LIGHT ON THE PATH - 45 : Kill out desire of comfort. - Be happy as those are who live for happiness. - 2

🌹 LIGHT ON THE PATH - 45 🌹

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

✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj

CHAPTER 4 - THE 3rd RULE

🌻 Kill out desire of comfort. - Be happy as those are who live for happiness. - 2 🌻

202. How shall the man become happy? The answer is: by realizing that the Self is bliss. It is said in the Brahma Sutras that Brahman is Bliss, Brahman is Ananda. The man has now to realize this. He is no longer moved by pleasure nor by pain.

They have ceased to attract him; they came from contact between forms, but he has reached equilibrium. He is therefore likely to sink into the condition of being neither happy nor unhappy. But he must learn to be happy as those are who live for happiness.

203. It is the bliss of the Self, that deep abiding bliss, the sense of contentment and joy, which is an essential part of the spiritual life, and the most difficult part of that life to realize in consciousness.

It is a very marked fact about the great Mystics and Saviours of men that the side of sorrow has shown itself very much in their lives. Jesus was a man of sorrow. Gautama, the Buddha, left his splendid palaces and gardens and loving friends to seek the cure for the sorrow of the world.

The same is true when we look on the lives of all the great leaders of mankind. Sorrow touched them very deeply. But they were not overcome by the sorrow. In those men there was an abiding joy, and the sorrow is profoundly exaggerated by the man who looks upon them from outside.

As grief hovers over them, as anxiety, harassments, troubles, worries, and woes rain upon them from all directions, naturally they are judged’ by men to be sorrowful. But that does not follow.

They are not worried, harassed or distressed by these things, however much they may attend to them, and may do whatever may be necessary for the sake of the world. Underneath it all there is the heart of peace. Therefore you always find them saying: “My peace remaineth.”

204. The disciple feels the sorrow of the world. That he cannot escape; it will throw a shadow over him – an unavoidable shadow. The whole of the world’s sorrow has to find its echo in him. He feels sorrow, and continues to feel pity for the ignorant and the suffering, for their rebellion and revolt.

At the stage we are considering there is danger for him – that he may cease to feel for others; then just in proportion as he ceases to feel he loses his utility. The Great Ones feel helpless pity for those under the sway of karma; pity because of Their own inability to help them, for there are places where They cannot help, where men must go through their experiences by themselves.

Despite the knowledge that it should be so, and despite Their absolute contentment with the Law, They are standing aside and watching it work; still there is this pain and sympathy – pity, which has in it a certain element of sorrow.

205. That will always remain as something of a shadow. In losing the power to sympathize a man would lose the power to help. Just as his life flows into the ignorant he feels the pleasure and pain of the ignorant, and he lightens their trouble by feeling it himself.

206. With all this pressing upon him it is ever necessary that the disciple should be reminded that the Self is bliss. He must keep the heart of joy, must deliberately cultivate in himself the spirit of contentment and happiness. One way to do this is to practise meditation upon the divine bliss – deep, intense bliss, not equalled by anything belonging to this earth, because it is the very essence and nature of the Self.

A man can develop that aspect only by the deliberate cultivation of joy and contentment, and by looking at the world and recognizing that evil is avidya, unwisdom. In the midst of sorrows he is to be happy; he must teach himself that pain is in the vehicle while the life is ever joy.

Continues...

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06 Dec 2020