LIGHT ON THE PATH - 123 : Seek it not by any one road. - 16

🌹 LIGHT ON THE PATH - 123 🌹

🍀 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. - 16 🌻

467. It may be asked: “Why seek it by what it is not, if you can have a touch of atmic consciousness?” Frankly speaking, it is not atmic consciousness you get in the brain, but a little vibration from the manasic aspect of atma differing from any other vibration in the manasic consciousness.

Vibrations started on higher planes are different from those that begin on the manasic plane. When a person attains to the highest stage of the Path proper – the fourth or Arhat Path – then, in meditation out of the body, he can pass into samadhi and reach the atmic consciousness in nirvana.

468. C.W.L. – This twofold triple division, of the methods by which we are to seek the way and the laws which correspond with those methods, is illuminating and without a doubt intentional. Plunging into the depths of one’s inmost being leads to the study of the laws of being – the laws of that plane which lies beyond all that is manifestation for us, that is to say, nirvana. The higher planes are, of course, still planes of manifestation, and even what lies beyond them is not really unmanifested, but it is so to us, at our present stage.

Only by study of the laws of being shall we be able to fulfil the real purpose of plunging into the depths of our inmost being, which is to “make obeisance to the dim star which burns within”. Clearly that is a very high stage in development – when we look for the atma and follow only that.

469. The testing of all experience corresponds with the study of the laws of nature, that is to say, the laws of the phenomenal world, those which work on the physical, astral and mental planes into which the personality plunges.

Then we are to learn to understand the individuality by the study of the laws of the supernatural, by which evidently are meant the laws of those worlds in which the ego, as such, moves, that is to say, the laws of the buddhic plane and the higher part of the mental plane. Of course there is nothing supernatural, but that word is used here evidently in a somewhat technical sense.

Through all the planes it is the one Life which expresses itself in different ways, and there is no break of natural law and order in the whole scheme; only when we come to a region beyond anything that any of our physical, astral or mental senses can touch, are we reaching up into something beyond the nature which most of us know, where other and wider laws operate.

I think it is in that sense that the Chohan uses this word “supernatural”. Beyond the sphere of these senses we pass into a region above the phenomenal, to what the Greeks called the noumenal world, which is the source and cause of the phenomenal worlds.

So the meaning of this passage appears to be that when we thoroughly understand the personality we shall have grasped “the laws of nature”; when we are seeking to understand the individuality, we shall be dealing with the “laws of the supernatural”, and when, beyond that, we try to realize the atma, we shall be studying the “laws of being”.

Continues...

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23 Mar 2021