Kenneth Morris - The Crest-Wave of Evolution: A Course of Lectures in History, Given in the Raja-Yoga College, 1918-1919

These lectures will not be concerned with history as a recordof wars and political changes; they will have little to tellof battles, murders, and sudden deaths. Instead, we shalltry to discover and throw light on the cyclic movements ofthe Human Spirit. Back of all phenomena, or the outward showof things, there is always a noumenon in the unseen. Behindthe phenomena of human history, the noumenon is the HumanSpirit, moving in accordance with its own necessities andcyclic laws. We may, if we go to it intelligently, gain someinkling of knowledge as to what those laws are; and I thinkthat would be, in its way, a real wisdom, and worth getting.But for the most part historical study seeks knowledge only;and how it attains its aim, is shown by the falseness of whatpasses for history. In most textbooks you shall find, probably,a round dozen of lies on as many pages. And these in themselvesare fruitful seeds of evil; they by no means end with thetelling, but go on producing harvests of wrong life; whichindeed is only the Lie incarnate on the plane of action. TheEternal Right Thing is what is called in Sanskrit SAT, theTrue; it opposite is the Lie, in one fashion or another, always;and what we have to do, our mission and raison d'etre asstudents of Theosophy, is to put down the Lie at every turn,and chase it, as far as we may, out of the field of life.

For example, there is the Superior-Race Lie: I do not knowwhere it shall not be found. Races A, B, C, and D go onpreaching it for centuries; each with an eye to its sublimeself. In all countries, perhaps, history is taught with thatlie for mental background. Then we wonder that there are wars.But Theosophy is called onto provide a true mental backgroundfor historical study; and it alone can do so. It is themission of Point Loma, among many other things, to float atrue philosophy of history on to the currents of world-thought:and for this end it is our business to be thinkers, using thedivine Manasic light within us to some purpose. H.P. Blavatskysupplied something much greater than a dogma: shelike Platogave the world a method and a spur to thought: pointed forit a direction, which following, it might solve all problemsand heal the wounds of the ages.

A false and foolish notion in the western world has been,tacitly to accept the Greeks and Hebrews of old for the twofountains of all culture since; the one in secular matter,the other in religion and morality. Of the Hebrews nothingneed be said here; but that true religion and morality havetheir source in the ever-living Human Spirit, not in any sect,creed, race, age, or bible. I doubt there has been any newdiscovery in ethics since man was man; or rather, all discoverieshave been made by individuals for themselves; and each, havingdiscovered anything, has found that that same principle wasdiscovered a thousand times before, and written a thousand times. There is no platitude so platitudinous, but it remains to burstupon the perceptions of all who have not yet perceived it, as anew and burning truth; and on the other hand, there is nostartling command to purity or compassion, that has not beengiven out by Teachers since the world began.As for Greece,there was a brilliant flaming up of the Spirit there in theFourth and Fifth Centuries B.C.; and its intensity, like thelights of an approaching automobile, rather obscures what liesbeyond. It is the first of which we have much knowledge; so wethink it was the first of all. But in fact civilization has beentraveling its cyclic path all the time, all these millions ofyears; and there have been hundreds of ancient great empires andcultural epochs even in Europe of which we know nothing.

I had intended to begin with Greece; but these unexplored erasof old Europe are too attractive, and this first lecture must goto them, or some of them. Not to the antecedents of Greece, inCrete and elsewhere; but to the undiscovered North; and inparticular to the Celtic peoples; who may serve us as an exampleby means of which light may be thrown on the question of racialgrowth, and on the racial cycles generally.

The Celtic Empire of old Europe affects us like some mysteriousundiscovered planet. We know it was there by its effects onother peoples. Also, like many other forgotten histories, it hasleft indications of its achievement in a certain spirit, anuplift, the breath of an old traditional grandeur that has comedown. But to give any historical account of itto get atelescope that will reach and reveal itwe have not to come tothat point yet.

Still, it may be allowed us to experiment with all sorts ofglasses. To penetrate that gloom of ancient Europe may be quitebeyond us; but guessing is permitted. Now the true art ofguessing lies in an intuition for guiding indications. There issomething in us that knows things directly; and it may deign attimes to give hints, to direct the researches, to flash somelittle light on that part of us which works and is conscious inthis world, and which we call our brain-minds. So althoughmost or all of what I am going to say would be called by thescientific strictly empirical, fantastic and foolish, yet I shallventure; aware that their Aristotelio-Baconian method quitebreaks down when it comes to such a search into the unknown; andthat this guessing, guided by what seems to be a law, would not,perhaps, have been sneered at by Plato.

Guided by what seems to be a law;guided, at any rate, by theknowledge that there are laws; that "God geometrizes," as Platosays: that which is within flows outward upon a design; thatlife precipitates itself through human affairs as it does throughthe forms of the crystals; that there is nothing more haphazardabout the sequence of empires and civilizations, than there isabout the unfolding of petals of a flower. In both cases it isthe eternal rhythm, the Poetry of the Infinite, that manifests;our business is to listen so carefully as to hear, and apprehendthe fact that what we hear is a poetry, a vast music, not achaotic cacophony: catch the rhythmsperceive that there is adesigneven if it takes us long to discover what the designmay be.

You know Plato's idea that the world is a dodecahedron ortwelve-sided figure. Now in Plato's day, much that everyschoolboy knows now, was esotericknown only to the initiated.So I think Plato would have known well enough that this physicalearth is round; and that what he meant when he spoke of thedodecahedron, was something else. This, for example: that onthe plane of causesthis outer plane being that of effectsthere are twelve (geographical) centers, aspects, foci,facets, or what you like to call them: twelve laya centers,as I think the Secret Doctrine would say: through whichthe forces from within play on the world without. You haveread, too, in