W

'HAT was H. P. Blavatsky's most remarkable achievement? I believe that the historian of several hundred years from now will reply that it was her revival of the science of right thinking.

It is true that if one were to judge the result of her work by the number of people who now call themselves Theosophists, one would be inclined to doubt whether the historians of the future will take her into account at all. But I am supposing that these Actons of the twentyfifth century will be enlightened; that they will realize how widespread was the effect of the movement which she inaugurated, and how deeply it affected the literature of the age in which she lived. In that case they will search our records-our magazines and transactions-for the concentrated expression of that which the world received in a diluted form. Poor historians! They will find us terribly representative. May they know better days!

But one thing will rejoice them, I am sure: the fact that we have learned at last to ask for knowledge which can be used in daily life, rather than for instruction in those magic arts which fascinated our predecessors at the end of the eighteenth century. Cagliostro, questioned by Lavater, said that his understanding of magic was contained in verbis, in herbis, in lapidibus. H. P. Blavatsky, similarly questioned, would perhaps have replied that magic is founded upon a thorough comprehension of the nature of man. But she regarded man as the microcosm of the macrocosm, and she undoubtedly would have said that he who understands the nature of man-of man physical, astral, psychic, and spiritual-cannot fail to know also the virtues hidden in words and in herbs and in stones.

What St. Germain's answer to that question would have been, it is impossible to say. Perhaps a few chords on his wonderful violin, chords which would have revealed all or nothing, as the questioner had ears to hear. But if the doctrine of Cagliostro represented that of his superior, or represented that part of his superior's doctrine which the latter saw fit to reveal-we, in this century, may congratulate ourselves upon having had it made plain to us that a Master of Magic is really a Master of Service, and that he who would serve must learn to control his serviceable faculties.

"Every magical operation," said Madame Blavatsky, "is dependent upon the right use of the imagination and the will." In other words, before we can really serve, we must master these two among the many

other faculties or forces which we now either misuse, or which mis

use us.

Doubtless there are many ways of attaining this end. The following is but one view, quite incomplete, of one of these ways:

The first step is to realize that we have to deal, not with many forces, but with one, of which the many are but different manifestations. The second step is to realize that to control this one force we must ignore it and concentrate our whole attention upon thought.

The third step is to realize that instead of having to banish many different kinds of thought, such as thoughts of vanity, of envy, of sensuality, and so forth, we have to master one thought only, which is the thought of desire.

The fourth step is to realize that the banishment of desire is not merely a negative process, but involves creation also.

It does not require any profound analysis to see that the various passions and emotions which we desire to control are the manifestations of a single force. Consider the nature of anger, of hatred, and of love: evidently they are forces, or in any case are associated with force. We can feel the effect of anger in the body. Hatred may be looked upon as a sublimated form of anger, and although its effects in the body are not so perceptible as those of anger-hatred being a "cold," anger a "hot" force-it is not any the less powerful on that account: quite the reverse. For hatred, being "cold," carries the will, which is also "cold," with it; while, so long as anger is uppermost, the will is entirely inoperative.

Now the effect of anger is explosive, disruptive, revolutionary, while the effect of hatred is contractive, withering, paralyzing. Nevertheless, they are activities of the same force, and this same force, manifesting on other planes, is also known to us as one or another form of Love-either as love creative and evolutionary, or, on the other hand, as love involutionary (centripetal) in the direction of reunion with the divine. So the "force of anger," the "force of hatred" and the "force of love" are not separate forces existing in Nature. They are one.

If, however, we were to suppose that this one force, of which all the different passions and emotions are the phenomena, actually changes its character according to the plane on which it manifests, we should be making a serious mistake. For this one force in itself is pure and uncolored. Its "good" or "bad" character is the result of the thought with which it is associated. It is clear, for instance, that in so far as will and imagination are concerned, neither of them can be called good or bad. They can be used for the highest, as well as for selfish and immoral, ends. And, however used, they remain pure in themselves—as force. So with hatred and anger: they are

merely wrong directions given by thought to the one colorless force which blindly and implicitly pours itself into the moulds which the mind creates.

It follows, then, that we can omit force from our problem, and concentrate our attention on thought.

Now arises the question, how can we best control wrong thinking -those thoughts which stand in the way of the untrammelled and wise use of will and imagination, and which prevent our becoming Masters of Service?

The four great evils against which we are constantly warned in the Bhagavad Gita, are anxiety, fear, anger, and desire. In the writings of Shankaracharya, if I am not mistaken, but in any case in the Buddhist scriptures, these and all other evil tendencies are reduced to one: the cause of all sorrow, says Buddha, is desire. And to look at the matter in this way simplifies the difficulty because, instead of having to keep on the watch against thought of pride and hypocrisy and sensuality and anger and envy and contempt and ambition and vanity and the thousand other madnesses which possess us, we can turn from these to their root, which is desire, and try to extirpate that. The desire to shine, to convince ourselves as well as others that we are superior; the desire to dominate; the desire for ease; the desire to remain separate; the desire for sensation, intellectual as well as nervous; the desire to preserve what we possess and to acquire what we do not possess—all these desires, even the desire of growth, must be rooted up. But they need not be considered separately, for they are one: they are Desire.

The free Spirit which possesses all things and is all things, desires nothing; and we, in order to realize that we are that Spirit and nothing else, must "forsake every desire which entereth into the heart" the moment it enters, and, if possible, before it has become definite. We shall then attain to the supreme simplicity, and without desiring to do so.

This does not mean, of course, that we should "play the part in life of a desiccated pansy." It is not that we should kill out sensation, but that we should kill out the desire for sensation. It is not that we should no longer feel pleasure or pain, but that we should no longer hunger for pleasure or dread (that is, desire to avoid) pain.

But let me repeat it: every desire must go-in time. It is a mistake to give desire a free rein in what we choose to call a harmless. direction. If, as Thoreau said, we remain sensual in our eating or in our sleeping; if we indulge our desire for intellectual sensations (as for new books), for æsthetic or other cravings,-desire, being one, is always liable to revert to its former and admittedly harmful channels. We must cut it off at its source; not block up one or another of its outlets.

Nor is it selfish desire only that must go, but also that which we

flatter ourselves is unselfish, such as the desire to preserve or to benefit others. To some it will seem dreadful to say-cease from the desire to benefit others. But I would ask them to sink within themselves to that centre which is beyond desire, leaving behind them as they go every longing they have ever known; and as longing after longing is abandoned, they will find that the heart grows lighter and lighter, more and more luminous. What will they discover at last? That the centre which is beyond desire, is beyond separateness and beyond time; that in it all things are identical. To realize that, even for a moment and imperfectly, benefits the whole of creation; and if we carry the memory of it in our hearts, benefit others we must, at every point, without desiring to do so, and without the thought that we are benefiting them. Does a flower desire to arouse in us a sense of the beautiful? I think not. It is beautiful, because it is the perfect expression of the spirit which informs it. So with us: think away our desires, and we touch the Spirit which informs us. That Spirit, being one in all men, exists for all men.

But now it may be said: What scope can there be for will and for imagination if desire has been laid so utterly aside? There can be no scope for the personal will; but with the personal will no one yet has ever performed a feat of white magic. The white magician, the Master of Service, knows no will but that of the Spirit-the Spirit whose will is a flame. Set free when desire dies, it is that will which the Master is, and it is with that will that we have to identify ourselves. Acting in conjunction with the image-making power of a pure, untroubled mind, it is the supreme Magician. But this brings us to what I have described as the positive aspect of self-control.

The pertinacity of our covetous thoughts will horrify and even terrify us unless we realize that they are not, as it were, freshly evolved; that we are not responsible in this moment for their approach; but that in the past we have created centres of wrong thought which exist in the sphere of the mind, and that it is with these old accumulations that we now have to deal.

We have abolished force from our problem; otherwise we might explain the existence of these mental deposits, of these entities in the subliminal consciousness (for entities they are), in this way: a force which is used continually for selfish and material ends wears a path for itself, and thereafter tends to move in that direction almost automatically. It needs but the slightest external stimulus, and then, in spite of ourselves, as it appears, there follows the flow of force and faculty along the beaten path of selfishness or vice.

But it is better to consider the matter from the standpoint of thought, as heretofore. Our task, then, may be expressed thus: we must reduce these old centers of thought, these devils of the mind, to

impotence. Otherwise we shall eternally be doing and saying and thinking things "against our wills," and thus remain slaves instead of becoming masters. How can it be done? We may be sure of one thing that the thieves and money-changers, although driven out of the Temple, will return, unless we fill their places with genuine worshippers. And this we can do, in the case of our own minds, only by generating the right kind of thought and feeling. That is to say, we must fill the mind and heart with the highest thoughts of which we can conceive: we must "meditate."

Meditation may take the form of dwelling mentally upon one of the great truths, such as that all men, including ourselves, are essentially divine; it may be made more a matter of feeling, in which case we try to feel or to hear the harmony which lies at the root of things; or it may be self-identification, through the imagination, with our true naturewith That which is changeless, the source of wisdom, of power, of bliss. In any and every case, meditation or contemplation, among its other effects, opens the heart to the inflow of the Spirit and produces a radiation of divine energy from the centre throughout the sphere of the consciousness It dislodges bad accumulations in that sphere, and at the same time creates a veritable Jacob's ladder on which "the angels" of the God within us may pass to and fro between earth and heaven. As the positive aspect of the banishment of desire, it forms the first step in the science of right thinking, and the perfection of right thinking, as I have said, is Magic, or the Magical Service of man.

T.

Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling like a reed, under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is now, here, in these quiet weeks.

Now it is being decided whether in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by steady, long-continued process.

PHILLIPS BROOKS.