LIGHT ON THE PATH - 27 : KILL OUT AMBITION - 6

🌹 LIGHT ON THE PATH - 27 🌹

🍀 For those WHO DESIRE TO ENTER WITHIN - For DISCIPLES 🍀

✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj

CHAPTER 3 - THE FIRST RULE

🌻 KILL OUT AMBITION - 6 🌻

111. Not only is a worldly career expected of them by their parents, but the general trend of public opinion also influences them in that direction, and it is very hard to escape from the effect of public opinion. It is pressing upon us all the time in all directions, and so it comes about that these young people, who seem so nearly ready for the higher thing, seldom reach it. Instead they take up a very estimable and useful career, but it is just not that higher thing.

I have followed up some cases that seemed to me specially likely, and I have found that the same thing has sometimes occurred to egos for a number of incarnations. For a dozen or twenty incarnations they have been very nearly ready, within measurable distance of taking that great step, but each time they have turned aside from it, and practically always it has been worldly ambition that has led them away from their higher possibilities.1 1 Vol. I, Fart II, Ch. 3: Right and Wrong.

112. When the Master Hilarion says that men of intelligence and power are continually led away from their higher possibilities by ambition, I think He must have had cases in mind very similar to those which I have just described, because those to whom the higher possibilities lie open must necessarily be men of intelligence and power, not mere ordinary men.

He does not say that ambition ruins their lives, but only that higher possibilities exist for them from which it leads them away. It is surely not bad for a boy that he should wish to be a great engineer, a great lawyer, or a great doctor.

These are all fine professions, but there are other things which are even more useful, and if he could see and choose the more useful line it would surely be better for him. We cannot say that the worldly work is bad, but only that there is better work. When one says better work one is not depreciating any of these professions or their value to the world; one means that most well-educated men with ordinary capacity could take up those duties and make more or less of a success of them, whereas only those who have a history behind them from the occult point of view can take up with success the narrow and difficult path of occult training.

Those who follow it can do more good even than the man who wins high distinction along any of those other lines, so when there is a child who wishes to take it up, who obviously would be able to do so, no one should stand in his or her way.

113. Yet it is a necessary teacher. Its results turn to dust and ashes in the mouth; like death and estrangement it shows the man at last that to work for self is to work for disappointment.

114. The man who attains that which he has so long and so earnestly desired, often finds later that it is not quite what he hoped it would be. Men who scheme to obtain power and high position find that the power is to a great extent illusory, that it is hampered in all directions, as in the case of Lord Beaconsfield, which I mentioned before.

It is possible that he might have done more good by giving all his energy to the pursuit and spread of occultism. His works are not very much read, nowadays, but his occult knowledge shows through them as, for example, in his wonderful tale of Alroyd.

Continues...
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12 Nov 2020