Annie Besant

The teaching

Taught from her own books, from The Law of Population (1877) to Thought Power (1901), and her Bhagavad Gita (1895).

The planes and the bodies

Besant teaches Theosophy as a system of nature. A human being is a spirit clothed in bodies, one for each of the planes: the physical with its etheric double, the astral body of desire, the mental body, and the causal body that lasts from life to life. The seven planes, the bodies and the thought forms she drew with Leadbeater are taught in full in The planes and the cord. Her own teaching is of the laws by which the spirit grows through them.

Karma: thought, desire and action

Karma, she teaches, is no reward or punishment from outside but the law of cause and effect, working in the mind and the moral life as surely as in matter. It acts in three ways. Thought builds character: what a person thinks on, they become. Desire attracts its object: what a person longs for draws them to the places and the people where it can be had. Action makes circumstance: the happiness or the pain a person causes others comes back as the conditions of their own life.

She divides it by time as well. There is the whole store of the past, too great to be worked out in one life; the ripe part of it that this life must meet, which is fixed; and the karma being made now, which is free. The past cannot be undone, but its future fruit can be changed by new thought, and so the doctrine is a call to work and not to resignation.

Thought power

Thought Power teaches the training of the mind. Concentration comes first: the mind is fixed on one thing and, whenever it wanders, brought gently back, without strain, as often as it takes, and the power grows with practice as a muscle does. Meditation follows: at a fixed time each day, best in the early morning, the mind dwells on a lofty idea, a virtue or an ideal figure, until thinking about it passes into contemplation of it.

By the same means character is built. To gain a virtue such as patience, she counsels, one meditates on it daily and pictures oneself patient in the very trials that try one, so that when the trial comes the habit made in thought acts of itself. Worry is thought going round in a rut, and it is broken by turning the mind on purpose to a contrary thought. A good thought sent to another is, she holds, a real help, as an ill thought is a real harm.

The path of discipleship

The path begins before its gate. The Path of Discipleship names four qualifications to be won by long effort: discrimination between the real and the unreal; dispassion toward the fruits of action, in this world and in any heaven; six mental attainments, which are control of the mind, control of conduct, tolerance, endurance, faith and balance; and the longing for liberation. They come from the Hindu teaching of the path, and the life of the probationer is spent in building them.

Beyond the gate are four great initiations, which she names in the Buddhist way: the one who has entered the stream, the one who returns once, the one who does not return, and the arhat, the worthy one. On the way the disciple casts off fetters: first the delusion of a separate self, doubt and superstition; then desire and hatred; and at the last the clinging to life in form and beyond form, pride, restlessness and ignorance. Beyond the arhat stands the Master, who has nothing more to learn on earth and stays to help.

The Gita and the duty of action

Her Bhagavad Gita is a book of yoga for those who live in the world. Action cannot be given up, since even the life of the body is action, but it can be freed: the yogi acts because the work is right and leaves its fruit to God. Better one's own duty done imperfectly than another's done well. Yoga is balance, an evenness of mind in success and failure, and yoga is skill in action. The Lord dwells in the heart of every being, and a whole life lived in that knowledge becomes an offering.

Before Theosophy: the law of population

Before Theosophy she taught as a freethinker, and that teaching stands on its own. The Law of Population takes up Malthus: population tends to grow faster than the food to feed it, and where it does, poverty, overcrowding, hunger and early death keep the numbers down. Late marriage, the remedy Malthus himself offered, she rejects as a cause of misery in its own right. The humane check is the limiting of families within marriage by preventive means, which she holds to be moral and even a duty: fewer births, healthier mothers, and children who can be fed, clothed and taught.

The same conviction runs through White Slavery in London: those who know how the poor are made to live have a duty to say so in public, and the girls of the match factory, with their fines and their poor wages, were not to be left without a voice.