🍀 For those WHO DESIRE TO ENTER WITHIN - For DISCIPLES 🍀
✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj
CHAPTER 7 - THE 15th RULE
🌻 17. Seek out the way - 4 🌻
392. When the final secret of this great lesson is told, in it is opened the mystery of the new way – a path which leads out of all human experience, and which is utterly beyond human perception or imagination. At each of these points it is needful to pause long and consider well. At each of these points it is necessary to be sure that the way is chosen for its own sake. The way and the truth come first, then follows the life.
393. A.B. – When the liberated soul has completed the stages of progress to Arhatship, and is passing onward to the first of the great Initiations beyond, he makes a choice from a variety of paths open to him. They are of the sacred number of seven – he has seven ways of choice before him.
People often say that at that point there can be only one possibility – that a man must choose to be a Master – the underlying idea being that if he decides rightly he will choose to return to help the world.
Such a decision recommends itself when humanity itself is thought of, but I must remind you that this is a hasty conclusion. A hint is thrown out as to the nature of the choice, where the note says.: “At each of these points it is necessary to be sure that the way is chosen for its own sake.”
The words “own sake” give the key. The choice is to be made for the sake of the way only. The fact that there are more ways than one, ought to prevent our laying down the law as to our choice; still more should it stop any person from using the words: “If he chooses rightly,” as if any one could choose wrongly when the soul is liberated.
394. Yet an idea – a very subtle one – runs through us, that we can dictate the choice. We sometimes find ourselves choosing for our own future – for the far-off future – what to be and what to do; and that is really the lower consciousness choosing for the higher. This subtle tendency runs through our life.
Part of our consciousness feels itself as the ‘I’, and naturally inclines to choose the path of the future as it looks at it, forgetting that it is thereby choosing for the higher consciousness, in whose hands alone the choice really lies. Making up your minds as to what is to be done at the close of the Arhat stage, would be like a child choosing his profession in life.
His selection, not being guided by knowledge, would certainly not be one that his mature judgment would approve. A young child can have no choice as to his career in the future, and it is the same in these matters. The higher ego will choose, without regard to the lower; indeed, the lower will perish before the choice comes.
All that is important to put before the lower, then, is the idea of service – of its being made an instrument to serve. Unless it does this it becomes an obstacle to the higher consciousness. Remember it can throw obstacles in the way of that consciousness; as has often been said, it crucifies the higher ego.
395. Another thing to remember is that we cannot judge of any stage of consciousness that we have not experienced, and of which we do not know the relative value. When thinking of a higher condition of consciousness that you have not experienced, there is no possibility of your being able to form any judgment about it. When you reach that state the universe alters for you, bringing about a change in your nature, and causing you to know how such consciousness can act.
You must experience this change before you can know. So in forming any opinion as to a path in the future, it is a case of judging a state of consciousness of which you have no knowledge, and your judgment is worthless.
Continues...
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16 Feb 2021
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