Eternal Work Together in Life
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
Reducing Waste of Time
* In the life of a pilgrim, the subconscious loss of energy is a profound source of lessons.
* Your actions are your karma. Fortunately, your waste of time can be identified when you examine your life from the point of view of your own main (and sacred) goal. It can then be reduced. All you have to do is remember a single basic principle:
* The efficiency of actions aiming at self-improvement results from the combination of different and contrasting factors, whose interaction deserves calm observation.
* Among such factors, five can be mentioned here, but their order is highly changeable, for they act simultaneously:
* Our short-term and long-term goals;
* The time available to us;
* The surrounding circumstances;
* Our habits and patterns of behavior; and
* Our ability to learn and to improve ourselves.
* The magical side of life includes the fact that the Immediate and the Eternal flow together. Every new second, and every new decade, their highly dynamic combination gives form to the vital energy of the pilgrim.
Alexandre Dumas’ View of History
* Born under the sign of Leo on 24 July 1802, Alexandre Dumas, father, completed his lifetime when the Sun was in Sagittarius on 5th December 1870.
* Among various ways of reading his book “The Three Musketeers”, the work can be seen as a study in the motto “one for all, all for one”. The famous rule adopted by the legendary warriors of the King of France coincides with the central law of brotherly cooperation that unites those who want to seek spiritual wisdom, and more especially if discipleship is involved. See the article “One for All, and All for One”.
* It is clearly an illusion to underestimate the importance of Dumas’ books in human thought. While offering a generous amount of humor and adventure, his books have a septenary character. They include a message for the higher levels of consciousness. Ethics is very much the essence of his novels, but they can also be read as studies in sublime love, in morality, in physical courage, in loyalty versus disloyalty, in psychology, and in both the subtle and brutal struggle for political power.
* Claude Schopp helps us understand the true depth of Dumas’ works. In an essay on Dumas’ novel “The Last Cavalier”, Schopp calls our attention to the fact that, writing about his own novels, Dumas makes a comparison. “Balzac”, says Dumas, “composed a great and beautiful work entitled La Comédie Humaine. Our own work, begun at the same time as his, but which of course we shall not attempt to describe, can be entitled Le Drame de la France.”
* Immediately after quoting these words, Claude Schopp writes about that larger book formed by all of Dumas’ historical novels taken as a whole. He says:
* “In Le Drame de la France, the forces at play, to keep the reader’s interest (and Dumas has no other aesthetic credo than the Aristotelian to instruct while entertaining), must assume the different aspects of the human condition and find expression in all of the protagonist’s emotions, his ‘loves, hates, shame, glory, joys, and pains’. In the poignant portrayal of a human being thrown into the very history he is constructing, most often as a blind instrument, the often-forgotten past is linked to the present, the ancient to the contemporary, as readers of novels meet historical characters. The writer restores to forgetful society a memory that can shed light on the obscurity of the present. The noise and furor of distant times find their echoes in the present furor, but no longer is it the Shakespearean idiot narrating. The narrator is a poet, a retrospective prophet who can distinguish order in chaos and uncover necessity where chance seems to reign. The [larger] book [formed by Dumas’ historical novels] is, above all, the reading of another book whose author could be God.”
* According to Theosophy, the past possesses the keys to the future, for Time and Karma are cyclic, or circular, and Claude Schopp proceeds:
* “Beneath its unassuming legend, Dumas claims nothing less than to follow in the footsteps of prophets by finding in the past some signs for the future. His undertaking, whether or not he was fully conscious of it, deals particularly with the difficult birthing process of the modern world, from the beginnings of absolute monarchy to the advent of the Republic. A Dumas novel is never a novel turned only toward the past. Although the writer may long for bygone values, he never gives in to nostalgia for the good old days. He orients his historical narrative toward the present and the future, that is, toward the regeneration of mankind. The different epochs are like circles in which the writer places the reader to spiral up toward the social perfection he wishes to create. The past is not worth being restored unless it can help explain the present and foreshadow the future. Thus we should never be surprised that most of Dumas’ novels are set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the prehistory of the present.” [1]
* It is easy to see, in esoteric philosophy, the valuable contents of the above lines.
Three Aphorisms from Helena Blavatsky
* “Occultism is not magic, though magic is one of its tools.”
* “Occultism is not the acquirement of powers, whether psychic or intellectual, though both are its servants. Neither is occultism the pursuit of happiness, as men understand the word; for the first step is sacrifice, the second, renunciation.”
* “Life is built up by the sacrifice of the individual to the whole. Each cell in the living body must sacrifice itself to the perfection of the whole; when it is otherwise, disease and death enforce the lesson.” [2]
NOTES:
[1] “The Last Cavalier”, by Alexandre Dumas, Pegasus Books, New York, translated by Lauren Yoder, 2008, 753 pages. See the introductory essay by Claude Schopp entitled “A Lost Legacy”, page xliii.
[2] From “Collected Writings”, H. P. Blavatsky, TPH, USA, volume VIII, p. 14.
The article “Thoughts Along the Road – 101” was published on the websites of the Independent Lodge of Theosophists on 21 October 2026. An initial version of it is part of the December 2023 edition of “The Aquarian Theosophist”, pp. 16-18.
Explore the full collection of articles entitled “Thoughts Along the Road”.
Read more:
* Alexandre Dumas and Social Conflicts.
* Alexandre Dumas Describes Cagliostro.
* The Mystery of Alessandro Cagliostro.
* Immortal Sages Humbly Obey the Law.
* Visit the channel of The Aquarian Theosophist on YouTube.
