Theosophists

"Within a short time after the alleged crucifixion of the Master Jesus - at any rate from the time when the Christian Scriptures began to have circulation in the Mediterranean world - and all through the Middle Ages and till nearly our own days, men quarreled and fought about the documents composing the Christian New Testament, not only with regard to just what these documents had to say, but about mere words and phrases, and also as regards their age, and as regards who wrote these various Christian Scriptures. (Chapter 1)"

"Yet the majestic philosophy-science-religion of the ages teaches us that there are beings so much greater and higher than man is, and beings so much smaller and less than he, that in reality he himself in turn stands in his world and cosmos as the one or the other of these extremes to such greater or smaller entities. (Ch 2)"

"The psychology of the times following the publication of Darwin's works was so strong that most thinking men could not then be brought to admit that there were any alternative explanations of the phenomena of progressive development in life — human, animal, or plant life — to the scheme of transformism which he set forth. (Ch 3)"

"This psychological phenomenon was brought about mainly by the efforts of two men... Thomas Henry Huxley and Ernst Heinrich Haeckel. Both were fervent Darwinists... These two men were exceedingly able; but they spoke with the voice of authority on subjects which they themselves, in many particulars, were merely guessing at. These conclusions are not mine alone. They are also the conclusions of many scientific researchers and thinkers of today. (Ch 3)"

"The strength of the doctrine of reincarnation lies in itself, in its appeal to our intellectual and logical faculties, in its own persuasiveness, in the manner in which it answers problems, in the hope that it gives, in the light that it sheds upon collateral questions of human life, and indirectly upon the problems of the physical world surrounding us. It is through and by reincarnation as a natural fact, that we learn the beauty of the inner life and thereby grow, developing a larger comprehension, not only of ourselves, but of the loveliness inherent in the harmony of the universal laws. For there is back of all things beauty, and bliss, and truth. (Chapter 10)"

"Although this Wisdom has been offered throughout the ages under various names and in many languages, its essence is fundamentally the same, however much its outer aspects and manner of presentation may vary. It especially points to the reality of brotherhood and the imperative necessity of practicing it; but it also gives insight into the unexplained around us and helps the development of our latent powers; and it is the inner harmony of religion, philosophy, and science."

"We are only in the middle of our development, so we still have a great deal to discover."

"The ultimate quest in the Harry Potter books is that of self-discovery. In that respect, these books share a common theme with the great spiritual guidebooks of humanity. Enlightenment is the ability to answer correctly the question Who am I? ... The same question is the principal subject of all the Upanishads and, indeed, of spiritual treatises in all the great traditions. Harry is on a great quest to discover who he is -- in the simplest, most literal sense of learning about his parents -- but also in the deeper sense of discovering his own nature and his mission in life. That great quest is mirrored in a different quest theme in each book of the series."

"Jesus the Syrian Avatara did not teach anything new. What he did was to point once again to the old, old Pathway to the spiritual life: the Pathway to wisdom and spiritual power. And he told his followers how and what they might achieve by following this Pathway, so that ultimately they could become such as he was - such as he was so far as wisdom and power went; for in the heart of the heart of every human being there is a divinity, his own inner god, which the Christians of a mystical turn of mind today call the immanent Christ. (Chapter 3)"

"Concerning the nature of the cyclical times when the great teachers either appear personally in the world of men or send a messenger, it may be stated that the greatest teachers come at the opening or close of the longest cyclical periods; the messengers or envoys are sent forth at the opening or closing of the short cycles, and the teachers or messengers of intermediate power come at the beginnings or endings of time-periods of intermediate length. (Chapter 22)"

"It was pointed out that a messenger or envoy is sent from the Brotherhood into the world for the purpose of striking anew a keynote of spiritual truth when a sincere call comes from the heart of mankind; but it must likewise be stated that, just as Krishna points out in the Bhagavad-Gita (4:7-8), an avatara comes in times of great spiritual barrenness, when the waves of materialism are rising high. (Chapter 22)"

"The members of the Brotherhood are eternally alert and watchful, and are continuously acting as a Guardian Wall (to adopt the phrase of H. P. Blavatsky), around mankind, shielding it against dangers both of a cosmic and terrestrial character. Mankind little knows what it owes to the great sages and seers. (Chapter 22)"

"The Brotherhood of great seers and sages, united in a common purpose and governed by common ideals and esoteric knowledge, has existed as an association of high adepts under the direct inspiration and guidance of their hierarch, or mahaguru, for many millions of years — certainly for not less than twelve million; in other words, since the appearance on earth of the root-race which preceded our own present fifth root-race. (Chapter 22)"

"Probably there is no single doctrine of the Esoteric Tradition which makes so instant an appeal as does the idea of the present existence in the world of great sages or seers. In most minds there lies an intuition that there must be in the world human beings of far loftier spiritual capacity and of immensely more developed intellectual power than the ordinary run of men. Those who hear of this for the first time instantly turn to those luminous figures, such as Gautama the Buddha, Jesus the Syrian avatara, Apollonius of Tyana, Lao-Tse, Krishna, Sankaracharya, etc. and, among many, the first reaction is: if such great figures have already existed in the world, why should they not exist again? (Chapter 19)"

"The cause of the disappearance of the Mysteries has always been degeneracy, faithlessness on the part of the students, and their lack of an imperative and heart-reaching call for light. Where there is a genuine spiritual and intellectual call issuing from both heart and mind, there invariably comes the response by way of a new installment of teaching from the Brotherhood. (Chapter 22)"

"These great sages or masters have never been discouraged in their work for humanity by the fact that the body of truths which at cyclical intervals they promulgate anew would have to undergo periods of degeneration. Directed by spiritual beings even greater than they, they do this sublime work and without intermission throughout the whirling cycles of time. (Chapter 22)"

"Every one of these great Sages and Seers, whether he was the Buddha-Gautama of India, or Lao-Tse of China, or Sankaracharya of India again, or Jesus, or Empedocles, or Pythagoras, or Apollonius of Tyana: any one of the numerous host of them all taught the same fundamental doctrines which therefore were identical. (Chapter 3)"

"But Christianity in its doctrines has wandered widely indeed from the original thought of its great founder, for the reason that inferior men became its propagandists after the time of Jesus. While many of them undoubtedly were thoroughly sincere, some probably were intellectually insincere in the sense of attempting to impart as universal truths of nature what were the more or less vagrant ideas of their own minds — misunderstood and misinterpreted hints and flashes which they had received from the great source.(Chapter 11)"

"It is true that some of the teachings of these ancient religions or philosophies which by many ages preceded the respective eras of Mohammedanism and Christianity are now more or less degenerate. In addition, they have been grossly misunderstood and misinterpreted by Occidental scholars. (Chapter 11)"

"Our own globe earth, in fact is technically a "hell" because it is a relatively dense material sphere and the states of consciousness of the beings inhabiting it are relatively heavily involved in the webs of maya — illusion. For this reason H. P. Blavatsky in The Voice of the Silence speaks of "Men of Myalba" — Myalba being a Tibetan term used for one of the hells in the philosophy of Northern Buddhism, and Myalba is our earth. (Chapter 11)"

"The urge behind evolution, and the objective which this urge is impelling us toward, is simply the divine hunger in the universe to grow greater. It is innate in the universe. Why this is so, no one can say. Perhaps the gods do not know. All we men can aver is that it is so. (Chapter 6)"

"Eternity stretches in one direction behind and in another direction in front of us, and along and within this eternity numberless multitudes of beings and entities have been evolving — and will evolve — forever. This progressive growth is continuously in action throughout universal nature — nebula or comet, star or planet, atom or electron, all exemplify it on one side of the picture; and, on the other side, gods, cosmic spirits or dhyani-chohans, men, the beasts, and all so-called animate entities. (Chapter 6)"

"What we may call a blind struggle for betterment in the atoms, becomes in man a self-conscious yearning to grow, to become ever more the divinity within himself, arising in a recognition, now quasi-conscious, that man is a son of the gods. This same urge becomes in the gods a divine knowledge that they are inseparable parts of the universe, and are growing to take a vaster self-conscious part in the universal labor. (Chapter 6)"

"It will be impossible to understand death and its mysteries as long as one concentrates attention on the mere bodies or sheaths in which this ray or flame of consciousness periodically enwraps itself. It is necessary to follow the peregrinations of the consciousness per se, if a man desire to know his postmortem destiny. When a man can do this he will no longer fear death, because he will see its non-existence except as a phase of life opening into peregrinations through inner worlds and spheres, till the devachan is reached; and he will recognize death exactly for what it is, the gentlest helper and friend that a man has. (Chapter 16)"

"Reincarnation comes under the more general doctrine of reimbodiment. It is the teaching that the human ego returns to earth at some future time after the change men call death... in order that the ego may learn new lessons on earth, in new times, in new environments; taking up again on this earth the old links of sympathy and of friendship, of hatred and dislike, which were apparently ruptured by the hand of death when the ego-soul left our spheres. (Chapter 2)"

"Man himself in former lives set in action the causes which later, by rigid karmic justice, bring about the effects which he in the present life complains of and calls unmerited. This same mistake in misunderstanding the logic and delicate and subtle reasoning of the teaching caused in early Christianity that first fatal departure from the recognition of infinite and automatic justice in the world, to the idea that because man's sufferings seemed inexplicable they were therefore unmerited and due to the inscrutable wisdom of Almighty God — whose decrees man should accept in humility without questioning the wisdom of the providence thus erected in explanation. (Chapter 2)"

"These two teachings once held secret, or openly promulgated in a more or less imperfect form, are examples of the manner in which from age to age when the need arises for so doing, esoteric teachings are openly developed by the Brotherhood of sages and seers. Such teachings profoundly modify civilization because they profoundly change human psychology and the spiritual and intellectual vision of mankind. (Chapter 2)"

"Indeed, this wisdom-religion was delivered to the first thinking human beings on this earth by highly-intelligent spiritual entities from superior spheres; and it has been passed down from guardians to guardians thereof until our own time. Furthermore, portions of this original and majestic system have been given out from time to time to various races in different parts of the world by those guardians when humanity stood in need of some new extension and cyclical renewal of spiritual verities. (Chapter 1)"

"There can be but one truth, and if we can find a formulation of that truth in logical, coherent, and consistent form, obviously we then can understand those portions of it equal to our capacity of comprehension. (Chapter 1)"

"Who are these guardians? They are those whom we call the elder brothers of the human race, and are men in all senses of the word and not excarnate spirits. They are, relatively speaking, fully evolved or perfected men, who have successfully run the evolutionary race and are therefore now in point of spiritual and intellectual grandeur where we shall be many ages hence. (Chapter 1)"

"Few people realize the enormous but always invisible and quiet psychological leverage that new ideas have upon human consciousness; and this is especially so with teachings of a spiritual or intellectual type. All these teachings are replete with the divine conceptions of the gods who first gave Truth to men; and this is the secret of the immense sway that Religion per se (apart from mere degenerate religions) has upon human intellect. (Chapter 2)"

"For of death, that blessed angel of mercy should not be feared. It is nature's most blessed relief and rest, for it is sleep, perfect and complete, and filled with ineffably lovely dreams. The man who has died sleeps in peace; and his spiritual soul, the peregrinating monad, gaudet in astris — rejoices in the stars. (Chapter 16)"

"What were some of these teachings? "Man, Know thyself!" For self knowledge - the knowledge of the higher spiritual Self - is the pathway of wisdom, of understanding, of light, of peace, of power; and it comes to man through self-forgetfulness, and self-forgetfulness is the knocking, the mystic knocking, at the door of the initiation-chamber of the temple. (Chapter 3)"

"They have lived throughout the ages, each generation of Them transmitting to succeeding generation the accumulated wisdom and knowledge that had been gained from immemorial time. They have wonderful powers over Nature, because they have learned to know Nature. They work entirely with Nature, with the Law. That is the reason that they are great. They are in harmony with things as they are, with the roots of things. They are the Servants of the Law, and in that lies their power. They never work contrary to Nature's mandates. They warn men as far as men will let them. They are warning continually. Every now and again they send forth from among their own number someone to teach men, to carry a new message of wisdom and knowledge of Nature's secrets into the world. They have done this through the ages, warning, teaching, encouraging, consoling, constantly saying: Come up higher; come to us. Jesus, the Buddha, Sankaracharya: all these great men have been Messengers from the Lodge, the great White Lodge."

"As for human nature in general, it is the same now as it was a million of years ago: Prejudice based upon selfishness; a general unwillingness to give up an established order of things for new modes of life and thought—and occult study requires all that and much more—; pride and stubborn resistance to Truth if it but upsets their previous notions of things,—such are the characteristics of your age, and especially of the middle and lower classes. Ch. I"

"Now, the science of Hatha Yoga rests upon the 'suppression of breath,' or Pranayama, to which exercise our Masters are unanimously opposed. For what is Pranayama? Literally translated, it means the 'death of (vital) breath.' . . . Several impatient Chelas, whom we knew personally in India, went in for the practice of Hatha Yoga, notwithstanding our warnings. Of these, two developed consumption, one of whom died; others became almost idiotic; another committed suicide; and one developed into a regular Tantrika, a Black Magician, but his career, fortunately for himself, was cut short by death."

"In common with many, you blame us for our great secrecy. Yet we know something of human nature for the experience of long centuries—aye, ages—has taught us. And, we know, that so long as science has anything to learn, and a shadow of religious dogmatism lingers in the hearts of the multitudes, the world's prejudices have to be conquered step by step, not at a rush. Ch. I"

"I hope that at least you will understand that We (or most of Us) are far from being the heartless morally dried-up mummies some would fancy Us to be..., few of us would care to play the part in life of a desiccated pansy between the leaves of a volume of solemn poetry. We may not be quite 'the boys' to quote -----'s irreverent expression when speaking of Us, yet none of Our degree are like the stern hero of Bulwer's romance. While the facilities of observation secured to some of Us by our condition certainly give a greater breadth of view, a more pronounced and impartial, a more widely spread humaneness- for answering Addison, we might justly maintain that it is the business of "magic " to humanize our natures with compassion' -for the whole mankind as all living beings, instead of concentrating and limiting our affections to one predilected race- yet few of Us (except such as have attained the final negation of Moksha) can so far enfranchise Ourselves from the influence of our earthly connection as to be unsusceptible in various degrees to the higher pleasures, emotions, and interests of the common run of humanity."

"There is naught that is weird about these Great Men. They are the sanest men on earth, the gentlest, the kindliest, the most pitiful, the most compassionate, the most brotherly, and the most peaceful and the wisest, the strongest and the purest, the noblest and the greatest. They do not stand, all of them, on the same step of the ladder of evolutionary progress. Some of them are very great, very high, others less so, others less so still."

"There is only one Hierarchy of Light, which is of course, the Trans-Himalayan Hierarchy. Just as Light conquers darkness, so does the Hierarchy of Light battle against and defeat the hierarchy of darkness. The latter is very strong, since it acts through a multitude of followers. Not one teacher, living on Earth in ordinary earthly conditions, can be compared with the great Himalayan Masters. Those Masters are so lofty in their spiritual achievement that they are no longer able to accept the burden of purely earthly existence and of a personal, direct leadership of and contact with the masses. That would constitute an unproductive expenditure of forces. Their tasks are planetary-cosmic to such an extent that They can allocate only a portion of Their forces to the direct guidance of certain units of humanity, and therefore They use Their nearest trusted ones and disciples for the purpose of transmitting the spiritual Teaching. At the present time, Their main forces are concentrated on the gigantic battle with the destructive dark forces in the Subtle World and on Earth, on staying the clashing of the nations until a certain time... Verily, frightful is the tension of Their forces for the salvation of Earth; while humanity, in its madness, walls up dynamite everywhere. Thus, because of such small numbers of co-workers on Earth, these selfless Guardians of ungrateful and ignorant humanity have taken completely upon themselves the incredible burden of discharging destructive energies."

"The Masters are those beings who, by sore travail of soul, by vast experience, suffering, and sacrifice, have advanced to a degree of evolution far beyond ordinary human beings. Their consciousness is not limited to any one plane of life, as is the case with ordinary men and women. A Master is one who has conquered the limitations of matter, as that term is usually under stood, and is able to function consciously and at will on more than; one plane of being, according to the degree to which he has attained. In other words, a Master is one who has entered the Eye of the' Triangle in the Square, and who henceforth functions in wider spheres', of action, where he becomes and IS a conscious factor, force, and agent in helping on the evolution of worlds and races."

"Of course the greater the progress towards deliverance, the less this will be the case, until, to crown all, human and purely individual personal feelings, blood-ties and friendship, patriotism and race predilection, will all give way to become blended into one universal feeling, the only true and holy, the only unselfish and eternal one - Love, an Immense Love for humanity as a whole."

"The Masters are not Gods, they are men, and if necessity requires, they can work on the physical plane in a physical body. Their greater work is done, however, in their Nirmanakaya body, the robe of conscious immortality, which they have won through pain and sacrifice endured age upon age. The Lodge of Masters is synthesized in the Central Spiritual Sun, which is composed of all the Masters of the Right-hand Path. This Central Sun is interchangeable with the Christos who is the perfected Son (Sun) of Infinite Love."

"We doubt not but the men of your science are open to conviction; yet facts must be first demonstrated to them, they must first become their own property, have proved amenable to their own modes of investigation, before you find them ready to admit them as facts. If you but look into the Preface to the "Micrographia" you will find in Hooke's suggestions that the intimate relations of objects were of less account in his eyes than their external operation on the senses —and Newton's fine discoveries found in him their greatest opponent. The modern Hookeses are many. Like this learned but ignorant man of old your modern men of science are less anxious to suggest a physical connexion of facts which might unlock for them many an occult force in nature, as to provide a convenient 'classification of scientific experiments' so that the most essential quality of an hypothesis is not that it should be true but only plausible—in their opinion. Ch. I"

"As hoary antiquity had more than one Socrates so the dim Future will give birth to more than one martyr. Enfranchised science contemptuously turned away her face from the Copernian opinion renewing the theories of Aristarchus Samius—who "affirmeth that the earth moveth circularly about her own centre" years before the Church sought to sacrifice Galileo as a holocaust to the Bible.Ch. I"

"The Masters are, in a sense, the Higher Self of humanity and watch over, protect, and guide its unfoldment. They cannot interfere with karmic law, but have the power, at crises, to hold back to some extent the action of accumulated karma that otherwise might destroy civilization or shatter the planet itself. But in the end every iota of karmic law must be fulfilled. Devastating epidemics, great wars, destruction of cities in past or present times with their toll of death, the sudden breaking up and submergence of continents, as in the case of Atlantis, are instances of karmic forces operating on a large scale, and where such forces could be held back no longer by the administrators of nature's laws, the Masters of Wisdom, lest a greater spiritual damage be done to the people of those cities, nations, or continents affected. Where spirituality and morality have departed beyond a certain measure, humanity can only be brought back to a recognition of its spiritual foundations by some great shock or series of shocks driving the personal consciousness inward to the eternal verities, to its inherent divinity, and so preventing a further descent into the lure and glitter of outer falsities and sense illusions."

"Most of Them are distinctly fine-looking men; Their physical bodies are practically perfect, for They live in complete obedience to the laws of health, and above all They never worry about anything. All Their evil karma has long been exhausted..."

"The Bodhisattva Maitreya. The Lord Maitreya, whose name means kindliness or compassion, took up the office of Bodhisattva when the Lord Gautama laid it down, and since then He has made many efforts for the promotion of Religion. One of His first steps on assuming office was to take advantage of the tremendous magnetism generated in the world by the presence of the Buddha, to arrange that great Teachers should simultaneously appear in many different parts of the earth; so that within a comparatively short space of time we find not only the Buddha Himself, Shri Shankaracharya and Mahavira in India, but also Mithra in Persia, Laotse and Confucius in China, and Pythagoras in ancient Greece."

"This august body is often called the Great White Brotherhood, but its members are not a community all living together. Each of Them, to a large extent, draws Himself apart from the world, and They are in constant communication with one another and with Their Head; but Their knowledge of higher forces is so great that this is achieved without any necessity for meeting in the physical world. In many cases They continue to live each in His own country, and Their power remains unsuspected among those who live near Them. Any man who will may attract Their attention, but he can do it only by showing himself worthy of Their notice. None need fear that his efforts will pass unnoticed; such oversight is impossible, for the man who is devoting himself to service such as this, stands out from the rest of humanity like a great flame in a dark night. A few of these great Adepts, who are thus working for the good of the world, are willing to take as apprentices those who have resolved to devote themselves utterly to the service of mankind; such Adepts are called Masters."

"Experimental knowledge does not quite date from 1662, when Bacon, Robert Boyle and the Bishop of Chester transformed under the royal charter their "Invisible College" into a Society for the promotion of experimental science. Ages before the Royal Society found itself becoming a reality upon the plan of the 'Prophetic Scheme' an innate longing for the hidden, a passionate love for and the study of nature had led men in every generation to try and fathom her secrets deeper than their neighbours did. Ch. I"