The selfish devotee lives to no purpose. The man who does not go through his appointed work in life—has lived in vain.

Follow the wheel of life; follow the wheel of duty to race and kin, to friend and foe, and close thy mind to pleasures as to pain. Exhaust the law of Karmic retribution. Gain Siddhis for thy future birth.

—The Voice of the Silence, pp. 38-39

With world conditions as they are, it seems almost impossible to reform large numbers of the populace. Only individuals, a man here and a woman there, are inspired sufficiently so that they take themselves seriously in hand and endeavour to purify their morals and to enlighten their minds. The snares of the Kali Yuga are many; the evil influence of the Astral Light is very powerful. But individuals can and do free themselves from their passion-self.

What is most needed today are living Centres of Beneficence, nuclei of earnest men and women who are radiating the purity and intelligence gathered by the exercise of right morality and the acquirement of correct knowledge. Those who are educating themselves for the life of the soul and are making adequate use of the siddhis, soul powers gained through such education, are the saviours of humanity in this day and generation.

What is required of us is not the doing of something remote from the duties with which we are born, but the discharging of those very duties by a different method. Over and over again we are advised that we must take our evolution in our own hands, that no outside power, no known or unknown forces of nature will help us, that he who conquers himself is greater than the conqueror of worlds.

Self-education is fourfold: education of the mind, of the emotions, of the body, including the senses and the brain, and of the soul. Very few in our age, when life has become a contest of minds or a struggle for existence on the plane of economics and of the body, recognize the fact that they are souls. Concentration, intelligence, efficiency, capacity, the power to do things well, at times even character—these are demanded in the educational sphere, in the competitive world of business; but the soul is rarely taken into account, and when it is accorded a place it is generally a secondary place.

Mind without soul guidance is bound to go astray, and is only too likely to produce the atheist or the agnostic. Emotional expression without guidance from the soul is also bound to go wrong, as when it produces such an artist as is creative at times, and the rest of the time a parasite and worse. Physical education without soul guidance will produce an athlete; as mere brain and sense education, it may produce a fine businessman and competitor in the struggle of life, who will know how to overthrow his rivals in the same field of business of life.

More than half of our troubles arise because our education is incomplete. Mostly education is dual—of the body and of the intellect. Culture of the emotions and soul culture are very largely neglected. The fourfold education of soul, mind, feelings and body is possible for all, for every individual has this fourfold nature. One need not wait; a beginning in self-education can be made wherever we are in space and time—in the home, in whatever country we live, and whatever the age of the body.

What will it profit one to undertake this education? Time was when people asked, "Is it profitable to be educated in 'the three Rs'?" Some of the people for whom compulsory education had been introduced rebelled against it—and later fought for it. Similarly, only those who have gone through the discipline of self-education are qualified to speak of its worthwhileness.

Self-education means, first and foremost, taking stock of what we are, not of what we are not; trying to find out, not how weak and mean we are, but how strong and noble we are or can be.

Secondly, each one lives in a particular environment and is responsible for the performance of his own duties in that environment, duties to himself, to his kith and kin and to the wider universe, in ever-expanding circles. No one can live an isolated life, for through our body, our emotional or feeling nature, our mind and our soul we are all the time affecting the whole wide world, which we need to understand and to penetrate. In terms of our knowledge of the beings who make up the universe, human, sub-human or super-human, the universe takes on a different meaning for us. Self-education is that process of education of the incarnated aspect of the soul which enables that soul to discharge its obligations to the great intellectual universe, to the great moral universe, to the great universe of form or of matter.

The soul's reaction to the universe determines its duties. In our bodily aspect, in our feeling or moral aspect, in our intellectual aspect, we are reflecting the powers of the soul. Each one finds himself in a certain set of circumstances because of the necessities of the soul. One man is poor, another is rich; one man is intellectually advanced along one line, another is intellectually advanced along another line, and a third is not intellectually advanced at all—all find themselves where they are under Karma and for the purpose of the soul.

Recognition needs to be gained not only that we are what we are because we deserve it, but also that our desires in the past have created our present environment, both inner and outer. Our congenital duties are the effects that proceed from what we have desired in the past. We may not desire at the present moment to be where we are, but to try to change our environment by any forcible methods is to invite on ourselves unhappiness and suffering, mental, moral, bodily. The only right way to change our environment is by learning from it the best we can, and, in making use of it, we can begin to alter it in terms of our own energy or desire in the present.

To feed, clothe and shelter the body is one aspect of our congenital duties. Next, each one has certain mental-moral duties. We have duties to our immediate surrounding, to our friends, to our work, to our city, to our country, to the world at large. Our daily life consists of a thousand things. How shall we learn to do them so that the soul, the mind, the moral character, the body with its senses and its brain, may gain for themselves the utmost advantage? No man is superior or inferior to another, from the soul point of view, by reason of the work he does. But a sweeper who performs his own duty well is, spiritually speaking, superior to a king who neglects his obligatory duties. There is no necessary work that is not honourable if the performer is an honourable person. All drudgery, if rightly performed, in the right spirit, becomes divine.

One of the things required of us in our present civilization is to perceive divinity in all tasks. We speak of efficiency, of the power of concentration necessary for successful business and in many other spheres of life. We cannot have these unless we have the right moral viewpoint that concentration develops most easily in those affairs that comprise our natural duties. Unhappiness is the outcome of not seeing that our proper function is the performance of our own duties by a particular method.

What is that method? All of us live in space and in time and we are all the time making causes. Our relationship to space, to time and to causation leads us to the consideration of three fundamental laws which should govern all actions. Once these three laws are understood and made part of ourselves, self-education becomes a continuous process.

First, in reference to space, there is the law of accuracy. Every significant or insignificant act of ours is performed in space. Accuracy in space sounds simple enough, yet innumerable difficulties present themselves once we begin to apply this basic law. All our laws, programmes, policies, methods of what we call efficiency in all walks of life are based on the idea enshrined in that sinple-sounding phrase, accuracy in space.

Every action, moreover, has to be done not only accurately but also at the right time, and so puntuality in time is another fundamental law. We see its operation in all nature, and it is not difficult to conceive of the chaos that would result if the functioning of the natural order of things were based on anything but the law of punctuality. Man alone can and often does break that law—and he and often others also have to bear the resulting repercussions.

Whatever we do, whether it be the act of waking up or of going to sleep, of speaking or of listening, we are generating causes. The generation of a cause with a pure motive, or purity in causation, is the third fundamental law. In thinking, feeling, speaking, performing deeds, let us ask ourselves, "Is my motive pure?"

He who is not accurate, punctual and purely motivated in what he does is not educating himself, or is educating himself wrongly. He is generating discord, disharmony, and the resulting effect is not contentment and joy but suffering and pain. It is not what we do but how we do the least thing that really matters. It is not an ambition to do something different, but the ambition to do what we are doing in a still better way that will result in soul progress. By striving to do better and better till we become perfect in the particular line of our endeavour, we build for ourselves a more propitious environment for the future. It is this that constitutes self-education.

The performance of duty makes way for further growth. The soul comes to a realization of its own innate, divine nature in such a way that it awakens to a new life. The inner peace and bliss that are born of knowledge unfold, not through the pursuit of some kind of psychic practice or some kind of peculiar meditation, but by the performance of the daily duties of life accurately, punctually and with all the purity of thought, feeling, word and deed that we can command. That is the way of gaining new soul powers. The powers of the soul manifest themselves in a discordant, disharmonious way when the lower constituents of our being are not trained and controlled by the soul. No one ever entered the spiritual life save by the purification of the mind, the emotions, the senses and the body.

Just at the serpent tamers seize the serpent and remove its fangs, without killing it, so must we render harmless the serpent of the lower nature that exists in each one of us. We often feed it with honey and cake and think that by and by its poison will drain away; but it will not. There is only one way to remove that poison—by not giving quarter to the whisperings of the lower self. We shall not succeed at once; many will be the setbacks; but he who picks himself up each time and goes forward is on the right road.

Let each aspirant to the spiritual life learn to use the talisman named Duty. Let hopes for progress, desire for uncalled for service and all else be made subservient to the performance of duties—the small plain duties of life—but duties performed with knowledge of theosophical principles, and applying that very high standard of morality to each act. Thus will the soul be educated and strengthened. We have to perceive the real inwardness of the saying that "the Chohan in his place, and the atom in its place, do what they can—no more." This perception results from the discharge of one's own duties by the light of the Message of the true Saviours of the Race.

Remember that every thought kept ever constant, leads to action and results will follow....These are all pictures of the mind or a voice from within which the wise take notice of and fools ignore. The only precaution to be taken is that some people paint wrong pictures and live in misery; others paint bright pictures and enjoy life. You have the colours, brush and canvas with you. You can paint heaven and in you can go; you can paint hell and in you can enter. The choice is yours.

So select carefully, use your mind productively so that life is worth living and you make this world a little better than before.

—T. G. L. Iyer