LIGHT ON THE PATH - 36 : KILL OUT AMBITION - Work as those work who are ambitious - 16

🌹 LIGHT ON THE PATH - 36 🌹

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

✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER

📚. Prasad Bharadwaj

CHAPTER 3 - THE FIRST RULE

🌻 KILL OUT AMBITION - Work as those work who are ambitious - 16 🌻

165. Whether a man is really working as part of His Life will be shown by his perfect contentment whether he succeeds or fails. If that contentment is perfect, without a shadow of dissatisfaction, he has been working absolutely for the maintenance of mankind; then the work does not bind him and he has solved the problem of inaction in the midst of action. He has learned the use of the vehicles and the gunas, without identifying himself with them. 

In ordinary cases the gunas work the man, but the man on the Path works the gunas. Most men are carried about by the energies of nature; they work as those energies are active. But the man on the Path takes those energies as instruments of labour and, standing behind them, utilizes them. 

The ambitious man is driven by the gunas when he thinks that he is working, but the man who has transcended them is directing them along the road of evolution traced by Ishvara, and does not identify himself with them. This is thus taught in the Gita:

166. Having abandoned attachment to the fruit of action, always content, nowhere seeking refuge, he is not doing anything, although doing actions.

167. Hoping for naught, his mind and self controlled, having abandoned all greed, performing action by the body alone, he doth not commit sin.

168. Content with whatsoever he obtaineth without effort, free from the pairs of opposites, without envy, balanced in success and failure, though acting he is not bound.

169. Of one with attachment dead, harmonious, with his thoughts established in wisdom, his works sacrifices, all action melts away.

170. So the man who finds himself at the point of balance, of indifference, must discover some means to increase the higher influences within himself, so that these may spur him into this life of spiritual action. 

He must use meditation; he must try to utilize whatever emotion he may possess; he must deliberately take every opportunity of service. He must move even without the desire to move, and even against the desire not to move. He must move.

If he can find anyone for whom he has reverence, whose example inspires him to activity, that will be a great help to his getting over this transitional stage, where otherwise he might drop out of evolution for the time being. 

If the desire to please someone whom he admires should arise in his mind, he may use that to urge himself on until he is in a position to feel the impelling force of Ishvara’s Life, and thus use the emotion to carry him over and out of his condition of collapse.

Continues...

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24 Nov 2020