LIGHT ON THE PATH - 136 : 21. Look for the flower to bloom in the silence that follows the storm: not till then - 1

🌹 LIGHT ON THE PATH - 136 🌹

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

✍️. ANNIE BESANT and LEADBEATER
📚. Prasad Bharadwaj


CHAPTER 11 -

🌻 21. Look for the flower to bloom in the silence that follows the storm: not till then - 1 🌻

515. It shall grow, it will shoot up, it will make branches and leaves and form buds, while the storm continues, while the battle lasts. But not till the whole personality of the man is dissolved and melted – not until it is held by the divine fragment which has created it, as a mere subject for grave experiment and experience – not until the whole nature has yielded and become subject unto its Higher Self, can the bloom open.

Then will come a calm such as comes in a tropical country after the heavy rain, when nature works so swiftly that one may see her action. Such a calm will come to the harassed spirit. And in the deep silence the mysterious event will occur which will prove that the way has been found.

Call it by what name you will, it is a voice that speaks where there is none to speak – it is a messenger that comes, a messenger without form or substance; or it is the flower of the soul that has opened. It cannot be described by any metaphor. But it can be felt after, looked for, and desired, even amid the raging of the storm.

516. C.W.L. – The blooming of the flower is the development, the unfoldment of the soul. The worst feature of sorrow and suffering down here is the feeling that one is helpless. People engage in all sorts of struggles, and in many cases think they are predestined to fail.

They will say: “I have heard of certain people making rapid progress, but there is no chance for me.” They are hopeless about it because they do not know. We can never again have that feeling when once the soul has unfolded itself, because we know. We shall still have struggles and troubles and difficulties, but we know for certain that as souls we are invincible.

517. As is said here, it is in the silence and the calm that the soul grows. People tell us, and I think that they often emphasize it quite unduly, that the soul grows through suffering. Put that way the statement is not quite correct. It is by making mistakes and correcting them that the soul learns how to grow, and suffering invariably comes as the result of the mistakes; but as I have explained before, the growth does not take place during the suffering, but afterwards.

A person may be very much better after a surgical operation, but the improvement does not take place while the operation is being performed.1 (1 Ante. p. 100.) In like manner while people are in the throes of all sorts of terrible difficulties they are not growing, but by the way in which they meet those difficulties they may be learning to grow after they have surmounted them.

It is in the silence which follows the storm that the flower grows. It is possible that plants may develop strength within themselves by enduring a storm, but growth can come only when the buffeting of the storm is over. We must have gone through the turmoil of battle before we gain that great reward of victory, the real unfoldment of the soul, which brings with it a calm certainty which nothing again can ever shake.


Continues...

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18 Apr 2021