🍀 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 - 11 🌻
270. One of the finest symbols of brotherhood that I have come across was a vision of one of our members of an Eastern temple supported by many hundreds of pillars. He said: “All these pillars are helping to support the temple, and they are therefore symbols of individual souls who form a part of the temple of humanity.
Some of these pillars are on the outside, are seen and admired all the time. They also face the sunshine and the rain. Others are far away in the interior of the forest of pillars, never having the sun shining directly upon them at all, never being admired by people as they pass. Some of these pillars are in places where the worshippers gather round and sit leaning against the plinth of the pillar all day long.
Other pillars are in less approachable places, but each one is an integral part of the temple and is doing its work. That is like the brotherhood of humanity. Some people may feel that they are doing a great deal; others may never know of a single opportunity of help that comes to them, and yet they are all bearing their part and are just as much pillars in the temple as those which are more prominent in the public eye.”
271. Many of our students are eager to claim unity with the Master and the saints, and not so anxious to claim unity with the criminal, the drunkard, the inefficient, the sensual, the cruel. But since humanity is one, we must be one with the less evolved people as well as with the greater; in the one case there is a part of ourselves towards which we must reach up, but in the other case there is a part of humanity which we must try to help. How can we help them? First of all by thinking in the right way about them.
If we shrink from them with horror, if we hate them, we are making their path more difficult. If we allow the natural and justifiable feeling with regard to the evil that is being done to influence our attitude towards the person who does it, we are making an error. It is scarcely possible to avoid that sometimes, but we can always to some extent reason ourselves out of it.
272. Doctors meet with cases of the most loathsome and horrible diseases – which in many an instance the man concerned has brought entirely upon himself. But no doctor who is really earnest in his work thinks of that when the patient is before him.
He does not shrink from the man with horror, but regards the disease as an enemy that has to be fought and conquered. That is a very good example of the attitude that we ought to be able to adopt when we have to deal with a degraded person.
Undoubtedly the probabilities are that we could not produce very much effect upon an absolutely degraded drunkard, whose will is almost gone; but to shrink from him in horror or to feel contempt is not the way to help him. In the same way when a man commits a terrible crime we may have the greatest possible horror of the crime, but not of the criminal. It is difficult for us to separate them, but we have to do it.
Continues...
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02 Jan 2021
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