Five Years of Theosophy | Page 5

selfishness. (And that is also why the Yogis, and the Fakirs of
modern India--most of whom are acting now but on the dead-letter
tradition, are required if they would be considered living up to the
principles of their profession--to appear entirely dead to every inward
feeling or emotion.) Notwithstanding the purity of their hearts, the
greatness of their aspirations, the disinterestedness of their self-sacrifice,
they could not live for they had missed the hour.
-------- * On page 151 of Mr. Sinnett's "Occult World," the author's
much abused, and still more doubted correspondent assures him that
none yet of his "degree are like the stern hero of Bulwer's" Zanoni....
"the heartless morally dried up mummies some would fancy us to be"
and adds that few of them "would care to play the part in life of a
desiccated pansy between the leaves of a volume of solemn poetry."
But our adept omits saying that one or two degrees higher, and he will
have to submit for a period of years to such a mummifying process
unless, indeed, he would voluntarily give up a life-long labour
and--Die.--Ed. ----------
They may at times have exercised powers which the world called
miraculous; they may have electrified man and subdued Nature by fiery
and self-devoted Will; they may have been possessed of a so-called
superhuman intelligence; they may have even had knowledge of, and
communion with, members of our own occult Brotherhood; but, having
deliberately resolved to devote their vital energy to the welfare of
others, rather than to themselves, they have surrendered life; and, when
perishing on the cross or the scaffold, or falling, sword in hand, upon
the battle-field, or sinking exhausted after a successful consummation
of the life-object, on death-beds in their chambers, they have all alike
had to cry out at last: "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!"
So far so good. But, given the will to live, however powerful, we have
seen that, in the ordinary course of mundane life, the throes of
dissolution cannot be checked. The desperate, and again and again
renewed struggle of the Kosmic elements to proceed with a career of
change despite the will that is checking them, like a pair of runaway
horses struggling against the determined driver holding them in, are so

cumulatively powerful, that the utmost efforts of the untrained human
will acting within an unprepared body become ultimately useless. The
highest intrepidity of the bravest soldier; the interest desire of the
yearning lover; the hungry greed of the unsatisfied miser; the most
undoubting faith of the sternest fanatic; the practiced insensibility to
pain of the hardiest red Indian brave or half-trained Hindu Yogi; the
most deliberate philosophy of the calmest thinker--all alike fail at last.
Indeed, sceptics will allege in opposition to the verities of this article
that, as a matter of experience, it is often observed that the mildest and
most irresolute of minds and the weakest of physical frames are often
seen to resist "Death" longer than the powerful will of the high-spirited
and obstinately-egotistic man, and the iron frame of the labourer, the
warrior and the athlete. In reality, however, the key to the secret of
these apparently contradictory phenomena is the true conception of the
very thing we have already said. If the physical development of the
gross "outer shell" proceeds on parallel lines and at an equal rate with
that of the will, it stands to reason that no advantage for the purpose of
overcoming it, is attained by the latter. The acquisition of improved
breechloaders by one modern army confers no absolute superiority if
the enemy also becomes possessed of them. Consequently it will be at
once apparent, to those who think on the subject, that much of the
training by which what is known as "a powerful and determined
nature," perfects itself for its own purpose on the stage of the visible
world, necessitating and being useless without a parallel development
of the "gross" and so-called animal frame, is, in short, neutralized, for
the purpose at present treated of, by the fact that its own action has
armed the enemy with weapons equal to its own. The force of the
impulse to dissolution is rendered equal to the will to oppose it; and
being cumulative, subdues the will-power and triumphs at last. On the
other hand, it may happen that an apparently weak and vacillating
will-power residing in a weak and undeveloped physical frame, may be
so reinforced by some unsatisfied desire--the Ichcha (wish)--as it is
called by the Indian Occultists (for instance, a mother's heart-yearning
to remain and support her fatherless children)--as to keep down and
vanquish, for a short time, the physical throes of a body to which it has
become temporarily superior.

The whole rationale then, of the first condition of continued existence
in