them alive, prevent men from falling under the sway of a world ruled by brute force, in which might was considered right and in which the only justice was the booty of the strongest. She knew that the will of brutal power would govern mankind unless checked and stayed by those innate rules of right residing in the souls of men. How came about this situation in our world? Because of two things: A religion which had become thoroughly materialistic, thoroughly; so much so that men no longer believed that this universe was run by spiritual powers enforcing the rule of right; and therefore that men could act pretty much as they pleased if they but rendered lip-homage to an ecclesiastical set-up. This idea coming from the religious side of man's knowledge, education, and social contacts, was more than strengthened by an equivalently evil power emanating from the ranks of modern scientists. And this latter power had incomparably more influence on men's minds than the former, the dicta of the Church and its Hierarchy. Why? Because men had begun to believe that the noble research into nature undertaken by science gave us truth; and men were justified in so believing, for that is the real work of scientists: the investigation of facts and the collating of them into a comprehensive philosophic mold. And a great many scientists do work most earnestly and with energy and most praiseworthy perseverance to that noble end. But it is a very different thing when men who themselves had already lost all belief in a spiritual control of the universe, began to theorize and lay down laws of theoretic speculation regarding the origin of the universe and the origin of man, the working of the universe and the continuation of man therein, and the future of the universe and man's future in it. These were not scientific facts discovered by research. They were theories only, speculations only, hypotheses only, derived from the imagination of men who had lost a belief in a spiritual control of the universe. Sincere efforts these were, of course, but they were based on no spiritual belief, and therefore these scientists could not render into a comprehensive whole, a philosophic whole, the facts in nature which they had discovered. Thus, examine those early days of complete materialism beginning about the time of Voltaire and others. I use Voltaire as an example, not because he was the originator of this era; but he was one of its earliest products and one of its noblest. He was a fighter against dogmatism of any kind. More glory to him! But his work likewise destroyed belief in a spiritual universe. Thus, then, what were these scientific theories on the one hand and religious theories on the other hand? That this universe runs itself, that there is no spiritual power in it controlling it or guiding it, and that things happen by chance not by law. This was uttered out of one side of the mouth and out of the other side of the mouth of scientists came the equally fervent statement: the universe is caused by the laws of nature. With one side of the mouth they preached fortuity and chance and with the other side they preached laws. It never seemed to strike them that these two preachments were mutually destructive. What were, then, the factors that Darwin stated made evolution, or what were the conditions under which evolution took place, or again what caused evolution? - phrase it

as you wish. It was a struggle - it was a struggle in which the fittest survived, not the best, not the noblest, but the strongest. This was thought of as a law of nature. There was not a word in Darwin or in Lamarck or in Haeckel or in Huxley, or in any of these great men so called, of fifty or eighty years ago, about this world's being ruled by intrinsic moral sanctions, not a hint of it. It was a rule of brute force in which the strongest survived, a struggle in which the fittest survived, and the fittest meant the most brutally strong, not the best. Thus, as I have often pointed out, a man and a shark in the ocean - which is the more fit to survive in case a conflict should arise between them? The shark will survive because it is in its element. He is the fitter in that element and he will kill the man. Yet the man is the nobler creature, the better, the more evolved. That is what Darwinism is: chance action by nature in a desperate struggle to survive, in which the weak are eaten or go to the wall and brutal strength only is the cause of victory. These ideas are destructive of the soul-life of mankind, whether they are born from theology or science. Get these facts clear, and examine, as we Theosophists have for all these years, the lapses from logic in our scientific works, the lapses in the reasoning of our scientists. It was into a world governed by a belief in brutality as nature's sole way of functioning that came the God-Wisdom through H.P.B., and, as she proclaimed, her first work was to keep alive in man his spiritual intuitions, so that he would react against this `rule' so-called and mis-called, this `accident' in nature, this rule of brutal force. Look at the actions of the peoples of the earth during the last hundred years or more - no, the last three or four hundred years. Look at the world today. The result of soul-loss, of the stifling of the spiritual instincts of the human being. Indeed we Theosophists have reacted with power against these teachings, whether from the theologic or the scientific side. We have faced the scorn and the ridicule of a day when even to speak of the human soul meant loss of caste. Look what H.P.B. did. Almost alone and single-handed she challenged the thoughtlife of the world and brought about by her courage and her teachings the founding of the Theosophical Society, proclaiming aloud and to all and sundry that the world was ruled by moral law and that he who infringed that law whether under the hypocritical guise of virtue or whether openly and desperately as the criminal does - that he who breaks that law shall pay. Today the world no longer believes that. It believes that the only way to make what they think is a criminal pay is to use greater brutal power than anyone else does. They no longer believe in the rule of spiritual law. They no longer believe that this universe of ours is governed by moral sanctions. They take the law into their own hands. Is this the truth? Is this religion? Is this philosophy? Is this science? It is not religion, it is not philosophy, it is not science. All these three in their essence proclaim the rule of law in nature; that this law is spiritual and therefore moral; that there is cause and there is effect emanating from that cause, and that these effects are ineluctable and cannot ever be avoided: they should, can, and will haunt your footsteps as the cart follows the foot of the ox which draws it - a magnificent old Buddhist statement of the Dhammapada written in a day when men believed that the universe was ruled by spiritual and moral sanctions. Do an evil deed and, sure as the cart follows the foot of the ox which draws it, that evil deed will haunt you and find you out in this life or in a future one. This is religion, this is philosophy, this is science; especially science, teaching as this last does its doctrine of cause and effect, its doctrine that effect follows cause and is alike unto its parent cause.

The world no longer believes in these things. The peoples no longer believe in them. Only those fine spirits whose intuition flames brighter than in the majority of our fellow human beings have disbelief in these teachings of materialism now dying: dying in religion, dying in philosophy, dying in science, but whose maleficent consequences afflict us like Atlantean karman even today weighing heavily upon us. So it is important to support in the science of our time all those elements which uphold the belief in a spiritual governance of the world. It is important for us as Theosophists to support in philosophy those elements, those philosophic elements, which teach that the universe is controlled by intrinsically moral sanctions. It is important for us Theosophists to support with deepest sympathy and understanding those elements in religion which, casting aside the materialism of the last 1800 years more or less, teach that divinity filleth all vessels, whether vessels of honor or vessels of dishonor; for to divinity neither the one nor the other is dishonorable. That divinity is the spirit universal out of the womb of which come all beings and things, and back into which celestial haven in due course of the revolving ages all things and all beings shall one day return. I think, dear Brothers and Companions, that the most needed thing today for us Theosophists is this: to do our utmost to bring about a renascence, a rebirth, in the minds of men of the truth that this universe of ours is under the most strict cosmical moral law, in other words of harmony; for what in the universe is harmony, in the human soul we call the ethical instinct. Remember that the man who is sincerely convinced that his thoughts and feelings are going to result in action and that he is responsible for this action, will take thought and long and searching thought before he acts. There you are. There is the secret of the whole thing. Just that simple law, a belief by us men that this universe of ours is not the product of chance; that it is infilled with moral power and that this moral force resides in the human soul and that this moral force in the human soul should be our guide in our daily conduct. If men followed just that simple rule our life here on earth would be a heaven when compared with what it now is. All too long has thinking man been under the illusion of maya that he could take nature's laws into his own hands and in his feeble manner with his weak and shaky intellect attempt to administer cosmic justice. How the gods must laugh at us! And if they weep, as some say they do, how at times their celestial eyes must be filled with the tears of divine pity for man! --------------------REMEMBER that you are a child of infinitude, each one of you, inseparable from the boundless Universe in which we all live and move and have our being; remember that you are well taken care of by almighty Nature's laws, which brought you here, which will take you out from this life, and which will infallibly guide you on your way. Trust yourself then to death in happy confidence; die with a strong and happy will; die with gladness when your time comes; be not afraid. Mock at the phantom of `death' - mock at the old hideous specter which the fearful imagination of ignorance wove in the hearts and minds of men. Mock at that specter, that evil thing of the imagination! Cast it out! Remember that you are well taken care of .... Ye are gods feebly manifesting your transcendent divine powers through bodies of flesh. Live accordingly, and receive the guerdon of the gods when ye die. Be not afraid. - G. de Purucker, Questions We All Ask

- Theosophical Forum, Nov., 1942 -----------------------

THE TIBETAN DOCTRINE OF TULKU - G. de Purucker I want to make a few brief remarks on an imporatant point and a very beautiful one. It has to do with the teaching of the Mahayan Buddhism of Tibet, which is also exactly our own teaching, hinted at by our beloved H.P.B., but not explained because the times were not ripe for explanation when she wrote. It is a very difficult, highly mystical and subtil doctrine and for that reason filled full with beauty and richness. It is the doctrine of what the Tibetans call Tulku, and is believed in by every Tibetan whether educated or not. Madame David-Neel, a convert to the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, speaks of tulkus and tries with great earnestness and sincerity to explain just what they are; but she has not got the key, the heart of it. She says a Tulku is an apparition, that it is a kind of spiritual appearance which sometimes makes it manifestation among men; but it is evident that she does not get the real idea. When I recently read Peaks and Lamas by Marco Pallis, it pleased me so greatly because the author tries so hard to understand this Tibetan teaching, and speaks of it much more accurately, saying that a Tulku is an incarnation. This is closer to the truth. Now what is a Tulku? Tulkus can be of many kinds, according to Tibetan teaching. The tulku-doctrine is in fact a generalized statement of our doctrine of Avataras. For instance there are the so-called living Buddhas in Tibet. The Tibetans do not call them that; that is what Europeans call them; but the Tibetans say that there is the transmission of a spiritual power or energy from one grand abbot of a Tibetan monastery when he dies to a child successor or an adult successor. Now if this transmission is successful, the one who receives the transmission is tulku. He is the avatara of the spiritual essence or ego or ray from the previous grand abbot of the monastery. That is one kind of tulku. Another kind of tulku is an instance where a human Mahatman or great Adept will send a ray from himself, or send a part of himself, to take incarnation or imbodiment, it may be only temporary, it may be almost for a lifetime, in an envoy that this Mahatman is sending out into the world to teach. H.P.B. was such a tulku; she imbodied frequently the very life and egoity of her own Teacher. While this incarnation of the Teacher's higher essence lasted, she was tulku. When the influence from the ray was withdrawn, tulku stopped. Some time ago, I think it was two or four weeks ago, I made a statement in answer to a question asked of me, that H.P.B. had not incarnated, and I repeat that now. She has left the devachan, but has not incarnated. But in another place - and I was delighted to get this information from one who had heard the statement, showing how carefully our teachings are studied - in another place about 1930 I stated that H.P.B. had left her short devachan and was then in body; but I very pointedly remarked, whether a child's body or an adult body it is not for me here to say. I was asked to explain this apparent contradiction. Now this was my meaning, and I had better explain it as I did to one who asked the

question. H.P.B. has not incarnated, that is, she has not incarnated as you have. She has not yet been born as a child. But she has at certain times, and for one certain individual, with that individual's consent, organized as it were tulku for that individual. Do you understand what I am trying to say? So for the time being we can say that H.P.B. is imbodied, or partially imbodied, in that chosen individual's being for the purpose of special transmission. That is another kind of tulku. I have thus given you examples of three kinds of tulku. You notice in all cases they are incarnations or appearances. If H.P.B. for instance were to - well, take the Chairman here (turning to the presiding officer,) make a tulku of him for a month or a year, for the time being he would be tulku; but when that particular work was done, the influence would be withdrawn, tulku would stop. It is a kind of avatara, a kind of incarnation. You may think this is very mysterious and very wonderful, but to people who know about these things it is all very reasonable. Do you realize that every clever hypnotist makes a tulku of his victim in a black magic sense? When a hypnotist puts an idea into the brain of his victim that one week from now, at three o'clock in the afternoon the subject is going to commit murder, or going to jump off a cliff, or going into the Jones's house to steal a Christmas pudding in the larder, for the time being that hypnotist is working a black magic tulku on that victim, and every psychologist hypnotist today know this. Yet speak to him of tulku and he will laugh. He is ignorant. The wise man has learned not to laugh until he knows. But I want to point out as my final word before I close, that this doctrine of the tulku has a side to it which is extremely sublime and beautiful, outside of the practical issues concerned. For instance, Jesus the Avatara was a life-long tulku, a ray from the divinity, a tulku of that divinity so far as that ray goes, an incarnation of that divinity. The Buddha himself - Sakyamuni Siddhartha often called Buddha Gautama - was also a tulku, but a tulku of his own inner god. The average man is merely overshadowed occasionally; the light gets through if he really aspires, and he gets a touch of the divine flame. But when Gautama, later called the Buddha, attained Buddhahood, he was infilled with his own god, he was that god's human tulku. That was for him Nirvana. To speak very technically, he entered Dharmakaya, and was known of men no more. In other words he was a man become divinized, made divine. Your own reading will give you instances of other cases of tulku. So you see what a tulku is. It is, as Madame David-Neel said, an apparition, yes, appearance yes; but these words are not sufficiently descriptive. It is an imbodiment of a spirit or a spiritual being or entity, for a specific or general objective. A good example of black magic tulku was what the medieval Europeans used to call were-wolves or menwolves, and thereby hangeth a wondrous tale. But that was black magic. (The Above remarks at a meeting of the Headquarters Lodge, July 14, 1940, are here printed as Dr. de Purucker gave them. He edited the same text for inclusion in his Encyclopedic Glossary, and this latter more formal edition will appear in one of the volumes of his collected writings now in preparation; but it was thought readers would enjoy here the informality of his first words. [[- Eds. Theosophical Forum]]) [From Theosophical Forum, March, 1944, including the annotation at the end of the article. For an extremely interesting article on Purucker himself as a tulku, see Purucker's own description in The High Country Theosophist, July, 1991. (140 South 33rd Street,

Boulder, Colorado 80303) Editor Richard Slusser will likely supply a copy on request.] - Protogonos, #14, Fall, 1991 -----------------------

UNIVERSALITY AND THE ESOTERIC TRADITION by G. de Purucker H.P.B. wrote grandly of the Secret Doctrine of the ages, and she pointed out that this Secret Doctrine has come down to us from time immemorial in the guardianship of our great Teachers, in all their various grades. She showed that this Wisdom of the Gods was originally handed to the first human protoplasts by beings from other spheres, by spiritual beings from other planes, to use the argot which we have popularized. But it seemed to me that with all the grandeur of her teaching and the high plane of thought to which she led us, there still remained something to be given which should guard the student against the intrusion into his mind of false ideas, false teachings, doctrines leading him away from the Central Fire. In other words men lacked, Theosophists lacked, a standard, a test-stone, against which they could lay a teaching presented to them and find out whether the teaching were pure gold or only tinsel, brass. What is this really infallible touchstone, this instrument which you can use if you recognize it? It is universality. Any teaching presented to you which cannot stand that test, which can be shown to be only a purported communication from other spheres, and which has no basis in the great philosophies and religions and sciences of the past given to mankind by Masters of Wisdom - any such teaching is fraudulent and has no right, no place, in court, in the court of our conscience. The gods taught men in the beginning, man in his childhood, and led him on, and bred him up, enlightened his mind, so that it could receive and understand and pass on in secret and open tradition the archaic God-Wisdom, our god-teachings, the Secret Doctrine. In getting this idea, this conception that truth, reality, has been communicated to mankind, that it is now on earth ready for us when we prove ourselves ready for it and worthy of it, we understand that it is traditional, that it has been given forth in larger or smaller measure and in varying manners from age to age by the greatest men, the titan intellects, of the human race; and therefore that this tradition, this Qabbalah, this BrahmaVidya, can be found in all the great religions and philosophies of the ages. In accepting this view, you lose sight of the mere author of whatever book may be in your hands. You forget the personality, the individuality of the Teacher, and you look to what he brings. If he is genuine you find, not the vague frontiers upon which structures of falsity may be erected by scheming minds; but you understand that here is a glorious and mighty Tradition coming down to us from the Universe, from the heart of Divinity, and that its appearances as communicated to men are in the great religions and philosophies of the ages. It is this Tradition, this Secret Doctrine, which gave to H.P.B. the title of her masterpiece; and it was for this same reason that I chose these actual words, The Esoteric Tradition, as the title of my latest book. It is esoteric because few have as yet understood

it. It is traditional because it has been handed down from immemorial time. Thus The Esoteric Tradition is an attempt, feeble it may be, but very honest and sincere, to do what our Teachers are trying to do with us: to instil into our hearts and minds a reverence for and a worship of the truth before us; to awaken in our hearts the divine Fire of love for all that is, which becomes constricted and restricted and usually degraded when it is fastened solely on an individual accepted as a Teacher. The suggestion in the title of this book is that a Teacher should receive reverence, but only in so far as his teaching is truth. In losing sight of the man, you see the Message. Was there not need, is there not need, of just this touchstone, particularly in the Theosophical Movement today? Is it not absolutely accordant with all that dear H.P.B. taught us: to look within, to look up, to forget yet to revere the hand which gives; to take the Message? Inspect it. Take from it what you find good; reject the balance if you wish. You may make a mistake in so doing, but you are exercising your prerogative of choice, of discrimination, of intuition. And by so exercising it you give strength; and as time passes it will grow very powerful, and you will then take back the corner-stone which you rejected, and in so doing you will receive the Teacher with the teaching in your hearts, and in the proper way. One lesson I have learned: that it is the teaching and its magic working upon me which counts; for when the teaching enters my heart my reverence for the communicator grows. Is not your reverence for our Masters infinitely greater when you realize that they awaken in us the noblest and best? It is just this noblest and best in us which, when awakened, enables us to see them. And that is what they want: not to have us see them, but to have us awake, our hearts beating in steady rhythm with the heartbeat of the universal heart, and our minds fired with the truth which they communicate to us and which we value precisely in proportion as it is impersonal. I think the Theosophical Movement will suffer from no more fakers, no more false teachers, now or in the future, provided we can remember that the touchstone of anything that may be offered to us for a teaching is universality, and the appeal to the conscience, the appeal to the voice within. - G. de Purucker, Wind of the Spirit, (Extemporaneous remarks given in the Temple of Peace, Point Loma, California, in 1941.) - Eclectic Theosophist, Aug. 11, 1971 -------------------

"THE WAY OF HEAVEN" - G. de Purucker I was asked once why it was that in all the ancient scriptures, so far as we know them, with a few exceptions all spiritual teaching was given in the vernacular of the battlefield. The Bhagavad-Gita, for instance, tells of the battle between the opposing armies of the Kurus and the Pandavas; in the Scandinavian mythology, for instance, there

is the constant battling between the gods and the heroes; in the Greek mythology likewise there is constant battling. The Egyptian, the Persian, the Babylonian mythologies, all are alike in this respect. No question is more easily answered: To little children you give story-books; to boys you give story-books of a somewhat different kind; to unevolved men who cannot understand the meaning of peace and quiet and the enormous strength that lies in these, you talk of battle, and of fighting, because in battle and in fighting there is always a victor and a vanquished; and you tell them: "Be you the victor." That is all there is to it. It is common language, common phraseology. A great many of the sacred scriptures were written for warlike, battling peoples. The ancient Germanic tribes, including the Scandinavians, and the people of the time of the Homeric poems, and similarly the various other nations in different parts of the world whose literatures contain epic poems, as is also the case with the Gita, which is one episode in one of the greatest of the epic poems - all were battling, warlike, and fighting peoples, and their epic literatures took the form that they possess because they were written for battling peoples. Secrets of mystic truths were written in the epic vein in order to meet the mental characteristics of those various ages. But behind all this, behind the necessity of teaching hard-fisted and hard-headed warriors some of the beautiful lessons of truth and of compassion, there were the esoteric schools, which taught truth, which taught compassion, much as great Lao-Tse of China taught: to wit, that the way of Tao - often translated Heaven - is not to strive. Halfunderstanding Occidental scholars, studying these Oriental scriptures, make fun of the idea that the way to succeed is by not striving to succeed; that the way to progress rapidly is by hastening more with mind and heart, but without the idea of speedy accomplishment; that the way to health is in the attainment of harmony rather than in the mere practice of formal rules. But Lao-Tse was right. Quiet are the places where growth takes place. Still are the chambers where light enters the heart. Nature's most majestic processes are silent, peaceful, quiet. The rattling drum and the blaring brass-band may stand as ideals for the little boy, but for the Sage - no! All growth is quiet, takes place without striving, in the silence. Battle, strife, activity, hustle, bustle all these things are signs of human imperfections, and of a lack of knowledge of the Wisdom of the Heart-Doctrine. It is indeed the way of Heaven not to strive. - From an Informal Talk at Point Loma - Eclectic Theosophist, Sept. 15, 1978 ----------------------------

Weather and Eclipses:

G. de P. on ECLIPSES Extract from a private talk by Dr. de Purucker at Covina, California, August 25, 1942.

Reprinted from Dialogues of G. de Purucker, I, 188-89. - Editors It is contrary to every rule of the archaic occult school for an esoteric gathering to be held during an eclipse, or indeed during any other of the several great phenomena of nature. Among such phenomena we can reckon earthquakes and very severe electric storms. Invariably our esoteric or occult meetings immediately close should any or all of these phenomena begin, although of course where great adepts are concerned, and earthquakes, eclipses, severe electrical storms are foreseen, no occult or esoteric meetings are even begun. So strongly held was this rule, and so commonly understood amongst the ancients, that it is a matter of recorded history that even in the midst of most important human affairs, such as congresses, or meetings of the heads of states, or the founding of a city or what not, even during battles on land or naval engagements at sea, at the first sign of an earthquake, at the first sign of an eclipse, or even the coming of a heavy electrical storm, everything stopped instantly because, to phrase it in the esoteric language of those ancient days, the gods were angered with men at the moment ... This sounds quaint to the modern man, whose mind has been so colored by scientific theory or speculation that he utterly fails to realize that all nature is knitted together in an absolute web of destiny. The ancients were wiser for they knew that earthquakes `don't just happen,' that eclipses `don't just happen,' nor electrical storms, or any other of the serious phenomena of nature. The absolute unity of nature, including men, as well as the earth's electrical and seismic movements, and the movements of the sun and planets, were to the ancients all different movements of one common nature of which every part responds and calls to every other part. So that when men were fighting on land or on sea, or engaged in important deliberations, and then Nature takes a hand in other parts of the web producing an earthquake or an eclipse or a severe electric storm, or even an unusual chilling of the atmosphere or a sudden heat-pocket - all these things to the ancients were significant of the unity of life. The idea that they `just happened' would have been dismissed not merely with wonder but with contempt. Which attitude is the more truly scientific, that of the modern who sees no fundamental webbing of event with event, no fundamental unity with nature, and who thinks that things `just happen'; or that of the ancients and of many moderns even today who look upon nature as one and uniform, every part electrically connected with every other, human beings included, so that what one part did affected most intimately and perhaps powerfully every other greater or smaller part of nature? - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 71 -------------------------

WHAT IS TRUTH? - G. de Purucker How may we find truth, or distinguish as among different teachings calling themselves truth, as to which is the proper or the best? What is truth? Do you remember Pontius Pilate

calling for a bowl of water to wash his hands, and saying: What is truth? I ask you the same: What is truth? Do you think, any one of you or any son of man, that you have all truth within the small compass of your mind? Don't you see what a preposterous question this is? All we can know of truth is partial cognisance of the laws of the Universe, an evergrowing cognisance, an ever-increasing range of consciousness and feeling, a growth in wisdom and inner power. But if any man could encompass the whole truth within the small compass of his mind, of his brain, what a sad outlook for all the future there would lie before him. He has ended, he has finished, he has it all! He has infinite truth - all of which is fortunately impossible. Truth is relative, because what men call truth is just so much as each individual man can understand, take in, receive and digest, of the laws of the Universe around us; and by that I mean the spiritual Universe even more than the gross physical one that gives us our bodies. Truth is relative, I repeat, which means in the simplest way of speaking, that what is truth to Jack may be false to John. Charles may see where Jack fails and where John fails, and have a vision of a still higher truth; and some other man with a vision and penetrating power of intellect larger than that of Charles, may see more and feel more. Deduction: Be therefore generous in your feelings towards others. Learn to respect true convictions, if they are indeed convictions; and learn to understand mere opinions for the paltry value that most of them have, opinions that are as changeable and uncertain as the moonlight. Truth per se is infinite wisdom, and what man has it? Even the gods themselves in their Azure Seats have only portions, but portions vastly greater than we have. So you see how futile such a question is af ter all, and how distressing it is that questions like this have given rise to so much human ill feeling as among men, not only in religion but in every aspect of human life. Instead of having kindliness and sympathy towards others, and an endeavor to understand your brother's viewpoint, there is a constant clash of opinions and warring of words, leading to human unhappiness at the least, and to desperate misery at the worst - all very foolish and, indeed, childish, because unnecessary. The old simple rule of brotherhood and kindliness solves all these problems. Remember that your own growth in wisdom is steady, your own growth in understanding is constant. Learn then to be charitable to others. Of course, on the other hand, some systems of thought have much more of truth than others. This is obvious, because some men are more evolved than other men, are wiser, have a more penetrating mind, and see farther. Learn therefore to be charitable, but to be always ready to receive a new truth and to follow a Teacher whom you believe to have that truth, thus recognising that it is possible for some other man to know a little more than yourself . It takes a big man to follow some other man; and I don't mean blind slavery or servile obedience. I abhor them. I mean an honest conviction in your heart that someone else in the world knows more than you do; and such a conviction dignifies a man, clothes him with manly dignity. Truth dwells within, in you and in me. There is a secret fountain of truth and consequent wisdom within every son of man, at which he may drink; and this secret fountain is his own inmost being, his link with the divinity which is the heart of our Universe, for that same heart is his heart, for we are of its substance, of its life we are children, of its thought we are offspring. The very physical atoms which compass my body are mere guests therein, and

I am their host. They come to me from the farthest ranges of the Galaxy, dwell a while in my body, and give it form, and pass on. And I, alas, perhaps dirty their faces when they come to me in trust, or mayhap, peradventure, I cleanse their faces. But whatever happens, those same atoms will return to me some day in the infinite whirling of the Wheel of Life, continuous throughout eternity. The big wheels move by the grace of God; The little wheels move also! You know the old Negro 'spiritual' - a wonderful truth in that fact! So then, truth is merely as much as the spiritual man within you can take in from your study, from your intuitions, from your living with your fellowmen, and above all from your inner inspiration. Does truth dwell in Science? Does truth dwell in the churches? The answer is obvious, isn't it! Does truth dwell in the philosophical lecture-halls of our Universities? The same answer! You will find in church and lecture-hall and in scientific laboratory only as much as individual men bring there; and these individual men know only as much as they have evolved from within themselves. You see how futile this question is as among the different sects and societies. Where may truth be found, and how may we know when we find it? You see the answer. Here is the touchstone: within; because there is truth within the heart, within the core of your being, the divine center which is identical with the divine center of the Universe, for we are children of it, of its essence; and just in proportion as a man comes to know and to become this divine spark burning within his own being, does his grasp of truth grow greater. The more he can vibrate in unison with the vibrations of that spiritual sun within himself, that spark which is the light from the divinity of the Galaxy, just in proportion does he know truth. But in a practical way be kindly to those who differ from you, recognizing that your own understanding is limited also. Do not resort to sarcasms, a sure mark of small minds. Use irony if you like, but not unkind sarcasms. When a man resorts to sarcasm, it simply means that he cannot think of anything more clever to say. Be kindly towards others; respect others' convictions; and seek continually that fountain of Wisdom within yourself where in its inmost we may indeed say that Truth abides in fulness. There lies the pathway of which Theosophy teaches. - From Lucifer, December, 1934 - Protogonos, #16, April, 1994 ---------------------

WHAT LESSONS HAVE WE LEARNED? - G. de Purucker The following article, under the title "Signs of the Times: Simple and Apparent", is reprinted from the New Century Path, August 7, 1904, Vol. vii, No. xxix. The author had come to Point Loma, and the Theosophical Headquarters there, the year before at the age

of 29. Later, in 1929, he became head of that Society (T.S., Point Loma), succeeding Katherine Tingley. It is sobering in the light (?) of what the passing decades have brought to this twentieth century, to read again and ponder words of this nature, and ask ourselves today what lessons have we learned? - Eds. The times are full of signs; but not always correctly may they read. Though both simple and apparent to the very casual observer, they are yet recondite and difficult to follow. The destiny of several of our greatest nations is today hanging in the balance of Divine Justice; and yet the warning cry of more than one modern Jeremiah has sounded in vain. They will not listen, these nations, and it would seem as if the bitter fruit of repentance must of necessity be mixed with their tears. But jeremiads, of whatsoever kind they may be, are rarely listened to with respect. The state of our poor human mind at this stage of the evolutionary development of ourselves is, after all, one which needs comfort, not condemnation; compassion, not anger; brotherhood, not separation of individual interests; the practice of altruism instead of laissez faire. What a curious commentary on our civilization is, indeed, our manner of viewing the offspring of that civilization! Unanimously we decry any attempt to belittle the achievements attained in this our epoch, and point with searching finger towards the shadowy past, asking silently whether those who have preceded us had risen to the heights we now occupy. We have deified material attainment; and the apotheosis of scientific achievement has probably reached its acme. Our savants we look upon as beings of peculiar and delicate mental build; living automata, whose duty it is to purvey to our wants and to the necessities to which we have sold ourselves as bondsmen. Yet those ancients had, as we now have (in theory), ideals which made them great. To them, life was not an insolvable mystery; nor was the individual existence of man lost in the maze of spiritual and mental uncertainties, which to us moderns is a veritable Cretan labyrinth. We have lost the Ariadne's thread thereof, and wander purblindly hither and thither seeking the light we have lost. It was the moral qualities in man which the ancients gave formal place to. With them the apotheosis bestowed was not on things, but on the man himself. A noble and dignified manhood, and a true and strong womanhood, were their standards of attainment; and those quickening powers in the human breast which raise from death into the life of the ages, were the inspiration of those deeds of heroism concerning which so much has been echoed and so little understood. The Roman Augurs, so it is said, once declared that only Rome's choicest and most precious treasure could close the yawning gulf in their Forum. The Patrician Curtius, esteeming that nothing more sacred and precious existed within the walls of Rome than that spirit of heroism which makes man great, leaped in full armor into the terrible chasm, which forthwith closed with a sound of grinding rock. That spirit in man which impels to deeds of self-sacrifice in times when need is great, is the spirit which saves a nation; it is the soulful power which makes a people sublime in achievement, and splendid in act; which raises the clay of the body to electric life, and sets upon the brow of him it inspires, the crown of the hero. Such, truly, were the moral ideals of the ancients; but as man is yet but man, and as the destiny of peoples runs upward and then downward again, each epoch registers itself in the Book of Eternity as one of growth, of maturity, and of decadence of the power

of this immortal spirit in man. It would seem, therefore, that it is Things which we today worship, and not qualities. And as it is the inevitable fate of Things to find an eternal rest in dust, why what feeble strands have we woven into the anchors of our hopes! Man is in truth not bound; his higher will is the will of Eternity, and all shall dissolve like a morning's mist before It. His higher purposes are those of the god within his breast, and if man would but surrender the reins of his temporal power, to grasp those of his spiritual nature, the things he would do, and leave undone, would very quickly lift the heavy weight of the world, a weight of sin, and of suffering, and of human misery. There is a lost art: it is the art of self-control. He who possessed it fully might rule the world, for the world would be prone before him; and if this control of self were that of gentle divinity and of simple altruism, such a one would pass to posterity as a savior of his fellows. Our citizenship compares ill with that of many of the peoples of the past; and were our national ideals judged by the Higher Law in contrast with those of some of the ancients, the comparison, possibly, would not flatter us. Therefore, what has the future for us? What individual and national legacy are we now in process of bequeathing to our posterity? Is it one which will lay so burthensome a responsibility, and so chafing a destiny upon our descendants, that our memory will be thought of with aversion? The signs of the times, which are now so many, what story do they tell us? They are vocal with menace, yet vocal with hope. How shall we interpret them? What lessons will we learn from them? - G.de P. - Eclectic Theosophist, May 15, 1978 ------------------------

WHERE CAN TRUTH BE FOUND? - G. de Purucker It was the custom at Point Loma at the conclusion of an address by one of the students at a Sunday afternoon public meeting, or after an evening Lodge meeting, for Dr. de Purucker to add a few words, emphasizing perhaps some point that he felt would be responsive to the call, so to say, from the audience. The following impromptu remarks, given some time in 1940, and reprinted now from Wind of the Spirit, (pp. 222-23) are indicative of this procedure. - Eds. I love to see breadth of vision, richness of thought, in our speakers, instead of narrow-minded, dogmatic, bigoted framing of thought in a framework to which human genius must conform or be considered outcast. It is fine, and the world sadly needs it today, believe me, when the Middle Ages seem to be flowing back upon us with intolerance and with less and less respect for human rights, and less and less conception of the larger human duties of men to men, duties even nobler than rights.

There is an old Spanish proverb that I often quote, which runs thus: La Verdad no se casa con nadie: Truth is not married to any one being. You will find truth everywhere, wherever human genius has flowered, wherever human effort for the attainment of truth has succeeded in grasping at least some of the cosmic realities, not merely from outside, from the environment, but, I venture to state, more especially from within. For it is within the secret resources of the human heart, of the human spirit, that truest truth, most real reality, is to be found. And why? Because this inmost essence of us all, where truth abides in its fulness, is of the very essence and stuff of cosmic life, of cosmic intelligence, of cosmic space, for we verily are the children of Space. And truth can be found in every one of the religions of the world. Every one of the great religions and philosophies of the world in the past has ultimately sprung from the Theosophical Movement of its age, or has been founded by an Envoy coming from Mahatmans sent out to do so, sent out once more to strike the keynotes of truth which live in every human heart when that heart is not asleep, to awaken human hearts, to pluck these strings of harmony that every human heart contains within itself, so that once those strings are plucked, there springs within men a new hope, and a new vision comes to them. Once again they see and they have confidence because inwardly they know. The strings of the intuition or the heart have been touched. I pray only that our Theosophical Society proves true to the work which it was given to us to do. It is a heavy charge, and it depends upon us Fellow-Theosophists, and brothers and friends who are with us in heart, so to guide the Theosophical Society and its workers, that more and more the human souls as the years pass by will be attracted to us. If we fail, it will be our own fault. Let us see that we do not. Remember that our own beloved Theosophical Society is but one hierarchy working within an encompassing sphere, the vital life, the vital sphere of another, greater hierarchy. We can call it the Hierarchy of the Sons of Light. It matters not much what names we use. We may call these hierarchies of the Sons of Light as the early Christians did by the name of Angels and Arch-angels and Virtues and Principalities and Powers, Cherubim and Seraphim. The thing is to get the thought behind those words. We call them generally Dhyan-chohans, a beautiful phrase when it is understood: Lords of Meditation in Wisdom - so expressive. Believe me when I tell you that no human soul, no matter where it may be, has ever had an utterly unselfish and worthy aspiration unanswered. Never! This world is ruled by spirit, by intelligence's so high that ours are like the minds of little children. The symbol of the Buddha with the long ears is but a symbol of the Master who hears the cries from whatever part of the world they may come. Those great ears which so often cause amusement in the West, with which the Buddhas are picturated, symbolize that the Buddha part hears the cry from afar, no matter whence it comes, and aids it, always in silence, except when the knock is very very strong; and then discipleship enters into his life. I think it is one of the tragedies of the West that men and women in this Occident of ours have lost the knowledge that the affairs of this world are regular, not chaotic, that behind all there are governing intelligence's, hearts cosmic in their sympathies. It is but the smaller ones like us that bring confusion into the picture. With our hot tempers, our fevered desires, we bring disharmony where harmony should be. But it is comforting to remember that all nature is harmonic; and the way to attain entrance into that harmony of nature, that cosmic harmony, is to bring harmony into your own heart.

- Eclectic Theosophist, No. 79 ---------------------------

WHO ARE YOU? By Iverson L. Harris [[mostly quoting Purucker]] An address delivered before a group of unaffiliated Theosophists and their guests, at San Diego, Calif., Sunday, March 15, 1953. -------I open my address this afternoon with Socrates' prayer: "Great Zeus and all ye other gods who haunt this place, teach us to esteem Wisdom the only riches; give us beauty in our inmost souls, and may the outward and the inward man be at one." This prayer, uttered by Socrates 23 centuries ago, I learned more than forty years since while participating in a symposium entitled The Aroma of Athens, presented by Katherine Tingley and her students in the open-air Greek Theatre at Point Loma, at the old Isis Theatre in San Diego, at the President Theatre in Washington, D.C., and on the Island of Visingso, Sweden. That was in the halcyon days when many of us were `nourished on wholesome poetic dreams from the Golden Age'. - As Kenneth Morris, the Welsh Poet of Lomaland sang: "High upon a hill beside the western seas, That hath more wealth than Hybla for the bees, That hath more blueness than the Aegean skies, Athens shall again arise, most fair, most wise, To shine upon the world." And though, like the `Glory that was Greece', the outward picture has faded, to have shared in the vision made life worth living. "Life", says a fine Greek adage, "is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom." Socrates was pronounced by the Oracle at Delphi to be the wisest of the Greeks, and Plato called him "the wisest, justest, and best of all men whom I have ever known." Socrates was not satisfied with the examination of the material and measurable world with which his Greek predecessors in philosophy had largely concerned themselves. "This is very good," said he; "but there is an infinitely worthier subject for philosophers than all these trees and stones, and even all these stars: there is the mind of man. What is man, and what can he become?" Gnothe Seauton, "Know thyself", said Socrates, echoing the inscription over the portal of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. This brings us directly to the subject: "Who Are You?" You will note that our theme consists of three monosyllables: WHO ARE YOU? As many of you doubtless know, the Chinese spoken language consists entirely of monosyllables, and the meaning to be conveyed is determined by the inflection given to these monosyllables by the speaker. So, likewise, the meaning of the three monosyllables

in our title WHO ARE YOU? is greatly modified by the intonation or emphasis given to each of these three short words. Let me illustrate: I can say "Who are you?", "Who are you?" or "Who are you?" and at least three different and distinct reactions will be evoked from the listener. However, I do not intend to ask "Who are you?" or "Who are you?" as I take it that the purpose of this meeting is nether to learn one another's names or occupations on the one hand, nor, on the other hand, to pry into each other's religious, political, or economic status. So I follow the example of the Buddhists and the Taoists, as well as of the Greek sages and of philosophic minds of all ages and races and stick to the Middle Way, by asking: "Who are you?", seeking to plumb, if we can, the mystery which has exercised the greatest thinkers of all times as to what man is essentially, not what he merely appears to be - what the German philosophers call das Ding an sich, `the thing in itself', the essence behind the outward seeming, the sat or reality hidden by maya or illusion, as the Hindu sages express it. In ancient Aryavarta, the sacred home of the Aryan race in prehistoric India, the guru or teacher asked his chela or disciple: "Kas twam asi?" - "Who art thou?" and the pupil answered, "Aham asmi Parabrahma" - "I am the Boundless," thus anticipating by thousands of years the identical great spiritual verity uttered by Jesus "I and my Father are one." To enable us better to grasp the meaning of this basic, all-important, universal truth, let me invoke the aid of Dr. G. de Purucker. I quote from his illuminating lectures on Questions We All Ask: "Who are you? . . . It is the most important question with which human beings can concern themselves. It involves everything that you are and do. If you know truly who you are, you will know your origin; you will also know why you are here, and why you are doing such and such things, and not doing other things. You will also know whither the course of your thoughts is leading you - in other words, you will have some vision of what the destiny is which your present character is already shaping for you . . . " "You are, each one of you, a visible expression of an inner divine intelligence, poorly expressing itself through the human vehicle; but the root of you is divine, a child of the spiritual universe, even as your physical body is an offspring of the physical universe. You are a child of the spiritual-divine Universe in the inmost of the inmost of your being. You are, therefore, inseparable from that spiritual-divine Universe, for you cannot leave that Universe. You are an essential, intrinsic part of it. Think what that fact means. It means, among other things that within you, somewhere, either active or latent, there is everything that is in the Boundless; somewhere locked up within you there is this fiery spirit, a godspark, of which you, in your intelligence and in the feelings of your heart, are a still feeble expression; but you are destined in the far-distant aeons of the future much more completely to manifest forth the divine flame within you . . . . " (Series II, No. 1.) Sages of freed spiritual vision and clear intellectual insight in many lands have recognized the fact that man himself is a stream of consciousness, ranging all the way from the beast kingdom in his merely physical form, appetites and desires - his lowest aspects to the cosmic consciousness and attonement with the Universal Soul or Anima Mundi achieved by the Christs and the Buddhas. Each one of us is, at any time, whatever his self-conscious ego identifies itself with at that particular moment. Each of us is not one, but many, as we can readily see for ourselves by studying our own states of consciousness. Speaking for myself, when partaking of a good meal, I do not believe I am quite the

same person as I am when seeking, with Socrates, to invoke the wisdom of the gods on Olympus! Again, one's ego is certainly not centered in the same knot of consciousness when he is witnessing over television or listening over the radio to some of the ghastly, subhuman, barbaric cater-wauling that goes by the name of singing, as he is when exalted by a well-trained choir singing Schubert's Ave Maria, or when inspired by Maestro Toscanini conducting the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. Again, are you the same person when you allow your mind to be beclouded as well as your bloodstream poisoned with illwill, resentment and sometimes with hatred - are you the same person under these circumstances, I repeat, as you are, if and when you can not only say with Jesus but actually feel in your heart as He did when He told His followers on the Mount of Olives?: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; . . . " (Matthew: V, 43-44. ) No, we are not merely dual, not merely Jekylls and Hydes, we are chameleons who change from moment to moment, from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year, and even from lifetime to lifetime, according to whether, by the exercise of will, of the failure so to exercise it, we raise our minds towards the light of the spirit, to the bright realms of thought where the good, the true and the beautiful are native, on the one hand, or on the other hand, permit ourselves to drift rudderless on a sea of personal emotions, when we might turn in aspiration upwards towards the Buddhas and the Christs, who are ever beckoning and calling to us to come up higher. The great Spiritual Masters are not figments of the imagination - they have actually lived and taught, and the existence and availability of the wisdom which they bequeathed to us, are, by far, the most valuable and incontestable witness to what man is, potentially, and what he can actually become. Their incarnation as men is the most inspiring event in the history of the human race on this planet terra. Plato said: "He who knows not the common things of life is a beast among men. He who knows only the common things of life is a man among beasts. He who knows all that can be learned by diligent inquiry is a god among men." Sir Francis Bacon, who has been called the most powerful mind of modern times, wrote: "The mind is the man, and knowledge mind; a man is but what he knoweth. Men are not animals erect, but immortal gods." And Shakespeare has the Prince of Denmark soliloquize: "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!" (Hamlet: II : 2. ) The old Greek Philosopher Heraclitus, said: "Man is a portion of Cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." Please note how close this comes to the first line of the subtitle of my talk this afternoon: Who Are You? "Offspring of the Cosmos, yet child of the Earth." Heraclitus's definition of man will be better understood if we recollect that among many ancient philosophers, fire symbolized spirit, water symbolized feeling or emotion, and earth symbolized matter. So, if we say that man is a tripartite creature consisting of fire (spirit), water (emotion) and earth (body), we come very close to the

Pythagorean-Platonic threefold division of man into a spiritual soul (nous), an animal soul (psuche) and the physical body. This division was adopted by Paul, who was also an Initiate into the Mysteries, and even by James (III-15). In Chapter VI of The Key to Theosophy, H.P. Blavatsky discusses and reconciles this threefold division of man's constitution with the Theosophical division of man into seven principles. Before going into this septenary division, let me here utter the very warning which H.P.B. herself gives at the close of the chapter referred to: "But you must beware of the general error into which too many even of our Theosophists fall. Do not imagine that because man is called septenary; then quintuple and a triad, that he is a compound of seven, five or three entities; or, as well expressed by a Theosophical writer, of skins to be peeled off like the skins of an onion. The "principles," as already said, - save the body, the life and the astral eidolon, all of which disperse at death - are simply aspects and states of consciousness." The ranges of our consciousness or the aspects or states of our consciousness may be briefly defined as follows: The highest state is that of Pure Spirit, sometimes called the `Divine Soul', in Sanskrit Atman, in which there is no sense of separateness at all - a radiation of Universal Consciousness; the same in you and me and in all of us just as sunlight shines on all alike. It is the `I am' consciousness, as distinguished from the egoic or `I am I' consciousness. It is in this Atmic state of consciousness - when in highest meditation or ecstasy the spiritual Sage reaches it - that Universal Brotherhood becomes, as it was to the Buddha and the Christ when they received their enlightenment - not a matter of sentiment at all, because personality at that time did not exist for them; it was an actual recognition and direct perception of the fundamental oneness of all that is. In The Light of Asia Sir Edwin Arnold describes in exquisite language the life of the Prince of India, his enlightenment as the Lord Buddha and his message to suffering mankind. The poem closes with these verses picturing one who has reached at-one-ment with Atma, the Divine Soul, with Cosmic Consciousness, with God: No need hath such to live as ye name life; That which began in him when he began Is finished: he hath wrought the purpose through Of what did make him Man. Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes Invade his safe eternal peace; nor deaths And lives recur. He goes Unto Nirvana. He is one with Life, Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be. Om, Mani Padme, Om! The Dewdrop slips Into the shining sea! - in other words, the personal self merges with Universal Self, "The Dew-drop slips into the shining sea" - losing its identity as a separate dew-drop, which ever was and ever will be identical in essence with the mighty ocean, the source from which it sprang, a microcosm of the macrocosm - individual man a replica in the small of the Boundless All, man an

image of God: Aham asmi Parabrahma: "I am the Boundless." What a rebuke to all that is small, self-centered and earthbound in us, and what a challenge to all that is godlike and aspiring in every human being! It cannot lead to arrogance in the sincere man; for while it inspires him with a vision of what he is in his inmost, it humbles him with the recognition of how far short he falls of being what he can become! The second principle in the Theosophical septenary division of man's states of consciousness is known by the Sanskrit term Buddhi, the `Spiritual Soul', the vehicle of pure, Universal Spirit, the principle by which Universal Spirit is `stepped down' into egoic or individual consciousness, just as diffused sunlight is brought into focus by a lens; it is the principle or state of consciousness which is reached on rare occasions by men of genius and high spirituality, including men of less exalted talents but of lofty ideals when they have direct perception of truth. It is a state of consciousness attained by the few truly devoted worshippers in the Temple of Pure Science, when, with the flashing light of intuition they perceive an actual fact in Nature, which they then proceed to prove by empirical tests or mathematical calculations for the enlightenment of smaller men of less intuition. It is the principle by which the greatest philosophers and religious teachers, the noblest figures in literature, art, music, and social service, catch their visions of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which thereafter perennially inspire grand thoughts, fine feelings, and noble actions. These reflect the light of Buddhi, the Spiritual Soul. The perceptions of the man whose consciousness is touched with the light of Buddhi may transcend reason, but they will never be unreasonable nor an affront to one's highest and most generous instincts. The third principle in our septenary division of man - the most important of all in aiding us to answer our question: WHO ARE YOU? - is the thinking principle, the mind, in Sanskrit Manas, that which makes a man a man and not a beast. It is the principle which gives a man the power of self-consciousness - that is, of consciousness reflected upon itself. Man in his physical form has many characteristics and biological features similar to those of the higher apes and other mammals with whom he has evolutionary ties. But besides the enormous gap between physical man and the anthropoids, there is the still greater gap between man's power of reason, of self-analysis, of self-directed evolution, of deliberate self-sacrifice and of creative imagination, on the one hand, and on the other hand the responses to mere instinct, habit, or even training, of the most highly evolved beasts. In fact, the word man itself is actually cognate with the Sanskrit root of manas, meaning `to think.' Hence, man is essentially a thinker. The thinking principle is decidedly dual in its aspects - the battleground in which every human being wages continuous warfare with himself, until he either wins, and thus unites himself with the Spiritual Soul, or loses, and identifies himself entirely with the lower principles of his constitution, and thus drifts backwards in the stream of evolution towards the beasts. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that he gets stranded on a sandbank, while the stream of evolution flows past him, instead of marching forwards and upwards and onwards towards the gods, of whom he is one in his inmost essence. Most of us oscillate in our consciousness between the two extremes. A very few lose in time the last link with the Higher Self and become what are known as `Lost Souls.' On the other hand, relatively few unite themselves completely with the Spiritual Soul and become the great Spiritual Teachers who have been the strength and refuge of millions of struggling human beings who followed after them. So much for man's highest principles, called in our septenary division of man's

constitution, the Higher Triad. We come now to the four lower principles termed the Lower Quarternary: Kama, or desire, which is the driving force in nature generally, though not necessarily, of a purely personal, passional, and selfish character. In its higher aspect it becomes aspiration and upward striving. "Back of Will stands Desire," is an Eastern maxim. It was Will in this sense that was the basis of Schopenhauer's doctrine in The World as Will. In view of the excessive weight given to the desire principle in man's constitution by many modern psychologists and psychiatrists, I should like to add to the other end of the scales the following conclusion reached after more than half a century of practice by one of California's oldest and most respected psychiatrists, Dr. James Tucker Fisher, in his recent book, A Few Buttons Missing: "If you were to take the sum total of all the authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists . . . if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount." Next to the Kama or desire-principle, we may consider the Linga-Sarira, or model, or astral, or form body - scarcely less gross than the physical body itself. It is the formbody on which the physical body is molded and which enables the physical body in Nature's marvelous processes of adaptability to preserve its form in repairing and replacing tissues, which have been diseased, injured, or worn out, to anticipate functions soon to be required, and to maintain the body's physical identity throughout its life-cycle amidst the constant flux and changing of its billions of cells. The existence of this astral or model or phantom body has recently been definitely put to use by orthopedists in rehabilitating men who have lost their limbs. To the 2000 doctors attending the Internatoinal College of Surgeons in Madrid in May, 1952, Dr. Henry H. Kessler of Newark, N.J., exhibited a one-legged man equipped with an artificial leg, darting around a stone pavement cutting intricate figures on roller skates. With the collaboration of Consultant John Seeley of International Business Machines Corporation, marvelous electrical mechanisms had been successfully employed in restoring the use of amputated legs and arms. An account of this fine work, published in the magazine TIME, issue of June 2, 1952, ends with this significant paragraph - particularly significant to students of Theosophy: "As an aid in rehabilitation, Kessler, pointed out, orthopedists can now take advantage of the amputee's familiar `phantom limb' sensation; i.e., after an amputation, patients often `feel' pain in the lost member. Instead of trying to get rid of this sensation, doctors in Vaduz, capital of the postage-stamp principality of Liechtenstein, have been urging patients to cultivate it, e.g., by flexing the muscles in the arm stump, as if opening and closing the hand. Thus the muslce is kept alive, and rehabilitation (with an electric hand) can be speeded up." It remains to mention briefly the two other principles: Prana: - the life or vitality which runs through all Nature and which keeps in physical functioning every composite organism until dissolution at death. The physical body or Sthula-Sarira - which we are all too painfully familiar with, and which, alas, the materialistic science of the last century, and indeed, of the present century in some quarters, would have us believe is all there is to man! As if the piano on which

Rubinstein plays were the artist himself! Of course he cannot make music without an instrument, and if the piano is defective the resulting performance is imperfect. But to the materialist who believes that a man's physical body is all there is to him, we ask: What is it in him that questions this assumption? Does anyone seriously maintain that the molecules of his brain, purely by chance, suddenly begin to vibrate and question their own monopoly of man's thinking? No, we need a higher, God-given Sherman Anti-Trust Law to break up that assumed monopoly! An eminent British neurologist, Sir Russell Brain, in a lecture last year on The Contribution of Medicine to our Idea of Mind, published by Cambridge University Press, has this to say: "I speak of mind quite openly and unashamedly, not being one of those philosophers who make their living by expounding the nonexistence of their own minds . . . I shall assume that you know what I mean when I say that thinking, remembering, imagining, willing, feeling emotions and experiencing sensations are the kind of activities we describe as mental . . . Though it is linked through the brain to the world of matter, it (the mind) moves in its own sphere as though it could soar above the physical." As I opened this lecture with Socrates' prayer of yearning for wisdom I will close it with another, probably the oldest extant, expressing, I believe, the highest wisdom known to man, the Gayatri, regarded for ages in Hindus - than with almost divine reverence. I use Dr. de Purucker's paraphrase of the original Sanskrit: "O thou golden Sun of most excellent splendour, illumine our hearts and fill our minds, so that we, recognizing our oneness with the Divinity which is the Heart of the Universe, may see the pathway before our feet, and tread it to those distant goals of perfection, stimulated by thine own radiant light." - Canadian Theosophist, June, 1953 -------------------

WHY "THEOSOPHY?" - G. de Purucker [Questioner:] Dear sir: I attended your lecture for the first time last Sunday afternoon... and I was entirely in sympathy with all that you said; but there is one question I should like to ask you... Why do you label what you teach "Theosophy"? Why limit your philosophy by any name at all? I have met many broad-minded and progressive people who in almost all points think as you do, but who are unwilling to group their ideas of philosophy and life under any one name, as they feel that doing this would immediately draw a circle around them thus excluding thousands of others whose beliefs differ but slightly from their own. It seems to me that you calling your philosophy "Theosophy" fosters a sense of separateness between you and the rest of the world. Are we not all working towards one great Truth, which no one has arrived at, but which, through the efforts of us all, will be the possession of the human race at some time in the future? (Yes, I will answer affirmatively this point at once. - GdeP) I cannot help but think that if theosophists (among whom I doubt not are many fine and

progressive people), would join hands with the rest of us in their and our efforts to find out the truth about man and nature, we should all be nearer to the realization of that Universal Brotherhood of which you spoke of forcibly on Sunday last... [GdeP]: Isn't this questioner kind! In the first place, Theosophy is not an invention. Nobody invented it and gave to it a name, as a man might invent a new kind of buzz-saw and give to it a trade-name, or a new kind of pigs-in-clover puzzle, and give it a new name. Suppose that the suggestion of this kind friend were adopted by us, what then could we do? Suppose I were to ask the question: "How do you call your teaching?" It has no name. "What name do your beliefs go by?" Oh, they have no name. "Well, don't you call yourselves by some kind of name?" No, we haven't any name. We don't want any name. We are so broad and universal that we take in the whole universe. We are, let me say, Roman Catholics, and Protestants, and Jews, and Brahmanists, and Buddhists, and the inhabitants of Venus, and we don't require a name. We are IT. We are so perfectly universal and well-known by everybody that we don't need a name. We are just like the sunlight shining in our brilliance upon everyone. Now, such a mental attitude looks very pretty at first sight, and people who adopt it may perhaps flatter themselves that they are wonderfully broad-minded. But such an attitude of mind has its great disadvantages. Personally, I think it is uncommonly fierce egoism. That is my private opinion about any such attitude. Now, I have heard of people and the woods are full of them today - who think they are so broad and generous-minded and perfectly universal and so assured of their own superiority, that they don't want to ally themselves with anybody or anything. They just want to be superior to any attachments, spiritual, intellectual, ethical, or social, - being such superior people you see - and the consequence is that they are just as colorless and diffuse as the air is. They have not much individuality; they have not much force of character; they have no definite beliefs; they are just most wonderfully diffuse and characterless. You cannot accomplish anything in life that is of worth by following such a fallacy. You must have one-pointedness, a directed will, a definite policy, a system, order, co-ordinated thought, if you are to accomplish any kind of work that is worthwhile in the world; nevertheless, we Theosophists don't follow Theosophy merely because we look upon it as a circumscribed and restricted thing, which it most emphatically is not. We Theosophists don't say to anybody: "If you don't believe as we do, then get out. This is our circle here and in it we live and move and have our being and it is for us alone." Never do we Theosophists talk in that way. Our platform is so broad and yet so profound that the only prerequisite to fellowship in The Theosophical Society is an honest belief in Universal Brotherhood. Now, if that isn't broad enough for anybody, I would like the objector to show me something better. Nevertheless the Theosophical teachings are a formulated system of thought originated by great spiritual Seers and Sages depicting and explaining the structure, operations, nature, origin, and destiny of the Universe and therefore of man who is an inseparable part of that Universe. Our teachings are definite, clear-cut, well defined, and satisfy both the heart and mind of man. We are obliged to call ourselves by some name. Everything that exists must be verbally defined if we are to allude to it definitely either in thought or in speech. We must give to the Universe a name, but everybody recognises that this is a name. Infinitude must be defined by some human word if men are to allude to it in human speech. The ancient Wisdom-Religion of mankind, my Brothers, however, was not called by

the name "Theosophy" in all other ages. That is the name given to it today, simply in order to give people some idea of what it is and to have some name to call it by. Being merely a name, of course it does not adequately characterize and explain this ancient WisdomReligion of the human race which has existed in all times, among all peoples, and has been given different names in different ages. If Theosophy were merely a new way of explaining science or one of the already known great religions or great philosophies, the question of the querent might have good sense in it; but Theosophy contains doctrines and teachings which are utterly unknown in the Occident today or nearly so, as well as the teachings which of course are found in all the great world-religions and world philosophies. It gives a grand, a magnificent, an imposing, outlook or vision on the Universe and on human life and explains this vision both in general and in particular; and thus you see it is something which stands by itself, although we Theosophists claim, and claim with positiveness, that it is universal, that is allinclusive, that it covers all the fields of every activity of the human consciousness. It is obvious, therefore, that we must give it a name, and if it is, as I have just shown you it is, something so different from anything else that men are ordinarily accustomed to, we are obliged to give it a name in order to allude to it when speaking of it. It seems to me - and I say this without any wish to give offense to the thoughtful questioner - that not enough thought has been devoted to this question, because it is juvenile in its restricted and narrow views. Furthermore, I tell you that we Theosophists have a work to do in the world. That work is what we are doing, or trying to do. You come here, I suppose, to learn something about what Theosophy teaches. Suppose that we were to advertise: "Come to Point Loma every Sunday afternoon at three o'clock to hear Dr. de Purucker talk of nothing at all - or what is the same thing - talk on everything." Such an advertisement, to me, would be a madman's advertisement. I don't think that this question shows very deep thought. There are so many people in the world today - oh, the woods are just full of them; and I have met many of them - who don't want to belong to anything, or to believe anything definite. They merely want to be spiritual and intellectual dreamers. I have sometimes said to people like these: "You have just said that you don't want to belong to anything. Haven't you any idea of order, of system, of one-pointedness of thought and work? Do you know how things are accomplished in the world? We Theosophists have a work to do. We must have a mental and psychological plow-point. You cannot plow a field by waving your arm over it. That may be a beautiful gesture, and it is easy, but it does not accomplish anything. It does not mean honest -to-goodness work, the exercise of will-power, the use of your intelligence. If you want to do anything, you must set for yourselves a program, you must outline your policy; you must define your field of thought or work, and then go to it. Study Theosophy, my friends; and if you find that it is circumscribed or limited or shuts anybody out, anything out, then come and tell me and I will take your hand in thankfulness for what you have shown to me. But some unfortunate people are narrowminded, and they don't know it, and consider themselves exceedingly broad-minded. They are actually so narrow-minded that they want even heaven for themselves alone - although I have never heard them say that they wanted the other place for themselves alone! All this really originates in the fact that these people have lacked training in concentrated thought, and therefore are actually impatient at people who don't accept their own vague diffuseness

of ideas. I am going to read to you a funny little poem that was sent in to me as quoted in The 0. E. Library Critic, an interesting periodical edited and published by the Theosophical modern Juvenal or satirist, Dr. H.N. Stokes of Washinqton, D.C., a man of trenchant wit, whose favorite occupation in life seems to be pricking bubbles of fantasy and bursting bladders of pretension and perforating shams. The four lines of this sellection are as follows: We are the sweet elected few; May all the rest be damned; There's room enough in hell for you; We won't have heaven crammed! Now, we Theosophists don't think in that way. We want you to 'come to heaven' with us. And that is why I always appeal to you to awaken the inner god within you; and when that inner divinity is awakened and you then begin to see the Vision Sublime in your own heart and mind, my brothers, then you are 'hooked.' A 'Fisher of men' I am, and my bait is Truth; and I catch my 'fish' by awakening their own inner beings and thus giving them light and the grand consciousness of a living, immortal love. Love is the captor, and those who love are the captives. [From Qustions We All Ask, Second Series, Vol. I, pp. 141-44] --------------------

WIND OF THE SPIRIT "Despite the agony and the sadness that we humans in our blindness feel, there is the wind of the spirit sweeping over the earth, rearranging, remaking, reshaping. And the agonies and sorrows that come, come from ourselves, blind humans that we are who will not enter into Nature's majestic processes, helping her, but instead oppose her, and in opposing her suffer . . . "We ask why we suffer. We ask why these things have fallen upon us. In our ignorance of our own Higher Selves, and in our lack of a perfect confidence in the eternal laws of cosmic life, we assume, we take to ourselves, the duties of the avenger. What man knows - enough to judge any other man unto the scaffold? So well - are these principles recognized that there is not a civilized society today that recommends them. They all want justice; they all want to use reason. Why don't they use it? And using it, why don't they abide by it? Face facts if you want to know the reason of the suffering and agony, the terror and appalling privations that are upon us. It is no extra-cosmic god, nor intra-cosmic god, who has put these horrible things upon us, his blind children. It is we ourselves . . . "It is well to remember that while our hearts may ache - and the man is inhuman whose heart today does not ache over what our brothers in humanity are everywhere enduring - remember, I say, that behind the suffering there is learning, that behind and beyond the present events there is a dawn. Let us as individuals, not merely as

Theosophists, do our part in helping to bring the new day, when violence will be seen for the folly that it is, and the reign of justice and reason and fellow-feeling will be with us and around us. If not, we shall have a recurrence, and worse, of what now we are passing through, and after that another recurrence still worse than the former, and so on to the remains of our civilization, until our civilized society will vanish in flame and blood. 'Those of you who may be alive to see the handwriting on the wall had better awaken. MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN! Weighed, Weighed, Wanting - the Persians! "The tragedy of Occidental society is that it has lost its trust in an abiding spiritual power in this world of ours, and Reason has lost its seat. This entire universe of ours is but an appearance, an outer shell, a physical body as it were, manifesting the tremendous forces at work on the other side of the veil of Nature; and no man, no demi-god, or god, can offend or oppose these powers with impunity. Law rules this world and sooner or later the gods will descend from their azure seats. Let us see that they come to us as envoys of happiness and peace, rather than with the flaming swords avenging overthrown innocence. "You will tell me: 'You are preaching after the event!' But this is not true, for worse will come unless we heed. And these things have been told to mankind from immemorial time. The man who said, 'God and I are a majority against the whole world' was no flamboyant egotist. If we understand his meaning we realize what he meant. "I have felt impelled to speak of the wind of the spirit blowing over the earth. It will extinguish all false lights; the true and the holy will but burn the brighter and will remain. Yet judge not. Things do not happen in a day. Perhaps it may be fifty years before we know at least something of the inner meaning of what is now coming upon us: of good, of ill; of high, or low! of pathos or of bathos. But this that I have called the wind of the spirit is clairvoyant in the heavenly sense. It is the spirit of the Earth, if you wish, and its works are utter true. All that is grand and unselfish, I repeat, will live. What is false and selfish, this wind will not merely pass by, but mayhap overthrow. Put your whole trust in the divine power behind nature and live in accordance therewith, and Nature will look upon you as working with her and therefore as her master and will make obeisance. Those of you who have ears to hear, hear!" - G. de Purucker: given in the Temple at the Point Loma Theosophical Headquarters in 1940. - Eclectic Theosophist, March 5, 1971 ---------------------

WIND OF THE SPIRIT EXCERPTS - G. de Purucker (From the Book) How true it is that truth is not popular, that truth is not welcome, that people do not

like it. Why? Because it means change. It means an evolution of feeling and thinking. It means a revolution of the moral instincts to become alive and vigorous again. Truth is not married to any one being. You will find truth everywhere, wherever human genius has flowered, wherever human effort for the attainment of truth has succeeded in grasping at least some of the cosmic realities, not merely from outside, from the environment, but more especially from within. For it is within the secret resources of the human heart, of the human spirit, that truest truth, most real reality, is to be found. If you are satisfied with yourself as now you are, you are less than human, for there is an inextinguishable immortal hunger in the human heart for better and grander and greater things; every normal man feels this, and the more than normal man allows himself to be guided by it. Man is great precisely in proportion as he can throw aside, break through, the barriers, the frontiers, with which habit and custom and he himself have surrounded himself. The ordinary man is one who lives in the small, circumscribed, shell of personal consciousness. He has no intuition, no inspirations. The man of genius is the man who has broken his shell. He wanders out in consciousness and feeling to the surrounding universe. He vibrates in synchronous frequency with the universe around him, and then come inspiration and marvelous ideas. This visible world of ours is but a shell, is but the body, the exterior carapace, the skin of things. The life, the individuality, the power, the will, the thought, the real entity, is not this outer shell. Whether a man, or sun, or solar system, or galaxy, or an entire universe: the reality is within. There is no chance anywhere in Infinitude. Now just apply your reasoning faculty to that statement, and see how far afield it will carry you. The first deduction is this: There being no chance anywhere, therefore no fortuity, everything that happens is a link in a chain of causation - cause, effect - the effect immediately becoming a new cause, producing its effect, which in turn becomes a new cause, producing it effect. This is what we call Karman. I wonder if you can forget for a moment the matter of fact things in daily life and really feel or realize this fact: that you are going to be held to a strict accounting somewhen, somewhere, for everything that you are, which means everything that you have done, have felt, have been - Karmic responsibility! We discern, in our investigations or researches into Nature two things: an allembracing, all-encompasing orderliness, or what we call the laws of Nature; and within this, embraced by this universal law, an infinitude of individuals or individualities, each one an entity, working under the mandate, as it were, of cosmic law - no entity can do otherwise. We have therefore unity, divine unity, working through virtually infinite multiplicity. Everything that happens is therefore caused by law, which is just another word for cosmic vitality plus intelligence, plus what we call the ethical instinct, order. These things are precisely what our studies of the universe show that it exhibts to our inquiring gaze. Everywhere we see order, law, procedures acting according to causational and effectual relations. Essentially karman is but a name we give to the operations or to the processes of the universal cosmic harmony seeking readjustment, moral and otherwise, that is to say cosmic equilibrium. The laws of Nature, of which karman is one of the most recondite, the most mysterious, and indeed the most comforting, are all of them absolutely impersonal,

and in them there is neither variation nor variability nor any shadow of turning. That (karman) is the grandest doctrine that human genius ever brought forth from the womb of cosmic truth. There is no escape. Most of us realize this and accept it as a philosophic proposition, but have not taken it into our consciousness as a serious reality facing us instantly, momently, daily, all our life long. Most of us would be infinitely more careful than we are, not only in our feelings and in our thoughts, but of course in our actions. Whatever you do is not only going to mold your character, thereby change your whole future destiny, but going to affect others. Others by that fact are going to react upon you. Action and reaction: Nature's first law. That is all Karman is: the doctrine of consequences, ethically speaking, the doctrine of responsibility. What ye sow, that will you reap, not something else. The pathos of people who think that they can do what they want to do because they like it, or because they are afraid, too cowardly to do otherwise, and think they will get away with it! Never, never, never. You will pay for it to the uttermost farthing. It is not only what happens to YOU. If you have hearts ever touched by the holy flame of pity, of compassion, you will realize that everything you think or feel, will result in action some day, and this action will affect others, helping them, or injuring them. And YOU will pay. Even if you fly to the uttermost ends of the earth, nothing can save you from resulting consequences. By the same law, every gentle, pitiful act, every thought for others, every compassionate pulsation of the human heart, will have its holy recompense not only in the present gratitude of others, not only in their present friendship, sincere and given whole-heartedly; but even in future lives. Sympathy will have been set up between others and yourself. Mark you this, the teaching of all the great titan Seers and Sages of all ages: THAT WHICH YE SOW, THAT SHALL YE REAP, NOT SOMETHING ELSE. This is a Christian saying and a grand one. Now notice the immense moral effect this teaching, once sincerely believed, has on man, not only for his own protection in the future, but because of the revolution in feeling and in thought it works upon his character. He will watch very carefully lest he ever injure a fellow human being. Think what this one doctrine alone would mean for the safety and happiness of mankind if it were commonly accepted as once it was all over the world. Now what is reincarnation but a carrying out of this same law of destiny? We have lived on earth almost innumerable times in the past. We are here today because we are attracted back here. Familiar scenes attract us, just as the traveler traveling away from home looks forward to the time when he will return. That is what reimbodiment is, reincarnation, coming back to familiar scenes on this earth. We humans are pilgrims of destiny, children of the Divine wandering purposefully, and purposively driven by karman, driven by destiny. As a spider weaves its web, so does man weave around himself his own web of destiny. How can you prove reincarnation to be a fact? This is one of the commonest questions that we are asked, and I always wonder how such a question could be asked. Do you expect to prove after the manner of the laboratory something that does not belong there? What is proof? The bringing of conviction that a thing is true to the thoughtful mind. That is truth - so stated in courts of law, and properly so stated. Now then how can you prove reimbodiment to anyone? By bringing conviction to the impartial and thoughtful mind that it is the only possible and satisfying explanation of

the existence of human beings. And how is such evidence of proof adduced? By thinking. Thus: We are here. We are not all alike. We vary as amongst ourselves more than the leaves on the trillions of trees on the surface of the earth do. Each man is a unity. How came that thinking, feeling unit on this earth? Created by God? Prove to me first that such a creating God exists. How much simpler and more reasonable is the supposition - as it seems at first that here we have a thinking, feeling, self-conscious entity, which we now in the one life find among us. We find this entity at one stage of what is evidently an incomparably long journey of evolution. That is the first thought. WE ARE HERE. We were not created by a marvel - some extra cosmic God of infinite injustice, making some men almost godlike and others heavily, woefully, afflicted. You can cheat the mind by saying, "These are things which belong to Divine Mercy and are beyond our power," but you see, that is no answer and that is no proof to the thinking mind. It is side-stepping the question. Why are we here on this earth? Why are we here now? Why are men living in other ages, or what about the men who will follow us in future ages? Why will they then be? These things are matters of cosmic law. Now pray follow the reasoning, because we are advancing from link to link of thought. Being here by law, and one life being utterly insufficient to produce the purposes of cosmic mind, it is obvious that our being here once is a proof of reincarnation. Otherwise what brought us here? What cosmic mind put us here instead of on some other planet in some solar system, either ours or outside of ours? We are here because we have been here before, because here we sowed seeds of destiny, and we come back on this earth to reap those seeds which we sowed. This universe, governed by cosmic law, will not allow us to sow corn or wheat in San Diego county, and three or four months afterwards travel into Arizona or Nevada and attempt to reap the corn and wheat there. Where we sowed the seeds, there shall we reap the harvest. It is obvious. Our very being here, to the man who can think clearly, is a proof of reincarnation. Otherwise we must say cosmic law put us here by chance. And who would believe that? If fortuity governed this world we would see the stars in their courses and all the planets running helter skelter all over the cosmic Spaces without law, without reason, without order, without intelligence, without system. It is ideas that rule the world, and it is likewise from men that come ideas. Let us then change our ideas, and follow ideas which are composites of good, ideas based on universal grandeur, ideas which in time will bring about a confraternity not only of the people of the earth, but of all the smaller social units that go to make up a nation. Then, with these ideas permeating our consciousness, we shall not need to bother about petty politics. The world of humans will then run as easily and smoothly as a well-ordered mechanism. It is easier far to make such a shift of values to their natural, proper, and therefore legitimate sphere, than it is to continue being involved through centuries of the future in the horrible struggles of an international or internecine character. It is only a greater idea which will capture and lead captive the less idea, the smaller. Graecia capta Romam victricem captam subducit. "Captured Greece leads conquering Rome captive." It is ideas that unmake men and the world of men. A man's life is changed sublimely by his thoughts; so too can he go to "hell" or the gallows by his thinking. It is thought that makes the gentleman and the boor. It is thought which makes the courageous man or the coward. It is thought which produces forgiveness or carries on hate. A man is great in proportion to his thinking, and by naught else. Deep thought is likewise deep

feeling. The multitude likes to follow what it thinks is enlightened selfishness. I cannot conceive of a more diabolic notion than what is covered in that phrase, "enlightened selfishness." It is a deliberate obscuring of every noble intuition of the human soul. No permanent, no enduring, no genuine happiness, can be found in the ownership of material things at any time. A man's future destiny depends upon that which his heart most loves now. LOVE not these things; set not your heart upon them so that your heart thereby becomes enchained, becomes bound, becomes shackled. Use them, however as you use all other good things of the earth; but use them as a master of them, not as a slave to them. It is not money per se that is the root of all evil; it is the selfish love of it.n This is what Jesus the Avatara meant, and what all the great Sages and Seers of all the ages have meant and have taught: Tie not you heart unto the things of earth, but enter into the profound deeps of the spirit within you, and there you will find utter freedom and immense peace and ineffable happiness. The majority of men today are unensouled; and hence I say that they are empty vessels, instead of filled ones - filled with inner power and light. Instead of men being guided by the spirit within us, and by its irresistable mandates, they follow the brain-mind schemes of selfish considerations. It is always : "Number One, and the devil take the hindmost." Essential values lie not in property but in human beneficence. The root of all the world's troubles in the past has lain in the wrong centering of our human sense of permanent values as in property rather than as inherently residing in human beings themselves. Men, most of them, are unensouled. I do not mean they have no souls; but their souls are not active, are not working, are not productive. They are asleep. And thus men and women mostly live like human animals; in fact; worse; because animals are governed more or less by an instinct which holds some measure of respect for other animals; but men have planning and tricky minds, and when planning and tricky minds are endowed with reason, we have tyranny, religious, social, political. Ensouling means living those things which we can intuitively and instinctually sense belong to the better part of us. That is all there is to it: living in the Human Soul instead of the human animal soul: to speak technically, living in the Buddhi-Manas instead of in the Kama-Manas. The animal does not only mean sex. That is only one side of it and a relatively unimportant side. The animal means the grasping, acquisitive, selfish, appetitive, indulgent, part of us, running after this and running after that, without stability of character, in other words, without soul. The chief or fundamental rule is the becoming receptive to the inner and higher part of one's own constitution, whose whisperings of truth and intimations of cosmic verities find no lodgment in minds willfully or ignorantly closed against their entrance. There is the whole, or at least the fundamental, rule of occult teaching and learning in a nutshell. Man's religious instinct, perhaps the profoundest and most subtil and in one sense the highest of all his being, is his because he partakes of it in common with all the Universe. That awe and reverence so dignify man because he loses his petty personality when he is in these states. The body is but the passing instrument of the mind. It is the mind where wrong is born. Our eyes should always be turned upwards, heavenwards; because if we keep our eyes turned downwards, earthwards, then the human is lost in the animal. The trouble is

in our feelings and thoughts, not in the unfortunate body. Sin is born in the mind, in thought, in feeling. It is the spiritual part of us, this flame from the Divine, which is the deathless essence of our being. It is the anchor of our life, and of our growth, and of our progress, from embodiment to embodiment. We call this inner spiritual part the Monad. It is the inner Buddha in us, the inner Christ in us. Sin actually with us humans does not reside in the body, not in the animal part of us. It resides in the human parts of us, in our emotions, in our willful,, selfish thoughts which stimulate the animal in us, rousing up the wrong side and impelling it to do things which carry the body with it. If a man fills his mind with gross thoughts and evil dreams, he learns by it in the long run through suffering, but the effects and consequences on his mind and character will ensue. He suffers, he is in torture, he pays the penalty. He has poisoned his inner system and he won't have peace until the poison has worked itself out, until he has become what is called reformed, i.e., reshaped. Then he will have peace again. You know the old English proverb: Curses like chickens come home to roost. They do not go and roost in somebody else's farm, CHICKENS COME HOME. Someday, somewhen, somewhere, we reap what we sow. If men knew and felt this great law, how differently would they not act towards each other! If there were any pardon in the Universe, the Universe itself would be thrown out of the gear of infinite justice. Fortunately there is another side to this. The greatest teacher we poor men have is our sorrow. What is it that softens a man's heart so that he can understand the suffering of others and feel with others? Nothing softens the heart like one's own suffering. Strange and beautiful paradox, it puts steel into our character like-wise. It makes us stronger. The man who has never suffered is without feeling. It is precisely those who stumble on the path who are often in the end the richer. Holiness comes from the struggles with self fought and lost, and fought and lost, and fought and won. You can know truth by that power within. But if you want to find that power then you will indeed have to do a lot of hard work, We ourselves can face the universe and all its impacting horror, for within us, unconquerable and deathless, is the divine spark. By following its mandates we have free will, the free will of the universe, that all the power of the universe coming upon us at once cannot ever overthrow, for we are the children of the Divine and that Universe is we ourselves and we are It. We learn from our weaknesses to mount to higher things. Our weaknesses themselves become our teachers. Once we have learned their lessons it is then no longer needful to turn to them for instruction. So we say then that they become evil instructors, for we have already learned much and mounted higher through their help. You yourself then, in such instance, become yourself the adversary, the so-called Satan. You must conquer yourself, this part of yourself, in order to go higher. See the beauty in and behind things. See likewise the ignominy and the ugliness in life, although do not let these latter depress you or discourage you. The ideal man is not the washed out, pallid ascetic who abandons his duty to mankind and to the world merely in order to cultivate his own intermediate constitution. Our ideal is the full man, the complete man, a man like Buddha, a man like the Christ, a man like the Masters, a man who lives in the human animal, but controls it, and governs it, and makes it a fine instrument for himself. Exercise brings out strength. If Nature gave us no chance to probe the god within

us, we should never grow. Therefore Nature is not only a beauteous, helpful mother, but also a stern nurse watching over us with an infinitely compassionate eye, and insisting by her operations and reactions to what we do or follow with our own will, that this shall grow in strength through exercise; that our understanding shall become brighter and keener through use. From the human heart come all the greatest issues of the world. They do not reside in the brain-mind, for the brain-mind is the great separator of men, the great deceiver. It is the heart that is the unifier of men. The heart speaks a universal language which needs no words. But the brain-mind speaks a language of words which have to be interpreted from mind to mind. It is about things out of the brain that men are continually quarreling. They never quarrel about the issues of the heart, for they are things of our common humanity. The heart is not the emotions. Oh, just there so many stumble on the path constantly. The emotions are all too often connected with the head, as you will find, and perhaps have found. But the heart is always hoping against hope that truth will be understood, that others will understand and help. The emotions are full of hot fire, of jealousy, suspicion, resentment. They have no vision, the emotions. So when we speak of the understanding heart, we never mean the emotions in which some people live and boast is a rich life. It is a poor life, a thin and a hungry, for the emotions are satisfied never . They are like the pistchas of ancient India, described by the visionaries as beings of immense (or small) body, consumed with immense thirst or hunger, and with but a pin-size mouth, so small that a pin might not enter in; and they starve, and they thirst, and are not ever satisfied. This is figurative of the emotions. The great lost chord of modern civilization is forgetfulness of the fact in nature of universal brotherhood, which means not merely a sentimental or political brotherhood at all; it means that we are all of one common cosmic or spiritual origin, and that what affects one affects all. This forgotten truth, the forgetfulness of human brotherhood, can be expressed otherwise: the loss of the conviction that nature is fundamentally spiritual, and therefore is ruled by law, and therefore has compensation for meritorious conduct, and retribution for unmeritorious; and that these twain, the compensation and the retribution, are as infallible as is that cosmic law itself, for they are but the expressions of it. No man will act against the dominating impulse within him. Let him change that dominating impulse from self-seeking interests to altruistic service for all, and life will take on a grandeur that up to that moment he had never seen or understood. Such a man is becoming truly ensouled. He sees the reason for the universe around him. He sees the reason for his life. He sees the reason for his own thoughts. He sees vast and utterly grandoise visions opening before his mind's eye; and he knows that all he has to do in order to attain still greater vistas, and to be of greater service, is to put the strength of his intellect in these intuitions and lofty feelings, center his power of action upon them and thus grow in ever enlarging stages of inner grandeur and inner understanding. His life will then have changed because the man will have changed, and he will then so rule his life and coordinate it to the life of the Universe around him and to the lives of his fellow human beings. -------------------

WINTER SOLSTICE - G. de Purucker There were at least three dates when commemorative festivals were held in the early Christian era: on December 25th, on January 6th called the Epiphany, and on the 25th of March - practically the time of the spring equinox. Now, all these dates were based on astronomical data and facts; and the Christians of about the fifth or sixth century of the Christian era finally chose the date which had been in use for the celebration of the birthday of the Persian god, Mithras - December 25th. The Mysteries of Antiquity were celebrated at various times of the year - in the spring, in the summer-time, in the autumn, and at the winter solstice... Beginning with the winter solstice, on December 21st, these most sacred of the ancient Mysteries began. Therein were initiated certain men who had been chosen on account of having perfected a certain preliminary period of training: chosen to go through initiatory trials for the purpose of bringing into manifestation in the man the divine faculties and powers of the inner god. Two weeks were passed in this cycle of training or of initiation; and on the 6th of January, later called Epiphany (a Greek word which means "the appearance of a god"), celebrated even today in the Christian Church, came the supreme moment in the ancient crypts of initiation, when the aspirant, having successfully passed through the preliminary trials, was brought face to face with his own inner god. If he withstood successfully the supreme test, he was suddenly suffused with splendor, with light which shone from him, so that he stood there radiating light like the sun. His face shone brilliantly; back of his head was an aureole of splendor, and he was said to be "clothed with the sun." ....The "Christ-sun" was born. --------The Theosophist looks upon this season with reverence and awe, for he knows that in the proper quarter some human being is undergoing the supreme test, and that if successful, if he is "raised," if he can raise his own personal being into communion with his inner god and hold it there, so that he becomes suffused with the divine splendor, a new Christ is born to the world, a Teacher of forgiveness, of compassion, of almighty love to all that is. - from Clothed with the Sun. -------------------------

THE WINTER SOLSTICE - ITS MEANING - G. de Purucker In 1929 G. de Purucker began a series of public lectures in the Temple at Point Loma on Sunday afternoons to which the general title "Questions We All Ask" was given. In these spontaneous talks he answered the many pressing questions sent in of a general and specific nature regarding Theosophy, its teachings, its way of life. They were

published weekly at the time, and later in booklet form, but are now long out of print. The following are closing paragraphs from his talk of December 22, 1929, in response to the question: "Will you tell us something about Christmas from a theosophical standpoint? I understand that you always celebrate Christmas at Point Loma Headquarters. As the Christmas-Festival is essentially a Christian one, how do the members of your Society (which is said to include many non-Christians in the Orient and elsewhere) regard it?" Eds. They regard it as Theosophists regard it. The Christmas-Festival is in one sense only, a Christian festival. It is based upon something belonging to the Greek and Roman paganism, which the Christians took over. It is therefore older than Christianity. It is pagan, to use the popular word. The Christians themselves up to the fifth century of the Christian Era did not know (I am speaking of the mass of Christians) exactly when to celebrate the birthday of Jesus called the Christ. There were at least three dates when commemorative festivals were held in the early Christian era: on December 25th, on January 6th called the Epiphany, and on the 25th of March - practically the time of the spring equinox. Now, all these dates were based upon astronomical data and facts; and the Christians of about the fifth or sixth century of the Christian era finally chose the date which had been in use for the celebration of the birthday of the Persian god, Mithras - December 25th. Why? Whether Jesus the Syrian lived or not has nothing to do with the question. If he lived, it matters not on what day of the year he was born; for the commemorative celebration of that birth is really the celebration of' a mystical birth, the birth of the god in man, literally. I will tell you what I mean. The Mysteries of Antiquity were celebrated at various times of the year - in the spring, in the summer-time, in the autumn, and at the winter solstice, on December 21st or 22nd. But the greatest of these mystical celebrations, the greatest of the Mysteries, was that which was celebrated in the winter-time, when the sun had reached his southernmost point, and turning, began his return journey northwards. Beginning with the winter solstice, on December 21st, these most sacred of the ancient Mysteries began. Therein were initiated certain men who had been chosen on account of having perfected a certain preliminary period of training: chosen to go through initiatory trials for the purpose of bringing out into manifestation in the man the divine faculties and powers of the inner god. Two weeks were passed in this cycle of training or of initiation; and on the 6th of January, later called Epiphany (a Greek word which means `the appearance of a god'), celebrated even today in the Christian Church, on that day came the supreme moment in the ancient crypts of initiation, when the aspirant, having successfully passed through the preliminary trials, was brought face to face with his own inner god. If he withstood successfully the supreme test, he was suddenly suffused with splendor, with light which shone from him, so that he stood there radiating light like the sun. His face shone brilliantly; back of his head was an aureole of splendor, and he was said to be `clothed with the sun.' This splendor is the Christ-light, called in the Orient the Buddhic Splendor, and is simply the concentrated spiritual vitality of the human being pouring forth in irradiation. The 'Christ-sun' was born. I could bring to you proofs from the Greek and Latin literatures - proofs of many

kinds - showing you what took place at this most sacred time of the pagan initiatory cycle. On that day was born the Christ, to use the mystical phraseology of the primitive Christians; and using the phraseology of the Greeks and Romans, from whom the Christians adopted and, alas, adapted, the ideas: on that supreme day was born the mystical Apollo - to give the mystical name given to the man so raised; and in the Orient it was said that a Buddha was born . . . . The Theosophist looks upon this season with reverence and awe, for he knows that in the proper quarter some human being is undergoing the supreme test, and that if successful, if he is `raised', if he can raise his own personal being into communion with his inner god and hold it there, so that he becomes suffused with the divine splendor, a new Christ is born to the world, a Teacher of forgiveness, of compassion, of almighty love to all that is; and as I, being a Theosophist, would phrase it, a Buddha is born into the world. Hail and revere! - (Readers interested may also wish to consult the booklets "Clothed with the Sun: The Mystery Tale of Jesus the Avatara", and "The Mahatmas and Genuine Occultism", both by G. de Purucker. - Eds.) - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 84 --------------------

A Word on Chelaship There are as many chelas as there are individuals in the Universe. I sometimes think that everybody is a chela in degree. I sometimes think that even the greatest sinner, as we say, is a chela, because he is learning, poor devil! Of course he is not a great chela, he is a very weak and humble one, a poor, stumbling, weak specimen of mankind. A true chela hence is one who is living the Life and knows the Knowing, and combines the two into one, and thereby loses interest in himself, forgets himself. Self-forgetfulness, love of others: if men could only follow this as a life even in their ordinary intercourse, if we could only realize how uninteresting I am and how awfully interesting the other fellow is. That is all there is to chelaship; and the greatest man is he who can express that the most, the best. That is why, as the Buddha said, we attain Nirvana, we attain the stage of the `samma-sambuddha', when the dew-drop slips into the shining sea, when the little knot and point and focus of I-consciousness expands to be the Universe. I will add this: I for one have no patience with those who segregate themselves from others and go out, away from others, and think that they are holier than others. That is not chelaship. You can starve till your bones stick through your skin, and you can burn yourself and torture yourself until the body, wracked with pain, dies; and you are no more chela than a snap of the fingers, because all your searching is upon yourself; you become an imbodiment of self-seeking egoism. That is not the way to attain chelaship. Chelaship is an inner being, an utter self -forgetfulness in its greater reaches, it is an inner change and forgetting yourself; and in proportion as you do it, so much farther will you be on the chelapath, because of an ever-enlarging consciousness and wisdom and love.

- G. de Purucker: Studies in Occult Philosophy, pp. 228-29 - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 75 ---------------------

THE REAL WORK OF THE T.S. THE Theosophist is often asked what practical good the Theosophical Society is doing in and for the world, and the answer is simple enough and direct to the point of the question. We work with ideas, and we try to show men that there is nothing more practical, stronger and more forceful than an idea. Ideas shake civilizations and overthrow them. Look what has happened in the past. What brought such changes about? Ideas. The ideas living in the minds of a few men - seeing ill or seeing good, is quite beside the point I am discussing. It is the ideas that I wish to stress, not who voiced them, or the consequences flowing from their enunciation to the world. The important thing is that ideas good or bad have tremendous power. And because these ideas and ideals were different from what was commonly accepted, they met at first with contempt and derision, later with study, and finally with acceptance; and structures toppled and there was much dust, and other structures rose and endured for centuries. Show me something more practical than an idea. If ideas overthrow civilizations, they also build them up. The whole work of the Theosophical Society is to fill the minds and hearts of men with ideals of grandeur, inspiring them to ever nobler, more unselfish, and altruistic objectives; to give men and women thoughts that they can live and die by. Show me something more practical than this. This is our main work. True, we give from our slender means what we can and may when the calls come; but this is the least. What ails the world today? Is it lack of riches? No. Is it lack of thought and goodwill? The hearts of men vibrate with agony and pain at everything that goes on everywhere. But men and women are blind, they have no ideal, no solid, central spiritual idea around which men may collect. Religion has lost its grip on Western men. Science has become suspect even in the minds of its foremost proponents, so that they themselves are questioning whether their scientific discoveries are good for the ethical stability of the human race, giving to men power to control their present evil passions and thoughts. Philosophy is today little short of a caricature and mimic of far older and truly grand philosophical systems known however to relatively few in the Occident. What the world needs today is grand humanitarian ideals that they can believe in and follow in trust, ideals of a constructive character: something to give men hope, and a conviction that this world is run morally, i.e. morally inspired by the spiritual powers of nature, and is not a mere accident, originating in some far off time in cosmic space when by chance a nebula began spinning in empty space and finally after many aeons brought us forth, creatures of a day, finally to draw up our legs in bed and die into nothingness. For fifty or sixty years Occidental science has been teaching us that men are but a higher kind of beast, soulless, irresponsible, answerable to none; a teaching flying in the face of every voice of Nature, of every being around us. For everywhere we see law and order and cause and effect, and that if you do certain things you will reap the penalty, or

win the guerdon, the reward. These are facts. The others are evil dreams or devachanic illusions. What, then, can we do? Teach men that this universe is essentially and fundamentally governed and controlled by irrefutable law and destiny, ethical, moral in its essence; and that it is not simply a crazy phantasmagoria, a danse macabre, without sense or purpose or reason. That is what too many tens of millions think in the Occident today, that is what they think they believe. Self-interest has become their sole guide in life. Result? Each man for himself, and the Devil take the weakest. There is where the trouble lies: false teachings, false convictions, stupidity, and the pathetic picture of noble human beings run away with by ideas and ideals indeed - but of what category? The pathos of it all is that men fail to discern in nature and in themselves nature's own categorical moral imperative, in which indeed most men no longer believe. Thus they fail to find the road to everlasting happiness and peace and wisdom and unselfish love. The greatest men in the world are they who have seen beyond the clouds, seen the stars of spiritual destiny and followed them. In other words they have followed that divine inner peace which all men vaguely sense, but which when recognized and followed gives us wisdom and knowledge and power to labor mightily for the common good of all men. But our civilization as a whole has lost that religious instinct of unity with inner guidance; it has lost belief in its science which has miseducated it; it has no philosophy; it is unguided, blinded, almost helpless, and yet it is pathetically crying and asking the cause like a child in the night, crying helplessly - an appeal to the powers that be. There is the picture. The main work of the Theosophical Society seems to me to be the restoring to man of the self-conscious realization of his spiritual intuitions and of the belief in the innate morality welling through Nature's heart and recognizable when our own eyes, through the same moral urge, open to recognise it in others and everywhere. This is the main reason of its founding; this is the main reason why the Masters sent their first Envoy, H.P. Blavatsky; to restore to men the archaic heritage of the philosophy of life which is at once a religion and a science, which is founded on the spiritual heart of Almighty Mother Nature herself and on no man's say-so; which is provable by examination into Nature's secret places. It is our work to change men's hearts by changing their thoughts; give them ideas and ideals for them to follow and live up to. And to work with malice towards none, with a yearning to do justice to all, even to those with whom we most disagree. The Theosophist will be successful just in so far as he can implant in the hearts of others who may see him and hear him the thoughts and ideas and ideals which he himself has sought and found and is blessed with. Little by little the thoughts of men will change, until a time will come when these Theosophic ideas will sweep like wildfire through the hearts and minds of men everywhere, permeating both mind and conscience, thus furnishing a strong, a mighty, guide to all. The world will then be changed because men will begin to think new thoughts, see new ideas, realize their truth and immense import and value, and instinctively will follow them; and they will understand then that self-interest is the worst policy possible to follow, because the man who works for his fellows works likewise for the best for himself and wins friends everywhere. The man whose honor is unstained and whose heart beats with love for his fellows; he is the man who will be looked to for counsel, for all will instinctively feel the inner guidance that such a man follows, and will themselves seek the light that directs

him. If ideas can overthrow and work havoc, it is by this fact evident that ideas of another type can build and unite and save. - G. de P. - Theosophical Forum, May, 1942 -----------------------

Work Out Your Own Salvation THIS is the teaching of the great sages and seers of all the ages: work out your own salvation. Exercise the powers within you with which you are endowed. Hearken: does the fact that men are bewildered and often troubled with questions of conscience signify that we have been left without guidance? Don't you see that that very fact is a call to us by nature to exercise the powers latent within us! By the exercise of judgment and discrimination, judgment and discrimination grow stronger. If we do not exercise our own god-like right of spiritual and intellectual judgment we grow weaker and weaker. It is by this exercise that we evolve, bring forth ever more the god-like powers within us. Look at the great, the magnificent examples of human spirituality and genius with which the annals of human history are builded. These are indeed glorious and give us courage and show us how, since others have attained, so may we. These are signposts along that mystic path leading to the Mountains of the Spirit. But it is we ourselves who must tread that path, and we ourselves who must make our own judgments and abide by them. Just there is their great beauty. As ye sow, ye shall reap. Not something else than what you have sown. Think what this means. When men become convinced of this, their judgment will be broadened, they won't leap to points of conclusion, they will not lean negatively on others and thereby weaken their own judgment because no call is made upon it. They will accept the magnificent examples of human history as encouragements. "What he has done as a Son of Man, that also may I do by exercising within me the same powers that that grand figure of human history exercised." Their lives are a perennial example for us. But it is we ourselves who must grow, and by exercising our powers we do grow; and with each exercise the discrimination becomes more keen, the judgment becomes more sure, the light brighter. Then when the test comes we know which way to go. - G. de Purucker - Theosophical Forum, April, 1942 --------------------------

THE WORLD'S TROUBLE AND ITS CURE - G. de Purucker Extracts from an extempore talk given in the Temple at Point Loma, California, in

1938, and later published in Wind of the Spirit. Though four decades have since passed, marked by wars and violence and repression to the human spirit of the most searing kind, the simple direction of thought here pointed to still remains, in a global sense, neglected. And, we may ask, how much even very largely so in our own individual lives? - Eds. What is the trouble with the world today? It is this: the desperate desires that men have to make other men accept their views. That was and has been the trouble with the Occident since the downfall of Paganism. It was the scandal of the Christian Church - and I say it with reverence for the many noble hearts who have lived in and brightened that Church with their lives. The great fault of men from the time of the downfall of Rome in all the European countries, and in these two continents of ours, has been the desperate effort of men to force other men to think as they do - in religion, in politics, in society, it matters not what. It is this which has lighted the pyres of the martyrs. It is this which has sent murdering, marauding bands out for the killing of other men. It is this which has made and signed treaties, and imposed them on nations. It is this which troubles us today. You see it in our social relations among ourselves. Western men and women do not seem to be happy unless they are trying with more or less success to impose their will upon others, their thoughts, their ideas of what is right: the way the world should be run, the way things should be done, and especially the way other men should believe and feel. And when you realize how greatly we men value the sanctuary of our own hearts, the freedom of our own lives, and our right to think freely, you can see how tragical the consequences always are. Why, I have seen the same evil strain running even through the minds of Theosophists who seem to think other Theosophists are all on the wrong path because they do not accept their opinions. Theosophically, this is simply repeating the same old evil desire to make the other fellow think as you do. Now, try as you may, you cannot completely succeed in this. You can kill men, you can shackle their bodies, you can defile and distort their minds and their hearts. But you cannot enchain the human soul. It will break free. And then the same old tragedy is repeated. It is pathetic; and the pathos of it lies mainly not so much in the great human suffering brought about but in the immense loss to humankind of the treasures repressed and defeated in the hearts and minds of others. Think! What is more beautiful than for a man to study the mind of his friend or his fellow, to bring out what is there, to see it grow, to see unfolded the treasuries of thought? This is productive. The other is destructive. The one enriches the treasuries of human thought and human feeling; it brings about gentleness and peace and mildness in man's dealings with each other. The other brings about hatred and suspicion and a seething resentment and urge to throw off the slavery of imposed beliefs, or ideas or forms. And do you know why all this happens? Simply because men, most of them, are unensouled. I do not mean they have no souls; but their souls are not active, are not working, are not productive. They are asleep. And thus men and women mostly live like human animals; in fact, worse; because animals are governed more or less by an instinct which holds some measure of respect for other animals; but men have planning and tricky minds; and when planning and tricky minds are endowed with reason, we have tyranny, religious, social, political, any kind. We have, I say, tyranny: the attempt by minority, or by majority, or the one upon the many, or the many upon the one, to impose ideas and

thoughts and modes of conduct to which others must submit - and we call it the "freedom of the Occident"! Freedom! One of heaven's most blessed gifts and the one that we Occidentals have most outrageously abused, for we have considered that to gain freedom is the causing of other men to accept our beliefs, is the obliging of other men to accept our institutions and our ways of doing things. And the result: the crushing down of the flowering of millions of human souls which otherwise would have produced abundantly, brought forth nobly their contribution to the enrichment of our common human treasury. Am I revolutionary in these ideas? Never. For that would be just myself trying to repeat the moral crimes I speak of, trying to impose my views upon others. Evolutionary? Yes! Appealing to human hearts and minds always to remember that they can never be ultimately happy, or produce their best, or allow their fellow men to produce their best, if they fight others. It never has worked. It never will. It is against the laws of human nature. It is against all the laws of psychology, both the higher and the lower. It is a man's duty to obey the laws of his country. No matter what country it is, no matter what laws it may have, as long as he lives in it he should be obedient to its laws. But let him in his own life be an example of an ensouled man, and if he die a martyr in the cause of justice, the world will hear of his example and it will be, like the old Christian said, "the Seed of the Church"; for it is a curious fact in human psychological thought, that even though a man die in a poor cause it is a seed of propaganda. The greatest wisdom in human life as taught by the Masters of Wisdom is sympathy for the souls of men, and making your own life an example of what you preach: justice, brotherly love, sympathy, pity, compassion, helpfulness, refraining from doing any unjust act to whomever it may be. Your example will be followed by others because you will stand out like a beacon light on a dark night... Therefore, in my judgment if men and women would follow the simple rule of ceasing to try to impose their views on other men, ninety-nine percent of the world's misery, suffering, bloodshed, crime, would cease; for the rule runs through all human relationships. - Eclectic Theosophist, March 15, 1978 ------------------------

G. de P. on "Yoga Training" "The Theosophical teachings themselves are helpful, but I would like to know a few rules showing me how to live." At a gathering of esoteric students Dr. de Purucker responded as follows: Companions, you know me well enough to realize that I would not say an unkind word about anyone; yet I will tell you frankly that I was hurt, and have been hurt, when receiving these communications, which although not numerous yet do reach me from time to time . . . What these dear people were really after was instructions in what they thought was 'Yoga -training.' What they really craved was Hatha-Yoga exercises. They wanted instructions as to concentrating the mind at certain hours, and to be shown the best way of doing it, and to be told what positions the body should take, and to be given astrological

instructions as to `concentrating' in the proper planetary positions, etc., etc. Now I will tell you something really important, and I ask your most earnest attention: Your Pledge, if you will only live it, and not merely talk about it, will be all the training that your mind and heart and imagination can possibly understand and follow. `Live the life and you will know the doctrine.' Live the life and you will achieve Masterhood. The whole effort in our E.S. is exactly the same as what it was in H.P.B.'s E.S., for hers and ours are one and have always been the same. The E.S. is a distinct school of training in Chelaship and is an attempt to develop our students so that by living the life they may grow inwardly, so that they may develop their spiritual and intellectual and psychical faculties and powers; and I will tell you frankly and once and for all that you will never develop these powers by any Yoga-practices whatsoever - never! It simply cannot be done. It is a running after willo'-the-wisps of faulty imagination; and this is my only objection . . . to these itinerant Yogis from the East traveling around and teaching Yoga - usually for a price. The doctrines of the Vedanta that they teach are usually beautiful as doctrines; and if they are the teachings of the genuine Vedanta these teachings are unquestionably fine; and if they are of the genuine Vedanta of the Adwaita-cycle, they are mostly our own doctrines; but these doctrines by themselves and without the esoteric keys that are given in the E.S. do not emphasize the need of ethical living, of noble thinking translated into noble action. And I will tell you that if you follow the Pledge which H.P.B. gave to us, and which we now have, you will have all the Yoga-exercise that you can possibly manage to take care of. Certain ones of the higher Yoga-exercises are good and are occasionally followed by our Masters' own chelas for specific and particular reasons; but usually, if not always, they are followed in the cases of less advanced chelas whose lower principles are so strong that they need particular subjugation .... Live nobly, think nobly, feel nobly, do your duty to all at all times and in all places, and by all men. Speak the truth, fear naught, stand up for others when they are unjustly attacked; never add your voice to the burden of condemnation of others: rules like these are the rules that our chelas follow. And I tell you truly that you will have your hands full and your mind full and your heart full in following them. And, in addition, if you wish to undertake another aspect of the Chela-training . . . then follow the teaching of the ten Paramitas of Buddhism, which are always followed in the true schools of esoteric training . . . . The Paramitas are ten, sometimes they are enumerated as seven, sometimes as six. The six are the easier; the seven are a little more difficult; and the ten are for those who intend to devote all their life, and the next life perhaps, and possibly the next life after that, to that resigning of the lower self to the Higher in service to the world. There, in these rules, is the whole Path of Achievement. The Masters have no other training than what I have told you, and it is the same that their chelas invariably follow; only the Masters follow this training more grandly, and on a scale which is wider, and with reaches which are much more extended, than what their chelas can comprehend. I might say without feeling that I am wandering into hyperbole, that the very gods follow the same thing, inasmuch as they live for the Universe; and I trust that the day will never come when our School will see the introduction of Hatha-Yoga practices of any kind! Should it so happen, it will mean that our School has broken the link and is on the way to mere quasisecret, sectarian degeneration.

- Eclectic Theosophist, No. 75 ---------------------

THE YOGA WE FOLLOW - G. de Purucker The following is an answer given by Dr. de Purucker to a question asked at the European Convention of the T.S. (Point Loma), held in London, October 8th and 9th, 1932. The question had to do with the advisability or non-advisability of violent revulsions or changes of thought. - Eds. All violence is unwise. I never would think of suggesting to a very devout and orthodox Christian, that within the space of twenty-four hours or a fortnight or a month, if he could do so, he reverse all his psychological conceptions, all his religious views, and try to enter into something, entirely new. It would be very unwise. Such violent methods can work a permanent injury to the brain, for the reason that the brain-particles are set in a certain way. I am not a machine-man; I am not acquainted with machines; but I think there is such a thing as wrenching the works of an automobile in such fashion as to disorganize the gears. Is that right? That is the principle, I suppose. Festina lente: hasten, but hasten slowly; in other words, 'More haste, less speed', the old English proverb meaning exactly the same thing. All great things require time for growth. Mushroom-growths are usually useless, and they are not permanent. This matter is especially important in questions of esoteric training. It takes a chela sometimes several lifetimes before he can so readjust the parts of his constitution as to become a fit and ready and an adequate instrument under the Master's hand. And mark you, it must be his own inner Master first. No outside Master would ever use a chela's body or brain-apparatus, unless it had previously been prepared by the inner Master, the man's own inner being. No, violence in any wise is not good; and the danger lies especially in these methods of Yoga-training. Now, I speak with hesitation, as you see; because my whole policy is to try to bring these searchers for truth into our ranks in a kindly way; and you know, Comrades and Brothers and Friends, that you cannot ask a man to come to your meetings and then, as soon as he enters the temple or the door, slap his cheek because he does not accept what you say. That is not the way to gain recruits to the T.S. We must be all things to all men in a wise and kindly and honorable sense of that policy. I don't want to say anything unkind about these yoga-practices; but they are not necessary. They are not necessary. The Yoga-practice that is necessary is that which is taught in Theosophy, and it is the only real Yoga. Yoga means union - union with the god within; and this kind of Yoga has been called Raja-Yoga, you can call it Jnana-Yoga, either `Kingly Union' or 'Knowledge-Union'. Yoga means getting union with one's god within; it means following the ethical practices which Theosophy teaches us; it means being kindly, generous, truthful in speech at all times - not telling the whole truth always, but when you speak, tell the truth and only the truth. Do you see what I mean? Sometimes it is unwise to speak; and a man must have discrimination and judgment to understand this and to do this. It means acting

always as a Theosophist should act - kindly in action, gentle in thought, firm in self-control, always having command of a situation. Take command! It is your duty. Whenever you rise on a platform, whenever you approach a fellow-human being, take command of the situation. If your motive be pure and good, you are practicing the proper yoga. Don't be negative. Take command. It is a duty. Be leaders - leaders of your fellow-men. This is the yoga that we can follow, the yoga of truth, the yoga of right as against wrong, the yoga of compassion, the yoga of pity, the yoga of inner aspiration, the yoga of looking within, of union with the divine; and all these other different kinds of yoga - Karma-Yoga, and BhaktiYoga, and all the rest of them - don't amount to a snap of the fingers as contrasted with the actual spiritual and intellectual training under our Masters. All these things are but crutches for men who do not know anything better. Do you understand? Is the answer responsive? - Eclectic Theosophist, No. 61 ---------------

Miscellaneous Quotes from G. de P. "If we do not keep the Theosophical Society or the Theosophical Movement, for to us in our inmost hearts they are one, always fluid, always uncrystallized, always ready to grow, always ready to lead and not to follow - if we are not prepared for this and have not the vision sublime of our destiny as well as of our duty, then we are slack, then we are failing in our devoir and not true pupils or chelas of those to whom some of us at least owe perfect allegiance and all of us owe reverence . . . The Theosophical Society is an ensouled body, and therefore not only can it learn, but it can grow, it can be-come greater . . . " - G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, pp. 74-75. (Theosophia #140) ---------------We have spoken before of the "lost soul" as being at one pole, and the Master it the other pole, of consciousness. It is between the higher human soul and the human soul (or man proper), that lies the psychological frontier over which one must pass forwards or upwards; backwards or downwards; into regeneration or degeneration. If you go "upwards" and continue to go "upwards" or rather "inwards".... it is quality that we are speaking of, the refining of the human ego; the penetrating, the breaking into, as it were, of the final sheaths of our inner being that makes the distinction - if we continue to go "upwards" or "inwards," we attain finally to Masterhood. But, contrariwise, if we go "downwards," if our egoic soul-quality deteriorates . . . . . is given over to full attraction or gravitation towards matter, the momentum increases with time and use, and, through attrition as it were, that part of us where our egoic consciousness then resides, called "soul," is worn away and finally vanishes. We lose the ego-center, the soul-center, which divorced from its upper life-thread, is dissipated, and, as said, is at last annihilated. There is the cause of a "lost soul" at one pole of consciousness; and of the Master at the other pole. When mortality becomes Immortality; when the corruptible becomes Incorruptible,

then do we attain to full and complete conscious Masterhood - a Lord of Life. - Fundamentals, p. 227 --------------". . . often and perhaps usually the magnetic phenomena which accompany an eclipse of the Sun extend far beyond the path of the shadow. An eclipse of the Moon is also a very important event, especially for those parts of the Earth which are just opposite the Moon at the time . . . Remember that eclipses of both kinds, whether of Sun or Moon, produce enormous psycho-magnetic movements on the Earth, rushing of entities to the Earth or to the Moon..." - G. de Purucker, Dialogues, Vol. II, p. 328. --------------Jesus taught Theosophy in a manner and in words appropriate to the men of his era; and because what be taught is Theosophical, therefore we Theosophists claim him as one of us. He was the Theosophical Teacher of the people to whom he came in his era, but a very great and noble one; for Theosophical Teachers vary among themselves, just as ordinary men do. There are the average Teachers, then the greater, then the still greater, and finally the greatest, if you like to call them so; but their hierarchy does not stop there. "Believe not," said in substance the Syrian Sage of old to his disciples, "men when they come to you and tell you: 'Lo I am the Christ, follow me!' Or when another one comes and says: 'Lo! I am the Christ, follow me!' Believe them not." But when one comes before you, in the name of the Christ-spirit, and tells you to follow truth whose ringing tones are heard in every mortal heart of man, and who speaks in the name of the god within, in the name of the inner Christ, in the name of the inner Buddha, then, said in substance the Syrian Sage, "He is my own. Follow him." - G. de Purucker, The Story of Jesus, pp. 26-27. --------------We must remember that no nucleus of a genuine Theosophical Brotherhood will be fit to endure and to perform its proper work in the world unless it is based on those spiritual qualities which the Masters have pointed out to us as the sine qua non of a successful Theosophical organization; and first among these qualities, and in the front rank, the present writer would place the two grand virtues of Universal Charity and perfect Fidelity: Charity not only to those of our own Family - our own T.S. - but Charity to all and to everyone without exception: as much to those who differ from us and who may even go so far as to attempt to injure us, as we are charitable or try to be so to those with whom we feel most spiritual and intellectual sympathy, they of our own Household, of our own Family. Let our record in this respect be so clean, on so high and truly spiritual a plane, that the mere thought of losing it or abandoning it would cause us greater and more poignant grief than any other loss we could possibly incur.... It is futile and entirely beside the mark to say, as some may perhaps say, that in pointing out the desperate wickedness of other Theosophists we are doing our Masters'

work, in exposing wrong and fraud to the world. In no case would we be manifesting the true spirit of Charity and Fidelity to our Masters' admonitions were we to call a BrotherTheosophist by names suggesting ignominy, such as 'traitor,' 'impostor,' 'insincere,' etc., etc. Outside of anything else, all this is very bad psychology, if not worse; and it certainly is not the way by which to reform any abuses that may have crept into the Theosophical Movement. Arrogance in criticizing others shows clearly self-righteousness in the notion that the critic's views are the only 'holy ones,' and that all who differ from him are on the 'wrong path,' or on the 'downward path.' . . . A Theosophist may know The Secret Doctrine of H.P.B. from cover-page to coverpage; he may be able to rattle off at will incidents innumerable in the history of her life; he may be able to cite volume and page and word of the thoughts of our great H.P.B.; but if he have not her spirit of Charity living in his heart and enlightening his mind, he does not understand the Fidelity which was so eminently hers, and tehrefore himself is not faithful either to the Message which she brought, or to the Masters whom she pointed to as our noblest exemplars in life. - G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, pp. 241-242 --------------On Neo-Theosophy: .......The Forum prints Dr. de Purucker's address on "The Need of Regeneration in the Theosophical Movement", delivered, before the Wirral (Adyar) Lodge at Birkenhead last January 5. He spoke plainly on certain points which are worthy of the attention of all who call themselves Theosophists. Here is such a passage: "I am trying to bring about a reunification of the disjecta membra of the Theosophical Movement, i.e., of the various Theosophical Societies, so as to form a compact organic entity to do battle with the forces of obscurantism and of evil in the world, just as there was one organic entity, the T. S., in the time of H.P.B.; and, I believe that this will come to pass, but perhaps not in my lifetime. I may be called to give an account of what I have done before the thing comes to pass; but verily, I believe with all my soul that this Theosophical unity will some day be an accomplished fact. Now we at Point Loma hold certain doctrines and hold them with tenacity; we love these doctrines more than life, because to us they are Theosophy, all of it pure Theosophy, but not all of Theosophy open-ly expressed. We of Point Loma don't like other strange doctrines, or new doctrines, added on to these ancient WisdomTeachings of the gods. We don't like psychic visions added on to the Message of the Masters. But for pity's sale is the Theosophical Movement not broad enough to allow its component members, its component fellowships, i.e., the different Theosophical Societies which compose it, to believe what they please, and to honour what they may choose to honour? If not, then the Theosophical Movement has degenerated; and personally I don't believe that it has degenerated. I take you Brothers of Adyar: you, I believe, teach and accept certain things that I personally cannot accept as Theosophy. But do I say that you are ethically wrong in holding to these your beliefs and in teaching them, and do I say that you have no right to do so? Never. My attitude has always been: give fellow-Theosophists a full chance; if what they profess and believe as truth is true, it will prove itself to be true; if what they profess and believe is wrong, time will uproot it. We of Point Loma ask for the same kindly tolerance. It was so in H.P.B.'s day, and it should be so today. There is no

reason in the world why the different Theosophical Societies today could and should not combine together to form a spiritual unity as it was in H.P.B.'s time; and, the only thing that prevents it is the spirit of doubt, of suspicion, of mis-trust, of hatred. These are lovely Theosophical virtues, aren't they?" Then he adds what is equally necessary and well said. "Mind you, I must add that I don't like anything artificial in this Fraternization Movement, because I want the real thing. You at Adyar, if you don't like something that Point Loma has to say or to teach, I would like you openly to express your opinion about it and to tell us so; and if anything that you tell us is good and true, we will then listen and we will test what you say; but equally we reserve the right to tell you, our Brothers of Adyar, what we don't like; and I believe that it is only on such a basis of mutual understand-ing, on a platform of interchange of opinions frankly and manly expressed, that such a reunification of the different Theosophical Societies can ever be brought about." - From The Canadian Theosophist, June 15, 1933 -----------------------On Condemnation of Others: ". . . the greatest mark of human folly is the feeling of self-satisfaction in our own impeccable virtues, a feeling which we but increase by foolishly com-paring our own virtues with the real or imaginary manifold defects and imperfections and sins and failings of others around us, who belong more or less to the same line of spiritual effort to which we have consecrated our lives. No true Theosophist, no Theosophist worthy of that sublime title, can ever find real satisfaction in condemnation of others, or in pointing out how much better others might have done, if they had but followed 'our' ways, or 'our' particularities of belief, or 'our' methods of performing duties. "Let us conscientiously examine ourselves rather than search for the failings in the characters of others, and thus doing we shall fit ourselves to be better servants of the Great Ones whose chelas we aspire to be. The haughty isolation of the egoist in his self-pride and biased judgment is probably one of the most pathetic spectacles that human folly offers for our study. It is the worst possible psychology to lie under the delusion that we call convince others that our ways are better ways, if we choose the method of criticizing them or of throwing mud at them; for this foolishness simply alienates them from us instantly, and in addition arouses in their hearts a feeling probably of injustice, and in any case of antagonism and dislike. Sympathy, kindliness, frank confession of our own failings where such confession will lead to a better mutual understanding; purity of motive and of life, and the self-dedication of the heart without thought of reward to our blessed Cause - all without criticism of others: this I do believe is the Way which we should follow . . . . It is the man who really and sincerely strives to do justice unto all, and to do it in a kindly and sympathetic way, who is really successful in his purpose; and this is true because he is strong in his sense of right. He is not torn by hatred, nor is his mind distorted by crooked motives, and therefore he feels confident in his own strength and in the justice of his cause." -G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, pp. 244-215. --------------

On Justice: "The world indeed is in a dangerous situation just at present; and it is my keen realization of the existence of much as yet unexhausted European and American racial karman which urges me to impress upon the minds of all our members, and indeed upon the minds of Theosophists everywhere, our supreme present duty: to do our utmost to bring back to the consciousness of the humanity of our day a keen and lively sense of the inevitability of karmic retribution - a sense which humanity has almost lost - and to make universal this sense or feeling of our responsibility towards each other and towards our fellows; and if we succeed in awaking this sense of responsibility, because of its permeating and powerful influence, it will surely work strongly in the counsels and deliberations of those representative men whom our western peoples set over themselves as guides and governors in national affairs and in international relations. "No normal human being who is awake to the fact that Nature is infinitely just and metes out retribution with unerring and infallible action, will ever do other than strive to his utmost to deal with justice, impartiality, and impersonal fairness by all other men, irrespective of what expediency or individual or national profit may, from short-sighted vision, otherwise urge upon him. Let us spread this great and consoling teaching of Nature's unerring retributive justice everywhere, my Brothers, and by every means in our power, supporting our presentation of it with all the scientific and philosophical knowledge at our command, and with all the persuasive logic that we are capable of. Only a universal awakening to a lively sense of the great fact that reason and not chance governs worldaffairs, will restore to mankind in general the instinctive sense of the ever-present need to do right and to give impartial justice unto all, and that the doing of right brings success of all kinds and all true and lasting worth in its train." - G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, pp. 233-234. -----------The Christmas Tree The Christmas tree, dotted with lights and bright with tinsel that reflects these lights and multiplies them manifold, is an old pre-christian symbol used by the people of North-ern Europe at the time of the Winter Solstice; and here is the inner significance of it: Have you never heard of the World-Tree with its roots in the realms of spirit and whose branches are the great suns and systems of suns? This World-Tree began in the beginning of this Cosmic Age to bring forth all the stellar hosts. Now the Winter Solstice is the beginning of the cosmic New Year, and so these northern peoples, knowing some of the ancient truths, celebrated this cosmic event with the Christmas tree. It symbolized the World-Tree, and the lights are the suns that bestrew the deeps of Space, hinting to us the message from the divinities who constantly give us the light of love, the light of mind, the light of hope eternal.... The giving of gifts on the Christmas tree was emblematic of the self-dedication of the gods so that the worlds might come into being. "Here is my gift. It is born from myself." - G. de Purucker, Wind of the Spirit, p. 241. -----------------------

.... those portions of the universal Theosophical Movement which live not only for teach-ing the mere letter of the Theosophical doctrines, but which live likewise for spreading its true spirit above everything else... will live on into the future, and will do the work which our Masters founded the Theosophical Society to do .... The Theosophical Movement above everything else should be plastic, flexible, and its exponents should always be open to the reception of new truth, and above everything else should avoid self-righteousness, ignorance and sectarian conceit, and the empty formalisms arising in religious or philosophical self-satisfaction...,, The spirit of truth among us Theosophists shows itself above everything else by a fervid sympathy for the souls of men, wherefrom arises generosity towards others. - G. de Purucker, Wind of the Spirit, pp. 331-32. --------------------------"To bring peace to men, to give them hope, to give them light, to show them the way our of the intricate maze of material existence, to bring back to one's fellow-men the knowledge of their own essential divinity as a reality - is not that a sublime work?" - Golden Precepts of Esotericism, p. 168 ------------------------------"The destiny of the world does not lie in the hands of men who are self-safisfied with their self-sufficiencies, who are so proud of their haughty isolation that they stand apart and will not even obey the dictates of the conscience within them nor the sublime precepts of Brotherhood and fraternal peace . . . . Every Theosophical Movement in the past has had to face the passing over into a New Era. Some have failed because they were satisfied with what they had; satisfied that the revelation given was complete and perfect unto the next Messiah who should come at some indefinite time in the future, and neglected the duly of the moment, which was keeping the mind fluid, the heart warm with brotherly love, and therefore the avoidance of crystallization: churchism. Churches are always the danger of a movement like ours, churches which are brought about by self-satisfaction, with a feeling that 'We have the truth' - suspicious of our fellow-men, afraid to receive truth from a brother, because, forsooth, our own opinion is so great that our interpretation and translation of what we already have is so profound and so perfect that even a brother may not know a little more than we! "This last is the spirit of a sect, the spirit of the church, and we must not allow it in the Theosophical Society; for if we do, then we become but another sect, another Theosophical failure; and we shall deserve the fate that Nature has in store for all failures . . . . Growth comes from the feeling that we can learn more . . . . Growth comes from the readiness to receive more light of any time . . . Growth comes from keeping the mind plastic, the heart warm with the love which flows to us always from the Heart of the Universe." - Messages to Conventions, pp. 75-76. ---------------------------------------

Fidelity, and the Future of the T. S. (Excerpts from an editorial in The Theosophical Forum, January, 1939) . . . . Breaking up into its different component or separate societies, like Theosophical Movement has nevertheless lived on . . . . Each one of these different societies will succeed or fail, in my judgment, precisely in accordance with the degree of spirituality and intellectual penetration and selfless devotion which its members as individuals possess; or, lacking these, any one of them will drift off as H.P.B. pointed out, on to one or more sandbanks of thought and there decay and become another sad wreck in the cyclic history of Theosophical endeavor. Let us pause a moment and look at these sandbanks that we may more clearly understand just what they are. They are rarely if ever, indeed never, in my judgment, sandbanks formed of the thought of other movements contrary to our own, but always of the mental prejudices, biases, and intellectual and emotional waywardnesses which it is human nature so utterly to cherish. In other words, these sandbanks are the product of ourselves, of Theosophists, of whatever society we may belong to. We are caught and ensnared by our own weaknesses and our infidelity to the principles I have mentioned above, in which principles lie our only safety, our sheet [sic] anchor, as well as our assurance of future success. Any society, for instance, which becomes merely a bibliolatrous sect, worshiping books, however grand they may be because of the teachings contained in them, is almost certainly destined to fall into the next error of judgment, which is the worshiping of dead Leaders; and this is one of the pitfalls, one of the commonest sandbanks, of organized thought which our own beloved T.S. must at all costs avoid. - G. de Purucker -------------Whosoever, therefore, asks anyone to believe blindly, or drags mankind behind him through controlling it by his superior will is an injurer to humanity, though he may not have intended it. Therefore use your own minds, control body and mind yourselves, remember that until you are a diseased person, no extraneous will can work upon you, and avoid everyone, however great and good he may be, who asks you to blindly believe. - Fundamentals, p. 105 (1st. ed.) -----------------Freedom of Self-Expression in the T. S. "Above everything else, fellows of the Theosophical Society must guard their right to freedom of conscience, freedom of thought and freedom of speech; and while the brainmind always loves things which are `clear and definite,' as the saying goes, and while we certainly should strive for clarity and definiteness, yet we can achieve these without losing our inestimable right and privilege of searching for truth for ourselves in the blessed teachings we have, and finding them from our own efforts in study and self-discipline .... Hence let us prize the freedom we have today which gives us individual diversity of opinion in the T.S. and guarantees our freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, and furthermore, and not less important, makes us realize that the opinions of a brother may

be well worth listening to, even if they may differ from our own." - G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, pp. 164-65. "Nothing in this world can prevail against the T.S. and its work as long as we stand united, determined to continue to stand united no matter what may be at times our own personal feelings or convictions regarding others. United we stand; divided we shall fall. There is no doubt of that whatsoever. Remember it." - G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, p. 146. ---------------"Few Theosophists realize that there is in the world a power antagonistic to the best spiritual interests of men, the power which H.P.B. fought during her entire life, and which every genuine Theosophist must fight if he is worthy to bear this noble name. It is the power working for obscurantism; it is the power of the enemies of the human race who yearn to see disunion and disarray in our camp, and who work with subtle machinery, with subtil enginery of thought, to this end, and unceasingly, even when the poor deluded ones of our own camp sleep in fancied security." - G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, p.65. -------------" . . . Above everything else. Fellows of the Theosophical Society must guard their right to freedom of conscience, freedom of thought and freedom of speech; and while the brain-mind always loves things which are 'clear and definite,' as the saying goes, and while we certainly should strive for clarity and definiteness, yet we can achieve these without losing our inestimable right and privilege of searching for truth for ourselves in the blessed teachings we have, and finding them from our own efforts in study and self-discipline . . . ." - G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, p. 164. ---------------The Divine Proportion What Sympathy is to Love, which latter otherwise is Cosmic Harmony, that Consciousness is to Divine Intelligence. In other words, Love awakened or in action, shows itself as what we humans call Sympathy; Intelligence awakened to action and selfcognising being expresses itself as Consciousness. This includes likewise selfconsciousness which is but consciousness reflected back upon itself so that it 'sees' or 'feels' itself. And indeed everything in the Universe, and consequently everything in man who is but an offspring of the Universe, is ultimately reducible in the last analysis to One: whether you call it the One Kosmic Ultimate or the One Kosmic Principle, is a matter of words only; but from this One - which is not monotheism in any sense - but from this abstract Unity there flow forth into activity the things that we men call Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Sympathy, etc. Thus then what Sympathy is to Love, which is Cosmic Harmony ultimately, that Consciousness is to Cosmic Intelligence. That is all.

- G. de P., Theosophical Forum, September, 1938 -----------------Marie Corelli Was Marie Corelli a real mystic? G. de P. - I think she was. Some of her books are extremely interesting, and show an intuitive reception of gleams of light from the fountain of Truth, which, in her case, was from within her own Higher Self, touching, as it were, her literary brain. Yet, on the other hand, she was heavily laden by some of the things of this world, as for instance I understand she was of a very jealous temperament, jealous of other literary people, and apt to be critical even of her own friends. But, after all, that belongs to the artistic temperament almost always, and can be overlooked. I think Marie Corelli did a good work as far as it went in raising many people to a realization of mysticism and magic who never would have been awakened, even in the slight degree in which she touched them, except through the medium of some pen like hers which was graphic, thought-arresting, and inflamed the imagination of this type of mind; and there are millions of them. She was an unconscious kind of Theosophist in half of herself. - Theosophical Forum, Sept., 1938 ---------------"For the sake of our common humanity which is at present passing through one of the dark periods in its history, and when the wisest of men are bewildered and uncertain whither to look to find help, what is more needed than anything else is a conviction of the reality of spiritual and moral values, not only in the world of men, but in the general world of nature, of which after all men are but undetached portions or parts. Restoring to man his spiritual intuitions and his realization that Nature is conscious both in the whole and in its parts, and furthermore conscious in various degrees from the spiritual down to the physical, will compensate for the tragical loss of the sense of responsibility which the materialism, the mechanism, dead and soulless, in past science has been largely responsible for, to say nothing of the materialism and dogmatism of formally organized ecclesiasticism. It is for these general reasons that Theosophists so greatly value pronouncements from eminent scientific men which point the way, to those who look unto scientists as their guides, forwards to a spiritual and intellectual rejuvenation of the human race. A heavy responsibility rests upon the shoulders of scientific men, precisely because the public believes in them as guides. The scientists of the future in my judgment will, if they remain honest and true to their sublime work, become the high priests of Nature, whose temple will be the Universe, whose altar will be the altar of Truth, and whose ministry will be spiritual and intellectual, as well as physical, service to mankind. - G. de P., Theosophical Forum, Oct., 1938 -----------------

The Word 'Paramita' Will you kindly point out the derivation of the word Paramita? - G. R. G. de P. - This is a Sanskrit word, and is a compound, formed of param, which means `the other shore,' in the technical sense of this word, in the beautiful Buddhist way of speaking, which means the other shore, or over the river of life, instead of this shore which is the material existence where sorrow and pain and all the rest of it exist. Thus `the other shore' means attaining perfect enlightenment because one's consciousness has passed over all the illusions of the material world to the other shore of spiritual glory and peace and freedom and wisdom and love. The other part of the compound paramitd is ita, which comes from a Sanskrit verb meaning `to go,' and is the past participle of this verb; and hence in English can be translated `gone': go, gone; and ita is this Sanskrit past participle, meaning `gone.' Then this past participle is turned into a noun, and this makes it ita; and hence, as a noun, the meaning is, by paraphrasing it, `successful going,' or `successful reaching.' Thus the whole compound means `the successful reaching of the other shore.' Please note also - and this will make the matter a little clearer to you - paramita means `one who has successfully reached the other shore,' whereas, as said above, paramita is the compound noun describing this, and therefore is to be translated as `the successful reaching of the other shore.' - Theosophical Path, Oct., 1938 --------------------Knowing Teachers How can one distinguish the true Occultist and Seer from one who is sincere but who is misguided? The cases vary greatly. It is difficult indeed to give a general answer which will cover all cases.... Test, Observe, watch, and put your own heart into it. Your heart is a touchstone, my brother. Never will it fail you. Your brain may, but the instincts of the heart are virtually infallible, and by the 'heart' I emphatically don't mean the emotions. I mean that subtil instinct having its seat in some part of our constitution, which the run of men call the heart-light. Furthermore, when you see a man living the doctrine that he preaches, and if you find that his teachings are universal - that is to say, have universal application... and apply to all times and places, and to all races, to all men, and furthermore call forth from yourself the best that is in you; then follow them. Don't however, if these results do not follow. If you don't feel the answer within your own heart, then abhor him, as Shakespeare said, i.e., avoid him. This is a good rule, a most excellent rule: Watch the man, watch the man who sets himself forth as a Teacher. Judge carefully of what he says. Test it by the best within you. Give to him the credit of being honest. Give to him credit, but don't give yourself until your conscience - the best that is in you - acquiesce. Then, if you feel, my Brother, that the man has truth, or can teach you truth, don't hesitate to give your assent. - GdeP., Theosophical Forum, April 15, 1933 ----------------------

We were with the Sun, with the Earth, in the very morning of Time, though not then in bodies of flesh; and we helped to build this planetary chain as well as this Earth of ours, because, not only are we its children but we are collectively and individually integral parts thereof. This last fact is obvious. Even our bodies, our physical bodies, are of the substance of which our Mother-Earth itself is composed; and every atom that now sings its musical hymn or note in our bodies has likewise sung its paean in the Sun and in other planets and in the interplanetary spaces during its unceasing peregrinations - in this case as a life-atom - in ages past during the course of its evolving and revolvings. -G. de Purucker, in The Esoteric Tradition, p. 279 ------------------------The Giving of the Self There is no freedom so great, no happiness so large, so wide-reaching, as the giving of self in service. It is the hero who gives himself. If he did not give himself utterly, there would be no heroism in it. It is the giving which is heroic. And so it is with love. Where there is questioning about it - not uncertainty because uncertainty is always very natural in these things; one wishes to be sure - but where there is a question about the values involved, where there is a selfish searching of `what I want,' there is no heroism, no love, no self-giving. There is not the ghost of a shadow of a chance there for the god-like, heroic quality of self-renunciation. When the year begins, when it opens, the one mantram I always make to sound in my own heart and mind is this: A new year is opening. Can I give myself a little more than last year? I pity from my soul the man or woman who has not learned the exquisite joy of giving of the self. There is not anything on earth that equals it in beauty, in grandeur, in sublimity, and in the peace and richness it brings to both heart and mind. - G. de P., Theosophical Forum, Jan, 1942 ----------------------The Injunction of Pythagoras Remember the rule laid down by Pythagoras. It has been quoted again and again, but it loses none of its beauty and profundity by repetition. It runs somewhat as follows: "Let not the setting sun reach the western horizon, nor close thine eyes in sleep, before thou hast gone over all the events of the day just past, and hast asked thyself this question: What have I done today that has been done amiss? What have I done today that has been done aright? Have I injured anyone? Have I failed in my duty? Let not the setting sun reach the western rim of space, nor let thine eyelids close in sleep ere thou hast asked thyself these questions." If only men and women would conscientiously follow that simple rule, ninety-nine percent of the world's trouble, heartache, sin, and anxiety, would be nonexistent, would never happen. And the reason is simple. The world's troubles arise from our weaknesses, not from our strength; and if we would increase our strength, and do away with our weaknesses, every human being thereafter, in proportion to his inner evolution, would

become a power for good in the world. And you see what that would mean. It cuts at the taproot of most of the thoughts and feelings and acts that bring misery amongst us. - G.de P., Theosophical Forum, June, 1942 --------------------Where Two or Three Are Gathered . . . There is an old saying that where two or three are gathered together in my name, that is in the company of the Spirit, the Spirit is present with these two or three. There is a great occult truth in this, and if you will multiply the two or three fifty-fold or one hundred-fold, and realize, or try to realize, that the force of a unified spiritual will and understanding can do much good in the world, and keep this before you as an ideal of help and of comfort, then I think you will feel with me that it is not merely for ourselves that we gather together in Theosophical meetings for consolation and comfort and light, but that wherever these meetings are held we gather together as aspirants to join the highest elements of the human race. In these words there lies more perhaps than may appear on the surface. - G. de P., Theosophical Forum, August, 1942 ------------------------Making Mistakes Do not believe it is ever wrong to make an honest mistake. Infinitely better for a man to have his motive right, to wish to do right, to render justice, to do grandly and to make a mistake because he cannot see fully just the right way to take, than it is for a man who is all atremble lest he make a mistake: and because of his lack of inner strength, immediately proceeds blindly to make mistakes. That man will never easily rise. Better to make a mistake and learn by it and to bear the consequences manfully and be more of a man afterwards. Improve your faculties by exercising them. Do not be afraid of making honest mistakes. Only let your motive be right, and then your mistakes won't injure others and you will soon correct them. You will be stronger, grow more keenly. Let your heart be filled with compassion for the mistakes of others, and the wish to do right, and you will never go far wrong. And each repetitive instance of exercising your inner power of judgment will be more sure, more certain, clearer. The light will be brighter. Then you are a man, a real man. - G. de P., Theosophical Forum, Feb., 1941 ----------------"It is our work to change men's hearts by changing their thoughts; give them ideas and ideals for them to follow and live up to. And to work with malice towards none, with a yearning to do justice to all, even to those with whom we most disagree. The Theosophist will be successful just in so far as he can implant in the hearts of others who may see him

and hear him the thoughts and ideas and ideals which he himself has sought and found and is blessed with. Little by little the thoughts of men will change, until a time will come when these Theosophic ideas will sweep like wildfire through the hearts and minds of men everywhere, permeating both mind and conscience, thus furnishing a strong, a mighty, guide to all. The world will then be changed because men will begin to think new thoughts, see new ideas, realize their truth and immense import and value, and instinctively will follow them; and they will understand then that self-interest is the worst policy possible to follow, because the man who works for his fellow works likewise for the best for himself and wins friends everywhere. The man whose honor is unstained and whose heart beats with love for his fellows: he is the man who will be looked to for counsel, for all will instinctively feel the inner guidance that such a man follows, and will themselves seek the light that directs him. "If ideas can overthrow and work havoc, it is by this fact evident that ideas of another type can build and unite and save." - G. de Purucker, Messages to Conventions, 188-89 ----------------------------

Appendix

GOTTFRIED DE PURUCKER A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH [Boris de Zirkoff] Hobart Lorentz Gottfried de Purucker was born at Suffern, Rockland Co., N.Y., January 15, 1874. His father, Gustaf Adolf H.E.F. von Purucker of Bavarian and Franconian ancestry, as an ordained minister, was for some years chaplain of the American Church in Geneva, Switzerland, and later served in the same capacity in Rome and in Strassburg. His mother was Juliana Smyth of Anglo-Irish descent. who was born in Philadelphia, Pa., and belonged to a New England family of distinction. Gottfried was one of seven children and received somewhat severe training in his youth. In 1881-82, when his father was a young clergyman in Texarkana, Texas, he barely survived typhoid fever; and though declared dead by his physician on one occasion, he slowly recovered. Later the family lived for a time in St. Joseph, Mo., and in Rome, N.Y., and Gottfried was expected to follow his father's footsteps in the service of the Church. After they moved to Geneva, he studied in various schools including the College de Geneve, and was taught Greek and Hebrew by his father. He specialized under private tutors in ancient and modern languages such as Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Sanskrit, Italian, and Spanish. French and German were spoken in the family. In 1888 he translated the entire Greek New Testament as a Christmas gift for his father, and a couple of years later made a translation of Genesis from the Hebrew. At eighteen, he returned to the U.S.A. where, after a few months sojourn in New York State, he settled for several years in California, spending some time for experience on different ranches, among these Old Fort El Tejon, near Tojon Pass in the Tehachapi

Mountains. He then moved to San Diego, where in 1892 lie joined the "Point Loma Lodge" of The Theosophical Society (chartered in April, 1888) then under the national jurisdiction of William Quan Judge, and at nineteen conducted therein a class in The Secret Doctrine. In 1894 he met Mr. Judge in San Diego while the latter was on a lecture tour of the Pacific Coast. A year later, Gottfried returned to Geneva to live for a time with his people. It was in that city that he first met Katherine Tingley, on September 2, 1896. She was on her first world tour as successor to William Quan Judge, who had died March 21, 1896. During this brief meeting, he was able to provide her with specific information about land available for purchase on the Point Loma Promontory, near San Diego, and drew for her a pencil sketch of the area, thus enabling her to secure for her intended "White City in the Golden Land of the West" acreage which she had felt was there but which her agent in San Diego was unable to locate. In the years 1897-98, Dr. de Purucker travelled extensively in South America, and in 1899 returned to Geneva via New York. He then spent several years in Paris where he was for a while associated with Ralph Lane (later Sir Norman Angell, M.P.) on the editorial staff of the Paris Daily Messenger, an old and famous continental paper published in English, founded by Galignani in 1814 and originally known as Galignani's Messenger. A year after his father's death in 1902 he came back to the U.S.A. and after some weeks of travel took up permanent residence on August 4, 1903, at the International Theosophical Headquarters, Point Loma, California. During the years 1903-1929, the period between his arrival at Point Loma and the death of Katherine Tingley, Dr. de Purucker was engaged in many and varied activities, acting as Private Secretary to Katherine Tingley in the early years, as member of her Cabinet in later years, and as Editor of The Theosophical Path after its initial publication in 1911. He supervised the publishing of successive editions of H.P. Blavatsky's works, and utilized to full advantage his great scholarship in this field of endeavor. He engaged in many administrative activities under the direction of Katherine Tingley, and soon became one of the most trusted members of her staff. He accompanied her on her world tour of 1903-1904, and on her European tours of 1908, 1912 and 1926. A great deal of his work was done in the quiet of his office and on the whole he lived a somewhat retired life, and was never married. When Katherine Tingley died on July 11, 1929, while on a trip to Europe, Gottfried de Purucker succeeded her as Leader of the Point Loma Theosophical Society. He inaugurated many new activities for the expansion of the work, one of which was a worldwide Theosophical Fraternization Movement, with the object of bringing all Theosophical groups into closer friendly relationship one with the other. In 1931, lie went on a lecture tour in the United States and Europe; in 1932-33, he established for a year a temporary Headquarters at Oakley House, Bromley Common, Kent, England; and in 1937 made another short trip to Europe. Soon after taking over the administration of the Society, Dr. de Purucker started publication of The Theosophical Forum, the first issue appearing in September, 1929, in this manner reviving the name of a small organ inaugurated many years previously by W. Q. Judge. In 1936, The Theosophical Path was combined with The Forum. Through the years of his administration, Dr. de Purucker delivered a great number of public lectures, mostly in the Temple of Peace at Point Loma, and conducted members' and private meetings for the deeper study of the Esoteric Philosophy. Some of his works

have been compiled from these lectures, while others were dictated by him as independent texts. In June, 1942, Dr. de Purucker moved the Headquarters to a new location near Covina, California, and died soon after very suddenly on September 27, 1942. Dr. do Purucker's literary output throughout his lifetime was very considerable in extent and unique in character. His profound knowledge of the recondite teachings of the Esoteric Philosophy, his great mastery of H.P.B.'s writings, and the results of his own scholastic studies, especially of the Classics and the literature pertaining to the origins of Christianity and its early Mystical Schools, as well as his linguistic achievements, combined, one and all, in making him an outstanding expounder of the Occult Doctrines. This he did in complete harmony with the original installments of that doctrine given by H.P.B. and her own Teachers, elucidating and clarifying many obscure points of the teachings, opening up new vistas and disclosing still deeper levels of the Wisdom-Religion. He had a special aptitude for answering questions in a manner which disclosed the qualities of a born teacher attempting to lead the student to a greater grasp of the subject by arousing his own intuition and reasoning capacities. Dr. de Purucker's writings, in their chronological order, are listed elsewhere in this issue...... Literary Heritage of Dr. G. de Purucker: - The Mysteries of Antiquity. Pamphlet of the School of Antiquity. Point Loma: Theos. Publishing Co., 1901,. - A Churchman's Attack on Theosophy Answered and Criticized by a Theosophist. Point Loma: Theos. Publishing Co., 1905. " - Is Reincarnation Contrary to Christian Doctrine?" in The Theosophical Path. Point Loma, Calif. Vol. VI, September, 1914, pp. 182-204. - "H. P. Blavatsky, the Mystery," in The Theosophical Path, Vol. XXXVI, April, 1929 Vol. XXXIX, January, 1931. In collaboration with Katherine Tingley. - Questions We All Ask. Lectures in the Temple of Peace, Point Loma, Calif. Series One: October 1, 1929 - August 22, 1930. Series Two: September 1, 1930 - April 13, 1931. Published as weekly pamphlets; later in 3 volumes. - The Bhagavad-Gita. Translated from the Sanskrit. Published serially in the Theosophical Club magazine Lucifer, Vols. I-III, January, 1930 - Nov., 1932. - Researches into Nature, by Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Translated from the Latin text of Haase, Breslau, 1877. Published in The Theosophical Path, beginning with April, 1930. - Theosophy and Modern Science. Temple Lectures delivered in 1927. Point Loma: Theos. University Press, 1930. Two Volumes. Revised and condensed in One Volume as Man in Evolution, published in 1941; 2nd impr. 1947; cloth, $5.00; paper, $3.00. - Golden Precepts of Esotericism. Point Loma: Theos. University Press, 1931; 2nd rev. ed., 1935; 3rd rev. ed.: Point Loma Publications, Inc., 1971; hard-case, $5.00; paper, $3.00. - Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy. Edited by A. Trevor Barker. Originally Lectures delivered to members of the Esoteric Section in 1924-27. London: Rider & Co., 1932, xvii + 555 pages; 2nd pr., Theos., Univ. Press. 1947; cloth, $6.00; paper, $3.50. - Occult Glossary. A Compendium of Oriental and Theosophical Terms. London:

Rider & Co., 1933, 192 pp. Reprinted 1953 and 1956 by Theos. Univ. Press, Pasadena, Calif., cloth, $1,.50; paper, $2.50. - The Esoteric Tradition. Point Loma, Calif.: Theos. University Press, 1935. Two Volumes, 1109 pp., copious Index. Second Edition, 1940: See page 32 for special announcement! - Messages to Conventions. On the Policies, Work and Purposes of the T.S. (posthumously published). Covina, Calif.: Theos. Univ. Press, 1943, viii + 251 pp. - Wind of the Spirit. A selection of Talks on Theosophy as related primarily to Human Life and Human Problems (posthumously published). Covina, Calif.: Theos. University Press, 1944,, x + 254 pp.; 2nd ed., slightly abridged: Point Loma Publications, Inc., 1971; paper, $3.25. - Studies in Occult Philosophy. Compiled by W. Emmett Small and Helen Savage (posthumously published). Covina, Calif.: Theos. University Press, 1945, xv + 744 pp., copious Index; cloth, $7.00; paper, $4.50. - The Dialogues of G. de Purucker. Compiled from Private Teachings beginning in November, 1929. Covina, Calif.: Theos. University Press, 1948. Three Volumes fully indexed; set, $15.00; each vol. $5.00. Several small booklets have also been coimpiled from the teachings of Dr. de Purucker by some of his students, such as: The Story of Jesus (1938 and 1944; 2nd rev. ed. as Clothed with the Sun (1972) ; and The Masters and the Path of Occultism (1939) ; 2nd rev. ed. as The Mahatmas and Genuine Occultism (1972), and others. Also many short articles and reviews in the pages of The Theosophical Path and The Theosophical Forum during the years of his editorship of these periodicals. - Theosophia, Winter 1973-4, no. 137 ---------------

TRIBUTES TO DR. DE PURUCKER (from Theosophia, no. 137)

I. [From older students who knew him well and worked with him.] During my twenty years of secretarial work with Dr. de Purucker, fifteen of them as his private secretary, I was deeply impressed by his wide sweep of compassionate consciousness which, with all his brilliant and immense knowledge, never made those of us who worked with him or studied under him feel small or stupid or inadequate. He had the faculty of encouraging us and bringing out the best in us. Not only was he proficient in the realm of Occultism - where, in spontaneous discussion, "The Secret Doctrine" was an open book to him - but he was skilled even in mundane affairs and able to meet people on their own level.

As well as being an acknowledged spiritual teacher, he was a superb instructor. He always took infinite pains to illustrate a point of teaching so that the least of us could comprehend. His mind was strictly disciplined; one felt he could move through it freely (as one feels when reading H.P.B.). He was of course utterly faithful to the esoteric tradition as it has been transmitted through the centuries; and we owe to him many enlightening explanations of difficult passages in the teaching. The farther away in years we move from his presence among us, the greater seems to become our debt to him. Perhaps the greatest was his encouraging us to think for ourselves and to the keys that Theosophy gives us in order to discern truth from distortions of it - to recognise the genuine from the false. As young students, we felt he acted as a sort of Manasaputra, enabling us to light our own minds. We are grateful to him! - Elsie Benjamin, Private Secretary to Dr. de Purucker, now at Worthing Sussex, England. -------------As G. de Purucker would have attained his hundredth birthday anniversary On Jan. 15, 1974, we can point out in all fairness to him that the statements made by the Masters and H.P.B. to the effect that neither would they come, nor would they send anyone to work openly in the world after the close of the last century, do not apply to him. He was already here. And it is doubtful whether anyone can find a statement to the effect that any such as he were to be recalled. Nor was it ever indicated that the Masters would stand in the way of any who were able to do so, to work for Humanity as he did. So while all of the hubbub was going on, he went about his work teaching, teaching and teaching. His work was chiefly in the field of elaborating and explaining some of the more recondite of the teachings brought by the Masters and H.P.B. The result is that we have a priceless legacy from him which must be shared with others, for his work holds many master-keys to an understanding of The Mahatma Letters and The Secret Doctrine. G. de P. labored constantly to establish a fraternization movement that would take in all Theosophists, and he was adamant on the principle that such a fraternization must be founded upon genuine Theosophy. A wise and far-reaching program, and one which is going forward to this day. To those who worked with him, he was not only a Teacher in his own right, but he was a respected and deeply loved friend. - L. Gordon Plummer, San Diego, Calif. --------------These thoughts are recorded on September 27, 1973, exactly forty-one years since G. de P. died of a heart-attack at Covina, California, while taking his morning constitutional. His passing summoned me to assume the administrative duties of Chairman of the Cabinet, to which post he had, much to my surprise, appointed me a few months before. My personal acquaintance with G. de P. began on August 4, 1903, when he arrived at Point Loma, a young man of twenty-nine - tall, with high forehead, as handsome as the statue of a Greek god, with exquisite manners and profound erudition - obviously a person of distinction. He was greeted by Katherine Tingley and the Headquarters Staff.

G. de P. was linked with Point Loma much earlier in a most important weaving of the webs of destiny. In 1896, when K.T. and her party were in Geneva, Switzerland, on a crusade of American Theosophists around the world, they were distressed to learn by cable from their agent in San Diego, a Mr. Rambo, that there was no private property available for purchase on Point Loma, where K.T. intended to establish her Headquarters. G. de P., then living with his family in Geneva, was invited to K.T.'s hotel and informed of the upsetting news. Forthwith, G. de P. drew a rough map of San Diego and vicinity, where he had lived for a time, and pointed out that, while the U.S. Government did own the southern portion of the peninsula, there was private property available for purchase north of the Government reservation. With this authentic information, the future site of the International Headquarters of the Point Loma Theosophical Society was obtained, and a rich era in the history of the Movement was inaugurated. The fruits of G. de P.'s teaching taught me to know him - at least to the extent of my own capacity to understand. His superb administration of the T.S. brought added conviction. The reading of The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett was a revelation to me of the higher intelligence of obviously superior men; and G. de P. exhibited similar characteristics. On March 30, 1930, G. de P. publically inaugurated the Fraternization Movement among Theosophists of all societies or unaffiliated. This gesture completely captured my mind and heart and imagination; because it was to me so absolutely sound and right and Theosophical. Recognizing in himself the ability to teach, he nevertheless completely rejected claims to any temporal authority. The Movement as a whole lost an awesome opportunity to fulfill its potential by its unwillingness (and probably its inability) to accept G. de P. as a spiritual Teacher. In the language of the Arabian proverb: "He who knows, and knows that he knows, is wise. Follow him." It is not too late to seek the intellectual and spiritual guidance which G. de P. offered and gave. It is still available in his writings. - Iverson L. Harris, Chairman of the Cabinet, Point Loma Theosophical Society. --------------On January 15th of this year our combined thoughts join in memory of our beloved G. de P., who was born one hundred years ago, on this date. He was a great soul with a magnificent intellect: a teacher who taught the Ancient Wisdom with perfect understanding and a keen awareness of the students' need to have the teachings presented in a way that could be most easily understood. Characteristic of his writing and teaching is repetition and analogy, which is the mark of a great teacher. Everything we learn stems from repetition of thought and deed through many incarnations. This is the road by which perfection is finally attained. G. de P., the man, was a strong, noble character; kind and compassionate. Because of his thorough understanding of human nature, he was sympathetic towards the weaknesses of others. His capacity for appreciation of some thoughtful gesture extended him was touching. To be in close contact with such a teacher is a rich, soul-satisfying experience, and indeed consciousness expanding. This contact once made can never be broken. What

a beautiful thought! Because of this, G. de P. is always with us in spirit. So it is with grateful hearts that we pay homage to a thoroughly true Theosophist and Teacher. Our gift to G. de P. should be to follow the path which he pointed out to the very best of our ability. - Eunice Ingraham, Point Loma, California. --------------"Ego sum Servus Servorum Dei." It was with these words that G. de Ppurucker often closed his lectures when he was in Holland, adding a few thoughts on the real meaning of the last word. A "servant of the servants," as he called himself, understood as yet only by the few, referred to the representatives of the Hierarchy of Light, to the "Guardian Wall" around humanity, the spiritual brotherhood behind the movements that have been leading the real evolution of mankind. We met him first when, as a young boy and secretary of the Boys' Brotherhood Club, we welcomed him and Katherine Tingley in the north of Holland. We may have felt the spiritual force of a man with a capacious mind and marvelous memory, but, still looking on the outward plane, we saw his high forehead and were impressed by his voice, deep and melodious. Afterwards, growing older and wiser, we understood more of the words "Servus Servorum," having had the privilege of translating his lectures. Gradually we began to understand more of the work of a real representative of the Hierarchy of Light. Here was a man who had that "something" which does not belong to this world. Indeed, there was the human side, the love and compassion felt at once by those coming in contact with him; there was that typical sense of humor of one who always sees the relativity of things. At other times there was the inspiring presence of a man who had perceived the light behind the outward plane and had the power to radiate it in unforgettable words, a man who lived what he taught, wholly reliable, wholly inviolable. Years before World War II he gave us his advice and told us what was our task in the coming events and terrors that might have to be faced. When the clouds of destruction and misery rolled over Europe, we realized that he possessed "inside information." After he had left our country, we had the feeling that actually he had never gone. A brooding spiritual influence remained and remains until today. It can probably be felt also by those who study his writings which bring lasting inspiration. The "bards of the gods" may disappear on the outward plane, their songs of wisdom, love and compassion always sound on the terrestrial plane. - Jan H. Venema, The Hague, Holland. --------------Something about a teacher - one who has made an impression on you perhaps from your tender years - stays with you. All students share in some degree this experience. Leaving school and the teacher's physical presence does not erase his memory or the force of his example; later even his dying does not take away the feeling of his abiding presence - a kind of protective 'atmosphere' affecting your thought and behavior. It is that way with G. de P. Since 1912 in a real way he has been "with us"; and his influence almost surely will grow with passing decades. And this, I believe, will be so

because he was a true teacher, one who inspired, one who awakened within his students their own inner light. From him one learned, and what one learned he did not have to unlearn. His whole life was given to teaching, and in a strange way he seemed only 'complete' when teaching. Modest, quiet, retiring, he was yet strong in action when action was required. As one looks back over the years with him one is impressed by a quality of conservatism - in the true meaning of the word - which characterised his work. He was unwasteful of his energies. How often smilingly he would admonish: the King of France with a thousand men marched up the hill - and down again! When nothing was to be gained but much lost by a gesture, a deed, a splurge of any kind - abstain. Ah, to abstain is the greatest art! In his case it gave him added energy to direct with wisdom the destiny of his society, and to teach. The impartial and earnest student must come to the conclusion that the record G. de P. left of exposition and clarification of the Esoteric Philosophy can be ignored only to his own great loss. Another twenty-five years will show whether the disciple H.P.B. spoke of in the Introductory of The Secret Doctrine was here, and spoke, and taught. - Emmett Small, San Diego, Calif. ---------------My first impression of G. de P. was when as a beginner-student of Theosophy - I happened to read one of his articles. I felt as if his words radiated something that reached me, entered into me, and filled my heart and mind; it powerfully raised my consciousness and set my higher thinking in motion; it illumined me and gave my life a new meaning. That impression became stronger yet when I was lucky enough to meet G. de P. in person. Even today, forty years later, I can clearly picture to myself how he slowly walked hither and yon before those listening to him and presented Theosophy in his own special manner, calm and quieting. In 1937, Emmi Haerter and myself had an unforgettable experience. We knew that G. de P. was in Holland, and we felt eager to go there and listen to him, as he had such a masterly way of embodying difficult teachings in words that were easily understood. But we could not attempt to do so at that time. We were informed, however, that G. de P. would speak on the radio. On that day we were sitting together, busily comparing with the original our German translation of the chapter on "Visible and Invisible Worlds" from G. de P.'s Esoteric Tradition, and waiting for his talk to begin. Suddenly we heard him start in his melodious and rich-sounding voice: "I will speak to you today about Visible and Invisible Worlds . . . . Deeply impressed, we looked at each other in utter silence. Such was G. de P. with his striking capacities and his deep warmth of heart. - Mary Linne and Emmi Haerter, Unteriengenhardt, Germany. ---------------In the outward, G. de P. was a man of the world, an aristocrat, an intellectual, a professor - inwardly a mystic, a seer, a sage, of uttermost sensitivity paired with humility, compassion and humour. I can still hear him say (in the Temple) with pathos in his deep voice: "Oh the stony

human hearts! - Remember justice above all!" It is not easy to know if G. de P. himself was fully aware to what degree he was a challenge as a spiritual mentor and teacher to his students in general, considering how difficult was the task of handling a dedicated group of people from the four corners of the earth, with all their sincere devotion, obstinate personalities, idiosyncrasies and passions by no means a host of angels. But, as a true Teacher, he found his opportunities in the appeal to and stirring of man's higher nature, which responded in inner growth and expanding consciousness, so conspicuous in his disciples. I believe we will all agree that G. de P. succeeded to an eminent degree, considering the material he had to work with, and for this we should be eternally grateful. - Maja Synge, Halsingborg, Sweden. ---------------The privilege of having been a resident at the Theosophical Headquarters, when Dr. de Purucker was the Leader, I consider as my greatest opportunity and good karman in this life. The imprint of a true Teacher creates an atmosphere of higher ideal and principles. It gives us inspiration to raise our consciousness to those higher vibrations that the Teacher receives from the Powers that he serves. From the Temple platform G. de P. gave guidelines for us to follow. He taught us to use spiritual judgment in all of our dealings; to value things according to their real worth; and at all times to be true to our Inner Self. One of G. de P.'s favorite quotes from the Masters was: "Ingratitude is not among our vices." These words we, students of Theosophy, should always re-member. Dr. de Purucker was a Leader, a Teacher and a Scholar of the highest type. His work as an author will always stand as a shining monument in years to come. His name will not be forgotten. - Alice Eek, Long Beach, Calif. --------------Work and study with Dr. de Purucker (1929-1942) was an ever expanding experience; and the years that followed have not diminished the power then engendered. Our hearts and minds were illumined by those Universal Ideas (in the Platonic sense,) from which the noble philosophy of the Ancient Wisdom flows. To the extent that we were responsive, there was no room for dogma, for that would mean crystallization, rigidity of thought, and a stifling of that exhaustless source of wisdom by which our intuitions are nourished. We endeavored to hold "in the back of our minds" an awareness of those Great Ideas - in the performance of our smallest duties, in our relationships with our fellowmen, in all the- vicissitudes of life - as in so doing, right action would spontaneously follow. It was G. de P.'s teaching that this was the safest, wisest and most fruitful type of meditation. I believe he would wish no greater tribute from us than our trying to practice this essential discipline. - Helen Todd, San Clemente, Calif.

-------------Dr. de Purucker - G. de P. to his contemporaries and most of his students was invariably Professor to me, because, included in all that he was, and predominantly so, he was an incomparable teacher - a Spiritual Teacher. His profound knowledge of World Religions and specifically of that aspect today called Theosophy; his understanding of human nature and its needs, and his facile use of an extensive vocabulary of the English language, worked magic for the earnest student, in that vital interchange of manasic life atoms which is the basis of true teaching and learning. Thus Dr. de Purucker quickened our dormant minds, inspired us, nourished our intuition and expanded our conceptions of truth. By his use of pertinent words - sometimes two or three to describe an idea - we were able to create our own perspectives. Stressing the ethical, fundamental in Theosophy, Dr. de Purucker challenged us to become exemplars of the noblest conceptions of human endeavor. Any who heard the cogent summations he made after lectures by his students in the Temple on Point Loma, or who read his books, will appreciate these qualities of an exceptional Teacher. - Irene R. Ponsonby, Los Angeles, California. -------------In the early twenties, I first noticed G. de P. among the Cabinet members who welcomed K.T. after a European tour. As children, we saw G. de P. only occasionally in Point Loma. What impressed me most in those days was - in the open-air Greek Theatre drama, the Eumenides - G. de P., as a shining sun-god, stepping forth from the sid: temple to bid Hermes to escort Orestes to Athena's shrine. Later in Europe I often had the privilege - together with my husband - of listening to G. de P.'s inspiring speeches, where he was our Teacher, speaking with authority and endless love. For the way in which he has enriched our lives we will be ever grateful. -Lucie Molyn nee Goud, Heemstede, Holland. -------------What a heritage of the immemorial Wisdom-teaching was given to the world by Dr. de Purucker! My association with him was unique, in that I was privileged to set up for printing at the Theosophical University Press every one of his articles and books. This took place both before the period of his administration of the Theosophical Society as well as during the time that the Society's headquarters was maintained at Point Loma, California. What splendid contribution was his in carrying on the esoteric philosophy for the Theosophical Movement, in the same manner that it was presented to the western world by the great ones who initiated the founding of the Theosophical Society. - Geoffrey A. Barborka, Ojai, Calif. -------------I first came to know Dr. de Purucker when he invited me to be his housekeeper soon

after he became head of the Theosophical Society at Point Loma, California. To be in daily contact with him was to experience many facets of this remarkable man. I was impressed by his extraordinary neatness and orderliness in every detail. I shall never forget his thoughtfulness for all who worked for him; his keen sense of humor, his gentle tenderness for those who were passing through dark times, for he lived in his own life the philosophy he gave so generously. Looking back, I see him, the teacher, the scholar, the true and understanding friend. He gave with all he had in devotion and dedication to the high office he held so nobly. It was indeed a privilege to be associated for so many years with G. de P. - Ila Barborka, Ojai, Calif. ----------------All who have heard G. de P. speak, or read his works, will remember him as a scholarly metaphysician. To Theosophists he will always be something far more: one who by purity of body, mind and motive had drawn closer, day to day, to the heart of the divine universe of which he loved to speak. Being himself splendid and good, he recognized the splendor and goodness in others. The god in him spoke to the god in you which, however hidden, answered. We say that he is gone, but somehow I do not feel that this is so. Always will I see him, with a smile of compassion on his face, standing on Point Loma by the sea. - George Cardinal LeGros, Joplin, Missouri. ----------------II. [From other students who know him through his writings.] It must have been a great privilege to know and study with Dr. de Purucker, but even for those who did not have that privilege, he left behind him an impressive literary output and a group of dedicated students to carry on his work. Many who attended his lectures say, that when listening to him, ideas that had hitherto seemed obscure became much clearer, for he was an inspiring teacher. It has been truly said that the "Path runs uphill all the way" and sometimes those reading of the trials and difficulties facing one attempting to tread it, may be excused for holding back. Dr. de Purucker's teachings had just the opposite effect, for not only did he inspire his students with his own courage and determination, but be urged all who wanted to help in the age-old struggle between the dark forces and those of light at least to guide their steps in the right directions. In 1975 we will observe the centenary of the Theosophical Society, when we should rededicate ourselves to keeping alive and vital the teachings of the Masters, given to the world at such cost by their chosen instrument H.P. Blavatsky. In 1974 we observe the centenary of the birth of Dr. de Purucker who gave his life to carrying on this work and who is becoming more and more known as another light on the way. That "love is the cement of the universe" is one of the fundamental ideas of his philosophy and one which we shall always remember when thinking of him.

- Mollie Griffith, Victoria, Canada. ------------G. de P.: Man and Legend Some men, it is said, become legends in their own time. Some men speak and the words are quickly forgotten; other men voice a message that comes not so much from them as through them, and the words blaze with light. I am among those who did not know G. de P., the man; perhaps if I had, his portrait miglit have grown larger than life with the passing of years, for one tends to forget the littlenesses to be found in all great men just as one usually overlooks the greatnesses in all little people. I have come to know G. de P. principally through his writings, though partially also through those who did have immediate contact with him in his work for the Theosophical Movement. G. de P.'s writings, therefore, constitute for me the legend of this theosophical leader; it is a legend in the tradition of those who have, by their own efforts, become knowers. The words of such men convey beyond their immediate meaning a luminosity that reveals the startling fact that within the room of the reader's own mind there are doors and windows capable of being opened inward to the Light of Spirit. The essential Theosophist is one who does not crowd the mind-room of another with his own particular theories, ideas, visions, or perceptions; he is, rather, one who encourages another to clear the mental space of the clutter of useless and broken-down furniture of ideas in order that the illumination of the spiritual dimension of consciousness may flood the mind with new insights. "These things, these thoughts that we study," wrote G. de P. in Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, "are serious, there is no playing with them; it means going up or going down; and you have the choice of paths daily, momentarily, instantly." Words, then, expressing noble ideas, great concepts, are not meant to confine, delimit, the understanding of the student; they are pointers on the way to truth, but each must walk the way for himself. G. de P., in company with all true Theosophists, was a pointer of the way. As he himself wrote in connection with the study of The Secret Doctrine, a work he so capably expounded, ". . . never take a single statement in it and allow your mind to mold itself around it, never let a single idea crystallize; break the molds, let in the light." The "choice of paths" is still before us; it is always present for the student of Theosophy, of occultism, of the way that leads to understanding, liberation, redemption. The choice, however, is not which leader to follow, but whether to pursue truth at whatever cost. I am happy for this opportunity to join with others in paying tribute to G. de P. It will be for others, however, to remark upon G. de P., the man and the leader. As legend, he embodied and embodies that age-old injunction to those who would walk the paths of truth: "Let in the light." - Joy Mills, National President, The Theosophical Society in America, Wheaton, Ill. -------------Becoming acquainted with the writings of Dr. de Purucker, a further window was opened, and a brighter light thrown on the Theosophical teachings H.P.B. brought to us.

His writings are in a "language" readily to be grasped and assimilated by both heart and mind, and my own have been nurtured by his clear expositions. G. de P. does not 'translate" or "interpret" H.P.B., but shows how to study to find the way of understanding from within oneself. His words have answered many of my questions and encouraged me to think for myself. He does not attempt to give full and complete answers, without further need to think and search. G. de P. gave us principles that enable us to do our own thinking in order to gain a greater understanding. To me, G. de P. is a Teacher who stands in a direct line with the Masters of Wisdom and with H.P.B.; he points to the Heart of the universe - which is our own Self. My gratitude is embodied in my wish that I may assimilate what he taught, so that in my turn I may hand it on to those who come my way searching for Truth. - Henrietta de Hoog, Los Angeles, California. --------------Since I did not know Dr. de Purucker personally, my comments must be based upon those of his writings with which I am familiar. If it be true that an author's deeper nature is revealed in what he writes, then indeed one may assume a rare inner quality in Dr. de Purucker; and one may admire the intellect through which he was able to focus this quality with such clarity and beauty. My introduction to Dr. de Purucker came through Wind of the Spirit, which I purchased when I had been a member of The Theosophical Society for only a short time, and which I found deeply inspiring. Sometime later, to my delight and lasting benefit, a friend presented me with a copy of his Golden Precepts; I have cherished this little volume through the years and never fail to be rewarded when I dip into it. Being especially interested in the Letters of the Mahatmas, I have found Dr. de Purucker's "Studies in The Mahatma Letters" from Transactions of Point Loma Lodge particularly illuminating and useful. Man in Evolution, the volumes on The Esoteric Tradition, the Dialogues - to name a few other of his works - all constitute outstanding contributions to Theosophical literature. It seems to me wholly fitting that special tribute should be paid to the memory of this man who left behind so much of lasting benefit for generations to come and who, while he lived, so obviously inspired unique respect and affection among those who knew him. I am happy to add my own words of appreciation. - Virginia Hanson, Editor, The American Theosophist, Wheaton, Ill. -------------What a treasure was given in the writings of G. de P. The truth of the age-old teachings shines brighter with the clarity of his presentation. The brilliance of his mind, his high ideals, and devotion to truth gleam on every page. But most important to me is his understanding of man's search for the Path of light, which is given so beautifully in the little book, Golden Precepts. We know that for him love is, indeed, the "cement of the universe," the great truth behind it all. - Francis Ziegenmeyer, Los Angeles, Calif. ----------------

To my regret, I never met Dr. von Purucker personally, and so was able to acquaint myself with him only through his writings. In them one feels that every sentence reflects a living, spoken word, and one senses the power and the spiritual meaning which he knew how to transmit to those listening to him, over and above the merely intellectual meaning of the words. He was one of the "Greats" in the second phase of the Theosophical Movement: the spiritual world was his home; and he invariably emphasized the fundamental truths of Theosophy rather than subsidiary details of the occult worldconception. It was symbolic that he should have concluded his earthly life-work, on September 20th, 1942, with the words Aham asmi Parabrahman, which point to one of the most wonderful passages in The Secret Doctrine where the Commentary to sloka 4 of Stanza V says: "Lift thy head, oh Lanoo; dost thou see one, or countless lights above thee, burning in the dark midnight sky?" "I sense one Flame, oh Gurudeva, I see countless undetached sparks shining in it . . ." Those present on that occasion must have felt what was actually taking place for him, as Dr. von Purucker ended with the words of The Light of Asia: "The dewdrop slips into the Shining Sea" and added: Consummatum est. - Dr. Norbert Lauppert, General Secretary, The Theosophical Society in Austria. --------------Although the privilege of meeting Dr. Gottfried de Purucker has never been mine, his teachings have inspired my life and deeply influenced the course of it. And so I join with earliest students everywhere to observe the one-hundredth Anniversary of his birth, to honor this noble man, and to add my words of gratitude to their phrases of appreciation that credit the work done by this eminent Theosophist. Let me acclaim with them the brilliant promulgation of the Ancient Wisdom by this born Teacher, and voice together our devotion to that Great Cause which he has served so well for the upliftment of our human-hood. And yet, this heartfelt eloquence upon our lips would be but an empty tribute and a sacrilege - unless we hold within the very fabric of our being those Golden Precepts that he taught so well and live the every-dayness of our life in deeds of Brotherhood, Compassion, Justice, Selflessness, Impersonal Love - in deeds that are a fact. Only then does our living testimony do homage to this revered Teacher, Theosophist and Man. - Vonda Urban, Chicago, Ill. -------------The Self links man to the Unutterable Mystery, and through humble self-effacement, much suffering, and compassionate love growing inthe human heart, man slowly awakens and makes present that Mystery. This presence calls forth the unitive vision in and about the beholder, manifesting and giving the wholeness of life to all. Presence of Self-flowering in the human heart is a rare and wondrous thing; its vision, a life-giving to all. The essence of Dr. de Puruckers' life and teaching was a lifegiving, a pointing to the Self within, and beyond to the Unutterable Mystery.

- Kenneth Small, San Diego, California. ------------"And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine. For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes." [Matt. vii, 28-29.) These concluding words of the Sermon on the Mount have two wonderful messages and express clearly what G. de P. means to me. In the first place it is very comforting and encouraging to realize that from time to time Teachers appear with their astonishing doctrines. And, in the second place, isn't it marvelous that, evidently, there is some inner center in the human constitution which recognizes this authority. Such an authority is not imposed from outside, but an awakening of that inner center "where Truth abides in fullness." To me G. de P. is such a Teacher; never imposing, but always appealing to that inner center, activating it as it were. I always regret that I never met such a man, though in his books there is all the inspiration we need. In Man in Evolution, G. de P. says: "Everyone should read The Secret Doctrine. He who does not is really not keeping up with the times; and this will become very greatly more evident than it is now as time passes." It is my firm conviction that these words are equally true for G. de P.'s own literary works. - Arien Smit, Flushing, Holland. ------------Judging by his own definition of the phrase "the Ensouled Man," G. de P. was one himself. He "kept the link unbroken" in showing us the nobility of the Path. He portrayed it as a Path of true joy, because everything we have put aside as illusory has its counterpart in a grander concept of being. This quickening of our efforts and lighteniing of the burdens of selflhood shine out as pure impersonality: a goal he always reminded us to strive for. He demonstrated what true clairvoyance is in our unnurtured potential to see clearly into the hearts of our fellow men. The more universal a man becomes, the less powerful is the hold upon him of all crippling thoughts and actions. The practical application of Theosophy is the only true freedom and release the beginner student must count on. "Our life in the world is only a dream," wrote Li Po. G.deP.'s writings give this feeling, but with one difference. G. de P. was one at home in the Universe, not just a spectator. Each passing moment is a vital link by which we may enlighten this dream with full God-Consciousness. I would imagine, from the sterling precepts in Wind of the Spirit, G. de P. must have been as strong as flint. He must have been like the blind barrister in a play I once read: "having a capacity for rage - but never at the Universe." And when he used his "flint" it must always have been to aid along the "Ensouling of Man." - Dara Eklund, Studio City, Calif. ------------A Glimpse of G. de Purucker In studying Dr. G. de Purucker's writings one cannot help but find the inner theme of his philosophy. It is not solely a mental perception of the universe, but is also a spiritual

awareness that he evidences. In studying his writings on philosophy one can discern an unblemished image of a man of great spiritual stature. He sees far beyond the transitory situations and turmoils in life. He sees all of life as a part of a mighty living conscious force, trying to unfold, unify, and create a balance in the whole of creation. The smallest particle is a part of the Whole, and the Whole mirrors itself in the particle. All the changes in life, birth, death, reincarnation, war, peace, pain or pleasure, the struggles for freedom are all part of the changes brought about by the Cosmic consciousness to balance and create the order which projects the sense of unity in all. This is the Oneness which all must eventually experience. It is in this aggregate of all beings and all things as they are in themselves that a wholeness, and unity is discovered. This discovery is Truth. One can only inadequately describe the vision of this man whose image transcends all personalities and mortal limitations. Thus is portrayed his image as it is seen in the boundless areas of the spiritual quest. The underlying theme of all of his writings seems to point to the fact that the whole universe is a manifestation of a composite organic consciousness - or God's consciousness. Not a single atom, or person, or plant, or creature, or system of evolution that is not enclosed in this organism of Cosmic consciousness. It appears that the whole of Cosmic physiology expresses and functions as one force through the whole of creation. That everything from the infinitesimal of manifestation to that of the greatest magnitude is directed by this unifying force which embraces all. Therefore, our existence is a part of that profound unity, and one must always strive to be aware of our consciousness in that All. All are but parts of one tremendous Whole. This is a Truth that Dr. de Purucker was aware of and emphasized. - Henry A. Smith, M.D., Past President, The Theosophical Society in America, Ojai, California. ---------------H.P.B. was the first to assume the Mantle of responsibility worn by those who represent the Golden Chain of Teachers; called Guru-parampara, thus becoming the first in the line of the theosophical spiritual succession. Next William Q. Judge was called to fulfill this duty; then Katherine Tingley and G. de Purucker in the Point Loma esoteric successorship. Today there is no single successor to them in the outer world - at least to our knowledge. It is inevitable, then, that the modern student may often feel a desolation stealing slowly but inexorably over him - a loneliness not known to those who had the privilege of knowing and studying under a Teacher as G. de Purucker or any of the others. Yet we must not allow this to deter us from realizing that perhaps this generation of students has been born to an even more difficult and challenging task than were the earlier students . . . that of keeping the Golden Chain of 'Teachings UNBROKEN AND UNSULLIED for future generations of students, and this through and by their own individual effort. Unsupported by a spiritual Leader, we must learn to work as though they were here - for indeed they are, unseen, yes, but not unaware of any effort made in the name of Universal Brotherhood and their work. Let the few who feel called upon to do so, fight to retain the purity of the Teachings

given to a hungry humanity at such personal cost to the Teachers. Let us go forth under the Light of their inspiration and not falter beneath the yoke of aloneness. Let us rely upon our own inner Divinity and thus help to justify the seif-sacrifice of such a one as G. de. Purucker. - Lina Psaltis, Tarzana, Calif. ------------I never had the privilege of meeting Dr. Purucker personally, but I heard him lecture on many occasions. As a student of comparative religious myself, I was always impressed by his erudition and the simplicity of his presentation. In the question and answer periods which followed many of his lectures, he was always patient and understanding and never patronizing. He was a wise and gentle teacher. I have often thought that the Tibetan doctrine of tulku might well apply to him. He was a man of great conviction, courage and hope. How much the world needs these qualities in its leadership today. How greatly each of us needs to dedicate himself, as did Dr. de Purucker, to the eternal quest for truth, come whence it may and cost what it will. -The Rt. Rev. Francis Eric Bloy, Bishop, The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

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