English
‘The unity of Spiritual consciousness is the primary thought to appre- ciate, the insignificance of differentiated sensation, the logical deduction. The first thought brings with it the anxiety to realise that unity in consciousness, which is equivalent to the anxiety to promote the Divine idea expressed in the system to which we belong: the second thought, if fully absorbed, extinguishes selfishness absolutely. With that characteristic abolished there is no room in the nature for evil; as soon as it is inaccessible to evil its capacity for infinite good, which embraces infinite knowledge, is established. The difficulty with most of us is that we fail to realise the unity of spiritual consciousness, and only to some extent dispel the contrary idea, — the actuality of separate, consciousness. Let any one get himself absolutely saturated with the loftier conception so that he feels his own individualised sensation to be just as important, and no more important to him, than any other individualised manifestation of the spirit working within him, and he will find himself on Adept levels 332 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. ‘to-morrow ’”’ as compared with the. duration of a Manvantara—as soon, that is to say, as in a life or two he may have dissipated the evil forces he has engen- dered in past lives, leaving the whole account of good and evil, so to speak—none the worse for his individual- isation—as a preliminary measure before he goes on to make it much the better. If he does really express our fundamental idea in his consciousness, he will not want to manifest Adeptship in his own individuality till that preliminary work is accomplished. Even from the midst of the stormy and ignoble period of the world’s history represented by the civilisa- tion of Atlantis, some of the best individualities of the race learned these lessons from their more advanced teachers, and began to supply the race with Adept guardians of ‘“‘its own blood,’ to use our physical- plane phrase. A little occult knowledge is enough to give the phrase an almost comic flavour, in view of the relatively small part in human evolution played by the physical organism that is habitually dealt with in our language as though it constituted the race. And thus from the mid-period of the Atlantean race onward there has never been a time when the world has been unprovided with Adept leaders, for remember there is no death out of such a condition of existence as that. There may be a transfer of activity to the higher planes of Nature, but these are a part of the world—or are partly of the world, to put the idea more correctly— just as much as its physical aspect. But on the other hand, Re-incarnation itself, if voluntarily accepted by the Adept, who no longer needs it for himself, is no THE EIL.DER BRETHREN OF HUMANITY. 333 extinction of his Adeptship; and whether their work was carried on in or out of the body—with or without that accessory—the elder brethren who first attained Adeptship did not, we may be sure, pass on to other functions until others, coming up from mankind at large to join them, were ready to take their places at the head of human affairs. ‘They or their successors have, from a far remoter time than any which common- place historical research has penetrated, even in imagina- tion, been in control of the great occult ‘‘ Lodges ”’ of initiation, the existence of which—the accessibility of which for persons willing to undergo the necessary training, and inspired by the necessary ideas—has been better known to humanity at large at former epochs in the world’s history than during the last few hundred years. During the predominance of the Atlantean race on earth, it was hardly to be expected that the elder brethren would obtain any great number of recruits. Not only were the Atlanteans pre-eminently a selfish race—it might almost be argued that it was their busi- ness in the scheme of evolution to be so. They may not have been much more culpable in being so than a community of animals would be under similar circum- stances. Individualised to perfection, but nothing more, it was their business to deliver the innumerable hordes of the human family on the threshold of the fifth race intelligent enough to learn the first new lesson of the upward carve of the great cycle, the lesson of fraternal sympathy. Intellectually, keeping that term strictly to its limitations, and altogether excluding 334 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. from it everything that appertains to spiritual intuition, the Atlanteans were giants of capacity. They possessed a great mass of knowledge, which the younger genera- tions of the fifth race—ourselves and our immediate progenitors—have lost. They had even penetrated many of the secrets of Nature belonging to that Astral plane which transcends the more densely miaterial realm of the physical senses. They could accomplish results which, to our own science, are as yet undreamed of. But be it remembered, that when we speak of the Atlanteans from the point of view of the information concerning them, which occult science enables us to procure, we are dealing with that race in its fullest maturity. Humanity has entered on the fifth of its present cycles, armed with all the intellectual capacities required for the recovery of the lost Atlantean know- ledge, and that recovery is certain to be brought about in the progress of time. The Re-incarnation of a race precisely follows the analogy of individual Re-incarna- tion. Just as the fresh personality by the time it arrives at maturity is once more in possession of all the capacities engendered by its permanent Ego during the preceding life, so the race inherits capacity in a similar degree. Intellectual giants as the Atlanteans were, we are already not far short of their stature, and the rest will come to us in due course. But with those gifts, something else will come to us if we are willing to receive it—the first beginnings of a general capacity to apprehend the spiritual possi- bilities of our Nature. The downward curve of the great cycle—considering the Manvantaric evolution as THE ELDER BRETHREN OF HUMANITY. 335 one process for the moment—may be regarded as the curve of preparation. The upward curve—from the nadir point of the fourth race in this round—the curve of fruition. Now the nature of every evolutionary cycle—as understood by esoteric wisdom—involves, from one point of view, a return to the condition from which the circling procession set out. But that return does not mean a mere reversion to the status quo anie, without any result accomplished, It must always be a return freighted with something gained on the journey. And in the broad view of the whole evolutionary scheme that we are taking now, the all-important distinction between the spiritual existence out gf which the human race emerged in the beginning, and the spiritual exist- ence to which it will ultimately return, is to be discerned in the individualisation of consciousness combined with spirituality. In dealing with these transcendent mysteries, every incarnate writer must be profoundly impressed with the impossibility of thinking them out completely in terms of the physical intellect. One would gladly refrain from the audacity of writing about them at all if it were not absolutely necessary for the elucidation of the spiritual evolution on which the human race is now entering, to take cognisance of ultimate ideas which it is quite certain we shall formulate in the mind but dimly and inaccurately. But somehow, within and beyond the immeasurable profundities of the spiritual consciousness which crown the edifice of a perfected humanity, it is certain that the stupendous 336 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. prize of individual consciousness which Nature has gone through such infinite pains to evoke—will not be for- feited. A few misleading analogies,—and even the most graceful, about the dewdrop slipping into the shining sea, cannot but be misleading in this connexion, —are largely responsible for the comfortless belief so many people entertain, that the esoteric teaching of the East, at all events, preaches a kind of ecstatic annihilation as the supreme felicity to be struggled for through ages of suffering existence. It should be obvious that no epigrammatic phrase can sum up the unfathomable subtleties of a thought that reaches out towards a comprehension of the incomprehensible—of phases of consciousness utterly transcending the limita- tions of the brain that idly strives to define them. If we inverted the usual simile, and said that on attain- ing the condition of Nirvana, the dewdrop received into its bosom the whole shining sea, that would, perhaps, be a better way of presenting the figure to the mind, because it would not then suggest a false- hood, even if it failed to be explanatory in any high degree. Without attempting so absurd a task as to explain the nature of the spiritual consciousness indicated in Oriental philosophy by the term Nirvana, I will be content to suggest a mode of approaching a conception rather less extravagantly imperfect than that generally entertained, by hinting, on the basis of the suggestion just made, that it mav be much more like an absorption of all consciousness into the individuality, than an absorption of individuality into all consciousness, THE ELDER BRETHREN OF HUMANITY. 337 However this may be, in one conclusion we may safely rest; that the purpose of Nature in evolving humanity is that of evoking individualities on the levels of Nature, so to speak, from which the whole creative spiritual impulse stooped down at the com- mencement of the undertaking.