Misery is a vital element in human nature, and is as necessary to some as pleasure is to others. The religious philanthropist does not do good just for the sake of doing good, but also with an eye to his own salvation. The secular philanthropist, socialist at heart, hopes to make men happy by helping them materially. Ill-being is not only endurable but agreeable to those who endure it, not from love of vice but from love of that very state which the wealthy classes call misery. Kind and considerate regard for others will sometimes bring out the worst qualities of those who led a fairly presentable life, when kept down by pain and despair. Indiscriminate benevolence can be severely harmful as all, but those blind in their love of the suffering of the poor, are compelled to admit. Practical charity is not one of the declared objects of our Society though the flame of brotherly love and sympathy in action with every living creature, whether man or beast, burns silently in the heart of every true Theosophist. A heartfelt appreciation of Theosophy will help to soften the atrocities of life by creating the charity which afterwards, and of its own accord, makes itself manifest in practical works. Even the hollow men prize their vice and live by it.
Truth is systematically boycotted and exiled from the Press because truth is not as sensational as falsehood — it fails to tickle the reader’s bump of gossip and love of slander as effectually as a cock-and-bull story. Colenso’s insults, shielded under the cloak of anonymity, are cowardly and contemptible acts of moral violence. Human sacrifice is being offered to public prejudice by editors who know next to nothing about Theosophy, and yet each has to propitiate his subscribers, hence to besmear with literary mud all men and things unpopular in the sight of his readers. Truth pure and simple, dearly beloved Knights-errant of the quill and pencil, is often stranger than fiction. The venomous Billingsgate of the Religio-Philosophical Journal, having poisoned but itself, it is now reduced to a clawless and toothless drivelling idiot. Ignorance goes hand in hand with malevolence. A bullying descendant of Ananias, in the Agnostic Journal, pontificates that the theosophical doctrines are “phallic worship.” Can an Atheist be a Theosophist? The Theosophical Society is an international and unsectarian body of kindred souls. While showing respect for every religion and school of thought, it prides itself on belonging to none, save to the Spirit of Truth or Theosophy. In other words, our Society is a brotherhood of men and women in search of Absolute Truth — an uncompromising Republic of Conscience. Narrow-mindedness, scepticism, and worldly philosophy have no room in it. Gautama Buddha is the pre-eminent Theosophist of all ages. Haweis and Headlam transformed their pulpits into oratorial tribunes similar to those in ancient Athens, where feminine beauty in general, and Aspasia and Company in particular, were defended. There are two Jesuses: The real Jesus, a Master of Wisdom, and Jesus travestied by pseudo-Christian fancy and clad in pagan robes borrowed from heathen gods. Thus the exalted Christianity of Jesus has been degraded to “Church” Christianity.
The most venomous monsters bred by calumny, envy, hatred, and revenge are former Theosophists. They, whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. The Religio-Philosophical Journal is neither religious nor philosophical. As the Indian spirit of patriotism and independence had been numbed, Colonel Olcott called upon the Japanese not to prostrate themselves at the shrine of foreign civilization.
He was answerable for her during the perilous excursions which she made with her father and sisters to hunt the wild boar in the mountains; he was the one who adjusted the bridle and fastened the girth of her horse, who loaded her gun, who carried that gun slung across his shoulders, who aided her to overleap the ravines and torrents, who plunged into the thickets brought her the game which she shot, who wrapped her in his cloak to protect her from the rain or snow. Such frequent and complete intimacy between a sensitive and ardent young man, and a young girl whose childhood each was imperceptibly changing into adolescence and charms, could hardly fail of awakening in their bosoms, almost without their knowledge, a first and in involuntary attachment. There is no snare more dangerous for two pure than that which is prepared by habit and veiled by innocence. Fate united them. Even though they reproached it, they adored it. The eye of man is dimmed and dazzled and moistened when it rests on the mystery of such a situation! If fault there was, man can only see it through the tears which, as he condemns, wash out fault and absolve the faulty. Who can peer into two sealed hearts and read characters which have been obliterated by torrents of tears, and which are only visible to the eye of God?
Is it possible for me, who loves animals, to learn how to get more power than I have to help them in their sufferings? Why do the noblest animals suffer so much at the hands of men? I need not enlarge or try to explain this question. Cities are torture places for the animals who can be turned to any account for use or amusement by man! And these are always the most noble. Why should a harmless creature be burnt alive, or vivisected? Suffering is the cause of knowledge, so that the incarnating entity gains experience, although the organism is tortured to death. In China frogs are under the protection of law. We award the palm of superiority to the Chinese over the English legal documents, for the mellifluous, kindly, and fatherly appeal of the philobatrachian Chinese is far superior to dry, commaless, and incomprehensible legal twaddle of the British lawyer.
Epidemics in moral and physical affairs are more now more rife than ever. The seeds of vice and crime spring up and bring forth fruit with appalling rapidity and paralyzing succession. The reciprocal relations between planetary bodies and man are as perfect as those between the red blood cells, which float in a common fluid. Each body, whether planetary of human, is affected by the combined influences of all and, in its turn, affects each and all. Pythagoras’ music of the spheres is more than a mere fancy, as certain planetary aspects may disturb the æther of our planet, while others may bring about rest and harmony. Some pathological conditions have a tendency to become rapidly spreading epidemics, influenced by causes unknown to modern science. Plato says that animal man is a son of necessity. A physically pure body will strengthen the soul which, though liable to err, will always side with reason against the lusts and proclivities of the body. The rapid growth of human intellect has paralysed spiritual perceptions. It is at the expense of wisdom that intellect thrives, and mankind is quite unprepared to comprehend the awful drama of disobedience of the laws of spiritual life and those governing natural life. The Sun is the Mind and Heart of our Cosmos. Its bright spots are the blood cells of that luminary. Its coronal changes have no effect upon the earth’s climate, but the sunspots have. The connection between sunspots and epidemics affecting plants is well-established, but the karmic influence of sunspots on the fortunes of man, the living barometer, is not even suspected. The current solar cycle of sunspot activity began in December 2019 and will continue for eleven years. The fact that the current COVID-19 pandemic also began in December 2019 is no coincidence. This is further evidence of the magnetic sympathy between man and the planetary orbs that rule and guide human destinies. In Occultism atoms are called vibrations; also sound, collectively. It is the sound that produces the colour, and not the other way around. By correlating the vibrations of a sound in the proper way, a new colour can be made. Now, if the nerves of the human body thrill in synch with a low form of life, such as a virus for example, the outcome of this abnormal chromatic vibration is likely to be an infection acquired by magnetic affinity. Epidemics such as cholera, are the consequence of man’s sin, though his neglect of hygienic laws, of cleanliness and good drainage, are preventable. But there are also climatic conditions, as those in the outbreak of cholera in 1884, when the epidemic seemed confined to certain areas, following some law of atmospheric currents. Number 9 represents the earth under the influence of an evil principle. It is a digit dreaded by the ancients, for its natural depravity is awful. Influenza epidemics have a mysterious predilection for royalty. That which is now called influenza was known before as the grippe, and the latter devastated Europe centuries before the cholera made its first appearance in the so-called civilized lands. Epidemics of influenza and other respiratory tract infections are often caused by an abnormal exuberance of ozone in the air. The real ozone is the Elixir of Life. Thought is neither less material nor less objective than the elusive germs of infectious diseases — current and continuously emerging — the causes of which are such a puzzle for modern science. Since the mind of a living person can psychologize another mind at will, so can the thought of a person already dead. Mental epidemics are often caused by sorcerers who arouse the earth-bound shadows of the dead to hallucinate the minds of good men. Moral taint is as communicable as the physical. Bad companions will degrade personal magnetism and this is more pernicious than the impressions conveyed to the eye or the ear. The latter may be repelled by avoiding seeing or hearing what is bad; but the moral poison of the former, floating in the air, enwraps the sensitive and penetrates his very being. A negatively polarized man, a man of a susceptible temperament, if exposed to a current of foul emanations from some vicious person will be absorb the insidious poison until he is saturated by it. Likewise, a susceptible body will absorb pathogenic microorganisms. The two best remedies for the sensitive to have his sensitiveness destroyed, is to change his negative polarity to positive, and to avoid passivity at all costs by maintaining full control of his mind at all times. While the fear that the presence of the dead brings pollution to the living is no better than a superstition, the real cause of the religious prohibition not to handle too closely the dead and to bury them without first subjecting the bodies to the disinfectant process of fire, vultures, or nitric acid, was as beneficent in its results as it was wise, since it was the best and most necessary sanitary precaution against epidemics. The Astral Light is no light, it is a huge storehouse of human corruption and degeneracy. It gives out nothing but what it has received; it is the great terrestrial crucible, in which the vile emanations of the earth (moral, psychic, and physical, upon which the Astral Light is fed) are all converted into their subtlest essence, radiated back intensified, and then spread as epidemics — moral, psychic, and physical.
Mabel Collins may have been “studying” Madame Blavatsky for a time but she never “studied under” her, as she claims to have done. Madame Blavatsky is the origin and fountainhead of all Esoteric Knowledge and has the means and the necessary knowledge to teach. First, Coues proudly proclaimed himself “Perpetual President of the Esoteric Theosophical Society of America.” He then began casting slurs upon Madame Blavatsky and upon the Section of which she is the Head, in order to destroy one through the other. Attention, Theosophists! A little more “Light on the Path” for your benefit. For a woman to confess to the world that she has been deliberately deceiving it for years, simply for the pleasure of fathering the cause of a deception upon a supposed enemy, is a psychic riddle in itself. Those whom god wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason. While the one publicly proclaimed her own untruthfulness in order to slander a hated enemy, the other jumped at the opportunity to gratify his wounded vanity at the cost of breaking the pledge and his word of honour to the Theosophical Society, which he took upon joining it. Members of the Inner Group of Theosophists are pledged by a vow of silence and secrecy to their Higher Self.
