Gottfried de Purucker – USA
We speak of rendering homage. There are various ways of so doing. There is the homage of words, and there is the homage of the heart which leads to emulation. The homage of words is good when the heart is behind it; but the homage imitating grand action is finer and higher still.
I think the best homage we can render to H. P. Blavatsky, outside of the words with which we express our deep gratitude, is by copying her, copying her life and her work for mankind: being as like unto the example she gave to us as it is possible for us to be. She indeed said the same in regard to her relation to her own teachers: they teach, I follow. My message is not my own, but of those who sent me.
In the Theosophical world since her passing there has been no small amount of talk about the successors of H.P.B.; and all this has seemed to me to be so perfectly trivial, a trifling with words and with the most sacred instincts and impulses of the human heart. For every true Theosophist is a successor of H.P.B. and should be glad of it and proud of it. We are all successors of H.P.B., every one of us without exception whatsoever. And the least is often the greatest amongst us. Here is a case where it is not conceit or arrogance but the impulse of a loving and grateful heart to come to the front and serve, and dedicate one's service to the cause which our teachers have served and which they still serve. What is grander than this? Actually it is the abdication, the rejection, of the low and the personal. It is the forgetting of the personal and the sinking of the self into the immensely greater self of the universe. When we forget ourselves, then something supremely grand is born in us; for then the spiritual, of which we humans are such feeble examples, has a chance to come forth in us, to speak and to work in and through us, because then it begins to find its channel in and through the human heart and mind.
It has always seemed to me that H. P. Blavatsky's great work was to ensoul men—words which are profound and very meaningful; to give men and women a philosophy-religion-science which should so mightily persuade both mind and heart that they would come to realize that the universe is alive and conscious, and that we, her children, perforce and from that fact, are alive and conscious also, and are coeternal, coeval with the universe, from which we come, in which we live, and into the spiritual parts of which we shall again return.
When you get this simple thought in your heads and in your hearts so that it amounts to a conviction within, you are already becoming reensouled. The soul, nay rather, the spirit within you, is beginning to take command of you, and from that moment your lives will be changed. New and grand vistas will open to your vision, vistas which your intellect and your intuition will show you are realities, and you will begin to govern your life in accordance with the living, flaming thoughts that will thereafter make their shrine in your hearts. You will begin then really to live. You will no longer be what Pythagoras called the "living dead"—those alive in their bodies and relatively unconscious in their souls. You will then actually be embodied souls. This to me has always been one of the loftiest and most beautiful parts of H. P. Blavatsky's work that she came to inaugurate: to ensoul men so that they might live anew with the vision glorious and with eternal hope.
No man will act against the dominating impulse within him. Let him change that dominating impulse from self-seeking interests to altruistic service for all, and life will take on a grandeur that up to that moment he had never seen or understood. Such a man is becoming truly ensouled. He sees the reason for his life. He sees the reason for the universe around him. He sees the reason for his own thoughts. He understands causal relations and effectual consequences. He sees vast and utterly grandiose visions opening before his mind's eye; and he knows that all he has to do in order to attain still greater vistas, and to be of greater service, is to put the strength of his intellect in these intuitions and lofty feelings, center his power of action upon them and thus grow in ever enlarging stages of inner grandeur and inner understanding. His life will then have changed because he will have changed. He will have been awakened; and he will then so rule his life and coordinate it to the life of the universe around him and to the lives of his fellow human beings, that universal brotherhood will be his first instinct and the controlling impulse in both his thought and action. This to me is the essence of the message of H. P. Blavatsky.
[from Wind of the Spirit, Theosophical University Press Online Edition]
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/wind/ws-04.htm#essence
