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The Externalization of the Hierarchy - Section III - Forces behind the Evolutionary Process
SECTION THREE - FORCES BEHIND THE EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS OF THE RACE

The Doctrine of Avatars

May 1941

As we enter the momentous month of May this year, I have asked myself if there is any way in which I can arouse the world aspirants and my disciples to a truer appreciation of the immanent significance of the presented opportunity, and also if there is any way in which I can simplify and make more real to you the Doctrine of the Coming One - linked as it is to the teaching of every great religion. In all of them, the idea of a subjective, spiritual Order, concerned with the developing welfare of humanity, is to be found.

This is an age of culminations. Such culminations appear today in the field of religion as well as in the field of science and politics. All the great lines of human approach to reality and to truth are passing out of the realm of the tangible and exoteric, into that of the intangible and esoteric. Science is rapidly becoming the science of the unseen and of the unprovable; religion has emerged from the realm of the mystical into the clearer atmosphere of the occult, and must now emphasize the reality of the unseen as the efficient cause of the seen; politics and governments are engaged with processes of thought and ideologies.

What then is the true inner structure of reality which will provide the needed strength for humanity at this time, thus sufficing to satisfy man's demand for truth and prove adequate to answer his ceaseless yet intelligent questions?

I would assert here that the great and satisfying reply [286] to all human questioning and human need is to be found in the doctrine of Avatars, and in the continuity of divine Revelations. This is the persistent belief - ineradicable and unalterable - that (at major moments of world need) God reveals Himself through Appearances, through a Coming One. This doctrine is found in all the basic world religions, in every time and age; it appears in the doctrine of the Avatars of the Hindu faith, in the teaching of the return of Maitreya Buddha or the Kalki Avatar, in the belief in the Western world in the return of Christ and His Advent or second Coming, and in the prophesied issuing forth of the divine Adventurer of the Moslem world. All this is tied up with the undying belief of mankind in the loving Heart of God, Who ever meets man's need. The witness of history is that always the appearance of man's necessity has been met with a divine Revelation.

The reason for this faith, innate in the human heart, is to be found in the fact of the nature of Deity itself. The Christian statement that "God is Love" is founded on that deepest, recognized, spiritual fact. The expression of this divine characteristic can be summed up in the words from The Voice of the Silence:

Compassion is no attribute.
It is the Law of Laws - eternal Harmony, Alaya's Self;
a shoreless, universal essence,
the light of everlasting right and fitness of things,
the law of love eternal.

To this everlasting Compassion the cyclic appearance of the Sun Gods of the ancient myths, the World Saviors and the Avatars bear witness and are the guarantee.
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