Category: Making Of The Universe

“Those who grasp something of the wonderful possibilities which open out before us as we voluntarily associate ourselves with the law of sacrifice will wish to begin that voluntary association long ere they can rise to the heights just dimly sketched. Like other deep spiritual truths, it is eminently practical in its application to daily [...]

“From this plane only can a man act as one of the Saviors of the world, because on it he is one with the selves of all. Identified with humanity where it is one, his strength, his love, his life, can flow downwards into any or into every separated self. He has become a spiritual [...]

“The full recognition of the law of sacrifice, however, lifts man beyond the mental plane – whereon duty is recognized as duty, as “what ought to be done because it is owed” – to that higher plane of Buddhi where all selves are felt as one, and where all activities are poured out for the [...]

“The next step was achieved when the sense of duty was definitely established; when the sacrifice of the lower to the higher was seen to be “right”, apart from all questions of a reward to be received in another world; when the obligation owed by the part to the whole was recognized, and the yielding [...]

“We can see among the Hindus, the Persians, the Chinese, how men were taught to recognize their manifold obligations; to make the body yield dutiful sacrifice of obedience and reverence to ancestors, to parents, to elders; to bestow charity with courtesy; and to show kindness to all. Slowly men were helped to evolve both heroism [...]

“The next lesson removed the reward of sacrifice to a region beyond the physical world. First, by a sacrifice of material goods material welfare was to be secured. Then the sacrifice of material goods was to bring enjoyment in heaven, on the other side of death. The reward of the sacrificer was of a higher [...]

“Hence have arisen all the sacrifices to these forces – as science calls them – to these intelligences guiding physical order, as religions have always taught. As fire quickly disintegrated the dense physical, it quickly restored the etheric particles of the burnt offerings to the ethers; thus the astral particles were easily set free to [...]

“Divine Teachers were there at the side of man in his infancy, and they authoritatively proclaimed the law of sacrifice, and incorporated it in a most elementary form in the religions by which They trained the dawning intelligence of man. It would have been useless to have suddenly demanded from these child-souls that they should [...]

“The lower nature of man was evolved under the same law of sacrifice as ruled in the lower kingdoms. But with the outpouring of divine Life which gave the human Monad came a change in the way in which the law of sacrifice worked as the law of life. In man was to be developed [...]

“So far the idea of pain has scarcely connected itself with that of sacrifice, for, as we have seen in the course of our studies, the astral bodies of plants are not sufficiently organized to give rise to any acute sensations either of pleasure or of pain. But as we consider the law of sacrifice [...]