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
In order that you may not think that that is quite removed from
experience, let me ask you for a moment to look at a fairly prominent
family of the fourth race, the one that preceded our own, which is now
living in Burma, part of the Indian empire. In that fourth race as a
whole the sense of taste was the one that was gradually evolving, the
sense of smell being only germinal and rudimentary, not developed. Now
if you go among the Burmans to-day and inquire into their diet, you will
find that one favourite article of diet is fish; but not fish freshly
drawn from sea or river, but fish that has been caught for some time,
buried in the ground until it has become fairly aged, and then unburied,
to form a delightful dish on the Burmese table. Certainly you can well
realise the fact that in that fourth Race people the sense of taste is
very different from what it is amongst yourselves, with perhaps one
exception that I ought to make, that I believe even now in the sense of
taste in some people finds gratification in game and venison that are
euphemistically called “high.” Well, the fish that the Burman eats is
very high; one might almost, if it were not rude, perhaps apply to it a
word more like calling a spade a spade, and call it rotten. Now no one
could eat such food as that and find it pleasant if the sense of smell,
which has so much to do with the more delicate savours of taste, were
already well developed among the people; and I take that as a striking
illustration, one that has come also under my own observation, in order
to make clear what I mean when I say to you that with each race one sense
is developed and the next sense to it is only germinal, and shows itself
out in the following race, through which it grows to higher and higher
perfection. So that the mere fact of the five senses of the present is an
indication of the point at which humanity is standing, and a proverb—and
there is often much truth in proverbs—about a man being frightened out
of his seven senses, although at present he has only five, may serve
as an indication of the widespread and ancient tradition that man has
two races still through which he will evolve, and senses which will be
developed as those races gradually develop upon earth; so that in the
sixth Race, with which I shall have to deal in these lectures this day
fortnight, “The Coming Race,” we shall be looking for the development of
a new sense, the sense which will make the next world on the other side
of death as palpable to us in the physical body as the physical world
is palpable at the present time. For in man that form of vision will be
the next to develop; and as his next higher body, the astral, becomes
rightly organised, then in the physical brain will develop _pari passu_
the organ whereby the knowledge of that world will come into the physical
consciousness, and thus enormously widen our outlook, and make palpable
what now is hidden from the eyes of most.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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