The Value of Theosophy
in the World of Thought
By
Annie Besant
An Address on taking office as President of the Theosophical
Society.
Delivered at the Queen's Hall,
You will have
seen on the handbill announcing the lecture, that we are holding this meeting
in connection with my taking office as President of the Theosophical Society,
and it is my purpose, in addressing you to-night, to try to show you, at least
to some small extent, what is the value which the Society represents, as
regarded from the standpoint of human activities, manifested in
the world of
thought. I want to try to show you that when we say Theosophy we are speaking
of something of real value which can serve humanity in the various departments
of intellectual life. I propose, in order to do this, to begin with a very
brief statement of the fundamental idea of Theosophy; and then,
turning to the world of religious thought, to the world of artistic thought, to
the world of scientific .thought, and lastly to the world of political thought,
to point out to you how that which is called Theosophy may bring
contributions of value to each of these in turn.
Now Theosophy, as the name
implies, is a Wisdom, a Divine Wisdom;
and the name historically, as many of you know, is identical with that
which in Eastern lands has been known by various names—as Tao, in China; as the
Brahmavidya, in India; as the Gnosis, among the Greeks and the early
Christians; and as Theosophy
through the Middle
Ages and in
modern times.
It implies
always a knowledge, a Wisdom that transcends the ordinary knowledge, the ordinary
science of the earth; it implies a wisdom as regards life, a wisdom as regards
the essential nature of things, a wisdom which is summed up in two words when
we say " God-Wisdom." For it has been held in elder days—although in
modern times it has become largely forgotten—that man can really never know
anything at all unless he knows
himself, and
knows himself Divine; that knowledge of God, the Supreme, the Universal Life,
is the root of all true knowledge of matter as well as of
Spirit, of
this world as well as of worlds other than our own; that in that one supreme
knowledge all other knowledges find their root; that in that supreme light all
other lights have their origin; and that if man can know anything, it is
because he is Divine in nature, and, sharing the Life that expresses itself in
a universe, he can know at once the Life that originates and the Matter that
obeys.
Starting from
such a standpoint, you will at once realise that Theosophy is a spiritual
theory of the world as against a materialistic, It sees Spirit as the moulder,
the shaper, the arranger of matter, and matter only as the obedient expression
and servant of the Spirit; it sees in man a spiritual being, seeking to unfold
his powers by experience in a universe of forms; and it declares that
man
misunderstands himself, and will fail of his trueend, if he identifies himself
with the form that perishes instead of with the life which is deathless. Hence,
opposed to materialism alike in science and
philosophy,
it builds up a spiritual conception of the universe, and necessarily it is
idealistic in its thought, and holds up the importance of the ideal as a guide
to all human activity.
The ideal,
which is thought applied to conduct,
that is the
keynote of Theosophy
and its value in the varied worlds of thought; and the power of thought, the
might of thought, the ability that it has to clothe itself in forms whose life
only depends on the continuance of the thought that gave them birth, that is
its central note, or keynote, in all the remedies that it applies to human
ills. Idealist everywhere, idealist in religion, idealist in art, idealist in
science, idealist in the practical life that men call politics, idealist
everywhere; but avoiding the blunder into which some idealists have fallen,
when they have not recognised that human thought is only a portion of the
whole, and not the whole.
The
Theosophist recognises that the Divine Thought, of which the universe is an
expression, puts limitations on his own power of thought, on his own creative
activity. He realises that the whole
compels the
part, and that his own thought can only move within the vast circle of the Divine
Thought, which he only partially expresses; so that while he will maintain
that, on the ideal depends all that is called " real" in the lower
worlds, he will realise that his creative power can only slowly mould matter to
his will, and though every result will depend on a creative thought, the
results
will often
move slowly, adapting themselves to the thought that gives them birth. Hence, while
idealist, he
is not impracticable; while he sees the power of thought, he recognises its
limitations in space and time; and while asserting the vital
importance of
right thought and right belief, he realises that only slowly does the flower of
thought ripen into the fruit of action.
But on the
importance of thought he lays a stress unusual in modern life. It is the cant
of the day, in judging the value of a man, that "it does not matter
what he
believes but only what he does." That is not true. It matters infinitely
what a man believes; for as a man's belief so he is ; as a man's thought, so
inevitably is his action. There was a time in the world of thought when it was
said with equal error: " It does not matter what a man does, provided his
faith is right." If that word " faith " had meant the man's
thought in its integrity, then there would have been but little error; for the
right thought would inevitably have brought right action ; but in those days
right thought meant only orthodox thought, according to a narrow canon of
interpretation, the obedient repetition of creeds, the blind acceptance of
beliefs imposed by
authority.
In those days
what was called Orthodoxy in religion was made the measure of the man, and
judgment depended upon orthodox acquiescence. Against that mistake the great
movement that closed the Middle Ages was the protest of
the intellect
of man, and it was declared that no external authority must bind the intellect,
and none had right to impose from outside the thought which is the very essence
of the man—that great assertion of the right of private judgment, of the
supreme principle of the free intelligence, so necessary for
the progress
of humanity.
But like all
things it has been followed by a reaction, and men have run to the other
extreme: that nothing matters except conduct, and action alone is to be
considered. But your action is the result of your thought of yesterday, and
follows your
yesterday as its expression in the outer world; your thought of to-day is your
action of to-morrow, and your future depends on its accuracy and its truth, on
its consonance with reality. Hence it is all-important in the
modern world
to give back to thought its right place as above action, as its inspirer and
its guide. For the human spirit by its expression as intellect
judges,
decides, directs, controls. Its activity is the outcome of its thinking; and if
without caring for thought you plunge into action, you have the constant
experiments, feeble and fruitless, which so largely characterise our modern
life.
Pass, then,
from that first assertion of the importance of right thinking, to see what
message Theosophy
has for the world of religious thought.
What is
religion ? Religion is the quenchless thirst of the human spirit for the
Divine. It is the Eternal, plunged into a world of transitory phenomena,
striving to realise its own eternity. It is the Immortal, flung into a world of
death, trying to realise its own deathlessness. It is the white Eagle of
Heaven, born in the illimitable spaces, beating its wings against the bars of
matter, and striving to break them and rise into the immensities where are its
birthplace and its real home. That is religion : the striving of man for God.
And that
thirst of man
for God many have tried to quench with what is called Theology, or withbooks
that are called sacred, traditions that are deemed holy, ceremonies and rites
which are but local
expressions
of a universal truth.
You can no
more quench that thirst of the human Spirit by anything but individual
experience of the Divine, than you can quench the thirst of the
traveller
parched and dying in the desert by letting him hear water go down the throat of
another. Human experience, and that alone, is the rock on which all religion is
founded, that is the rock that can never be shaken, on which every true Church
must be built. Books, it is true, are often sacred; but you may tear up every
sacred book in the world, and as long as man remains, and God to
inspire man,
new books can be written, new pages of inspiration can be penned.
You may break
in pieces every ceremony, however beautiful and elevating, and the Spirit that
made them to express himself has not lost his artistic power, and can make new
rites and new ceremonies to replace every one that is broken and
cast aside.
The Spirit is
deathless as God is deathless, and in that deathlessness of the Spirit lies the
certainty, the immortality of religion. And Theosophy, in appealing to
that immortal experience, points the world of religions—confused by many an
attack, bewildered by many an assault, half timid
before the
new truth discovered every day, half scared at the undermining of old
foundations, and the tearing by criticism of many documents—points it back tcp
its own inexhaustible source, and bids it fear neither time nor truth, since
Spirit is truth and eternity. All that criticism can take from you is the outer
form, never the living reality; and well indeed is it for the churches and for
the religions of the world that the outworks of documents should be levelled
with the ground, in order to show the impregnability of the citadel, which is
knowledge and experience.
But in the
world of religious thought there are many services, less important, in truth,
than the one I have spoken of, but still important and valuable to the faiths
of the world; for Theosophy
brings back to men, living in tradition, testimony to the reality of knowledge
transcending the knowledge of the senses and the reasoning powers of the lower
mind.
It comes with
its hands full of proof, modern proof, proof of to-day, living witnesses, of
unseen worlds, of subtler worlds than the physical. It comes, as the Founders
and the early Teachers of every religion have come, to testify again by
personal experience to the reality of the unseen worlds of which the religions
are the continual witnesses in the physical world. Have you ever noticed in the
histories of the
great
religions how they grow feebler in their power over men as faith takes the
place of knowledge, and tradition the place of the living testimony of living
men ? That is one of the values of Theosophy in the religious
world, that it
teaches men
to travel to worlds unseen, and to bring back the evidence of what they have
met and studied; that it so teaches men their own nature that it enables them
to separate soul and body, and travel without the physical body in worlds long
thought unattainable, save through the gateway of death. I say " Long
thought unattainable " ; but the scriptures of every religion bear witness
that they are
not unattainable. The Hindu tells us that man should separate himself from his
body as you strip the sheath from the stem of the grass.
The Buddhist
tells us that by deep thought and contemplation mind may know itself as mind
apart from the physical brain. Christianity tells us many a story of the
personal knowledge of its earlier teachers, of a ministry of angels that
remained in the Church, and of angelic teachers
training the neophytes
in knowledge. Islam tells us that its own great prophet himself passed
into higher worlds, and brought back
the truths which civilised Arabia, and gave knowledge which lit again the torch
of learning in Europe when the Moors came to Spain. And so religion after religion bears
testimony to the possibility of human knowledge outside the physical world; we
only re-proclaim the ancient truth—with this addition, which some religions now
shrink from making: that what man did in the past man may do to-day; that the
powers of the Spirit are not shackled, that the knowledge of the other worlds
is still attainable to man.
And outside
that practical knowledge of other worlds it brings by that same method the
distinct assertion of the survival of the human Spirit after death. It is
only in very modern times that that has been doubted by
any large numbers of people.
Here and
there in the ancient world, like a Lucretius in Rome, perhaps; like a
Democritus in Greece; certainly like a
Charvaka in India, you find one here and there who doubts
the deathlessness of the Spirit in man; but in modern days that
disbelief, or the hopeless cynicism which thinks knowledge impossible, has penetrated far and wide
among the cultured, the educated
classes, and from them to the masses of the uneducated.
That is the
phenomenon of modern days alone, that man by hundreds and by thousands despairs
of his own immortality. And yet the
deepest convictionof humanity, the deepest thought in man, is the persistence
of himself, the " I " that cannot die. And with one great
generalisation, and one method, Theosophy
asserts at once the deathlessness of man and the existence of God; for it says
to man, as it was ever said in the ancient days : " The proof of God is
not without you but within you." All the greatest teachers have reiterated
that message, so full of hope and comfort; for it shuts none out from
knowledge.
What is the
method ? Strip away your senses, and you find the mind; strip away the mind,
and you find the pure reason; strip away the pure reason, and you find the
will-to-live; strip away the will-to-live, and you find Spirit as a unit;
strike away the limitations of the Spirit, and you find God. Those are the
steps: told in ancient days, repeated now. "
Lose your
life," said the Christ, " and you
shall find it
to life eternal." That is true: let go everything that you can let go; you
cannot let go yourself, and in the impossibility of losing yourself you find
the certainty of the Self Universal, the Universal Life.
Pass again
from that to another religious point. I mentioned ceremonies, rites of every
faith. Those Theosophy looks at and understands. So many have cast away
ceremonies, even if they have found them helpful, because they do not
understand
them, and
fear superstition in their use. Knowledge has two great enemies: Superstition
and Scepticism. Knowledge destroys blind superstition by asserting and
explaining natural truths of which the superstition has exaggerated the
unessentials; and it destroys scepticism by proving the reality of the facts of
the unseen world. The ceremony,
the rite, is
a shadow in the world of sense of the truths in the world of Spirit; and every
religion, every creed, has its ceremonies as the outward
physical
expression of some eternal spiritual truth. Theosophy defends them, justifies
them, by explaining them; and when they are understood they cease to be
superstitions that blind, and become crutches that help the halting mind to
climb to the
spiritual life.
Let us pass
from the world of religious thought, and pause for a moment on the world of
artistic thought. Now to Art, perhaps more than in any other department of the
human intelligence, the ideal is necessary for life. All men have wondered from
time to time why the architecture—to take one case only—why the architecture of
the past is so much more wonderful, so much more beautiful, than the
architecture of the present. When you want to build some great national
building to-day you have to go back to
time, as that
was expressive of the past ? The severe order of Egypt found its expression in
the mighty temples of Karnak; the beauty and lucidity of Grecian thought bodied
itself out in the chaste and simple splendor of Grecian buildings; the
sternness of Roman law found its ideal expression in those wondrous buildings
whose ruins still survive in Rome; the faith of the Middle
Ages found
its expression in the upward-springing arch of Gothic architecture, and the
exquisite tracery of the ornamented building. But if you go into the Gothic
cathedral, what do you find there ?
That not
alone in wondrous arch and splendid pillar, upspringing in its delicate and
slender
strength from
pavement to roof, not there only did the art of the builder find its
expression. Go round to any out-of-the-way corner, or climb the roof of
those great
buildings, and you will find in unnoticed places, in hidden corners, the love
of the artist bodying itself forth in delicate tracery, in stone that lives.
Men carved for love, not only for fame; men carved for beauty's sake, not only
for money; and they built perfectly because they had love and faith, the two
divine builders, and embodied both in deathless stone. Before you can be more
than copyists you must find your modern ideal, and when you have found it you
can build buildings that will defy time.
But you have
not found it yet; the artist amongst us is too much of a copyist, and too
little of an inspirer and a prophet. We do not want the painter only to paint
for us the things our own eyes
can see. We
want the artist eye to see more than the common eye, and to embody what he sees
in beauty for the instruction of our blinded sight. We do not want accurate
pictures of cabbages and turnips and objects of that sort. However cleverly done,
they remain cabbaggs and turnips still. The man who could paint for us the
thought that makes the cabbage, he would be the artist, the man who
knows the
Life. And so for our new Art we must have a splendid ideal.
Do you want
to know how low Art may sink when materialism triumphs and vulgarises and
degrades ?
Then see that exhibition of French pictures that was placed in
then you will
understand how Art perishes where the breath of the ideal does not inspire and
keep alive. And Theosophy
to the artist would bring back that ancient reverence which regards the artist
of the Beautiful as one of the chief God-revealers to the race of which he is a
portion; which sees in the great musical artist, or the sculptor, or the
painter, a God-inspired man, bringing down the grace of heaven to illuminate
the dull grey planes of earth.
The artists
should be the prophets of our time, the revealers of the Divine smothered under
the material; and were they this, they would be regarded with love and with
reverence; for true art needs reverence for its growing, and the artist, of all
men— subtle, responsive, sensitive to everything that touches him—needs an
atmosphere of love and reverence that he may flower into his
highest
power, and show the world some glimpse of the Beauty which is God.
And the world
of science — perhaps there, after the world of religion, Theosophy has most of
value to offer. Take Psychology. What a confusion; what a mass of facts want
arrangement; what a chaos of facts out of which no cosmos is built!
Theosophy, by its clear
and accurate definition of man, of the relation of consciousness to its bodies,
of Spirit to its vehicles, arranges into order that
vast mass of
facts with which psychology is struggling now. It takes, into that wonderful
" unconscious " or " sub-conscious "—which is now, as it
were, the answer to every riddle ; but it is not understood—it takes into that
the light of direct investigation; divides the " unconscious" which
comes from the past from that which is the presage of the future, separates
outthe inheritance of our long past ancestry which remains as the "
sub-conscious" in us; points to the higher " super-conscious,"
not " sub-conscious," of which
the genius is
the testimony at the present time; shows that human consciousness transcends the
brain ; proves that human consciousness is in touch with worlds beyond the
physical; and makes sure and certain the hope expressed by science,
that it is
possible that that which is now unconscious shall become conscious, and that
man shall find himself in touch with a universe and not only in touch with one
limited world. That which Myers sometimes spoke of as the " cosmic
consciousness,"
as against our own limited consciousness, is a profound truth, and carries with
it the prophecy of man's future greatness. Just as the fish is limited to the
water, as the bird is limited to the air, so man has been limited
to the
physical body, and has dreamed he had no touch with other spaces, to which he
really belongs.
But your
consciousness is living in three worlds, and not in one, is touching mightier
possibilities, is beginning to contact subtler phenomena; and all the traces of
that are found in your newest psychology, and are simply proofs of those many
theories about man which Theosophy
has been
teaching in
the world for many a century, nay, for many a millennium.
And physics
and chemistry is there anything of value along Theosophical lines of thought
and investigation, which might aid our physicists and our chemists, puzzled at
the subtlety of the forces with which they have to deal?
Has it never
struck some of the more intuitive physicists and materialists that there
may
be subtler
senses which may be used for investigation of the subtler forces? That man may
have in
himself senses by the evolution of which he will able to pierce the secrets
that now he is striving vainly to unveil ?
Has it never
even struck a physicist or a chemist that, if he does not believe in the
possibility of
himself
developing those subtler forces, he might utilise them in others in order to
prosecute further his own investigations ? They are beginning to to do that in
I would not
say to the scientific man: " Accept our theories," I would say to
him: " Take them as hypotheses by which you may direct your further
experiments, and you may go on and make discoveries more rapidly than you can
at the present time." For there is many a clairvoyant who, put before a
piece of some elemental
substance,
could describe it very much better than is done by your fractional analysis.
And along other lines—chemical and electrical—surely there is something a
little unsatisfactory, when a few years ago men told us that the atom was
composed literally of myriads of particles, and during the last year it has
been suggested that perhaps one particle is all of which an atom is composed.
Might it not be wise to try to get hold of your atoms by sight keener than the
physical, as it is possible to do, whether
by the ordinary clair-voyant who
is sometimes developed up to that point, or by an untrained sensitive whose
senses are set free from the limitations of the physical brain, and from
that
sensitive try to gather something of the composition of matter which may guide
you in your more scientific search ? I realise that what one, or two, or twenty
people see, is no proof for the scientific man ; but it may give a hint whereby
mathematical deductions may be made, and calculations which otherwise would not
be thought of. So that I only suggest the utilising by science of
certain
powers that are now available, keener than those of the ordinary senses—a new
sort of human microscope or human telescope—whereby you may pierce to the
larger or the smaller, beyond the reach of your physical microscopes and
telescopes,
made of metal and not of intelligence showing itself in matter.
Is there anything
of value in Theosophical ideas, shall I say to the science of medicine? Some
say it is not yet a science, but works empirically only. There is some truth in
that; but are there not here again lines of investigation which the physician
might well study? For instance, the power of thought over the human body, all
that mass of facts on which partly is built up such a science as Mental
Healing, or what is called Faith Cure, and so on. Do you think that these
things have been going on for hundreds of years, and that there is no truth
lying behind
them ? " The effects of imagination," you say. But what is
imagination? It does not matter of what it is the effect, if it brings cure
where before
there was disease- If you put into a man's body a drug that you do not
understand, and find that it cures adisease and relieves a pain, will you throw
the drug aside because you do not
understand it
? And why do you throw the power of imagination aside because you cannot weigh
it in your balance, nor find that it depresses one scale more than the other?
Imagination is one of the subtlest powers of thought: imagination is
one of the
strongest powers that the doctor might utilise when his drugs fail him and his
old methods no longer serve his purpose. Suggestion, the power of thought. Why,
there are records of cases where suggestion has killed! That which has killed
can also cure, and man's body being only a product of thought, built up through
the ages, answers more rapidly to its creator than it does to clumsier products
from the mineral and vegetable
kingdoms.
Here again I only ask experiment. You know that you can produce wounds upon the
body of the hypnotised patient, in a state of trance. By suggestion lesions are
made, burns are caused,
inflammation
and pain appear by the mere suggestion of a wound. A blister is placed on a
patient and forbidden to act; the skin is untouched when the blister is
removed: a bit of wet paper is given by thought the qualities of the blister,
and it will
raise the skin, with all the accompaniments of the chemical blister.
Now these
things are known. You can see the pictures of wounds thus produced, if you
will, in some of the
lies much of
useful experiment to be brought to the relief of the diseases of humanity.
But as I have
touched upon medicine, let me say—
for I ought
here to say it—that there are some methods of modern medicine which Theosophy emphatically
condemns. It declares that no knowledge which is gained from a tortured, a
vivisected creature, is legitimate, even if it were as useful as it has been
proved to be useless. It declares that all inoculations of disease into the
healthy body are illegitimate, and it condemns all such.
It declares
that all those foul injections of modern medicine which use animal fluids to
restore the exhausted vitality of man are ruinous to the body into which they
are put. Here again
they feared
that they had caused more diseases than they cured. Why are these things
condemned as illegitimate ? Because the building up of the human body is the
building by a living Spirit of a temple for himself, and it is moulded by that
Spirit for his own purposes.
The higher
powers of intelligence have made
the human
body what it is, different from the animal bodies out of which, physically, in
ages long gone by, it has grown. Your delicacy of touch, the
exquisite
beauty and delicacy of your nervous system, these things are the outcome of the
higher powers of the Spirit expressing themselves in the human body, where they
cannot express themselves in the animat form. And if you ignore this, if you
forget it, if
you forget that this splendid human temple built up by the
Spirit of man through ages of toil and of suffering, to express his own higher
qualities—compassion, tenderness, love, pity for the weak and the helpless,
protection of the helpless against the strong—if you forget the whole of that,
and act as a brute even would not act,
in cruelty
and wickedness to men and animals alike, you will degrade the body you are
trying to preserve, you will paralyse the body you are trying to save from
disease, and you will go back into the savagery which is the nemesis of
cruelty, and ruin these nobler bodies, the inheritance of the civilised races.
I pass from
that to my last world, the world of political thought. Now Theosophy takes no part in
party politics. It lays down the great principle of human Brotherhood, and bids
its followers go out into the world and work on it—using their intelligence,
their power of thought, to judge the value of every method which is proposed.
And our
general criticism on the politics of the moment would be that they are
remedies, not preventions, and leave untouched the root out of which all the
miseries grow. Looking sometimes at your party politics, it seems to me as
though you were as children plucking flowers and sticking them into the sand
and saying: " See what a beautiful garden I have made." And when you
wake the next morning the flowers are dead, for there were no roots, but only
rootless flowers. I know you must make remedies, but you should not stop at
that. When you send out your Red Cross doctors and nurses to pick up the
mutilated bodies that your science of war has maimed, they are doing noble
work, and deserve ourlove and gratitude, for the wounded must be nursed; but
the man who works for peace does more for the good of humanity than the Red
Cross doctors and nurses.
And so also
in the political world. You cannot safely
live "hand-to-mouth" in politics any more than in any other
department of human life. But how many
are there in the political parties who care for causes and not only for effects
? That is the criticism we should make. We see everywhere Democracy
spreading; but Democracy
is on its trial, and unless it can evolve some method by which the wise shall rule, and not
merely the weight of ignorant numbers, it will dig its own grave. So long as you leave your people ignorant
they are not
fit to rule.
The schools
should come before the vote, and knowledge before power. You are proud of your liberty; you boast of
a practically universal suffrage—leaving out, of course, one half of
humanity!—but taking your male suffrage as you have it, how many of the voters
who go to the poll know the principles of political history, know anything of
economics, know anything of all the knowledge which is wanted for the guiding
of the ship of the State through troubled waters ? You do not choose your
captains out of people who know nothing of navigation; but you choose the makers of your rulers
out of those who have
not studied and do not know.
That is not wise.
I do not deny
it is a necessary stage in the evolution of man. I know that the Spirit acts
wisely, and guides the nations along roads in which lessons are to be learned;
and I hope that out of the blunders, and the errors, and the crudities of
present politics there "will evolve a
saner method, in which the wise of the nation will have power and guide
its councils, and wisdom, not numbers, shall speak the decisive word.
Now there is
one criticism of politics that we often hear in these days. It is said that
behind politics lie economics. That is true. You may go on playing at
politics for
ever and ever ; but if your economic foundation is rotten, no political
remedies can build a happy and prosperous nation. But while I agree that behind
politics lie economics, there is something that lies also behind economics, and
of that I hear little said.
Behind
economics lies character, and without character you cannot build a free and a
happy nation. A nation enormous in power, what do you know of the way in which
your power is wielded in many a far-off land ? How much do you know about your
vast Indian Empire ? How many of
your voters
going to the poll can give an intelligent answer to any question affecting that
300,000,000 of human beings whom you hold in your hand, and deal with as you
will ? There are responsibilities of Empire as well as pride in it, and pride
of Empire is apt to founder when the responsibilities of Empire are ignored.
And so the Theosophist is content to go to the root of the matter, and
try to build
up for you the citizens out of whom your future State is to be made. Education,
real education, secular education, is now your cry. They tried secular
education in
of the
schools altogether, and train the children only in morality, allowing an
insignificant minority to have its way ? Why! we have done better than that in
and morality
alike. I grant it was a Theosophical inspiration that began the movement; but
the whole mass of Hindus have fallen in with it, and are accepting the books as
the basis of education. Government has recognised them, and has begun to
introduce them for the use of Hindus in its own schools. That is the way in
which we Theosophists work at politics. We go to the root to build
character,
and we know that noble characters will make a noble and also a prosperous
nation.
But you can
no more make a nation of free men out of children untrained in duty and in
righteousness, than you can build a house that will stand if you use ill-baked
bricks and rotten timber. Our keynote in politics is Brotherhood. That worked
out into life will give you the nation that you want.
And what does
Brotherhood mean ? It means that everyone of us, you and I, and every man and
woman throughout the land, looks on all others as they look on their own
brothers, and acts on the same principle which in the family rules. You keep
religion out
of politics ? You cannot, without peril "to your State; for unless you
teach your people that they are a Brother-hood, whether or not they choose to
recognise it, you are building on the sand
and not on
the rock. And what does Brotherhood mean ? It means that the man who gains
learning, uses it to teach the ignorant, until none are ignorant. It means that
the man who is pure takes his purity to the foul, until all have become
clean. It
means that the man who is wealthy uses his wealth for the benefit of the poor,
until all have become prosperous. It means that everything you gain, you share;
everything you achieve, you give its fruit to all.
That is the
law of Brotherhood, and it is the law of national as well as of individual
life. You cannot rise alone. You are bound too strongly each to each. If you
use your strength to raise yourself by trampling on your fellows, inevitably
you will
fail by the
weakness that you have wronged.
Do you know
who are the greatest enemies of a State? The weak, injured by the strong. For,
above all States, rules an Eternal Justice; and the tears of
miserable
women, and the curses of angry, starving men, sap the foundations of a State
that denies Brotherhood, and reach the ears of that Eternal Justice by which
alone States live, and Nations continue. It is written in an ancient scripture
that a Master of Duty said to a King: " Beware the tears of the weak, for they
sap the thrones of Kings." Strength may threaten: weakness undermines.
Strength may
stand up to fight: weakness cuts away the ground on which the fighters are
standing. And the message of Theosophy
to the modern political world is: Think less about your outer laws, and more
about the lives of the
people who
have to live under thoselaws.
Remember that
government can only live when the people are happy; that States can only flourish
where the masses of the population are contented; that all that makes life
enjoyable is the right of the lowest and the poorest; that they can do without
external happiness far less than you, who have so many means of inner
satisfaction, of enjoyment, by the culture that you possess and that they lack.
If there is not money enough for everything, spend your money in making
happier, healthier, purer, more educated, the lives of the poor; then a happy
nation will be an imperial nation; for Brotherhood is the strongest force on
earth.
Theosophy in
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