If you urge that I am young and tender, and that the time for seeking wisdom is not yet, then you should know that to seek true religion there never is a time not fit. —Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king

He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed. —Socrates

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well done is done forever. —Thoreau

When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will follow surely. —Honore de Balzac

Duty persistently followed is the highest yoga. —W. Q. Judge

Procrastination has been well called "the thief of time," for it is of the quality of Tamas, indifference or darkness, which, as Krishna tells Arjuna in Chapter Fourteen of the Bhagavad-Gita, "is the deluder of all creatures...it imprisoneth the Ego in a body through heedless folly, sleep, and idleness."

Those who have had the good Karma of being favourably situated to study Theosophy are especially unwise, from the standpoint of their own interest, if they procrastinate. If they do so, they let slip the opportunity which they must have earned, in this life or in previous ones, and who knows whether they may not be thereby postponing the recurrence of such a chance for spiritual growth and service? Such postponement may not only retard their own progress but also that of the Cause of Theosophy and of those whom their example of faithful study and practice of the Theosophical teachings might have led to emulate it.

In "The Great Master's Letter," published as No. 33 of the U.L.T. Pamphlet Series, He had written that there was "hardly a Theosophist in the whole Society unable to help it effectually by correcting erroneous impressions of outsiders, if not by actually propagating the ideas himself."

When that letter was written in 1881, Isis Unveiled was the only book available to students of Theosophy in its modern restatement, though valuable additional teachings from Madame Blavatsky's pen had been appearing in The Theosophist ever since its launching in October 1879. The two volumes of Isis Unveiled and those articles contained much teaching of importance, but the modern student is even better off in having readily accessible, besides these, The Secret Doctrine in two volumes, The Key to Theosophy, The Voice of the Silence, the Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge, and the many helpful and inspiring articles by Madame Blavatsky, Mr. Judge, Mr. Crosbie and other faithful followers of the Lines laid down by the Mahatmas and their Messenger of this cycle, which offer a wealth of trustworthy explanation and simplification of the teachings as first given out.

Corresponding, however, to the opportunity offered to the modern student is the latter's responsibility to the Cause of Theosophy and to his fellow men. The trusteeship of wealth applies no less to treasures of the mind and the spirit than to physical possessions.

It is true that a great Master once wrote:

Knowledge for the mind, like food for the body, is intended to feed and help to growth, but it requires to be well digested and the more thoroughly and slowly the process is carried out the better both for body and mind.

But He prefaced this by a reminder to His correspondent that it was a life-long task that he had chosen, and by a quotation from Christina Rossetti's poem "Up-hill":

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

The longest journey has been recognized from antiquity as beginning with the first step, and many of the early steps of the Theosophical aspirant will naturally be on the path of study. Before we can properly pass on Theosophy we must know clearly what its basic tenets are. This is needed even to be sure that we are applying them in our daily life.

The conscientious student will naturally try as far as possible to keep his understanding of what he studies uncoloured by either prejudice or predilection. Almost inevitably, however, the teachings of Theosophy, though conscientiously studied and applied to the best of the student's ability, and though faithfully given out by him as he understands them, whether in conversation, when another's question or remark provides an opening, or from the platform of the U.L.T. as his willing contribution to the Lodge's disinterested efforts at sharing Theosophy with the public, will bear, to a greater or less extent, the stamp of the individual student's own approach to and comprehension of those teachings, as well as of his own mind and heart.

The analogy suggests itself of the different colours of the spectrum revealed when a beam of white light is passed through and dispersed by a prism. The latter represents in this case the sum total of an individual's heredity, environment and life experiences, as well as his Karmic inheritance, mental, psychic and physical, from his own prior lives.

"Humanity," The Secret Doctrine tells us, "is divided into seven distinct groups and their sub-divisions, mental, spiritual, and physical," corresponding to the seven chief groups of Dhyan Chohans, there being a special bond, "known to every high Initiate in every age and in every country," between the "radiations of one and the same Planetary Spirit." Unrecognized though such a bond might be by ordinary individuals, would it not help to explain why some gain more from equally conscientious and impersonal efforts to present the teachings from the platform by one or another speaker? And, if this be so, is it not desirable that as many earnest students as possible should participate in the propaganda effort of the U.L.T., whether by sharing the insight they have gained by study from the Lodge platform, or by contributing to magazines devoted to the promulgation of pure Theosophy, or even to the general press?

Sometimes excessive modesty or shyness keeps a student from offering his services for platform assignments. Such an individual, if qualified by study to expound the teachings correctly, need not hesitate. It has been truly written that "fire is the same, if temple burn or flax," and Olive Schreiner pertinently demanded: "Is it the trumpet which gives forth the call to battle, whether it be battered tin or gilded silver, which boots? Is it not the call?"

Sometimes a humble individual provides the spark to quicken another's conscience or to fire his aspiration or his zeal. Such was the case of Benjamin Lundy, descibed in the Supplement to The Theosophist for February 1889 as a member of the Society of Friends in the U.S.A., who early in the 19th century was carrying on such agitation against slavery as was in his power, and, despite his handicaps, kindled the enthusiasm of one of the most stalwart agitators for the abolition of slavery in that country.

He was deaf. He was a poor man. He was in feeble health. He was a bad speaker. But in addition to this he was on fire with the wrongs of the slave. He travelled on foot from town to town and from state to state, holding meetings wherever he could get a few people to listen to his broken words. In 1826 at Boston he converted William Lloyd Garrison. William Lloyd Garrison was an able speaker, and a fiery writer, who went straight forward through prisons and murderous mobs on to that final victory in 1863, when by the proclamation of President Lincoln every slave in the United States was set free.

"Tomorrow," in whatever language spoken, is a word of hope and promise only if we are doing all that we can do today. Otherwise it serves as a narcotic; it can keep us marking time for ever if we become addicted to it, so that

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day....

"Next week," "next month," "next year," "next life," we say, and so our present opportunities slip away. It is not thus that we shall reach the goal. "Nothing succeeds like success" may have originated as a hard-headed business maxim, but it has its application also to spiritual advance. Those who feel drawn to Theosophy from their first contact with it in this life, whose reaction to its teachings of universal brotherhood, of an impersonal Deity, of the divine nature in man and the existence of Perfected Men, of Karma and Reincarnation, is an inner affirmation, "That sounds true," may well have been in contact with it in a former life or lives.

Mr. Judge gives us the encouragement, in his Notes on the Bhagavad-Gita, that "every point of progress gained is never in reality lost," but we are free-willed beings. We may mark time life after life if we so choose. No one can pull or push us forward against our will.

Should not the efforts of all sincere students, convinced of the bona fides of Theosophy, be to acquire knowledge of it in order that they may apply it and pass it on? Says The Friendly Philosopher:

"The number of true Theosophists is not legion. The ranks are not crowded. They are not to be known or judged by standards of the world, but by the strength of their convictions. They are one and all dead in earnest....They are those who move from age to age invincible and eternal...." Most minds instead of living and acting out their ideals in the present, and fulfilling their present known duties to others, waste most of their opportunities in memory and anticipation. To live and act fully and rightly in the present is the whole of life.

In an article entitled "Occultism: What Is It?" which Mr. Judge published in The Path for May 1890, and which has been reprinted in U.L.T. Pamphlet No. 18, "Culture and Concentration," reference was made to "dilettanti" in Occultism, among whom our procrastinators may perhaps be numbered. And it was added:

Meanwhile the world of real occultists smiles silently, and goes on with the laborious process of sifting out the living germs from the masses of men. For occultists must be found and fostered and prepared for coming ages when power will be needed and pretension will go for nothing.

In Julius Caesar Shakespeare put in the mouth of Brutus a strong warning against the dangers of procrastination:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

Even the warning in our teachings about the "moment of choice" which awaits us in the next Round, when the Manasic principle shall have reached its full development, is dismissed by many, perhaps most, as an ordeal to be faced on a day so distant that all consideration of it can be safely and indefinitely postponed. These would do well to heed what Mr. Crosbie wrote on this in his Answers to Questions on The Ocean of Theosophy (P. 201):

The moment of choice exists all the time for every individual. In that moment he may take any path, but when the general moment of choice comes, he takes the path to which he has become addicted by his nature and disposition. We are constantly following the line of separateness, or of unity, choosing one way or the other, and the time must come when the differences between those who take the right-hand path, and those who take the left, are so great that there is no possible conjunction between them.

What Mr. Judge wrote in an answer appearing in The Theosophical Forum for March 1893 is also pertinent to this subject:

The race as yet has not fully evolved Manas—the 5th principle—and will not until the next round. For that reason it cannot, as a race, make a fully intelligent choice [at this time]. But each man's life now is important, inasmuch as in it he is either sowing seeds of weeds or wheat. If weeds, they may grow so as to choke all the rest; if wheat, then when the time for the great reaping comes he will be able to choose right. Those who deliberately in the 5th round make a choice for evil will be annihilated as far as their souls are concerned; those who drift along and never choose right or wrong, but are whirled off to the indifferent side, will go into that state Mr. Sinnett describes [a state of unconsciousness until the next Planetary Manvantara]...while the consciously wicked who deliberately choose wrong will have no place whatever. In a smaller degree it is the same for each man in every life or series of lives; for we are setting up tendencies in one direction or the other, and thus in the end compel ourselves to make very disagreeable choices for next life. And man's little life is a copy in miniature of the greater life included under the word Manvantara....

Is procrastination wise?

We should therefore go through our appointed task, not only courageously but gladly, knowing what it leads to, and what the great end is in view. The lives we have lived with joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, are forgotten; the one we are now living will pass into the same limbo of the past; but we shall be what we have made ourselves, strong or weak, as the case may be, and face once again what we have brought about. We have only the present in which to do what may be done, so we ought to be bold and courageous and go forth and show our strength in the face of any and all difficulties, for they are veritably our saviours.

—Robert Crosbie