CHRISTMAS: by Kenneth Morris
THIS is the time when we decorate our habitations with holly and mistletoe, and our hearts with unwonted good feeling, commemorating the dawning of a great light. There are certain stations in the journey of the year, where we may see the legend writ large on the signboards: "Change here for a better way of life; change here for happiness." We read, and come out on the platform; make festivity a little in the waiting (and refreshment) rooms, and then bundle back into the old train, having never changed at all. The Christmas-New Year time, and the Easter-time of the flowers, are two such important junctions; and it is worth while to note that these feasts were kept long before the advent of Christianity. For Christmas is in the very nature of things, and not merely historically, the birthday of the Christ. It is the end of the winter solstice, when the sun is, as it were, born anew after his months of decline, and begins to flow towards the high tide mark of his power.
That there is a certain reality in the significance of the season, is proven by the bright good will that greets us when we rise on a Christmas morning, and that it is so hard to escape. Marley's ghost and the three spirits will be apt to haunt the veriest Scrooge among us, forcing issues, compelling us to see that benevolence and kindliness are part of the essential business of life. Though we starve our souls on a thin diet of self-interest during the rest of the year, now our fare shall be less meager, and the whole world demands of us that we share in the common joy. There lies the heart and crux of it all—share. It is a great thing that there should be the habit of present-giving; it is so easy, when one is considering the giving of a gift, to escape from self, and take thought in some degree for the one to whom the gift is destined. Just a little such thought is cleansing; for even the least trickle of it, Augean selfhood is the sweeter and more habitable. And here it is flowing at Christmas time, a full current of which all the world may partake. The force of age-long custom has dedicated the day, and the habit has been formed of making an effort at brotherly feeling. We think of the children, of absentees, of many we give no thought to at other times. No doubt but for this, many a soul still flickers on, that would else have dwindled long since into pin-point insignificance, or waned altogether out of minds anchored at all other times to dreary and sordid self-interest. No doubt our civilization would be nearer to the rocks even than it is, or quite battered and broken on them, were it not that we do put some strain on the rudders, and turn, if falteringly and without clear design, to the free open waters on this one day of the year.
It is the proof of brotherhood, and that we are all filled with a common life, this generality of Christmas good will. We share in thought and feeling, as much as we do in the very air we breathe; mental infection is as real, and perilous, as the physical infection of disease. One man's thinking, though unuttered, shall pass through a thousand minds, sowing wheat or tares, good or evil, light or darkness, health or disease, in every one of them. What a new light this sheds on the question of reform! New laws are only efficient as old modes of thought are sweetened and uplifted. Will you move heaven and earth over the mote that is in your brother's eye, forgetting the beam that is in your own? Then do you stand accused, not merely of hypocrisy, but of being a worthless, profitless laborer, a twister of sand-ropes, a plower of the barren shore.
But what might not Christmas be for us, were we to treat it really reasonably! Happiness lies not in the region of sanctimonious ecstatics; but then, it is also incompatible with an overloaded stomach. We begin well enough with the wishes for a "Merry Christmas"; excellently well with the geniality and present-giving. What a promise there is for all sorts and conditions of men, or nearly all, on a Christmas morning: what a general sun of Austerlitz is it that rises! But how of its setting? What heavy physical clouds there are apt to be; what a sinking low, a simple vanishing, of ideals—what mere brute, material indigestion! Heigho! here's a come-down—from Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, to these well-known, brain-deadening results!
It all comes of our erratic, freakish extremism. We pride ourselves on the practical trend of our lives: Gad, there's no nonsense here; it is a businesslike and commonsense generation, with the whole trade of the world on its hands; and what would you have, sir? Why, some evidence of that same so-much-bragged-of commonsense, if there be any. Our notion of carrying on the work of the world is, on the whole and for the most part, a fever; a wearing out of manhood, a furious, unseemly jostling round the trough wherein providence, like a swineherd, pours the wash of money, position, fame, power, etc.; and while we are so fighting and swilling, the work of the world is left undone; it may take care of itself, it may go hang, we will have none of it. Does anyone doubt that? Let him look around and see the abuses that remain and fester, heaven knows, till the world is rank with the corruption of them. Let him think of the reformatories that don't reform; of the horror that walketh by night in the cities. When he has taken note of all the work left undone within the limits of his own nation, let him consider, but with more charity—for the conditions will be less easy for him to understand—the work that other nations are leaving undone; the work that humanity as a whole whistles past unheeding. And meanwhile we sweat and drudge and strain, strain and drudge and sweat after the things we desire, money and so forth; we give health for it, culture for it, leisure for it, honor for it, virtue for it, manhood for it; and call that business; call that doing the work of the world. Oh how this aching earth must be desiring a humanity that can put in some claim to be human!
We cannot go on so always; we must of course have safety-valves somewhere; and so we arrange these holidays and festivals, when we shall react and revolt against the things of common day, and be wildly different, for those few annual hours at least. Now we will have pleasure, rest, recreation. So—
Oh, we know the sweet fair picture! We know how it is done, only too often, this recreation business. Come now, who is it that is recreated? Which element, which party, which guild or stratum of society in that curious pathocratical republic, that kingless, impolitic, mob-swayed kingdom called the human personality, rises like a giant refreshed from the somnolent, torpid nebulosity wherewith the liver, poor drudge on strike, has its revenge on its tyrant? How much of Christmas good will, Christmas merriment and cheer, will be carried forward? What new light will shine on our workaday activities?
You pass through a treasure-house, from which you may take what you will, and the more you take, the better. But you "take no thought for the morrow"—with a vengeance! you pay no heed to the rich and beautiful things; you allow yourself to be beguiled, from entrance to exit of it, by that most wily esurient companion Appetite, that should be slave and porter but has tricked himself into the position of master and guide. We do go in there, indeed; we do see the treasures; it is proven for us that they exist, and undoubtedly we are the better for that. But we might go forth enriched for the whole year; and—we don't. Christmas, that might be perennial, hardly lasts for a whole day.
Why should not such a birthday be kept in a fitting manner? Is there nothing within ourselves that corresponds to the Hero of the day—no sunbright redeeming principle? Indeed there is; and it is the service of that that pays (to put it vulgarly); for that is the soul, whose mere garments are brain and body and appetites; indeed, whose mere hopples and handcuffs they are. No joy is acceptable, or without its sickening foul aftertaste, unless countersigned by It; that feast is poisonous of which It does not partake. To carry through the day the jolly atmosphere of good will and good service, of stepping outside selfhood; to keep one's insolent servant, appetite, cowed and right down in its place, finding pleasure in the things that belong to ourselves, not to it—that would be to celebrate Christmas rationally. When we do so, we do not find that the Christmas spirit wanes with the waning of the holidays.
I wish the whole world could have just a glimpse of the Lomaland Christmas, which is such a rational one, permeated with sunlight "both within and without." Then it would be more generally understood, how that the day may be, and ought to be, the feast-day of Human Brotherhood, the annual reconsecration of the celebrants to all things bright and beautiful, and cheerful and excellent, and happy and thoroughly practical and of good report. By heaven, the influence of these Theosophical Christmases will make its mark on the world yet!
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
ROTHENBURG: A VIEW OF THE MEDIEVAL TOWN
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
ANOTHER VIEW OF ROTHENBURG: A ROMANTIC CORNER
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
VIEW OF ROTHENBURG SHOWING SOME OF THE OLD TOWN HOUSES
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
ROTHENBURG: THE "STRAFTHURM"
PEACE ON EARTH: GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN:
by R. Machell
PEACE to all beings! is an Eastern benediction. Peace on earth: good will toward men! is the Christian expression of the same heart-felt emotion. But what is peace? Is it merely the suspension of war, or the prevention of war, or its postponement? Is a long period of peace merely in itself productive of "good will toward men"? Does prosperity necessarily produce generosity, love, nobility, dignity, purity, or happiness? Can we possibly answer in the affirmative with the statistics of want and crime, corruption and suicide before our eyes constantly? Is peace the absence of war? If so we must stretch the meaning of the word war very considerably, stretch it indeed until it includes all unbrotherly acts; but then it will include a great part of our commercial system as well as of our social life. What then? Is peace a mockery? If so why is it so generally recognized as a desirable state, a blessed state, a state of beauty and joy? The cessation of international wars, so greatly to be desired, is peace of one kind only. "The peace of God that passeth all understanding," is another.
It has been found that the greatest stability can be attained by maintaining rapid motion in a heavy body, as in the gyrostat, the power of which has made the monorail train and other strange things a possibility. Thus stability in mechanics is found to be increased by rapid motion; rest is produced by action. Even in the arts of peace, and indeed more particularly in these, prosperity depends upon intense activity; when the works are at rest there is not usually an extra amount of peace and good will in evidence. Prosperity is not the result of idleness, and peace is not attained by the prevention of war; an idle man may grow fat, and a nation that does not fight may grow rich; but the fat man is not the healthy man, not the ideal human being, and the rich nation is not the happy nation; neither the fat man nor the rich nation are types of true progress in the eyes of any but the grossest of materialists.
I venture to think that peace is not at all a question of war or its prevention, but entirely a matter of self-discipline: self-discipline in the individual, in the family, the community, the nation, and the entire human race. It is the result of ceaseless activity. If this activity of self-discipline (not self-torture or abuse of the body) ceases there is an end of the state of peace as surely as the top or gyrostat falls when its rotation ceases. The essence of this rotation is the recognition of the center or axis of rotation by all the particles of the revolving body, from which an important analogy may be drawn. Self-discipline begins at home, as surely as the circle can only be described around a center. A circle without a center is unthinkable, and so is self-control without a self; but as the center of any visible object is itself an abstract point (having no magnitude) but subsisting on the plane of the immaterial, so the self is not material, but in its spiritual reality bears a similar mysterious relation to the material body that the abstraction called the center bears to a mass. A homeless man may be self-disciplined, but a nation is not composed of homeless men; national life depends upon the family and the family depends upon the home. The home is the spiritual center of the nation. It is everywhere and depends upon the ceaseless activity of its parts. This is the great binding-force that holds a nation in balance, and when this home-life weakens, the whole nation, like a top whose rotation slows down, begins to wobble; then, like the top, it is likely to fall over and rush off violently in any direction, and it becomes a dead body.
So if we would have peace in ourselves we must keep up a ceaseless fight against the inertia of the lower nature and replace the false peace of inertia by the stability, which, as in the gyrostat, results from rapid motion round its own center—that is to say, constant attention to duty. If we would have peace in the nation we must have it in our homes, and the home must have its invisible center of attraction, and the constant attention to duty of its parts or members.
If this is established there will be no great need to think about the sorrows of international wars or the means of preventing them.
Universal Brotherhood has no creeds or dogmas; it is built on the basis of common sense. It teaches that man is divine, that the soul of man is imperishable, and that Brotherhood is a fact in Nature, and consequently takes in all humanity.
Men must rid themselves of fear, and reach a point where they realize that they are souls, and where they will strive to live as souls, with a sense of their duty to their fellows.—Katherine Tingley
PSYCHISM: A Study in Hidden Connexions:
by H. T. Edge, B. A. (Cantab.)
THE wave of psychism which is sweeping over us grows more pronounced as time goes on. If we do not master it, it will master us and bring our civilization to an untimely end.
Theosophy did not bring on this tide of psychism. Theosophy was introduced (in part) for the purpose of coping with it. When H. P. Blavatsky entered upon her work she foresaw what was approaching. An era of materialism was about to be succeeded by a reaction towards psychism. The first beginnings were already manifest in the rise of phenomenalism. One of the objects of founding the Theosophical Society was to prevent the disasters that would arise if this wave of psychism should come in the midst of an atmosphere of selfishness and ignorance. Some people still wrongly suppose that H. P. Blavatsky initiated the interest in psychism; but what she really did was to prepare the way for a successful fight against the abuse of psychism; to prepare the way by introducing to the world a knowledge of OCCULTISM—a very different thing. She did work among the Spiritists because that movement was there ready to hand; among them she found many awaiting the teachings of Theosophy. She sought to turn the prevalent craze for phenomena into channels of true knowledge. Her writings all show how strongly she emphasized the dangers of dabbling in phenomenalism and the distinction between Occultism and the occult arts, between Spiritual powers and psychic powers.
Some may think the warnings of Theosophists against psychism are exaggerated, but the record of facts tells a different story. Every day brings new justification of these warnings. In a newspaper published by the American-Examiner Company there lately appeared an article entitled "The Soul-Destroying Poison of the East." Let it be said at the outset that the phrase thus unqualified would constitute a libel upon the East, and that it is not the East in general, but merely a particular phase of orientalism, that is intended. The title goes on: "The Tragic Flood of Broken Homes and Hearts, Disgrace and Suicide, that follows the broadening stream of Morbidly Alluring Oriental 'Philosophies' into Our Country."
The article begins as follows:
It is startling to realize that in many a commonplace flat ... occult rites are being celebrated as shocking as the ancient worship of Moloch and Baal. A long series of recent occurrences has proved that Oriental occultism in various forms has many followers in the United States.... Hindu occultism is leprous.
This kind certainly is; but should it not be the ambition of Hindûs to clear their name from such an aspersion? The article then recounts several cases of the breaking up of homes, suicides, and other calamities, of a kind with which we are daily becoming more familiar through the columns of the newspapers; and it traces all these to the subtle influence of the said poison. It goes on to speak of "Tantrikism," a cult which is said to have 100,000 followers in the United States and to have been introduced by the "Swamis," many of whom came over ostensibly to attend the Congress of Religions in 1893. We know of a certain class of Swâmis, sanctimonious and plausible individuals, who reap a harvest from a credulous and admiring public.
According to my interpretation of the following quotations, the basis of this cult is a deification of passion and sensuality. Indeed that seems to be the whole tenor of it. It exalts weakness and vice into an appearance of virtue and makes a religion of depravity. The fundamental principle is thus expressed:
Our emotional longings are not to be crushed, but we must lend brain, heart and muscle to secure their eternal gratification.
To quote again:
Some of the American Tantriks would persuade American parents that it is an honor to have their daughters chosen as nautch-girls, and it is sad to say that they sometimes succeed.
Oh, parents! Fond and foolish, but how ignorant!
All this fully justifies Theosophists in asserting that there is a cancer lurking at the roots of our racial vitality. How futile and frivolous, in face of this terrible fact, seem our puny efforts at reform by legislation and philanthropy, a mere tinkering at the symptoms. The sexual passion has obtained a fearful hold on us, as is manifested in numerous ways, in secret and open depravity, in the form of new religions and philosophies. Here we have a cult which exalts it into a worship and which is well calculated to ensnare the morbidly excited imaginations, debilitated nervous systems, and untrained minds of our ill-guided youth of either sex.
No doubt the above account will come as a revelation to many, and it may serve to enlighten them on some matters which before were dark, particularly as to the underground connexions between certain things which on the surface seem unconnected. One of these is the connexion between psychism and crank religions on the one hand and sexual depravity on the other. From the beginning Theosophists have insisted on this fact and issued warnings against the danger. It is a commonplace of the history of religions and cults that, when the devotees fail in following the path of light and duty, they lapse into sensual perversions. As far as we can trace back, we find instances of pure worship and sacred symbolism being perverted into gross license and corrupt teachings. In our times we have witnessed many eruptions of vice associated with crank religions. The connexion is not accidental; it simply means that when anyone dares to try and make the higher nature serve the lower he ends in a complete breakdown.
How well is illustrated the truth that psychic practices merely stimulate the animal centers, send up a foul current to the brain, and produce an emotional and erotic intoxication, which is often mistaken by the ignorant dabbler for divine inspiration!
And here we call attention to the circumstance that innumerable people today are ignorantly and heedlessly dabbling in psychism. Many of them are perfectly innocent of any leanings to depravity. Yet observe the connexion. Theosophists have never failed to warn them; and for their pains have been laughed at; yet see the confirmation of their warnings. We merely take this occasion to point out to the heedless and innocent experimenters the dangers that lie ahead of them in the path they are treading. There are only two paths in Occultism—the right and the wrong; the right path is the path of duty, service, and righteous living; any other path is the wrong path.
In an age when nothing is immune against perversion, it is no slur upon the Theosophical Society to say that even that body, pure and lofty as its teachings and work are, has not been free from attempts made to divert it into some wrong direction. From time to time ambitious and misguided adherents have deserted its ranks that they might pursue outside the courses which they were prevented from pursuing within.
In this way a number of so-called "Theosophical" cults have originated, which in varying degrees carry on a propaganda that misrepresents Theosophy and thereby wrongs the public. The reason for alluding to this here is that some members of these cults are preaching the very psychism which, as has just been shown, is so intimately related to these grave abuses. In books and on the lecture platform we may find their leaders reproducing some form of the original Theosophical teachings and even professing lofty principles of morality; but a closer examination of the teachings prevailing among them reveals only too often the same unsavory atmosphere of psychism. If these "teachers" really followed the lofty teachings they profess there could be no reason why they should not be working in harmony with real Theosophists; but it is because they have cut themselves from the pure teachings of H. P. Blavatsky and the original Theosophical program that Theosophists are obliged to repudiate them.
It behooves all people who have a reputation to preserve to search out carefully these hidden connexions and make sure of the nature of everything they may endorse; for a man is judged by his associations.
Again, all kinds of "new" social doctrines are being preached, usually in the name of liberty, honesty, and purity; and those who protest against them are dubbed "slaves of Mrs. Grundy." But in view of the above newspaper revelations it would seem as though the protestors had some justification for their warnings. In much of this talk about liberty we detect not liberty but license. We are told, on high authority, apparently, that it is better to give vent to one's "youthful vitality" than to let it smoulder; but what becomes of this argument in view of the Tântrik program mentioned above, or other similar cults?
There is a class of popular writers who, having won the public ear by novels, brilliant criticism, or some such way, are now using the opportunity to vent their crude speculations and unripe imaginings, which pass current as "daring and original views." The morbidity, acidity, or angularity of their minds—seemingly unsuspected by themselves—is revealed in a way that dismisses them from the consideration of the more thoughtful readers; but they serve as ringleaders to a host of readers who share their temperament if not their literary gifts. They analyse in their peculiar fashion the institutions of human life as though they were people sent from another planet to inspect this world. Ignorant of the existence or possibility of points of view other than their own, they discuss marriage as if it were a physiological problem, and men as if they were but draughts on a checkerboard.
We have had novels based on the theory that human life is a physiological question, whose heroines are soulless over-cerebrated women of the most intolerable type; and a continuous torrent of smart writing whose aim seems to be to turn everything upside down and take the perverse view on every possible occasion. All this literary rubbish, whatever its moving spirit may be, must be regarded as a part of the general disintegrative force that is at work among us; its effect is to unsettle inexperienced minds at a time when they need guidance; and thus to pave the way for the implanting of the noxious seeds described above.
Time and space will not suffice for a full list of the movements and cults and fads which are all heading, consciously or unconsciously, in this dangerous direction—fads scientific, religious, social, what not. Sometimes one can detect the same element at the root of them—the morbid craving, the pruriency of thought, the subtle suggestion of the lower nature seeking new recognition for itself by assuming an attractive disguise.
The difficulties of a Theosophist may be realized when we bear in mind that he has to warn people against dangers which, though real to him, by reason of his knowledge of human nature, are by them unsuspected. So many of the fads seem quite harmless. Yet the Theosophist may be aware of the direction in which they are tending, or of some ugly facts beneath the surface. His warnings are uttered with the voice of genuine compassion. He sees every one of his warnings justified as time goes on and the latent seeds of evil develop and come into view. His one aim in life is to spread a knowledge of the noble and helpful teachings of Theosophy, for these alone can cope with such a subtle and powerful foe. His pity is aroused for those who are innocently lending themselves to such a propaganda, and for those earnest truth-seekers who are deceived by the misrepresentation.
So great is the menace of evils like the above, and so rapidly are they spreading, that every attempted reform sinks into insignificance beside the importance of dealing with this. We fret about the evils of our educational system, the increase of insanity and suicide, child-degeneracy, consumption and cancer, drug-taking, the white slave traffic, unemployment and labor troubles, all kinds of problems; when down in the very marrow of our twentieth century life lurks this frightful decay. Under the most plausible and specious forms it insinuates itself. Many "teachers" are insinuating the same poison into us under the guise of fine high-sounding doctrines, and sometimes even by using Theosophical terms. Sometimes from beneath the surface of their public teachings some "inner doctrine" pops up as though the teachers were experimenting with the public tolerance; and we hear whispers of a "new morality," strange sexual doctrines, etc. Then, if we are wise, we suspect what lies at the root.
The consequences to our children and youth are a thing that should surely move our hearts. Parents and teachers alike are by their own confession unable to cope with the evils becoming so rampant among the young. Noted headmasters have given up in despair the attempt to stop unnatural vice among the boys entrusted by loving parents to their care. Most mothers are sublimely ignorant of what goes on in the inner life of their boys and girls, who in secret and in ignorance are all the time sowing in their constitution the soil of debility in which the poison seeds so ruthlessly sown can sprout.
In fact there is no visible power competent to deal with this evil. It lies beyond the reach of any criminal or judicial procedure. Religion is powerless before it; science can find no cure. So the conclusion remains that unless something is done, the evil will continue to grow and spread unchecked, involving in its decay the very powers that should check it, until the fabric of society is altogether loosened and our civilization comes to a premature end.
In the past whole nations probably have been swept away by this cause. Our own race has reached a point in its development where the same fate threatens it. Unless we are to experience a general outburst of libertinism, a welter of disease and insanity, a universal strife, we must find some means of restoring a knowledge of the immutable laws of life and an adherence thereto, such as taught by Theosophy. Passion can never be overcome by being indulged; it has to be subdued by self-knowledge.
Those unfortunately afflicted with unlawful desires should not seek to make society their victim in the hope of thus saving their miserable selves. Let them patiently and loyally bear their burden until unremitting effort at last brings the meed of success. Such infirmities must perish at last if they are not fed by the mind; but as they took a long time in the acquiring, they may take a long time in the undoing. Disease is thrown off by building surely, if slowly, a healthy foundation. We conclude with a few quotations from H. P. Blavatsky:
Do not believe that lust can ever be killed out if gratified or satiated, for this is an abomination inspired by Mâra [delusion]. It is by feeding vice that it expands and waxes strong, like to the worm that fattens on the blossom's heart.—The Voice of the Silence
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Occultism is not Magic. It is comparatively easy to learn the trick of spells and the methods of using the subtler, but still material, forces of physical nature; the powers of the animal soul in man are soon awakened; the forces which his love, his hate, his passion, can call into operation, are readily developed. But this is Black Magic—Sorcery.... The powers and forces of animal nature can be used by the selfish and revengeful, as much as by the unselfish and the all-forgiving; the powers and forces of Spirit lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart—and this is Divine Magic.—Practical Occultism
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There are not in the West half-a-dozen among the fervent hundreds who call themselves "Occultists," who have even an approximately correct idea of the nature of the Science they seek to master. With a few exceptions, they are all on the highway to Sorcery. Let them restore some order in the chaos that reigns in their minds, before they protest against this statement. Let them first learn the true relation in which the Occult Sciences stand to Occultism, and the difference between the two, and then feel wrathful if they still think themselves right. Meanwhile, let them learn that Occultism differs from Magic and other secret Sciences as the glorious sun does from a rush-light, as the immutable and immortal Spirit of Man—the reflection of the absolute, causeless, and unknowable All—differs from the mortal clay, the human body.—Occultism versus the Occult Arts