by annie besant / part 3

Annie Besant was a British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer, orator, educationist, and philanthropist. Regarded as a champion of human freedom, she was an ardent supporter of both Irish and Indian self-rule. She was a prolific author with over three hundred books and pamphlets to her credit. She became a member of the Theosophical Society and a prominent lecturer on the subject.

As part of her theosophy-related work, she travelled to India. In 1898 she helped establish the Central Hindu School, and in 1922 she helped establish the Hyderabad (Sind) National Collegiate Board in Mumbai, India.  In 1902, she established the first overseas Lodge of the International Order of Co-Freemasonry, Le Droit Humain.

Over the next few years she established lodges in many parts of the British Empire. In 1907 she became president of the Theosophical Society, whose international headquarters were, by then, located in Adyar, Madras, (Chennai). She also became involved in politics in India, joining the Indian National Congress.

When World War I broke out in 1914, she helped launch the Home Rule League to campaign for democracy in India, and dominion status within the British Empire. This led to her election as president of the Indian National Congress, in late 1917.

In the late 1920s, Besant travelled to the United States with her protégé and adopted son Jiddu Krishnamurti, who she claimed was the new Messiah and incarnation of Buddha. Krishnamurti rejected these claims in 1929. 

Besant met fellow theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater in London in April 1894. They became close co-workers in the theosophical movement and would remain so for the rest of their lives. After the war, she continued to campaign for Indian independence and for the causes of theosophy, until her death in 1933.

"The universe exists for the sake of the Self."

Not for what the outer world can give, not for control over the objects of desire, not for the sake even of beauty or pleasure, does the Great Architect plan and build His worlds. He has filled them with objects, beautiful and pleasure-giving. The great arch of the sky above, the mountains with snow-clad peaks, the valleys soft with verdure and fragrant with blossoms, the oceans with their vast depths, their surface now calm as a lake, now tossing in fury they all exist, not for the objects themselves, but for their value to the Self.

Not for themselves because they are anything in themselves but that the purpose of the Self may be served, and His manifestations made possible. The world, with all its beauty, its happiness and suffering, its joys and pains" is planned with the utmost ingenuity, in order that the powers of the Self may be shown forth in manifestation. From the fire-mist to the LOGOS, all exist for the sake of the Self. The lowest grain of dust, the mightiest deva in his heavenly regions, the plant that grows out of sight in the nook of a mountain, the star that shines aloft over us-all these exist in order that the fragments of the one Self, embodied in countless forms, may realize their own identity, and manifest the powers of the Self through the matter that envelops them.

- Annie Besant

“These lectures [Delivered at the 32nd Anniversary of the Theosophical Society held at Benares, on Dec. 27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th, 1907.] are intended to give an outline of Yoga, in order to prepare the student to take up, for practical purposes, the Yoga sutras of Patanjali, the chief treatise on Yoga. To prepare the student for the mastering of that more difficult task, these lectures were designed; hence the many references to Patanjali. They may, however, also serve to give to the ordinary lay reader some idea of the Science of sciences, and perhaps to allure a few towards its study.” 

In this article I cover main points in Annie Besant’s book, “An Introduction to Yoga.”

PART 3 / Contents

MEDITATION, MEDITATION WITH SEED, CONCENTRATION IS ATTENTION, PURIFICATION OF BODIES, DWELLERS ON THE THRESHOLD, PREPARATION FOR YOGA,

MEDITATION

The method must vary with the temperament of the practitioner.

Do not allow the mind to go aside to other lines of thought.

Keep it rigidly along a single line, and steadiness will gradually result.

At the highest point of thinking, cling desperately to the last link of the chain, and there keep the mind poised, in steadiness and strenuous quiet, waiting for what may come.

After a while, you will be able to maintain this attitude for a considerable time. Whom the imagination is stronger than the reasoning faculty, the method by devotion, rather than by reasoning; is the method.

Call imagination to your help. Paint the picture of your scene, your devotion, line by line, brush by brush of your imagination.

Over and over picture the scene, dwelling less and less on the surrounding objects and more and more on the central figure which is the object of his hearts’ devotion.

The drawing of the mind to a point, in this way, brings it under control and steadies it, and thus gradually, by this use of the imagination, he brings the mind under command.

The object of devotion will be according to the man’s religion.

A God may leave his universe, and it may drop away when He turns His gaze inward, for it was He who gave reality to it.

Such is the law of activity and rest. Steady the vehicle, so that consciousness may be still.

You can also use the mechanical resource of a mantra. A mantra is a definite successions of sounds.

Those sounds, repeated rhythmically over and over in succession, synchronize the vibrations of the vehicles in unity with themselves.

CONCENTRATION IS ATTENTION

The fixed attitude of attention, that is concentration. To become a Yogi you must be attentive all the time. You must practice concentration every hour of your active life. You must pay attention every day to everything you do.

Do not let your mind wander from the thing before you. It does not matter what the thing is. It may be the adding up of a column of figures, or the reading of a book. Anything will do.

It is the attitude of the mind that is important and not the object before it. This is the only way o learning concentration. It is further possible to train your mind as the girl has trained her fingers. The mind/the mental body, can be so trained as to do a thing automatically.

When the higher consciousness can be fixed on the Supreme, while the lower consciousness in the body will do the things of the body, and do them perfectly, because perfectly trained. These are the lesson of Yoga.

Practice this to build up qualities you want, and you become stronger and better, and fit to go on tot he definite study of Yoga.

You must be alert, energetic, in your thought. You must have decision of will, must be able to make up your mind. You cannot be carelessness, or lazy. You must not lack the power and will to exert themself. Next is having world-mindedness.

You must be fundamentally true.

Must have desire, conviction and practice thought power and imagination. Must strengthen the will from without too within.

Keep promises to yourself and make them. Don’t break them for a whole week and a month. By this forcing of action, you strengthen the will. It grows greater in power and you find your inner strength increases.

Desire transmutes to a strong will. You must have broad intelligence. You cannot control your mind, unless you have a mind to control. You must develop your mind. Study and think.

Nurture your intelligence to make your mind grow strong. A strong desire, indomitable will, a keen intelligence. You must unfold the mind by which you are to work.

Bliss manifested as desire is changed into will.

Wisdom Thought     Reason

Activity Work     Sacrifice

The Will is placed in the human being as the correspondence of bliss in the Divine.

Chit - Consciousness

Ananda - Bliss

Sat - Existence/Truth

Consciousness is reflected in the intelligence in man - the same quality only in miniature. Existence and activity belong to each other. You can only exist as you act outwards. It is manifested life.

The nature of the Self is bliss. Throw that nature down into matter and what will be the expression of the bliss nature?

Desire for happiness, seeking after desirable objects, which it imagines will give it the happiness which is of its own essential nature, and which it is continually seeking to realize amid the obstacles of the world. Bliss seeks happiness, and that desire for happiness is to be transmuted into will.

The will to live translate into the desire for happiness. Desire and will are both the determination to be happy.

But the one ignorant, drawn out by outer objects; the other is self-conscious, initiated and ruled from within. Desire is evoked and directed from outside; and when the same aspect rules from within, it is will. There is no difference in their nature.

Desire on the Path of Forthgoing becomes will on the Path of Return.

When desire, thought and work are changed into will, reason and sacrifice, then the man is turning homewards, then he lives by renunciation.

On the Path of Forthgoing, you must fight for everything you want to get; on the Path of Return, nature pours her treasures at your feet. When a man has ceased to desire them, then all treasures pour down upon him, for he has become a channel through which all good gifts flow to those around him.

Seek the good, give up grasping, and then everything will be yours.

Cease to ask that your own little water tank may be filled, and you will become a pipe, joined to the living source of all waters, the source which never runs dry, the waters which spring up unfailingly. Renunciation means the power of unceasing work for the good of all, work which cannot fail, because wrought by the Supreme Worker through His servant.

True renunciation is to stop clinging to the visible, to the fruit of action, and so the wealth does not pour through your hands.

PURIFICATION OF BODIES

You must purify each of your 3 working bodies - mental, astral and physical.

Without that purification you had better leave yoga alone. Purify the thought body by right thinking. Imagination, your great creative tool must be used.  Imagine things, and imagining them, you will form your thought-body into the organization that you desire.

Imagine something strongly, as the painter imagines when he is going to paint. Visualize an object if you have the power of visualization at all. It is an artistic faculty and push it to see how far you can reproduce perfectly a face you see daily. It will strengthen your imagination and a great tool to practice with.

We can rid of half our troubles and faults by dealing with them through our imagination.

As the thought body is purified this way, you must turn to the astral body. The astral body is purified by right desire.

Desire nobly, and the astral body will evolve the organs of good desires instead of the organs of evil ones. The secret of all progress is to think and desire the highest, never dwelling on the fault, the weakness, the error, but always on the perfected power.

Slowly in this way you will be able to build up perfection in yourself.

Think and desire, then in order to purify the thought body and the astral body.

You cannot have a pure physical body with impure mental and astral bodies, so that the work of imagination helps also in the purification of the physical. Every food has a dominant quality in it, either rhythm, or activity, or inertia, and that all foods fall under one of these heads.

All foods which show signs of decay (alcohol) are to be avoided. Flesh foods are really stimulants and come under the quality of activity. Flesh foods give vitality and strength which does not last, a sudden spurt of energy.

All the foods that tend to grow are the most highly vitalizing.

Grain, out of which the new plant will grow, is packed full of the most nutritious substances; fruits; all those things which have growth as their next stage in the life cycle, those are the rhythmic foods, full of life and building up a body sensitive and strong at the same time.

DWELLERS ON THE THRESHOLD

Elementals try to bar the astral plane against man. They are concerned with the building up of the lower kingdoms, these elementals of form the Rupa Devas; and to them man is a really hateful and destructive creature.

The band themselves together to stop the one who is just taking their first conscious steps on the astral plane, and try to frighten him, for they fear that he is bringing destructiveness into the new world. They cannot do anything, if you do not mind them.

When that rush of elemental force comes against the man entering on the astral plane, he must remain quiet, indifferent, taking up the position; I am a higher product of evolution than you are; you can do nothing to me.  I am your friend, not your enemy, Peace!”

If he be strong enough to take that position, the great wave of elemental force will roll aside and let him through. The seemingly causeless fears which some feel at night are largely due to this hostility.

You are at night more sensitive to astral travel than during the day, and the dislike of the beings on the plane for man is felt more strongly. But when the elementals find you are not destructive, not an embodiment of ruin, they become as friendly to you as they were before hostile.

That is the first form of the dweller on the threshold.

The importance of pure and rhythmic food comes in; because if you use meat and alcohol, you attract the lower elementals of the plane, those that take pleasure in the scent of blood and spirits, and they will inevitably prevent your seeing and understanding things clearly. They will surge round you, impress their thoughts upon you, force their impressions on your astral body, so that you may have a kind of shell of objectionable hangers-on to your aura, who will much obstruct you in your efforts to see and hear correctly.

That is the chief reason why everyone who is teaching Yoga on the right-hand path absolutely forbids indulgence in meat and alcohol.

The second form of the dweller on the threshold is the thought forms of our own past.

Those forms, growing out of the evil of lives that lie behind us, thought forms of wickedness of all kinds, those face us when we first come into touch with the astral plane, really belonging to us, but appearing as outside forms; as objects; and they try to scare back their creator.

You can only conquer them by sternly repudiating them; “You are no longer mine; you belong to my past, and not to my present.  Will give you none of my life.”

Thus you will gradually exhaust and finally annihilate them. This is perhaps one of the most painful difficulties that one has to face in treading the astral plane in consciousness for the first time.

Of course, where a person has in anyway been mixed up with objectionable thought forms of the stronger kind, such as those brought about by practicing black magic, there this particular form of the dweller will be much stronger and more dangerous, and often desperate is the struggle between the neophyte and these dwellers from his past backed up by the masters of the black side.

Now we come to the most terrible form of the dwellers on the threshold.

When a man during the past has steadily identified himself with the lower part of his nature and has gone against the higher, paralyzing himself, using higher powers for lower purposes, degrading his mind to be the mere slave of his lower desires. Instead of serving the purposes of the Spirit, it is dragged away for the purposes of the lower, and becomes part of the animal life belonging to the lower bodies, so that the Ego and his higher bodies are weakened, and the animal life of the lower is strengthened.

Under these conditions, the Ego will sometimes become so disgusted with his vehicles that when death relieves him of the physical body he will cast the others quite aside. Even sometimes during physical life he will leave the desecrated temple.

In these cases the man generally reincarnates very quickly, for having torn himself away from his astral and mental bodies, he has no bodies with which to live in the astral and mental worlds, and he must quickly form new ones and come again to rebirth here.

Under these conditions the old astral and mental bodies are not disintegrated when the new mental and astral bodies are formed and born into the world, and the affinity between the old and new, both having had the same owner, the same tenant, asserts itself, and the highly vitalized old astral and mental bodies, and become the most terrible form of the dweller on the threshold.

There are also direct attacks by the Dark Brothers, taking up various forms and aspects, and the most common form they will take is the form of some virtue which is a little bit in excess in the yogi.

It is the extremes which are ever the vices; the golden mean the virtue.

Virtues become tempters in the difficult regions of the astral and mental worlds, and are utilized b the Brothers of the Shadow in order to entrap the unwary.

If you are threatened with danger on the astral which belongs to the physical, but are unwise enough to think it can injure you, it will injure the physical body.

You may get a wound, a bruise, and so on, out of astral experiences. One more protection you can make for yourself as you become more sensitive. Be rigorously truthful in thought, in word, in deed.

Every thought, every desire, takes form in the higher world. If you are careless of truth here, you are creating a whole host of terrifying and deluding forms.

Think truth, speaks truth, live truth, and then you shall be free from the illusions of the astral world.

PREPARATION FOR YOGA

The initiate pays for his faults ten times the price they would have had to pay for them as a man of the world. That is why I have put at the ideal so high.

It is the duty of those who have seen the results of going through the gateway with faults in character, to point out that it is well to get rid of these faults first. Every fault you carry through the gateway with you becomes a dagger to stab you on the other side.

It is well to purify yourself as much as you can, before you are sufficiently evolved on any line to have the right to say, “I will pass through that gateway.”

For a man can afford to do in the outer world with small result what will bring terrible results upon him when once he is treading the Path.

THE END

What is to be the end of this long struggle? What is the goal of the upward climbing, the prize of the great battle? What does the yogi reach at last?

He reaches unity.

There are many virtues of your ordinary life which will drop entirely away from you when you reach unity. Many things you admire will be no longer helps but hindrances, when the sense of unity begins to dawn.

Moral indignation, repulsion from evil, judgement of others, have no room where unity is realized.

When you feel repulsion from evil, it is a sign that your Higher Self is beginning to awaken, is seeing the dangers of evil; he drags the body forcibly away from it.

That is the beginning of the conscious moral life. Hatred of evil is better at that stage than indifference to evil. It is a necessary stage.

But repulsion cannot be felt when a man has realized unity, when he sees God made manifest in man. A man who knows unity cannot judge another. He cannot be repelled by anyone.

The sinner is himself and how shall he be repelled from himself? For him there is no “I” or “Thee” for we are One.

This is not a thing that many honestly wish for.  It is not a thing that many honestly desire.

The man who has realized unity knows no difference between himself and the vilest wretch that walks the earth.

He sees only the God that walks in the sinner, and knows that the sin is not in the God but in the sheath. The difference is only there.

He who has realized the inner greatness of the Self never pronounces judgement upon another, knows that other as himself, and he himself as that other-that is unity.

We talk about brotherhood, but how many of us really practice it?

Greater than brotherhood are identity and realization of the Self as one.

The 6 Root Race will carry brotherhood to the highest point.

The 7 Root Race will know identity, will realize the unity of the human race.

To catch a glimpse of the beauty of that high conception, the greatness of the unity in which “I” and “mine” “you” and “yours” have vanished, in which we are all one life, even to do that lifts the whole nature towards divinity, and those who can even see that unity is fair, they are the nearer to the realization of the Beauty that is God.