There is one other thing that will help us a little as well as the principle of correspondences, but, so far as I know, this other clue of ours has not been adopted or used in modern science. I say, so far as I know, for science is going on so rapidly at the present time that it is not possible to keep abreast with all the details of the later investigations. This second principle is called the principle of reflexion. As you may have a mountain reflected in a lake, and all the peculiarities, the outlines, the foliage on the mountainside, will be reproduced in the calm water of the lake that washes the foot of the mountain; as in that reflexion the highest in the object will be reflected as the lowest in the image, and as at every intermediate point where the mountain is reproduced in the image, the reflexion of the mountain, there will be a reversal, the higher being the lower, and so on, until you come to the point of junction between water and mountain, and there the nearest to you on the mountain will be reflected in the nearest to you on the water—just so may we in studying man understand something of him by regarding him as a reflexion of divinity, the great threefold aspect of divine life showing itself out in man. But you may ask me: What do you exactly mean when you say reflexion? I mean the reproduction of similar characteristics in a grosser and denser form of matter. That is what we mean by reflexion thus applied. Just as the mountain which you see by the air is reflected in the denser water, so are spiritual attributes reflected in grosser matter; or, otherwise expressed, the same, or rather a similar characteristic, works in grosser matter; therefore with powers more limited, therefore with faculties less potent. That is the use we make of this term “reflexion” in theosophical literature. The characteristics are the same, but because of the denser matter their manifestation is limited and confined. So the great Will which brings the universe into existence is reflected in the Will to Live in man; and as that is the highest manifestation of Deity, so, reflected in man, does it appear at the lowest stage of evolution as the one prominent characteristic of the dawning human consciousness. In the babe, that will to live is practically the only sign of consciousness, showing itself out in groping movements, whereby the will to live is striving to come into contact with the outer world and discover something of its environment. And so the second great manifestation of Deity, the Wisdom-Love which in the Christian nomenclature shows itself out in the person of the Son, that reflected in human nature comes out as the emotions, the refined, gentle, unselfish emotions that form the second great stage of human consciousness, beginning with the lowest stage of passion, and gradually rising unbroken to the loftiest manifestation of emotion; and then the third, the creative activity, which, again, in the Christian nomenclature would be the creative Spirit, shows itself out in man’s one creative power, the power of the mind, of which one of the expressions is imagination, that which creates with the intellectual force of man. The correspondence, you see, is complete, but how limited the manifestation compared with the manifestation on the planes of divinity. Hence this limited reflexion, this limited reproduction, we term the law of reflexion; and we very often find it hand in hand with the law of correspondences, giving us a clue once more to guide us through difficulties and obscurities where direct vision might fail.
Let us begin at that point I spoke of with regard to the human being. Now, by this process of deduction, and seeing in man the image of the Supreme, we are not compelled to stop our study when we have taken these three stages—the stage of the will to live showing itself in activity, the stage of passion and emotion, the stage of mentality; for we see that above those there shine out the three same attributes of Deity in subtler, finer form that we call the human Spirit, and that this human Spirit, reproducing in itself the three great aspects, tells us of the future, as the lower reflexions tell us of the past. So that we cannot only trace, as science does, the unfolding of consciousness through the vast ages of the past, but we can follow it onwards into the future, where that higher repetition of divinity is gradually unfolding, and trace out for ourselves man’s higher qualities, the later stages of human evolution.
Now, it is true that in this the theory is not complete and perfect unless you recognise the fundamental truth of Reincarnation. No otherwise can you trace the unfolding of the divine Spirit in man, save by giving him time and environment by which these successive stages may be accomplished. For, looking at humanity, we see that very many men disappeared in the savage state, where only the preliminary stage of human consciousness had been unfolded; others we find coming into the world above the savage state, but showing out only passions, strong, selfish emotions; others, again, further on, showing out mental powers, and in them the mind becoming predominant. But unless you admit here a sequential unfolding of the individual consciousness, you will find yourself surrounded by complicated difficulties when you try to understand human evolution; for if you follow those consciousnesses onwards, thinking they are never to return to the school of life to learn the lessons that they have not learned in the infant school of savage life, then you will have to posit a heaven or heavens, one of which is full of these souls that have only accomplished savagery on earth; another that is full of those that have reached the emotional stage without having started and laid the foundation of the savage; a third that show forth mind, but not the will to live of the savage, nor the emotion of the half-cultivated man. And so you get a world on the other side more fantastic than rational, and you realise that somehow or other in your scheme of things you must make room for post-mortem evolution; and the very moment you adopt that, that moment you have accepted the principle of reincarnation, even though you may choose to carry it on in other worlds rather than in the present.[2] With that, of course, other difficulties arise, but on those I need not for the moment dwell, as I do not want to deal fully with reincarnation now. But suppose you accept it, then the whole thing is rational before you—a spiritual intelligence unfolding in one stage after another, and building each stage on the one that preceded. If you apply that to the evolution of the reincarnating individual, you see the stage of the child, the stage of the youth, the stage of the man, and you await the unfolding of the spiritual man. Or if you choose to look at it in the vast cycles of the past, then you will realise that you have before you animal man, passional man, intellectual man, and you can hardly stop without thinking next of spiritual man—the four stages that you can trace by this principle that I spoke of, the deduction from the divine life leading you onwards to the stage not yet unfolded, save in some lofty specimens of humanity. And when you have just seen these stages so thoroughly reproducing at each point of enlarging sight the other in yourself—the four stages visible—the three and the dawning of the next; then in the whole reincarnating life of the individual the same three and the dawning of the next; then in evolution the same three and the possibility of the next—it does not seem strange then to come on to the races, as the Theosophist does, and to see in the early human race—that which is really the first that can truly be called human, although there preceded it a semi-animal man—the birth of our present humanity. We call it the Lemurian Race; and it is interesting that Haeckel points to the lost continent of Lemuria as that which was the cradle of the human race; so does modern science every now and again touch on these teachings of the elder world. In that Lemurian Race was shown the strong will to live; then came the Atlantean, that which lived on the vast continent of Atlantis, the existence of which is being recognised more and more by science by logical necessity, as it cannot get geological evidence or antiquarian evidence, the greater part of the continent being whelmed beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Still, antiquarian research gives us something by pointing out to us identities of racial characteristics in places now separated by that same vast Atlantic Ocean. And archæology shows us in ancient Egypt, in the style of its painting, in the symbols that it used, nay, even in some of the human types that it limned, exactly the same symbols, the same types, the same outlines of philosophical and religious thought as in Southern Mexico, in a civilisation long since disappeared, that was swept away by the Aztec civilisation, which had become ancient and corrupt when the Spaniards invaded Mexico. In those two far removed portions of the earth’s surface, separated by the Atlantic, we find the repetition of one in the other. And there are many other reasons on which I need not now dwell, similarities of fauna and flora, certain architectural likenesses, and so on, which are all leading scientific men onwards to the recognition of the great continent of Atlantis. Just as the men of the Lemurian continent showed out only that will to live in clumsiest form, so did the men of the Atlantean continent show out passion, appetite, desire, the whole of their civilisation showing the marks of this predominant passional nature; that which might be expected in theory showed itself out in fact. With that went—as always goes with the passional and non-intellectual type—a great development of what in these days we call the lower form of psychism. We apply that term, as our knowledge of these powers grows more precise, to the way of seeing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, and so on, that we find in some members of the animal kingdom; that we find largely developed in savage nations; that we find showing themselves out sometimes among the dwellers in mountains and in vast spaces where the air is pure, where nature is still in a fairly primitive condition. It is not precise, exact science under the control of the will; it seems to be responsive to impressions of passions, emotions; very rarely, if ever, to impressions from the mind. And so, looking back on the great Atlantean peoples, we see them showing out these forms of psychism that we connect with the higher animal and with the lower human evolution before mentality has been very largely developed, before the nervous system characteristic of the modern man has dominated the sympathetic system more characteristic of the animal. And then we come to a time when we can glance backward and see the method of the evolution of a new race, giving many an indication to help us in our study of the Coming Race of our own time. For, looking back into that far-off history, we see a selection going on among the Atlantean people, and we notice that the selection was made not amongst those who had carried the Atlantean type to its highest and most triumphant point, but, on the contrary, from a subdivision of that race—a sub-race, as we call it—in which those qualities did not show which had made Atlantis great and mighty, but in which there were more germs than in the triumphant Atlantean of the coming development—that of the mind. Some of you will be familiar with the name of the Toltec, the race, or rather sub-race, in which the Atlantean civilisation touched its highest point. Not from those were the germs of the Aryan race chosen; rather from the succeeding sub-race, in which, as I said, mental qualities were beginning to assert themselves, with the inevitable result that as those qualities became manifest, the others, the psychic, fell into the background. Look round to-day and you will see how true that still is with the ordinary uncultivated, untrained psychic; how very low is the stage of the intelligence, very little mental power going hand-in-hand with that lower kind of psychism; and so the people who were chosen to be the germs of our own great Race were not amongst the most admired of the Atlantean civilisation, but were rather looked down upon as not showing out these faculties which then were regarded as the most valuable, as falling below the triumphant type of the Toltec, as people of little account, and yet people who had in them the promise of the future. Then the gathering of those together, the isolating of them from the rest of the then civilised world; the deliberate breeding of them into a type which was aimed at. For all the great types of human kind exist in the mind of the Logos before they are made manifest in the matter of our earth—first the idea, then the manifestation; and the seven great types which were to make up the humanity of our globe in the present cycle of its existence, those existed as Ideas in the Platonic sense of the word, those were the types towards which the great Powers guided the evolution of humanity; and when the highest point was being touched at the fourth, then came the preparation for the birth of the fifth. The same great laws which, on a far lower scale, are used by the ordinary scientific gardener or scientific breeder of cattle, when he is trying to develop a new type that exists in his mind, remember, before he tries to work it out in petals of flower or flesh and blood of animal, that ideal type to which the scientific breeder directs his efforts, those laws help him to-day which, on a far loftier level and for mightier purposes, were used by the great Ruler of the Coming Race in order to shape the ideal type that now we know as the Aryan. If you compare one of the men of Kashmir, in Northern India, with your best Caucasian type, you will find they closely resemble the one the other, evidently replicas of the same type. I choose the man of Kashmir especially, because he is fair of skin, owing to his living in a temperate clime, and because from the shutting in of his land from communication with other countries, due to the difficulty of reaching his fellows—owing to that the type has been kept purer there than probably anywhere else upon earth. Fair of skin, blue- or violet-eyed, with hair brown in varying shades, with features sharply cut, delicate lips, thin and well-formed nose, there you have one of the finest types of human beauty existing upon earth. You find that type reproduced over and over again, with varying modifications as the sub-races develop, but the one type is everywhere visible; and in the shape of the head, with the forehead largely developed, with the place in the brain where all intellectual faculties can be made manifest, in that type of head you have the type of mentality, the Race that is to carry to the highest point the possibilities of the human intellect. As you come down, looking at the sub-races, the same strange point strikes you as we saw with regard to the psychic Atlantean, and the comparatively psychic sub-race from which our own was gradually built up. Compare together the refined Roman, luxurious, well-built, cultured, and the Goth, who was the origin of the Teutonic sub-race; there again you see the same thing, the contrast with the regnant type of the apparently lower type, the one that has in it the promise of rising higher than its predecessor. Judging by analogy, following along similar lines of thought, we can very readily understand to-day that the type of the Coming Race will not be that which is the triumph of the present, but rather those in whom the characteristics of the present are less developed, but which have in them the germ of something more, which can unfold in the far-off future into a greater splendour, a diviner manifestation. So that when we are looking for those who are the beginnings of the Coming Race, we should not look for them to-day among those in whom our Aryan peoples show out the highest types of mentality, of intellect, of power, of thought. Their work is to carry on the present civilisation to the zenith. Who but they can lead it to the highest point? They have developed the mind which is the great characteristic of this fifth Teutonic sub-race; theirs the mission, theirs the privilege, to guide that sub-race to its highest point of achievement. They only, whose intellect is so loftily developed, are fit to guide the present civilisation to the point of glory which it has yet to reach, and it is they who are the leaders of the triumphant type of to-day, they to whom our present race looks up as the ideal of all that is most splendid in intellectual power. Not amongst them, then, should we seek the beginnings of the Coming Race, of the Race that shall be; for, using our principle of correspondences, we can see that now we must look for the germinating of the spiritual man, not of the intellectual; that which is beyond intellect, that which is higher than the scientific mind, the qualities that have shone out in the great religious teachers of the past, the qualities that characterised the Buddha, the Christ, are the spiritual qualities as apart from the intellectual; and it is the germinating of those qualities now which will make the origin of the Race that is to be.
But we can see in the race of the present signs of the changing evolution which shall gradually show out the coming type of consciousness, which shall gradually adapt the bodies to the fuller manifestation of the qualities that shall gradually unfold. For what is the great mark of such spiritual types of humanity, what the quality that shines out above all others wherever they appear upon earth? It is that quality that to-day we name Brotherhood, the recognition of that unity of life which makes for all-embracing compassion and boundless self-sacrifice. Those are the types that we see in these great Ones of our race, they who have unfolded the spiritual nature, who show out the glory of the Spirit. It is very marked that in every one of those mighty Teachers of the past this is the quality which above all others shines out as their distinguishing mark among the men of the generation in which they are born. The love of the helpless and the weak, the effort ever to raise those who are downtrodden and oppressed, the effort to share, to uplift, to make happy—in a word, to save; that is the great spiritual characteristic of all the Saviours of the world, and therefore at the present time those are making ready for the beginning of the Coming Race who show out in conception and in practice their belief in the universal Brotherhood of man. They may be less developed in intellect, that is not what is for the moment wanted from them; they may be less glorious in the triumphs of the mind, that is not the material that is needed specially for the Coming Race; it is these higher qualities of the Spirit that must be looked for by the Leader of that Race as the material which gradually He can mould into the type He has in His mind, and so out of those germinal possibilities evolve the Man that shall be.
Now let us pause for a moment and ask what are the special marks of that Race in consciousness and in body. In consciousness, clearly the recognition of unity. That is essential; for what the intellect divides the Spirit unites. The recognition of life in each rather than of the separated form, the recognition of the one Self in all rather than the separated selves that are marked out by the separated bodies, that will be the great mark in consciousness, the new unfolding; wherever that recognition of unity is made, there is one of the signs of the Coming Race. And then, side by side with that, growing inevitably out of it, a breadth and liberality of tolerance will mark those in whom the sense of unity is beginning to unfold. All that is narrow and exclusive, all that tends to separate one from another, all that emphasises differences instead of emphasising likenesses, all those are against the unfolding of the consciousness that knows the One in the many, and recognises Divinity in all. With that unfolding consciousness will come a type of body of which there are beginning to be many amongst us to-day. When there is going to be a variation which will start a new evolutionary type, it is always noted that those out of whom the variation grows are what is called unstable. Instability is the mark of progress, or of degeneration. There is the instability of health, but also of disease; and with the changing type of the nervous system you find this instability present in both its forms. If you look around you at the present time, what is one of the marks of the bodies in the most advanced races of the earth? Nervous troubles of every kind, and most marked amongst the most highly developed. It is needless to draw your attention to that; everyone knows it. The greater tension of the nervous system shows itself out amongst us in all kinds of different ways; saddest of all, in the extraordinary increase of madness in the most highly civilised nations of the world. Lunatic asylums are always multiplying, for as soon as a new one is built it gets filled, and another is demanded. That is the sad sight when we are looking around, looking for the Coming Race; the present race suffers by the very conditions that that race has made for itself; all the separative conditions of competition, struggle, class and individual and trade antagonism, all these are destructive to the evolving nervous system of man. The environment is impossible, the conditions ruinous for the evolution of a finer, more delicate nervous organisation; and yet the resistless force of nature presses onwards against the human race, forces it onwards whether it will go or not, and the evolutionary forces cannot be opposed save at the risk of destruction.
Now that is one of the lessons that needs to come out of these studies for the immediate guiding of our own lives to-day. We are living in an environment that is destructive of the higher evolution, and at our peril we leave it as it is when the Coming Race must inevitably be born. If we would go on we must adapt ourselves, and that adaptation is the crying need of the time. For amongst us to-day are being born children in whom this finer nervous organisation is showing itself already, children of delicate nervous type, but not necessarily at all unhealthy; often perfectly healthy, but with the nervous system so delicately poised that it is always in danger of jar and injury. There must be many amongst you who know that out of your own personal experience as fathers and mothers; there may be born into your family a little child whose nervous system is so delicate, so exquisitely poised, that the child is very readily thrown out of balance, and suffers quite abnormally. One thing that it is very necessary for the fathers and mothers of the time to understand is, that as these children come to them for protection, for training, for help, they must remember that they have there organisms which suffer and enjoy more keenly than organisms that are less delicately, less exquisitely balanced. Such a child feels pain where a child of rougher type would pass through unnoticing. The intense joy which, on the other hand, marks such an organism is always balanced with periods of intense depression. Such children should be guarded as far as possible from all that can jar and trouble. It is useless to try to make them live in the surroundings that suit those whose nervous systems are not so fine. On the contrary, it is the duty of the parent to try to provide for such children gentler and more harmonious surroundings, realising that without those the delicate instrument would be jarred and thrown out of tune, so that that from which the most lovely melodies might have been drawn will be only an instrument fit to be thrown away, destroyed. Think for a moment of the conditions under which you are living now in London. During the last ten years London has become almost intolerable to live in, if only for the noise, the continual rattle, the shrieking and hooting that fill the streets; the shaking of the very earth itself under the heavy vehicles of all sorts that we place upon it. London is becoming a city where to live in peace you would want to go about with cotton-wool stuffed into your ears and spectacles over your eyes so that you might not see too clearly, and with your nose closed so that you might not smell the horrible smells with which the streets are continually filled. Literally, what will have to be done is this: all the more refined and cultured people will have to go out of these huge towns and leave them to the people who like them. For remember, there are many people who like them; there are plenty of people who enjoy the rattle and the noise and the tumult of a London street. There are plenty of country peasants who, if you bring them up to London, like it enormously; but if you take the London lad or lass and put them down the country they say how frightfully quiet and dull it is. Why not let the great cities go to the people who like them, who will be helped to evolve by them? For, mind, that which is destructive to a delicate nervous system is the necessary stimulus for the evolution of a nervous system of a lower and coarser type. I do not want to abolish all these great cities at all; but I would say to any who feel the suffering which grows out of the noise and the rush and the hurry. Your place is no longer here, and, above all, it is no place for the children. For the finer the organisation of the father and the mother from the nervous standpoint, the finer will be the nervous organisation of the child; and if they suffer from it, their best policy is to leave London for the country, and surround themselves and the children of the Coming Race with sweeter and better environments. It is not only that these vast towns that are deforming and defacing England are an impossible environment for the Coming Race; we must also adapt ourselves to the new conditions by changes of food, by changes of method in ordinary living. The food that the great majority of people now use, flesh, is utterly unsuited to the finer type of nervous organisation. You may notice how people of a finer type shrink from it instinctively. Children of a finer type, when they realise that meat was a living thing, will turn aside from it with disgust, and leave it untouched. That instinctive dislike is one of the things that will be growing very much amongst the little ones; more and more will they revolt against the use of flesh. But it would be wise not only to notice how that revolt is growing, but deliberately to avoid the use of such articles of diet yourself, if you desire to train your bodies into a preparation for the Coming Race. For the body which is nourished on flesh and on the many forms of alcohol is a body which will be thrown out of health by the opening up of the higher consciousness; and nervous diseases are partly due to the fact that the higher consciousness is trying to express itself through bodies clogged with flesh-products and poisoned with alcohol. For, let me take a point of very great importance which has direct bearing upon this. As the new bodies develop, and the higher, more nervous organisation of the physical body grows, the next of your bodies, the astral, will become more and more highly organised year by year. The organisation of that next body of yours, of finer matter than the physical, is going on very rapidly at the present time under the pressure of thought, which all educated and cultured people use at least to some extent. As that body becomes more highly organised, its special sense-organs come into activity, and then we have what is called a higher psychism, which is not the result of an astral body unorganised and vibrating to every passing wind of emotion, but of a body highly organised, with its own senses developed, and those senses seeking to express themselves through the grosser body of the physical plane. Now there is one organ in your brain which is the sixth sense, the sense through which all these astral cognitions, astral emotions, will show themselves down in your own waking consciousness, and that is the body which very much puzzles many of our doctors and scientific men—the pituitary body. That is not, as many of them think, a mere vestigial organ left from the past; it is that, but it is also the organ of which the finer internal differentiation is making the sense for the higher psychic powers of the Coming Race. Now that is matter of fact known to the occult student, because he sees that development going on in his own case and in the case of others around him; and in proportion as that finer and well-organised astral body hands down into the brain the various things which it cognises, so does he find the pituitary body functioning, so does he experience changes that go on in that. Now, that body, according to one of the latest discoveries of modern science, is at once affected by the vapours of alcohol; it is one of the glands of the body which are most readily poisoned, and even a very small amount of alcohol poisons the pituitary body, and chokes its highest evolution. Obviously, then, if you want to ease that, if you want at this stage of evolution to put a little evolutionary pressure even on the bodies of the fifth Race, and thus ease that, one of the first things that should be said to you is: Never touch alcohol at all in any form, for if you do the vibrations of the alcohol poison the very means of communication between the astral and the physical bodies, and the developing of them to higher purposes is one of the marks of the Coming Race, the means whereby it will sense the astral world in waking consciousness; hence the instruction that you will have from everyone who is speaking of this and understands the conditions: Do not only give up all forms of flesh, but also take care that your diet is free from every trace of alcohol. Now, these are laws of nature that you cannot get over; and if you make up your mind to cling to the fifth Race way of diet, then you must be content to remain fifth Race, and go no further. No one wants you to go further than you wish to go, but the conditions are unchangeable, and the more that is recognised the better will it be. Above all, with those children that I have been mentioning, take care not to try to force them in any way, nor to induce them to take those articles of diet which will injure their growing delicacy of nervous organisation, and destroy that developing organ in the brain by which they will bring their knowledge through into ordinary life.
Then let me remind you of the way in which this may be done. Let us suppose that you desire to hasten the coming of the Coming Race; let us suppose that you are not willing to wait for the slow processes of nature, lasting hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years, but want to co-operate with nature, as we ought to do to-day, having reached the stage of evolution that we have reached, where human intelligence can quicken the workings of nature. The first thing that you must do is to make meditation a part of your daily life. Now, meditation has three stages: first, the reining in of the wandering mind, the checking of its thinking from one point to another continually in activity; then the fixing of that controlled mind on a single object of thought; then the contemplation of that object in order that it may be reproduced in yourself. That process of meditation is the way in which the unfolding consciousness may be definitely stimulated, and there is no other healthy and sane way. By a daily practice of that sort, the fixing of your mind either on the ideal Self or on some ideal of virtue that you desire to reproduce within yourself—as you follow that practice of meditation, the higher consciousness develops, and you change your contact with the world. Let me take a case. You come across a man who is very untruthful. Normally he may deceive you for a time until you get evidence that appeals to the mind, until you can argue logically and prove that the man is not truthful; a slow process, but one that needs to be used in the present stage. What will be the process of recognising untruth where the spiritual nature has begun to develop by the process of meditation? You would meditate on truth; that is the first step. By that regular daily meditation on truth you make your subtle body vibrate, so that the nature of your subtle body becomes that which answers to truth; then when a man who is untruthful comes along you do not have to reason; by the direct process of intuition you recognise that man as false; he jars you just as a false note jars on a musical instrument. There is no process of reasoning, no need to go into evidence, no need to seek for proofs; you feel him, see him to be false, by intuition instead of reasoning. Now, I know a case of that kind in India, although I don’t suppose you will quite copy my Indian friend, for he was a man who, from his boyhood upwards, had meditated every day upon truth, and he had done it for forty years. That is a long time from the western standpoint. The effect of that was that he had so tuned himself to the note of truth—he happened to be a judge—that no evidence could deceive him, however plausible; he knew when a man was lying by the jar that he felt within himself. I only mention that as a special case to show you the method by which this meditation unfolds the inner powers, so that, instead of the slow processes you are accustomed to, a direct intuition tells you the character of the person with whom you come into touch. I might go through the whole string of the virtues; the principle is the same everywhere. In addition to meditation, you must practise. You must practise in your daily life the keenest sympathy that you are able to develop; by deliberate effort, force yourself into sympathy with everyone whom you may happen to meet; make yourself feel as that person feels; and above all, practise it with those who are lower in evolution than yourself, for there sympathy becomes most useful, and the practise of feeling as the less-evolved feel enables you to lift them up nearer to your own level. You must not only practise sympathy, too, in your daily life; you must practise the absence of the sense of separateness, the most difficult thing in the world to do for all of us who belong to this Teutonic sub-race. Our sense of individuality is so strong that in everything we feel “my,” “mine,” “my property,” “my books,” “my house,” “my friends”—a continual repetition of the “my.” You must get rid of that; you must get rid of the feeling which instinctively claims something that you call your own as against other people. Now, it is not an easy thing to do; and the first stages are very disagreeable, jarring the fifth sub-race type of mind. Try to get rid of your sense of individual ownership in the things that are yours. How often you hear a generous-tempered man say: “Oh, I would have given it to him at once if he had asked for it, but I did not like his taking it!” Why not? Because you feel separate; because of “I” and “he,” “mine,” “his.” The next Race is not going to have that sense so strongly developed; and if you want to take part in the building of it, the sooner you get rid of it the better for yourselves. Practise not minding having your things taken away and used by anybody who wants to use them. It sounds strange to you, but it is a commonplace in India. My Indian friends, when I first knew them, used to be astonished when I said to them: “May I use such-and-such a thing?” “Why, of course, if you want it,” was the invariable answer; and at last I got to realise that that was a very much higher position towards objects of property than the self-assertive owning. Similarly, in India, when you have a garden, anybody who likes comes in, sits under your trees, lights a little fire, and cooks his dinner there if he likes. When one day, again, in my very early days, before I understood this, I said to somebody: “Oh, but do you like people coming into your garden like that without asking permission?” “What else is a garden for?” was the reply. That is the natural feeling there because of the communal life which has been universal for thousands of years. You think of the use of the thing and the man who wants to use it; that he wants it is the reason why he should have the use of it. That is a very long way from our fifth sub-race way of looking at property. Practise that, then, in order to get rid of this utterly exaggerated sense of separation which we find in our social life at the present time. This habit of self-sacrifice—sacrificing your own whims, wishes, wants, every day of your life, for the sake of making life easier for those around you—that will be one of the characteristics of the Coming Race. And as you do it, you will gradually find that you won’t mind; that the pleasure of making another person satisfied is far greater than the pleasure of having a thing for yourself; that the words of the Christ are literally true: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”; not a duty but more blessed, more happy, so that the joy that comes out of the sharing utterly swamps any feeling of self-sacrifice. That, again, will be the great social type of the Coming Race.
See how practically, then, this thought of the Coming Race bears upon our living of to-day. Those who would prepare themselves for the part of that changed type of man must begin building it up in their character, their emotions, their minds to-day, by meditation, the opening of the consciousness by practise, the training of the life into expressions along higher lines. That race will be the builder of a universal religion, in which sharing what each has of truth will be the only form of missionary effort. That Race will be the builder of a brotherly civilisation, in which the need of every man will be the measure of what he has given to him; in which the power of every man will be the limit of his responsibility. Those will be the great changes that will come, and you, if you will, may take part in that changing; you, even in the present civilisation, may hold to the higher ideal, and try to make it acceptable to the minds of your fellow-men. But our hope is mostly in the young, in those who have not yet been hardened in the brutal competition which marks the commercial and class life of to-day. The young lads and the young girls, still plastic, still easily fired by great ideals, with nervous systems finer in many cases than ours, and hearts warmer than those that have been chilled in the experience of life—in them lies the hope of the future. For they shall make ideals, they shall create them in the world of thought, and out of the world of thought those ideals shall be sent into the world of matter, and make the Coming Race, which shall build a civilisation happy, glorious, beautiful, and free, but in which it shall be realised that the greatest freedom expresses itself in the greatest service.