Keightley J - Letters on the True

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H A L P S

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Letters on the True

Julia Keightley

(English)

(June, July, August, September 1887)

Publications:

• The Path, vol. II, no. 3, June 1887, pp. 65-71 (Part I)
• no. 4, July 1887, pp. 97-101 (Part II)
• no. 5, August 1887, pp. 129-133 (Part III)
• no. 6, September 1887, pp. 161-168 (Part IV)

Read:

• Electronic journal edition in Teopedia

DATA

Title for references: Keightley J - Letters on the True
Short description:

Julia Keightley

Letters on the True

Signed "Jasper Niemand, F. T. S." throughout, addressed to "My Comrades." The series continues in later issues of Volume II, outside the scope of this project.

65

I.

My Comrades:—

A renowned occultist said recently; "Do not write like the Peripatetics, but put your soul into it." The wisdom of this advice becomes at once apparent. We may not all attain those brave pinnacles in the distance, but the first hard steps lie close at hand, to be taken by every earnest man. He takes them more or less in the dark. Now our struggle is for Union; not merely to be in Union, but to be that Union itself. This idea should attend us from the outset, for ideas create men. So in considering the subject of Truth, and how to become It, I find myself confronted with my individual experience, and my conception of its value soon enlarges as I

66 find it repeating itself in many another life. It would seem that I might thus come to you, a friend to friends, speaking plainly of such hidden essences as I may find in diurnal things. I do not offer a universal panacea. I point out that which is for me The Way. Yet I say also with Ulysses: "I am a part of all that I have met," and to those sharers of my larger nature I manifest that which I have found. You are very present with me, oh, my Comrades! Distance cannot shut you from me. Maya cannot hide you. As we breast the tide of this Dark Age, I seem to feel your hearts beating time with mine. I meet one, and he becomes identical with me; then perhaps another and still another, until merged in the pulsation of a single Hope, we are but so many throbs in the Great Heart of All. I salute you out there in the Unknown, and may we one day come together with the large homeric joy of fellow warriors! Now you know in what spirit I address you.

Would to God Truth were more believed in! I say this amid frequent surprise. Yet it is a mimic Truth by which we live. This puppet virtue emasculates. It cozens our judgment, disowns our intuitions and divides our motives. We drift to and fro with the material scum of Being. When do we come face to face, speaking entire thoughts? We look each at the other's mask, and Truth is dumb. Shy as schoolboys we are before the tricksy illusion of form. As friends commune best in the twilight, so we shrink back within the veiled recesses of the mind, and if we speak our conviction, it is in parable. Who has a true relation in life? Between the closest lovers there arises this impalpable wall of fictitious personality. We do not break through it. The heart pants for the True, but it cannot reveal its necessities to those whose thirst is slaked by shallower streams. If we dared be what we are with one another, we might get down to bed rock, and begin to understand somewhat of this great mine called Life, and the lay of its ore veins, and where a man may blast through to everlasting riches. You will say to me; "Shall I disclose the sacred core of my soul to be gapped at and appraised as the thing for which I have paid just so much blood and so many tears?" Never! I know well that even those who under ties of birth and law have a right to confidence, do not always know of its existence. You sit among them in the twilight, gazing towards the horizon, striving to catch the first divine harmonies of the on-coming night, and when they say to you, "Of what are you thinking?" you answer;—"I wondered if to-morrow will bring good harvest weather." For you have tried it and found no scale to measure, no bottom to the box. It is a common need that I specify. We are delivered up at the bar of custom, impressed under arbitrary standards, bidden accept the verdict of self impanelled citizens for the swift mandate of our own soul. She mocks at this usurped authority. We have too long allowed others to bind us in

67 the names of the great Verities, and now we discover beneath those august mantles, plastic little gods of civic creation. It is a tale as old as the world.

It lies within our power to change this in some degree at least. He who would have true relations, must himself be true. Let him distrust names, and sift facts. Give nothing the right to pass you unchallenged. The most trifling opinion must give the eternal countersign before I admit it within my lines. I receive no idea until I have tested it by all the laws known to me, whether natural or supra-natural. For if I give out some false thought to another, I poison his spring. I have a corsican feud with that lying word—"Independence." I would raze it from the memory of men. There is no such thing. The True repudiates it. Exact Science protests her ignorance of this fabled monster. Even on the physical plane, each man, himself a glowing sphere in action, throws off and inhales by every pore, particles of matter, of mind stuff, of cell stuff, of all that goes to the making of the mere flesh and blood man. Case him up in plaster of paris but with the necessary orifices for organic functions, and see how long he will live. Put him into solitary confinement and mark what becomes of his "independent" brain. We interchange bodies with one another and recruit them even from the dead. Reject me; put the Atlantic between us, and I will send a shaft to your heart in the shape of my thought. I have seen proud men chafe at a comrade's suggestions, and accept unconsciously the alms of a thousand stranger minds. We have a tremendous lien upon one another. All Humanity impinges upon every man, at every instant, on every plane. Where among the worlds do you find Independence? Is your constitution larger than that of Orion? Shall continuity be displaced, that you may stretch yourself? Accept the reign of Law; and instead of Independence write "Interdependence," on the lintel of the heart. I do not say this procedure is always painless. Truth is a goddess who demands a human sacrifice. For my part, give me facts, though they crush me. Something finer will spring up from the remains.

Being true friends we shall find them. Here in this perplexed world if hearts could get together, and together—untinged by sense—go out through one another's real experience, much might be found out. Such friends love truly because each in the other sees the true self reflected. They do not hold silence but reveal their hidden thoughts, and by mutual comparison, which is greater and surer, eliminate error, realize the True in all things and "keep each other awake in Him." They hold intercourse also, at times which they do not recollect, as we do with all higher souls who love us, and who certainly exist, though not now known to our mortal eye and memory, and who drink perhaps often with us the little ambrosia that we are able to reach. For this infrequent boon doubtless all people languish, knowing not what it is that they desire, and thus many a soul goes through life seek-

68 ing it for years, and often, too often, concludes that it is a search for Utopia, because the rough experience of long seasons proves apparently "friends such as we desire are dreams and fables." It need not be so, if you will not have it so. Be wholly true and you must find within your circle at least one heart equal to yours, with whom you can establish this priceless interchange. Seek another; break up the ice and get out into free air. The man of the world and the deifier of the practical, will alike bear witness that in such union is strength indeed, no matter what the issue. It can be maintained where lives have a mutual lodestar. Yet on your guard against the intellectual tramp, who is ever ready to refresh himself in your inner domain and gape at your wonders. The curious and the idle have no right of way through my mind.

The awakening soul demands a plain and vital relation. She cries to all her environments: "Hereafter I am bound by no arrogative claims. Does your word reverberate in me? I follow! Does your thought attract mine? Take it! I will give you all that is yours in me; I will not give you one jot more. Hope not to mould me within given limits. I shape myself only to the True. I will no longer be merely virtuous. I am Virtue!" Such is the language of the soul, to whom her own Being is sufficient fact, who offers no explanations, no excuses, but faces the interlocutor boldly, and answers: "Thus have I done. Am I or am I not free?" When the eternal comparison is established, however, she bears herself humbly before it, so long as she has not herself become that Eternal in very fact. She knows that there is but one place in the universe whereon a man may make a square stand, and he does so with the Law to back him. That place is his Duty. The equation of the Past has brought him there. All these paltry concerns, this material pressure are outcomes of the energies of that Astral Medium which is at once his flux and his teacher. He and others about him are making these things themselves; for this lesson there is no better place than that wherein his soul first rouses from her stupor.

I spoke of Virtue. What is that? Emerson once told us: "Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things." That commanding Nature, which is the True, stands above the adherent virtue. Growth and decay advance through retrogression, the fermenting and cathartic processes, these are Nature's. She gives, not opiates, but astringents. To sin, which is to go off at a tangent from the True; to suffer, which is discordant vibration; to return when a latent attraction, developed through pain, sets out towards the sphere of harmonious action; all this is natural. To lose a thousand vintages through the evolution of finer forces, to make here a rose and there a desert, these, with many transmuting and conserving powers, Nature

69 offers as analogies to the student of the True and forbids him to condemn any of them. Sometimes convention establishes this natural order, simply because it is too massive to be overlooked, as when well-bred people select only topics of general interest to all. Then the crowd follow, not because it is true, but because it is convention. This cold acceptance freezes up the vitality of the germ. Let a man agree with his own soul that he will not lie because he galvanizes non-being into Being; that he will not steal because he goes behind the law which gives him all that is his own and will demand restitution at compound interest for the very word of which he may have deprived another. Let him not covet aught because his true manhood depends on his balance of power, his control of desire. Let him demand of himself the Why, of every impulse. Let him seek out the basic reason of his thoughts and actions, and assuring himself of his hidden motive, kill or exalt that as it may deserve. This is vital. What I say here of man applies once and for all to woman also. I am considering that fontal essence in which is no sex, no condition, no division—the True. If the whole tendency be to that, the greatest secrets in occultism can be known. Loyalty must be a sum, not a fraction. Take Truth alone for your headlight, thereby the world may see your course, and children and jejune idlers be warned from its track. I do not say you should rise up and cast off the outer life all at once. That is your protection; you will need it for some time to come. But I say that you should look sleeplessly for the true kernel of these external things. Our advance must even be made with discrimination, often in befriending silence. Remember that under the present social constitution, as long as Theosophy seems to unfit men for their private capacities and obligations, so long will the world condemn it as lacking in moral and in common sense. Its exponents may not deal violently with established relations. You are to work out, not to jump out. If we love the True, we shall fulfil every personal claim, every formal pledge incurred by our position in life, at no matter what cost, rather than allow a false deduction to be drawn which shall implicate the good faith of our moral philosophy. Those to whom we are due alone can free us. An Adept wrote recently: "To find masters, you must be unclaimed by man or woman." Unfulfilled duties are ropes which drag us back. Men are eager to serve this cause; let them bear the result of their actions for its honor until the high law sets them free. Only an overwhelming certainty of a divine mission, of a certified call to Adeptship and the service of Humanity at large frees us from these present considerations by removing us to a higher plane, wherein we stand justified. While I live among men I wear the garment appointed to their assembly. Hours befall when I am called to quit this communion for that of the gods! Then I only know the laws of the soul and emerge from these platitudes of this lower world.

70 We cannot too deeply inhale the knowledge that Truth is not a surface growth. How often I have seen the clue overlooked by seekers; how often seen the messenger refused! Perhaps the tenor of his speech was too foreign, or too unassuming; or time was lost in questioning his methods, or the student flung away in fancied independence, forgetting that men do not own their own minds, but are debtors to the great currents of Thought. These flow through us like a river; the individual mind is but one of a million ripples, yet the force gathers momentum from ripple to ripple and all the river. Only a large nature can receive a gift with grace and integrity; it has no fear of belittling itself by acceptance, for it knows that in the True we only receive in due proportion to our gifts, and that it must speedily bestow elsewhere. You do not hesitate to accept the services of a bank clerk because he is paid for them. Do you suppose that equity is confined to men, and that the Eternal gives us no retainer? Dismiss this commercial weighing and counting; give and take as the winds do! If an archangel stood within a body whose exterior did not announce that divine prompter, men of average standing would reject him while searching for him. "I faint with the desire to find those who will unselfishly accept me and work for the rest. I give myself in all things for your benefit and would be glad if by my death or by my loss you could reach enlightenment. I would transfer, could I do so, all my experience to your soul and give it away to you. For what? For nothing at all save your acceptance. We know very well we can do no more than offer these goods. We set up the wooden image before the eyes of men and not one taking the sword cuts it in two, to find the jewels within. Then we sadly go on again." That is the language of spiritual power and self confidence ignores it daily. If Jesus and Buddha walked the earth to-day without followers or protestations, how many men who clamor for the mysteries would recognize Them by an innate perception of Their qualities? I marvel that others suppose the Great Spirits of all ages to have passed onward to realms of bliss, without a second thought for the belated brotherhood behind. By the inexorable laws of Their perfected natures, some must have returned, in renunciation and bondage, to live and humbly teach and cheer reluctant men.

Do not take any man at his surface valuation or yours, but look to the spirit within his words. This discernment of spirits is a great power; it can be cultivated. Close your eyes, summon up the man before your thought and try to feel his total effect as it impresses itself on your passive mind. Then regard him impersonally as a problem solved, not forgetting that a foolish man may at times become the mouthpiece of unseen powers. Our perception is often tested thus; be vigilant, lest unawares you reject the fruit of life. But you wish to pluck it for yourself without the aid of any

71 man? Friend! Such fruit never grew. The One Itself can only realize through the many. Are you higher than that?

Others again fall into the besetting error of students who are tempted at the outset to elaborate a system. The wish to set our intellectual acquisitions in order is natural enough, but as on our present plane we can only attain to partial conceptions, we may harden them into a finality, become insensibly attached to them as being our very own, and reject all that does not accord with them. Must the universal march up and toe my chalk line? Eschew mental habit; it is a great encrustor. Submit the outer and inner man to the solvent of will. Heed the indications of Nature. Observe the bird as it folds its wings and drops down the air to the predetermined spot. Consider the lightning, when from the lurid sheeted flow it forges a bolt and darts it to the mark. Every bullet that scores must first be liquid lead. Fix your motive, then make your thought fluidic and free. We are much conjured in the name of consistency. In heaven's name then, let us be consistent, but to the Truth itself, through all its varied manifestations. Each man need care only for what he is this moment, and pass on easily with life to the next. There are times when we rise into an instant perception of Truth through the total nature of the soul. Then I feel myself great, by reason of this power, yet infinitely small, in that I do not hourly contain it. The laws governing this tidal wave form part of my inner consciousness, just as many of my forces are out yonder in the infinite correlations of cosmic energy. A full perception of them enables a man to hold up hand and lure, and the hawks swoop down. When a comrade displays this touchstone of the soul we know one another without any words. Many men of positive nature think that they also have fallen heir to this power because they test and are confident. They stand fast in reality by the lower knowledge of the delusive self, and can no more apprehend this internal aurora which throbs and gleams through the expanded man than a child discriminates between Northern Lights and the glare of distant conflagrations. The reason for this, as for all mistakes, inheres deeply in the elemental nature of man, and suggestions can be given whereby he may first recognize and then if he be a strong man—conquer it. To this end let us unite our efforts, for you know it is through sharing this faulty nature that I have been led to an earnest contemplation of possible remedies.

Jasper Niemand, F. T. S.

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97

II.

My Comrades:—

The elemental nature of man has long engaged my thoughts, for so soon as I look within I am confronted with a mystery. Others admit the same experience. There is in me a morass, or a mountain, or a cold water dash which appalls me, it seems so icy and dead. In it none of my friends do walk; all is frozen and silent. Yet I seem to like the place, for there I can stand alone, alone, alone. When a boy I had often to cross that cold tract, and then I did not want to meet any boys. I wished to go

98 alone, not with despair, but with a grim and terrible pleasure. I could weep and enjoy with another, and drink in their words and their souls, and the next week that cold arctic death came between us. It does so still. What think you, comrades, is that? But the stars still shine overhead, and on the margin flit the shapes of my loved, and I know that I shall either go back to them or meet them on the further side. It is not grim nor ghastly at all but is certainly unseen by the crowd. This mystery rose before me often and surprised me. It knew so much that it wanted to tell me. Soon I found that all my energies were but the play of correlated powers upon the margin of that strange spot. Where did all my life force come from, if not from that? What else had saved my ideals from the degradation of our material mechanical life? Over there in the centre, mist-enfolded, is the tented Self, the watchful god. Only a great tide of love, impersonal, unselfish, divine, can dissolve the lower self and flood us over that arctic desolation. Such love is the aloe flower, and blooms but once a century. Here, on the near side of the mystery, the side nearest the outer man, embedded in his heart, is the lurker, the elemental self.

When first we discover a trace of the soul within ourselves, there is a pause of great joy, of deep peace. This passes. The Soul, or Self, is dual, semi-material, and the material or outer covering is known as the elemental self, the Bhutatma of the Upanishads. As you know, Bhuts or Bhoots are elementals or spirits of a certain lower order. It is this lower self—"human soul"—which feels the effects of past Karma weighing it downwards to each fresh descent into matter, or reincarnation. These effects, in the shape of latent impulses, accompany the higher principles into Devachan, where the spiritual energies work themselves out in time. Those karmic tendencies then germinate in their turn, and impel the soul to their necessary sphere of action,—the earth life—to which it again descends, carrying with it as its germ, the true Self or Buddhi, which may develop so far as to unite with Atma, or Divine Spirit.

Now our bodies, and all the "false I" powers, up to the individual soul, are partial forms in common with the energic centres in the astral light, while the individual soul is total, and according to the power and purity of the form which it inhabits, "waits upon the gods." All true things must be total, and all totalities exist at once, each in all, and hence the power of the soul to exhibit Truth; hence those sudden gleams from the half awakened soul of which the occultist becomes aware as his consciousness locates nearer and nearer the centre; he draws ever closer to the blaze of Light, until the recognition of it becomes enduring because it is now himself. In the earlier stages this perception is physical as well as mental and cannot be likened to any other sensation. There is a flash, a thrill, a surge, sometimes a fragrant sound, and a True thought is born into the world of the lower man.

99 It thus follows that only such forms as are total, reveal entire Truth, and those that partake of lower nature, or are partial, receive but a limited view of Truth. These partial forms participate in each other, and exist partially in those that are total. Such partial forms are elementals in the astral light, are the energic centres in common with all, so that it is only when our consciousness is located in part in the astral body that we perceive things pertaining to the astral plane.

The elemental self is a partial form, existing partially in the true Self, with which it can only be really incorporated when entirely purified from all material dross, when is no more itself, but that other Self, even as the Spirit enters Nirvana. This gross, or false self, is great in its way; it must be known and conquered. Of it the Upanishad says that when "overcome by bright and dark fruits of action he enters on a good or bad birth," he dwells in the body and "thus his immortal Self is like a drop of water on a lotus leaf, and he himself is overcome by the qualities of nature. Then because he is thus overcome, he becomes bewildered, . . . and he sees not the Creator, the holy Lord, abiding within himself. Carried along by the waves of the qualities, darkened in his imaginations, unstable, fickle, crippled, full of desires, vacillating, he enters into belief, believing 'I am he,' 'this is mine,' he binds his Self by his self as a bird by a net." We are told that if this elemental self be attached to sound, touch, outer objects—in a word, to desire and sensation—"it will not then remember the highest place." When the student thinks that he loves, hates or rejects at will, he is only the manifester or machine, the motor is the elemental Self. It must have sensation, must enjoy through the senses or organs, or it would be extinguished in the higher principles. For this enjoyment it has sought the earth world again. So it casts up clouds and fumes of illusion whereby the man is incited to action, and when he denies it one mode of satisfaction, it inoculates him with a craving for some other. When he forsakes the temptations of the outer life, it assails him with those of the mind or heart, suggests a system to ossify him, a specialty to limit him, emotions to absorb him, evokes a tumult to drown the "still, small voice." Pride, dogmatism, independence, desire, hope and fear, these and many other qualities are its aids under mock titles. It disturbs the true proportions of all things. It cozens and juggles him beyond belief. Instead of relying upon the great All as himself, developing that faith and standing fixed by the Law, the man increases his confidence in his personal abilities, opens his mind to the thousand cries of self-assertion and puts his trust in this "will o' the wisp" nature which strives to beguile him from firm ground. This self of death and ashes tells him every hour that he, the man he now knows as himself, is a being of judgment and power. The contrary is true; the first advance to the True must be humbly made, under the fixed belief which later becomes

100 knowledge, that the man as he now appears to himself is to be wholly distrusted and self-examined step by step. As the physical atoms are all renewed in each seven years' course, so a man has many mental deaths and births in one incarnation, and if he makes steady resistance to the undermining principle of Reversion to Type, carefully testing the essence of motives and thoughts, the very well-spring of deeds, he soon finds that one higher state of consciousness is succeeded by another and still others, until, in each of which transient conditions he temporarily and illusively lives, until he takes the last stronghold of the lower self and beholding its dissolution, crosses with a supreme effort to where the watchful god awaits him.

As the man has advanced on the animal, driving it from every subterfuge, lopping off its hydra heads and searing them with the fire of spiritual wisdom, and stands calm and firm in the equipoise achieved by the strength of his attraction for the True, then it is that the enemy makes a sudden halt upon the psychic plane, and summons to its service the grim battalions of the deadliest warfare ever known to the human race. The Dweller of the Threshold stands revealed, a congeries of materialistic essences expressed from the man's entire past, a bestial apanage of his lower self, and this lusty huntsman, whose quarry is the soul, shouts a view-halloo to all the nameless devils of its pack and gives and takes no quarter. The conquest of the body, the dispersal of worldly interests are child's play to this struggle, where the enemy itself is still a sharer in the divine, and is not to be killed but subdued. All the powers of Maya, all the startling vividness of universal illusion are at its disposal. It has for allies the hosts of earth and water, air and fire, terrible apparitions, horrid thoughts incarnate in malodorous flesh and reeking with desire, creatures dragged from the polluted depths of animal existence, sounds hideous and inconceivable, sensations that cast a frigid horror over the palsied mind. The man battles with misty evils that elude the very grasp of thought, he cannot even answer for his own courage, for the foe is within, it is himself, yet not himself, and its surest weapons are forged in the fires of his own heart. Thence too comes his strength, but his perception of that is obscured in this hour. The last stand of gross Matter, the last barricade before Spirit, is here, and over it the conqueror passes to the frontiers of his kingdom. Hereafter, spiritual warfare is appointed him, the ache and turmoil of the flesh are left behind. The pen refuses to deal with this first great contest, the thought falls back from it, and he who faces its issue is a madman indeed, unless he wears the magic amulet.

It should be ever borne in mind that this self of myriad deceptions is the ruler of the astral or psychic plane. Hence that plane is a play-ground of elemental forces most dangerous and entangling to man. Great intellects, pure hearts are bewitched there. Persons of natural psychic powers are

101 easily stayed in this cul de sac, this "no thoroughfare," especially when those powers are inherited from past lives and have no simultaneous growth with soul in this. They dazzle and blind their possessor. Evil has its greatest momentum on the astral plane. If a man lingers too long he becomes as much intoxicated as is the worldly man with material life, for these too are only senses of a more dazzling order, matter volitalized and more deadly. Its very language, dealing as it does with subtle gradations of color, light, odor and sound, is easily misinterpreted by those who have not obtained the total perception of the illuminated Self. Some think that they have acquired this illumination and steep themselves in psychic enjoyment and action. It is the fickle light of the astral world which floods and bewilders the elemental self. This plane is a necessary experience, a passing trial, not a goal. Only Adepts can fathom its mazes as they look down upon them from above. Students must observe and try to control them without acting from them or depending upon them.

So comrades, I say again, procure the magic amulet. It is pure motive. Motive is the polarity of the soul. A polarized ray of light is one so modified by the position of its medium that it is incapable of reflecting or refracting itself in any but one direction. Its polarity depends upon the parallel direction of every molecule of ether constituting the vehicle of the ray. Divergence in one affects the whole. Are you so fixed down in those unfathomed deeps of yours? Do you know to what medium you respond and its position in the Celestial? He who claims to be sure of his motive, he, more than any other, is under the sway of the great magician. How can he be wholly sure when he does not so much as know fully the constitution of the mere outer man? Dares he aver to what the action of his immense and forgotten past has polarized his soul? Can he answer for the essential Motive at its centre when he comes face to face with the mystery at last? The wise student feeds and increases it. Few indeed have the warrant to "put it to the touch, to win or lose it all." That warrant is only found at the core of the life, written in the blood of the heart. He who can give up all for All, even to his own salvation, he may confront the elemental self. There is nowhere any safety for him unless his hope is anchored in the unmanifest, his present trust in Karma. If the soul has been deflected, future unselfish motive can in time restore its integrity, whereas to loose the ungoverned soul now is to fall a victim to its lower tendency. Rely on Karma, It is divine. We cannot escape It; we may become It.

Jasper Niemand, F. T. S.

---

129

III.

My Comrades:—

As we turn our thoughts in upon ourselves, we find the good on top; the bad is below. We must set the blaze of self-examination to the task and drag out the lurker within. We think we have abandoned ambition and comfort, but we have only given up those of the lower plane, the mere reflection of the great ambitions and joys of a larger life. The rays of Truth burn up the covers we had placed upon those seeds, and then the real seeds begin to sprout and cause new troubles. Do not ignore this; it has cost others many years and tears of blood to self-learn it. Men have been deceived as to their motives up to high passages of the Way.

Indolence is a great deceiver. We trust to the sufficiency of "our Divine Spirit," and so hope to reach the goal easily with the natural evolution of the race. We forget that the kingdom must be taken by violence. It is by no means sure that we shall make the connection with spirit in this life journey. Your divine spirit is only yours in so far as it is that of all others equally; not yours but ours, making us one. The Bagavad-Gita destroys the idea that if there be in us this higher self, it will, even if we are indolent, triumph over the necessity for effort, and lead us to find beatitude in common with the whole stream of man. "The man of doubtful mind enjoys neither this world nor the other (the Deva world) nor finds beatitude." Sometime then during the period of choice for the race this self must be discovered, purified and set free. The period is long—but it ends. The unprogressed soul falls back; it may die, but only the spiritual monad is incorruptible. On the soul itself depends this spiritual polarity; each personality heightens or lessens it by the greater or smaller impetus given by him to the life of the lower self. Its luxurious growth throttles the true self as mistletoe devitalizes the live-oak. "Bitten by the world, like one bitten by a great serpent; darkened with passion, like the night; changing its dress in a moment like an actor; fair in appearance, like a painted wall:" thus the Upanishad warns us against the elemental self.

These warnings are not meant to discourage, but to strengthen. The Way is narrow, but it is there. So narrow it is, and so often lost amid the bustling highways of life, that many who have wandered far afield still think their feet are set upon it. There is oftimes much to discourage us in the attitude of our nearest friends. They are on far shores, and when we arrive they speak of the small potato patch and see nothing in our talk of what is over the sea, and of the grander interests beyond the little place they stand on. This is a blow dealt the inner man and hurts inside. Life is all up in arms against us. A letter sent me by one of my comrades goes clearly and nobly to the root of this matter:

"Dear Jasper: I gave your letter to a distressed soul: she returned thanks saying it was a cooling draught to one athirst. The thanks of course are yours.

"Now this lady says it was refreshment to the weary, that letter True, or she would not say it. But it was not so to me nor to you. It all seems so well understood to be so. We needed it not. But she illustrates a certain state of progress. She is not yet where we are, but which is happier? She is happier, but poorer in hope. We are not all too happy, but are rich in hope, knowing the prize at the end of time, and not deterred by the clouds, the storms, the miasms and dreadful beasts of prey that line the road. Let us then at the very outset wash out of our souls all desire for reward, all hope that we may attain. For so long as we thus hope and desire we shall be separated from the Self. If in the Self all things are, then we cannot wish to be something which we can only compass by excluding something else. Standing where we are, let us purify ourselves to be all things.

"So being beyond this lady so grateful, we find that everything that we meet on this illusory plane of existence is a lure that in one way or another has power to draw us out of our path. That is the point we are at, and we may call it the point where lures of Maya have omnipresent power. Therefore we must beware of the illusions of matter.

"Before we got to this stage we knew the fateful lure, the dazzling mirror of the elemental self, here and there in well defined places and intrenched as it was, so to say, in strongly marked defences. Those we assaulted; and that was what it desired, for it did think that it then had no need to exercise the enchantment which is hard because so subtle, and so distributed here and there that we find no citadels to take, no battallions in array. But now our dearest friends are in league with this beautiful, deceitful Maya. How strongly do I realize the dejection of Arjuna as he let his bow drop from his hand and sat down on his chariot in despair. But he had a sure spot to rest upon. He used his own. He had Krishna near, and he might fight on.

"So in passing along past those stages where the grateful lady and others are, we may perhaps have found one spot we may call our own and possess no other qualification for the task. That spot is enough. It is our belief in the Self, in Masters: it is the little flame of intuition we have allowed to burn, that we have fostered with care.

131 "Then come these dreadful lures. They are in fact but mere carcasses, shells of monsters from past existences, offering themselves that we may give them life to terrify us as soon as we have entered them either by fear or love. No matter which way we enter, whether by attachment to them or by repugnant horror, it is all one: they are in one case vivified by a lover; in the other by a slave who would be free but cannot.

"Here it is the lure of enjoyment of natural pleasures, growing out of life's physical basis; there it is self-praise, anger, vanity, what not? Even these beautiful hills and river they mock one, for they live on untrammeled silence. Perhaps they do not speak to us because they know the superiority of silence. They laugh with each other at us in the night, amused at the wild struggles of this petty man who would pull the sky down. Ach! God of Heaven! And all the sucklings of Theosophy wish that some great, well diplomaed adept would come and open the secret box; but they do not imagine that other students have stepped on the spikes that defend the entrance to the way that leads to the gate of the Path. But we will not blame them, nor yet wish for the things—the special lots—that some of them have abstracted, because now that we know the dreadful power that despair and doubt and violated conscience have, we prefer to prepare wisely and carefully and not rush in like fools where angels do not pass uninvited.

"But, Companion, I remind you of the power of the lure. This Path passes along under a sky and in a clime where every weed grows a yard in the night. It has no discrimination. Thus even after weeks or months of devotion, or years of work, we are surprised at small seeds of vanity or any other thing which would be easily conquered in other years of inattentive life, but which seem now to arise as if helped by some damnable intelligence. This great power of self-illusion is strong enough to create a roaring torrent or a mountain of ice between us and our Masters. Z......."

132 The Path lies not in extremes but midway, like that Sun whose centre is everywhere, like that Eternal Liberty which Boehme says is the middle-most and within all things. We must pin ourselves down to a rigid appreciation of the mathematical workings of Law and trace their connection with our own constitution. It would seem well to take all the suggestions we can get, but I have known travellers on western prairies who preferred to go a day's journey out of their road, rather than make inquiry of a passer by. If the law of Continuity remains unbroken, as it must if it exists at all, and from its very nature cannot be suspended, then there must be personalities far more progressed than ourselves, somewhere along the vast chain stretching from man to the Deity. I have heard comrades repel the idea that any "Master" could aid them. The western mind detests that word; American boys will not even say "schoolmaster." And yet it is only an equivalent for Teacher, and how glorious are the teachings.

If a man's magnetic sphere is confused, however, he cannot feel the attraction of higher spheres; he does not believe in their existence. If they do not exist to his hope or his intuition, for him they are not, nor will he feel their benefit even indirectly until he shall have evolved enough spiritual energy to enable him to assimilate the currents which unceasingly flow through them to raise the powers of the race. Let every man have his mind within his own power and resolve firmly to believe. Our own is everywhere if we will only take it! We do not justly value the gifts of Truth given us without personal attestation. We clamor for persons and authorities; we have a sense of injury which cries to the echo; "if Truth be true she will sign her name." Not always: for how then can the perceptions of men be tested in the absence of genuine relations? How can those students be discovered who do not depend upon a revenue stamp to recognize a genuine article? If a man receives a gem, does he growl because the jeweller's case came

133 not with it? What lustre can a name add to Truth? We should need no guarantee beyond the spirit of the words; the words themselves are often traps. Nothing avails us at last but the touch-stone of our own souls; it is deeply concealed in the heart, far beyond the elemental nature. It is not mind, judgment, reason: it is the fire which tests and welds.

Jasper Niemand, F. T. S.

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161

IV.

My Comrades:—

That the way to the Immortal lies through the heart of man, is evident to him who observes that in it arise all those feelings which drive him into thought and action and constitute the sum of his life. A primary study of the office and nature of the heart then suggests itself to the wise student, for it is far easier to sink back into the eternal than to dive. The diver must needs have power to retain breath against the rush caused by diving, while to sink back gives time to get and keep breath.

As to the office of the heart of man—by heart I mean that physiolog-

162 ical organ which is also the psychological seat of the various emotions and desires whose total we call "mind." "I have changed my mind," is really to say I have changed my desire. The Hindu philosopher calls it "Manas; the heart; the internal organ of perception which receives the external impression of the senses and transmits them through the consciousness (Ahankara) and the intellect (Buddhi) to the soul, and is the seat of the passions." The seat of the astral soul being the heart, that spark causes the systole and diastole of the heart by its own vibration in unison with the whole body of Astral Light. We can thus conceive of the heart as "pumping up" such light along the nervous system (just as it does the blood through the circulatory system) whence it is transmitted in rythmic shocks to the brain, and reflected by the gray matter there to its mysterious inhabitant, Consciousness. If the heart's action be disturbed by passion or emotion, the rythm of such shocks is altered. These passions and emotions have a two-fold source. They may take their rise in outside astral currents proceeding from other lives: they stream into the heart, which—if it accepts the insidious suggestions—passes them along as we have seen, and the man carries them out to pleasure himself unless he controls them by his will. Or such thoughts may proceed from the Universal Mind in original purity, and be misconceived by the elemental self of man. The heart may be either (or both) an organ of action or an organ of perception. As the former, it hurries man along the bustling highways of action and fatally commits him to a return to life. As the latter, it perceives the influx of emotions and classes each as a petition of the body which the calm judge within refuses to entertain. Hence we have the saying, "Keep a steady heart," and hence the repeated injunctions of Vedic literature. It is the object of this letter to examine into the methods of such control, but a word as to the nature of soul is first in order.

Brief statements are necessarily incomplete, but it suffices our present purpose to say that the soul has also two offices. Its higher part communicates with the Divine Spirit: the lower elemental part collects the essential experiences of earth life and transfers them to that higher self. Here is a most important link, because these selections determined the tenor of experience, its spirituality or materiality. These selections again, are governed by the heart, or feeder of the elemental self, and it has in turn the option of choice between the pure or the impure, being, however, like all other parts of man, controllable by his supreme will. As we have seen, the heart must take note of all transmissions from without, but if it remains equilibrated, neither recoiling in horror nor eagerly attracting the material, and "free from the pairs of opposites," they are not recorded upon the brain with

163 sufficient vividness to become deeds. In other words, the consciousness does not refer them to self and the man is not moved to action. The intellect has another choice: it may discover the true nature within all thoughts, and return them, thus raised to their highest power, to strengthen the heart. It thus becomes apparent that we must secure the entire co-operation of the heart in order to train the lower nature to submit to the diviner will of man. We must control and regenerate the mind.

The universal mind is the first production of nature, by which, I mean the eternal nature, the material (so to say and in a sublimated sense) essence of Diety. Evidently the first issuing outward or manifestation of the Unknown, was a Thought. Mind is the link between soul and body; it is a subtle form of matter, and is the vehicle of the soul, whether in an individual or a universal sense. Even a mode of motion, such as mind, is "matter" as compared with spirit. Mind serving to transmit the outward to the inward, may also convey the internal to the external. It may look forward or back. Be it remembered that spirituality is not what we understand by the words "virtue" or "goodness." It is the power of perceiving formless, spiritual essences. It may be used for good or evil purposes. The heart may be preoccupied with the eternal or the transitory in either (or both) outward and inward, for selfish or unselfish ends. Hence the initial importance of purifying the natural. Within the beast is that luminelle of the World-Soul, the Archaeus which is the medium between God and man, and it may be alchemized to be the Christ or Christos which is the mediator "for our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world." Thus along the whole line, at every station and in every part, we have the power of choice, we may depart or return. While man is unconscious of his possible destiny, Karma governs automatically. When he becomes integrally conscious of it and the "moment of choice" is reached, he may turn the faculties of every organ either way. The responsibility of that Knowledge is then upon him and all his actions have a centupled power. We must not forget that no part of his body or constitution stand by itself alone, but reacting and interacting forms a compact whole.

When the student examines his heart, he first discovers that he does not at all know it; he is not what he appears to himself to be. Perhaps he recovers from some grief which he thought would end his life or his interest in life; or he has longed apparently to end physical suffering by death and finds he has lived on because the real inner man had still the will to live, and finds the intermissions of pain as sweet as by-gone joys.

164 Some withered part of his nature puts forth new buds, or the deadened senses resume the simplicity of youth and with the dying Falstaff he "babbles o' green fields."

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Perhaps sudden revulsions from the path of evil or pleasure have surprised him; or at the wizard touch of realization, the lover, the miser, the votary, the worshipper in him kneel no more but pursue the nimble chameleon desire to some remoter shrine. Behold the profound wisdom of Truth, which places the ultimate forever beyond his reach!

Seeing then that he can predicate nothing of himself, the student confines himself to an observation of the feelings welling up from those unfathomed deeps. It is here that I am fain to meet him with a few suggestions, for as I watch that tidal ebb and flow within my breast I see that I tasted so much of the gross sweetness of life in other lives that I know most of it now by reason of its being in me.

It appears insufficient to restrain passion or to check action so that they are pent up within us and wait over for their chance in another life. Under the law of attraction those accumulated forces will draw themselves forcibly together within the dreaming soul and driving outward, propel it back to earth and form. So Behmen tells us that the magnet or essential desire of nature compresses itself into a substance to become a plant and in this compression of the desire becomes a feeling or working, whence comes the growing and smell of the plant, and he goes on to remind us that if it were not for such an outgoing and working of the trinity in the eternal unity, the unity were but a stillness, and there would be no nature, no color, shape or figure, nor any world at all. This is the pattern by which all things proceed.

Neither is it wise to rush on in deliberate expenditure. While the

165 burnt out nature may leave us in sight of the spiritual, we may stand there too exhausted to put forward the immense effort required to pass through. It is not needful to plunge again into the mud of sensation to know it. Nor yet should we ignore those parts of us which produce such experience, but admit and test them. We should not willingly rush back into desires of the past, but accept all situations and study them, the heart fixed on the True. Then they do not sweep us off into delirious action, but we convert them into true action. Every man may misinterpret or pervert a true ray; he may reflect or deflect. The particular disposition of each man determines the direction, the mode of expression which he may give to any impulse instilled into his mind; this disposition is regulated by the preponderance and proportions of the "three qualities" in his nature. I shall hope to show that all impulse is based upon the True. We must then carefully watch those indices of old fires which are now only banked, and try to turn their powers, by inwardly knowing them, into our service. The discovery and right use of the true essence of Being—this is the whole secret.

The case standing thus, we ask ourselves what is the strongest motor of man. Is it not Desire? When I look out over life I see this strange potency dissimulating yet forcing its underground current along in defiance of laws and civilizations, asserting itself now and then in colossal upheaval, sacrificing health, wealth, fame, honor, love, and life for the intoxicating passion of the hour. I see also, in the arc of life, how the first fierce color of Desire, burning higher, blends here and there to purer hues in the solvent of the one light, and nerves men to sublime self sacrifice. Then I understand that the cohesion of life is in the True, and that this force, properly understood, must be the clue to man's whole nature. Back of its multiform expressions I find one meaning—desire to be. In lovers, in the poet, in the hero's leap to the deed, in the sensualist's longing to be born anew to joy, even in dumb brutes this vigorous stir of force means to expand one's finest essences for a new result on some one of many planes, and the truth of the eternal creative impulse, shines through the low act, as the fire soul through the opal's cloudy heart. Even in passion, tho' I find six drops of poison to the seventh, in that last drop hides the sublime counterpart. It is fed by some experience. Do not the intense sympathies for others feed and express it? I find that the desire of things is the love of them; this is the "desire which produces will, and it is will which develops force," and the latter generates matter, or an object having form. As the Diety first feels desire "to beget His heart or son," so man follows the divine example, and by transubstantiation, begets a new heart or nature, and a new inner form.

166 Taking up the fact that man may misunderstand his own heart, I remind you that there are in nature, three great forces.

1st.—The creative. It corresponds to "Love in man." It is "Brahma, the universal expansive force in nature;" the Creator.

2d.—The preservative. It is Maya, the formative power of illusion or ideation; this stands for Vishnu, the preserver, and takes the form of Vanity in man.

3d.—The destructive force. Siva the destroyer; in nature the great separator which annihilating forms or illusions, brings us back to the re-combinations of love and closes the circle. This force is Anger in man, and these three, Love, Vanity, Anger, are the three great gates of life and death.

As the author of "Primary Concepts" has most admirably shown us, all things are dual or polar. The other pole of love is lust; of illusion, falsehood; of anger, justice. Duality is the condition of manifestation: without it the deity must remain forever unseen. There is nothing finally and eternally "good" save the mysterious unit. Neither good nor evil is inherent in manifestations, forms or powers, but depend upon the uses to which these emanations are put. The moment departure from Deity takes place the free-will of Being becomes apparent; two paths present themselves for choice—duality and division. Duality is the harmonious inter-action of two opposites in force. Duality in action is a trinity in unity, composed of two forces and the resultant; this is the condition of life. Division is the discordant, or disconnected working of two forces, whereby one overpowers the other, acts for a time in sterile isolation and then ceases to exist in that shape or form. This is the condition of change or death. Without intercorrelation, without attraction and repulsion, we are without the attributes of life. As the life of the material universe can thus be traced to magnetism or desire, so all our personal desires have a common aim: sensation, or the realization of life. This is also the law of the Deity!

Tracing special desires back to their causes, I find each to be rooted in the True. Ambition is a perverted love of excellence. Falsehood is a misshapen desire to create. Fame is a restricted thirst for the immortal, and so on with all the originally pure thoughts of the universal mind, which have been appropriated and misconstrued by the elementary nature of man. Division has occurred through man's forcible adaptation of a true principle to personal and selfish ends. He ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge on that day when he first conceived good and evil to be single separate modes of progression, instead of counterbalancing powers working together for the same end and confined to the expression of harmony. He will regain his lost Eden on that day when he can look at every desire

167 in the broad, quiet light of this question: How can I give desire such vent as shall conduce to the benefit of other men? The great watchword of the True is this; in last analysis all things are Divine!

To instance such a mode of dealing with any master passion, we will take up love, itself the basis of all desire. Continuity is said to be the law of laws in the world of effect. Love—the ethical expression of continuity—holds an identical position in the world of cause. Gravitation, polarity, attraction, cyclic necessity: hope, faith, aspiration; the sum of each and all of these is love. By this force, raised to its highest power, Masters become. Their great attainment consists in this—that they embody this huge law of love.

It would seem then that we should recognize the existence of this huge force of passion within us, so that we may drag it out on our mental and spiritual planes and clutch it so tight that we are master. This is not done by pretending to ourselves that such and such a propensity does not exist. All things must exist in each one of us, and we must understand them all as a figure of the real. For example—the contest of the sexes. Why do women lure men? Why do men rush after them? And do not women act with those who seek them just as nature does with us? She shows a part, and then retreats behind the bars. Then again she comes out and sometimes throws herself into our arms: this latter not so often. Although men and women differ much, either is to the other the mysterious undiscovered, to be conquered and known. Especially does this attraction come out when we have started upon the path, unless where a person is wholly devoid of it by nature, having burnt it out in other lives. What then are we to do? To yield is a mistake; it is the high spring of the impulse that we must understand, and then stand master of the lower form. This is the method spoken of in the Gita as burning it out in the fire of spiritual wisdom, for being bent upon finding the True, we naturally discard these false disguises. This same fight and self examination is to be carried on with the other traits, such as anger, vanity and so on, not referring it to self, but as sharing in the processes of nature, and for the sake of all those who are deluded by their own perversions of the True.

The heart sends out its impulses in circular and magnetic waves of feeling which surge through the man until they reach the coarse outer shell which renders them into the gross terms of matter. That does not suffice the inner man, much less the soul, for what they clamor for so loudly in that throb of fire and blood is the large sensation of those rich fields beyond the Gates of Gold. If we could catch that vibration before it reached the outer body, we should find that the inner man gave it a finer meaning, and if we will drop back within ourselves, we may by introspection come to understand somewhat of this higher language. We can

168 arrest the ripples of feeling further and further within ourselves if we will to do it, and work off their impulse by the expenditure of higher energies which reacting, feed the soul itself. When we are attacked by an adversary, the universal mind says "separation"; the individual heart translates "anger." When a current of invincible attraction reaches us, the body shouts "passion," but the pure heart whispers "divine love," and gives a thought or act of brotherhood to all. Ah, my comrades, have not we and desire come together to learn this deathless lesson—that joy enduring is not in matter and that even its most tender love can not long contain the strange, the universal heart of man? We must then re-adjust our comprehension to its real meanings. This great victory can be won by supreme effort, and we are preparing ourselves for it by the daily efforts we do make. We may look to the natural laws of energy and growth for further help, and these will form the subject of another letter.

Jasper Niemand, F. T. S.

Footnotes

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