Part I Lectures to the Public (continued 3)

Let us begin at that point I spoke of with regard to the human being. Now, by this process of deduction, and seeing in man the image of the Supreme, we are not compelled to stop our study when we have taken these three stages—the stage of the will to live showing itself in activity, the stage of passion and emotion, the stage of mentality; for we see that above those there shine out the three same attributes of Deity in subtler, finer form that we call the human Spirit, and that this human Spirit, reproducing in itself the three great aspects, tells us of the future, as the lower reflexions tell us of the past. So that we cannot only trace, as science does, the unfolding of consciousness through the vast ages of the past, but we can follow it onwards into the future, where that higher repetition of divinity is gradually unfolding, and trace out for ourselves man’s higher qualities, the later stages of human evolution.

Now, it is true that in this the theory is not complete and perfect unless you recognise the fundamental truth of Reincarnation. No otherwise can you trace the unfolding of the divine Spirit in man, save by giving him time and environment by which these successive stages may be accomplished. For, looking at humanity, we see that very many men disappeared in the savage state, where only the preliminary stage of human consciousness had been unfolded; others we find coming into the world above the savage state, but showing out only passions, strong, selfish emotions; others, again, further on, showing out mental powers, and in them the mind becoming predominant. But unless you admit here a sequential unfolding of the individual consciousness, you will find yourself surrounded by complicated difficulties when you try to understand human evolution; for if you follow those consciousnesses onwards, thinking they are never to return to the school of life to learn the lessons that they have not learned in the infant school of savage life, then you will have to posit a heaven or heavens, one of which is full of these souls that have only accomplished savagery on earth; another that is full of those that have reached the emotional stage without having started and laid the foundation of the savage; a third that show forth mind, but not the will to live of the savage, nor the emotion of the half-cultivated man. And so you get a world on the other side more fantastic than rational, and you realise that somehow or other in your scheme of things you must make room for post-mortem evolution; and the very moment you adopt that, that moment you have accepted the principle of reincarnation, even though you may choose to carry it on in other worlds rather than in the present.[2] With that, of course, other difficulties arise, but on those I need not for the moment dwell, as I do not want to deal fully with reincarnation now. But suppose you accept it, then the whole thing is rational before you—a spiritual intelligence unfolding in one stage after another, and building each stage on the one that preceded. If you apply that to the evolution of the reincarnating individual, you see the stage of the child, the stage of the youth, the stage of the man, and you await the unfolding of the spiritual man. Or if you choose to look at it in the vast cycles of the past, then you will realise that you have before you animal man, passional man, intellectual man, and you can hardly stop without thinking next of spiritual man—the four stages that you can trace by this principle that I spoke of, the deduction from the divine life leading you onwards to the stage not yet unfolded, save in some lofty specimens of humanity. And when you have just seen these stages so thoroughly reproducing at each point of enlarging sight the other in yourself—the four stages visible—the three and the dawning of the next; then in the whole reincarnating life of the individual the same three and the dawning of the next; then in evolution the same three and the possibility of the next—it does not seem strange then to come on to the races, as the Theosophist does, and to see in the early human race—that which is really the first that can truly be called human, although there preceded it a semi-animal man—the birth of our present humanity. We call it the Lemurian Race; and it is interesting that Haeckel points to the lost continent of Lemuria as that which was the cradle of the human race; so does modern science every now and again touch on these teachings of the elder world. In that Lemurian Race was shown the strong will to live; then came the Atlantean, that which lived on the vast continent of Atlantis, the existence of which is being recognised more and more by science by logical necessity, as it cannot get geological evidence or antiquarian evidence, the greater part of the continent being whelmed beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Still, antiquarian research gives us something by pointing out to us identities of racial characteristics in places now separated by that same vast Atlantic Ocean. And archæology shows us in ancient Egypt, in the style of its painting, in the symbols that it used, nay, even in some of the human types that it limned, exactly the same symbols, the same types, the same outlines of philosophical and religious thought as in Southern Mexico, in a civilisation long since disappeared, that was swept away by the Aztec civilisation, which had become ancient and corrupt when the Spaniards invaded Mexico. In those two far removed portions of the earth’s surface, separated by the Atlantic, we find the repetition of one in the other. And there are many other reasons on which I need not now dwell, similarities of fauna and flora, certain architectural likenesses, and so on, which are all leading scientific men onwards to the recognition of the great continent of Atlantis. Just as the men of the Lemurian continent showed out only that will to live in clumsiest form, so did the men of the Atlantean continent show out passion, appetite, desire, the whole of their civilisation showing the marks of this predominant passional nature; that which might be expected in theory showed itself out in fact. With that went—as always goes with the passional and non-intellectual type—a great development of what in these days we call the lower form of psychism. We apply that term, as our knowledge of these powers grows more precise, to the way of seeing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, and so on, that we find in some members of the animal kingdom; that we find largely developed in savage nations; that we find showing themselves out sometimes among the dwellers in mountains and in vast spaces where the air is pure, where nature is still in a fairly primitive condition. It is not precise, exact science under the control of the will; it seems to be responsive to impressions of passions, emotions; very rarely, if ever, to impressions from the mind. And so, looking back on the great Atlantean peoples, we see them showing out these forms of psychism that we connect with the higher animal and with the lower human evolution before mentality has been very largely developed, before the nervous system characteristic of the modern man has dominated the sympathetic system more characteristic of the animal. And then we come to a time when we can glance backward and see the method of the evolution of a new race, giving many an indication to help us in our study of the Coming Race of our own time. For, looking back into that far-off history, we see a selection going on among the Atlantean people, and we notice that the selection was made not amongst those who had carried the Atlantean type to its highest and most triumphant point, but, on the contrary, from a subdivision of that race—a sub-race, as we call it—in which those qualities did not show which had made Atlantis great and mighty, but in which there were more germs than in the triumphant Atlantean of the coming development—that of the mind. Some of you will be familiar with the name of the Toltec, the race, or rather sub-race, in which the Atlantean civilisation touched its highest point. Not from those were the germs of the Aryan race chosen; rather from the succeeding sub-race, in which, as I said, mental qualities were beginning to assert themselves, with the inevitable result that as those qualities became manifest, the others, the psychic, fell into the background. Look round to-day and you will see how true that still is with the ordinary uncultivated, untrained psychic; how very low is the stage of the intelligence, very little mental power going hand-in-hand with that lower kind of psychism; and so the people who were chosen to be the germs of our own great Race were not amongst the most admired of the Atlantean civilisation, but were rather looked down upon as not showing out these faculties which then were regarded as the most valuable, as falling below the triumphant type of the Toltec, as people of little account, and yet people who had in them the promise of the future. Then the gathering of those together, the isolating of them from the rest of the then civilised world; the deliberate breeding of them into a type which was aimed at. For all the great types of human kind exist in the mind of the Logos before they are made manifest in the matter of our earth—first the idea, then the manifestation; and the seven great types which were to make up the humanity of our globe in the present cycle of its existence, those existed as Ideas in the Platonic sense of the word, those were the types towards which the great Powers guided the evolution of humanity; and when the highest point was being touched at the fourth, then came the preparation for the birth of the fifth. The same great laws which, on a far lower scale, are used by the ordinary scientific gardener or scientific breeder of cattle, when he is trying to develop a new type that exists in his mind, remember, before he tries to work it out in petals of flower or flesh and blood of animal, that ideal type to which the scientific breeder directs his efforts, those laws help him to-day which, on a far loftier level and for mightier purposes, were used by the great Ruler of the Coming Race in order to shape the ideal type that now we know as the Aryan. If you compare one of the men of Kashmir, in Northern India, with your best Caucasian type, you will find they closely resemble the one the other, evidently replicas of the same type. I choose the man of Kashmir especially, because he is fair of skin, owing to his living in a temperate clime, and because from the shutting in of his land from communication with other countries, due to the difficulty of reaching his fellows—owing to that the type has been kept purer there than probably anywhere else upon earth. Fair of skin, blue- or violet-eyed, with hair brown in varying shades, with features sharply cut, delicate lips, thin and well-formed nose, there you have one of the finest types of human beauty existing upon earth. You find that type reproduced over and over again, with varying modifications as the sub-races develop, but the one type is everywhere visible; and in the shape of the head, with the forehead largely developed, with the place in the brain where all intellectual faculties can be made manifest, in that type of head you have the type of mentality, the Race that is to carry to the highest point the possibilities of the human intellect. As you come down, looking at the sub-races, the same strange point strikes you as we saw with regard to the psychic Atlantean, and the comparatively psychic sub-race from which our own was gradually built up. Compare together the refined Roman, luxurious, well-built, cultured, and the Goth, who was the origin of the Teutonic sub-race; there again you see the same thing, the contrast with the regnant type of the apparently lower type, the one that has in it the promise of rising higher than its predecessor. Judging by analogy, following along similar lines of thought, we can very readily understand to-day that the type of the Coming Race will not be that which is the triumph of the present, but rather those in whom the characteristics of the present are less developed, but which have in them the germ of something more, which can unfold in the far-off future into a greater splendour, a diviner manifestation. So that when we are looking for those who are the beginnings of the Coming Race, we should not look for them to-day among those in whom our Aryan peoples show out the highest types of mentality, of intellect, of power, of thought. Their work is to carry on the present civilisation to the zenith. Who but they can lead it to the highest point? They have developed the mind which is the great characteristic of this fifth Teutonic sub-race; theirs the mission, theirs the privilege, to guide that sub-race to its highest point of achievement. They only, whose intellect is so loftily developed, are fit to guide the present civilisation to the point of glory which it has yet to reach, and it is they who are the leaders of the triumphant type of to-day, they to whom our present race looks up as the ideal of all that is most splendid in intellectual power. Not amongst them, then, should we seek the beginnings of the Coming Race, of the Race that shall be; for, using our principle of correspondences, we can see that now we must look for the germinating of the spiritual man, not of the intellectual; that which is beyond intellect, that which is higher than the scientific mind, the qualities that have shone out in the great religious teachers of the past, the qualities that characterised the Buddha, the Christ, are the spiritual qualities as apart from the intellectual; and it is the germinating of those qualities now which will make the origin of the Race that is to be.

But we can see in the race of the present signs of the changing evolution which shall gradually show out the coming type of consciousness, which shall gradually adapt the bodies to the fuller manifestation of the qualities that shall gradually unfold. For what is the great mark of such spiritual types of humanity, what the quality that shines out above all others wherever they appear upon earth? It is that quality that to-day we name Brotherhood, the recognition of that unity of life which makes for all-embracing compassion and boundless self-sacrifice. Those are the types that we see in these great Ones of our race, they who have unfolded the spiritual nature, who show out the glory of the Spirit. It is very marked that in every one of those mighty Teachers of the past this is the quality which above all others shines out as their distinguishing mark among the men of the generation in which they are born. The love of the helpless and the weak, the effort ever to raise those who are downtrodden and oppressed, the effort to share, to uplift, to make happy—in a word, to save; that is the great spiritual characteristic of all the Saviours of the world, and therefore at the present time those are making ready for the beginning of the Coming Race who show out in conception and in practice their belief in the universal Brotherhood of man. They may be less developed in intellect, that is not what is for the moment wanted from them; they may be less glorious in the triumphs of the mind, that is not the material that is needed specially for the Coming Race; it is these higher qualities of the Spirit that must be looked for by the Leader of that Race as the material which gradually He can mould into the type He has in His mind, and so out of those germinal possibilities evolve the Man that shall be.

Now let us pause for a moment and ask what are the special marks of that Race in consciousness and in body. In consciousness, clearly the recognition of unity. That is essential; for what the intellect divides the Spirit unites. The recognition of life in each rather than of the separated form, the recognition of the one Self in all rather than the separated selves that are marked out by the separated bodies, that will be the great mark in consciousness, the new unfolding; wherever that recognition of unity is made, there is one of the signs of the Coming Race. And then, side by side with that, growing inevitably out of it, a breadth and liberality of tolerance will mark those in whom the sense of unity is beginning to unfold. All that is narrow and exclusive, all that tends to separate one from another, all that emphasises differences instead of emphasising likenesses, all those are against the unfolding of the consciousness that knows the One in the many, and recognises Divinity in all. With that unfolding consciousness will come a type of body of which there are beginning to be many amongst us to-day. When there is going to be a variation which will start a new evolutionary type, it is always noted that those out of whom the variation grows are what is called unstable. Instability is the mark of progress, or of degeneration. There is the instability of health, but also of disease; and with the changing type of the nervous system you find this instability present in both its forms. If you look around you at the present time, what is one of the marks of the bodies in the most advanced races of the earth? Nervous troubles of every kind, and most marked amongst the most highly developed. It is needless to draw your attention to that; everyone knows it. The greater tension of the nervous system shows itself out amongst us in all kinds of different ways; saddest of all, in the extraordinary increase of madness in the most highly civilised nations of the world. Lunatic asylums are always multiplying, for as soon as a new one is built it gets filled, and another is demanded. That is the sad sight when we are looking around, looking for the Coming Race; the present race suffers by the very conditions that that race has made for itself; all the separative conditions of competition, struggle, class and individual and trade antagonism, all these are destructive to the evolving nervous system of man. The environment is impossible, the conditions ruinous for the evolution of a finer, more delicate nervous organisation; and yet the resistless force of nature presses onwards against the human race, forces it onwards whether it will go or not, and the evolutionary forces cannot be opposed save at the risk of destruction.

Now that is one of the lessons that needs to come out of these studies for the immediate guiding of our own lives to-day. We are living in an environment that is destructive of the higher evolution, and at our peril we leave it as it is when the Coming Race must inevitably be born. If we would go on we must adapt ourselves, and that adaptation is the crying need of the time. For amongst us to-day are being born children in whom this finer nervous organisation is showing itself already, children of delicate nervous type, but not necessarily at all unhealthy; often perfectly healthy, but with the nervous system so delicately poised that it is always in danger of jar and injury. There must be many amongst you who know that out of your own personal experience as fathers and mothers; there may be born into your family a little child whose nervous system is so delicate, so exquisitely poised, that the child is very readily thrown out of balance, and suffers quite abnormally. One thing that it is very necessary for the fathers and mothers of the time to understand is, that as these children come to them for protection, for training, for help, they must remember that they have there organisms which suffer and enjoy more keenly than organisms that are less delicately, less exquisitely balanced. Such a child feels pain where a child of rougher type would pass through unnoticing. The intense joy which, on the other hand, marks such an organism is always balanced with periods of intense depression. Such children should be guarded as far as possible from all that can jar and trouble. It is useless to try to make them live in the surroundings that suit those whose nervous systems are not so fine. On the contrary, it is the duty of the parent to try to provide for such children gentler and more harmonious surroundings, realising that without those the delicate instrument would be jarred and thrown out of tune, so that that from which the most lovely melodies might have been drawn will be only an instrument fit to be thrown away, destroyed. Think for a moment of the conditions under which you are living now in London. During the last ten years London has become almost intolerable to live in, if only for the noise, the continual rattle, the shrieking and hooting that fill the streets; the shaking of the very earth itself under the heavy vehicles of all sorts that we place upon it. London is becoming a city where to live in peace you would want to go about with cotton-wool stuffed into your ears and spectacles over your eyes so that you might not see too clearly, and with your nose closed so that you might not smell the horrible smells with which the streets are continually filled. Literally, what will have to be done is this: all the more refined and cultured people will have to go out of these huge towns and leave them to the people who like them. For remember, there are many people who like them; there are plenty of people who enjoy the rattle and the noise and the tumult of a London street. There are plenty of country peasants who, if you bring them up to London, like it enormously; but if you take the London lad or lass and put them down the country they say how frightfully quiet and dull it is. Why not let the great cities go to the people who like them, who will be helped to evolve by them? For, mind, that which is destructive to a delicate nervous system is the necessary stimulus for the evolution of a nervous system of a lower and coarser type. I do not want to abolish all these great cities at all; but I would say to any who feel the suffering which grows out of the noise and the rush and the hurry. Your place is no longer here, and, above all, it is no place for the children. For the finer the organisation of the father and the mother from the nervous standpoint, the finer will be the nervous organisation of the child; and if they suffer from it, their best policy is to leave London for the country, and surround themselves and the children of the Coming Race with sweeter and better environments. It is not only that these vast towns that are deforming and defacing England are an impossible environment for the Coming Race; we must also adapt ourselves to the new conditions by changes of food, by changes of method in ordinary living. The food that the great majority of people now use, flesh, is utterly unsuited to the finer type of nervous organisation. You may notice how people of a finer type shrink from it instinctively. Children of a finer type, when they realise that meat was a living thing, will turn aside from it with disgust, and leave it untouched. That instinctive dislike is one of the things that will be growing very much amongst the little ones; more and more will they revolt against the use of flesh. But it would be wise not only to notice how that revolt is growing, but deliberately to avoid the use of such articles of diet yourself, if you desire to train your bodies into a preparation for the Coming Race. For the body which is nourished on flesh and on the many forms of alcohol is a body which will be thrown out of health by the opening up of the higher consciousness; and nervous diseases are partly due to the fact that the higher consciousness is trying to express itself through bodies clogged with flesh-products and poisoned with alcohol. For, let me take a point of very great importance which has direct bearing upon this. As the new bodies develop, and the higher, more nervous organisation of the physical body grows, the next of your bodies, the astral, will become more and more highly organised year by year. The organisation of that next body of yours, of finer matter than the physical, is going on very rapidly at the present time under the pressure of thought, which all educated and cultured people use at least to some extent. As that body becomes more highly organised, its special sense-organs come into activity, and then we have what is called a higher psychism, which is not the result of an astral body unorganised and vibrating to every passing wind of emotion, but of a body highly organised, with its own senses developed, and those senses seeking to express themselves through the grosser body of the physical plane. Now there is one organ in your brain which is the sixth sense, the sense through which all these astral cognitions, astral emotions, will show themselves down in your own waking consciousness, and that is the body which very much puzzles many of our doctors and scientific men—the pituitary body. That is not, as many of them think, a mere vestigial organ left from the past; it is that, but it is also the organ of which the finer internal differentiation is making the sense for the higher psychic powers of the Coming Race. Now that is matter of fact known to the occult student, because he sees that development going on in his own case and in the case of others around him; and in proportion as that finer and well-organised astral body hands down into the brain the various things which it cognises, so does he find the pituitary body functioning, so does he experience changes that go on in that. Now, that body, according to one of the latest discoveries of modern science, is at once affected by the vapours of alcohol; it is one of the glands of the body which are most readily poisoned, and even a very small amount of alcohol poisons the pituitary body, and chokes its highest evolution. Obviously, then, if you want to ease that, if you want at this stage of evolution to put a little evolutionary pressure even on the bodies of the fifth Race, and thus ease that, one of the first things that should be said to you is: Never touch alcohol at all in any form, for if you do the vibrations of the alcohol poison the very means of communication between the astral and the physical bodies, and the developing of them to higher purposes is one of the marks of the Coming Race, the means whereby it will sense the astral world in waking consciousness; hence the instruction that you will have from everyone who is speaking of this and understands the conditions: Do not only give up all forms of flesh, but also take care that your diet is free from every trace of alcohol. Now, these are laws of nature that you cannot get over; and if you make up your mind to cling to the fifth Race way of diet, then you must be content to remain fifth Race, and go no further. No one wants you to go further than you wish to go, but the conditions are unchangeable, and the more that is recognised the better will it be. Above all, with those children that I have been mentioning, take care not to try to force them in any way, nor to induce them to take those articles of diet which will injure their growing delicacy of nervous organisation, and destroy that developing organ in the brain by which they will bring their knowledge through into ordinary life.

Then let me remind you of the way in which this may be done. Let us suppose that you desire to hasten the coming of the Coming Race; let us suppose that you are not willing to wait for the slow processes of nature, lasting hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years, but want to co-operate with nature, as we ought to do to-day, having reached the stage of evolution that we have reached, where human intelligence can quicken the workings of nature. The first thing that you must do is to make meditation a part of your daily life. Now, meditation has three stages: first, the reining in of the wandering mind, the checking of its thinking from one point to another continually in activity; then the fixing of that controlled mind on a single object of thought; then the contemplation of that object in order that it may be reproduced in yourself. That process of meditation is the way in which the unfolding consciousness may be definitely stimulated, and there is no other healthy and sane way. By a daily practice of that sort, the fixing of your mind either on the ideal Self or on some ideal of virtue that you desire to reproduce within yourself—as you follow that practice of meditation, the higher consciousness develops, and you change your contact with the world. Let me take a case. You come across a man who is very untruthful. Normally he may deceive you for a time until you get evidence that appeals to the mind, until you can argue logically and prove that the man is not truthful; a slow process, but one that needs to be used in the present stage. What will be the process of recognising untruth where the spiritual nature has begun to develop by the process of meditation? You would meditate on truth; that is the first step. By that regular daily meditation on truth you make your subtle body vibrate, so that the nature of your subtle body becomes that which answers to truth; then when a man who is untruthful comes along you do not have to reason; by the direct process of intuition you recognise that man as false; he jars you just as a false note jars on a musical instrument. There is no process of reasoning, no need to go into evidence, no need to seek for proofs; you feel him, see him to be false, by intuition instead of reasoning. Now, I know a case of that kind in India, although I don’t suppose you will quite copy my Indian friend, for he was a man who, from his boyhood upwards, had meditated every day upon truth, and he had done it for forty years. That is a long time from the western standpoint. The effect of that was that he had so tuned himself to the note of truth—he happened to be a judge—that no evidence could deceive him, however plausible; he knew when a man was lying by the jar that he felt within himself. I only mention that as a special case to show you the method by which this meditation unfolds the inner powers, so that, instead of the slow processes you are accustomed to, a direct intuition tells you the character of the person with whom you come into touch. I might go through the whole string of the virtues; the principle is the same everywhere. In addition to meditation, you must practise. You must practise in your daily life the keenest sympathy that you are able to develop; by deliberate effort, force yourself into sympathy with everyone whom you may happen to meet; make yourself feel as that person feels; and above all, practise it with those who are lower in evolution than yourself, for there sympathy becomes most useful, and the practise of feeling as the less-evolved feel enables you to lift them up nearer to your own level. You must not only practise sympathy, too, in your daily life; you must practise the absence of the sense of separateness, the most difficult thing in the world to do for all of us who belong to this Teutonic sub-race. Our sense of individuality is so strong that in everything we feel “my,” “mine,” “my property,” “my books,” “my house,” “my friends”—a continual repetition of the “my.” You must get rid of that; you must get rid of the feeling which instinctively claims something that you call your own as against other people. Now, it is not an easy thing to do; and the first stages are very disagreeable, jarring the fifth sub-race type of mind. Try to get rid of your sense of individual ownership in the things that are yours. How often you hear a generous-tempered man say: “Oh, I would have given it to him at once if he had asked for it, but I did not like his taking it!” Why not? Because you feel separate; because of “I” and “he,” “mine,” “his.” The next Race is not going to have that sense so strongly developed; and if you want to take part in the building of it, the sooner you get rid of it the better for yourselves. Practise not minding having your things taken away and used by anybody who wants to use them. It sounds strange to you, but it is a commonplace in India. My Indian friends, when I first knew them, used to be astonished when I said to them: “May I use such-and-such a thing?” “Why, of course, if you want it,” was the invariable answer; and at last I got to realise that that was a very much higher position towards objects of property than the self-assertive owning. Similarly, in India, when you have a garden, anybody who likes comes in, sits under your trees, lights a little fire, and cooks his dinner there if he likes. When one day, again, in my very early days, before I understood this, I said to somebody: “Oh, but do you like people coming into your garden like that without asking permission?” “What else is a garden for?” was the reply. That is the natural feeling there because of the communal life which has been universal for thousands of years. You think of the use of the thing and the man who wants to use it; that he wants it is the reason why he should have the use of it. That is a very long way from our fifth sub-race way of looking at property. Practise that, then, in order to get rid of this utterly exaggerated sense of separation which we find in our social life at the present time. This habit of self-sacrifice—sacrificing your own whims, wishes, wants, every day of your life, for the sake of making life easier for those around you—that will be one of the characteristics of the Coming Race. And as you do it, you will gradually find that you won’t mind; that the pleasure of making another person satisfied is far greater than the pleasure of having a thing for yourself; that the words of the Christ are literally true: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”; not a duty but more blessed, more happy, so that the joy that comes out of the sharing utterly swamps any feeling of self-sacrifice. That, again, will be the great social type of the Coming Race.

See how practically, then, this thought of the Coming Race bears upon our living of to-day. Those who would prepare themselves for the part of that changed type of man must begin building it up in their character, their emotions, their minds to-day, by meditation, the opening of the consciousness by practise, the training of the life into expressions along higher lines. That race will be the builder of a universal religion, in which sharing what each has of truth will be the only form of missionary effort. That Race will be the builder of a brotherly civilisation, in which the need of every man will be the measure of what he has given to him; in which the power of every man will be the limit of his responsibility. Those will be the great changes that will come, and you, if you will, may take part in that changing; you, even in the present civilisation, may hold to the higher ideal, and try to make it acceptable to the minds of your fellow-men. But our hope is mostly in the young, in those who have not yet been hardened in the brutal competition which marks the commercial and class life of to-day. The young lads and the young girls, still plastic, still easily fired by great ideals, with nervous systems finer in many cases than ours, and hearts warmer than those that have been chilled in the experience of life—in them lies the hope of the future. For they shall make ideals, they shall create them in the world of thought, and out of the world of thought those ideals shall be sent into the world of matter, and make the Coming Race, which shall build a civilisation happy, glorious, beautiful, and free, but in which it shall be realised that the greatest freedom expresses itself in the greatest service.

Lecture VI The Coming Christ

Friends: Looking back over the long story of the past we can see certain mighty, grandiose figures emerging from the great crowd of human beings, men who tower far above their generation, who are giants, as it were, with pigmies around them; however far we look back such figures are ever to be seen, until at last the mists appear to roll across this great vista of the past, and even through those mists we can discover the outlines of great Ones who teach and bless mankind. To the great mass of students these figures, standing out in the past, appear very closely to resemble each other. We cannot, as it were, distinguish Them with regard to Their knowledge or Their power; all are so far above the men of the time, so far above the most advanced humanity of our own day, that it seems impossible to throw Them into any kind of order, or to understand how far They are part of one great group of mighty Beings; what relation They bear to each other we cannot see; what Their rank in the hierarchy of the superhuman we are practically unable to say. But as the occult student tries to study the past, there are certain indications that he can grasp which serve as a kind of guide as to these mighty Beings. He sees great world-cycles of different extent, embracing longer or shorter periods of time, and he is able to trace some relation between these mighty Beings and the cycles of the world, the point of time at which They appear, at which They manifest. And by this study of the past, assisted by occult methods, these periods in the world’s story and these Teachers of the world’s humanity fall into quite definite relations.

We can notice, looking back, that there are four great ages through which the world passes in its long evolutionary history, ages that are often referred to in what are called the mythologies of the past, ages which are characterised very differently the one from the other, and in which the whole cycle of the world’s story is divided. It may be noticed that at the beginning of each of those huge cycles a very great figure appears, as though, when the world was entering on a new phase of life, it were necessary that a special benediction should descend upon it, a special light should shine out. When we ask who are the great Ones who mark these longest periods in human history, we are told that They are Beings belonging to past worlds, belonging to other planets than our own, planets and worlds older in the scale of manifestation; that They have passed through all the struggles of an evolving life, that They have formed part of a humanity that long since has passed away and been numbered in the records of the universe, too far off to touch a world like ours; that, reaching through human to superhuman growth, They have finally joined their consciousness with the consciousness of the Logos Himself, expanding to His consciousness, uniting with His nature, and yet never losing that centre which is the result of Their long evolution up the human and the superhuman ladder. Holding that centre in all the life of God, it is possible for Them to draw around Themselves again a circumference which shall enable Them to become manifest in any world, in any race. Where a centre is, a circumference can ever be drawn; and around such a centre in Deity itself, of the Son made one with the Father, from such a centre a new circumference of a human life may be drawn, and such a Being, mighty in His Deity and yet veiled in humanity, may appear to enlighten and to bless the world. Among the Hindū people, whose teachers have carried them far along occult lines, whose sacred scriptures are full of occult indications, a special name is given to these pre-eminent manifestations. They call them by a Sanskrit word which means those who descend. The name avatāra may be familiar to you, perhaps. But it is the significance of the name on which for a moment I pause. They have climbed up to unity with the God head: They descend to humanity in order to preserve and help. Such are the mightiest figures that appear in any world, on any globe, through the long course of its evolution. Egypt signified that mystery under a special name: they called it the birth of Horus. Christianity has symbolised it under another name—Divine Incarnation; and the Christian will tell you—accurate in the spiritual fact, although at times confused in the definition of the life—that the Second Person of the Trinity descends upon earth, and he regards the Christ of Judea as being such a manifestation of the Most High. The main fact that such a revelation may come to man is a fundamental spiritual truth. It ought never to be lost from sight; and in every great religion it has ever been said that it is from that aspect of the Logos that these manifestations descend upon earth. Christianity recognises but a single manifestation; Hindūism recognises nine that have passed and one that is to come. In Zoroastrianism you find the same conception. Religions, living and dead, have ever groped after that highest of truths; only it must never be lost sight of that He who is an Avatāra, the highest of divine manifestations, has been in some other cycle of life a man among men, and that it is because of that long-past experience that a return to those conditions is possible at any time.

Leave that aside for a moment, and take another great type that shines out. There is no name for the next type I am just thinking of except in Eastern lands, where they call him “The Enlightened,” the Buddha. In the West that name is constantly connected with the last of those manifestations, with the great Being born into the world nearly six hundred years before the Christian era. He is called the Buddha. But among the people of the faith that He gave to the world the belief is that there were many before Him, that there shall be many after Him; that He is only one among the great host of revealers of the divine, and that one of those is born in every world, in every Root Race. So that in every world there are seven of such Beings, one manifesting in every Race; but when He has appeared, then He passes away from earth, having finished even the superhuman evolution, and passes on, as those that I mentioned passed in other worlds, in other times, in order to unite Himself as the Son with the Eternal Father, so that in a world later than our own such a one may return as an Avatāra, one who descends. But note that the Buddha, mighty as He was, climbed to His greatness through the humanity of our own globe. Climbing step by step up the long ladder of human life, of superhuman unfolding, He touched the last rung of that ladder when He was born as Gautama into India some twenty-five centuries ago, and then, having finished His work, passed onward into what is there called Nirvāna, the highest condition available for the superhuman, that of union with the divine, though without loss of the centre of which I spoke.

Considering that great Teacher, let us ask what He was before He became the Buddha, and then passed away from earth, His teaching work being over. Before He took that last and greatest of the Initiations along the line He followed, He had manifested several times before on earth, and manifested in the same great Root Race, the Aryan Race, to which we all and so many others belong. For before that last step was taken there was another high office that He filled for thousands and tens of thousands of years. I do not want in any way to confuse you with unfamiliar names, and yet it is a little difficult to avoid them, because I want a name that stretches back to manifestation after manifestation; and our own fifth sub-race, the Teutonic, has been on earth so brief a time, living in the western world, that it has not yet created the general name which we can use with regard to these past manifestations. The eastern name is a word which translated means “the Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva; the name matters little provided that you take it for the moment that it signifies an office, and the office is that of the Supreme Teacher, not only teacher of men, but teacher, as they would say, of Gods, as you would say, of Angels and Archangels. For you must remember that the Shining Ones of the East are the same as those to whom over here you give the names of Angels and Archangels. The East calls them by a name which merely means “the shining”; and though it is often translated over here as “God,” much confusion of thought thereby is made as regards the great eastern faiths. For they, like Christianity, proclaim the unity of God, the one all-pervading life; and those whom they call the Shining Ones, the Devas, are but manifestations of that light, the Angels and Archangels of Christianity or of Islām. And He who is the Supreme Teacher has for His pupils Archangels and Angels as well as men; He is the one who is the Teacher of all, whether in the body of flesh or outside of it as spiritual intelligences; there is no other Teacher in earth or heaven above that mightiest One who fills this supreme office.

Now, such a Teacher, the Supreme Teacher of the worlds, makes Himself manifest as man at the beginning of every sub-race. I have talked to you so much of Races and sub-races that the terms will not be unfamiliar; and if I remind you that we are all of one great Root Race, the Aryan, whether you take the first sub-race in India; or the second along the basin of the Mediterranean in the ancient days; or the third in ancient Persia; or the fourth giving birth to the ancient Greeks and the Romans, and then spreading westwards through Spain, France, Britain, up to the North of Scotland, and then across to Ireland, the mighty Keltic sub-race; or the fifth, the Teutonic, now peopling Germany, Britain, America, and their offshoots—if you think of those, the one Race including all the divisions, you will be able readily enough to follow the manifestations of the Supreme Teacher. Just as in the larger cycles there are manifestations of great Beings, so has every successive sub-race the appearance of this great Teacher as man, to give it the religion under which the civilisation shall develop, to give it the benediction which starts it on its evolution in the world.

Looking backwards to the sub-races that preceded the fifth, the Teutonic, to which the greater part of you who are present here belong, we can mark in each the appearance of the Supreme Teacher, taking a different name, but ever the same immortal Individuality under the veil of that name. One name that is known to all of you who are students of the past was the name He took when He led forth from Central Asia the second of the great emigrations that passed westward, which āryanised large numbers of the people dwelling in Arabia, in Northern Africa, in the whole great basin of the Mediterranean. He then bore the name of Hermes, a name familiar to every student of antiquity, especially to the students of Egyptian thought, for it was largely in relation to that that this mighty manifestation was made, and in much of the so-called Hermetic literature the name of Hermes, the Thrice Greatest, is preserved. It was a name first worn in Lemuria, but in this case was used by the Supreme Teacher manifesting for the second sub-race.

Let me pause a moment to say one word of explanation, to meet a difficulty that may readily rise in the minds of the more scholarly amongst you who have looked back to these past tales. You find the same name appearing from time to time along the same tradition. That has ever been so in the past. The name of the great teacher himself has been taken up by his successors, who renewed his teaching and carried on the tradition that he left; and so in the vast spaces of time that have elapsed since that Hermes first appeared in the second root-race of the Aryans, others took up the tradition, carried on the teaching, and the name was ever repeated. It is the eastern way. No disciple dreams of teaching there under his own name; it is under the name of his Master that he gives his wisdom to the world; and that not to conceal, but because it is held that to the teacher the credit belongs of that which the pupil may be able to expound, and so, in humility, in veneration, in gratitude to the mightiest, those who follow Him write under the name that they worship, and so hand on His wisdom, although in generations much later than Himself. It causes much of confusion, much of difficulty when the people with the western historical sense go turning over these ancient writings and applying their own canons of interpretation to people who were ancient long before those canons were invented. What is called the historical sense is a very different thing in the East from that in the West. Historical sense here means a sequence of names, dates, persons, and that is what is regarded as important; in the East it means the God unfolding in the various types of humanity that may appear; and that which they are interested in is not a special individual who has written this, that, or the other, but the teaching, the tradition, handed on from age to age, and ever marked out from the first Revealer, the name of Him who gave the knowledge to mankind. I do not want to dispute which is the better way. I only mark the difference that you may realise that in the likeness of the name there is no attempt to deceive the reader, but only to mark the line of the tradition.

In the second sub-race, then, appeared Hermes. Ages rolled on. The third sub-race was to be born; the emigration to found that sub-race rolled westwards into Persia. Once more the “Wisdom-Truth” led the emigration. To that people he was known as Zarathustra, more often called among us Zoroaster. Fourteen of those are known in the old story of Persia, but the first, the eldest of them all, He alone was that one Supreme Teacher, coming down to His disciples, building the policy of Persia, handing down to those who came after Him the tradition that went by His name; and every great high-priest of that religion worthy to bear the mantle of the great One, he also is known in history as Zoroaster; and, as I have just said, some fourteen of those are named.

The time came for the fourth sub-race, the Keltic; the same great Being came forth again under another name, the name known to every student of Greek thought as that of Orpheus. The Orphic Mysteries, the Orphic tradition—these are phrases familiar to every student of the mighty past of Greece. But the scholars, as a rule, with regard to him will say, as was said in regard to Hermes: This is not an individual; it is only a name for a succession of individuals. There is a truth in that, for there was such a succession. The blunder lies in not realising that such a succession must have an originator, and that the first and mightiest of the teachers, to whom everything ran back, is not necessarily a myth merely because He is so great. Those who started the Sun Myth have done a great deal of harm in clouding the story of the past, and it is only as the buried remains of that past are brought up and studied by the scholars of the time that people find that many of the so-called Sun Myths were mighty Teachers and mighty Kings in the childhood of our race. That has become more and more palpable as the excavations go into deeper and deeper strata, uncover more and more ancient civilisations; so that those who have been made into myths are now taking on again a semblance of humanity, but humanity so great, so divine, that it seems scarcely possible to believe that such Beings lived in the guise of men on earth. But you can trace down that Orphic tradition through all that was mightiest and most beautiful in Greece; you can trace in by the Mysteries I mentioned, by the names of the great Greeks who declared that they took their inspiration from that tradition. So we come to the last of the incarnations of that great Being until He appeared as Gautama, became the Buddha, passed away as teacher from the worlds.

Now I have mentioned those mighty ones of the past because without that it might seem only a dream when I speak of such possibilities in modern times as well. I have traced the four latest appearances of Him who is the “Wisdom-Truth,” the last of the four manifestations before, appearing to take His last Initiation as the Buddha, He passed away and became the Son united with the Father, no longer Teacher, no longer Guide of our humanity. But there is never a break in the great succession; in that mighty succession of religious Teachers the chair of the Teacher never remains unfilled; there is ever a wise one to fill it, the wisest who is living upon earth; and when one lays down the sceptre of the Teacher, which is the symbol of His rule, another is waiting by the steps of the Chair of Wisdom to take that seat of Supreme Teacher as His predecessor passes away from earth. For never is the world left without its Teacher; never is mankind left orphaned, without the mighty One to guard and save; as one passes away, His function over, another steps in to fill the seat and carry on the teaching of mankind.

When Gautama was initiated as the Buddha, another then became what I have called the “Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva. His first manifestation upon earth was at the beginning of the next sub-race. That you will very readily see, and for that reason I have been tracing down those names, sub-race after sub-race, that you might realise the relation between the new departure of mankind and the manifestation of the Supreme Teacher. So when the fifth sub-race was being born, when there was the slow growth of the Teuton in the forests of Germany, when the germs, the seeds of that new sub-race were being sown over Northern Europe, then was made manifest again the Supreme Teacher, and He came to the world once more to found a new religion, once more to bless a dawning civilisation. The religion that He founded, the civilisation that He blessed, gave to him the Greek name, the Christ. Let us pause for a moment on that western name—name, again, of an office. For it was not the name of the Buddha that He wore; it was not the name of an individual. As we look at the dominant Greek thought of the time we find that that thought embodied its highest triumph in a certain institution known as the Mysteries. There were Mysteries in ancient Egypt, in ancient Persia, in ancient India, in all the countries of that elder past; and among the Greeks also there were Mysteries—the Orphic Mysteries, to which I alluded, and many others known to the students of Grecian history under many names of Grecian Gods and Goddesses, as we call them, of the Teachers of the past. In those Mysteries there was a certain grade marked with the name Christos; these Mysteries the reflexion on our earth and in our poor worldly mirror of the great Initiations that belong to the Occult Hierarchy that guides the religious destinies of men, a shadow of those supreme Initiations thrown down upon the mirror of earth for the helping of ordinary humanity. This kind of reflexion is indicated, for instance, in the Christian Testament when it is said that Moses, the great leader of the Jews, made all things according to the pattern shown to him in the mount—a well-known ancient phrase, the Mount of Initiation—an indication to the people who followed him as lawgiver that the temple which he outlined, which for a time was seen in the tabernacle that accompanied the Jews in the wilderness, and then received its more gorgeous presentment in the Temple of King Solomon, was formed after the pattern of the heavenly things. So the heavenly and the earthly are thus related as object and image, and the object, which is the great Initiations of the Hierarchy, was imaged here in the civilisations of the past in the Mysteries, by which, by many ordeals and in many difficult ways of training and of discipline, the best men and women of the older civilisations were guided upwards from the human to the superhuman path. In those Mysteries there was this grade, the Christos, the anointed one. It was the grade of the Initiate who had triumphed over suffering, the grade of the Initiate who had carried the cross, the grade of the Initiate who was to know no more compulsory death or compulsory birth, that which marked him as having crossed the threshold of the superhuman, and being ready to enter on that higher grade of manifested life. Natural, inevitable, that in a time when Greek thought was marking the highest point of human attainment and dominating Europe, the Greek name should be taken to describe the mighty One revealed as Teacher upon earth. What nobler name could be chosen, what title more significant, what symbol more instructive, than to call the teacher who appeared and was slain by the name of the Christ?

In the early days of Christianity, as most of you probably know, a difference, which is being revived in our own day, was drawn between Jesus the Hebrew and Christ the anointed Teacher. Look back to all those schools of philosophic and learned teachers in the early days of Christianity, who, when ignorance triumphed after the fall of Rome and Constantinople, were branded with the name of heretics—those who were called the Gnostics, the knowers. A significant name. If you turn over the pages of Origen, one of the greatest teachers, remember, in the early Church, you will find many passages in his exposition of Christianity in which he says that it is necessary for the Christian Church to have in it many Gnostics, who should serve as the foundation on which it should be built, as the pillars on which it should be reared. He used the word in the sense of knowers, not alluding to the many schools classed together under that name. In a famous passage Origen points out that, while it is true that Christianity is for the unlearned, while he says it is medicine for the sinner, it is not out of the sinners and the unlearned that the great Christian Church could be builded; and he goes on to say that, while that is true, and there is medicine for the sinner, the Church must be buttressed by the Gnostic, not by the sinner, by those who know, not by those who are ignorant. That was well provided for in those early centuries of Christendom, for they also had their Mysteries, just as had the older religions around them. Turn over the pages of those early Christian bishops and doctors of the Church, the pages of S. Clement of Alexandria—canonised as saint for his learning and his holiness—turn over almost any of the pages you will of those earlier Christian teachers, who learned from the lips of those who had received their teaching again from the lips of the followers of the Christ Himself, and you will find continual references to the Mysteries of Jesus. You will find the rules laid down by which alone admission to those Mysteries could be won; you will read in the pages of S. Clement the proclamation of the hierophant to whom the candidates presented themselves, he who had in his hands the key of that kingdom of heaven, and you will find that as they stood before him he told them that only those who for a long time had been conscious of no transgression might come and learn the teaching which Jesus gave secretly to His disciples. Those were the old words of challenge ere the door of that kingdom of heaven was flung open, and only to such men and women was admission to the Mysteries possible. There they learned the inner secret teachings, those that are indicated in the Gospel story; for you remember how it was written of the Christ: “For without a parable spake He not unto them”; you remember how, when the disciples asked for explanation, His answer was: “To you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to others in parables.” You may remember, again, how it was said that when His disciples were with Him in the house, then He told them things which to the multitude without He refused to reveal; and you may remember the further promise that He left, when He knew that His own earthly life was drawing to a close: “I have many things to say to you, but ye cannot bear them now.” The Christian tradition of the Mysteries declared that those many things were told afterwards, when the disciples were more ready to receive, when the pupils were fitter to be taught. Origen tells us that all those teachings were kept in the Christian Mysteries, and made the secret teachings of the Church, given only to those who were worthy.

In those days when many knew, when many understood, a distinction was drawn between Jesus and Christ. I alluded to it, you remember, in the first of this course of lectures; and I did so deliberately, intending to return to it when, having dealt with the many intermediate questions, I should arrive at the lecture on the Coming Christ. For there was a difference between the human body of the mighty disciple Jesus, born in Bethlehem, and the divine Power that came down upon that body at the point of time marked as the Baptism, when it is written, the Spirit of God came down upon Him and abode with Him; there you have marked the Coming of the Christ, the consecration of the Supreme Teacher. That distinction you find recognised in the Epistles, though no attention is drawn to it further in the Gospels after that startling and suggestive statement; but if you take the Pauline epistles you find yourself in quite a different atmosphere from that of the history as told in the Gospels; you find there the name of Christ in a new meaning, a mystical meaning of profoundest import; you find S. Paul declaring that he does not ask to know Him after the flesh, it is the inner Christ he seeks; you find him saying of that mystic Christ that He has to be born in the believer—a statement that could never have been made of the physical body of Jesus. You find him declaring that that mystic birth of the Christ in human souls is to be followed by a growth of the mystic Christ within the believer, until at last he has reached the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ. That is the mystic Christian life, the Christ born in the soul, unfolding His divine powers as the Christian grows in wisdom and in love, showing Himself more and more manifest as the human life unfolds to the divine, until the perfect Christ is manifest and the Son of God is seen again on earth. But that old mystical idea slipped out of the Church teachings, and only remained in the Testament, marked but not understood. And so He who was the inspiring Spirit, the Supreme Teacher, the all-pervading life of His Church, became the outside Saviour, who by a physical sacrifice was said to have made atonement between God and man; and you had a vicarious atonement, a legal substitution, instead of that identity of nature which made the Christ and the believer one. That is the change which came over Christian teaching in those long ages of darkness that followed the vanishing of the Mysteries that had kept the flame of knowledge alive, until there were no longer pupils willing to be taught, and by the absence of the pupils the teachings of the Masters were withdrawn.

So we realise that with the revival in our own days of the mystic teaching and the realisation that there is a life in Christianity which is rightly marked out by that holiest of names, we begin to see in that spreading new life in Christian churches, in the revival of that idea of the possibility of the divine growth in humanity, we see one of the signs of the coming of the Christ, preparatory to His next manifestation upon earth. For it would scarcely have been worth while merely to amuse you for an hour with the story of the past if it did not bear on the present and the future, on the repetition of the old-world tale, of the remanifestation of that mighty Son of God. For that reason, to make, as it were, the gulf less wide between the ordinary thought and the thought of the Occultist, I spoke about the earlier manifestations, marking each successive sub-race of man; and if you have followed along the line of what I have been putting to you Sunday after Sunday of the stage at which the world is standing now, of the transition age in which we are, of the closing age that is passing, of the opening age that is coming, of all the signs which show the ending of the one, of all the signs which show the beginning of the other, then without shock or jar should come to you the present idea that we may well be looking again for a manifestation of the Teacher, the Supreme Teacher of the worlds, who was last manifest as the Christ in Palestine. Let us see what that would mean.

Unless all that I have been telling you during the past five weeks is a mere dream; unless the very facts that I have pointed you to are utterly without significance, you ought almost to have thought yourselves into the point to which I fain would lead you now—that we are on the threshold of a new manifestation, and that the mighty Teacher again will appear as man among men. Now, to say that to any people may only make them think: “But why for us?” So might the Jew have questioned when last He came on earth. That a thing so great, so transcendent, and so rare, should come to earth at any particular time, to be measured by only a few years of mortal time—that that should be now seems too strange, too beautiful, to be true. And yet He came before; why not again? If at the birth of the fifth sub-race, why not at the birth of the sixth? Some must be on earth when any such manifestation takes place; some generation of men and women must be born around the coming of a Christ; and there is no valid reason that any one of you can give why this age should not be such a time, and the people of this age the recipients of the new flood of spiritual life. Strange, because it happens seldom, but sure, because it happened at similar crises in the story of the world; and the strangeness of it does not mark it as untrue when you see the signs of the coming all around you, if your eyes should be open to recognise what they mean. For an expectation is spreading everywhere of the coming of some mighty Teacher, and here and there on earth the expectation has taken voice, nay, has even had a human messenger and herald to proclaim it. In Persia such a messenger came in the one who was called the Bāb, who declared the coming of a mighty one, followed by another said to be yet greater than himself, and yet a third, the Abbas Effendi of the present time, certainly a great spiritual teacher, but one who still declares that the mightiest is yet to come, who is to bind together the eastern and the western worlds.

Not only along that line has this expectation shown itself, but among the people of Islām in a strange combative form, natural to their fighting races, showing itself, therefore, as leader in battle to be ruler in the future; and through Africa you see it in this expectation of the Mahdi, which has given so much trouble during our own time.

I only mention these to show you that the thought is spreading and the expectation growing; for ever the world grows expectant before the mighty One returns to reveal Himself on earth. Such a coming of the Christ the occult world is looking for—for the same great Being who appeared in Palestine, for He is still the Supreme Teacher, the same individual. Who may say what name He will bear? But what is of import to all of us is: Shall we recognise Him when He comes, or shall we be as blind of vision, as hard of heart, as were the Jews among whom His last manifestation occurred? It is so easy for us looking back through the glamour of the centuries in which the great Christian Master has been the head of Christendom, and seen as perfect man with the irradiation also of the Christ upon Him—for the Church has made no distinction between the two all these later years—it is so easy for us to look back through all those centuries and say we should have known Him had we been there. But that has happened so often. Was it not His reproach to the people of His day: “Your fathers slew the prophets, and ye build their sepulchres”? There are always plenty of people ready to rear the sepulchre of honour to the name of the prophet of the past; how few in any age of the world have recognised the prophet of their own day! That is not only true of the Supreme Teacher, but of others a little beyond the knowledge and the power of their own day; ever they have been met with hatred, ever the world has cast them out, has tortured or has slain them. Why should we in our own day, then, be any wiser? Why should the fifth sub-race, the most combative of all the nations, the most critical, the most sceptical, the most unwilling to recognise the higher, the most self-assertive—why should we have eyes open to see a greatness that has never been recognised in the past? That is the problem that may well exercise our minds, in order that we may try to develop in ourselves the power to recognise should He come in our own day. For one great rule runs all through nature: that you can only recognise that to which you can respond. It is true of the outer nature and our physical eyes. We can only see each other because in the retina of the eye there is the ether that answers to the external waves of light. Similarly in moral characteristics, and, above all, in the spiritual nature, we can only recognise in proportion as we reproduce. If in ourselves there is some opening up of the spiritual nature, if in ourselves there are some of the qualities which shine out so gloriously in Him, if in us there is some touch of that nature which in Him has risen to divinity, ah! then it is possible that we may throb responsive to Him when He comes, hidden, as He ever has been, beneath the veil of flesh. But that that may be so we must go outside the thought of our time to that of the time that is coming; not the combativeness of the fifth, but the compassion of the sixth sub-race must find its home in our hearts. And if one may judge from the past, when He comes He may again be despised and rejected of men, for the spiritual ideal is not an ideal to which the heart of our own age quickly responds. You can see it in the characteristics of the Christ: “when He was reviled He reviled not again; when He suffered He threatened not.” But amongst you that would show great poverty of spirit. Not to revile back when you are reviled, in the mind of the modern day, is to mark the reviling as true. That is the spirit of the time. If you are slandered, libelled, abused, go into court and drag the slanderer there; if not, you are guilty. That is the common opinion of the time. One who has learned the lesson of the Christ, who before His accusers answered nothing, that man is condemned by the popular mind of the day. He would answer if he could, because they would answer if they could; but the measure of the Christ is not the measure of those who bear His name in the combative civilisation of the time. And so when He comes again, reviled and slandered as He must be if He be far beyond our knowledge and our understanding, the common verdict will go against Him as it went against Him before. We may not murder; that is too merciful in these modern days. We prefer rather that the victim shall live to be tortured than to give him the mercy of a swift, a ready death.

And so, looking over the world at the moment, there seems little likelihood that when He comes He will be welcome. A few will recognise Him as they ever have done, and maybe, as the characteristics of the coming race are those of spirituality, there will be more to welcome Him, for the spiritual life is spreading to-day, and those who are of the Spirit will know the law of the Spirit; and I would fain leave you with the thought to-night that that is a truth, that the Supreme Teacher will again ere very long be incarnate upon earth, again made manifest as Teacher, again walking and living amongst us as last He walked in Palestine. Splendid as is the hope, mighty as is the inspiration, there is nothing too glorious to be possible for the ever-unfolding Spirit in man, and the hope of to-day is that that spirit is spreading, despite the characteristics of our time; that men are becoming more liberal, more tolerant, more ready to recognise that which is true and just. And it may well be that we have reached such a time of evolution that the popular mind of the day will be transcended by large numbers of the more spiritually minded, and that when He comes again He will be able to stay amongst us more than the three brief years that marked His last ministry. That, then, is the word, the thought I leave with you: to develop in yourselves the Spirit of the Christ, and then at His coming you shall recognise His beauty. Learn compassion, learn tenderness, learn good thoughts of others rather than evil, learn to be tender with the weak, learn to be reverent to the great; and if you can develop those qualities in you, then the coming Christ may be able to number you among His disciples, and the welcome that the earth shall give Him shall not again be a cross.

Lecture VII The Larger Consciousness and its Value

Friends: During the whole of the lectures, of which the discourse of to-night is the last, I have taken for granted the existence of a larger consciousness in man than that which we know at the present time as our physical or waking consciousness. Over and over again I have had occasion to allude to it, once or twice I dwelt for a few moments upon it, but I could not interrupt the course of what I had been putting to you by any detailed description of the larger consciousness, or of the instruments of that consciousness, the body or bodies of man. It seemed to me that the work I had been trying to do would remain somewhat imperfect unless I tried to place before you, ere quitting the subjects I had been dealing with, something with regard to this larger consciousness in man; a consciousness which exists in every one of us; which functions intermittently in all of us; which is in course of unfolding in humanity at the present time. And side by side with the unfolding of the consciousness there goes a continual evolution of the bodies in which that consciousness expresses itself, and it is that subject that I want to deal with to-night, trying to put before you clearly and definitely the theory which is studied by Theosophists with regard to this matter, a theory which some of us have proved to be true by our own investigations, and—which is a far more important thing—confirmed by the great Scriptures of the world’s religions, the testimony which has been given to man by seers, by prophets of the highest, the most inspired, order. Sometimes we are inclined to lay more stress on contemporary evidence than on the evidence that comes from the great Scriptures of the world. It seems to me as though that were a little along the line of hiding the sun by holding a plate quite close to the eyes. For it is quite clear, when you come to think of it, that testimony which may be given nowadays by half-developed students cannot in the nature of things be nearly as valuable as that of the great prophets and seers of humanity, embodied, however mystically and allegorically, in the great Bibles of humanity. In fact, the testimony of the modern-day investigator should be checked and governed by those mightier and wider revelations, and it is always a point of satisfaction, a point of confirmation to the modern and partially developed seer when he finds that his own investigations throw light on some of the statements of these Scriptures, and that the Bibles of the race become more illuminating in some of their obscurer passages by the light that he may have been able to gain by his own investigations. I am not, then, pretending for one moment that anything I put to you now is comparable in value with what you might find out for yourselves, if spiritually illuminated, in these great Bibles of religions. But I do think that the investigations of to-day help us to understand those great revelations, though much that is there said is necessarily obscure to us because of the immense difference in knowledge between the speaker and the student; therefore, though we may call our knowledge to-day a farthing light, it may be of value in the deciphering of these great manuscripts of the past, so that even a little knowledge of our own may enable us to go more deeply into those great wells of truth which have come down to us from antiquity, which have been given to us by the Saviours of the world.

In order to make what I have to say clear to you, I shall have to ask you to pardon me if I go in the beginning a little into definition and detail. If you want to study your own body, comparatively simple as that is, you must be willing to learn the difference between a bone and a nerve, between an artery and a vein, and so on through the whole of the more or less familiar terms which the physiologist uses in explaining the anatomy and the physiology of the body. No person can have clear and definite ideas if he is not willing to study the mere nomenclature of that which he wishes to understand; and while it is quite possible to avoid using words of other languages, it is not possible to avoid some demand on the consecutive thought-power of the student if he desires to be anything more than a mere superficial hearer, without any definite understanding of the subjects which he supposes himself to be studying. There is a very good and simple description of man’s constitution in one of the Pauline epistles, where a triple division is given, and a perfectly accurate division, although subdivisions again are possible and practicable; but for my purposes now that division into three, and then certain subdivisions of each, will be sufficient to give you a very clear and definite idea of consciousness in man; and then by your own experience you can decide how much of the larger consciousness comes into your waking consciousness, or how much of you is still without vehicle of expression, still without the power of manifesting in worlds related to our own.

That division, as all of you will at once know, is Spirit, Soul, Body. It is curious how indefinite the mass of Christian people are with regard to the meaning of the first two terms, Spirit and Soul. I am not quarreling with the fact that different definitions may sometimes be given; I am quarrelling with the fact that most Christians have no definition at all; that they use the words interchangeably; that they constantly talk of man as a duality, always using the word body; sometimes using the word Spirit, and sometimes soul, for all that which they exclude from the body. Thus you hear people talking about spirits manifesting in various ways; sometimes you hear about the human soul and its immortality, and so on. But a clear, distinct definition of what is Spirit, what is soul—that for the most part is wanting among even the students of theology. Let us see if it be not possible to define them in a way which may at least be clear. You may, of course, differ with the division for the reason that you may think some other dividing line is better; I am concerned chiefly, for the moment, with giving you a clear definition, and then you may correct or amend it according to your own thought or your own knowledge. The definition will, of course, govern me in all that I say to-night. First of all, then: What is Spirit? Spirit is a germ of Divinity unfolding itself gradually in human evolution, appropriating certain kinds of matter which it gradually organises into an instrument for self-expression—we may shorten that by saying a germ of Divinity encased in matter. That germ of Divinity, as you might naturally expect, shows out in itself the triple division of its Divine parent. Just as you find God, manifesting in a universe, ever manifesting three supreme attributes, sometimes personified into what is called a Trinity, so you would naturally expect to find in the germ that which you find in the parent—that the triple nature of Divinity should show itself out in the triple nature of the Spirit which is man. And that is so. You find Spirit showing itself forth in full Divinity, taking for a moment the Christian names as most familiar, in the form of Power in the Father, in the form of Wisdom in the Son, in the form of creative Activity in the Holy Spirit. If you will take those names for the time as being most familiar to your own thought, and therefore introducing nothing of difficulty to you—if you will remember those accepted ideas for the time, and translate them into terms of consciousness, limited, because these are not all fully unfolded in man, you will be able readily to distinguish in man’s spiritual nature, and even more distinctly for the moment in the lower reflexion of that with which I will deal presently—you will be able to distinguish the threefold division, and so to obtain, as it were, a clear picture of your own spiritual nature. That which in Divinity we call Power, the Will by which the worlds exist, shows itself out in our own spiritual nature as Will. The Wisdom which upholds the worlds shows itself out in the human Spirit also as the pure and compassionate Reason, which is the Wisdom, the Christ, in man. The third, creative Activity, shows itself in intellect, the highest, the noblest form of creative Activity—the intellect, the pure intellect in man is the third reflexion in man of the creative Activity of God. And if you link what may be less familiar with the familiar, it will be very easy for you to keep the thread of that which I desire to put before you. Think first of all, then, that the Spirit, the germ of Divinity in man, has to show out in the gradual unfolding of its hidden powers these three supreme attributes with which you are familiar in the thought of Divinity itself.

Then, passing from that highest part of our nature to what S. Paul calls the soul, what is the Soul in relation to the Spirit? It is the temporary reflexion in grosser matter of the eternal Spirit; the image of that which is the eternal object; the reflexion in the mirror of a world of that eternal life which passes from world to world, unfolding, but is never subject to the transitoriness which marks the ever-changing worlds. The soul in man is the Spirit working in grosser matter; and hence in our own natures, so familiar to us—for now we come into a region that psychological science deals with and tries to define and understand—we have, when we look at our own consciousness, the soul, the reflexion of the Spirit in grosser matter. We have the mind reflecting the pure intellect with all its activities—imagination, judgement, reason—all these powers of the mind. Then we find a part of our nature that we call the emotional; there we have the reflexion of that pure and compassionate Wisdom that I spoke of which shows itself in the lower worlds by Love, the highest and loftiest of the emotions, the root whence all virtues spring. For the same principle of unity which expresses itself as Wisdom in the spiritual world expresses itself as Love, which draws the separated lives together in the world where matter has overcome Spirit, where Spirit is blinded by matter. The unity that the Spirit knows the soul seeks by Love, which is the attribute that draws toward unity, and that which in the spiritual world is known, in the lower world is sought by this exquisite attribute of the soul. And that which in the higher world we call Will becomes Desire in the lower. For the difference between Will and Desire is that Will is self-determined, whereas Desire is determined by the attractiveness of objects outside the consciousness. You are moved by Desire when some pleasure attracts you, some pain repels you, when your activity goes along the road that is determined by an outer attraction, an outer repulsion; you are moved by Will, the spiritual attribute, when the whole of your inner nature, drawn up to a single point, self-determined, sends that nature along the road that within yourself you have chosen, whether it leads to pleasure or pain, whether it leads to gain or loss in the lower world. Will is determined from the spiritual Self; Desire is guided and stimulated by objects in the lower world. Hence that which is Will in the Spirit is Desire in the soul. And so you find the soul represented by these three well-known attributes: Mind, with all its powers; Emotion, the root emotion being love; Desire, the reflexion of the determining power in this lower world.

When you come down into everyday life you find the whole of these make up your waking consciousness, showing itself out in the denser matter of the brain; in your waking consciousness you know the working of the mind; in your waking consciousness you know the working of the emotions; in your waking consciousness you know the working of desire; so that the waking consciousness, the limited, the conditioned, the smaller consciousness, is that which is within the limitations of your brain or physical body, but is none other than the larger consciousness which shows itself in the subtler worlds as soul, in the spiritual world as Spirit. If you realise clearly that outlining, with its subdivisions, you will find that consciousness is a unit, and the differences are differences of the material in which it is working rather than in itself. The triple division is the only one, whether you look at it in the brain, in the subtle body, in the matter of the world where the Spirit rules. Everywhere consciousness is one, expressing itself in three modes, by three qualities, but everywhere a unit, yourself, the reality within you.

What is Body? For there is a third factor in S. Paul’s definition of man. Naturally the body also has in it the same triple differentiation as the consciousness. And so we find a spiritual body, the clothing of the Spirit in the highest worlds of consciousness. We find also what S. Paul, again, calls a natural body. There is a natural body, he says, and there is a spiritual body. But that natural body divides itself into two—the subtle body in which the soul is working; the dense body in which the waking consciousness is working, the reflexion of the highest. Those two naturally go together, and might well be classed roughly as the single natural body, for it is transitory, impermanent, belongs to the three worlds of change—the physical world, the intermediate, and the heavenly; has a certain life through which it passes in the three worlds, and then gives back its elements to the worlds to which they respectively belong. Whereas the spiritual body is a relatively permanent thing, lasts through the whole of the long life of the individual, passes through birth after birth, death after death, knows neither birth nor death in its own nature, passes through them, but is not affected by them—the spiritual individuality, the real man, is eternal in his own nature, and has a permanent clothing of the matter of the spiritual world, unfolding his powers, organising his matter, but remaining ever the same in essence, the consciousness ever living in those worlds, the matter the same, only becoming more and more definitely organised. In that spiritual body remains the memory of all the experiences through which you have passed; in that spiritual body resides your true individuality, that knows neither birth nor death; in that spiritual body which is ever yours all the experiences of the past are gathered up, and part of those experiences is put forth, birth after birth, in order that the soul may clothe itself in new bodies for new experiences and new developments. So that the part of you that lasts is the Spirit in the spiritual body; the part of you that changes, the soul in the temporary body, whether you take the subtler or the denser parts.

Supposing you accept that definition of man in his triple division, it will be easy enough then to follow out step by step what the higher consciousness is as apart from the lower, the larger as apart from the smaller. You will start with the great conception of a living Spirit coming down into denser and denser matter, with the object of acquiring that matter and subduing it to his own purposes, appropriating it, wrapping himself up in it, and temporarily blinded by the veil, but a veil that he is going to turn into an instrument, so that by it he may know all the worlds, and come into contact with every portion of the universe. For that he appropriates the matter of every world; for that he wraps himself round in these material garments; and working upon these, he turns them to his own purposes, shapes them by his own will, moulds them in order that he may use them for that which he desires to effect—contact with matter, the condition of his becoming master of the worlds; and by making matter his servant and his instrument, all the worlds become open before him, and he can function in any one of them. That the pure spiritual being cannot do. He can only function in worlds of the Spirit, those lofty eternal regions where Divinity itself resides and manifests without the blinding effect of the denser matter that we wear. But just as Divinity emanates these coarser forms of matter in order that the spiritual germs may be sown therein, and therein gain the experience by which their powers will be unfolded from within; just as Deity is manifest in matter, so must the germs of Deity grow therein, until matter is subject to them as it is to the Father of light, whence they come.