Alice Bailey - From Intellect to Intuition - I

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From Intellect to Intuition - Chapter One - Introductory Thoughts

Perhaps the problem consists in this: that the gates of the future seem to open upon an immaterial world, and upon a realm that is intangible, metaphysical, super-sensuous. We have well-nigh exhausted the resources of the material world, but we have not yet learned to function in a non-material one. We even deny its existence at times. We face the inevitable experience, which we call death, and yet take no rational steps to ascertain whether there really is a life beyond. The progress of evolution has produced a wonderful race, equipped with a sensitive response apparatus and a reasoning mind. We possess the rudiments of a sense which we call the intuition and, with this equipment, we stand before the gates of the future and ask the question: "To what purpose shall we put this composite, complex mechanism which we call a human being?" Have we reached our full development? Are there shades of meaning to life which have hitherto escaped our attention, and have they escaped our attention because we have latent powers and capacities as yet [11] unrealized? Is it possible that we are blind to a vast world of life and of beauty, with its own appropriate laws and phenomena? Mystics, seers and thinkers of all ages and in both hemispheres have said such a world exists.

With this equipment, which we might call the personality, man stands with the past behind him, in a present that is full of chaos, and before a future into which he cannot look. He cannot stand still. He must go forward, and the vast educational, scientific, philosophic and religious organizations are all doing their utmost to tell him which way to go and to present to him a solution of his problem.

That which is static and crystallized eventually falls to pieces and, where there is arrested growth, abnormalities will occur and retrogression be found. Someone has said that the danger which we must avoid is that of a "disintegrating personality." If humanity is not potential, if man has reached his zenith and can go no further, then he should recognize this fact and make his decline and fall as easy and as beautiful as possible. It is encouraging to note how in 1850 the dim outlines of that portal into the New Age were vaguely seen and how much concern thinkers then evinced that man should not fail to learn his lesson and go forward. Read the words of Carlyle and note how appropriate they are to the present time.

"In the days that are passing over us, even fools are arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless [12] calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded... It is not a small hope that will suffice us, the ruin being clearly... universal. There must be a new world if there is to be a world at all. That human beings in Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance therein, - this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal rebirth, if the ruin is not to be total and final. It is a time to make the dullest man consider whence he came and whither he is bound."
- Jacks, L.P., Religious Perplexities, page 46.

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