Theosophy and Life's Deeper Problems E-Book

Annie Besant

• Herausgeber: Interactive Media
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Theosophy and Life's Deeper Problems

Leseprobe

Annie Besant

Theosophy and Life’s Deeper Problems

THE BIG NEST

Published by The Big Nest

This Edition first published in 2020

Copyright © 2020 The Big Nest

All Rights Reserved.

ISBN: 9781787362406

Contents

GOD

MAN

RIGHT AND WRONG

BROTHERHOOD

GOD

FRIENDS:

Amid the excitements of the present National Week, amid all the Conferences on matters of importance to the Nation, amid the discussions—industrial, commercial, political—which are agitating this great City, and will agitate it during the next week, we, of the Theosophical Society, have ventured to invite you here to consider not the passing concerns of the moment but the perpetual concerns of the life dealing with the eternal interests, the life wherein alone permanence can ever be found.

I have chosen for the subject of our Convention Lectures, those great problems of thought which ever challenge the attention of the highest mind of man. That question of questions of the nature, of our conception, of God; the nature of man, his relation to the Universe in which he finds himself—the evolution of an intelligent spiritual Being amid the transitory phenomena of passing worlds; then that profound2 question of conduct, what is Right and what is Wrong? is it possible to find a standard of ethics? is it possible to find a canon of conduct which will guide us in that tangled path of action which is one of the hardest problems of human life? Then, lastly, the meaning of Brotherhood, on what it is based, in what it consists, what duties it imposes upon us, what is to be our attitude to our brethren on every side. These questions, that on these four mornings we are to consider, are not questions of the passing time, but are the problems that confront humanity at all the stages of its evolution. Not only is that so, but in this alone can we find peace, amid the turmoil of the world; not in the constant struggles of outer life may peace be found, but in the heart of peace which abides in the Eternal, that can remain peaceful in the midst of storms, amid friends, amid enemies, amid neutrals; only in the Peace of the Eternal may the human Spirit find abiding rest. When that centre is found, when that knowledge of God which is eternal life has been realised by man, then, and then alone, can action be wisely taken, not swayed by passion, not moved by prejudices, having nothing to gain which the outer world can give and nothing to lose which that world can take away; asking for nothing, desiring nothing, save to be an instrument of the Will that works for Righteousness, seeing in the world around us the field of action where God is working, and where we can be co-workers with God. There, and3 there alone, can you work above the guṇas, using them for the Divine purposes, but not permitting yourself to fall under the glamour of their phenomena; making use of all: of the passions of man, of the aspirations of man, of the good and of the evil, turning them all to send man forward on the path which God has marked out for human progress. That is the high activity which finds its expression in Service, and that can only be where God has been realised, and where the Spirit of man, consciously one with the Spirit Eternal, sees everywhere one Will, one Wisdom, and one Activity, and men, in all their different workings, the instruments whereby the Divine Will is worked out in evolution.

Hence, our study in these four morning hours is not apart from the day’s activity, but is really the source, the spring, of that activity; and so, loving all because in all the Self abides; seeing the inner Self, unblinded by outer appearances; thus may work the messengers of the great Hierarchy that guides our world. It is to a treading of the path that leads to Service, it is for that, that I invite your attention to these profound problems of the spiritual life of man.

Now, to-day, we are first to consider the nature, the existence, of that One Life in which we all subsist, and the views that man has taken thereof.

Let me say at the very outset, that there is a common view to-day among many thoughtful, among4 many good men, that it does not much matter what a man believes providing that his conduct is right. That is a half truth, not a whole truth, and it is the natural reaction from the Middle Age view in Europe that it did not matter what a man’s conduct was provided that his beliefs were orthodox. Such a view has not only been found in mediæval Europe, but also has been found in India herself. You will find among Indians to-day, as still among some Christians, that the all-important matter is belief in certain dogmas, and that where those are held conduct is comparatively unimportant. We all know men in all faiths who are orthodox, as it is said, in belief, but whose lives are worldly lives, and sometimes not even of a very high worldly character. Now, a century or so ago that view was so common that men were persecuted, men were penalised, because of a difference of theological views. If men did not believe, at one stage, the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, then their fate was, at first, the stake, then later the prison, and still later, slander, social ostracism, and disabilities under the law of the land. In England, that is now largely swept aside, and we have the opposite exaggeration: “Let a man think as he will; but let him be a good citizen, a good man.” But that leaves out the profound truth that “man is created by thought, and as a man thinks, so he is”; conduct is not independent of thought, for thought5 is the spring of conduct, and so it is written in the Bhagavaḍ-Gīṭā, that “a man is compacted, composed, of his beliefs,” and as a man believes, so he is. You have to make, however, a distinction between beliefs conventionally accepted, and the real belief, which is the conviction of the heart, out of which action arises. And so, I urge on you to-day that right-thinking on the great truths of life is a most important part of the whole of your conduct. The better your thought, the better will be your life. The truer your thought, the more candid and transparent will be your actions. But remember that it must be your own thought, and not the thought of your neighbour, not the thought of authority, not the thought of a book, however ancient and however sacred, not the thought of a great man, however true for him; the thought that moulds conduct is the thought of the actor, and every man is responsible for his own thinking; the repetition of the thought of another is useless and even mischievous. Be not then afraid to think, even about God Himself. Do not think it is blasphemous to enquire; do not think it is blasphemous to doubt. Doubt is the stage which comes before a larger and truer thinking. You doubt your past thought, because you are opening up new vistas of thought and the past is lying behind you. The man who never doubts never really thinks; and there is a wholesome, a healthy scepticism which is the forerunner of a nobler and a truer faith. Think as far as you can. It6 is true that from the very Highest thought and speech fall back unable to go farther; but as far as you can think, as far as your intellect is able to grasp, to investigate, to argue, think your freest and your noblest, and you will grow by your errors as well as by your truths. Do not then fear to think; do not fear to be called unorthodox; try your best to think truly and accurately, and trust in Truth, who never betrays her servant. The determination to think your highest, the determination to think your best, may lead you into some desert for a time, but there are gardens on the other side of the desert. You may have to cross many a desert, many a torrent which seems to sweep you away; but I, who ventured all to seek for Truth, who left family, friends, religion, because their religion had become to me untrue, I bear you witness that such unbelief is the way to a higher, a greater, and a serener faith, and that those who are unwilling to lose the life of the past will not be able to advance into the life of the future.

Now, let us, with regard to our thoughts of God, realise that there are two lines towards knowledge. The first is the way of the intellect, which deals with metaphysics, which deals with philosophy, which gradually lifts a man out of superstition, out of narrowness, out of ignorance, and carries him as far as human intellect can go. Along those lines exercise your intellect, think your best, but remember, that it is written that not by intellect7 shall the Self be found, and the path of realisation is not the path of the intellect. It is the path of the conquered senses, of the conquered mind, when in the «quietude of the senses and the tranquillity of the mind, the man beholds the glory of the Self». That is realisation: that is the only knowledge: that is Eternal Life. By the intellect we reach the highest philosophy, and let none dare to despise philosophy, which rises up to peaks of knowledge, which are the glory of the human race. But, on the other hand, remember that it is the pure in heart who see God. It is the conquest of the lower nature which enables us to breathe the air in which the higher nature lives; and not by intellectual research, not even by devotion itself, but by sinking into the depths of your own being, by searching within, there where the Self abides; by casting aside everything that changes; by saying to the senses: «You are not I»; by saying to the mind: «You are not I»; by saying to the highest intelligence: «You are not I»; in the silence, where the mind has naught to say; in the silence, where the senses are not heard; in the depths of yourself, one with the Supreme Self; there, and there only, shall you realise that you yourself are one with the Self Universal. A hard path, a difficult path, the outcome of the practice of lives of self-abnegation and of service; but once you have realised God, you can never doubt again. An intellectual argument may be overthrown8 by keener logic, by larger grasp of facts; but the man who once has seen the Face of God, he never again can doubt that God is, that God is All. That is the Self-realisation of the Mystic. That is the triumph, not of the intellect but of the Spirit; then the Spirit which is Divine recognises its kinship with the Spirit Omnipresent, and when once, as I have said before, you have found God within yourself, then, and only then, will you find Him in every one in everything, around you. That is the triumph of the Spirit. That is the Peace of the Eternal.

And now, let us turn to man›s conceptions of God, and see how they have changed. And, in doing this, friends, let us seek for the kernel of truth which underlies even mistaken beliefs; for, man is so constituted that no error can hold him long in bondage save by the truth that that error conceals. Just as you may have the husk, the shell, and the kernel within it, so in every error that dominates mankind there is a kernel of truth that gives it its nutritive power. Only when you recognise the kernel of truth will you be able to convince a man of the husk of error.

Now, looking back to early times in our race, we find what is called Polytheism; and that you practically find everywhere. You find it very very strongly in the first half of the Hebrew Old Testament, as is called the Hebrew part of the Christian Bible. If you read that, what is the God that you9 find? Clearly, a God of limited power, a God of limited knowledge, what in the talk, the jargon, of the day is called a «tribal God». In the early story told by the Hebrews, the conception of God is very limited. You find Him «walking in the garden in the cool of the day,» and calling out to the man he had created: «Adam, where art thou?» You find him a little later—when men have multiplied and begun to build a tower which in their ignorance they think will reach up to heaven—saying; «Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another›s speech.» For «now nothing,» he said, «will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do». And so, we read, that «the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded,» and he confused the speech of the builders, so that they were scattered abroad and could not build their tower. And the Babel of Tongues is a phrase in English, because it was the Tower of Babel from which all the languages on earth originated! You find him again with his chosen people, the children of Abraham, leading them into the land he gives them; and then you come across the remarkable statement that «the Lord was with Judah,» one of the tribes, and he drove out all «the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron». You see at once that you are10 in the realm of a very limited kind of tribal God. Of course, I know that in the days when the Bible was regarded as verbally inspired, as God›s Word, they said these statements were an accommodation to the ignorance of man; but that is only the desperate effort of the believer in verbal inspiration to infuse the knowledge of later days into the form of ancient fables. You and I recognise at once that where thoughtful Christians are concerned, these are to them old ideas, that you have here the local God, the tribal God, and that the God of the Hebrews of the early days does not claim to be the only God, but only the chief one, the chief for his own nation: «Who among the Gods is like unto Thee, O Jehovah!» That is the position of the Hebrews, and they have their own National God. To go away from him is treachery to the State. To disbelieve in him is punishable with death, because it is treason to the Nation, and such punishment was not so much regarded as a religious persecution as a State penalty. As a State and social sanction, the worship of Yahveh was maintained among the Hebrews; it was the State, the National, Religion. He conquered the Gods of the Philistines, He fought with the Gods of all the other people round about, each with their own God.