"All occult study is based on the fact that when one asks a question, he creates in mind a vortex into which ideas swirl." This sentence contains the seed idea of the series of articles, Theosophic Study, by Roy Mitchell which have been collected in this booklet.

It is a book of practical guidance for working students and will be of special interest to those students of Theosophy who have passed through the stage of the first enthusiasm which results from early contact with Theosophical ideas, and are now desirous of selecting their own way across the many fascinating fields of investigation which open up before the serious student. There does come a time when desultory reading, dipping into this and that aspect of the Ancient Wisdom, no longer satisfies. The student undergoes a change in mental polarity. He no longer wishes to read in order to absorb the ideas and thoughts of other persons; he desires to pursue a particular line of study for himself, to collect data, to work over the information he gathers, and to formulate his own ideas.

This, of course, is as it should be; each student is required to make his own way 'by self-induced and self-devised efforts'. Mr. Mitchell, from his wide experience as a working student, offers many practical suggestions for systematizing one's efforts and projecting the work in such a manner that ideas are consolidated and that from each consolidation, new avenues of enquiry are opened.

Mr. Mitchell was essentially a teacher — he had an extraordinary ability to stimulate and inspire others. This ability was best expressed through his work with groups, in Theosophical Lodges in Canada, as Director of Hart House Theatre at the University of Toronto, and as Professor of Dramatic Art in New York University. His sudden death in July 1944 brought an unexpectedly early end to a life of service. The memory of his genius, his kindliness and his ability to arouse the best in others, lives in the hearts of his many friends.

Mr. Mitchell's work on Theosophic Study was not finished when his sudden death occurred in July 1944. Several additional chapters were planned — in fact, had he lived longer, doubtless what had been written would have been expanded. There is, however, sufficient material in the existing articles to give students a good working idea of his method and approach.

This work is published by the Blavatsky Institute of Canada as a memorial to Mr. Roy Mitchell who was the founder and guiding genius of the Institute.

The central figure in any mystery story is the Ego — you and I. When Cuchulain climbs a mountain, it is I who climb or must climb the mountain. If Perseus slay a Gorgon, it is I who must slay something in me that corresponds to that Gorgon. I find my way to a garden of the Hesperides, I slay my mother Clytemnestra, I listen to the discourse of my Divine Guide on the field of Kurukshetra. I, the candidate in the mystery, am the protagonist, the first worker, and every other figure in the drama is a power, good or evil, in my own being. The first task, therefore, of the student is to find the protagonist in his story, the type of the Ego, and make constant revision as I have done above. Almost invariably that protagonist will be identified with the symbolism of the Sun. He will be a Solar hero, he will be descended from the Sun, he will be a miraculously born type of the Sun Himself, and he will move, as the Sun does, in a drama of recovery of a high estate. The student must find, then, the Sun or [Page 22] the son of the Sun. He will be Lugh in the Irish, or Cuchulain, Ahura-Mazda in the Zoroastrian; Hercules, Dionysos, Apollo, Theseus, Perseus, Jason, Oedipus, Orestes, Prometheus in the Greek; Osiris and Horus in the Egyptian; he is variously Rama, Krishna, Arjuna, and at the last Vishnu, Himself, in the Hindu. These symbolic First Workers will have other meanings in all the worlds of being, but this is the first one the student needs, because when these stories lived as mystery drama the candidate himself enacted that central role and was required to identify himself with it.

Now for the process of extension of notes. The mechanism of it is very simple. It consists in taking a double sheet of foolscap, marking it, let us say, "Cuchulian's Bridge", or "The Bridge Tradition — First Extension", and after going over the scattered and unorganized material in the notes, writing about it. The student should set himself to write a thousand words, very much as a designer sets himself to fill a given space, and just as the designer expects to put down many lines he will not want [Page 23] at last, the student should not mind if much of what he writes does not make very good sense. He is not writing an essay. He is feeling out a sketch. It will console him greatly to know that good writers and all artists destroy three or four times as much as ever sees the light of day.

Keeping in mind the basis of which I have spoken, that the Ego is always the hero of the myth, and that every other factor is some power, quality or function, within the field of the various planes, the student should proceed to volatilize his notes. That is, he should translate or distil the idea out of the form. He might write something like this:

The symbol of a bridge evidently has to do with mind. It is in the nature of a link, over which a candidate must go in initiation. He must pass from a lower state to a higher one, proceeding in the subtle matter of mind, a changeable and elusive medium. Wherein is my mind thus changeable? What are the mental processes that would give a clue to the sudden changes of Cuchulain's bridge? When would it be broad? When [Page 24] razor-edged ? Why razor-edged ? What is the chasm that might engulf the Ego if it failed to hold its place on the bridge? Is it that the Ego must pass over a bridge in the realm of mind, or that, having learned to cross, he must make a bridge over which another can pass? This is the implication in the idea of the pontifex. If so, what other is to go over it? If I am a bridge-builder for another, I am in the capacity of a Redeemer or Saviour of some other being. "I am the Way. None other cometh unto the Father but through me." (Note in margin: Look up this and similar texts.) May not the symbolism of a bridge merge into the symbolism of a door? Of away? Of a path? What is the chasm? Is it a break in the chain of evolution? Do we make a way over it for some other and lower one? Is this what is meant by becoming the bridge?

The extension gathers strength as it goes. Sometimes questioning, sometimes offering an answer, sometimes opening up a whole new series of bearings on the problem, the student begins to elicit from his own inner being intuitions regarding the symbol, and having [Page 25] enriched and ordered his enquiry, he will find that he has created a new habit regarding all things that touch it. Let him develop a single topic as I have indicated, and see what happens to his reading. His mind will have become eager and pointed, he will have a new light on everything that comes under his eye, and his study will cease to be merely acquisitive. It will become creative.

That first projection of which I spoke is a compartmented reservoir, and as each division fills, the student should extend it, always abstracting inferences from the lifeless data. Each section should be carried forward only a short distance. That is why I have set a thousand words. When the thousand is made, another section should be extended in its turn. Not in the sequence of the projection, but as any section comes to the point where the student feels he can distil it.

When the whole projection has been extended, or any considerable and more or less complete division of it, the student may make a second extension, and when he does so he will find that many of his questions will become [Page 26] statements. It may seem laborious to some persons to write so much, but for most of us who have not yet learned to make orderly and recoverable thoughts it is the only way.

At first he will get greatest encouragement out of the identities he will find. Then presently he will come on a great discovery. He will learn by experience what nobody else can tell him to any purpose, that the secret of occultism is in its contradictions and not in its easy identities. Then the unfriendly Gordian knots that trouble him most at first will prove to be most magical. [Page 27]

Earlier in these articles I have suggested that no esoteric truth is explicitly written down. It is to be derived by inference. The moment esoteric truth is written it must cease to be esoteric. What is esoteric, therefore, in our literature is not in the words but between the words, and is to be found by filling up the gaps in the fabric and in the reconciliation of contradictions.

The hypocritical reader who comes to a theosophical book with his mind closed in a bristling shell of resentments and denials, might as well lay the book down and get on with something else for which he has a sympathy, for the contradictions in theosophy will seem to him like falsehood. The uncritical reader is in just as bad a way. He will gobble up the contradictions as if they did not exist. Sympathy without intellect is as incompetent as intellect without sympathy.

When the two are conjoined the student follows the secure middle way. He rushes neither into denial of what he reads nor yet into blind acceptance of it, [Page 28] but fixes his attention on the inferences to which the words stir him. These inferences are born of the union of the new ideas with ideas already in his mind — the gleanings of previous reading or experience. We commonly think of an inference being derived from one idea. It never is, but is the offspring of two, an earlier one which for lack of fertilization had become inert and a new one which possesses no virtue whatever for us beyond its power to fertilize the old. It is the business of the student to fix his attention neither on what he already possesses—for that will only close his mind — nor yet upon what he has just acquired — for that makes him the victim of externals and is psychic in its nature — but on the offspring of these meetings which is the fruit of true creative function in mind.

This, of course, we do unconsciously all the time, but I suggest that the student who is not familiar with the process try it consciously, because it is with conscious use of the power that study becomes most fertile. It will seem as if mind were working simultaneously on two levels. While on the lower level [Page 29] it is taking in the sense of the words, on the higher it is fixing attention on the new-born derivatives. Our word assimilation does not describe it, because assimilation implies that what we already have is not changed but is merely added to by something that has been made similar to it. Neither is it distillation of the new idea. That implies that only the spirit has been drawn off. It is a true transmutation in the alchemists' sense and the power by which we do it is intuition, the elixir of the old philosophers.

When the theosophical student acquires the habit of doing it consciously he achieves a new power over books, and instead of judging them by their imputed authority he judges them by their demonstrable fertility, their power to fecundate the inert elements in his consciousness. He finds as he goes on in his work that while identities in study reassure and fortify him, discrepancies activate him most. He finds that instead of being contradictory these discrepant factors are really complementary, and that each goes to explain something that lies between them. [Page 30] It is as if he had taken outside and inside measurements of a room and, finding they did not correspond, was forced presently to the conclusion that there was a secret room whose measurements accounted for the difference.

Theosophy is full of such secret rooms. These are the genuinely esoteric parts of our tradition, and they are ours to find. The gobbling reader proceeds unconscious of them; the measuring reader is sure of their existence; the transmuting reader may enter them.

When he reads, for instance, of the long slow process of the unfolding of the powers of the soul, of the inflexible rhythm of evolution, of globes, of rounds, of races, of great cycles, of mineral and plant and animal kingdoms to be passed, he derives one concept. Then on the next page perhaps he reads that the Self can attain to liberation in a few lives; the discrepancy leads him to suspect a secret room. He takes measurements.

Liberation implies imprisonment, a being caught and held in something alien, from which the Self must be set free. But nowhere in the religions is [Page 31] liberation described as a triumph over cosmic law, a condensation or hastening of processes. It is described as a release, as the finding of something that was lost, as the return of a prodigal to his Father, as the means by which a light-bringer regains his former high state, as the ascent into his heaven by a redeemer who has had a work to do here — a work he can do in a long time or a short one, as he chooses. It is a work he must do or return again and again till he does it. It involves his crucifixion. It involves, as in the bridge story, his making himself into a bridge over which some other can pass. It involves, says another version, the learning of something which, if he had been an evolving entity, he would have known all along. Plato says each Self has a knowledge of a higher state which is its true place of being, but that a lower, half man half animal creature has held him here.

So by a process of critical reading we measure our secret room. Then by transmuting all the factors we enter into it. Not very far, perhaps. Just far enough to let us glimpse the fact that [Page 32] what we call man is two-fold, a dualism, and that the lower half plods along the slow course of evolution; the superior and redeeming half, which is our true Ego, is bound here until it completes its redemptive work, after which we may rise to our full stature as recapitulating in a short space a journey which we have made slowly and laboriously long before. There is vastly more in the room, but this is our means of finding it.

So also there are many more rooms to be found and entered. There is that room of our animal nature, with all the measurements to be taken in physiology, psychology, the Satan traditions, the satyr traditions, transmigration, magic, totemism, insanity, the pitris and a host of others. There is the room that contains what is not told us, but what is hinted at about the subtle body, the body of the insurrection here upon earth. It too can be mapped by measurement and entered by this transmuting process.

I have mentioned these three because they are the three most important in occultism, the three upon which all the [Page 33] Gospels of mankind converge; the three whose secret is the great preoccupation of the Teachers wherever they appear. We are constrained at first to think of them as separate compartments, but I think at the last, when we have learned our trick of transmutation, the very walls with which we surround them will vanish, and they will prove to be one great Temple.

I have written this to indicate a method, which if the student follow it will give him a new theosophy, a theosophy of provable things. The application of it to his immediate work I shall leave until the article on Catharsis. [Page 34]

A man might go on studying and transmuting ideas for himself alone and make thus great gains in his powers of mind, finding that he became very expert in the manipulation of mind forms and the derivation of inferences by the union of previously unrelated ideas. If, however, he worked only for himself, he must find very soon that the inference-making faculty would wane and he would have to be content with logical deduction which is not the same thing at all but greatly inferior to true inference. This inferential faculty of which I speak and which I urge the serious student to exercise, is a function of intuition and belongs to higher mind where the latter borders on the Buddhic faculty. It is highest mind illuminated by a ray of direct cognition. The ancients called it a flaming sword and their divine figure for it was Hermes, the Messenger of the Gods. It is a flash of fire that, unless we learn to use it, casts a feeble enough ray in our smoky, emotion-clouded minds. Mere arithmetical logic, on the other hand, is of lower [Page 35] mind and, useful and all as it is for the ordering and classification of ideas and for committing to memory, is unequal to the work of transmutation. Transmutation is of the spirit working in mind.

It is implicit in all occultism that to draw down the powers of spirit, we must give away something we have. I suppose most of us when we have come across this doctrine for the first time have thought it a hard saying and as having something to do with austerity of life and rigid self-denial. Indeed at a certain stage it has but it has far wider implications than these and far more generous ones. Its great implication, and this means most for the creative worker, is, that having our true being in an inexhaustible fountain-head of spiritual power, we are, as it were, conduits through which power flows, and, like a physical conduit, if we are not giving off below, we cannot take in from above. We must stagnate.

This is the basis of that old tradition of the chain Guruparamparã, the chain of teachers above and above, and its converse, of pupils below and below, the implication of which is that every [Page 36] living being receives instruction from someone above and in his turn instructs someone below him in the scale. The measure in which we can be instructed is precisely the measure in which we transmit. "With what measure ye mete it shall be meted to you again", we say and we think of the saying as having to do with some kind of vengeance or reward imposed on us by external forces. But it is far more significant when we see it thus as a current flowing through us and we are measurers of that current, transmitting it to our benefit or neglecting it to our hurt.

For purposes of our present enquiry and the problems of theosophic study, this tradition is of prime importance to us and we will do well to make closer and more immediate application of it. It means for us that, to vitalize our study — our quest of truth — we must find an outlet for such truth as we have. That we should go on gathering a wisdom that does not flow is as impossible as that we should employ static electricity for dynamic uses without first dynamizing it.

Of course no living being can refuse [Page 37] utterly to transmit. If he does he must cease to be a living being. Indeed I can conceive of no other way of death physical or spiritual than this of refusing to pass on the impulses of the spirit. A man who will do so must lose light and warmth, growing interiorly darker and darker, colder and colder until at last the vitalizing breath of the flow of spirit in its seven modes, passes him by. Truly an eighth sphere, an ice-bound hell.

For the rest of us, standing somewhere between a full acceptance of the flow of spirit and its full denial, there are manifestations of the law far more immediate and provable than this general concept. There is that phenomenon anybody may test in a moment for himself, the curious inrush of an idea that follows faithfully upon the utterance of one, as if there was no room for the newcomer until an old one was thrust forth. The exercise is more potent when the idea is accompanied by an eager desire that a listener understand what is being told him.

Orators are familiar with the phenomenon, at first to their great [Page 38] embarrassment. Upon the utterance of an idea, there swirls into the mind a better way of saying what has just been voiced. A tyro will become confused thinking he has chosen the inferior way of saying his thought and believing therefore that he is making a poor showing. The experienced speaker knows that the second idea can only be born when the first is voiced and will store the new idea away for future use. Every lecture is to him a study for the next, and he will derive the next in the process of incarnating this one.

So a student working along by himself, and much more than he supposes for himself, must come presently to the realization that the closet-theosophist is a contradiction in terms; that the vital and on-going student of the mysteries cannot keep his way without this cathartic process, this cleansing that works in its necessary measure when he endeavours to put his ideas into external form; in a greater and more concentrated degree when he incarnates them in the living voice, and most vitally of all when he believes most in the need that [Page 39] his ideas should carry aid and light and mercy.

Why? Because, as I suggested early in these essays, there is no spirituality to be attained alone. Spirituality is a shared thing and only an intense eagerness to share will evoke it. With every kindly thought in us it flashes through the murk of our minds, expending itself most commonly in the pleasant warmth we feel when we have done a helpful thing. But when, because we are transmitting ideas, and are filled with a great longing that our ideas be serviceable, the light does flash in our minds, we are far more likely to see it, keeping as we are a sort of vigil and praying for it. We get what we want most. Wisdom also. And no other motor force will energize our wants so purely and intensely as the desire to give to another. Such a desire carries no misgivings to impair its intensity.

It is not enough to say, "I shall study and then I shall teach". It sounds logical but this law transcends that kind of logic. The occultist says, "I shall teach and thereby give point and purpose to my study, for there can be no study [Page 40] without these". Mere curiosity will not take us into the mysteries. They are closed to the sight-seer and open only to the load-bearer.

We Theosophists have made this same mistake over and over again. We must see that we are only helped after we have become helpers, only loved after we have become lovers, only taught after we have become teachers and only assumed by the Masters after we have assumed others.

There was another implication of the Greek verb auein from which we get our word "austerity". It was "to dry with heat", "to parch" and in the Greek system of classification of the planes of being it carried the idea that not only did the thread of thought-images require to be purged of its passional or moist content, but that the drying could be best brought about by inducing a flow or warmth from the fire or spiritual realm.

This may seem silly to a person who has not perceived the correspondence between the physical, passional, mental and spiritual functions and the properties of earth, water, air, and fire that manifest themselves throughout the universe. Even to our Theosophical student who has not learned to understand the superior planes of being in terms of their strict analogy with the elements of the physical plane, it may seem like arbitrary symbolism or poetic conceit. Of course it is not. The wind that sways the trees is the visible [Page 57] expression of a wind that sways the souls of trees. Such a thing is difficult to demonstrate under our present limitations of sense, but we can easily see why it must be so, and once we get into the realm of must-be, we are more fertile than when we allow ourselves to be hypnotized by phenomena. Plato argued long ago that a must-be is of the archetypal world of pure ideas, a world we know by virtue of our long-forgotten past but which we cannot quite link up with this world because of the passional element that distorts our mind-images. That is, the images are blurred, distorted and unsteady because we see them in the water.

The idea, then, about austerity seems to be that we start, remaining in the plane of mind, to drive out of our thoughts of effort of will, the destructive or obscuring or misty elements we have picked up in our commerce with the animal soul, and each time we expel a feeling we gain a mental power; that is, we have a clear thought about something and to know a fragment of truth about anything and have it readily [Page 58] available is to have a measure of power over it. We could stay here in mind, cleaning and tidying up and gaining great power thereby and some of us do exactly this. But sooner or later we must suspect that the business of fighting our emotions to improve our minds is at best only a little less selfish than feeding our emotions. That when we forego the delights of a good dinner to make sure of the applause that follows a good lecture, for instance, we are not necessarily spiritual; we are really trading in a little selfishness for a slightly bigger one. Of course we make a gain and in the early stages it will be a great gain. Any time we lift ourselves up a notch by sacrificing the little end to the bigger one we have gone forward in our work.

As this trading goes on however we realize that there is a better way of doing it, a process of drawing down spirituality into mind and thereby, shall we say, evaporating our passions. It is a thing we do now unconsciously when we are stirred. Artists do it when in the full tide of creation, they forget [Page 59] food and sleep and animosities in the effort to incarnate their vision. Reformers do it when they think more of reform than they do of themselves as reformers. We all do it with those we love greatly.

The mechanism of it is a little intricate. Let us say of any work that it has three aspects. There is, first, its purpose; second, its detail as work, and, third, its reward. Its purpose is the high end it serves. The detail is a mental operation. Its reward is an emotional feasting on money, applause or prestige.

The man whose focus of consciousness is preponderantly in the emotions confuses purpose and reward and, as naturally, fuses them into one. He conceives them both as reward. That is, his purpose is the attainment of a reward. He goes into a thing for its reward — money, fame or whatever it is — and if you asked him why he did anything, although he might dally for a moment with noble reasons he would sooner or later betray himself into the admission that he was in it for what he [Page 60] could get out of it. For this reversal of values of course the price he pays is ineptitude and uncertainty — a minimum of vision. He thinks he is a very clever fellow and the more he thinks it the less true it is.

The man whose focus of consciousness is preponderantly in mind and the processes of mind derives his satisfaction from the exercise of mind itself, very much as the owner of a fine watch might enjoy the operation of its mechanism and its ability to keep time to a fraction of a second a day without having any necessity in his life to make it matter whether he was an hour late or an hour early. The man thus centred in mind takes his delight in the increase of mental certainty and mental power. He is of the type of the artist who thinks art is self-expression; his austerities are assumed for the increase of his intellectual expertness. His resentment of emotion is because it gets in the way of his creative processes. His reward means no more to him than it permits him to continue his work. His purpose is only a guide to his processes. The [Page 61] price he pays for his distortion of values is coldness. We borrow unconsciously a bit of symbolism from the Greek; we say he has no fire.

The man who is preoccupied of spirituality works in mind just as do these two others, but the purpose of his work is its preoccupying aspect. He also fuses reward and purpose but for him the reward is the fulfillment of his purpose. The details of mental imaging are the means to that fulfillment. He does not recognize self-expression as art. Art for him takes count not only of a maker but also of a recipient. It must serve. Whereas the first man thinks of himself as against others and the second as of himself alone, this man thinks of himself as in behalf of others. He has come upon that greatest of all truths in life, the one I spoke of early in these essays, that a man cannot go to Heaven alone. The essential quality of Heaven is "together-ness".

He has learned that all things must finally merge in their purpose and that the great error in life is to mistake means for ends. He has learned that as [Page 62] purpose envelopes us it dries out our emotional cravings, or, as the Greek would have said, the spiritual fire when we arouse it and bring it into mind will dry out the watery elements that saturate the thread of life.

How shall we bring down the fire? All at once? That will be very hard to do, so hard that few people will accomplish it. The oldest and greatest occult practice indicates that it should be done little by little. As the old occultists used to say, when we wish to purify an idea we should "devote" it.

Here is another word whose important implication we have lost. We have learned to think of devotion as a kind of absorption in religion, as a habit of what healing or beautifying or helping mind which in a sense removes us from everyday affairs, as a preoccupation with the spirit. So, perhaps it is, but these are distant views of it; they are vague and without detail. They provide no entrance to the practice of it but admit more often into a negative and spineless inertia .

The Romans, who made the word and [Page 63] used it, had a very definite sense for it. De, in behalf of, and vovere, to vow or dedicate, meant with them to offer something in behalf of something else. To make a sacrifice, to consecrate something. They derived their word from their Mysteries where the process was as it is in all mysteries to offer something in mind to the spiritual nature, in order that it might be cleansed or dried out, or, as another symbol had it, to offer that which was animal in their thoughts to the fire of the spiritual world.

Many persons, of course, under the distortion that creeps into every mystery teaching as it becomes exoteric, took the symbol literally and rushed out to buy an animal offering which they burned to the honour of the God, but after all, their mistake, loathsome and cruel as it was, was scarcely worse than ours of muddling up the idea of devotion with notions of sentimentality, piety and emotional religion.

Devotion in the mysteries was what it must be with each student, a practical, everyday process of making [Page 64] thought more potent by offering it to the spirit. Not all thought at once, but any idea that the student wishes to make vivid and useful in life. The method is to take the idea with all its train of emotions and by conscious effort lift it up. Then, thinking round and round it, he should try to see what purpose it could have in his contact with his fellow-men. What place does it play in the scheme of brotherhood? use could be made of it? And magically as he does so he will find that the dross in the idea disappears. It is burned out. When he thinks of his idea as taking years to come to its full fruition, impatience goes, the desire for reward and for praise. Immediacy and its temptation to be tricky will wither up and patience will take their places. As pride in the idea vanishes new vistas will appear: the idea will grow magically. He must not say, as so often, "This is a fine idea", because right afterwards he is sure to say, "It is mine, and I am a fine fellow for thinking so fine an idea". Then the idea will become soiled and dull. He must ask, "Of what [Page 65] use could this be to those about me, to mankind, to the One God?" It is not necessary to hold it long. The student should just lift it up and, if he cares to, vow it deliberately to the service of mankind, in so many words. Then he can drop it and go on with something else. He has purified a place in the thread and when it comes again, as it will in its due cycle, it will glow with the intensity he has given it. It will be a great moment, the like of which can carry him to Heaven. This is the alchemist's trick of making dross into gold.

I wonder if I have made myself clear. Devotion is a greater way because it is a better way than the something-for-something austerity I spoke of, not because a theologian's God likes it better, but because it is easier and surer and more thorough and more enduring. We do not fight an emotion. We dry it out.

So if our student desires to clarify his work and give it fire, let him add this kind of devotion to it from time to time until the devoting of his work becomes a habitual means to vision. It does not [Page 66] mean that he must give up intellection. It means that he can thus become master of the most dynamic of all means of intellection. [Page 67]

The practice of devotion — we will understand it better if we call it devoting, because all these -ion words have a theological taint that makes us react unconsciously to old misconceptions — has many values for us as theosophical students, the most important of which is that it lets us into an understanding of the right and left hand paths of magic.

All magic, as I have suggested, begins with austerity. There are lesser psychic functions sometimes called magical but they are potentially so. Nothing is really magic until the ego, the maker and magician, takes hold of the operation and creates forms in mind. So long as the ego remains subject to the animal soul, and makes his forms at the behest of, and at the demands of, the animal, he has not assumed his magical power in his own right. He is answering drowsily to the demands of another. When once he has asserted his individuality as distinct from that of the animal he may, in any given thought, go either of two ways. Or, to put it differently, he may give either of two answers to the central problem of life. [Page 68]

Remember, the ego is a fallen angel. This is the cornerstone of all occultism as it would be of all religion if religions had not been tampered with. He is not of this earth evolution at all. He is one who has, in cycles past, gone far beyond this human stage, and is now back where he is, charged with the work of redeeming a broken and defiled race, the greater part of whose defilement is due to his unwillingness to do his work here. He is Lucifer, the Light-Bearer. He is Prometheus, the Fire-Bringer, bound for a cycle on the rock of earth. He is a redeemer of whom all Redeemers are the type and exemplar. They do not come to lift us. They come to demonstrate a work of lifting and restoring an erring humanity to its God.

The ego, then — each of us — may do either of two things. Once knowing himself as an ego, he may determine to retrieve that first error of unwillingness and to retrace his steps to his high estate of unity, which is his to recover as soon as he wills it. This is the right-hand path.

Or he may compound his first rebellion and, standing firm in that first [Page 69] decision, to refuse to create, he may defy the Law and choose separateness as he has done before. This is the left-hand path, the Path of the Shadow, the path of the Lords of the Dark Face.

It does not come as a terrifying moment at some time in the far future. It comes, decision by decision, through many lives until the scale tips one way or another with the load of unitive or separative impulses that have been made. This is why mind is called the Great Battlefield, the scene of a struggle that goes on for many lives.

We have wondered, all of us, perhaps, why any man should choose deliberately to tread the path of the Shadow. He does not. He takes to the Shadow because of the force of a great chain of little choice? to do the selfish and separative thing. He has in the realm of mind, in this very thread I have spoken of, his account of the Light and his account of the Shadow, and every thought is a force entered in one or the other. He has probably never thought of them thus as Light and Shadow. His thoughts take their places by Law and those that are tinged with the light go to the light; [Page 70] those darkened by the shadow of self go to the Shadow. He is incarnate Will. He can will to give or will to take. Of this he can be sure: every act of giving or taking propels him. It lifts him to the Light or it drives him to the Shadow.

I am not trying to frighten my reader into being kind or good or brotherly. I am endeavouring only to show how all choices lie in this instant and how each is a dynamic element in ordaining a man's path. I am endeavouring to show that unless austerity — the gaining of power for the sake of power — finds its way into devoting, it must be destructive of all that the ego has gained in ages gone, and, most of all, of those powers, far beyond mind, he has acquired and must regain.

The proud Lucifer who rebelled and persists in that rebellion is not a symbol in the skies. He is a reality in the heart. He awakes from the spell of passion that the beast has woven around him. He is vaguely conscious of a power far transcending his present one. He augments the power he has. But that will not free him. He must share his power, [Page 71] because in the act of sharing:, which is an act of love, he enters into the Buddhic or spiritual realm whose power is direct cognition of past, present and future as one. It is that other dimension in space I spoke of. He refuses to share; he shuts himself out of the knowledge of the fourth way in space. He cuts off his past and blinds himself to the future. The God does not punish him. He punishes himself as a man does who puts his own eyes out. He rejects a far greater power than mind because it requires of him the same sharing he refused so long ago to do. Do you see now why tracing the past launches us into the future? Our future is the past we must recover.

Devoting is sharing. It is giving for the use of the rest of mankind the fruit of the kriyashaktic power of mind. It is losing the world to find it. It is an offering of the forms of the air world to the fire of spirit — an offering to the Light. "He maketh the air his messengers; flaming fire his servants", says Sepher Yetzirah and the Avesta of the Persians has a further assurance: "It is a fire that gives knowledge of the [Page 72] future, science and amiable speech".

That was the Greek idea too. The name, Prometheus, means "foresight" or vision of the future and it is essentially the power of the fire-drawer who devotes his wisdom. And as Prometheus was a Lord of Flame, so are we Lords of Flame if we will practise the drawing of fire to the service of men.

You see, these myths would mean nothing if they did not mean something now. The key to all occultism is in the words of Sallustius regarding the Greek fables: "These things never were. They always are".

The entrance into the realm of Buddhi is not something to be patiently awaited until at long last we enter in one great burst of some kind of ceremonial initiation. We have listened to our theosophical hierarchies talking of it that way for some years now, steadily pushing occultism further and further out of reach and offering us instead their unserviceable promises of something gratifying to our vanity that will happen ages hence or promises of the favour of this or that Great One. [Page 73]

All occultism is true as of now and the student's business is to study it so. All that has been told us as being true of aeons can be caught up and known as true in the instant because instants are only little aeons. All that is false in what has been uttered can be known as false now. If the student, bent upon his work demands insight he has only to devote his idea, and the insight will come. What he writes and says will be white magic, an unselfish making. If he elect to share nothing, but go on by powers of mind, weaving mind-forms for himself alone, his work will be black magic, selfish making.

The price he will pay with each refusal to share will be to make the Light harder and harder to enter, the Shadow harder and harder to avoid. It is not a shadow of wrong-doing. It is a shadow of dim seeing and the end of it is the darkness of being walled up in insensate forms, of having to rely on the sight of others, of vampirizing on innocence, of drawing the blood from the veins of the credulous and foolish.

Do not think there is anything sentimental about this kind of sharing. The [Page 74] fire that it brings is as real as electricity or any other manifestation of force in Nature, and as available to the person skilled in drawing it. If you want to bring static electricity into dynamic manifestation spin a loop of wire in its field. If you want to elicit this energy of the spiritual world, you spin a cycle of thought-forms in it and it will dynamize as light.

Giving up self to not-self is not annihilation. It is devoting our magical product to other selves, caught like us in the illusion of separateness. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these little sharers of the Light, ye have done it unto the Light.

  ΔΔ

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