The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science

By Thomas Troward, Late Divisional Judge, Punjab, 1904

XVI. THE SPIRIT.

What must the Supreme All-originating Spirit be in itself? That is the
question before us. Let us start with one fact regarding it about which we
cannot have any possible doubt–it is creative. If it were not creative
nothing could come into existence; therefore we know that its purpose, or
Law of Tendency, must be to bring individual lives into existence and to
surround them with a suitable environment. Now a power which has this for
its inherent nature must be a kindly power. The Spirit of Life seeking
expression in individual lives can have no other intention towards them
than “that they might have life, and that they might have it more
abundantly.” To suppose the opposite would be a contradiction in terms. It
would be to suppose the Eternal Principle of Life acting against itself,
expressing itself as the reverse of what it is, in which case it would not
be expressing itself but expressing its opposite; so that it is impossible
to conceive of the Spirit of Life acting otherwise than to the increase of
life. This is as yet only imperfectly apparent by reason of our imperfect
apprehension of the position, and our consequent want of conscious unity
with the ONE Eternal Life. As our consciousness of unity becomes more
perfect so will the life-givingness of the Spirit become more apparent. But
in the realm of principles the purely Affirmative and Life-giving nature of
the All-originating Spirit is an unavoidable conclusion. Now by what name
can we call such an inherent desire to add to the fulness of any individual
life–that is, to make it stronger, brighter, and happier? If this is not
Love, then I do not know what else it is; and so we are philosophically led
to the conclusion that Love is the prime moving power of the Creating
Spirit.

But expression is impossible without Form. What Form, then, should Love
give to the vehicles of its expression? By the hypothesis of the case it
could not find self-expression in forms that were hateful or repugnant to
it–therefore the only logical correlative of Love is Beauty. Beauty is not
yet universally manifested for the same reason that Life is not, namely,
lack of recognition of its Principle; but, that the principle of Beauty is
inherent in the Eternal Mind is demonstrated by all that is beautiful in
the world in which we live.

These considerations show us that the inherent nature of the Spirit must
consist in the eternal interaction of Love and Beauty as the Active and
Passive polarity of Being. Then this is the Power for the working of which
our soul faculties are specially adapted. And when this purpose of the
adaptation is recognized we begin to get some insight into the way in which
our intuition, imagination, and will should be exercized. By training our
thought to habitually dwell upon this dual-unity of the Originating Forces
of Love and Beauty the intuition is rendered more and more sensitive to
ideas emanating from this supreme source, and the imagining faculty is
trained in the formation of images corresponding to such ideas; while on
the physical side the molecular structure of the brain and body becomes
more and more perfectly adjusted to the generating of vibratory currents
tending to the outward manifestation of the Originating Principle. Thus the
whole man is brought into unison with himself and with the Supreme Source
of Life, so that, in the words of St. Paul, he is being day by day renewed
after the image of Him that created him.

Our more immediately personal recognition of the All-originating Love and
Beauty will thus flow out as peace of mind, health of body, discretion in
the management of our affairs, and power in the carrying out of our
undertakings; and as we advance to a wider conception of the working of the
Spirit of Love and Beauty in its infinite possibilities, so our intuition
will find a wider scope and our field of activity will expand along with
it–in a word we shall discover that our individuality is growing, and that
we are becoming more truly ourselves than we ever were before.

The question of the specific lines on which the individual may be most
perfectly trained into such recognition of his true relation to the
All-embracing Spirit of Life is therefore of supreme importance, but it is
also of such magnitude that even to briefly sketch its broad outlines would
require a volume to itself, and I will therefore not attempt to enter upon
it here, my present purpose being only to offer some hints of the
principles underlying that wonderful three-fold unity of Body, Soul, and
Spirit which we all know ourselves to be.

We are as yet only at the commencement of the path which leads to the
realization of this unity in the full development of all its powers, but
others have trodden the way before us, from whose experiences we may learn;
and not least among these was the illustrious founder of the Most Christian
Fraternity of the Rosicrucians. This master-mind, setting out in his youth
with the intention of going to Jerusalem, changed the order of his journey
and first sojourned for three years in the symbolical city of Damcar, in
the mystical country of Arabia, then for about a year in the mystical
country of Egypt, and then for two years in the mystical country of Fez.
Then, having during these six years learned all that was to be acquired in
those countries, he returned to his native land of Germany, where, on the
basis of the knowledge he had thus gained, he founded the Fraternity R.C.,
for whose instruction he wrote the mystical books M. and T. Then, when he
realized that his work in its present stage was accomplished, he of his own
free will laid aside the physical body, not, it is recorded, by decay, or
disease, or ordinary death, but by the express direction of the Spirit of
Life, summing up all his knowledge in the words,

“Jesus mihi omnia.”

And now his followers await the coming of “the Artist Elias,” who shall
bring the Magnum Opus to its completion.

“Let him that readeth understand.”

The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science

By Thomas Troward, Late Divisional Judge, Punjab, 1904

XV. THE SOUL - 2

The fact, however, remains that the intuition works most freely in that
direction in which we most habitually concentrate our thought; and in
practice it will be found that the best way to cultivate the intuition in
any particular direction is to meditate upon the abstract principles of
that particular class of subjects rather than only to consider particular
cases. Perhaps the reason is that particular cases have to do with specific
phenomena, that is with the law working under certain limiting conditions,
whereas the principles of the law are not limited by local conditions,
and so habitual meditation on them sets our intuition free to range in an
infinitude where the conception of antecedent conditions does not limit it.
Anyway, whatever may be the theoretical explanation, you will find that the
clear grasp of abstract principles in any direction has a wonderfully
quickening effect upon the intuition in that particular direction.

The importance of recognizing our power of thus giving direction to the
intuition cannot be exaggerated, for if the mind is attuned to sympathy
with the highest phases of spirit this power opens the door to limitless
possibilities of knowledge. In its highest workings intuition becomes
inspiration, and certain great records of fundamental truths and supreme
mysteries which have come down to us from thousands of generations
bequeathed by deep thinkers of old can only be accounted for on the
supposition that their earnest thought on the Originating Spirit, coupled
with a reverent worship of It, opened the door, through their intuitive
faculty, to the most sublime inspirations regarding the supreme truths of
the universe both with respect to the evolution of the cosmos and to the
evolution of the individual. Among such records explanatory of the supreme
mysteries three stand out pre-eminent, all bearing witness to the same ONE
Truth, and each throwing light upon the other; and these three are the
Bible, the Great Pyramid, and the Pack of Cards–a curious combination some
will think, but I hope in another volume of this series to be able to
justify my present statement. I allude to these three records here because
the unity of principle which they exhibit, notwithstanding their wide
divergence of method, affords a standing proof that the direction taken by
the intuition is largely determined by the will of the individual opening
the mind in that particular direction.

Very closely allied to the intuition is the faculty of imagination. This
does not mean mere fancies, which we dismiss without further consideration,
but our power of forming mental images upon which we dwell. These, as I
have said in the earlier part of this book, form a nucleus which, on its
own plane, calls into action the universal Law of Attraction, thus giving
rise to the principle of Growth. The relation of the intuition to the
imagination is that the intuition grasps an idea from the Great Universal
Mind, in which all things subsist as potentials, and presents it to the
imagination in its essence rather than in a definite form, and then our
image-building faculty gives it a clear and definite form which it presents
before the mental vision, and which we then vivify by letting our thought
dwell upon it, thus infusing our own personality into it, and so providing
that personal element through which the specific action of the universal
law relatively to the particular individual always takes place.[1] Whether
our thought shall be allowed thus to dwell upon a particular mental image
depends on our own will, and our exercise of our will depends on our belief
in our power to use it so as to disperse or consolidate a given mental
image; and finally our belief in our power to do this depends on our
recognition of our relation to God, Who is the source of all power; for it
is an invariable truth that our life will take its whole form, tone, and
color from our conception of God, whether that conception be positive or
negative, and the sequence by which it does so is that now given.

In this way, then, our intuition is related to our imagination, and this
relation has its physiological correspondence in the circulus of molecular
vibrations I have described above, which, having its commencement in the
higher or “ideal” portion of the brain flows through the voluntary nervous
system, the physical channel of objective mind, returning through the
sympathetic system, the physical channel of subjective mind, thus
completing the circuit and being then restored to the frontal brain, where
it is consciously modelled into clear-cut forms suited to a specific
purpose.

In all this the power of the will as regulating the action both of the
intuition and the imagination must never be lost sight of, for without such
a central controlling power we should lose all sense of individuality; and
hence the ultimate aim of the evolutionary process is to evolve individual
wills actuated by such beneficence and enlightenment as shall make them
fitting vehicles for the outflowing of the Supreme Spirit, which has
hitherto created cosmically, and can now carry on the creative process to
its highest stages only through conscious union with the individual; for
this is the only possible solution of the great problem, How can the
Universal Mind act in all its fulness upon the plane of the individual and
particular?

This is the ultimate of evolution, and the successful evolution of the
individual depends on his recognizing this ultimate and working towards it;
and therefore this should be the great end of our studies. There is a
correspondence in the constitution of the body to the faculties of the
soul, and there is a similar correspondence in the faculties of the soul to
the power of the All-originating Spirit; and as in all other adaptations of
specific vehicles so also here, we can never correctly understand the
nature of the vehicle and use it rightly until we realize the nature of the
power for the working of which it is specially adapted. Let us, then, in
conclusion briefly consider the nature of that power.