Compass Newsletter Summer 2022 No.48

Looking for Answers
The Forward Look by Hugh Percy Leonard
Anybody’s Man by Hannah Berman

Looking for Answers

Sometimes it’s not about finding an answer but looking for it. “The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy” is the opening of The Secret Doctrine”. We will all have used these main avenues of looking for an answer. We are all so beautifully complex, all so different. Complex, different, it’s not surprising we use many avenues to look for an answer to the eternal questions of who am I, where did I come from, where will I go to, why now, where do I belong?… we’ll all have our own list. H. P. Blavatsky and those behind and steering her, presented her Magnum Opus having understood humanity was reaching a number of junctions, avenues of exploration and investigation, in its development. Each of these avenues have been used, and will continue to be used by mankind in its journey through evolution. There was nothing new in the Secret Doctrine but she uses the comment by Montaigne, “Gentlemen, I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them.”

Depending on when and where we begin questioning will present to us the avenue we choose which enables us to advance on the road of questioning. At different points we will use one or more avenues. perhaps more than one at the same time. It seems incorrect to limit oneself to one when multiple avenues have been suggested. It is the open-ness of Theosophy which is its triumph. The Secret Doctrine is not a bible but an aid to advancement. We are where we are. Let’s start from that point for as William Quan Judge answers to a correspondent in New York, Sept 26, 1888, in the book Practical Occultism, Volume 1… “The fact that we are born in this kind of a place and time shows that that is our karma and it is our duty to make the most of it for if we win to any extent in such difficult circumstances then we have acquired more actual strength than if it had been our fortune to be born in a nation or time which to our short sight seems to be a better fortune. But it is a mistake for a man to ever suppose that any other sort of fortune than the one that is now his is a better one; that which is now ours is the best because it is the only one that by any possibility could be ours…”

Our duty (dharma) is delivered through our karma. The purpose of Karma is to bring about equilibrium, harmony. An act, on whatever level, is merely one part of an equation, to be balanced by a re-action. We act when we commit but we also act when we omit. The choice is ours. It is all part of a Cosmic Dance at which every entity is a participant. The advice of James Long to ‘ride loose in the saddle’ is prescient. Theosophy should always have the flexibility to allow the adjustment of changing attitudes of a developing humanity with the gentle overall framework of holding accepted and trusted axioms.Kill in thyself all memory of past experiences. Look not behind or thou art lost. — The Voice of the Silence, pg. 17, TUP, 1976.

The Forward Look

Let us turn the leaf upon the blotted record of the past and make a fairer set of entries in the open journal of today. The past is country we have traveled through, and now our whole concern is how we may best get through the day’s march. We might, of course, sit down and engage in retrospect, tracing those points at which we wandered from the path, glancing backwards at the mud-holes in which we were almost foundered; but such a futile waste of time and effort is not for the Pilgrim of Eternity. Our present position is the resultant of all our past, and our future opportunity. Forward, march!

The pathway of advance must of necessity be strewn with failures, because in acquiring the use of new powers we must often fall short of success. But that we now have the use of these powers is all that matters, and why should we pause and conjure up again the vanished specters of the days gone by? The waters of oblivion may be left to do their cleansing task upon the dismal memoranda of the past that we have left behind.

All final success is the culmination of hosts of failures, and on the stepping-stones of our abortive efforts we rise to higher levels of attainment. The eternal Now is that cross-section of eternal duration in which alone we live and work. The water which has flowed down-stream has lost its opportunity to turn the wheel. Now is the only time we have in which to do our work. Why should we ever turn our minds to view the dead and buried past?

Not that the past is really dead, for all that, because each weak surrender, every mood of self indulgence, still lives on in the man of the present. We are the past of ourselves and it survives in our character of today. That past can be transmuted by the steady flame of our aspiring mind into the purest gold; but this alchemical process demands a continuous heat, a steady fire that never fails to radiate its genial glow. The magic of the spiritual will is operative only in the living present, and its field of action does not run backwards into the past.

Failure is natural, normal and unavoidable, and however much it seems complete, is not disaster, so long as the indomitable will to try again lives on.

One fatal result of brooding over days gone by is that in the process regret is developed, a mental sorrow for past misdoing. This grey, depressing, interior fog is actually reckoned as being desirable and distinctly meritorious by certain sectaries, and unfortunate babies are afflicted by being christened “Dolores,” as though there were something praiseworthy and attractive about those who are prostrated with grief on account of their load of ancient sin! Regret is a motion of the mind and hence an energy, and all our energy must be conserved and husbanded if we would ever reach the goal we have proposed. By generating gloomy clouds of sorrow and repentance we tend to obscure and darken the common atmosphere of thought in which we live, and by perpetually dwelling on our “sins” we actually infuse them with an added wave of life and almost invite their repetition.

Ideals in the mind are often considered to be unsubstantial things, while our specific failures to act up to them are seen to stand out as enduring monuments of our incompetence. As a matter of fact, it is these supposedly ephemeral ideals that are the permanent, foundation factors in our lives, while our failures may be compared to the waste clippings on the floor of the workshop, to be cast into the crucible and used again in fresh attempts. Let us then, hold fast to our floating ideals and pour fresh life into them by the brooding heat of our aspiration. They are only unsubstantial in so far as we have failed to give them a place in our lives. On their own plane they are the raw material of a better life to be: they are positive and prophetic and absolutely compel their own fulfilment.

Forward, then, upon the track that leads to a future all unknown! Repeated failures must, indeed, attend us on the onward march, but each advancing step is cheered by the tones of an eternal hope.

Hugh Percy Leonard, The Theosophical Forum, July 1936“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.” – Fyodor DostoevskyAnybody’s Man

Nature spews the Lukewarm out of her mouth

In a world of tragedy and unhappiness, for that is the stage to which humanity has brought itself today, there is nothing so futile as a negative mind. The man who does not know which ‘side he is on,’ and who flounders about in a wobbly sort of way from here to there, is anchored nowhere, a danger to himself, and a potential enemy of himself and of all mankind.

People on the whole can be roughly divided into three classes. Firstly, those who stand positively for universal brotherhood and truth and loyalty and compassion and all those ideals that emanate from the higher part of man. Secondly, those who, just as sincerely, believe in the opposite ideals, and have a religion which spells a desire for power and a God which spells Force. These two classes are very positive and definite, but comprise comparatively few in numbers.

The great mass of humanity belongs to the third class — the negative class. Here one finds the individual who is not particularly one thing or the other; who, in short, does not know his own mind. As a rule he takes pride in proclaiming his open-mindedness.

Actually he is anybody’s man; like the dog who is so generally friendly that he would carry a lantern round for the burglar. Unfortunately there are those who know how to use these ‘openminded’ individuals to swell their own ranks. Our weak, negative friend is easily ‘talked over,’ easily convinced and converted to this point of view or that, and alas! if we take a look around today, we can see the result of thousands, nay millions of people of this type, having been ‘roped in,’ because like sheep they have been passively led and convinced and so have followed some persuasive orator. They now find themselves in a deplorable and even tragic position of helplessness; in many cases even actively being forced to carry out a policy which they loathe, but in which they find they are entrapped. One day such an individual wakes up and says, “What have I done to get myself into this awful mess?” That is exactly the point. He did nothing — nothing at all. The question he should ask himself is, “What did I omit to do?” He omitted to think, to use his mind, and to place a guard around himself of positive ideas on fundamental issues.

The mind is a marvellous and precious possession capable of untold miracles and latent possibilities. No one would allow a priceless picture or a precious jewel to be mishandled by others. And yet there are millions of individuals, each possessing a mind and not using it: not only not using it, but actually allowing anybody who has the power to do with it anything at all — to mould it, to impress it with ideas and, in millions of cases, to allow it to be taken possession of and imprisoned.

The Brutus and Mark Anthony of today play games with the mob mind as in Julius Caesar. Those who have become experts toy in the same way with minds in the mass. He who does nothing to prevent his own mind from being captured in this way is committing a ‘crime of inaction’ which is just as terrible as a positive criminal act, and even more destructive in its ultimate results.

To one who has even an intuition of the potentiality of the human spirit, this imprisoning of the mind is the most dreadful thing that can happen, taking away from the individual his chance of making his incarnation worth while.

Hannah Berman, Sunrise, September 1953News

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