AE in the Irish Theosophist eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 335 pages of information about AE in the Irish Theosophist.

AE in the Irish Theosophist eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 335 pages of information about AE in the Irish Theosophist.

But the student too often turns to books, to the words sent back to him, forgetful that the best of scriptures do no more than stand as symbols.  We hear too much of study, as if the wisdom of life and ethics could be learned like ritual, and of their application to this and that ephemeral pursuit.  But from the Golden One, the child of the divine, comes a voice to its shadow.  It is stranger to our world, aloof from our ambitions, with a destiny not here to be fulfilled.  It says:  “You are of dust while I am robed in opalescent airs.  You dwell in houses of clay, I in a temple not made by hands.  I will not go with thee, but thou must come with me.”  And not alone is the form of the divine aloof but the spirit behind the form.  It is called the Goal truly, but it has no ending.  It is the Comforter, but it waves away our joys and hopes like the angel with the flaming sword.  Though it is the Resting-place, it stirs to all heroic strife, to outgoing, to conquest.  It is the Friend indeed, but it will not yield to our desires.  Is it this strange, unfathomable self we think to know, and awaken to, by what is written, or by study of it as so many planes of consciousness.  But in vain we store the upper chambers of the mind with such quaint furniture of thought.  No archangel makes his abode therein.  They abide only in the shining.  How different from academic psychology of the past, with its dry enumeration of faculties, reason, cognition and so forth, is the burning thing we know.  We revolted from that, but we must take care lest we teach in another way a catalogue of things equally unliving to us.  The plain truth is, that after having learned what is taught about the hierarchies and various spheres, many of us are still in this world exactly where we were before.  If we speak our laboriously-acquired information we are listened to in amazement.  It sounds so learned, so intellectual, there must need be applause.  But by-and-by someone comes with quiet voice, who without pretence speaks of the “soul” and uses familiar words, and the listeners drink deep, and pay the applause of silence and long remembrance and sustained after-endeavor.  Our failure lies in this, we would use the powers of soul and we have not yet become the soul.  None but the wise one himself could bend the bow of Ulysses.  We cannot communicate more of the true than we ourselves know.  It is better to have a little knowledge and know that little than to have only hearsay of myriads of Gods.  So I say, lay down your books for a while and try the magic of thought.  “What a man thinks, that he is; that is the old secret.”  I utter, I know, but a partial voice of the soul with many needs.  But I say, forget for a while that you are student, forget your name and time.  Think of yourself within as the titan, the Demi-god, the flaming hero with the form of beauty, the heart of love.  And of those divine spheres forget the nomenclature; think rather of them as the places

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AE in the Irish Theosophist from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.