🍀 For those WHO DESIRE TO ENTER WITHIN - For DISCIPLES 🍀
✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj
CHAPTER 5 - THE 5th RULE
🌻 5. Kill out all sense of separateness - 1 🌻
238. Yet stand alone and isolated, because nothing that is embodied, nothing that is conscious of separation, nothing that is out of the Eternal, can aid you.
239. A.B. – This teaching is specially given in this book, intended for the disciple, because he has to learn to stand utterly alone. Nothing that is embodied, that is out of the Eternal, can aid him. All help that comes from the embodied is secondary help and may fail him in the moment of his greatest need. The biographies of the great Christian mystics show it to have been an invariable characteristic of their lives that they felt forsaken by every one, and had to stand absolutely alone.
These experiences are connected with the fourth great Initiation, when the man is thrown back upon himself and learns to rest upon the inner Self alone, to realize that he himself is only an expression of the Eternal in the outer world. There is always a danger that in this last great test the disciple will break down.
240. A double task lies before the disciple. He must kill out the sense of separateness, but he must learn to stand alone in order that he may be strong with the strength of the divine within himself. He must be like a star in heaven, that gives light to all but takes it from none. He can learn that only from the experience of isolation. Yet the sense of isolation is illusory, for he is in the Eternal. The illusion is due to the breaking away of all the forms before the realization of unity – of being the Eternal – develops in the consciousness.
241. This aphorism with its comment also contains other important thoughts. There is a stage at which the aspirant must stand aside from the body of men, because of his weakness, not of his strength.
Sometimes a man is so near the condition of other men around him, who still lead the lower life that he has left, that he feels that by keeping company with them he is likely to be- dragged down into their vices. At that time the sentiment of repulsion is useful; and although it does show that he is in a lower stage of development yet he will do well to follow it and avoid their company.
242. When a man speaks with horror of a certain vice you may be sure that in the near past he has been in the grip of it. In the recent past there has been a fight against that vice, and his inner consciousness, from which nothing, disappears, now warns him against it. There is a stage when a man has risen higher, when he need not seek such isolation from those who are still sinning.
But so long as that is not the case, so long as he is liable to fall into vice on account of an impulse from outside, a man’s safety lies in his running away from the temptation, until he is strong enough to go amidst that vice without being attracted by it. Only when a man has got beyond the power of falling into attraction by vice will he usually get over his horror and repulsion.
243. Then he has come to the stage at which he ought to think of the sinner as in need of his help. The very thought of his own past faults will now enable him to help others. We cannot help them as long as we ourselves are liable to fall, but only when we are neither attracted nor repelled, when we recognize our identity with those who are struggling.
We then remember that the sin of the world is our own sin-^-the profound truth that no man can be perfectly clean while another remains unclean. While a man remains part of humanity its life is his; to escape from that, he must go outside humanity. The vice of any man is our vice, until he also has got rid of it. Upon that truth the saving of the world entirely turns.
Continues...
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20 Dec 2020
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