These excerpts from a pamphlet titled “The Song of Life” by Charles Johnston, first published in 1901, are quite easy to read but contain great mystical depth. To truly and practically benefit from them, they will need to be read quietly, slowly, meditatively, and reflectively, when alone. They focus in particular on the cultivation of continuity of consciousness and on the supreme importance of being able to bring back to our “brain memory” all that occurred in our dreamless state of sleeping consciousness at night. Waking, dreaming, and deep, dreamless sleep are the three main ascending states of consciousness that each human being is said to pass through each day. There are some people who don’t even remember any of their dreams, while for the majority of us who do remember at least some of our dreams, there is no memory of the far superior dreamless state. Perhaps reflection on and application of Johnston’s words may start to change that for us. Charles Johnston (1867-1931) was as a young man a pupil of H. P. Blavatsky in London. He soon married HPB’s niece Vera. The couple were strong supporters of William Q. Judge after HPB’s passing and later moved to the USA, where Charles would become one of the most important figures in The Theosophical Society in America, later simply renamed The Theosophical Society, headquartered in New York. This Society no longer exists but can be read about in our article The Forgotten Theosophical Society.

THE MYSTERY TEACHING

The secret of Life is whispered for ever in our ears, summoning us to enter the hall of everlasting youth, bidding us unbar the door of our present divinity, pointing the path of unconquerable power, revealing to mortal man the secret of man the immortal. We are challenged to make true for ourselves the dreams we have dreamed of God. . . .

Since the Cross first threw its black shadow along the earth, the promise of immortal life was held forth to those only who turned back in bitterness from the world, whose garb was sackcloth, their best hope despair. Their master was the Man of Sorrows. Their password was Renunciation. But we have left behind us the old evangel of pain. Our new watchword is Victory. Our Genius is the lord of Joy. We are to renounce no longer but to conquer: to overcome the world not by flight but by possession. No longer exiles but victors shall knock at the immortal doors.

The genius of our age has drawn very near to the secret. We have merged all ideals in one: to conquer, to be strong. Power and valor are our divinities. We no longer worship wealth but the will that wins it. Our one goal is the sense of success, and we see nothing but the goal. . . . The time has come for us to claim our divinity. . . .

When we learn to live from the will as we tried to live from sensual desires, we shall be already immortal, and enter living an immortal world. Therefore our worship of will brings us near to the portal of peace.

This is the secret that shadows itself forth in the stillness and darkness. Soon will follow clearer vision that we have drawn our life from the world of the immortal, day by day since the beginning. But this simplest of all secrets was hidden from us by the seething of our desires. We and all creatures enter every day into the immortal world, though we know it not. Nor shall we remember, until the hush of stillness comes upon us when we draw back victorious yet disappointed from our battle with the material world. Not till we have renounced can our eyes open.

Every day we wage our warfare with the world. Every night, when the throb of desire and the whirl of the senses grow still, we sink, as we call it, to sleep. We might more truly say we arise to our awakening. The shadows of our desires hover awhile around us, haunting us as we linger in the borderland of dreams. As our desires were, so are our dreams: things fair or hideous, grim or radiant with lovely light. But dreams soon fade and desires cease, and we enter into our rest. We pass from the world of the senses to the realm of immortal will. We enter in through the golden portal, far better than the fabled gates of ivory or horn, and for awhile we are immortal in power, immortal in peace. For without power, there is no peace.

Beyond the land of dreams and the shadows of desire stands the gate of peace. All men enter there and all creatures. Were it not so, all men must go mad. And within that portal all are equal. All alike awake to their immortal selves. Sinner and saint have left their difference at the threshold. They enter in together as pure living souls. Weak and strong are one there, high and lowly are one. The immortal sunshine, the living water, are for all. For great Life has wrapt us round with beneficence, so that even now we are in the midst of the everlasting.

Thus we all enter the power beyond the veil of dreams. We all draw our lives alike from the sea of life. In the radiance we are all one, wrapt in the terrible flame of Life. Yet we forget. We come back again shivering across the threshold, and hasten to wrap our pure divinity in a mist of dreams. The saint once more takes his white garment; the sinner, his red vesture of desire. The weak is weak again, and the strong exults. Their dreams are once more real to them; and these dreams are our mortal world.

We return to the world of daylight to live for a few more hours in the strength brought back from the immortal world. Our earthen lamps are replenished for another watch. We strain and stagger under the burden of our dreams, driven by hope and fear, by desire and hate. Fear is the fiercest scourge of all; making us cowards, it makes us also cruel. Thus we fall away from our divinity, robbed of every shred of memory by the army of shadows that meet us on the threshold, with their captain, fear. Yet in all our phantom-world, there is no illusion so absolute a lie as fear. We are the gods, the immortals; yet we cower and cringe. We are children of the will, yet slaves of fear. Therefore our ideal of valor brings us near the threshold, for it bids us kill the captain of the shadows who bar our way. But for a long time yet, the shadow of fear will lurk in the haunted darkness of our human hearts.

Another day ends, and our tide ebbs. The storm of our desires has worn us out, and overcome with weariness, we sink to rest, we rise to power. And all our prayer and aspiration, all the fervor of our faith has no aim but this: to reach awake the sea of power we bathe in while asleep. Therefore we close our eyes in aspiration, seeking once again the light behind the veil. So great is the beneficence of sleep, so mighty a benison [i.e. “blessing,” “benediction”] is ever near to us. We enter perpetually, but we always forget. Our power slips from us as we return through the cloud-zone of dreamland. Round every pillow gather thick the terrors and pains of life, not less than its ambitions and its hopes, instantly invading us as we come back to waking.

Therefore we gain this clue to the secret. The door of our immortality is open to us day by day. But we are so ridden with dreams that our immortal heritage brings us no profit. Therefore we must elude the army of dreams. We must bring back to the light of day the present sense of our divinity which illumined us in dreamlessness. A thing so simple as that is the open door of our salvation. Our genius bids us gather power and conquer fear. And fear once mastered, we may begin to disband the army of dreams, the ghosts that haunt our borderland and make us forget. The diminished army on the frontier is no longer strong enough to keep us from smuggling through with us something of our dreamless vision, some memory of the immortal world. We glean these memories day by day, in the silence of the morning, in the first hush of waking, as we bring back into every morning something of the freshness of everlasting youth.

At first, what we carry back with us will seem more dreamlike than dreams. Yet dreams have their power, as we should know, whose whole lives are guided by dreams. First a dream-memory only: a haunting shimmer of other worlds; a secret freshness and gladness, coming we know not whence. Yet a vision so full of unearthly fascination and allurement that we would follow it rather than the solidest reality of day. Thus far all the poets have reached. This is the secret of their inspiration. They are haunted by the dreamless dream; it lingers in beauty over all their works. Even the faint memory of this vision is brightness enough to illumine hearts throughout all the world. . . .

With fidelity and strong will we are to make real the fragments of our remembered dream, . . . We must fight to the death, if we would inherit life. . . . our waking world is the real dream; the true waking is elsewhere, a better reality than this. Thus we begin to remember. . . . The real world of [our] immortality. It lies about us in sleep. It is not far from us in our waking. Thus we gather the fruits that drift to us in the dawn from the other shore. There will come a time when that world begins to outshine this. . . . No longer dimly overshadowed by the Soul, we enter through the silence into the very being of the Soul itself. . . . As we enter into the vision, there is silence: yet a silence full of immortal song. . . . For we have entered the All: the infinite ocean of life, whose foam and bubbles are the world.

It is a sudden revelation of the splendor of the living Soul. Then the mystic gloom closes upon us, and we return from our initiation descending again to the waking world. . . . We see spread out before us the country we are to pass through, with its hills and valleys leveled, as we view it from above; yet the whole road is clear to us, and no very formidable dangers await us or threaten to intercept us, ere [i.e. before] we enter into our rest. For that one moment of our return, nothing is hidden from us of all the future; all things are present to the living soul. . . .

We bring back the memory of the radiance, to guard it as the hidden treasure of our hearts. From henceforth, our task is this: with resolute valor to weave the brightness of that vision into all our lives.

When we unseal the inner fountain of knowledge, its waters will never more cease to flow into our hearts, bringing life and light and everlasting youth. Many old and well-guarded secrets will come to us and reveal themselves in the twilight stillness. Deathlessness we know to be ours; and gradually the mists begin to lift from the infinite army of years we have lived, from the endless days that are to come. By entering the Soul, we have lifted ourselves above the narrow walls of this one life, and it no more tyrannies over us with loud insistence as before. Fragments of long-forgotten days drift back to us, with names and scenes of other lands left long ago, when we passed away from them through the gates of death.

They come very near to us, these memories of dead years; closer and more vivid than scenes of yesterday. We find old faces of new friends, very familiar kindred under names and forms that our common past had buried, yet never so deep but that they rise again. This one life of our mortality takes its place in the undivided Life, ranged with the days that are vanished yet still here, with the days that are not, yet already are. The tangled skein [i.e. “thread,” “web,” or “maze”] of fate begins to unravel, and we see more clearly where and why we failed. The sins and sorrows of our life take their true color, in the awful light of the all-seeing Soul. . . .

We are now to learn what true work is, untainted by the usurper’s touch. For the mission of the Soul is work. The Soul is no exile shivering on the verge of space, at home only in some pale heaven, but the lord who made the worlds, full of tremendous power, and ready to transmit it through our wills. We are to handle all the force and substance of our lives, holding nothing too gross or trivial; to transform all, no longer guiding ourselves by hearsay or tradition, but working through the instant intuition of the Soul. . . .

Only those who reinforce themselves through the Power can handle even the weakest forces firmly, with a will as irresistible as nature’s might. For will is the key to all nature’s power, and in the fullness of time we shall unlock all her secrets, learning how she made the rocks and rivers, the stars and the ever-moving sea. We divine already that there is a way of touching force direct, with the will; and not mediately as we do, through reason and thought acting on substance, which is embodied force.

In the days to come, we are to create. But at the outset, we must learn through our individual task the one thing we can do best, the work that strikes from us a flash of genius, a fire whose secret is with us alone. All men are heirs to genius, to the personal revelation which shall set the stamp of original power on all they do. But they must claim their inheritance. . . . Every act of creative will makes us stronger and brings us nearer to immortal life. . . . What each man’s genius is, will be whispered to him in the silence, when he has found his way back to the omnipotent Soul. Thenceforward, the genius will work in him, handling all things in life in a new and masterly way. The perfect poet and artist, the hero and saint, differ in this only from other men: that they obey the genius of valor and beauty who stands above them, yielding up the reins to their divinity and offering their wills as workers for the light. As there is something creative and unprecedented in the life of every saint and hero, in the work of every true poet and master of beauty, so it should be with us all. Our lives should be every moment creative, bearing in all their works that power and light which are the sign manual of our divinity. And from the Soul will come the measure of our reward, full, pressed down, flowing over. . . .

This is what the tide brings us, from the sea of Life, concerning our work, and work is the essence of the Soul. Yet all this is as nothing, compared with the unveiling which awaits us, when we come with new eyes to look on human life. If the fear-self thwarted us with nature, ten times more did it thwart us with man. Mortal has never understood the simplest heart of mortal, nor ever shall. Only the immortal in us can do that. For in every heart there are immortal gleams, and only their like can comprehend them. What lies before us is a vivid and inward realization of other lives, those nearest to us at first, then the more remote: a vision as piercing and intimate as the love we once bore ourselves. All men shall be to us as our own souls, and our whole aim will be, to let the great Soul do its work in them, as in us, for they are our other selves.

In the splendid hour of illumination, we were alone in the silence and darkness of the immortal world. Yet not alone, for the inmost holy of holies was full of the souls of men. In that dread presence all are one, and that one the Soul. We bring that memory back, our first intuition of human life, coming to us only with our immortality. Thenceforth, we need not go abroad to find our other selves. They come to us, pressing closely round our souls, in vision or in blindness, in sadness or mirth, in love or hate. But above love or hate or sorrow is the immemorial essence of our common Soul, the holy presence of the all-penetrating Life. We must bow to it and obey it in every relation of our lives, dealing with the immortal in mortals, answering the powers and needs of the soul alone. Mortals are at strife, but the immortals in them never. All move in the one Light. Each strengthens and fulfills the other. From the day of our vision, we shall learn to find the immortal in everyone: with that divinity alone our work lies. We must seek for each what his own genius seeks.

In building our lives on immortal lines, we have thrown away the burden of anxious scheming, laying the responsibility of our success on the genius within, the genius who cannot fail, for his light is drawn from the infinite Light. Thus we ease our hearts of a weight they have carried for ages, thereby tasting the first fruits of liberty and peace. For in the will of the genius we are free.

So when we deal no longer with mortals for ever at strife, but with the immortals above them who are full of peace, we find another lightening of our load, another mighty secret of power and joy. . . .

But hate shall cease from henceforth for evermore. We shall no longer seek to constrain anyone to do our bidding. It is not our bidding that needs to be done, but the bidding of the genius in each, the wise divinity within the other’s heart. When we surrender our willfulness and bow to the light in another, we draw forth wonder and willing help. The lord of his inmost fortress sees in us a friend, all doors are opened to us, and we are made free of every secret within. . . .

We are to perfect our oneness with the Soul, to break down all barriers, to draw into our wills the powers of the Most High, not for our own purposes, but for everlasting ends; to draw ever towards the Light, not for guidance along our pathway, but for the Light. We are to find the way to the immortal sea, for thither are we to return.

For when the last word is said, we are finally concerned, not with the works of our wills, nor with our other selves, but with the Soul that gives to them their life. Our lives and our other selves concern us because they are of the Soul. But there is something greater and more august than these sunbeams of the Soul, however radiant they are and lovely. There is the Soul itself, the infinite, undivided Life. Thither at last shall our footsteps tend. Thither when our works are done, when we have come to perfect oneness with our other selves, so that the radiance flows unimpeded through us all: thither shall we enter in, losing ourselves and them and all things, to find them again in the infinite Soul.

~ * ~

Listen to the song of life.
Store in your memory the melody you hear.
Learn from it the lesson of harmony.
Life itself has speech and is never silent. And its utterance is not, as you that are deaf may suppose, a cry: it is a song. Learn from it that you are a part of the harmony; learn from it to obey the laws of the harmony.
(Master Hilarion, “Light on The Path” II:5-8, recorded by Mabel Collins)

This article may have raised more questions about various things. Please make use of the site search function (the magnifying glass symbol at the top of the page) and visit the Articles page to see the complete list of over 400 articles covering all aspects of Theosophy and the Theosophical Movement.

You can read more from Charles Johnston in such articles as The Egyptian Lodge and the Secret Wisdom, The Virgin Birth and Immaculate Conception, and The Master Who Stands At The Head of Your Ray, as well as in The Forgotten Theosophical Society.

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