Why has there been a long succession of prophets, teachers and spiritual leaders in the world, all teaching the selfsame truth about man's origin, his mission and his destiny? The answer is simple: We all forget, and our way of learning, like Nature's way of teaching, is—repetition, repetition, repetition. When we understand that this is the only way any being learns—not through a long succession of unrelated experiences but through a continual repetition of the same lesson, then perhaps we can understand better why our progress is through repeated lives on earth.

Anybody can easily verify for himself or herself that even with the best of intentions to be accurate, to get correctly what is offered to us, and to transmit correctly what we have received, such is the nature of our mind at the present stage of evolution that it is almost impossible for us to get anything straight and to transmit it to another exactly as we received it. There is a game that children play: they arrange themselves in a circle and then someone whispers a story to the next one, and the second child whispers it to the third as faithfully as he can, and so on, each repeating it to the one sitting next to him. The last child then has to tell the story out aloud, and the way that tale gets twisted and gains and loses in the telling affords an illustration of how the teachings of spiritual teachers get distorted in the progress of time.

The teachings of Jesus, for instance, are quite simple; yet disputes as to what Jesus meant have been carried so far that there are today any number of Christian sects, all claiming to represent Jesus and his message, yet all of which have distorted whatever he taught and meant out of all semblance. The teaching of reincarnation, to take one instance, has been converted in the Christian Church into the doctrine of the resurrection of the physical body, and its eternal duration after it has been resurrected; yet that utterly impossible myth is a direct growth from, a straight perversion of, the original teaching of reincarnation. The Hindus believe that when a man who has not performed the prescribed ceremonies dies, he will be turned into a maggot, a worm, a cat, a dog, a monkey, a tiger, a sheep, or what not. Here is the teaching of reincarnation corrupted in another fashion. Most other teachings have likewise been corrupted.

Is it any wonder, then, that the great teachers are extremely reticent; that they give out the simplest of fundamental teachings, not by telling man "thou shalt do this; that shalt not do that," but by placing before him principles of conduct, not rules and commands? Take Jesus: He asked us to treat our neighbour as we would like to be treated by him. The Christian world has been preaching that for ages and not practising it. And so with all the other teachings, so simple that the ordinary person can understand them, yet converted by successive generations into theologies and sects, and finally into sheer atheism and hypocrisy.

No teacher worthy of the name has ever come forth as a revealer of new and hitherto unheard-of facts, but each in turn has restated part of the unchanging truth. Who among them all ever revealed his highest spiritual doctrines to the crowd? There are cogent reasons for this silence:

Firstly, the perversity of average human nature and its selfishness, always tending to the gratification of personal desires to the detriment of neighbours and next of kin. Such people could never be entrusted with divine secrets. Secondly, their unreliability to keep the sacred and divine knowledge from desecration.

It is for this reason that

every ancient religious, or rather philosophical, cult consisted of an esoteric or secret teaching, and an exoteric (outward public) worship. Furthermore, it is well-known fact that the MYSTERIES of the ancients comprised with every nation the "greater" (secret) and "Lesser" (public) MYSTERIES—e.g., in the celebrated solemnities called the Eleusinia, in Greece. From the Hierophants of Samonthrace, Egypt, and the initiated Brahmins of the India of old, down to the later Hebrew Rabbis, all preserved, for fear of profanation, their real bona fide beliefs secret. The Jewish Rabbis called their secular religious series the Mercavah (the exterior body), "the vehicle." or, the covering which contains the hidden soul, i.e., their highest secret knowledge. Not one of the ancient nations ever imparted through its priests its real philosophical secrets to the masses, but allotted to the latter only the husks. Northern Buddhism has its "greater" and its "lesser" vehicle, known as the Mahayana, the esoteric, and the Hinayana, the exoteric, Schools. Nor can you blame them for such secrecy; for surely you would not think of feeding your flock of sheep on learned dissertations on botany instead of on grass? Pythagoras called his Gnosis "the knowledge of things that are," or e gnosis ton onton, and preserved that knowledge for his pledged disciples only: for those who could digest such mental food and feel satisfied; and he pledged them to silence and secrecy. Occult alphabets and secret ciphers are the development of the old Egyptian hieratic writings, the secret of which was, in the days of old, in the possession only of the hierogrammatists, or initiated Egyptian priests. Ammonius Saccas, as his biographers tell us, bound his pupils by oath not to divulge his higher doctrines except to those who had already been instructed in preliminary knowledge, and who were also bound by a pledge. Finally, do we not find the same even in early Christianity, among the Gnostics, and even in the teachings of Christ? Did he not speak to the multitudes in parables which had a twofold meaning, and explain his reasons only to his disciples? "To you," he says, "it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven; but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables" (Mark, IV, 11). "The Essenes of Judea and Carmel made similar distinctions, dividing their adherents into neophytes, brethren, and the perfect, or those initiated" (Eclec. Phil). Examples might be brought from every country to this effect. (The Key to Theosophy, pp. 8-9)

A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.

—Erin Majors