🍀 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. - 12 🌻
233. Keep your thought hopefully on the future, not regretfully on the past. The present is very largely an illusion; so we are not really dissatisfied with what we are doing, but with what we have just done. If we want to get on we must keep our eyes in front of us.
To look behind is not the way to make progress. If that course were persisted in on the physical plane we should not go far without meeting with an accident, and the same thing is true in these higher realms also. The more we think over it the clearer it becomes that in the three aphorisms we have just been examining, viz., “Kill out ambition, kill out desire of life, and kill out desire of comfort”, all that moves the ordinary man to exertion has been absolutely cut away.
234. A man’s life is first of all directed by the desire to keep himself and his family alive, “to keep his head above water”; he has always the ambition of rising to higher levels; he wishes for greater comfort for himself and for his family. These are precisely the mainsprings which move the ordinary man, and it is obvious that if all of them should be absolutely removed from him, he would be left supine – he would be left without any reason to bestir himself at all; he would be like a log.
He would say: “If I am not to have ambition of any sort, if I am to cease to desire either life or comfort, why should I do anything? Why should I move at all?” He would be left without any adequate motive for exertion of any kind, and all progress for him would be at an end. It is obvious that for him the killing out of these things would have a bad effect.
235. Even the man who is nearly ready to tread the Path, who has ceased to feel any interest in lower things, reaches a stage when there is danger of his falling into a state of inaction. Intellectually he is absolutely convinced that all these lower things are not worth pursuing, and because they have ceased to attract him he does not feel inclined to put forth energy in any direction. That is an experience which comes to nearly every one in the course of his evolution, and is a very real trouble to numbers of people.
They have got rid of the lower and not taken on the higher. They are at a transition stage between the two; they have not sufficiently realized the unity for that to be the great motive power in life, but they have realized enough of it to know that the desires of the separated self are not worth following. So they remain in a condition of suspended animation. It is for some students a very great difficulty to rouse themselves out of this state. Nothing is worth while; nothing has any longer any interest for them. They want to die and be done with it.
236. The only way for a man to get beyond that unsatisfactory condition is to go a little further, and then he will begin to see that there is a higher and truer life which is infinitely well worth the living. He will find that when he has glimpsed the divine scheme he wants to throw himself into it – he cannot do otherwise. In identifying himself with the One Life, and acting as part of that Life, he finds the one motive which can stir him to action.
When he takes that one step further and begins to realize the Life of the Self, then instead of wanting to fall into annihilation and to be done with everything, he will long to possess more and more energy in order to throw it into this glorious work. The motive power of the One Self will stir him to far greater activity than ever before, because it is infinitely more powerful than any lower motive, and the man who works with it to fulfil the high purposes of the Deity will gain infinite happiness and infinite peace.
Continues...
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19 Dec 2020
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