Annie Besant · 4

Now, the Science of Yoga has its own practices and experiments, and therefore its own dangers. If you believe it possible that there should be such a science, if by study you have convinced yourself that such a science exists, it is childish to kick against the restrictions which every science places on its students until they have learned and understand; and then they can go forward as they will, for knowledge has justified their independence.

This Discipline of Life does, I frankly admit, keep off a certain, even a considerable, number of those who say that they would like to enter on the search which means presently to tread the Path. People sometimes more resent restrictions on their ordinary daily life than they resent things more impalpable, and there­fore less realised. Take, for instance, one very common habit, especially of the western world, and now unhappily penetrating into the East, the habit of taking various forms of alcoholic drink. I admit that for the great majority of men and women of the world, leading the ordinary life of men and not inclined to fall into the excesses which we see amongst the less cultured and less intellectual, very little harm accrues from the taking of a certain small amount of wine or spirit. I admit men can do it all their lives, and women too, with very [35] little harm. Those of them who adopt abstin­ence without desiring to follow Yoga probably do it because they see the harm and the excess drink leads to, and realise that example is better than precept. Those who take it will injure themselves a little. But then they are injuring themselves all the time by insanitary habits, and one, more or less, is not a matter of life and death. It may shorten life a little; it may open a small door to let in disease. But it is quite different when you begin the practice which by seeking leads you to the Master; for part of that practice is what is called Meditation, con­centrated, definite, hard thinking along a par­ticular line, which is intended to stimulate and develop in you organs at present rudimentary, which will not develop in ordinary people in the ordinary course of evolution for a considerable time, although I admit a good many amongst ourselves are just beginning to evolve them. Now those organs are in the physical brain, organs which doctors have lately stated are peculiarly susceptible to any vapour of alcohol, which by it are poisoned, and so are rendered incapable of functioning healthily at all. When you begin deliberately to hasten their evolution from the rudimentary or semi-rudimentary con­ditions up to the activity in which they become the bridge between the physical and the astral worlds, by means of which you bring through certain vibrations to which the rest of the brain does not normally respond, the organs, which [36] are literally the bridges of communication; then, by thus increasing the flow of blood to them by meditation, thus stimulating the minute vessels which feed them, you will render the danger of inflammation very much greater; it is madness to do it, if those organs are already suffering from slight alcoholic poisoning, which, while it goes on without bringing much harm where the organs are left alone, becomes a source of active and serious danger the moment they are stimulated to growth, the moment attention is turned towards them in order that they may develop. Hence part of the Discipline of Life for the practical study of Yoga is the entire putting aside of every spirituous liquor.

Another demand which is made, still more annoying in the minds of many - and I grant it is troublesome to those who are very much in contact with their fellows - is the dropping of all forms of flesh food. That does not poison in the same way, but it tends slightly to coarsen the body, and the aim of the student of Yoga is to have a body which will be very strong and very resistant, while at the same time it is very sensitive and very responsive to vibrations from the subtler worlds of matter and of life. You have to deal here with your nervous system and your brain; you have to build those up; and the building depends on the kind of food that you take; and, putting aside all questions of compassion (though they cannot be put aside by those who would seek [37] the Masters of Compassion), and taking only the physical results, apart from any question as to animal suffering and pain, you find that unless your nerves, your brains, are prepared, then the vibrations of subtler matter beating upon them - and you are inviting that beating, remember - will tend to disorganise both, and to render you liable to nervous disorder and to various forms of hysteria.

This warning I am bound to give. If you want to see it justified, turn back to the records of Mystics and Saints, whose religions did not impose upon them a strict Discipline of Life. You will find much of unbalanced thought and judgment, much of hysterical emotion, mingled with a splendid insight into the worlds called invisible, and a marvellous response to the powers coming from beings of the higher world. That is so unchallenged, so unchallengeable, that some psychologists have used it as a proof that all religious higher vision is really a form of hysteria, and that all great Saints and Prophets and Teachers of religion are more or less unbalanced, when they have come into touch with the invisible worlds. You know how far Lombroso went in that, and many of his school go as far as he did. If you would search safely, if you would keep your balance, your nervous system strong and sane and healthy, then you must be willing to pay the price that all have paid in the past and are paying in the present, that when they affront [38] those keener vibrations, when they allow them to play upon their body, and especially on the brain and nervous system, they must then take up a life different from that led by men and women of the world, and must be willing to tune up the instrument on which the melodies of the Spirit presently are to be played.

So you may take Yoga practically to cover an application of the laws of mind to swifter individual evolution, and a discipline of life­ - the latter applicable, of course, to those who practice, who do not only study.

Then the seeker finds that there are certain Qualifications laid down for the treading of the earlier portion of the Path, that which the Roman Catholic calls the Path of Purgation, which the Hindu and the Buddhist call the probationary or preparatory Path. Those Qualifications are laid down quite plainly and definitely, so that any man may begin to practise them, and the practice of them, with some slight restriction which I will give you in a moment, need not imply that Discipline of Life of which I have been speaking, because it does not, with one exception, lead into a certain definite practice of meditation. These Qualifications are said to be four. First the Power to Dis­criminate between the real and the unreal. I shall go more fully into these next week, but I want to run over them now to show you the line of the preparation. You have to learn to distinguish in everything around you, and in [39] everyone around you, between the permanent element and the impermanent, between the surface and the content, as it were, between the eternal and the transitory. That is the first of the Qualifications, and that leads on necessarily to the second; for when you distinguish between the passing and the lasting, you become some­what indifferent to the things that are ever-changing, while your gaze is steadfastly fixed on that which you recognise as lasting. The second Qualification is what is called Dispassion, or Desirelessness, the absence of desire for the fleeting and the changing, the concentration of desire on the Eternal, on that which Is. The third Qualification is made of the Six Jewels, mental qualities that you must acquire. First, Control of the Mind, that you may be able to fix it steadily on a single thing, to suck out all the contents of that thing, and also to use it as an instrument in the building of character; for your mind is your only instrument, remember, whereby you can create, re-create, yourself. As the mallet and the chisel in the hand of the sculptor, so is control of the mind moved by will the mallet and chisel in the hand of the man who would create out of the rough marble of his own nature the perfect image of the Divine, that he seeks within that marble. Then Control of Action, which grows out of the mind, and the great virtue of Tolerance. No one who is bigoted, narrow-minded, illiberal, can enter on the Path we seek. Tolerance, broad, [40] all-pervading, that is one of the Qualifications, and it means far more than some of you think. It does not mean the spirit that says: “Oh, yes, you are all wrong, but you can go your own way”. That is not real tolerance; that is rather indifference to your neighbour’s welfare. The real tolerance grows out of the recognition of the Spirit in the heart of each, of him who knows his own way and takes it “according to the Word”, recognising in each the Spirit that knows, seeing in each the will of the Spirit that chooses, never desiring in any way to compel any more than to obstruct; to offer anything we have of value, but never to desire to force it on the unwilling; to place what we believe to be true before the eyes of another, but to feel no vexation, no anger, no irritation, if to him it is not true; to remember that truth is no truth to anyone until he sees it and embraces it for himself, and that we are so built, our inner nature is so true, that the moment we see a truth we embrace it. It is not argument, but recognition, with which the Spirit in man meets the unveiled truth; and while the bandage is on the eyes and we cannot see, truth is to us as falsehood, for our nature has not recognised it as truth. That is what tolerance means, holding your own, willing to share it, but ever refusing to impose or to attack. The fourth jewel is Endurance, that strong power which can bear without giving way, which can face all things in the search for truth, and never fall back [41] because of difficulty or of peril; which knows no discouragement, admits no despair, which is sure that truth is findable, and resolute to find it. Every obstacle makes it stronger, every struggle strengthens its muscles, every defeat makes it rise again to struggle for victory. The man needs endurance who would tread the higher path. Then Faith, faith in the God within you, faith in the God manifested in the Master, faith in the One Life whereof we all are manifestations, faith unshaken and unshake­able, so that no doubt may arise. Then Balance, equilibrium. The Song-Celestial says: “Equili­brium is called Yoga”; absence of excitement, absence of passion, the transmutation of excite­ment and passion into the will that points un­swerving to its goal; the power of standing serene while all around are troubled; the power of standing alone where all others have left and have deserted. That perfect balance is the sixth of these jewels of the mind. The fourth Qualification is the desire to be free, the will to be free, in order that you may help.

These need not be wholly gained before you find the Master, else were the search well-nigh impossible. All that is meant by saying that these are the Qualifications is that you must aim at them, and try to begin to build them into your character. You build so much better, if you know what you want. You study so much more effectively, if the subjects of your examination are before you. And so these are [42] laid down by the Masters as the Qualifications that those are to develop who desire to find Them and to become Their pupils. The moment we know them we can begin to work at them. The moment we see them we can begin to try to develop them, and only a little development in each is wanted before the search will pass into the finding.

But you may say: “How begin, how work at them?” Not by that vague wish to be better than you are, which is all that some people seem to know of the deathless, unconquerable will which forces its way to the Path. The means are very largely meditation, and then the practice in life. There are no other real means, for meditation is concentrated thought, and concentrated thought is, as I have just said, your one instrument when you would re-create yourself. For this meditation to be safely practised, it is necessary to adopt the Discipline above-mentioned. Meditation means that you will for a time withdraw from the world, not for long at first, for it is a strain upon the brain; five or ten minutes in the morning is enough to begin with, and if you have done it well you will find it enough, for you will be tired before the ten minutes are over. For that time you withdraw from the outer world, you shut it right out, you build a wall, as it were, around you, through which the thoughts and the hopes and the fears of the outer world cannot pierce. You go within yourself, into the Holy of Holies [43] within you, and there you sit, in the silence within that wall, to listen for the voice of the Self, to await the coming of the higher man into his kingdom. And when you have built your wall and shut out the outer world, you turn your mind, which is ever wandering about and disturbing you, and fix it on some single idea. Take, if you will, the first of the Qualifications, in many ways the most difficult - dis­crimination. You begin steadily to think of what that means, to think, say, of yourself; you realise that there is much in you that is chang­ing and not permanent; your body is changing; your emotions are changing; your thoughts are changing. Those then belong to the unreal and not to the real, and in your thought you put those aside, sometimes one by one, some­times with the body; you put aside a single sense like that of sight, and try to realise the world as it would be without the sense of sight, or any other sense that you please for the time, to force yourself into realising that it is not yourself. You feel an emotion and put it aside, shut it out, refuse to vibrate in answer to it, and you see those changing emotions are not yourself. Then those wandering thoughts that change with every breath; you put them aside, and see that changing phantasmagoria of thought is not yourself. And so you shut out part after part, until perchance nothing seems left, for you find that all is changing, and you seek the real and the Changeless. But in that [44] emptiness that you have made, in that void whence the unreal has disappeared, from which the changing has vanished, and where for a moment you feel disappointed, in that void there arises upon you the higher consciousness, the death­less, the unchanging, the eternal; the Will, of which your changing wishes are the reflection in the lower world; the Wisdom, of which your varying thoughts are the images in the lower world; the Activity, of which your changing actions are the reflection in the lower world. You feel yourself to be Will, Wisdom, Activity, apart from all those changing images. Just as the sun in the heaven is unchanged, but is mirrored as a thousand suns in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, so do you know the Sun of the Spirit within you from the broken reflections that you find in the lower self. You gain by meditation the knowledge that you are eternal, and that all the changing things are only the broken images of your real Self.

Out of that quiet meditation, out of that great realisation, you go into your outer world of broken images, and you try to live in the Eternal while you are busy in the outer world. You know you are dealing only with reflections, but reflections of vital import for the building of character and for the helping of men. You know there is something beyond them, and that in yourself, but willingly you go out into the world of men to bring them what you have found in the silence of the chamber of life. You [45] live what in that chamber you have known; you walk in the light which there has risen upon you; you love with the love that grows out of the love of the real, and you become a true worker in the haunts of men. And so, again, it is written: “Yoga is skill in action”, for only, the man who knows the higher can control the lower; only the man who is without desires can see how to work best for the helping of his brethren; only the man who has the will that never changes can be unmoved by the passing wishes that flit through the lower nature.

From meditation to work, from the gaining of light to the bearing of it into the world, from the learning of wisdom to the using it among men, from the realisation of right activity to the guiding aright your acts. And as the man thus searches, desiring to find the Master, as he offers to Him the service he is able to render and works with the longing to find Him that so he may serve Him better, then after long seeking and resolute searching he sees awakening in his partial darkness the; Light that is real; he comes to the point where the Master will find him, where truly his feet shall be set on that probationary Path, for which he has been preparing himself during his search.

And so we leave him knocking at the door, seeking for the Master, knowing that the door will soon be turned upon its hinges, and that on its threshold the Master shall be found. [46]

FINDING THE MASTER

WE left our aspirant last week on the thres­hold, as it were, of the door that opens into the presence of the Master. He has served in the outer world; he has learned theoretically of the existence of the Path and of the Masters; he has acquired a certain amount of knowledge as to the great facts of human life and human evolution; he has awaked to the wish to take himself definitely in hand, to use the great laws of nature in order to quicken his evolution that he may be of greater service to the world. I ran over very hastily the names of those Quali­fications which are definitely laid down as precedent to Initiation, not that they must be perfectly acquired, not that the man must show them out without failure in their full strength and full beauty, but that he must have made some progress in weaving them into his character, must to some extent at least have shaped his conduct after these main ideas of Right Living - right living as laid down by the Masters of the Wisdom as necessary for candidates for the Path. I told you also something of meditation, [47] as the means whereby a man may create him­self, first thinking of the ideal and then carrying it out in life. I must ask you just to recall those closing sentences of the last lecture, because, in the brief time I have to cover a big subject, there is not leisure enough to repeat.

And now I must go straight on to the Finding of the Master, and the living out of those Qualifications in action along the lines that the Masters demand. It may well be that on some of the points your thought may not wholly accord with the thought of the Occultist; it may be that on some points you may think too much stress is laid on something that to you is trivial, while on the other hand some things are omitted that you may regard as essential to right conduct. But we are now passing out of the region of opinions into the region of facts. The disciple cannot choose the Qualifications; it is his to fulfil them; and if he thinks them ill­chosen or unnecessary, there is no obligation upon him to enter on the Path of which they are the preparatory stage. Only, if he would enter on the Path, the Guardians of which are the Masters of the Wisdom, then he must accept the conditions that They lay down; he must endeavour to shape himself according to the immemorial law of the disciple.

When a man has sufficiently distinguished himself by service, and by acquiring and accepting the theoretical views that were glanced at in “Seeking the Master”, then he finds his [48] Master - or rather his Master finds him. During all the time of his struggle those gracious eyes have been upon him watching him progress; in many lives in the past he has come under the same influence which now is to become the dominant influence in his life. He has reached a point where the Master can reveal Himself, can place him definitely on probation, can help to prepare him for Initiation. That is the first stage: a particular Master chooses a particular aspirant and takes charge of him, in order to prepare him for Initiation; for you must remember that Initiation is a quite definite thing, that only Those who have already attained can enable others to enter on the Path which They Themselves have trodden.

Now, the time has come for the knitting firmly of the link which cannot be broken - the distinct individual tie between the man who is still outside the Path and the One who stands at its summit; a tie which shall endure from life to life; a tie which nothing can break, neither death nor failure nor folly; it holds against all attempts to break it. The man may go slowly towards his goal, but he can never entirely break away, nor can he utterly fail. The tie is there, knit and knotted by the Master, and there is no power in all this universe which can break that which a Master has made. He summons the man to His presence - not, naturally, in the physical body, for, for the most part, the Masters live away in retired places difficult to [49] reach, hard to find. But long before this the man has learned, when the body is sleeping, to work actively in the world invisible to fleshly eyes, and in what is called his astral body; which is, remember, the lowest of those invisible bodies above the physical, in which the whole man is present, Spirit and soul, clothed in a subtler body; it is in that that he receives the summons of the Master to enter into the Master’s physical presence, to stand face to face with Him and listen to His words. Then that Master places the man on what is called “probation”. It means the knitting of the tie I have spoken of, and then the sending of the man back into the outer world to see how he will live his life, how he will meet his trials, where he will show strength and where show weakness, to test how far the strength admits of the rapid working out of the evil karma that may still exist. He comes back to the world a disciple on probation, feel­ing a new strength behind him, a new power encircling him; knowing, even though he may not remember the event, that some great thing has happened to him on the inner planes of being; for the strength of the Master is with him; the blessing of the Master is upon him; the hand of the Master is stretched out in blessing over him; and so he goes to his probation in the world of men.

Quickly or slowly, according as that proba­tion is lived nobly or poorly, another summons comes to him, when the Master sees that he [50] has gained to a considerable extent the Qualifi­cations which are necessary, and needs a further fuller teaching in order that he may apply his knowledge more efficiently to life. Again he is called; again he sees his Master. And then the Master accepts him as disciple, no longer on probation, but accepted and approved; now his consciousness is to begin to blend with the consciousness of his Master, and he is to feel His presence more clearly, His thought more effectively.

It is very often at that stage that special and illuminating teachings are given to the young disciple, in order to help him more swiftly on his way. Such you may read, if you like, in the little book that I hold in my hand, called At the Feet of the Master, in which a young disciple, taught by his Master, on his return to the body wrote down, day after day as best he could, that which his Master had told him of the way of applying the Qualifications to life, and of understanding thoroughly what those Qualifications meant. So far as I know, it is the first time that anyone has been allowed to write down, word by word, teachings received on the inner plane along the lines of the Quali­fications. I do not mean that nothing has come from the great Teachers to the world, but this is peculiar, inasmuch as the Qualifications are taken one after the other and their exact appli­cation to life is shown. And he who wrote them down has said: “These are not my words; [51] they are the words of the Master who taught me; without Him I could have done nothing, but with His help I have set my feet upon the Path. You also desire to enter the same Path; so the words that He spoke to me will help you also if you will obey them. It is not enough to say that they are true and beautiful; a man who wishes to succeed must do exactly what is said. To look at food and say that it is good will not satisfy a starving man; he must put forth his hand and eat. So to hear the Master’s words is not enough; you must do what He says, attending to every word, taking every hint”.

In dealing with these Qualifications I am basing what I say on this direct teaching of one of the Masters of Wisdom and Compassion. Naturally, I cannot give you all that is written here, for that would far outpace my time; but the outline is taken from this special teaching, which I may remind you may be found, although not in this detailed application, in the Hindu and Buddhist books that have traced for us the preparatory Path as well as the Path itself. The names are given there; the outline has long been in our hands. It is the special application which may help any of you who know the names, but sometimes ask how they are to be applied to life. And it is that which I now go on to try to give you, though naturally in words feebler and less beautiful than those of the great Teacher Himself. For how should [52] lips that still have the stain of earth upon them speak adequately those great spiritual truths, as they have fallen from the pure lips of a Master of the Wisdom?

The first of the Qualifications, as I told you last week, is called Discrimination, discrimina­tion between the real and the unreal. Among the Buddhists they call it the “opening of the doors of the mind”, a very graphic and significant expression. Last week also I told you how you might meditate in order to find the higher consciousness which is yourself. How shall we apply what we have learned in meditation to practice? To meditate on a quality and then to live it, that is the way of definite progress.

Now the Master makes one great division of the whole human race, sweeping and clear. He says there are only two classes of men in the world - those who know and those who know not. The second class naturally embraces at present the vast majority of human kind, for, as another Teacher said, few there are who are treading that narrow Path. Knowledge, as He defines it, is the knowledge of the Divine Will in evolution, and the attempt to co-operate with that Will so as to help effectively forward the day when that Will shall be done on earth as it is already done in the higher worlds of being. To know then that the world is being guided towards a higher and nobler evolution; to know that every child of man, young or old, laggard or rapid in his progress, is walking by [53] that divine Plan, and may be helped or hindered in the walking; to recognise the Plan and try to live in it; to make one’s own will part of the Will divine, the only true willing there is; that is the characteristic of those who know. Those who know not this are ignorant.

Turning to apply that knowledge to practice, we are told how discrimination should be worked out in life, not only between the real and the unreal, but between all those many things in which there is more or less of the real, in which the essential mark of the real may be seen. And, first of all, we have to recognise that the form is unreal, while the life is real. It does not matter to the Occultist, to take an illustration, to what form of religion a man may belong. He may be a Hindu or a Buddhist; he may be a Christian or a Hebrew; he may be a Zoroastrian or a Mussulman. That is all of form and unessential; the question is: How does he live his religion, and how far does the essence of it come out in his thought and in his life? And so in distinguishing between the real and unreal in religion, we put aside the whole of the forms, admitting to the full that they are valuable to those who need them­ - they are the signposts that guide a man along the way of life - but knowing that they all mark out a single road, the road of man to Perfection. Not against any of them may the Occultist speak; not contemptuously must he ever look even at any forms that he may himself have [54] outgrown; but he must realise that while forms are many, the Wisdom is but one, and the Wisdom is the food of the soul, while the forms are for the training of the body.

He must learn also to discriminate between truth and falsehood, not as the world discriminates, but as the Occultist discriminates. The man who is training his thought to truth and to the avoidance of falsehood must never ascribe to another man a motive which is evil as being behind an outer action. He cannot see the man’s motive; he has no right to judge what he cannot know; and over and over again, as the Master points out, he may ascribe a wrong motive which does not exist, and so may break the law of truth. A man may speak angrily to you, and you, to whom the angry word is said, may think that the aggressor desired to wound or to hurt you, and see an evil motive behind the evil word. But the man, it is pointed out, may not be thinking of you at all; he may have some troubles of his own, some trials of his own, some strain upon him of which you know nothing, which makes his nerves irritable and his lip-speech unkind. Do not, then, ascribe a motive where you are ignorant of it, for you are breaking there the occult law of truth, and are condemned as a false witness before the bar of the great Teacher.

You must discriminate also not only between right and wrong, for to the Occultist there is [55] no choice between right and wrong; he is bound to do the right at whatever cost and at whatever sacrifice. He cannot, as some will do, hesitate between the course which is one with the divine Will and the course that goes against it; that he left far behind him in his progress towards the Path. He must ever remember, in dealing with questions of right and wrong, that for the Occultist there is no excuse if he swerves from the law of right; he must follow it more strenuously, more rigidly, more perfectly, than the men who are living in the outer world. To do the right is woven into his nature, and no question can arise in the mind as to taking the lower way when the higher is seen. I do not mean that he may not make a mistake; I do not mean that his judgment may not err; but I do mean that where he sees the right inevitably he must follow it, or else his eyes will become utterly blinded, and he will stumble and fall upon the Path. But not only must he distinguish between right and wrong, but between that which is more or less important in the right things he follows. Sometimes a question arises of relative importance, and he must remember ever, when such question arises, that to serve the divine Will and follow his Master’s guidance is the one important thing in life. Everything else must give way to that; all else must be broken in order that that may be preserved; for that Will marks out the path of [56] the most important duty, and as he follows it the very best he can give is rendered to human service.

And then, in this distinguishing between the essential and the non-essential, he has to cultivate a gentle yielding, a sweet courtesy, on all matters that are not essential. It is well to yield in little things that do not matter, in order that you may follow perfectly those things that do matter. I remember myself how difficult at first I found it to check the wilful nature that I brought over from many other lives of struggle and of storm. And for a year or two I made it a practice never to refuse a single thing I was asked to do, in which right and wrong did not arise. I made it an exaggerated practice, in order rapidly to correct the inborn fault. And so I wasted a good deal of time, as people would say, in doing unnecessary things that people wanted me to do, in going out for a walk, perhaps, when I would far rather have stayed at home and read a book, yielding in everything in the immaterial in order that in the material I might go forward unswervingly towards the goal. And that I would recommend to those amongst you who are naturally imperious, naturally self-willed, for in the swing of the pendulum from one side or the other you must go sometimes to excess in the practice of the contrary, in order that finally you may strike the middle path, that golden mean which the Greeks said was virtue. And if you have little [57] time and much to do, then it is well even to go to excess in the building of a virtue, in the eradication of a fault.

Then also you must learn to discriminate between the duty to help and the desire to dominate. There are so many people who are always meddling with the thoughts and actions of other people, and desiring, as it were, to save their neighbours’ souls instead of attending to their own. As a rule, while you may offer help, you should never try to control another, save in those cases where they are placed in your hands for guidance; then it may be your duty to exercise some control over conduct. Along those lines the Master taught that discrimination should be practised, in order that this first great Qualification might become second nature to the disciple.

And then the second came, Dispassion, Desirelessness. That is very easy in its coarser forms. When once the great desire has arisen for the treading of the Path, the things that are unreal lose their attraction, the things that are seen to be passing have small power to hold back the man bent on going rapidly forward towards Perfection.

As it is said in an old Hindu Scripture “The desire for the objects of the senses falls away when once the Supreme is seen”; when once the eyes have rested on the wondrous perfection and beauty of a Master, when the radiance of His character has shone out into [58] the dazzled eyes, but one longing is left - to reproduce His likeness, and to be in some small measure His image, His messenger, among men.

But there are subtler desires that may trip up the feet of the unwary traveller. There is the desire to see the results of one’s work. We work with all our heart and all our powers; we build our life into some project for the helping, the uplifting, of men. Can you, without a pang, see your project crumble in the dust, and the walls that you had built for shelter break down as ruins at your feet? If not, you are working for results, and not purely for the love of humanity; for if one has built ill instead of well - though meaning well - the great Plan breaks the work into pieces, and it is good. But the material is not lost. Every force put into it, every aspiration it embodied, every effort made in order to build it, are garnered up as materials for the raising more wisely of a greater building, which shall be according to the Plan of the great Overseer of the universe. And so we learn to work, but not to demand payment in results for our labour, sure that what is good must last, and willing that what is evil shall be broken.

Sometimes the desire for psychic powers attacks the disciple. “Oh, I could be more useful if only I could see; I could help people so much more if only I could remember what I do when out of the body”. Who is the best [59] judge, the disciple or the Master? Who knows best what is wanted, the pupil or the Teacher? If He sees you can help better by possessing them, He will open up the way and tell you how to build them. But sometimes the work is better done without them, the work of the special kind that He wants his disciple at that moment to fulfil. Leave to Him the time when those powers shall flower; they are the blossoms of the spiritual nature, and they will come to open maturity when the great Gardener sees the time is come for the blossoming.