Besant A. - The Sphinx of Theosophy

THE Egyptian Sphinx will be familiar to every one of you, either by its pictured semblance, or possibly by the vision of its actual form; and to me, and I dare say to many of you, there has always been a certain fascination in that mighty Sphinx, so serene in its composure, so absolutely still, so impressive in that stillness, with, as it were, the wisdom of ages sculptured on its impassive face. Few I think can have looked at it without feeling the fascination of the mystery of its wise eyes and fast-locked lips; few can have seen it without dreaming fantastically whether questions addressed to it might not possibly win answer to many problems of the world. I have thought sometimes that that creed that to many is so strange; that creed which has come to us from the East but is not of the East only but of the thought of all climes and of all ages; that that thought of the world that we speak of now as Theosophy, has in itself much likeness to that sculptured Sphinx, so much promise of answer to mystery and so much silence in face of the questionings of the world – silence which has been profound for centuries, but silence which more recently has been broken. And to-night I am to try if it be possible to sketch for you something of what that Sphinx has to say of the world-questionings; to strive to give you in some fashion a rough answer, as it comes to some of us from the lips of the thinkers of the East.

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Theosophy is so vast a subject, embracing as it does the whole of human life at once, a philosophy, a science, and a religion, that in dealing with it one can but sketch it in roughest outline, hoping only that even the outline may stir some thinkers to enquiry, and that by their own study they may fill in the details which necessarily in a lecture must be left untouched. To many of us, in whom the habit of study has grown through a lifetime given to it, to many of us it seems as though years of careful thinking would only bring us as it were to the threshold of the subject that I am to treat to-night. And if, to those who have given so long to study, to them still there are many problems left unanswered, many questions to which no reply has come, then surely you can scarcely expect that with some of you to whom the subject may be absolutely new, you can scarcely expect that in the mere lecture of an hour there will not be many questionings rising in your own minds that the lecture will not answer; much that may seem puzzling; much that may seem impossible; for it is only by study, and years of study, that you can hope to grasp the explanation of even some of the problems that I am to set before you.

To-night, then, in sketching my outline, I propose to try to present to you Theosophy first in what it says as to the Universe; then in what it says as to man and his destiny; and lastly in what it says touching human duty. Under those three heads I shall have more than enough to say, and in taking it in this fashion, with a sketch of the philosophy of the Universe, with a sketch of the destiny of the human race, with a sketch of the ethical system that is based upon the philosophy – in so dealing with it, I hope to succeed in leaving at least some coherent impress on your minds, something that perchance may win one here and there to go further into that which I can unfold to so small an extent.

And now first then, as to what Theosophy tells us as to the Universe, the view of the Universe that it puts before us, the line of thought along which it leads us when we face the vast problems of existence. To the Theosophist the Universe is but the outbreathing of the eternal and universal life. Has it ever struck you how throughout Nature rhythm is everywhere found? if you turn to the lowest forms of animate life, to those small infusoria which only the microscope can enable you to study and to scrutinize; even there as you watch that speck of animated matter you will see the rhythm, the rhythm of the breathing, the outbreathing and the inbreathing, which is part of the very life of that lowly form of existence. And just as you find rhythm is the lowest, so right through the universe similar rhythm is found: everywhere rising and falling, everywhere expansion and contraction, everywhere the ebbing and the flowing, whether you look at worlds, or whether you look at atoms; and to the Theosophist this Universe as a whole pulses with the same rhythm that you find in its minutest portions. The outbreathing of the universal life is the Universe; the inbreathing is the disappearance of that Universe once again; and so through the endless ages of eternal life, 452so through the whole of that eternity that stretches behind us and before us, we see the outbreathing and the inbreathing of the living, we see the formation and the disappearance of the Universes. But while we can study the Universe we cannot study the source of its periodical life; we cannot use words regarding that centre and source of all existence which shall not in the very using be self-contradictory and incomprehensible. We cannot speak of It as life, for life is but one of Its aspects, and It is All. We cannot speak of It as intelligence, for intelligence is but a phase, and It is the essence of everything. Before that Unknowable human thought can only be silent. Imagine some such infusorium, as I spoke of, trying to describe to its fellow infusoria the thinking and the arguments of intelligent man. You can guess how blind would be its gropings; you can imagine the follies and the self-contradictions that it would utter. Further than it is below us are we below the Centre and the Essence of Life; and before that, the Universal, we can but bow in silence, knowing that all our thought is but impertinence, and that any word of ours would be but audacity and not reality. And so from That, which in one of its aspects to us is life, the Universe proceeds.

Think of this life, as for clearness you may imagine it, pulsing outwards through infinite space; imagine then this life differentiating itself, as it is put in our Theosophical philosophy, into seven stages or planes of existence; imagine it pulsing outwards through these seven stages, becoming more and more “material”, as we call it, as it proceeds – the most ethereal of spirit at the innermost, the most material of matter at the outermost – and then you will grasp the first fundamental thought of the philosophy – this sevenfold plane of existence, and with the sevenfold plane of existence the sevenfold series of organisms fitted to inhabit each plane, and the sevenfold consciousness existing in each of these planes. Thus everywhere in your Universe you have this fundamental conception: Seven stages of existence, uttermost spirit above and uttermost matter below, and between those two poles of spirit and of matter stretch every kind of form of animated existence, each stage suitable to its inhabitants, each series of organisms fitted for that plane of existence on which they live. And this notion of the sevenfold existence is not a mere dream. Has it never struck you how strangely this “seven” meets you everywhere? In light, which is one, you have seven colors, which united make the whiteness of the light. In the sound which is music you have seven notes in your scale, and your eighth is but a repetition of the first on a higher plane. And so throughout Nature you have the suggestion of this seven-stepped existence, so to speak; you have it in light and in color perceptible to the eye, as in sound to the ear; and you have it, we are taught, through the whole of the Universe, making one mighty unity with the sevenfold diversity of existence. When once you have grasped that fundamental notion, then simpler before you will stretch the idea of the different beings, each suitable to the plane of existence on which it lives; and then you will begin to realize that there 453may be existence other than your own; that there may be intelligences under conditions that differ from those that surround you; that each stage of being will be suitable to its environment; that each will have a consciousness fitted to its own surroundings; and that if you are fitted to the world in which you are, this terrestrial matter which is the third of the planes that we know of, that so on other planes than yours are other lives, so in other stages than yours are other forms of consciousness, and those other lives and other forms of consciousness are not supernatural although they are superhuman, for they are all as natural as your own lives, living, thinking, as you live or think, but on a different plane, on a different stage, of conscious existence. Reaching then that point of thought, you will see the Universe evolving along these different lines. You will see what you call spirit gradually descending, as we phrase it, into matter and climbing upwards through matter to self-consciousness, and so reaching once more the goal from whence it came. So that to us all existence is a cycle, and the very object of existence is the gaining and the gathering of knowledge and of experience. Spirit becoming self-conscious through its union with matter, spirit becoming self-conscious as it descends through matter and climbs up from it once again. And so in treading that mighty cycle, so in passing through these various stages, it gathers up into one all knowledge and all experience, becoming perfect through the experience through which it passes, and taking back at the ending all that it has gained in the course of that pilgrimage of milleniums. And then, when that view of the Universe has worked itself into your thought, when you realize that you are part of this mighty whole, that your individual self is a portion of that evolving life, that your humanity is the very image in small of the Universe at large, that the evolution of humanity is the great object of this mighty cycling through eternity, then you have caught, as it were, the first glimpse of this great philosophy of life, you have taken your first steps on that path of knowledge which takes us so far onwards into the future, as well as gathers up for us all the treasures of the past.

From this rough outline of this cosmical view, this view of the Universe as a mighty and evolving life through the seven stages, turn from that to man, the microcosm, who reproduces, as it were, in himself the very essence of this total evolution, the man sevenfold as the Universe is sevenfold, and each stage of the human life corresponding to a stage of the Universe.

I need not weary you with the Sanskrit terms which are most familiarly used among us in dealing with the sevenfold aspect of man. I am taking the thing rather than the name, and am trying to clear your conceptions rather than to burden you with a difficult terminology.

Think, then, of man as sevenfold in his nature; think of each of these aspects in man as corresponding to the aspects in the Universe. Think of the highest, the seventh aspect of all, as being the spark of the universal Spirit, as the very life of the life of the Universe in man, a spark from the 454universal fire in the very centre of man’s being, a pulse of the eternal life. And then, passing from that highest and most abstract part of man, think of the human spirit that is its vehicle, as you might have a lamp encircling the flame, the spirit which, in union with the eternal spark that I spoke of, and in union also with the highest mind in man, forms that upper triad of which the Theosophist so often speaks. The union of the divine element with the human spirit and with the loftiest mind forms the true individuality of the man, which existed in the past and will exist in the future. And then in conjunction with that higher trinity in man is the fourfold aspect of his lower life; the physical body that he has in common with the brute, and its astral counterpart; the life that animates that body, the mere animal life just as any brute may live; then the passions and the emotions and the lower intellectual faculties that you may find in your horse and your dog, as you find them in the man, the same in essence although not in degree. Thus you have this lower part of man; this physical life, with his emotions, with his lower intellect, with his physical body; there you get the lower and the transitory part of man, whose life is of the earth from which it comes, and which goes back to the earth and scatters when death at last touches him; scatters, not in a moment, but gradually disappearing, not at once, but not any the less certainly. For that which is eternal in man is not his physical body, is not his animal soul; it is that higher trinity I spoke of: the spark of the eternal life, the human spirit which is its vehicle, and that highest and noblest intellectual portion which knits him to the divine, and which cannot perish but must endure for ever.

And so, looking thus at man, you have our Theosophical conception of the human being. The higher trinity, the lower quaternary: and all man's life upon the earth is the attempt to evolve, to render perceptible, the Higher Self within him, and to conquer and hold in subordination the lower life that comes from earth. Here we come to that portion of our teaching which raises much of opposition from those who do not think, but only deride or scoff at what they cannot understand. The Theosophist says to everyone of you: “In you, whether you know it or not, there resides this higher trinity which is part of your heritage as man. It is for you to evolve it if you will, and to render active what in most to-day is latent. But you can render it active if you will. Latent in you there is the glorious possibility, which belongs to every child of man, of conquering the lower and of evolving the higher, with all that that conquest and all that that evolution mean.” These higher powers of what we call the Manas, or the mind in man, those powers, though latent in the majority, are beginning to show themselves in many of our own race and of our own time. Not as yet is the highest showing itself; not that spark of the everlasting life nor the very spirit in which it dwells; but the lower, the third of the trinity of which I speak, this higher mind of man is beginning to show itself in our present race, and signs of it are not awanting that everyone of you may discover. It is not in the normal that you must seek for informa455tion about these awakening powers in man; it is in the abnormal and not the normal that you must look for the further evolution. For it is only in those who are a little way ahead in their evolution that you will find these powers dawning, unless you can evoke them in the ordinary man by using certain artificial means which, by rendering the lower part of man quiescent and lethargic, will enable the inner self to shine more brightly forth. You may study, if you will, now as a recognised science the phenomena of Clairvoyance, that you get in connexion with the mesmeric and hypnotic trance; in the trance you will find some of these powers partially evolved, suggesting to you what they will be in the days to come, when their full development has been reached.

Glance for a moment at some of the well-known hypnotic phenomena where the body being thrown into a state of trance, the lower quaternary is for a time paralysed. Your bodily organ of vision has been closed; your ears are deaf to every outside sound; all in you that is purely physical has been thrown to sleep, is helpless and unconscious; but it is when the physical is most unconscious that the psychical can best testify of its real existence, and it is when all the organs of the mind are dulled and helpless that the mind itself is able to manifest its supremacy. Then you can get vision without organ of vision; then you can get hearing without the organ of hearing; you can see hundreds of miles away, you can hear across a continent, you can converse across an ocean, for the mind knows no barrier of time or of space, and it can converse with other minds when once the lower life is made quiescent and still. And in your hypnotic phenomena you will find this vision, this mental activity, without bodily organ; or, if you like, you may exercise your mental perception under conditions where all bodily vision is impossible, as in the diagnosis of obscure diseases, the description of internal organs, as they have been described before medical men over and over again, the post-mortem examinations of the body testifying to the reality of the vision of the Clairvoyant. Here you are not dealing with what you may think merely fancies of the Theosophist; you are dealing with the testimony of the laboratory and of the dissecting room, that comes from men of science revered wherever civilization has made its way. You can go to Charcot or to Liébault, you can go to Heidenhain or to many other scientists in France or Germany, and they will give you the evidence of this abnormal exercising of the human mind, of this exercise of mental faculty without bodily organ, of this seeing without eyes, when it is the mind that sees, that perceives without bodily assistance. And you can go yet further, and to a person under such conditions you can project your own thought, so that the thought becomes visible and audible to him. You can take a blank piece of paper and on that paper throwing your own thought-image, the person you have hypnotized will see what you desire. He shall see, and your thought to him becomes material because he judges it mind to mind. Remember what I said as to the seven states of consciousness. Remember what I said to you about the seven planes of 456existence. When you go to the fifth plane where the mind is working; when you pass from the third, which is your matter as you know it, to the fifth where the mind is in its own environment, and living in its own life; there what to you is immaterial becomes material to it, for matter there is not identical with matter here, and that is visible and audible to the mind which is invisible and inaudible to the coarser senses of the body.

And so we learn from this dry science of the lecture hall, from our Western thought, we learn from this how the Occult Thought is justified by modern science; how that which has been taught for centuries in the Eastern schools is now becoming a matter of experience in the Western hospitals; and if from that and from many another scientific proof of this real existence of thought and of mind, an existence other than we have known on our own earth, and within our own normal and daily life, if we once realize what that means, then Man’s destiny will indeed unfold itself before us as something loftier than poets have chanted, something mightier than ever prophets have dreamed. For that which is abnormal to-day shall be general to-morrow; that which is only beginning to bud here and there amongst us shall blossom in a future, which is not far off as the time in Eternity is counted; and that which now can only be gained by careful study and by careful living shall after a while become the inheritance of every child who is born into our world and to a higher life.

But if you would desire to prove for yourselves the reality of something more than hypnotism can give you; if you would desire to follow out your own evolution and try to climb upward beyond mind into spirit, into a plane of consciousness higher yet; then, indeed, it will only be by the constant conquest and subordination of the lower nature, until that which is done by the hypnotized person in trance and unconsciously is done by yourself with full consciousness of your doing, and without losing hold of yourself from the beginning to the ending. If this has to be done, it can only be done by rising for yourself and climbing upwards by your own endeavor. If there be intelligences on those higher planes, you cannot drag them down to you, you must climb up to them. The consciousness that you would share with them must be the consciousness which is theirs, and not the endeavor to degrade them to your lower life; and that can only be done by uttermost effort, by perfect self-devotion, and by nobility of heroic life.

If the athlete to climb a mountain-top must train himself for many a week and many a month, and then as he climbs must strain every muscle, must use every power of body, if he would reach the mountain-top that he covets to scale; do you think that if physical mountains can only be climbed by effort, it is without effort that these mountains of the mind and of the spirit can be scaled? For, mind you, as you climb upwards, fresh powers pass into your hands, and with wider knowledge comes greater power over Nature. The student of physical science gains fresh power to control Nature as he learns more of her secrets, and the student of psychical science also gains these natural powers which lie hidden from the majority 457to-day, but are open to those who know how to study and how to attain.

It is sometimes said: “There is too much mystery in your Theosophy. These powers that you are hinting at, these powers over Nature, why not throw them open to the world and let all men everywhere know how to learn and how to win?” Do you give your children dynamite to play with? Do you let your schoolboy play with poisons in the Laboratory? Do you not say that only with manhood’s knowledge must come manhood’s power, and that that which is potent for use and for service may also be potent for mischief and for destruction of life? And so in the past as in the present. These higher natural powers can only be gained by those who are willing to work and labor for many a year of patient study and of constant endeavor. They come as an appanage of the development of the higher life; they come as the natural growth of the human being as he evolves upwards in this long climb; not followed for themselves, not gained for themselves, but only as the natural blossoming of the higher humanity, which gradually grows within the men and the women who study and who live for others. For such powers bring with them vast responsibility; such powers bring with them the ability for service, but also ability for mischief; and I ask you, would it be wise that they should be thrown everywhere amongst a people, men and women of the world, men and women of to-day, women who would lose their temper if their dress did not fit, or men who would swear if their coachman made them late for a dinner party; are those people to be entrusted with powers which with a thought are able to cure, but are also able to slay? Are those people to be trusted with ability which gives mighty power for salvation but power also for destruction, at the mere will of the evil desire? And so that side of Theosophy is not thrown open to the multitude, and when you hear talk of phenomena, and when you see foolish excitement from the people who desire to see something wonderful, like a conjuring trick, then the answer is: Those powers are only interesting as signs of the growing spirituality, and they are not to be used for the amusement of a moment, nor as mere platform tricks to spend an hour in some fresh excitement. You will read of them, and they exist; but they exist only for those who are worthy to wield them; aye, for any one of you, who is willing to go through the discipline, who is willing to give the time and have the patience for study. They are not supernatural, they are wholly natural; and they can only be won, as all Nature’s powers are won, by those who have patience to study, who have courage to investigate and to act.

And from that side I point you to the light that there is in man’s destiny; reminding you how it shows the time when man shall indeed be royal over Nature, because he is first royal over himself; that Nature shall be his servant because he is his own master; having conquered himself, he conquers everything; and when that victory has been won, man’s destiny will be perfect and complete.

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But you may well say: “How can life give time for such attainment, how can one brief life find space for the evolution of which you speak?” No one life would be enough for such growth, nor in one brief human life is such attainment possible; but Theosophy teaches that it is not one life but many lives through which you pass. You who are here to-day are not here for the first time; far behind you stretches a vast human experience, and the abilities that you have, the faculties that you enjoy, the powers that you exercise, those are the trophies of your past victories, they are the signs of the fashion in which you have used the lives of the past. Not one, but many lives, come to every human spirit in its pilgrimage through Time and Space; not once, but often, does man renew his experience, gathering more of knowledge with every life, adding fresh pages of experience to the book of his existence, and so writing line after line of that human story which at last he will be able to read. So, we are taught, man is re-born according to the past which he has made by his own effort. What you are, Theosophy tells you, you have made yourself. The life that you have and the powers that you exercise, that life has been moulded by your own past, those powers have been won by your own endeavors. For the ethics of Theosophy grow out of this view of man; the ethics of Theosophy tell you of a law that none can escape, of a destiny that none can avoid: that law of moral causation which is universal, and which moulds for each the life which his own previous existence has deserved. According to that law of Karma, that law of ethical causation, to-day is the result and the fruit of the past. Your present is moulded by your past, your future shall be the outcome of your present. Shadows thrown upon a wall, Professor Draper tells us, leave an impress there, so that if you use the rightful means, you can evolve once more the shadow from the wall over which it has passed. If that be true of matter, shall it not also be true of spirit? and if the suitable means could evolve from the wall the shadow that your passing figure has cast upon it, shall not the shadow of your acts cast upon your character be evolved by the mighty alchemy of Nature and change it, and leave an impress that nothing can take away? And so we believe that men are born as they have prepared for themselves the life into which they come. And if you say to that, “Well, but look at the rich and the poor, look at the varieties of human circumstance, the varieties of human happiness. Would you tell us that all who suffer poverty have ill-used their previous existence, that the prosperous and wealthy are only reaping the reward of some past life?” Then we answer you: “In dealing with human life, you must look not only on the surface but below it. These lives of yours are but moments in the great life through which you pass; each life but as an hour out of the many years of your pilgrimage through the ages. When you judge of wealth or of poverty, you must measure them in the scales of the eternal life, and not only in those of the transitory present. It may be that those who are most miserable and most poor, whose fate has flung them into some slum of this vast city, may there 459be expiating only some trifling error, and by the self-denying of their living, by the glory of their charity to their fellows, by that nobility and unselfishness that you find more among the slum-dwellers than the palace-dwellers, it may be that they are moulding for themselves the most glorious future, and making progress more rapidly than they could dream of in their darkness now. And it may be that some wealthy man or woman, thrown into that position by some event of a previous life, it may be that in the selfishness that grows out of comfort, in the isolation that grows out of wealth, in the indifference to other lives that comes out of ease to one’s self, it may be that they are losing, spiritually and mentally, far more than they are winning with their mere bodily ease, and they are further back in their pilgrimage by reason of the very ease of their daily life. For, mind you, the worst crime in man is selfishness; that which isolates him from his brothers, that which separates him from the common lot, that which puts him apart and separate, is oft-times the worst curse that can fall upon a human life. For if it be true, as we teach, that all men are brothers; if it be true that in this vast human family there is one great tie of brotherhood, that goes from life to life and from heart to heart; then I ask you, what can do more to degrade the whole life of man than to live in selfish and easeful isolation while others are in misery and wretchedness at your very doors? For think not that the poor suffer alone; think not that the brutality and the misery, the degradation and the crime of one part of London leave unpoisoned the atmosphere of the rest. I spoke of the bearing of Theosophy on human conduct; the one message Theosophy brings to the Western World, is the message of brotherhood, a brotherhood which is blasphemed every day in this metropolis, and which is merely a word and an empty phrase in the mouth of most. But we who believe in this Universal Brotherhood, we recognize and understand that no progress in the spirit can be made unless there be self-devotion to the general good of humankind. That any idea of progress by the intellect, that any hope of attainment by means of the mind, that those are but as dreams beside the progress that can be won by self-devotion to humanity, and the service that is done to our brothers when we sacrifice our own happiness to their good.

And so the final message of Theosophy is one of ethics rather than even of philosophy or of science. It has its philosophy of which I have suggested to you some outline; it has its science of man to some points of which I have alluded; and I have suggested also the line of study along which we may go. But more vital than its philosophy, more essential than its science, is that ethical duty of brotherhood between all members of the human race, which sees misery only to relieve it, and suffering only to lighten the pang that it inflicts. And so it teaches us that none can rise alone; that the degradation of one is the degradation of all; that while some are miserable, none can be truly happy; that while there are poor to be succored, there ought to be no rich to waste; that while there is starvation on one side there ought to be no idle luxury on the other. And that message of brotherhood 460is the one which is most wanted in our selfish Western Civilisation; for here luxury has reached its highest point, here the purely material rules over men’s minds more than it has ever ruled before. In this 19th century, in its race for wealth, in its triumphs of material science, in its pride of material advancement, here more than ever before in the world’s history, has been wanted this message of brotherhood from man to man. And sometimes I have thought, in their far-off Eastern home, those whom we call Masters and Teachers, in that they are wiser by their study than we are, that they have broken what one of them has called the silence of centuries, because of the sore need of our Western World. We may progress in science and in wealth, we may progress in knowledge and in intellectual attainment, but useless is this, nay, worse than useless, mischievous, if it widen the gulf between rich and poor and makes more impossible the Brotherhood of Man. For together we must climb or together we must fall. No one of us can be saved by his own efforts unless his brother rises side by side with him. Our work is the work of a common salvation; our work here is the work of a common duty to common human need; and in doing that, in devoting ourselves to that, we shall be true Theosophists, working out the spirit of the Philosophy, and climbing upwards towards the Higher Life.

And to you, who, for one brief hour this evening, have come from gayer scenes and brighter lives to listen to this message from the East, my last word to you, which is the central word, shall be this word of “Brotherhood”. To be rid of selfishness, to win but to serve, to use your education to help the ignorant, to use your training to help the untrained, to use your voices to make articulate the sufferings of the voiceless; that is the command that Theosophy gives to the rich of the Western World. And if you would learn its Philosophy, you must bear its moral yoke; if you would learn its Science you must accept its ethical teaching; for Ethics come before Science, and Duty comes before attainment. Accepting the one, the other likewise shall be yours, and then all together, not apart and individually, all as one vast family bound in bonds of love, we shall climb together that ladder of Humanity whose foot is set in the slime of animal life, but whose summit is lost in the eternal light – the ladder on whose rungs our feet are set to-day, but up which we cannot climb, save as we bear our brethren with us, and use our strength to help their weakness and our powers to make their helplessness strong.

Annie Besant.

Footnotes