On Karma
by Annie Besant
A lecture to the Glasgow Lodge,
T.S.
Published in 1921
Theosophical Publishing House,
Adyar, Chennai [Madras] India
The Theosophist Office, Adyar,
Madras. India
FRIENDS,
[Page 1] Wondering what I
should say to you this evening —being specially a members' meeting — I asked
Mr. Graham Pole, who was lately in Paris when I went there, and he suggested
that I might take up one of the subjects that I dealt with at a members' meeting
there — the ever-fresh subject of Karma, put in a way which may, perhaps,
enable some of you to understand better the underlying principle, and so to
answer for yourselves the questions that arise when you are dealing with
special applications of the law.
It has very often seemed to me
that students are too much inclined to study details, each by itself, and so
they become entangled in really an infinite series of details, each one of
which has to be dealt with separately, and there is no end to it. If, instead
of doing that, the serious students amongst you would try rather to grasp the
principle, and then, having grasped it, apply it to any new detail that may
arise, I think you would discover that you know very much [Page 2] more than
you think you know, and that you could answer for yourselves the questions that
you very often put to those whom you believe to be more learned students than
yourselves. It is much easier to see the relations of complicated attachments
when you look at them from the centre, than when you try to study them from the
circumference. If you can stand in the centre and look over the whole field,
you can then see, generally, the relations that exist between the different
parts; but if you stand at the circumference and see only a little bit of that,
and then a mere tangle stretching from every side to the centre, you are very
little likely, I think, to reach satisfactory conclusions, and you will remain
more or less in a muddle, as to how the great principles that you recognise
work, when they are manifested in the world. This seems especially the case
with Karma.
The particular question that
was put to me in Paris as a subject for my talk was: " When did individual
Karma begin ? " and if people start with that kind of question, and ask
other questions of a similar nature, they may, I think, ask for the rest of
their lives and never be very much wiser. If, on the other hand, they would try
to see "Karma" as part of a universal law, special expressions of a
law which everywhere is found, part of the whole mechanism of the universe,
existing from the beginning of the universe so far as manifestation is
concerned, and existing always as part of universal nature, [Page 3] then,
studying it from that standpoint, they would be able, I think, to get a clear
view of the principle involved, and then proceed at leisure, when any
particular detail turns up, to apply the principle to the explanation of that
special fact.
Now, it seems to me that the
first fundamental thing to understand about Karma is that it has no beginning
and, therefore, that any attempt to find out a beginning for Karma is hopeless.
You may find out beginnings in a particular universe, and endings in a
particular universe. You may take up any fragment that you choose to separate
off from the rest of existence and, as regards that fragment, you can find
beginning and ending; but when you are dealing with Karma you are dealing with
a great principle, a universal principle, which has neither beginning nor
ending, which cannot be spoken of as though it were a thing, or an object, with
certain lines which limit it. You have to think of it as a principle in the
divine nature and to begin your study, I think, in trying to realise to some
extent how things exist in the divine mind; the conditions of such existence
and the inevitable differences which accrue when they pass out of the divine
mind into manifestation; the conditions according to which manifestation takes
place; the space and the time necessary for a manifested universe, but
non-existent in what the Greeks used to call the intelligible world, from which
any special universe is derived or reflected. [Page 4].
Now, think for a moment along
what people call metaphysical lines. Realise that existence always is, and that
any particular mode of existence, any particular thing, always has existed and
always will exist — not always in manifestation but always in potentiality —
and that it is literally true, that which was laid down by one of the great
Musalmãn doctors in the ninth or tenth century, that everything that can ever
come into existence, everything that has been in existence, or that has any
possibility of existence, always is in the divine eternity. It is put in quite
another way in a verse in the Bhagavad-Gîtã: "The unreal has no existence;
the real never ceaseth to be". And if you can think that out, you have the
key to many a problem concerning Karma. In the divine mind exist as
thought-forms every possibility of existence, always there, owing their being
to God Himself and sharing His eternity. That which He thinks is the stuff out
of which universes are made. One portion of these thoughts of His may come out
for one universe, another portion for another universe, but in Him and in His
eternity they are ever-existent and everpresent. And, by virtue that they are
all the thought-forms of His mind, generated, if one may use the phrase, in
eternity, by that mind — in that fact is implied the interrelation between
every one of them, all of them being related to each and each to all, by virtue
of that unity of life in which they ever exist. You cannot separate [Page 5]
off one from the rest, nor from any other. You cannot take one as an isolated
thing out of relation to all else. They all exist in relation, in interdependence,
in interrelation, in that divine intelligible world, and that is the source of
all manifested existences. They only are, because they are in God. In His
eternal thought they exist; from that they draw their life. And you want, if
you can, to dwell on that thought until it has become part of your mental
machinery — the realisation, as to beginnings and endings, that these belong to
our limited minds, existing under the conditions of space and time. These
limitations do not, cannot, exist in the universal consciousness where there
is, literally, always the All.
You know people often get into
a muddle — to take a rather side-issue for the moment—when they say: "Why
should the universe exist ?" because they imply that there was a time when
the totality of universes was not, and that God brought it into existence; and
then they necessarily muddle themselves up with the idea of the everlasting —
which is not at all the same as the eternal — and they get into that position
in which Shelley was when he wrote: "Out of an eternity of idleness, I,
God, awoke" — a misconception. If you are thinking of God as the
ever-existing — and no other thought of Him is possible — for that which was
brought into existence would again need something behind it; it is only the [Page
6] Self-existent which is eternal — unless you think of God in that way the
whole conception becomes impossible; if you think of Him as existing ever,
doing nothing, thinking nothing, and suddenly beginning to think and to bring
universes into being, you find yourselves tangled up with all sorts of
impossibilities and inconceivabilities. If you think of Him as the
Ever-Existent, in whom there is all, literally all — all that can be as well as
all that has been — then you at least have an intelligible conception from
which you can go out and understand, very dimly, something of what are often
called the mysteries of the existence of universes. Every universe that can be,
is, already. In manifestation it only becomes what we call objective; that is,
to our minds it becomes a visible, tangible thing. But our minds, again, are
but the thought-forms in the divine mind. There is nothing but He, and that is
the fundamental idea that you want to grasp. He may manifest; He may show parts
of Himself to other parts of Himself. But He, the Selfexistent, is the All,
outside of whom there is nothing — there is no outside. So that you can no more
say: "Why should there be a
universe ?" than: "Why should there not be a universe ? " That
which always is does not need explanation; that it is, is all that can be said
of it. Reasons only become necessary when you have come into the realm of
succession, of one thing following upon another, and then you at once begin to
ask why and how. But for that which [Page 7] ever is, the totality of existence
in the fullest sense of the term, for that there is no reason; it needs no
reason; it always is. And that idea of Self-existence has to be grasped,
otherwise you will be continually asking questions for which there is no
answer; and it is only in realising that tremendous conception of
Ever-Existence that then the partial existences become relatively intelligible.
When a universe comes forth into manifestation, then two conditions must ever
be present — space, or distance between objects; time, succession of states of
consciousness by which objects are recognised.
That is all time is. It is only
a succession of states of consciousness, or of conscious being, if you prefer
the phrase. You will very soon realise that, if you look a little into the
measures of time that you have in your waking consciousness and that you have
in your dream consciousness, There is no objective time by which you can
measure either of these. In your waking consciousness you have certain definite
successions. In your dream consciousness you also have successions; but the
time-measure is completely different, as we have been shown by very numerous
experiments. Take those numerous cases of dream instigated by a touch from
outside, a touch on the body. Probably you have read many of these in Du Prel's
Philosophy of Mysticism. He gives a large number of them. Let me recall just
one to remind you of the nature of these experiments. A man had a touch, either
by the [Page 8] finger or a knife on the back of the neck, and it woke him. He
was asked whether he had dreamed and if so, what ? The answer was that he had
dreamed that he had fought a duel, and he had killed his opponent; that he was
arrested and tried for murder. He went through the whole scene of his trial in court
before the judge, counsels found guilty and was condemned to die. He was taken
away to the condemned cell, and went through I forget how many days between the
sentence and the execution. He was led out to the guillotine, the knife fell
upon his neck — and he awoke.
Now there you have incidents,
certainly extending over what we should call two or three weeks, in the
fraction of a minute which intervened between the touch on the back of his neck
and his being awakened by that touch, the whole of that compressed in the
states of consciousness of the man in the dream state.
There are a great many cases of
that kind in which the person has always been awakened by the thing which
generated the dream, so that in every case you only have the fraction of a
minute in which all these states of consciousness succeed each other. It has
been made one of the arguments, you know, for the activity of consciousness in
other states of matter than the physical — matter clearly very much finer, able
to vibrate very much more rapidly than physical matter, and so responding to
these moods of consciousness, these changes, with what we should [Page 9] call
enormously increased rapidity. An argument has been founded on that for the
immortality of the soul, or, at least, for the persistence of the soul on the
other side of death.
Now the moment you realise that
and assimilate the results of the many experiments which have taken place along
these lines, you will begin to understand what is meant when the metaphysician
says that time is only a succession of states of consciousness. Time, for you,
is the order in which you perceive the objects amidst which you are living and
it has been compared, I think quite well — the existence of a universe — to a
picture gallery, or a gallery of statuary. All the statues are there, but they
only come into your sight at night-time as you go about with a lantern. As the
light of the lantern falls on the statue, that statue, to you, comes within
your consciousness. When the light of the lantern goes from it, the statue
vanishes out of your consciousness; but it is the light of the lantern that
enables you to see it. The statue is changed in no way. And so with all
objects. Always they are there, existing; we see them in succession, we, as it
were, moving about in what for the moment we might call a stationary universe;
the whole of the universe being the ever-present, but we moving through that,
so that one thing comes into our consciousness after another — we call that a
succession of events; it is really a succession of changes of consciousness.
[Page 10] I do not know whether you will think me perfectly mad if I just
mention one thing to you, but it has a great bearing on a Christian doctrine
which is very much discussed and always discussed on wrong lines — the
forgiveness of sins.
The particular danger of your
thinking me a lunatic is the statement that the past can be altered, and that
what you are now influences what you were in the past. I am aware that it
sounds perfectly cracked, but it is not so, because there is neither past nor
future. You are an everpresent fact, an ever-present consciousness, and what
you are now as much conditions what you were in Atlantis, as what you were in
Atlantis conditions what you are now. It is possible to catch a glimpse — only
a glimpse of course — of the mind of the LOGOS, so as to see that past,
present, and future are only our names for our successions of states of
consciousness, and that none of them have any real existence; that it is always
"ourselves" and always "now"; hence that the future affects
the past backwards as much as the past affects the future forwards; and if you
have the patience to try to think that out, without standing on your heads, you
will find there is no real difficulty in it. You have to get a little outside
your consciousness; and there comes in the difficulty, because you are always
working under the forms of thought with which you are familiar, and you have to
take yourself out of that, and, by a great effort of the imagination, imagine
everything as present all [Page 11] together, interrelated; and then you will
have hold of a very real idea, and then you will have a glimpse of what is
meant by the forgiveness of sins. It is a getting rid of the cause, not a
getting rid of the effect, the annihilation, so to speak, of that which
produced the attitude of mind that you call sin. I do not in the least expect
that you will really understand what I am saying at the moment, but, I
think, if you think it over, you will catch a certain understanding of it. It
is difficult to think it in the physical brain. But it is just possible to get
a little out of the physical brain, and catch glimpses of things that through
the brain you cannot see. The only thing is, if you try to do it, do not try to
do it for long together, because the strain on the physical matter of the brain
is too great. You should only try to do it for a very short time; then come
back to your normal way of thinking; and if it causes the least dullness or
pain in the brain, drop it, because it means that your brain is not yet ready
to undergo that strain. Physically, it means that you are trying to force the
life of the Spirit through another set of spirillae in the physical atom, and
that can only be done with great care and caution, otherwise you will injure
your brain. That, as I said, is rather a side-issue.
Now let me come back to the
central idea. I ask you to take for granted for the moment that all the objects
in a given universe, existing as thought-forms [Page 12] in the divine mind,
are interrelated.
Imagine those put forth into
manifestation under the laws of space and time, and you will see then that the
interrelations that exist in the mind become successions under the condition of
time. "All these lines that you may think of, which join together the
thought-forms of the LOGOS in an immense web, as it were — which is a universe
— as the things are drawn out, become successions; and the Karma that is
eternal is the link in the divine thought between all the thought-forms that He
puts forth as a universe; and Karma, in time, is the succession of these — the
principle of causation, as we call it, when one follows another in a definite
order, meaning only that they are interlinked in the divine mind, and therefore
are interlinked down here; only we see them in a succession, where the LOGOS
would see them simultaneously. If you work in that way, you will see that Karma
never begins; it only manifests when the conditions for its manifestation are
present. Like any other law in nature, it will always be seen working where the
conditions for its working are present. The conditions do not create the law,
but the law manifests only when the conditions are present. The principle of
the law is ever-existing. The manifestation of the law in time comes whenever
the conditions are there which enable that principle to show itself out.
And so with Karma. It has no
beginning, but you have local and temporary manifestations of that [Page 13]
eternal principle wherever the objects, ever related to each other in the
divine consciousness, become related to each other in their own consciousness,
as being present side by side, before and after. Now apply that to the
manifestation of the Monad. The Monad lives in the eternal, beyond the limitation
of our fivefold universe, in the second of those divine worlds, the two divine
worlds which make up the seven of our universe — only five are manifested, the
other two are divine. The Monads are part of the LOGOS, inseparable from Him,
part of His consciousness, so that the Will and the Awareness and the Creative
Intelligence of these are part of God Himself and therefore, on that plane,
unlimited. The LOGOS wills to manifest the universe. The Monads will to act in
that universe. There is only one Will. We speak of God and the Monads. But the
Monads are part of God. What He wills they will. He wills manifestation; they
will it. And so they draw to themselves, as you know, the atoms of matter that
we call the permanent atoms, and that is the beginning of manifestation in this
special universe, when these atoms are appropriated by the Monad. And he and
his atoms in all the worlds of the manifested universe are separated from all
other Monads and all other appropriated atoms. This great mass of Spirits, as we
call them — for the Monad really is a Spirit the moment he has taken to himself
these atoms of matter — they are all separated from each [Page 14] other by
virtue of the separation of the matter to which each fragment of divinity is
linked, and the separation lies in those atoms. The moment those are
appropriated — the beginning of manifestation — that moment each Monad has his
own set of atoms which he is going to keep with him through the whole of that
universe, unless he chooses to return, as it were, to throw them aside of his
own will, and realise only his unity with God.
That is the next great thought
you want to get hold of, because you are identifying yourself with what you
call the individual, that is, the causal body with the ego-consciousness within
it, which is only one manifestation of individuality. The true individual is
the Monad himself with his atoms; nothing less — the Self. And you get into
many tangles when you begin your individuality in the middle of manifestation.
I know we have all done it, and we have all found the difficulty which comes
out of it, the difficulty which has made Western people so entirely
misunderstand the Hindû and Buddhist ideas of Nirvãna. The individual who
begins, ceases; all that has a beginning has an end. To use the old argument,
you cannot have a stick with one end. The moment you have a stick, you have two
ends. The moment you have one end, you have another end. If you think of
yourself as beginning with the ego-individual, you must come to an end as an ego-individual;
and there is where our Orientalists [Page 15] get into such a muddle about
Nirvãna. They see quite clearly that that which began in time must end in time,
and so they thought that Nirvãna meant annihilation. They did not realise that
from the Hindû and the Buddhist standpoint, existence, which always is, cannot
end, and that they are part of that, and that the manifestation in time — this
appropriation of matter and so on, necessary for the separation — is only the
manifestation of a supreme Individuality which takes these atoms for a local
and temporary expression of himself for gaining as much knowledge as he wants,
for obtaining freedom under certain conditions in which he chooses to work; and
that, as the Lord Buddha has said, if there had not been the uncreated and the
eternal, the created and the temporary could not exist. We begin by thinking of
the created and the temporary, and then get into confusion as to our own fate
when we leave these things to which we cling.
If we began in the Eastern way,
by thinking of the eternal as the source of the temporary, the uncreated as the
source of the created, then we should realise that the temporary and the
created might disappear, but we ourselves should remain. There is a splendid
verse, in the Hebrew Apocrypha, of the Book of Wisdom: "God created man in
the image of His own eternity" — a thoroughly Eastern thought. And that
image, that reproduction of the divine existence, can never cease to be. He may
lose one sheath after another; [Page 16] he may fling aside one garment after
another; but he himself is always there, and the ego in the causal body is only
a temporary expression of that supreme eternal Self which is your real life.
There lies your memory, which
gives the sense of identity. You do not begin your sense of identity with the
ego. You may imagine that from the statement of the Lord Buddha when He spoke
of the time when He was a tiger, which was before He was individualised as man;
and that came out very strongly, as far as we were concerned ourselves, in the
researches which are embodied now in Man. We found to our astonishment — at
first we felt rather stupefied by it — that we could find ourselves in the
mineral kingdom; and to find yourself as a mineral, when you had always thought
of the ego as beginning with the third wave and the individuality, such
individualisation was rather a shock; and yet we, who were doing those
investigations, found ourselves in different minerals, quite separated from
each other, with a consciousness which was the same consciousness as that now
living in these bodies — realised as the same by the sense of identity, the
memory, which is quite different from looking at the thing from the outside.
You know yourself to be the same consciousness as you were as a child, because
you remember; and the ego of the child is known in your consciousness to be
identical with your ego now — I do not mean identical in extent; you may have
drawn [Page 17] more into it than you had in it when you were a child
consciously — but you know it is yourself. Nothing would persuade you that
yourself as a child was not yourself, not the same you, that is now existing;
and it is that sense of individual identity which remains through all changes
and which enabled us to find ourselves in those ridiculous minerals which we
were simply studying from the outside.
Well, when we came to reason
about it, we saw how perfectly sensible it was. As Monads we had
appropriated atoms. Those atoms were plunged into the mineral kingdom; and the
Monad and his consciousness, and his putting of his consciousness into these
atoms, made a perfectly intelligible procedure. We did not have to break off
anywhere, or trouble about the formation of individuals and so on, but only the
consciousness gradually appropriating more and more matter, through which it
could express more of itself than it could in its earliest experiments.
Certainly consciousness in the mineral was a very feeble thing in its
self-expression, frustrated, held back, imprisoned, as it were, in this matter
into which it was pushed, unable to express itself through it for the time,
except by a dull groping — which was a very peculiar condition of consciousness
to find yourself in, groping vaguely after something, you did not know what,
and yet, as it were, trying to push upwards, to unfold outwards, and unable to
do it.
Tracing this consciousness
onwards, always clinging, you see, [Page 18] to the permanent atoms, which are
the only connecting link you can get, you can trace it through the vegetable
kingdom into the animal kingdom, through the animal up into the human; and
there comes a certain point in that in which an exceedingly interesting change
takes place, which we call individualisation.
But now think for a moment what
lives — streams of life I had better say — are present just before
individualisation takes place. There is the stream of life in the atoms—a very
undeveloped form of life as expressed in the life of the atoms — which is
that of the Third Logos — the Holy Spirit, as the Christian would say. That is
one stream. Then you come to the stream of the life of the Second Logos, which
has come downwards through the matter of the universe built up by the Third,
giving to that matter qualities; that is, putting it into mechanical terms,
powers of vibration — these powers of vibration being imposed by Him on the matter
by His own changes of consciousness, each change of consciousness in the Logos
being answered by a vibration in the matter around Him. Now the Hindûs use a
very good phrase for that fact. They call it "the measure of that",
the extent, as it were, of a mode of divine consciousness. It is that which
makes the essence of the atoms, all the way down through all the planes, and
then, when the Second Logos pours His life over all [Page 19] these formed
atoms and aggregations of atoms, then He imposes upon them a number of
qualities in which all the separate vibrations are, as it were, grouped
together and made to answer either to will, or to awareness of an outer world,
or to creative intelligence — activity, that is — and these qualities, imposed
upon matter, are imposed first on the permanent atoms — the ãtmic and the
buddhic and the mãnasic — and then, later on, imposed on the mental unit and
the astral atom and the physical atom, which are really the lower expressions
of the three higher. Now the Second Logos does not work in those three higher
atoms, but leaves them for the time, and He goes on working in the mental unit
and the two lower atoms, related by the link of life to the higher, but not
otherwise played upon. The Monad himself cannot at this stage play upon those
atoms, those lower atoms; he can only play upon the higher. The life of the
Second Logos invigorates these and gives them their characteristics, and
finally, in the upward arc, begins to build them into bodies, and through the
bodies the qualities of the permanent atoms are expressed. When that has grown
up to a certain point of development through the help of the group soul, which
is part of the Second Logos, from that group soul these lower atoms are plunged
down into matter. When death comes they are pulled back again into the group
soul, but these permanent atoms never change their attachment.[Page 20] They
come out over and over again. There is a definite linking of all their
experiences, the difference between that and the more separate individuality of
the later life being that when these permanent atoms are drawn back into the
group soul they distribute all their experiences, that is, all their powers of
vibration, through the whole matter of the group soul so that all have a share in
it. But your line of individuality is always there all the same. The set of
atoms are never separated the one from the other, from the first moment the
Monad appropriated them in the beginning of manifestation — and so, climbing
upwards with the divisions of the group soul going on over and over again, with
fewer strings of permanent atoms connected with each subdivision as the
subdivisions proceed, until at last there is only a fragment of group soul with
one set of atoms.
Now in those there is every possibility
of all future evolution. The life of the Logos is there, but instead
of allowing these possibilities to unfold themselves from below, as they
ultimately might have done, the Monad pours down his life, stimulated by
the first Logos, from above, as we say — above and below are
meaningless—the germinal line
in the ascending life is stimulated by the mãnasic qualities of the higher, the
reproduced aspect of the Monad of creative activity, and that approach of the
one to the other, that H. P. B. once called " Heaven and earth kissing
each other", causes that union [Page 21] between the fragment of the group
soul and the matter of the higher mental plane which makes what we call the
causal body, always formed, you know, in a flash. The descent of the one and
the ascent of the other reach a point where they affect each other, and then
the flash takes place. And if you have read the ways of individualisation, you
may remember that it was always the upreaching from below that caused the
little stir in the matter of the subtler plane; that, in that plane, whilst yet
there was no form there, no causal body, there was a little stir in the matter
near the permanent atom, caused by the condition of the permanent atom in the
lower world, and that little response it was which made the flash of
individualisation. And so you get what we call the three right ways, all based
on love — love which showed itself in action on the physical plane, stirred the
ãtmic matter and made the response from the ãtmic plane; love, inspired by
devotion to a superior, not showing . itself in act but showing itself in pure
emotion, brought the response from the buddhic plane, and individualisation
from that; love on the lower mental plane, trying to understand the object of
devotion, brought the response from the intelligence, the higher mãnasic plane,
and so you had these three methods, all of which we call light methods, you may
remember. But then there were three other ways — wrong ways — which had their
roots; two of them in selfishness, and one of them in hatred. [Page 22] You
cannot have read that without asking why, in a world of justice, one set of
individualisations should have taken place along the wrong lines, while others
took place along the right lines; for it governs the whole life. The whole life
connected with the causal body is conditioned by the method of
individualisation, and if there was no karma behind it, that would be a very
terrible thing, just as terrible as the man in the slum and the man in the
palace, if they only had the one life and were newly created in these two
positions. People do not seem to have troubled to go behind that, and yet it is
obvious you must go behind it. And there must have been a karma present there,
which brought about that difference of way. Now I can only throw out a
suggestion; although I am fairly sure it is accurate, yet I do not know whether
it is one that will recommend itself to you. It is that this is not the first
time that we come into a universe; that those other ways, which we call the
wrong, had been experienced by us in some previous universe altogether, and had
been lived through, and we learned what they had to teach; and that then,
coming into another universe, we differed from those who were only beginning
their separate life in this one, and with that experience behind us, we went
along the good ways, having learned by experience the lessons of the others. I
know that to some people that idea will be very unwelcome. I was talking over
it with a member the other day and he said: [Page 23] "Do you mean that we
may some day have to go back into a mineral in a universe ?" I replied
dryly: "Why not ?" — to this member's horror. It is not the form we
wear that matters. It is the amount of consciousness in ourselves.
And you have to transfer your
sense of individuality to the Spirit, and not keep it, clinging to the bodies,
as we mostly do. As a matter of fact, you have to realise that to the Spirit
all these different forms are of exceedingly small importance, simply ways of
gathering experience; and provided he is gathering experience that makes the
content of the Spirit fuller and greater, it does not matter to him whether he
is a mineral, vegetable, animal, or man. They are all stages; but the content
of the Spirit would be very much greater, when taking up the mineral form for
the helping of evolution, after you had gone through your present experiences.
You would not lose these, and you would not lose yourself; yourself, you can
never lose. The more highly you are evolved, the less do you care about the
special form which, for the time, you take, in order that you may enrich your
consciousness with an expression which you see will be valuable to it.
I know I am taking you into
rather deep waters this evening, but it is all the fault of your General
Secretary; and he heard me talk about this in French when I was in Paris, so he
ought not to mind my talking about it in English here.[Page 24] It is along
these lines of close, careful thinking, in which you try to identify yourself
with your real Self — the Spirit, the eternal mind — that gradually, although
slowly, there grows upon you a sense that nothing of the outer matters, except
as it can be used for the enrichment of the content of the Spirit, your real
Self, the one true consciousness. What you gain by each experience is more
power to subdue matter to your own purposes; and there was one very curious
difference that we noticed at the time — though I did not then think of it
along these lines — in the different consciousnesses in the mineral kingdom.
Some of those who were connected with various forms, the ordinary earth, the
formless kind of earth that you get, had the merest gleam of
consciousness, and did not, as it were, try to do anything. Those that went
into metals and from the metal went on into the crystal — in those it was clear
that the life in them had a gleam of comprehension of what it was doing, made
an effort to do a thing, which was entirely absent from the other; and if I had
had any sense at the time, I should have seen that that implied some
difference. But I had not, and simply, noted the fact without seeing the
implication, that the difference between effort and non-effort meant a
difference of experience behind it; otherwise one would never try to do a thing,
however vaguely and gropingly, while the other remained entirely inert. And if
you realise that every atom has to be evolved, that there [Page 25] is an
infinite past behind us in relation to atoms, that slow evolution of the atom,
probably through a whole universe, in order to make the atom fit to be taken up
and appropriated by a consciousness, you will begin to realise then, vaguely I
know, but still to some extent, that we cannot cut ourselves off at a
particular point and say: "Here we began"; that we are always going
on, and, in that going on, passing through many, many different phases of
consciousness.
We are now in the human, but
our real individuality does not depend on the human. We are going out of the
human to the superhuman presently, but we shall not lose our individuality by
it. The whole experience of our past is that as we reach a higher and higher
state of body — I am using body in the widest sense, the difference between the
animal, the vegetable and the man — there is an expansion of consciousness with
which the sense of individuality deepens; that as we come up to the place where
we learned to function, and other places than those in our evolution, every new
plane that we consciously function upon is an enormous expansion of consciousness,
and an increase in the Spirit, in the individuality; that that goes on through
the astral and mental planes, the buddhic plane and the nirvânic plane. There
is no reason why it should stop. If the whole of our past has been an
increasing individuality and an increasing extent of consciousness, the whole
analogy goes to show that we, [Page 26] the individual, are something much more
than all these forms, and that, reaching the nirvânic consciousness and
mastering that, we shall then pass to the Superman. The human will lie behind
us with all its limitations. We are as much limited as man in comparison with
the Superman, the Master, as the dog is limited in comparison with ourselves.
It is not a loss of what we are, but an enormous addition. The dog's
consciousness is much less than yours. When he sees you reading a book, judged
from the dog's standpoint you must seem an exceedingly foolish creature, to sit
there doing nothing, simply staring at a piece of paper and some black dots,
when you might be running after a rabbit or trying to catch a hare.
He must think you a perfect
fool. You know that your consciousness is much wider than his, that you
have not lost anything by being a human being now. So with the other. I do not
know myself personally, of course, the conditions of the Superman in my own
consciousness, but I know, by every expansion of consciousness that I have gone
through, that it adds to the sense of the strength in the individual, to the
keenness of memory, to the feeling of identity, and I see no reason why I
should lose that in taking another expansion. Looking at it in this way, you
see at once, then, that individuality does not cease to be, and that it never
begins; that that is your real Self, and that all that you are doing, fidgeting
about with this matter that we have come [Page 27] into, is utilising the
matter in order that we may be able to act freely in a universe composed of
matter. It is not that it is of any importance to us, but we want that we shall
not be fettered by it, blinded by it, hindered by it. We want to move as freely
in the physical world as we moved in the world whence we came, and in order to
do that we have to conquer this matter and turn it to our own purposes. The
higher we can rise in the unfolding of consciousness the more are we masters of
physical matter as well as other matter, and that is what we are here for: to
be able in any world to freely express ourselves and manifest our divine
powers. We are busy at that all the time. Matter blinds us, hinders us, cramps
us, when we first come into it. Slowly and gradually we obtain mastery over it,
and what we gain is this power of expressing ourselves in any world of matter
like this. We do not go back as we came out. We go back with powers unfolded,
and masters of the mystery of the universe.
And so, in any future changes
we may imagine that we shall undergo, we ourselves shall always be there, our
consciousness constantly getting richer, fuller, with more content. Our aim now
is — being blinded by physical matter, and held by it, and unable to remember
as the Spirit ever remembers and ever knows — to become able to use that power
of the Spirit, whatever may be the material form in which we are clothed. That
is the purpose of evolution. It is for [Page 28] that that we come out into
this world, in order that in this world we may subdue every force and every
form, so that they may perfectly express the mood of the eternal consciousness.
Now I am afraid that this is a
very dry talk, but I cannot help it. It is the fault of the Secretary, because he
asked me to talk about it, and I cannot talk about it with any use for you
except on lines that do need some thinking and do mean thought for you; and if
you do not like it, do not come to another lecture of this sort.
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