So he spake in the elder days, and so ought
the teachers of religion to be able to speak today; for they should speak by
knowledge and not by hearsay. It is no new and strange thing, then, when the
Theosophist says that man may travel into worlds that to most people are on
the other side of death. For every one of you possesses in the sense-garment
that deeper layer of subtler matter which makes you free of those subtler
worlds, and it is only the ignorance of the super-physical that shuts you
out from a knowledge that might rob death of its terrors, and make the
passage thither a passage of joy instead of grief. And that sense-garment
has not only the physical and astral layers, but also that layer of matter
which belongs to the worlds beyond the astral — the heaven-worlds. And it
seems as though, along the lines of study of the New Psychology, men were
beginning to recognise the existence in consciousness of more worlds than
one. For whence the numerous premonitions, warnings, dreams, apparitions,
phantoms of the living, and those strange prophecies which are realised from
time to time ? Whence the vision that sees beyond the physical, if only in
the hypnotic trance ? Whence the hearing with keener hearing than the
physical? Whence all these strange phenomena, if it be not that what is
called the subconscious is largely the super-conscious — consciousness
beginning to utilize a subtler vehicle, that vehicle evolving as the
physical vehicle has evolved in the past ? And all that view of the
super-physical grows out of this thought that man can know directly God and
Nature, and that in his sense-garment he has gathered together matter from
all the different worlds that surround him, and [Page
through that veil of matter he can contact worlds other than the physical.
This is the first great work of Theosophy in the world — to proclaim the actuality of such knowledge, now as well as in the past. It is not the proclamation of a creed. It does not rest on books, however sacred; it does not rest on tradition, however hoary; it does not rest on authority, however dignified; it rests alone on human experience of the eldest and of the present days. It is not a creed; it is a method. It is not a collection of doctrines, but an attitude towards life — the attitude of the man who deliberately, consciously evolves himself, who, instead of waiting for the slow evolution of nature, works for his own self-unfoldment, recognises within himself powers divine, and faces life with the determination to use it for the unfolding of those powers, and to know himself consciously a citizen of more worlds than one.
Basing religion thus on human experience, the facts gathered by that experience form a certain body of teachings like any other science. You collect a number of facts and put them together as the science of chemistry, and another number as the science of electricity, while facts of the spiritual consciousness form the essential body of religious teachings. But we assert that these facts may constantly be reverified by everyone who follows that conscious self-evolution of which I have just spoken. Now these facts, discovered by human experience and reverified thereby, lie at the root of every great religion. They are not in consciousness because religion has revealed them; they are the foundation of religion because human consciousness has discovered them. That is the difference of position between the Theosophist and many believers in the various religions of the world. Those main facts are — I but recite them — the Unity of the One Life whence all lives are drawn; the revelation of that life in any world system as a Trinity; the existence of countless hosts of non-human intelligences who have to [ page 8] do with the working out of the laws of Nature in every world, and the guidance of the destinies of humanities in the many worlds; man himself as one rank in that great hierarchy, unfolding the Spirit within him; this by repeated sojourns in the three worlds, earth, the world beyond, and the heavenly world — Re-incarnation; and that c