The Theosophical Forum – November 1942

THE GUARDIAN ANGEL — G. de Purucker

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.



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