🍀 For those WHO DESIRE TO ENTER WITHIN - For DISCIPLES 🍀
✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj
CHAPTER 3 - THE FIRST RULE
🌻 KILL OUT AMBITION - 1 🌻
89. A.B. – We now turn to the first rule, dealing with ambition in particular. The undeveloped man is strongly held by the attractions of the senses; he desires physical luxury and bodily enjoyment.
He does not feel ambition, which is the desire for power, until the mind is highly developed and the intellectual power has grown strong. The note of the intellect is “I”. It causes the man to feel himself separate, and that invariably leads him to wish to exercise power, because that desire is the self-assertion of the individual soul. He feels himself superior to all around him, and that shows as a desire for physical authority.
From that comes the temptation to seek and grasp social and political power. In the political and social sphere ambition is the great moving force; for the man who by his intellect has gained influence over his fellow-men, stands out as their leader and this is a position which is incense in the nostrils of the proud and superior man.
90. Then the man begins to despise outer power over the bodies of men, and there comes into his mind the realization of a subtler form of power, which he now seeks to obtain. He no longer wants to lay down laws with physical authority; he has the subtler longing to dominate and rule the minds of men. That is intellectual ambition – the ambition to be a leader of thought. It is not an ambition which would move anyone who had not a largely developed intellect.
91. Still later, when that desire has been outgrown, ambition reappears in a yet subtler form, when the man passes on into the spiritual life. He thinks of the spiritual progress as made by himself for his own sake, because he wants to grow and understand and progress; the old ambition is really still holding him, and it is more dangerous because it is higher and subtler.
That is why in the note to this aphorism the Master makes the remarkable statement that the pure artist, who works for the love of his work, is sometimes more firmly planted on the right road than the occultist who fancies he has removed his interest from self, but who has in reality only enlarged the limits of experience and desire, and transferred his interest to things which concern his larger span of life.
The occultist is no longer confined to the ambitions of his present incarnation, yet his ambition may not be dead. He no longer cares to be a law-giver or ruler of mankind, nor even an arbitrator in the thoughts of men; but he desires to be high in the spiritual world.
He realizes that he is going to live life after life, and his ambition extends to the whole span of that greater life. He is still longing to be first, to be separate, to be what others are not. Yet that too must be overcome.
Continues...
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05 Nov 2020
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