Here is a wonderful series of Questions put to G de Purucker. These are out of print now, but here is the link with the Q & A:
http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/qwaa/qwaa-hp.htm Here is an excerpt from #18:
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Here is a short question preceded by several lines of explanation.
"Rosita Forbes, the famous traveler and friend of the Arabs, met a Ulema, evidently a real spiritual teacher among the Mohammedans, who said the West was not yet ready for the deeper teachings which were yet alive in the Orient, because the Western peoples were not 'single-hearted' enough. What is this desired quality?"
[GdP answers] "Single-heartedness" -- that idea is nothing new. It is the burthen of the message of all the sages and seers of the ages. Gain the child-heart. Be simple; be not complex. Be upright; be not supine. See! Be not blind. Live in the life eternal, and live not the living death of the beings of matter. Be true, which is simplicity. Be simple, which is truth. Be single-hearted, not double-hearted.
Our Western world has been psychologized for the last one hundred years or more by the now moribund materialism of our fathers, now passing away and more or less dead, but leaving its baleful influence on our minds still; whereas, in the Orient, the mystic flame still lives. Men there still yearn to know and to understand. They understand enough to see that mere speculative theories about the nature around us are not truth, and that the passing phases of human intelligence are not truth; that truth if anything is simple, direct, clear, and that the only way to know anything is to be it. If you have no links of sympathetic self-being with it you cannot understand it.
Open therefore your hearts. Be simple, be true. Look within, ally yourself with your higher energies -- which is the same thing as entering behind the veils of outward, material nature, going ever more and more behind or upwards until you see the vision sublime. Then nothing will ever shake you. Nothing can ever move you. Nothing will ever disturb you. Be single-hearted....
An excerpt from #6:
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Why do people ask questions? Because they want to know something. And why do they want to know? Because they have something within them which is desirous of consciously re-allying itself with the foundations of the universe -- truth. If we did not have within us this divine instinct, this divine hunger for and instinct towards truth, we never should ask any questions at all. We should be like the senseless stone or, perhaps, having no further spirit of divine curiosity than might be expressed by the unvoiced questions of the beasts.
The asking of questions, serious questions, is an attribute which appertains to the spiritual part of man's being, and is, in a sense, the voice of his higher nature attempting to express itself through the intermediate nature and the brain-mind, the intermediate nature being what is commonly called the human soul; and this attempt to express the divine-spiritual consciousness of us through this psychic or intermediate nature, and through the latter's vehicle, the physical body, stimulates this latter or intermediate part of us into at questioning mood or attitude.
The spiritual psychology of this process is rather difficult to understand by one who has not deeply thought on the matter, nevertheless what I have just said is an exact explanation, albeit imperfectly developed here, of what takes place in the human constitution.
We question: Who am I? What am I? Whence am I? Whither go I? Why am I here? What is life? What is the purpose of life? What is death? What is the purpose of death? What are trust and love and friendship and self-sacrifice and aspiration and hope and joy? All these questions, and many more like them, arise from the divine energies in our inmost parts seeking expression through the intermediate vehicle which, sensing the inflow and stimulated by it, automatically as it were assumes a questioning mood or attitude.
It is an amazing thing that so many thinking human minds through the ages have asked themselves: Is there a soul? Is there something more of me than the physical body? Whereas they have merely to examine themselves, each man to examine himself, to find the answer written large in his own nature and constitution.
Had you not this divine hunger for knowledge, had you not this urging instinct within, had you not these aspirations for knowledge, there would be nowhither to go in thought in order to understand yourselves and the universe in which you live and of which you are an inseparable part.
Do you understand the drift of my thought? My meaning is that these inner impulses, irresistible in their force and unceasing, are a proof of an inner nature, popularly called the soul, seeking its own, and therefore proving that that thing exists; for nature never cheats itself. If there were no higher things than the physical, there would be no urge towards higher things, because nature could not have an urge towards something which does not exist. This questioning attitude, this desire or hunger for knowledge, are proofs of the existence of a spiritual nature within.