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The Inner Government of the World
By Annie Besant
The Method of Evolution; The Building of Man; The Building of Races and Sub-Races; The Manus
FRIENDS:
You will remember that last night we left off, at the point where we were considering the especial Government of our own world, the Occult Hier¬archy as it is called, the Beings composing that having come to our earth in the middle of the third human Race from the planet Shukra (Venus). I pointed out to you that you will find in the Hierarchy the threefold division which is the reflexion of Ishvara Himself in the three aspects in which He reveals Him¬self. Thinking for a moment of the Supreme Brahman, the Brahman with qualities, the Saguna Brahman, we notice that there we had this triple division that reap¬pears all the way down on the Life-side, the Conscious¬ness-side, of beings in the Kosmos, so far as we know anything about it, and presumably it would be found outside our Cosmos in the same way, as the inevitable result of the Unity of the Supreme with His three Aspects, neither more nor less. Then thinking of the Ishvara of a single system, a single solar system like our own, we recognise the same triplicity, and then speaking of the Occult Hierarchy itself, we find that in that Hierarchy also we find the same triplicity. Looking at it for a moment from the outside standpoint, as we sometimes call the personifications, the anthro¬pomorphic Deity, we have in all the Trinities of the religions, just as in the Trimurti here, the recognition of the three Aspects in One. We think of the Brahma, Who creates the universe. We think of the Vishnu, who supports and maintains it. We think of the Mahadeva, the Mighty Being who gives to man that immortal spark of Divinity, which is the source of all evolution in the human race as in the sub-human. So we come to see that it was a natural thing that in the Hierarchy itself - the direct Governors of our world, embodying in that Inner Government of the World the divine qualities - it was natural that we should find this same triple division as we had found it in the larger Cosmos outside. And so I put it to you, that we found in that the Rulers, that we found the Teachers, that we found all the Activities which I summarised under the name of the Forces, remembering that in that word “Forces” we have the spring of all the activ¬ities in the Cosmos outside the ruling and the teaching; so that we may think for a moment of a great picture, as it were, in which as the head of the Rulers there stands the Mahadeva, the One Ruler behind all who exercise the function of rule. So again we may think of the Teachers as distributing to the world the Wis¬dom Aspect, which is incarnate, as it were, in Vishnu, that Wisdom that the Hebrew Scriptures speaks of as “mightily and sweetly ordering all things”. And then in Brahma, Activity, the Third Aspect, activity carried on by all the forces distributed under their own heads, we have the expression of the Love of the Supreme shown in His own manifestation in the emanation of the world. Among the legends and tales in sacred books we find one answer to the question so often heard and so seldom answered: “Why did God emanate, or create, the world?” We find the answer given: “Because the Supreme Love, God, desired to be loved”, and as the lives that came forth from Him were the fragments of His own Life, by that very unity of origin, there was the love to Him from whom they came of the intelligent beings thus emanated. That is only one of the many answers, a beautiful and poetical one, containing a profound truth, that the great mark of the Love of the Deity is shown in His Activity. You will find in the different religions of the world that they all recognise this Activity and Power and Wisdom on the part of the Supreme Lord of the Universe; but some, with regard to the Activity, prefer to call it Love, creation being the great sign of love, looking at it from the standpoint of our¬selves; then the Aspects are called Power, Wisdom and Love. You will find in other religions, as for instance the Greek, the idea that one of the three great qualities of the Deity is Beauty rather than Love. To the Greek Beauty most appealed, so that it struck him as the characteristic of the divine manifestation. And that view of Divinity has been repeated and reiterated by modern science. The more science investigates into the innumerable beings that are the embodiments of the divine Love in our world, the more does science find that Beauty is their inevitable sign of manifesta¬tion. You may go beyond the power of human sight. You may call upon the microscope to help you in study¬ing that which is too minute for the unassisted human eye to see. The higher the power of the microscope the more wondrous is the detail in the manifestation of the Beauty. So that in these invisible objects which no eye of man can see without this mechanical magni¬fying power, you wilt find beautiful forms traced on the surface of the body, living creatures with wonderful forms of curves, angles and lines delicately arranged in admirable perfection, so that when the Greek tells us that “God manifests as Beauty”, we find that manifesta¬tion in His universe bears out well the old Greek idea. It is right that we should not forget that, because in the more modern religion of Christianity, there was a great revolt against this idea of the loveliness of the universe and the beauty of the human body, which was part of the inspiring thought of the Greek world. We find in that view that beauty is a thing that leads man away from God, instead of being the manifestation of His innermost nature. We know that the Puritan idea in the Protestant side of Christianity disliked objects of beauty as temptations, instead of accepting them as the manifestation of the supreme Beauty. On account of this idea of beauty, men lost that side of Divinity characterising all the activities of the Supreme.
Coming to our Hierarchy, divided in this triple fashion, let us pause for a moment on this grouping in order to take it up a little more closely; let us take it up in two words that I have used in speaking of today’s lecture at the end of the subjects that will be treated - the Manus and the Buddhas. The Manus come under the line of Rulers.[1] I want to pause for a moment on this great manifestation of Power or Will. There is very much in your Puranas that throws great light on these more obscure subjects, and because the phrases used have not been always understood, much that was given for the helping and teaching of men has slipped out of the minds of those to whom these great Scriptures were given as a treasure for the helping of the world. There are in all religions, in fact in all the organisations, whether called exactly religions or not, which grew out of the impulse of the Hierarchy, a certain number of symbols, of names and anal¬ogies, which seem to have been utilised by the great Knowers of the past, so that, putting them into the teach¬ing for the helping of the world, that might remain, even when their meaning was forgotten owing to the efflux of time: so that they might remain as witnesses to the depth and the fullness of the original teaching given to the great Aryan Race; so that in the later days there might be one more witness of the ancient knowledge. Thus they might see that all through the millennia of their history, that knowledge was really imbedded in their sacred books, and that they had their witnesses ever ready to come forward into the light, when the evolution of that Race, having gone forward from the time when as children it learnt from its teachers, as in its youth and young maturity it threw away much of the knowledge, as then, growing into maturer manhood, it should regain the knowledge of the past, and realise that there was the whole trend of its evolution, that throughout the whole of it that teaching remained from its early days. We find, then, in the Puranas that name that I mentioned yesterday as connected with this first great group of Rulers, the name of the four Kumaras. There is not very much said about Them. Not many explanations are given. But they are spoken of as “the Four”, the “One and the Three”. He who is spoken of as the Eldest among Those - as to whom time may be said only to be a name, for They are beyond its illusions - He is called Sanat Kumara, the Eternal, the Ancient; in later days He is thought of as the Eldest, but it is better to think of Him as the Eternal, to whom and in whom time is not.
Time is but one of the ways in which the limited con¬sciousness tries to measure by itself, in order to gain more clarity in its thought, tries to measure out intervals by which and in which it is able to think; for the order in time is only a succession of the true measure of time in moods of consciousness, not the movement of the Sun, the Moon and the Stars. These are only adopted by the human mind in order that they may have a fixed measure, but one to which the truth does not correspond. And so we have this idea of the Eternal, who is beyond time, and to whom all succession is simultaneity, who is sometimes spoken of as the “Eternal Now”. Their conception is one. We have to try, however feebly, to grasp it with this limited consciousness of ours, which speaks of a past, a present and a future. It is not real¬ised that there is a possibility of the whole three being really simultaneous, and mutually affecting each other, the future affecting the past, as the past is said also to influence the future. But that is a thing more for us to think out for ourselves in contemplation than to try to explain to each other. Our language, which has been founded on the very idea of succession, cannot express in any intelligible fashion that where succession is not. And the Eternal is the only word we have practically, which conveys, however dimly, however poorly, that great thought of “Now”. So that that word Eternal is never to be confused with everlasting, Remember that word is the word rightly given to that great Being beyond our knowing, who is spoken of in the Puranas as the Eldest Kumara, the great Being we call Sanat Kumara, The Eternal. Then the Three who are with Him, dwellers in that mystic City of Sham-balla, the White Island Youth, are the remaining Kumaras, called the Pupils of Him who is the Head of the Inner Government of our World.
H.P.B. speaks of the Three, and of Their name derived from Buddhism, which speaks of Them as the Pratyeka Buddhas, the “Solitary Buddhas”. It is not at all a good name; it is a name which has been given a con¬notation wholly inapplicable to that great height of super-human existence. But They are given the name, be¬cause the word Buddha has been applied specially to the Supreme Teacher. And because They did not teach, Their work being that of the Rulers and not of the Teachers, men in their blindness, dimly groping after the fact of this great existence, spoken of Them as solitary Buddhas - alone, isolated, and even went so far as to apply to them the monstrous adjective “selfish”. So foolish, so childish, are human beings in trying to judge of Lives so far exalted beyond their own. The Secret Doctrine uses the phrase: “Higher than the Three is only One, in Heaven and in Earth”. Many students wonder what the phrase means. H.P.B. often took her words from statements made by Hindu and Buddhist friends. It was simple enough in reading of the Four Kumaras, that They were the Heads of all power and Rulers in our world, to realise that we were really face to face with the Mighty Four at the head of the Group of Rulers, and the Three and One is only the obvious division between the Head and the Three who come next to Him in the Inner Government of the World.
Leaving those Four and coming, as it were, down¬wards, we then come to the great sub-group of the Manus. They come nearer to our possibility of under¬standing. Their work is very clearly laid down. They are specially related to the evolution of Races. Wherever a great Race is to be born into the world - Root-Race we call it because so many sub-races spring from it - ¬then we see a Manu at work. The two with whom we are chiefly concerned at the present stage of the evolution of our globe, are the Manu of the Fourth Race and the Manu of the Fifth Race. There is only one Manu to a Race. We have to remember that from the beginning. There are certain great Beings marked out in the Occult Hierarchy who are to be the Fathers of the Races. As I said, the two with whom we are now most concerned are the Manu of the Fifth and Fourth Races. Vaivasvata Manu, as you know, is the Manu of the Fifth, or the great Aryan Root-Race, that Race which is sometimes spoken of as the “Sons of Manu”. You have for instance the stotras which specially speak of the sons of Manu because there is this peculiarity about the work of a Manu, that the whole of the Root¬-Race takes origin in him. He is literally the Father of His Race. About the very early days of the fourth Root-Race we do not know as much as we do about the early days of the Fifth. We only know of a great Being spoken of generally as the Manu of the Fourth Race, and as still charged with the care of the larger part of the population of the globe. He looks after those hundreds of millions of Asiatic peoples, of whom the chief are the Chinese and the Japanese, the Japanese comparatively small in number, but great in develop¬ment and in power. The Japanese caught hold of western ideas, sucked them dry, and then threw them away again, having utilised all that was useful for them¬selves in those ideas, and every one that they accepted they stamped with their own mark, just as you might stamp coin made of gold from any mint. If you want to coin it, you send it to the mint, and have it stamped with the image of your own Nation. So the Japanese have done with western thought and organisation. They, under the direction of their Manu, the impulse that He sent to them through their earthly ruler sent all over the western world numbers of their cleverest men, sent them on a great mission to the West, to learn how they managed their affairs, how they organised, and how they worked. They travelled far and wide in the world, looked into the ways of all Nations, their industry, their education, their political institutions, and all other things that make up the outer life of a Nation, and they came back to Japan, just as they picked up the outer things, such as the European clothes; instead of their own beautiful garments. I remember talking to Mr. Swinburne one day, the great poet in England. He has a quaint way of speaking - slow and drawling. He said in this kind of dreamy drawling way: “There is only one thing that God on the Day of Judgment will never forgive the Japanese”. I said in answer: “What is that, Mr. Swinburne?” because I knew he did not believe in the Day of Judgment. I rather wondered what he was driving at. He half shut his eyes in the queer dreamy way that I have just mentioned, and spoke of the Japanese adoption of the western dress. Swinburne was a great lover of beauty. The thing that disgusted him in the new Japanese civilisa¬tion was this phase of it. They put aside their own beautiful men’s and women’s dress, and dressed in the fashion of Paris, which made them ugly instead of beautiful. He was very much disgusted with them. There was a truth in his quaint remark, because persis¬tence in that would have denationalised the Japanese, and they would have no longer struck their own note in the chord of the music of the world. But they soon threw aside all that outside folly, and utilised what they had learnt in the West. The Chinese having learnt less, being a people too self-contained, too shut off from the rest of the world, were not ready for the work which was then wanted, which was the saving of the eastern ideals. This was assigned to Japan, because India - which was the heart and home of eastern ideals, from whom the Japanese had learnt their eastern thought, their eastern beauty - because India was then at the moment of her greatest peril, which now, thank God, has passed away, when there was the danger that she would become westernised, taking the outer appearance instead of anything which was valuable in western thought and culture. Then her young graduates were more proud of their knowledge of Spencer and Huxley than of the knowledge of their own maturer philosophers and scientists; then there was the danger that Indian religion, that sublime faith of Hinduism, given to the Root-stock of the Aryan Race for the help¬ing of the whole world, that that should be looked on as childish babblings; when that moment came, it was the only moment that really threatened her true life. It was not menaced by the dangers through which she has passed. She has had many invasions, she has had partial conquests, she has had many foreigners coming within her borders; but she has conquered and assimilated them all, no matter how they came, or she cast them aside. You all know that the Greeks came and went away, but they have left India richer for the traces of the art that they had imprinted on hers. The Musal¬mans came and conquered parts of India, but they were assimilated, and today are Indians by right of a thousand years of residence. None of these was a danger to India, for India was stronger than they. It was only when she began to be really westernised that the moment of her peril came; in the other cases she had taken advantage of her conquerors, had remained herself and added something from them to her own great National wealth. But in this case she was trying, as it were, unconsciously, to change her very life, to take western ideals instead of eastern, to follow western customs instead of eastern, to look to western teachings instead of to eastern, in a word to denationalise herself, losing her hold on the treasures for which she was the trustee for humanity, instead of only taking whatever was valuable and incorporating it into her own system. In that hour of peril her Manu came to save her from that which would have made her cease to be a Nation, she, eldest but one of all living Nations. Just then Theosophy was sent to her, sent to make Hindus realise that they had a treasure, and that it was from the Hindus that the rest had learnt, There was resentment in many quarters about this and especially one writer, Sir Valentine Chirol, said that Indians were being taught by western people that their religion was the greatest in the world, and that they were the teachers of religion, and not learners of religion from the West. Then it was that, in that moment of peril, our Manu could not find in the Indian people a people who could guard their own ideals from being submerged under the flowing tide of western civilisation. So he turned to his Brother Manu, who had the Chinese and the Japanese in His charge, and - ¬because China was not ready for the work, China was isolated, China was untrained, China was lacking in power and adaptability - He turned to that smaller Nation, the Japanese, inspired them with His Life, stimulated them with His Power, and then flung them against the western Russian people and made them conquerors, in order that eastern ideals might be saved through them, and preserved for the future helping of the world. You do not look on wars as you should, as you would do if you read your own Puranas. You look on them as due to one Nation coveting the land of another, one Nation desiring to dominate over another. I am asking you to look behind the outer governors to the Inner Governors of the World, the Rulers who balance the various developments in the world one against the other, in order that nothing that is precious shall be lost, in order that every gain shall be preserved, and gradually, East and West, North and South, shall all contribute to the perfect humanity of the days that are yet unborn, and make that mighty Federation of the World, of which the poor League of Nations is a beginning in the ideal world, which shall yet be realised in the world of men, and become the Great Peace with the blessing of the Supreme upon it. So the Fourth Race Manu did that piece of work for the Fifth Race.
There is one thing which you may as well remember, which is a very interesting sidelight which shows that all the planets of our solar system are linked together in successive evolutions. They are not all of the same age, they are all evolving, but one is behind the other, one is younger, one older than the other. And so from the great Kosmic Hierarchy which sends forth the Guides for the whole system, as on the first planet humanity grew up to the stage where the Inner Government of the world was wanted, that originally had to be supplied from the reservoir, and that reservoir was Ishvara Himself. From planet to planet an Heir to the Crown of the Ruler is handed on, and as an older planet develops more and more, and its humanity grows higher and higher, some of that humanity pass on into the Occult Hierarchy, and there are evolved and disciplined; and thus some are always ready, in every step of the rank of that Hierarchy, to pass over to another planet when that other planet is evolving its humanity, just as the Sons of the Fire came to us in the middle of the Third Root-Race. So also in our turn our world has sent the Heads of another Hierarchy to the next planet in the order of evolving human¬kind. And Those who came in that wonderful wave, Themselves to be the Rulers of our planet, are not to be thought of as though They were Themselves Gods, mighty as They are. A passage was mentioned to me today by our General Secretary, in a commentary written by Goswami, a disciple of Chaitanya of Bengal one of the minor avataras. He speaks of these Kumaras as not being Ishvaras, but Aishvarik, not Themselves Gods, but divine in Their nature, not yet Kings, but of the blood royal, as one might say. But in the evolu-tion of human-kind, the Elders, as we hereafter shall come to be, as we climb up that long, long ladder of evolution, become a glorified humanity, a Divine Humanity, into whose hands may safely be trusted the governing of a world.
Just as we find the group of Manus Themselves looking after the Races by which mankind evolves, so do we find that all the great catastrophes, the seismic catastrophes in our globe, are under the rule of these Four Highest, who appoint the time and the seasons when these tremendous changes shall take place. So with every new Root-Race there comes a change in the configuration of the globe, of the disposition of land and water. Our Third Race began in what the scientists call Lemuria. That was a great continent stretching through what we now call the island of Ceylon southwards to the Pacific, when the Hima¬layas were washed by the great waves of Pacific seas, and the Indian Peninsula had not emerged. Then Lemuria was stretching where the Pacific now is, and Australia is the end of the land before you come to the southern Pole. Australia and New Zealand both belong to this ancient continent, destroyed by earthquake, by fire and by flood. And then the Third Race gradually dwindled and dwindled, although some remains are still left. Another great continent arose as Lemuria was broken up, right over in the West, where the Atlantic is. That is called the continent of Atlantis, where the Atlantic is now rolling. On that continent was the great city, the capital of a mighty Empire, the City of the Golden Gate, men¬tioned in the Chinese Classic of Purity. That City was the centre of Atlantean power, and there grew up the Atlantean Toltec Empire. They spread as far as Northern Africa to ancient Egypt. Turning westward we find an Empire where Mexico now is and the North and South American Indians belong to that ancient Race. You may still read in Plato how the remains of that continent were submerged, and the great civilisation which he mentions, that was on the last fragment of Atlantis itself. Now when they sound the depths of the Atlantic, they find hill¬tops and valleys; some islands are left, some of the highest peaks are now islands, like the Canary Islands, just as you have here, where the great stretch of the Lemurian continent existed, Java, the East Indies Islands, the Spice Islands and so on, that are dotted over the Pacific. Atlantis was the land of the Fourth Race. Myriads upon myriads of that Race perished in the mighty cataclysm and went down beneath the flood. But one part in Asia was left. North of the Himalayas a large stretch of land formed part of the ancient Atlantis. The sacred City of Shamballa, the imperishable, is there.
Now disturbances are beginning to take place in the Pacific again, where the next great continent is to arise. There you find the “earthquake ring” that science talks about as a source of danger to the present world. From the submarine volcanos there are flung, through the mass of the water above them, great eruptions of earth and minerals of all kinds, piling up great peaks as they force their way. Then an island appears. Where there was no island before an island appears, and the charts that the captains have do not show those islands. Sometimes ships are wrecked for lack of that knowledge. Not very long ago the British Association in its Geographical Section discussed this building up of a new land, spoke of the dangers that would come, of the possibility of one tremendous eruption that should dash the ocean into great tidal waves, sweeping across the United States, drowning all the people. They spoke of a world catastrophe in which humanity might perish. When they talked in that panic-stricken way, well-read Hindus and well-read Theosophists smiled to them¬selves; for they said: “Continents have been destroyed before, and humanity did not perish. This new continent we now hear about is mentioned in the Puranas. Its name is given to it, and the race that will live upon it is a race unborn. Why should we be afraid? Humanity has survived these catastrophes before and will survive them again. And a seventh continent will come, the last continent of this phase of the evolution of our globe. There are hundreds of thousands of years before that will happen, pro¬bably hundreds of thousands of years before the sixth continent will be ready for its children, and those tremendous catastrophes that change the whole surface of the world in its configuration, those are the work of the Great Kumaras, the Supreme Rulers in the Inner Government of our World. Under Their direction the Manus work.” I shall try to put before you tomorrow how the plan of all these changes is known to the Head of the Occult Hierarchy, and how sections of it are distributed among those who have to carry them out in detail. Into that I will not go today.
The Manus, then, are those who build up Races, and the plan of evolution is to build up successive Races, Root-Races, characterised by particular qualities that are wanted in humanity. If you look at the constitution of your own body you have a picture of the evolution of the Races. You have a physical body. That was the first to be gradually evolved through the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms into savage mind-less men. Then you know that that physical body shows out two subdivisions, sthula, dense, and sukshma, etheric. The first two Races evolved these, and the Third built the human form; with lower astral and germinal mental by its middle stage. These were linked to the higher three, and man was embryonically complete. You find all this in your own teachings. You ought to know it better than I do. Those, how¬ever, were only known to the learned and slipped out of the minds of the people. There is a very simple reason for this. That is, that the old way of teaching was very different from the modern. When we begin to teach a subject, we try to get a grasp of the whole subject, and we try to present it to those we are teaching in a clear form. That is the modern way of teaching. It makes people rather lazy, because too much is done for them, and the result is that the memory is very much more, and the reasoning much less exercised than they ought .severally to be. The teachers take all the trouble, and present an already cooked and digested teaching to save the pupils from the trouble of exercising their mental faculties. So that they have quite a large amount of second-hand knowledge and very little first-hand knowledge.
The old ways were different. The teacher came along, threw one great truth to his pupils and said: “Go and think about it”. The result is that in the eastern books you do not get a clear presentment of a doctrine as a whole. It is scattered over the books. A careful student can gather the whole teachings. But he has not now the patience and industry required for the task. In the old days men had to work out results; so they grew into great thinkers, because they exercised their minds. Hence it is very difficult for the Hindu to find out the details of the teachings of his religion in this enormous library, this immense encyclopaedia of the Shastras. Hence the convenience of Theosophy, which gives way to human weakness in modern days and which presents all those teachings in a form which is very easy to grasp. Theosophy accommodates itself to the ways of the present day. It gives you in a more scientific form those great teachings given to the Root¬stock. When you read the Puranas after studying the Theosophical books, you will find them full of informa¬tion, crowded with information, and the opinion that you held that they were all childish vapourings dis¬appears. You will find they give the most valuable teachings. That is almost the only outer use of Theo¬sophy to the instructed Hindus.
Under these conditions, then, you find how your Manu works. You find named in the Puranas the seven different continents and the Races that inhabit them. We are now on the fifth continent. Do not think of continents in the way geographical people use the word, because it here means the whole land surface of the globe as distinct from the water. So you have your Fifth Race continent, and the sixth continent is beginning to come up in the Pacific. Now there is one interesting point we come to. The Manu is not only busy in developing a great Race, but He picked the families of His Race ages ago out of the fifth sub-race of the Atlantean people. Every Root-Race sends out sub-races like branches of a tree. He picked his people out of the fifth sub-race of the Fourth Root¬-Race. He led them by the Sahara, then a sea, to Egypt and on into Arabia. After a long stay, He took them across Mesopotamia up into Northern Asia, and then a little again downwards, and settled them near the White Island. Later, after many troubles and massacres, He settled them round the White Island in the City of the Bridge. A long journey, because all the time He was working to improve the type that He had selected. Now taking the Fourth and Fifth Races you will find the Fourth Race predominantly emotional and passional. If you take the fourth and the fifth sub-races you will be able to see exactly what is meant by that. Your Root-Stock sent out west¬wards four great groups of emigrants, each of a some¬what different type. Your own Root-Stock had ultimately to come down from Central Asia to India, and is spoken of as the first sub-race. Before that the second sub-race, the first emigration, went along the borders of Mesopotamia into ancient Egypt, and along Northern Africa and the Islands of the Mediterranean. They left a very fine civilisation behind them, which decayed away, but in Egypt and in the Island of Crete you find traces of it. The remains in Crete, the story of which was regarded as mythical, showed traces of a greatness which was regarded with wonder by the white people of the nineteenth century. The third sub-race, or second emigration, went to Persia and founded the great Persian Empire. The fourth sub-¬race, or third emigration, went westward over the Caucasus into Europe, and they are represented by the Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, the French and the Irish. Kelt is their general name. The fifth sub-race, or fourth emigration, went more to the north, and originated Slavs and Germans, with many sub-divisions. Taking the two last, you will see the difference between the sub-races. All those that I have mentioned to you as belonging to the fourth sub-race are emotional people. The reason why England and Ireland cannot get on together is because England belongs to the Teutonic sub-race, in which the concrete mind is most developed, while the Kelts (the Irish are Kelts) belong to the fourth sub-race and emotion is strong in them. Neither of them is to be blamed for the fact that they cannot pull on together, because the Irish are a Keltic people, except those in the North who were emigrants, and they are moved by their emotions. If you want to move the Irish, you have to appeal to their higher emotions, and then you can do anything in the world with the Irish race. If you appeal to them with cold logic, it leaves them cold and uninfluenced, and very often they get very angry. Because the English are not imaginative enough to understand them, because in them the concrete scientific mind is the dominant thing, they can never understand an emotional impulsive people. So they try to keep them by force. There is the explana¬tion of the endless feuds. They have not the common sense to rule people according to their own type, and not according to a different type. The fifth sub-race people have strength of mind and high intellect. You have in the Root-Stock, the germs of all the various qualities of Fifth Race mankind, embodied and balanced in your Root-Race, and these had to be developed one after another - those great qualities and capacities; and so the sub-races were dominated by one of these chiefly, and had to develop that very strongly for the final enriching of humanity as a whole. Thus you have the capacity to develop along those lines and assi¬milate them together. That is one part of India’s great mission towards humanity in the world. The germs of all these sub-races are in her, as the child is in the womb of the mother, and the sub-race comes forth, develops that as a new sub-race and then reacts upon the Mother. And so your children, spread over the whole western world, are developing their qualities, especially the quality that dominates each. And the fourth is there with its mission of beauty, and the fifth is there with its mission of mind, and both can find their key in you from whom they spring, and to whom many of them come back in order to help in the building up of the type of the whole Fifth Race. I cannot go far into that. The whole subject is of profound interest. If you realise that evolution in the sub-races is for the enriching of the typical Fifth Race Man, then you will understand a little more of the way in which migrations go out and some of each come back to the Motherland, and how India is the common Motherland of the whole Aryan, or Fifth, Race. The sixth sub-race is only now being born. And the seventh is still on the far, far-off horizon of the future. The sixth sub-race will give birth to the Sixth Root-Race in the future. It will develop some of the qualities of Buddhi, that spiritual intuition which illuminates the intellect. That will be the characteristic of the sub-race, and, in fuller development, of the Sixth Root-¬Race; for which the continent is to prepare itself through thousands of years yet unborn. Evolution goes on in this regular way: a Race embodying the germs of several special qualities; a sub-race developing specially one of these, dominating the other qualities, which are also necessary in the man, as I said, separated for that purpose. And so you gradually come to realise how mankind evolves, how all these Races and sub-races are needed, and how every one of them has its place in the ultimate perfect humanity which shall evolve on our globe; how all these antagonisms are to be outgrown, all these prejudices are to be eliminated, and when sub-races are thrown together in anta¬gonism or in friendship, they are thrown together by the Inner Government of the world, in order that they may begin to assimilate each other. Every antipathy grows out of ignorance, and the less you know of a people the more you are prejudiced against them, when you come across them. They are develop¬ing one side of a quality, while you are developing another side. You are thrown together to get rid of prejudice and narrowness, and the Motherland has been the melting pot of all these sub-races. They all keep coming here, some go away again and some remain. You have the fourth sub-race people here, the Portu¬guese, the French. You have had in the old days the Greeks. You had the fifth sub-race people, the Dutch and the English. They have come and will go, each giving something and having made a little tie between the Nations, which gradually will grow stronger and stronger, if we follow the impulse of the Inner Rulers, and do not fling against each the racial hatred that destroys.
It is a very practical subject. The more you know it, the more you realise how practical it is.
The whole unrest and trouble of the world today are the marks of the transition period through which we are passing, where one civilisation is beginning to pass away, where another civilisation is getting ready to be born, and where you, the Heart of the World, the Mother of the great Aryan Race, whose children are scattered everywhere, have its immediate fate in your hands; you will decide whether evolution shall go onwards and upwards, or be thrown backwards for centuries to come. The Great Work cannot stop. The evolution of humanity must inevitably proceed; but it can proceed either by destruction of what is already existing and beginning again at the very beginning of civilisation; or, for the first time in the history of our Races, it may begin by gradual transition into a higher and nobler condition, if the Sons of the Fire can gain full Victory over the Brothers of the Shadow.
