Stand Ready to Abandon All Learned with the Head

Julia Wharton Keightley · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 12 pages

A twelve-page compilation attributed to Julia Wharton Keightley, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts. The running head states the movement it describes: turn inward from head-learning to soul wisdom.

The opening concern is not doctrine but style, and it bears directly on why a library like this one exists: that in order to reach the wider public, theosophical literature should be couched in simple, unpretentious language that anyone can understand. Two instructions to the reader follow. The first is that whoever thirsts after spiritual truths should learn how to read between the lines. The second is more demanding — not to believe what is read or heard regardless of the authority of the teacher, but to believe only when the writing or saying is corroborated by one's own reason and consciousness, and thereafter to act accordingly. The true disciple is then described as humble and self-effacing, unnoticed by the man in the street, and what may look to others like mere ethics is said to be, for him, instruction in boundless devotion to humanity and to all creatures great and small. The numbered sections take the argument further. The first asks the reader to seek darkness with the lamp of faith, faith being called an aspiration and a desire with hope and charity for sisters, and true faith able to blossom only from the realisation that All is One. The second gives the injunction of the title, on the ground that head-learning is false learning and as perishable as the body, while soul-wisdom alone is immortal — with the observation that at every new period of his inner life a new self rises within the disciple.

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