When a person, through suffering or through a spirit of quest, begins to ask questions as to what is God, what is Spirit and Soul, why two natures, divine and beastly, fight within him, there is the first awakening. To ask questions, to express honest doubts about one's beliefs and habits, one's religious and social practices, is a healthy sign. An inquiring soul has awakened and is ready to enter the great School of Life. Just as our physical body goes through phases from conception to birth, so also with the soul. The inquiring, awakened soul begins to use his mind and reason—that is his moment of conception. But between conception and actual birth there is a period—for the body it is nine months; for the soul that period is indefinite and depends on the effort the mind makes to learn and to apply what is learnt. The inquirer can shorten the period of the antenatal life of the soul by his own endeavours. If he uses his mind and reason perseveringly, he will come to the next stage. That soul, purifying himself gaining knowledge which enlightens, unfolds the calm and tranquillity that bring to birth a faculty higher than reason—intuition.
Intuition is direct perception. We understand a subject by reasoning, going from one step to another, more or less laboriously; but intuition is like turning on a floodlight in a dark room, which enables us to see at a glance what is in that room. All of us possess the faculty of intuition, but in most of us its action has been atrophied. It is a faculty that develops with use and decays with neglect. With purity of life and practice of right knowledge, intuition gradually begins to function.
Can we learn to experience the power which is peace, and express the sacrifice which is joy, day after day? To produce that result, can any ordinary human being undertake the work of reforming himself, forming himself anew, and becoming as one "newly born"? He can—by Right Living. But what is Right Living?
There are two divisions into which Right Living as an art and a science naturally falls. What not to do is one; what to do is the other. Those who are eager to live the Higher Life, naturally desire to get rid of their weaknesses of character. The sensuous man wishes to overcome his lust; the impatient and irritable woman desires to acquire patience and contentment; a young man wishes to lose his timidity and become a hero; a young girl desires to get rid of her shyness and acquire grace and inner stamina; and so forth. It is but natural that having seen our own moral blemish we aspire to get rid of it.
Next, there is the desire to learn, to gather knowledge, to exercise the moral limbs and unfold virtues, to develop the mind and evolve faculties. In the minds of most people who aspire to become better and nobler, there is some idea-image, some picture of a great character in history or in literature. This feeling that people possess is not meaningless. It is indicative of the heart-aspiration for betterment of oneself, for improvement of one's own life, for the ennobling of one's own labour and actions.
So people desiring to reform themselves come upon prescriptions—what not to do, what to do; how to fight moral weaknesses, how to steady the wandering mind; what not to eat, what to eat; where to go, where not to go; and so on. Let us not begin with our weaknesses; let us not start out by saying, "I desire to control my wandering mind; I wish to kill out my lust; I want to defeat my impatience; I am going to fight my timidity"; and so forth. How then to begin? "The fight is in the mind" is a good aphorism to remember. All our moral weaknesses, our evil tendencies and bad habits, are rooted in the mind. Milton uttered a great truth when he said:
The mind in its own place, in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
The fight is in the mind, and the beginning of real reformation is in and of the mind. But what about our moral weaknesses? Do we know how to attack them? If we begin to handle a gun before we have learned how to use it, we might injure ourselves! So let us acquire knowledge of the "holy war" and how to wage it. When a person tries to fight his anger, but does not know how to go about it, in his very effort to overcome anger he will lend the force of his own thought to that evil, and the anger will continue to live. Fear of a weakness produces resentment in our lower nature, and that particular weakness grows. People waste time by beginning at the wrong end. The weakness we fear will leave us if we turn away from the programme of "thou shalt not" to the programme whose first item is—knowledge of first principles.
By reading and by study, the mind should be occupied with principles of right philosophy. That is the first step. The minds of most people are full of notions of all sorts. Ask anyone what his principles of life and conduct are, and he will be puzzled. There is the real difficulty. To acquire the principles by which we should live, implies that we are learning how to hold and to handle the "gun" to fight the enemy of our moral blemishes and vicious tendencies. All know that to lie, to lust, to rob, are evil things, but why are they evil and how to overcome them? They have no knowledge of that. Once we acquire the fundamentals of right philosophy, we ourselves shall be able to formulate our own principles of life. So we must get busy with our minds and bring to them right food, proper nourishment.
It is said that the Higher Life, often called the Holy Life, commences when a person begins to love God. But what is Love and what is God? Theosophy, as a philosophy, teaches as its first fundamental proposition what god or Deity is. Correct knowledge about Deity also informs us about the right practice of what is called Love. Acquiring a correct conception about God or Deity, about the manifested universe and man's relationship to it, brings to birth a new attitude within us. The values of all things undergo a transformation when by study we see what man is, what his relationship to the universe is, and what functions he is called upon to perform as a part of Great Nature. This knowledge brings about Reformation. Without that knowledge, we assign a particular set of values to the people and objects around us. When that knowledge brings to birth the new attitude in us, those values undergo a change. The world and its humanity look very different; our friends and kin, our religion and customs, everything is seen in a new light. Our own weaknesses look different; our fight against them takes a different form; our life has a new meaning; and our heart throbs with a new joy and a new vitality.
The immediate moral result of this knowledge acquired by and in the mind is perceived by us in our own lives. A new power or force, a new shakti, begins functioning in us—call it love, call it sacrifice, call it the spirit of service. It is an inner change. It makes the student go to his books and his exams with a new purpose—preparation, not only for earning his own livelihood, but for the service of all human souls. It makes the businessman, the banker, the industrialist, the manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the clerk, think about his duty to the community at large; not just for his own profit or pay does he toil, but to serve the community by his work in factory, office or shop. It makes the woman in the home endeavour for a nobler purpose than home-making; she wants her home to become a centre of purity and beauty where the grace of hospitality, the charm of friendship, the harmony of affection, radiate Light for all. That inner change is the first step towards the true spiritual life. It activates the real heart of man. Most people live by and in their likes and dislikes; some live by and in the mind, using their reason; but the real life begins when the Heart functions. Mind-knowledge is one kind of knowledge; it is called the Eye Doctrine; but spiritual knowledge is named the Heart Doctrine, the Hidden Knowledge, called in the Gita Esoteric Knowledge—Guhya-Vidya.
In Chapter Nine is to be found the magnificent promise of Krishna to all men and women: even a great sinner can reform himself by right resolve. But we must resolve, i.e., go to our own mind and there perceive the great truth that man is divine, and that the Temple of God is the human heart. The world is full of casteless men and women; many of them are "untouchables" because of their vices. By right resolve to acquire and practise knowledge, we become truly human, and by self-effort we are born again, we become Dwijas—"Twice-Born"—men and women who live in their hearts, who work with heart-energy for the regeneration of the world. They are those selfless Sacrificers who, forgoing the rest of Emancipation, remain on Earth in the service of all human souls.
