"seeking for freedom i go to that god who is the light of his own thoughts. a man who knows him truly passes over death; there is no other path to go"—upanishads.
in the path for may, 1887, we find these words: "we need a literature, not solely for highly intellectual persons, but of a more simple character, which attempts to appeal to ordinary common-sense minds who are really fainting for such moral and mental assistance as is not reached by the more pretentious works."
the experience of one student is, on the whole, the experience of all. details differ, however. some are made more instantly rich than others: they are those who put forth more vigorous and generous effort; or they have a karmic store which brings aid. what theosophists know as karma, or the law of spiritual action and reaction, decides this, as it works on all the planes, physical, moral, mental, psychical, and spiritual alike. our karma may be worked out on any one of these planes when our life is chiefly concentrated upon it, no matter upon what other plane any special initiative impulse or branch of it originated.
the writer, when first he became a theosophical student, had the aid of an advanced occultist in his studies. this friend sent him, among others, the letters which, in the hope that they may assist others as they have the original recipient, are here published. they are not exhaustive treatises; they are hints given by one who knew that the first need of a student is to learn how to think. the true direction is pointed out, and the student is left to clarify his own perceptions, to drawvi upon and enlarge his own intuitions, and to develop, as every created thing must at last develop, by his own inward exertions. such students have passed the point where their external environment can affect their growth favorably. they may learn from it, but the time has also come to resist it and turn to the internal adjustment to higher relations only.
the brevity of these letters should not mislead the reader. every statement in them is a statement of law. they point to causes of which life is an effect; that life arising from the action of spirit in nature, and which we must understand as it is manifested within us before we can advance on the path. there is a scientific meaning within all these devotional or ethical injunctions, for the wisdom-religion never relaxes her hold upon science or attempts to dissever an effect from its cause. most of these admonitions have their base in the constitution of the arch?us, or world-soul, and the correlation of its energies; others, still, adhere in the eternal.
no less should the reader guard himself against a slight estimate arising from the exquisite modesty of z. an occultist is never so truly a man of power as when he has wholly learned and exhibits this truth:
"and the power the disciple shall desire is that which shall make him appear as nothing in the eyes of men."
the inner eye, the power of seeing, looks deeper into the source of a man's knowledge and takes it at its true value. those men who are sharers in the divine, whose first office is to give, are often protected from the demands and curiosity of the careless by a simple exterior which deceives the worldly sense. some men are great because of the power which stands behind them, the divine energies which flow through them; they are great through having learned how to receive this celestial influx from higher spheres of being; they are the appointed ministrants, the true servitors of thevii law and pupils of masters whose office is humanitarian and universal.
such aid is never volunteered; it follows the karmic behest, and, when given, leaves the student free to follow it or not, as his intuitions may direct. there is not a shadow or vestige of authority in the matter, as the world understands the word authority. those who travel the unknown way send messages back, and he who can receives them. only a few of the first steps are here recorded and the first impediments surmounted. no hints of magic lore are to be found; no formulas of creed or occult powers; the questions of an awakening soul are answered, and the pilgrim is shown where lies the entrance to the path. the world at large seeks the facts of occult science, but the student who has resolved to attain desires to find the true road. what may seem to others as mere ethics is to him practical instruction, for as he follows it he soon perceives its relation to facts and laws which he is enabled to verify, and what seemed to him the language of devotion merely, is found to be that of science; but the science is spiritual, for the great cause is pure spirit.
many students must at some time stand where the writer then stood, at the beginning of the way. for all these this correspondence is made public, and they are urged to look within the printed words for their imperishable meaning. they may be cheered to find the footprints of a comrade upon the rugged path, above which the light of truth ever shines. yet even this light is not always a clear splendor. it may seem "in the daytime a cloud, and by night a pillar of fire." we must question every external aspect, even that of faith itself, for the secret and germ of things lies at their core. let us purify even our faith; let us seek truth herself, and not our preconceptions of truth. in her mirror we shall never see our own familiar face: thatviii which we see is still ourselves, because our real self is truth.
as the theosophical movement gathers new momentum, fresh recruits may be aided by those letters which so greatly sustained me, or encouraged by some copartnership of thought, and that, too, in the real issue confronting them. we first take this issue to be the acquirement of occult knowledge. soon we find that the meaning of all really informed occult writers eludes us. we find that books only serve to remind us of what we knew in the long past, perhaps when "journeying with deity", and the echoes awakened within us are so faint that they are rarely to be caught. whether we study philosophies, metaphysics, physics, ethics, harmony, astrology, natural sciences, astralism, magnetism or what not, we meet with endless contradiction and differentiation; we forever require to strike the balance of our own intuition. we discover that the final word has not yet been written down upon any of the higher subjects (unless it be on mathematics, and scarcely on that), and that all our learning is but a finger-post to that supreme knowledge of truth which is only found and closely guarded within the human heart. thrown back upon our inner perceptions for continual readjustment, on every side of experience this warning confronts us: stand ready to abandon all thou hast learned! not knowing the one center, we cannot thoroughly know any sub-center. the cause unknown, effects mislead us. then we turn to that mysterious center whereby the one is manifest in man, and we begin the study of the heart, both in itself and in the life it has instituted about us.
to be put into more direct communication with the world of cause is now the student's most pressing need. one thing alone prevents this,—himself. he is of such gross fibre that he cannot be "porous to thought, bibulous of the sea of light". to the refinementix and dispersal of this lower self—of the man he now takes himself to be—he then directs his will. each man has a different mode of doing this, but each who advances at all finds that with every new period of his inner life a new self rises before him. looking back over a group of weeks or months, he is amazed to see what manner of man he was then, and smiles that pitying smile which we bestow upon the faded letters of our youth.
yet some there be who ossify there in their rut; let them struggle mightily to break up the mass which has resisted all environment, all change, all the conditions of progressive life. they have done for themselves what the enemy strives to do for others; they are the rock in their own path.
what our eastern brothers call "the sheaths of the heart" fall away one by one; when the last bursts open there is a silence, the silence of the mystic death. but "the dead shall arise," and from that death springs up the first tender growth of eternal life.
up to this point we shall not travel in the ensuing pages. yet having realized the real issue so forcibly that his whole strength was at the start directed towards self-knowledge and the right use of thought, the writer offers a part of his first instructions to those of his comrades who, single-hearted and of royal faith, hold truth to be dearer than all material life and seek it on the hidden way. there is no tie in the universe equal to that which binds such comrades together. it has been forged in the fires of unspeakable anguish; it has been rivetted by a dauntless purpose and a unique, because divine, love. the fierce hatred of seen and unseen worlds cannot tamper with it so long as a man remains true to himself, for this larger life is himself, and as he grows towards it his self-imposed fetters fall away and he stands, at last, a free soul, in the celestial light which is freedom itself, obedient only to thex law of its own divine being. to reach it, let us obey the law of our own being, for, truly, being is one.
my comrades, wherever you are, i salute you.
jasper niemand, f. t. s.