Questions We All Ask — G. de Purucker

No. 43 (July 22, 1930)

QUESTIONS WE ALL ASK

(Lecture delivered April 13, 1930)

I don't see why a theosophist should think stern and severe thoughts, or look sternly and severely. If he knows the realities of life — human life and cosmic life — which show him what sorrow and suffering there are in the world, he also sees the background of beauty and harmony; he also sees the great fountain of life whence flow forth not only into human hearts, but everywhere, almighty love which is the cement of the universe, holding all things together in harmonious correlations and coordinations; and he feels upspringing within his own inner forum the same life, the same intelligence, the same consciousness, that as aspects of the one fundamental reality are the very heart of the universe.

So, why should not a theosophist smile and laugh — not one of those cold-hearted laughs and those stony smiles in which only the lips are moved, but an honest-to-goodness laugh and smile, springing from a warm heart and genial soul? For true life is happy. It is only we humans who make it the opposite, and other beings equivalent to us men on other planets — imperfectly evolved beings who do not know fully what is in them, and who do not fully know what is in the universe surrounding them, of which they are all, each one, an inseparable part. They live in dreams; they live in illusions; they live surrounded by the web of the lower personal self, all enwrapped and tightened up and crystallized with these bonds and bands of the lower selfhood surrounding their inner god. Break them! Find your freedom!

Be a child of the universe: for I tell you on every Sunday afternoon — and this is one of the divinest parts of the message that I am here to give — that the core of the core of each one of you is a divine being, an offspring of the spiritual-divine side of the universe. Just as your body is the child of physical nature, so are all of you, the real part of you, the real man, the offspring of the spiritual side, rooted in the divine life of the universe.

"Life is joy," as Katherine Tingley used to say — not, however, as men mislive life, but in itself, for life per se is harmony; life is orderly; life is consequential; life follows regular and harmonious sequences, from cause to effect, which effect becomes instantly the cause producing another effect; and so on forever.

Yes, joy, beauty, love, harmony, peace — all these fine and noble things are in us; and these are the things that we should cultivate, because these are the qualities and powers that make men truly men.

I read to you from this platform on last Sunday afternoon, a little verse, written by some humorous American poet, I think it was, about a little stone that wanted to sit on a hillside and neither eat nor drink nor wash, but "I jest want to set on a hillside and rest for a thousand years, by gosh!" Now, you surely don't want to be like a little human stone of that type. Be a true man, an actor and doer in the cosmic drama.

Well, I am here this afternoon to answer questions. The first one before me is the following:

How far shall we go in our efforts to get others interested in our philosophy? Many good, intelligent, and experienced people do not seem to comprehend even the A B C of theosophy. Is it up to us to waken them and continue to stir them, even when they show only a lukewarm interest or indifference, or shall we follow the advice of the Bible: "not to throw pearls"?

How polite it is that the rest of the New Testament quotation is omitted! No, the throwing of pearls before "dogs" and "swine" is not a part of our theosophical duties; but, do you know, this passage in the Christian New Testament refers to teaching the deeper principles of the esoteric philosophy to people who have neither minds to understand them nor the hearts to realize them, nor again, how much it costs a teacher to tell openly of these esoteric truths.

This reference to dogs and swine — "casting your pearls before swine" — is one of the allusions, phrases, technical terms, used in the Mystery schools. Certain classes of men have always been supposed to look like and act like certain beasts, according to the physical or other attributes of these beasts. Some men like dogs will bark and rend; some men like swine will wallow in the mud and eat and do little else. Some men will be like a bird which soars — therefore the bird was chosen to represent the soaring mind of man, the soul; whereas the dog and the swine, etc., stood for those men who would not take truth even if you gave it to them, for they prefer to wallow in the mud of physical existence, or to bark and bite at the hand outstretched to feed and to help.

No, we do not cast pearls of wisdom before anybody, not even before those who are prepared and ready to receive these priceless pearls of wisdom. They must come to us and knock; and when they give the right knock, the doors fly open as if they were enchanted. But, on the other hand, we most certainly are aggressive in our propaganda; we have something exceedingly good to give to our fellow human beings; and to give this is what I am here for.

I am a fisher for men, for men's souls, and my bait is the ancient wisdom-religion of antiquity; and I am trying to "save the souls" of men — and I here employ the old-fashioned Christian phrase, because by using that phrase I shall be understood. I want to bring peace and light and help to my fellow men. That is my main objective in my work; that is what I was sent to do, and that is also what every earnest theosophist tries to do. We are aggressive propagandists. However, we get nothing for what we give. If we worked for a price we should thereby sell ourselves, and that is something theosophists don't do and won't do. We are free men, recognizing our kinship with the immortal gods who guide, control, and govern, the universe; and when you find a single theosophical doctrine taught for a price, then I say to you in all earnestness: Take it not. No theosophical teacher ever sells himself or sells the treasures — spiritual treasures — of the ancient wisdom-religion for a price. I make no derogatory allusions against anyone. I plainly state a fact, and you can apply that fact just as you please, and where you please, and when you please.

"How far shall we go to get others interested in our philosophy?" My answer is: just as far as you can, honestly, honorably, truly, and truthfully. The reason why many good, intelligent, and sincere people do not accept the theosophic bait offhand and when they first see it, is because they are afraid. Their hesitancy arises out of a more or less vague fear of being labeled or of undergoing restrictions; and also because so many are afraid of truth. They are afraid that they may be caught; they are afraid to give themselves. And this my manner of speaking is unusual; therefore do I use it. A theosophical speaker's duty is to tell you the truth, no matter in what phraseology he may couch that truth. We theosophists are here to deliver the sublime message which it is our duty to give, and that message is priceless and is never sold.

You don't have to believe in any particular doctrine in order to join The Theosophical Society. You don't have to subscribe to any dogmas, to any creed. The only prerequisite is an honest and sincere belief in universal brotherhood; and I will tell you one thing: you won't subscribe even to that — and this has been our experience — unless you are ready to go farther.

I have met men who have told me: "I don't believe in brotherhood; I don't like the idea. I am myself; no other man is my brother, except one born from the same mother." What can you do with a mind like that? Such a man does not know even the latest teachings of science: that all life is one, that all human beings — that all entities whatsoever, human or not — have a common origin and a common destiny, and are all children of the universal Mother. Why, you Occidentals do not even really think half the time; you accept things on belief, things that you have read in a book, in an encyclopedia perhaps, or — the gods immortal forgive us! — in a newspaper!

Now, what you find there may possibly be true, but ninety-nine chances out of a hundred are that what you read there is merely some man's opinions or conclusions. Therefore you are acceptors of opinions, which you thereafter believe to be your own opinions. Pray believe me when I say that I don't desire to step on any good man's toes, or hurt anyone's feelings; but nevertheless I repeat my conviction that Occidentals do not really know how to think. You of this audience are Occidentals too, and I want to waken you, so that you really will think; and if I cannot do it by proffering my outstretched hand in fraternal good feeling as a brother, then I am going to jolt you and jar you through your minds and hearts. Your antagonism to this would be to me the first good sign of your awakening mind and heart; because I know that you will be honest, and that from antagonists you will become friends.

By the way, the following question is out of its sequence of order, but as it pertains in a sense to what I have just been speaking of, I think that I will answer it now.

Say [pardon me, this is not my language] what are you putting over on us when you speak about "you Occidentals"? You don't wear a turban and a robe yourself. [Wouldn't I look handsome in one!] Do you mean that your philosophy is Oriental?

No, I do not. The theosophical philosophy is no more Oriental than it is Occidental, no more ancient than it is modern; it is of all times and of all parts of the world. And if you are interested and will undertake a study of the fundamentals (I don't mean this word in the modern Christian sense, but in the dictionary sense of the word — the bases, the foundations) — of the great world religions and world philosophies, you will find theosophy there in every one of them; for theosophy is truth — no one man's truth: nobody imagined it. It is not the fruit of minds which burn the midnight oil in trying to find a solution of the problems of life — not at all.

But the great sages and seers of mankind, the lofty and illuminated intellects, the titanic men of the race who were all initiates, have sent their percipient souls or minds behind and beyond the veils of the outward seeming and have studied causal truths in the very womb of being, and have brought back what they found and taught it to their fellow men. The natural truths thus formulated we today call theosophy. In other ages this formulation bore other names.

I am not trying to put anything over on you. I am trying to "hook" every one of you who is not a theosophist already. I hook none but honest hearts, for none but honest hearts and strong minds will be attracted to the bait with which I bait my hook. I am a fisher of men, and so is every Theosophical teacher: no matter what his own particular evolutionary stage may be — young soul or old soul, high or low — no matter what his position in the scale of life, the humblest member of The Theosophical Society is a fisher of men.

I am trying to give you something free, and it is difficult to make you take it, simply because you won't believe it to be as good as it is. You find it difficult to believe me and this is because you are not awake; you don't know how to think. Now, this is a truth, an actual truth, and I speak of you Occidentals because while this body of mine was born in the Occident, my soul elsewhere takes it rise.

The Occidentals, however, have a world of good in them. They are in the foreground of evolutionary progress today; they are leading the races of mankind on the earth today. But their time will pass. They are still young, so far as their experience of building a civilization is concerned. When your forefathers ran around the forests of the European countries clad in the skins of beasts — wild white men (or pink men, because you are pink, not white) — the Orientals were building lofty and splendid civilizations. They had merely come in ahead of you on the evolutionary pathway; and when your time passes and the Occident has run its course — yes, when empire passes from your grip, it will pass elsewhere to other races of men. And don't forget it!

Man owes a duty to his fellows. He is not here by chance. Examine yourselves. Examine your own hearts. You will find that you have a conscience when you think long enough. Most of you don't think long enough. You just let it go at that; and the average man in the Occident today actually does not believe that there is such a thing as a system of natural truth which so to say photographically represents nature's laws, nature's operations, and nature's structure. He is still under the psychology of the materialism of our fathers, the old scientific determinism which even today has gone by the board. Your best scientific thinkers have thrown it overboard, have cast it away; and yet the average Occidental, the human multitude of Occidental civilization, is running along the old tracks laid by our fathers and grandfathers, whereas their ultra-modern scientific leaders and thinkers have branched off from those old tracks and are going in another direction, at a tangent.

No, I am not trying to put anything over on you. I am simply telling you sheer truth. Theosophists are aggressive propagandists; we have something exceedingly fine to give to the world, and we don't charge anything for it. We are taught that it is our duty, bounden to it as we are — a moral duty, a spiritual obligation — to give to others what we ourselves have.

Question Three. By cultivating trees and flowers do we help them in their evolution?

Yes. Of course this question is a bit vague, particularly to a theosophist who sees in a plant only a minor example of what he sees in a human being. The physical body of the plant is merely the vehicle through which appear natural energies, powers, expressing themselves as best they can through the variety of plant forms which cover the earth; just as he sees in the physical body of man the physical vehicle through which man's inner and invisible constitution, of his spiritual, intellectual, and psychological nature, is expressing itself as best it can.

Nevertheless, the cultivation of plants helps those plants and, as a matter of fact, all the choice fruits that are cultivated today in our gardens and orchards have been developed in past ages from wild stocks. The peach, the banana, the orange, the fig, the apple, the plum, the cherry, whatnot, all of them have been developed by former races of men of whom your Occidental history preserves no longer even a memory, but which lived and civilized the earth in their own times aeons ago; and they have transmitted to us down through the ages these developed fruits, and these evolved grasses which we call grain, cereals.

If this questioner means by this question to ask me whether cultivating plants hastens the evolution of the inner life of them, then my answer is also Yes.

Question Four. Can the conscience be educated? My conscience seems not to be the same today as it was ten years ago. And the conscience of a Baptist does not seem to be the same as that of a Methodist or of a Christian Scientist. What is then the conscience?

Well, I have heard people say that other people haven't any conscience. Of course that is not true. We always recognize in other people what we have in ourselves. You doubtless see the meaning of this. The man who says of his fellow man: "Oh, he has no conscience!" simply proclaims to the world that he has not awakened his own conscience. It takes grandeur to recognize grandeur; and if you have not the percipient heart within your own breast, then you cannot recognize it in others. If you have not beauty, harmony, love, within your own heart and mind, you will not see them in others. No, I tell you that even in the most hardened criminal there is a spark at least of something noble and high.

I do not like to say that the conscience can be "educated." Doubtless the word is true enough, is applicable enough, in one sense; but I would liefer say that the conscience can be brought more actively into manifestation.

What is the conscience? The conscience is the working of your spiritual being, a spiritual manifestation of the inner god of you, managing to send some faint gleams of light and truth and harmony and love into the poor, heavy, material brain-mind in which most men live and suffer and die.

Obviously, therefore, the conscience of a child is not as fully awakened as the conscience of a man; and the conscience of an inferior man is not as fully awakened as is the conscience of one of the great sages and seers. Evolution continuously brings forth a larger measure of the spiritual being into play in human hearts and minds, and in that sense the conscience may be said to be evolving, but not in the sense of being added to particle by particle and built up, as it were, out of the bricks of thought or bricks of feeling.

No. The inner god within you, your inner divine light, is constantly attempting to send ever more and more of its own grand illumination into your hearts and minds; and evolution is this bringing forth, this unrolling, of what is within: this unwrapping of what is wrapped up — the divine part of you — into outward life.

Our teaching, however, is that the conscience is not an infallible guide. Don't believe it! If men were perfect, the conscience would be an infallible guide; if men were full exemplars, full manifestations, of the divine powers of the god within, then the conscience would be godlike. But the conscience is not an infallible guide. It is high time that Occidentals understood this truth. Men need teachers, guides; and don't forget it.

That is a truth which is unwelcome to the Occidentals at the present time. They think that they know better than that. "I want to be my own guide," they say. "I am the captain of my soul." True, but what kind of a captain? Do you make a success of it? Do you bring your ship into port safely? Are you full understanders of the universe? Does all nature lie spread before you like a panorama of truth, on which you can read the secrets of the universe? If so, then as captain of your soul you need no other helper or guide.

But wiser men know better; and they look to the stars. They guide their ship by the compass. Some of you may say: "That is an awfully dangerous doctrine you are teaching. Do you want us to go back and be the humble slaves of some ecclesiastical organization?" No! Immortal gods, forbid such a catastrophe! Don't misunderstand me to mean that.

I tell you that there is truth in the universe; that there are guides; that there are teachers, illuminated and utterly self-forgetful men, who know more than the average men do; and I can tell you where to find them. I mean every word of this. I cannot progress for you; but I can show you where you will be taught; and you will be taught not a thing that will ever injure you; you will be taught first to rely on the god within you.

But beware of your own egoism, your own lower self; become impersonal, so that your judgment will not be swayed by bias, distorted or twisted. Lean on your conscience as much as you will; but go beyond it to that supreme fount of light within, your own inner god, remembering that in some other men their respective inner gods are self-expressing themselves in fuller measure than in you, and these other men are the great men of the human race, who therefore are the natural leaders and teachers of their fellows.

Who was Jesus? Who was the Buddha? Who was Sankaracharya? Who were all these spiritual titans? They are the natural leaders of men or spiritual leaders of men; and men like them live on the earth today, and are what we call the Masters of Wisdom and Compassion. It was they who sent into the world H. P. Blavatsky, the foundress of The Theosophical Society, in order to bring back to mankind, and to the Occident especially, some inklings of the ancient wisdom-religion of the human race.

So therefore, you see, I also tell you to be the captain of your soul, but to place that captaincy in the divine part of you, not in your brain-mind, not in that part of you which is asleep, unalert, unevolved, unwitting of spiritual things; and remember, furthermore, that this captain of you will recognize still greater captains in greater men than you are at present.

Think over a saying ascribed to Jesus: "Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter the Kingdom" of wisdom. This seems like a hard saying to follow these words of Jesus; but really it is not. It is just simple truth. It means regaining the child-mind of simplicity and willingness to learn and reliance on the feeling that the big personal I is not everything in the universe, in other words a reliance on those who our intuition tells us know more than we do.

Why do you go to your universities, why do you go to your schools, why do you send your children to school? So that they may be under teachers. If you do not believe in these, why not let them grow up wild, like the beasts? Because you know better. And do you think that simply because you are grown-up children — and that is what we men and women are, just grown-up girls and boys — you know so much, each one of you, that nobody can possibly know more than you do? If that is your idea, I pity you. You need training badly, you need educating in order to awaken your mind.

Remember that a reverent heart and an eager intellect are signs of a growing man, and that when a man has reached the stage where he thinks in his heart, although he may not actually say so openly, that "I no longer need a teacher, I am the captain of my soul, I am going to guide my own destiny" — all of it true, but misapplied — then you can be certain that he is one who needs guidance and light badly. Yet teachers can be had for the asking for those who ask aright, and who come with a pure heart and eager intellect and an impersonal search for truth. Knock, and the door will be opened unto you.

I don't know anything about the conscience of a Baptist. I have known Baptists. They seem to me to be average men. Doubtless they have a conscience, each one. I suppose so. I have not dissected them and tried to find a conscience; but I take it for granted that they have, because they act like human beings with a conscience; and the same may be said with regard to Methodists and Christian Scientists. Why not? But because they have a conscience does not mean that they have all of truth and are quite capable of teaching that truth to others.

Next question:

Is there any hope for the Occident? I mean by this, is the West as a whole prepared and ready for theosophy, the ancient wisdom? Our unwillingness to give up our personality, or as you so beautifully express it, to forget ourselves, seems a great hindrance. Even in Occidental religion we have this cult of personality, believing as Occidentals do in a personal God and a personal Savior. Can the pure wine of theosophy be "poured into old bottles"?

I would never try to do that. Yet I tell you that every one of us is an "old bottle" in the sense of being receptacles of a knowledge and light that we have outlived, but which guided us for the time being; and in consequence we are all just full of prejudices and all kinds of mental hindrances and stumbling blocks.

Now, is there any hope for the Occident, as this kind questioner puts it, evidently a theosophist. I think that there is great hope. Because Occidentals are just human beings like all the rest of the world; and the sooner Occidentals realize this and live up to it and feel it, the better for them.

I will tell you what my own opinion is, and it will be an answer to this question, and this possibly may sound like a contradiction of what I said a little while agone, but it is not. You Occidentals have been accustomed for so many hundred years to let someone else think for you, to be "washed in the blood of the Lamb" (who is somebody else), and to cast your sins on somebody else, and to take things easily, that you have simply forgotten what you have of divinity each one within yourself. Don't you see the difference between following a person and following an ideal — lofty, sublime, grand — of which that person is the channel of expression to his fellow man?

I do not ask you to follow me. I would pity you if you did. But I do ask you to follow the message which I am trying to give to you. It is a lodestone to your ship — yourself; and it will pull you — pull you starwards; for it itself is starry, and that lodestone is a spiritual star.

There is hope for the Occident, of course there is; but I don't see much hope for any man who wants to cast all his troubles and trials and sins on a personal God and to make that personal God his spiritual pack horse. Such was NOT the teaching of that great initiate, the Syrian sage, Jesus.

As ye sow, that ye shall reap. That is also the teaching of theosophy. You Occidentals for hundreds of years have grown into the habit of trying to relieve yourselves of moral and intellectual and spiritual responsibility, and you will never succeed in doing so. Nature does not permit it; nature does not work in that way. She demands retribution for what you do; she exacts payment for what you have done; she lavishes rewards where she finds human beings working with her; and the heart of her is love and harmony and order and compassion. You see it all around you in the order and beautiful harmony that prevail everywhere.

The disorder that we occasionally see and the inharmonious things that occasionally spring to our attention, especially among men, are produced by those individuals who work against Nature's spiritual and other laws, and nature in her efforts to restore equilibrium, to restore the harmony and peace in her own structure, brings about suffering and pain; and thus these are our best teachers.

What I shall now read to you is a beautiful thing. It was sent in to me as a question, but it is rather a commentary written on two extracts taken from one of the lectures that I have given here, and later printed as one of the pamphlets in the series Questions We All Ask. The two extracts are these, somewhat misquoted from the original:

"Where is the simplicity in the flower? I see grace, selflessness, infinitude, in the bosom of a flower."

"And yet you talk about the 'simplicity' of a flower." — Excerpts from Questions We All Ask, see Pamphlet No. 25, page 362

And this writer, my kind friend, has the following commentary:

The most baffling problems in mathematics (in the last analysis) are mastered by the judicious use of simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Is not mathematics of the soul equally simple (perchance more so), but hidden by the veil of man's unconsciousness?

The most charming people, even to a casual observer, are they to whom spiritual unfoldment has imparted the power to radiate love, compassion, wisdom, and brotherhood; and withal a sweet simplicity of tastes, desires, and way of living that are at once compelling and irresistible. Even enemies learn to love them. Infinity, thy mantle is simplicity.

And then, here is a quotation appended to this commentary:

"Anything that we do not understand is a mystery. To a pig it is a mystery why a man flings turnips over the wall of his sty."

It was rather unkind to inject this quotation and yet it is true. I think that this kind friend has misunderstood what I intended to convey when I spoke of the mystery in a flower as being baffling, irresolvable, profound. A flower, I think, can be spoken of as being simple, as possessing simplicity, only if we consider the exterior parts of it. But who with an understanding heart and a feeling soul can look into the bosom of a dewy rose and not sense infinite mystery there? It would be wrong, I think, to call that wonder by the name of simplicity. It is spiritually simple, true, and yet the very wonder of it baffles even our penetrating mind.

I can see no ordinary simplicity in the flower. We speak of the simplicity of lovable human beings, and that is very true; but that is merely our first impression of them. It is precisely these who have real spiritual and intellectual simplicity who are the most baffling, the most profound, because their hearts and minds are like deep wells. Do you understand me?

All beautiful things are clothed in simplicity of course, and lavish ornament, ornate decoration, simply bewilders and offends, because the eye is distracted from detail to detail, and wearies in the search for individuality, and therefore does not sense perhaps the architect's motif behind the finished project. At least — and I am sure that others feel as I do — I can see infinite wonder in a flower, and in one sense all the mystery and wide range of destiny; and I also sense simplicity here, but a simplicity of perfect order, perfect harmony, perfect proportion in detail, arising out of the fundamental individuality thus expressing itself as an entity.

Perhaps after all it is a mere matter of words between me and my kind questioner. Most human disagreements arise out of verbal misunderstandings; so that wise men, when they meet together to discuss some problem, usually have a preliminary meeting in order to settle among themselves the meanings of the words that they are going to use.

William Durant, the popular writer on philosophy, says: "Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose; of matter by form and will. . . . It is increasing control of the environment by life."

Is this view of progress in harmony with theosophy, or is there more to it?

Oh, much more, vastly more! In a general way of course what this writer has to say theosophists also believe to be true. But what I object to here is the divorce between mind and purpose on the one hand, and the physical world on the other hand. I claim that any such radical divorce between the two extremes of nature is nonexistent and therefore not true. You cannot fundamentally separate the two, for the exterior world merely manifests what is within, in the interior and invisible worlds. The outer world is merely the garment clothing the inner powers and energies and forces which pour through the outer world as through a channel, and self-express themselves here in the physical world and produce the wonderful variety and beauty and marvels that we cognize.

Furthermore, I do not like the phrasing this writer uses when he says: "progress is increasing control of environment by life." In a general way the statement is of course true, but here again he makes the same radical fault above spoken of, as I understand it: to wit, he makes life one thing, and environment something else. How can you separate environment from life? If the environment is not alive, if it is not full of life, it could not exist; and theosophists say that progress is the ever fuller expression of the powers, energies, characteristics, and faculties lying latent in the evolving entity, pouring themselves forth through the ages, in and by means of environment, bringing out what is within ever more and more, and in ever larger and fuller measure.

Therefore environment is merely the resultant of the working energies, the laboring lives, the hosts of evolving entities, interblending and interlocking and, by their grossest energies, producing that environment. Is there such a thing as environment per se apart from the thing which it environs? In other words is environment a radical entity? What is called environment is merely all the other entities and things, living just as the observer is. You cannot separate life from environment. They are fundamentally one thing.

No: progress, in our theosophical teachings, is the bringing forth from within in ever greater measure, in progressively greater degree, of what the evolving entity has locked up within it. A thing cannot bring forth what is not within it. Isn't that obvious? That is our theosophical teaching of evolution, and we are evolutionists through and through and through, but not Darwinists, nor Lamarckians, nor neo-Darwinists, nor neo-Lamarckians. I could say much more on this point, but my time this afternoon is already drawing to a close. I will answer one more question this afternoon.

We read: "Heaven and earth are touching each other in travail, to bring to birth a new race, and a new religion and science in one." Do theosophists endorse this statement?

Yes, in a general way we most emphatically teach that religion and science and philosophy are one thing, and that these three are merely the three different operations of the human mind by which natural truths are expressed through human consciousness. But fundamentally religion and science and philosophy are one thing, and we refuse to admit that they can be kept in watertight compartments — or more correctly in thought-tight compartments.

That is where the mischief in the past has lain. Religion was a thing apart; science was a thing apart; and philosophy — lay somewhere else. Religion, science, and philosophy are fundamentally one thing: three methods or manners by which the human consciousness attempts to express its view and conception of the universe. And oh, how much is locked up within this human consciousness! Human beings simply do not realize what they have within them.

It is to this inner fountain of consciousness and power — deathless, beginningless and endless, rooted in boundless infinitude, the god within, your own inner god, the Christ immanent to use the Christian phrase, the inner Buddha — it is to this that every true theosophist will recall your thought. Each one of you is an incarnate god, a living spiritual-divine entity at your core, and all evolution is merely the bringing forth in ever larger degree of the powers and faculties, of the energies, and of all that is within and of the essence of this inner god.

The time is coming in the future when the human race will have so far expressed their own inner faculties and powers, the powers of the inner god, that men will walk the earth like human divinities, and every man will be a Christ, a Buddha. As the Christian New Testament has it: "Ye are gods," and it is so. Oh, when men of the Occident — because it is in the Occident especially that this grand truth has been forgotten — when men in the Occident know what they have within themselves, then heaven will be on earth, for men will live in that part of their being and draw upon fountains inexhaustible of spiritual energy and strength and consciousness; and through that future race of men will flow in majestic stream from the fountains latent in the, resident in the, heart of the universe, the all-enlivening power of cosmic love. Think! And each one of you be the god you are within you.



Theosophical University Press Online Edition