Book: Five Years Of Theosophy

V >> Various >> Five Years Of Theosophy




Such is the admitted rationale of heredity and atavism. That the same
things apply to our ordinary conduct is apparent from the notorious ease
with which "habits,"--bad or good, as the case may be--are acquired, and
it will not be questioned that this applies, as a rule, as much to the
moral and intellectual, as to the physical world.

Furthermore, History and Science teach us plainly that certain physical
habits conduce to certain moral and intellectual results. There never
yet was a conquering nation of vegetarians. Even in the old Aryan times,
we do not learn that the very Rishis, from whose lore and practice we
gain the knowledge of Occultism, ever interdicted the Kshetriya
(military) caste from hunting or a carnivorous diet. Filling, as they
did, a certain place in the body politic in the actual condition of the
world, the Rishis as little thought of interfering with them, as of
restraining the tigers of the jungle from their habits. That did not
affect what the Rishis did themselves.

The aspirant to longevity then must be on his guard against two dangers.
He must beware especially of impure and animal* thoughts. For Science
shows that thought is dynamic, and the thought-force evolved by nervous
action expanding outwardly, must affect the molecular relations of the
physical man. The inner men,** however sublimated their organism may
be, are still composed of actual, not hypothetical, particles, and are
still subject to the law that an "action" has a tendency to repeat
itself; a tendency to set up analogous action in the grosser "shell"
they are in contact with, and concealed within.

----------
* In other words, the thought tends to provoke the deed.--G.M.

** We use the word in the plural, reminding the reader that, according
to our doctrine, man is septenary.--G.M.
----------

And, on the other hand, certain actions have a tendency to produce
actual physical conditions unfavourable to pure thoughts, hence to the
state required for developing the supremacy of the inner man.

To return to the practical process. A normally healthy mind, in a
normally healthy body, is a good starting-point. Though exceptionally
powerful and self-devoted natures may sometimes recover the ground lost
by mental degradation or physical misuse, by employing proper means,
under the direction of unswerving resolution, yet often things may have
gone so far that there is no longer stamina enough to sustain the
conflict sufficiently long to perpetuate this life; though what in
Eastern parlance is called the "merit" of the effort will help to
ameliorate conditions and improve matters in another.

However this may be, the prescribed course of self-discipline commences
here. It may be stated briefly that its essence is a course of moral,
mental, and physical development, carried on in parallel lines--one
being useless without the other. The physical man must be rendered more
ethereal and sensitive; the mental man more penetrating and profound;
the moral man more self-denying and philosophical. And it may be
mentioned that all sense of restraint--even if self-imposed--is useless.
Not only is all "goodness" that results from the compulsion of physical
force, threats, or bribes (whether of a physical or so-called
"spiritual" nature) absolutely useless to the person who exhibits it,
its hypocrisy tending to poison the moral atmosphere of the world, but
the desire to be "good" or "pure," to be efficacious must be
spontaneous. It must be a self-impulse from within, a real preference
for something higher, not an abstention from vice because of fear of the
law: not a chastity enforced by the dread of Public Opinion; not a
benevolence exercised through love of praise or dread of consequences in
a hypothetical Future Life.*

----------
* Col. Olcott clearly and succinctly explains the Buddhist doctrine of
Merit or Karma, in his "Buddhist Catechism."
(Question 83).--G.M.
----------

It will be seen now in connection with the doctrine of the tendency
to the renewal of action, before discussed, that the course of
self-discipline recommended as the only road to Longevity by Occultism
is not a "visionary" theory dealing with vague "ideas," but actually a
scientifically devised system of drill. It is a system by which each
particle of the several men composing the septenary individual receives
an impulse, and a habit of doing what is necessary for certain purposes
of its own free-will and with "pleasure." Every one must be practiced
and perfect in a thing to do it with pleasure. This rule especially
applies to the case of the development of Man. "Virtue" may be very
good in its way--it may lead to the grandest results. But to become
efficacious it has to be practiced cheerfully not with reluctance or
pain. As a consequence of the above consideration the candidate for
Longevity at the commencement of his career must begin to eschew his
physical desires, not from any sentimental theory of right or wrong, but
for the following good reason. As, according to a well-known and now
established scientific theory, his visible material frame is always
renewing its particles; he will, while abstaining from the
gratification of his desires, reach the end of a certain period during
which those particles which composed the man of vice, and which were
given a bad predisposition, will have departed. At the same time, the
disuse of such functions will tend to obstruct the entry, in place of
the old particles, of new particles having a tendency to repeat the said
acts. And while this is the particular result as regards certain
"vices," the general result of an abstention from "gross" acts will be
(by a modification of the well-known Darwinian law of atrophy by
non-usage) to diminish what we may call the "relative" density and
coherence of the outer shell (as a result of its less-used molecules);
while the diminution in the quantity of its actual constituents will he
"made up" (if tried by scales and weights) by the increased admission of
more ethereal particles.

What physical desires are to be abandoned and in what order? First and
foremost, he must give up alcohol in all forms; for while it supplies
no nourishment, nor any direct pleasure (beyond such sweetness or
fragrance as may be gained in the taste of wine, &c., to which alcohol,
in itself, is non-essential) to even the grossest elements of the
"physical" frame, it induces a violence of action, a rush so to speak,
of life, the stress of which can only be sustained by very dull, gross,
and dense elements, and which, by the operation of the well-known law of
Re-action (in commercial phrase, "supply and demand") tends to summon
them from the surrounding universe, and therefore directly counteracts
the object we have in view.

Next comes meat-eating, and for the very same reason, in a minor degree.
It increases the rapidity of life, the energy of action, the violence of
passions. It may be good for a hero who has to fight and die, but not
for a would-be sage who has to exist and....

Next in order come the sexual desires; for these, in addition to the
great diversion of energy (vital force) into other channels, in many
different ways, beyond the primary one (as, for instance, the waste of
energy in expectation, jealousy, &c.), are direct attractions to a
certain gross quality of the original matter of the Universe, simply
because the most pleasurable physical sensations are only possible at
that stage of density. Alongside with and extending beyond all these
and other gratifications of the senses (which include not only those
things usually known as "vicious," but all those which, though
ordinarily regarded as "innocent," have yet the disqualification of
ministering to the pleasures of the body--the most harmless to others
and the least "gross" being the criterion for those to be last abandoned
in each case)--must be carried on the moral purification.

Nor must it be imagined that "austerities" as commonly understood can,
in the majority of cases, avail much to hasten the "etherealizing"
process. That is the rock on which many of the Eastern esoteric sects
have foundered, and the reason why they have degenerated into degrading
superstitions. The Western monks and the Eastern Yogees, who think they
will reach the apex of powers by concentrating their thought on their
navel, or by standing on one leg, are practicing exercises which serve
no other purpose than to strengthen the willpower, which is sometimes
applied to the basest purposes. These are examples of this one-sided
and dwarf development. It is no use to fast as long as you require
food. The ceasing of desire for food without impairment of health is
the sign which indicates that it should be taken in lesser and ever
decreasing quantities until the extreme limit compatible with life is
reached. A stage will be finally attained where only water will be
required.

Nor is it of any use for this particular purpose of longevity to abstain
from immorality so long as you are craving for it in your heart; and so
on with all other unsatisfied inward cravings. To get rid of the inward
desire is the essential thing, and to mimic the real thing without it is
barefaced hypocrisy and useless slavery.

So it must be with the moral purification of the heart. The "basest"
inclinations must go first--then the others. First avarice, then fear,
then envy, worldly pride, uncharitableness, hatred; last of all
ambition and curiosity must be abandoned successively. The
strengthening of the more ethereal and so-called "spiritual" parts of
the man must go on at the same time. Reasoning from the known to the
unknown, meditation must be practiced and encouraged. Meditation is the
inexpressible yearning of the inner Man to "go out towards the
infinite," which in the olden time was the real meaning of adoration,
but which has now no synonym in the European languages, because the
thing no longer exists in the West, and its name has been vulgarized to
the make-believe shams known as prayer, glorification, and repentance.
Through all stages of training the equilibrium of the consciousness--the
assurance that all must be right in the Kosmos, and therefore with you a
portion of it--must be retained. The process of life must not be hurried
but retarded, if possible; to do otherwise may do good to others--
perhaps even to yourself in other spheres, but it will hasten your
dissolution in this.

Nor must the externals be neglected in this first stage. Remember that
an adept, though "existing" so as to convey to ordinary minds the idea
of his being immortal, is not also invulnerable to agencies from
without. The training to prolong life does not, in itself, secure one
from accidents. As far as any physical preparation goes, the sword may
still cut, the disease enter, the poison disarrange. This case is very
clearly and beautifully put in "Zanoni," and it is correctly put and
must be so, unless all "adeptism" is a baseless lie. The adept may be
more secure from ordinary dangers than the common mortal, but he is so
by virtue of the superior knowledge, calmness, coolness and penetration
which his lengthened existence and its necessary concomitants have
enabled him to acquire; not by virtue of any preservative power in the
process itself. He is secure as a man armed with a rifle is more secure
than a naked baboon; not secure in the sense in which the deva (god)
was supposed to be securer than a man.

If this is so in the case of the high adept, how much more necessary is
it that the neophyte should be not only protected but that he himself
should use all possible means to ensure for himself the necessary
duration of life to complete the process of mastering the phenomena we
call death! It may be said, why do not the higher adepts protect him?
Perhaps they do to some extent, but the child must learn to walk alone;
to make him independent of his own efforts in respect to safety, would
be destroying one element necessary to his development--the sense of
responsibility. What courage or conduct would be called for in a man
sent to fight when armed with irresistible weapons and clothed in
impenetrable armour? Hence the neophyte should endeavour, as far as
possible, to fulfill every true canon of sanitary law as laid down by
modern scientists. Pure air, pure water, pure food, gentle exercise,
regular hours, pleasant occupations and surroundings, are all, if not
indispensable, at least serviceable to his progress. It is to secure
these, at least as much as silence and solitude, that the Gods, Sages,
Occultists of all ages have retired as much as possible to the quiet of
the country, the cool cave, the depths of the forest, the expanse of the
desert, or the heights of the mountains. Is it not suggestive that the
Gods have always loved the "high places"; and that in the present day
the highest section of the Occult Brotherhood on earth inhabits the
highest mountain plateaux of the earth?*

---------
* The stern prohibition to the Jews to serve "their gods upon the high
mountains and upon the hills" is traced back to the unwillingness of
their ancient elders to allow people in most cases unfit for adeptship
to choose a life of celibacy and asceticism, or in other words, to
pursue adeptship. This prohibition had an esoteric meaning before it
became the prohibition, incomprehensible in its dead-letter sense: for
it is not India alone whose sons accorded divine honours to the Wise
Ones, but all nations regarded their adepts and initiates as divine.--
G.M.
---------

Nor must the beginner disdain the assistance of medicine and good
medical regimen. He is still an ordinary mortal, and he requires the
aid of an ordinary mortal.

"Suppose, however, all the conditions required, or which will be
understood as required (for the details and varieties of treatment
requisite, are too numerous to be detailed here), are fulfilled, what is
the next step?" the reader will ask. Well if there have been no
backslidings or remissness in the procedure indicated, the following
physical results will follow:--

First the neophyte will take more pleasure in things spiritual and pure.
Gradually gross and material occupations will become not only uncraved
for or forbidden, but simply and literally repulsive to him. He will
take more pleasure in the simple sensations of Nature--the sort of
feeling one can remember to have experienced as a child. He will feel
more light-hearted, confident, happy. Let him take care the sensation
of renewed youth does not mislead, or he will yet risk a fall into his
old baser life and even lower depths. "Action and Re-action are equal."

Now the desire for food will begin to cease. Let it be left off
gradually--no fasting is required. Take what you feel you require. The
food craved for will be the most innocent and simple. Fruit and milk
will usually be the best. Then as till now, you have been simplifying
the quality of your food, gradually--very gradually--as you feel capable
of it diminish the quantity. You will ask: "Can a man exist without
food?" No, but before you mock, consider the character of the process
alluded to. It is a notorious fact that many of the lowest and simplest
organisms have no excretions. The common guinea-worm is a very good
instance. It has rather a complicated organism, but it has no
ejaculatory duct. All it consumes--the poorest essences of the human
body--is applied to its growth and propagation. Living as it does in
human tissue, it passes no digested food away. The human neophyte, at a
certain stage of his development, is in a somewhat analogous condition,
with this difference or differences, that he does excrete, but it is
through the pores of his skin, and by those too enter other etherealized
particles of matter to contribute towards his support.* Otherwise, all
the food and drink is sufficient only to keep in equilibrium those
"gross" parts of his physical body which still remain to repair their
cuticle-waste through the medium of the blood. Later on, the process of
cell-development in his frame will undergo a change; a change for the
better, the opposite of that in disease for the worse--he will become
all living and sensitive, and will derive nourishment from the Ether
(Akas). But that epoch for our neophyte is yet far distant.

---------
* He is in a state similar to the physical state of a fetus
before birth into the world.--G.M.
---------

Probably, long before that period has arrived, other results, no less
surprising than incredible to the uninitiated will have ensued to give
our neophyte courage and consolation in his difficult task. It would be
but a truism to repeat what has been again alleged (in ignorance of its
real rationale) by hundreds and hundreds of writers as to the happiness
and content conferred by a life of innocence and purity. But often at
the very commencement of the process some real physical result,
unexpected and unthought of by the neophyte, occurs. Some lingering
disease, hitherto deemed hopeless, may take a favourable turn; or he may
develop healing mesmeric powers himself; or some hitherto unknown
sharpening of his senses may delight him. The rationale of these things
is, as we have said, neither miraculous nor difficult of comprehension.
In the first place, the sudden change in the direction of the vital
energy (which, whatever view we take of it and its origin, is
acknowledged by all schools of philosophy as most recondite, and as the
motive power) must produce results of some kind. In the second,
Theosophy shows, as we said before, that a man consists of several men
pervading each other, and on this view (although it is very difficult to
express the idea in language) it is but natural that the progressive
etherealization of the densest and most gross of all should leave the
others literally more at liberty. A troop of horses may be blocked by a
mob and have much difficulty in fighting its way through; but if every
one of the mob could be changed suddenly into a ghost, there would be
little to retard it. And as each interior entity is more rare, active,
and volatile than the outer and as each has relation with different
elements, spaces, and properties of the Kosmos which are treated of in
other articles on Occultism, the mind of the reader may conceive--though
the pen of the writer could not express it in a dozen volumes--the
magnificent possibilities gradually unfolded to the neophyte.

Many of the opportunities thus suggested may be taken advantage of by
the neophyte for his own safety, amusement, and the good of those around
him; but the way in which he does this is one adapted to his fitness--a
part of the ordeal he has to pass through, and misuse of these powers
will certainly entail the loss of them as a natural result. The Itchcha
(or desire) evoked anew by the vistas they open up will retard or throw
back his progress.

But there is another portion of the Great Secret to which we must
allude, and which is now, for the first, in a long series of ages,
allowed to be given out to the world, as the hour for it is come.

The educated reader need not be reminded again that one of the great
discoveries which has immortalized the name of Darwin is the law that an
organism has always a tendency to repeat, at an analogous period in its
life, the action of its progenitors, the more surely and completely in
proportion to their proximity in the scale of life. One result of this
is, that, in general, organized beings usually die at a period (on an
average) the same as that of their progenitors. It is true that there
is a great difference between the actual ages at which individuals of
any species die. Disease, accidents and famine are the main agents in
causing this. But there is, in each species, a well-known limit within
which the Race-life lies, and none are known to survive beyond it. This
applies to the human species as well as any other. Now, supposing that
every possible sanitary condition had been complied with, and every
accident and disease avoided by a man of ordinary frame, in some
particular case there would still, as is known to medical men, come a
time when the particles of the body would feel the hereditary tendency
to do that which leads inevitably to dissolution, and would obey it. It
must be obvious to any reflecting man that, if by any procedure this
critical climacteric could be once thoroughly passed over, the
subsequent danger of "Death" would be proportionally less as the years
progressed. Now this, which no ordinary and unprepared mind and body
can do, is possible sometimes for the will and the frame of one who has
been specially prepared. There are fewer of the grosser particles
present to feel the hereditary bias--there is the assistance of the
reinforced "interior men" (whose normal duration is always greater even
in natural death) to the visible outer shell, and there is the drilled
and indomitable Will to direct and wield the whole.*

-----------
* In this connection we may as well show what modern science, and
especially physiology has to say as to the power of the human will.
"The force of will is a potent element in determining longevity. This
single point must be granted without argument, that of two men every way
alike and similarly circumstanced, the one who has the greater courage
and grit will be longer-lived. One does not need to practice medicine
long to learn that men die who might just as well live if they resolved
to live, and that myriads who are invalids could become strong if they
had the native or acquired will to vow they would do so. Those who have
no other quality favourable to life, whose bodily organs are nearly
all diseased, to whom each day is a day of pain, who are beset by
life-shortening influences, yet do live by will alone."
--Dr. George M. Beard.
-------------

From that time forward the course of the aspirant is clearer. He has
conquered "the Dweller of the Threshold"--the hereditary enemy of his
race, and, though still exposed to ever-new dangers in his progress
towards Nirvana, he is flushed with victory, and with new confidence and
new powers to second it, can press onwards to perfection.

For, it must be remembered, that nature everywhere acts by Law, and that
the process of purification we have been describing in the visible
material body, also takes place in those which are interior, and not
visible to the scientist by modifications of the same process. All is
on the change, and the metamorphoses of the more ethereal bodies
imitate, though in successively multiplied duration, the career of the
grosser, gaining an increasing wider range of relations with the
surrounding kosmos, till in Nirvana the most rarefied Individuality is
merged at last into the INFINITE TOTALITY.

From the above description of the process, it will be inferred why it is
that "Adepts" are so seldom seen in ordinary life; for, pari passu, with
the etherealization of their bodies and the development of their power,
grows an increasing distaste, and a so-to-speak, "contempt" for the
things of our ordinary mundane existence. Like the fugitive who
successively casts away in his flight those articles which incommode his
progress, beginning with the heaviest, so the aspirant eluding "Death"
abandons all on which the latter can take hold. In the progress of
Negation everything got rid of is a help. As we said before, the adept
does not become "immortal" as the word is ordinarily understood. By or
about the time when the Death-limit of his race is passed he is actually
dead, in the ordinary sense, that is to say, he has relieved himself of
all or nearly all such material particles as would have necessitated in
disruption the agony of dying. He has been dying gradually during the
whole period of his Initiation. The catastrophe cannot happen twice
over. He has only spread over a number of years the mild process of
dissolution which others endure from a brief moment to a few hours. The
highest Adept is, in fact, dead to, and absolutely unconscious of, the
world; he is oblivious of its pleasures, careless of its miseries, in
so far as sentimentalism goes, for the stern sense of DUTY never leaves
him blind to its very existence. For the new ethereal senses opening to
wider spheres are to ours much in the relation of ours to the Infinitely
Little. New desires and enjoyments, new dangers and new hindrances
arise, with new sensations and new perceptions; and far away down in
the mist--both literally and metaphorically--is our dirty little earth
left below by those who have virtually "gone to join the gods."

And from this account too, it will be perceptible how foolish it is for
people to ask the Theosophist to "procure for them communication with
the highest Adepts." It is with the utmost difficulty that one or two
can be induced, even by the throes of a world, to injure their own
progress by meddling with mundane affairs. The ordinary reader will
say: "This is not god-like. This is the acme of selfishness." .... But
let him realize that a very high Adept, undertaking to reform the world,
would necessarily have to once more submit to Incarnation. And is the
result of all that have gone before in that line sufficiently
encouraging to prompt a renewal of the attempt?

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.