by Talbot Mundy
The paradox, so baffling to the men and women who believe they visit earth but once and then are done with it, grows clear as daylight if we keep man’s true essential divinity in mind. The mystery of how, and why, “the poor are always with us” and no money can be made to buy more than a momentary anodyne, ceases to be a mystery at all. Materiality can no more change itself than darkness can. It is through spiritual consciousness that matter yields and men grow masters of their destiny; and disregard of mere material results, while aiming at the spiritual goal, lays matter in subjection.
To try to place matter in subjection by manipulating matter is the snare that traps the would-be ‘higher occultist,’ who, if he should expend the half of the amount of energy in striving to identify himself, by wholesome living, with that true divinity that is his higher self, would earn more virtue in a minute than a life-time of ambitious conjuring can gain for him.
The higher knowledge comes of higher living at the stage at which we are, not of trying to obtain it by manipulations of the intellect. All Nature is exactly balanced and the individual who leaves the royal road of duty, seeking to escape responsibility by stealing marches on his Karma, though he may attain a sort of misty half-acquaintance with another plane, will be unbalanced by it, having not the necessary wisdom. And the end of that is chaos, with the way out difficult to find.
We forget that Wisdom seeks us; that its line of least resistance is a balanced character; that he who has attained to self-control and a delight in duty is inseparably one with Wisdom, which will find him out and feel its way into his consciousness exactly in proportion to his value to the human race.
The survival of the fittest is undoubtedly a law of Nature; but the fittest are not necessarily the fattest, nor the richest, nor the most successful on the plane of mere material results. Viewed through the distorting lenses of materiality, Lao-Tse, the Buddha, Jesus, and Pythagoras, the Druids, and all truly spiritual teachers, have been failures; it is not recorded that they slew their tens of thousands, or excelled in sport, or left invested money to endow associations that should standardize religion and enforce its rule. With a convincing unanimity they all ignored the weight of popular opinion, the threat of violence, the said-to-be omnipotence of numbers and the lure of gold. Is there a financier on record, or a demagogue, or an elected ruler, or a conqueror by force of arms, whose efforts have achieved one fraction of the benefit that theirs did? How many men were happier or wiser as a consequence of Caesar’s triumphs? Was it Croesus who expressed the Golden Rule? Did Roman arms, or Roman gladiators, pave the way for Vergil’s poems, or was Shakespeare raised on the rapine of Drake? There have been great kings; which of them has wrought surviving changes on the earth remotely comparable to the bloodless revolution set in force by Lao-Tse, to cite one simple instance?
What then is fittest to survive? that is the question — not whether to be or not to be, as Shakespeare makes the unhinged Hamlet ask. The dullest wit can answer, if the elementary and fundamental fact is not forgotten, that we shall return to earth — it may be a million times, or oftener — to meet the consequences of our action and neglect. What nature of conditions do we choose to meet when we revisit earth? And do we wish to be the victims, or to be the agents through whom the regenerative forces of the universe may find expression and prevail over materiality?
Success reshapes itself in that perspective. Failure dons new hues. Time loses its significance in the importance of the everlasting Now. Desirable results appear less tangible and not so measurable in the scale with dollars and political control. Intolerance of other men’s and other nations’ vanity succumbs before alertness to our own imprisonment within a mold of prejudice that we begin to work to break. Self-discipline replaces the desire to govern others. True self-interest is seen to be attainment of such self-command as shall admit more wisdom into our own complex nature, driving out the dregs of ignorance in front of it, thus fitting us for manlier life now. So destiny is fashioned. So are laid the genuine foundations of success.
The problem is one and the same, whether a man possesses millions, or owes them; whether he has been elected to a legislature as the representative of millions, or whether a community, for lack of wisdom, in itself and him, has thrown him into prison. Destiny appoints no favorites, anoints no specially favored sons, avoids no issues, and ignores no subtleties of surreptitious lapses from integrity. We carve our own careers; and he who wrings extravagant amounts of money from the sweated labor of men, women, and children driven to obey him by the pressure of necessity, will learn inevitably, in experience, the sharpness of that shape of selfishness. Death may afford a breathing-spell, but it avoids no consequences of the acts that we commit; and there is many a man in prison, brought up short by that predicament, and so provided with an opportunity to think and look for the solution of life’s problem in himself, whose destiny will uplift and enrich the world.
Success and failure are twin frauds until the mask is stripped from them and we discern that dread of one is as unjustified as craving for the other. Then, those frauds exposed, we see the true direction for expenditure of effort and thereafter we permit the Lords of Destiny to measure our success exactly, by providing us with opportunity to prove, now, in experience, how far we have identified ourselves with the divine in us. That is the only test worth taking, and the only evidence that counts.
A BEGINNER’S CONCEPT OF THEOSOPHY
I REMEMBER the occasion when I first began to learn to swim. There was a deep end and a shallow end. The deeper looked more satisfying, so I jumped in while the teacher was not looking. The indignity of having to be fished out was humiliating, but the worst part was the distaste that it gave me for the whole business of swimming, with the result that younger boys, who had approached the problem reasonably, left me far behind and it was several years before I began to acquire much confidence in the water or any genuine liking for it.
Then there was school. We studied Shakespeare in the English class; but not once, during four years of instruction, were we encouraged to enjoy the poet’s plays or to appreciate their beauty. We were set to parsing and analysis, to definition of the obsolete and rare words, and to memorizing drily written footnotes — with the consequence that poetry, particularly Shakespeare’s poetry, became a synonym for drudgery. I believe I was thirty years old before it ever really occurred to me that poetry was something that a man might blend into his life and breathe into his efforts, thus ennobling any task he touched.
The simplest means opponents of Theosophy could use in order to delay and to obscure its message to humanity, would be to encourage all beginners to plunge into it heads foremost at the deeper end and swamp their intellects with Sanskrit definitions. If they could be kept thereafter struggling to possess Theosophy in a bewilderment of words, Theosophy would die out from beneath as certainly as poetry has vanished from the schools, since there would be no natural responsiveness in which the love of it could flourish.
Love is the life of the Ancient Wisdom, and unless we love it ardently — unless it comforts and convinces by the flow of confidence outwelling from within — we may be sure we are but grasping at, or arguing against, the printed word; its spirit has escaped us. We cannot absorb Theosophy like patent medicine, and the attempt to masticate it all and crowd it into one gray brain is madness. It is infinite, with no beginning and no end. It would be easier to swallow all earth’s air and drink up all the rivers than to possess Theosophy, in the sense that we possess degrees from universities or stock certificates.
A hundred years before the birth of Christianity Shu Kuang wrote: “The genius of men who possess is stunted by possession. Wealth only aggravates the imbecility of fools.” (From Gems of Chinese Literature, translated by H. A. Giles.) No wiser summary of the futility of all possession ever dripped from a satiric pen, and if the epigram were printed on the front page of all text-books and engraved on every dollar-bill in circulation there might be some hope of civilizing earth within a hundred
years. It is an axiom for all beginners in Theosophy.
Meanwhile, we struggle to possess, beginners just as keenly as the older hands who have accumulated what are euphemistically termed resources. Public education is designed to cultivate a memory for facts, as if a crowded brain were an essential to living. And a number of us, having been so educated, try to ‘cram’ Theosophy as if we had to pass examinations in it and be judged according to an arbitrary scale of marks.
It is true indeed that we must pass examinations in it, but their incidence is hourly. We receive marks, and are judged. But the impersonal Judge, Karma, utterly ignores the feats of memory and all unproved claims, examining the progress of the heart’s integrity as demonstrated by experience. Examination questions are the incidents of daily life. We act and react, do and leave undone, think and refuse to think, stand firm or are seduced, while Karma — incorruptible and inescapable — inscribes our spiritual progress on the rolls of destiny.
“The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on.”
I write as one who has but recently become a member of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society: that is, as a beginner, who had never seen a copy of The Secret Doctrine until about three years ago, nor ever read a copy of The Theosophical Path or any of the Theosophical Manuals until the magic of Blavatsky’s pen stirred in me something deeper and more challenging than I had known was there and capable of being stirred. And I remember the bewilderment of all the knowledge crowded into her immortal book; and what thoughts first occurred to me when I had laughed a while (for there is humor in all logic, and the logic of the Law of Karma is complete).
For days on end I wrestled with the Sanskrit technicalities and tried to memorize them, caught in the enthusiasm of the universal theme but blinded by the habit of attributing all knowledge to the brain-mind. I would master this magnificent philosophy and make it mine! Then, failing to remember more than half-a-dozen Sanskrit words or to recall, for more than half-a-day, to which Root-race and Sub-race I belong, I scrambled out of that deep water and proposed to myself to try the shallow end. It looked, and was, much easier, but there was mystery enough.
I studied the significance of Karma, as applied to me, and found it not so easy or amusing as the thought of its retributive effect on others. There was too much justice in it. I began to be aware that there were incidents which, had I known of Karma at the time, might not have happened; and it irked me to discover that a more or less meticulous observance of convention during forty years or so, a reasonably decent reputation, and a habit of avoiding what is known as lawlessness, were not masks that could affect the final outcome. Theoretically, having had parents who hired somebody to teach me morals, I had never quite forgotten the necessity to play safe with a watchful Providence; but there was something in the Catechism I remembered about the forgiveness of sins, and it came as something of a shock to realize that all that I had done, for good or evil, must produce inevitable consequences, for me or against me, as the case might be.
I daresay all beginners, when they think a while, face that predicament.
It seemed, to state it mildly, not quite just that a man should have to face the consequences of an act he did in ignorance of the Law of Retribution. Nevertheless, exactly like a landlord pocketing his rents, I felt the justice of receiving compensation for investments on the side of virtue, whether made in this life and in ignorance of Karma, or in past lives utterly forgotten. We enjoy our income. It is outgo that obliges us to think.
Reincarnation, logical though it might be, began to lose that roseate, romantic lure that first appealed to my inquiring mind. I started there and then to reconsider it, and much more critically.
But that was where a little understanding entered in. I had been looking forward to possess Theosophy — to make of it a tool with which to tickle self-esteem and cut a nice wide swath along contenting aeons of eternity. The first glimpse makes the brain reel! It was the humor of my own imagination that upset that view of things. Some spark of Theosophical illumination made me wonder just how long the universe would last if each of us might manage his own destiny unguided by experience and by Intelligences higher than our own?
That thought began to lead me somewhere. Who, or what, is this that shall be guided by experience? Our bodies? Possibly, to some extent; but the experience of past lives hardly could be said to educate a body that developed from an embryo in this one; neither could a body destined to be burned to ashes be supposed to have much influence on future lives. Though atoms, or the subdivisions of which atoms are composed, are indestructible; and though our bodies are an aggregate of atoms, purposely assembled in accordance with a law beyond our comprehension; though the atoms so assembled undergo a change and are dispersed for other uses — so that you, or I, or anyone may have the dust of Alexander in our veins and Caesar’s clay may stop a bung-hole; nevertheless, the education of those atoms comes a long way short of answering the riddle of the universe.
The brain? Another congeries of atoms, grouped within a section of a skull and destined to disperse at death. The brain of Socrates, of Plato, and of Shakespeare was returned into the common storehouse of disintegrated matter when the change took place that we call death. And unimaginable though it may be that the particles of matter they employed to clothe their bones were not affected by the thinking that they did, and not enriched by the association, none the less those scattered particles are not, and never can have been, the man.
Who is the man? What is he? We all identify ourselves with blood and bones, and we undoubtedly provide our blood and bones with mixed experience. The most conservative of scientists admit that evolution seems to be a fact in nature, and that all things are in process of becoming something else. The brain-chambers of skulls discovered in the prehistoric drifts are differently shaped from those we humans use today, which would suggest, at any rate, that men knew other limitations than our own when those skulls had employment. Yet, the owners of the skulls could think — if not exactly as we think, still thoughtfully and to a purpose.
Has all the thinking that they did died with them? Were the atoms of their vanished flesh the only beneficiaries of the lives they lived? Who were they? Is this all of them, or even the important part of them, that lies in a museum-case or in the gravel of a prehistoric river-bed?
Theosophy does not withhold the answer, though the brain-mind may reject it and keep on rejecting it, until it has exhausted all the arguments of habit, all its prejudices, and the stored-up miscellany of remembered speciocity acquired at second-hand.
The brain-mind clings to what it thinks it knows, and dreads enlightenment. I know mine did, and does, and I believe myself not different, except in relatively unimportant details, from the rank and file of ordinary men. As we identify ourselves with flesh and blood, that flesh and blood in turn identifies itself with us and it grows very difficult, in consequence, at times to differentiate. But surely it is evident, that if we are that flesh and blood and bone and brain that, at our death, is buried and decays, then there is not much hope for us as individuals and such experiences as we suffer or enjoy can be, at best, a school for atoms.
And we know, though we are clothed in atoms , that ourselves are something vastly more. The very atheist, who says he disbelieves in anything but what his senses indicate, himself is proof upstanding of Intelligence so subtle and pervading that the atoms he assures us are himself took shape and grew into the thing he thinks he is.
Theosophy unfolds to us two natures, spiritual and material, the one immortal and the other governed by the alternating law of life and death. That stuff that we discard, and that they burn or bury (brain and all), when we have “shuffled off this mortal coil,” has been subjected to the alchemy of use and we have changed its nature — possibly not much, but we have changed it for the better or the worse. Who then are we?
It dawns after a while; and all the words in all the bibles and the dictionaries ever written lack ability to tell the wonder of it
when it wakes into the consciousness. That knowledge comes to us in silence, though the world may yell with passion, and there rises in us from within a dignity beyond all measure — hope that is whole and deathless — an illimitable patience — and, like gentle rain on dry earth, the assurance of our own essential divinity.
Then, actually for the first time, we begin to understand the teachings of Blavatsky and appreciate why, with the alternative of wealth at her disposal, she preferred a life of hardship and the task of bringing the Masters’ message of the Ancient Wisdom to humanity.
To understand that message is impossible, unless we do as she did: that is, let the lures of selfish ambition go. The love of reputation and of easy short cuts to a brain-mind Utopia, just as surely as resentment of injustice, and as subtly as contempt for others’ seemingly less spiritual efforts, lead astray.
There must be thousands who have read The Secret Doctrine and have leaped to the conclusion that the simplest, surest way to follow in its author’s footsteps is to make the desperately toilsome journey into Tibet and there learn the doctrines from the Great Teachers, just as she did. There are some who have rejected the whole teaching of Theosophy because, to them, that journey is impossible. And there are others who, for other reasons, have assailed the mountain-passes and by dint of almost superhuman energy have reached what maps declare to be the heart of the forbidden land and then, returning, have announced in lectures and on printed page that Tibet is the home of superstition, so engrossed in ritual and devil-worship as to harbor no conceivable philosophy worth study.
