Notes - 6
The purpose of meditation and silence is to reopen the spiritual centre
within each soul.
There is a thought which is not cerebral at all as we know the brain or
is not the mind as we know the mind.
As long as we continue to suppress one side of our nature, there can
be no meditation for us. Feeling becomes hostile through subjugation
and thwarts in a thousand lurking ambushes.
Meditation is unprofitable and dangerous to the man who enters upon it
without the basis of a good character and of clean living. Meditation then
becomes only a medium for the bringing in of energies which but serve to
stimulate the undesirable aspects of his life. Meditation is dangerous
when the desire to serve is lacking.
Only confined to our ordinary illusion of a one-way flowing time could
man believe in personal salvation and paradise independent of others.
----
It is quite possible for a man to tune into the fears of other people
whilst he has himself nothing to fear.
Enter thy brother's mind and read his thoughts, but only when thy own
thoughts are pure.
Enter thy brother's heart and see his woe. Thine is the work to speak
with understanding.
A true comprehension of a brother's need, divorced from sentiment, will
lead to that silence of the tongue which grows out of non-reference to
the separate self and the demonstration of a non-critical spirit.
The most potent force in the world is harmlessness. I speak not of
non-resistance, but that positive attitude of mind which thinks no evil.
He who thinks no evil and has naught is a citizen of God's world.
Only the hands that have let slip all within the three worlds are free
to carry the ultimate blessing to struggling humanity. In love of all that
breathes comes the capacity to vibrate universally.
Aspirants must live harmlessly in thoughts, words and deeds. The
freedom to walk in the light carries with it its own problems.
Harmlessness will result in control of speech; harmlessness in
emotional reaction will result in being a channel for the love aspect of
the Soul (Self); harmlessness in action will produce poise, skill in
action, and the release of creative will.
Harmlessness is the expression of the life of a man who realizes
himself to be everywhere; he lives consciously as a soul whose nature is
love, whose method is inclusiveness, and to whom all forms are alike in
that they veil and hide the light.
The armed hand is an empty hand and this protects it possessor from the
accusations of his enemies. It is a hand freed from the taint of the four
symbolic evils: gold, lust, dagger and enticement.
...Because criticism, being a faculty of the lower mind, can hurt and
wound, and no man can proceed upon the way as long as wounds are made and
pain is knowingly given. Learn never to criticize in thought and word.
...There is a great hindrance to the growth of the man in spiritual
being through the critical attitude.
----
No person is educated until he can think for himself.
Intuition is the condition of internal clarity.
Intuition ever concerns itself with higher activity and not with petty
personal affairs. The intuition reveals not the way ambition can be fed,
nor the manner in which desire for selfish advancement can be gratified.
Let desire and word be so pure and so equally apportioned, and the
created form so justly balanced that it cannot be attracted towards the
destructive or left-hand path.
\ Purity is largely a question of motive. If the incentive to action of
any kind in the three worlds is based upon personality desire and brought
about by the applied use of the mind.
Motive is of prime importance. Mixed motive is universal. Pure motive
is rare, and where it exists there is ever success.
Why do we choose? When we analyze the choice, we see that it is
determined by motive.
If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the
wrong way.
{ A vibration, an impulse, an emotion, a desire originate in the lower
aspect of the form side. They differ from an emanation coming from the
soul.
Distinguish between instinct and intuition, higher and lower mind,
desire and spiritual impulse, selfish aspiration and divine incentive.
...Liberation from the thraldom of lower loves into the liberty of love
itself and into the freedom of one who possesses all things and yet
desires nothing for the separated self.}
The secret of all aspirants is to cultivate the attitude of the
onlooker and of the silent watcher. By premature speech and too much talk,
the child of his thought is still-born.
But as time goes, a man grows spiritually, his meditation will perforce
give way to a steady spiritual orientation. He must assume and constantly
hold the position of the observer, detached from the mechanism of
observation.
The cultivation of a detached attitude personally, with the attached
attitude spiritually, will cut away roots of a man's life, but it will
render a thousand-fold for all that is cut away.
It is persistence in the attitude of right observation that brings
about detachment from form and a subsequent power to use form at will.
An individual who has elevated the functioning of his consciousness
from the fourth principle to the fifth principle, he approaches all
subjects with a mind wholly free from prejudice or desire. He seeks merely
to know the truth regardless of what the truth may be.
God is a God of knowledge.
Pray with intense desire for wisdom, knowing that God does not withhold
it.
\ Knowledge we ask not, knowledge thou has sent; but Lord, thy will then
lies our bitter need?
Know only one mind at work -- God. Let the action of God take place.
In the Universe, there is no form of knowledge which is not perceived
through sound; knowledge is pierced through by sound, all this Universe is
but the result of sound.
Study of sound and effects of sound will put into man's hands a
tremendous instrument in the world of creation.
All fear, doubt and worry have to be eliminated. If this can be done,
the development of the inner points of contact and the knowledge of how to
tap the sources of inspiration will increase in a wonderful manner.
Rest not from your meditation work, keep the inner link, think the
truth at all times.
Pray as though no work would help, and work as though no prayer would
help.
All progress is in cycles, and there is a point of inspired waiting.
The inner life, slowly developed during the cyclic interlude, becomes
the dominating factor.
Only when spirit by the power of thought controls the material vehicles
does the subjective life assume its rightful place.
Visions, voices and mental pictures we must fly from. The less the soul
thinketh that it seeth God, the nearer it is to perceive Divine Love.
Mental images proclaim the lower levels of consciousness.
Use the safer method, utilize the mental vehicle as an intermediary
between Soul and brain -- oiuja boards, planchette pencil, automatic
writing, direct voice, obsessed mediums are not utilized as a rule by the
disciple. \Mediumship is dangerous.
In the understanding of the law of cycles we gain knowledge of the
underlying laws of evolution and come to a realization of the rhythmic
work of creation. We gain poise if we study our own life impulses. They
also have an ebb and flow.
{ Pain is following the line of greatest resistance. Pain is the smashing
of form and the reading of the inner fire. It leads the human soul out of
the darkness into light, out of bondage into liberation, out of agony into
peace.
To each temperament there is one road which seems the most desirable.
Each man is to himself absolutely the way, the truth, and the life. But
he is only so when he grasps his whole individuality firmly...}
----
Every disciple has to understand the astral plane.
The main task of the aspirant is the handling of energies.
Seek not to attain essence before the mind absorbs. Not thus is wisdom
sought. Only one who has mind in least and seeth the world as in a mirror
can be safely trusted with the inner sense.
Perception of greater worlds, greater forces, higher ideals, higher
possibilities, taken in a certain way, will nourish and enrich the
essence. If such perceptions constantly penetrate into a man and are
digested by him, essence begins to unfold.
The premature unfoldment of centres involves much loss of time. Such
stimulations produce insanity and the breaking down of the cellular
structure of the brain.
Let a man apply himself to a life of high altruism, to a discipline
that will refine and bring his lower vehicles into subjection, and to a
strenuous endeavour to purify and control his sheaths. His centres will
raise their vibrational tone.
Until the understanding of the web of life or the body of vitality
which underlies every form and links every part of a form with every other
part is recognized and known to be a fact in nature, the problem will
remain unsolved.
Until the mental apparatus is sufficiently awakened and controlled, it
would not be possible for man to interpret rightly and utilize correctly
the information which his body of sensitive response could convey to him.
Vice is an energy of the sheaths, individually and collectively, in the
personality, and it controls the life activity and subordinates the Soul
to the sheaths and to the impulses and tendencies of the lower self.
Man, being not yet master of the substance of his own sheaths, incurs
risk when he concentrates his attention on the not-Self.
Pouring into brain consciousness (\land) of the knowledge of the astral
planes. The aspirant becomes aware of but should not produce a tendency to
psychism. This will produce death by drowning, for the aspirants'
spiritual life can be swamped and entirely submerged in the interest of
lower psychical experiences. It is here that many worthy aspirants go
wrong.
The human being is entirely conditioned by his instruments of
expression and can express no more than his nervous system, brain and
glands permit.
The waking consciousness of a man is the consciousness working through
the physical brain at a certain rate imposed by it, conditioned by all the
conditions of the brain.
So long as certain physical development remains unaccomplished, self-
consciousness may be evolved on the astral and mental planes but its
workings do not express themselves through the brain. Super-consciousness
includes the whole of the consciousness above and besides the waking
consciousness.
The higher powers in man are not due to something added but to the
absence of factors which inhibit their development; they are releases of
power heretofore suppressed.
Supernormal powers are of themselves no evidence of divinity at all.
The astral stage is the vast cycle of time in which the great illusion
holds sway -- it is not the stage of definitely divine manifestation, it
is that period of time where the half-gods walk.