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
Only the Spirit can know Him, only the Spirit can find Him; while it
searches through matter it can only hope He is, but the unveiled Spirit
can feel the unveiled Godhead, and by the identity of nature can know
that God is, and is itself. And as this inner spiritual life more and
more awakens in the religions of the world, man will know the truth of
that great saying of the Christ: “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
As you go down into the depths of your own being, there shall you
find Deity, the conviction that God is and must be. For you can strip
away from yourself everything that is not He, until only He, the one
Self of all, remains. You can mutilate your body and lose your limbs,
but _you_ remain. Your emotions can grow worn out and be withered, but
behind your emotions _you_ still are there. Your mind may grow weaker,
feebler, may become, as it were, paralysed for reasoning, and yet _you_
are there, behind the failing mind; and if you are willing to pass on
into spiritual experience, to let your emotions be quieted, to let your
mind be still, then in the silence of the emotions, in the tranquillity
of the mind, you shall find a deeper consciousness, a deeper life, a
more real individuality; and as the emotions are still and the mind is
silent, in the innermost depths of the Spirit you shall find yourself
and God. And then, contemplating that mighty and eternal life, you
shall feel that you share it, that you are part of it, that you cannot
be separated from it, and, in a great gush of experience that never
again you can doubt, you shall know the reality of Deity in finding the
reality of yourself. That is the ultimate conviction that nothing can
shake—that the human experience that many a man has had, that for him has
transformed the world; that is the sure ground of the religion of the
future, that the rock on which a true faith alone can be based; and it
is written, and truly written, in an ancient Hindū scripture, that the
only proof of God lies in the witness of the Self. On that rock religion
will base itself, fearless of all attack, of all assault. No question
of chronology can move it, for every man can gain that experience for
himself; no criticism and destruction of scriptures can tear this in
pieces, for it is ever renewing in the perennial life of the Eternal
Spirit; no churches, in failing, can shake it, for it is this that made
churches, to help in its own searching; nothing outside can touch it,
for it lives in the innermost heart of man. And in that, ever-opening
new experiences, fuller knowledge, deeper understanding, more abounding
love, and unchanging peace and bliss. Everything else may go, but this
remains unchanging; and as out of this all has come, the perishing of the
transient matters not, for the Eternal Source remains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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