Fragment 1

Talks on the Path of Occultism - Vol. II
Commentary on The Voice of the Silence
By
Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater
The Theosophical Publishing House
Adyar, Madras 600 020, India Wheaton, III., USA
First Edition 1926
FOREWORD
THIS book is merely a record of talks by Mr. C. W. Leadbeater and myself on three famous books, small in size but great in contents. We both hope that they will prove useful to aspirants, and even to those above that stage, since the talkers were older than the listeners, and had more experience in the life of discipleship.
The talks were not given at one place only; we chatted to our friends, at different times and places. chiefly at Adyar, London and Sydney. A vast quantity of notes were taken by the listeners. All that were available of these were collected and arranged. They were then condensed, and repetitions were eliminated.
Unhappily there were, found to be very few notes on The Voice of the Silence, Fragment I, so we have utilized notes made at a class held by our good colleague, Mr. Ernest Wood, in Sydney, and incorporated these into Bishop Leadbeater's talks in that section. No notes of my own talks on this book were available; though I have spoken much upon it, those talks are not recoverable. None of these talks have been published before, except some of Bishop Leadbeater's addresses to selected students on At the Feet of the Master. A book entitled Talks on "At the Feet of the Master" was published a few years ago, containing imperfect reports of some of these talks of his. That book will not be reprinted; the essential material in it finds its place here, carefully condensed and edited.
May this book help some of our younger brothers to understand more of these priceless teachings. The more they are studied and lived, the more will be found in them.
ANNIE BESANT

FRAGMENT I: THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE
The Preface 3

The Higher and the Lower Powers 25

The Slayer of the Real 43

The Real and the Unreal 54

The Warning Voice 62

Self and All-Self 75

The Three Halls 89

The World's Mother 108

The Seven Sounds 121

Become the Path 134

The One Road 146

The Last Steps 157

The Goal 168

FRAGMENT- I THE PREFACE
C.W.L.?Even from the superficial and wholly physical point of view, The Voice of the Silence is one of the most remarkable books in our Theosophical literature, whether we consider its contents, its style, or the manner of its production; and when we look a little deeper and call to our aid the power of clairvoyant investigation, our admiration is by no means diminished. Not that we should make the mistake of regarding it as a sacred-scripture, every word of which must be accepted without question. It is by no means that, for, as we shall presently see, various minor errors and misunderstandings have crept into it; but anyone who on that account regards it as unreliable or carelessly put together will be making an even less excusable mistake in the opposite direction.
Madame Blavatsky was always very ready to admit, and even to emphasize, the fact that inaccuracies were to be found in all her works; and in the early days, when we came across some especially improbable statement of hers we not unnaturally laid it reverently aside as perhaps one of those inaccuracies. It was surprising in what a number of such cases further study showed us that Madame Blavatsky was after all correct, so that
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presently, taught by experience, we grew much more wary in this matter, and learnt to trust her extraordinarily wide and minute knowledge upon all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects. Still there is no reason to suspect a hidden meaning in an obvious misprint, as some too credulous students have done; and we need not hesitate to admit that our great Founder's profound knowledge in occult matters did not prevent her from sometimes misspelling a Tibetan word, or even misusing an English one.
She gives us in her preface some information as to the origin of the book?information which at first seemed to involve some serious difficulties, but in the light of recent investigations becomes much more comprehensible. Much of what she wrote has been commonly understood in a wider sense than she intended it, and in that way it has been made to appear that she put forward extravagant claims; but when the facts of the case are stated it will be seen that there is no foundation for such a charge.
She says: '' The following pages are derived from The Book of the Golden Precepts, one of the works put into the hands of mystic students in the East. The knowledge of them is obligatory in that school the teachings of which are accepted by many Theosophists. Therefore, as I know many of these Precepts by heart, the work of translating has been relatively an easy task for me." And, further on: " The work from which I here translate forms part of the same series as that from which the stanzas of The Book of Dzyan were taken, on which The Secret Doctrine is based." She
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also says: " The Book of the Golden Precepts . . . contains about ninety distinct little treatises."
In early days we read into this more than she meant, and we supposed that this work was put into the hands of .all mystic students in the East, and that "the school in which the knowledge of them is obligatory " meant the school of the Great White Brotherhood itself.1 Hence when we met with advanced occultists who had never heard of The Book of the Golden Precepts we were much surprised and a little inclined to look askance at them and doubt gravely whether they could have come altogether along the right lines, but since then we have learnt many things, and among them somewhat more of perspective than we had at first.
In due course, too, we acquired further information about the Stanzas of Dzyan, and the more we learnt about them and their unique position the clearer it became to us that neither The Voice of the Silence nor any other book could possibly have in any real sense the same origin as they.
The original of The Book of Dzyan is in the hands of the august Head of the Occult Hierarchy, and has been seen by none. None knows how old it is, but it is rumoured that the earlier part of it (consisting of the first six stanzas), has an origin altogether anterior to this world, and even that it is not a history, but a series of directions?rather a formula for creation than an account of it. A copy of it is kept in the museum of the Brotherhood,
1 This term is used to denote a great Brotherhood of Adepts, and is not related to color.
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and it is that copy (itself probably the oldest book produced on this planet) which Madame Blavatsky and several of her pupils have seen?which she describes so graphically in The Secret Doctrine. The book has, however, several peculiarities which she does not there mention. It appears to be very highly magnetized, for as soon as a man takes a page into his hand he sees passing before his eyes a vision of the events which it is intended to portray, while at the same time he seems to hear a sort of rhythmic description of them in his own language, so far as that language will convey the ideas involved. Its pages contain no words whatever?-nothing but symbols.
When we came to know this fully, it was somewhat startling to find another book claiming the same origin as the sacred Stanzas, and our first impulse was to suppose that some strange mistake must have arisen. Indeed, it was this extraordinary discrepancy that first led to our investigating the question of the real authorship of The Book of the Golden Precepts; and when this was done, the explanation proved to be exceedingly simple.
We read in the various biographies of Madame Blavatsky that she once spent a period of some three years in Tibet, and also that on another occasion she made ah unsuccessful attempt to penetrate into that forbidden land. On one or other of these visits she seems to have stayed for some considerable time at a certain monastery in the Himalayas, the head of which at that time was a pupil of the Master Morya. The place seems to me to be in Nepal rather than in Tibet, but it is difficult to be sure of this. There she studied with great assiduity
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and also gained considerable psychic development; and it is at this period of her history that she learnt by heart the various treatises of which she makes mention in the Preface. The learning of them is obligatory upon the students of that particular monastery, and the book from which they are taken is regarded there as of exceeding value and holiness.
This monastery is of great age. It was founded in the early centuries of the Christian era by the great preacher and reformer of Buddhism who is commonly known as Aryasanga. I think a claim is made that the building had already existed for two or three centuries before his time; but, however that may be, its history as far as we are concerned begins with his temporary occupancy of it. He was a man of great power and learning, already far advanced along the Path of Holiness; He had in a previous birth as Dharmajyoti been one of the immediate followers of the Lord Buddha, and after that, under the name of Kleinias, one of the leading disciples of our Master Kuthumi in his birth as Pythagoras. After the death of Pythagoras, Kleinias founded a school for the study of his philosophy at Athens?an opportunity of which several of our present Theosophical members took advantage. Centuries later He took birth at Peshawar, which was then called Purushapura, under the name of Vasubandhu Kanushika. When he was admitted to the order of monks He took the name of Asanga??" the man without hindrance "?and later in his life his admiring followers lengthened this to-Aryasanga, by which he is chiefly known as author and
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preacher. He is said to have lived to a very great age ?nearly a hundred and fifty years, if tradition speaks truly?and to have died at Rajagriha.
He was a voluminous writer: the principal work of his of which we hear is the Yogacharya Bhumishastra. He was the founder of the Yogacharya school of Buddhism, which seems to have begun with an attempt to fuse with Buddhism the great Yoga system of philosophy, or perhaps rather to adopt from the latter what could be used and interpreted Buddhistically. He travelled much and was a mighty force in the reform of Buddhism; in fact, his fame reached so high a level that his name is joined with those of Nagarjuna and Aryacleva, and these men have been called the three suns of Buddhism, because of their activity in pouring forth its light and glory upon the world. The date of Aryasanga is given vaguely as a thousand years after the Lord Buddha; European scholars seem uncertain as to when he lived, but none assign him a later date than the seventh century after Christ. To us in the Theosophical Society he is known in this life as a specially kind, patient and helpful teacher, the Master Djwal Kul?one who has for us an unique position, in that when some of us had the honour of knowing him about forty years ago, he had not yet taken the step which is the goal of human evolution? the Aseka Initiation. So that among our Masters he is the only one whom we knew in this present incarnation before he became an Adept, when he was still the head pupil of the Master Kuthumi. The fact that as Aryasanga he carried Buddhism into Tibet may be the
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reason why in this life he has chosen to take a Tibetan body; there may have been karmic associations or links of which he wished to dispose before taking the final initiation as Adept.
In the course of one of his great missionary journeys in his life as Aryasanga he came to this Himalayan monastery and took up his abode there. He stayed there for nearly a year, teaching the monks, organizing the religion generally over a very large section of the country, and making this monastery a kind of headquarters for the reformed faith, and he left upon the place an impression and a tradition which last until the present time. Among other relics of his is preserved a book, which is regarded with the greatest reverence; and this is the scripture to which Madame Blavatsky refers as The Book of the Golden Precepts. Aryasanga seems to have commenced it as a sort of common place book, or a book of extracts, in which he wrote down anything that he thought would be useful to his pupils, and he began with the Stanzas of Dzyan?not in symbol, as in the original, but in written words. Many other extracts he made?-some from the works of Nagarjuna, as Madame Blavatsky mentions. After his departure his pupils added to the book a number of reports (or perhaps rather abstracts) of his lectures or sermons to them, and these are the " little treatises" to which Madame Blavatsky refers.
It was Alcyone, in his last life, who prepared and added to The Book of the Golden Precepts the reports of the discourses of Aryasanga, three of which form our
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present subject of study. So we owe this priceless little volume to his care in reporting, just as in this life we owe to him our possession of the exquisite companion volume At the Feet of the Master. That life of Alcyone began in A.D. 624, and was spent in Northern India. In it Alcyone entered the order of Buddhist monks at an early age and became deeply attached to Aryasanga, who took him with him to the monastery in Nepal, and left him there to help and direct the studies of the community which he had re-organized?a service that Alcyone performed with distinguished success for about two years.1
It is in this sense, and in this sense only, that The Voice of the Silence claims the same origin as the Stanzas of Dzyan?that the two are copied in the same book. We must not forget also that though we have undoubtedly much of Aryasanga's teaching in these treatises, it cannot but be coloured considerably by the prepossessions of those who reported it; and it is probable that at least in some passages they misunderstood him and failed to convey his real meaning. As we examine the work in detail we shall find verses here and there which express sentiments that Aryasanga could hardly have held, and show ignorance which for him would have been impossible.
It will be noticed that Madame Blavatsky speaks of translating the precepts?a remark which raises some interesting questions, since we know that she was unacquainted with any Oriental tongue except Arabic. The book is written in a script with which I am 1 See The Lives of Alcyone.
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unfamiliar, nor do I know what language is used. The latter may be Sanskrit, Pali, or some Prakrit dialect, or possibly Nepalese or Tibetan; but the script is not any of those now commonly employed to write those languages. It is at any rate reasonably certain that on the physical plane neither script nor language could have been known to Madame Blavatsky.
For one who can function freely in the mental body there are methods of getting at the meaning of a book, quite apart from the ordinary process of reading it. The simplest is to read from the mind of one who has studied it; but this is open to the objection that one gets not the real meaning of the work, but that student's conception of the meaning, which may be by no means the same thing. A second plan is to examine the aura of the book?a phrase which needs a little explanation for those not practically acquainted with the hidden side of things, An ancient manuscript stands in this respect in a somewhat different position from a modern book. If it is not the original work of the author himself, it has at any rate been copied word by word by some person of a certain education and understanding, who knew the subject of the book, and had his own opinions about it. It must be remembered that copying, done usually with a stylus, is almost as slow and emphatic as engraving; so that the writer inevitably impresses his thought strongly on his handiwork.
Any manuscript, therefore, even a new one, has always some sort of thought-aura about it which conveys its general meaning, or rather, one man's idea of its meaning
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and his estimate of its value. Every time the book is read by any one an addition is made to that thought-aura, and if it be carefully studied the addition is naturally large and valuable. A book which has passed through many hands has an aura which is usually better balanced, rounded off and completed by the divergent views brought to it by its many readers; consequently the psychometrization of such a book generally yields a fairly full comprehension of its contents, though with a considerable fringe of opinions not expressed in the book, but held by its various readers.
With a printed book the case is much the same, except that there is no original copyist, so that at the beginning of its career it usually carries nothing but disjointed fragments of the thoughts of the binder and the bookseller. Also few readers at the present day seem to study so thoughtfully and thoroughly as did the men of old, and for that reason the thought-forms connected with a modern book are rarely so precise and clear-cut as those which surround the manuscripts of the past.
A third plan, requiring somewhat higher powers, is to go behind the book or manuscript altogether and get at the mind of the author. If the book is in some foreign language, its subject entirely unknown, and there is no aura round it to give any helpful suggestion, the only way is to follow back its history, to see from what it was copied (or set up in type, as the case may be) and so to trace out the line of its descent until one reaches its author. If the subject of the work is known, a less tedious method is to psychometrize that subject, get into
I
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the general current of thought about it, and so find the particular writer required, and see what he thinks. There is a sense in which all the ideas connected with a given subject may be said to be local?to be concentrated round a certain point in space, so that by mentally visiting that point one can come into touch with all the converging streams of thought about that subject, though of course these are linked by millions of lines with all sorts of other subjects.
Supposing her clairvoyant powers to have been at that time sufficient, Madame Blavatsky may have adopted any of these methods of getting at the meaning of the treatises from The Book of the Golden Precepts, though it would be a little misleading to describe any of them as translations without qualifying the statement. The only other possibilities are somewhat remote. There is at present no one in that Himalayan monastery who speaks any European language, but since it is probably at least forty years since Madame Blavatsky was there, there must have been many changes. It is recorded that Indian students have occasionally, though very rarely, come to drink from that fount of archaic learning, and if we may assume that the visit of some such student coincided with hers, it might also be that he happened to know both English and the language of the manuscript, or at least the language of other inmates of the monastery who could read the manuscript for themselves, and so could translate for her.
Strangely enough, there is also just a possibility that she may have been taught in her own native tongue. In
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European Russia, on the banks of the Volga, there is a fairly large settlement of Buddhist tribes, probably Tartar in their origin; and it appears that these people, though so far removed on the physical plane from Tibet, still regard it as their holy land and occasionally undertake pilgrimages to it. Such pilgrims sometimes remain for years as pupils in Tibetan or Nepalese monasteries, and as one of them might very well know Russian as well as his own Mongolian dialect, it is obvious that we have here another possible method by which Madame Blavatsky may have communicated with her hosts.
In any case it is obvious that we must not expect an exact verbal reproduction of what Aryasanga originally said to his disciples. Even in the archaic book itself we have not his words, but his pupils' recollection of them, and of that recollection we have now before us either a translation of a translation, or the recording of a general mental impression of the meaning. It would of course be quite easy for one of our Masters or for the author himself to make a direct and accurate translation into English; but as Madame Blavatsky distinctly claims the work of translation as her own, this evidently was not the plan adopted.
At the same time, the account which we have from an eyewitness of the speed with which it was written down, does certainly seem to suggest the idea that some assistance was given to her, even though it may have been unconsciously to herself. Dr. Besant writes on this subject:
She wrote it at Fontainebleau, and the greater part was done when I was with her, and I sat in the room while she was writing
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it. I know that she did not write it referring to any books, but she wrote it down steadily, hour after hour, exactly as though she were writing either from memory or from reading it where no book was. She produced in the evening that manuscript that I saw her write as I sat with her, and asked me and others to correct it for English, for she said that she had written it so quickly that it was sure to be bad. We did not alter in that more than a few words, and it remains as a specimen of marvelously beautiful literary work.
Another possibility is that she may have done the translation into English beforehand while at the monastery, and that at Fontaineblcau she may really have been reading it at a distance, just as Dr. Besant says she appeared to be. I have often seen her do that very thing on other occasions.
The six schools of Hindu philosophy to which she refers on the first page of the preface are the Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Sankhya, Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta. She states that every Indian teacher has his own system of training, which he usually keeps very secret. It is natural that he should keep it secret, for he does not desire the responsibility of the results that would follow if it were tried (as, if known, it certainly would be), by all sorts of unsuitable, ill-regulated people. No real teacher in India will take charge of a pupil unless he can have him under his eye, so that when he prescribes for him a certain exercise, he can watch its effect and check the man instantly if he sees that anything is going wrong. That has been the immemorial custom in these occult matters, and unquestionably it is the only way in which real progress can be made with rapidity and safety. The first and most difficult task of the pupil is to reduce to order the chaos in himself?to eliminate the
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host of minor interests, and control the wandering thoughts, and this must be achieved by a steady pressure of the will exercised upon all his vehicles through a long period of years.
Our author tells us that if the systems of instruction differ on this side of the Himalayas in the esoteric schools, on the other side they are all the same. We must emphasize here the word esoteric, for we know that in the exoteric religion the corruptions and evil magical practices are worse on the northern side of the mountains than on the southern. We may perhaps even understand the expression " beyond the Himalayas " rather in a symbolical than in a strictly geographical sense, and many suppose that it is in the schools owing allegiance to our Masters that the teaching does not differ. This is very true in a certain sense?-the most important of all senses; but capable of misleading the reader if not carefully explained. The sense in which all are the same is that all recognize the virtuous life as the only path leading to occult development, and the conquest of desire as the only way of getting rid of it. There are schools of occult knowledge which hold that the virtuous life imposes unnecessary limitations. They teach certain forms of psychic development, but they care nothing for the use which their pupils may afterwards make of the information given to them. There are others who hold that desire of all sorts should be indulged to the utmost, in order that through satiety indifference may be attained. But no school holding either of these doctrines is under the direction of the
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Great White Brotherhood; in every establishment even remotely connected with it, purity of life and nobleness of aim are indispensable prerequisites.
The next paragraph in the Preface happens to contain two of the trifling inaccuracies to which I have referred. Our author mentions " the great mystic work called Paramartha, supposed to have been delivered to Nagarjuna by the Nagas ". Nagarjuna's great book was not called Paramartha, but Prajna Paramita?-the wisdom which brings to the further shore; but it is very true that the subject treated in that book is the paramartha satya, that consciousness of the sage which vanquishes illusion. Nagarjuna, as already mentioned, was one of the three great Buddhist teachers of the earlier centuries of the Christian era; he is supposed to have died A.D). 180. He is now known to Theosophists under the name of the Master Kuthumi. Exoteric writers some-times describe Aryasanga as his rival, but, knowing as we do their intimate relation in an earlier birth in Greece, and now again in this present life, we see at once that this cannot have been so. It is quite possible that, after their death, their pupils may have tried to set up the teaching of one against that of the other, as pupils in their undiscriminating zeal so often do; but that they themselves were in perfect accord is shown by the fact that Aryasanga treasured much of Nagarjuna's work and copied it into his book of extracts for the use of his disciples.
It is not, however, certain that the Prajna Paramita was the work of Nagarjuna, for the legend seems to be
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to the effect that the book was delivered to him by the Nagas or serpents. Madame Blavatsky interprets this as a name given to the ancient Initiates, and that may well be so, though there is another very interesting possibility. I have found that the name of Nagas or serpents was given by the Aryans to one of the great tribes or clans of the Toltec sub-race of the Atlanteans, because they carried before them as a standard when going into battle a golden snake coiled round a staff. This may well have been some totem or tribal symbol, or perhaps merely the crest of a great family. This tribe or family must have taken a prominent part in the original Atlantean colonization of India and the lands which then existed to the south-east of it. We find the Nagas mentioned as among the original inhabitants of Ceylon, found when Vijaya and his companions landed there. So a possible interpretation of this legend might be that Nagarjuna received this book from an earlier race? in other words, that it is an Atlantean scripture. And if, as has been suspected, certain of the Upanishads came from the same source, there would be little reason to wonder at the identity of teaching to which Madame Blavatsky refers on the same page.
The Gnyaneshwari (transliterated Dhyaneshwari in the first edition) is not a Sanskrit work, but was written in Marathi in the thirteenth century of our era.
On the next page we find a reference to the Yoga-charya (or more accurately Yogachara) school of the Mahayana. I have already mentioned the attempt made by Aryasanga, but a few words should perhaps be
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said as to the vexed question of the Yanas. The Buddhist Church presents itself to us to-day in two great divisions, the Northern and the Southern. The former includes China, Japan, and Tibet; the latter reigns in Ceylon, Siam, Burma and Cambodia. It is usually stated that the Northern Church adopts the Mahayana and the Southern Church the Hlnayana,1 but whether even this much may be safely said depends upon the shade of meaning which we attach to a much-disputed word. Yana means vehicle, and it is agreed that it is to be applied to the Dhamma or Law as the vessel which conveys us across the sea of life to Nirvana, but there are at least five theories as to the exact sense in which it is to be taken:
1. That it refers simply to the language in which the Law is written, the Greater Vehicle being by this hypothesis Sanskrit, and the Lesser Vehicle Pali?-a theory which seems to me untenable.
2. Hina may apparently be taken as signifying mean or easy, as well as small. One interpretation therefore considers the Hinayana as the meaner or easier road to liberation?the irreducible minimum of knowledge and conduct required to attain it?while the Mahayana is the fuller and more philosophical doctrine which includes much additional knowledge about higher realms of nature. Needless to say, this interpretation comes from a Mahayana source.
3. That Buddhism, in its unfailing courtesy towards other religions, accepts them all as ways of liberation,
1 Usually known as Theravada.
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though it regards the method taught by its Founder as offering the shortest and surest route. According to this view, Buddhism is the Mahayana, and the Hinayana includes Brahmanism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism and any other religions which were existing at the time when the definition was formulated.
4. That the two doctrines are simply two stages of one doctrine?the Theravada for the Shravakas or hearers, and the Mahayana for more advanced students.
5. That the word Yana is to be understood not exactly in its primary sense of " vehicle," but rather in a secondary sense nearly equivalent to the English word " career ". According to this interpretation the Mahayana puts before a man the "grand career" of becoming a Bodhisattva and devoting himself to the welfare of the world, while the Theravada shows him only the "smaller career " of so living as to attain Nirvana for himself.
The Northern and Southern Buddhist Churches are related somewhat as are the Catholics and Protestants among the Christians. The Northern resembles the Catholic Church. It has added to the teachings of the Lord Buddha. For instance, it adopted much of the aboriginal worship which it found in the country?such ceremonies as those in honour of nature-spirits or deified forces of nature. When Christian missionaries went among the Northern Buddhists, they found ceremonies so similar to their own that they said it was plagiarism due to the work of the devil, and when it was conclusively proved that these ceremonies antedated the Christian era, they said it was " plagiarism by anticipation " !
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In the Buddhist, as in all other scriptures, there are contradictory statements; so the Southern Church has founded itself on certain texts; anxious to avoid excrescences, it ignores the others, or calls them interpolations. This has made it narrower in its scope than the Northern Church. To take one example. The Lord Buddha preached constantly against the idea that was evidently prevalent in his time, of the continuation of the person-alky. That notion is common also among Christians?-that our personalities survive to all eternity. But while he taught that nothing of all that with which men generally identify themselves lasts for ever, he made most unequivocal statements about the successive lives of men. He gave examples of preceding lives; and when some King asked him what it was like to recover the memory of former lives, he. said it was like remembering what one had done yesterday and on preceding days when visiting this village or that. Yet the Southern Church now teaches that only karma persists, not an ego; as though man in one life made a certain amount of karma, and then died, and nothing was left of him, but another person was born, and had to bear the karma which he did not make.
Still, while the Southern Buddhists teach that only the karma survives, they speak at the same time of the attainment of Nirvana; so that if you ask a monk why he wears the yellow robe, he will answer you: "To attain Nirvana," and if you say: " In this life? " he will reply at once: " Oh, no, it will need many lives." So also, after every sermon that a monk preaches he blesses
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his congregation with the words: '' May you attain Nirvana "; and again, if you asked him whether they could attain it in this life, he would say, " No, they will need many lives." So a practical belief in the continued existence of an individual persists, in spite of the formal teaching to the contrary.
Madame Blavatsky devotes a couple of pages to the question of the various forms of writing adopted in the Himalayan monasteries. In Europe and America the Roman alphabet is so widely spread, so almost universally employed, that it is perhaps well, for the sake of our Western readers, to explain that in the East a very different condition of affairs prevails. Each of the numerous Oriental languages?Tamil, Telugu, Sinhalese, Malayalam, Hindi, Gujarati, Canarese, Bengali, Burmese, Nepalese, Tibetan, Siamese, and many others ?has its own alphabet and method of writing, and a writer in one of them, when quoting a foreign language, expresses that language in his own characters, just as an English writer, if he had to quote a German or Russian sentence would probably write it not in German or Russian type, but in Roman. So that in dealing with an oriental manuscript we have always two points to consider?the language and the script, and these two are by no means always the same.
If I take up a palm-leaf book in Ceylon, it is almost certain to be written in the beautiful Sinhalese script, but it does not at all follow that it is in the Sinhalese language. It is quite as likely to be in Pali, Sanskrit or Elu. The same is true of any of the other scripts.
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So that when Madame Blavatsky says that the precepts are sometimes written in Tibetan, she may very likely mean only in Tibetan characters, and not necessarily in the Tibetan language. I have not seen any instances of the curious cryptographs which she describes, in which colours and animals are made to represent letters. She speaks in the same paragraph of the thirty simple letters of the Tibetan alphabet. These are universally recognized, but it is not clear what is meant by the reference a little later on to thirty-three simple letters, since if she takes them without the four vowels there are but thirty, while if the vowels are included we should of course have not thirty-three but thirty-four. As to the compound letters, their number may be variously stated; a grammar which is before me gives over a hundred, but probably Madame Blavatsky refers only to those in general use.
I remember an interesting illustration of her statement as to one of the Chinese modes of writing. When I was in Ceylon there came one day to visit us two Buddhist monks from the interior of China?-men who could speak no language with which any of us were acquainted. But fortunately we had some young Japanese students staying with us, in pursuance of Colonel Olcott's splendid scheme that each Church, the Northern and the Southern, should send some of its neophytes to learn the ways and the teaching of the other. These young men could not understand a word of what these Chinese monks said, but they were able to exchange ideas with them by means of writing. The written symbols meant the same
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to them, though they called them by quite different names, just as a Frenchman and an Englishman would each perfectly understand a line of figures, although one would call them " un, deux, trois," and the other " one, two, three ". The same is true of notes of music. Sol had a very curious and interesting interview with these monks, at which every question which I put was first translated into Sinhalese by one of our members, so that the Japanese student might understand it; then the latter wrote it down with a paint-brush in the form of writing common to Chinese and Japanese; the Chinese monk read it and wrote his reply in the same characters, which the Japanese student then translated into Sinhalese, and our member into English. Under these circumstances conversation was slow and a little uncertain, but still it was an interesting experience.

CHAPTER 2 THE HIGHER AND THE LOWER POWERS

These instructions are for those ignorant of the dangers of the lower Iddhi.
C.W.L.?To this opening sentence of the First Fragment there is a note by Madame Blavatsky as follows:
The Pali word Iddhi is the equivalent of the Sanskrit Siddhis, or psychic faculties, the abnormal powers in man. There are two kinds of Siddhis? one group which embraces the lower, coarse, psychic and mental energies, while the other exacts the highest training of spiritual powers. Says Krishna in Shrimad Bhagavat.
" He who is engaged in the performance of Yoga, who has subdued his senses and who has concentrated his mind in me [Krishna], such Yogis all the Siddhis stand ready to serve.
There is a vast amount of misunderstanding on this subject of psychic powers, and it will save the student a great deal of trouble if he will try to get a reasonable conception of it to begin with. First, let him not
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attach a wrong interpretation to the word " abnormal " These powers are abnormal only in the sense that they are at present uncommon?not in the least in the sense that they are in any way unnatural. They are perfectly natural to every man?-indeed they are latent in every man here and now; a few people have developed them from latency into activity, but the majority have as yet made no effort in that direction, and so the powers still remain dormant.
The simplest way to grasp the general idea is to remember that man is a soul, and that he manifests himself on various planes through bodies appropriate to those planes. If he wishes to act, to see or to hear in this physical world, he can do so only through a body made of physical matter. Similarly if he wishes to manifest in the astral world, he must have an astral vehicle, for the physical body is useless there and even invisible, just as the astral body is invisible to our physical sight. In the same way a man who wishes to live upon the mental plane must use his mental body.
To develop psychic faculty means to learn to use the senses of these different bodies. If a man can use only his physical senses, he can see and hear only things of this physical world; if he learns to use the senses of his astral body, he can see and hear the things of the astral world as well. It is merely a matter of learning to respond to additional vibrations. If you will look at the table of vibrations in any book of physics, you will see that a large number of them evoke no response from us. A certain number appeal to our ears, and we hear them
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as waves of sound; another set impress themselves upon our eyes, and we call them rays of light. But in between these two sets, and above and below them both, are thousands of other sets of oscillations that make no impression at all upon our physical senses. It is possible for a man so to develop himself as to become sensitive to all these undulations of the ether, and of matter even finer than the ether; we call a man who has done that clairvoyant or clairaudient, because he can see and hear more than the undeveloped man can.
The advantages of such an unfolding of the inner sight are considerable. The man who possesses it finds himself free of another and far wider world; or to speak more accurately, he finds that the world in which he has always lived has extensions and possibilities of all kinds of which he has previously known nothing. His studies may already have informed him of the presence all round him of a vast and complicated non-physical life?of kingdoms of devas and nature-spirits, of the enormous army of his fellow-men who have laid aside their dense bodies in sleep or in death, of forces and influences of many sorts which can be evoked and used by those who understand them; but to see all these things for himself instead of merely believing in them, to be able to contact them at firsthand and experiment with them?all this makes life far fuller and more interesting. He who can thus follow on higher planes the results of his thought and action, becomes thereby a more efficient and more useful person. The gain of such an unfoldment of consciousness is obvious; but what of the other side
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of the story ? Madame Blavatsky writes of the dangers of this development, and of two kinds of it, a lower and a higher. Let us take this latter point first.
All information which reaches man from without comes to him by means of vibrations. Vibrations of the air convey sounds to the ears, while those of light bring sights to his eyes. If he sees things and creatures of the astral and mental worlds, it can only be through the impingement of vibrations of astral and mental matter upon the bodies respectively capable of responding to them. For man can see the astral world only through the senses of his astral body, and the mental world through those of his mental body.
In each of these worlds, as in this, there are coarser and finer types of matter, and, roughly speaking, the radiations of the finer types are desirable, while those of the coarser kinds are distinctly undesirable. A man has both kinds of matter in his astral body, and he is therefore capable of responding to both the higher and the lower vibrations; and it is for him to choose to which of them he will turn his attention. If he resolutely shuts out all the lower influences, and accepts only the higher, he may be greatly helped by them even at astral and mental levels. But Madame Blavatsky will have none of these?not even as temporary aids; she groups them all together as " lower, coarse, psychic and mental energies " and urges us to sweep onward to far higher planes which are beyond the illusions of the personality. She evidently regards the dangers of ordinary psychic development as outweighing its advantages; but as a
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certain amount of this development is sure to come, in the course of the evolution of the disciple, she warns us of some points as to which extreme care is necessary.
In our own experience during the forty years that have elapsed since Madame Blavatsky wrote this, we have seen something of these dangers in cases of various students. Pride is the first of them, and it bulks very largely. The possession of a faculty which, though it is the heritage of the whole human race, is as yet manifested only very occasionally, often causes the ignorant clairvoyant to feel himself (or still more frequently herself) exalted above his fellows, chosen by the Almighty for some mission of world-wide importance, dowered with a discernment that can never err, selected under angelic guidance to be the founder of a new dispensation, and so on. It should be remembered that there are always plenty of sportive and mischievous entities on the other side of the veil who are ready and even anxious to foster all such delusions, to reflect and embody all such thoughts, and to fill whatever role of archangel or spirit-guide may happen to be suggested to them. Unfortunately it is so fatally easy to persuade the average man that he really is a very fine fellow at bottom, and quite worthy to be the recipient of a special revelation, even though his friends have through blindness or prejudice somehow failed hitherto to appreciate him.
Another danger, perhaps the greatest of all, because it is the mother of all others, is ignorance. If the clairvoyant knows anything of the history of his subject, if
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he at all understands the conditions of those other planes into which his vision is penetrating, he cannot of course suppose himself the only person who was ever so highly favoured, nor can he feel with self-complacent certainty that it is impossible for him to mistake. But when he is, as so many are, in the densest ignorance as to history, conditions and everything else, he is liable in the first place to make all kinds of mistakes as. to what he sees, and secondly to be the easy prey of all sorts of designing and deceptive entities from the astral plane. He has no criterion by which to judge what he sees, or thinks he sees, no test to apply to his visions or communications, and so he has no sense of relative proportion or the fitness of things, and he magnifies a copy-book maxim into a fragment of divine wisdom, a platitude of the most ordinary type into an angelic message. Then again, for want of common knowledge on scientific subjects he will often utterly misunderstand what his faculties enable him to perceive, and he will in consequence gravely promulgate the grossest absurdities.
The third danger is that of impurity. The man who is pure in thought and life, pure in intention and free from the taint of selfishness, is by that very fact guarded from the influence of undesirable entities from other planes. There is in him nothing upon which they can play; he is no fit medium for them. On the other hand all good influences naturally surround such a man, and hasten to use him as a channel through which they may act, and thus a still further barrier is erected about him against all which is mean and low and evil. The man
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of" impure life or motive, on the contrary, inevitably attracts to himself all that is worst in the invisible world which so closely surrounds us; he responds readily to it, while it will be hardly possible for the forces of good to make any impression upon him.
But a clairvoyant who will bear in mind all these dangers, and strive to avoid them, who will take the trouble to study the history and the rationale of clairvoyance, who will see to it that his heart is humble and his motives are pure?'Such a man may assuredly learn very much from these powers of which he finds himself in possession, and may make them of the greatest use to him in the work which he has to do.
The siddhis are enumerated at considerable length in the third chapter of the Toga Sutras of Patanjali. He speaks of them as being attained in five ways?by birth, by drugs, by mantras, by tapas, and by samadhi.
We have come to birth in a particular kind of body as the result of our actions in previous incarnations, and if we find ourselves by nature in the possession of psychic powers we may take it for granted that we have worked for them in some way in previous lives. Many clairvoyants of the present day, in whom the faculty has been easily awakened, but perhaps reaches no great heights of spirituality, have been in such positions as those of the vestal virgins of Greece and Rome, the minor yogis of India, or even the medicine-men of various half-savage tribes or the "wise women" of the middle ages; there has always been a very wide range in these matters.
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What will happen to such people, how their spiritual lives will be shaped, depends largely upon those with whom it is their karma to come into contact. If that karma is good enough to lead them to Theosophy, they will have the opportunity of learning something about these dawning faculties, and of being trained in its Esoteric School in the preliminary qualities of character and purity of physical and magnetic life that are prescribed by all true occultists, so that a little later on they may develop their psychic powers in safety, and become of great service to mankind.
If on the other hand they come into touch with the spiritualistic school of thought, they are quite likely to find themselves following a line which frequently results in passive mediumship, the very opposite of what we are trying to attain.
There are those who turn to pseudo-occultism for the attainment of magical powers in order to gratify personal ambition. That path is full of the most serious dangers. Sometimes such people sit in a passive condition and invite unknown entities of the astral world to work upon their auras and organisms and to adapt them to their purposes; sometimes they practise various forms of Hatha-yoga, consisting mainly of peculiar kinds of breathing, which have unfortunately been widely taught in the Western world in recent years. As a result of such proceedings mental and bodily disorders of a serious character often arise, while at best the contact which is gained with the inner worlds seldom extends beyond the lower astral
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levels, from which nothing can come that is uplifting to mankind.
As to the second method?-the use of drugs?there is a note by Vyasa, in his commentary upon the Yoga Sutras, to the effect that these are used " in the houses of the asuras " for the purpose of awakening the siddhis. The asuras are the opposite of the suras, and the word may roughly be translated as " the ungodly "; the suras are the beings on God's side, those who work for His plan of upward-evolving life.
Patanjali does not recommend this method; he is merely enumerating the ways in which the siddhis can be acquired. A study of the Sutras shows very clearly that he favours only the last of his list of five methods? that by means of samadhi or contemplation.
We can understand to some extent the action of drugs on the body, when they are used as a means of awakening psychic powers, if we remember that in the fourth root race clairvoyance through the sympathetic nervous system was quite common. Then the astral sheath, not yet properly organized into a body or vehicle of consciousness, responded in a general way to the impressions made upon it by the objects of the astral plane. Those impressions were then reflected in the sympathetic centres in the physical body, so that consciousness in that body received astral and physical impressions together, and often scarcely distinguished between them. Indeed, in the earlier days of that race, and in the Lemurian race, the activity of the sympathetic system was far greater than that of the cerebro-spinal system, so that the astral
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experiences were more prominent than the physical. But since then the cerebro-spinal system has become the dominant mechanism of consciousness in the physical body, and man in consequence has paid more and more attention to the physical-plane experiences, as they have grown stronger and more insistent. Therefore the sympathetic system as a purveyor of impressions has gradually lapsed, its business now being to carry on in an involuntary manner many bodily functions to which the man need not attend, because his life is mental, emotional and spiritual rather than physical.
The objection to the use of drugs, therefore, is not only that they upset the healthy working of the body and bring the sympathetic system once more into a prominence which it ought not to have, but even from the point of view of the psychic powers attained they merely re-awaken that system and bring again into the physical consciousness indiscriminate impressions from the astral world. These come generally from the lower part of the plane, in which are aggregated all the astral matter and all the elemental essence concerned with exciting the lower passions and impulses. Sometimes they come from slightly higher regions of sensuous delight, such as are described in the visions of the Count of Monte Cristo in Dumas' famous novel, or in De Quincy's Confessions of an Opium Eater; but these are scarcely better than the others.
All that is entirely contrary to the plan of evolution laid down for humanity. We are all intended to unfold clairvoyance and other cognate powers, but not in that
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\way. First there should be a development of the astral and mental bodies, so that they may be definite vehicles of consciousness on their own planes; then may come the awakening of the chakras in the etheric double by means of which the valuable knowledge gained through those higher bodies may be brought down to the physical plane consciousness. But all this should be done only when and as the Master advises; remember, in At the Feet of the Master the Teacher said: "Have no desire for psychic powers."
The third method mentioned is by the use of mantras. The term mantra is applied to certain words of power which are used in meditation or in ceremonial rites, and are often repeated over and over again. These are to be found in Christian rituals as well as in the East, as has been explained in The Science of the Sacraments. In many religions sounds are thus used, and are associated with pictures, symbols, signs and gestures, and sometimes dances.
The term tapas, used to describe the fourth method, is often associated with ideas of extreme austerity and even self-torture, such as the method of holding the arm extended until it withers, or lying on a bed of spikes. These practices certainly develop the will, but there are other and better ways of doing that. These Hatha Yoga schemes have the great demerit of making the physical body useless for that service of humanity which is above all other things important for the Master's work. The will may be just as effectively developed in dealing with the difficulties of life that come to us by nature
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and through karma; there is no necessity to make trouble.
In the Gita Shri Krishna speaks strongly against this superstition. He says, " The men who perform severe austerities, which are not prescribed by the Scriptures, wedded to vanity and egoism, impelled by the force of their desires and passions., unintelligent, tormenting the aggregated elements forming the body, and Me also, seated in the inner body?know these as asuric in their resolves." Such antics cannot be the real tapas. The word means literally " heat," and perhaps the nearest English equivalent to that when it is applied to human conduct is " effort ". The real meaning of the teaching with regard to it seems to be: " Do for the body what you know to be good for it, disregarding mere comfort. Do not let laziness, selfishness, or indifference stand in the way of your doing what you can to make your personality healthy and efficient in the work that it ought to be doing in the world." 2 Shri Krishna says in the Gita'. " Reverence to the Gods, the elders, the teachers and the wise, purity, straightforwardness, continence and harmlessness are the tapas of the body; speech truthful, pleasant and beneficial, and study of the sacred words are the tapas of speech; cheerfulness, balance, silence, self-control, and being true to oneself are the tapas of mind." 3 These descriptions, given by one whom most of the Hindus regard as the greatest incarnation of
1 Op. cit., xvii, 5-6.
2 See Raja Yoga, by Ernest Wood.
8 -Op. cit., xvii, 14-16.
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Deity, certainly do not indicate any of the dreadful developments of which we sometimes see such sad examples.
It is the fifth means, that of samadhi, that the Book of the Golden Precepts advocates, and, as in the Toga Sutras and other standard works of the kind, this is preceded by dharana and dhyana, which are commonly translated as concentration and meditation, while samadhi is interpreted as contemplation. These one-word translations from the Sanskrit are, however, often rather unsatisfactory; the Sanskrit words, coming down to us through the ages, have acquired a marvellous complexity, have added to themselves many fine shades of meaning which are not to be found in any modern English expression. The only way really to understand them is to study the terms in their context in the ancient books.
The siddhis may be divided into two classes, not only as higher and lower, but also as faculties and powers. The world acts upon us through the senses, through our faculties of sight, hearing and the rest; but we also act upon the world. This duality applies also with regard to super-physical accomplishments. We receive impressions through the newly unfolded powers of our astral and mental vehicles; but we can also act through them. It is usual in Hindu books to speak of eight siddhis: (1) anima, the power to put oneself in the position of an atom, to become so small as to be able to deal with that tiny thing; (2) mahima, the power to be as if of monstrous size, so as to deal with huge things at no disadvantage; (3) laghima, the power to become as light as
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cotton borne on the wind; (4) garima, the power to become as dense and heavy as anything can be; (5) prapti, the power of reaching out, even as far as the moon; (6) prakamya, the will power with which to realize all wishes and desires; (7) ishatwa, the power to control and create; and (8) vashitwa, the power of command over all objects. These are called " the great powers ", but others are mentioned, such as steadiness and effulgence in the body, control of the senses and appetites, beauty and gracefulness, and so on.
We students of these later days approach all these problems from a point of view so totally different from that of the Hindu writers of thousands of years ago, that it is sometimes difficult for us to understand them. We are the product of our age, and the quasi-scientific training through which we all pass makes it a mental necessity for us to try to classify our knowledge. Each man endeavours to build for himself some kind of scheme of things, however crude it may be, and when any new fact is presented to him he tries to find a niche in his scheme for it. If it fits in comfortably he accepts the fact; if he cannot make it fit in, he is quite likely to reject it, even though it may come to him with the weightiest evidence. Though some people seem capable of holding, quite happily, beliefs which are mutually contradictory, there are others who cannot do this, and it is often a painful process for them to reconstruct their thought-edifice to admit a new fact?-so painful that they not infrequently avoid it by conveniently forgetting or denying the fact. Our ancient Indian brethren seem to me
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to have catalogued their observations and left them there ?-to have made no special attempt to relate them to one another or to classify them by the planes on which they occurred or the kind of faculty which they required.
We have no difficulty in recognizing the first and second powers on this list of siddhis; they are instances of the alteration of the focus of the consciousness; we sometimes call them powers of magnification and reduction. They mean the adaptation of the consciousness to the objects with which it has to deal?a feat which presents no difficulty to the trained occultist, though it is not easy on the physical plane to explain exactly how it is done. The third and fourth mention the possibility of becoming light or heavy at will; this is achieved by the comprehension and use of the repulsive force which is the opposite of gravity. I am not so sure about the fifth; it may refer merely to the power of travelling in the astral body, since the limit of astral migration is indicated by the mention of the moon; but I rather suspect that it means the power of producing a definite result at a distance by 'an effort of will. The sixth and eighth are only developments of will-power, though very remarkable developments; the seventh is the same, with the addition of the special knowledge required for the dematerialization and rematerialization of objects. In this list there seems to be no direct reference to clairvoyance at all, either in space or in time.
It is to be noted that The Voice of the Silence does not say that the lower iddhis, those belonging to the astral and mental bodies, are to be neglected altogether;
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it merely points out that there are serious dangers connected with them. We shall have to deal with them a little further on, for he who would climb the ladder must step on every rung.
He who would hear the voice of Nada, the " Sound-less sound," and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dharana.
To this there are two footnotes, as follows:
The " Soundless Voice," or the " Voice of the Silence." Literally perhaps this would read " Voice in the Spiritual Sound,''' as Nada is the equivalent word in Sanskrit for the Senzar term.
Dharana is the intense and perfect concentration of the mind upon some one interior object, accompanied by complete abstraction from everything pertaining to the external universe, or the world of the senses.
The word that is here translated concentration comes from the root dhri, to hold. The word dharana, with a short final vowel, means holding or supporting in general, but here we have a special feminine substantive, with the long terminal vowel, as a technical term signifying concentration or holding of the mind.
It is described in some places as a kind of pondering or dwelling upon a given thought or object, and it is said in the Hindu books that meditation and contemplation will not be successful unless this is practised first. It is obvious that while the mind is responding to
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the appeals of the physical, astral and lower mental planes, it is not likely to hear the message that the ego is trying to transmit to the personality from his own higher planes.
Concentration is requisite, that attention may be given to the chosen object, not to the restless activity of the lower vehicles. It is usual to begin the practice of concentration with simple things. On a certain occasion some people came to Madame Blavatsky, and asked her upon what they should meditate; she threw a matchbox down on the table, and said: " Meditate on that! " It startled them somewhat, because they had expected her to tell them to meditate upon Parabrahman or the Absolute. It is very important that this concentration should be done without strain to the body. Dr. Besant has told us that, when Madame Blavatsky first instructed her to try it, she began with great intensity; but her teacher interrupted her, saying: " My dear, you do not meditate with your blood-vessels! " '
What is required is to hold the mind quiet, so that one looks at the object of thought with perfect calmness, just as one would look at one's watch 'to see the time, except that one keeps on looking for the length of time prescribed or decided upon for the period of concentration. People often complain of headaches and other pains as a result of meditation; there should never be any such result; if they will take care to keep the physical body calm and free from tension of any kind, even in the eyes, they will probably find their concentration much easier and more successful, and free from
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physical trouble and danger. Various books have been written on this subject, and some of them offer exceedingly dangerous suggestions. Anyone wishing further information on this should read Professor Wood's book, Concentration?-a Practical Course, of which Dr. Besant wrote: '' There is nothing in it which, when practised, can do the striver after concentration the least physical, mental or moral harm."
In her footnote, H.P.B. associates dharana with the higher mental plane, for she says the mind must be fixed upon an interior object and abstracted from the world of the senses; that is, from the physical, astral and lower mental worlds. That is a prescription for the candidate who is already on the Path, and is aiming at the samadhi of the nirvanic or atmic plane. But the three terms concentration, meditation and contemplation are also used in a general way. To fix one's thought on a verse of scripture?-that is concentration. To look at it in every possible light and try to penetrate its meaning, to reach a new and deep thought or receive some intuitional light upon it?that is meditation. To fix one's attention steadily for a time on the light received?? that is contemplation. Contemplation has been defined as concentration at the top end of your line of thought or meditation. It is usual for the Oriental student to begin his practice on some simple external object, and from that to carry his thought inward or upward to higher things.

CHAPTER 3- THE SLAYER OF THE REAL

Having become indifferent to objects of perception, the pupil must seek out the Raja of the senses, the Thought-Producer, he who awakes illusion.
The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real. Let the Disciple slay the slayer.
This refers to what has to be done during the practice of concentration. In the Hindu books on the subject it is explained that prior to the actual concentration the student who sits for the practice must withdraw his attention from the objects of sensation; he must learn to take no notice of any sights or sounds that may come within his range; he must not be attracted by anyone or anything that comes within his view, or affects his sense of touch. He will then be ready to observe what thoughts and feelings rise in the mind itself, and to deal with them.
As I have already explained, in most persons the mental and astral bodies are in a constant state of activity, full of vortices, which must be removed before real progress can be made. It is these that create the mass
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of illusions which beset the average man, and render it exceedingly difficult for him to get a true view of anything at all. It is an axiom of Shri Shankaracharya's teaching that just as the physical eye can see things well when it is steady, but not when it is roaming about, so the mind can understand things clearly when it is still. But if it is full of vortices they are sure to distort the vision and so create illusion.
The mind is called the raja or king of the senses. Sometimes it is spoken of as one of them, as in the Gild:
A portion of Mine own Self transformed in the world of life into an immortal Spirit, draweth round itself the senses, of which the mind is the sixth, veiled in matter.1
That the mind does act as a kind of sense is obvious, since it corrects the evidence of the five senses and also indicates the presence of objects beyond their reach; for example, when a shadow falls across your threshold, you may infer that somebody is there.
What is the mind, that has to be dealt with so severely by the aspirant? Patanjali speaks of it when he defines yoga practice as chitta-vritti-nirodha, which means restraint (nirodha) of the whirlpools (vritti) of the mind (chitta). Among the Vedantins, or in Shri Shankaracharya's school, the term antahkarana is not used as we generally employ it, but indicates the mind in its fullest sense. It means with, them literally the entire internal organ or instrument between the innermost Self and the outer world, and is always described as of
1 Op. cit., v, 7.
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four parts: the "I-maker" (ahamkara); insight, intuition or pure reason (buddhi); thought (manas); and discrimination of objects (chitta). It is these last two that the Western man usually calls his mind, with its powers of abstract and concrete thought; when he thinks of the other processes he imagines them to be something above the mind.
The Theosophist ought to recognize in these four Vedantic divisions his own familiar atma, buddhi, manas and the lower mind. Madame Blavatsky called the last kama-manas, because it is the part of manas that works with desire and is therefore interested in material objects. Kama is to be taken not only as relating to low desires and passions, but also to any sort of desire or interest in the external world for its own sake. The whole of the triple higher self is from this point of view nothing but the antahkarana (or internal agency) between the monad and the lower self. It has become a tetrad, because manas is dual in incarnation.
The three parts of the higher self are considered as three aspects of a great consciousness or mind; they are all modes of cognition. Atma is not the Self, but is this consciousness knowing the Self; buddhi is this consciousness knowing the life in the forms by its own direct perception; manas is the same consciousness looking out upon the world of objects, and kama-manas is a portion of the last immersed in that world and affected by it. The true self is the Monad, whose life is something greater than consciousness, which is the life of this complete mind, the Higher Self. Therefore
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Patanjali and Shankara are quite in agreement; it is the chitta, the kama-manas, the lower mind, which is the slayer of the real, and has to be slain.
Much that is now called the astral body by Theosophists must be included in the Indian idea of kama-manas or chitta. Madame Blavatsky also speaks of four divisions of the mind. First there is manas-taijasi, the resplendent or illuminated manas, which is really buddhi, or at least that state of man when his manas has become merged in buddhi, having no separate will of its own. Then there is manas proper, the higher manas, the abstract thinking mind. Then there is the antahkarana, a term used by Madame Blavatsky merely to indicate the link or channel or bridge between higher manas and kama-manas during incarnation. Finally there is kama-manas, which is on this theory the personality.
Sometimes she calls manas the deva-ego, or the divine as distinguished from the personal self. Higher manas is divine because it has positive thought, which is kriya-shakti, the power of doing things. Really all our work is done by thought-power; the sculptor's hand does not do the work, but thought-power directing that hand does it. The higher manas is divine because it is a positive thinker, using the quality of its own life, which shines from within it; that is what is meant by the word divine, from div, to shine. But the lower mind is only a reflector; like all other material things, it has no light of its own; it is something through which the light comes, or through which the sound comes?merely persona, a mask.

THE SLAYER OF THE REAL 47
The antahkarana is usually considered in the Theosophical works as the link between the higher self or the divine ego, and the lower self or personal ego The chitta in that lower self puts it at the mercy of things, so that our life down here may be compared to the experience of a man struggling to swim in a maelstrom. But this will be followed sooner or later after death by a period in the heaven-world. The man has been whirled about; he has seen many things; he has not dwelt upon them, however, with a calm, steady mind, but with kama-manas; therefore he has not understood their significance for the soul. But in the heaven-world the ego can widen out the antahkarana, because all is now calm; no new experiences are to be gathered. The old ones can be quietly turned over and dwelt upon, and their essence taken up, as it were, into the deva ego, as being of interest to him. So, very often, the ego really begins his personal life-cycle with the entry into the heaven-world, and pays a minimum of attention to the personality during its period of collecting materials.
In that case the aspect of mind that is antahkarana (in Madame Blavatsky's classification) functions but little before the period of the heaven-life. But if a man is to become expert on the astral and mental planes during the life of the physical body, he must bring the positive powers of the higher Self down through that channel, by the practice of dharana or concentration, and so make himself entire master of his personality. In other words he must clear out the astral and mental whirlpools. A man who is genius on some line may find
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it easy to apply tremendous concentration to his particular kind of work, but when he relaxes from that, his ordinary life may quite possibly be still full of these whirlpools. That is not what we want; we are aiming at nothing less than the complete destruction of the whirlpools, so as to comb out the lower mind and make it the calm and obedient servant of the higher Self at all times.
These whirlpools may and do constantly crystallize into permanent prejudices, and make actual congestions of matter closely resembling warts upon the mental body. Then if the man tries to look out through that particular part of that body he cannot see clearly; everything is distorted, for at that point the mental matter is no longer living and flowing, but stagnant and rotten. The way to cure it is to acquire more knowledge, to get the matter into motion again, and then one by one the prejudices will be washed away and dissolved.
It is in this way that the mind is the great slayer of the real, for through it we do not see any object as it really is. We see only the images which we are able to make of it, and everything is necessarily coloured for us by these thought-forms of our own creation. Notice how two persons with preconceived ideas, seeing the same set of circumstances, and agreeing as to the actual happenings, will yet make two totally different stories from them. Exactly this sort of thing is going on all the time with every ordinary man, and we do not realize how absurdly we distort things. The disciple must conquer this; he must " slay the slayer ". He must
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not of course destroy his mind, for. he cannot get along without it, but he must dominate it; it is his, but it is not he, though it tries to make him think so. The best way to overcome its wandering is to use the will; its efforts are just like those of the astral body, which is always trying to persuade you that its desires are yours; you must deal with them both in a precisely similar manner.
Even when the whirlpools that fill the mind with prejudice and error are gone, much illusion still remains. The translation of the Sanskrit word avidya as ignorance is perhaps not very fortunate, though it is universally accepted. So often in Sanskrit there are delicate shades of meaning which it is difficult to convey in English. In this case perhaps what is intended is rot so much ignorance as unwisdom. A man may have vast stores of knowledge, and yet be unwise, for knowledge is concerned with objects and their relations in space and time, whereas wisdom is concerned with the soul or consciousness embodied in those things. The wise politician understands the people's minds; the wise mother understands her children's minds. However much one may know about material things, if one has only the matter-sight and not the life-sight, one has in reality only unwisdom or avidya. "It is at the expense of wisdom that intellect generally lives," said Madame Blavatsky. Then, out of that unwisdom or ignorance spring four other great obstacles to spiritual progress, making five altogether, which are called the kleshas.
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If avidya be the first obstacle the second is asmita, the notion that " I am this " or what a Master once called " self-personality". The personality is developed through life into quite a definite thing, with decided physical, astral and mental form, occupation and habits; and there is no objection to that if it be a good specimen. But if the indwelling life can be persuaded to think that he is that personality, he will begin to serve its interests, instead of using it merely as -a tool for his spiritual purposes.
In consequence of this second error men seek inordinate wealth and power and fame. When a man looks over his country houses and his town houses, his yachts and cars, his farms and factories, he swells with pride; thinking himself great because he is called the owner of these things; or he hears his name on everybody's lips, and feels that thousands of people are thinking of him with praise (or even with condemnation, for notoriety is often pleasing to men who cannot attain fame) and he thinks himself a very great person indeed. That is " self-personality ", one of the greatest superstitions in the world, and a great source of trouble for one and all. The spiritual man, on the other hand, counts himself fortunate if he can be the master of his own hand and brain, and he wishes to hold the images of thousands of others in his own mind that he may help them, rather than to rejoice in the thought that his image is multiplied and magnified in their minds. Hence self-personality is the greatest obstacle to the use of the personality by the higher Self, and so to spiritual progress.
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The third and fourth obstacles may be taken together. They are raga. and dwesha, liking and disliking, or attraction and repulsion. These too spring from this same self-personality. That it should show its likes is inappropriate; it is as though a motor-car should have a voice of its own, and should raise it in great discontent when its master drives over a broken road, or in a purr of delight when he goes over a good road. The road may be a bad one for the car, but from the point of view of the driver it is a good thing that there is a road at all, because he wants to get somewhere, which would be a difficult matter without a road. It is nice to have our armchairs and fires and electric light and steam heat, but he who would make progress has to go over new country, sometimes materially, and always in thought and feeling. People like the things that consort with their settled conveniences and habits; anything that disturbs those is " bad "; anything that fits in with them and enhances them is " good ". Such an outlook upon life does not harmonize with spiritual progress; we do not refuse comfort when it comes, but we must learn to be indifferent to it, and to take things as they come: this emphasis upon liking and disliking must go, and the calm judgment of the higher Self as to what is good and what is bad must take its place.
The fifth obstacle is abhinivesha, the outcome of the last, the state of being fixed, settled in, attached to a form or mode of life, or to the personality. From this arises fear of old age and of death?events which can never exist for the man himself, but must come in due
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course to the personality. A veritable death in life may arise out this of fifth trouble; people -waste their youth in preparation for comfort and safety in age,- and then waste their age in seeking for their lost youth, or are afraid to use their bodies, lest they should wear out. They are like a man who buys a beautiful motor-car, and sits in his garage, enjoying his new possession, but unable to bring himself to run it out on the road, lest it should be spoiled. Our business is to do what the higher Self wants, and to be utterly willing to die in his service if need be.
All the whirlpools arise from these five obstacles. Concentration and meditation are the means to dispel them completely. When the kama-manas no longer gravitates downwards, the manas can turn upwards, to become manas-taijasi.
Another Sanskrit word connected with this self-personality is mana, sometimes translated pride, but perhaps better rendered by conceit. This root appears in the word nirmanakaya, which means a being who is beyond this illusion?nirmana. Madame Blavatsky said that there were three kinds or modes of incarnation: first, that of the avatar as, those who descend from higher spheres, having reached them in a cycle of evolution prior to ours; secondly, those of an ordinary kind, when a person passes through the astral and mental worlds and then takes up a new body; and thirdly, that of nirmanakayas, who incarnate again without interlude, sometimes perhaps after only a few days. In The Secret Doctrine she cites the Cardinal de Cusa as an
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instance of this, he having been born again quickly, as Copernicus; and she says that such rapid rebirth is not an uncommon thing. She speaks of such people as adepts, not using the word quite as we employ it now, but meaning that they are adept or expert on the astral and lower mental planes; she says that they sometimes act as spirits at seances, and that they are particularly opposed by the Brothers of the Shadow, presumably because of the progress that they are making for themselves and also for mankind in general.
She explains that there are two kinds of nirmana-kayas: those who have renounced the heaven-world, as above explained, and those who at a later and higher stage renounce what she calls absolute Nirvana, in order to remain to help the progress of the world. Modern Theosophical literature confines the term to this latter class, but here we are concerned with the lower class. The man who has slain the slayer has largely destroyed the five obstacles, and has become the servant of the higher Self, with nothing in him but what is favourable to its purposes. He has his antahkarana widened out so that during his bodily life he is in full touch with the higher Self, and all the time that self is taking what it needs; the bee can visit the flower when he will, for there is no storm raging: and when the physical body is dead, the subtle part of the personality can be used again in the next incarnation, because it is not full of whirlpools which represent fixed desires and rigid opinions, and selfish habits of feeling and thought.

CHAPTER 4 - THE REAL AND THE UNREAL

For when to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams; when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the One?the inner sound which kills the outer.
C.W.L.?The simile of dreaming and waking is frequently used in Oriental philosophy. It has its use, but we must take care that it does not lead us into a misapprehension. When we wake from an ordinary dream we realize that our senses have been deceived, that what we thought at the time to be a real experience was in truth nothing of the kind. But this is not exactly what happens when we wake to a perception of spiritual reality. We awaken to a higher and broader life; we perceive for the first time the crushing yet entirely unsuspected limitations under which we have hitherto been living. But that does not mean that our life before that time was nothing but a useless deception. The awakening to higher things causes our previous state of mind to appear irrational, but, after all, it was only relatively so. We were acting then according to our lights, upon such information as we had; now we have so much
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more that all our lines of thought and action are completely changed.
Even the Vedantist does not deny that this physical plane dream of ours has its value for the production of enlightenment. A man may dream that a snake is threatening him, and be much alarmed thereby; at last in his dream the snake strikes him, and with that shock he wakes, and is much relieved to find that the whole experience was an illusion. Yet it was the blow of the illusory snake that awoke him to a more real life. Similarly, in the Gild, Shri Krishna tells His pupil that wisdom is better than worldly goods, because, He says, " All actions in their entirety culminate in wisdom." 1 That great Teacher did not deprecate a life of activity, but encouraged it to the utmost; yet He said that one should not be attached to the activities and the things with which they deal, but should seek only the wisdom that can be obtained from them. It is in the wisdom that man has his own true being, as he is a part of the Logos. If he listens to the voice of wisdom he will become increasingly the master of himself and his life; the inner sound will thus put a stop to the outer clamour which directs the feverish activities of ordinary men.
It is very true that a man should cease to give his attention to the many things which surround and play upon him, and should turn it inwards to the one witness of all these things; but he is not entirely free to do this until he has fully performed his dharma in the outer world. Any man at any time, whatever his duties may
1 Op. cit., iv, 33.
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be, may set his affection upon things above, and not upon things of the earth. But he may not be at liberty to devote his whole life to higher work until he has satisfied the demands of the karma which he has made in past lives, or in the earlier part of his present life. He may certainly feel vairagya, but while any physical duties Still remain to him, he must retain sufficient interest in them to do them as perfectly as they can be done.
If his desire for liberation is strong enough, and unless his karma places some insuperable obstacle in his way, he will probably find that the path to freedom will soon open before him. I myself had an experience of that kind; I received a, message from my Master offering me certain opportunities which I most thankfully accepted. But if that gracious offer had been made a little earlier, I should have been unable to accept it, because I should not have been free; there lay upon me a clear duty which I could not possibly have neglected.
Vairagya has two parts; there is the apara or lower vairagya, and the para or higher vairagya.
There are three stages in the abandonment of attachment to external things. First, the man becomes tired of the things which used to give him pleasure, yet he is sorry that he is tired of them; he desires still to enjoy them, but he cannot. Then, because of that satiety, he seeks elsewhere for satisfaction. Finally, when he has caught a clear glimpse of the higher things his spiritual desires awaken, and they prove so attractive to him that he thinks of the others no more. Or else, having learnt of the existence of the higher things and decided to follow
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them, he in the second stage either sets himself to observe the defects of the lower things, so as to create a sort of artificial disgust for them, or he fixes his will in rigid determination to reject their attractiveness and starve out desire for them. Finally, as in the former case, perhaps only after many fluctuations, the man sees the higher; he hears the inner sound which kills the outer. Then he has the higher vairagya.
In the middle stage of struggle, it often happens that the man conceives a positive repugnance for the things of his erst-while pleasure; that is usually a sign that he has only recently escaped from bondage to them and he still fears their attractiveness; he feels that he is liable to be tainted by their proximity, so he shudders and avoids them, or he attacks and tries to destroy them with unreasoning vehemence. All these different aspects of the second stage are forms of the lower vairagya.
Then only, not till then, shall he forsake the region of Asat, the false, to come onto the realm of Sat, the true.
Let us be careful here not to misunderstand. Many have supposed that this passage implies that the lower planes are mere illusion, but that is by no means what is intended. I have already written on the real and the unreal and have explained that each plane is real to the consciousness which functions upon it.1 What is true is that until a man is able to hear the inner voice and to look upon life from the standpoint of the higher planes
1 " The Occult Path and the Interests of the World " in the first Volume of Talks on the Path of Occultism.
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he has no real grasp of the truth which lies behind all this complexity of manifestation that surrounds us.
Before the Soul can see, die harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion.
Before the Soul can hear, the image (man) has to become as deaf to roarings as to whispers, to cries of bellowing elephants as to the silvery buzzing of the golden fire-fly.
Before the Soul can comprehend and may remember, she must onto the Silent Speaker be united, just as the form to which the clay is modelled is first united with the potter's mind.
The harmony within is that between the ego and his vehicles, and also, of course, between those vehicles themselves. In the average man there is a perpetual strain going on between the astral body and the mental body, between the desires and the mind; and neither of these bodies is in the least in tune with the ego, or pre- : pared to act as his vehicle. The personality must be purified, and the channel between it and the ego must be opened and widened.- Until this is done the personality sees everything and everybody from its own very limited point of view. The ego cannot see what is really going on; he perceives only the distorted picture in the personality, which is like a camera with a defective lens that distorts the light rays, and a faulty plate or film which makes the result all blurred, indistinct and unequal.
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That is why in most people the ego cannot derive any satisfaction from the personality until it is in the heaven-world. The ego knows the true from the false, he recognizes the true when he sees it, and rejects the false; but generally when he casts an eye downwards into the personality he finds so crazy a confusion of inconsequent thought-forms that he can distinguish nothing definite; he turns away in despair, and decides to wait for the quietude of the heaven-world before attempting to pick the fragments of truth out of this unseemly chaos. Under those more peaceful conditions, as the emotions and thoughts of the recent physical life come up one by one and envisage themselves in the vivid light of that world, they are examined with clear vision, the dross is thrown away and the treasure is kept. The disciple must try to bring about this condition while still in the physical body, by purifying the personality and harmonizing it with the soul.
The possibilities of personal error are almost infinite. Suppose that a worm, a bird, a monkey, and a traveller simultaneously look at a tree. The first will think of it as food, the second as a house, the third as a gymnasium, the fourth as a kind of umbrella; the pictures will all be different from one another, and different again from the tree's conception of himself.
While seeing has reference to looking outward, hearing refers to what comes from within. The man must become quiet if he is to hear the still small voice. Dharana or concentration will produce this quietness. If the soul is to hear the inner voice with
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certainty and accuracy, the outer man must be unshaken by all external things?by the clamour of the big breakers of life that dash against him, as well as by the delicate murmur of the softer ripples. He must learn to be very still, to have no desires and aversions.
Intuition can scarcely ever be invoked except when the man is utterly willing to receive its behests as the best and most acceptable guide, without intruding his personal desires. It would be of little use to ask from the intuition any solution of a problem of conduct, if at the same time the man wished that the answer should be this or that. Except on rare occasions when it is unusually strong, it is only when personal desires and aversions have ceased to exist when the voice of the outer world can no longer command him, that a man can hear the inner voice which should be his unfailing guide.
Before the soul can fully comprehend the drift of all the tuition which comes to him from without, and the intuition that comes from within, another harmonizing process must take place, in which the manas gradually becomes attuned to the will, which gives direction to his life.
There are three stages in the development of consciousness. On the probationary path the man's highest consciousness works upon the higher mental plane; after the First Initiation and until the Fourth, it is climbing steadily through the buddhic plane; at the end of that stage it enters on the atonic or spiritual plane. He has then become united with the will, the directing
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agent, controller of his destiny. While in the middle stage he might have said: "Thy Will, not mine, be done," but now he says: "Thy Will and mine are one." Just as the design of the pot that is to be made is first in the potter's mind, and just as the model for a race of men is in the Manu's mind, He having received it from above, so is the goal of achievement for every one of us already marked out by the Monad, and then brought down into the evolving life of the conscious man by the spiritual principle within him.
There is thus a reason for the use of the word soul in these three verses. It is the soul that treads the path of progress, not the personality. On the first half of the path it unites itself more and more completely with the buddhi, forming the spiritual soul, manas-taijasi. But all the work is done under the direction, of the atma, the voice of the silence.

CHAPTER 5 - THE WARNING VOICE

For then the Soul will hear, and will remember. And then to the inner ear will speak.
THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE, and say:
If thy Soul smiles while bathing in the sunlight of thy life; if thy Soul sings within her chrysalis of flesh and matter; if thy Soul weeps inside her castle of illusion; if thy Soul struggles to break the silver thread that binds her to the Master; know, O disciple, thy Soul is of the earth.
C.W.L.?In occult books we have frequent reference to the voice of the silence, and we often find that what is said in one place does not agree with what appears in others. In the early days of the Society we used to puzzle over its exact significance, trying to make it always mean the same thing. Only after much study did we discover that the term is general. The voice of the silence for anyone is that which comes from the part of him which
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is higher than his consciousness can reach, and naturally that changes as his evolution progresses. For those working with the personality the voice of the ego is the voice of the silence, but when one has dominated the personality entirely and has made it one with the ego so that the ego may work perfectly through it, it is the voice of the atma?-the triple spirit on the nirvanic plane. When this is reached there will still be a voice of the silence?that of the Monad on the plane above. When the man identifies the ego and the Monad and attains Adeptship, he will still find a voice of the silence coming down to him from above, but then it will be the voice, perhaps, of one of the Ministers of the Deity, one of the Planetary Logoi, as They are called. Perhaps for Him in turn it will be the voice of the Solar Logos Himself; and if even for Him there is such a thing as that, it must be the voice of a higher Logos. But who can say?
" The sunlight of thy life " refers to those periods in our personal existence when fortune smiles upon us, and everything seems bright and fair. The ego who basks in that pleasure, and mistakes it for the true happiness of the higher Self, has not yet the higher vairagya which kills the outer sounds. In The Ancient Wisdom Dr. Besant has explained how the man who feels that nothing on earth can satisfy him, not even those things that give the greatest delight to ordinary mortals, may through a strong but calm effort of the will rise to and unite himself with the higher consciousness and find himself free of the body; but that is only for those who
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obey the first condition, who cannot be satisfied with anything less than that union.
The three bodies, physical, astral and mental, which with their habits constitute the personality, are in truth a chrysalis, in which a butterfly is gradually being formed. In our present caterpillar state the soul must be in the body and the world; yet it must not be of them; it must not accept that life as its own, but must realize that it is independent of its vehicles. Here again we must be careful not to misunderstand. It is indeed well, it is even necessary that the soul should rejoice on its upward path, that it should smile, that it should sing within its chrysalis; there is no harm in that?there is even much good in it. What it must not do is to sing because of the chrysalis, or of anything that happens to that outer shell. It would be wrong, terribly wrong, that the soul should weep within its castle of illusion, because depression and sadness are always wrong. But that, true as it is, is not what is meant here. What Aryasanga is trying to tell us in his graceful poetical language is that the soul must neither rejoice nor sorrow because of anything whatever that is connected with the chrysalis or the castle, or any outer form; it must be indifferent to that form, unaffected by what happens to it. If it is not indifferent, it is still of the earth, still entangled with this lower world, and so not yet ready for perfect freedom.
All around us eternal change is taking place; but the soul must press forward on its way resistless, undeterred by change, for to be influenced by these outer things
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shows weakness. Remember how Shakespeare writes in his Sonnets:
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age When sometime lofty towers I see down-raze And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away,
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Since brass, nor stone nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o'er-sways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wreckful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays? 1
But time is really the friend of the aspirant, for it is precisely the finer, the higher, the inner things which are least subject to its ravages. This truth the occultist learns as a matter of certain experience and knowledge, so the changes in outside things at last come to trouble him not at all.
Silver is the thread?as befits an emblem of purity? that binds the soul to the higher Self; every traffic that the soul has with impurity of body, emotions or thought, is a struggle to break that silver thread, a temptation to ignore the still, small voice.
1 Sonnets, xliv, xlv.
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Madame Blavatsky adds the following footnotes:
The "great Master " is the term used by chelas to indicate the Higher Self. It is the equivalent of Avalokiteshvara, and the same as Adi-Buddha with the Buddhist occultists, Atma with the Brahmanas, and Christos with the ancient Gnostics.
Soul is used here for the human Ego or Manas, that which is referred to in our occult septenary division as the human Soul in contradistinction to the spiritual and animal Souls.
Madame Blavatsky here employs the word Master in an unusual sense, saying that it is so used by the chelas or pupils. In later Theosophical literature this title has been reserved for that limited number of members of the Great White Brotherhood who accept pupils from among those who are still living in the world. That number is small; it would seem that one Adept on each of the rays is appointed to attend to that work, and all those who are coming along his particular ray of evolution pass through his hands. No one below the rank of Adept is permitted to assume full responsibility for a pupil, though those who have held the position of pupil for a number of years are often employed as deputies, and receive the privilege of helping and advising promising young aspirants. These older pupils are gradually being trained for their future work when they in turn shall become Adepts, and they are learning to take more and more of the routine work off the hands of their Masters, so that the latter may be set free for higher labours which only
I
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they can undertake. The preliminary selection of candidates for chelaship is now left to a large extent in the hands of these older pupils, and the candidates are temporarily linked with such pupils rather than directly with the great Adepts. But the pupils and the Master are so wonderfully one that perhaps this is almost " a distinction without a difference ".
The terms which Madame Blavatsky uses in these footnotes will be better understood if we study a little the various trinities in the universe and in man. It is in the experience of everybody that there is a duality of the knower and the known, of the one who sees and the things that are seen, of the subject and the object. This is the old division of the world of experience into two parts, spirit and matter, using those words in a general or common sense. Spirit or consciousness and matter are a pair of opposites?-the spirit is an active principle, the matter a passive one; the spirit has a centre but no circumference, the matter has a circumference but no centre; the spirit is self-moving, the matter is moved from outside. In these two we have also the division of reality into the divine and the material; the free and the bound; that which shines with its own light and that which has only reflected light.
When one looks closer still, one sees that those two are playing, as it were, on the stage in one's presence, that they are not No. 1 and No. 2 principles, as many people think, but they are No. 2 and No. 3; for the one that now witnesses their interplay is No. 1. No. 2 is the God who is seen, but No. 1 is the God who is
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the real Self, who is the cause of all the interplay between No. 2 and No. 3.
In Christian terminology, Christ is the God who is seen. " No man hath seen God at any time." 1 Yet said Christ: " I and my Father are One." 2
That brings us to the term Avalokiteshvara. This word is a compound of avalokita (seen), and Ishvara (God, the Ruler). It thus means the Higher Self in the duality of spirit and matter in the universe. " There are three that bear record in heaven," said St. John,. "the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost."3 The Word, the Logos, Avalokiteshvara, is the Second. He is the Christos, the God that is seen. This is the universal spirit, or purusha, as distinguished from the matter, or prakriti. Man is consciousness looking at matter, and this God is glorified or universal Man, the supreme subject. Analyze yourself, and you will find the reflection of this?the inner God in yourself. Still, that God that is seen only bears witness to the real God?in man to the Self, the " I " which embraces both the subject and the object.
This " I " is not a new subject, witnessing the old subject and object, put together and now made into one new compound object. It is " I "?that is all there is to say. Every thinking man can look at his own body, and in some cases his astral and mental bodies as well, and call it "it", that is, he can look upon it as an
11 John, 4, 12.
I St. John, x, 30.
I1 John, 5, 7.
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object. He can also have a conception of the consciousness or subject in his neighbour, and infer that it is of the same nature as that consciousness (containing will, feeling and thought) which he finds in himself. But on this point he now makes a great mistake, by giving two different names to one thing?-he calls the same thing " you " when he sees it in his neighbour, but " I " when he looks at it in himself! Let him look upon the consciousness or subject within himself (all of it) as he does upon that in others, and call it " you ", regarding it as just one of the great sea of " yous " that make up the Logos, as drops of water make up the ocean, and he will be ready to transcend consciousness and reach the real " I ", the Self or God that is not seen.1 The consciousness, the " you ", is a portion of Avalokiteshvara, the God that is seen, the Christ, the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, just as much as the bodies are parts of the ocean of cosmic matter; and both equally are not the Self. No one hath seen the supreme God at any time?not even the Son.
This trinity has been considered in various ways: Avalokiteshvara has been described as follows by Swami T. Subba Rao: " Parabrahman by itself cannot be seen as it is. It is seen by the Logos with a veil thrown over it, and that veil is the mighty expanse of Cosmic Matter." And again: "Parabrahman, after having appeared on the one hand as the Ego, and on
1 This argument is expounded in The Seven Rays, by Ernest Wood, Ch. xxi.
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the other as Mulaprakriti, acts as the one energy through the Logos". The danger of all such descriptions is immense; the use of the word " it " alone in this connection can undo everything. In oneself deliverance, the truth, must be sought?only I being I can solve this mystery, which is so easy, but that people will not see. There is also the strongest objection even to the word God as applied to Parabrahman?for to think of God is to think of the seen, that is, of Avalokiteshvara; and that God is, after all, a " you ", or rather all " yous ".
The conception of a subject or " you " involves a time limitation; that of an object or " it" involves a space limitation. But motion in both time and space is a mystery. Some ancients argued that nothing could really move, " because it cannot move in the space where it is, and it certainly cannot move in the space where it is not." But subjects can move in time, and objects can move in space, because all move in Parabrahman. Both time and space are secondary to motion, properly conceived.1
" And these three are one." 2 Mulaprakriti, the root of manifestation, basic matter, external being, is not something other than Parabrahman, but is the same, as seen through the time limitations of consciousness. Parabrahman is beyond that time limitation, and therefore seems to be still, and from that arises the appearance-of space, the characteristic of Mulaprakriti?which is in reality a space containing everything which ever existed
1 See The Seven Rays, Ch. viii. 2 I John, 4, 12.
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or will exist in all of the three periods of time?past, present and future. Then universal consciousness, the great Man, also called Daiviprakriti (the divine manifestation), as against Mulaprakriti (the material manifestation), is Avalokiteshvara, the Ishvara or Ruler or God who is seen, in contradistinction to Parabrahman, the first member of the Trinity, who is not seen directly even by him.
Now, in the higher triad in the consciousness of man we have a reflection of this great Trinity. Therefore Madame Blavatsky says that the Higher Self, by which she means buddhi or the intuitional love, is the equivalent of Avalokiteshvara. Any confusion in thought of the universal reality with atma, buddhi and manas? the three modes of consciousness in man?would result in serious error, but there is an analogy between the two. The great Trinity is reflected in man in various ways, and appears in one form in those three aspects of his consciousness. So atma, buddhi and manas reflect in their smaller sphere the characteristics of the universal trinity. Atma is the consciousness of Self, and also the will, which gives self-direction. Manas, at the other pole, is consciousness of the world, and its thought-power does all our work, even that which is effected through the hands. But buddhi, between the two, is the very essence of consciousness, of subjectivity. Thus the greater Trinity is reproduced in the consciousness of the ego.
Beyond this middle member, triple in character, is the Monad in man, representative in him of Parabrahman,
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the state of his true and absolute nirvana, beyond consciousness. The atma is the state of his false and relative nirvana of the nirvanic plane, his last illusion, that persists between the Fourth and Fifth Initiations. As the Monad lies above the trinity of consciousness, so the personal bodies lie outside or beneath it?they are known only in reflection in manas. On the first half of the Path (from the First to the Fourth Initiation) the man is busy shaking himself free from those personal limitations, from the illusion of " it ". On the second half he is engaged in releasing himself from the illusion of "you".
There are still a few more points to consider in Madame Blavatsky's notes. Her reference to Adi-Buddha and Atma requires some comment, though that to the Christos of the Gnostics will be abundantly clear from what has been said above. The " Atma of the Brahmanas " is rather what the Buddhists thought that the Brahmanas meant by the term (and what perhaps many of the Brahmanas who missed the true point of their philosophy really did think); it is that spiritual soul in man which the Buddha declared to be not utterly permanent. Yes, even the Christ (the higher self) in man is at last mortal. Beautiful and wonderful, and far beyond the vision of ordinary men as it lies, it must at last give up its life, to be one with the Father. It is the " you " masquerading as the " I " in spiritual men ?just as, far earlier in evolution, the absurd personality, the " it " pretended to be " I ". But when he says that their belief in atma is wrong, the orthodox Buddhist has
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not understood the height of true Brahmana thought, and especially the teaching on this point of Shri Shankara-charya, who was really one with the Buddha in His anatma doctrine, because by atma He meant the Monad, the indescribable Parabrahmic aspect of man. The Buddha saw that people called " you " the atma, the Self, and tried to dislodge them from that error by saying that what they called " I " was perishable.
In the footnote Madame Blavatsky says that Avalokiteshvara is the same as Adi-Buddha. She amplifies her statement on the subject in The Secret Doctrine, as follows:
In the esoteric, and even exoteric Buddhism of the North, Adi-Buddha, . . . the One Unknown, without beginning or end, identical with Parabrahman, emits a bright Ray from its Darkness. This is the Logos, the First, or Vajradhara, the Supreme Buddha, also called Dorjechang. As the Lord of all Mysteries he cannot manifest, but sends into the world of manifestation his Heart?the " Diamond Heart," Vajrasattva or Dorjesempa. This is the Second Logos of Creation.1
In this extract she clearly shows that the First and Second Logos are respectively Adi-Buddha and Avalokiteshvara, for the latter is the same as Vajrasattva. Therefore when she speaks of them as one it can only be as the Christians speak of the Christ as one with the Father. I wrote as follows on this subject in The Inner Life, Section II:
There has been much discussion as to the exact meaning of the terms Adi-Buddha and Avalokiteshvara. I have made no special study of these things from the philosophical standpoint, but so far as I have been able to gather ideas from discussion of the matter with the living exponents of the religion, Adi-Buddha seems to be the culmination of one of the great lines of superhuman development?-what might be called the abstract principle
1 Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 624.
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of all the Buddhas. Avalokiteshvara is a term belonging to the Northern Church and seems to be the Buddhists' name for their conception of the Logos. European scholars have translated it: " The Lord who looks down from on high," but this seems to have in it a somewhat inaccurate implication, for it is clearly always the manifested Logos; sometimes the Logos of a solar system and sometimes higher than that, but always manifest. We must not forget that-while the founders of the great religions see and know the things which They name, Their followers usually do not see; they have only the names, and they juggle with them as intellectual counters, and build up much which is incorrect and inconsistent.1
We have already seen that by the term Higher Self Madame Blavatsky means the buddhi in man, the central member of the trinity of his immortal consciousness. That is the wisdom in man. But it is a reflection of the universal wisdom, without which there could be no human wisdom. Similarly, without the Dhyani-Buddha Avalokiteshvara, the " centre of energy'' of the ultimate wisdom, Adi-Buddha, no human Buddha could become. The Illumination of the sage Gautama was therefore not essentially the flowering of a man into a god, but the union of a perfected human consciousness with the wisdom of the Logos.
The second of the footnotes under consideration speaks not only of the manas as the human Soul, but refers also to the animal soul in man. This is the lower manas, the kama-manas. On its plane reside the group-souls of animals, while those of the vegetable kingdom are on the plane beneath it, and those of the mineral lower still. To these meanings of the terms Soul, Higher Self, etc., Madame Blavatsky keeps with perfect consistency right through the book. 1 Op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 169

CHAPTER 6 - SELF AND ALL-SELF

When to the world's turmoil thy budding Soul lends ear; when to the roaring voice of the great illusion thy soul responds; when frightened at the sight of the hot tears of pain, when deafened by the cries of distress, thy Soul withdraws like the shy turtle within the carapace of selfhood, learn, O disciple, of her silent God thy Soul is an unworthy shrine.
When waxing stronger, thy Soul glides forth from her secure retreat; and breaking loose from the protecting shrine, extends her silver thread and rushes onward; when beholding her image on the waves of space she whispers. " This is I"?declare, O disciple, that thy Soul is caught in the webs of delusion.
C.W.L.?At the beginning of this passage, in the expression " budding Soul " we have a suggestion of the idea of evolution. For many centuries in Europe people did not think of evolution; they had the idea that the world and all the various creatures in it had been created quite suddenly, and they did not suppose that the more

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complex forms had evolved out of inferior ones, and would evolve further into something more perfect. Then came the idea, within about the last century and a half, that the material forms of living creatures were undergoing evolution, an unfoldment which has been believed by some to be due to an impulse of the indwelling life, and by others merely to the selective agency of natural environment.
But long ago there existed a theory of evolution of the Soul, which has all along been a central doctrine of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and has been spread extensively in the Western world by Theosophists along with the doctrine of reincarnation. This is put forward as the most logical and ethical theory of human destiny, once it has been established, on scientific or religious grounds, that the Soul of a man survives the death of his body. The soul incarnates many times for the sake of experience, and each one will thereby become at last not merely a genius in some field of human thought or work, but a perfect man, ready for full conscious divinity.
There are two great stages on the path of the soul's evolution?-the first is called the pravritti marga, the way of forth-going, and second the nivritti marga, the way of return. In the former the development of personality takes place, accompanied by the accumulation of much karma as the soul pursues its restless career of seeking the satisfaction of its multitudinous desires in the external world. In the latter the soul little by little turns its back upon the world, and with its face towards
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the divine, its source and goal, proceeds with the task of perfecting itself so as to finish up the human stage of its evolution.
It is this second stage, the nivritti marga, that is divided up into the probationary path and the Path of Initiation, which have been fully described in The Path of Discipleship, Initiation, The Perfecting of Man; and The Masters and the Path. This marga implies a course of voluntary evolution, in which the candidate is deliberately training himself in the higher qualities of character; the evolution of the lower creatures and of men on the pravritti marga is involuntary, they seek and respond to experience, and learn without clear realization of what is happening to them.
In a footnote to the word illusion, Madame Blavatsky calls it Maha-Maya, the great illusion, the objective universe. The meaning of the term illusion, as applied to the external world, has already been discussed. It is not the same idea as that referred to in the text as " webs of delusion," which has reference, as another footnote says, to " Sakkayaditthi, the delusion of personality ".
When the Lord Buddha revealed to men the Noble Eightfold Path, the way to liberty, the practical means to bring sorrow to an end, He told them about the ten fetters which the candidate must cast off?one after another. The first of these was called Sakkayaditthi, the delusion of personality. Let us see how this arises. A child is born subject to karma?the result of its deeds in previous lives. It has a certain kind of body, and
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various things happen to it. In course of time it hears what people say of it, and it finds out what it can and what it cannot do. It sees itself in these things as in a mirror?one of those distorting mirrors which are sometimes set up in exhibitions to amuse people with their grotesquely flattened or elongated images. It thus obtains ideas about itself?that it is clever or stupid, beautiful or ugly, weak or strong. As its education proceeds it acquires social standing or position or character, assumes the habits of body and mind of doctor^ lawyer, house-wife?whatever it may be?and thus acquires a settled personality. When it thinks itself to be that personality, it has- what has been called " self-personality "?exactly the same delusion that obsesses the unfortunate people in the lunatic asylums, who imagine themselves to be tea-pots, ear-drums, north poles, Queen Elizabeths and Napoleons.
A definite well-trained set of bodies and personality, with useful habits, is, of course, a good thing, just as is . a good set of tools, or a good motor-car. We do not want to have weak or nondescript personalities. But however good our personality may be we should not think it to be ourself, and we should be able to enjoy all our native will-power, love-power and thought-power while using it for our purposes, for our spiritual life in the material world. These personalities should not set themselves up as candidates for immortality, and try to intrench themselves against the ravages of use and time that beset all material things. A middle-aged gentleman once said to his son, who volunteered to relieve him of
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some work: " No, no, my boy. Always use up the old ones first! " The personalities must be willing to be used, to be adapted to the spiritual purposes of the moment, to be worn out?and must be content with the sole reward of a long and glorious devachan, that will follow the death of the outer body in the case of all those who have thus served the divine indwelling self, except, of course, the servants of the Masters who renounce this reward and take speedy rebirth in order to work for the world.
This earth, disciple, is the hall of sorrow, wherein are set along the path of dire probations, traps to ensnare thy Ego by the delusion called "great heresy ".
That the physical plane is a place of sorrow is a widespread Buddhist and Hindu thought. Uncongenial and often disfiguring or debilitating labour, oppression, disease, indignity and dread fall to the lot of the majority of mankind. Those whose fortune has set them in places of ease may say that they find much pleasure in it; but Patanjali says: " To the enlightened all is misery." There are many things that give no trouble to the relatively unevolved?-such as the smell of alcohol, meat or onions, the noise of factory sirens or coarse music, gross manners, hideous clothes and buildings, and a thousand other things that afflict those who are more sensitive. In addition to these there is hunger to gain what we want, and fear to lose it when it is in hand, and suffering for others all round us, if not for ourselves. Surely men must be made to hug such chains as these. Surely this
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world is indeed a hall of sorrow. Think how poor is its best in the sight of those who know the higher planes.
But it is so chiefly because man has made it so. Think of the vast sea of life that fills the mineral, the vegetable and the animal kingdoms of nature, and how all that is throbbing with pleasure. Even the dreadful picture of the poet, of " nature, red in tooth and claw with ravin " loses most of its lurid colour when we realize that the animals do not " think before and after " as men do, with painful longing and fear, and that while their battles are on, and the blood and wounds distress the human beholder, the excitement of the animal consciousness is at its greatest height and is often experiencing its greatest pleasure. Earth is a hall of sorrow only for man, who with his greed and anger, born of a strong imagination that feeds the flames of hot desire, has poisoned with innumerable horrors both his personal and his social life.
Yet it only needs the conquest of selfishness to remove every one of these horrors, and open to all mankind the joys of this world?the thrill and deep strong peace of beauty, of discovery, of creative work; of social and bodily well-being.
Madame Blavatsky's footnote then speaks of:
Attavada, the heresy of the belief in Soul, or rather in the separateness of Soul or Self from the one universal, infinite Self.
Attd is the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit atma, and vada means doctrine. The doctrine of atma, which we
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have already considered, is the great source of cleavage between the Hindus and Buddhists, but as a matter of fact the distinction is merely one of words, because when the Hindu says that the Self or atma in man is one with the universal Self, he does not mean by the word what people usually mean when they think or speak of themselves, but something altogether deeper, which only the advanced yogi can even imagine. There is a passage in the Shri Vakya Sudha which warns the aspirant that when he repeats the great religious formula " I am That", he must take care what he means by " I " j it explains that the separate individual should be understood as threefold, and that it is the union with Brahman only of the highest of these three that is proclaimed by " Thou art That " and such sayings. As already explained, the personality is not " I", and even the " you " in me is not " I", but the " I ", is something indistinguishable from the universal Self in which the many and the One are one. The Lord Buddha's teaching denies the permanency of the "you" that men call " I " It is an unfortunate thing that two such great religions as Hinduism and Buddhism should be separated mainly by so small a misunderstanding, and also that because of it the modern Theosophical movement has spread very slowly among the Buddhists. We have developed a large Theosophical literature, in which the words atma and Self figure extensively, and this has alienated a good many Buddhists who have not taken the trouble to clear away this obstacle of words which we have inadvertently put in their path.
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This earth, O ignorant disciple, is but the dismal entrance leading to the twilight that precedes the valley of true light?that light which no wind can extinguish, that light which burns without a wick or fuel.
In this and some later verses we have poetical names for the planes of nature. As previously stated, it was common among oriental occultists to bunch together the astral and lower mental planes, and Madame Blavatsky often followed that plan in- her teaching. This combining of the two is indicated in this picture of a " twilight that precedes the valley of true light ". That description of the valley of true light shows it to be the region of the Soul and the Higher Self, the planes where buddhi and higher manas have their habitat.
If we divide the planes by a line separating the lower from the higher mental, we find that there is a radical difference between those which lie below the line and those which are above. In the former, matter is dominant; it is the first thing that strikes the eye; and consciousness shines with difficulty through the forms. But in the higher planes life is the prominent thing, and forms are there only for its purposes. The difficulty in the lower planes is to give the life expression in the forms, but in the higher it is quite the reverse?to hold and give form to the flood of life. It is only above the dividing line that the light of consciousness is subject to no wind, and shines with its own power. The symbol of a spiritual fire is very fitting for consciousness at
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those levels, as distinguished from the lower planes, -where the symbol of fire burning fuel is more appropriate.
Saith the great Law: "In order to become the knower of All-Self, thou hast first of Self to be the knower." To reach the knowledge of that Self, thou hast to give up self to non-self, being to non-being.
In a foot-note Madame Blavatsky distinguishes between the Atmajnani who is mentioned here, and the Tattvajnani. In Hindu literature generally the distinction is slight and is usually ignored, but she says: " The Tattvajnani is the knower or discriminator of the principles in nature and in man; and Atmajnani is the knower of Atma, or the universal One Self." Jnani means a knower and tattva means the truth or the real nature of things.
It has always been a teaching of Theosophy that to make progress we must apply the old Greek formula " Know thyself". In consequence, a very large part of our modern Theosophical literature deals with the constitution, history and destiny of man. It is by the study of the various principles and bodies of man that we are able gradually to distinguish what he is, and to separate him in thought from the vehicles that he uses, until at last we arrive at the real Self. Then, through that real Self in us, we shall realize the universal Self; in fact, the two are one.
But to know the real Self in oneself, the lower self must be set aside, must become as naught. As we have
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already seen, the utter destruction of " self-personality " is the very first task of the Initiate on the Path proper, since sakkayaditthi, the delusion of the personal self, is the first fetter which must be cast off.
And then thou can'st repose between the wings of the Great Bird. Aye, sweet is rest between the wings of that which is not born, nor dies, but is the Aum throughout eternal ages.
On the Great Bird, which occupies a prominent place-in Oriental religious symbolism, Madame Blavatsky has the following foot-note:
Kala Hamsa, the bird or swan. Says the Nada-vindupanishat (Rig Veda) translated by the Kumba-konam Theosophical Society?" The syllable A is considered to be the bird Hamsa's right wing, U its left, M its tail, and the Ardhamatra (half metre) is said to be its head."
The word Aum, generally pronounced Om, is used at the commencement of every good work or thought, because it is a word of power, symbolizing divine creation. Innumerable Sanskrit books repeat the statement that hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell are correlated respectively with the orders of matter named akasha. (ether or sky), vayu (air), tejas or agni (fire), apas or jala (water), and prithivi (earth), which are our familiar five planes of human manifestation, the atmic, buddhic, mental, astral and physical. These planes were created in this order, beginning with the atmic, where sound was applied as the. creative power. Of course, that could
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not be the same thing as our physical sound, which is a pulsation in the air or some other physical substance; It was of the nature of the voice of the silence, the will of atma. Yet even on our physical plane sound is a great builder of forms, as every student of elementary science knows, who has made Chladni's figures or performed similar experiments. There is a great deal of symbolism in the Hindu Scriptures connected with this idea that the world was created by sound.
The word Aum is said to have special value as a mantra because it is the most complete human word. It begins with the vowel A in the back of the mouth, continues with the vowel U sounded in the centre of the mouth, and closes with the co sonant M, with which the lips are sealed. It thus runs through the whole gamut of human speech and so represents in man the entire creative word. Its three parts are also taken as symbolical of the manifestation of the Trinity, in a variety of ways, to explain which one might fill a book. Thus we have Parabrahman, Daiviprakriti and Mula-prakriti; Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma; will, wisdom and activity; ananda, chit and sat, or happiness, consciousness and being; atma, buddhi and manas; tamas, rajas and sattva; and many another. Aum is thus a constant reminder of this triplicity running through all things; it is a key therefore to the solution of many mysteries, as well as a word of power. The head of the bird is then taken as the unmanifested origin of the triple word.
Kala, a word which means " time " is one of the names of Vishnu or Avalokiteshvara. Kala-hamsa
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therefore means the swan of time or in time, hamsa being a swan. This symbol of a bird contains the implication of time, since it is proceeding through space. It is a characteristic of consciousness that it progresses or evolves, and so exists in time. The consciousness of the Logos is time, it does not begin nor end in time, and is therefore without birth or death.
This bird is thus a symbol of the Second Logos, which is also the great Wisdom. There is a well-known Hindu fable which connects the hamsa or swan with this idea of wisdom also, for it relates of that bird that when a mixture of water and milk is placed before it, it can separate the milk from the water. So does wisdom operate even in human life, selecting from our mixed experience the essential nutriment of the soul. Wisdom remains in the spiritual soul of man when experiences have died away, since, as the Bhagavad-Gita says: " All actions in their entirety culminate in wisdom."1
A man on the Path who has passed the Third Initiation is also called a Hamsa, or swan. He is busy getting rid of raga and dvesha the fourth and fifth fetters, which are liking and disliking and is therefore especially practising wisdom. People in the world are full of likes and dislikes, and they therefore suffer greatly from their own opinions about things. Throwing these two fetters off, the Hamsa becomes like the sage described in the Gita as one satisfied with wisdom and knowledge, to whom a lump of earth, a stone and gold are the same, who regards impartially friends and foes, the righteous 1 Op. cit., iv. 33.
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and the unrighteous. It is not that this man does not value gold and friends; he does, but he values also clay and foes. The wise man can profit from every kind of experience; all are useful for the soul. Epictetus asserted this when he declared: "There is only one thing for which God has sent me into the world? to perfect my own character in virtue; and there is nothing in all the world that I cannot use for that purpose."
Again, Hamsa is also a form of the saying " Aham Sah " or " I am That," or, as it is frequently used, " Soham," which consists of the same words reversed. So when the aspirant repeats this sentence he also remembers that the way to bestride the Hamsa or bird of life is to realize that he is the Self. It is said that the devout yogi utters this formula with every breath, of which there are said to be 21,600 in a day and night, for the air is considered to come in with the sound of" sah " and go out with that of" ha ".
As long as the bird is flying, the creative word is sounding, time exists. Although this time has neither beginning nor ending it is nevertheless a measurable period?which is a great mystery. On this point Madame Blavatsky has the following note:
Eternity with the Orientals has quite another signification than it has with us. It stands generally for the 100 years or age of Brahma, the duration of a Maha-Kalpa or a period of 311,040,000,000,000 years.
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This part of the subject is concluded with the words:
Bestride the Bird of Life, if thou would'st know. Give up thy Life, if thou would'st live.
To these are appended the following notes:
Says the same Nadavindu, " A Yogi who bestrides the Hamsa, (thus contemplates on Aum) is not affected by karmic influences or crores of sins."
Give up the life of the physical personality if you would live in Spirit.
A crore is ten millions. It must not, however, be assumed that the yogi is permitted to perform these sins; if he did he would not be a yogi. This expression is only an Oriental way of indicating that he is utterly free from taint by the material world. The man who thinks and works without personal desire, with utter unselfishness, suffers no karmic consequences. The fruit of all his efforts goes into the great reservoir of spiritual force for the helping of the world, as has already been explained.

CHAPTER 7 - THE THREE HALLS

Three halls, O weary pilgrim, lead to the end of toils. Three halls, O conqueror of Mara, will bring thee through three states into the fourth, and ' thence into the seven worlds, the worlds of rest eternal.
If thou would'st learn their names, then hearken, and remember.
The name of the first hall is Ignorance?Avidya.
It is the hall in which thou saw'st the light, in which thou livest and shalt die.
The name of hall the second is the Hall of Learning. In it thy Soul will find the blossoms of life, but under every flower a serpent coiled.
The name of the third hall is Wisdom, beyond which stretch the shoreless waters of Akshara, the indestructible fount of omniscience.
C. W. L.?The three halls may be interpreted in two ways: as objective planes, or as the subjective condition of man.
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In the former case the hall of ignorance is the physical plane, and the hall of learning, described in a foot-note as " the hall of probationary learning " is what may perhaps be called the astro-mental plane (the astral and lower mental planes taken together). When I wrote The Inner Life it seemed to me probable that by the term hall of learning Madame Blavatsky meant the astral plane, and by the hall of wisdom the lower mental plane, but having thought the matter over and discussed it many times since then, I now lean to the opinion that we shall more accurately represent her thought if we take the hall of learning to include not only the astral but also the lower mental, and if we raise the hall of wisdom so as to include within it the planes of higher manas and buddhi.
That Aryasanga was not thinking of the astral plane as the hall of learning and the lower mental world as the hall of wisdom is shown a little further on, when he speaks of the latter hall as one " wherein all shadows are unknown, and where the light of truth shines with unfading glory". The lower mental world does not answer to this description; far more glorious and delicate than the astral plane as it is, it is still a material world and the habitat of the personalities of men. Further, the Teacher also says that that which is un-create abides in the hall of wisdom, and it is the ego, not the personality, which is uncreate. And in the lower mental plane, as well as in the astral, there is a serpent coiled under every flower; for if passion and foolish desires infest the one, pride and prejudices inhabit the
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other. In the higher mental plane, though there may be much that the ego does not know, what it does know it knows correctly; but the lower mental is a region of personality and error.
The extent to which the lower planes are worlds of illusion is also seen in the way in which our senses and powers work in them. To take sight as an instance?we see because our sight is obstructed. If one could see perfectly through the wall one could not see the wall. It is the same with walking; we have some freedom to move about, because the earth resists the free motion of our feet. In the higher planes one lives in the light.
The combination of the astral and mental planes is not uncommon in the Oriental schools of occult training. The Vedantins speak, of one body (called the manomayakosha, the body made of mind),1 where our Theosophical literature usually distinguishes the two (the astral and the mental), and to that body when awakened and functioning they ascribe the experiences proper to both planes. The candidate for the path of yoga in the Raja Yoga schools was always trained to work from the mental down to the astral. This very cautious procedure is also shown in the teaching of Patanjali, who makes his first two steps moral, and requires definite progress in these before the practices leading to the siddhis or yoga powers are taken. In Raja Toga: The Occult Training of the Hindus, Prof. Wood had called these first steps " The ten
1 See The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 181.
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commandments ", and has translated them as the five restraints: " Thou shalt not injure, lie, steal, be incontinent, be greedy ", and the five observances:" Thou shalt be clean, content, self-controlled, studious and devoted." These methods were in full force long before the time of Aryasanga; Pandit N. Bhashyacharya and some other Sanskrit scholars maintain that Patanjali, who in turn was not the originator of the system, gave his famous Sutras to the world as far back as in the ninth century B.C.
In The Masters and the Path I have explained that; in the old Initiations it often happened that much time was taken in instructing the candidate in astral work, as the awakening of the pupil to work at that level was left to a relatively later stage than is customary among the modern Theosophists, who often have already done much astral work and have thus learnt the detail of the astral world long before Initiation.
If we think of the three halls subjectively, as stages of progress in human development, we have the following familiar divisions: (1) The man who lives ignorantly in the world, attracted and repelled by the things around him, impelled to action by his own uncontrolled passions and desires?-this is the ignorant stage. (2) The man who is learning that nature has definite laws, and is realizing that by working with them he can gain much more power than he had in the days of his ignorance? this is the hall of learning. (3) The man who has realized that there are spiritual laws, and is learning to obey them. He knows about reincarnation and karma.
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and the ethical and moral laws that govern the progress of his own soul and those of others. He is aware that outer things exist only for the purposes of the evolving soul, and lives according to this knowledge. He is in the hall of wisdom.
Madame Blavatsky describes the four stages of consciousness :
The three states of consciousness, which are Jagrat, the waking; Svapna, the dreaming; and Sushupti, the deep-sleeping state. These three Yogi conditions lead to the fourth?the Turiya, that beyond the dreamless state, the one above all, a state of high spiritual consciousness.
These states of consciousness are not fixed, but may be correlated to the sets of planes or objective halls above mentioned, in the case of the candidate who is being prepared for the Arhat Initiation. In this case the waking state may be the physical, the dreaming state the astro-mental, the sleeping state the higher mental and buddhic, and the turiya state, the atmic.
The rather curious terms waking, dreaming and sleeping seem to have been selected from a physical plane point of view to name the heights of consciousness reached by the candidate at different times. When the man was going about his business in the physical plane, with all his faculties awake to this world, he was in the first state. To understand the second state we have to remember that there are two kinds of dreams?the often nonsensical productions of the brain (physical and
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etheric), and the true experiences of the man away from his physical body, working and learning in the astro-mental regions. It is to these latter that this term dreaming applies. The candidate sleeping, or almost going to sleep in a day-dream, would afterwards remember some such experiences, and then ascribe them to the " consciousness of the dream state ". Suppose, however, that the aspirant out of the body should at any time go into what may be called a second sleep, and rise into the next set of planes, to be conscious for a time at that higher level. Probably on waking physically he would remember nothing of what had been happening out of the body?his brain not being attuned to record the experiences coming from planes higher than his "dreaming state ". So it would seem to him that he had had deep dreamless sleep, and usually his only feeling would be one of great satisfaction and well-being. The " sleeping state" is therefore consciousness in that still higher region. Now, the fourth state is sometimes called trance, for the following reason. It has often been explained that an aspirant when out of the body can rise a stage higher than when in it. It is possible also in deep meditation for the disciple to rise in trance to the higher state and afterwards bring that experience down into the waking memory. Thus the Arhat can touch the buddhic level while in the physical body, and the atmic or nirvanic plane when out if it, or in deep meditation or trance. The term akshara, which is here applied to this fourth region, means simply that which does not melt away; it is the undecaying.

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The same set of terms may be used as a relative series for less advanced occult students. One may have his waking consciousness on the physical plane, his dreaming state on the astral plane, his deep sleep on the mental; another, who is able to use his astral faculties in his physical waking consciousness, will have his dream consciousness on the lower mental, and his sleep state on the higher mental, and so on. The turiya is a higher state reached in every case by a special effort of will and meditation, which is a means to ultimately raising the whole set of three states to a higher level than before. While the transition is in progress, before the new level is established, there will always be this fourth stage.
This is seen in meditation. The candidate will sit and fix his waking consciousness on some object?suppose it is a cat. Then he will rise to the " dream state ", and try to realize the astral aspect of the animal. Next he will ascend to the " sleep stage ", and give his attention to the mental being of the creature. The fourth step would be samadhi?or contemplation?an attempt to realize its significance and reality for the ego, to go beyond the three forms of the cat into its subjective meaning. The fixing of the mind on the cat in the first case is concentration; the process of elevation of the consciousness is meditation; the final concentration in a higher field of vision, beyond what was reached before, is contemplation (or samadhi). The last effort may be like piercing a cloud or fog, out of which the new vision will gradually form itself, or from which it may come
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like a flash of lightning. In either case the practitioner must hold himself very still in order to retain the impression as long as possible?one thought of self, of the old personal relativity, can dismiss the whole thing, so that there remains not even a memory of what it was like.
The three halls, it is said, lead to the end of toils? not to the end of work, it must be observed. In these lower worlds we have a sense of work which is certainly quite different from that of higher levels. To us down here the word is almost synonymous with toil, and often with drudgery, but from a higher point of view work is really play. Drudgery is merely action; it does not create the man who does it. But the least bit of work done occultly, done heartily "as to God and not unto men ", done better than ever before, is good for the evolution of him who does it. If, in writing a letter, for example, one is at pains to do it neatly, even beautifully and to express oneself briefly, clearly and gracefully, one has developed hand, eye and brain, thought-power, love-power and will-power. True work, such as that of an artist, is full of creative influence and of joy. We find some toil even in these things, however, because of the obstructions of the lower planes. Yet even down here there is no clear dividing line between toil and play. If one goes out, for example on a long ride, the earlier part of the journey will be full of delight for both man and horse, but insensibly that passes away as fatigue increases, until suddenly the man realizes that the ride which was play in the beginning has now become work, or rather drudgery. In other cases, there may be a task,
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not prolonged, but a little beyond our strength; then there is a sense of toil. But all work in reality is play when there is willingness and no fatigue or overstrain.
We have much to learn from the animals, and even from the plants, in this respect. " Grow as the flower grows," says Light on the Path, " opening your heart to the sun." Said the Christ: " Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." 1 It is deadly fear of the morrow that makes men's work a toil, that makes them sweat in bitterness. But the Law says: " Do the wise and right thing today, and leave the result to take care of itself." This is not a doctrine of idleness, but of work that is play instead of toil.
An illustration of this is also to be seen in the way in which different people take a long journey. One man will get into the train at Chicago, and remain in a fever of impatience for the time which the train takes to go to San Francisco, his destination. He has fixed his mind on something that he wants to do there; in the meantime his journey is a toil and a misery. Another finds a thousand things of interest on the way? the scenery, the people, the train itself; for him the journey is a happy holiday. And in the end he has accomplished much more than the other man. The Hindu villager lives very near to nature, and certainly grows as the flower grows. A man will set out from his village to get the mail from the Post Office or to post 1 St. Matthew, vi, 7.
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some letters there, perhaps sixteen or twenty miles away. He does not tramp along stolidly and painfully, jarring his nerves with the graceless movements that spring from a discontented or impatient mind. The vision of his mail is not a mania that shuts out all other interests, and makes him curse the length of the track. No; there are insects, birds, flowers, trees, streams, clouds in the sky, fields, houses, people and animals, and lastly the blessed earth itself, to lie on which for awhile is to be on velvet in the divine arms. How little the white man knows of life, how much of toil!
The Hindus have long held that God plays. The Lila or play of Shri Krishna, as it is called, is the great work of evolution, which looks so toilsome to us that we shudder at the long ages of work that lie in front, and cry out for rest. Think of the 311,040,000 million years of our mahakalpa. What an illusion! When we come to the end of toils life will be all play, all happiness.
The end of toils, though not of work, comes with the entry of the candidate, on the fourth Path, into the nirvanic plane. He has finished the toil of casting off the first five fetters?self-personality, doubt, superstition, liking and disliking?all of which marked his bondage to material things, with which his life was one long struggle on an up-hill road. But now his remaining five fetters are internal; he has to conquer them, truly, but his weapon will be serenity, quietness, calmness? the use of the will, which is the quietest thing in the world. These fetters are: desire for life in form and formless life, pride, agitation and ignorance. Little
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profit is to be derived from examining these in detail in this place; it is enough to notice their internal character, and to say that to destroy them the man must quieten himself and his vehicles above the line that divides the personality from the ego.
At earlier stages, before the end of toils, the student will do well to organize his life wisely, so that his work for the Master may be as far as possible play. It should be pure delight, unmixed happiness?such a condition wou\d make for the swiftest progress. Toil is not meritorious, nor especially profitable, though sometimes it may be necessary. How often a student does meditation, feeling it an irksome thing, but regarding it as a duty to be done, though with travail and suffering. Do it happily and rejoicing, as play, or at least look forward to the time when you can do so. Some men sink luxuriously into the arms of the present, and say, " We will enjoy ourselves now, and let the future take care of itself." Others stand aloof in proud strength and say, " We refuse to respond to that which can distress us." But the disciple must bare his back to the strokes of time, rejoicing in the long future, in the game in which every move can be a dancing poem of delight.
On the subject of the seven worlds, Madame Blavat-sky says:
Some Oriental mystics locate seven planes of being, the seven spiritual Lokas or worlds within the body of Kala Hamsa, the swan out of time and space, convertible into the swan in time, when it becomes Brahma instead of Brahman.
1OO
All the manifestations of seven in Nature, such as the seven principles in man, or the seven planes in the world, come from a sevenfold division arising from Parabrahman. Three of the seven principles are manifest in the universal consciousness, and three more in mulaprakriti. One remains at its source and includes all the others, for the presence of many does not mar the unity of That which is truly One. So, at his lower level, the man who transcends his middle set or principles (atma-buddhi-manas), and rises into the first (the Monad), though he escapes from the worlds or planes, finds them all present in that new state of real nirvana, which is beyond the consciousness-state as much as that is beyond the mere matter-state. We speak thus of it, in the third person, only as a concession to ignorance, and must point out that what has been said should be translated into terms of " you " for consciousness and " I " for the true life of super-conscious nirvana, if it is to be understood. These " worlds", however, are not entered by the Arhat, but by the full Adept.
There are several other ways in which the Arhat may be thought of as entering the seven worlds of rest eternal:
In one way those worlds are the sub-planes of the atomic plane, through which the Arhat begins to climb. The characteristic of the man who dwells in them is a changeless serenity, for everything is seen as in the One Self, and where that is realized, fear and anxiety can have no place. As the Gita says: "For the sage
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enthroned in yoga, serenity is called the means."1 It is not that there is any lack of activity in those regions ?it is one vast wave of ever-moving life?-but there are no obstructions to the will of the One. On the buddhic plane we have still duality in a sense, since there one sees others, though the same Self is seen dwelling in them as in ourselves. But buddhi has to be transcended, for love implies a duality.
The serenity that the Arhat increasingly acquires puts a new face on the common planes of our existence. He enjoys in them a liberty that others do not know; he has found that work is play. Having touched the vale of bliss, he has discovered that life not only there but on all planes is pure delight. He not only sees and loves the advancing life behind the perishing forms, but feels and rejoices in the Divine Will behind the changing life. The rest eternal that he enjoys is not idleness, but the utter internal peace of one who knows that all is well, that the Divine Will is present even in what may to others seem the obstructions to progress, as well as in the apparent progress itself. A philosopher once caught a glimpse of this idea when he said: "Be serene; for if you fail through no fault of your own, the failure is a success better than you knew, since the Divine Will is being done." The Arhat knows something of the peace that passes understanding, because he is beginning to dwell in the Eternal. This is, Madame Blavatsky says, " The region of the full
1 Op. cit., vi, 3.
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spiritual consciousness, beyond which there is no longer danger for him who has reached it."
If thou would'st cross the first hall safely, let not thy mind mistake the fires of lust that burn therein for the sunlight of life.
If thou would'st cross the second safely, stop not the fragrance of its stupefying blossoms to inhale. If freed thou would'st be from the karmic chains, seek not for thy Guru in those mayavic regions.
The wise ones tarry not in pleasure-grounds of senses.
The wise ones heed not the sweet-tongued voices-of illusion.
Seek for him who is to give thee birth in the Halt of Wisdom, the hall which lies beyond, wherein all shadows are unknown, and where the light of truth shines with unfading glory.
The Guru here spoken of is the Master, the Teacher. Madame Blavatsky puts it:
The Initiate who leads the disciple, through the knowledge he imparts, to his spiritual, or second birth, is called the father, Guru or Master.
A statement of the lives and work of the Gurus or Masters has been given in The Masters and the Path. A glimpse of the marvel of Their exalted powers is seen in the account there given of a meditation of the Master Kuthumi. As he sits in his garden or his room, He seems to be meditating, but is, in fact, giving
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attention to some millions of people, dealing with each one as individually as an ordinary man could if he were to give his full attention to that one.
Every ego is being helped by one of the Masters, so the man who can vivify the link in himself between the lower self and the higher may receive that help in his personal life. The gurus who are to be met with on the physical plane are generally Initiates, advanced pupils of the full Adepts, as stated before.
That which is uncreate abides in thee, disciple, as it abides in that hall. If thou would'st reach it and blend the two, thou must divest thyself of thy dark garments of illusion. Stifle the voice of flesh, allow no image of the senses to get between its light and thine, that thus the twain may blend in one. And having learnt thine own Ajnana flee from the Hall of Learning. This hall is dangerous in its perfidious beauty, is needed but for thy probation. Beware Lanoo, lest dazzled by illusive radiance thy Soul should linger and be caught in its deceptive light.
This light shines from the jewel of the great ensnarer (Mara). The senses it bewitches, blinds the mind, and leaves the unwary an abandoned wreck.
That which is uncreate refers to the higher triad, atma-buddhi-manas, as distinguished from the personality and its bodies. The statement that the hall of learning is needed but for probation applies to the hall of

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ignorance as well. The set of material planes, physical, astral and lower mental, are but the buildings and equipment of a school for man, in which he is taught by means of toys. There is no experience that does not modify the soul and give it some wisdom; but he who is alive to the educative purpose of it all, and is eager to learn and to extract from the experience of embodied life lessons of eternal value, will not find the toys attractive in themselves. He will be like the bee that takes the honey from the flower and goes away, not intoxicated by its scent and colour.
Mara is a personification of the attractiveness of external things. Madame Blavatsky describes him as follows:
Mara is in exoteric religions a demon, an Asura, but in esoteric philosophy it is personified temptation through men's vices, and translated literally means " that which kills " the soul. It is represented as a king (of the Manas) with a crown in ; which shines a jewel of such lustre that it blinds those who look at it, this lustre referring of course to the fascination exercised by vice upon certain natures.
In The Light of Asia1 Sir Edwin Arnold has given us a vivid picture of this prince of darkness, as he came forth leading the ten chief sins, his angels of evil, against the Lord Buddha, as He sat under the Bodhi Tree, when nearing His Illumination.
1 Op. cit., Book vi.
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The moth attracted to the dazzling flame of thy night-lamp is doomed to perish in the viscid oil. The unwary Soul that fails to grapple with the mocking demon of illusion, will return to earth the slave of Mara.
Behold the hosts of Souls. Watch how they hover o'er the stormy sea of human life, and how, exhausted, bleeding, broken-winged, they drop one after another on the swelling waves. Tossed by the fierce winds, chased by the gale, they drift into the eddies and disappear within the first great vortex.
The subject of " lost souls " is very complex. Some are like the children in a class at school who are not ready to pass on with the bulk of their fellow-students into the next grade at the end of the year, either because they are too young or because they have been lazy. Then, too, there are cases where the personality has become so inmeshed in matter during bodily life that it has nothing to give to the ego, and it may then be cut off. Thirdly, there are the terrible fruits of the practice of black magic. It would take too long to discuss the subject here; I have dealt with it at some length in the article on Lost Souls in Volume I of The Inner Life.
Some of the expressions in these passages have all the strength of Oriental imagination. We must not think too literally of abandoned wrecks and broken wings. He who falls from the Path on account of material
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desires certainly does wreck his spiritual prospects for the time being, but even in that case he has learnt something which will be useful to the soul later on. In all cases it is best for a man to learn with wise thought; only when that is neglected will bitter experience be necessary to take its place.
It is by no means requisite that any human being shall go through every kind of experience. The more advanced and the wiser a man becomes, the more he will see in everything, and he will learn much from trifles that others might pass by as insignificant. It is said that a fool cannot learn even from a wise man, but a wise man can always learn, even from a fool. To know that fire is hot it is not necessary to put one's hand into it; a fool may do so, but the wise man has other ways of learning the fact that fire burns. Yet it is a great blessing that those who will not think and thus learn willingly, should be taught in the stern school of experience, without which they would learn nothing at all and make no progress.
The law of karma, that brings to men the experiences that they have given to others, is thus a benefactor and ultimately a liberator, not an instrument of vengeance or punishment. Suppose, for example, that a foot-pad waylaid a gentleman, knocked him down, perhaps killed him, and took his money. Under the law he would have to meet with some such painful experience himself, sooner or later. The robber was capable of such an act because he himself was a coarse being, lacking sensitiveness and imagination; otherwise he would have thought
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of the feelings of his victim or of the latter's wife and family, and such thought would have stayed his hand. Because he is coarse, crass, unimaginative, the foot-pad needs the violent kind of experience that he gives to others; nothing less will stir him. Later, when through karmic retribution he has had some suffering, he will remember it when he is about to strike another, and will say to himself: " That is not a very nice thing for that poor man." He will then begin to reform, thanks to the law, which is always educative, never punitive.

CHAPTER 8 - THE WORLD'S MOTHER

If through the Hall of Wisdom thou would'st reach the vale of bliss, disciple, close fast thy senses against the great dire heresy of separateness, that weans thee from the rest.
C.W.L.?Herbert Spencer came very near to a revelation of the spiritual truth about evolution, when he described it as a progressive change from a state of incoherent homogeneity to one of coherent heterogeneity of structure and function. To him evolution meant that things which in the beginning were similar and separate, later become different but united. This specialization is seen in the human body, which has different organs which work for the whole; thus the digestive system digests food for the whole body, and the hands grasp, the feet walk, the eyes look, not for the sake of the hands, the feet and the eyes, but for the whole body. Similarly, society becomes more and more highly organized as time goes on. Men become more and more differentiated from one another, as the professions in life advance in knowledge and skill. The doctor cures all, the teacher teaches all, the bridge-builder builds bridges for all. One man works for the benefit of many, and the work of many flows back to benefit him.
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When men get the organic sense and feeling for their fellows they cease to be a mob of incoherent homogeneous human beings and become heterogeneous and coherent. A man with that spirit will do his best for his community, or nation, or humanity, leaving it to the law of unity to bring him what he needs from the other organs of the great body. The incoherent homogeneous elements of matter or of society cannot organize themselves; it is the inner principle that draws them together and makes swift progress possible for them through mutual help. The unity is love, the force behind evolution, the energy of life; it is buddhi, the greatest wisdom. There is a profound difference between co-operation and brotherhood ?the former springs from an intelligent appreciation of the mutual relations of men, the latter from a realization in feeling that the same life is dwelling in all.
In the evolution of an individual it is usually the spirit of co-operation that develops first; the business of the world brings people together, then by contact the divine fire of buddhi is struck. Two men, for example, go prospecting together, and support each other in the work. True friendship supervenes. But if it should chance, as it sometimes does, that brotherhood comes first, it will not develop into perfect and useful co-operation unless the intelligence is also awakened and applied to the business of life. An instance in point was the beautiful love between David Copperfield and his impractical wife Dora, whom the novelist was constrained to kill in order to make room for the
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more practical Agnes, and so give the story a happier termination.
In the occult life candidates who have developed the higher intelligence so that they have a keen appreciation of the principle of co-operation and of spiritual laws, often still find themselves dull and apparently incapable of rapid progress. They await the awakening in themselves of true love, buddhi. That is the burning energy of the inner man. Still, in this second of the stages of true spiritual unfoldment there will often be much agitation and trouble; the divine energy gushes forth irregularly and not always in the wisest way, causing much sorrow to its possessor?-until the third spiritual stage, the place of serenity, has been reached. As that serenity is the goal to which the voice of the silence is directing the candidate, he is told to pass through the Hall of Wisdom into the vale of bliss. Even in the buddhic plane there is a certain duality, or separateness. We cannot love ourselves; love needs an object, even though it be not a material object, but the divine life manifested in many spiritual souls. Buddhi is the first veil, the Avalokiteshvara of the Higher Self, not the Parabrahman. The " dire heresy of separateness " has to be disposed of on every plane in turn, the physical, the astral, the mental and even the buddhic.
Let not thy " heaven-born," merged in the sea of Maya, break from the universal Parent (Soul), but let the fiery power retire into the inmost chamber, the chamber of the heart, and the abode of the world's Mother.
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Then from the heart that power shall rise into the sixth, the middle region, the place between thine eyes, when it becomes the breath of the One-soul, the voice which filleth all, thy Master's voice.
The " heaven-born " is chitta, the lower mind. It is born from the soul above, when manas becomes dual in incarnation. The planes of atma-buddhi-manas are typified by heaven, while those of the personality are spoken of as earth. We have already observed the distinction of character which divides the five planes of human manifestation into two. The monadic and divine planes, beyond these five, taken together form a third division. So the seven worlds can also be grouped as three. The lowest division is in the region of sattva or law. Here we find everything regulated, but man has some freedom because the " heaven-born " is in him?? so much of the energy of the Law-maker works through him. It is because man has this liberty and power to go his own way that his life is usually more disorderly, less regulated, than that of the lower kingdoms of external nature.
The middle set of planes contains those of spiritual energy, the indwelling life, without which the rest would be dead and motionless. They are the planes of the divine, the shining, the Avalokita, or " seen", God?the life seen by wisdom, not the form seen by knowledge.
The highest group of planes is that of the Monad, the Self that is bliss and freedom, where are the realities behind every human ideal and the ecstasy beyond consciousness that is the extracted quintessence of beauty,
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goodness, truth, harmony, comprehension, union and freedom.
What is here called the fiery power is the force named kundalini in Sanskrit. This may be described as a latent fire, coiled up like a sleeping serpent at the base of the spine in all men except those few in whom it has been specially awakened, and is actively working in the etheric body. It should not be difficult to realize the existence of such a fire, since it is well known that the breath in our lungs constantly feeds a slow fire, and that digestion also is a kind of fire. Kundalini is more like electrical fire?a force developing heat where there is resistance? than fire that burns fuel, but it is not of the same order of force as electricity.
I have written on this subject in the articles on the Serpent-Fire and the Force-Centres in The Inner Life and that on Vitality in Chapter IV of The Hidden Side of Things, and I hope to publish shortly a somewhat fuller study, illustrated with coloured plates.1 There is also aft extensive, if somewhat obscure, literature on the subject in Sanskrit, including the Shat-chakranirupana, the Ananda Lahari, and many other works. There is an excellent translation of the first of these, with a commentary, by Arthur Avalon, called The Serpent Power, published by Ganesh & Co., Madras.
The following is a very brief summary of the subject.
Kundalini is the lower end of a stream of a certain
kind of the force of the Logos, and it commonly lies
sleeping in the chakra or force-centre at the base of the
1 Book on Chakras has been since issued by T.P.H., Adyar.
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spine. If it is awakened prematurely, that is, before the man has purified his character of every taint of sensual impurity and selfishness, it may rush downwards and vivify certain lower centres in the body (used only in some objectionable forms of black magic), and irresistibly carry the unfortunate man into a life of indescribable horror; at best, it will intensify all that the man has in him, including such qualities as ambition and pride. Kundalini should be wakened only under the personal direction of a Master, who will instruct the student in the use of the will to arouse it, in the manner in which it should be moved when aroused, and in the spiral course along which it must be carried through the chakras or force-centres, from that near the base of the spine, to those which lie on the surface of the etheric double at the spleen,1 the navel, the heart, the throat, between the eyebrows, and at the top of the head. This course differs with different types of people, and it is quite a definite physical thing, for the force has literally to burn a pathway for itself through the impurities of the etheric double.
There are chakras in the astral body also, which are already aroused by kundalini working in that plane in all fairly evolved people. The process of developing those centres has rendered the astral body sensitive to the plane, awakening its feeling, its power to travel about, its sympathetic response to other entities
1 Hindu works usually mention the chakra at the root of the genital organs as the second. We recognize the existence of such a centre, but we follow the ancient Egyptians in thinking it eminently undesirable that it should be stirred into activity.
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there; its vision and hearing, and astral faculties generally. But the memory of those experiences or the use of the astral faculties while in the physical body becomes possible in a definite and well-controlled way only when kundalini in the etheric double has been carried through the corresponding centres.
The special mention of the place between the eyes in our text has reference to the pineal gland and the pituitary body. The forces from both the sixth and seventh astral centres (which are between the eyebrows and on top of the head) usually converge on the pituitary body, when the etheric centre is aroused, and then vivify it and act through it. But there is a certain type of people (who are being addressed in our text) in whom the seventh astral chakra vivifies the pineal gland instead of the pituitary body, and it in that case forms a line of communication directly with the lower mental plane, without apparently passing through the astral plane in the ordinary way. Through that channel come for them the communications from within, while for the other type of people they come through the pituitary body.
When kundalini awakens of itself, which it rarely does, or is accidentally aroused, it usually tries to pass up the interior of the spine, instead of following the spiral course in which the occultist is trained to guide it. In this case it will probably rush out through the head, and the man will suffer from, nothing worse than a temporary unconsciousness.
The Hindu books hint at, rather than explain, what happens. They make no references to the chakras on
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the surface of the etheric double, but speak of their roots, which are in the spine. In the spine, running from its base to the top is what is called Merudanda, the rod of Meru, the central axis of creation. In that rod is the channel called sushumna, and in that again is the channel called chitrini, which is "as fine as a spider's thread ". Upon that are threaded the chakras, like the knots on a bamboo rod. The lowest of the chakras, called muladhara, lies at the base of the spine, and in it kundalini sleeps, closing the mouth of the merudanda.
The aim of the aspirant is to raise kundalini through all the chakras till she reaches that which is between the eyebrows. Then the candidate will find that he, as it were, remains behind, while she leaps forward into the sahasrara, the great " thousand-petalled " lotus at the top of the head. If he goes with her, it will take him out of the body and put a stop for the time being to his practice of meditation in the body. She rises up chitrini little by little as the candidate uses his will in meditation. In one practice he may not get very far, but in the next he will go a little further, and so on. When she comes to one of the chakras or lotuses she pierces it and the flower, which was turned downwards, now turns upwards. The candidate meditates upon her in some form, and upon her associates, seated in that lotus. An elaborate dhyana or meditation, full of rich symbology, is prescribed for each lotus. When the meditation is over, the candidate leads kundalini back again by the same path into the muladhara; but in some schools she is
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brought back only as far as the heart chakra, and there she enters what is called her chamber.
Kundalini can be awakened by various methods, but it should be done only under the direction of a guru or competent teacher, the Master who is responsible to the Brotherhood for the training of the candidate. He is not likely to conduct this awakening until the first three fetters on the Path have been destroyed by the candidate's own power, so that he is no longer in serious danger of being stirred by sensuous or material things. Then his " heaven-born ", closely united or harmonized with the higher manas, can remain master of the triple house of personality, and when the energy of kundalini" is set free in the body it will be likely to run in pure channels of service to the higher self. Hence the awakening of kundalini will take place usually somewhere near the Third Initiation, or, in the present kali yuga, or dark age, it is said, even later. Even then it is awakened in various layers, so that in the early stages it may give nothing more than a general sensitiveness to the higher planes.
Kundalini is thought of as a goddess. She is what is called the shabdabrahman in the body. Shabda means sound. Sound is the creative force, as before described. Speech is considered to be the most outward form of it. It is an expression of thought, which in its true active form is kriyashakti. Certain letters of the alphabet, which are the foundation of human speech, are said to reside in each of the chakras, and the power of those letters (their portion of the creative word) is awakened
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when kundalini enters them after her union with Shiva in the highest centre, causing them to shine brilliantly with her light. The creative speech of Brahma, the Third Logos, has four forms or stages; hence He is called the four-faced one. When kundalini represents him in the body she also exhibits those four forms, as she rises through the chakras.
Kundalini is called the world's mother because the ?outward action of the powers of consciousness is always regarded as feminine. Thus will, wisdom and activity are feminine, being shaktis or powers, outward turned aspects of the divine. She is the representative of all these, as they were expressed in the creation of the world, in the activity of Brahma, the Third Logos. It has also been said that she is the world's mother because it is through her that the various planes are brought into conscious existence for the occultist.
The following footnote by Madame Blavatsky will also throw light on the foregoing explanations.
The inner chamber of the heart, called in Sanskrit, Brahma-pura. The " fiery power " is Kundalini.
The "power" and the "world-mother" are names given to Kundalini?-one of the mystic Yogi powers. It is Buddhi considered as an active instead of a passive principle (which it is generally, when regarded only as the vehicle, or casket, of the supreme spirit, Atma). It is an electro-spiritual force, a creative power which when aroused into action can as easily kill as it can create.
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It is by no means certain what Madame Blavatsky meant by saying that kundalini is active buddhi, but several speculations may be offered:
In normal men buddhi is not positively active in the outer life, but when the first three fetters have been cast off, the personality is so purified that the astral J body will no longer be active merely on its own account, but will faithfully respond to buddhi, now active. At or near this stage kundalini is often aroused, as we have seen, and when the faculties of the astral body are then laid open to the candidate while in his physical body it is an astral body reflecting buddhi, which now becomes a veritable fire of love in the man's life. That clairvoyance and other psychic powers need not be awakened in the physical brain even at this advanced stage of human progress, is also indicated by Dr. Besant. in her Initiation, the Perfecting of Man. She there says that before a man can come to the Third Initiation he must learn to bring the spirit of intuition (buddhi) down to his physical consciousness, so that it may abide on him and guide him. Then she adds: " This process is usually called ' the development of psychic faculties,' and it is so, in the true meaning of the word ' psychic'. But it does not mean the development of clairvoyance and clairaudience, which depend on a different process."
The entire higher triad (atma-buddhi-manas) is but the central member or the buddhi of the still more inclusive triad of Monad, ego and personality. That
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larger buddhi is triple (will, wisdom and activity), and now its third aspect (activity, kriyashakti) comes into operation in the body, to awaken its organs and liberate its latent powers.
'Tis only then thou canst become a "walker of the sky," who treads the winds above the waves, whose step touches not the waters.
On this, Madame Blavatsky says:
Kechara, " sky-walker " or " goer ". As explained in the 6th Adhyaya of that king of mystic works, the Jnaneshvari?the body of the Yogi becomes as one formed of the wind; as "a cloud from which limbs have sprouted out," after which?"he [the Yogi] beholds the things beyond the seas and stars; he hears the language of the Devas and comprehends it, and perceives what is passing in the mind of the ant."
The term " walker of the sky " has various grades of meaning. In Indian story it is, for example, applied to the great Rishi Narada, as an emissary of the Logos, who could travel through the pure akasha from globe to globe. On the lower planes, the astral body or the mayavi-rupa may be taken as an illustration, as they can be used to travel in what is the air or sky to ordinary people.
In the astral world the ordinary man is a kind of cloud, a being full of kama, that is, desire and emotion, but not by any means a definite entity such as he is on the physical plane. But when he masters his kama,
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and gives it definiteness, the astral body is organized as a vehicle; it is no longer kama but kamarupa. Still further, about the time when the first three fetters are dispensed with, the mayavi-rupa is formed, and that enables the man to operate with his mental body in the astral as well as the lower mental plane. This may be taken as one interpretation of the statement that his step " touches not the waters ", which are a symbol for the astral plane.

CHAPTER 9 - THE SEVEN SOUNDS

Before thou sett'st thy foot upon the ladder's upper rung, the ladder of the mystic sounds, thou hast to hear the voice of thy inner God in seven manners.
C.W.L.?It has already been mentioned that The Voice of the Silence is intended to guide the candidate as far as the Fourth Initiation. At that point his consciousness is raised to the seventh principle and begins to function in the atmic or nirvanic plane. The man is then ready to commence treading what is here called the ladder's upper rung, to go through the course of training which prepares for the Fifth Initiation, that of the Asekha Adept. The Path has two equal divisions, which may be called the ladder's lower and upper rungs.
It is said that the Initiate on the ladder's lower rung must hear the voice of his inner God in seven manners. That inner God at his present stage is the higher Self, the buddhi, the second principle. In his meditation the aspirant may or may not hear a series of seven sounds, marking his attainment of the seven sub-planes of the buddhic plane; that depends upon his psychic
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temperament. But what he must do, in all cases, is to bring the influence of buddhi down into his life on each of the lower planes, so that the activity of all his principles will be governed by it, and thus his inner God will be ever-present in his life.
The latter stage is called the ladder of the mystic sounds; this is perhaps because they are the sounds of the voice of the silence, hidden in the atma or Self. One must not push too far the exact interpretation of any English word in our text, as it is only a translation; though every Sanskrit and Pali word in it is rich with technical significance. Still, the word mystic, coming from a root that means to close the eyes, indicates here certain sounds which do not mingle in the outward life at all, but give direction as from above, in the ex cathedra manner of pure conscience. It is implied that the sounds about to be mentioned are more accessible, are not " mystic " at all events to the candidate at the stage under consideration. True conscience does not tell you what to do, as is commonly supposed, but it commands you to follow that which you already really know to be best, when your mind is trying to invent some excuse to do otherwise. It speaks with the authority of the spiritual will, determining our path in life. It is not the atma, but the buddhi, the second principle, that gives intuitive knowledge as to right and wrong. Manas gives inspiration, buddhi intuition as to right and wrong, atma the directing conscience.
The first is like the nightingale's sweet voice,
chanting a song of parting to its mate.
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The second comes as the sound of a silver cymbal of the Dhyanis, awakening the twinkling stars.
The next is as the plaint melodious of the ocean-sprite imprisoned in its shell.
And this is followed by the chant of the vina.
The fifth like the sound of bamboo-flute shrills in thine ear.
It changes next into a trumpet-blast.
The last vibrates like the dull rumbling of a. thunder-cloud.
The seventh swallows all the other sounds."
They die, and then are heard no more.
The series of seven sounds mentioned here has caused much puzzlement among those who meditate upon this little book. We must notice first of all the character of the sounds; then we shall see that there are several interpretations of them. They are increasing in materiality and losing, in penetrating quality in the order here given. One may notice, for example, the difference between the vina and an Indian trumpet of the old-fashioned kind. It is nearly always a surprise to the European, when he first hears the wonderfully delicate music of the vina, perhaps in a large and crowded hall, how, without any exhibition of force, it reaches every corner, and how it gives the impression of sound half-removed from our material planes.
The highest sound in the series is likened to a certain chant of the nightingale. It is said that there are occasions when the voice of this bird rises higher and higher
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in pitch until it is beyond the range of human hearing, although one may still see the throat of the warbler trembling with song. That such high sounds exist is well known to students of science. The note of a siren, for example, can be raised by increased pressure of air or steam, until one after another of those who are listening declare that they can no longer hear it. There is a certain kind of whistle with which German police dogs can be called. When one blows upon this instrument, which looks like an ordinary whistle, no man can hear the slightest sound, but the dog, in another room or some distance away, will instantly prick up its ears, and come leaping and bounding to the exact spot where what is presumably to it the sound originated.
The interpretations of the sounds fall into two groups. The first mentioned in the list may represent the last heard by the candidate. The sounds are enumerated downwards in the order of their creation, after the Oriental manner, so that the first sound in creation is the seventh when the aspirant is approaching the Lord of that creation. So, first comes the dull rumbling of a thunder-cloud, a sound representing or correlated to the physical principle in man, in the middle is the vina, representing the antahkarana (according to Madame Blavatsky's classification), and lastly there is the nightingale's melody, associated with atma, the silence. That well typifies the seventh, the soundless sound, into which all the others have to be raised, until they die away and are heard no more. The candidate must learn to hear God in the dull rumbling sound of the physical plane,
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then in the trumpet-blast of the astral, then in the sound of the lower mental that is likened to the music of a bamboo-flute, and so on right up to the world of his highest principle.
The same sounds may be taken in another way as typical of the intensity with which the aspirant hears the voice of the higher Self. It is one voice, but is heard in seven manners. At first it is delicate and sweet, like the nightingale's song, and it often disappears into silence; next it becomes stronger, like " the silver cymbal of the Dhyanis ". Louder and louder it becomes, until at last it is constantly heard, as filling all the air, like the dull rumbling of a thunder-cloud. In the early stages of our progress the voice of the higher Self may seem thin and faint, but later it will have for us all the reality of thunder.
Again, in the text the description of these sounds follows upon the mention of kundalini, which is carried through the chakras. That force awakens in seven layers, or degrees, and so gives the psychic results already mentioned in increasing power. The voice that is heard when kundalini rises to the place between the eyes will therefore be heard with seven degrees of intensity, typified by the seven sounds here mentioned.
Once more, it is natural that in the densest plane the candidate should hear the inner voice but faintly, like the nightingale's voice. When he rises to the next plane, where the covering of the inner Self is not so dense, its voice will be more easily heard; until finally, when he reaches the highest principle it will be like the rumbling
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of a thunder-cloud. It is only the illusion of the lower planes that causes us to ascribe delicacy to the higher things. Ultimately we shall find that they have the full body and reality of thunder.
These interpretations are not mutually exclusive. All the experiences which they suggest are possible for the candidate at the same time.
I remember that on one occasion a question about these sounds was asked in one of our talks on the roof at Adyar. The President and I respectively answered as follows:
A.B.?In meditation, one of the sounds that you begin to hear (for instance, one thing that I heard quite distinctly) was a sound which was like the beating of a tom-tom in a Indian village. I described that to H.P.B., who said: "That is very good, go on." Next I heard some strains of beautiful music, and then something like silver chimes. . Another sound was like the ringing of a temple bell, such as you hear in Benares. I never found out that these sounds meant anything more than that I was becoming able to hear in the astral world.
In India there is a school formed by a man of whom the Master M. spoke highly. The people who belong to that, after a certain amount of practice, hear sounds quite clearly in the brain, but I have never found that any of them got further on that account. Many people come to me in the North, asking what the sounds mean. I reply: " I think it is nothing more than that you are becoming clairaudient."
These seven sounds mentioned by H.P.B. I have never been able to sort out. They may mean that you have to wake your consciousness in plane after plane, and that each is meant to symbolize the note of a particular plane, just as down here Fa is the combination of the countless sounds in the physical plane blended together. But that does not really explain matters.
C.W.L.?I cannot make them exactly correspond with the planes; they may possibly be sub-planes. They may also be intended to symbolize the sounds which accompany the awakening of the seven centres by the Kundalini, for sound is one of the expressions that take place in that particular case. I have never felt at all certain of what she meant. One would be inclined to
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say that the silver cymbal in different tones would do for all The thunder certainly does not seem to fit in very well.
A.B.?-Of course there are a certain number of sounds in the head which belong entirely to the vascular system. If a person hears such sounds very strongly it means that he is getting into a dangerous state of anaemia.
The sounds are not progressive. H.P.B. put things very often in a circle; she sometimes begins with number four and then works round on the two sides. It may also be that she gives these sounds in no sort of order. You might possibly begin with the thunder, then the trumpet blast, and next the ocean sprite; then you might come to the cymbal for the fourth, the flute for the fifth and the vina, which is a more delicate sound, for the sixth, and then the nightingale for the seventh, the top.
C.W.L.?-If we are allowed to turn them round like that, they will begin to mean something definite.
A.B.?H.P.B., when consulted astrally said: "What fools you all were to take them in that way: you might have arranged them before: thunder, trumpet, ocean-shell, cymbal, flute, vina, nightingale." She said that we were abominably literal.
C.W.L.?.Similar lists of sounds are to be found in various Sanskrit works. We have taken the following example from the Shiva Samhita:
The first sound is like the hum of the honey-intoxicated bee, next that of a flute, then of a harp; after this, by the gradual practice of Yoga, the destroyer of the darkness of the world, he hears the sounds of ringing bells; then sounds like the roar of thunder. When one fixes his full attention on this sound, being free from fear, he gets absorption, O my beloved! When the mind of the Yogi is exceedingly engaged in this sound, he forgets all external things, and is absorbed in this sound." 1
When the six are slain and at the Master's feet are laid, then is the pupil merged into the One, becomes that One and lives therein.
Madame Blavatsky speaks of the six as:
The six principles; meaning when the lower personality is destroyed and the inner individuality is merged into and lost in the seventh or Spirit.
1 Op. cit., v, 27-8.
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And of the One here spoken of she says: The disciple is one with Brahman or Atma.
When the six principles are " slain", in other words, when they no longer assert their independence, but have become entirely obedient to the will of the Self, the aspirant lives in that One. The seventh voice of buddhi will carry him up into Atma. Madame Blavatsky applies the term Brahman to the human atma by analogy. Brahman (neuter) is the One containing the Three; so does atma contain buddhi and manas within itself, when the man has become an Arhat, and learned to live in the triple spirit.
Before that path is entered, thou must destroy thy lunar body, cleanse thy mind-body, and make clean thy heart.
To the term " lunar body " Madame Blavatsky adds the note:
The astral form produced by the kamic principle, the Kama Rupa, or body of desire.
On the term " mind-body " she comments:
Manasa Rupa. The first refers to the astral or personal self; the second to the individuality, .or the reincarnating Ego, whose consciousness on our plane, or the lower Manas, has to be paralysed.
Madame Blavatsky did not think in planes so completely as do most of the Theosophists of today. She had her eye more on the principles, and saw the matter of different levels taking form under their influence.
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Here she speaks of " our plane", meaning the region of personal existence?physical, astral and lower mental. The " astral form " is by no means necessarily the astral body, but rather the personal form built up in the subjective regions of our personal life (the astral and lower mental planes) on account of our bodily form and the personal feelings and thoughts connected with it. In my little book The Devachanic Plane and in Dr. Besant's Ancient Wisdom an account is given of the four types of life in the heaven-world: (1) personal friendship, (2) personal devotion, (3) the true missionary spirit, and (4) human achievement. They are all emotive?though unselfish, they are not impersonal, but kamic. They take their form from the character of the physical plane experience. But the pure lower manas would be the antahkarana?it would be the soul's mind, not the body's mind. It would have its activity stimulated only from above. It must now be cleansed from all the kama, to become a pure channel for the soul.
Think of the condition of the astral body of an advanced person. It gives practically no direct response to impacts from outside. It is, by itself, dead to the world. It has no independent life of its own; it has been " slain ". If some one went up to the average man and struck him, probably his astral body Would burst instantly into flames of anger; that is its immediate response. Not so that of the advanced man. The impact in his case would go inwards through the astral to the buddhic vehicle. That would respond in its own way. Then its impact upon the astral would call
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forth the beautiful colours of the love emotions which are its correspondences in the astral body. Dr. Besant has often explained that the astral aura of an advanced man is colourless, or rather, slightly milky-white, when in repose, but that all the most lovely colours which the , plane can exhibit flood through it in response to the great man's buddhic response to the world.
Eternal life's pure waters, clear and crystal, with the monsoon tempest's muddy torrents cannot mingle.
Heaven's dew-drop glittering in the morn's first sunbeam within the bosom of the lotus, when dropped on earth becomes a piece of clay; behold, the pearl is now a speck of mire.
Strive with thy thoughts unclean before they overpower thee. Use them as they will thee, for if thou sparest them and they take root and grow, know well, these thoughts will overpower and kill thee. Beware, disciple, suffer not even though it be their shadow to approach. For it will grow, increase in size and power, and then this thing of darkness will absorb thy being before thou hast well realized the black foul monster's presence.
There are some people in the world who imagine that It is possible to carry on the lower things and still make progress on the Path. Sometimes they actually think that by various forms of vicious excitement they can generate a great deal of energy which will help to carry them onward and upward. They are afraid of becoming

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colourless, should they repress the lower activities entirely. It has been said, of course, that the colourless person, the feeble good man, cannot make progress. " I would thou wert cold or hot," says the Spirit in Revelation, and " Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth."1
This very well represents the facts. The most promising persons, in order of preference, are (1) the vigorous good man, (2) the vigorous bad man, (3) the ordinary good man. No man can be an effective criminal unless he has a strong development of some divine quality. His badness is the result of unbalance?-such as great will-power and courage, or great intelligence, without love for his fellow-beings. Or great love and willpower, without intelligence, can make an equally dangerous and harmful man, for he may become a fanatical leader of forces of discontent and disruption. The mere good man, weak in all qualities?in will, intelligence and love?makes little progress, though it may be steady. Great men have great faults, but they may get rid of them quickly; little men have little faults, which often seem to last for ever.
There is in all this no recommendation to evil living. It indicates that mere repression of lower tendencies will not make for rapid progress, but that there must be positive and- vigorous exertion in the expression of what is high and good. While making that effort a person may possibly fall. The very will-power or knowledge or love that he has gained by his exertions will make the
1 Revelation 3, 15-16.
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man's fall deep and terrible, should he become unbalanced. Thus the magnitude of a man's sin may be a sign of possible rapid future progress for him; but that progress will begin only when the man through karmic suffering has realized his error and purged away the impurities incidental to his fall. Nothing much can be done, however, until that purification has taken place. Madame Blavatsky deals vigorously with this point in her First Steps in Occultism, as follows:
There are those whose reasoning powers have been so distorted by foreign influences that they imagine that animal passions can be so sublimated and elevated that their- fury, force and fire can, so to speak, be turned inwards; that they can be stored and shut up in one's breast, until their energy is, not expanded, but turned towards higher and more holy purposes: namely, until, their collective and unexpanded strength enables their possessor to enter the true Sanctuary of the Soul and stand therein in the presence of the Master?the HIGHER SELF. For this purpose they will not struggle with their passions nor slay them. They will simply, by a strong effort of will, put down the fierce flames and keep them at bay within their natures allowing the fire to smoulder under a thin layer of ashes. They submit joyfully to the torture of the Spartan boy who allowed the fox to devour his entrails rather than part with it. Oh, poor, blind visionaries!
As well hope that a band of drunken chimney-sweeps, hot and greasy from their work, may be shut up in a Sanctuary hung with pure white linen, and that instead of soiling and turning it by their presence into a heap of dirty shreds, they will become masters in and of the sacred recess, and finally emerge from it as immaculate as that recess. Why not imagine that a dozen skunks imprisoned in the pure atmosphere of a Dgon-pa (a monastery), can issue out of it impregnated with all the perfumes of the incense used? Strange aberration of the human mind.
This portion of our text concludes with the following uncompromising passages:
Before the mystic power can make of thee a God, Lanoo, thou must have gained the faculty to slay thy lunar form at will.
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The Self of matter and the Self of Spirit can never meet. One of the twain must disappear; there is no place for both.
Ere thy Soul's mind can understand, the bud of personality must be crushed out, the worm of sense destroyed past resurrection.
The mystic power is once more kundalini, the representative in the body of" the great pristine force which underlies all organic and inorganic matter ". Madame Blavatsky's note on the subject is as follows:
Kundalini, the serpent power or mystic fire; it is called the serpentine or the annular power on account of its spiral-like working or progress in the body of the ascetic developing the power in himself. It is an electric fiery occult or fohatic power, the great pristine force which underlies all organic and inorganic matter.

CHAPTER 10 - BECOME THE PATH

Thou canst not travel on the Path before thou hast become that Path itself.
C.W.L.?To this the following foot-note is appended:
This Path is mentioned in all the mystic works. As Krishna says in the Jnaneshvari; " When this path is beheld . . . whether one sets out to the bloom of the east, or to the chambers of the west, without moving, O holder of the bow, is the travelling in this road. In this path, to whatever place one would go, that place one's own self becomes." " Thou art the path," is said to the Adept Guru, and by the latter to the disciple, after Initiation. " I am the way and the path," says another Master.
It has already been explained (in the commentary on At the Feet of the Master) that the thoughts and feelings which are at first difficult to grasp and maintain become quite easy in the course of time. When the aspirant has so trained and developed himself that the buddhic outlook and response to life become perfectly natural and spontaneous to him, we may say he has become the Path itself. Sometimes such a consequence
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of continued effort and practice is called " second nature ". That expression, however, gives one something of a feeling that the new qualities have been put on, and afterwards become habitual. That is unfortunate. It is our original and best nature, our higher nature, that shows itself in the higher life; it seems to be something new to us only because it has heretofore been obscured by our material integuments and the pressure of circumstances in the worlds of our personal being.
An interesting metaphysical truth is indicated in the foot-note. Our evolution is not a transit, nor even a growth. It is not a process of going somewhere, nor an increase of size. It is an unfoldment of the powers potential in our lives. As already stated, in the planes of the ego materiality takes second place, the powers of consciousness?-will, "wisdom and activity (or will, love and thought)?-dominate almost completely the matter of the planes. Therefore space is not the jailor which it is down here, and consciousness need not travel through it in order to appear in another place. The following conversation between a Guru and his pupil has been related to illustrate this point. The Guru told the pupil to walk across the room, and then asked:
" What were you doing? Were you moving? "
After meditating upon the matter, the disciple gave the following answer, which was declared to be correct:
" No, I was not moving. I was watching the body move. I was thinking, feeling and willing; the body alone was moving." 1 The Seven Rays.
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This fact is true for all of us; we know of the body's motion merely on account of observing it by means of the senses, just as we do that of any other object. The sensation of rushing along, in an open motor-car, for example, resolves itself, when one shuts one's eyes, into an actual feeling of air rushing by, and a sense of power which, acting through the imagination, exhilarates the body. The same experience could be reproduced by suitable apparatus, composed of wind and motion machines, without any transportation of the body. Again, most people who have travelled at night in Pullman berths have had the experience of waking and wondering whether they were going head first or feet first, or even whether the train was moving or not, and they have usually settled the question by slipping up the blind and inferring their direction from an observation of passing lights and shadows.
The fact that, in order to go from one place to another, travelling is not necessary for the ego, is shown also in the way in which it can simultaneously appear in the devachanic images of a number of people in the lower mental plane in different parts of the world.
Though, at the stage of development presupposed in this teaching, the candidate is working at the perfection of his personality, at the same time his inner work is particularly concerned with the development of buddhi, the spiritual soul. To put it in other words, he is climbing through the buddhic plane. Hence his becoming the Path is shown in a great development of
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sympathy and love for others, as indicated in the following verses:
Let thy Soul lend its ear to every cry of pain like as the lotus bares its heart to drink the morning son.
Let not the fierce sun dry one tear of pain before thyself hast wiped it from the sufferer's eye.
But let each burning human tear drop on thy heart and there remain; nor ever brush it off until the pain that caused it is removed.
These tears, O thou of heart most merciful, these are the streams that irrigate the fields of charity immortal. "Tis on such soil that grows the midnight blossom of Buddha, more difficult to find, more rare to view, than is the flower of the Vogay tree. It is the seed of freedom from rebirth. It isolates the Arhat both from strife and lust, it leads Mm through the fields of being unto the peace and bliss known only in the land of silence and non-being.
When Christ said, " I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me," He declared a mystic truth, for the Christ is one with the buddhic aspect of the world-consciousness. There is only one consciousness; on full recognition of this fact the Initiate can become an Arhat?but unless he goes through that Christ-principle he cannot reach the Father, the atma, above. That truth, explained with
S. John, 14, 6
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wonderful inspiration and clarity in Dr. Annie Besant's Esoteric Christianity, is, however, only" one aspect of the matter, for the Christ incarnate embodied the same principle in his outward life in Palestine, which has moved millions of men?-because he did not shrink from pain. Most men try to escape pain as much as possible, but Christ accepted his own and added to it that of all other people as well. Men who follow the buddhic path instinctively say, when trouble comes to them: " Many are suffering; why should I desire to be exempt?" More than that, in the fullness of their sympathy, they feel that other suffering to the breaking point, before they reach the serenity of Arhatship, the illumination that puts death under them, that makes them glow with the joy of liberty, whatever pain may betide. Such liberty would lead to careless rest, could men have it before experiencing the suffering of the Christ, in which the pain of the cross is as nothing beside that of his compassionate response to the cry of a world in pain. Then comes the point at which the man says: " What does it matter whether I suffer or not? " His mind is so busy with service that he can scarcely attend to himself.
Such an expression as " the peace and bliss known only in the land of silence and non-being" can be understood only by those who are willing to think of metaphysical realities. Most of such Oriental expressions as this are based on the fundamental idea that the universal God expresses himself as sat, chit and ananda, that is, as being, consciousness and bliss.
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Being is well understood; people see it all around them; consciousness they also know by experience; but happiness they seek. All seek themselves. Happiness is not something that we shall gain, obtain and possess; it is our true state of Self. But beyond both matter and consciousness is the real inner life, which is silence and non-being from the standpoint of the external, and yet is the bliss of true being.
Kill out desire; but if thou killest it, take heed lest from the dead it should again arise.
Kill love of life; but if thou slayest Tanha, let this not be for thirst of life eternal, but to replace the fleeting by the everlasting.
Desire nothing. Chafe not at Karma, nor at nature's changeless laws. But struggle only with the personal, the transitory, the evanescent and the perishable.
Common desire is the love of external things for the sake of astral or sensuous enjoyment. We have already seen that the disciple must not seek the satisfaction of such desires, but must give up all the energy of his personality?physical, emotional, and mental?to the work of spiritual evolution and the service of the inner life in himself and other men.
Tanha is the root of these desires, because it is the thirst for sentient life. The ego on its own plane is far from being fully conscious, but what consciousness it has gives it a feeling of great pleasure, and arouses a kind of hunger for a fuller realization of life. It is that
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which is behind the world's great clamour for a fuller life. As before explained, the forces of the higher mental plane pass through the causal body for the most part without affecting it in the case of ordinary persons, as the ego is not yet developed and trained so as to respond to more than a few of the vibrations of its own level. There are no coarse vibrations on that plane, such as it can respond to in its younger days, so it descends to the lower planes for the sake of feeling more fully alive. For a long time therefore its consciousness is most vivid when things of the physical plane are presented to it, but later, when the astral nature is awakened, the pleasures of that plane prove to be still more intense.
It is not possible in the physical body to realize how keen are the delights of the astral life. So much is that the case that they often turn aside and delay persons who have overcome the same sort of pleasure of the physical plane. Yet that danger is not great for those who in physical life are definitely seeking the things of the Path, if they are persons of advanced type, as they are in a position to realize still higher delights, which have a far greater attraction. The same thing is true of each plane in turn.
Still, the disciple must be on guard not to give up the lower pleasures merely for the sake of relatively higher ones, but always to keep his eye upon his ideal goal, beyond all transitory pleasures. He must not thirst to enjoy the age-long pleasures of the heaven-world, but must give up all that is transitory and personal. While, on
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the one hand, he will not seek to obtain the objects of desire, on the other he will not shrink from the lessons that karma places before him; he will not wish that his field of experience should be other than it is. He knows that it is because nature's laws are unchanging that he can use experience for growth. Were it not for the orderly nature of the world, it would be impossible for the intellect to grow or for man to use his powers at all. So he has no resentment against karma, which is the embodiment of the Law.

Help nature and work on with her; and nature will regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance.
And she will open wide before thee the portals of her secret chambers, lay bare before thy gaze the treasures hidden in the very depths of her pure virgin bosom. Unsullied by the hand of matter, she shows her treasures only to the eye of Spirit ?the eye which never closes, the eye for which there is no veil in all her kingdoms.
Then will she show thee the means and way, the first gate and the second, the third, up to the very seventh. And then, the goal; beyond which lie, bathed in the sunlight of the Spirit, glories untold, unseen by any save the eye of the Soul.
All students of the material sciences arc familiar with the fact that " nature is conquered by obedience ". All the forces that we employ in modern life, such as the pressure of steam or electricity, are examples of our
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working with nature. It is perhaps rather unsympathetic to use the word conquered, when the fact is that all our power in the world is the result of harmony between man and nature. The man in a boat who sets his sail so that he may go against the wind is not overcoming the wind, but is harmonizing his affairs with its laws. By working with the laws man gains in power, not by fighting against them.
The occultist knows that the same principle is true on every plane, and not only with regard to the matter of each world but also to the forms of life that dwell there, high or low in the scale of evolution. Therefore the knowledge of nature's mechanical laws, which has led to so much power and wealth for mankind, represents only one aspect of the harmony that should subsist between the two. A feeling of friendly sympathy towards the animal, the plants and even the minerals, and towards the nature spirits and the devas, is equally important, if not more so, for the progress of man. Nature is composed of life as well as matter, and it is through sympathetic feeling that that life becomes known, and harmonized with human life. To look upon the world as a place full of forbidding entities is the unfortunate custom of our age, but the man who faces life with a feeling of kindliness to all living things will not only see and learn more than others, but will have a smoother passage on life's sea. There is a tradition in India of the " lucky hand " of certain persons who have this sympathy, and for whom plants will grow well when for others they ail. It has also been explained
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many times by authorities in occult science that because of his love for all beings the true yogi or sannyasi may wander among the mountains and in the jungle quite without danger from wild animals or reptiles.
In ordinary human life this sympathy works in many-ways. The modern business man knows that the first requisite for his success is to establish friendliness with those with whom he wants to deal. The same quality is necessary for teaching children, who often regard grownup people as strange, arbitrary beings, not all of their own class, but somewhat foreign, as an earth man might regard one of Mr. Wells' fanciful men from Mars. But when sympathy is established, all that strangeness goes, and real education becomes possible.
The nature spirits are in the same position as the children, except that they are not dependent upon us and can easily avoid our vicinity, as the more pleasing kinds of them usually do when modern civilized man arrives, with his noisy, clumsy and cruel ways, and his unclean, repellant aura and cloud of thought-forms. It is a fact that were men sympathetic with the other kingdoms, did they plant forests and not only destroy them, and did they feel kindly towards nature in general, we should enjoy more equable climate and more successful cultivation. It must, of course, be said that the modern movement in favour of gardens round houses, and trees and flowers even in the roads of our cities, all tends in the right direction, and that in special ways of cultivation of the earth and of particular flowers and fruits and grains and trees, and even animals, men have done much
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to help the work of the nature-spirits. But with more sympathy still better results would have accrued.
This sympathy has occasionally been shown, especially by the poets. Dr. Rabindranath Tagore's essays and poems exhibit it in a very high degree; in fact, the spread of this quality may be regarded almost as his special contribution to modern civilization. Another well known instance is that of the philosopher Emerson who, on returning from his winter lecture tours to his home at Concord, used to shake hands with the lower branches of his trees. He declared that he could feel that the trees were glad at his return, and no doubt that quality of sympathy was a great aid to his inspiration.
Men who live in their gardens, like Luther Burbank of California, often say that they are distinctly conscious of the feeling that comes to them from certain plants bushes and trees. Men in Canada, whose duty calls them to live constantly in the forests?to inspect them, mark trees and do other work?have told me that they feel a life in the woods distinct from that elsewhere, that they know that there are some places and trees which like men, and others which do not.
Such sympathy is perfectly natural. If you feel special love and admiration for a certain human being, there is a tendency on his part to become interested in you and to return the affection. A stage lower, if you are affectionate with an animal it becomes strongly attached to you. Still lower, in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, the same rule obtains, though its effects are less obvious. From this arises the tradition that flowers and
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plants will grow better for some persons than for others, other things being equal. It is personal magnetism that calls it out; and that is what at a higher level we call affection.
There is no need to say anything here about the seven gates mentioned in this passage, for the whole of the third Fragment of this book is taken up with the seven portals, and there we shall study them in detail.

CHAPTER 11 - THE ONE ROAD

There is but one road to the Path; at its very end alone the Voice of the Silence can be heard. The ladder by which the candidate ascends is formed of rungs of suffering and pain; these can be silenced, only by the voice of virtue. Woe then to thee, disciple, if there is one single vice thou hast not left behind; for then the ladder will give way and overthrow thee; its foot rests in the deep mire of thy sins and failings, and ere thou canst attempt to cross this wide abyss of matter thou hast to lave thy feet in waters of renunciation. Beware lest thou should'st set a foot still soiled upon the ladder's lowest rung. Woe unto him who dares pollute one rung with miry feet. The foul and viscous mud will dry, become tenacious, then glue his feet unto the spot; and like a bird caught in the wily fowler's lime, he will be stayed from further progress. His vices will take shape and drag him down. His sins will raise their voices, like as the jackal's laugh and sob after the sun goes down; his thoughts become an army, and bear him off a captive slave.
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C.W.L.?We have seen, in The Masters and The Path, that there are four ways of coming to the beginning of the probationary path: by contact with those ?who are already on the Path; by deep thought; by hearing and reading the sacred word; and by the practice of virtue.1 Then, on the probationary path, there are four qualifications to be attained, of which the last is given in At the Feet of the Master as Love, and it is said that without this the other qualifications are in vain.2
This, then, is the one road to the path proper?the way of love, of unselfishness in thought, word and deed.
All the old selfish habits of body and mind must be overcome, by positive virtue. The word virtue as used here cannot mean mere passive goodness or absence of wrongdoing; it must be taken in its old meaning of strength. Virtues are forms of strength of" the soul. When the soul dominates the personal life it will be seen to be full of such virtue. In the mean time a great battle is necessary. In very many cases the candidate for the Path must bring forth all his determination to stamp out completely any fault of selfishness that he may find in himself in the course of his daily self-examination. This can best be done by picturing a scene in which the fault has been exhibited, and then reconstructing it in the imagination, so that in it the corresponding virtue is shown; then one may dwell on that for a little while, and resolve that henceforth, under such circumstances, the virtue, not the fault, will be expressed.
1 Op. cit., Ch. vi.
2 Volume I, Ch. 24, Liberation, Nirvana and Moksha.
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It is sometimes very hard to overcome habitual faults; hence the frequent mention of suffering and pain. It gives great pain, for example, to the drunkard, to resist "just one more, one last drink ". But if he holds firm to his resolves never to take strong drink again, not even once, in time the suffering will disappear, and he will know a higher kind of pleasure than that which he obtained from the stimulus of drink. It is exactly the same with impure or selfish emotions and thoughts; many a man fails because he dwells upon an unworthy thought "just once more ". It is just that one that he must give up, and refuse to harbour in his mind. To give up their faults people have sometimes to suffer great wounds to their pride. In all these cases humility is a great help, because it makes men willing to change themselves.
Still, there are many whose lives have already been considerably purified, who feel little or nothing of this pain. It has, indeed been suggested that in this passage Aryasanga has exaggerated the suffering. That is not so, but he has expressed it in extreme terms, so that no one will meet with suffering on the Path, expecting the reverse, and all will be ready to pay toll to the past, to face what suffering there is, and to bring it to an end for ever by the practice of virtue. We may remember here the encouraging words of the Gita: " Even if thou art the most sinful of all sinners, yet shalt thou cross over all sin by the raft of wisdom. As the burning fire reduces fuel to ashes, O Arjuna, so doth the fire of wisdom reduce all karmas to ashes."1 And again:
Op. cit., iv, 36-37.
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" Never doth any who worketh righteousness, O beloved, tread the path of woe."1
The necessity of getting rid of vices at the very beginning has been emphasized in all yoga systems, as mentioned before.2 Only when the virtues were firmly established in his character could the student be allowed to pass on to the later steps of the Path, including practices of posture, breathing, control of the senses and meditation. The reason for this demand is that as the pupil advances on the Path the forces of his will and thought become much more powerful than ever before, and there will come times when the ego pours his energy down into the body. If there be still remnants of any vice in the body that energy will give it new strength, so that the fall of the aspirant will be far greater than anything that is possible for one not so far advanced. Powers are powers, for good or ill, so the candidate should purify himself before seeking them, lest he injure others and himself. There is one place on the Path, just after the Second Initiation, where the danger is greatest of all, especially from the vice of pride, as has been explained at length in The Masters and The Path.
Kill thy desires, Lanoo, make thy vices impotent, ere the first step is taken on the solemn journey.
Strangle thy sins, and make them dumb for ever, before thou dost lift one foot to mount the ladder.
1 Ibid., vi, 40. 2 Ante, p. 91.
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Silence thy thoughts and fix thy whole attention on thy Master, whom yet thou dost not see, but whom thou feelest.
Merge into one sense thy senses, if thou would'st be secure against the foe. 'Tis by that sense alone which lies concealed within the hollow of the brain, that the steep path which leadeth to thy Master may be disclosed before thy soul's dim eyes.
Aryasanga's repetition of the injunction to get rid of desires and vices shows the importance which he attached to this part of the work. Not only are any such defects enormously intensified as the powers of the candidate develop, but also his responsibility increases, and he becomes capable of making far more karma than before.
The sixth sense, the mind, has its physical organ in the brain. People do not usually employ this, when faced by the various objects and experiences of life. They live too much in their astral bodies. They "like" certain things, and "dislike" others, quite without reason, quite without considering what they are, and which are really good and bad, or useful and useless. That will not do, of course, for anyone who wants to tread the occult path. He must consider all things dispassionately, and revalue them according to their usefulness to the soul.
In the brain there are' also the organs by means of which direct perception of things beyond the reach of
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the physical senses may be had. The pituitary body is a link between the physical body and the astral body, and so on. In the same hollow in the brain, but a little further back, lies the pineal gland, which is connected directly with the mental body, and serves to bring impressions down from the mental plane. Some people develop the pituitary body first, some the pineal gland? each must follow the method prescribed by his own guru.
Long and weary is the way before thee, O disciple. One single thought about the past that thou hast left behind will drag thee down, and thou wilt have to start the climb anew.
Kill in thyself all memory of past experience. Look not behind or thou art lost.
Once more we find Aryasanga emphasizing the worst aspect of the matter, so that none shall find the path harder than he may have thought it to be before entering upon it. Relatively, that path is not long, when one considers that it is only the last fourteen lives, out of a series of many hundreds or even thousands, which are usually spent between the First and Fifth Initiations. Further, in many cases the work of those fourteen lives is done in but few, taken consecutively, without devachanic interludes?which makes the time short indeed.
It is true that " the road winds uphill all the way", but it need not necessarily be weary. It is when one thinks only of the goal that the journey is weary. A student entering college will find his three or four yean there intensely weary if he is thinking only of getting
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his degree and going out into the world with it, and is not really interested in his studies. But if he has planned out his work, which will bring him naturally to his degree if properly carried out, and if he is really interested in the subjects of his study, he may then forget all about the years that lie ahead, and may have a fascinating time. So also on the Path the work is full of interest for heart and mind, and he who finds it so will make it shorter in fact as well as in appearance than he who cares only for reaching a certain prescribed goal.
It is the same in meditation; some who practise it faithfully feel it to be a tedious thing, but do it all the same, for the sake of its results. Others find it full of interest, and therefore gain much more from it. Let the candidate not think of his own progress on the Path; as so often recommended, let him forget himself and work for the world, and his progress will take care of itself. Self-examination and self-training are necessary, but that is only like preparing and oiling machinery; it should not take much time, the work being the important thing.
It is true that sometimes people find it necessary to force themselves at first along certain lines of work and thought, or meditation, which they feel that they ought to take up. Very well, go on with the dreary task, if such it appears to be, and if the motive is pure, you will soon find that the dreariness departs, a new interest arises, and the work becomes full of delight.
The statement that one single thought about the past can drag the candidate right down to earth again should certainly give pause to anyone who proposes to enter
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the Path, and yet is unwilling to give up some pet vice, however trifling. It is not the act so much as the thought of it that drags one down. Madame Blavatsky says, in The Secret Doctrine:
Purity of mind is of greater importance than purity of body.
. . An act may be performed to which little or no attention is
paid, and it is of comparatively small importance. But if thought
of, dwelt on in the mind, the effect is a thousand times greater.
The thoughts must be kept pure.1
I recollect a story about Colonel Olcott which illustrates this point. A young man who much wanted to live the higher life came to him one day and asked him if he must give up smoking. The Colonel replied: " Well, if you can't you must, but if you can you needn't." Certainly strength of will and purity of thought are of paramount importance, and there is no progress without them, no matter how clean the body; and the Colonel emphasized the fact very successfully. But it might be added also that smoking is a dirty habit; it befouls the bodies, and often causes much annoyance and discomfort to others. The worst of its dirty selfishness physically is that the smoke is made damp with saliva and then sent off to enter other people's lungs. It is a horrible feature of modern life that we are often compelled to contact and breathe smoke which has been so treated.
As to the effect of a thought of a quality belonging to the past, Madame Blavatsky also says:
The student must guard his thoughts. Five minutes' thought may undo the work of five years; and though the five years' work will be run through more rapidly the second time, yet time is lost.*
1 Op. cit., Vol. III, 570. 2 Ibid., p. 573.
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A distinction must be made here between a thought which is merely a floating form which has entered the mind, and thought proper, which is a deliberate act. It is the latter that can do so much harm. An unworthy thought may drift into the mind, but if it is not dwelt upon, encouraged and strengthened, little harm is done.
That one who falls thus may quickly rise again is encouraging. That old Greek allegory in which every time that the hero falls to earth, worsted in the conflict, he gains new strength from it, applies to man. Better that he should win the battle once and for all without falling; but in any case he is destined to triumph ultimately. Much may be learned by the intelligent and willing pupil without bitter experience, just as one may learn that fire is hot without putting one's hand into it; but all that is necessary will be learnt sooner or later in one way or another.
Do not believe that lust can ever be killed out if gratified or satiated, for this is an abomination inspired by Mara. It is by feeding vice that it expands and waxes strong, like to the worm that fattens on the blossom's heart.
The rose must re-become the bud, born of its parent stem, before the parasite has eaten through its heart and drunk its life-sap.
The golden tree puts forth its jewel-buds before its trunk is withered by the storm.
The pupil must regain the child-state he has lost ere the first sound can fall upon his ear.
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Sir Edwin Arnold speaks of Mara, as he is understood by the Buddhists, in vigorous and graphic terms, in connection with the temptation of Buddha just before
His illumination:
But he who is the Prince Of Darkness, Mara?knowing this was Buddha Who should deliver men, and now the hour When he should find the Truth and save the worlds? Gave unto all his evil powers command. Wherefore there trooped from every deepest pit The fiends who war with Wisdom and the Light, Arati, Trishna, Raga, and their crew Of passions, horrors, ignorances, lusts, The brood of gloom and dread; all hating Buddh, Seeking to shake his mind.1
Still, Madame Blavatsky says: " But Mara is also the unconscious quickener of the birth of the Spiritual." The resistance that Mara opposes to the aspirant enables him to develop his strength. An athlete might move his arms up and down much easier without dumbbells than with them, yet he would not develop the same strength so quickly, if at all. That even evil is made use of for good was once illustrated by the remark of a very spiritual man who took a high Initiation. For some time before it he had been terribly maligned, and the important work on which he had set his heart had been spoiled. One day someone offered him a word of sympathy, which was quite unnecessary, for he said: "The fact is, I owe a debt of gratitude to those people who tried to injure me, though I did not realize it at the time; for without their aid I should not yet have taken that Initiation." An ordinary man would have been full of anger or of depression, but in such a man as this 1 The Light of Asia, Book the Sixth.
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Mara calls out an equal strength only of loving sorrow or compassion. Thus may even the greatest enemy become our friend while we are in the way with him.
It is, of course, not the ignorance but the innocence of childhood that is requisite for real spiritual progress. Mere goodness is not progress; it is only preparatory purification. Progress is the development of the ego on its own planes, which, when shown in the personality, appears as strength of character?in will and love and thought. In the three stages of the relation of a pupil to his Master, it is the third and highest that contains the idea of childhood, for he is first a probationary pupil, then an accepted one, and thirdly a Son of the Master.

CHAPTER 12 - THE LAST STEPS

The light from the one Master, the one unfading golden light of Spirit, shoots its effulgent beams on the disciple from the very first.
Its rays thread through the thick, dark clouds of matter.
Now here, now there, these rays illumine it, like sun-sparks light the earth through the thick foliage of the jungle growth. But, O disciple, unless the flesh is passive, head cool, the Soul as firm and pure as flaming diamond, the radiance will not reach the chamber, its sunlight will not warm the heart, nor will the mystic sounds of the akashic heights reach the ear, however eager at the initial stage.
C.W.L.?As the sun is always shining behind the clouds, so is the higher self constantly shedding its beams on the aspirant. The flashes of inspiration and intuition that come now and again into the darkness of our minds in what we call our best moments are derived from that
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high source. It is a wise policy to try to capture those best moments, to hold them in imagination, and to dwell upon them in meditation, and thus to bring the whole life into that diamond-like condition that is mentioned in the text.
With reference to the " mystic sounds of the akashic heights " Madame Blavatsky adds the following footnote:
The mystic sounds, or the melody, heard by the ascetic at the beginning of his cycle of meditation, called Anahatashabda by the Yogis. The Anahata is the fourth of the Chakras.
The fourth centre or chakra is that at the heart. When the consciousness is centred in the heart during meditation it is most susceptible to the influence of the spiritual soul or higher Self. The heart is the centre in the body for the higher triad, atma-buddhi-manas. The head is the seat of the psycho-intellectual man; it has its various functions in seven cavities, including the pituitary body and the pineal gland. He who in concentration can take his consciousness from the brain to the heart should be able to unite kama-manas to the higher manas, through the lower manas, which, when pure and free from kama, is the antahkarana. He will then be in a position to catch some of the promptings of the higher triad. That higher consciousness tries to guide him, through the conscience; he cannot guide it until he is one with buddhi-manas. The foregoing explanation is condensed from notes on some oral teachings
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of Madame Blavatsky, appended to the third volume of The Secret Doctrine.1
Indian tradition on the subject says that when kundalini rises she dissolves the qualities of the various chakras through which she passes and carries their essence upwards. When she reaches the fourth, the heart chakra, the yogi hears the sound from above, called anahata-shabda. Shabda is sound; an-ahata means*' not beaten "; so it is?that sound which is made without beating things together. The term is therefore symbolical of that which is above the planes of personality. The practitioner's touch with the higher triad begins at this point. Those who want to increase the contact between the higher and lower manas should not dwell in meditation on anything below it. The following meditation, translated from the Gheranda Samhita, is one of those prescribed for the heart centre. It illustrates the way in which the yogi gradually withdraws his attention from his surroundings and concentrates it upon his Ideal.
Let him find in his heart a broad ocean of nectar,
Within it a beautiful island of gems, Where the sands are bright golden and sprinkled with jewels,
Fair trees line its shores with a myriad of blooms, And within it rare bushes, trees, creepers and rushes,
On all sides shed fragrance most sweet to the sense.
Who would taste of the sweetness of divine completeness Should picture therein a most wonderful tree,
On whose far-spreading branches grow fruit of all fancies? The four mighty Teachings that hold up the world,
There the fruit and the flowers know no death and no sorrows, While to them the bees hum and soft cuckoos sing.
1 Op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 582-4.
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Now, under the shadow of that peaceful arbour
A temple of rubies most radiant is seen, And he who shall seek there will find on a seat rare,
His dearly Beloved, enshrined therein, Let him dwell with his mind, as his Teacher defines,
On that Divine Form, with His modes and His signs.1
Unless thou hear'st thou canst not see. Unless thou seest, thou canst not hear. To hear and see, this is the second stage.
We have already considered the significance of seeing and hearing.2 Unless the candidate is responsive to the inner voice, that is, unless he understands spiritual laws, he will never see the outer things as they are. He must learn to look at the things of matter with the eyes of the spirit, as a Master once expressed it. When he sees the material or outward things in that way, he will more and more understand the inner voice. This is like the alternation which is necessary between meditation and experience. To go through life in a busy way, without stopping to meditate upon it, is to miss much of the significance of its events; one should spare a little time each day to let the inner light play upon them. On the other hand, to shut oneself in one's study and give one's whole time to thought would yield little profit; in that wav a man would acquire endless misconceptions, for experience is required to correct and enlarge our meditation. It is the balanced interplay of the inner and the outer that the pupil must seek. He must aim to be
1 See Concentration, Ch. x. 2 Ante, p. 59

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harmonized?to use the expression repeated again and again in the Gita.
The inner and outer worlds correspond perfectly to one another, point for point in God's system. Says Madame Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine:
In the realm of hidden forces, an audible sound is but a subjective colour, and a perceptible colour, but an inaudible sound.1
Colour is spoken of here, not form; it makes the statement more accurate, for we really see only colours, not forms.
It is impossible to say with any certainty why this state of hearing and seeing harmonized together is called the second stage; We cannot tell what system of stages Aryasanga was expounding, for a veil is drawn over his instructions at this point. The line of stops marks a missing portion dealing with the third stage. When the teaching emerges again (after this hiatus) we find Aryasanga dealing with later stages exactly as the Toga Sutras give them, namely (5) pratyahara, entire control of the senses, (6) dharana, concentration, (7) dhyana, meditation, and (8) samadhi, contemplation.
When the disciple sees and hears, and when he smells and tastes, eyes closed, ears shut, with mouth and nostrils stopped; when the four senses blend and ready are to pass into the fifth, that of the inner touch?then into stage the fourth he hath passed on.
1 Of. cit, Vol. III, p. 508.
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There are some yogis who do literally stop the mouth and nose when going into meditation or trance. The fingers are so placed as to keep the eyes, the nostrils and the mouth closed, and these men have also trained the tongue so that they can turn it upwards and backwards into the cavity above the mouth, and thus prevent the inlet of air. This is called khechari mudra, as practised by certain hatha yogis. It is not done by the raja yogis, and is not recommended here. There is a stage at which the pupil can close his eyes and reproduce within himself or experience in the astro-mental region the sensations of smell, taste, sight and touch. Now, in order to withdraw himself to a still higher state he must attend to the inner touch, which is hearing. By giving his attention to the sound within, and tracing it into its finer and finer recesses, he brings himself to the point where he may practise pratyahara, the restraint of all sensation, the inner as well as the outer, that of the hall of learning as well as that of the hall of ignorance. This practice is described in the next verse:
And in the fifth, O slayer of thy thoughts, all these again have to be killed beyond re-animation.
The attention is quite commonly withdrawn to a large extent by most people when, for example, they are especially interested in a book; they do not then respond to the impressions made upon the senses by the various odours, sights and sounds surrounding them. To put oneself into that condition at will is pratyahara, and it is a preparation for really successful meditation. The
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killing beyond re-animation means nothing more than that the senses, like good dogs, will lie down when told to do so, and will not get up again until they are called. There is a foot-note at this point, as follows:
This means that in the sixth stage of development which in the occult system, is Dharana, every sense as an individual faculty has to be " killed " (or paralysed) on this plane, passing into and merging with the seventh sense, the most spiritual.
Dharana is the sixth step of yoga, as given in the Toga Sutras. It is that concentration of mind which we have already studied,1 and it follows upon pratyahara. Since mind or chitta is regarded as a sixth sense, when dharana is complete and that mind thereby ceases to function in relation to the things of the external world, intuition, here called the seventh sense, arises. Life teaches us in two ways, by tuition that the world gives us, and by intuition, the working of the inner self. As men proceed on their evolutionary pilgrimage, their intuition increases and they do not depend so much as before on the instruction that the world gives. This is only another way of saying that the man who uses his inner powers can learn much more from a little experience than other men can from a great deal. Because of the activity "of his innate intelligence the developed man is able to see the great significance of even small things; but the undeveloped mind is full of curiosity. It is constantly eager for novelty, because, not being
1 Ante, p. 40.
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good at thinking, it soon exhausts the obvious significance of common place things. This mind is the one that craves miracles in connection with its religious experiences as it is blind to the countless miracles that surround it all the time.
Withhold thy mind from all external objects, all external sights. Withhold internal images, lest on thy Soul-light a dark shadow they should cast.
Thou art now in Dharana, the sixth stage.
In the practice of concentration it is always necessary to consider both the external and the internal sources of interruption. One must prevent the mind from taking an interest in any external thing, for if this is not done, the slightest sound will awaken its curiosity and spoil the concentration. Also one must stop the mind from bringing up within itself images relating to the past or the future; during the practice one must be completely uninterested in what happened yesterday or what is likely to happen to-morrow. When this concentration has been successfully achieved, the next and seventh stage of practice begins, which is called dhyana, that: is, meditation.
When thou hast passed into the seventh, O happy one, thou shalt perceive no more the sacred Three, for thou shalt have become that Three thyself. Thyself and mind, like twins upon a line, the star which is thy goal burns overhead. The Three that dwell in glory and in bliss ineffable, now in the world of Maya have lost their names.
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They have become one star, the fire which is the Upadhi of the flame.
And this, O Yogi of success, is what men call Dhyana, the right precursor of Samadhi.
Passing from dharana to dhyana, from concentration to meditation, the aspirant on this Path enters the buddhic consciousness. That is then " thyself". The mind here spoken of is the higher manas, for the lower manas has been silenced. The manasic principle has been raised into that of buddhi, so the two are like " twins upon a line ", the two lower corners of a triangle, as is indicated by the following footnote:
Every stage of development in Raja Yoga is symbolized by a geometrical figure. This one is the sacred triangle and precedes Dharana. The A is the sign of the high chelas, while another kind of triangle is that of high Initiates. It is the symbol " I " discoursed upon by Buddha and used by Him as a symbol of the embodied form of Tathagata when released from the three methods of the Prajna. Once the preliminary and lower stages passed, the disciple sees no more the A but the?, the abbreviation of the?, the full septenary. Its true form is not given here, as it is almost sure to be pounced upon by some charlatans and desecrated in its use for fraudulent purposes.
The star that burns overhead is the atma. But it refers also, as Madame Blavatsky says in another footnote, to the star of Initiation, which shines over the head
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of the Initiate. As the object to be attained is the Fourth Initiation, that of the Arhat, it is the star of that Initiation, which leads to the atmic or nirvanic plane, that is his goal.
At this stage, instead of looking upwards in thought, and regarding the higher triad (atma-buddhi-manas) as above oneself, as was the case heretofore, one finds oneself to be in the buddhic state, manas being united with buddhi as manas-taijasi. The " meditation" of the Initiate at this stage will ultimately lead on to a further union of buddhi and atma. Upon the attainment of that union the higher triad will have become one star, described in a foot-note as " the basis, Upadhi, of the ever unreachable flame, so long as the ascetic is still in this life ". The fuel is the personality; the fire is this triple spirit; the flame is the Monad. Even the Adept, while remaining in physical incarnation, does not enter fully into the state of the Monad. Says Madame Blavatsky:
Dhyana is the last stage before the final on this earth unless one becomes a full Mahatma. As said already, in this state the Raja Yogi is yet spiritually conscious of self, and the working of his higher principles. One step more, and he will be on the plane beyond the seventh, the fourth according to some schools. These, after the practice of Pratyahara?a preliminary training, in order to control one's mind and thoughts?count Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi, and embrace the three under the generic name of Sannyama. Samadhi is
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the state in which the ascetic loses the consciousness of every individuality, including his own. He becomes the All.
It is significant that the three should lose their names. They are not forms, for their region is that of consciousness. The lower planes of the personality are planes of form; then come the planes of name or " meaning ", but the Monad is beyond name, beyond what men call consciousness.
The text goes on to indicate that, having attained to the practice of samadhi, the aspirant has now become an Arhat, and has reached the goal of the endeavour discussed in this Fragment.

CHAPTER 13 - THE GOAL

And now thyself is lost in Self, thyself onto Thyself, merged in that Self from which thou first didst radiate.
Where is thy individuality, Lanoo, where the Lanoo himself? It is the spark lost in the fire, the drop within the ocean, the ever-present ray become the All and the eternal radiance.
And now, Lanoo, thou art the doer and the witness, the radiator and the radiation, light in the sound, and the sound in the light.
C.W.L.?As a man rises in life to a realization that the personality is merely "it", and thus raises his centre of consciousness to the higher Self, so there comes the time when he discovers as a fact of experience that that consciousness is only "you", not "I".1 When that comes about, at or about the Fourth Initiation, the lower self becomes lost in the true Self, and what the man has thought or felt to be his individuality goes. And just as he who has achieved the buddhic state recognizes and accepts the Consciousness of others as
1 See ante, pp. 72, 81.
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his own, and feels their joys and sorrows as his own; so now does this man find only one true " I " in all.
The distinction between the realization obtained by the initiate of lower degree, and that of the Arhat, between the consciousness of the buddhic plane and that of the atmic, has been given in the Bhagavad-Gita. In the former state the man sees the same Self equally dwelling in all beings; in the latter he sees that all are in the one Self.
This, according to Toga Sutras, is the state of kaivalya, of " oneness ", of freedom, on the full attainment of which the distinction between seer and seen, between subject and object, is destroyed.
Thou art acquainted with the five impediments, O blessed one. Thou art their conqueror, the master of the sixth, deliverer of the four modes of truth.
The light that falls upon them shines from thyself, O thou who wast disciple, but art Teacher now.
And of these modes of truth:
Hast thou not passed through knowledge of all misery?truth the first?
Hast thou not conquered the Maras' king at Tu, the portal of assembling?truth the second?
Hast thou not sin at the third gate destroyed, and truth the third attained?
Hast thou not entered Tau, the path that leads to knowledge?the fourth truth?
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Madame Blavatsky adds:
The four modes of truth are, in Northern Buddhism: Eu, suffering or misery; Tu, the assembling of temptations; Mu, their destructions; and Tau, the Path. The " five impediments " are the knowledge of misery, truth about human frailty, oppressive restraints, and the absolute necessity of separation from all the ties of passion, and even of desires. The " Path of salvation " is the last one.
There are the Four Noble Truths taught to the world by the Lord Buddha. These were Sorrow, Sorrow's Cause, Sorrow's Ceasing and the Way. These have been put before the Western world with wonderful beauty and accuracy in Sir Edwin Arnold's matchless poem, The Light of Asia, from which the following verses are quoted. But all who seek inspiration on the Path should not fail to read the whole work.
Ye that will tread the Middle Road, whose course Bright Reason traces and soft Quiet smoothes;
Ye who will take the high Nirvana-way, List the Four Noble Truths.
The First Truth is of Sorrow. Be not mocked!
Life which ye prize is long-drawn agony: Only its pains abide; its pleasures are
As birds which light and fly.
Ache of the birth, ache of the helpless days,
Ache of hot youth and ache of manhood's prime:
Ache of the chill grey years and choking death, These fill your piteous time.
Sweet is fond Love, but funeral-flames must kiss
The breasts which pillow and the lips which cling
Gallant is warlike Might, but vultures pick The joints of chief and King.
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Beauteous is Earth, but all its forest-broods Plot mutual slaughter, hungering to liv^;
Of sapphire are the skies, but when men cry Famished, no drops they give.
Ask of the sick, the mourners, ask of him
Who tottereth on his staff, lone and forlorn,
" Liketh thee life? "?these say the babe is wise That weepeth, being born.
The Second Truth is Sorrow's Cause. What grief Springs of itself and springs not of Desire?
Senses and things perceived mingle and light Passion's quick spark of fire:
So flameth Trishna, lust and thirst of things.
Eager ye cleave to shadows, dote on dreams; A false Self in the midst ye plant, and make
A world around which seems;
Blind to the heights beyond, deaf of the sound
Of sweet airs breathed from far past Indra's sky;
Dumb to the summons of the true life kept For him who false puts by.
So grow the strifes and lusts which make earth's war, So grieve poor cheated hearts and flow salt tears:
So wax the passions, envies, angers, hates; So years chase blood-stained years
With wild ted feet. So, where the grain should grow
Spreads the biran-weed with its evil root And poisonous blossoms; hardly good seeds find
Soil where to fall and shoot;
And, drugged with poisonous drink, the soul departs, And, fierce with thirst to drink, Karma returns;
Sense-struck again the sodden Self begins, And new deceits it earns.
The Third is Sorrow's Ceasing. This is peace
To conquer love of self and lust of life, To tear deep-rooted passion from the breast,
To still the inward strife;
For love to clasp Eternal Beauty close;
For glory to be Lord of self; for pleasure To live beyond the gods; for countless wealth
To lay up lasting treasure
.
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Of perfect service rendered, duties done
In charity, soft speech, and stainless days: These riches shall not fade away in life, Nor any death dispraise.
Then Sorrow ends, for Life and Death have ceased How should lamps flicker when their oil is spent?
The old sad count is clear, the new is clean; Thus hath a man content.
The Fourth Truth is The Way. It openeth wide Plain for all feet to tread, easy and near,
The Noble Eightfold Path; it goeth straight To peace and refuge. Hear!
Manifold tracks lead to yon sister-peaks
Around whose snows the gilded clouds are curled;
By steep or gentle slopes the climber comes Where breaks that other world.
Strong limbs may dare the rugged road which storms, Soaring and perilous, the mountain's breast;
The weak must wind from slower ledge to ledge, With many a place of rest.
So is the Eightfold Path which brings to peace;
By lower or by upper heights it goes. The firm soul hastes, the feeble tarries. All
Will reach the sunlit snows.1
The five impediments in the way of the candidate for Arhatship may be taken in various forms. They are the five mentioned by Madame Blavatsky in the footnote just quoted, or they are the first five fetters, or they are the five kleshas mentioned in the Toga Sutras, and already discussed.2
And now, rest 'neath the Bodhi tree, which is perfection of all knowledge, for, know, thou art the master of Samadhi?the state of faultless vision.
1 Op. cit., Book the Eighth. 2 Ante, pp. 49-52.
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Bebold! thou hast become the light, thou hast become the sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art thyself the object of thy search: the voice unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, the seven sounds in one, the Voice of the Silence.
Aura Tat Sat.
The termination Aum Tat Sat is one of the Maha-vakyams or " great sayings" of the Hindus. The meaning of Aum we have already considered.1 Tat refers to the Supreme. Philosophically, the pronouns he and she are unsuitable to refer to the Supreme, so Tat, meaning "That", is employed. Beyond "it" and "you" is That, which is "I". So the expression means that it is That which is the Red. All good works begin and end with this thought.

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Copyright (c) 2005-2006 by Anand Gholap