With the western world fairly flooded with its teachings, as it certainly is today, it would seem almost superfluous to attempt a re-statement of the facts and philosophical deductions therefrom which are connoted by the term Theosophy. Yet it is good to sometimes step aside from the hurrying throng of busy workers, and to clearly define to one's self the ideals for which one is striving, lest one should have lost sight of them in constant attention to practical details. And one will find that somehow the old definitions do not hold good; Theosophy means more than it did at the time when we could so confidently and glibly state its exact signification.
Those old definitions! They conjure up an array of "rounds," "races," "globes," "principles," and what not, while through them all a small, mechanical note keeps piping, "to form the nucleus of an universal brotherhood, to form the nucleus of an universal brotherhood," This we always put in our statements because it was the principal Object; but I wonder it was not completely buried under the "manvantaras " and "pralayas" we piled mountain high upon it.
Now, when one thinks of Theosophy, what word appears instantly — an ever-present corollary? Brotherhood, Brotherhood, BROTHERHOOD! So Theosophy is Brotherhood; and to define it is to tell how men can be brought to a living realization of this central fact in nature.
There is no brotherhood upon the earth today. As a pretty sentiment, we hear the Creeds prating of it — a far-off echo of the time when religion really taught it and enforced its teachings by practical examples. But now Creed demands the subscription to some particular belief before one can be admitted to its brotherhood, and if one fails to subscribe to this, damns to an eternal hell. Philosophy sits helplessly by, or else toys with the materialistic labels which science is busily gumming upon the lifeless forms of matter. For science has distinguished and labelled two hundred thousand varieties of beetles, without once thinking of inquiring into the nature of the consciousness which ensouls them and causes the variations in the form of the beetle — for consciousness is only a "property" of matter; it does not even require a separate label. Human hopes and human fears interest not, because they cannot be properly weighed, measured and ticketed. Evolution concerns itself with the form alone; modern psychology dabbles diffidently with consciousness, but must take all its data from materialistic science. And sometimes science deigns to cut off the mammae of a poor helpless bitch, "to see if she will still manifest the maternal instinct by trying to suckle her young," and then psychology rejoices; a "fact" has been observed, and visible progress in the attainment of knowledge made. The inner soul is entirely lost sight of in the study of the outer form; Plato buried beneath Aristotle; wisdom lost in the search after knowledge.
All this is heartless and hopeless. The world-cry for brotherhood, for living sympathy, for compassion, for hope and faith, was voiceless until Theosophy again gave it expression. So that Theosophy stands today as the virile, powerful opponent of creed and dogma, of materialistic philosophy and materialistic science, for all these know nothing of brotherhood. It puts forward new ideals (old, to be sure, but new to the west), new theories of life, new conceptions of nature; and an altogether new basis for brotherhood. For never, in the recorded history of the world at least, has the veil of Isis been drawn so widely aside, and men so universally taught the hitherto carefully hidden secrets of their own being. Great must have been the necessity which demanded and permitted this. Old faiths had to be restored; false idols overthrown; false beliefs exposed; cant and hypocrisy unmasked; religion, science and philosophy harmonized. Truly a herculean task.
Prominent among the many erroneous beliefs which paralyzed human effort and human hopes in the west was its one-life theory. To combat this, and to enable men to form juster conceptions of the past through which they have travailed, and, therefore, of the future which evolution holds in store for them, Theosophy unfolds the past history of earth and man, in a truly magnificent manner. Geology, archaeology, astronomy, "myth," and tradition are appealed to, and the biblical six thousand years pushed back into a vista which embraces millions upon millions of years. This made necessary the primary teaching of "rounds" and "races," and the old traditions of "floods" and of submerged Atlantis suddenly acquired a new significance. Time spent upon the acquisition of these facts is not lost; they are the tables to be learned before attempting real problems.
An infinite past requires, logically, an infinite future; and the philosophy of Theosophy supplies a most rational outline of this future into aeons of time at which the mind itself stands amazed and awed. For materialistic science there is no future life; for western religions, the merest travesty of one. According to western religions the soul "bobs up serenely," created out of nothing, having no choice as to its nation, race, or to any particular age in which to arrive upon earth, imbibes some creed or faith which happens to environ it, does the best or the poorest it can for a few brief years, and then retires to an eternal heaven, horrible for its partiality and its weary sameness, or to a hell of eternal torture. Were this concept of a future life a true one, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and his recent imitators would be more than justified; earth would be but the creation of some mighty evil monster, and life a cruel, useless tragedy. Brotherhood would be but a sentimental mockery; the present mad rush after riches or fame would be the very apotheosis of philosophical wisdom.
But Theosophy brings forward as a logical, satisfactory and complete explanation of the apparent injustices and inequalities of life, the fact of the repeated reincarnation of the same soul in new bodies, and at successive cycles of the earth's existence. It posits the soul as undergoing an almost (or quite) infinite cycle of evolution. Throughout the vast periods to which it has pushed back human history, it declares that the same souls have occupied the earth continuously (except for brief cycles of rest between two earth-lives); that each soul is evolving, not form, as the scientists would have us believe, but character; widening at the same time its conscious area until it successively passes through all the phases of consciousness up to man; that it (the soul) is now passing through this human arc of its evolutionary cycle, after which its pathway leads it directly to godhood. The scientific theory of evolution is only a half-understood recognition of a small portion of the magnificent cycle which the philosophy of Theosophy holds up to view. For the theosophist adds to his concept of evolution, involution; and postulates the deliberate descent of mighty spiritual beings into matter with the sole motive of compassion, and in order that they may help lowly, matter-bound entities to evolve to higher planes of consciousness.
All of this magnificent process is under law; absolute, universal, immutable law, whose infinite activities and modes of motion may be summed up and expressed by the terms cause and effect, or the bugbear, "Karma," of theosophical nomenclature. Appealing to this law in every thought, and by every act of any and all of its lives, the soul is alone the fashioner of its own destiny. Its hells and its heavens are of its own making; its character and its associations in the past, under this law, carry it to the race, nation, family, period, and place, which it itself has made inevitable. See how the dark horrors of injustice fade away from both heaven and hell when the light of these great companion truths, Karma and Reincarnation, falls across the pathway of life! There is no injustice in all the wide universe; what the soul suffers and enjoys now are the fruits of its own past! But if nature and divinity (nature is the robe of divinity, as Goethe so poetically puts it) are just, man is not; and so the world is full of wrongs and injustices of man's own making. And so, we come back again to brotherhood — the necessity, the absolute necessity for brotherhood. Karma and reincarnation are valueless to us, except as they illustrate and enforce brotherhood. Their very teaching, even, must be laid aside, if they cause by their newness and strangeness, the recognition of the real brotherhood of humanity to lag.
Look you! Do we realize how absolutely dependent we are upon those wiser than ourselves when we take birth in these animal bodies? (For Theosophy teaches, and proves, that the human soul at present is but a prisoner in the body of an animal whom long ages of evolution of form have at last fitted for his transient occupation. Take those instances — happily very rare — where children have been carried off by wolves, and have grown up to maturity with only animal associates. The result in every instance has been an animal, lower and more degraded than the animals by which he was surrounded. Rudyard Kipling, in his Jungle stories, has drawn as false a picture as the human imagination could conceive. Surrounded only by animals, man fails to develop any faculty to distinguish himself from them. Human assistance is absolutely necessary to help him take at least the first feeble steps up towards his human estate.
So, the man born under Moslem environments becomes inevitably a Moslem; the Christian accepts his dogmas because of his early Christian associations; and so on, throughout the dreary round of infantile differences of faith. It takes a strong soul, indeed, to rise above his fellows even a little; none may rise more than a little. It were a hopeless task to try to teach the people of the west the truths of karma, reincarnation and brotherhood, if they now really heard them for the first time. But they do not; they have been taught these truths throughout the ages; they have only lost them temporarily for the same reason that the wolf-child loses his hold upon even his reason — their births have brought them (by their own acts in the past) among a people who only believe in a single life, and they accept this false view as true because of this association and early teaching. And they go on, repeating to their children the uuphilosophical dogma, and these to theirs, until at last the cycle of karmic adjustments permits the thought to be again sown whose harvest will be their reacceptance of the ancient — aye, the eternal — truth of repeated rebirth upon earth until the lesson and meaning of life here shall have been learned.
Say the Christians: You must believe in Jehovah; you must accept Christ as a Saviour, or you will be eternally damned! Yet not one of these but would be just as enthusiastic an advocate of Moslemism had he been born under that influence. For the latter-day Methodist who so fiercely insists upon your accepting his creeds, is only the old Moslem, who gave one his choice between Allah and the sword, with his enthusiasm just a little modified — by his environments! And they entirely fail to perceive the horrible injustice in a God who insists upon a particular belief, while surrounding the soul which he has just created with associations which make that belief seem but the most impious blasphemy.
Theosophy comes to the west, not with a sword, but with the peace which the acceptance of its solemn declaration of the truth of universal brotherhood must bring. It urges each faith to seek within its own tenets for the concealed truths which they contain; it desires not to propagandise Buddhism, Brahmanism, Christianity, nor even its own teachings, for it declares that these are to be found buried in every religion. Aye, the veriest absurdities in Christian dogmas are often but the, at first wilful and then ignorant, perversion of profound truths of Theosophy. And as one passes from the outer form to seek the inner meaning, the fact dawns that, take what religion he may, his path will soon lead him in a common direction. Dogmas and creeds are not religion; they are its worst enemies; and, in almost every instance, have been deliberately imposed upon religion by designing priests and leaders for their own aggrandizement. To pose as the representative of an almighty autocrat, has been too giddy a position of power not to have been longed for, and, too often, to have been attained by ambitious but short-sighted men.
If, then, the conjuring-word of Theosophy be Brotherhood, the way to a realization of this it shows to be tolerance. Tolerance of the religious faiths of each other; of racial differences; of color, caste, and every one of the ten thousand things which divide us because of our childishness and ignorance. Find wherein your religious agree, not wherein they differ; seek to perfect your own faith, not to enforce it upon another. He who is the surest that he alone possesses the truth is by that very sign, the farthest astray. For this reason the Theosophical Society refuses to permit any creed to be attached to it as a pre-requisite to membership; all creeds are welcome if they accept and practice brotherhood. Not even karma and reincarnation must be thrust in the face of him who, weary of the many things which separate him from his fellows, seeks the refuge of our association. The recognition of truth must follow a sincere belief in, and an equally sincere attempt to practice brotherhood; and, nine times out of ten, the seeker after it is amazed to find it in his own creed, and to perceive at the same time the same truth in the faiths of others.
After all, we are souls incarnated in as new and strange conditions for us as the wolf-children of India, and we must help each other; we dare not stand aloof. Our souls have not yet conquered the animal propensities of our bodies; we may yet retrogress into worse than animal conditions unless we keep alight the real truths of existence.
Theosophy may thus be summed up as the re-presentation of the great truths of the reincarnation of the human soul in successive bodies; of the universal reign of rigid law, expressed as cause and effect; of the compound nature of man and the relation his soul bears to his successive bodies; of the fact that evolution is a widening of the conscious area, and the building of character rather than form, and that it prevails in every department of nature throughout the entire universe. It also shows the falsity of those ideals and idols before which man now adores; it points to higher, more sublime conceptions of the mystery of life. It asserts that its teachings are no new truths; but are to be found buried under the rubbish of every creed or faith, and therefore calls upon each to seek in his own faith for the truth it contains, to recognize the same truth when it appears in another guise in the faith of his brothers. But, above all this, and one of its three fundamental concepts, it teaches the absolute unity of all souls with the divine Oversoul; and that therefore men are, in fact, brothers born, brothers in essence, in common hopes, loves, aspirations and destiny. To re-teach these old, forgotten truths the present Theosophical Society was organized, and every soul who feels his heart warm with the desire to help his fellow men is heartily welcomed, and so long as he shall faithfully work to aid his brothers he may deny karma, deride reincarnation, believe the moon to be made of green cheese, or any other theory which pleases him. Brotherhood is that to which the Society demands the applicant to subscribe — not to any other theory, hypothesis, or fact whatsoever.