🍀 For those WHO DESIRE TO ENTER WITHIN - For DISCIPLES 🍀
✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj
CHAPTER 3 - THE FIRST RULE
🌻 KILL OUT AMBITION - 9 🌻
127. A.B. – The man on the path must do his work thoroughly. On the threshold mistakes can easily be corrected. But unless the disciple gets rid entirely of the desire for power while he is in the early stages of his spiritual apprenticeship, it will become stronger and stronger.
If he does not weed it out where it is based in the physical, astral and mental planes, but allows it to take root in the spiritual plane of the ego, he will find it very difficult to eradicate. Ambition thus established in the causal body is carried on from life to life.
The’ physical, astral and mental bodies die, and he gets new ones, but the causal body does not die till the end of the kalpa; so let the pupil beware of permitting spiritual ambition to touch the causal body and build into it elements of separateness which more and more encase the life.
128. Work as those work who are ambitious.
129. A.B. – I have taken this sentence out of its place in the book, where it occurs at the beginning of Rule 4, and brought it in for consideration here, where it specially applies. It is the comment of the Chohan upon Rule 1. In each case we will take the rule and then the comment that the Chohan gave in explanation of it. Put them together, and you get the sense.
Thus you read:
“1. Kill out ambition, but work as those work who are ambitious.
2. Kill out desire of life, but respect life as those who desire it.
3. Kill out desire of comfort, but be happy as those who live for happiness.”
130. Desire for power, life and happiness forms the motive power of the world. These are the prizes that Ishvara holds out before all beings, and the result is that evolution goes on. All the struggles that a man makes for these things bring out his qualities and cause him to evolve. Suppose the whole of this is suddenly removed – a man loses all ambition, all desire for life and for happiness. That represents a stage through which men pass before the longing for the spiritual life awakens fully in them. It is called vairagya, and is the result of satiety.
The Removal of Desire. The man has enjoyed power and has found that it does not bring, happiness; he has worked for it and grasped it, but has found that the effect of it on the inner ego is only disappointment. It is not what he expected, and it does not bring satisfaction.
Take the case, for example, of the late Emperor of Russia, who stood at the summit of human power, was thoroughly tired of it, and heartily wished himself free of it. It is not an uncommon thing in history that a man who wields absolute power gets a fit of vairagya and abdicates his position.
131. The result of that is a collapse, a lessening of all the motives that had animated him up to that point. Then the man droops down, and says: “Why should I exert myself any more? I do not want power; why then should I work? I do not want life; why then should I continue to live? I do not want comfort; it gives me no satisfaction; why then should I do anything to gain it?”
132. The question for us is: How may such a man be stimulated into renewed activity so that he may continue to grow and may finish his evolution; how may he be aroused from his state of collapse? Only by attracting into activity the divine life in him, that lives by giving, not by taking.
He is now at the critical point in his career. If he is still to cling to the separated self his future lives will be full of weariness and disgust. Is it possible to awaken in him the desire of the true life, which consists in pouring oneself out in service, not in indrawing into selfish idleness?
Continues...
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16 Nov 2020
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