Evolution of Life and Form: Four lectures delivered at the twenty-third anniversary meeting of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Madras, 1898Besant, Annie
Religion
Evolution of Life and Form: Four lectures delivered at the twenty-third anniversary meeting of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Madras, 1898
Besant, Annie
Evolution; Life -- Origin; Theosophy
At first there comes from it very little response to the life that is
transmitted, very little answer to that which is outside; but what are
the characteristics of this infant Self, this spark of the Eternal Fire?
Triple in aspect is the life in man as it is triple in the Deity, and
its characteristics are the same, Sat, Chit, Ananda. We speak thus of
Brahman, and if we study the human Self we shall find these three
aspects present also in that human Self; and the first to develop in
man, as in the Kosmos, is Chit or knowledge. All the earliest stages of
human evolution have to do with the evolution of Intelligence; it is
that with which we are now concerned, as we climb this mighty ladder. We
are evolving intelligence or intellect, and if we trace its stages from
the earliest germs as they appear in the primeval races of the humanity
of our globe, and as fostered in those races by the Great Ones who came
to us as Teachers from other worlds, we shall find that the dawning
intellect in man was but very slightly responsive to anything that came
to it from without, and that at first every effort of the intelligence
was stimulated by the promptings of the animal nature, by the sting of
desire, by the passions which belong to the animal part of man. Consider
a savage. When is a savage active? Only when some animal desire awakens
within him. If he is hungry, yes, then he will begin to think, "where
can I find food?" If he is thirsty, he will ask, "where shall I find
liquid?" Any animal prompting that arises within him, his dawning mind
applies itself to satisfy; and the germ of mind is stimulated by the
promptings of animal desire. In that stage he knows not right from
wrong; right and wrong for him have no existence; hunger and thirst,
sexual desire, and the need for sleep, these are the things that make up
his life and that move his dawning consciousness; these only are strong
enough to stir it into activity; it cannot yet initiate activity from
within. But as these play upon it, life after life, birth after birth,
century after century, in successive incarnations of this germinal but
growing life, as these vibrations continually arouse, awaken the life of
the intelligence, which is the third aspect of the Self, these repeated
vibrations, repeated over and over and over again a thousand times, by
that very repetition bring about an internal tendency to repeat it again
without a fresh stimulus from outside; and we find in the next stage of
the evolution of intelligence, still in the savage, that the savage does
not wait for hunger in order to search for food, but that the memory of
hunger and the memory of food are enough to send him out, before the
hunger strikes him, in search of the meal that to-morrow he will require
to satisfy the needs of the body. But what a change is there if we
consider it, small as it is in appearance. The man is no longer
stimulated by an outer impulse coming from the animal nature; he is
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