Editorial Board Of Theosophy Trust

Gandhi, like Gautama, did not try to escape the evident truth of human suffering through seeking mindless oblivion or neurotic distractions, nor did he choose to come to terms with it through compensatory spiritual ambition or conventional religious piety. Rejecting the route of cloistered monasticism, he pondered deeply and agonizingly upon the human condition, and sought to find the redemptive function and therapeutic meaning of human misery. Translating his painful insights into daily acts of tapas - self-chosen spiritual exercises and the repeated re-enactments of lifelong meditation in the midst of fervent social activity - he came to see the need for a continual rediscovery of the purpose of living by all those who reject the hypnosis of bourgeois society, with its sanctimonious hypocrisy and notorious 'double standards' for individual and public life. Spiritual striving towards enlightenment can help to raise a ladder of contemplation along which the seeker may ascend and descend, participating in the worlds of eternity and time, perfecting one's sense of timing in the sphere of action. In most people, alas, the seed is not allowed to sprout or grow owing to chaotic and contradictory aims and desires, tinged by vain longings and delusive expectations, fantasies and fears, blocking any vibrant encounter with the realities of this world as well as any possibility of envisioning Jacob's ladder, "pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross". Gandhi's own spiritual conviction grew, with the ripening of age, that social reformers and non-violent revolutionaries must repeatedly cleanse their sight and remove all self-serving illusions by placing themselves squarely within the concrete context of mass suffering.

Raghavan Iyer founded HERMES, a journal of Theosophical Wisdom, just prior to the beginning of the 1975 Cycle in Santa Barbara, California, as one of several vehicles for the current behind the 7th Century Impulsion. In that journal, he illustrated the ways in which Mahatmas have worked and continue to work in the world. In the article, "The Seventh Impulsion: 1963-2000", he made clear that the Mahatmic impulsions were concentrated in the last quarter of each century, but that preparations for them occurred earlier, and that their reverberations lasted far beyond the conclusion of each quarter-century cycle in an unfailing continuous stream. Near the beginning of 1976, after a year of guiding the golden HERMES current, Professor Iyer determined that those thinkers and teachers most involved in the Seven Century Plan should be honored through writings - called the Teacher Articles - that described the hidden current behind their lives and the timeless context for their work within the cycles of time. All of the Teacher Articles were written from a Theosophical perspective based, in large part, upon the philosophy expounded in H. P. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine. This collection of essays contains those articles that first appeared in HERMES as an exploration of the Seven Century Plan.