The Daily Life Of Those Who Decided
to Learn
The Theosophical Movement
The Theosophical Movement

000000000000000000000000000000000000000
The following article
was first published by
the “The Theosophical Movement” magazine
in Mumbai, India, in
its January 2003 edition.
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
“Having become indifferent to objects of perception, the
pupil must seek out the Rajah of the senses, the Thought-
pupil must seek out the Rajah of the senses, the Thought-
Producer, he who awakes illusion....
When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all
the forms he sees in dreams;
When he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the
ONE - the inner sound which kills the outer....
Before the Soul can comprehend and may remember, she
must unto the Silent Speaker be united....
the forms he sees in dreams;
When he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the
ONE - the inner sound which kills the outer....
Before the Soul can comprehend and may remember, she
must unto the Silent Speaker be united....
For then the Soul will hear, and will remember.
And then to the inner ear will speak.”
- “The Voice of the
Silence”, a book by H. P. Blavatsky.
It is round these few lines
that the student of Theosophy must build his resolve, his course of conduct and
his daily spiritual exercise. His efforts have to be concentrated towards one
objective only - that he may discern the ONE - the inner sound which kills the
outer. If this were beyond the capacity of the aspirant, the instruction would
not have been worded in the manner in which it stands today. In fact, unless
the few directions contained in these verses are followed, the rest of the book
will have hardly anything to offer. It is only to those who try to become
indifferent to objects of perception and who persist in the endeavour as year
piles upon year that the message of the spiritual life comes loud and clear.
Before meditation can be
thought of, the aspirant has to achieve some degree of concentration. At all
times, before he enters upon his sacred hour dedicated to the spiritual, he has
to immunize himself against all earthly reactions and stabilize himself by
becoming indifferent to outer as well as to inner sights and sounds that
project objects of perception on to his mind. His preliminary endeavour must be
to render the emotions powerless to disturb his serenity at least for the hour.
The smarting under a wrong; the indignation and the shame of being the target
of calumny; the feeling of being ostracized by the very persons from whom love
and tolerance are due - these are but a few circumstances which life throws up
and which, if rightly approached, become the training media for achieving the
higher indifference. It is circumstances such as these which teach the disciple
to go through the foul atmosphere of personal existence. Then, there are days
of gloom when nothing seems to go right and sitting for concentration arouses
only greater oscillations. There come moments when undesirable images come
trooping in, unbidden, devilish and full of terror. Matter has these
tendencies, but the Soul of man is stronger than any compulsion which these may
impose. There also come days when, squirming under the tyranny of others, he
wonders whether brotherhood does exist and is the key to emancipation. Such are
the events which try men’s souls and which by their very virulence arouse the
soul’s strength to stand up and conquer.
A person is said to be
concentrated when he makes his entire consciousness (body, desires, mind)
converge to a focal point of attention. At such times, he brings the entire
force of his thoughts to rest upon a single point, so that there is no straying
away, no relaxation of effort during the time that concentration is practised.
The energy thus fixed on any subject or object is intense and produces results
the magnitude of which surpasses the achievements of what the world calls
brilliant minds. In such a state of concentrated effort, there can be no
deviation of attention, no lessening of the compact oneness of the effort.
Fixity of purpose, one-pointedness, the refusal to be drawn away from the
desired objective, and the shutting off of all channels that can bring in
outside disturbing elements, are requisites for its practice. The health of the
body is as vital to its practice as is the peace of mind and serenity of
temperament. As a practice conducive to an awakening of the Soul, it demands an
exclusive devotion that discriminates between sights, sounds, emotions and
acts, and divides them into those favourable and those inimical to its development.
Of this, Krishna speaks:
“This divine discipline is not
to be attained by the man who eateth more than enough or too little, nor by him
who has a habit of sleeping much, nor by him who is given to overwatching. The
meditation which destroyeth pain is produced in him who is moderate in eating
and in recreation, of moderate exertion in his actions, and regulated in
sleeping and waking.” (“Bhagavad-Gita”, Theosophy Company, Chapter VI, 16-17)
He then goes on to advise that
such a person should centre his heart in the true Self and be exempt from
attachment to all desires. He alone should adopt the practice who is prepared
to centre his heart in the true Self which is the Self of all creatures. He who
practises concentration for ends other than these is no devotee of the Highest
and but makes the effort to possess the higher force for lesser and even
non-spiritual ends.
If Krishna’s words of wisdom
are given their due importance, it will be found that they demand an active
awareness of the entire daily life of the aspirant, no moment excluded. In such
context, the trivia of a day may for the higher life be stumbling-blocks, the
ordinary modes of society inimical, rivalry in business and the pursuit of “innocent”
pleasures a deterrent and a bar to progress. “Concentration” is the act,
conscious and cautious, of trying to find an emplacement of the Soul in the
Highest. No light task this, for, as late as in the Eleventh Chapter of the “Gita”,
Arjuna confesses that during his walk in life he had forgotten who Krishna was
and had therefore been guilty of not paying due reverence to the ubiquitous
presence that is Krishna. Even though a disciple of Krishna, he had failed to
discriminate between the mortal and the Krishna-aspect of things. It is in this
wide context that Arjuna’s words have to be placed. Says he:
“Having been ignorant of thy
majesty, I took thee for a friend, and have called thee ‘O Krishna, O son of
Yadu, O friend’; and blinded by my affection and presumption, I have at times
treated thee without respect in sport, in recreation, in repose, in thy chair,
and at thy meals, in private and in public.”
It is such loss of memory of
the highest which has to be guarded against; for, without this ever-present
memory the soul will not be able to rest upon the spirit in every moment of
leisure.
The concentration which the
disciple must seek is totally different from that which is made to go under
that name in recent times. The quacks are a-plenty and the market of ambitious
learners is rapidly expanding. Concentration is but the use of a force which
like any other can be drawn upon for good or evil ends. There is a craze to
acquire it to secure personal advancement and to obtain dominance over the
destinies of other men. The student of Theosophy is warned against practising
concentration for ignoble and for personal ends. As one who tries to put the
interests of others above his own, he is expected to acquire steadiness of mind
and accumulate reserves of power. These he must acquire so that he becomes the
better equipped to serve humanity. His efforts at concentration must revolve
round the desire to make Theosophy a living power which can work through his
life force. In concentration, he must find that potency which will enable him
to build up a vast brotherly love which cuts across the barriers of race,
caste, creed and colour. He has to gather in himself vast stores of energy
which will ultimately give him the strength to bestow labour unselfishly upon
humanity, upon all men, whether good or bad. To attain such a high objective,
he has to convert himself from the man ravaged by desires into an impersonal
force for good. He trains himself to use his senses and organs of action for
such efforts as shall benefit in the mass. It therefore follows that when such
an aspirant sits for the practice of concentration he strives to make himself
completely forgetful of his personal self. So doing, he becomes the better
equipped to saturate himself with that sincere quality of altruism that knows
no barriers and is free from all limits.
Granted that the student has
this noble objective, how does he plan to proceed, what knowledge does he seek,
what powers does he covet?
Concentration has to become a
way of life, an intimate attribute of the waking man. Yet, for him who would
like to be inducted into it gradually, the best exercise is that of reviewing
the walk of himself as a personal man throughout the preceding twenty-four
hours. Did Theosophy walk with him the thorny paths of discipline? Did it form
the backdrop to his plans, his successes and his failures? Picking up each
event, he has to scrutinize it as though from the throne of the Most High. Did
the ideal of a universal brotherhood of humanity peep through his dealings with
others? Did he show indifference to his own sufferings and bear his soul in
peace even when personal injustice was meted out to him by cruel hands? Did he
seek out him who sat starving for the word of wisdom and give to him the benign
protection of a living LAW? Was he charitable to the weaknesses of others? Did
he attend to his duties - not at all, indifferently, or with assiduity born of
devotion? Did he help lame dogs over stiles? Did he step aside so that thus the
advance of another was assured? Each event has to be seen in retrospect and
from each has to be extracted its lesson for the living of the life.
To each act, for each
reaction, the following five norms could be applied: Did it evoke in me that
charity which is the manifestation of love immortal? Did it synthesize the
unity of thought, word and act? Did it go to build up reserves of that calmness
which would remain unshaken through all experiences? Was boldness to the fore -
the boldness that comes of an awakened soul? Was a divine indifference to
pleasure and to pain effectively maintained at all levels? And, whether the
answer be “yes” or “no”, the effort of concentration builds up in memory the
images of what should have been the ideal movement of the soul at the time when
it stands allied to its parent.
All this in the retrospect - the
casting up of credits and debits, the assimilation of experience, the
generation of a knowledge to meet similar situations in the future. The
exercise marks the closing of a twenty-four hour day. But there is yet another
exercise where imagination is called upon to play a very important part in the
life of the individual. The Soul has, at the start of the day, to cast its
vision forth on flesh, to foresee and to plan its mind-painted images for the
morrow. What duties have to be performed? What shall be his attitude at
performance time? Whom is he likely to meet? Is there a possibility of his
having to listen to slander? If so, how will he comport himself? Can he bring
someone on to the right path? If there is a chance that another will be unjustly
attacked in his presence, how shall he go to his defence and yet preserve the
image of respectability, decency and good behaviour? If calamitous
circumstances are likely to arise, how will he control his reactions, how turn
the circumstance so as to trample a vice or help a merit grow - in himself and
in others? A half-hour dedicated to such work tends to grow and grow till each
moment of leisure comes to be spent in the close nearness of the man’s
personality to his inner light.
Like a good artisan, the man
of concentration selects and arranges his tools for the effort to be
undertaken. The sculptor, the painter and the artist invoke their muse; why not
therefore he who sculpts and paints with life for his creations? This is
exactly what he is expected to do with the power of concentration after
centring himself in the true Self. His is the privilege and the responsibility
to create and project on to this plane the images that his soul builds - pictures
of deeds well done and of days and nights spent in holy striving.
000
In September 2016, after
a careful analysis of the state of the esoteric movement worldwide, a group of students
decided to form the Independent Lodge of
Theosophists, whose priorities include the building of a better future in
the different dimensions of life.
000