E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
by
Price 25 Cents
1922
"We may be either the suffering slaves of nature or the happy mastersof her laws."
It is the natural right of every human being to be happy—to escapeall the miseries of life. Happiness is the normal condition, asnatural as the landscapes and the seasons. It is unnatural to sufferand it is only because of our ignorance that we do suffer. Happinessis the product of wisdom. To attain perfect wisdom, to comprehendfully the purpose of life, to realize completely the relationship ofhuman beings to each other, is to put an end to all suffering, toescape every ill and evil that afflicts us. Perfect wisdom isunshadowed joy.
Why do we suffer in life? Because in the scheme of nature we are beingforced forward in evolution and we lack the spiritual illuminationthat alone can light the way and enable us to move safely among theobstacles that lie before us. Usually we do not even see or suspectthe presence of trouble until it suddenly leaps upon us like aconcealed tiger. One day our family circle is complete and happy. Aweek later death has come and gone and joy is replaced with agony.Today we have a friend. Tomorrow he will be an enemy and we do notknow why. A little while ago we had wealth and all material luxuries.There was a sudden change and now we have only poverty and misery andyet we seek in vain for a reason why this should be. There was a timewhen we had health and strength; but they have both departed and notrace of a reason appears. Aside from these greater tragedies of lifeinnumerable things of lesser consequence continually bring to uslittle miseries and minor heartaches. We most earnestly desire toavoid them but we never see them until they strike us, until in thedarkness of our ignorance we blunder upon them. The thing we lack isthe spiritual illumination that will enable us to look far and wide,finding the hidden causes of human suffering and revealing the methodby which they may be avoided; and if we can but reach illumination theevolutionary journey can be made both comfortably and swiftly. It isas though we must pass through a long, dark room filled with furniturepromiscuously scattered about. In the darkness our progress would beslow and painful and our bruises many. But if we could press a buttonthat would turn on the electric light we could then make the samejourney quickly and with perfect safety and comfort.
The old method of education was to store the mind with as many facts,or supposed facts, as could be accumulated and to give a certainexterior polish to the personality. The theory was that when a man wasborn he was a completed human being and that all that could be donefor him was to load him up with information that would be used withmore or less skill, according to the native ability he happened to beborn with. The theosophical idea is that the physical man, and allthat constitutes his life in the physical world, is but a very partialexpression of the self; that in the ego of each there is practicallyunlimited power and wisdom; that these may be brought through intoexpression in the physical world as the physical body and itsinvisible counterparts, which together constitute the complex vehicleof the ego's manifestation, are evolved and adapted to the purpose;and that in exact proportion that conscious ef