English
Hitchcock saw, the admirable book he has produced will at least serve to open up the subject for those who may be sufficiently interested by what has been said here to feel inclined to venture further into an area of research which, to express myself in a paradoxical phrase congenial with the spirit of the authors I have been quoting, is at once forbidding and seductive. Alchemy, Mr. Hitchcock concedes, may have passed away, as his opponent had been arguing, never to return. ‘‘ This may be so; but the questions about which the alchemists employed themselves have not passed away, and never shall pass away while man wanders upon the surface of the earth. They are the most interesting questions which the heart can propose, and although they begin in man, the answer must compass both the microcosm and the macrocosm.”’ INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. 391 CHAPTER XIV. INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. It will be obvious on reflection, if we correctly interpret the meaning of ancient Egyptian initiation, and graft that in a reasonable manner upon the general view of natural evolution which the esoteric teaching gives us, that the opportunities of ancient initiation must be with us still. Still with us in a certain sense, moreover, are those of our predecessors who, at an earlier stage of the world’s progress, passed beyond the action of the laws governing the periodic incarnations of ordinary humanity. They will have attained a higher condition of being in which life for one thing is very much more persistent, and their power of functioning on the higher planes of Nature even more persistent than that. But they are none the less within our reach at this day, certainly not amongst the crowds of busy modern cities, but in secluded retreats where the physical instruments they now employ to keep up their relations with this phase of being are beyond the reach of that magnetic pestilence which emanates from the more densely peopled portions of the earth, and would render them incapable of exercising the higher spiritual functions to which their progress in Nature has now appointed them. Of course, such beings are under conditions of 392 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. existence so widely unlike those of ordinary humanity that it would be almost better to describe them as great spirits maintaining a physical body on earth for use in occasional emergencies, than as physical men who have a peculiar power of rising into spiritual conditions of nature; and of course in the long interval that has elapsed since the ancient initiations of the Egyptian period many new recruits, besides those who entered on the path in that remote period, have joined the stream of the higher evolution. Nor have the opportunities of initiation been extinguished merely because after their last public flicker in Greece the world at large has lost sight of them. Gradually, no doubt, their character has changed in some important respects in accordance with the cyclic necessities of the time which left the race to concern itself chiefly with the advancement of pliysical knowledge, even at the expense, for the generations so engaged, of a tem- porary forgetfulness concerning higher things. But there has never been a time in the world’s history during which the channels of initiation have been altogether blocked, and for those whose spiritual ardour has itself, in the first instance, developed as a Karmic consequence in successive lives, those higher faculties of vision and consciousness which are now spoken of as psychic, there has always been a possibility of access to the higher knowledge along the lines of those very faculties. It has ceased to be necessary that, in order to enter the path of occult progress, a man should present himself at some specific temple and become the acolyte of a Hierophant visible to all his fellows. There INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. 393 has been for him an inner temple to which his own psychic faculties, on the hypothesis we are dealing with, have given him access. And in this way the body of initiated Adepts has constantly been reinforced, although probably there has never been a time in the history of the present race at which this mere numerical strength would have been less than it is now. The cycle of great activity in the department of physical knowledge, the scientific era par excellence—assigning the word “science’’ to the limited meaning it has latterly enjoyed with ourselves—is necessarily a period of relative spiritual stagnation. ‘The two phases of progress are by no means antagonistic to one another in reality; the highest scientific attainments may be, and in the end, before they reach their perfect efflores- cence, must be united with great spiritual development also; but taken as a whole the forces of natural evolu- tion press with greater intensity at one time than at another in the direction of physical knowledge, just as at other periods this impulse may be in abeyance, and Spiritual aspiration be a more powerful incentive. Now finally we reach the all-important fact that at the present moment as much as ever, although less than ever now by old world methods, the possibilities of attaining higher spiritual perfection in the sense in which we have been employing the phrase, chiefly as connoting knowledge, power, and voluntary advance- ment, are open to all those who have the necessary qualifications, and the all-important intensity of desire. Initiation in the higher mysteries which have to do with that region of natural law in reference to which 394 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. all the little manifestations of abnormal wonder which attract attention at the present day in the departments of mesmerism, clairvoyance, thought-transference, and spiritualism, are but as the spray from a wave—those regions are still accessible to modern aspirants who strive to attain them in the right way. In one sense I may say that they are more attainable than ever, because it has come to pass that the great authorities who direct the conditions of all such progress are fully alive to the necessity of making the whole situation more intelligible to the masses of mankind than they have been for the last dozen clouded centuries. A very great advance has been made without being so far in the least degree understood in this aspect by ordinary physical science in the direction of what may be called psychic mystery. Left to itself without any healthy guidance or encouragement, that progress may be quite likely to turn into channels in which it would be eminently injurious to the permanent welfare of the race. As I have indicated more than once, true occult progress is a dual achievement involving at the same time a development of a very exalted morality pari passu with the acquisition of a correspondingly pene- trating knowledge. Nothing less than the two achieve- ments would accomplish the evolution of the human being as we know him now into that higher kingdom of Nature, which, as compared with the human kingdom, may be spoken of as divine, and nothing short of such evolution brings with it a really complete development of the power and capacities for knowledge latent in mankind. But something very short of that may INITIATION IN THE PRESENT DAY. 395 invest humanity with powers transcending those familiar to the physical senses. Just as the rain of heaven falls on the just and the unjust, so in a certain sense and in a certain degree, knowledge is obtainable by the evil- minded as well as by the good; and very disastrous results both to themselves and to others are bound to ensue from its acquisition by people who are not ade- quately alive to the loftiness of the responsibilities which its possession entails. In this way, to put the matter roughly, the mere pursuit of knowledge along the paths of purely physical study may, by the time it is carried some distance beyond that as yet reached by the physical science of the nineteenth century, super- induce the condition of things in which the possessors of such knowledge would be what the medieval world called Black Magicians. The name we give does not matter, but at all events the fact is that knowledge concerning the deeper mysteries of Nature which have to do with spiritual and psychic forces may theoreti- cally be attained by persons altogether without the exalted motives which govern those who attain it by what occultists call the right-hand path, and therefore a time comes in the progress of science when from all points of view the old policy of extreme reserve in regard to the mysteries with which initiation is concerned, becomes impossible of further maintenance. That 1s the state of things now coming on. For a long time it seemed best for the human race that during ages of very imperfect human development the tremendous forces which occult knowledge places within the reach of man should be kept back from him altogether. Now 396 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. his advancing intelligence has enabled him to grasp some conception of what those forces are, even without the help of initiated teaching. It becomes the policy, therefore, of those who represent this teaching in the present age of the world to anticipate, if possible, this unhealthy development of psychic discovery, and guide it beforehand into channels prepared for its reception by the theoretical development of spiritual science, in such a way as shall enable the races at large to comprehend the lofty purposes for which Nature holds this superior wisdom in reserve. ‘To acquire knowledge concerning the forces operative on the higher planes of Nature, and then to apply this knowledge to the pursuit of merely selfish and transitory objects of mundane desire, is to degrade and insult the highest attributes of our humanity.