Paperback(REV)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780835606660 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quest Books |
| Publication date: | 03/01/1991 |
| Edition description: | REV |
| Pages: | 180 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Spiritual Life
By Annie Besant
Theosophical Publishing House
Copyright © 1991 Theosophical Publishing HouseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-0666-0
CHAPTER 1
The Spiritual Life in the World
A complaint which we hear continually from thoughtful and earnest-minded people, a complaint against the circumstances of their lives, is perhaps one of the most fatal: "If my circumstances were different from what they are, how much more I could do; if only I were not so surrounded by business, so tied by anxieties and cares, so occupied with the work of the world, then I would be able to live a more spiritual life."
Now that is not true. No circumstances can ever make or mar the unfolding of the spiritual life. Spirituality does not depend upon the environment; it depends upon one's attitude towards life.
I want to point out to you the way in which the world may be turned to the service of the spirit instead of submerging it, as it often does. If people do not understand the relation of the material and the spiritual; if they separate the one from the other as incompatible and hostile; if on the one side they put the life of the world, and on the other the life of the spirit as rivals, as antagonists, as enemies, then the pressing nature of worldly occupations, the powerful shocks of the material environment, the constant lure of physical temptation, and the occupying of the brain by physical cares—these things are apt to make the life of the spirit unreal. They seem to be the only reality, and we have to find some alchemy, some magic, by which the life of the world shall be seen to be the unreal, and the life of the spirit the only reality. If we can do that, then the reality will express itself through the life of the world, and that life will become its means of expression, and not a bandage round its eyes, a gag which stops the breath.
Now, you know how often in the past this question of whether a person can lead a spiritual life in the world has been answered in the negative. In every land, in every religion, in every age of the world's history, when the question has been asked, the answer has been no, the man or woman of the world cannot lead a spiritual life. That answer comes from the deserts of Egypt, the jungles of India, the monastery and the nunnery in Roman Catholic countries, in every land and place where people have sought to find God by shrinking from the company of others. If for the knowledge of God and the leading of the spiritual life it is necessary to fly from human haunts, then that life for most of us is impossible. For we are bound by circumstance that we cannot break to live the life of the world and to accommodate ourselves to its conditions separating the sacred from the profane.
I submit to you that this idea is based on a fundamental error that is largely fostered in our modern life, not by thinking of secluded life in jungle or desert, in cave or monastery, but rather by thinking that the religious and the secular must be kept apart. That tendency is because of the modern way of separating the so-called sacred from that which is called profane. People speak of Sunday as the Lord's Day, as though every day were not equally for serving him. To call one day the Lord's Day is to deny that same lordship to every other day in the week and to make six parts of life outside the spiritual, while only one remains recognized as dedicated to the Spirit. And so common talk of sacred history and profane history, religious education and secular education, all these phrases that are so commonly used, hypnotize the public mind into a false view of the Spirit and the world. The right way is to say that the Spirit is the life, the world the form, and the form must be the expression of the life; otherwise you have a corpse devoid of life, an unembodied life separated from all means of effective action.
I want to put broadly and strongly the very foundation of what I believe to be right and sane thinking in this matter. The world is the thought of God, the expression of the Divine Mind. All useful activities are forms of Divine Activity. The wheels of the world are turned by God, and we are only his hands, which touch the rim of the wheel. All work done in the world is God's work, or none is his at all. Everything that serves humanity and helps in the activities of the world is rightly seen as a divine activity, and wrongly seen when called secular or profane. The clerk behind his counter and the doctor in the hospital are quite as much engaged in a divine activity as any preacher in his church. Until that is realized the world is vulgarized, and until we can see one life everywhere and all things rooted in that life, it is we who are hopelessly profane in attitude, we who are blind to the beatific vision which is the sight of the one life in everything, and all things as expressions of that life.
Divinity Everywhere
An ancient Indian scripture says, "I established this universe with one fragment of Myself, and I remain." Now, if there is only one life in which you and I are partakers, one creative thought by which the worlds were formed and maintained, then, however mighty may be the unexpressed Divine Existence—however true that Divinity transcends manifestation, nonetheless the manifestation is still divine. By understanding this we touch the feet of God. If it is true that he is everywhere and in everything, then he is as much in the marketplace as in the desert, as much in the office as in the jungle, as easily found in the street of the crowded city as in the solitude of the mountain peak.
I do not mean that it is not easier for you and for me to realize the divine greatness in the splendor of snow-clad mountains, the beauty of some pine forest, the depth of some marvelous secret valley where Nature speaks in a voice that may be heard. I mean that although we hear more clearly there, it is because we are deaf, and not because the Divine Voice does not speak.
It is our weakness that the rush and the bustle of life in the city make us deaf to the Voice that is ever speaking. If we were stronger, if our ears were keener, if we were more spiritual, then we could find the Divine Life as readily in the rush of Holborn Viaduct as in the fairest scene that Nature has ever painted in the solitude of the mountain or the magic of the midnight sky. That is the first thing to realize—that we do not find because our eyes are blinded.
Worldly Attractions
Now let us see what are the conditions by which the man or woman of the world may lead the spiritual life, for there are conditions. Have you ever asked yourself why objects that attract you, things you want to possess are found on every side? Your desires answer to the outer beauty, the attractiveness of the endless objects that are scattered over the world. If they were not meant to attract, they would not be there; if they were really hindrances, why should they have been put in our path? For the same reasons that a mother, wanting to coax her child into the exertion that will induce it to walk, dangles before its eyes a little out of reach some dazzling toy, some tinsel attraction. The child's eyes turn to the brilliant object, and the child wants to grasp it. He tries to get on his feet, falls, and rises again, endeavors to walk, struggles to reach it. The value of the attraction is not in the tinsel that presently the child grasps, crushes, and throws away, wanting something more, but in the stimulus to the life within, which makes him endeavor to move in order to gain the glittering prize, which he despises when he has won it.
The great mother-heart by which we are trained is ever dangling in front of us some attractive object, some prize for the child-spirit, turning outwards the powers that live within. In order to induce exertion, in order to make the effort by which alone those inward-turned powers will turn outwards into manifestation, we are bribed and coaxed and induced to make efforts by the endless toys of life scattered on every side. We struggle, we endeavor to grasp. At last we do grasp and hold. After a short time the brilliant apple turns to ashes, as in Milton's fable, and the prize that seemed so valuable loses all its attractiveness, becomes worthless, and something else is desired. In that way we grow. The result is in ourselves; some power has been brought out, some faculty has been developed, some inner strength has become a manifested power, some hidden capacity has become faculty in action. That is the object of the Divine Teacher. The toy is thrown aside when the result of the exertion to gain it has been achieved.
So we pass from one point to another, from one stage of evolution to the next. Although until you believe in the great fact of continual rebirth and ever-continuing experience, you will not realize to the full the beauty and the splendor of the Divine Plan, still, even in one brief life you know you gain by your struggle and not by your accomplishment, and the reward of the struggle is in the power that you possess. In the words of Edward Carpenter, nineteenth-century English author, limited in scope if you do not believe in reincarnation, "Every pain that I suffered in one body was a power that I wielded in the next." Even in one brief span from the cradle to the grave you can trace the working of the law. You grow, not by what you gain of outer fruit, but by the inner unfolding necessary for your success in the struggle.
Lessons from the Worldly Life
Now, if long natural experience has made one wise, these objects lose their power to attract. The first tendency then is to cease from effort; but that would mean stagnation. When the objects of the world are becoming a little less valuable than they were, then is the time to look for some new motive. The motive to action for the spiritual life is, first, to perform action because it is duty, and not in order to gain the personal reward that it may bring. Let me take the case of a man [or woman] of the world and a spiritual person and see what is needed to turn one into the other. I take as example a man of the world, a man who is making some enormous fortune, who puts money before himself as the one object of life to be rich. It is a common thing.
Now, for a moment, pause on the life of the man who is determined to be rich. Everything is subordinated to that one aim. He must be master of his body, for if that body is his master, every week and month he will waste the money that he has gathered by struggle. He will waste it in luxury for the pleasing of the body, the money that he ought to grasp, in order to win more. And so the first thing that such a man must do is to master the body, to teach it to endure hardness, to learn to bear frugality, to learn to bear hardship even; not to think whether he wants to sleep, if by traveling all night a contract can be gained; not to stop to ask whether he shall rest if, by going to some party at midnight, he can make a friend who will enable him to gain more money by his influence. Over and over again in the struggle for gold the man must be master of this outer body that he wears, until it has no voice in determining his line of activity. It yields itself obedient servant to the dominant will, to the compelling brain. The first thing he learns is conquest of the body.
Then he learns concentration of mind. If he is not concentrated, his rivals will beat him in the struggle of the marketplace. If his mind wanders about here, there, and everywhere, undecided, one day trying one plan, another day another plan, without perseverance, without deliberate, continuing labor, that man will fail. The goal he desires teaches him to concentrate his mind; he brings it to one point; he holds it there as long as he needs to; he is steady in his persevering mental effort, and his mind grows stronger and stronger, keener and keener, more and more under his control. He has not only learned to control his body, but to control his mind.
Has he gained anything more? Yes, a strong will; only the strong will can succeed in such a struggle. The soul grows mighty in the attempt to achieve. Presently that man, with his mastered body, his well-controlled mind, his powerful will, gains his object and grasps his gold. And then? Then he finds out that, after all, he cannot do so very much with it to make happiness for himself; that he has only one body to clothe, one mouth to feed; that he cannot multiply his wants with the enormous supply that he can gain, and that, after all, his power to gain happiness is very limited.
His gold becomes a burden rather than a joy. The first delight of the achievement of his object palls, and he becomes satiated with possession, until in many cases he can do nothing but, by mere habit, roll and roll up increasing piles of useless gold. It becomes a nightmare rather than a delight; it crushes the man who won it.
Now, what will make that man a spiritual person? A change of his object—that is all. Let that man in this or any other life awaken to the valuelessness of the gold that he has heaped together; let him see the beauty of human service; let him catch a glimpse of the splendor of the Divine Order. Let him realize that all in life that is worthwhile is to give it as part of the great life by which the worlds are maintained.
The power that man has gained over body, over mind, over will, will make him a giant in the spiritual world. He does not need to change those qualities, but to get rid of the selfishness, of the indifference to human pain, of the recklessness with which he crushed his brother in order that he might climb into wealth on the starvation of myriads. He must change his ideal from selfishness to service; from strength used for crushing to strength used for uplifting. In the giant of the money market you will have the spiritual person. His life is consecrated to humanity, and he owns only to serve and to help. Difference of object, difference of motive—whether a man is of the world worldly or of the spirit spiritual depends on these, not difference of the outer life.
Changing Motives
I just now used the word "duty," for that is the first step. It does not matter what your work in the world may be if you begin to do it, not because it brings you a livelihood—though there is nothing to be ashamed of in that—but slowly, gradually, more and more you do it because it ought to be done, not because you want to gain something for yourself. Then you are taking the first step towards the spiritual life, you are changing your motive; all the activities of your day will have a new object.
Duty must be done; the wheels of the world must be kept turning. Men and women must be fed along the various lines of trade and commerce; the sick must be healed; the ignorant must be taught; justice must be sought between the strong and the weak, and the rich and the poor. Looking at it thus, the tradesman, the merchant, the doctor, the lawyer, the teacher may all take a new view of life, and they may say: This activity with which I am engaged is part of the great working of the world which is divine. I am in it to do this work and my duty lies in the perfect performance of my task. I will teach, or heal, or argue, or trade, or enter into commercial relations of all kinds, not for the mere money that it brings or the power that it yields, but in order that the great work of the world may be worthily carried on; and that work may be done by me as servant of a will greater than my own, instead of for my own personal gain and profit.
That is the first step, and there is not one person that cannot take it. You may do your business just the same, but you carry a new spirit into it. You do it because it is your work in the world, as a servant does a task for his master because he is bidden to do it, and his loyalty makes him do it well. Then every addition of a number of figures in a ledger, every sale of an article in a shop would be done with this sublime idea behind it: I do it as a part of the world's work, and this is the duty that falls to my lot to do. It would be taken as coming directly from the great Will by which the worlds move, as your share of the Divine Activity, your part of the universal work; and the mightiest archangel, the greatest of the shining ones, can do nothing more than his share of carrying out the Divine Will. George Herbert (English poet and clergyman, 1593-1633) wrote truth when he said that the one who sweeps a room as to the glory of God makes that and the action fine. That is spiritual life, where all is done for duty, for the larger instead of for the smaller self.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Spiritual Life by Annie Besant. Copyright © 1991 Theosophical Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Joy Mills,Publisher's Preface to the New Edition,
Original Publisher's Preface,
1. The Spiritual Life in the World,
2. Some Difficulties of the Inner Life,
3. The Place of Peace,
4. Devotion and the Spiritual Life,
5. The Ceasing of Sorrow,
6. The Value of Devotion,
7. Spiritual Darkness,
8. The Meaning and Method of the Spiritual Life,
9. Theosophy and Ethics,
10. The Supreme Duty,
11. The Use of Evil,
12. The Quest for God,
13. Discipleship,
14. Human Perfection,
15. The Future that Awaits Us,
Sources,