🍀 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. - 9 🌻
225. C.W.L. – This is the remainder of Rule 4, the Chohan’s comment on the first three rules. The giant weed is the heresy of separateness – the idea of the separated self – which is truly the source of evil. We are directed to kill it out by stages. We are told first to unify the lower and the higher self, that is to say, to merge the personality in the individuality.
For most of us the personal self is still so near that it tends to shut out the higher things. We have to work our way through that and gradually to transcend it, to get entirely rid of all selfishness. Then we have to begin upon the individuality.
226. Now, the individuality, the ego, is a very wonderful thing – complex, exceedingly beautiful and marvellously adapted to its surroundings, a glorious being indeed; yet eventually we must realize that even that is only an instrument that we have created by the working of many ages for the sake of the progress of the Monad.
Because we have had to develop the idea of the separated self in the earlier stages of our progress, the giant weed; or the seed of it, is in the heart of everybody. That has to be killed out at one time or another, yet only the strong can tear it out from themselves at the beginning of their development.
The weak must wait and let it go on growing while they are developing sufficient strength to kill it out. That is unfortunate for them, because the longer it is allowed to persist the more closely it becomes intertwined with the nature of the man.
Those who can summon the courage to tear it out now will make rapid and much surer progress. Terrible as the struggle is to get rid of this separated self at any time, it will be thousands of times more difficult if we leave it until the later stages of our progress.
Until it is finally destroyed we shall be subject to all kinds of difficulties and dangers from which we can escape only by getting rid of it here and now. Obviously, therefore, it is best to kill it out in the beginning.
227. All systems of occult teaching agree in advising students to try from the very beginning to get rid of this illusion. The difficulty in the way, apart from the habit of thinking of ourselves as separate, is that this idea has been the source of all our strength in the past.
When the ego was first formed as an individual he was distinctly weak. He had been, until then, part of a group soul, and the idea of separate identity was not strong in him. It had to be intensified through the savage life.
The man’s strength gradually grew from the feeling, “I am I”. In the earlier days it would be: “I am a great fighter and a swift runner; I am a mighty headsman; I can lead armies; I can guide men; I can make them do as I will.”
Later on, it would express itself on a higher level as: “I have a mighty intellect; I can trust myself; I am proud of myself; I am a great man; I can think more strongly than other men and therefore I have power over their minds, and can sway them to do this or that.” It is through the sense of separateness that we have learnt to be self-reliant.
Continues...
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16 Dec 2020
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