Theosophy and Life's Deeper Problems: Being the Four Convention Lectures Delivered in Bombay at the Fortieth Anniversary of the Theosophical Society, December, 1915Besant, Annie
Religion
Theosophy and Life's Deeper Problems: Being the Four Convention Lectures Delivered in Bombay at the Fortieth Anniversary of the Theosophical Society, December, 1915
Besant, Annie
Theosophy
Come to another point, where you do not know in a particular case,
what is Right and what is Wrong. To the more developed man, it is no
longer a conflict between the "Right and Wrong" that he knows. It is a
conflict between two duties, and he does not know whether of the twain
is the one that he should follow. There you come to the agony of the
opening Spirit, the unfolding God within, who is faced by two paths,
and knows not which is the right one. Some arguments on one side, some
arguments on the other. "Which of the two paths shall I take? How may
I know what is the will of God?" That is the agony of the Soul whose
will is set to the Right, but who does not know the Right under the
conditions which surround him. What does it mean? It means that he
lacks experience. For Conscience, that which tells you "this is Right,
that is Wrong," is only the accumulated experience of your past, which
has registered certain facts in the nature that you bring into the
world with you as that fruit of experience. You have murdered--you have
suffered; you are born with the instinct that murder is wrong. You have
robbed--you have suffered; you are born with the instinct that theft is
wrong. That does not exist in the savage. Take a savage child, and you
will find that your precepts carry him up to a certain point, and you
can go no further. You can awaken in him the result of past experience,
but you cannot give him a Conscience, an experience, which he has
not yet acquired. But you, you have a great fund of Conscience, a
compelling voice, which says: "kill not," "steal not," "don't give way
to lust which injures another"; you take it for granted that is Right,
and that knowledge is the outcome of your past experience. But now, you
do not know what is Right and what is Wrong. Why? Because, you have not
had the experience to enable you to judge in a new condition, to enable
you to see the Right in an environment that you have not been in
before. When a fresh step forward is to be taken, when a new knowledge
is to be gained, what shall you do? You have to act. First, use your
best intelligence; think as far as you can. Then try to put aside the
bias which the inner desire is apt to imprint upon your thinking.
Try to put aside all questions of personal gain, all questions of
personal loss, everything which makes you more inclined to take one
path or the other. It is a difficult thing to do, and it implies
considerable training before you can thus neutralise the inner desires
of your nature. Do your best; and then having used your intelligence,
having put aside your desires, try, in that tranquillity of mind and
senses, lifting up your heart to God, or Master, to see which is the
higher path. Sometimes an inner voice will whisper to you and give you
guidance; sometimes a Ḍeva may help you and suggest the better path;
sometimes you are left to find your own way. Having done your best,
decide; and when you have decided, act; for you have done all you can.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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