he Eternal, is understood: you have Theosophy, under its Samskrit name of Brahma-Vidyâ. Through all history and all philosophy, in Greece and Rome, in Egypt, in Middle Ages Europe, in India, always the same idea is connected with this word, and that idea is the direct knowledge of God, and therefore of the invisible worlds. That is the historical meaning of this great word. Everything else is secondary, conclusions from this great premiss. It is the assertion that man can know God directly, and can therefore know Nature directly - not only physical but superphysical nature - and know it by the same means that Science uses. I summarise it as the knowledge of God and Nature, because that includes in a single sentence the knowledge of all that can be known; and it asserts that That , which some modern philosophy has declared to be unknowable, is as much the heritage of human knowledge as any observations that science may make, as any deductions that philosophy may create. That which is denied by the Agnostic is affirmed by the Theosophist. It is the Gnosis of early Christians and Neo-Platonic times, the Brahma-Vidyâ of the Hindu.
From that supreme principle flow other deductions. God is to be known by consciousness, which is in its essence identical with Himself. Human consciousness is the bud of which the open flower is God. All powers are hidden within the human consciousness, and are capable of gradual unfoldment. And inasmuch as only this direct knowledge can give absolute certainty of the Divine Existence, therefore, again, it is written in a very ancient [Page 5] writing that the only proof of the existence of God is in the conviction in the human Spirit. All other proofs fail of absolute demonstration. Only the Spirit can know the Source whence it has flowed.
Now with that inevitably comes the direct knowledge of Nature, physical and
superphysical. I make the distinction because it is made by all around me,
although truly distinction there is none. Consciousness knowing the Supreme
Consciousness is knowledge of one kind; knowledge of the physical, astral,
mental, or of the worlds beyond is knowledge of another kind, of the
phenomenal, and the phenomena is in stages, differing in degree but not in
kind. This knowledge of Nature, visible and invisible, reaches the
consciousness through the sense-garment in which it is clothed. That
sense-garment is more complex than many think, and senses subtler in their
nature lie behind the physical senses. But always the consciousness through
the sense-garment knows by observation; if through the physical part
thereof, by observation of the physical world; in the next layer of that
sense-garment the consciousness comes into touch with the astral world, the
world of the dream-consciousness, the sub-conscious of the New Psychology.
Call it, if you like,the world on the other side of death; for the world on
the other side of death is certainly included therein, although there is no
world which is exclusively a world on the other side of death, for that
world may be entered ere the physical body is shaken off. It sounds
startling in modern ears if it is stated that it is as possible for men of
the twentieth century to enter that other world as it was possible for the
teachers of Christianity, of Islam, of Buddhism or of Hinduism in the elder
days. And yet it would seem a natural thing that what man could know at one
age he can also know at another. In the old days how common was the
declaration that men could know the world invisible. Some men came to the
Buddha when he was teaching upon earth some five centuries before the coming
of the Christ, and they asked him about the [Page 6]
worlds into which, as their religion taught them, men went on the other side
of death. And the Buddha answered plainly and simply: " If you want to know
the way to a village you go to a man who has lived there, and who knows the
road because he has often trodden it. And so, if you would know of the
worlds beyond death you do well in coming to me, for I know those worlds and
have oft-times trodden the way." 