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A Treatise on White Magic - Rule Fifteen - A Call to Service
But if true impersonality is cultivated, if the power to stand steady is developed, if every situation is handled in a spirit of love and if there is a refusal to take hasty action and to permit separation to creep in, then there will be the growth of a group of true servers, and the gathering out of those who can materialize the plan and bring to birth the new age and its attendant wonders. To do this, there must be courage of the rarest kind. Fear holds the world in thrall, and no one is exempt from influence. For the aspirant and for the disciple there are two kinds of fear which require to be especially considered. The fears that we dealt with in the earlier part of the treatise, and the fears that are inherent, as you know, in existence itself are familiar to all of us. They have their root in the instinctual nature (economic fears, fears arising out of the sex life, physical fear and terror, fear of the unknown, with that dominating fear of death which colors so many lives) and have been the subject of much psychological investigation. With them I do not seek to deal. They are to be overcome by the life of the soul as it permeates and transforms the daily life [626] and by the refusal of the aspirant to accord them any recognition. The first method builds towards future strength of character, and prevents the coming in of any new fears. They cannot exist when the soul is consciously controlling life and its situations. The second negatives the old thought forms and brings about eventually their destruction through lack of nourishment. A dual process is therefore carried forward, producing a genuine manifestation of the qualities of the spiritual man and a growing freedom from the thralldom of age-old fear concepts. The student finds himself becoming steadily detached from the prime governing instincts which have hitherto served to weld him into the general scheme of the elementary planetary life. It might be valuable here to point out that all the major instincts have their roots in that peculiar quality of the planetary life, - fear reactions, leading to activity of some kind. As you know the psychologists list five main and dominant instincts, and we will very briefly touch upon them. The instinct of self-preservation has its root in an innate fear of death; through the presence of this fear, the race has fought its way to its present point of longevity and endurance. The sciences which concern themselves with the preservation of life, the medical knowledge of the day, and the achievements of civilized comfort have all grown out of this basic fear. All has tended to the persistence of the individual, and to his preserved condition of being. Humanity persists, as a race and as a kingdom in nature, as a result of this fear tendency, this instinctual reaction of the human unit to self-perpetuation. The instinct of sex has its main root in the fear of separateness and of isolation, and in a revolt against separative unity on the physical plane, against aloneness; and it has resulted in the carrying forward of the race and [627] the persistence and propagation of the forms through which the race can come into manifestation. The herd instinct can easily be seen to have its root in a similar reaction; for the sense of safety and for convinced assured security - based on numerical aggregations - men have always sought their own kind and herded themselves together for defense and for economic stability. Out of this instinctual reaction of the race as whole, our modern civilization is the result; its vast centers, its huge cities and its massed tenements have merged, and we have modern herding, carried to the nth degree. The fourth great instinct, that of self-assertion, is also based on fear; it connotes the fear of the individual that he will fail of recognition and thus lose much that would otherwise be his. As time has progressed, the selfishness of the race has thus grown; its sense of acquisitiveness has developed and the power to grasp has emerged (the "will to power" in some form or another) until today we have the intense individualism and the positive sense of importance which have produced much of the modern economic and national troubles. We have fostered self-determination, self-assertion and self-interest until we are presented with a well-nigh insuperable problem. But out of it all, much good has come and will come, or no individual is of value until he realizes that value for himself, and then with definiteness sacrifices the acquired values for the good of the whole. The instinct to enquire in its turn is based on fear of he unknown, but out of this fear has emerged - as a result of agelong enquiry - our present educational and cultural systems and the entire structure of scientific investigation.
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