Past and Future Are Here and Now

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 21 pages

Twenty-one pages with an abstract and train of thoughts, opened by a statement of what theosophy is that could stand as the motto of the whole library: brotherly love, mutual help, altruism in action, and unswerving devotion to truth — with the promise that once men realise true happiness is found in these alone, and never in wealth, possessions or selfish gratification, the dark clouds will roll away and a new humanity will be born upon earth.

The doctrinal claim the file makes is compressed into one sentence: we shall become what we already have been, and we shall thus gain what we have formerly lost. That is the cyclic view applied to the individual rather than to civilisations — the idea that spiritual progress is a recovery rather than an acquisition, which is what the Third Proposition means by the pilgrimage of the soul. Against it the file sets a survey of its own century, and the survey is angry. Ours, she writes, is a boastful age, as proud as it is hypocritical and as cruel as it is dissembling; there are more hypocrites in a square yard of our civilised soil than antiquity bred on all its idolatrous lands. The observation about honesty that follows has kept its force: it takes a brave man to speak the truth fearlessly, and even then at personal risk and cost, for the law forbids one to speak the truth except under compulsion in its courts. Between the two moods stands the sentence that holds the file together and gives it its tone — 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.

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