🍀 For those WHO DESIRE TO ENTER WITHIN - For DISCIPLES 🍀
✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj
CHAPTER 8 - THE 20th RULE
🌻 20. Seek it not by any one road. - 12 🌻
452. People think it would simplify their lives if the personality could remember all those past incarnations. In some ways it might, but I think that if in the personality we had the full remembrance of all our past lives before we had reached Adeptship, it would do more harm than good. In the first place, we have not the power to weigh all these things calmly. We should find it distinctly depressing to look back at the ghastly crimes we had committed in the past lives.
I have long ago learnt how to look back at my own past lives, but it is by no means a pleasure to do so. There are certain beautiful actions, some fine incidents in the past lives of everyone, and one is able to look back with a certain degree of pleasure on those, but we have found that in looking back upon a past life the thing that immediately strikes one most forcibly is the number of opportunities which one did not see.
Here, there, everywhere, we were surrounded by opportunities, and we cannot help feeling amazed that we took advantage of so few of them. It was not, usually, that we failed to take them because we did not want to do so; our intentions were good, though rather feebly good, perhaps, and if we had seen the opportunities we should have taken them. Now we look back and wonder at our own blindness.
We say: “If only I had taken this or that course of action certain results would have followed, and by this time I might have reached Adeptship.” But we did not. When we rise to that level the power to look back will be useful to us, but with the amount of intellect and free-will we have now it would certainly not be an unmixed pleasure.
453. Let us consider the general principles involved. The whole of this scheme of which we are a part is intended to further the evolution of man, therefore there can be no doubt whatever that if it were best for him that a personality should remember all his past lives, most certainly that would have been so arranged.
As that has not been done, we should at least have faith enough to see that it is best as it is. When a man has the power to look back he also gains with it a wider insight and a more balanced view of things, and by that time he is so imbued with the certainty of justice in the scheme that if he cannot see exactly how a result followed from its cause he will say: “Well, I do not see the reason for this, but I am sure I shall do so presently.”
It would not occur to him to think that he had been unjustly treated. The person who is always talking of being unjustly treated and is perpetually accusing high heaven of neglecting him, does not understand the rudiments of the case. We know that the law is absolutely just – as just as the law of gravitation – but it does not follow that we can always tell exactly how it will work itself out.
454. As I have said, the ego makes a note of that which produces evil results. Warned by past experience, he tries to influence the personality before it becomes so strong, so definite and decided that it will not be guided by the vaguer touch from the ego behind. It distinctly thinks that it knows best along its own line. Very often it declines to be helped from above, and so the ego cannot influence it to the full extent that he would like.
But he tries to gain control, and as we go on we shall feel this higher self more and more endeavouring to take the reins. If we will identify ourselves with him, we shall find that then he can do Very much more for us. His chief difficulty is the fact that the average personality identifies itself with the lower vehicles and rather resents his interference, but if it can be persuaded to identify itself with him, then at once the whole difficulty is very much lessened.
Continues...
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14 Mar 2021
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