The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
overcome would mean separation; but realises the unity between oneself
and another, and takes the weakness of another as one’s own. Now these
things are well enough known in principle. Why not practise them? Why,
in difficulties like those we have been passing through, should there
be angry words on both sides? The Theosophist who understands has no
room for anger, but only room for compassion. These are the things that
in the sixth sub-race we shall want. All these must begin to grow now,
and germinate in the heart of every one of you who would take part in
the building of that coming sub-race. And hardest of all to develop, in
a race where separateness has been the type of greatness, is the sense
of unity. This sense of unity and of compassion will be a strength and
power which is only one for service, which makes the measure of strength
the measure of responsibility and of duty. And so your character will
be marked—if you are a candidate for the sixth sub-race—will be marked
by a great sense of duty, and a great indifference to what are called
“rights.” There is a splendid word of Mazzini that “every right grows
out of a duty discharged.” That is utterly true. It is the discharge of
duty out of which inevitably the right grows, and then the right comes
not by combat, but by the inevitable necessity of nature. Because where
everyone discharges his duty, everyone enjoys his rights without conflict
and without demand. The mark of our own sub-race is the demanding of our
rights. But to those who know the law of karma there is nothing that need
be claimed, because you possess all which is yours. The karma brings
to you everything to which you have a right; and if what is called an
injustice is done you, it is only the balancing up of an ancient wrong.
You think people can hurt you. Then you do not believe in the law of
karma. It is your own hand that strikes you, and no one else’s. No one
can injure you or wrong you, no one can commit any injustice against you.
The whole of that which you suffer comes out of your past. These people
are mere puppets who come forward to claim the debt that you have to
pay. If you really believed that, then the man who demands a debt from
you would be your friend whom you would welcome; for karma’s debts are
never demanded twice. There is no error in her account. But, as a matter
of fact, hardly any of you believe it in actual life. What you profess
does not make one scrap of difference. You do not believe unless you live
what you say you believe. And if you believed it, you would know that
no slander could wrong you, no injury hurt you, and that the words of
the Christ on His way to His Passion were absolutely true: “You could do
nothing at all against me except it were given you from above.” That is
the secret of the patience of the Christs; they know the law, they live
by it and accept it. And that utter belief in Law, and therefore the
recognition of duty, that is another of the great marks of the race that
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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