Charles Webster Leadbeater

“ One has only to raise the consciousness to a plane sufficiently high, to find the limitation which we call time disappearing, and the past, present and future spread out before us like an open book. How that can be reconciled with our freedom of action I am not prepared to say, but I can testify that the fact is so; when this sight is employed the future is simply there, down to the minutest detail. I believe myself that we are free to choose, though only within certain limits; yet a power, far higher than we, may well know how we shall choose. ”

“ So when we speak of a man as rising from one plane or subplane to another, we do not think of him as necessarily moving in space at all, but rather as transferring his consciousness from one level to another — gradually becoming unresponsive to the vibrations of one order of matter, and beginning instead to answer to those of a higher and more refined order; so that one world with its scenery and inhabitants seems to fade slowly away from his view, while another world of a more elevated character dawns upon him in its stead. ”

“ I cannot feel his rays, but I know he is there, and I know that some day these clouds will roll away as others have done, and I shall see him again. What is necessary for the life of the world is that he should be there, not that I should see him; it is far pleasanter to see him and to feel the warmth of his rays, but it is not a necessity of life. I know just exactly how these people feel, and it is cold comfort to be told that our feelings do not matter, even though there is a very real sense in which it is true. ”

“ While he still lives in the world the difficulty of this undertaking is multiplied a hundredfold by the ceaseless pressure of disturbing waves of thought and emotion, which give him no moment of rest, no opportunity to collect his forces in order to make a real effort. This is why in India the man who wishes to live the higher life retires to the jungle — why, in all countries and in all ages, there have been men willing to adopt the contemplative life of the hermit. The hermit at least has breathing-space, has rest from the endless conflict, so that he can find time to think coherently. ”

“ When this stage is reached he usually comes under the influence of a Master; indeed often his first clear consciousness of anything outside himself is his touch with that Master. The tremendous power of the Master's influence magnetises him, draws his vibrations into harmony with its own, and multiplies manyfold the rate of his development. It rays upon him like sunshine upon a flower, and he evolves rapidly under its influence. ”

“ For such a worker there will be no sense of strangeness or newness in the condition of the life after death. The change for him means only that he will then be able to devote the whole of his time to what is even now by far the happiest and most effective part of his work — a part which he takes up every night with joy and lays aside every morning with regret — the real life, in which our days of physical existence are but dull and featureless interludes. ”

“ When he withdraws His eyes from it the life fades away, the wheels of progress slacken and the wave passes on to the globe to which His attention has been turned. But the life does not die out altogether. ”

“ We could see clearly then that we were unquestionably ourselves a part of this great scheme, and therefore it followed that it was alike our duty, our advantage, our privilege, to throw ourselves into scheme and co-operate intelligently in its fulfillment. There was then no doubt for us about the fact of the great evolution and the future of humanity, for it was clear to us that we had risen through the lower Kingdoms, and we could see many stages both below us and above us; all the various stages of human life arranged themselves for us as steps upon a ladder ”

“ Tiny though our efforts may be as compared with the splendid outpouring of force of the Nirmanakaya, we also can add our little drops to the great store of force in that reservoir. Every outpouring of affection or devotion produces a double result — one upon the being to whom it is sent, and another upon ourselves, who sent it forth. But if the devotion or affection be utterly without the slightest thought of self, it brings in its train a third result also. ”

“ Thus when, later on, that animal wave of life goes up into humanity, we shall have a humanity starting terribly handicapped — starting with these awful qualities of fear and hatred ingrained in it, instead of a humanity all aspiring, devotional, loving and gentle, such as we might have had if the men to whom the animal part of that evolution was committed had done their duty.
We have also our duty towards other and even lower forms of life than that. There is the elemental essence, which is surrounding us everywhere ”

“ That is a wicked thing, and it makes far worse karma than would be the maligning of a person to whom they owed nothing. I do not mean that people have no right to change their minds. If a man finds that he can no longer conscientiously follow our President, he has a full right to withdraw himself from among her disciples; we may regret his blindness, but we have no word of blame for him, for each man must do what he sees to be right. For such a departure there is no evil karma but that of the loss of opportunity — the ordinary result of failing in a test and making a serious mistake. ”

“ Try to imagine the whole universe filled with and consisting of an immense torrent of living light, and in it a vividness of life and an intensity of bliss altogether beyond all description, a hundred thousand times beyond the greatest bliss of heaven. ”

“ These men of the keenest intellect, these others of the noblest spirituality, surely they ought to be the very first to welcome the splendid effulgence of Theosophy, the clarity and common-sense of its system, the light which it throws upon all the problems of life and death, the beauty of the ideals which it puts before us. ”

“ For the sun may pale, and the stars may fail, But the LAW of GOOD shall stand. Its splendour glows and its influence grows As Nature's slow work appears, Front the zoophyte small to the LORDS of all, Through kalpas and crores of years. ”

“ WHEN we are considering the life of man we have three principal forces to take into account, all interacting and limiting one another: the steady pressure of evolution, the law of cause and effect which we call karma, and the free-will of man. The action of the evolutionary force has, so far as we can see, no reference whatever to the man's pleasure or pain, but only to his progress, or rather his opportunities for progress. ”

“ Fortunately, however, the half-forgotten lover of her youth happened to be within reach, wandering about in the starlight and looking up at her window in the approved style of young lovers all the world over. The helper pounced upon him, seeing the condition of his sentiments, and to his great delight found him more receptive. His deep love made him anxious, and it was easy enough to influence him to walk far enough to see the carriage and the adventurer in waiting around the corner. ”

“ In a general way, all the colours denoting good qualities are to be found in the upper half, and those denoting unpleasant qualities are mostly in the lower half. The violet of high aspiration, the blue of devotion, the rose-colour of affection, the yellow which indicates intellect, and even the orange of pride or ambition — all these belong to the upper part, while thoughts prompted by anger, selfishness or jealousy gravitate towards the bottom of the ovoid. ”

“ You are like that minor focus; you are going upon your own course and doing the work appointed to you, and yet all the time you are but a reflection of the major focus, and your consciousness is centred within the sun, for the Master of whom you are a part is a member of the Great Hierarchy which is ever doing the work of the LOGOS.
While a man is the centre of his own circle he is perpetually making the mistake of thinking that he is the centre of everybody else's. ”

“ So you see that conditions that seem terrible are but the effects in the other world of a wrong life here on earth. That is nature's method of turning wrong into good. Man does suffer, but what he suffers is only the effect of his own action and nothing else; it is not punishment inflicted upon him from outside, but entirely of his own making. And that is not all. The suffering he has to bear is the only means by which his qualities can be directed in the right way for his evolution and progress in another life. This was a point much emphasized in the teaching of the mysteries. ”

“ Now, ever since the Christian religion materialised the glorious conceptions originally committed to its charge, and tried to represent them as a series of events in a human life, devout souls in all countries under its sway have been striving as a pious exercise to picture the supposed events as vividly as possible. Consequently we are here provided with a set of thought-forms of quite exceptional strength and prominence — a set which can hardly fail to attract the attention of any ecstatic the bent of whose mind is at all in their direction. ”

“ The whole earth lay before us with all its millions of souls, undeveloped most of them, and therefore inconspicuous; but wherever amidst all that mighty multitude there was one who was approaching even at a great distance the point at which definite use could be made of him, he stood out among the rest just as the flame of a light-house stands out in the darkness of the night. ”

“ But so far as His system is concerned He possesses omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence; the love, the power, the wisdom, the glory, all are there in fullest measure. Yet He is a mighty Individual — a trinity in unity, and God in very truth, though removed by we know not how many stages from the Absolute, the Unknowable before which even solar systems are but as specks of cosmic dust. ”

“ He may probably call himself practical, matter-of-fact, unsentimental, while in reality he is hard as the nether millstone, and because of that hardness his life is a failure, and he making no progress.
If the matter in which he is so fatally entangled be astral, he will be (on the physical plane) one who thinks only of his own gratification, who is absolutely ruthless when in pursuit of some object which he strongly desires, a man utterly unprincipled and of brutal selfishness. Such a man lives in his passions, just as the man immeshed in mental matter lives in his mind. ”

“ There is another aspect of karma the consideration of which I have found helpful in the effort to understand its working; but it belongs to a plane so high that it is unfortunately impossible to put it clearly into words. Imagine that we see each man as though he were absolutely alone in the universe, the centre of an incredibly vast series of concentric spheres. Every thought, or word, or action of his sends out a stream of force which rushes towards the surfaces of the spheres. ”

“ This brings him eventually to the realization that he is the ego or soul, and still later on he realizes that even that ego is only apparently separate, and that there is in reality but one transcendant unity.
Thus the man treads the weary round of the seven hundred and seventy-seven incarnations, a time of slow and painful progress and of harrowing uncertainty, but at last after all those struggles the uncertainty ends with that plunge into the stream that makes the man safe forever, and so that is the second and still more important point in his evolution. ”

“ When the time comes for our chain to disintegrate and for the life from it to pass into the fifth chain, we shall already have moved on to a stage beyond the human, along one or other of these seven paths. Consequently the humanity which will commence as primitive man in the fifth chain will not be ourselves at all, but will be the wave next behind us — that which is ensouling our present animal kingdom. ”

“ We must not forget the influence on our destiny of that third variety of karma which we are making for ourselves every day. A man may be doing such good work that for the moment he cannot be spared; he may or he may not have acted so as to deserve release from the physical plane at that particular period. Our tendency is to attach an altogether exaggerated importance to the time and the manner of our death. If for a moment we try to imagine how the matter must present itself to the Great Beings in charge of our evolution, we shall gain a much truer appreciation of relative values. ”