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.