---

Compassion - The Spirit of Truth

By Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

---

Let Thy Pulses Beat To Heavens Own Music

It was to counteract the ungratefulness and heartlessness of the age that HP Blavatsky dedicated The Voice of the Silence as her parting gift to “the few” Elect.1 Like everything else, The Voice has a heart: it throbs faster when one is about to decide which path to follow, or for whose sake to live. For,

, . . . private life is but the aggregative phantasms of thinking throblets, rushing in their rising onward to the central heart of eternal death! 2

That is why Blavatsky commends first and foremost total devotion to each other. She being dead yet speaketh.3

In order that one should fully comprehend individual life with its physiological, psychic and spiritual mysteries, he has to devote himself with all the fervour of unselfish philanthropy and love for his brother men, to studying and knowing collective life, or Mankind. . . . To do this he has first “to attune his soul with that of Humanity,” as the old philosophy teaches; to thoroughly master the correct meaning of every line and word in the rapidly turning pages of the Book of Life of MANKIND and to be thoroughly saturated with the truism that the latter is a whole inseparable from his own SELF. . . . How many of such profound readers of life may be found in our boasted age of sciences and culture? Of course we do not mean authors alone, but rather the practical and still unrecognised, though well known, philanthropists and altruists of our age; the people’s friends, the unselfish lovers of man, and the defenders of human right to the freedom of Spirit. Few indeed are such; for they are the rare blossoms of the age, and generally the martyrs to prejudiced mobs and timeservers.4

The Elect of our Race are never discouraged by the terrifying accounts of the difficulties ahead. On the contrary, they are heartened by the infinitely greater privations and sufferings that the Elders 5 have shouldered for our sake by living among us: bright stars in dark cycles, inspiring, teaching, and protecting us “from further and far greater misery and sorrow.” 6

. . . those who act up to Their teaching and live the life of which They are the best exemplars, will never be abandoned by Them and will always find Their beneficent help whenever needed, whether obviously or invisibly.7

Master KH entreats “every man who is capable of an unselfish impulse, to do something, however little,” for the welfare of his beloved Humanity:

the purest sympathies called out by the aesthetic effects of high art, its tenderest cords respond to the call of the holier and nobler human attachments. Of course, the greater the progress towards deliverance, the less this will be the case, until, to crown all, human and purely individual personal feelings — blood-ties and friendship, patriotism and race predilection — all will give away, to become blended into one universal feeling, the only true and holy, the only unselfish and Eternal one — Love, an Immense Love for humanity — as a Whole! For it is “Humanity” which is the great Orphan, the only disinherited one upon this earth, my friend. And it is the duty of every man who is capable of an unselfish impulse to do something, however little, for its welfare. Poor, poor humanity! It reminds me of the old fable of the war between the Body and its members; here too, each limb of this huge “Orphan” — fatherless and motherless — selfishly cares but for itself. The body uncared for suffers eternally, whether the limbs are at war or at rest. Its suffering and agony never cease. . . . And who can blame it — as your materialistic philosophers do — if, in this everlasting isolation and neglect it has evolved gods unto whom “it ever cries for help but is not heard!” Thus

“Since there is hope for man only in man I would not let one cry whom I could save! . . . ” 1

Happy the optimist in whose heart the nightingale of hope can still sing, with all the iniquity and cold selfishness of the present age before his eyes! Our century is a boastful age, as proud as it is hypocritical; as cruel as it is dissembling.2

Prahlada, a staunch devotee of Vishnu, was acutely aware of the distress brought about the stormy seas of samsara when he addressed Narasimha, an incarnation of Vishnu, in these words:

I am being burnt, in the fire of birth in successive wombs, involving experiences of pleasure and pain of union and separation. In this worldly existence all measures adopted for freedom from sufferings bring new sufferings in their turn.

O Lord! Sages generally concern themselves only with their own salvation. They strive for it in solitude, without any thought for the salvation of others. But I do not desire salvation of myself alone, abandoning all other creatures to their miserable condition.3

Or, as Bhagavan Das and George William Russell (Æ) put it: 
I do not want Moksha for myself alone, but for all.1 
Not alone, not alone would I go to my rest in the heart of the love: 
Were I tranced in the innermost beauty, the flame of its tenderest breath,
 I would still hear the cry of the fallen recalling me back from above, 
To go down to the side of the people, who weep in the shadow of death.2

Specks of dust we may be, still, we should be doing whatever we can for our Brothers and Sisters here and now, regardless of our own weaknesses and misfortunes. 
If Sun thou can’st not be, then be the humble planet.3

Too many rich people in this greedy age forget that the grandest privilege of those who possess the means is that they have the power of alleviating suffering. Too many, again, forget that the sympathies of those who rule the animate world should extend beyond the limits of their own kind.4

Then every song is free from blame, 
Though silence veil her inmost part 
Like the dark centre of the flame, 
Or the hot patience of the heart.5

Unveiled stands truth and looks thee sternly in the face. She says: “Sweet are the fruits of Rest and Liberation for the sake of Self; but sweeter still the fruits of long and bitter duty. Aye, Renunciation for the sake of others, of suffering fellow men.” 6