I am always thinking of reconstruction, but it is the great keynote of effort at the present time, for it is a time of new things, new light, and very great help, if we invoke it.
The reconstruction of humanity! How shall we set about it? The first step, I hold, is to declare to man: You are Divine! There is within you soul-life, and if you WILL to bring out that life it will reveal to you the truth; it will make clear every step that you take. Greatest of all, it will reveal to you your duty. For humanity at present is working largely on mistaken lines of duty.
Duty is misunderstood as Justice and Equity are. Yet if we could free ourselves from the limitations of preconceived ideas — ideas that are literally riveted into the mind — we could move out into the free air of harmonious thought and action, and would know what duty is. The things we believed in yesterday we should believe in no longer; the false gods we have worshiped in our home-life and the life of the nation, would vanish in the presence of the New Light.
For the Light is only waiting to be perceived. You need not go to India, nor wait for the touch of a Swami’s hand, in order to find that Light. You can find it for yourselves, although since all have evolved differently, in different environments, under different conditions, and up to different points of understanding, one cannot say when or how. To establish a set rule for reformation would therefore be unwise. This we do know, however, that with the motive pure and the soul ever urging one upward, one moves forward naturally on lines of simple duty, and thus into the light of the higher nature and of Truth.
0 ye men and women! Sons of the same Universal Mother as ourselves! Ye who were born as we were born, who must die as we must die, and whose souls like ours belong to the Eternal: I call upon you to arise from your dreamy state and to see within yourselves that a new and brighter day has dawned for the human race.
This need not remain the age of darkness, nor need you wait until another age arrives before you can work at your best. It is only an age of darkness for those who cannot see the Light, for the Light itself has never faded and never will. It is yours if you will turn to it, live in it; yours today, this hour even, if you will hear what is said with ears that understand.
Arise then, fear nothing, and taking that which is your own and all men’s, abide with it in peace for evermore!
(From an address delivered to a native audience at Bombay, India, during the First Theosophical Crusade around the World (1896-7).
Wisdom comes not from the multiplication- of spoken or written instructions; what you have is enough to last you a thousand years. Wisdom comes from the performance of duty, and in the silence, and only the silence expresses it.
Source: Katherine Tingley, Theosophy: The Path Of The Mystic, 1922.
