Theos-Talk Archives (January 1998 Message tt00145)

                 LEAVES OF THEOSOPHICAL HISTORY

     [The following is from a copy which is held in the
     archives of the Theosophical Headquarters at Point Loma
     and together with the heading is reproduced verbatim et
     literatim.]

Copy of a letter received in one from H.P.B. postmarked May 10th, 1887.

     You say you are a "sad case" and yet you have in your heart so
great a love for humanity and for the individual members of the
race that you are haunted night and day by thoughts of their
suffering, ignorance and pain. It is such as you who hold the human
race from falling into that bottomless pit of emptiness where
despair is forgotten and where effort is unknown.
     My dear friend, for that you are, being truly the friend of
all who are looking for the light, do not forget that you are
living in a very dark and sad Maya of intensely physical life. The
whole busy continent of America is eaten up by materialism and when
an effort is made towards psychic life it results only in dragging
that psychic life into matter where it dies as a volatile gas
escapes in the hands of one who is not expert. The sadness of this
fact colors your letter. You know that any school founded amongst
you would at once become a school of practical magic working in
order to produce results in matter. This is quite true. The reason
is that even those who are most in earnest among you have no true
psychic aspirations. Remedy this in yourself and endeavor to remedy
it in others by word and example.
     Desire no results which are forms of power. Desire only, in
your efforts, to reach nearer to the center of life (which is the
same in the Universe and in yourself) which makes you careless
whether you are strong or weak, learned or unlearned. It is your
divinity; it is the divinity we all share. But its existence is not
credited by those who look only for money or power or success in
material effort. (I include intellect in matter.)
     Lean I pray you in thought and feeling away from these
external problems which you have written down in your letter; draw
on the breath of the great life throbbing in us all and let faith
(which is unlearned knowledge) carry you through your life as a
bird flies in the air -- undoubtingly. Only remember one thing --
when once you fling yourself on the great life of Nature, the force
that keeps the world in motion and our pulses beating and which has
within it, in its heart, a supreme and awful power -- once having
done that, you can never again claim back your life. You must let
yourself swing with the motions of the spheres. You must live for
other men and with them; not for or with yourself. You will do
this, I am sure.

[signed with outline of triangle]

[Theosophical Forum, Vol. VI #9, May 15, 1935, p. 232]
***************

--
Nicholas <> am455@lafn.org <> Los Angeles <> "The evil that has overtaken
souls has its source in self-will...They...largely indulged their own
motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path...they came to lose
even the thought of their origin in the Divine."  Plotinus