Capturing a World with Ideas
- G. de Purucker
IT takes some courage, I mean the true courage of the Seer, whom naught can daunt and none may stay, to oppose a world's thought-currents, and for this sublime work are called forth the truest heroism, the sublimest intellectual vision, and the deepest spiritual insight. These last prevail always. Sometimes he who runs counter to the world's thought-currents loses what the world esteems highest: reputation, fortune, even perhaps life. But his work - that is never lost!
That is what H.P. Blavatsky did. And that is what the Theosophical Society has been doing ever since her time, in certain ways opposing a world's lower thought-currents and prevailing in the end. It is a strange paradox of our life on this earth that the noblest things call for sacrifice, and yet it is one of the most beautiful; so that the Theosophist may say with the proud boast of the Christian Church - and I deem it true, and even truer than in their case - that the blood of its martyrs is the seed of its success, and of its victory. The world is ruled by ideas, and an inescapable truth it is also that the world's lower thought-currents must be opposed by ideas higher than they. It is only a greater idea which will capture and lead captive the less idea, the smaller. Graecia capta Romam victricem captam subducit. "Captured Greece leads conquering Rome captive."
What is this Theosophical Movement which was so magnificently voiced in some of its teachings by H.P. Blavatsky, but a series, an aggregate, of grand ideas? Not hers, not collected by her from the different great thinkers of the world; but the god-wisdom of the world; and she brought together the world's human wisdom in order to bulwark, for the weaker minds who needed such bulwarking, the grand verities shining with their stellar light, and bearing the imprint of divinity upon them. Some men cannot see the imprints of divinity. Forsooth, they say, it is to be proved! They must put the finger into the nail-mark, into the hole. Millions are like that, they have not learned to think yet.
So the only way to conquer ideas is to lead them captive by grander ones; and that is what Theosophy does: it is a body of divine ideas - not H.P. Blavatsky's, who was but the mouthpiece in this day of them, but the ancient god-wisdom of our earth, belonging to all men, all nations, all peoples, all times; and given to protoplastic mankind in the very dawn of this earth's evolution by beings from higher spheres who had learned it themselves from beings higher still - a primeval revelation from divinities. The echo of this revelation you will find in every land, among every people, in every religion and philosophy that has ever gained adherents.
When H.P. Blavatsky brought our modern Theosophy to this world in our age, she did not bring something new, she brought the cosmic Wisdom, the god-wisdom studied by the Seers, as understood on this earth, which had been stated in all other ages preceding that in which she came. She merely repeated what she had been taught; the same starry Wisdom, divine in origin: Science because voicing nature's facts; Religion because raising man to divinity; Philosophy because explanatory of all the problems that have vexed human intelligence. No vain boast this - aye, no empty words; no vain boast I repeat, but truths which are provable by any thinking man or woman who will study our blessed god-wisdom faithfully and honestly.
It was an amazing world to which H.P. Blavatsky came, a world held by - the Western world I am now speaking of - held by one slender, yet in a way faithful, link to Spirit, to wit the teachings of the Avatara Jesus called the Christ, nevertheless held to by faith alone and by the efforts of a relative few in the Churches. On the other hand, millions, the major part of the men and women of the west, absolutely psychologized - by what? Facts? No! By theories, postulates, ideas, which had gained currency because they were put forth aggressively and with some few natural facts contained in them. Why, all the science of those days practically now is in the discard, and the scientists themselves have been the discarders, the later generations of scientists have themselves overthrown the overthrower of man's hope in those days.
It was in such a time that H.P. Blavatsky came, and almost single-handed in an era when even in the home-life, in society so-called, it was considered exceedingly bad form even to speak of the "soul" in a drawing-room; it was considered a mark of an inferior intelligence. Alone, she wrote her books, challenging the entire thought-current of the western world, backed as it was by authority, backed by so-called psychology, backed by everything that then was leading men astray. And today we Theosophists happen to know that her books are being read, mostly in secret, by some of the most eminent ultra-modern scientific thinkers of our time. What did she do? Mainly she based her attack on that world-psychology on two things: that the facts of nature are the facts of nature and are divine; but that the theories of pretentious thinkers about them are not facts of nature, but are human theorizings, and should be challenged, and if good accepted pro tempore, and if bad, cast aside. She set the example; and other minds who had the wit to catch, to see, to understand, to perceive what she was after, gathered around her. Some of the men eminent in science in her time belonged to the Theosophical Society, although they rarely worked for it. They lent their names to it occasionally. But she captured them by the ideas she enunciated, and these men did their work in their own fields. That indeed already was much.
Consider her titanic task: that of changing the shifting and varying ideas of a body of earnest scientific researchers after nature's facts: replacing these shifting ideas, then called science - which had for nearly two hundred years been casting out all that innumerable centuries of human experience had shown to be good and trustworthy - replacing these, I say, with thoughts that men could live by and become better by following, thoughts that men could die by with hope and in peace; and bringing these back into human consciousness by the power of her own intellect voicing the immemorial traditions of the god-wisdom which she brought to us!
- Theosophical Forum, Dec., 1938
