Light on the Path 2010
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The document discusses various levels of consciousness and the necessity of overcoming personal desires and ambitions to attain spiritual enlightenment. It emphasizes the importance of inner strength, individual growth, and the duality of action and stillness in the path toward self-realization. Ultimately, it advocates for an understanding of one’s true self as the guiding warrior in life’s battles, fostering harmony with the universe's deeper truths.
Light on the Path 2010
- 2. Levels of Consciousness The double; vehicle of prana or ch’i Physical, liquid and gaseous Physical Etheric Dense Seat of feelings Emotion Concrete thinking; with form Lower Mental Abstract thinking; formless Higher Mental Seat of spirituality and true intuition; where illumination And enlightenment occurs Transcendent Consciousness Spark of the Divine; True Self within Higher Self Function Vehicle
- 3. Light on the Path
- 4. Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears. Before the ear can hear, it must have lost its sensitiveness. Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters it must have lost the power to wound. Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart.
- 5. 1. Kill out ambition. 2. Kill out desire of life. 3. Kill out desire of comfort. 4. Work as those work who are ambitious. Respect life as those do who desire it. Be happy as those are who live for happiness.
- 6. Seek in the heart the source of evil and expunge it. It lives fruitfully in the heart of the devoted disciple as well as in the heart of the man of desire. Only the strong can kill it out. The weak must wait for its growth, its fruition, its death. And it is a plant that lives and increases throughout the ages. It flowers when the man has accumulated unto himself innumerable existences.
- 7. He who will enter upon the path of power must tear this thing out of his heart. And then the heart will bleed, and the whole life of the man seem to be utterly dissolved. This ordeal must be endured; it may come at the first step of the perilous ladder which leads to the path of life: it may not come until the last. But, O disciple, remember that it has to be endured: and fasten the energies of your soul upon the task. Live neither in the present nor the future, but in the eternal. This giant weed cannot flower there: this blot upon existence is wiped out by the very atmosphere of eternal thought.
- 8. 5. Kill out all sense of separateness. 6. Kill out desire for sensation. 7. Kill out the hunger for growth. Yet stand alone and isolated, because nothing that is embodied, nothing that is conscious of separation, nothing that is out of the eternal, can aid you. Learn from sensation and observe it, because only so can you commence the science of self-knowledge, and plant your foot on the first step of the ladder.
- 9. 9. Desire only that which is within you. 10. Desire only that which is beyond you. 11. Desire only that which is unattainable. 12. For within you is the light of the world -- the only light that can be shed upon the Path. If you are unable to perceive it within you, it is useless to look for it elsewhere. It is beyond you; because when you reach it you have lost yourself. It is unattainable, because it for ever recedes. You will enter the light, but you will never touch the flame.
- 10. Grow as the flower grows, unconsciously, but eagerly anxious to open its soul to the air. So must you press forward to open your soul to the eternal. But it must be the eternal that draws forth your strength and beauty, not desire of growth. For in the one case you develop in the luxuriance of purity, in the other you harden by the forcible passion for personal stature.
- 11. 17. Seek out the way. 18. Seek the way by retreating within. 19. Seek the way by advancing boldly without.
- 12. Seek it not by any one road. To each temperament there is one road which seems the most desirable. But the way is not found by devotion alone, by religious contemplation alone, by ardent progress, by self-sacrificing labor, by studious observation of life. None alone can take the disciple more than one step onward.
- 13. All steps are necessary to make up the ladder. The vices of men become steps in the ladder, one by one, as they are surmounted. The virtues of man are steps indeed, necessary -- not by any means to be dispensed with. Yet, though they create a fair atmosphere and a happy future, they are useless if they stand alone. The whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desires to enter the way.
- 14. 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, and, by the force of his awakened spiritual will, recognizes this individuality as not himself, but that thing which he has with pain created for his own use, and by means of which he purposes, as his growth slowly develops his intelligence, to reach to the life beyond individuality. When he knows that for this his wonderful complex separated life exists, then, indeed, and then only, he is upon the way.
- 15. Look for the flower to bloom in the silence that follows the storm: not till then. 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.
- 16. 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.
- 17. The silence may last a moment of time or it may last a thousand years. But it will end. Yet you will carry its strength with you. Again and again the battle must be fought and won. It is only for an interval that Nature can be still.
- 18. 1. Stand aside in the coming battle, and though thou fightest be not thou the warrior. 2. Look for the warrior and let him fight in thee. 3. Take his orders for battle and obey them.
- 19. 4. Obey him not as though he were a general, but as though he were thyself, and his spoken words were the utterance of thy secret desires; for he is thyself, yet infinitely wiser and stronger than thyself. Look for him, else in the fever and hurry of the fight thou mayest pass him; and he will not know thee unless thou knowest him. If thy cry meet his listening ear, then will he fight in thee and fill the dull void within. And if this is so, then canst thou go through the fight cool and unwearied, standing aside and letting him battle for thee. Then it will be impossible for thee to strike one blow amiss. But if thou look not for him, if thou pass him by, then there is no safeguard for thee. Thy brain will reel, thy heart grow uncertain, and in the dust of the battlefield thy sight and senses will fail, and thou wilt not know thy friends from thy enemies.
- 20. He is thyself, yet thou art but finite and liable to error. He is eternal and is sure. He is eternal truth. When once he has entered thee and become thy warrior, he will never utterly desert thee, and at the day of the great peace he will become one with thee.
- 21. 5. Listen to the song of life. 6. Store in your memory the melody you hear. 7. Learn from it the lesson of harmony.
- 22. 8. You can stand upright now, firm as a rock amid the turmoil, obeying the warrior who is thyself and thy king. Unconcerned in the battle save to do his bidding, having no longer any care as to the result of the battle, for one thing only is important, that the warrior shall win, and you know he is incapable of defeat -- standing thus, cool and awakened, use the hearing you have acquired by pain and by the destruction of pain. Only fragments of the great song come to your ears while yet you are but man. But if you listen to it, remember it faithfully, so that none which has reached you is lost, and endeavor to learn from it the meaning of the mystery which surrounds you. In time you will need no teacher. For as the individual has voice, so has that in which the individual exists. Life itself has speech and is never silent. And its utterance is not, as you that are deaf may suppose, a cry: it is a song. Learn from it that you are part of the harmony; learn from it to obey the laws of the harmony. 9. Regard earnestly all the life that surrounds you.
- 23. Hold fast to that which has neither substance nor existence. 20. Listen only to the voice which is soundless. 21. Look only on that which is invisible alike to the inner and the outer sense.