The Theosophical Forum – September 1940

WANTED! TODAY! — Iverson L. Harris

First: Men and women with courage and vision based on unshakable faith in the ultimate triumph of spirituality and brotherhood over cynicism and hatred.

Second: Men and women who know that in our higher parts we are all one, whether we will or whether we nill, and that when we injure one, we injure all, and that we ourselves — all of us — must sooner or later reap the consequences of any infringement on our own part of the law of Universal Brotherhood.

Third: Men and women who refuse to allow propaganda of hatred from any source at any time about anything whatsoever to blind their vision as regards the essential truths of life which they readily recognise when their inner eyes are undimmed by fear, or falsehood, or emotional disturbance, or unreasonable partisanship.

Fourth: Men and women who are capable of taking a long-range view of human history and evolution, and while responding as best they can to the immediate calls of duty lose not sight of the distant goal towards which the Enlightened Ones of the ages have pointed.

Fifth: Men and women who have evolved from within themselves, aided by outward experience and the spiritual legacy left them by their predecessors on the Path, an adequate philosophy of life that permits them to remain calm and clear-sighted in the midst of turmoil and confusion.

Sixth: Men and women who know that thought is not only free but potent, and that no matter what the exigencies of a world in travail may demand of any of us outwardly and temporarily, there still remains to us, in the words of Browning, "that inmost center within us all, where truth abides in fulness."

Seventh: Men and women who can rise in thought above the clashes of classes, of parties, of nations, of races, or of ideologies, and fight the battle of the gods with the weapons of the gods: wisdom, vision, and almighty love.

Eighth: Men and women who recognise that on this, our planet Terra, races and nations must inevitably follow the universal course of birth, growth, maturity, age, and death, and who, therefore, lend their enlightened efforts as regards nations and races and systems of thought quite as much as in regard to every precious individual of the race, towards making

The birth loving and welcome;
The growth strong and purposeful;
The maturity fruitful and illuminated;
The old age wise and compassionate;
And the death, peaceful and transfiguring like a sunset.

Ninth: Men and women who realize that the real growth and lasting progress of the race takes place through evolution rather than through revolution; and that just as the human individual body evolves by growth from cell to cell, so does the body politic grow by evolution of every individual "cell" in that social structure; hence the way to establish a healthy body politic is for each individual to take command of the little world which he regards as his own — himself — and by self-directed evolution spread his beneficent influence among those with whom karman has surrounded him. When we have established peace and normal growth within ourselves and among our immediate fellows, we may then hope for peace and normal growth in the larger social or national or racial groups to which we belong. This is something which everyone of us can begin to do, right here and now.

Tenth, and finally: Most urgently wanted today are real Theosophists!



Theosophical University Press Online Edition