38. It is time to understand the responsibility and privilege afforded by earthly incarnations, yet people often avoid listening to the waves of space and catching the echoes and answers which come from various strata of the universe....Try to speak of the light of realization and the bliss of spirit and you will be feared like robbers and murderers. But even robbers were disciples of Christ and Buddha; hence do not fear human epithets but harken to the voice of eternity which leads to bliss and light. -Morya: Hierarchy 1931
Just as food cannot be digested without being masticated, so ideas cannot be assimilated without having been thought over and understood....The time has come for all men of good will and of good faith to become conscious of the part they can and must play in life, if our present Christian civilization is to endure. Everyone shares a responsibility in the future. But this responsibility can materialize into a constructive effort only if people realize the full meaning of their lives, the significance of their endeavors and of their struggles, and if they keep their faith in the high destiny of Man. -preface any restriction to liberty of conscience is contrary to the great law of evolution, that is, to the divine Will, and represents Evil. If certain individuals make bad use of their freedom, so much the worse for them. The test was unfavorable. They were not evolved enough to understand. As far as they are concerned, the trial was a failure. In nature chance favors a small number of eggs out of the hundreds of thousands laid by one fish. As it is impossible to distinguish one egg from another it does not matter which one survives. In mankind the individual is no longer indiscernible, and each being has an equal chance to qualify as an element of moral evolution. If man does not seize this chance, if he does not understand intuitively or rationally the significance of his decision, it denotes that he was not fitted to play his part. Others will assume the responsibility of assuring the ascendant march of evolution. We must therefore instruct men, and not blindfold them under the pretext that society will lead them by the hand and guide them. Nobody has the right to substitute his own conscience for that of another, for progress depends on personal effort and to suppress this effort constitutes a crime. -p. 117 Those who are slaves to their ancestral tendencies and cannot--or will not--understand what a noble and wonderful destiny is theirs, are indeed unfortunate. -p. 160 The truth is, we repeat, that progress depends on a very small number of individuals, and that this progress, which represents the ascending march of evolution through Man, transcends the boundaries of nations. In like manner, the root of a tree penetrates into the ground, led by a small group of cells imbued with a devouring activity, at the extreme tip. This tip is delicate and fragile, slender as a thread, but behind it the root swells rapidly, becomes as thick as a finger, as a wrist, as an arm, and blindly follows the path chosen and dug in the soil by the frail white hair which leads it. The whole tree grows and feeds on the sap sucked from the earth by these slender rootlets. The chances for the appearance and development of a genius, or an unusual human intelligence, are greater in a highly civilized country because the mind can develop in surroundings more favorable to its improvement than that of backward nations without contact with the kind of intellectual fermentation which prevails in great capitals or in university towns. Tradition is richer, and the sources of in formation and inspiration are more numerous. However we cannot affirm that the men who are today considered as the most brilliant and most profound will be the ones who in the future will leave a permanent trace from the point of view of evolution. For we judge the value of genius or of greatness by the standards hnposed by the actual state of our civilization, of our culture. It is impossible for us to cast an absolute judgment. The man who win, in one or two thousand years, be considered as the greatest of our epoch exists perhaps today, or lived yesterday. We may have passed him in the street, we may know him, or he may be entirely unknown. We have no means of discovering him either because we are too intelligent, or not enough so. Excessive intelligence, which creates an Archimedes or a Descartes, anesthetizes the more subtle qualities of the brain, which are not necessarily rational, and reason is not powerful enough to do without a direct knowledge of facts. Intuition disposes of a much greater field of action than does reason, and purely intuitive, religious faith is a much more efficacious human lever than science or philosophy. Action follows conviction, not knowledge. -pp. 162-3 Guardians of an incomparable tradition (of Christ and prophets), conscious of their responsibility, their first task was to endure. They wanted to survive at any price, and the cost was often so high that they sometimes hesitated a long time, only to end by compromising against their will, carried away by the irresistible flood of ancestral myths.... But the spark that was Jesus could light only an infinitely small part of the immense pyre which fire alone could purify, and which will illumine the world when it bursts into full blaze. In the beginning His disciples had to preserve and protect the fragile flame while waiting for the wood to dry. His doctrine was too simple, too profound to impress a world which, two thousand years later, still has to be shown colored pictures. -pp. 174-5 |
No comments:
Post a Comment