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 us come back to the tracing of our forms. Íshvara, brooding over the
evolving forms, continues His patient work--patient, that the form may
never be broken by an overstrain, but may be slowly developed into a
vehicle of the life that ensouls it. In every form He lives, evolving
it, but He limits with illimitable patience His manifestation of life to
the poor capacities of the form, that it may grow and not be destroyed.
Do you remember an old story of the ancient days, in which most of you
would be ashamed to acknowledge belief, for are you not graduates and
men of western knowledge? Though descendants from the old time, you have
naught to do with it, but I, who was trained in the West, I have no
feeling of shame in acknowledging my belief in the strange things that
come down to us from the times when truth was less veiled than it is
now. So I dare to recall the story to you, although you may think that
it is but a fable or legend. There was a boy who believed in Vishnu or
Hari, in whom his father believed not, Prahlâda he was named; and that
boy went through many trials, but in all his faith in the Supreme
defended him; at last his father, scoffing, said, turning to a pillar in
his room: "You tell me that Hari is everywhere: is He in that pillar?"
"O Hari, Hari!" cried the boy, and forth from the pillar in the form of
a Lion burst an avatâra of Vishnu and the pillar was shivered into
pieces. Truly is He everywhere, in every particle of matter; there is no
one particle from which He cannot come forth in all the might of His
Godhood, in all the majesty of His Deity. But He will not, because if He
did, the form could not bear that revealing, and would shiver into
pieces as the God appeared. A profound truth, even if you regard the
story as an allegory, a truth which teaches us what evolution means.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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