LIGHT ON THE PATH - 106 : 18. Seek the way by retreating within. 19. Seek the way by advancing boldly without. - 2

🌹 LIGHT ON THE PATH - 106 🌹

🍀 For those WHO DESIRE TO ENTER WITHIN - For DISCIPLES 🍀

✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj

CHAPTER 8 - THE 18, 19 RULE

🌻 18. Seek the way by retreating within. 19. Seek the way by advancing boldly without. - 2 🌻

408. We get these samples sometimes, and should try to understand them as such; we often find, for example, quite an ordinary person showing great heroism when a sudden emergence arises. A workman will sacrifice his life to save his fellow-man. Now the possibility of doing that shows that the man inside is really at that level.

Whatever is the highest a man can touch is in reality the man himself, because he could not touch it, could not think it, if it were not himself. All the lower expression – the storms of passion, the baser feelings – belongs to the personality. They should not be there – that goes without saying – but they are not the real man. If sometimes he touches great heights, that is the level at which he ought always to strive to keep himself.

409. The high and noble things for which a man yearns must be to some extent developed in the ego, otherwise he could not be longing for them down here.

The people who do not wish for such ideals are those in whom those particular qualities do not exist even in germ. If we yearn for higher things they are in us not as a mere possibility but a living fact, and it remains for us to live at our highest level and in that way reach one still higher. The whole object of the ego in putting himself down is that he may become more definite, that all his vaguely beautiful feelings may crystallize into a definite resolution to act.

All his incarnations form a process by means of which he may gain precision and definiteness. Therefore specialization is our way of advancement. We come down into each race or sub-race in order that we may acquire the qualities for the perfection of which that sub-race is working. The fragment of the ego which is put down is highly specialized.

It is intended to develop a certain quality, and when that is done the ego absorbs it into himself in due course, and he does that over and over again. The personality scatters something of its special achievement over the whole when it is withdrawn into the ego, so that he thus becomes a little less vague than before.

410. The ego, with all its mighty powers, is very much less accurate than the lower mind, and the personality, valuing above all the discriminating powers of the lower mind which it is intended to develop, often comes in consequence to despise the far higher but vaguer self, and acquires a habit of thinking of itself as independent of the ego.

Continues...

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22 Feb 2021