Charles Webster Leadbeater

“ No number of failures can daunt the man who understands the scheme, just because he knows that however great the struggle may be the forces of infinity are on his side, and therefore in the end he cannot fail.
To be certain of remembering this purpose of his from life to life he should raise his consciousness to the ego; but during the stages when he is as yet incapable of this he will nevertheless impress that purpose upon the permanent atoms, and so it will be carried over with them from life to life. If the ego can be reached, the man will be born with the knowledge inherent in him ”

“ It may be long before he comes under the influence of that law, because by the hypothesis a man who has already at this stage set himself free from all desire must be considerably in advance of the average. There will however inevitably come a time when the slow and steady advance of the law of evolution will overtake him, and then its resistless pressure will force him out of his selfish bliss into rebirth once more, and so he will find himself again upon the wheel from which he had hoped to escape. ”

“ To have taken that step is to have achieved the most important result, to have passed the most critical point in the whole of human evolution. For in the course of that evolution three points stand out beyond all others. The first is the entrance upon humanity, the attainment of individuality, the gaining of a causal body, the becoming a definite and apparently separate ego. To gain this individuality was the aim of the animal evolution, and its development serves a very definite purpose. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is not easy to imagine any other way in which this result could be achieved but that which has been adopted — the plan of leaving man free and therefore capable of making mistakes. From those mistakes he learns and gains experience, and although in such a scheme as this it is inevitable that there should be evil, and therefore sorrow and suffering, yet when the part these play as factors in man's evolution is properly understood we shall see that the Chinese proverb is true which tells us that evil is but the dark shadow of good. ”

“ But before he can take this step the man must have learned consciously to co-operate with nature, he must definitely have taken his own evolution in hand. The knowledge of the unity which makes him unselfish also makes him desire to be useful, for it gives him an incentive to study and to perfect himself — a reason for his actions and a criterion by which he can judge the feelings and thoughts within him, and also the value of all with which he comes into contact. ”

“ This is only a stage, leading on to the condition when you have become yourself the Law and the Path, and you fulfil its requirements, instinctively doing the right merely because it is the right, and because it is inconceivable that you could do anything else. Then only you have become the Path.
A man cannot climb if he does not try; though if he does not climb it is true that he will not fall far. The strong man often makes serious errors; but the very force which enables him to make them also enables him to make great progress when he turns his energies in the right direction. ”

“ The LOGOS pours forth into manifestation the stream of force which we may describe as part of Himself or of His vesture. This stream contains in potentiality the vast hosts of monads, each of which, when fully developed, may itself become a LOGOS. But for such development it is necessary that it should manifest itself through matter of various grades, that the individuality should very slowly and gradually be built up, and then that certain latent qualities should be brought out. This is the process of evolution, and all the great laws of the universe are arranged to facilitate this process. ”

“ In its descent into matter it is simply gathering round it the matter of the different planes through which it passes, and it is not until, having reached the lowest point of its evolution in the mineral kingdom, it turns upwards and begins its return to the level whence it came, that it commences to develop that we call consciousness at all. It is for that reason that man began first of all to unfold his consciousness on the physical plane, and it is only after fully attaining that that he begins to be conscious upon the astral and mental planes in turn. ”

“ Now if you can in any way manage to make him as sure of the value of the higher things as he is now about the value of pounds, shillings and pence, he will at once turn that will and that perseverance to the service of the higher development, and he will seek after realities with just the same intensity that he is now devoting to the pursuit of shadows. ”

“ It must be remembered that when humanity in general has this work to do and this evolution to accomplish, it will be far better fitted for the effort than is the man who is trying now to take a shorter and steeper road. Many of his difficulties are due to the fact that he is attempting with a set of fourth-round bodies to achieve the result for the attainment of which nature will prepare her less adventurous children by supplying them in the course of the ages with the splendid vehicles of the seventh round. ”

“ The whole of the past lies before us; we know the halting-places on the road, and the side-paths that branch off from it, and therefore we are justified in our confidence that where these great ones now stand we also shall one day stand. Seeing and understanding the inevitableness of our destiny, we also realize that it will be quite useless to endeavour to resist it. ”

“ When we state the great truth that all evolution came forth from the Divine, and that we ourselves are but sparks of the divine flame and one day to be reunited to it, people often ask us two not unnatural questions. ”

“ At some time in the future the average man will extend his ideas of self to include the whole of humanity, and then at last we may say that he has become by slow degrees unselfish.
While he is thus learning to take a wider view of his relation to others, he is also learning something with regard to himself. First he realizes that he is not his physical body, later that he is not his feelings, and further on still that he is not even his mind. ”

“ The way in which the world usually treats a new truth is first to ridicule it, then to grow angry about it, and then to adopt it and pretend that it has always held that view. In the meantime the first exponent of the new truth has probably been put to death or died of a broken heart. ”

“ It is not necessary for any one to become such a crucible; perhaps it would be nearer the fact to say that to become one is a distinction eagerly sought after; nearer still to say that when once a man has seen the great sacrifice of the LOGOS there is no other possibility for him but to throw himself into it — to do his tiny best to share in it and to help it at whatever cost to his lower nature. ”

“ How much does so and so love me? Does he love me as he loves some one else?" The love which we need is that which forgets itself altogether, and seeks only the occasion to pour itself out at the feet of the loved one. ”

“ How then is such a man to make himself unselfish, to bring himself abreast of the advancing current of evolution? The methods adopted by nature to secure this end are many and various, but they are all fundamentally one. For what is necessary is that the man shall realize the unity of all. ”

“ Progress is the law marked out for us. In progress only is our happiness and our safety. As regards the progress that lies before us in this particular chain of worlds the great majority of us are by no means yet what is technically called “safe” or “saved.” We reach that desirable position only when we have become members of the Great Brotherhood which lasts from eternity to eternity, by passing the first of the great initiations, that of the Sotapatti or Srotapanna, the man who enters upon the stream. ”

“ But an earnest student will be able to realize that a man may so love his work, and may be so full of joy in it, that outside of it there can be no pleasure worth considering, even though that work may tax almost beyond bearing every faculty and every vehicle — physical, astral or mental — which he possesses. ”

“ This is stored up, not in the ego as an inherent quality, but in the permanent astral atom; and when he realizes the inadvisability of anger and sets himself against it he has to meet this store of force which he himself has generated during many past lives. Naturally he finds his task a difficult one, and he meets with many failures and discouragements; but the important thing for him to bear in mind is that however many times he may fail, victory is absolutely a scientific certainty, if only he will persevere. ”

“ In precisely the same way very few animals are as yet attaining individuality, for the animal who attains individuality is as far in advance of his fellows as is the human being who attains adeptship in advance of the average man. Both are doing at the middle point of evolution what they are expected to be able to do only at the end of it. Those who achieve only at the normal time, at the end of the seventh round, will approach their goal so gradually that there will be little or no struggle. ”

“ The plan of the LOGOS is to allow a man a certain amount of freedom (at first a very small amount) in the use of this dawning will, and naturally enough by the law of averages this primitive individual uses his will about as often wrongly as rightly, although he has almost always teachers belonging to earlier evolutions, who tell him the way, in which he should walk. When he uses his will wrongly, (that is to say, in a direction opposed to the current of evolution) the mechanical working of nature's laws brings suffering as the result of such action. ”

“ Rapid progress affects the whole organism and is a great strain upon it, and this inevitably finds out whatever weak spots there are in the man. The plans of the Hierarchy will be carried out whatever we may or may not do, for we are but as pawns in the mighty game which is being played; but if we are intelligent pawns, and are willing to co-operate, it gives much less trouble to the authorities, and incidentally to ourselves. ”

“ After that initiation the third point is sure to follow — the gaining of the further shore of that stream, in the attainment of adeptship, when the man leaves the merely human evolution and enters upon that which is superhuman. We are told that after a man has entered upon the stream it takes him an average of seven incarnations to reach the fourth step, that of the arhat, the noble, the venerable, the perfect. That period is more often lengthened than shortened, and the lives are usually taken without an intervening stage in the heaven-world. ”

“ The attainment of perfection. Yet even that is only relatively and not absolutely the end, for when we have reached in fullest consciousness the LOGOS of our system and have unified our consciousness with His, there still remains the further Path which leads us to union with still higher Powers. A great authority has told us that at the end of one of the stages of evolution far beyond adeptship the perfect man will be a decad, having a body upon each of the sub-planes of the lowest cosmic plane, the triple LOGOS outside of time and space constituting his Self, and thus completing the ten. ”

“ We often exhort people to follow the higher course rather than the lower, but I think that the truth is that man always follows the highest about which he is really certain. The difficulty is that in so many cases the higher teaching seems vague and unreal to many people, and so although they profess to believe it, and really think that they do believe it, when it comes to the point of action they find it too vague to trust their lives to it. ”

“ However great the amount of force may be which he has stored up, it must be a finite amount, and every effort which he makes against it reduces it by just so much. But on his side there is a force which is infinite; if only his will is strong enough he can go on, if necessary through many lives, steadily renewing the force for good with which he combats the evil, and behind him in that effort is the infinite force of the LOGOS Himself, because that evolution is in accordance with His will. ”

“ We see therefore that this most unlovely of qualities has its place in evolution. Now for us its work is over, and we ought to have got rid of it. But it is useless to be angry with the ordinary man for his selfishness, since it simply means that what was in the savage a necessary virtue is still persisting into the civilized condition. In point of fact the selfish man is an anachronism, a survival of prehistoric savagery. ”

“ She told us that if we chose to take the trouble to develop the requisite faculties we might unquestionably experience for ourselves the truth of a great deal of the teaching. She warned us that the way was long and arduous, and that no one could tell beforehand how long it would take for a man to tread it. But on the other hand she consoled us by saying that the end was absolutely certain, and that it was impossible that any man who started to reach it should fail to attain, though in many cases such attainment might lie, not in this life, but in some other in the future. ”