Theosophy is an extremely old theory of the Universe and of Man. It starts with the idea that the Universe and Man are primarily spiritual existences; that what we call spirit and matter are not really two and in antagonism, but are one substance in different stages of evolution. If you go back to the beginning of our present Universe you will find as you go backward that life becomes more and more spiritual in its manifestations, that is to say, the denser forms of manifestation are later in time than the more subtle and ethereal forms. But the principle of the Universe is Life, and not lifeless matter or energy; primarily life and consciousness are at the core of the Universe, but this body issues forth in various forms of matter, the forms becoming denser and grosser as evolution proceeds, and that finally when this first stage, the plane so to speak of the Universe, is complete, the whole is ready to start along the plane of further evolution. You have a Universe manifested in seven different forms of matter, subtle at the beginning, denser at the end, and, so to speak, arranged in seven different stages or, as we say, seven different planes of manifestation. To take a very rough image, to put to you by physical analogy what I mean, you might have in a chemical experiment a receiver that appeared to be empty, you might subject that receiver to constantly increasing cold. As you lowered the temperature the apparently empty receiver would soon be filled with a delicate mist; as you continued to lower the temperature, that mist would gradually assume the form of definite vapour, then of definite liquid, and further on of solid. You would have but the one substance right through, but you would have had it manifested at different degrees of density according to the conditions under which it was manifested, and so we say that the Universe is but of one substance essentially, but is manifested in different forms according to the conditions in which this substance has been bodied forth. I am simply putting to you the statement without for a moment giving the arguments with which it is supported. I will ask you simply to have clearly before your mind this conception of the Universe in seven different stages or planes of various degrees of density, so far as what we call matter is concerned. Each of these planes has life manifestations suitable to the plane on which they are manifested; whether or not the organisms of one plane are conscious of the organisms of the other will depend on the power of sensation possessed by those organisms. If you take Man as you have him now he comes by is physical sense into contact with the physical plane of the Universe. He is able to see because the molecules of the eye can vibrate in unison with those waves of ether that impinge on the mechanism of the eye, he is able to hear because the organ of hearing is so disposed that it vibrates in unison with the waves of air. He becomes sensible of the material universe without him because his body is able to vibrate in unison or in response to the various physical vibrations of the physical universe with which it is surrounded.
Let me now take the next stage. Man, like the Universe, consists of seven principles in seven different stages of this manifesting spirit-matter or substance. We say that these seven principles existent in man are correlated to the corresponding plane of existence in the Universe, and that just because he has in himself these seven different stages of existence he is able to investigate the whole Universe around him, becoming conscious of each plane in the Universe by virtue of the corresponding principle in himself. So that in the theosophical conception of Man and the Universe you have two images, so to speak, that respond the one to he other, as the image of Man's physical body might be reflected in the mirror before which he stands. He can know the Universe because he is himself the Universe in miniature, and as he develops in himself each different principle of his nature he is able to investigate the plane of the Universe to which that principle in himself responds. Now, it is by virtue of this fact of man's nature that knowledge becomes possible of these different planes. Take for a moment again the body: you can investigate the physical plane of existence by your physical body, but beyond that physical plane you cannot go with your bodily senses. Now, for a moment, as an hypothesis, suppose that there is a subtler form of matter than the matter that composes your bodies, it is not at least an impossible hypothesis, science is always discovering rarer and rarer forms of energy, and the latest discovery is not susceptible to the ordinary senses. There are light waves which are too rapid for the molecules of the eye to vibrate in response to when they strike upon them. The eye is, therefore, unconscious of their existence. It is idle to say that these light waves do not exist; their existence has been proved by scientific men, partly by observing them as they affect other forms of life and chemical combinations, and partly by subjecting them to experiments which, by changing the rate of vibration, render them susceptible to our senses; therefore, they do exist, as a matter of fact. Now, the Theosophist says that the next set of vibrations, too subtle and too rapid to make any impression on the physical body of man, are on the Astral Plane. It is possible to develop in Man a form of nervous sensitiveness which will enable him to respond to those vibrations, just as a physical body responds to the air. You can throw Man into a special nervous condition which will render him far more sensitive than he is normally; when he is thrown into that condition you will have evolved a sensitiveness that responds to those more rapid and ethereal vibrations, and then those vibrations become as real to him as light is to ourselves. That condition is the condition variously known as hypnotic trance, or mesmeric trance, or condition of conscious clairvoyance. In America, where the climatic conditions are different, people are evolving normally this increased sensitiveness to peculiar external conditions. In England, what is called the "psychic" is comparatively rare; they are not unknown, but they are regarded as "cranks." In America, where the air is brighter and drier, where the conditions of life are more rapid and the nervous system has become more tense, you have the psychic development carried on to a much greater extent and developed among a much larger number of people than in Europe at the present time. When we want to obtain these conditions here, we mostly do it by shutting the ordinary senses and by making the body impervious to the impressions of the physical universe outside. You render the person blind, deaf, and insensible to touch from without When a person is thrown into the mesmeric trance, you may beat a gong in his ear without his hearing it, you may flash the electric light into his eyes without his seeing it, you may run needles into him or subject him to shocks from an electric battery, and the most delicate apparatus of the investigator will not indicate any response to these conditions of stimulus from without. I am putting a matter of knowledge; this is a fact testified to over and over again by every scientific man who has investigated hypnotic phenomena.
When the body is in this condition, closed to every ordinary stimulus from without, you obtain a completely new set of results--the patient is more keenly alive to the person who has hypnotised him than he is normally alive to the persons who surround him in ordinary life. That one person can communicate with him and produce extraordinary results. He can make him describe objects that have no existence outside the thought power of the hypnotiser. He will place an imaginary object in his hands, so that the man cannot put his hands together, thinking they are stopped by the object he is holding; he will describe elaborate pictures on a blank sheet of paper, those pictures hang no sort of existence so far as the ordinary eyes of the unhypnotised person can discover. These facts point us to a whole plane of existence of which we are normally unconscious, and the theosophist will tell you you have transferred the consciousness of this person on to the Astral Plane, where you are dealing with matter invisible to the normal senses and with vibrations of matter too rapid for the ordinary senses to perceive or respond to. When you have passed into this Astral condition, you are able to see with fresh sense of sight and to hear with fresh organs of hearing, and these organs of sight and of hearing function under laws which are very different from the ordinary law under which matter works in its grosser manifestations. You can see to a distance which otherwise would be impossible, and you can see through objects impervious to the ordinary eye. You can take a board an inch and a half thick, you can place this in front of the eyes of the hypnotised person, and on the far side of the board you can place ribbons of different colours, the hypnotised person will see the ribbons and tell you the colour of each ribbon. Under these conditions, the sight that you have evolved in your patient is a sight which is not trammelled by the ordinary material conditions under which you are accustomed to let your organ of sight function. There is nothing in that particularly remarkable, because, if you are dealing with vibrations so subtle that they can pass through interstices of gross matter, then you have the conditions of eyesight present under the responsiveness of more delicate sense, so that you are still within at least the analogy of science when you are dealing with this second plane. When you go a step further you come to the plane of the emotions and the feelings, and you can transfer man's consciousness to that plane of existence, so as to render him unconscious of an injury received to the body. Take the case of a soldier wounded in battle. Any soldier thus wounded will tell you that it is not until the rush of the fight is over that he becomes conscious of bodily pain, but, if the consciousness were then in his physical body, he would know then the pain; but consciousness has passed from the physical plane to the plane of emotion, and not till the passion is stilled will he recognise the pain.
Beyond this, there is the plane of the mind. The plane of the mind is still a plane of matter, for I will ask you to remember that there is no essential difference between mind and matter; they are one substance manifesting under different conditions or planes. Mind is still far subtler, far more ethereal, but it is as real, and we say that the mind functions on that plane; that, when you think, your intelligence is a force or an energy that is working on this mental plane and that its workings there are as perceptible to the mental organism as any workings on the physical plane are perceptible to material eyesight; that, when you think, you create a thought image and that that image may be rendered visible under certain conditions of enormously increased sensitiveness and that it is possible and has been done to so develop the mind element in Man that you can separate it fromthe brain organism through which it normally functions, and free it from its restraint. You can make it more active and more potent, just as your limbs are more active if you take off them a weight of chains. People can develop the power of transmitting thought through this thought-medium from intelligence to intelligence without the ordinary material mechanism that you normally employ for that purpose.
But I am still only dealing with things that Science is beginning to dream about. Twenty years ago, to talk about conveying ideas without the use of written messages would have been to render yourself a candidate for the nearest lunatic asylum; but only a few weeks ago, before that eminently respectable body the British Association, it was confessed that here there was room for investigation, showing that such communication was likely to be possible, and Professor Lodge even said that it might be taken as almost having been proved possible. It has been proved over and over again, and, just as your scientific men scoffed at Mesmer and fifty years later invented the new name of Hypnotism, so your science to-day is beginning to recognise the necessity of investigation into this new means of communication and this working of the intelligence in subtler realms than hitherto it has admitted.
All the fuss made during the last week about the possibility of communication in various fashions is nothing more than a mere outcry, but people imagine they have got hold of a miracle. If you installed an electric wire across the Desert of Sahara, you might very much astonish some of the natives by communicating across the desert in a way that they would not understand, or you might even flash a message by utilising the sunbeam as the method. It is only going a few steps farther to be able to control other forces without your physical apparatus, and even without the sunbeam to help you. How people would have laughed a century ago to hear scientific men say they would be able to converse by means of a wire! It is further, I admit, along the analogy of scientific thought when you are able to deal with subtler currents, but no more miraculous than any other form of dealing with natural forces, and it is only ignorance that cries out "miracle" or "fraud"--miracle where there is the superstitious to account for the unknown--fraud where there is the gross ignorance that denies the possibility of further advance, and because the nineteenth century is so wise and thinks that none can be wiser.
Let me here allude to one phrase which will show you at least in the thought of those who believe in the existence and the control of those forces how thoroughly natural they are. Some years ago in India, when H. P. Blavatsky was there, she was utilising a number of those forces in connection with her Teachers. On one occasion she was asked to bring about a certain. result. I forget whether it was the conveyance of a letter or some other object. She was asked to convey that object to a particular spot within a particular cushion, and she said she would try to do it. Later on in the same day, talking over this matter, she was asked, "Will you change the place that we have already asked you to deal with and put it in another place?" She asked, and the answer came, "We have set the currents to the place where we were asked to set them, and it is easier therefore to send the object to that spot." You set those forces going and, unless you are a miracle-worker, which the Theosophist does not believe in, you must work under natural conditions. If you have started your forces along a line, that is the line along which you must follow; if you want to alter your result, you must alter the cause by which your result is to be brought about. When you begin to learn anything about these forces, you find you are in a world of law as strict as that of a chemist; you can no more produce a result which is not within the law than your electrician can produce an effective spark from the machine if the atmosphere is charged with moisture. It is this side of Theosophy which tends to prove most attractive to those who are simply curious for a new sensation. .They don't care twopence about the philosophy, they care even less about the Theosophy, they want something that will sell their papers; something they don't understand is the one thing that they want. In the Daily Chronicle all that I told them about the Mahatmas was put down.*1 They carefully cut out what I said about the results ethically of the teaching of these same Mahatmas. (Shame!) I don't say it is a shame; I am very glad to get half of it in; the great difficulty that every new theory has is to get a hearing at all; when they came to the end of the column, there was a battle or a murder or something, so my other half had to be omitted. As far as the Chronicle is concerned, it has acted in a most fair and just fashion and has given a fair hearing to both sides. I am not putting that in any spirit of complaint, but as showing you one of the disadvantages under which really serious people labour when they are dealing with a philosophy that has a side that appeals to curiosity and the desire for experiment and what is known as phenomenal, but which has to us a far more serious side in its bearing on the progress of the race.
Let me show you how this view of Man and the view of the Universe passes onward into our philosophy. These discoveries about mind--the power of mind to make thought images, to transfer by the subtle forces under its control ideas from place to place--we say that these show that every man has in him the same power of creation as that universal mind of which we say the Universe at large is the manifestation. I don t mean by creation making something out of nothing--I mean by creation utilising the various forms of matter around you to produce a new result, just as you say the artist creates a statue, just as you say the musician creates the harmony when he by the efforts of his genius gives some great opera to the world, so I speak of creation when by the subtle forces of the mind you utilise the forces and the material around you to bring about certain results that you have made up your mind to effect.
Man is essentially a thinker, and that thinker is imperishable and eternal. We say that the thinker is the real man, and that the body is the instrument the thinker uses: a more or less good instrument as may happen, so that the brain, through which the intelligence or the thinker normal functions, may be a better or worse instrument for the expression of that thinker's thoughts, but always an instrument by which he must work on the material plane, and only as he is able to transcend that plane can he work in the subtler media of which I have been speaking.
We say that the speaker passes from incarnation to incarnation, moulding and building as he goes his own future and the future of the world. We say that in every thought that you think you create a thought image on the mental plane and that the whole of your life is a constant action of creation of these thought images, that these images persist, and that during life you are constantly adding to them, that they act and re-act on each other like any other forces, and that they build up the human character; that your character is made by your thinking, and the modus operandi of making it is that every thought creates a form on the plane of thought, and that the aggregate of these forms working upon each other makes the character of the man at the end of his life-experience. We say that that mental thought image, that is the outcome of the life thinking, persists after the death of the body, that it does not depend on the form of matter you call physical , it depends on the subtler form of matter I have been speaking of, and of which Science is beginning to get evidence in thought transference. When the time comes for the thinking principle or the thinker to again clothe itself in material body, this thought image, which is the outcome of the previous experience, is the mould or the matrix in which that physical body will be built, so that what you call the character with which a man is born, the tendencies that every child has when it comes into the world, the tendencies to act one way rather than the other, to be quick or to be slow, that all these tendencies that you speak of as inborn character are the natural and inevitable results of the thinkings of past incarnations which have made a mould of subtle matter into which the grosser matter of the material body is builded.
If this is true, then its bearing on life and conduct is enormous, because it means that everyone of you is creating at the present time his own future and the future of the world. If you are thinking selfish and evil thoughts you are making a form of matter that outlives your physical body that keeps the form that you imprint upon it and into which the physical molecules of your future life will indisputably be moulded so that those who think selfish thoughts habitually will in their next incarnation be born with a selfish character, so that what a man is now is the record of what he has been in his past, and the true life of the man is in the thought and not in the act. Whether a man is a thief or a murderer depends on opportunity. It is not every thief that gets put into jail. The thief is the man whose tendencies are thievish and who tries to get that which he has no right to; whether that thievish tendency works out in act depends upon the opportunity, if he has the chance he will be a thief in act; but his moral value depends on the thought. He is judged by the thought and not by the act. Many a thief in Holloway Jail is not as deep-dyed a robber as the man who poses through life as a splendid character. This bearing on our theory of right is to us the most important part; that is what we call Theosophy: the great central truth of the Universe and Man. And this doctrine of Reincarnation is not only the basis of our ethics as regards the individual man, but the foundation of our belief in Universal Brotherhood: it implies the essential equality of Man.
The differences in material condition are mere outward accidents and do not touch the inner self, whether a man be prince or pauper, whether sage or sinner, the essential unity of humanity remains, and makes them brothers in fact, whatever the dissimilitude of the outer garb, and this is the basis of human brotherhood. What matters it to you and to me that in this particular life there may be an apparent difference between us? We are one in that we are human, and the intelligent thinker is the same for all, although in different stages of evolution, and it is quite possible that the man whom you despise as stupid, as profligate, as vile, may be a human being further in evolution than yourself; although for the moment he may be under passing disadvantages. The progress may be clogged for a moment, although he may be advanced in the whole evolutionary cycle. The passing nature through which he has to work may be some gross tendencies inherited from a past that he has not conquered. It might well be that such a person is only under temporary obscuration, and is really a far nobler type than the man who judges and despises him, and who may not have travelled as far along the road as the one for whom he feels contempt. Theosophy teaches you o be careful in your judgment of your fellows: you may say a person is repulsive, covered over with some horrid skin disease, better so than have the disease driven in so that he becomes a source of infection; so many a man in the outer vices may be working off the symptoms of evil in him, and may come out the nobler. I say that because sometimes you find acts of the utmost heroism in those who have seemed even the most degraded. We tell you that no man is wholly evil, that at the root of things man is good, and not evil, that he will work through the evil to the light; though he is bad to-day, do not make his road rougher by putting your hatred to keep him down, give him the hand of help to lift him upward and so live through the vice which makes him hateful to the many to-day; and that is the ethical side of our teaching, but it depends upon the philosophy. You cannot work it out in that fashion unless you accept the central doctrine of reincarnation, and you have no reason to accept that unless you can work it from plane to plane. When you can prove intelligence working apart from your material organism you have taken the great step which makes the whole of our theory intelligible.
We, who are Theosophists, do not encourage people to rush hastily into a mass of experiments in which they are very likely to lose their heads and destroy their nerves. I am not what is normally called a Spiritualist, because I think that Spiritualists make a mistake in the deductions from their phenomena. A large number of the results they get are genuine, though there is a large amount of fraud as well. But, unless you study the subject with knowledge, you are likely to ruin your brain and your nerves. The attitude of reception to all outside influences which is necessary for mediumship--because you must render yourself specially susceptible--that study persisted in month after month brings about an abnormal condition which is likely to ruin the health of the person who subjects himself to it. And so with hypnotic experiments: you may very easily destroy both nervous system and moral character by playing with forces whose management you do not understand. Now, what is necessary before you begin to experiment is study: study the theory before you practise. You would not let a young lad loose in a laboratory to put together whatever compounds he might choose; you would say, "You must not try these compounds until your knowledge of them and the laws under which they work is such that you can make your experiments without laying the laboratory and the houses all around in fragments." When a person comes and says, "I want to know this experiment," we say, "No; if you want to know you won't mind the trouble of studying." The curiosity which runs out to see the Queen, or a jumping flea, or a fat woman, is not the kind we want for this work. We quite admit that you can get knowledge of many of the occult arts without moral character, you can become a mesmerist without the slightest attempt to control your passions, but we say that those of us who are studying the matter seriously won't help you to do it. Find out what you can, but don't ask us--who have pledged ourselves to serve the race before everything else, who have pledged ourselves to utter subjugation of self before we place our hands on one of these forces, who have proved the truth of the pledge by living lives of self-denying labour for the people for years before we tried to study these things at all--don't ask us to take you into the occult laboratory and enable you to experiment with the most explosive substances before we know you will use them for service and not for self.
Take the ordinary man: he loves his wife and his children more than the children in the gutter, but he must not be an occultist while he has one love for a human being which will make him unjust to anyone else. As long as he would rather serve his own child than the child in the gutter, so long he has no right to use these occult powers: he night use them to serve his own child to the destruction of others. The claim on you is the claim of want, and not the claim of personal affection; and if the gutter child is starving, that child has first claim upon you because his need is greater. I don't say that this is the view that the mass of the people should take--it is not. But you cannot enter into the occult school until your love for the race has become as pure, as passionate and as self-denying as your present love for wife or child, and until that be so, take the evolution of the race as it goes but do not claim to climb the mountain up which only those can climb who have thrown every personal desire aside. All the race will come to these powers in due time; every son of man will be born into this heritage of absolute royalty over Nature, but he has got to evolve into it, and if he wants to evolve much faster than the race, he must pay the price; and the price is, to live the impersonal life, so that he may be a safe custodian of those tremendous powers of Nature. That is the school through which everyone has to go, and I know no reason why a curious person should escape it more than anyone else. It won't do him any good to escape it, for if he happens to be a person of psychic development, you will have given him the clue to get mastery of that power and he can use it, not for a harmless purpose, but for the mischievous purpose of slaying an enemy. Already you are beginning to learn something of the doctrines of hypnotism, that is the very lowest of those powers possessed by the occultist; yet hypnotism has been used for criminal suggestion, and the true criminal has escaped, because there is no law which can touch him. Is it altogether so foolish then, this secrecy?
People say they will not believe me. I don't mind whether you believe me or not. A fact of Nature does not alter whether you believe it or not. My only reason for ever mentioning the letters from Mahatmas in public was, not to show that letters could be precipitated, but to show that my friend was not the forger she was stated to be. I have had letters from the same person, and it proves that she did not write them. If the writing was the same, it was not the hand of H. P. Blavatsky, therefore she did not forge that writing. It was a perfectly fair point to make in defence of a woman who has made my life all that is worth living.
I have had letter after letter from good people, saying, "You are deserting the poor." I deserting the poor? I am learning to serve them better than I ever served them before. I have given up the momentary praise which comes from rescuing one woman here and there a solitary unit out of thousands who perish, and I am learning how to save the thousands. I am learning how to use my brain so as to make it more serviceable to the wretched than it has ever been before. I am giving up that political work that only deals with facts and not with the causes by which they are produced. I am doing so, in order that by a more complete self-devotion I may rescue those who are perishing before my eyes at the present time. Hundreds can do my work on the School Board much better than I can: let them do this work that they can do as well as I; let me, who have no human tie to keep me back, except the tie to my race--every other tie having been broken by the force of circumstances--leave me free to go along the road where few will care to follow me. To learn the lessons that can only be learnt by the surrender of everything that makes life precious to the many. Believe me that in giving my life to this new work, I do it, not for selfishness, but for self-surrender, and in the hope that in long years to come I may realise the idea that I formed in childhood, and that I have nurtured and tried to work out in woman hood--to save the race of whom I am a part, to learn lessons which worked out in life will render the present social misery impossible for evermore and [?] the world worth living in, to help those people to whom my heart is given, to gain a [?] for my brothers and not a selfish [?] mere knowledge or self-advancement.
Publisher's Note: [?] = words obliterated or missing from the original copy.