THEOSOPHY
Theosophical Society,
Annie
Besant
Vegetarianism in the
Light of Theosophy
by
Annie Besant
First Published May 1913
Return to Annie Besant
Selection
THE title of the lecture that I am to deliver to you tonight shows
you, I think, the limitations which I practically impose upon both the subjects
mentioned in it, so defining the limits of what I have to say. I am to speak to
you on "Vegetarianism in the Light of Theosophy''. Now, it is certain that
you may argue for the vegetarian theory and practice from very many points of
view. You may take it from the standpoint of physical health; you may take it
along the physiological and chemical lines; you might make a very strong
argument in its favour from the connection between it and the use, or rather
the disuse, of strong liquor, because the use of alcohol and the use of meat
are very closely connected with each other, and are very apt to vary together
in the same individual; or you might take it from other standpoints, familiar,
probably, to many of you, in the arguments that you road in vegetarian journals
and hear from vegetarian speakers. So again with Theosophy.
If I were going to deal with it by
itself, I should be giving an impression of its meaning and doctrines, tracing
for you, perhaps, the course of its history, advancing arguments as to the
reasonableness of its general teaching, as to the value of its philosophy to
man. But I am going to take the two subjects in relation to each other, and
that relation means that I am going to try to bring to some of you, who very
likely are already vegetarians, arguments along a line of thought that may be
less familiar to you than those with which vegetarianism is generally
supported. And I am going also to try to show to those of you who are not
vegetarians that, from the Theosophical standpoint, there are arguments to be
adduced, other than those which deal with the nourishment of the body, with
chemical or physiological questions, or even with its bearing on the drink
traffic - a line of thought entirely different from these, and valuable perhaps
especially because of its difference; just as you might bring up fresh
reinforcements to an army that is already struggling against considerable odds.
The vegetarianism that I am going to argue about tonight is that
which will be familiar to all of you as the abstinence from all those kinds of
food which imply the slaying of the animal, or cruelty inflicted upon the animal.
I am not going to take up any special line of argument, such as those which may
divide one vegetarian party from the other. I am not going to argue about
cereals, nor about fruits, nor about the variety of diets which form so much of
the discussion at the present time. I am going to take the broad line of
abstinence from all kinds of animal food, and I am going to try to show the
reasons for such abstinence which may be drawn from the teachings of Theosophy,
which may be endorsed by that view of the world and of men which is known under
this name.
I ought to say before putting the argument that, while I believe
the argument I put to be perfectly sound from the standpoint of Theosophy, I
have no right to pledge the Theosophical Society as a whole to the acceptance
of that argument, for, as many of you know, we do not require from persons who
enter the Theosophical Society their acceptance of the doctrines which are
known under the general name of Theosophy. We only ask them to accept the
doctrine of universal brotherhood, and to search after truth in the cooperative
spirit, as it were, rather than in the competitive. That is, we require from
our members that they shall not attack aggressively the religions or other
views of their neighbours, but that they shall show
the same respect to others as they expect others will show to them in the
expression of their opinions. With that one obligation we are content. We do
not try to force Theosophical views on those who enter. Those of us who believe
them to be true have faith in the force of truth itself, and therefore we leave our members
perfectly free to accept or to reject them. That being so,
you will understand that in speaking I am not committing the Society.
The views that I speak are drawn from the Philosophy which may or may not he held by any individual member of our union.
Now, the first line of argument to which I am going to ask your
attention regarding vegetarianism in the light of Theosophy, is this: Theosophy
regards man as part of a great line of evolution; it regards man's place in the
world as a link in a mighty chain, a chain which has its first link in
manifestation in the divine life itself, which comes down, link after link,
through great hierarchies or classes of evolving spiritual intelligences,
which, coming downwards in this fashion from its divine origin through
spiritual entities, then involves itself in the manifestation that we know as
our own world; that this world, which is but the expression of the divine
thought, is penetrated through and through with this divine life; that
everything that we call law is the expression of this divine nature; that all
study of manifestation of law is the study of this divine mind in nature; so
that the world is to be looked on, not as essentially matter and force, as from
the standpoint of materialistic science, but essentially as life and
consciousness involving itself for purposes of manifestation in that which we recognise as matter and as force.
Then, starting with this idea and tracing what we may call this
involution of life to its lowest point, we come to the mineral kingdom; from
that to the life working upwards again, as it were, in an ascending cycle
instead of a descending - matter becoming more and more ductile under the force
of this now evolving life, becoming more and more plastic - until from the
mineral is evolved the vegetable. Then, as, working in the vegetable kingdom,
matter becomes yet more plastic and therefore better able to express the life
and consciousness which are working within it, you come to the evolution of the
animal kingdom, with its more highly differentiated energies, with its growing
complexity of organisation, with its increased power
for feeling pleasure and pain, and, above all, with the increase of individualisation, these creatures becoming more and more
of the type of individuals, becoming more and more separated, as it were, in
their consciousness, beginning to show the germs of higher consciousness; this
primary life, that lives in all, being able to express itself more completely
in this more highly organised nervous system, and
being, as it were, trained in that by more responses to the contacts from the
external universe. Then, still climbing upwards, it finds a far, far higher
manifestation in the human form, and that human form is animated by the Soul
and by the Spirit - the Soul which through the body manifests itself as mind,
and the Spirit which
by the evolution of the Soul gradually comes into manifestation
in this external universe.
Thus man, by virtue of this Soul that becomes self-conscious, by
virtue of this higher evolution - the highest which exists in material form in
our world - is, as it were, the highest expression of this evolving life; he
ought, therefore, also to be the most perfect expression of this continually
growing manifestation of law. Because of the will which develops itself in man,
which has the power of choice, which is able to say "I will", or
"I will not", which separates itself from the lower forms of living
creatures by this very power of self-conscious determination, which, just
because it is near the expression of the divine, shows those marks of thought,
of spontaneous action, which are characteristics of the supreme life evolving
itself in matter - just because of all that, man has a double possibility, a
greater responsibility, a higher or a more degraded destiny. He has this power
of choice. That law which in lower forms of life is impressed on the form and
which the form obeys, as it were, by way of compulsion; the law which in the
mineral world leaves no choice to the mineral atoms; which, in the vegetable
world again, is a compulsory law, developing it along certain definite lines,
without, as far as we are able to judge, much power of resistance; which in the
animal speaks as instinct, which the animal obeys, and obeys continually; that law, as we follow the general order,
when it comes to deal with man, finds a change.
Man is the disorderly element in nature; man it is who, although he
has higher possibilities, sets up discord in this realm of law; man it is who,
just by virtue of his developed will, has the power of setting himself against
law and holding his own, as it were, for a while against it. In the long run
the law will crush him. Always when he sets himself against it, the law
justifies itself by the pain which it inflicts; he cannot really break it, but
he can cause disorder, he can cause disharmony, he can, by this will of his,
refuse to follow out the highest and the best, and deliberately choose the
lower and the worse road. And just because of that power the power of choice -
he has higher possibilities than lie before the mineral, the vegetable, or the
animal world. For it is a higher type of harmony to put oneself consciously
into union with the law than it is to be simply an apparatus moved by it
without the volition that consciously chooses the higher; and therefore man is
in this position: he may fall lower than the brute, but ho can also rise
infinitely higher. Therefore, the responsibility comes upon him to be the
trainer of the lower nature, the educator of the lower nature, the gradual moulder, as it were, of the world into higher forms of
being and nobler types of life. And man, wherever he goes, should be the friend
of all, the helper of all, the lover of all, expressing his nature that is love in his daily life,
and bringing to every lower creature not only the control that may be used to
educate, but the love also that may be used to lift that lower creature in the
scale of being.
Apply then that principle of man's place in the world, vicegerent
in a very real sense, ruler and monarch of the world, but with the power of
being either a bad monarch or a good, and responsible to the whole of the
universe for the use that he makes of the power. Take then man in relation to
the lower animals from this standpoint. Clearly, if we are to look at him in this position, slaying them for his own gratification
is at once placed out of court. He is not to go amongst the happy creatures of
the woods, and bring there the misery of fear, of terror, of horror, by
carrying destruction wherever he goes; he is not to arm himself with hook and
with gun, and with other weapons which he is able to make, remember, only by
virtue of the mind which is developed within him. Prostituting those higher
powers of mind to make himself the more deadly enemy of the other sentient
creatures that share the world with him, he uses the mind, that should be there
to help and to train the lower, to carry fresh forms of misery and destructive
energy in every direction. When you see a man go amongst the lower animals,
they fly from his face, for experience has taught them what it means to meet a
man. If he goes into some secluded part of the earth where human foot has rarely trodden,
there he will find the animals fearless and friendly, and he can go about
amongst crowds of them and they shrink not from his touch. Take the accounts
you will read of travellers who have gone into some
district where man has not hitherto penetrated, and you will read how he can
walk among crowds of birds and other creatures as friend with friends. And it
is only when he begins to take advantage of their confidence to strike them
down, only then, by experience of what the presence of man means to them, do
they learn the lesson of distrust, of fear, of flying from his presence. So
that in every civilised country, wherever there is a
man, in field or in wood, all living things fly at the sound of his footstep;
and he is not the friend of every creature but the one who brings terror and
alarm, and they fly from his presence.
And yet there have been some men from whom there has rayed out so
strongly the spirit of love, that the living things of field and forest crowded
around them wherever they went; men like St. Francis of Assisi, of whom it is
told that, as he walked the woods, the birds would fly to him and perch on his
body, so strongly did they feel the sense of love that was around him as a halo
wherever he trod. So in India you will find man after man in whom this same
spirit of love and compassion is seen, and in the woods and the jungle, on the
mountain and in the desert, these two
men may go wherever they will, and even the wild beasts will not touch them I
could tell you stories of Yogis there, harmless in every act of thought and
life, who will go through jungles where tigers are crouching, and the tiger
will sometimes come and lie at their feet and lick their feet, harmless as a
kitten might be, in face of the spirit of love. And thus it might he with all
things that live: thus it would be, if we were friend instead of foe. And
though, in truth, it would now take many a century to undo the evil of a
bloodstained past, still the undoing is possible, the friendliness might be
made, and each man, each woman, who in life is friendly to the lower creatures,
is adding his quota to the love in the world, which ultimately will subdue all
things to itself.
Pass from that duty of man as monarch of the world to the next
point which in Theosophical teaching forbids the slaughter of living things.
Some of you may know that part of our teaching is that the physical world is
interpenetrated and surrounded by a subtler world of matter that we speak of as
"astral"; that in that, subtle matter - which may be called ether if
the name be more familiar to you - forces especially have their home; that in
that world you have the reflection and the imaging of what occurs on the
material plane; that thoughts also take image there, just as actions are there
reflected, and this astral world lies between the material world and the world
of thought. The thought-world, full of the thoughts of men, sends down these
potent energies into the astral world; there they take image, which reacts upon
the physical. It is this which is so often felt by the "sensitive".
When he comes into a special hall, a house, a city, he is able to tell you, by
a subtle feeling that he may be unable to explain, something of the general
characteristics of the atmosphere of that house, or hall, or city - whether to
him it is pure or foul; whether to him it is friendly or hostile; whether it
exerts upon him a healthful or a hindering influence. One of the ways in which
you may recognise the working of this astral world is
by connecting it in your thought, as science is beginning to connect the ether,
with all magnetic currents, and with all electric action. Take, for instance,
the action that a speaker has upon a crowd. That is dependent upon the presence
of this ethereal matter in which magnetic forces work, so that a sentence which
is spoken charged with the magnetism of the speaker has a wholly different
effect upon those on whose ears it falls than if they read the same sentence in
cold blood, as it is called, in a newspaper or a book. Why ?
Because the force of the speaker, taking form in this subtle matter which is
the medium between him and the hearers, sets it throbbing to his vibrations;
his magnetism charges it, throws it into waves, and these waves strike upon the
similar matter in the bodies of the hearers, and the wave [Page12] sweeps right
across the hall, and this vibration of a single thought for the moment makes
all who are there feel its power alike, though they may not do so afterwards.
Over and over again, in talking to people - talking, I mean, from the platform
- when the magnetic force is strong, you will carry away the people you are
talking to, although they may not agree with the arguments you are putting to
them, and you will see somebody clapping madly in his applause who you know is
antagonistic to the thought that you are then expressing. Meet him on the
following day, and you will find him very angry with himself because he let
himself be carried away for the moment. What has done it ?
It is this magnetic sympathy, this throwing of ether into waves, which strike
on him as they strike on others, and both his body and brain respond to the
vibrations, and so for a time he is mastered by this magnetic power of the
speaker.
Now, taking that - which is only an illustration, to show you what
I mean by this astral matter and the way in which it is thrown into vibration
by magnetic currents - think of astral matter for a moment from the standpoint
of Theosophy as interpenetrating and surrounding our world ;
then carry your thoughts to a slaughter-house. Try to estimate, if you can, by
imagination - if you have not been unfortunate enough to see it in reality -
something of the passions and emotions which there are aroused, not for the
moment in the man who is
slaying - I will deal with him presently - but in the animals
that are being slain!I Notice the terror that strikes
on them as they come within scent of the blood! See the misery, and the fright,
and the horror with which they struggle to get away even from the turning down
which they are being driven! Follow them, if you have the courage to do it,
right into the slaughter-house, and see them as they are being slain, and then
let your imagination go a step further, or, if you have the subtle power of
sensing astral vibrations, look, and remember what you see: images of terror,
of fear, of horror, as the life is suddenly wrenched out of the body, and the
animal soul with its terror, with its horror, goes out into the astral world to
remain there for a considerable period before it breaks up and perishes. And
remember that wherever this slaughtering of animals goes on, you are there
making a focus for all these passions of horror and of terror, and that those
react on the material world, that those react on the minds of men, and that
anyone who is sensitive, coming into the neighbourhood
of such a place, sees and feels these terrible vibrations, suffer under them,
and knows whence they are.
Now, suppose that you went to
I said that there was this, apart from the men who slaughter. But can
we rightly leave them out of consideration when we are dealing with the
question of flesh-eating? It is clear that neither you nor I can eat flesh
unless we either slay it for ourselves or get somebody else to do it for us;
therefore, we are directly responsible for any amount of deterioration in the
moral character of the men on whom we throw this work of slaughtering because
we are too delicate and refined to perform it for ourselves. Now take the case
of the slaughterer.
I suppose no one will contend that it is a form of business which he himself
would very gladly take up, if he be either an educated or refined man or woman
- for I do not know why women should be left out of this, as they figure
largely amongst meat-eaters. I presume that very few men and very few women
would be willing to go and catch hold either of sheep or of oxen and themselves
slaughter the creatures in order that they may eat. They admit that it has on
the person who does it a certain coarsening influence. So much is that recognised by law that, certainly in the United States - I
don't know if the law is the same here - no butcher is permitted to sit on a
jury in a murder trial; he is not permitted to take part in such a trial,
simply because his continual contact with slaughter is held to somewhat blunt
his susceptibilities in that connection, so that all through the States no man
of the trade of a butcher is permitted to take part as juryman in a trial for
murder. That law is not confined to the States, but, as I say, I do not know if
it is the law in
Has it ever struck you as a rule in ethics that you have no right
to put upon another human being for your own advantage a duty that you are not
prepared to discharge yourself? It is all very well for some tine and delicate
and refined lady to be proud of her delicacy and refinement, to shrink from any
notion, say, of going to tea with a butcher, to certainly strongly object to
the notion of his coming into her drawing-room, to shrink altogether from the
idea of consorting with such persons - "So coarse, you know, and so
unpleasant". Quite so, but why ? In order that
she may eat meat, in order that she may gratify her appetite; and she puts on
another the coarsening and the brutalising which she
escapes from herself in her refinement, while she takes for the gratification
of her own appetite the fruits of the brutalisation
of her fellow men. Now, I venture to submit that if people want to eat meat,
they should kill the animals for themselves, that they have no right to degrade
other people by work of that sort. Nor should they say that if they did not do
it the slaughter would still go on. That is no sort of way of evading a moral
responsibility. Every person who eats meat takes a share in that degradation of
his fellow men; on him and on her personally lies the
share, and personally lies the responsibility. And if this world be a world of
law, if it be true that law obtains not only in the physical, but also in the
mental and the moral and the spiritual world ; then
every person who has a share in the crime has a share also in the penalty that
follows on the heels of the crime, and so in his own nature is brutalised by the brutality that he makes necessary by his
share in the results that come therefrom.
There is another point for which people are responsible in addition
to their responsibility to the slaughtering class. They are responsible for all
the pain that grows out of meat-eating, and which is necessitated by the use of
sentient animals as food; not only the horrors of the slaughterhouse, but also
the preliminary horrors of the railway traffic, of the steamboat and ship
traffic; all the starvation and the thirst, and the prolonged misery of fear
which these unhappy creatures have to pass through for the gratification of the
appetite of man. If you want to know something of it, go down and see the
creatures brought off some of the ships, and you will see the fear, you will
see the pain, which is marked on the faces of these our lower fellow-creatures.
I say you have no right to inflict it, that you have no right to be party to
it, that all that pain acts as a record against humanity and slackens and
retards the whole of human growth; for you cannot separate yourself in that way
from the world, you cannot isolate yourself and go on in evolution yourself
while you are trampling others down. Those that you trample on retard your own
progress. The misery that you cause is, as it were, mire that clings round your
feet when you would ascend; for we have to rise together or to fall together,
and all the misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution,
and makes the progress of humanity slower towards the ideal that it is seeking
to realise.
Looking at the thing from this broad standpoint, we get away from
all the smaller arguments on which discussion arises, away from all questions
as to whether meat nourishes or not, whether it helps the human body or not;
and we take our ground fundamentally on this solid position: that nothing that
retards the growth and the progress of the world, nothing that adds to its
suffering, nothing that increases its misery, nothing that prevents its
evolution towards higher forms of life, can possibly be justified, even if it
could be shown that the physical vigour of man's body
were increased by passing along that road. So that we get a
sound standpoint from which to argue. Then you may go on, if you will,
to argue that as a matter of fact the physical vigour
does not need these articles of food; but I would rather take my solid stand on
a higher ground: that is, on the evolution of the higher nature everywhere, and
the harmony which it is man's duty to increase, and finally to render perfect
in the world.
You may notice on all these points I have been arguing outside, as it
were, the individual meat-eater; I am not, therefore, urging abstinence for the
sake of personal improvement, for the sake of personal development, for the
sake of personal growth. I have been putting it on the higher basis of duty, of
compassion, of altruism, on those essential qualities which mark the higher
evolution of the world. But we have a right also to turn to the individual and
see the bearing on himself, on his body, on his mind, on his spiritual growth, which
this question of meat-eating or abstinence from meat may have. And it has a
very real bearing. It is perfectly true, as regards the body, when you look
upon it as an instrument of the mind, when you look on it as that which is to
develop into an instrument of the Spirit; it is perfectly true that it is a
matter of very great importance what particular kind of nourishment you
contribute to the body that you have in charge. And here Theosophy comes in and
says: This body that the Soul is inhabiting is an exceedingly fleeting thing;
it is made up of minute particles, each one of which is a life, and these lives
are continually changing, continually passing from one body to another, so that
you get a great stream as it were of particles going from body to body and
affecting, as they fall on them, all these bodies, affecting them either for
good or for evil. Science, remember, is also coming to recognise
that as truth. Science, studying disease, has found that disease is constantly
propagated by these minute organisms that it speaks of as microbes; it has not
yet recognised that the whole body is made of minute
living creatures that come and go with every hour of our life, that build our
body today, the body of someone else tomorrow, passing away and coming continually,
a constant interchange going on between these bodies of men, women, animals,
children, and so on.
Now suppose for a moment you look on the body from that standpoint,
first, again, will come your responsibility to your
fellows. These tiny lives that are building your body take on themselves the
stamp that you put upon them while they are yours; you feed them and nourish
them, and that affects their characteristics; you give to them either pure or
foul food ; you either poison them or you render them healthy; and as you feed
them they pass away from you, and carry from you to the bodies of others these
characteristics that they have gained while living in your charge; so that what
a man eats, what a man drinks, is not a matter for himself alone, hut for the
whole community of which that man is part; and any man who in his eating or in
his drinking is not careful to be pure, restrained and temperate, becomes a
focus of physical evil in the place where he is, and tends to poison his
brother men and to make their vitality less pure than it ought to be. Here both
in flesh and in drink the great responsibility comes in. It is clear that the
nature of the food very largely affects the physical organism, and gives, as it
were, a physical apparatus for the throwing out of one
quality or another. Now the qualities reside in the Soul, but they are
manifested through the brain and the body; therefore, the materials of which
the brain and the body are made up is a matter of very considerable importance,
for just as the light that shines through a coloured
window comes through it coloured and no longer white,
so do the qualities of the Soul working through the brain and the body take up
something of the qualities of brain and body, and manifest their condition by
the characteristics of that brain and that body alike.
Now, suppose that you look for a moment at some of the lower
animals in connection with their food; you find that according to their food,
so are the characteristics that they show. Nay, if you even take a dog, you
find that you can make that dog either gentle or fierce according to the nature
of the food with which you supply him. Now, while it is perfectly true that the
animal is much more under the control of the physical body than the man; while it
is quite true that the animal is more plastic to these outer influences than
the man with the stronger self-determining will; still it is also true that,
inasmuch as the man has a body and can only work through that body in the
material world, he makes his task either harder or easier as regards the
qualities of the Soul, according to the nature of the physical apparatus which
that Soul is forced to use in its manifestations in the outer world. And if in
feeding the body he feeds these tiny lives, which make it up, with food which
brings into action, with them, the passions of the lower animals and their
lower nature; then, he is making a grosser and a more animal body, more apt to
respond to animal impulses, and less apt to respond to the higher impulses of
the mind. For when he uses in the building of his own body these tiny lives
from the bodies of the lower animals, he is there giving to his Soul as an
instrument a vehicle which vibrates most easily under animal impulses. Is it
not hard enough to grow pure in thought ? Is it not
hard enough to control the passions of the body ?
Is it not hard enough to be temperate in food, in drink, and in all
the appetites that belong to the physical frame ? Has
not the Soul already a difficult task enough, that we should make its task
harder by polluting the instrument through which it has to work, and by giving
it material that will not answer to its subtler impulses, but that answers
readily to all the lower passions of the animal nature to which the Soul is bound ? And then, when you remember that you pass it on,
that as you eat meat, and so strengthen these animal and lower passions, you
are printing on the molecules of your own body the power of thus responding,
you ought surely to train and purify your body, and not continually help it, as
it were, to remain so responsive to these vibrations belonging to the animal
kingdom. And as you do so you send them abroad as your ambassadors to your
follow men, making their task harder, as well as your own, by training these
tiny lives for evil and not for good ; and so the task
of every man who is struggling upwards is also rendered harder by this increase
of the molecules that vibrate to the lower passions. And while that is true in
the most terrible degree of the taking of alcohol - which acts as an active
poison, going forth from every one who takes it - it is also true of this animalising of the human body, instead of the ensouling and spiritualising of
it; we are keeping the plane of humanity lower by this constant degradation of
the animal self.
When you come then to think of the evolution of the Soul in
yourself, what is your object in life? Why are you here ?
For what are you living ? There is only one thing
which justifies the life of man, only one thing that answers to all that is
noblest in him and gives him a sense of satisfaction and of duty done; and that
is when he makes his life a constant offering for the helping of the world, and
when every part of his life is so regulated that the world may be the better for
his presence in it and not the worse. In Soul, in thought, in body, a man is
responsible for the use he makes of his life. We cannot tear ourselves apart
from our brothers; we ought not to wish to do it, even if we could, for this
world is climbing upwards slowly towards a divine ideal, and every Soul that recognises the fact should lend its own hand to the raising
of the world. You and I are either helping the world upward or pulling the
world downward; with every day of our life we are either giving it a force for
the upward climbing or we are clogs on that upward growth; and every true Soul
desires to be a help and not a hindrance, to be a blessing and not a curse, to
be amongst the raisers of the world and not amongst those who degrade it. Every
true Soul wishes it, whether or not it is strong enough always to carry the
wish into act. And shall we not at least put before us as ideal that sublime
conception of helping, and blame ourselves whenever we fall below it. whether in the feeding of the body or in the training of the
mind?
For it seems to me, looking at man in the light of Theosophy, that
all that makes life well worth having is this co-operation with the divine life
in nature, which is gradually moulding the world into
a nobler image, and making it grow ever nearer and nearer to a perfect ideal.
If we could make men and women see it, if only we could make them respond to
the thought of such power on their own side, if only they would recognise this divine strength that is in them to help in
the making of a world, to share in the evolution of a universe, if they could
understand that this world in theirs, placed as it were in their hands and in
their charge, that the growth of the world depends upon them, that the
evolution of the world is laid upon them, that if they will not help, the
divine life itself cannot find instruments whereby to work on this material
plane - if they would realise that, then, with very
many falls, their faces would be set upward; with very many mistakes and
blunders and weaknesses, still they would be turned in the right direction, and
they would be gazing at the ideal that they long to realise.
And so in mind and in body, in their work in the inner world of force as in the
outer world of action, the one ruling idea would be: Will this act and thought
of mine make the world better or worse, will it raise it or lower it, will it
help my fellow men or hinder them ? Shall the power of the Soul be used to
raise or to lower ? If that thought were the central
force of life, even though forgetting it or failing, the Soul would again take
up the effort and refuse to yield because it had so often failed. If we could
all do that and think that, and win others to do it too, then sorrow would pass
away from earth, the cries and the anguish and the misery of sentient existence
would lessen; then from man, become one with divine law, would love radiate
through the world and bring it into nobler harmony. And each who turns his face
in that direction, each who purifies his own thought, his own body, his own
life, is a fellow-worker with the inner life of the world, and the development
of his own Spirit shall come as guerdon for the work he does for the helping of
the world.
Return to Annie Besant
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