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
Now, let us, with regard to our thoughts of God, realise that there are
two lines towards knowledge. The first is the way of the intellect,
which deals with metaphysics, which deals with philosophy, which
gradually lifts a man out of superstition, out of narrowness, out of
ignorance, and carries him as far as human intellect can go. Along
those lines exercise your intellect, think your best, but remember,
that it is written that not by intellect shall the Self be found,
and the path of realisation is not the path of the intellect. It is
the path of the conquered senses, of the conquered mind, when in the
"quietude of the senses and the tranquillity of the mind, the man
beholds the glory of the Self". That is realisation: that is the only
knowledge: that is Eternal Life. By the intellect we reach the highest
philosophy, and let none dare to despise philosophy, which rises up to
peaks of knowledge, which are the glory of the human race. But, on the
other hand, remember that it is the pure in heart who see God. It is
the conquest of the lower nature which enables us to breathe the air in
which the higher nature lives; and not by intellectual research, not
even by devotion itself, but by sinking into the depths of your own
being, by searching within, there where the Self abides; by casting
aside everything that changes; by saying to the senses: "You are not
I"; by saying to the mind: "You are not I"; by saying to the highest
intelligence: "You are not I"; in the silence, where the mind has
naught to say; in the silence, where the senses are not heard; in the
depths of yourself, one with the Supreme Self; there, and there only,
shall you realise that you yourself are one with the Self Universal. A
hard path, a difficult path, the outcome of the practice of lives of
self-abnegation and of service; but once you have realised God, you
can never doubt again. An intellectual argument may be overthrown by
keener logic, by larger grasp of facts; but the man who once has seen
the Face of God, he never again can doubt that God is, that God is All.
That is the Self-realisation of the Mystic. That is the triumph, not
of the intellect but of the Spirit; then the Spirit which is Divine
recognises its kinship with the Spirit Omnipresent, and when once, as
I have said before, you have found God within yourself, then, and only
then, will you find Him in every one in everything, around you. That is
the triumph of the Spirit. That is the Peace of the ETERNAL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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