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
gardener or scientific breeder of cattle, when he is trying to develop a
new type that exists in his mind, remember, before he tries to work it
out in petals of flower or flesh and blood of animal, that ideal type
to which the scientific breeder directs his efforts, those laws help
him to-day which, on a far loftier level and for mightier purposes,
were used by the great Ruler of the Coming Race in order to shape the
ideal type that now we know as the Aryan. If you compare one of the men
of Kashmir, in Northern India, with your best Caucasian type, you will
find they closely resemble the one the other, evidently replicas of the
same type. I choose the man of Kashmir especially, because he is fair
of skin, owing to his living in a temperate clime, and because from the
shutting in of his land from communication with other countries, due to
the difficulty of reaching his fellows—owing to that the type has been
kept purer there than probably anywhere else upon earth. Fair of skin,
blue- or violet-eyed, with hair brown in varying shades, with features
sharply cut, delicate lips, thin and well-formed nose, there you have one
of the finest types of human beauty existing upon earth. You find that
type reproduced over and over again, with varying modifications as the
sub-races develop, but the one type is everywhere visible; and in the
shape of the head, with the forehead largely developed, with the place in
the brain where all intellectual faculties can be made manifest, in that
type of head you have the type of mentality, the Race that is to carry to
the highest point the possibilities of the human intellect. As you come
down, looking at the sub-races, the same strange point strikes you as we
saw with regard to the psychic Atlantean, and the comparatively psychic
sub-race from which our own was gradually built up. Compare together the
refined Roman, luxurious, well-built, cultured, and the Goth, who was
the origin of the Teutonic sub-race; there again you see the same thing,
the contrast with the regnant type of the apparently lower type, the
one that has in it the promise of rising higher than its predecessor.
Judging by analogy, following along similar lines of thought, we can very
readily understand to-day that the type of the Coming Race will not be
that which is the triumph of the present, but rather those in whom the
characteristics of the present are less developed, but which have in
them the germ of something more, which can unfold in the far-off future
into a greater splendour, a diviner manifestation. So that when we are
looking for those who are the beginnings of the Coming Race, we should
not look for them to-day among those in whom our Aryan peoples show
out the highest types of mentality, of intellect, of power, of thought.
Their work is to carry on the present civilisation to the zenith. Who
but they can lead it to the highest point? They have developed the mind
which is the great characteristic of this fifth Teutonic sub-race;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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