Theos-Talk Archives (December 2006 Message tt00917)

Friends, 
 
Ethics is no easy thing,  although it is essential to anyone who seeks for the path towards universal wisdom. 
 
The pilgrim must have the courage to challenge a diversity of false consensus,  mediocrity  and routine traditions around him.  He will perhaps face physical danger. He will be the object of  lies and disrespect.  These things will test his determination. So Ethics is not something to be  lived by when everything is easy ; it must be applied in difficult situations,  and that demands a certain amount of courage. 
 
Anyone, for instance,  who will defend  the founders of the theosophical movement, will probably replace for a time HPB, or William Judge, as the object of  active slanders.  Instead of the founders, he will be a blank himself for a while. 
 
By doing so the student will willingly offer himself as a shield to defend something more precious and important than his own personal comfort.  By offering himself to be attacked, that is,   by being himself a new blank for blind cowards to aim at, he will train himself in indifference with regard to lower vibrations,  while helping the movement as a whole. Of course, such help will hardly be seen or perceived by anyone. If it were, he wouldn’t be the blank for attacks,  and karma would then turn for the better.  
 
There is a ‘moral courage’ to be exerted in such occasions, and it is good to examine it. Cicero, a Roman thinker who had a good deal of real perception about the Ethics of  esoteric tradition, wrote: 
 
“ The soul that is altogether courageous and great is marked above all by two characteristics: one of these is indifference to outward circumstances; for such a person cherishes the conviction that nothing but moral goodness and propriety deserves to be either admired or wished for or striven after, and that he ought not to be subject to any man or any passion or any accident of fortune.  The second characteristic is that, when the soul is disciplined in the way above mentioned, one should do deeds not only great and in the highest degree useful, but extremely arduous and laborious and fraught with danger both to life and to many things that make life worth living.”
 
And more: 
 
“All the glory and greatness and, I may add, all the usefulness of these two characteristics of courage are centred in the latter; the rational cause that makes men great, in the former. For it is the former that contains the element that makes souls pre- eminent and indifferent to worldly fortune. And this qualitity is distinguished by two criteria: 1) if one account moral rectitude as the only good; and 2) if one be free from all passion. For we must agree that it takes a brave and heroic soul to hold as slight what most people think grand and glorious, and to disregard it from fixed and settled principles. And it requires strength of character and great singlenesss of purpose to bear what seems painful, as it comes to pass in many and various forms in human life, and to bear it so unflinchingly as not to be shaken in the least from one's natural state of the dignity of a philosopher.”  (1) 
 
Perhaps this is why HPB wrote about a “steep narrow path”,  and dedicated “The Voice of the Silence” to “the few” who have the courage necessary to take steps in that direction. 
 
Therefore in the “Mahatma Letters”, one reads: 
 
“It has ever been thus. Those who have watched mankind through the centuries of this cycle, have constantly seen the details of  this death-struggle between Truth and Error repeating themselves. Some of you Theosophists are now only wounded in your ‘honour’ or your purses, but those who held the lamp in preceding generations paid the penalty of their lives for their knowledge.” (2) 
 
Mediocrity can’t be challenged or put aside while taking tea in a cozy environment, and real wisdom tends to be preserved for those who can go far beyond it. 
 
 
Best regards,    Carlos. 
 
 
NOTES: 
 
(1) "De Officiis" ( On Duties ), Cicero, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 2005, 424 pp., see p. 69. 
 
(2) “The Mahatma Letters”,  transcribed by A.T. Barker, Theosophical University Press,  1992, Pasadena, CA, USA, 494 pp., see Letter LV, p. 322.  Letter 130 in the Chronological Edition, Philippines TPH, 1993. 
 
 
 
 
 


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