The Immediate Future and Other Lectures

An excerpt from the beginning. WHEN I chose as the subject for my Sunday lectures this year "The Immediate Future," I felt that some of the subjects were rather far removed from ordinary thought. While such questions as the Growth of a World-Religion, the Coming of a World-Teacher, might without introduction be sufficiently familiar to the Theosophist to be placed before him directly, I felt on the other hand that to the general public, who had not made a study of Theosophical ideas, some kind of introduction was necessary in order to make the more obscure subjects intelligible and rational. And so I thought that in the opening lecture I would try to give a common-sense and rational foundation for the hopes that are spreading so widely within and without the Theosophical Society of to-day; that I would try to show you that these hopes were based on a study of the past as well as on observation of the events of the present; and that our feeling that the world is standing on the threshold of mighty changes is justified by knowledge and is not the mere dream of the enthusiast. In pointing you to the impending physical changes, I want to show you that similar changes have also happened in the past before the other changes which I have classed together as the Growth of a World-Religion, the Coming of a World-Teacher. For just as you may look upon the plan of an architect stretched out before you on a table, may know that part of the building is already completed, that part is still building, that another part is not yet raised above the surface, but that the whole is one building, traced out on a single plan, so you may look at the great plan whose field of evolution is our world. On that world a great drama is played, divided into different acts. In every act the setting is different, but the plot is carefully carried on. And so in the world's story, past, present, and future are all part of the same plan, all filling up some of the great outline, and the present becomes more intelligible and the future more hopeful if we see how it is growing out of a past, if we understand how it is linked with events that have gone before. And so, looking at what is being done to-day amid all the confusion of the building, we may see how, as a matter of fact, the plan is being followed, and may forecast the future because we have caught a glimpse of the whole. Now I only know of two books in which an outline is given of the whole story of evolution from the beginning to its ending on our globe. One in a series of ancient books, repeating very much the same story that has come down from the far past, in India, whose name, Purana, simply means old. There you may read the story of the world with no distinction made, save that of succession, between past and future. Similarly, in H. P. Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine" you may also find an outline of the world's story from beginning to end consecutively traced. Both those come from the same source, from the reports of great seers who have studied the occult records, where there is neither past nor future, but all is looked upon as present. Because they are the work of great seers reading the same records they tell us the same story, though in the one case in ancient and in the other in modern words. The "Secret Doctrine" is less obscure, less difficult to follow, than the Pauranic writings, but both give the same outline; and it is to that outline that for a moment I would direct your attention now. I am conscious that in running over for a few moments that record of the past I may be seeming to give you a somewhat dry and uninteresting history; but if it seem to be dry, if to you it appear uninteresting, it is the fault of the speaker and not of the subject....