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
Let me take one instance which seems to be the most hopeless of all--the
instance of war. What can be more inhuman than war, what more brutal and
more terrible, stirring the angriest passions of man and making him like
a wild beast in his rage? Aye, but that is not all. Let us look at the
life within a soldier which has been evolved by this terrible discipline
without. What is that life learning as its vehicles are plunged into
strife, into blood-shed, into mutilation, into death? It is learning
lessons that without that stern experience it could not learn, without
which its evolution would be checked and be unable to proceed it is
learning that there is something greater than the body, something
greater than the physical existence, something higher, more noble, more
compelling, than the guarding of the physical vehicle from injury and
even from death; and the poorest soldier who goes out on a campaign, who
goes through hardship after hardship, who finds himself frozen with cold
or burnt up with heat, who plunges through frozen river or toils across
sandy desert, who learns to preserve discipline and submission under
hardship, who learns to keep cheerful under difficulty, so that his
comrades may not be depressed, who is moved, not by the thought of the
body which is suffering, but by the great ideal of the military renown
of his regiment, and the safety of the country which he is serving, who
is learning thus to sacrifice himself for an ideal, is developing
thereby qualities invaluable in lives to come. Need I say this to you,
who know the place of the Kshattriya in human evolution? Did Manu when
he described these different castes demarcate a caste that had not its
place in the evolution of life, that had not something to teach? Was not
a man kept in the Kshattriya vehicle until he had learned that life was
not dependent on the body, that life was to be held at the service of
the ideal, at the service of the mother-land that gave him birth, of the
king who ruled him, and who to him stood, as to every Hindu the king
should stand, as an Avatâra of God? He learned that when that king
called him to the battle-field, he had to give his body to mutilation
and to death, because the life that was in him recognised the service of
the ideal as evolving the real life, and the body as a mere garment to
be thrown aside when duty called? Without that training, no Brâhmana
could be; no man could come into the caste of the Brâhmana, save as he
had gone through that discipline in the ranks of the Kshattriya; because
until he had learned that life was everything and form nothing--and that
is the lesson which war teaches when it is rightly understood--until
that lesson was learned, he was not prepared for the far harder
evolution of the life, which is to master the lesson of unity beneath
diversity, of love beneath antagonism, of being the friend of every
creature and the foe of none.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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