The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students. / Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909

by Annie Besant

But I said, people might ask not only what is Theosophy, but—Whence does it come? It is the latest—I do not say the last—of the great impulses which, one after another, in the long past of history, have founded the great religions of the world. Those impulses ever come from a mighty Brotherhood of Teachers made up of the past Founders of religion, presided over by the Supreme Teacher who rules and guides and inspires them all—a mighty Brotherhood of Teachers of the world, coming from time to time to found a religion, to shape a civilisation. Such impulses were often repeated in the past, to be again repeated in the century which now is running its course amongst us, history in very truth repeating itself, and bringing at the appointed time a new civilisation, preceded by a new spiritual impulse.

That impulse on this occasion has differed from all that went before it in that it founds no new religion, builds no new barrier, does not mark out believers and unbelievers, does not try to proselytise, but only to inspire. For, as I just said, Theosophy goes to all religions as a peacemaker, and does not strive to draw away from any faith those whom the law has brought to birth beneath its shelter. So its first work in preparation for the coming civilisation is to try to bring about a brotherhood of religions, not destroying any, not trying to make any less potent than they were before, but endeavouring to transform them from rivals to brothers, so that each religion may recognise its kinship with other religions, and they may become one mighty family, instead of warring and separate creeds. Now, to that high end it brings the knowledge of facts which have largely been used against religion, but ought really to be used in its service. Those of you who have reached even middle age will remember how in the latter part of the nineteenth century there grew up among the sciences of the time a science which was named Comparative Mythology. You will remember how that science grew; the oldest among you may remember its very beginnings. It sought out of the past religions, as well as out of the present religions, to prove that religion grew up out of ignorance, and only became refined as it grew older and spread among more cultivated people. It used the researches of the archæologist, the discoveries of the antiquarian, as weapons against the religion which dominated Christendom, where science was most powerful and most active. It took up doctrine after doctrine of the Christian faith, and pointed to the existence of those doctrines in other times, in other civilisations, among the religions of the past, both living and dead. It brought information from the open tombs of Egypt, and gathered together the fragments of Egyptian knowledge as they were traced on the papyrus, on the leaf that was put on the bosom of the mummy. It gathered them together, and out of those scattered fragments it made what we know well as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It did the same with Chaldæa, the same with Nineveh, the same with those replicas of Egyptian temples that were unburied in far-off Mexico—temples thousands of years older than the Aztecs, who slew their worshippers and destroyed their civilisation, the Aztecs, who themselves were thousands of years old when Cortez and his Spaniards treated them as they had treated their forerunners. It brought from those unburied temples similar teachings and similar ideas. It gathered, again, similar teachings from the books of China, with its immemorial traditions; from the scriptures of India, from the fragments of the Zoroastrian tradition, from the books of the Buddhist nations, from Greek and Roman. Piling up all the evidence it had gathered, it made out of that the science of Comparative Mythology. It was the deadliest weapon that was ever forged against dogmatic Christianity, because founded on knowledge of facts that none could deny. Then it was that it became the duty of Theosophy, just then born into the world, to come forward to acknowledge the truth of the facts, and to add many others to the store, but to point out that instead of Comparative Mythology there should be built a science of Comparative Religion, showing that that which had been universally taught was truth, and not lies; was verity, and not delusion. It defended every religion by the universality of religious beliefs; and it pointed out that a truth did not cease to be a truth because it was ancient, did not cease to be a truth because it ruled in ancient times as well as now; it justified religion by the very arguments that were used to discredit it, and traced it to a universal Ancient Wisdom, instead of to the ignorance of the savage, refined in modern days. It brought to that contention many an argument on which I have not time to dwell, but that you can very easily read for yourselves, if it be unknown to you, in the many publications that have been written along these lines. And now, in order to utilise that for the coming time in the building of the Brotherhood of Religions, we proclaim in every country, to every faith, among the people of every religion, the common heritage, the spiritual verity, the primary doctrines that are found in every faith. What are they? They are but few, although far-reaching. They could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and even than that, so few are they.

The first great doctrine that every religion teaches is the unity of God; the second, that God in manifestation is ever triple. In philosophy they speak of three qualities or attributes; in religion they mostly personify, and speak of a Trinity or a triple form. But whether philosophical, or personified in religion, you have ever Power or Will, Wisdom, Activity, and you can find those in the Trinity of every nation, whether you take in the Christian creed the Father, the embodiment of Power, of Will, the Son, the Wisdom everlasting; the Spirit, the creative Activity by which the worlds are made. Or you might take it equally well in Hindūism, and there you would see the order reversed: the Creator, who is the embodiment of Activity; the Preserver, the embodiment of Wisdom; the Regenerator, the embodiment of Power. And so might I take you to ancient and dead religions, and to ancient and living religions, and show you ever the same. For those primary truths of God are everywhere proclaimed, one in His nature, triple in His manifestation. And then, after those first two truths, you come to the third: the vast family of the Sons of God, the great hierarchy of spiritual intelligences—archangels, angels, shining ones; call them what you will—that mighty family of Sons of God, amongst which humanity finds its own place in process of evolution. Then you come to the fourth great teaching: that you have the unfolding of consciousness going on continually, and shaping ever finer and finer bodies for its own expression; that which science calls evolution, but which religion has ever called reincarnation, the method of perfecting the germinal seed of divinity into the divine man, when the human evolution is complete. Then, fifthly, the worlds in which these changes go on: our earth, the intermediate world, and the heavenly; and man, with bodies of matter belonging to all the worlds, so that he may be in contact with each. And then the sixth great teaching of universal law—law in the world of mind as well as in the world of matter; law which builds character as well as builds the outer world; law unchanging and inviolable, which, because we can know, we can utilise to the building up of ourselves into noblest ideals. And then, closing these doctrines that are common to every religion, we find the idea of the Teachers who preside over human evolution, who inspire religions, who guard the spiritual progress of mankind. Those are the truths universal, those are the teachings which every religion has had and has; and so we find in these religions, by their unity of teaching, the reality of Brotherhood that we seek everywhere to spread. For of what avail to change from one faith to another if in the new religion you only find the same old truths, though ceremonies and rites may differ? And we see in this Brotherhood of Religions one value to mankind which one religion only could never have given to us. Just as you see the light of the sun broken up into many colours, and those colours giving all the beauty to earth which you see in the nature around you; just as you know that those colours that constitute white light can be recombined again into the white light whence they sprung, so is it with religions. The great truths, the great virtues are as one—the great white light of truth; they are broken up by the prism of the intellect, and the many religions ray out, each with its own colour; they are recombined by the prism of the Spirit, and once again are blended into the unity of truth.

If you look at religions you will see how true that is. Every religion has a note of its own, a colour of its own, that it gives for the helping of the world. Go back to ancient Egypt, and you find the note of the Egyptian religion is knowledge, so that Egyptian religion became the mother of Egyptian science, and science spread from Egypt westwards over Europe. Go to the Far East, and you will find in India that the special note of Hindūism is the all-pervading nature of Deity, and the all-compelling duty which is the law for every individual. Go to Persia in her ancient days, and there the note of purity was struck—purity of thought, of word, of act. Go to Greece, and you will find her note was beauty—beauty in architecture, beauty in sculpture, beauty in painting, beauty in the perfection of her philosophy, which made the Beautiful of equal rank with the True and the Good. And in Rome you find the note of law, law all-compelling; and in Christianity the note of self-sacrifice, which has in it the promise of the future; and in Islām the proclamation again of the divine unity. And so every religion with its own note, every religion with its own colour; blended together they give the whiteness of truth, blended together they give a mighty chord of perfection.

Now that you could not have had with one faith and one creed. Human thought is too narrow, human brain cannot grasp at once this many-noted chord of perfection; and so many religions, each with its own characteristic, as though the Divine Name were to be spelt out by the religions, and each gave a single letter, all the letters together making the name of the Blessed One. When you look on religion in that way you realise how mighty a thing it is, how its strength is in unity expressed in diversity; how each religion should learn from others and share with others that which is its own specialty. And surely that does not lower religion, but makes it greater; surely it does not make it less compelling, but more attractive. Is Christ less when He taught “Love your enemies,” because we know that the Buddha said, six hundred years before Him, “Hatred ceases not by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love”? Or is it not more beautiful to see in the Buddha and the Christ proclaimers of the one eternal law, coming at different times to different nations, but ever with a single truth, ever with one code to teach to men?

Now in trying to do this work—which, of course, is taken in detail when one is dealing only with that side of thought—Theosophy is preparing for that common spiritual religion, the one Divine Wisdom, of which all the religions of the world shall see themselves as branches, while the trunk and root of truth are one. That is the great work, then, in the coming civilisation, which it is the duty of Theosophy to labour at; and hence, in one of its early teachings, it was said it was to be the corner-stone of the religion of humanity. For the religion of humanity will be the Brotherhood of Religions that I have been describing, where no religion can be spared, for each has something special, but where all religions will be seen as one, because they give similar truths in different forms.

Let us pass from that, and ask what Theosophy is to do in the coming civilisation, in the science of that time. Science in the coming days will pass into subtler worlds, or subtler matter. It has practically conquered the grosser, denser forms of matter; it is now going onward to the subtler and the finer. And there lies its difficulty: that the methods which did for the grosser, the apparatus that measured the grosser, are not applicable for the subtler. And when I say “the gross,” think how fine even its apparatus is, for quite lately I had sent to me an article in a scientific journal which spoke of an apparatus that could measure the forty-millionth of an inch, and yet that is coarse compared with the subtleties of the matter that lies beyond that, which science must conquer in the coming days. Now of what value can Theosophy be there? It is bringing, by training, the possibility to man in our modern days of quickening his own evolution, and running ahead of the slow working of the laws of nature unguided by human intelligence. It is bringing, and proclaiming everywhere, a system by which man can more rapidly unfold the powers of his consciousness, and also may more rapidly develop the organs of finer matter that are related to those worlds of finer matter which science will soon enter and begin to conquer. It is telling people how to develop the finer senses, and showing them the line along which the very few have gone in the past, but along which myriads shall tread in the future, the next great stage of human evolution, the organising of the finer body in man. It is bringing that to the help of science in order that by the evolution of the finer body the finer world may become the object of observation, exactly on the same lines, exactly by the same laws, that your grosser physical bodies to-day enable you to investigate the grosser physical world around you. There are eyes that are keener than these organs evolved from the pigment spots of the medusa; there are ears finer and subtler than those of our body, exquisite as they are in their mechanism and in their delicacy; there are organs of sense transcending the physical. Within the physical brain is an organ evolving which shall be the connecting link between those finer senses of the finer body and the grosser senses of the body of flesh that we wear; an organ that many of our scientists think is an organ that is passing away, because it is larger in the earlier stages of evolution than in the highly developed man; it is the pituitary body. It is not a question of size, but of inner complexity of organisation; and that organ is not simply what science calls it, a vestigial organ—that is, one belonging to the evolution of the past—it is truly a rudimentary organ, one belonging to the evolution of the future. And the fact of that has been proved by bringing life-currents, electric currents, to bear on that particular organ, so that the results of the finer senses are communicated to the brain, and we bridge what some people think the gulf between the world of physical matter and the world that is called that of astral matter.

Those experiments are now so familiar to some of us that it is impossible for us to agree with the notion that that organ in the brain has no future, as we find it can be stimulated and organised more finely, and used in this definite fashion; we know that what a few are doing now many shall do to-morrow, and those who have done it are only a step in front; others are treading on their heels, and may outstrip them soon in evolution. But here comes the difficulty, especially for the nations of western Europe, who, from climatic and other reasons, have taken so very largely to a diet of flesh, in which also alcohol plays a large part. Now flesh and alcohol are not suitable materials for building up the body of our ordinary life, which is to be made sensitive enough to receive the vibrations from the finer matter of which I have been speaking. Doctors have just discovered what was published by Madame Blavatsky many years ago—that alcohol has a direct effect on the pituitary body, and poisons that body, tending to cause inflammation. Have you ever wondered why it is that alcoholic excess leads to what is called delirium tremens, in which people see things that do not exist to the ordinary people around them? It is because they have poisoned that very organ by which vibrations come from other worlds; and although what they see is largely abnormal and irrational, it is none the less the result of action on these irregular and poisoned bodies, which vibrate under the stress of poison instead of under the stress of thought, as they should do. And that which doctors now have discovered and are publishing as a warning to people, that has ever been known in occult science, and one of the conditions of giving the details of the methods whereby that body may be rendered active, has been abstinence from alcohol, and for the simplest reason. So long as you are not using any of these methods, it does not so very much matter whether that body be poisoned or not. You may live long with a poisoned pituitary body; but the very moment that you begin to work upon it, to make it active, to throw into it new currents of life and energy, then the poison and the energy together bring about inflammation of the most intractable kind, causing severe pain, as well as brain mischief. And it is for that reason that the methods have not been publicly given, and are only given to those who are pure from the taint of alcohol. Along those lines, then, you will very likely come up against rules that many of you will not care to adopt. We do not say adopt them; we only say they are the conditions of the finer organisation. Natural laws do not change for people’s wishes and whims. If you want electric sparks from a machine you must make the conditions; you must have dry air, not air full of moisture. It is no good saying that dry air is not so comfortable to breathe as moist air. You are not obliged to have electric sparks, but if you want them you must conform to the conditions laid down by nature, and not follow your own whims. And that is true everywhere. Presently people will find that it is true when they want to investigate some of the spiritualistic phenomena; they have not discovered that yet. They think they can lay down the laws, and then get the results which can only be gained by obedience. The other day I was reading a rather curious report of investigation into spiritualistic photographs; and when I saw they had not obtained any, I could not help wondering how many physical photographs they would be able to get if they made it a rule that they should not put a dark cloth over the camera, and that, above all, they should not take the photographs away into the dark room, because that gives all possibilities of cheating and of fraud. Presently you will find out that finer nature has her laws quite as much as grosser nature, and that you can no more get results without obedience to those laws than you could get your photograph if your plates were exposed to the light. When that is learned, progress may be more rapid.

Along that line, where these rules are laid down for the organisation of the finer bodies, there is another matter that comes in: it is of no use to develop the finer bodies, unless the consciousness of the higher worlds is unfolded, and the only way to do that is by the old way of strenuous and regular meditation. Theosophy brings to the Western world the yoga of the East, by which the man who practises so trains and refines his brain that he makes it sensitive without making it diseased. There is where the difficulty is found in the West. Sometimes, when a great rush comes down from the higher worlds into the body of some great saint or some great genius, there is brain trouble and brain disturbance; hysteria is found. Naturally, because you are overstraining your instrument. And if you want to be able to receive those great downflows from the higher world, then you must begin to tune your instrument to vibrate to the swifter vibrations that come down. You can do it, and there is no danger unless you go to excess. If day by day you would give even ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour, to strenuous thought and careful concentration, you would gradually make your brain constitution more complex and finer than it is. Thought is really the creator of the brain. As you think, your brain grows; just as if you exercise your muscles, your muscles grow and develop. It is all law, and thought is the force which renders the brain more complex in its organisation. The Indian yogi practises that, and by practise year after year, builds up the brain of the coming race out of the brain of the race that is. He makes it finer, subtler, more responsive, and he does it without the sacrifice of physical health; and that is a thing that any one of you may begin, if only you will be moderate and not excessive. Never concentrate to the point of making a feeling of dulness and heaviness of the brain; never concentrate to the point of pain; dulness and pain are the danger-signals of nature, that you are trying to change matter more rapidly in its arrangement than is possibly consistent with health. Therefore you need moderation; but, given moderation, nothing but good can come out of the practise of meditation and concentration; and by that you will not only make your brain more sensitive, but also keep it sane and healthy, and you will have none of those miserable hysterical symptoms which have so blurred the value of the knowledge that has come through the seer or the saint. Along those lines, then, Theosophy works with science to show the road of development of science in the coming civilisation.

What has Theosophy to do with regard to art in that civilisation? Glance at the results of your civilisation to-day on the beauty of the land. Go to Sheffield, which is built in what was one of the loveliest valleys of the Midlands; notice, as you come near it, the beauty of the countryside, the wooding of the undulating land, the exquisite beauty of rivulet, of forest, and of grass; and then, out of all that beauty of Nature, you plunge suddenly into the hideousness of Sheffield. You find the atmosphere thick with black smoke. No tree will grow in many of the districts, no flowers even on the sills of the houses of the poor. The atmosphere poisons vegetation; what do you think it does to the men, women, and children who breathe it? And Sheffield is not alone. Go to Glasgow; see the hideousness of that, the second metropolis of Scotland. Go to Birmingham, to Manchester, to any of these great cities that so largely make the wealth of England. But sometimes it seems to me that what you pay in beauty is too heavy a price even for your wealth, and that England was happier as well as healthier when she had fewer millionaires, but also fewer stunted and deformed specimens of humanity in her slums. Look at the faces of the men, women, and children of one or two of those cities I have mentioned. Look at the faces of the Glasgow crowd as it tramps back from its labour to the slum. Those faces are not civilised; they are brutal, many of them—animal, more than human. Oh, you who think that beauty is only a luxury, look at the humanity you breed, where ugliness is the mark of the cities, instead of the beauty that has been destroyed. You must learn to understand what beauty means. It moulds the body, and ugliness does the same. Out of your hideous cities a hideous humanity grows up. The restoration of art is a matter of life and death, not a matter of luxury and of enjoyment. Artists are wanted in our towns much more than on the walls of our galleries. Only a few go into the gallery, but men, women, and children live in the town. Until the town is beautiful, as in Greece it was beautiful, the coming civilisation will lack one mark of the civilised man. And Theosophy teaches reverence for beauty, whether it be natural beauty or beauty formed by the skilful fingers and keen brains of men—reverence for the human body. No nation has a right to breed the bodies that we see in the population of the slums. It is all very well that in the richer, the upper classes you find men and women healthy, strong, magnificent to look at; but if they can be what they are, all ought to be able to share in the conditions that create that beauty. And art will not do its duty until it holds up for all to see the power that resides in beauty, and its moulding influence on civilisation; art should be ever painting and holding up to us the ideal in its beauty, for it is the ideal that makes the real. The artist should show the ideal, and the craftsman should reproduce it; and until your craftsmen honour their labour, there will be very little hope for art to thrive amongst us. Art is no art when it only paints the commonplace and the ugly. Sometimes, on the walls of a gallery, you come across a picture made up perhaps of a piece of cheese, and a boiled lobster, and a string of onions, and one or two corpses of birds thrown in for the sake of their plumage. That is not art. Art is beauty, and to paint things like that is to degrade art, no matter how well they may be reproduced. “Oh,” I have heard a person say, “how beautiful that cheese is. I could cut it!” You can cut cheese anywhere; and you don’t want to go to a gallery, and an art gallery, so-called, in order to see it. Put this beside the pictures of the ancient masters, and see what art means and what the travesty of art. Theosophy has to try to breathe into the artist the idea of the splendour of his calling, the divinity of his power. He can see what we cannot see, and hear what we cannot hear; let him give us what we cannot reach for ourselves, and be again the priest of the Beautiful for men. Then shall the civilisation grow into beauty, human as well as inanimate, and the right place of beauty shall come into our civilisation, the place it held in ancient Greece.