more easy to see our way in the
solution of difficult problems of our own time, if we regard these
problems as similar in nature to the problems that have been presented
to our predecessors. Because always, in dealing with the problems of
our own time, we are apt to be confused and bewildered by secondary
issues that rise up around them, complicating them, perhaps largely
clouding them, when we try to understand; whereas if we can catch
sight of the underlying principle and study it apart from any
difficulties of our own time, we are then able to apply that same
principle, as discovered apart from the circumstances of the moment,
and in that way there is a hope of applying it more justly amid the
more exciting incidents of our own day. And it is that which I want to
do in these lectures--to take our movement as a part of a world
series, to study the principles that underlie the whole of that
series, to trace out the working of these principles amongst the
societies that have preceded us in the spiritual world, and then,
having grasped them, to apply them to the solution of the problems of
our own time. For there is a tendency in the Theosophical Society to
narrow itself down to its time, instead of trying to widen out the
thought of its time. It is a tendency which we see affecting every
religion, every church, every great society, and it is useless to
recognise this fact in the history of others unless we apply the fact
for instruction in our own.

Now in all the religions of the past, so far as we have any knowledge
of them in history or from what are called the "occult records," there
is one thing we see in their early days--the presence of happenings
regarded as abnormal. I have used the word "phenomena," but it is a
very stupid word. One uses it because it is generally used; there is
no justification in using that particular word in relation to some
outer manifestations rather than to all. Properly speaking,
"phenomena," of course, will cover the whole of the objects in the
world, in the Not-Self, everything outside the Self; but the word has
been narrowed down, especially in our own time, to those occurrences
in the world around us, in the Not-Self, which are unusual, which seem
to be abnormal, which are the results of laws which are not familiar,
and therefore which are regarded by some people as supernatural, by
others, speaking more carefully, simply as superphysical. And we lose
much by separating off what we