LIGHT ON THE PATH - 63 : Kill out all sense of separateness - 8

🌹 LIGHT ON THE PATH - 63 🌹

🍀 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 - 8 🌻

261. Physically, we try to make other people do things our way and to give way to us; we are perpetually trying to get them to adopt our particular plan, whatever it may be. Because it is ours it is the best plan in the world and we want to force it upon every one else. We find the same thing at the intellectual level. People try constantly to force their opinions and their ideas upon others.

When a man has developed a keen intellect he begins subtly, slowly, to want to dominate other people by means of that intellect. Just because his thought becomes keener and stronger than that of others he tries to mould their thought by his. It is well and good that we should want to share with others all that we know; that we should set before them what we have found so good for ourselves. But as a rule that is not the idea which exists behind this desire to dominate other minds. It usually co-exists with a certain amount of contempt for the other people.

We think: “These people are like sheep; we can sweep them along; we can make them think what we like.” It is to a large extent true that a man who has learned to think, as we should be learning by meditation and study, can dominate the thoughts of others very easily; but we should not do it, because anything like domination is bad for the other man’s evolution and not good for our own. So even this desire for intellectual domination must be resisted. It is part of the vice of separateness.

262. When we have got rid of that there is still a higher possibility along that line – in the realm of the spiritual we may also try to make people take our path. That is at the back of all endeavour to convert people from one religion to another. It is perhaps not quite fair to put it in that way, because Christianity at least starts with the gigantic delusion that unless people believe its particular shibboleths they will have a very unpleasant hereafter, therefore its attempt to convert others comes to have the colour of altruism. It assumes: “Orthodoxy is my doxy and heterodoxy is your doxy,” and: “What I believe is true and you must come into line with it.”

When we have developed spirituality, when we have learned many things that others do not know, it is right and proper that we should preach our gospel, that we should wish to tell others what we have found and give them every opportunity to follow us into these realms of higher thought; but if that wish is tinged with a desire to dominate them – a desire that is often found along with many good qualities – there is still a touch of the old separated self about it, and the “giant weed” is not finally uprooted.

263. We must also get rid entirely of the wish to dominate others because so long as a man is working for the separated self he belongs to that great mass of separated selves which is such a terrible burden in evolution. The moment he begins to realize the unity, he ceases to be part of the weight which has to be lifted and begins to be one of the lifters.

Continues...

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27 Dec 2020