Judge, William Quan, 1851-1896; Theosophists -- United States -- Correspondence; Theosophy
Many students must at some time stand where the writer then stood, at
the beginning of the way. For all these this correspondence is made
public, and they are urged to look within the printed words for their
imperishable meaning. They may be cheered to find the footprints of
a comrade upon the rugged Path, above which the light of Truth ever
shines. Yet even this light is not always a clear splendor. It may
seem "in the daytime a cloud, and by night a pillar of fire." We must
question every external aspect, even that of Faith itself, for the
secret and germ of things lies at their core. Let us purify even our
Faith; let us seek Truth herself, and not our preconceptions of Truth.
In her mirror we shall never see our own familiar face: that which we
see is still ourselves, because our real self is truth.
As the Theosophical movement gathers new momentum, fresh recruits may
be aided by those letters which so greatly sustained me, or encouraged
by some copartnership of thought, and that, too, in the real issue
confronting them. We first take this issue to be the acquirement of
occult knowledge. Soon we find that the meaning of all really informed
occult writers eludes us. We find that books only serve to remind us of
what we knew in the long past, perhaps when "journeying with Deity",
and the echoes awakened within us are so faint that they are rarely to
be caught. Whether we study philosophies, metaphysics, physics, ethics,
harmony, astrology, natural sciences, astralism, magnetism or what not,
we meet with endless contradiction and differentiation; we forever
require to strike the balance of our own intuition. We discover that
the final word has not yet been _written down_ upon any of the higher
subjects (unless it be on mathematics, and scarcely on that), and that
all our learning is but a finger-post to that supreme knowledge of
Truth which is only found and closely guarded within the human heart.
Thrown back upon our inner perceptions for continual readjustment, on
every side of experience this warning confronts us: _Stand ready to
abandon all thou hast learned!_ Not knowing the one center, we cannot
thoroughly know any sub-center. The cause unknown, effects mislead us.
Then we turn to that mysterious center whereby the One is manifest in
man, and we begin the study of the heart, both in itself and in the
life it has instituted about us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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