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
months in power of close attention and thought, and at the end of the
three months, you will be startled to find how much these powers have
grown. When you have put yourself through this experiment, then you will
not want a lecturer to tell you about the value of such self-discipline,
for you yourself will have proved it to be good. Take one faculty after
another to train; train your reasoning faculty, your memory, your power
of comparison and contrast. Take up a faculty, just as any one takes up
a study that he is working at, and work at it until you are an artist
in that particular faculty.
That is how form is builded, when the human Self is beginning to
co-operate with the work of Íshvara, when the centre is beginning to
take the control of its vehicles. It rationalises its workings, and
builds and modifies them step by step. When this has been done for many
lives, then comes the life for Yoga; then the man may be taught how to
make more rapid progress, and how to vivify the inner and subtler
sheaths of his being by certain practices, that will be taught him the
moment he is ready--but that will never be taught him until he _is_
ready, nay though he range the world over in search of a Guru, or live
the life of an ascetic in the cave or in the jungle. That is not enough,
so long as his desire is unconquered, so long as his mind is still
restless. When the senses are dominated, when the mind is controlled,
and not before--but then, as certainly as before there will not be the
coming--a Guru will appear who will take that man by the hand and lead
him along the path that is narrow as the edge of a razor, that may only
be trodden by the controlled in sense and by the steady in mind, for the
fall either to the one side or to the other means delay for many a birth
to come. Then is developed that aspect of Bliss which shows itself
outwardly as love; a faint reflection of that bliss is felt in many
stages of meditation, and joy has birth within you, wells up within you,
enwraps you fold by fold, until you in yogic trance reach the true
A'nanda, which is the essence of beauty, and makes you quiver under its
subtle vibrations of ineffable delight. And later, later still, at a
stage that you may reach, when all is purified through long evolution,
there comes the rising into the highest, where the subtlest matter
becomes the vehicle of that developed centre, now no longer a
circumference restraining and necessary, but an obedient vehicle which
will serve when it is wanted and fall away when wanted it is not. As it
is written that in the A'kâsha there is every possibility of form, so
the life that has reached Self-existence is a being that garbs itself in
any form by gathering the A'kâsha around it. Thus it may develop vehicle
after vehicle until the whole of the human series is builded for use,
but none of them is prison for limitation; then we say that the man is a
Jîvanmukta, He is free, and all matter has become His servant, to use
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