Theosophy Northwest ViewTheosophy Northwest ViewThe Newsletter of the Northwest Branch of the Theosophical Society
June 1999 Vol. 2 Issue 4
In the sacredness of the silence, great and wonderful things are done. It is time that our present civilization woke up to this fact. One has not to move very far away from himself to realize that the very best thoughts he has ever had, have remained for the most part unuttered. Man's greatest aspirations, his brightest dreams, his grandest hopes, have been so deep in his heart-life, in his mind, and in the silent yearnings of his better nature, that no words could utter them -- so sacred are they and so little understood.
In spite of all the great efforts that have been made to spread truth, I hold that this silent power in our hearts, in our longings, in our unuttered prayers, tells of better things for humanity all the time, just as far as our motives are unselfish and impersonal. Consider everything that happens in our waking and in our sleeping, in our thinking and in our talking, and still more in our silences. Is it understood or even dreamed, that one's most beautiful and helpful ideas come in the silence?
Think of the glory and mystery of the beautiful flowers! In the early springtime we have little evidence that anything is waiting for us; and then, almost in a day, from all parts of the earth, everywhere, come these messengers of silence! There is certainly a mystery about them. We cannot yet fully tell what the wonderful processes are that have brought these flowers to such perfection. We do not know how long ago the first seed of them was planted!
There is so much that we meet in our everyday lives that we cannot explain, that we do not understand. And the reason is that we have removed ourselves so far away from our higher source of knowledge -- the better part of us, the nobler, aspiring, eternal part, which is to be found only in the silence.
The other part of us belongs in a sense only to the outer world, to the mortal man, to the one lifetime. Hug to your heart the idea that you are divine in essence. Believe that the best of yourself is to be found in the silence, when your soul is seeking recognition.
We have been educated for ages to look outside of ourselves for help; so most people have tried to penetrate through the mysteries of life with the brain-mind alone, and have never reached the Real, because they have depended upon external help instead of retiring into the silence of their deeper natures and feeling their own heart-throbs, and challenging and questioning themselves. They do not reach it, because struggling humanity has for ages been continually reminded of its mistakes, its weaknesses, its "sins."
Our purpose is to bring home to the human mind the consciousness of its own essential divinity, of its power to direct and control its life, for there are thousands and thousands in the world today who are seeking the light and the truth. -- Katherine Tingley
"How Can We Achieve Brotherhood?" is our subject. Join us for a discussion centering on the fundamental unity underlying all beings everywhere, and exploring various ways we can encourage greater understanding and good will in our personal relationships, community, and world. Come and share your ideas!
Open to the public, unsectarian, non-political, no charge.
Upcoming Topics
July 8: The Mystery of Death
August: One God or Many?
Theosophical University Press has recently added the following to its online publications:
We would like once again to express our appreciation to Gladney Oakley, who checked all the Isis Unveiled files for errors.
All things by immortal power
Near or far
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star. -- Francis Thompson
There is an infinite and a universal brotherhood among all beings; there are no radical separations, no root-divisions, anywhere; what man thinks, he thinks because the god within him thinks, and his human brain receives the divine thought, and interprets it feebly because humanly, and as we human beings evolve, we shall interpret these divine thoughts of the divine thinker within more and more perfectly, as evolution, growth, development, bring them forth.
The universe is our home. We are brothers; we also are essentially akin to the gods, for their life is our life, their consciousness is fundamentally our consciousness, their being is radically our being, their origin is our primal source, their destiny is ours; and what they are, we in essence are -- children of the gods!
What a wondrous field of thought this opens to the reflective mind! When man feels himself thus at-one with all that is: when he feels that the consciousness which he calls his own is but a god-spark of some vaster consciousness in which he lives; and that the very atoms which compose his own body are builded of infinitesimal lives which infill those atoms and make them what they are; when he feels that he can pass along the pathways of his own spirit ever more and more inwards into a closer and straiter union with some self-conscious entity still more sublime than his own highest, then he feels not only a keen sense of his own high human dignity, but he looks out upon the universe around him, and his heart broadens, and his mind expands, in sympathy, love, and benevolence towards all other beings and entities and things. Vast sweeps of consciousness open up for him as being his own future; duty takes on a new and gloriously bright aspect; right becomes the law of his living, and ethics no longer are a more or less tiresome code of abstract teaching, but very living and vital maxims of conduct; for he instinctively knows that by living in harmony with nature's harmony, he becomes self-consciously ever more at-one with it, and instead of opposing and battling with other entities and things, as the totally wrong ethic of modern scientific thinking has it, his new vision makes him to become helpful, and he obtains a growing understanding of all others, because in proportion as he understands himself, he understands other beings and entities, also recognizing that they are derivatives from the fountain of life and mind and consciousness which are his own fontal source.
What relation has this expansion of consciousness with the invisible spheres and worlds of the universe? When, either through evolution in the far-distant future or by special occult and esoteric training, man rises above the magnetic and psychical attraction of our earth-sphere of astral and physical matter, and functions in his higher principles and elements, which are his inner forces and substances making up his composite constitution, then he will be able to function and live and act on and in the inner and invisible worlds and planes and spheres of the entire solar system as easily as he does on the visible earth today; because then he will be an inhabitant of those inner planes or worlds or spheres, with bodies and senses fit and adequate for life there, and with ever strengthening faculties making him progressively fitter there to live and to act. This high state mankind will reach, as a human host, when in the far, far future evolution shall have brought man to be, self-consciously in thought and in function, the inner god that he even now actually is in his inmost essential self.
When personality vanishes into individuality, in other words, when the corruptible becomes the incorruptible, when the dissoluble is transformed into the indissoluble, into the undecaying, into the undying, then man shall have attained his final growth in evolution in this present system of worlds. He then shall have knowledge and vision and consciousness in all fullness, because he shall see and feel that he actually is one in his essential selfhood with the DIVINE.