|
Adepts of the Five Elements
David Anrias
(London: Routledge & Sons, 1933)
Excerpt from the Chapter:
The Changing Age
[21] Inevitably there must be a period
of transition between any two cycles [the passing Pisces
cycle and the Aquarian cycle], when the only possible [page
22] course is to adopt methods of occult instruction combining
as far as possible the old with the new. Therefore the training
of the first Western group of occult students was largely
coloured by Indian methods, and comprised strict instructions
to be rigidly adhered to.
After Madame Blavatsky’s death,
Dr. Annie Besant endeavoured to maintain this same Indian
discipline, which she herself had quickly mastered and scrupulously
carried out in everyday life, despite the fact that she
was freely mingling with people in the outside world. How
far this was achieved through strength of will and how far
through reverting to congenial customs associated with her
immediate past life as an Indian, it is impossible to say.
It soon became evident to the White Lodge that whilst an
Indian initiate functioning through a Western body might
quickly dominate that body through the old Indian higher
vehicles retained for the purpose, it was all but impossible
for the average Western occult student to maintain the old
Eastern standards of physical purity under modern conditions.
Other difficulties also arose. The
Secret Doctrine was the chief object of group-study,
but the higher mental body of the average bewildered Western
student was usually discovered to be [23] insufficiently
equipped for the task. Likewise early meditation on an empty
stomach, often between 6 and 7 a.m., although comparatively
easily sustained in India, where both long custom and climatic
conditions were favourable seemed all but impossible in
the West.
About 1912 the Adepts who had sponsored
the Theosophical Society realised that what was possible
for an initiate possessing a powerful will as well as the
means of creating her own surrounding conditions, was
not feasible for the average Western pupil still hampered
by past karma or a delicate body.
Therefore these particular Masters
effected a transference of occult force, hitherto wholly
confined to the higher mental plane, to the lower mental,
and later to the astral plane by means of group ceremonial
magic.
Naturally this transference of force
involved a great sacrifice on Their part, (ftn. 1) and required
the co-operation of another Adept, who had been’ associated
with purely Western methods of occult [24] training through
several centuries, having retained a physical body suited
to this particular type of work.
As the reason for the aforementioned
change of policy was never explained, many members imagining
that it implied failure to maintain the original standards
inaugurated by H. P. Blavatsky, resigned from the Society.
Those who had joined it at a period when occult study pure
and simple was de rigueur, left it, largely because
their karma was not of the kind that could be worked out
through ceremonial and the group-karma which this
form of activity inevitably entails.
For the benefit of those unconversant
with the technicalities of astrology, I must here point
out that the element water rules the emotional or astral
plane, with which ceremonial magic is closely associated.
Henceforth the Theosophical Society, unconsciously for the
most part, embarked upon a minor cycle demanding activities
in connection with this emotional or watery element,[25]
which, strange to say, predominated over all the others
in the horoscope of its founding in November, 1875. (2)
This astrological fact had been viewed with misgiving
by some of the Adepts, who, nevertheless, with Their far-seeing
eyes, saw that it would afford immediate opportunities for
growth for certain types of egos.(3)
1. "Those of
you who have carefully thought on these subjects will realise
that while the knowledge of a Master is as regards
you or me, practical omniscience, it is by no means omniscience
on His own plane, relative to the problems with which He
has to deal and which He has to solve . . .Hence the possibility
of miscalculation, the possibility of error, the
possibility of mistake. . . . When, then a Master volunteers
to serve as what may literally be called the scapegoat
of a new spiritual movement He takes up a karma whose whole
course He is unable to see."-- Annie Besant,
London, Lectures of 1907.
"For if one sees the Theosophical Society aright,
it is as one of the builders of that coming time, the civilization
of the. Sixth Root Race, with the experiments that
will go before it in the Sixth and Seventh sub-races of
the Fifth. For these experiments take long in the
making, and, as a great teacher once said: Time is no
object with us."-Ibid.
2. " ’Is
the West ready for a movement of this sort again? Can it
be carried on in such an environment without doing more
harm than the good which it is capable of accomplishing?’
And so much discussion arose . . . and most were against
it, and declared the time was not ripe ; . . . as the question
of time is always one of the most complicated questions
for Those who have to deal with the great law of cycles
and the evolution of man, it was felt that it was possible
that the effort might succeed, even although the time was
not quite ripe, the clock had not h quite struck the hour."
--London Lectures of 1907, by Annie Besant,
page 126.
3. The horoscope of
the Theosophical Society is given in the appendix to this
book, together with that of Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater,
Krishnamurti and H. P. Blavatsky, in specific relation to
it.
Excerpt from the Chapter:
Adepts of the Water
[39] By an extraordinary concatenation,
these forces involving the element water, hitherto associated
with the previous Age, were also utilised to herald a new
Era, for about this period Dr. Annie Besant proclaimed Krishnamurti
as the potential medium of the World Teacher.
That these forces of the old line
and the new might possibly conflict with each other was
never seriously considered. It was almost universally assumed
that in some miraculous fashion "new wine could be
poured into old bottles" without ultimate disaster.
How Krishnamurti, whose horoscope was polarised chiefly
towards the future, would be likely to react to the various
activities of the Society based exclusively upon the past,
was a question for the astrologer alone; by everyone else
it was taken for granted that he would somehow evolve a
teaching wholly new and stimulating, whilst at the same
time never athwart the existing ceremonial régime,
which by 1925, the year when the Jupiterian conjunction
was at full strength, was completely dominating the Society.
[40] Because the horoscope of the
Theosophical Society consists of planets forming opposition
and square aspects to each other from the four fixed signs
and the four elements, thereby creating a cross in the heavens,
it is an exceedingly interesting one and has a special application
to the subject of this book, i.e., the conflict of
the elements at certain periods of man's evolution on this
planet.
This horoscope is a very powerful
one, inevitably affecting in varying degrees each individual
occult student as he joins the Society. What the precise
effects are, depends, of course, on whether the mutual aspects
between his own nativity and that of the society are benefic
or otherwise.
The nativity of Dr. Besant, for instance,
formed many benefic aspects to that of the Society, her
Jupiter and Uranus vitalising and inspiring numerous physical
plane activities through their conjunction to the ascendant
and mid-heaven respectively. These aspects expanded the
Society in a physical sense and at the same time stimulated
Dr. Besant's own spiritual development on every plane.
With Krishnamurti the opposite was
the case, his planets either forming a conjunction with
the [41] original cross from fixed signs, thereby enhancing
its original difficulties, or else falling in the twelfth
house, the house of self-undoing and introspection.
It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion
to the astrological student that the future was not likely
to materialise as anticipated by the majority.
Excerpt from the Chapter:
Krishnamurti's Horoscope
in Relation to the Society
[100] Yet in spite of all the conflict
involved, his remarkable personality created a new self-conscious
current of thought within the Society, through the sextile
which his Moon, in the intuitive sign Sagittarius, forms
to the cusp of the radical ninth house ruled by Aquarius,
the sign of the New Age. Through this aspect he escaped
out of immediate difficulties into a state of consciousness
wholly impersonal, from which problems, both psychological
and material, pressing enough for the majority, appear as
mere fantasies. Nevertheless, the fact that the sign Scorpio
rules the house of the future in Krishnamurti's own map
and contains Saturn and Uranus, the latter afflicted, is
an indication that in his next life he may become involved
in those very psychological problems which he has either
evaded or ignored in this incarnation.
|
