The buzzword in the corporate world these days is "Knowledge Management." Corporations are trying to retain their intellectual property with the help of technological solutions for Knowledge Management. Having adopted new technologies organizations are under perennial threat of losing their "knowledge-workers" who have over the years become "experts" in their area. Many of these people have been nurtured by their organizations, as parents do their children. These "highly successful" men and women often begin their career on lower rungs. They wait until they have the necessary experience under their belt and leave the organization at the first opportunity, caring little as to who will manage their legacy or how. Words like "loyalty," "contentment," are quite foreign to many of them. Those with knowledge and expertise are found to be unwilling to part with what they have mastered. Forgetting the fact that they owe it, in the first place, to the organization which gave them the chance, investing its resources and trust in them. These people actually suffer from insecurity. They would not like to share their knowledge with another for fear of losing their own importance.

What is the spiritual position about this profound subject of "knowledge management?" It is quite simple. Giving of knowledge to another is the highest charity. Man does not live by bread alone and yearns for knowledge that can bring comfort, solace, and explain the mysteries of life. It is the duty of everyone to pass on his knowledge. Those of us who feel proud of our knowledge in some particular area, need to reflect. Was it not our parents and elders who taught us how to walk and talk? Who taught us our alphabet? Then again, it is the society and surroundings and actions and interactions with other beings that taught us many things that we, as isolated individuals, might never have learnt. There is the contribution of so many in making us what we are today. He who goes around with a swollen head has very little to call as his own. Books on history, human nature, evolution, science, mathematics, literature, etc., have taught us much that we now claim as our own. Our ideas and ideologies are often borrowed from someone we admired.

The highest knowledge is not the knowledge of this world, but spiritual knowledge. The greatest gift of spiritual truths has come down to us from the ancients—sages and seers. Theosophy teaches us about the existence of these spiritually wise men called Masters of Wisdom. These Beings are the product of evolution from prior periods. They are like graduate and post-graduate students, returning to schools and colleges as teachers to teach the new generation. Highest among them are the "guiding intelligences" behind silent and mighty evolution. When high Beings of one class called Lunar Pitris had completed their task of evolving a human form, another class of great Beings—known as Solar Pitris in Eastern tradition—stepped in. They awakened the thinking principle in man. It was then that man could think and choose. No longer was he a brute among brutes. It is said that these great beings did not leave infant humanity to its own devices. Thus:

It is under the direct, silent guidance of this MAHA—(great)—GURU that all the other less divine Teachers and instructors of mankind became, from the first awakening of human consciousness, the guides of early Humanity. It is through these "Sons of God" that infant humanity got its first notions of all the arts and sciences, as well as of spiritual knowledge; and it is they who have laid the first foundation-stone of those ancient civilizations that puzzle so sorely our modern generation of students and scholars. (S.D., I, 208)

No man descended from a Palaeolithic cave-dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those incarnated Rishis and Devas of the third Root Race, who handed their knowledge from one generation to another. (S.D., I, 208)

In the great esoteric tradition, knowledge has passed from one generation of sages and seers to the other—unaltered, unadulterated. The collectivity of these great beings called the "White Lodge of Adepts" have in their custody the accumulated wisdom of the ages. These compassionate ones are ever willing to give it out to true seekers among us who are ready to receive it and pass it on in their turn. One who seeks this wisdom selfishly for his own individual progress or benefit eliminates himself—whether he knows it or not—by nature's occult laws which require no executioners.

To think that mankind has come thus far, unaided, is to be simple-minded. Intuitive scientists have admitted that there must be guiding intelligences behind the universe. We owe our innate ideas and rapid progress to the Great Ones who are called "Elder Brothers" of humanity. But the knowledge is given to us in trust.

Thus, in one sense there is no such thing as "originality." However, while we cannot be original, we can be creative—like an artist or a genius. The abstract ideal and ideas can be given a form using materials and instruments available on the lower plane. For example, "love" is an abstraction but it is not a new idea. Everyone feels it but is unable to express it on this plane—though we all have language, paints and canvas at our disposal. Shakespeare describes love very graphically in his sonnets. He is not conveying something new or original, but bringing the idea of love from the abstract plane to our plane through the medium of words. That is the task of an artist—giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.

While it takes a genius to achieve this, yet a true genius does not claim it as his own. Newton said: "I appear tall because I am standing on the shoulders of the giants." A genius, too, is not made in isolation, as suggested in Through the Gates of Gold:

If the mind of man is turned upon any given subject with a sufficient concentration, he obtains illumination with regard to it sooner or later. The particular individual in whom the final illumination appears is called a genius, an inventor, one inspired; but he is only the crown of a great mental work created by unknown men about him, and receding back from him through long vistas of distance. Without them he would not have had his material to deal with. Even the poet requires innumerable poetasters to feed upon. He is the essence of the poetic power of his time, and of the times before him. It is impossible to separate an individual of any species from his kind. (p. 12)

However, modern man is ever eager to claim name, fame and glory for the ideas, inventions, discoveries and achievements that he sincerely considers to be the results of his own individual effort. While he knows it not, he has received much from those lesser beings who are less expressive, less articulate and apparently less intelligent. We are often guilty of appropriating to ourselves the credit that rightfully belongs to others. This idea is further elaborated in the dialogue between the student and the sage in Vernal Blooms:

Student: Does the mind actually do anything when it takes up a thought and seeks for more light?

Sage: It actually does. A thread, or a finger, or a long darting current flies out from the brain to seek for knowledge. It goes in all directions and touches all other minds it can reach so as to receive the information if possible. This is telepathically, so to say, accomplished. There are no patents on true knowledge of philosophy nor copyrights in that realm....General truth belongs to all, and when the unseen messenger from one mind arrives and touches the real mind of another, that other gives up to it what it may have of truth about general subjects. So the mind's finger or wire flies until it gets the thought or seed-thought from the other and makes it its own. But our modern competitive system and selfish desire for gain and fame is constantly building a wall around people's minds to everyone's detriment. (pp. 196-97)

An individual's private and personal thoughts are left severely alone. As regards those which are philosophical, religious, and moral in nature, there is no law of copyright or patent—all that is invention of the present-day competitive system. The sage further explains:

When a man thinks out truly a philosophical problem, it is not his under the laws of nature; it belongs to all....Similarly with other generally beneficial matters. They are for all. If a Spencer thinks out a long series of wise things good for all men, the seer can take them all. Indeed, but few thinkers do any original thinking. They pride themselves on doing so, but in fact their seeking minds go out all over the world of mind and take from those of slower movement what is good and true, and then make them their own, sometimes gaining glory, sometimes money, and in this age claiming all as theirs and profiting by it. (Ibid, 203,4)

Knowing this to be the fact, we must do for others what others have done for us. We must share knowledge. Little do we know that all our worldly knowledge or our achievements are not the baggage we can carry beyond death. This knowledge is of value only in proportion to its usefulness in helping others. It is our kindly acts and unselfish deeds that accompany us beyond this life into the next. It is this attitude of sharing and caring for others that makes us fit companions of the Masters of Wisdom. In this rat race—to be first, to be ahead, to be on top—men know not where to stop. What we know today becomes obsolete within a short time. We are ever running to remain on the same spot like Alice in Wonderland. What we need is a spirit of camaraderie, mutual appreciation and help in the collective effort to evolve and progress. Our endeavour should be to pass on the knowledge in all humility, as we low confess: "Thus have I heard."

However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them; However inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them; However immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to master them; However incomparable the Buddha-truth is, I vow to attain it.

—Zen Gatha